Prefaces and introduction to A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Joshua Christensen. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 1 by John Bagnell Burry. Prefaces to New Edition The excavations of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos began in the year in which the first edition of this History of Greece appeared, 1900. His amazing discoveries there, followed and supplemented by the work of other explorers on many other prehistoric sites in Crete, have transformed our knowledge of the Aegean civilization of the Second Millennium and placed in a new focus the problems of early Greece. In consequence of these discoveries and of other researches, among which I may mention especially Professor Ridgway's Early Age of Greece and Mr. Leaf's Troy, it has been necessary to rewrite the greater part of Chapter 1. An account of Cretan civilization is included, the view that the pre-Achaean inhabitants of Greece were not Greeks, which it seems to me no longer possible to maintain, is abandoned, and the Trojan War is recognized to be an historical event. Outside Chapter 1, a few minor changes have been made. I need only mention that the accounts of the battles of Salamis and Platia have been partly rewritten. J.B.B. End of Prefaces to New Edition Prefaces to First Edition In determining the form and character of this book, I have been prompted by two convictions. One is that while in writing a history based on the original authorities and from one's own personal point of view, it is natural and certainly easier to allow it to range into several volumes, its compression into a single volume often produces a more useful book. In the case of a new history of Greece, it seemed worthwhile to undertake the more laborious task. The other opinion which I venture to hold is this. So far as history is concerned, those books which are capable of enlisting the interest of mature readers seem to me to be best also for informing younger students. Therefore, while my aim is to help education, this book has in view a wider circle that knows merely who are going through a course of school or university discipline. It was a necessary consequence of the limitations of space which I imposed upon myself that literature and art, philosophy and religion should be touched upon only when they directly illustrate or come into some specially intimate connection with the political history. It will be found that I have sometimes interpreted this rule liberally, but it is a rule which could be the more readily adopted as so many excellent works dealing with the art, literature and philosophy are now easily accessible. The interspersion in a short political history of a few unconnected chapters dealing as they must deal inadequately with art and literature seems useless and inartistic. The existence of valuable handbooks within the reach of all unconstitutional antiquities has enabled me in tracing the development of the Athenian state or touching on the institutions of other cities to omit minor details. The reader must also seek elsewhere for the sagas of Hellas, for a geographical description of the country, for the topography of Athens. On the topography of Athens and on the geography of Greece he will find excellent works to his hand. There are two cautions which I must convey to the reader and it will be most convenient to state them here. The first concerns the prehistoric age which is the subject of the first chapter of this work. The evidence gathered by the researchers of archaeologists on the coasts and islands of the Aegean during the last twenty years as to the civilization of prehistoric Greece brought historians face to face with a set of new problems for which no solutions that can be regarded as certain have yet been discovered. The ablest investigators differ widely in their views. Fresh evidence may at any hour upset tentative conclusions and force us to seek new interpretations of the data. The excavations which are now to be undertaken in Crete at last restored to its own Greek world may lead to unexpected results that may transform the whole question. Thus prehistoric Greece cannot be treated satisfactorily except by the method of discussion and in a work like this since discussion lies outside its scope a writer can only describe the main features of the culture which excavation has revealed and state with implied reserve the chief general conclusions that he considers probable as to the correlation of the archaeological evidence with the literary traditions of the Greeks. He must leave much vague and indefinite. The difficulty of the problems is increased by the circumstance that the literary evidence concerning the doings and goings of the early Greek folks is largely embedded in myth and harder to extract from its bed than buried walls or tombs from their coverings of earth. The importance of the pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece the mixed ethnical character of the historical Greeks the comparatively early date of the Ionian migration the continuity of Aegean civilization the relation of the so-called Mycenaean culture to the culture described by Homer these are the main points which I have been content to emphasize. The second caution applies to all histories of Greece that have been written since the days of Aphoros. The early portion of Greek history which corresponds to the 7th and 6th centuries BC is inevitably distorted and placed in a false perspective through the strange limitations of our knowledge. For at that time, as well as in the centuries immediately proceeding which are almost quite withdrawn from our vision the cities of the western coast of Asia Minor formed the most important and enlightened part of the Hellenic world and of those cities in the days of their greatness there were only some disconnected glimpses. Our knowledge of them hardly begins till Persia advances to the Aegean and they sink to a lower place in Greece. Thus the pages in which the Greeks of Asia should have the supreme place are monopolized by the development of elder Greece and the false impression is produced that the history of Hellas in the 7th and 6th centuries consisted merely or mainly of the histories of Sparta and Athens and their immediate neighbors. Darkness also envelops the growth of the young Greek communities of Italy and Sicily during the same period. The wrong, unfortunately, cannot be righted by a recognition of it. Athens and Sparta and their fellows abide in possession. In the notes and references at the end of the volume I have indicated obligations to modern research on special points. Here I must acknowledge my more general obligations to the histories of Grote, Freeman, History of Sicily, Boussolt, Beloch, E. Meyer, E. Sixtides Alterums, and Dresen. Though other histories of high reputation, both English and foreign, have been respectfully consulted, it is to those mentioned that I am chiefly indebted. But I owe perhaps a deeper debt to the writings of one who, though he has never written a formal history of Greece, has made countless invaluable contributions to its study. Professor Yu Von Vilimovitz Molendorf. With some of his conclusions I do not agree, but I would express here deep sympathy with his methods and admiration for the stimulating virtue of his writings. Several friends have been good enough to help me. The book has had the advantage of the criticisms of a master of the subject, Mr. Mahafi, who most kindly read through the proof sheets. The first chapter is enriched by a small map of the Mycenaean sites of Crete, marked for me by Mr. J. L. Meyers. Mr. Cecil Smith assisted me in the matter of illustrations taken from antiquities in the British Museum, and Professor Percy Gardner superintended the preparation of some photographs from busts in the Oxford galleries. All the plans, and many of the maps, including Bactria and Northwestern India, were roughly sketched by myself and then properly drawn by the skillful cartographers, Mr. Walker and Botol. In the case of a plan or map that is not current, I have stated in the list of illustrations to what work I am indebted. Nearly all the reproductions of coins are from coins in the British Museum. My obligations to Mr. R&R Clark will be understood by those who have had the good fortune to have had works printed at their press. J. B. Burry. End of preface to first edition. Introductory, Greece and the Aegean. The rivers and valleys, the mountains, bays, and islands of Greece will become familiar as our story unfolds itself, and we need not enter here into any minute description. But it is useful at the very outset to grasp some general features which went to make the history of the Greeks what it was and what otherwise it could not have been. The character of their history is so intimately connected with the character of their dwelling places that we cannot conceive it apart from their land and seas. Of Spain, Italy, and Illyricum, the three massive promontories of which southern Europe consists, Illyricum in the east would have closely resembled Spain in the west if it had stopped short at the north of Thessaly and if its offshoot Greece had been sunk beneath the waters. They would then have been no more than a huge block of solid land at one corner almost touching the shores of Asia as Spain almost touches the shores of Africa. But Greece, its southern continuation, has totally different natural features which distinguish it alike from Spain, the solid square, and Italy the solid wedge and make the eastern basin of the Mediterranean strikingly unlike the western. Greece gives the impression of a group of nests and islands. Yet in truth it might have been as solid and unbroken a block of continent on its own smaller scale as the massive promontory from which it juts. Greece may be described as a mountainous headland broken across the middle into two parts by a huge rift and with its whole eastern side split into fragments. We can trace the ribs of the framework which convulsion of nature bent and shivered for the service as it turns out of the human race. The mountains which form Thessaly's eastern barrier, Olympus, Ossa, and Pelion, the mountains of the long islands of Euboea and the string of islands which seem to hang to Euboea as a sort of tail should have formed a perpetual mountainous chain, the rocky eastern coast of a solid promontory. Again the ridges of Pindus which divide Thessaly from Epirus find their prolongation in the heights of Tinfestris and Corax and then in an oblique southeastward line deflected from its natural direction the chain is continued in Parnassus, Helicon, and Scytheron in the hills of Attica and in the islands which would be part of Attica if Attica had not dipped beneath the waters. In the same way the mountains of the Peloponnesus are a continuation of the mountains of Epirus. Thus restoring the framework in our imagination and raising the dry land from the sea we reconstruct as the Greece that might have been a lozenge of land ribbed with chains of hills stretching southeastward far out into the Aegean. If nature had given the Greeks a land like this their history would have been entirely changed and by imagining it we are helped to understand how much they owed to the accidents of nature. In a land of capes and deep bays and islands it was determined that waterways should be the ways of their expansion. They were driven, as it were, into the arms of the sea. The most striking feature of continental Greece is the deep gulf which has collected asunder into two parts. The southern half ought to have been an island as its Greek name, the island of Pelops, suggests but it holds onto the continent by a narrow bridge of land at the eastern extremity of the great cleft. Now this physical feature had the utmost significance for the history of Greece and its significance may be viewed in three ways if we consider the existence of the dividing gulf the existence of the ismas and the fact that the ismas was at the eastern and not at the western end. 1. The double effect of the gulf itself is clear at once it let the sea in upon a number of folks who would otherwise have been inland mountaineers and increased enormously the length of the seaboard of Greece. Further, the gulf constituted southern Greece a world by itself so that it could be regarded as a separate land from northern Greece an island practically with its own insular interests. 2. But if the island of Pelops had been in very truth an island, if there had been no ismas there would have been from the earliest ages direct and constant intercourse between the coasts which are washed by the Aegean and those which are washed by the Ionian sea. The eastern and western lands of Greece would have been brought nearer to one another when the ships of trader or warrior instead of tediously circumnavigating the Peloponnesus could sail from the eastern to the western sea through the middle of Greece. The disappearance of the ismas would have revolutionized the roads of traffic and changed the centers of commerce and the wars of grecian history would have been fought out on other lines. How important the ismas was may perhaps be best illustrated by a modern instance on a far mightier scale. Remove the bridge which joins the southern to the northern continent of America and contemplate the changes which ensue in the routes of trade and in the conditions of naval warfare in the great oceans of the globe. 3. Again, if the bridge which attached the Peloponnesus to the mainland had been at the western end of the Gulf the lands along either shore of the inlet would have been accessible easily and sooner to the commerce of the Aegean and the Orient. The civilization of northwestern Greece might have been more rapid and intense and the history of Boetia and Attica unhooked from the Peloponnesus would have run a different course. 4. The character of the Aegean basin was another determining condition of the history of the Greeks. Strung with countless islands it seems meant to promote the intercourse of folk with folk. The Cyclides, which as we have seen belong properly to the framework of the Greek continent pass imperceptibly into the isles which the Asiatic coast throws out and formed a sort of island bridge inviting ships to pass from Greece to Asia. The western coast of lesser Asia belongs in truth more naturally to Europe than to its own continent. It soon became part of the Greek world and the Aegean might be considered then as the true centre of Greece. The west side of Greece too was well furnished with good harbours and though not as rich in bays and islands as the east there was no trade and civilisation. It was no long voyage from Corsera to the heel of Italy and the inhabitants of western Greece had a whole world open to their enterprise. But that world was barbarous in early times and had no civilising gifts to offer whereas the peoples of the eastern seaboard looked towards Asia and were drawn into contact with the immemorial civilisations of the Orient. The backward condition of western as contrasted with eastern Greece in early ages did not depend on the conformation of the coast but on the fact that it faced away from Asia and in later days we find the Ionian sea a busy scene of commerce and lined with prosperous communities which are fully abreast of Greek civilisation. The northern coast of Africa confronting and challenging the three peninsulas of the Mediterranean has played a remarkable part in the history of southern Europe. From the earliest times it was historically associated with Europe and the story of geology illustrates the fitness of this connection. Western Europe and northern Africa were once in days long past united together by bridges of continuous land and this ancient continent which we might call Eropolibia was perhaps inhabited by peoples of a homogenous race who were severed from one another when the ocean was let in and the Mediterranean assumed its present shape. Sicily, a remnant of the old land bridge has always been for Italy a step to or a step from Africa while Spain needs no island to bridge her straight. Greece is a land of mountains and small valleys. It has few plains of even moderate size and no considerable rivers. It is therefore well adapted to be a country of separate communities each protected against its neighbours by hilly barriers and the history of the Greeks could not have been wrought out in a land of dissimilar formation. The political history of all countries is in some measure under the influence of geography but in Greece geography made itself preeminently felt and fought along with other forces against the accomplishment of national unity. The islands formed states by themselves but as seas while like mountains they sever may also, unlike mountains unite. It was less difficult to form a sea than a land empire. In the same way, the hills prevented the development of a brisk land traffic while as we have seen the broken character of the coast and the multitude of islands facilitated intercourse by water. There is no barrier to break the winds which sweep over the Uxene from the Asiatic continent towards the Greek shores and render Thrace a chilly land. Hence the Greek climate was of severity and bracing quality which promoted the vigor and energy of the people. Again, Greece is by no means a rich and fruitful country. It has few well watered plains of large size the cultivated valleys do not yield the due crop to be expected from the area the soil is good for barley but not rich enough for wheat to grow freely. Thus the tillers of the earth had hard work and the nature of the land had consequences which tended to promote maritime enterprise On one hand, richer lands beyond the seas attracted the adventurous especially when the growth of the population began to press on the means of support. On the other hand it ultimately became necessary to supplement home-grown corn by wheat imported from abroad. But if Demeter denied her highest favours the vine and the olive grew abundantly in most parts of the country and their cultivation was one of the chief features of ancient Greece. Chapter 1 Parts 1 and 2 of A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please contact LibriVox.org Recording by Laura Koskinen A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 by John Bagnell Burry Chapter 1 The Beginnings of Greece and the Heroic Age Section 1 The Origin of the Greeks Our European civilization had its origin in Greece and we must date its beginnings to more than 3,000 years ago. We know that in the 13th century B.C. the Greek tongue was spoken throughout the Greek peninsula and that at the same time or not much later Greek minstrels were singing examiner lays and bringing that marvelous meter to perfection. But when we try to reach further back and to discover whence the Greek-speaking folks came and how long they had possessed their country we find little that is certain. In our earliest written record The Iliad of Homer does appear as the most prominent among the Greek peoples. There are reasons for believing that after the middle of the 2nd millennium invaders came down from the north penetrated into the Peloponnesus and founded or occupied those states which were afterwards glorified in Homeric poems and that these invaders were the Achaeans. But various opinions may be held as to the significance of this event. It has been supposed that it was in fact the Greek conquest of Greece that the Achaeans and their fellows were the original people who first spread the Greek tongue over the peninsula hitherto inhabited by men who spoke no Aryan speech. Or we may hold that men of Greek speech were already in the land and that the work of the conquerors whether Greeks themselves or men speaking some other Aryan language was not to create Greece but to stimulate her and guide her peoples into new paths. For several reasons it seems probable that the 2nd opinion is true and that the Achaean invasion is to be compared not to the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britain but rather to the Norman conquest. There are no traces of the survival of an older pre-Greek language and it is difficult to conceive that the conquered population could in a century or two have become entirely and throughout Greek like their conquerors. On the other hand a small body of conquerors entering into possession of a civilization superior to their own might in a short time be assimilated to their subjects. The inhabitants of the hilly uplands of Arcadia boasted that they had lived along their mountains before the birth of the moon. Here there was no Achaean settlements and if the inhabitants had not been already Greek Arcadia must have remained like Wales or Cornwall a land of alien speech long after the Achaean conquest. But although we conclude that it had become Greek centuries before the Achaeans appeared on the scene the Greek peninsula was Greek. The original coming of the Greeks was utterly forgotten by their descendants and we are unable to fix its date. The old home of the invaders is supposed to have lain in the northwest regions of the Balkan peninsula. They must have come southward in such numbers as to extinguish utterly the native speeches which they found in their new country. The men whom the Greeks conquered learned the new tongue and forgot their own. But they had given to many a hill and rock the name which was to abide with it forever. Corinth and Tyrens Parnassus and Olympus Arna and Larissa are names which the Greeks seem to have received from the ancient inhabitants. And some of these names which are also found in the western parts of Asia Minor suggest that the primeval people belonged to a race which was diffused on both sides of the Aegean. We shall not perhaps be far astray if we conjecture that the Greeks descended into Greece in the course of the Third Millennium. Their conquest may have been a gradual infiltration of people after people rather than the single migration of a vast host and may have extended over many years. But by 2000 B.C. Zeus, the great Indo-European Lord of Heaven was probably invoked throughout the length and breadth of the land. The Greeks of history who had completely forgotten this far distant past were not exclusively the descendants of these Greek invaders. For it is not to be supposed that the conquered people was abolished or obliterated. The idea that the older inhabitants were entirely rushed out and a clear field left for the newcomers is due to exactly the same kind of false inference from language to race which makes out Greeks and Romans, Celts and Germans, Slavs and Illyrians, Fridgens and Armenians, Persians and Ancient Indians to be the posterity of common Aryan ancestors because they all spoke kindred tongues. The Greek language is vigorous and a masterful, as its subsequent history has shown. It made a complete conquest of the languages of the older inhabitants. In whatever land the Greeks settled, it became exclusively the language of the land. But the extermination of the older tongues does not mean the extermination of the older races, the men among whom the Greeks settled or whom they conquered learned the new tongue and forgot their own. There was fusion of the old and the new, and the Indo-European gods of the invaders had to make terms with the deities of the natives. If Greece, as we may fairly believe, was Greek since days to which we cannot reach back their flourished close to its shores a great non-Greek civilization which had a decisive influence on its fortunes and of which we know far more than of the contemporary Greeks. It is only recently that we have become aware of this Aegean civilization as it is called which had grown steadily in Crete and in Melos and other islands of the Aegean from remote beginnings in the Stone Age until towards the end of the third millennium Crete entered upon a period of power and brilliancy which rivals in interest the more famous civilizations of Egypt and Babylon. The monuments which reveal the great age of Crete have been dug out of the earth and although Greek tradition remembered that Crete was once a strong sea power no one suspected that this island had been the home of a life and art highly developed and various and the center of a culture which spread far over the Mediterranean Sea. In the course of the third millennium Crete had passed from the Age of Stone into the Age of Metal. The remains of a homogenous culture have been found all over the island but the leading settlements the seats of the most powerful rulers were Cnosus and Feistus. Nearly at the middle of the north coast the hill of Cnosus is situated a few miles from the sea close to the banks of a stream Caratos. Before 2100 BC a great palace was erected on this hill and at Feistus in the south of the island a palatial residence arose much about the same time. The palaces endured for several centuries and in this period the development of Cretan art was marked by the perfection of polychrome, many colored pottery. We have some beautiful examples of what Cretan artists could do such as a fresco picture of a little boy who is painted in blue picking white crocuses and placing them in a vase. The most interesting fact about the civilization of the Cretans is that they could write. We find first a method of picture writing in which each pictorial symbol such as an ox head or a gate or an eye represented a word. But at a later period there was likewise used a system of linear signs of which each probably stood for a syllable. A table of drink offerings with signs of this kind was found in the cave of Mount Dicta already a holy place and afterwards to be associated with the birth of Zeus. We have no clue to the language of these documents. It seems unlikely that it was Indo-European. It seems most likely that it was cognate with the tongues of the Lycians and other ancient peoples of western Asia Minor. In Eastern Crete a strange language was still spoken in late times when the rest of the island had become Greek. We have some slight records of it which can be read but cannot be interpreted and it would be natural to suppose that this was the same language which prevailed in the pre-Hellenic period. It was towards the year 1600 BC that the end of this period of Cretan history was marked by the partial destruction of the palace of Knossos. Everything points to the conclusion that this was the consequence of a revolution within the island and not of foreign invasion. Perhaps there was war between Knossos and Faistus. At all events the early palace of Faistus seems to have survived the early palace of Knossos but a new dynasty was soon to take possession of the Knossian hill to develop further the native civilization and inaugurate a still more brilliant period in the island's history. A giant civilization attained its highest bloom in Crete but it had developed independently in the islands of the archipelago especially in Melos where its continuous growth can be traced in the important settlement of Filacopii. Melos produces obsidian which in the Stone Age and later was in great request for the manufacture of knives and spear points and her export of this product which was taken for instance to Egypt may explain her early prosperity. Remains have been found which show that the eastern coast of Greece was not unaffected by this insular civilization. We have still to glance at a great stronghold where the third millennium stood on the hill of Troy commanding the entrance of the helispont. It was not the first city that had been reared on that illustrious hill which rises to the height of about 160 feet not far from the banks of the Scamander. The earliest settlement fortified by a rude wall of unwrought stone can still be traced and some of its primitive earthware and stone implements are found. An axehead of white nephrite seems to show that in those remote days there was a line of traffic, however slow and uncertain, between the Mediterranean and the Far East for this white jade must have come from Central Asia. On the ruins of this primeval city arose a great fortress girt with a wall of sun-baked brick built on strong stone foundations. There were three gates and the angles of the walls were protected by towers. The inhabitants of this city lived in the stone and copper age. Bronze was still a rarity. Their pottery was chiefly hand-made. But a treasure of golden ornaments wrought by skillful craftsmen shows that the palace was wealthy. The most important feature to be noted is the outline of the palace of ancient city. Here at the very outset of Aegean civilization we find the general plan of the main part of the house exactly the same as that which is described more than a thousand years later in the poems of Homer. From an outer gate we pass through a courtyard in which an altar stood into a square preliminary chamber and from it we enter the great hall of earth. An enemy's hand destroyed the castle by fire and no tradition of its existence has survived. When we come down seven or eight centuries to the famous city of which it was the precursor we shall learn the probable secret of the prosperity of its kings. It may be asked how without the guidance of literary records we can fix the successive stages of Aegean civilization in a quartered series and assign approximate dates to its periods. When we have started with the capital division of time between the age of stone and the age of bronze the potter's art is the chief clue for establishing a relative chronology within each of these ages. The clay vessels from the most simple and primitive molded by hand to the most artistic and elaborate steel can be arranged in a definite series and thus the things which are found in the same stratum as a particular class of sherds can be assigned to a definite place in this succession. Such things found in association with particular stages in the development of pottery may then become themselves additional criteria for dating remains. The history of Cretan civilization from the end of the stone age has by this means been arranged in three chief ages called Early Middle and Late Minoan and each of these has been subdivided into three periods. It is to the intercourse of Crete with Egypt that we are indebted for the means of determining roughly the absolute dates of its history or in other words of correlating its chronology of the world. Thus a polychrome Cretan vessel found in the tomb of King Sinusert III Cisostris at Egyptian Abidos enables us to conclude that the second period of the Middle Minoan age was approaching its close about B.C. 1880. Again the statuette of an Egyptian in diorite stone inscribed with his name in Egyptian characters was found in a court of the Knossian palace and its style makes it probable that it was wrought under the 12th or 13th dynasty perhaps in the second half of the 19th century B.C. It was probably about 1600 B.C. that kings perhaps of a new dynasty but not of a new race began to rule on the hill of Knossus. The palace had been rebuilt on a grander scale and adapted to more sumptuous needs though there was no change in the general architectural style and about 1500 B.C. it seems to have been extensively remodeled. It covered an area of about five acres. It was not fortified by an exterior wall. Its lords seemed to have trusted to their ships for defense against foreign invaders. To the east and to the west of a great central court were extensive labyrinths of rooms and passages and the remains of staircases show that in some parts the building rose to the height of three or four stories. The principal halls were lit at one end by open shafts or light wells walled in on three sides and on the fourth opened to the hall from which they were separated by two or three columns. There were bathrooms and excellent system of drainage by pipes superior perhaps to any of the contrivances that have been since in use till quite recent times. If the palace had merely served as the habitation of the royal household it need not have been so large. But it was much more. It was the seat of a government which controlled not merely the neighboring regions or even the island but a maritime empire. The administration of this empire was conducted on careful business lines as is shown by the financial documents found in the archives. We may fairly surmise that there existed a well developed system of administrative machinery which needed considerable room for its offices. The rich tributes which the kings derived from their dependencies were stored in the palace and various industries were carried on within its walls for the private needs of the monarch and also probably for purposes of commerce. The discovery of an olive press and great jars for oil storage suggests that not only did the palace supply itself with the oil required for its cooking and its lamp fuel but that the king himself may have traded in oil which seems at this time to have been one of the principal Cretan exports. Then there was accommodation for the sculptors and painters who were employed in the royal service. There is evidence that the paints were manufactured on the spot and a sculptors workshop has been discovered. One of the most notable rooms in this spacious palace was the chamber of the throne entered through an anti-room from the central court. The throne is a stone seat adorned with a painted design and on either side are benches along the wall. Here the king may have sat in council with his ministers. Adjoining this apartment was a room open to the air containing a tank and its walls showed a picture of Egyptian character a landscape with river, sedge and palms. Most of the principal chambers and corridors were decorated with fresco paintings representing solemn processions gay groups of men and women scenes of town life less often of war. The fashions of the time are vividly portrayed in a series of miniature frescoes showing us women idling in courts or on balconies with their hair elaborately dressed wearing costumes which look as if they had been modeled on quite modern fashions puffed sleeves flaunced skirts bodices tightly drawn in round the waist. One of the most striking pictures which have survived is that of a tall handsome cup bearer evidently belonging to the same race as the Cretans, Keftu who are represented in a painting of Egyptian Thebes as bringing offerings to King Thothmy's the third in the 15th century. Near the northern entrance to their palace the later lords and their houses constructed a theater capable of holding about four hundred spectators. This was not a new thing. A theater of an earlier period has been discovered in the palace of Faistus. The orchestral area in these early theaters was not circular as in those of later times but rectangular and the performances were probably religious dances in honor of the great Cretan goddess of the Cretans. The space was not large enough for bullfights which seemed to have been a favorite amusement of the Cretans if we may judge from scenes depicted on wall paintings and gems which present acrobats grappling with bulls. Women took part in this dangerous sport. In one painting we see a girl in the air caught on the horns of a bull. The kings had also quieter a magnificent inlaid gaming board of very beautiful design was found in the palace made of pieces of ivory overlaid with gold foil and crystals colored alternately blue and white by means of blue paste, kianos, and silver foil on which they were set. Beneath the great palace close to the river bank and about one hundred and thirty yards east of the northern entrance gate a smaller palace which, it has been conjectured, may have been used by the king as a summer retreat. On its smaller scale it seems to have been as sumptuous as the greater dwelling. Here was found, fallen from a room on an upper story a superb painted jar showing the highest point to which the art of the canossian potters could attain in the sixteenth century. The decoration displaying sprays of papyrus and rosettes is effected by the combination of color and relief. Here, too, there was a throne room a remarkable pillared hall more than twelve yards long resembling in its arrangement the Roman Basilica or law court. The rebuilding of the palace of Faistus fell perhaps in the sixteenth century. Like that of canossus it was unfortified and it was built on a very similar plan and in the same fashion of architecture. Here, too, there was a large court in the center surrounded by pillared reception halls and storerooms and a smaller court in the west of the building. The residence of Faistus was distinguished by an imposing entrance with a flight of twelve steps forty-five feet broad and though it was much smaller in extent than the rival palace of canossus and its walls were not adorned with such rich and various paintings its external appearance seems to have been more imposing for it was built upon the slope of a hill and rose roof above roof on different levels. About two miles off at a place now called Hadia Triata a well-built house has been found which seems to have served as a pleasure residence for the potentates of the neighboring palace. Not far from the palace of Canossus there must have been a populous town. Whole Cretan towns have been excavated in eastern Crete and much has been found to illustrate the town life of the common people and the artisans. For instance, the house of a carpenter with all his tools his chisels, saws, alls, and nails but of the appearance of a flourishing town such as Canossus must have been we can better gain an idea from the facades of private houses which are represented on mosaic plaques of porcelain discovered in the palace. The houses were of several stories. Some had two doors others one. The windows above might have four or six panes and there seemed to be unwindowed openings in the upper stories which might serve the purposes of balconies. These Cretan houses show considerable likeness to contemporary houses in Egypt. There seems to be no evidence that there were public temples in Crete at this period. There were sanctuaries in the palaces and perhaps the Cretans generally performed their religious duties in domestic shrines. The chief divinity whom they worshipped was a nature goddess. The goddess whom the Greeks called Rea and this indeed may have been her Cretan name. Scenes of worship were frequently depicted in art. The goddess is represented sometimes guarded by lions sometimes associated with doves who were symbolic of the descent of a deity. She was served by priestesses. She was closely connected with a male divinity whether her consort or her son who seems to have been subordinate to her. In later times the Greeks conceived this god as Zeus, son of Rea, and nurtured in the Aedian cave. Both the goddess and the god were associated with the double axe, a fetish in which the deity was supposed to dwell. We find the same worship of the double axe in western Asia Minor among the Kaurians. This symbol was so frequently represented on the walls of the Knossian palace that it might almost be called the palace of the double axe. And as the Kaurian name for the double axe was Labres it has been suggested that the palace was known as the Labrentos. This would explain the origin of the curious Greek legend that Minos, king of Knossus, kept in a labyrinth the monstrous Minotaur who devoured the tribute of youths and virgins brought from overseas. The intricate plan of the palace might well suggest a maze. We have seen that the art of writing was long familiar to the Cretans. In this later period a new and more advanced system of linear signs was in use. The kings kept accurate records and accounts. Hundreds of written documents have been found in the Knossian palace consisting of small rectangular tablets of clay which were preserved in wooden boxes secured by seals. As we have no clue to the language they cannot be read but the numerical symbols can be identified. The arithmetical system was decimal and there were signs for fractions. It has been inferred from the frequent occurrence of numerals and from the insertion of figures representing objects that many of the documents are accounts relating to the stores. The Cretans possessed a system of weights and here they seem to have been indebted through whatever intermediate channel to the kingdom of Babylonia for their standard was derived from what is known as the light Babylonian talent. And they had a metal currency. Pieces of gold and silver and bronze ingots have been found which can only have been used to exchange. The power and splendor of the kings of Knossus were at their height in the fifteenth century. These kings were undoubtedly the richest and most powerful in Crete and it is not improbable that they now exercised over lordship over the rulers of Faistus and over the other towns of the island in many of which striking remains of Aegean civilization have been unearthed. Their fleets controlled the Aegean sea. They dominated the islands and their civilization spread as we shall see to the mainland of Greece. But Cretan influence radiated to more distant shores by trade and even by colonization. The commercial intercourse with Egypt which had existed from primitive times became probably more regular and frequent. Oil and pottery were exported to the lands of Anisle. The kings of the country of the Keftu and the Isles of the Great Sea brought offerings to the great monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty and the influence of Egypt can be traced in the Cretan culture of the time. The Philistines who settled in Southern Palestine are now supposed to have been colonists from Crete and remains found in Sicily and Spain to justify that the island of Minos sent products and offshoots of its civilization far to the west. The later Greeks associated the Cretan supremacy in the Aegean with the name of the great sea-lord Minos. The most ancient tradition seems to have known two kings of this name of whom one reigned towards the end of the fifteenth century and the other about two hundred years later. The earlier was confused and blended with the later figure and in consequence of this confusion the false belief arose that the Cretan thalysocracy was at its height towards the close of the thirteenth century. End of chapter 1 Part 2 Chapter 1 Part 3 of a history of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Leon Meyer A History of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 by John Bagnell Berry Chapter 1 Part 3 Mycenaean Civilization 1600-1100 BC The rise of a civilization on Greek soil very similar to Cretan and undoubtedly under Cretan influence began probably in the 16th century and lasted till the end of the 12th. Its records are monuments of stone which have remained for more than 3000 years above the face of the earth or have been brought to light by the spade and the objects of daily use and luxury which are placed in the houses of the dead and have been unearthed for many days by the curiosity of Europeans seeking the origins of their own civilization and for the later stage of this period we have the Homeric poems. The most numerous and significant records have been found in the east of the Peloponnesus and the plain of Argos at Mycenae which keeps guard in the mountains at the northern end of the plain and at Tyrenes its lowlier fellow close to the sea. The strongest city on the coast of the Aegean seems for a long time to have been Mycenae. The memory of its wealth survived in the epithet Golden which distinguishes it in the Homeric poems. For want of an exact term the whole civilization to which Mycenae's greatness belongs has been called Mycenaean. Tyrenes was the older of the two fortresses and had played its part in the earlier epic before the Aegean peoples from the Stone Age. It stands on a long low rock about a mile and a half from the sea and the land around it was once a marsh. From north to south the hill rises in height and was shaped by man's hand into three platforms of which the southern and highest was occupied by the palace of the king. But the whole acropolis was strongly walled round by a structure of massive stones laid in regular layers the crevices being filled with a mortar of clay. This fashion of building has been called Cyclopean from the legend that masons called Cyclopes were invited from Lycia to build the walls of Tyrenes. The main gate of entrance on the east side was approached by a passage between the outer wall of the fortress and the wall of the palace. In the right unshielded side of an enemy advancing to the gate was exposed to the defenders of the wall. On the west side there was a poster from which a long flight of stone steps led up to the back part of the palace. But one curious feature in the castle of Tyrenes sets it apart from all the other ancient fortresses of Greece. On the south side the wall deepens for the purpose of containing store chambers, the doors of which open out upon covered galleries also built inside the wall and furnished with windows looking outward. The stronghold of Mycenae about 12 miles inland at the northeastern end of the Argyve plain was built on a hill which rises to 900 feet above the sea level in a mountain glen. The shape of the citadel is a triangle and the greater part of the wall is built in the same Cyclopean style as the wall of Tyrenes but of smaller stones. Another fashion of architecture however also occurs and points to a later date than Tyrenes. The gates and some of the towers are built of even layers of stone carefully hewn into rectangular shape. No storerooms or galleries like those of Tyrenes have been found at Mycenae but on the northeast side a vaulted stone passage in the wall led by a downward subterranean path to the foot of the hill where a cistern was supplied from a perennial spring outside the walls. Thus the garrison was furnished with water in case of a siege. Mycenae had two gates. The chief was on the west ensconced in a corner of the wall which at this point running in southeastward then turned outward due west and thus enclosed and commanded the approach to the gate. The lintel of the doorway is formed by one huge square block of stone and the weight of the wall resting on it is lightened by the device of leaving a triangular space.  They are, as it were, watchers who ward the castle and from them the gate is known as the lion gate. The ruins on the hill of Tyrenes enable us to trace the plan of the palace of its kings. One chief principal of the construction of the palaces of this age seems to have been the separation of the dwelling house of the women from that of the men, a principal which continued to prevail in Greek domestic architecture in historical times. But the striking characteristic of Tyrenes is that while the halls of the king and the halls of the queen are built side by side in the center of the palace there is no direct communication between them and they have different approaches. The halls of king and queen alike are built on the same general plan as the palace in the old brick city on the hill of Troy and the palaces which are described in the poems of Homer. An altar stood in the men's courtyard which was enclosed by pillared porticoes, the portico which faced the gate being the vestibule of the house. Double-leaf doors open from the vestibule into a preliminary hall from which one passed through a curtain doorway over a great stone threshold into the men's hall. In the midst of it was the round hearth, the center of the house, encircled by four wooden pillars which supported the flat roof. The palace of Mycenae crowned the highest part of the hill and its plan, though it cannot be traced so clearly or fully, was in general conception and in many details alike. The hearth of which part remains was ornamented by spiral and triangular patterns in red, blue and white. The floors of the covered rooms were made of fine cement and in the open courts the cement was hardened by small pebbles. Sometimes the floors are brightened with colored patterns. It was customary to embellish the walls by inlet sculptured freezes and by paintings. A brilliant alabaster freeze inset with cyanis or paste of blue glass decorated the vestibule of the hall at Tyron's and the men's halls in both palaces were adorned with mural pictures. The design and structure of these palaces differ in some notable respects from those of Crete. They were protected by strong exterior walls while Gnosis and Feastus had no such fortifications. In the milder climate of Crete portable braziers were sufficient for heating the rooms and the architects could plan their houses without having to make holes in the roof or smoke to escape. Whereas the severe weather of Greece hindered a fixed hearth necessary in the center of the chief hall with a vent above for the smoke. This hall with its pillared portico became the most important part of the palace and it was lit from above. The light wells characteristic of Gnosis and Feastus were not used in the castles of the mainland. Besides their castle and palace the burying places of the kings of Mycenae are their most striking memorials. The men with whom we are now dealing bestowed their dead in tombs. There is no trace of the practice of burning corpses. At one time the lords of the Citadel and their families were buried on the castle hill. Close to the western wall south of the lion gate the royal burial circle has been discovered within which six tombs cut vertically into the rock had remained untouched by the hand of man since the last corpses were placed in them. Weapons were buried with the men some of whose faces were covered with gold masks. The heads of the women were decked with gold diadems rich ornaments and things of household use were placed beside them. There was a steely or sepulchral stone over each tomb and some of these slabs were sculptured. But a day came when this simple kind of grave was no longer royal enough for the rich princes of Mycenae and they sought more imposing resting places. Or else as some believe they were overthrown by lords of another race who brought with them a new fashion of sepulcher. Nine sepulchral domes hewn in the opposite hillside have been found not far from the Acropolis. The largest of them is generally known as the Treasury of Atreus a name which arose from a false idea as to its purpose. These tombs which are found as we shall see in other places in Greece consist of three parts the passage of approach the portal and the dome. A stone causeway leads up to the portal which admits into a round vaulted chamber built into the hollowed slope of a hill. And in some tombs but this is exceptional there is also a square side chamber. The portal of the Treasury of Atreus had a striking façade being clad with slabs of colored marble and framed by dark grey alabaster pillars with zigzag and spiral patterns and carved capitals. The two massive lentil stones were relieved by the same device which was adopted in the architecture of the Lion Gate and the triangle was filled by red porphyry. The vaulted room of beehive shape is formed by rings of well joined and well chiseled stones which grow narrower as they rise and a roof stone. The walls were adorned with bronze rosettes arranged in some pattern. A door similar to that of the portal and framed with pillars admits to the side chamber which is hewn into the rock. Its walls were decorated with sculptured alabaster plates. The doorway of another tomb was framed by two alabaster columns fluted like the columns of a Doric temple. But besides the stately burying places of the kings the humbler tombs of the people have been discovered. One of Mycenae below the citadel consisted of a group of villages each of which preserved its separate identity each had its own burying ground. Thus Mycenae and probably other towns of the age represented an intermediate stage between the village and the city a number of little communities gathered together in one place and dominated by a fortress. The tombs in these village burying grounds resemble and plan the royal vaults. They are square chambers cut into the rock. They are approached by a passage which leads up to a doorway. The difference is that they are not round and have gabled roofs. Some of the things found in these sepulchres indicate that most of them are a later date than the royal tombs of the citadel and contemporary with the vaulted tombs below. We have seen how in the royal graves on the Castle Hill treasures of gold long hidden in the city of day revealed the wealth of the Mycenaean kingdom. Treasures would perhaps have been found also in some of the great vaulted tombs if they had not been rifled by plunderers and subsequent ages. But for us the works of the potter and the implements of war and peace fashioned by the bronze myth are of more value than the golden ornaments for studying this early civilization. And things of daily use have been found in the lowlier rock tombs as well as in the royal sepulchres of hill or plain. From the implements which the people used and also from the representations which artists wrought we can win a rough picture of their dress, armor and ornaments and form an idea of their capacity in art. Their civilization belonged to the age of bronze and copper. Even in its later period iron was still so rare and costly that it was only used for ornaments, rings for instance and possibly for money. And in its earlier period the stone age had not quite been forgotten. Obsidian was still employed for the heads of arrows. But in general bronze was used in Greece for all implements throughout this age. The arms with which the men of Mycenae attacked their foes were sword, spear and bow. Their defensive armor consisted of huge helmets, probably made of leather. Shields of oxide reaching from almost to the feet. Complete towers of defense, but so clumsy that it was the chief part of a military education to manage them. The princes went forth to war and two horse war chariots which consisted of a board to stand on and a breastwork of wicker. The fragment of a silver vessel found in one of the rock tombs of Mycenae shows us a scene of battle in front of the walls of a mountain city from whose battlements men watching the fight are waving their hands. Round shields came into use later. Among the pottery discovered at Mycenae there was a large jar on one side of which we see a woman looking after six warriors with round shields, marching forth to battle armed from head to foot and on the other, less clearly men engaged in battle black ground figures on a yellow ground. On gems and seal stones we also find representations of armed men. One of the most striking pictures of the warriors of this age is a group of five spearmen with round shields on a painted gravestone. Men wore long hair, not however flowing freely, but tied or plated in tresses. Razors have been found in the tombs, but in contrast with the cretins who always shaved, they often let the beard grow. It is not certain that they ever went with mere loin aprons like the cretins. In later times they wore a close-fitting tunic and a cloak fastened by a claspin. High-born dames were tight bodices and wide-gown skirts. Frontlets, or bands around the brow, were a distinction of their attire, and they wore their hair high, coiled in rings, letting the ends fall behind. The ornaments which have been found in the royal tombs show that the queens of Mycenae wore a red and glittering gold ray. The Mycenaean pottery has given a clue for fixing the earlier and later epics of the civilization which produced it, and enables us to say that, for instance, the vaulted sepulchres of the plain were subsequent to the shaft sepulchres on the castle hill of Mycenae. The painted vessels of the second millennium fall into two general classes, unglazed and glazed. The unglazed ornamented chiefly with lines and spirals were older, and when the glazed style attained its perfection went almost entirely out of use. In the varnished jars the development of the handicraft from the cruder work of the earlier potters can be traced through the best period into an age of decadence when the Mycenaean comes into competition with other and newer styles. The color of these vessels in the best age is warm varying from yellow to dark brown and sometimes burnt into a rich deep red. A new impulse of decoration has come upon the potters. The ornaments are no longer lines and spirals but vegetables and animals especially of the sea kingdom, fishes, polypods, seaweeds. On the other hand sphinxes, griffins, lotus flowers and other oriental and Egyptian subjects, though common elsewhere in Mycenaean ornaments are hardly ever copied by the workers in clay. The curious false-necked jars which have no opening above the neck but a spout at the side are one of the most characteristic products of the potteries which we call Mycenaean. Other marks for fixing the relative dates of Mycenaean troves are stone tools and iron. If, for example, we find in one tomb obsidian spearheads and no trace of iron and in another no stone implements but iron rings it is a safe inference that the first is older than the second. The occurrence of iron is a mark of comparative lateness. It is by such marks as these that we are able to say that the kings of the shaft graves reigned before the kings who were buried in the vaulted tombs, and that remains which have been found in the island of Thura belong to the beginning of the Mycenaean age. The remains at Mycenaean tyrants are, taken in their entirety the most impressive of the memorials of the civilization of the Greek mainland in the Bronze Age. Close to Sparta on high ground on the east bank of the Eurotas there was an unwalled stronghold which perished in the conflagration and in later times was associated with the name of King Menelaus. And not too far to the south at a Mycenaean which was in early ages perhaps the most important place in the Laconian Vale where has been discovered a lordly tomb which, unlike the treasury of Atreus, was never invaded by robbers. In this vault among other costly treasures were found the most precious of all the works of Cretan art that have yet been drawn forth from the earth. Two golden cups on which a metal worker of matchless skill has wrought vivid scenes of the snaring and capturing of wild bulls. In Attica there are many relics. On the Athenian Acropolis there are a few stones supposed to belong to a palace of great antiquity but we can look with more certainty on some of the ancient foundations of the fortress wall. This wall was called Pilargic or Pulasgic by the Athenians and it seems likely that the word preserves the name of the ancient inhabitants of the place the Pulasgoi. But the Pulasgians of Athens were not the only people of the Athenian plain. Towards the north end of this plain a vaulted tomb seems to record ancient princes of Vakarni. The lords of Thoracus had tombs of the same fashion and at Elucis there is similar evidence. In many other places in Attica graves of this period have been found. At Prasii a number of remarkable rock tombs resembling those in the lower town of Mycenae. In Biosia there are some striking memorials. Remains of a palace with some traces of wall paintings have been found on Cadmia the citadel of historic thieves. On the western shores of the great Copaic marsh a people dwelt whose wealth was proverbial. In their city or commoness shared with Mycenae the attribute of golden in the Homeric poems. Paintings on the walls of their palace represented scenes from the sports of the bullring and pillar shrines which must have been executed by artists in the same school as those who wrought at Nausis. One of their kings built a great sepulchral vault under the hill of the citadel and later generations took it for a treasury. It approached, though it did not quite attain to, the size of the treasure house of Atreus itself and it had a second chamber covered by a stone ceiling which was adorned with a curious design and low relief an arrangement of meandering spirals covered by rosettes producing the effect of a carpet. The same design which decked the burying place over commoness and stone was used by the painters of some lord of tyrants to adorn the walls of his palace and one is tempted to see both in the ceiling and in the sepulcher the work of craftsmen from Crete. But in any case the common design of ceiling and painting is borrowed from Egypt for we find almost the same design on the ceilings of tombs at Egyptian Thebes. The lords of Orcomonus were probably the mightiest lords in Biosha but they had neighbors were they rivals or friends and another fastness of the Copaic Marsh. While Orcomonus was situated by the western shores this primeval stronghold was built on a rock rising out of the waters. The ruins of the mighty fortress walls which girded the edge of and the foundations of the palace of these island princes but the name of the place is unknown. To the lords of this nameless castle and to the princes of Orcomonus the curious habits of their spacious lake were a matter of perpetual concern. The lake or morass which fertilized their land has no river to bear its water to the sea and its only outlets are underground clefs piercing Mount Toan which rises on its northern banks a barrier between the lake and the sea. To help the water to reach these passages men made canals through the lake and guarded them by fortresses. Remains have also been found especially at Pylis and in Lucas and Cephalinia which show that the coasts and islands of the Ionian sea which in Homeric poetry are associated with Nestor and Odysseus were not outside the Mycenaean circle. At the extreme southwest of the Aegean there was a Mycenaean community at the beginning of the 14th century at Ealysis and Rhodes an old burying place has been dug out and revealed horizontal rock graves with the arrangement of avenue, doorway and foresighted chamber resembling those of Mycenae. The vases found here belong to the best kind of Mycenaean glazed ware. In the absence of earlier pottery suggests at this stage of civilization to be reached by a gradual development in the place but that settlers had brought their civilization with them. In Thessaly the rude life of the Stone Age survived long after Cretan civilization had transformed southern Greece. The land remained comparatively barbarous and even when in the late Aegean period the civilization of the south began to penetrate it never throw Thessaly can show no wealthy cities or mighty walls a few small beehive tombs are the chief record of the heroic age. From this brief survey of the character and range of the Mycenaean civilization it will be seen that it was an outgrowth of Cretan civilization marked by peculiarities of its own. The period within which it flourished and declined fell between the 16th and the 11th centuries. The end came at the beginning of the Iron Age and in Greece they did not come into general use for weapons and ordinary purposes before the 11th century. Here too as in Crete Egypt supplies evidence bearing on the chronology. Early in the 16th century Mycenaean vases were represented on a wall painting at Egyptian Thebes. At Ghurab a city which was built in the 15th century and destroyed two or three hundred years later a number of false neck jars imported from the Aegean have been found and they belong not to the earlier but to the later period of Mycenaean pottery. And Egyptian evidence is found not only on Egyptian soil but on both sides of the Aegean. Three pieces of porcelain one inscribed with the name the two others with the cartouche of Amenhotep III of Egypt and a scarab with the name of his wife Tya have been found in the chamber-tumes of Mycenae. It is a curious coincidence that a scarab of the same Amenhotep was discovered in the burying place of Yalis in Rhodes. The single occurrence of such a scarab in one place might be an unsafe basis for an argument but the coincidence seems to point to some special epic of active intercourse with Egypt in this king's reign. It was followed that early in the 14th century at latest the period of the chamber-tumes and the vaulted-tumes began but the earlier sepulchres also supply testimony to Egyptian influence. On an inlaid dagger-blade found in one of the rock-tumes on the Mycenaean Citadel we see represented a scene from Egyptian life Iknuman's catching ducks in a river which can only be the Nile. The workmanship is Aegean not Egyptian but the Aegean artist New Egypt. The simplest way of explaining the rise of this civilization is to suppose that the Cretans their power expanded after 1600 BC descended on various parts of eastern Greece and establishing themselves especially in Argulis and Biosha planted their own culture among the Greeks. There was some evidence for Cretan settlements and Cretan lordships. For instance the name of the island Manoa opposite to Megara seems to record its settlement from the island of Minos. In the legend of Cadmus and Europa the founders of Thebes Europa is the mother of Minos daughter of Phoenix and the tradition that Cadmus was the inventor of writing may commemorate the introduction of a Cretan script. Though the story represents Europa as a Phoenician she was in the original version a Cretan princess. As a daughter of Phoenix she was transferred to Phoenicia because the Greeks had forgotten that long before they were acquainted with the traders of Tyre and Psydon the brown-skinned Cretans as phoniques red men. The name of the hero Phoenix whom we meet in Homer may be explained by supposing that he descended from Cretan settlers in northern Greece. Probably some of the principalities which are founded under the aegis of Crete grew strong enough to fling off the authority of the Minoan sovereigns and refused to pay tribute. But in all that concerns the relations of Nausis to Mycenae and her fellows the history of the fifteenth century is hidden from us. Then about 1400 BC Nausis fell and the glory of Crete departed. This blended palace was destroyed by fire and the other great settlements in the island seemed to have been overwhelmed in the same catastrophe. This common destruction seems to show that the disaster was the work of invaders and of invaders who had come simply to destroy and to sail away was complete. But who the destroyers were we cannot say for certain. Some think that they were the Achaeans who as we shall see rose to great power in Greece in the thirteenth century and also made settlements and bore rule in Crete. But although it is not impossible that the Achaeans may have left their northern homes in the regions of the Danube and reached north Greece in the fifteenth century there was no convincing evidence that they were early. No new palaces arose at Nausis in Feastus. The old civilization was left to live on in decline. The site of Nausis was reoccupied but its reoccupation does not suggest the abode of new conquerors. It is not impossible that the ruin of the Cretan power was wrought by the lords of the Argolid Plain who had become rivals of the Nausian kings. At all events after the fall of Nausis the Argolists became the most powerful seat of Achaean civilization. We can make out little as to the mutual relations of the small kingdoms of the prehistoric Greek world. The eminent position of Golden Mycenae herself seems to be established. Her comparative wealth is indicated by the treasures of her tombs which exceed all treasures found elsewhere in the Achaean. But her lords were not only rich their power stretched beyond their immediate territory. This fact may be inferred from the road system which connected Mycenae with Corinth and must have been constructed by one of her kings. Three narrow but stoutly built highways have been traced the two western joining at Cleoni the eastern going by Tenea. They rest on substructions of Cyclope and Masonry streams are bridged and rocks are hewn through and as they were not wide enough for wagons the wares of Mycenae were probably carried to the Isthmus on the backs of mules. If the glazed clay ware so abundantly found at Mycenae was wrought there and not as something imported from the islands then the industry of her pottery may have been a source of her wealth. It is not easy to determine whether Mycenae held sway over the whole Arjive plain and especially what was her relation to tyrants. A road leading southward as far as a small hill famous for a great temple of Hera may show that this site was under the dominion of Mycenae and it was a place of some importance for three vaulted hill-tumes have been found hard by. Tyrants was an older place of habitation than Mycenae and it has been suggested that it may have been Tyrentian kings who first selected the Mycenaean hill as a strong post at the head of the plain and a bulwark against invaders from the north. Argos itself under the hill of Larissa must have been a place of importance and in the 13th century tyrants seemed not to have belonged to Mycenae but to the lords of Argos. Of the power and resources of the Aegean states the monuments hardly enabled us to form an absolute idea. They were small. It was an age when men might cross a kingdom in a day. The kings had slaves to toil for them. The fortresses and the large tombs were assuredly built by the hands of thralls. One fact shows in a striking way how small were these kingdoms and how slender their means compared with the powerful realms of Egypt and the Orient. If Babylonian or Egyptian monarchs with their command of slave labor had ruled in Greece they would assuredly have cut a canal across the Isthmus and promoted facilities for commerce by joining the eastern with the western sea. That was an undertaking which neither the small primitive states nor the Greek states which came after ever had the means of carrying out. End of Chapter 1 Section 3 Chapter 1 Parts 4 through 6 of A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Leon Meyer A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great Volume 1 by John Bagnell Burry Chapter 1 Part 4 The Achaeans and the Trojan War It is uncertain at what time the Achaeans made their first appearance in the Greek Peninsula. They were a people of blond complexion of Indo-European speech who came down from the regions of the Danube and made conquests in Thessaly and the plain of the Spurcius. In the course of time some of their chieftains won lordships in the Peloponnesus in Argolis and Laconia probably by marriages with daughters of the old Greek dynasties. It is not probable that the Achaean invaders came in great numbers.  They did not work destruction. They won lordship and leadership and their adventurous spirit guided Greece to great enterprises. They carried on the traditions of the civilization which they found in Thessaly, poor and backward in the Peloponnesus, wealthy and luxurious. In the later remains of Mycenaean civilization their presence or influence can be recognized by some new features which they brought with them from the north, such as the use of long swords, round shields, and brooches. They also introduced the practice of burning the dead. Some think it was these northern invaders who destroyed the palaces of Gnosis and Feastus. In that case we must suppose that before B.C. 1400 they had settled in Thessaly. But we can only be certain that by the 13th century they had both risen to power in Argos and made settlements in Crete. The dynasty from which the Homeric kings Agamemnon and Menelaus sprang was founded according to Greek tradition early in the 13th century by Pelops of Phrygian. Agamemnon and Menelaus represent the Achaean stock and the meaning of this Phrygian relationship is not clear. At whatever time they came the Achaeans had become true Greeks and were the most prominent among Greek rulers in the 13th and 12th centuries and the kings who held Sway and Argolis were the most powerful. It is significant that the minstrels of the 12th century used both Achaeans and Argyves to designate all the Greeks. They used also in the same sense the obscure name Danioi which legend associated especially with the Argalid and which perhaps belonged to the original Greek inhabitants of that district. The Achaeans of Northern Greece of the land which was later to be Thessaly seemed to have been the great sea adventurers of the heroic age. With this country were connected the memories of early Greek exploration of the Eucsine in the legend of the ship Argo and to the Achaeans of Thessaly we must probably refer the earliest notice which preserves the Achaean name in a historical document. An Egyptian writing tells that they came in company with other peoples from the lands of the sea and invaded Egypt in the year 1229 BC when Merneptah was king. But the great achievement which made the Achaeans illustrious was one in which southern and northern Greece combined, the expedition against Troy. The Achaean name is specially associated with the land of Thaya in southern Thessaly and the country each at the south including the plain of the river Spurkeus as far as Mount Eta. The Spurkeus region has a particular interest as the original land of Hellas. Here dwelled the Hellenes, a small folk, who would one day give their name to all the Greeks. They were probably the old Greek population who had been subdued by the Achaean invaders. If we may judge from the ancient names of places which the Greeks preserved it would seem that the languages closely akin were at one time spoken on both sides of the Achaean and in the Isles. The Coastmen and Highlanders of western Asia Minor called their capes and hills and streams by names which resemble in root and formation names which we find on the coast and in the highlands of Greece and in islands of the intermediate sea. But the strange thing is that the diffusion of the civilization which we have been examining worked at the margin of the Asiatic shore. It extended to roads and to small islands north and south of roads, but it did not until the days of its decline touch the opposite continent. The people who held the seaboard of Asia Minor between the Troad in the north and Lycia in the south were the Myonians, the Carians and the Leleges. It is a fact of importance that these lands lay outside notwithstanding the affinities of race which bound the inhabitants of those countries to the folks of the Achaean islands and Greece. South of Troy, which stood quite by itself, there are no palaces or fortresses of the Mycenaean age along the east Achaean coast, nor in the large islands of Lesbos, Chios and Samos. The relics even of commerce with the western Achaean though one would expect such commerce to have been brisk and constant and few and rare. There was therefore an obstinate resistance on the part of the inhabitants of these regions to the reception of the Achaean civilization of the bronze age. The most probable explanation of this fact is that a great inland power exercised control over Asia Minor down to the coast and excluded foreign settlements. This power was the empire of the Hittites. The ruins of their capital have been excavated at Bogas Coe in northwestern Cappadocia. Their kingdom seems to have been lasted from about 2,000 to 800 B.C. and about the time of the fall of Nausis they extended their power southward by conquering north Syria where they established a second capital at Karkamesh. They had close political relations with Babylonia as is shown by the clay tablets in two languages Hittite and Babylonian located at Bogas Coe. Their lordship extended in some form to the Troad and the western coast of Asia Minor. The conjecture may be hazarded that they were the people who destroyed the great brick fortress of Troy. Many of the influences which passed to and fro between the Achaean world and Mesopotamia may have been transmitted through the Hittites. Their southward expansion meant wars with the Egyptians who also aspired to conquer Syria. In a battle which was fought at K-Dash in 1287 B.C. between the two rival powers we find the Lycians and the Dardanians of the Troad fighting for their Hittite lords. But about this very time the Hittite power was declining and northwestern Asia Minor as far as the valley of the Sangarius was rested from their rule by swarms of new invaders from Europe. The Trojanians belonged and who were so closely akin to the Thracians that we may speak of the Frigio-Thracian division of the Indo-European family. After the destruction of early Troy centuries had passed during which no attempt was made to restore its vanished splendor. Three different settlements indeed succeeded one another on its site but they were insignificant villages rather than castles. We may account for this long interval by the jealous policy of the Hittite kings. At length before the middle of the 13th century one of the Frigian leaders built a strong stone fortress on the hill of Troy. This too disappeared. Probably as we shall see it succumbed to an enemy and then not long afterwards built by the same people arose the great stronghold of Priam, the Troy of legend and history. The new Troy through whose glory the name of the spot was to become a household word forever throughout all European lands was built on the leveled ruins of the older towns. The circuit of the new city was far wider and within a great wall of well wrought stone the citadel rose terrace upon terrace to a highest point. On that commanding summit as at Mycenae we must presume that the king's palace stood. The buildings which the foundations have been disclosed within the walls have the same simple plan that we saw in the older Brick City and in the palaces of Mycenae and Tyrants. The wall was pierced by three or four gates the chief gate being on the southeast side guarded by a flanking tower. The builders were more skillful than the masons of the router walls of the fortresses of Argolis which belonged to an earlier age. The walls were reckoned not only the men of the Trojan plain, but the Dardanians in the upper valley of the Scamander among the hills of Ida the country of the Homeric Aeneas and to the east the inhabitants of the plains of the Grinicus and the Ecipus. And south of Mount Ida were a number of strongholds inhabited by Pelasgian tribes who represented the original inhabitants of the country whom the Trojans had subdued. The lords of Troy whether of the earlier fortress of Brick or the later of Stone did not owe their power and wealth to the fertility of the soil or to any natural products of the region in which they had fixed their abode. The little plain, watered by the Scamander has no advantages in itself to attract settlers and its coasts north and west offer no good harborage for ships. The fortune of Troy was due to the difficulties of navigation which beset the mariners trading between the Aegean and the Eucsine. The prevailing summer winds from north, northeast and northwest used to detain sailing ships for days or weeks at the mouth of the Halispont. The sailors wanted anchorage and they wanted fresh water which was to be got from the Scamander and also on the west coast at Bishika Bay. These things the masters of the Scamander plain had it in their power hence Troy was in a position to control the trade which passed through the Halispont. And here a number of converging lines of traffic met. From Thrace and Peonia came wine, swords, white horses, and perhaps gold. From Paphlegonia and the southern coast of the Eucsine came timber, silver, and vermilion wild asses. Southward there was the commerce of the Mionians and Charians and Lichians. The Mionians who were noted as slave dealers dwelled in the land which was afterwards to be Lydia on the banks of the Hermes and in the plain of Sardis. The Charians possessed Miletus where there were skillful workers in Ivory and the districts of the Mionder. The Lichians probably held much of the carrying trade from Egypt and Syria to northern Europe. The policy of Troy which was, we may say, its very reason for existing was to levy a toll upon all the traffic which converged on the Hellespontine shores. If there was, as has been supposed, a great yearly market in the Trojan plain to which traders from all quarters came by sea or land with their merchandise, it was an arrangement which was not only profitable to the Trojan king who received the market dues, but may have been convenient to many of the merchants sparing them longer journeys. Sacred Troy was thus a parasite which grew fat on the produce of others in the Greeks who desired to have access to the Uxine and to trade freely with all the world determined to destroy it. We may conjecture that the fall of the fifth city in the course of the 13th century was the result of Achaean enterprise and was the fact which suggested the legend of the sack of Troy by Heracles. This story is closely connected with the tale of the Argonauts who was embarked at Iolaus with the other heroes in the Argo and left the ship during the voyage and destroyed Troy. It looks as if behind the whole legend there lurked the tradition of Greek attempts to navigate the Uxine between the fall of the fifth and the rise of the sixth city. So many legends of the heroic age of Greece have been proved by recent discoveries to have a historical basis that there was nothing rash in supposing that here, too, was building in the void but was working on the memory of definite events. It was probably at the beginning of the 12th century as Greek tradition reckoned that the Achaeans made ready a great expedition to exterminate the parasitic power which preyed upon the trade of the world. It is uncertain how far the Greek states of the time can be described as a federation or an empire with the definite organization under the supremacy of Argos. But there seems no reason to doubt that the Achaean king of Argos whose name in Greek tradition was Agamemnon, succeeded in enlisting the cooperation of the chief kings and princes of northern as well as southern Greece. It looks, indeed, as if the Achaean lords of Thaia and Thessaly, the country from which the Argos sailed, had a particular interest in the enterprise. All sailed to the plain of Troy. It was vain to hope that they could take by storm the well-walled castle of Priam. Their hope was to cut off all the trade on which Troy depended for her livelihood and to starve her out. The tradition that the siege was long, nine years according to the poets, is therefore in accordance with the conditions of the war. The Greeks supported themselves by raids on the surrounding subjects and allies of the Trojans. Priam city fell. Her fall was the necessary prelude to the opening of the propontus and the Uxan sea to Greek commerce and colonization. When the Greeks, in later days, established themselves securely on the Hellespont and the Bosphorus, the hill of Troy ceased to have any value as a site, and though it was again inhabited, it was little more than a place of famous memories. Part 5. The Homeric Poems The later period of the heroic age, its manners of life, its material environment, its social organization, its political geography are reflected in the Homeric Poems. Although the poets who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey probably did not live before the 9th century, they derived their matter from older Leys which must have belonged to the generations immediately succeeding the Trojan War. After the Age of Bronze had passed away and the conditions of life and the political shape of the Greek world had been utterly changed, it would have been impossible for anyone, however imaginative, unless he were a scientific aquarium with an abundance of records at his command to create a consistent picture of a vanished civilization. And the picture which Homer presents is a consistent picture, closely corresponding in its main features and in remarkable details to the evidence which has been recently recovered and described in the foregoing pages. The Homeric Palace is built on the same general plan as the palaces that have been found at Mycenae and Tyrants, at Troy and in Biosia. The equipment of the Homeric heroes in the man-screening Homeric shield received their best illustration from Mycenaean gyms and jars. The blue inlaid frieze in the vestibule of the Hall of Tyrants proves that the poets frieze of Sianus in the Hall of Alcinois was not a fancy. And he describes as the cup of Nestor a gold cup of doves perched on the handles, such as one which was found in a royal tomb at Mycenae. The subjects wrought on the shield which the master smith made for Achilles may be illustrated by works of art found at Mycenae and in Crete. The shield, wrought in bronze, tin, silver and gold, is round and has a ringed space in the center, encompassed by three concentric girdles. In the middle is the earth, the sea and the heaven, with the unwirried sun in the moon at her full, and all the stars wherewith heaven is crowned. The subject of the first circle is peace and war. Here are scenes in a city at peace. Banquets, brides born through the streets by torchlight to their new homes, the elders dealing out justice. There is another city besieged and scenes of battle. The second circle shows scenes from country life at various seasons of the year, plowing and spring, the plowman drinking a draft of wine as he reaches the end of the black furrow, a king watching reapers reaping in his meadows and the preparations for a harvest festival, a bright vintage scene, young men and maids bearing the sweet fruit and wicker baskets, and dancing while a boy plays a lyre and sings the song of Linus, herdsmen with their dogs pursuing two lions which had carried off an ox from the banks of a sounding river, a pasture and shepherd's hut in the mountain glen. The hole was girded by the third outmost circle through which the great might of the river Oceanus flowed, rounding off as it were the life of mortals by its girdling stream. The whole conception is due to the imagination of the poet, but similar scenes of peace and war were depicted by the artists of the Aegean, as for instance on the Cretan plaques which probably adorned the cover of a chest of cypress wood on which we saw a city represented and on a vase of steatite decorated by a picture of what is probably a harvest festival. The siege is illustrated by the scene of the Ligard city on the silver beaker and dagger blades discovered at Mycenae show brilliant examples of the art of inlaying on metal. The art of writing, too, is mentioned in the Iliad in the story of Balerophon who carries from Argos to Lycia deadly symbols in a folded tablet. The fact which was doubted till a few years ago that writing was practiced in the heroic age shows that the poet was guilty of no anachronism. There is indeed one striking difference in custom. The Mycenaean tombs reveal few traces of the habit of burning the dead, which the Homeric Greeks invariably practiced. While beyond what is implied in a single mention of embalming the poems completely ignore the practice of burial. In later times both customs existed in Greece side by side. The explanation of this discrepancy seems to be that reclamation was a practice introduced by the Achaeans. Hexameter verse must have already been far on its way to perfection in the 12th century when the Greek Bards used it to commemorate the Trojan War. The glorification of Achilles and other features of the Iliad point to Northern Greece where was the kingdom of Achilles in Theia as the home of one of these early minstrels. Southern Greece doubtless and here we may suspect the story of the homecoming of Odysseus took its first shape marked as it is by a lively interest in the Peloponnesus and Crete. Political and social organization of the early Greeks. The Homeric poems give us our earliest glimpse of the working of those political institutions which were the common heritage of most of the children whether children by adoption or by birth of the Aryan stock of Greek, Roman and German alike. They show us the king at the head but he does not govern wholly of his own will. He is guided by a council of the chief men of the community whom he consults and the decisions of the council and king deliberating together are brought before the assembly of the whole people. Out of these three elements king, council and assembly institutions of Europe have grown. Here are the germs of all the various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. But in the most ancient times this political organization was weak and loose. The true power and primitive society was the family. When we first meet the Greeks they live together in family communities. Their villages are habitations of a genus that is of a clan in a wide sense. All the members being descended from a common ancestor and bound together by the tie of blood. Originally the chief of the family had the power of life and death over all who belonged to the family and it was only as the authority of the state grew and asserted itself against the comparative independence of the family that this power gradually passed away. But the village communities are not as they were in the Asian world, isolated and independent. They are part of a larger community which is called the Phile, or tribe. The tribe is the whole people of the kingdom in the kingdom's simplest form and the territory which the tribe inhabited was called its deem. When a king became powerful and one sway over the deems of neighboring kings a community consisting of more than one tribe would arise and while each tribe had to emerge its separate political institutions in the common institutions of the whole state it would retain its separate identity within the larger union. It was usual for several families to group themselves together into a society called a freitra or brotherhood which had certain common religious usages. The organization of clan and tribe with the intermediate union of the freitree was a framework derived from the Aryan forefathers shared at least by other Aryan races. For we find the same institutions among the Romans and among the Germans. The clan is the foundation of Roman society and the Julian gins for instance has exactly the same social significance as the genus of the Akmianids of Attica. The Phile is the Roman tribe and the freitree corresponds to the Roman curia and to our own English hundred. The importance of the brotherhood is illustrated by Homer's description of an outcast as one who has no brothers and no hearth. The importance of the family is most vividly shown in the manner in which the Greeks possessed the lands which they conquered. The soil did not become the private property of individual freemen nor yet the public property of the whole community. The king of the tribe or tribes marked out the whole territory into parcels according to the number of families in the community and the families cast lot for the estates. Each family then possessed its own estate. The head of the family administered it but had no power of alienating it. The land belonged to the whole kin but not to any particular member. The right of property and land seems to have been based not on the right of conquest but on a religious sentiment. Each family buried their dead within their own domain, and it was held that the dead possessed forever and ever the soil where they lay and that the land round a sepulcher belonged rightfully to their living kin's folk, one of whose highest duties was to protect and tend the tombs of their fathers. The king was at once the chief priest, the chief judge, and the supreme warlord of the tribe. He exercised a general control over religious ceremonies except in cases where there were special priesthoods. He pronounced judgment and dealt out justice to those who came to his judgment seat to have their wrongs righted, and he led forth the host to war. He belonged to a family which claimed descent from the gods themselves. His relation to his people was conceived as that of a protecting deity. He was revered as a god in the deem. The kingship passed from sire to son, but it is probable that personal fitness was recognized as a condition of the kingly office, and the people might refuse to accept a degenerate son who was unequal to the tasks that his father had fulfilled. The sceptred king had various privileges, the seed of honor at feasts, a large and choice share of booty taken in war, and of food offered at sacrifices. A special close of land was marked out and set apart for him as a royal domain, distinct from that which his family owned. The royal functions were vague enough, and a king had no power to enforce his will if it did not meet the approval of the heads of the people. He must always look for the consent and seek the opinion of the deliberative council of the elders. Strictly perhaps the members of the council ought to have been the heads of all the clans, and they would thus have represented the tribe, or all the tribes if there were more than one. But we must take it for granted as an ultimate fact, which we have not the means of explaining, that certain families had come to hold a privileged position above the others, had in fact been marked out as noble and claimed descent from Zeus, and the council was composed of this nobility. In the purest authority of this council of elders laid the germ of future aristocracy. More important than either king or council for the future growth of Greece was the gathering of the people, out of which democracy was to spring. All the freemen of the tribe, all the freemen of the nation when more tribes had been united, met together not at stated times, but whenever the king summoned them, to hear and acclaim what he and his councillors proposed. To hear and acclaim but not to debate or propose themselves. Yet the gathering of the folk for purposes of policy had not been differentiated from the gathering for the purpose of war. The host which the king led forth against the foe was the same as the folk which assented by silence or applause to the declarations of his will in the Agara. The assembly was not yet distinguished as an institution from the army, and if Agamemnon summons his host to declare his resolutions in the plain of Troy, such a gathering is the Agara in no figurative sense. It is no mere military assembly formed on the model of a political assembly. It is, in the fullest sense, the assembly of the people. The fellow institution of the Roman Commissia, our own Gamote, derived all three from the same old Aryan gatherings. The king was surrounded by a body of companions or retainers who were attached to him by personal ties of service, and seem often to have a boat in his palace. The companions are the same institution as the thanes of our English kings, and if kingship had held its ground in Greece the companions might possibly as in England have developed into a new order of nobility founded not on birth, but on the king's own choice for his service. Though the monarchy of this primitive form as we find it reflected in the Homeric Laes, generally passed away, it survived in a few outlying regions which lagged behind the rest of the Hellenic world in political development. Thus the Macedonian Greeks in the lower valley of the Axias retained a constitution of the old Homeric type till the latest times, the royal power continually growing. At the close of the tale of Greek conquest and expansion, which began on the Khaester, and ended in Genesis, we shall come back by a strange revolution to the Homeric state. When all the diverse forms of the rule of the few and the rule of the many which grew out of the primitive monarchy have had their day, we shall see the Macedonian warrior who is to complete the work that was begun by the Achaean conquerors of Troy attended by his companions like Agamemnon or Achilles and ruling his people like an Achaean king of men. The constitutional fabric of the Greek states was thus simple and loose in the days of Homer. Perhaps few large communities had come into Greece, but larger communities were constantly formed in the course of the conquest. In the later part of the royal period a new movement is setting in which is to decide the future of Greek history. The city begins to emerge and take form and shape out of the loose aggregate of villages. The inhabitants of a plain or valley are induced to leave their scattered villages and make their dwellings side by side in one place which would generally be under the shadow of the king's fortress. At first the motive would be to gain the protection afforded by joint habitation in unsettled times. Just as we find in an earlier age villages grouped under the citadel of Mycenae. Sometimes the group of villages would be curt by a wall. Sometimes the protection still above would be deemed enough. The change from village to city life was general but not universal. Many communities continued to live in villages and did not form cities till long afterwards. The movement was promoted by the kings, and it is probable that strong kings often brought it about by compulsion. But in promoting it they were unwittingly undermining the monarchical constitution and paving the way for their own abolition. A city-state naturally tends to be a republic. In the heroic age then the state had not fully emerged from the society. No laws were enacted and maintained by the state. Those ordinances and usages which guided the individual man in his conduct and which are necessary for the preservation of any society were maintained by the sanction of religion. There were certain crimes which the gods punished but it was for the family and the whole community to deal with the shatter of blood. The justice which the king administered was really arbitration. A stranger had no right of protection and might be slain in a foreign community unless he was bound by the bond of guest friendship with a member of that community and then he came under the protection of Zeus the hospitable. Wealth in these ages consisted of herds and flocks for though the Greeks were tillers of a country which was already agricultural the land was not rich enough to bestow wealth. The value of a suit of armor for instance or a slave was expressed in oxen. Piracy was a common trade as was inevitable in a period when there was no organized maritime power strong enough to put it down. So many practiced this means of livelihood that it bore no approach and when semen landed on a strange strand a simple question to ask them was Outlanders, are ye robbers that rove the seas? End of chapter 1 parts 4 through 6