There seems little doubt that this prehistoric Aegean world was composed of many small states. Of the relation of these states to one another, of the political events of the period, we know almost nothing, and we can guess little; for the records of stone and bronze and gold cannot be interpreted without some clue. A few facts which seem to emerge, partly from archaeological evidence, partly from tradition, partly from hints in a pictured chronicle of Egypt, furnish us with historical problems rather than with historical information.
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 Aegean. 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 Cleonae, the eastern going by Tenea. They rest on substructions of “Cyclopean” masonry; streams are bridged and rocks are hewn through; and as they were not wide enough for waggons, 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 some think, imported from the islands, then the industry of her potteries may have been a source of her wealth. It is not easy to determine whether Mycenae held sway over the whole Argive plain and especially what was her relation to Tiryns. A road leading southward as far as a small hill which was, in later times, famous for a great temple of Hera, shows that this site was under the domination of Mycenae; and it was a place of some importance, for three vaulted hill-tombs have been found hard by. Tiryns was an older place of habitation than Mycenae; and it has been suggested that it may have been Tirynthian 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. But the relations of Tiryns to Mycenae must be left undetermined; and the position of Larisa, the hill of Argos, at this period is hidden from our eyes. In Greek history Argos appears, from the beginning, as what it seems naturally marked out to be, the ruling city of the plain; and it would be rash to suppose that it was not a place of importance in an earlier age, for we cannot argue backward from the absence of prehistoric remains on a site like Argos which has been continuously inhabited.
There was an active sea-trade in the Aegean, a sea-trade which reached to the Troad and to Egypt; but there is no proof that Mycenae was a naval power. Everything points to Crete as the queen of the seas in this age, and to Cretan merchants as the carriers of the Aegean world. The roads of traffic are conservative, and we may be sure that the route to Egypt, which in later days Greek mariners always followed, was fixed in the prehistoric period—from the west of Crete to the opposite shore of Libya and along the Libyan coast to the mouths of the Nile. The predominance of Crete survived in the memories of Minos, whom tradition exalted as a mighty sea-king who cleared the Aegean of pirates and founded a maritime power. The Greeks looked back to Minos as a son of Zeus, who “reigned”, as the poet of the Odyssey mysteriously tells us, “in nine yearly tides”, at Cnosus “the great city”, and held converse with his divine father in the cave of Ida. But Minos, as his name shows, was a figure of Cretan history or myth before the Greeks came; perhaps he was the greatest of the gods worshipped in the island; he was associated with “the bull of Minos”, who was possibly a horned man of primitive Egyptian art.
There were dealings of commerce between the Aegean world and northern Europe; “Mycenaean” influences travelled up the Hebrus and the Danube; amber from the shores of the Baltic was imported to Mycenae. Jars of Aegean manufacture have been found at Syracuse in vaulted tombs; but in Cyprus there were actually Mycenaean settlements. Of relations with Egypt we have already seen indications in the names of the Egyptian monarch Amenhotep and his wife found at Mycenae and Ialysus. This was toward the end of the fifteenth century. Still earlier, we see in a painting of Thebes men who can be recognized as of Aegean type, offering Mycenaean vessels to King Thothmes III; and they are described as “the kings of the country of the Keftu and the isles of the great sea”. It would seem then that in the fifteenth century the relations between Egypt and the Aegean were peaceful, and the small princes of the “islands” were ready to offer their homage to the great monarchs on the banks of the Nile.
It was possibly from Egypt that Aegean artists derived the spiral ornament; and it is probably to them that we owe its introduction into Europe. Moreover, through contact with Libya and Egypt, the Aegean civilisation had received some oriental elements; and thus, through the Aegean peoples whom they subjugated, the Greeks had their earliest glimpses of the Orient. It was perhaps from the peoples whom they conquered that Greek woodcutters learned to use a new kind of axe, with a name which had come from Mesopotamia; for, by a strange chance, Assyria had the privilege of bestowing her word for axe on two far-sundered races of Aryan speech,—on the Greeks in the west and on the speakers of Sanskrit in the east.
Of the power and resources of the Aegean states, the monuments hardly enable us to form an absolute idea. They were small, as we saw; 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-labour, 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 small Greek states which came after, ever had the means of carrying out.
Having examined the Aegean civilisation of the bronze age and drawn some conclusions which it suggests, we must now consider how far the Greeks may have shared in it.
SECT. 4. THE GREEK CONQUEST
The conquest of the Greek peninsula by the Greeks lies a long way behind recorded history, and the Greeks themselves, when they began to reflect on their own past, had completely forgotten what their remote ancestors had done ages and ages before. Their legends, their epic poems, their geographical names gave them material for attempting to reconstruct their history, and the outline of that reconstruction, which was a feat of genius, will demand our attention presently. But such a reconstruction, the work of a poetical age before historical criticism was applied, must be put away, if we would seek to discover what actually happened. We have most of the facts on which the Greek account was based.
The meaning of the Greek conquest has been generally misconceived. It has been supposed that it carried with it the extermination or enthralment of all the original inhabitants of the countries which the invaders conquered, and that a new Aryan population spread over the whole land. This view rests on two false conceptions. It mistakes the character of the Greek invaders, and it mistakes the nature of their relations to the peoples whom they found in Greece.
The invaders spoke an Aryan speech, but it does not follow that they all came of Aryan stock. There was, indeed, an Aryan element among them, and some of them were descendants of men of Aryan race who had originally taught them their language and brought them some Aryan institutions and Aryan deities. But the infusion of Aryan blood was probably small; and in describing the Greeks, as well as any other of the races who speak sister tongues, we must be careful to call them men of Aryan speech, and not men of Aryan stock. In historical Greece there were two marked types in the population, distinguished by light and dark hair, and there is no doubt