The Sea-Kings of Crete

rliest historic period there has always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land of se

ls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain section of students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming isolation of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to seek any pre-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid Hellenists in terms which implied that they hold it little else than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague l

Hogarth, 'Ionia and

like a beacon light across the dark gulf which separated the Hellas of myth from the Hellas of history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness, and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty of de

familiar to us as those of the chief Greek cities and states are of comparatively minor importance in the Homeric world; Athens is mentioned, but not with any prominence; Corinth is merely a dependency of its neighbour Mycen?; Sparta only ranks along with other towns of Laconia; Delphi and Olympia have not yet assumed anything like the place which they afterwards occupy as religious centres during the historic period. The chief cities of Hellas are Mycen?, Tiryns, and Orchomenos. Crete, although its chiefs, Idomeneus and Meriones, are only of

you?' says Nestor to Telemachus. 'Whence do you come? Are you engaged in trade, or do you rove at adventure as sea-robbers who wander at hazard of their lives, bringing bane to strangers?' The same question is addressed to Odysseus by Polyphemus, and was plainly the first thing thought of when a seafaring stranger was encountered. As among the Highlanders and Borderers of Scotland, cattle-lifting was looked upon as a perfectly respectable f

ffending their susceptibilities or wounding their sense of their own importance, while their treatment of the commons beneath them is sufficiently disdainful. Though the commons are summoned sometimes to the Council, their function there is merely a passive one; they are called to hear what has been determined, and to approve of it, if they so desire, but in no case have they any alternative to accepting it, even

s a distinct retrogression. In the Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with the other sex in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent

ith walls of bronze, a frieze of kuanos (blue glass paste), and golden doors, with lintels and door-posts of silver, while the approaches to it are guarded by dogs wrought in silver. The whole reminds one rather of the description of one of the vast Egyptian temples of the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty than of what one would have imagined the palace of an island chieftain. The Palaces of Priam at Troy, and of Odysseus at Ithaca, less gorgeously adorned in detail, are not less stately, and even the abode of Menelaus in comparatively insignificant Sparta is described as 'gleaming with gold, amber, silver, and ivory.' The minor appointments of these splendid homes are in keeping with their structural magnificence. Great vessels of gold, silver, and bronze are in common use, the richly dyed and wrought robes of the chiefs and their wives and daughters are stored in chests splendidly decorated and

he warrior crouched, wearing for defensive armour no more than a linen corselet and leathern cap and gaiters, and on the other that the hero wore practically the complete panoply of the later Hellenic hoplite, the small round shield, the bronze helmet, with metal cuirass, belt, and greaves; while the question of whether the offensive weapons were of iron or of bronze has been debated with equal pertinacity. The discussion of such details is beyond our purpose, and it i

al of what the highly wrought armour of the time should be. The shield of Achilles, with its gorgeous representations of various scenes of peace and war, seems almost to transcend the possibilities of actual metal work at such a period; yet we may believe that the poet was not merely drawing upon his imagination, but giving a heightened picture of what he had himself witnessed in the way of the armourer's art. Chiefly to be noticed with regard to it is the way in which he describes the method used by Heph?stos in produci

portance of states and cities, social life, art and warfare-all are different from anything we find in the Hellas of history; in many respects this world of the poems is at a higher stage of development than that which succeeded it; but certainly it is different. Now, the question of importance for us is-Had this poetic world of the Iliad and Odyssey an

ubsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it, extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders, but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy, or else so grandiose a

ng much to the power of art, the mind was not yet satisfied. We have said the poems seemed to carry with them their own evidence that they were not undiluted fiction, but contained at least an element of objective, perhaps traditional, truth. It was a beautiful world they told of, and yet it was a world apart. Agamemnon in the field and Achilles in his tent; Priam in his palace; Odysseus in his travels; Alcinous with his retainers, and Arete with her daughter; Penelope and Telemachus in the midst of the wicked suitors, and the old swineherd and the faithful nurse; the very shades of the Dead beyond the streams of Oceanus-how could the bards describe all these wonders if they had not lived in a world of their own, or at least acquired the

owne, 'Homeric Stu

onstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to have sprung into being without something behind them to account for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing

GATE, MYC

deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger, wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on 'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' even as these were greater than the men of the poet's own degenerate days. Does it not seem as though we were being led towards the conclusion that the Homeric civilization is