The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
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were independent, but they kept alive their communion of interest and sentiment by the common worship of the Triopian Apollo. The Carians were a vigorous people. They impressed themselves upon their land, and soon men began to forget that it had not been always Caria. They took to the sea, and formed a maritime power of some strength, so that in later ages a tradition was abroad that there was once upon a time a Carian sea-supremacy, though no one could mention anything that it achieved. The Carians also claimed to have made contributions to the art of war by introducing shield-handles, and the crested helmet, and the emblazoning of shields—claims which we cannot test.
The Greek fringe of western Asia Minor was complete. It was impossible for Doris to creep round the corner and join hands with Pamphylia; for the Lycians presented an insuperable barrier. The Lycians were not a folk of Aryan speech, as a widely-spread error supposes them to have been; their language is related to the Carian. Their proper name was Trmmili; but the name Lycian seems to have been given them by others as well as by the Greeks who recognised in the chief Tremilian deity their own Apollo Lykios. But, though Lycia was not colonised, the Aegean was now entirely within the Greek sphere, excepting only its northern margin, where Greek enterprise in the future was to find a difficult field. It is important to observe that the process by which Asiatic Greece was created differs in character from the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. The settlements of Ionia and Doris are examples of colonisation. Bands of settlers went forth from their homes to find new habitations for themselves, but they left a home-country behind them. The Dorian movements, on the other hand, partake of the character of a folk-wandering. The essential fact is that a whole people dispersed to seek new fields and pastures. For the paltry remnant which remained in the sequestered nook beyond Parnassus could not be called the parent-people except by courtesy; the people, as a whole, had gone elsewhere.
Before the completion of the Greek occupation of the western coast of Asia Minor, another migration left the shores of the Peloponnesus to seek a more distant home. Cyprus, an island whose geographical position marks it out to be contested between three continents, was now to receive European settlers. We have seen that throughout the bronze age it played an important part in supplying the Aegean countries with copper, but though it imported Aegean pottery it had lagged behind the Aegean civilisation. It was destined, however, to play a greater part in the world’s debate as a wrestling-ground between the European and the Asiatic; and the first Europeans who went forth for the struggle were Peloponnesian Greeks whom, we may expect, the events of the Dorian invasion incited to wander. Much about the same time the Phoenicians also began to plant settlements in the island, mainly in the centre—Amathus, Cition, Idalion, Tamassus, Lapathus—and some places seem to have been colonized jointly by Phoenicians and Greeks, just as on the coast of Asia Minor Greeks and Carians mingled. The Greeks brought their Aegean civilization, now in a decadent stage, with them, and abundant relics of it have been found. But a new Cypriot culture arose out of the intermingling of the two races; and the Greeks, under Phoenician influence, became so zealous in the worship of Aphrodite that she was universally known as the Cyprian goddess.
The settlers in Cyprus spoke the Arcadian dialect, but this does not prove that their old homes were in Arcadia. Before the Dorians came and developed new dialects, the Arcadian speech with but slight variations prevailed in the coast-lands as well as in the centre of the peninsula; and some of the Cypriot Greeks went forth from Laconia and Argolis. Some sailed from Salamis in the Attic bay and gave their name to Salamis in Cyprus. The colonists in their distant island might pride themselves on taking a step in advance of the rest of the Greek world—but it was a step which they had better have left untaken. They found there a mode of writing, in which each syllable of a word was represented by a sign. This syllabic system, which had been borrowed from the Hittites, was ill-adapted to express the Greek language; but the colonists adapted it to their use, and were thus able to write many years sooner than their fellow Greeks. But nothing is clumsier than a Greek writing in the Cypriot character, and it would have been better if they had waited longer and learned with the rest of their race the use of a finer instrument.
As for the chronology of all these movements which went to the making of historical Greece, we must be content with approximate limits:—
13th-10th centuries:
Achaean colonization
Fall of Troy
Beginnings of Ionian colonization
Thessalian conquest
Boeotian conquest
Dorian conquest of Crete and islands
Dorian conquest of eastern Peloponnesus
11th century:
Colonization of Cyprus
10th century:
Continuation of Ionian colonization
Dorian colonization of Asia Minor
SECT. 7. HOMER
No Greek folk has laid Europe under a greater debt of gratitude than the Achaeans, for the Achaeans originated epic poetry, and the beginning of European literature goes back to them. But the supreme inspiration came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil. They went forth from their Thessalian homes, bearing in their souls poetical legends, and that most precious of possessions, the rhythm of their six-footed verse. Their toils and adventures in settling in a new land, and their struggles with the Phrygians, gave a fresh impulse to poetic creation, and the old tales of the gods of nature were transfigured into historical myths. Deities, in this transformation, took upon themselves the guise of heroes—men of divine parentage; and the eternal processes of nature with which the old tales dealt were changed into human conflicts, in which the original motive was disguised. It was thus that the myth of Achilles and Agamemnon at the siege of Troy grew up. Achilles was a sea-god, son of Thetis, goddess of the sea. Agamemnon was likewise a god; and the same deity appears, fighting on the Trojan side, as the sun-god Memnon, son of the Morning. In both cases the sea-god is his antagonist. Achilles slays Memnon: the historical motive is that they are ranged on opposite sides in the war. Again, he is wroth with Agamemnon, and will not serve him. Here an event of actual history is introduced as the motive of that high wrath. Agamemnon has taken away for himself the maiden whom Achilles had won at the capture of the Lesbian Bresa; and the capture of Bresa was an actual event. Thus were legend and history blended into poetical myth.
When once the first step was taken, the legend of the siege was developed and elaborated as a history, without any regard to the primitive motive, which was wholly forgotten. In the early lays the Trojan story seems to have ended with the death of Hector. The original conception was not the tale of a siege which found its consummation in the fall of the fortress; the siege was rather the setting for the strife between Agamemnon and Achilles, between Achilles and Hector. The story of Troys fall and the wooden horse is a later invention. It almost looks as if the Achillean myth was created before the destruction of Troy; for if it had originated afterwards, the impression of the catastrophe could hardly have failed to produce an echo in the first lays.
It was, perhaps, in the eleventh century, at Smyrna or some other Aeolian town, that the nucleus of the Iliad was composed, on the basis of those older lays, by a poet whom we may call the first Homer, though it is not probable that he was the poet who truly bore that name. He sang in the Achaean, or as it came to be called the Aeolian, tongue. His poem was the Wrath of Achilles and the Death of Hector, and it forms only the smaller part of the Iliad. It was not till the ninth century that the Iliad really came into being. Then a poet of supreme genius arose, and it may be that he was the singer whose name was actually Homer. This famous name has the humble meaning of “hostage”, and we may fancy, if we care, that the poet was carried off in his youth as a hostage in some of the struggles between Aeolian and Ionian cities. He composed his poetry in rugged Chios, and he gives us a local touch when he describes the sun as rising over the sea. From him the Homerid family of the bards of Chios were sprung. He took in hand the older poem of the wrath of Achilles and expanded it into the shape and compass of the greater part of the Iliad. He is the poet who created one of the noblest episodes in the whole epic, Priam’s ransoming of Hector. Tradition made Homer the author of both the