Название | The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C. |
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Автор произведения | John Bagnell Bury |
Жанр | Документальная литература |
Серия | |
Издательство | Документальная литература |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 4064066051563 |
The Phoenicians exerted little or insignificant influence upon Greek art; on the contrary, it was probably from Aegean art that they learned much of what they knew. They had no artistic genius; they were imitators, not creators. And though the Homeric poems show that the skill of Phoenician artists was highly prized, the Greeks of Ionia had not to send to Phoenicia for lack of cunning workmen at home. The subjects wrought on the shield which the master-smith made for Achilles may be illustrated by inlaid works in metal of Phoenician or Cypriot craftsmen, but there is not the smallest reason to think that the work which stimulated the poet’s imagination was made by foreign hands. It was rather wrought by some successor of the ancient craftsmen whose handiwork we see in those inlaid dagger-blades which were found in tombs at Mycenae. The work of the artist has been doubtless elaborated and beautified by the imagination of the poet, who has drawn vivid and beautiful scenes of life in Ionia in the ninth century. The shield, wrought in bronze, tin, silver, and gold, is round and has a ringed space in the centre, encompassed by three concentric girdles. In the middle is the earth, the sea, and the heaven, with “the unwearied sun and 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 borne 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: ploughing in spring, the ploughman drinking a draught 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 tearing the sweet fruit in 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 shepherds’ huts in a mountain glen. The whole 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.
SECT. 11. GREEK RECONSTRUCTION OF EARLY GREEK HISTORY
We must now see what the Greeks thought of their own early history. Their construction of it, though founded on legendary tradition and framed without much historical sense, has considerable importance, since their ideas about the past affected their views of the present. Their belief in their legendary past was thoroughly practical; mythic events were often the basis of diplomatic transactions; claims to territory might be founded on the supposed conquests or dominions of ancient heroes of divine birth.
At first, before the growth of historical curiosity, the chief motive for investigating the past was the desire of noble families to derive their origin from a god. For this purpose they sought to connect their pedigrees with heroic ancestors, especially with Heracles or with the warriors who had fought at Troy. For just as the Trojan war came to be regarded as a national enterprise, so Heracles—who seems originally to have been specially associated with Argolis—was looked on as a national hero. The consequence was that the Greeks framed their history on genealogies and determined their chronology by generations, reckoning three generations to a hundred years. The later Homeric poets must have contributed a great deal to the fixing of the mutual relations of legendary events; but it the poets of the school of Hesiod in the seventh century who did most to reduce to a historical system the legends of the heroic age. Their poems are lost, but they were worked up into still more complete and elaborate schemes by the prose logographers or “story-writers” of the sixth and fifth centuries, of whom perhaps the most influential were Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos. The original works of the logographers have also perished, but their teaching has come down to us fully enough in the works of later compilers and commentators.
In the first place, it had to be determined how the various branches of the Greek race were related. As soon as the Greeks came to be called by the common name of Hellenes, they derived their whole stock from an eponymous ancestor, Hellen, who lived in Thessaly. They had then to account for its distribution into a number of different branches. In Greece proper they might have searched long, among the various folks speaking various idioms, for some principle of classification which should determine the nearer and further degrees of kinship between the divisions of the race, and establish two or three original branches to which every community could trace itself back. But when they looked over to the eastern Greece on the farther side of the Aegean, they saw, as it were, a reflection of themselves, their own children divided into three homogeneous groups—Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians. This gave a simple classification: three families sprung from Aeolus, Ion, and Dorus, who must evidently have been the sons of Hellen. But there was one difficulty. Homer’s Achaeans had still to be accounted for; they could not be affiliated to Aeolians, or Ionians, or Dorians, none of whom play a part in the Iliad. Accordingly it was arranged that Hellen had three sons, Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus; and Ion and Achaeus were the sons of Xuthus. It was easy enough then, by the help of tradition and language, to fit the ethnography of Greece under these labels;