Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 11

The first Greeks who sailed across the Aegean were the Achaeans and their fellows from the hills and plains of Thessaly and the plain of the Spercheus. Their expeditions probably started from the land-locked bay of Pagasae, and tradition long afterwards associated the first sea-ventures of the Greeks with the port of Iavolkos.

Along with the Achaeans there sailed as comrades and allies the Aeŏlians. Some indeed believe that “Aeolian” was simply another name for “Achaean”; but it seems safer to regard the Aeolians as distinct from, though closely related to, the Achaeans. It is impossible to determine whether those who crossed the Aegean were settlers in Thessaly, and not rather some of the Aeolians who lived beyond the mountains by another seaboard, on the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf. We know that in early times these Aeolians were engaged in constant warfare with the Aetolians, who ultimately won the upper hand and gave their name to the whole country. And perhaps the pressure of these foes induced some of them to throw in their lot with the Achaeans who were sailing in search of new homes beyond the sea. It need not surprise us that men of Aetolia should be in touch with men of Thessaly. There has always been a route of communication through the mountains connecting north-eastern Greece with the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, and it was just as easy three thousand years ago to walk from Iolcus to Calydon as it is to-day from Volo to Mesolongi.

It was to the northern part of Asia Minor, the island of Lesbos and the opposite shores, that the Achaean and Aeolian adventurers steered their ships. Here they planted the first Hellenic settlements on Asiatic soil—the beginning of a movement which, before a thousand years had passed away, was to carry Greek conquerors to the Indian Ocean. The coast-lands of western Asia Minor are, like Greece itself, suitable for the habitations of a sea-faring people. A series of river-valleys are divided by mountain chains which run out into promontories so as to form deep bays; and the promontories are continued in islands. The valleys of the Hermus and the Caicus are bounded on the north by a chain of hills which run out into Lesbos; the valley of the Hermus is parted from that of the Cayster by mountains which are prolonged in Chios; and the valley of the Cayster is separated from the valley of the Maeander by a chain which terminates in Samos. South of the Maeander valley there are bays and islands, but the mountains of the mainland are broken by no rivers. The Greek occupation of the lower waters of the Hermus and Caicus is known to us only by its results. The invaders won the coast-lands from the Mysian natives and seized a number of strong places which they could defend—Pitane, Myrina, Cyme, Aegae, Old Smyrna. They pressed up the rivers, and on the Hermus they founded Magnesia under Mount Sipylus. All this, needless to say, was not done at once. It must have been a work of many years, and of successive expeditions from the mother-country. The only event which we can grasp, by a fragment of genuine tradition lurking in a legend, is the capture of the Lesbian town of Brēsa. The story of the fair-cheeked maid of Bresa, of whom Agamemnon robbed Achilles, is the memorial of the Greek conquest of Lesbos.

The Greeks made no settlement in the Troad. But in occupying the country south of the Troad, they came into collision with the great Phrygian town of Troy, or Ilios, as it was called from King Ilos, who perhaps was its founder. We can easily understand that the lords of Troy—though we know not how far their power may have extended—would not look with favour on the arrival of the new settlers. There were weary wars. Then the mighty fortress fell; and we need not doubt the truth of the legend which records that it fell through Grecian craft or valour. The Phrygian power and the lofty stronghold of “sacred Ilios” made a deep impression on the souls of the Greek invaders; and the strife, on whatever scale it really was, blended by their imagination with the old legends of their gods, inspired the Achaean minstrels with new songs. Through their minstrelsy the struggle between the Phrygians and the Greek settlers assumed the proportion of a common expedition of all the peoples of Greece against the town of Troy; and the Trojan war established itself in the belief of the Greeks as the first great episode in the everlasting debate between east and west.

It is to be observed that the Greeks and Phrygians in that age do not seem to have felt that they were severed by any great contrast of race or manners. They were conscious perhaps of an affinity in language; and they had the same kind of civilisation. This fact comes out in the Homeric poems, where, though some specially Phrygian features are recognised, the Trojans might be a Greek folk and their heroes have Greek names; and it bears witness to the constant intercourse between the Achaean colonists and their Phrygian neighbours.

The Achaean wave of emigration was succeeded by another wave, flowing mainly from the coasts of Attica and Argolis, and new settlements were planted, south of the elder Achaean settlements. The two-pronged peninsula between the Hermus and Cayster rivers, with the off-lying isle of Chios, the valleys of the Cayster and Maeander, with Samos and the peninsula south of Mount Latmos, were studded with communities which came to form a group distinct from the older group in the north. Each group of settlements came to be called by a collective name. As the Achaeans were the most illustrious of the settlers in the north, one might expect to find the northern group known as Achaean. But it is not thus that names are given in primitive times. A number of cities or settlements, which have no political union and are merely associated together by belonging to the same race and speaking the same tongue, do not generally choose themselves a common name. It rather happens that when they get a common name it is given to them by strangers, who, looking from the outside, regard them as a group and do not think of the differences of which they are themselves more vividly conscious. And it constantly happens that the name of one member of the group is, by some accident, picked out and applied to the whole. Thus it befell that the Aeolian and not the Achaean name was selected to designate the northern division of the Greek settlements in Asia; just as our own country came to be called not Saxony but England. The southern and larger group of colonies received the name of Iāvŏnes—or Iones, as they called themselves, when they lost the letter v. The Iāvŏnes were, as we saw, a people who had settled on the coasts of Argolis and Attica, but there the name fell out of use, and perhaps passed out of memory, until on Asiatic soil it attained celebrity and re-echoed with glory to their old homes.

But it would probably be a grave mistake to regard these two groups as well defined from the first. To begin with, it is possible that they overlapped chronologically. The latest of Aeolian settlements may have been founded subsequently to the earliest of the Ionian. In the second place, the original homes of the settlers overlapped. Though the Aeolian colonies mainly came from the lands north of Mount Oeta—apart from those who came from Aetolia—they included some settlers from the coasts of Boeotia and Euboea. Thus Cyme in Aeolis derived its name from Euboean Cyme. And on the other hand, though the Ionian colonies were chiefly derived from the coasts of Attica and Argolis—apart from some contingents from Crete and other places in the south—there were also some settlers from the north. Thirdly, the two groups ran into each other geographically. Phocaea, for example, which is geographically in Aeolis, standing on the promontory north of the Hermus river, was included in Ionia. Its name shows that some of the men who colonised it were Phocians. And some of the places in north Ionia—Teos, for instance—had received Achaean settlements first, and were then re-settled by Ionians. In Chios, which was afterwards fully in Ionia, a language of Aeolic complexion was once spoken.

Of the foundation of the famous colonies of Ionia, of the order in which they were founded, and of the relations of the settlers with the Lydian natives we know as little as of the settlements of the Achaeans. Clazomenae and Teos arose on the north and south sides of the neck of the peninsula which runs out to meet Chios; and Chios, on the east coast of her island, faces Erythrae on the mainland—Erythrae, “the crimson”, so called from its purple fisheries, the resort of Tyrian traders. Lebedus and Colophon lie on the coast as it retires eastward from Teos to reach the mouth of the Cayster; and there was founded Ephesus, the city of Artemis. By the streams of the Cayster was a plain called “the Asian meadow”, which destiny in some odd way selected to bestow a name upon one of the continents of the earth. South of Ephesus and on the northern slope of Mount Mycale was the religious gathering-place of the Ionians, the temple of the Heliconian Poseidon, which, when once the Ionians became conscious of themselves as a sort of nation and learned to glory in their common name, served to foster a sense of unity among all their cities from Phocaea in the north to Miletus in the south. Samos faces Mount Mycale, and the worship of Hera, which was the religious feature of Samos, is thought to point to men of the southern Argos as participators in its original foundation. South of Mycale, the cities of Myus and Priene were planted on the Maeander. Then the coast retires to skirt Mount Latmos and breaks forward again to form the promontory, at the northern point of which was Miletus with its once splendid harbour. There was one great inland city, Magnesia on the Maeander, which must not be confused with the inland Aeolian city, Magnesia on the Hermus. Though counted to Ionia, it was not of Ionian origin, for it was founded by the Magnetes, who seem to have been among the earliest Greek settlers in Thessaly. While the greater part of Ionian territory was won from Lydia, the Maeandrian towns and Miletus were founded on Lelegian soil.

Settlers from Euboea and Boeotia took part in the colonisation of Ionia, as well as the Ionians of Argolis and Attica. In the regions of the Maeander, and southward from that river, the Greeks were brought into association with another race. The Leleges were now exposed to foes on the land side as well as on the sea side, for Carian highlanders came down from the hills and began to occupy their lands. The Carians were of the same race as the Lydians, and in some places, at Miletus for example, they mixed with the Greek strangers.

Meanwhile the Greek colonisation of the Aegean islands was going on at the same time. And it is just possible that some curious records which have been discovered in distant Egypt bear upon the occupation of the islands. We learn that the throne of Mernptah was shaken by a joint invasion of Libyans and the peoples of the north. A generation later another invasion is recorded in the reign of Ramses III; the peoples of the north threaten Egypt from the east. The Egyptian records mention the names of some of the northern peoples in both invasions, but the names teach us little. There is not much likelihood in the view that some of the invaders were Greeks. The day was to come when Greeks would fight in Egypt as mercenary soldiers; a day, more distant still, was to come when Egypt would be ruled by Grecian lords; but the twelfth century is too early an age to find Greek adventurers on the shores of Africa. But there are certain significant words in the record of the second invasion: “The islands were unquiet”. It is certainly not unnatural to refer this to islands of the Aegean. And if so, the Libyan invasion of Egypt is an echo of the Greek conquest of the islands. But it is not the Greek conquerors who sail to Libya; it is the islanders whom they conquer and dispossess. It would be unwise, however, to build any historical theory upon the Egyptian notices, even though we consider it tolerably certain that people from the regions of the Aegean are referred to. Perhaps the best commentary on the question is a passage in the Odyssey, which suggests that it was not an uncommon event for Cretan freebooters to make a descent on the Egyptian coast and carry off plunder.

The Greek settlers brought with them their poetry and their civilisation to the shores of Asia. Their civilisation is revealed to us in their poetry, and we find that it is identical in its main features, and in many minor respects, with the civilisation which has been laid bare in the ruins of Mycenae and other places in elder Greece. The Homeric poems show us, in fact, a later stage of the civilisation of the heroic age. The Homeric palace is built on the same general plan as the palaces that have been found at Mycenae and Tiryns, at Troy and in the Copaic lake. The equipment of the Homeric heroes and the man-screening Homeric shield receive their best illustration from Mycenaean gems and jars. The scene of the leaguered city on the silver beaker is an admirable illustration of the siege which was represented on the shield of Achilles; and that shield assumes the art of inlaying, of which some dagger-blades discovered at Mycenae show us brilliant examples. The blue inlaid frieze in the vestibule of the hall of Tiryns proves that the poet’s frieze of cyanus in the hall of Alcinous was not a fancy; and he describes as the cup of Nestor a gold cup with doves perched on the handles, such as one which was found in a royal tomb at Mycenae. There is indeed one striking difference in custom. The Mycenaean tombs reveal no trace of the habit of burning the dead, which the Homeric Greeks invariably practised; 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. It has been supposed that, in the period of migration to Asia, the Achaean and Ionian settlers, not having yet won their new homesteads, and wishing to preserve the ashes of their dead instead of leaving them in a strange place, adopted the usage of cremation; and, having once adopted it in this time of emergency, continued to practise it when the need had passed.

The circumstance that no remains of Aegean civilisation have been found in Ionia or Aeolis like those which have been discovered in Greece and the islands, has been already observed; and the inference was drawn that this civilisation did not gain a footing in these coast-lands before the time of the Greek settlements. But it must be said that the argument from the absence of such remains applies equally to the Greek settlers, and proves that they cannot have brought a civilisation of this kind to Asia Minor. For the sites on which the Greeks established themselves were continuously occupied throughout history, and therefore we cannot expect to find such archaeological remains as we find in sites which decayed or were deserted at the end of the heroic age. But one exceptional discovery confirms our inferences from the Homeric poems as to the nature of Ionian civilization. Under Mount Mycale, not far from the gathering-place of the Ionians, there has been found a graveyard, which archaeologists designate as “late Mycenaean”. It clearly belongs to the early period of the Greek settlements.

Two important conclusions follow. One is that by the twelfth century the Greeks had assimilated and were participators in the civilisation of the Aegean; and it is to be presumed that among the settlers who carried that civilization to the Asian coast there were many who though they had learned Greek speech did not belong to the Greek race. The other conclusion which emerges is that, whatever fate befell the Mycenaean civilisation in the mother country, it cannot be said to have died either a sudden or a slow death; for it continued without a break in the new Greece beyond the seas, and developed into that luxurious Ionian civilisation which meets us some centuries later, when we come into the clearer light of recorded history. New elements were added in the meantime; intercourse with Phrygia and Syria, for example, brought new influences to bear; but the permanent framework was the heritage from the ancient folks of the Aegean.

The question will be asked, whether the Greeks accepted anything beyond the outward forms of material civilisation from the folks with whom they mingled in the Aegean lands. Did those folks contribute anything to the religion or the social organisation of the Greek people which grew out of their own fusion with the invaders? We shall see presently that the political institutions of the invaders prevailed; and their great Aryan god, Zeus, the heavenly father, was exalted supreme in all the lands where they settled. But it is possible that some of the Greek gods were originally not the deities of the invaders, but of the old inhabitants of the land. The prehistoric tombs of Greece and the Aegean islands, both the tombs of the third millennium and those of the second, have preserved small idols in stone, in lead, in bronze, and in gold of a goddess, who was probably a goddess of nature, similar in character to the Babylonian Istar—the Phoenician Astarte—though there is no reason to suppose that she came from Babylonia. She was, we need not doubt, a native goddess of the Aegean peoples. The spirit of this divinity, associated with the fertility of nature, appears under many a name in Greece; in some places she is worshipped as Aphrodite, in some as Hera, elsewhere as Artemis. It should never be forgotten that originally these goddesses and many others had the same motherly functions; the division of labour in Olympus and the differentiation of the characters of the celestials were a comparatively late refinement. While Hera and Artemis appear to be genuine Greek names, Aphrodite has never been explained from the Greek language, and may possibly be the old Aegean name of the goddess of nature, recast in Grecian mouths. At all events it is not improbable that the worship of Aphrodite was an Aegean growth, afterwards promoted and influenced by the Phoenician cult of Astarte. The invaders may have often associated divinities of their own with the native cults; and traces of such fusion may sometimes be preserved in double names.

But there are clear enough memories of conflict and conciliation between the gods of the invaders and the older deities of the land. The legend of the war of the gods and the giants can hardly be anything else than a mythical embodiment of the conflict of religions; the giants, or earth-born beings, represent the older gods whom the gods of Greece overthrew. And we can hardly be wrong in regarding Cronos, whom Zeus dethroned, as one of those older gods. But Zeus, who dethroned him, became his son; that was the conciliation. In Crete it was somewhat otherwise. The god Minos had to make way for Zeus; he was reduced to the estate of a king; but he became the son and the speech-fellow of the god who displaced him.