Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 17

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; and the manifold dialects were forced under three artificial divisions.

The two great events on which everything turned and to which all other events were related were the Trojan war and the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus. A most curious version of the Dorian conquest was invented in Argos and won its way into general belief; it is the supreme illustration of the motives and methods of the Greeks in reconstructing their past. The Temenids, the royal family of Argos, derived themselves from Aegimius, to whom the foundation of the Dorian institutions was ascribed. But as the fame and glory of Heracles waxed great, the Temenids desired to connect themselves with him. The problem was solved with wonderful skill. The eponymous ancestors of the three Dorian tribes, Hyllus, Pamphylus, and Dyman, were naturally regarded as the sons of Aegimius. According to the new story Hyllus was really the son of Heracles. It was said that Heracles fought against the Lapiths for Aegimius who was Dorian king in Thessaly, and that he received a third of the kingdom as a reward for his valiant service. On his death, his children were protected by Aegimius, who adopted Hyllus, and confirmed him in the possession of his father’s third. The sons of Hyllus failed in their attempts to recover the possessions of Heracles in the Peloponnesus; the achievement was reserved for his great-grandchildren, Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus. With a Dorian host, they crossed from Naupactus, under the guidance of a one-eyed Aetolian man named Oxylus, and conquered all the Peloponnesus except Arcadia. They gave Elis to Oxylus for his pains. Those of the Achaean inhabitants of the peninsula, who did not migrate beyond the sea, retreated to the northern coast-land— the historical Achaea. The other three parts of the Peloponnesus fell by lot to the three brothers, Messenia to Cresphontes, Laconia to Aristodemus, and Argos to Temenus. An explanation was added how there were two royal houses at Sparta. Aristodemus died prematurely, and Laconia was divided between his twin sons Eurysthenes and Procles.

Thus the Dorian invasion was justified as a recovery of usurped rights; and the royal houses of Argos and Sparta renounced their Dorian origin and connected themselves by blood with Heracles who was associated with the pre-Dorian lords of Argolis. In the conception of the Dorian conquest there were two serious mistakes. The explanation of the origin of Peloponnesian Achaea was due to the false idea, derived from Homer, that the older inhabitants of the peninsula were Achaeans; and there was no such thing as a Dorian conquest of Messenia till a far later epoch.

The significance of Heracles and the mythopoeic methods of the Greeks are also illustrated by the manner of his association with Troy. The framework of legendary chronology forbade his taking part in the Trojan war; he belonged to an older generation than Agamemnon and Achilles. But Greece—or at least Argos—was determined that the great hero, whose life was spent in clearing the world of monsters and wicked men, should also appear as a champion of Hellas against Asia. To Troy he must somehow be brought. Accordingly an older Trojan expedition was manufactured specially for him, and Troy was said to have been twice sacked.

Every place in Greece had its own local legends, which grew up quite independently. Sometimes they were adapted and modified to suit the legendary scheme of the poets and “story-writers”; but often they lived on, unscrupulously accepted notwithstanding all incompatibilities. In several cases we find in the poems of Homer and Hesiod legends which are inconsistent with those which became currently accepted. Thus Cadmus was the founder of Thebes according to the current legend; but in the Odyssey, Thebes is built by Amphion and Zethus. The origin of Corinth was traced on one hand to Ephyre, daughter of Ocean; on the other to Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus. The received genealogy of pre-Dorian Argos had no connexion with Hellen and his sons. Argos derived its origin from Inachus—a personification of the stream of Inachus which flows by the town—who, like most rivers, was regarded as a son of Ocean; Argos was his great-grandson; Io, from whom the Danaoi were descended, was his daughter. Thus it emerges that the pre-Dorian Argives were not Hellenes, for they were not derived from Hellen. If the legend had been true to history they should have been traced from Ion, as there was probably a large Ionian element in Argolis. The Arcadians derived themselves from Pelasgus—the eponymous ancestor of the Pelasgian race—and this belief reflects what was doubtless an historical fact, that the bulk of the population of Arcadia belonged to the old pre-Hellenic race of the land. But the manipulators of legend did not keep their hand from Pelasgus. While Hesiod regarded him as an earth-born man, an Argive logographer made him out to be a brother of Argos and descended from Inachus.

But for most of the Greeks connexions with Hellen and his sons were manufactured. It was to Aeolus that most descents were traced. He had seven sons and five daughters, and it was not difficult to work out more or less plausible connexions. Aetolian legends fastened themselves on to his daughter Calyce. His son Sisyphus founded Corinth. The Thessalian heroes, Admetus and Jason, were derived from another son, Cretheus. Perhaps the most interesting instance is the genealogy which was established for the Codrid families of Miletus and other cities of Ionia. They traced up their lineage to Poseidon and at the same time derived themselves from Hellen. The story was that Salmoneus, son of Aeolus, had a daughter who bore to Poseidon twin sons, Pelias and Neleus. As Pelias won the Thessalian kingdom of Iolcos, Neleus went forth from the land and founded a kingdom for himself at Pylos in the southwest of the Peloponnesus. He was succeeded by Nestor, who in his old age bore a part in the Trojan war. Nestor’s fourth successor Melanthus was ruler of Pylos when the Dorians came down into the Peloponnesus, and he retreated before their attack to Athens, where he became king and was the father of Codrus. Then Neleus, a son of Codrus, led the Ionian migration to Asia Minor. Thus a number of different traditions were wrought into a narrative, which, originating in Ionia, was accepted in Attica and influenced the ideas of the Athenians about a part of their own early history.

The Greeks were not content that their legends should be confined to the range of their own country and their own race; and, in curious contrast with that exclusive pride which drew a hard and fast line between Greek and barbarian, they brought their ancestors and their myths into connexion with foreign lands. Thus the myth of Io made the Danaoi of Argos cousins of the Egyptians. By her amour with Zeus, Io became the grandmother of Danaus and Aegyptus, the eponymous ancestors of the two peoples. Cadmus, the name-sire of the Cadmeians of Thebes, was represented as a Phoenician, who went forth from his own land in quest of his sister Europa and settled in Boeotia. The Aeolian colonists found a new origin for Pelops in Lesbos or in Lydia; and the tale which gained widest belief made him son of Tantalus, king of Sipylus, whence he migrated to the Peloponnesus and founded the royal line of Argos, from which Agamemnon was sprung. A Corinthian legend brought the early history of Corinth into connexion with Colchis, representing Aeetes, offspring of the Sun, as the first Corinthian king, and his daughter Medea as heiress to the land. The true home of the Greeks before they won dominion in Greece had passed clean out of their remembrance, and they looked to the east, not to the north, as the quarter from which some of their ancestors had migrated.

Of the legends which won sincere credence among the Greeks, and assumed as we may say a national significance, none is more curious or more obscure in its origin than that of the Amazons. A folk of warrior women, strong and brave, living apart from men, were conceived to have dwelt in Asia in the heroic age, and proved themselves worthy foes of the Greek heroes. An obvious etymology of their name, “breastless”, suggested the belief that they used to burn off the right breast that they might the better draw the bow. In the Iliad Priam tells how he fought against their army in Phrygia; and one of the perilous tasks which are set to Bellerophon is to march against the Amazons. In a later Homeric poem, the Amazon Penthesilea appears as a dreaded adversary of the Greeks at Troy. To win the girdle of the Amazon queen was one of the labours of Heracles. All these adventures happened in Asia Minor; and, though this female folk was located in various places, its original and proper home was ultimately placed on the river Thermodon near the Greek colony of Amisus. But the Amazons attacked Greece itself. It was told that Theseus carried off their queen Antiope, and so they came and invaded Attica. There was a terrible battle in the town of Athens, and the invaders were defeated after a long struggle. At the feast of Theseus the Athenians used to sacrifice to the Amazons; there was a building called the Amazoneion in the western quarter of the city; and the episode was believed by such men as Isocrates and Plato to be as truly an historical fact as the Trojan war itself. The battles of Greeks with Amazons were a favorite subject of Grecian sculptors; and, like the Trojan war and the adventure of the golden fleece, the Amazon story fitted into the conception of an ancient and long strife between Greece and Asia.

The details of the famous legends—the labours of Heracles, the Trojan war, the voyage of the Argonauts, the tale of Cadmus, the life of Oedipus, the two sieges of Thebes by the Argive Adrastus, and all the other familiar stories—belong to mythology and lie beyond our present scope. But we have to realise that the later Greeks believed them and discussed them as sober history. Two powerful generating forces of these historic myths had been the custom of families and cities to trace their origin to a god, and the instinct of the Greeks to personify places, especially towns, rivers, and springs. Then, when men began both to become keenly conscious of a community of race and language, and to speculate upon the past, attempts were naturally made to bring the various myths of Greece into harmony; since they were true, they must be reconciled. Ultimately they were reduced into chronological systems, which were based upon genealogical reckonings by generations. Hecataeus of Miletus counted a generation as forty years; but it was more usual to reckon three generations to a hundred years. According to the scheme which finally won the widest acceptance, Troy was taken in 1184 BC, and the Dorians invaded the Peloponnesus under the leadership of the Heraclids in 1104 BC, and both these dates accord more closely than one might expect, considering the method by which they were obtained, with the general probabilities of the case.