Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 6

Table of Contents

It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at the task for which destiny had chosen them, of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oakwood of Dodona in Epirus is the earliest sanctuary, whereof we have any knowledge, of their supreme god, Zeus, the dweller of the sky. Thessaly has associations which still appeal intimately to men of European birth. The first Greek settlers in Thessaly were the Achaeans; and in the plain of Argos, and in the mountains which gird it about, they fashioned legends which were to sink deeply into the imagination of Europe. Here they peopled Olympus, under whose shadow they dwelled, with divine inhabitants, so that it has become for ever the heavenly hill in the tongues of men. And here their bards must have sung hexameter lays; though that marvellous metre was not brought to perfection till folk and legends had passed eastward overseas to another land. The invention of the hexameter was one of the most brilliant strokes of Greek genius. Perhaps it was invented by the Achaeans; no other people at least has so good a claim. We may be sure that hexameter lays were sung in the halls of the lords of northern Argos, and it is from minstrels who sang at the banquets of their descendants in a new home that we gain our earliest picture of those ancient Aryan institutions which are common to the Greeks and ourselves.

The history of the Greeks should begin with a picture of the life of these first conquerors of northern Greece. We would fain see them at work as they forged the legends, and made the songs, which became the groundwork of the national religion and national literature of their race. We would fain go back still further and visit them in their older, unknown and forgotten home among the mountains of Illyria. But these chapters of the story are lost; we can only guess at them from the results. On the other hand, we know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coasts of the Aegean they found a material civilizations more advanced than their own; and it has so chanced that we know more of this civilisations than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.