Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 8

Dynasties fell and rose in the land of the Nile; three cities were reared and perished on the ruins of the great brick city of Troy; tin came in larger abundance from the far-off west, and the folk of the Aegean islands were able to give up the old tools of stone, as bronze became plentiful and cheap; potters grew more skilful in mixing their clay, in using their wheel, in decorating their wares; and at the end of six or seven hundred years we find an advanced civilisation in possession of the Aegean. The shiftings and changes which may have taken place during that long period—invasions, or displacements in the centres of power and trade—are quite withdrawn from our vision but about the middle of the second millennium we find this civilisation in full bloom on the eastern side of the Peloponnesus. Its records are, the monuments of stone which have remained for more than three thousand years above the face of the earth or have been brought to light by the spade; and the objects of daily use and luxury which were placed in the houses of the dead and have been unearthed, chiefly in our days, by the curiosity of Europeans seeking the origins of their own civilisation.

Nowhere have more abundant and significant records been found than in the plain of southern Argos,—at Mycenae, which keeps guard in the mountains at the northern end of the plain, and at Tiryns, its lowlier fellow close to the sea. The richest and strongest city on the coasts of the Aegean seems at this time to have been Mycenae; the memory of its wealth survived in the epithet “golden” which distinguishes it in the Homeric poems. For want of an exact term, the whole civilisation to which Mycenae’s greatness belongs has been called Mycenaean.

Tiryns was the older of the two fortresses, and had played its part in the earlier epoch before the Aegean peoples had yet emerged from the stone age. It stands on a long low rock about a mile and a half from the sea, and the land around it was once a marsh. From north to south the hill rises in height, and was shaped by man’s hand into three platforms, of which the southern and highest was occupied by the palace of the king. But the whole acropolis was strongly walled round by a structure of massive stones, laid in regular layers but rudely dressed, the crevices being filled with a mortar of clay. This fashion of building has been called Cyclopean from the legend that masons called Cyclopes were invited from Lycia to build the walls of Tiryns. The main gate of entrance, on the east side, was approached by a passage between the outer wall of the fortress and the wall of the palace; and the right, unshielded side of an enemy advancing to the gate was exposed to the defenders on the castle wall. On the west side there was a postern, from which a long flight of stone steps led up to the back part of the palace. But one curious feature in the castle of Tiryns sets it apart from all the other ancient fortresses of Greece. On the south side the wall deepens for the purpose of containing store-chambers, the doors of which open out upon covered galleries, also built inside the wall, and furnished with windows looking outward.

The stronghold of Mycenae, about twelve miles inland, at the north-eastern end of the Argive plain, was built on a hill which rises to 900 feet above the sea-level in a mountain glen. The shape of the citadel is a triangle, and the greater part of the wall is built in the same “Cyclopean” style as the wall of Tiryns, but of smaller stones. Another fashion of architecture, however, also occurs, and points to a later date than Tiryns. The gates and some of the towers are built of even layers of stones carefully hewn into rectangular shape. No store-rooms or galleries like those of Tiryns have been found at Mycenae; but on the north-east side a vaulted stone passage in the wall led by a downward subterranean path to the foot of the hill, where a cistern was supplied from a perennial spring outside the walls. Thus the garrison was furnished with water in case of a siege. Mycenae had two gates. The chief was on the west, ensconced in a corner of the wall which at this point running in south-eastward then turned outward due west, and thus enclosed and commanded the approach to the gate. The lintel of the doorway is formed by one huge square block of stone, and the weight of the wall resting on it is lightened by the device of leaving a triangular space. This opening is filled by a sculptured stone relief representing two lionesses standing opposite each other on either side of a pillar, on whose pedestal their forepaws rest. They are, as it were, watchers who ward the castle, and from them the gate is known as the Lion gate.

The ruins on the hill of Tiryns enable us to trace the plan of the palace of its kings. One chief principle of the construction of the palaces of this age seems to have been the separation of the dwelling-house of the women from that of the men—a principle which continued to prevail in Greek domestic architecture in historical times. But the striking characteristic of Tiryns is that, while the halls of the king and the halls of the queen are built side by side in the centre of the palace, there is no direct communication between them, and they have different approaches. The halls of king and queen alike are built on the same general plan as the palace in the old brick city on the hill of Troy and the palaces which are described in the poems of Homer. An altar stood in the men’s courtyard which was enclosed by pillared porticoes; the portico which faced the gate being the vestibule of the house. Double-leafed doors opened from the vestibule into a preliminary hall, from which one passed through a curtained doorway over a great stone threshold into the men’s hall. In the midst of it was the round hearth—the centre of the house—encircled by four wooden pillars which supported the flat roof.

The palace of Mycenae crowned the highest part of the hill, and its plan, though it cannot be traced so clearly or fully, was in general conception, and in many details, alike. The hearth, of which part remains, was ornamented by spiral and triangular patterns in red, blue, and white. The floors of the covered rooms were made of fine cement; and in the open courts the cement was hardened by small pebbles. Sometimes the floors were brightened with coloured patterns. It was customary to embellish the walls by inlet sculptured friezes and by paintings. A brilliant alabaster frieze, inset with cyanus or paste of blue glass, decorated the vestibule of the hall at Tiryns, and the men’s halls in both palaces were adorned with mural pictures.

Besides their castle and palace, the burying-places of the kings of Mycenae are their most striking memorials. The men with whom we are now dealing bestowed their dead in tombs; there is no trace of the practice of burning corpses. At one time the lords of the citadel and their families were buried on the castle hill. Close to the western wall, south of the Lion gate, the royal burial circle has been discovered, within which six tombs cut vertically into the rock had remained untouched by the hand of man since the last corpses were placed in them. Weapons were buried with the men, some of whose faces were covered with gold masks. The heads of the women were decked with gold diadems; rich ornaments and things of household use were placed beside them. There was a stêlê or sepulchral stone over each tomb, and some of these slabs were sculptured.

But a day came when this simple kind of grave was no longer royal enough for the rich princes of Mycenae, and they sought more imposing resting-places; or else, as some believe, they were overthrown by lords of another race who brought with them a new fashion of sepulchre. Nine sepulchral domes, hewn in the opposite hillside, have been found not far from the Acropolis. The largest of them is generally known as the “Treasury of Atreus”, a name which arose from a false idea as to its purpose. These tombs, which are found, as we shall see, in other places in Greece, consist of three parts—the passage of approach, the portal, and the dome. A stone causeway leads up to the portal which admits into a round vaulted chamber built into the hollowed slope of a hill; and in some tombs (but this is exceptional) there is also a square side-chamber. The portal of the Treasury of Atreus had a striking facade, being clad with slabs of coloured marble and framed by dark grey alabaster pillars with zigzag and spiral patterns and carved capitals. The two massive lintel-stones were relieved by the same device which was adopted in the architecture of the Lion gate, and the triangle was filled by red porphyry. The vaulted room of beehive shape is formed by rings of well-joined and well-chiselled stones, which grow narrower as they rise, and a roof-stone. The walls were adorned with bronze rosettes arranged in some pattern. A door, similar to that of the portal and framed with pillars, admits to the side-chamber, which is hewn into the rock; its walls were decorated with sculptured alabaster plates. The doorway of another tomb was framed by two alabaster columns, fluted like the columns of a Doric temple.

But besides the stately burying-places of the kings, the humbler tombs of the people have been discovered. The town of Mycenae below the citadel consisted of a group of villages, each of which preserved its separate identity; each had its own burying-ground. Thus Mycenae, and probably other towns of the age, represented an intermediate stage between the village and the city—a number of little communities gathered together in one place, and dominated by a fortress. The tombs in these village burying-grounds resemble in plan the royal vaults. They are square chambers cut into the rock; they are approached by a passage which leads up to a doorway. The difference is that they are not round and have gabled roofs. Some of the things found in these sepulchres indicate that most of them are of later date than the royal tombs of the citadel and contemporary with the vaulted tombs below.

We have seen how in the royal graves on the castle hill treasures of gold, long hidden from the light of day, revealed the wealth of the Mycenaean kingdom. Treasures would perhaps have been found also in some of the great vaulted tombs if they had not been rifled by plunderers in subsequent ages. But for us the works of the potter, and the implements of war and peace fashioned by the bronze-smith, are of more value than the golden ornaments for studying from these early civilizations; and things of daily use have been found in the lowlier rock-tombs as well as in the royal sepulchres of hill or plain. From the implements which the people used, and also from the representations which artists wrought, we can win a rough picture of their dress, armor, and ornaments, and form an idea of their capacity in art.

Their civilisation belonged to the age of bronze and copper. Even in its later period iron was still so rare and costly that it was used only for ornaments—rings, for instance, and possibly for money. And in its earlier period, the stone age had not been quite forgotten; obsidian was still employed for the heads of arrows. But, in general, bronze was used in Greece for all implements throughout this age. The arms with which the men of Mycenae attacked their foes were sword, spear, and bow. Their defensive armor consisted of huge helmets, probably made of leather; shields of ox-hide reaching from the neck almost to the feet—complete towers of defense, but so clumsy that it was the chief part of a military education to manage them. The princes went forth to war in two-horsed war chariots, which consisted of a board to stand on and a breastwork of wicker. The fragment of a silver vessel (found in one of the rock-tombs of Mycenae) shows us a scene of battle in front of the walls of a mountain city, from whose battlements women, watching the fight, are waving their hands. Among the pottery discovered at Mycenae there is a large jar, on one side of which we see a woman looking after six warriors marching forth to battle armed from head to foot, and on the other, less clearly, men engaged in battle—black-brown figures on a yellow ground. On gems and seal-stones we also find representations of armed men. One of the most striking pictures of the warriors of this age is a group of five spearmen on a painted gravestone.

Men wore long hair, not, however, flowing freely, but tied or plaited in tresses. In old times they let the beard grow both on lip and chin; but the fashion changed, and in the later period, as we see from their pictures, they shaved the upper lip, and razors have been found in the tombs. Their garments were simple, a loin apron and a cloak fastened by a clasp-pin; in later times, a close-tunic. High-born dames wore tight bodices and wide gown-skirts. Frontlets or bands round the brow were a distinction of their attire, and they wore their hair high coiled in rings, letting the ends fall behind. The ornaments which have been found in the royal tombs show that the queens of Mycenae appeared in glittering gold array. There is some reason to think that women tattooed their faces.

In the foregoing sketch it has been implied that some monuments are later in date than others. Thus the vaulted sepulchres of the plain have been spoken of as subsequent to the shaft sepulchres on the castle hill of Mycenae. The chief means of establishing a basis for this relative chronology is the development of the potter’s art, and the “Mycenaean” pottery therefore concerns us in so far as it has given a clue for fixing the earlier and later epochs of the civilisation which produced it.

The painted vessels of the second millennium fall into two general classes, unglazed and glazed. The unglazed, ornamented chiefly with lines and spirals, were older, and, when the glazed style attained its perfection, went almost entirely out of use. In the varnished jars, the development of the handicraft from the cruder work of the earlier potters can be traced through the best period into an age of decadence, when the Mycenaean comes into competition with other and newer styles. The colour of these vessels, in the best age, is warm, varying from yellow to dark brown, and sometimes burnt into a rich deep red. A new impulse of decoration has come upon the potters. The ornaments are no longer lines and spirals, but vegetables and animals, especially of the sea kingdom, fishes, polypods, seaweeds. On the other hand, sphinxes, griffins, lotus flowers, and other oriental and Egyptian subjects, though common elsewhere in Mycenaean ornament, are hardly ever copied by the workers in clay. The curious false-necked jars which have no opening above the neck, but a spout at the side, are one of the most characteristic products of the potteries, which we call Mycenaean; though it is not known for certain that Mycenae was itself a centre of the trade.

Other marks for fixing the relative dates of “Mycenaean” troves are stone tools and iron. If, for example, we find in one tomb obsidian spear-heads and no trace of iron, and in another no stone implements but iron rings, it is a safe inference that the first is older than the second. The occurrence of iron is a mark of comparative lateness.

It is by such marks as these that we are able to say that the kings of the shaft graves reigned before the kings who were buried in the vaulted tombs, and that remains which have been found in the island of Thera belong to the beginning of the “Mycenaean age”

The remains at Mycenae and Tiryns are, taken in their entirety, the most impressive of the memorials of a widespread Aegean civilisation. Nowhere else in the Peloponnesus have great fortresses or palaces been found; but some large vaulted hill-tombs, on the same plan as those of the Argive plain, mark the existence of ancient principalities. The lords of Amyclae, which was the queen of the Laconian vale before the rise of Greek Sparta, hollowed out for themselves a lordly tomb, which, unlike the Treasury of Atreus, was never invaded by robbers. In this vault, among other costly treasures, were found the most precious of all the works of Mycenaean art that have yet been drawn forth from the earth two golden cups on which a metal-worker of matchless skill has wrought vivid scenes of the snaring and capturing of wild bulls.

In Attica there are many relics. On the Athenian Acropolis there are a few stones supposed to belong to a palace of great antiquity, but we can look with more certainty on some of the ancient foundations of the fortress wall. This wall was called Pelargic or Pelasgic by the Athenians; and it seems likely that the word preserves the name of the ancient inhabitants of the place, the Pelasgoi. But the Pelasgians of Athens were not the only people of the Athenian plain. Towards the northern end of this plain, a vaulted tomb seems to record ancient princes of Acharnae. The lords of Thoricus had tombs of the same fashion; and at Eleusis there is similar evidence. In many other places in Attica graves of this period have been found; at Prasiae a number of remarkable rock-tombs resembling those in the lower town of Mycenae.

In Thessaly the only important relic yet discovered is a vaulted sepulchre near Pagasae. In Boeotia there are more striking memorials. On the western shores of the great Copaic marsh a people dwelled, whose wealth was proverbial; and their city Orchomenus shared with Mycenae the attribute of “golden” in the Homeric poems. One of their kings built a great sepulchral vault under the hill of the citadel, and later generations took it for a treasury. It approaches, though it does not quite attain to, the size of the Treasure-house of Atreus itself; and it had a second chamber covered by a stone ceiling which was adorned with a curious design in low relief, an arrangement of meandering spirals and fan-shaped leaves bordered by rosettes, producing the effect of a carpet. The same design which decked the burying-place of Orchomenus in stone, was used by the painters of some lord of Tiryns to adorn the walls of his palace; and one is tempted to see both in the ceiling and in the sepulchre itself signs of influence from Argolis. But in any case, the common design of ceiling and painting is borrowed from Egypt, for we find almost the same design on the ceilings of tombs at Egyptian Thebes. The lords of Orchomenus were probably the mightiest lords in Boeotia, but they had neighbours—were they rivals or friends?—in another fastness of the Copaic marsh. While Orchomenus was situated by the western shores, this primeval stronghold was built on a rock rising out of the waters. The ruins of the mighty fortress-walls which girded the edge of the rock are still there, and the foundations of the palace of these island princes; but the name of the place is unknown. To the lords of this nameless castle and to the princes of Orchomenus, the curious habits of their spacious lake were a matter of perpetual concern. The lake or morass which fertilised their land has no river to bear its water to the sea, and its only outlets are underground clefts piercing Mount Ptôon, which rises on its northern banks, a barrier between the lake and the sea. To help the water to reach these passages, men made canals through the lake, and guarded them by fortresses.

Crete shared in the later as in the earlier stages of Aegean civilisations; it too has its fortresses and palaces and beehive tombs, as well as the systems of writing which were its peculiar product. In the Cyclad islands off the Greek coast remains have been found chiefly of the earlier Mycenaean epoch; and their value consists in the light they let in upon the progress of its growth. In Thera, a volcanic upheaval buried and preserved a settlement, of which the excavated houses show us earlier stages of the culture whereof we have seen the bloom in the fortresses of Argolis. In north-eastern Melos a spacious citadel, fortified by a strong wall, has been dug out, on a site which was occupied during a great part of the third millennium, and exhibits the continuity of Aegean civilisations.

At the extreme south-west of the Aegean there was a “Mycenaean” community at the beginning of the fourteenth century—at Ialysus in Rhodes. An old burying-place has been dug out, and revealed horizontal rock-graves with the arrangement of avenue, doorway, and four-sided chamber, resembling those of Mycenae. The vases found here belong to the best kind of Mycenaean glazed ware; and the absence of earlier pottery suggests that this stage of civilisation had not been reached by a gradual development in the place, but that settlers had brought their civilisations with them.

But of all the cities which shared in the later bloom of Aegean culture, none was greater or destined to be more famous than that which arose on the southern side of the Hellespont, on that hill whereon five cities had already risen and fallen. The new Troy, through whose glory the name of the spot was to become a household word for ever throughout all European lands, was built on the levelled ruins of the older towns. The circuit of the new city was far wider, and within the great wall of well-wrought stone the citadel rose terrace upon terrace to a highest point. On that commanding summit, as at Mycenae, we must presume that the king’s palace stood. The houses of which the foundations have been disclosed within the walls have the same simple plan that we saw in the older brick city and in the palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns. The wall was pierced by three or four gates, the chief gate being on the south-east side, guarded by a flanking tower. The builders were more skilful than the masons of the ruder walls of the fortresses of Argolis; and it is a question whether we are to infer that the foundation of Troy belongs to a later age, or that from the beginning the art of building was more advanced among the Trojans. But if Troy shows superior excellence in military masonry, its civilisations in other ways seems to have been simpler than that of the Argive plain. It imported indeed the glazed Mycenaean wares and was in contact with Aegean civilisations. Its position marks it out as probably an intermediary between the Aegean and the regions of the Danube; just as at the other side Crete was the intermediary between the Aegean and the regions of the Nile. But Troy stands, in a measure, apart from the “Mycenaean” world; beside it, in contact with it, yet not quite of it, the Trojan civilisations seems the issue of a parallel local development, always in constant relations with the rest of the Aegean, yet pursuing its own path. This was natural; for in speech and race the Trojans stood apart. We know with full certainty who the people of Troy were; we know that they were a Phrygian folk and spoke a tongue akin to our own. The six cities of Troy perhaps correspond to successive waves of the Phrygian immigration from south-eastern Europe into north-western Asia Minor, an immigration which seems to have extended over the third, and early portion of the second, millennium.