Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/101

 8o Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. stories which they heard from Carian dragomans, quite as prone to draw the long-bow three thousand years ago at Thebes and Memphis, as ciceroni are now-a-days at Naples or any other show-place. They scarcely fared better at the hands of priests of superior rank to whom they happened to be introduced, for these, whilst they supplied information, some of which was of unquestionable value, wished above all to impress the visitors with the superiority of everything Egyptian. In this fashion they revenged themselves upon the strangers for the favour these enjoyed at the court of the Pharaohs, for whether as mer- cenaries or privileged merchants, they were beginning to hold important situations in the state. The priests went out of their way in their endeavour to persuade the Greeks that they were but as men of yesterday by the side of the Egyptians, whose culture mounted back thousands of years ; the better to convince them of this, they set forth with much show of argument, that those arts and gods which Greece proudly claimed as her own had all come from Egypt, and been taken to Hellas by fugitive priests and princes from the Delta. These in their new home had become the initiators and apostles of Greek civilization. In support of this line of argument, they trumped up, doubtless with the connivance of the Greeks, by no means loth to help in the fraud, stories bearing, though only superficially, a certain air of resemblance, a seeming affinity of sounds and names, a concordance of rites and usages to one another. Strange as it may appear, no Greek, even the wisest among them, but became a dupe to these inventions. Hecata^us and Herodotus accepted and diffused them among their countrymen. Plato propounded them in the following century, and their echo is borne down to us as late as Diodorus. Like upstarts whose aim in life is to find ancestors out of a family of undoubted nobility, the Greeks were flattered to be connected with a nation which they were fain to regard with involuntary reverence. The historians of Greece and her wise men as well, from the first day of their acquaintance with the Nile valley, succumbed to a kind of Egyptomania. It was whilst this mood was uppermost that they invented the Cecrops myth ; one among many other instances found in Herodotus of those artificial affinities which they sought to establish between Athens and Egypt, between the gods and ceremonial of Hellas and the Delta. It was a