Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/111

 90 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. so rich in surprises, becomes aware at every turn of the effects of the steady work of a society which is no longer in a rude period, but has attained to a stage when men have grown strongly attached to the land which they deem their own for all time, and in which are buried their dead. This society has already behind it a long past ; for it possesses a style which ages alone can give. No matter its starting-point or the models whence, in the beginning, it derived its inspirations, it ended in being truly original, in that it impressed upon all its works something of its own individuality. To have been capable of building monuments such as we behold here, and have put the stamp of a special and well-defined taste on plastic arts of every kind, these lands must have had a dense population, well disciplined and very active, presided over by opulent and ambitious princes, who readily found any artificers they required for the execution of these stupendous works of public utility. The brilliant and animated life of these commonwealths was abruptly cut short by events, the character and sequence of which are no riddle for the historian, as soon as he turns away his gaze from the waters and coasts of the ^Egean, and fixes it on the mountain tribes that entered the Hellenic peninsula by the sea ; moreover, by the light of modern Greek history, he is able to understand much that went on in by-gone days on this same stage. He remembers the Albanian invasions of the last century, and the effects which they produced in Central Greece and Peloponnesus ; they explain to him what the Thessalian and Dorian invasions were some three thousand years ago, in what measure they modi- fied the condition of both inhabitants and land, bringing with them new dialects which they imposed upon the population, and sending out in many directions migratory groups, which sought to find beyond their boundaries what their country no longer secured to them : full possession of their hereditary plots, and freedom to live under laws of their own framing. It is more particularly towards the fields surrounding the fine sheet of water at Janina, that we shall find the oldest traditions of the Hellenic race, which hitherto have lain as it were out of sight in the deep glens of woody Pindus. There, at a short distance from the lake, in the secluded, low-lying valley of Tomarus, was discovered Dodona ; Dodona long sought in vain, and held in antiquity as the first religious centre around which