Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/75

 54 Primitive Greece: Mvcenian Art. by Italians or other Western peoples. It was quite the other way about : as soon as Hellas became civilized, she used her interference in diffusing her culture in the West. On this head there can be no room for doubt ; but what remains obscure is the route which the ancestors of the Hellenes took, when they came and spread themselves among the valleys and slopes of Greece. Did they come in canoes which, aided by the wind, they propelled from island to island ? Or did they make their way by land in their descent from the Thracian plains ? Tradition ascribed an important part to the populations of Thracia, which it led across Pindus on to Boeotia and Attica, carrying with them the cult of the Muses. Of the Dorians, too, it was told that they had dwelt in the savage valleys of Q£ta, whence they had forced their way into Central Greece and Peloponnesus. On the contrary, all we know of the lonians shows them as a people, whether in Asia Minor or Hellas, settled by the sea-shore, and whose migrations, whatever their point of departure, were effected from one side to the other of the Archipelago. If this was so in the early beginnings of history, during that period in which figure nations whose names at any rate have been retained, why should things have taken a different shape in those ages preceding it of which no record is left ? Why from that time should not some of them, already skilful in handling an oar or managing a sail, have chosen in preference sea-routes, whilst others, moving along the great ranges, scaled one after another the cross lines of mountains, and entered the land, then still deserted or thinly populated, through passes and narrow defiles as yet open to all ? The Greeks had no recollection of a time when their ancestors inhabited a land other than theirs ; they looked upon them- selves as autochtones, L e. sprung from the soil which carried them. This belief flattered their vanity. But the amiable myth, dear to their hearts, has been completely upset by philology and comparative mythography. If these youthful sciences have firmly established any one fact, it is the original parentage of the Hindus and Iranians on the one hand, and of the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Germans, and Slavs on the other. The languages spoken by all these nations, spread on so vast an area, that is to say from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, are too