Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/85

 64 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. and at one time or another visited all its islands. Thucydides — thus showing the way to modern research — confirms this assertion, basing it on the results yielded by the excavations which his contemporary Nicias had made at Delos, in order to clear it of human remains buried there and to purify the sacred island.^ The links which bound Lycians and Greeks together were no less close and intimate. Thus, we find in Crete the myth relating to Sarpedon, the king of Lycia and Minos' brother, and that of Bellerophontes and Perseus in Argolis ; whilst Lycians support the dynasty of the Prsetides, and send workmen to build their strongholds. These relations between the two groups come out even more clearly in their religious creeds : Apollo was adored with nearly the same rites at Delos and Patara, and Delian tradition credited Lycian priests with the honour of having largely framed the order of the ceremonial for the famous Ionian sanctuary. Granting that the initiative and impetus came from Asia Minor, it is natural to seek in the same quarter those Greek tribes which first profited by such examples and suggestions as came within their range, and which, having shaken off somewhat of their rudeness, joined in the movement then setting towards the West, carrying with it all those light boats to the European shores. Were not the lavanim the first-fruits of the nation that was to be, the lavanim who, as far back as the ninth century B.C., appeared to the Semite, in the dim perspective view, as holding lordship over the isles and coasts of the West, they who throughout the first period of the existence of the Grecian people ever formed the vanguard of the common host, and who might be rightly called Hellas' spring ? One is thus led by an imperceptible incline to E. Curtius' famous theory, which that eminent scholar published in a memorable essay more than forty years ago, and whose main lines at least have been accepted by the vast majority of experts.^ The fact which Curtius has placed almost beyond cavil had been suspected by others before him, 1 Thucydides, i. 8. History will be found a list of the writings in which Curtius takes up again the question to defend or confirm his opinions, as well as those of scholars such as Casaubon, Niebuhr, and Buttmann, who before him had surmised what he tried to demonstrate, along with the names of such well-known savants as accepted and adhered to his theory with more or less reserve.
 * Die lonier vor der lonischen Wanderungy 1885. In a note of his Greek