Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/517

 CHAPTER XII. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS, DATE, AND DIVISIONS OF THE MYCENIAN PERIOD. We have now passed in review the main discoveries that for the last twenty years have widened the canvas of the Homeric epoch, broken down the barrier that formerly checked the further progress of scientific research, and given it a background. Even before the excavations which Schliemann carried on at Mycenae had burst upon the world with somewhat of a theatrical effect, we ought to have suspected that a community in the midst of which the Epos had had its being, implied for it a long past not barren of results. Time alone, and a long time to boot, is required to transform, in the popular fancy, average humanity into heroes of supernatural stature, moral and physical, such as poetry attributes to them. The people whom the bards eulogized under the names of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achy lies, and Dio- medes were men of old, not their contemporaries. The tale of a war wherein all the Grecian forces from the continent and the isles are brought together against a powerful Asiatic city, the expeditions that led the heroes in and out of the islands until the shores of Egypt were reached, must body forth what the mythic cycle remembered, more or less modified by local tradition, of distant military campaigns, displacements and adventures of armed bands, that once had been impelled by their restless disposition to turn the coasts of the Mediterranean into their hunting-ground. It was in the course of these wanderings and migrations that the Achaean heroes, the offspring of the gods, gained for themselves a fame the faint echo of which is heard in Homer's verse. The