Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/525

 468 Primitivk Greeck: Mvceniax Art. The Epic poems, then, have their roots in popular lays of very ancient date ; they were taken from Europe to Asia by i^olian and Ionian refugees, who, driven from their homes by the Dorian invasion, struck out once more for the eastern shores of the iEgean under the lead of young chieftains. This view of the case takes us back to the beginnings of the Epic song and of Mycenian Greece ; it enables us to grasp why it comes about that all the poems should belong to European Hellas and the adjacent isles, and why the Iliad and the Odyssey contain elements of very different date. We should keep this well in sight when we turn to the Homeric tales for information likely to throw some light on the state and habits of the earlier com- munities. If, in our survey of the principal monuments of the prehistoric period, we have laid special stress upon such artistic products as belong to Tiryns, Mycenae, and Amyclce, it is because they represent Mycenian civilization in its mature state, when it was able to dispose of all its means of expression. The preference shown by the historian to a restricted number of works, nearly all from a small district of Hellas, by no means implies that the area upon which that civilization extended was confined within the boundaries of Peloponnesus, or even of continental Hellas. We cannot say on what spot the mother-tribes of the Hellenes first awoke to spiritual life. Let us remember, however, that the products of their nascent manufacture have been exhumed as well on the north-west coast of Asia Minor, as in the isles of the Archipelago and Europe. Hence some have proposed to call this industry *' yEgean '' in place of ** Mycenian." The name has this in its favour, that it would indicate the real limits of its domain. If we have kept to the second term, it is because it was already consecrated by usage, and had besides the merit of reminding one of such monuments of this art as are best calculated, from an artistic standpoint, to convey a just notion of its power. Whether this civilization be named Mycenian or iEgean is of small import. What has been established is the fact that it represents the general condition of the Greek world whose beginnings we can neither gauge nor fix, but which went on without a break for several centuries. Henceforward the Grecian world had to a certain extent its unity, a spiritual and aesthetic unity, the only one it was fated to work out for itself. Long before the