Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/534

 General Characteristics of the Mvcenian Period. 477 Achaean princes had supplied it with precious metals to be transformed into richly-decorated weapons, vases, and ornaments. But as the Dorian invasion broke in upon them, they used all their resources to repulse the common foe ; and when all was spent they too had wandered into exile, and with them were dispersed the master-artisans who had received their training in working for them. The condition of Hellas at the beginning of this period finds a parallel in the Middle Ages. Both stand between an era of constant progress and a spiritual birth when industries, manu- factures, and arts resume their onward march. Those centuries which in Western Europe are called modern times find their counterpart in Greece in the period opening with the ninth cen- tury ij.c, when the great Epics came into existence, and were followed by the rapid and brilliant development of plastic art. In the Hellas of the first Olympiads, as in the Italy and France of the fifteenth century, foreign models greatly contributed to awaken the mind ; but in both instances the new activity utilized certain elements of the old culture in carrying out its labours and working its inventions. / If we look back from the point we have reached, we embrace at one bound the whole of the ground travelled over by the Grecian mind during the early stages of its evolution, a ground we have seen emerge from the unfathom- able depths in which all beginnings are lost ; then gradually and almost insensibly we have seen it become lighter with the dawn of poesy ; but as we avert our gaze and take leave of it, a flood of light will burst over it under the growing day of history. Each one of these phases has been successively defined and distinguished by us, from the character of the monuments by which they are represented ; but it is when their probable date is in question that we feel how great these difficulties are, in the absence of all written documents. Greek chronographers place the Trojan war at the commence- ment and the Dorian invasion towards the end of the vast and undetermined space stretching beyond the twelfth century B.C. Geologists are inclined to place the catastrophe of Thera towards the twentieth century b.c. ; on the other hand, although the Greeks were aware that the Phoenicians had settled in the island as far back as 1500 u.c, they had preserved no recollection of the disaster. The situation of Thera, at the extreme south of