Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/126

 IK, HISTORY OF GREKCE. recorded times, can only be taken as conjectural, the conjectures, indeed, of a statesman and a philosopher, generalized. too, in part, from the many particular instances of contention and expul- sion of chiefs which he found in the old legendary poems. The Homeric poems, however, present to us a different picture. They recognize walled towns, fixed abodes, strong local attachments, hereditary individual property in land, vineyards planted and carefully cultivated, established temples of the gods, and splendid palaces of the chiefs. 1 The description of Thucydides belongs to a lower form of society, and bears more analogy to that which the poet himself conceives as antiquated and barbarous, to the savage Cyclopes, who dwell on the tops of mountains, in hollow caves, without the plough, without vine or fruit culture, without arts or instruments, or to the primitive settlement of Dardanus son of Zeus, on the higher ground of Ida, while it was reserved for his descendants and successors to found the holy Ilium on the plain. 2 Ilium or Troy represents the perfection of Homeric soci- ety. It is a consecrated spot, containing temples of the gods as well as the palace of Priam, and surrounded by walls which are the fabric of the gods ; while the antecedent form of ruder society, which the poet briefly glances at, is the parallel of that which the theory of Thucydides ascribes to his own early semi-barbarous ancestors. Walled towns serve thus as one of the evidences, that a large part of the population of Greece had, even in the Homeric times, reached a level higher than that of the ^Etolians and Lok- rians of the days of Thucydides. The remains of Mykenae and Tiryns demonstrate the massy and Cyclopian style of architecture employed in those early days : but we may remark that, while modern observers seem inclined to treat the remains of the former as very imposing, and significant of a great princely family, Thu- fydides, on the contrary, speaks of it as a small place, and labors 1 Odyss. vi. 10; respecting Nausithous, past king of the Phaeakians : 'A/<0( 61 Tfi^of iTiaaae TroAet, c2 idei^iro ol/covf, K(C vqoilf iroifjos fieuv, Kol edacaaT' upovpaf. The vineyard, olive-ground, and garden cf Laertes, is a model of careful niltivation (Odyss. xxiv. 245 ); see also the shiell of AchLMrs (11'uul, x.ii, 441-580), and the Kalydonian plain (Iliad, ix. 575). Odvss. x. 106-115; Iliad, xx. 216.