Trojan subjects.

Source of
Trojan

wealth.

To the Trojan realm were reckoned not only the men of the Trojan plain, but the Dardanians in the upper valley of the Scamander, among the hills of Ida-the country of the Homeric Aeneas—and, to the east, the inhabitants of the plains of the Granicus and the Aesepus. And south of Mount Ida were a number of strongholds inhabited by "Pelasgian tribes," who represented the original inhabitants of the country whom the Trojans had subdued.1

The lords of Troy, whether of the earlier fortress of brick, or the later of stone, did not owe their power and wealth to the fertility of power and the soil or to any natural products of the region in which they had fixed their abode. The little plain, watered by the Scamander, has no advantages in itself to attract settlers; and its coasts, north and west, offer no good harbourage for ships. The fortune of Troy was due to the difficulties of navigation which beset mariners trading between the Aegean and the Euxine. The prevailing summer winds, from north, north-east, and north-west, used to detain sailing ships for days or weeks at the mouth of the Hellespont. The sailors wanted anchorage, and they wanted fresh water which was to be got from the Scamander and also on the west coast at Besika Bay. These things the masters of the Scamander plain had it in their power to grant or withhold. Hence Troy was in a position to control the trade which passed through the Hellespont. And here a number of converging lines of traffic met. From Thrace and Paeonia came wine, swords, white horses, and perhaps gold. From Paphlagonia and the southern coasts of the Euxine came timber, silver, vermilion, wild asses. Southward there was the commerce of the Maeonians and Carians and Lycians. The Maeonians, who were noted as slave-dealers, dwelled in the land which was afterwards to be Lydia, on the banks of the Hermus and in the plain of Sardis. The Carians possessed Miletus, where there were skilful workers in ivory, and the districts of the Macander. The Lycians probably held much of the carrying trade from Egypt and Syria to northern Europe.

Lines of trade:

north;

east;

south.

The policy of Troy-which was, we may say, its very reason for existing was to levy a toll upon all the traffic which converged on the Hellespontine shores. If there was, as has been supposed, a great yearly market in the Trojan plain, to which traders from all quarters came by sea or land with their merchandise, it was an arrangement which was not only profitable to the Trojan king who received the market dues, but may have been convenient to many of the merchants, sparing them longer journeys.2

1 The most important of these cities were Larisa on the west coast, Pedasos (the later Assos), Lyrnessos (the late Antandros), and Thebe. Among the Pelasgian tribes some were Leleges, others Cilices.

2 It is to be observed that in the Trojan War the various peoples whose merchandise came to the Hellespont appear to have been the allies of Troy.

"Sacred Troy" was thus a parasite which grew fat on the produce of others, and the Greeks, who desired to have access to the Euxine and to trade freely with all the world, determined to destroy it. We may conjecture that the fall of the Fifth City in the course of the Fall of the thirteenth century was the result of Achaean enterprise, and was the Fifth City. fact which suggested the legend of the sack of Troy by Heracles. This story is closely connected with the tale of the Argonauts; for (ArgonauHeracles embarked at Ioleus with the other heroes in the Argo, and tic expedition.) left the ship during the voyage and destroyed Troy. It looks as if behind the whole legend there lurked the tradition of Greek attempts to navigate the Euxine between the fall of the Fifth and the rise of the Sixth City. So many legends of the heroic age of Greece have been proved by recent discoveries to have a historical basis, that there is nothing rash in supposing that here, too, imagination was not building in the void but was working on the memory of definite events.

correct).

It was probably at the beginning of the twelfth century, as Greek The Trojan tradition reckoned, that the Achaeans made ready a great expedition War: to exterminate the parasitic power which preyed upon the trade of (traditional date the world.1 It is uncertain how far the Greek states of the time of fall of can be described as a federation or an empire, with a definite Troy 1184 organisation under the supremacy of Argos. But there seems no B.C.; apreason to doubt that the Achaean king of Argos, whose name in proximately Greek tradition was Agamemnon, succeeded in enlisting the cooperation of the chief kings and princes of northern as well as southern Greece; it looks, indeed, as if the Achaean lords of Phthia and Thessaly the country from which the Argo sailed--had a particular interest in the enterprise. All sailed to the plain of Troy. It was vain to hope that they could take by storm the well-walled castle of Priam. Their hope was to cut off all the trade on which Troy depended for her livelihood and to starve her out. The tradition that the siege was long-nine years according to the poets-is therefore in accordance with the conditions of the war. The Greeks supported themselves by raids on the surrounding subjects and allies of the Trojans. Priam's city fell. Her fall was the necessary prelude to the opening of the Propontis and the Euxine sea to Greek commerce and colonisation. When the Greeks, in later days, established themselves securely on the Hellespont and the Bosphorus, the hill of Troy ceased to have any value as a site, and though it was again inhabited it was little more than a place of famous memories.

1 It is quite possible that the motive which the poets assigned for the Trojan War-to recover Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, carried off by Paris, son of Priam,-had some historical basis; but if such an incident occurred, it served only as a pretext for the war.

E

SECT. 5. THE HOMERIC POEMS

The later period of the heroic age, its manners of life, its material environment, its social organisation, its political geography, are reflected in the Homeric poems. Although the poets who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey probably did not live before the ninth century, they derived their matter from older lays which must have belonged to the generations immediately succeeding the Trojan War. After the age of bronze had passed away, and the conditions of life and the political shape of the Greek world had been utterly changed, it would have been impossible for any one, however imaginative,-unless he were a scientific antiquarian with abundance of records at his command, -to create a consistent picture of a vanished civilisation. And the picture which Homer presents is a consistent picture, closely corresponding, in its main features and in remarkable details, to the evidence which has been recently recovered from the earth and described in the foregoing pages. The Homeric palace is built on the same general plan as the palaces that have been found at Mycenae and Tiryns, at Troy and in Boeotia. The equipment of the Homeric heroes and the man-screening Homeric shield receive their best illustration from Mycenaean gems and jars. The blue inlaid frieze in the vestibule of the hall of Tiryns proves that the poet's frieze of cyanus in the hall of Alcinous was not a fancy; and he describes as the cup of Nestor a gold cup with doves perched on the handles, FIG. 24.-Inlaid Dagger-blade, such as one which was found in a royal

with lion-hunt (Mycenae).

1 See below, p. 69.

tomb at Mycenae. The subjects wrought on the shield which the The shield master-smith made for Achilles may be illustrated by works of art found of Achilles (in Iliad at Mycenae and in Crete. The shield, wrought in bronze, tin, silver, xviii.) and gold, is round and has a ringed space in the centre, encompassed made by by three concentric girdles. In the middle is the earth, the sea, and Hephaestus. the heaven, with "the unwearied sun and the moon at her full, and all the stars wherewith heaven is crowned." The subject of the first

FIG. 25.-Gold Cup, with doves (Mycenae).

circle is Peace and War. Here are scenes in a city at peacebanquets, brides borne through the streets by torchlight to their new homes, the elders dealing out justice; there is another city besieged, and scenes of battle. The second circle shows scenes from countrylife at various seasons of the year: ploughing in spring, the ploughman drinking a draught of wine as he reaches the end of the black furrow; a king watching reapers reaping in his meadows, and the preparations for a harvest festival; a bright vintage scene, "young men and maids bearing the sweet fruit in wicker baskets," and

dancing, while a boy plays a lyre and sings the song of Linus;
herdsmen with their dogs pursuing two lions which had carried off an
ox from the banks of a
sounding river; a pasture
and shepherds' huts in a
mountain glen. The whole
was girded by the third, out-
most circle, through which
"the great might of the river
Oceanus" flowed-rounding
off, as it were, the life of
mortals by its girdling stream.
The whole conception is due
to the imagination of the
poet, but similar scenes of
Peace and War were de-
picted by the artists of the
Aegean; as for instance, on

See above, the Cretan plaques (which

of a chest of cypress-wood) on which we saw a city represented, and Vase found on a vase of steatite decorated by a picture of what is probably a at Hagia harvest festival. The siege is illustrated by the scene of the leaguered Triada. city on the silver beaker; and dagger blades discovered at Mycenae show brilliant examples of the art of inlaying on metal.

σήματα λυγρά.

The art of writing, too, is mentioned in the Iliad, in the story of Bellerophon, who carries from Argos to Lycia "deadly symbols in a folded tablet." The fact, which was doubted till a few years ago, that writing was practised in the heroic age, shows that the poet was guilty of no anachronism.

Burial and There is indeed one striking difference in custom. The cremation. Mycenaean tombs reveal few traces of the habit of burning the dead, which the Homeric Greeks invariably practised; while, beyond what is implied in a single mention of embalming, the poems completely ignore the practice of burial. In later times both customs existed in Greece side by side. The explanation of this discrepancy seems to be that cremation was a practice introduced by the Achaeans.

Minstrelsy.

Hexameter verse must have already been far on its way to perfection in the twelfth century when the Greek bards used it to commemorate the Trojan War. The glorification of Achilles and other features of the Iliad point to northern Greece, where was the kingdom of Achilles in Phthia, as the home of one of these early minstrels.

1 The Cretans had seven-stringed lyres. Thus in a funeral scene on a sarcophagus found at Hagia Triada a man is playing this instrument.