The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
on by strangers. The men who took advantage of this opening were the traders of the city-states of Sidon and Tyre on the Syrian coast, men of that Semitic stock to which Jew, Arab, and Assyrian alike belonged. These coast-landers, born merchants like the Jews, seem to have migrated to the shores of the Mediterranean from an older home on the shores of the Red Sea, and it is possible that this older home was a region of the land known to the Egyptians as the land of Punt. This would explain the origin of their Punic name. But Greek fancy associated the name of the traders from the east with a like-sounding word of their own, phoenix, “bright-red”, a name or epithet of the sun-god; and so the men of Sidon and Sidon’s sister-cities were called Phoenicians—as it were, men from Phoenice, the sun-god’s red land. And various legends grew up, most famous of all the legend of Cadmus and Europa, connecting Phoenicia with Greece.
We have no warrant for speaking of a Phoenician sea-lordship in the Aegean. The evidence of the Homeric poems shows clearly that between the commercial enterprise of the heroic age and the commercial enterprise of the later Greeks there was an interval of perhaps two hundred years or thereabouts, during which no Greek state possessed a sea-power strong enough to exclude foreign merchants from Greek seas, and trade was consequently shared by Greek and Tyrian merchants. It was not only Phoenician carriers who came to Greece; the Greeks also sailed to Syria and Cyprus; and the Carians developed a considerable sea-power. We shall see in the next chapter how the men of Tyre and Sidon made a new Phoenicia in the western Mediterranean; but on the shores of the Aegean they seem to have made no serious attempts, or at least to have succeeded in no attempts, to plant permanent settlements, except at Camirus in Rhodes, and possibly in the island of Cythera. It may be that they had stations at the principal fisheries of Cos and Nisyros and Erythrae and elsewhere; it has been supposed that they were the first to tap the gold-mines of Siphnos and Thasos and even the silver-mines of Attica. It has been held that there were Phoenician settlements on the Isthmus of Corinth, under the Acropolis of Athens, and even at inland Thebes. There is no assurance or probability that such settlements were ever made. The Phoenicians doubtless had marts here and there on coast or island; but there is no reason to think that Canaanites made homes for themselves on Greek soil or introduced Semitic blood into the population of Greece. It was not here that the struggle was to be fought out between Baal and Zeus. Their ships were ever winding in and out of the Aegean isles from south to north, bearing fair naperies from Syria, fine-wrought bowls and cups from the workshops of Sidonian and Cypriot silversmiths, and all manner of luxuries and ornaments; and this constant commercial intercourse lasting for two centuries is amply sufficient to account for all the influence that Phoenicia exerted upon Greece. In the worship of Aphrodite and other Greek goddesses we see the influence of the cult of Syrian Astarte; and the Phoenician god Melkart was not only taken into Greek mythology under the name Melicertes, but was identified in many places with the Greek god Heracles. The briskest trade was perhaps driven with the thriving cities of Ionia, and the Phoenicians adopted the Ionian name, and diffused it in Syria, as the general designation of all the Greeks. These things were of slight concern compared with one inestimable service which the Phoenicians rendered to Hellas and thereby to Europe. They gave the Greeks the most useful instrument of civilisation, the art of writing. It was perhaps at the beginning of the ninth century, hardly later, that the Phoenician alphabet was moulded to the needs of the Greek language. In this adaptation the Greeks showed their genius. The alphabet of the Phoenicians and their Semitic brethren is an alphabet of consonants; the Greeks added the vowels. They took some of the consonantal symbols for which their own language had no corresponding sounds, and used these superfluous signs to represent the vowels. Several alphabets, differing in certain details, were diffused in various parts of the Hellenic world, but they all agree in the main points, and we may suppose that the original idea was worked out in Ionia. In Ionia, at all events, writing was introduced at an early period and was perhaps used by poets of the ninth century. Certain it is that the earliest reference to writing is in the Iliad, in the story of Bellerophon, who carries from Argos to Lycia “deadly symbols in a folded tablet”. It seems simpler to suppose that the poet had in his mind a letter written in the Greek alphabet, than that he was thinking of the old pictorial forms of writing which were employed in ancient times; and if this be so, the Greek alphabet must have been in use before the episode of Bellerophon was composed. Perhaps the earliest example of a Greek writing that we possess is on an Attic jar of the seventh century; it says the jar shall be the prize of the dancer who dances more gaily than all others. But the lack of early inscriptions is what we should expect. The new art was used for ordinary and literary purposes long before it was employed for official records. It was the great gift which the Semites, who themselves derived it from Egypt, gave to Europe.
The Phoenicians exerted little or insignificant influence upon Greek art; on the contrary, it was probably from Aegean art that they learned much of what they knew. They had no artistic genius; they were imitators, not creators. And though the Homeric poems show that the skill of Phoenician artists was highly prized, the Greeks of Ionia had not to send to Phoenicia for lack of cunning workmen at home. The subjects wrought on the shield which the master-smith made for Achilles may be illustrated by inlaid works in metal of Phoenician or Cypriot craftsmen, but there is not the smallest reason to think that the work which stimulated the poet’s imagination was made by foreign hands. It was rather wrought by some successor of the ancient craftsmen whose handiwork we see in those inlaid dagger-blades which were found in tombs at Mycenae. The work of the artist has been doubtless elaborated and beautified by the imagination of the poet, who has drawn vivid and beautiful scenes of life in Ionia in the ninth century. The shield, wrought in bronze, tin, silver, and gold, is round and has a ringed space in the centre, encompassed by three concentric girdles. In the middle is the earth, the sea, and 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 circle is Peace and War. Here are scenes in a city at peace—banquets, 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 country-life 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 tearing 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, outmost circle through which “the great might of the river Oceanus” flowed—rounding off, as it were, the life of mortals by its girdling stream.
SECT. 11. GREEK RECONSTRUCTION OF EARLY GREEK HISTORY
We must now see what the Greeks thought of their own early history. Their construction of it, though founded on legendary tradition and framed without much historical sense, has considerable importance, since their ideas about the past affected their views of the present. Their belief in their legendary past was thoroughly practical; mythic events were often the basis of diplomatic transactions; claims to territory might be founded on the supposed conquests or dominions of ancient heroes of divine birth.
At first, before the growth of historical curiosity, the chief motive for investigating the past was the desire of noble families to derive their origin from a god. For this purpose they sought to connect their pedigrees with heroic ancestors, especially with Heracles or with the warriors who had fought at Troy. For just as the Trojan war came to be regarded as a national enterprise, so Heracles—who seems originally to have been specially associated with Argolis—was looked on as a national hero. The consequence was that the Greeks framed their history on genealogies and determined their chronology by generations, reckoning three generations to a hundred years. The later Homeric poets must have contributed a great deal to the fixing of the mutual relations of legendary events; but it the poets of the school of Hesiod in the seventh century who did most to reduce to a historical system the legends of the heroic age. Their poems are lost, but they were worked up into still more complete and elaborate schemes by the prose logographers or “story-writers” of the sixth and fifth centuries, of whom perhaps the most influential were Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos. The original works of the logographers have also perished, but their teaching