The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 3

the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must for ever
remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet originally blended them,
for the amusement or edification of his auditors.... It was one of the
agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic that the man who travelled far
enough northward beyond the Rhiphæan Mountains would in time
reach the delicious country and genial climate of the virtuous

Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of Apollo, who dwelt in the
extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts of Boreas. Now, the hope that
we may, by carrying our researches up the stream of time, exhaust the
limits of fiction, and land ultimately upon some points of solid truth,
appears to me no less illusory than this northward journey in quest of
the Hyperborean elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents
fairly well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths
were beautiful, but their value was not in any sense historical; it arose
from the light which they cast upon the workings of the active Greek
mind, and the revelation which they gave of the innate poetic faculty
which created myths so far excelling those of any other nation.
Within the last forty years all this has been changed. Opinions like that
so dogmatically expressed by our great historian are no longer held by
anyone who has followed the current of modern investigations, and
remain only as monuments of the danger of dogmatizing on matters
concerning which all preconceived ideas may be upset by the results of
a single season's spade-work on some ancient site; and he would be a
bold man who would venture to-day to call 'illusory' the search for
'points of solid truth' in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of
matter of fact, if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of
romantic inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course,
is by no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well
begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian
conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of a
great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization, which
neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has any cause to
shrink from comparison with the great historic civilizations of
Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the process of disentangling
the historic nucleus of the legends from their merely mythical and
romantic elements cannot yet be undertaken with any approach to
certainty, it is becoming continually more apparent, not only that in
many cases there was such a nucleus, but also what were some of the
historic elements around which the poetic fancy of later times drew the
fanciful wrappings of the heroic tales as we know them. It is not yet
possible to trace and identify the actual figures of the heroes of
prehistoric Greece: probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet

untranslated Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient
Herodotus, and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but
there can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and
women of Ægean stock filled the rôles of these ancient romances, and
that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the record of
actual achievements.
In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important and
convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete. The
discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencæ, Tiryns,
Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to the former
existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all probability the
original of, that which is described for us in the Homeric poems; but it
was not until the treasures of Knossos and Phæstos began to be
revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest that
what was known as the Mycenæan civilization was itself only the
decadence of a far richer and fuller culture, whose fountain-head and
whose chief sphere of development had been in Crete. And it has been
in Crete that exploration and discovery have led to the most striking
illustration of many of the statements in the legends and traditions, and
have made it practically certain that much of what used to be
considered mere romantic fable represents, with, of course, many
embellishments of fancy, a good deal of historic fact.
Our first task, therefore, is to gather together the main features of what
the ancient legends of Greece narrated about Crete and its inhabitants,
and their relations to the rest of the Ægean world. The position of
Crete--'a halfway house between three continents, flanked by the great
Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller