tain a large population. This would account for the fact that in Homer the Trojans and their allies defended the city not from its walls, but in battle line on the plain before them, much as can be seen on the famous silver vase from the Royal tombs of Mycena."

Dr. Wace's results may be roughly summed up thus. Mycenae was first settled in the beginning of the Bronze Age; but only attained importance in the Middle Helladic Age, 1800 to 1600 B. C. Towards the end of this period, Cretan influence was strong, and by the First Late Helladic Period, the city was rich and powerful. In the succeeding age its products are found influencing even Crete. In the fourteenth century, after the downfall of Knossos, Mycena supplanted Crete as the chief centre of power and civilisation. "The clever apprentice took the master's place." This was the time when Mycenae reached the zenith of its power and skill, and though its best is not so fine in artistic quality as the best of the preceding age, yet in technical skill the products of this period are in advance of anything previously attained. "The massive Cyclopean walls, the domestic luxury, the splendid palaces, and the technical perfection—as shown, for instance, in the Treasury of Atreus and in the other complete domed tomb at Mycena ... bear witness that the Mycenæans of the Third Late Helladic Period (1400-1100 B. C.) were craftsmen of no mean skill and the worthy heirs of a long line of human effort. All research in this period helps us not merely to write the earliest history of Greece, but to fill out little by little the material background of Homer. We now realise

that Homer does not give us the first struggles of a rising Hellas, but the climax, or rather an epitome, of the wonderful pre-Homeric Greece, of which even Athens in its prime knew little. Yet it was in the pre-Homeric days of the Bronze Age that the broad foundations of the glory of Greece were laid."

CHAPTER XII

KNOSSOS: THE HOME OF THE SEA-KINGS OF THE ÆGEAN

"LESS than a generation back," says Sir Arthur Evans, in that brilliant article which first gave to the general public the results of his excavations at Knossos, "the origin of Greek civilisation, and with it the sources of all great culture that has ever been, were wrapped in an impenetrable mist. That ancient world was still girt round within its narrow confines by the circling 'Stream of Ocean.' Was there anything beyond? The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age, with their palaces and strongholds, were they aught, after all, but more or less humanised sun-myths?"

The answer to this question was partly given, as we have seen, by the remarkable work of Dr. Schliemann and his successors, at Troy, Mycena, Tiryns and elsewhere. It was shown that many generations before that First Olympiad (776 B. C.), from which Greek History, as we have known it, begins, there lived on Greek soil a race not only civilised, but much further advanced in the refinements of civilisation that the historic Greeks who succeeded them. We learned that the products of Mycenæan art and manufacture had already, by the end of the sixteenth century B. C., found their way throughout the Levant and Syria,

into the Nile Valley, to Sicily and Southern Italy, and even as far as the coasts of Spain.

There was one spot of the Greek world, however, which so far had not contributed anything to the evidence of this ancient splendour, though its situation and its traditions alike pointed to the probability that it had taken its place, and that no unimportant one, in the great story of those bygone days. "Crete, the central island—a half-way house between three Continents-flanked by the great Libyan promontory and linked by smaller island stepping stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia, was called upon by Nature to play a leading part in the development of the early Ægean culture." Nor were the indications of Nature contradicted by the evidence of tradition,—rather they were corroborated by it. It is true that in the Classical period of Greek history Crete occupies a comparatively insignificant place, and has sorely declined from the great days when she sent 80 ships to the siege of Troy, and reckoned 100 cities within her borders; but no land holds a larger place in Greek legend, and of none are the legends more significant.

It was to Crete that Rhea, the wife of Kronos, the father of the gods, fled to bear her son, Zeus; and in the Dictæan Cave the future ruler of gods and men was nourished with honey and goat's milk by the nymph Amaltheia, till the time was ripe for his vengeance on his unnatural father. It was in the Dictæan Cave, also, that Zeus was united to Europa, the daughter of man, in that union from which sprang Minos, the supreme legendary figure of Crete. And