"And yet the surface of the Mediterranean coasts and islands is nowhere so rich as the alluvial valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the Nile. The summer's drought may begin too soon or last too long, and everywhere a rocky basis lurks under the thin crust of the dusty earth.

"The temperate north and the tropic south are both more fertile than these historic lands where patient peasants, weary of coaxing the soil, more and more abandoned tillage to grow olives and the vine. And, at any moment, along one or another of a hundred faults, earthquakes might split the ground beneath men's feet, and frighten them into a fitful piety.

"The movements of wind and water conspired to help the sailor reach his goal. A strong central current flowed from the Black Sea into the Aegean, and countercurrents flowed northward along the coasts. The northeasterly etesian winds blew regularly in the summer to help back to their southern ports the ships that had gone to fetch grain, fish, and furs from the Euxine Sea.

"The great Schliemann, who had but lately resurrected Mycenae and Troy, visited the site in 1886, announced his conviction that it covered the remains of the ancient Cnossus, and opened negotiations with the owner of the land so that excavations might begin at once. But the owner haggled and tried to cheat. Schliemann, who had been a merchant before becoming an archeologist, withdrew in anger, losing a golden chance to add another civilization to history. A few years later he died.

"In 1893 a British archeologist, Dr. Arthur Evans, bought in Athens a number of milkstones from Greek women who had worn them as amulets. He was curious about the hieroglyphics engraved upon them, which no scholar could read. Tracing the stones to Crete, he secured passage thither, and wandered about the island picking up examples of what he believed to be ancient Cretan writing.

"In 1895 he purchased a part, and in 1900 the remainder, of the site that Schliemann and the French School at Athens had identified with Cnossus. In nine weeks of that spring, digging feverishly with one hundred and fifty men, he exhumed the richest treasure of modern historical research -- the palace of Minos. The palace is to all appearances identical with the almost endless Labyrinth so famous in old Greek tales of Minos, Daedalus, Thesus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur.

"Meanwhile two Americans, Seager and Mrs. Hawes, made discoveries at Vasiliki, Mochlos, and Gournia. The British -- Hogarth, Bosanquet, Dawkins, Myres -- explored Palaikastro, Psychro, and Zakro. The Cretans themselves became interested, and Xanthoudidis and Hatzidakis dug up ancient residences, grottoes, and tombs at Arkalochori, Tylissus, Koumasa, and Chamaizi.

"Digging down patiently beneath Cnossus, he found himself stopped, some forty-three feet below the surface, by the virgin rock. The lower half of the excavated area was occupied by remains characteristic of the Neolithic Age -- primitive forms of handmade pottery with simple linear ornament, spindle whorls for spinning and weaving, fat-buttocked goddesses of painted steatite or clay, tools and weapons of polished stone, but nothing in copper or bronze.

"In Middle Minoan I, the earliest palaces occur. The princes of Cnossus, Phaestus, and Mallia build for themselves luxurious dwellings with countless rooms, spacious storehouses, specialized workshops, altas and temples, and great drainage conduits that startle the arrogant Occidental eye. Pottery takes on a many-colored brilliance, walls are enlivened with charming frescoes, and a form of linear script evolves out of the hieroglyphics of the preceding age.

"Then, at the close of Middle Minoan II, some strange catastrophe writes its cynical record into the strata. The palace of Cnossus is laid low as if by a convulsion of the earth, or perhaps by an attack from Phaestus, whose palace for a time is spared. But a little later a like destruction falls upon Phaestus, Mochlos, Gournia, Palaikastro, and many other cities in the island. The pottery is covered with ashes, the great jars in the storerooms are filled with debris.

"Ordinarily the male has no clothing above the waist. There he wears a short skirt or waistcloth, occasionally with a codpiece for modesty. The skirt may be slit at the side in workingmen. In dignitaries and ceremonies it reaches in both sexes to the ground. Occasionally the men wear drawers, and in winter a long outer garment of wool or skins. The clothing is tightly laced about the middle, for men as well as women are resolved to be -- or seem -- triangularly slim.

"To rival the men at this point, the women of the later periods resort to stiff corsets, which gather their skirts snugly around the hips, and lift their bare breats to the sun. It is a pretty custom among the Cretans that the female bosom should be uncovered, or revealed by a diaphanous chemise. No one seems to take offense. The bodice is laced below the bust, opens in a careless circle, and then, in a gesture of charming reserve, may close in a Medici collar at the neck. The sleeves are short, sometimes puffed. The skirt, adorned with founces and gay tints, widens out spaciously from the hips, stiffened presumably with metal ribs or horizontal hoops.

"There are in the arrangement and design of Cretan feminine dress a warm harmony of colors, a grace of line, a delicacy of taste, that suggest a rich and luxurious civilization, already old in arts and wiles. In these matters the Cretans had no influence upon the Greeks, only in modern capitals have their styles triumphed.

"The wars become less frequent, more widespread, and more efficient in killing. At last the cities fight for the entire island, and Cnossus wins. The victor organizes a navy, dominates the Aegean, suppresses piracy, exacts tribute, builds palaces, and patronizes the arts, like an early Pericles.

"To make obedience easier the king suborns the gods to his use. His priests explain to the people that he is descended from Velchanos, and has received from this deity the laws that he decrees; and every nine years, if he is competent or generous, they reanoint him with the divine authority.

"To symbolize his power the monarch, anticipating Rome and France, adopts the (double) ax and the fleur-de-lis. To administer the state, he employs (as the litter of tablets suggests) a staff of ministers, bureaucrats, and scribes. He taxes in kind, and stores in giant jars his revenues of grain, oil, and wine. Out of this treasury, in kind, he pays his men.

"From his throne in the palace, or his judgment seat in the rotal villa, he settles in person such litgation as has run the gauntlet of his appointed courts. So great is his reputation as a magistrate that when he dies he becomes in Hades, Homer assures us, the inescapable judge of the dead.

"It is not only Cnossus that is great, with palaces so vast that imagination perhaps exaggerates the town that must have been the chief source and beneficiary of their wealth. Across the island, on the southern shore, is Phaestus, from whose harbor, Homer tells us, 'the dark-prowed ships are borne to Egypt by the force of the wind and the wave.' The southbound trade of Minoan Crete pours out here, swelled by goods from northern merchants who ship their cargoes overland to avoid a long detour by perilous seas.

"By our standards the minor streets are narrow, mere alleys in the style of a semitropical Orient that fears the sun. The rectangular houses, of wood or brick or stone, are for the most part confined to a single floor. Yet some Middle Minoan plaques exhumed at Cnossus show us homes of two, three, even five stories, with a cubicle attic or turret here and there. On the upper floors, in these pictured houses, are windows with red panes of unknown material.

"In the fields he takes with zest and audacity to the chase, guided by half-wild cats and slender thoroughbred hounds. In the towns he patronizes pugilists.

"However, time and again the Cretan pictures the stages of the lusty sport of charging bulls -- the daring hunter capturing the bull by jumping astride its neck as it laps up water from a pool -- the professonal tamer twisting the animal's head until it learns some measure of tolerance for the acrobat's annoying tricks -- the skilled performer, slim and agile, meeting the bull in the arena, grasping its horns, leaping into the air, somersaulting over its back, and landing feet first on the ground in the arms of a female companion who lends her grace to the scene.

"Since his death rate is high, he pays devout homage to fertility. When he rises to the notion of a human divinity, he pictures a mother goddess with generous mammae and sublime flanks, with reptiles creeping up around her arms and breasts, coiled in her hair, or rearing themselves proudly from her head. He sees in her the basic fact of nature -- that man's greaatest enemy, death, is overcome by woman's mysterious power, reproduction, and he identifies this power with deity.

"The mother goddess represents for him the source of all life, in plants and animals as well as in men. If he surrounds her image with fauna and flora, it is because these exist through her cretive fertility, and therefore serve as her symbols and her emanations. Occasionally she appears holding in her arms her divine child, Velchanos, whom she has borne in a mountain cave.

"Sometimes, as a god of fertility, he is conceived as incarnate in the sacred bull. It is as a bull that he mates in Cretan myth with Minos' wife, Pasiphae, and begets by her the monstrous Minos-bull, or Minotaur.

"Sometimes, with the sly economy of an incipient skeptic, he substitutes clay animals in the grave in place of actual food. If he buries a king or a noble or a rich trader, he surrenders to the corpse a part of the precious plate or jewelry that it once possessed. With touching sympathy he buries a set of chess with a good player, a clay orchestra with a musician, a boat with one who loved the sea.

"Perhaps it is from him, as well as from the Egyptians and the Semites, that the Phoenicians gather together those letters they will scatter throughout the Mediterranean to become the unassuming, omnipresent instrument of Western civilization. Even the common Cretan composes, and like some privy councilor, leaves on the walls of Hagia Triada the passing inspiration of his muse.

"We do not know what took place on those stages. Frescoes picture audiences viewing a spectacle, but we cannot tell what it is that they see. Very likely it is some combination of music and dance. A painting from Cnossus preserves a group of aristocratic ladies, surrounded by their gallants, watching a dance by gaily petticoated girls in an olive grove -- another represents a Dancing Woman with flying tresses and extended arms -- others show us rustic folk dances, or the wild dance of priests, priestesses, and worshipers before an idol or a sacred tree.

"As in every aristocratic civilization, he accepts conventions in the form and subject of his work, avoids extravagant novelties, and learns to be free even within the limitations of reserve and taste. He excels in pottery, gem cutting, bezel carving, and reliefs, for here his microscopic skill finds every stimulus and opportunity.

"He is at home in the working of silver and gold, sets all the precious stones, and makes a rich diversity of jewels. Upon the seals that he cuts to serve as official signatures, commercial labels, or business forms, he engraves in delicate detail so much of the life and scenery of Crete that from them alone we might picture his civilization. He hammers bronze into basins, ewers, daggers, and swords ornamented with floral and animal designs, and inlaid with gold and silver, ivory and rare stones.

"In Crete the earthquakes or the wars that overturned the palaces preserved here and there a frescoed wall. And wandering by them we molt forty centuries and meet the men who decorated the rooms of the Minoan kings. As far back as 2500 they make wall coatings of pure lime, and conceive the idea of painting in fresco upon the wet surface, wielding the brush so rapidly that the colors sink into the stucco before the surface dries. Into the dark halls of the palaces they bring the bright beauty of the open fields. They make plaster sprout lilies, tulips, narcissi, and sweet marjoram. No one viewing these scenes could ever again suppose that nature was discovered by Rousseau.

"In the museum at Heracleum the Saffon Picker is as eager to pluch the crocus as when his creator painted him in Middle Minoan days. His waist is absurdly thin, his body seems much too long for his legs. And yet his head is perfect, the colors are soft and warm, the flowers still fresh after four thousand years.

"At Hagia Triada the painter brightens a sarcophagus with spiral scrolls and queer, almost Nubian figures engrossed in some religious rituals. Better yet, he adorns a wall with waving foliage, and then places in the midst of it, darkly but vividly, a stout, tense cat preparing to spring unseen upon a proud bird preening its plumage in the sun.

"In Late Minoan the Cretan painter is at the top of his stride. Every wall tempts him, every plutocrat calls him. He decorates not merely the royal residences but the homes of nobles and burghers with all the lavishness of Pompeii. Soon, however, success and a surfeit of commissions spoil him. He is too anxious to be finished to quite touch perfection. He scatters quantity about him, repeats his flowers monotonously, paints his men impossibly, contents himself with sketching outlines, and falls into the lassitude of an art that knows that it has passed its zenith and must die.

"From that common civilization Crete borrowed in her youth, to it she contributed in her maturity. Her rule forged an order in the isles, and her merchants found entry at every port. Then her wares and her arts pervaded the Cyclades -- overran Cyprus -- reached to Caria and Palestine -- moved north through Asia Minor and its islands to Troy -- reached west through Italy and Sicily to Spain -- penetrated the mainland of Greece even to Thesaly -- and passed through Mycenae and Tiryns into the heritage of Greece.

"Possibly the collapse of Egypt after the death of Ikhnaton disrupted Creto-Egyptian trade, and diminished the riches of the Minoan kings. Crete had no great internal resources. Her prosperity required commerce, and markets for her industries. Like modern England she had become dangerously dependent upon control of the seas.

"In 1841 (age 19) he shipped from Hamburg as cabin boy on a steamer bound for South America. Twelve days out the vessel foundered. The crew was tossed about in a small boat for nine hours, and was thrown by the tide upon the shores of Holland. Heinrich became a clerk, and earned a hundred and fifty dollars a year. He spent half of this on books, and lived on the other half and his dreams.

"He married her almost at sight, and unwittingly in the ancient style of purchase. Her parents charged him for her a price commensurate with their conception of his fortune. When his new wife bore him children he reluctantly consented to baptize them, but solemnized the ceremony by laying a copy of the Iliad upon their heads and reading a hundred hexameters aloud. He named them Andromache and Agamemnon, called his servants Telamon and Pelops, and christened his Athenian home Bellerophon.

"His wife, who loved him for his eccentricities, shared his toil in the earth from sunrise to sunset. All winter long an icy gale from the north drove a blinding dust into their eyes, and swept with such violence through the cracks of their frail cottage that no lamp could be kept lit in the evening. Despite the fire in the hearth the water froze nearly every night. 'We had nothing to keep us warm except our enthusiasm for the great work of discovering Troy.'

"A year passed before they were rewarded. Then, blow by blow, a workman's pick exposed a lage copper vessel, and this, opened, revealed an astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in silver and gold. The canny Schliemann hid the find in his wife's shawl, dismissed his workmen to an unexpected siesta, hurried to his hut, locked the door, spread out the precious things on the table, linked each one fondly with some passage in Homer, adorned his wife with an ancient diadem, and sent messages to his friends in Europe that he had unearthed 'the Treasury of Priam.' No one would believe him. Some critics charged him with having placed the objects where he found them. At the same time the Sublime Porte sued him for taking gold from Turkish soil.

"He consoled himself with vigorous self-appreciation, and went on digging courageously until disease struck him down. In his last days he hesitated whether to pray to the God of Christianity or to the Zeus of classic Greece. He writes: "To Agamemnon Schliemann, best beloved of sons, greeting! I am very glad that you are going to study Plutarch, and have finished Senophon...I pray Zeus the Father and Pallas Athene that they will grant you a hundred returns of the day in health and happiness.'

"Here, too, men had been lifted from barbarism to civilization by the passage from nomadic hunting to settled agriculture, by the replacement of stone tools with copper and bronze, by the conveniences of writing and the stimulus of trade.

"Even then the town itself was old, having been founded, said ancient memory, 'by the hero Tiryns, son of Argus of the hundred eyes, in the infancy of the world.' Proteus, the story went on, gave the palace to Perseus, who ruled Tiryns with the dusky Andromeda as his queen.

"The walls that protected the citadel rose from twenty-five to fifty feet in height, and were so thick that at several places they contained spacious galleries, vaulted and arched with immense overlapping horizontal slabs. Many of the stones still in place measure six feet in length by three in breadth and depth. The smallest of them, said Pausanias, 'could hardly be moved by a pair of mules.'

"Within the walls, behind a propylon or gateway that set a style for many an acropolis, lay a broad paved court bounded with colonnades. Around this, as at Cnossus, was a medley of rooms gathered about the megaron -- a hall of state thirteen hundred square feet in area, with a pavement of painted cement, and a ceiling supported by four columns enclosing a hearth.

"Here, in contrast to merry Crete, was established a lastng principle of Greek architecture -- the separation of the women's quarters, or gynacceum, from the chambers of the men. The king's room and the queen's room were built side by side, but, so far as the remains reveal, they were eremitcally sealed against intercommunication.

"In a corner of the wall is the famous Lion Gate, where, carved upon a stone triangle over a massive lintel, two royal beasts, now worn and headless, dumbly stand guard over a grandeur that is gone.

"The lions of Mycenae have a Mesopotamian countenance. This ancient motif probably came through Assyria and Phrygia to Greece. Greek tradition called the Mycenaeans 'Pelasgi' (possibly meaning People of the Sea - pelagos) and pictured them as coming down from Thrace and Thesaly into Attica and the Peloponnesus in a past so distant that the Greeks termed them autochthonoi -- aborigines. Herodotus accepted this account, and ascribed the Olympian gods to a Pelasgic origin, but 'he could not say with any certainty what the language of the Pelasgi was.' No more can we.

"Doubtless these autochthonoi were themselves late-comers into a land that had suffered cultivation since neolithic days. There are no aborigines. In their turn they too were overrun. In the later years of Mycenaean history, toward 1600, we find many indications of a cultural-commercial, if not a military-political, conquest of the Peloponnesus by the products or emigrants of Crete.

The palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae, except for the gymnaceum, were designed and decorated in the Minoan manner. Cretan vases and styles reached into Aegina, Chalcis, and Thebes. Mycenaean ladies and goddesses adopted the charming fashions of Crete, and the art revealed in the later shaft graves is unmistakably Minoan.

"Industry was less advanced than in Crete. There are no signs on the mainland of such industrial centers as Gournia. Trade grew slowly, for the seas were troubled with pirates, including the Mycenaeans. The kings of Mycenae and Tiryns had Cretan artists engrave for them, on their vases and rings, a proud record of their achievements in piracy. To protect themselves against other pirates they built their cities inland, far enough from the sea to guard against sudden attck, close enough to take readily to their ships.

"Lying on the road from the Argolic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth, Tiryns and Mycenae were well situated both to plunder traders with feudal tolls, and to set out occasionally on buccaneering raids. Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy -- like its civilized offspring, tariff dues -- can strangle commerce and internationalize poverty. It reformed, and allowed piracy to subside into trade.

"In art the Mycenaeans followed Cretan models, and so faithfully that archeology suspects them of importing their major artists from Crete. But after Cretan art declined, painting flourished vigorously on the mainland.

"The decorative designs of borders and cornices are of the first order, and persist into classic Greece, while the surviving frescoes indicate a keen feeling for moving life. The Ladies in the Box are splended dowagers, who might adorn any opera promenade today and be in full fashion of coiffure and gowns. They are more alive than the stiffly conscious Ladies in the Chariot, who are out for an afternoon drive in the park.

"Better still is the Boar Hunt, a fresco from Tiryns. The boar and the flowers are unconvincingly conventional, the incredibly pink hounds are disfigured with stylized spots of scarlet, black or blue, and the hind quarters of the plunging boar taper away in the likeness of some high-heeled maiden falling from her palace bower. Nevertheless the chase is real, the boar is desperate, the dogs are in fast flight through the air, and man, the most sentimental and terrible of all beasts of prey, stands ready with his murderous spear.

"Now the commerce of the mainland princes reached eastward into Cyprus and Syria, southward through the Cyclades to Egypt, westward through Italy to Spain, northward through Bocotia and Thessaly to the Danube, and found itself balked only at Troy.

"(1) In the lowest strata were the remains of a neolithic village coming down to 3000 B.C. Here were walls of rough stones, mortared with mud -- clay whorls, bits of worked ivory tools of obsidian, and pieces of hand polished black pottery.

"(2) Above this lay the ruins of the Second City, which Schliemann believed to have been Homer's Troy. Its enclosing walls, like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, were of cyclopean stones. At intervals there were fortresses, and at the corners great double gates, of which two are well prserved. Some houses survive to a height of four feet, their walls built of brick and wood upon a stone foundation. The red-painted pottery, wheel-turned but crude, indicates a life span for this city from approximately 2400 to 1900. Bronze has replaced stone for tools and weapons, and jewelry abounds. The statuettes are unprepossengly primitive.

"(6) About 1600 another city rose on the historic hill. Through the passionate haste of his work, Schliemann mixed the objects of this stratum with those of the second, and dismissed the Sixth City as an unimportant 'Lydian settlement.' But Dorpfeld, continuing the excavations after Schlieman's death, and for a time with Schliemann's money, revealed a town considerably larger than the Second, ornate with substantial buildings in dressed stone, and enclosed by a thirty-foot wall of whose four gates three remain.

"In the ruins were monochrome vases of finer workmanship than before, vessels like the 'Minyan' ware of Orchomenos, and potsherds so like those found at Mycenae that Dorpfeld considered them to be importations from that city, and therefore contemporary with the Shaft Grave Dynasty (1400-1200).

"Both Crete and the Troad had a sacred Mount Ide, the "many-fountained Ida" of Homer and Tennyson. Presumably the region was subject at various times to political and ethnic influences from the Hittite hinterland. All in all, the excavations indicate a civilization partly Minoan, partly Mycenaean, partly Asiatic, partly Danubian.

"The city was admirably placed to levy tolls upon vessels wishing to pass through the Hellespont, while it was too far inland to be conveniently assailed from the sea. Perhaps it was this, and not Helen's face, that launched a thousand ships upon Ilium.

"On a likelier theory the southward current and winds in the strait persuaded merchants to unload their cargoes at Troy and ship them overland into the interior. From the charges exacted for this service, Troy may have derived its wealth and power. In any case the city's trade grew rapidly, as may be judged from the varied provenance of its remains.

"From the lower Aegean came copper, olive oil, wine, and pottery. From the Danube and Thrace came pottery, amber, horses, and swords. From distant China came so great a rarity as jade. In return Troy brought from the interior, and exported, timber, silver, gold, and wild asses.

"The city was admirably placed to levy tolls upon vessels wishing to pass through the Hellespont, while it was too far inland to be conveniently assailed from the sea. Perhaps it was this, and not Helen's face, that launched a thousand ships upon Ilium.

"On a likelier theory the southward current and winds in the strait persuaded merchants to unload their cargoes at Troy and ship them overland into the interior. From the charges exacted for this service, Troy may have derived its wealth and power. In any case the city's trade grew rapidly, as may be judged from the varied provenance of its remains.

"From the lower Aegean came copper, olive oil, wine, and pottery. From the Danube and Thrace came pottery, amber, horses, and swords. From distant China came so great a rarity as jade. In return Troy brought from the interior, and exported, timber, silver, gold, and wild asses.

"Hector, Helenus, and Troilus are more likable than the vacillating Agamemnon, the treacherous Odysseus, and the petulant Achilles. Andromache and Polyxena are as charming as Helen and Iphigenia and Hercuba is a shade better than Clytaemnestra.

"All in all, the Trojans, as pictured by their enemies, seem to us less deceitful, more devoted, better gentlemen, than the Greeks who conquered them. The conquerors themselves felt this in later days. Homer had many a kind word to say for the Trojans. Sappho and Euripides left no doubt as to where their sympathies and admiration lay.

"Probably it was they who gave Greek to the Pelasgians, instead of receiving it from them. In such place names as Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympia, we may have echoes of a Creto-Pelasgo-Mycenaean tongue. In the same manner,presumably, the Archaeans superimposed their mountain and sky gods upon the 'chthonic' or subterranean deities of the earlier population.

"The Mycenaean culture and that later phase of it, the Achaean, seem to have mingled and melted into one.

"Hittite inscriptions mention an Atarissyas as King of the Ahhijavas in the thirteenth century B.C. He is probably Atreus, King of the Achaeans. In Greek story Zeus begat Tantalus, King of Phrygia, who begat Pelops, who begat Atreas, who begat Agamemnon. Pelops, being exiled, came to Elis in the western Peloponnesus about 1283, and determined to marry Hippodameia, daughter of Oenomaus, Elis' king.

"The east pediment of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia still tells us the story of their courtship. The King made a practice to test his daughter's suitors by competing with them in a chariot race. If the suitor won he would receive Hippodameia. If he lost he was put to death. Several suitors had tried, and had lost both race and life.

"To reduce the risks, Pelops bribed the King's charioteer, Myrtilus, to remove the linch pins from the royal chariot, and promised to share the kingdom with him if their plan succeeded. In the contest that ensued, the King's chariot broke down, and he was killed. Pelops married Hippodameia and ruled Elis, but instead of sharing the kingdom with Myrtilus, he threw Myrtilus into the sea. As Myrtilus sank, he laid an ominous curse upon Pelops and all his descendants.

"From the dragon's teeth, which Cadmus sowed in the earth, sprang armed men who, like the Greeks of history, attacked one another until only five survived, these five, said Thebes, were the founders of her royal families. The government established itself on a hill citadel called the Cadmeia, where in our own time a 'palace of Cadmus' has been unearthed.

"There, after Cadmus, reigned his son Polydorus, his grandson Labdacus, and his great-grandson Laius, whose son Oedipus, as all the world knows, slew his father and married his mother. When Oedipus died, his sons quarreled over the scepter, as is the habit of princes. Eteocles drove out Polynices, who persuaded Adrastus, King of Argus, to attempt his restoration.

"Hera, who did not relish these jovial condescensions, sent two serpents to destroy the babe in the cradle, but the boy grasped one in each hand and strangled them both. Therefore he was called Heracles, as having won glory through Hera. Linus, oldest name in the history of music, tried to teach the youth how to play and sing but Heracles did not care for music, and slew Linus with the lyre.

"When he grew up -- a clumsy, bibulous, gluttonous, kindly giant -- he undertook to kill a lion that was ravaging the flocks of Amphitryon and Thespius.

"The latter, King of Thespiae, offered his home and his fifty daughters to Heracles, who rose to the occasion manfully. He slew the lion, and wore its skin as his garb. He married Megara, daughter of Creon of Thebes, and tried to settle down. But Hera sent a madness upon him, and unwittingly he killed his own children.

"He consulted the oracle at Delphi, and was instructed to go and live at Tiryns and serve Eurystheus, the Argive king, for twelve years, after which he would become an immortal god. He obeyed, and carried out for Eurystheus his famous twelve labors.

"Released by the king, Heracles returned to Thebes. He performed many other exploits. He joined the Argonauts, sacked Troy, helped the gods to win their battle against the giants, freed Prometheus, brought Alcestis back to life, and, now and then, killed his own friends by accident.

"It begins in Boeotian Orchomenos on the harsh note of human sacrifice, like Agamemnon's tragedy. Finding his land stricken with famine, King Athamas proposed to offer his son Phrixus to the gods. Phrixus learned of the plan and escaped from Orchomenos with his sister Helle, riding with her through the air on a ram with a golden fleece. But the ram was unsteady, and Helle fell off and was drowned in the strait which after her was called the Hellespont.

"Phrixus reached land and found his way to Colchis, at the farther end of the Black Sea. There he sacrificed the ram and hung up its fleece as an offering to Ares, god of war. Aietes, King of Colchis, set a sleepless dragon to watch the fleece, for an oracle had said that he should die if a stranger carried it off, and to better assure himself he decreed that all strangers coming to Colchis should be put to death.

"So Jason built the great ship Argo (the Swift), and called to the adventure the bravest spirits in Greece. Heracles came, with his beloved companion Hylas -- and Peleus, father of Achilles -- Theseus, Meleager, Orpheus, and the fleet-footed maiden Atalanta. As the vessel entered the Hellespont it was halted, seemingly by some force from Troy. Heracles left the expedition to sack the city and kill its King Laomedon, and all his sons but Priam.

"When, after many tribulations, the Argonauts reached their goal, they were warned by Medea of the death that awaited all strangers in Colchis. But Jason persisted, and Medea agreed to help him gain the Fleece if he would take her to Thessaly and keep her as his wife until he died.

"He pledged himself to her, captured the Fleece with her aid, and fled back to his ship with her and his men. Many of them were wounded, but Medea quickly healed them with roots and herbs.

"When Jason reached Iolcus he again asked for the kingdom, and Pelias again delayed. Then Medea, by the arts of a sorceress, deceived the daughters of Pelias into boiling him to death. Frightened by her magic powers, the people drove her and Jason from Iolcus, and debarred him forever from the throne.

"A Greek settlement was actually made, about this time, on the island of Lemnos, not far from the Hellespont. The Black Sea proved inhospitable despite its propitiating name, and the fortress of Troy rose again after Heracles' visitation to discourage adventures in the strait.

"The rich are great stockbreeders, raising cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses. One Erichthonius keeps three thousand brood mares with their foals. The poor eat fish and grain, occasonally vegetables. Warriors and the rich rely upon great portions of roast meat. They breakfast on meat and wine. Odysseus and his swineherd eat, between them, a small roast pig for luncheon, and a third of a five-year-old hog for dinner. They have honey instead of sugar, meat fat instead of butter. Instead of bread, they eat cakes of grain, baked large and thin on a plate of iron or a hot stone.

"The diners do not recline, as the Athenians will do, but sit on chairs -- not at a central table but along the walls, with little tables between the seats. There are no forks, spoons, or napkins, and only such knives as the guests may carry. Eating is managed with the fingers.

"The craftsmen are freemen, never slaves as in classic Greece. Peasants may in emergency be conscripted to labor for the king, but we do not hear of serfs bound to the soil. Slaves are not numerous, nor is their position degraded. They are mostly female domestics, and occupy a position in effect as high as that of household servants today, except that they are bought and sold for long terms instead of for precariously brief engagements.

"On occasion they are brutally treated. Normally they are accepted as members of the family, are cared for in illness or depression or old age, and may develop a humane relation of affection with master or mistress. Nausicaa helps her bondwomen to wash the family linen in the stream, plays ball with them, and altogether treats them as companions. If a slave woman bears a son to her master, the child is usually free.

"There are, it is true, many qualities and scenes. Even the warriors are generous and affectionate. Between parent and child there is a love as profound as it is silent. Odysseus kisses the heads and shoulders of the members of his family when, after their long separation, they recognize him, and in like manner they kiss him. Helen and Menelaus weep when they learn that this noble lad, Telemachus, is the son of the lost Odysseus who fought so valiantly for them. Agamemnon hmself is capable of tears so abundant that they remind Homer of a stream pouring over rocks.

"Friendships are firm among the heroes, though possibly a degree of sexual inversion enters into their almost neurotic attachment of Achilles to Patroclus, especially to Patroclus dead. Hospitality is lavish, for 'from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.'

"Maids bathe the foot or the body of the guest, anoint him with unquents, and may give him fresh garments. He receives food and lodging if he needs them, and perhaps a gift. 'Lo,' says 'fair-cheeked Helen,' as she places a costly robe in Telemachus' hands, 'I too give thee this gift, dear child, a remembrance of the hands of Helen, against the day of thy longed-for marriage, for thy bride to wear.'

"When a town is captured, the men are killed or sold into slavery. The women are taken as concubines if they are attractive, as slaves if they are not. Piracy is still a respected occupation. Even kings organize marauding expeditions, plunder towns and villages, and enslave their population. Says Thucydides, 'Indeed, this came to be the main source of livelihood among the early Hellenes, no disgrace being yet attached to such an occupation,' but some glory. Very much as, in our times, great nations may conquer and subjugate defenseless peoples without loss of dignity or righteousness.

"Odysseus is insulted when he is asked is he a merchant, 'mindful of the gains of his greed,' but he tells with pride how, on his return from Troy, his provisions having run low, he sacked the city of Ismarus and stored his ships with food. Or how he ascended the river Adgyptus 'to pillage the splended fields, to carry off the women and little children, and to kill the men.'

"He is a man of iron in body and mind, yet every inch human, and therefore forgiveable."

Does this remind us of anyone else we know -- either in fiction or in actuality?

"Since the Achaean knows little security at home, he respects none abroad. Every weakling is fair play. The supreme virtue, in his view, is a brave and ruthless intelligence. Virtue is literally virtus, manliness -- arete, the quality of Ares or Mars.

"The good man is not one that is gentle and forbearing, faithful and sober, industrious and honest. He is simply one who fights bravely and well. A bad man is not one that drinks too much. lies, murders, and betrays. He is one that is cowardly, stupid, or weak.

"The ceremony is familial and religious, with much eating, dancing, and loose-tongued merriment. 'Beneath a blaze of torches they led the brides from their chambers through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. The young men whirled in the dance, and high among them did sound the flute and the lyre.' So changeless are the essentials of our life.

Once married, the woman becomes mistress in her home, and is honored in proportion to her children. Love in the truest sense, as a profound mutual tenderness and solicitude, comes to the Greeks, as to the French, after marriage rather than before. It is not the spark thrown off by the contact or nearness of two bodies, but the fruit of long association in the cares and industries of the home.

"Amid these labors they bear and rear children, heal their hurts, pacify their quarrels, and teach them the manners, morals, and traditions of the tribe. There is no formal education, apparently no teaching of letters, no spelling, no grammar, no books. It is a boy's utopia. The girl is taught the arts of the home, the boy those of the chase and war. He learns to fish and swim, to till the fields, set snares, handle animals, aim the arrow and the lance, and take care of himself in all the emergencies of a half-lawless life.

"When the boy grows up to manhood, he becomes, in the absence of his father, the rsponsible head of the family. When he marries he brings his bride to his father's home, and the rhythm of the generations is renewed.

"The king or prince gathers his retainers about him for a feast, and some wandering minstrel, stringing the lyre, recounts in simple verse the exploits of ancestral heroes. This is, for the Achaeans, both poetry and history. Homer, perhaps wishing like Pheidias to engrave his own portrait upon his work, tells how Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, calls for such song in entertaining Odysseus.

"The common dwelling in Homer is apparently of sun-dried brick with a footing of stone. The floor is ordinarily of beaten earth, and is cleaned by scraping. The roof is of reeds overlaid with clay, and slopes only enough to carry off the rain. The doors are single or double, and may have bolts of keys.

"In the better dwellings the interior walls are of painted stucco, with ornamental border or frieze, and are hung with weapons, shields, and tapestries. There is no kitchen, no chimney, no windows. An opening in the roof of the central hall lets out some of the smoke that may rise from the hearth. The rest finds its way through the door, or settles in soot on the walls.

"We hear something of Agamemnon's royal residence at Mycenae, and a great deal about Odysseus' palace at Ithaca. This has a front court, paved in part with stone, surrounded by a palisade or plastered wall, and adorned with trees, stalls for horses, and a heap of steaming dung on which Odysseus' dog Argos makes his bed in the sun. A large pillared porch leads to the house. Here the slaves sleep and often the visitors.

"Within, an anteroom opens upon a central hall supported by pillars, and sometimes lighted not only by the opening in the roof, but by a narrow clerestory or open space between the architrave and the eaves.

"He is above all a military commander, solicitous for his army, without which he might be found in the wrong. He sees to it that it is well equipped, well fed, well trained, that it has poisoned arrows, lances, helmets, greaves, spears, breastplates, shields, and chariots. So long as the army defends him, he is the government -- legislature, executive, judiciary.

"He is the high priest of the state religion, and sacrifices for the people. His decrees are the laws, and his decisions are final. There is as yet no word for law. Below him the Council may sit occasionally to judge grave disputes. Then, as if to set a precedent for all courts, it asks for precedents, and decides accordingly.

"Precedent dominates law because precedent is custom, and custom is the jealous older brother of law. Trials of any kind, however, are rare in Homeric society. There are hardly any public agencies of justice. EAch family must defend and revenge itself.

"Stesichorus in his penitent years, and after him Herodotus and Euripides, refused to admit that Helen had gone to Troy. She had only gone to Egypt, under constraint, and had merely waited there a dozen years for Menelaus to come and find her. Besides, asked Herodotus, who could believe that the Trojans would fight ten years for one woman?

"We accept what the poets and dramatists of Greece have told us as rather literature than history -- but all the more for that reason a part of the story of civilization. We know that war is ugly, and that the Iliad is beautiful. Art may make even terror beautiful -- and so purify it -- by giving it significance and form.

"On the way up the coast the Greeks had stopped here and there to replenish their supplies of food and concubines. Agamemnon had taken the fair Chryseis, Achilles the fair Briseis. A sooothsayer now declares that Apollo is withholding success from the Greeks because Agamemnon has violated the daughter of Apollo's priest, Chryses. The King restores Chryseis to her father, but, to console himself and point a tale, he compels Briseis to leave Achilles and takes Chryseis' place in the royal tent.

"Helen bids him return to the fight, but he counterproposes that they 'give the hour to dalliance.' The lady, flattered by desire, yields.

"Agamemnon leads his army valiantly, is wounded, and retires. Odyssus, surrounded, fights like a lion. Ajax and Menelaus cleave a path to him, and save him for a bitter life. When the Trojans advance to the walls that the Greeks hve built about their camp, Hera is so disturbed that she resolves to rescue the Greeks. Oiled, perfumed, ravishingly gowned, and bound with Aphrodite's aphrodisiac girdle, she seduces Zeus to a divine slumber while Poseidon helps the Greeks to drive the Trojans back.

"His goddess-mother Thetis persuades the divine smithy, Hephaestus, to forge for him new arms and a mighty shield. Achilles is reconcilzed with Agamemnon, engages Aeneas, and is about to kill him when Poseidon rescues him for Virgil's purposes. Achilles slaughters a host of Trojans, and sends them to Hades with long genealogical speeches.

"The gods take up the fight. Athena lays Ares low with a stone, and when Aphrodite, going for a soldier, tries to save him, Athena knocks her down with a blow upon her fair breast. Hera cuffs the ears of Artemis. Poseidon and Apollo content themselves with words.

"The victors returned in weary sadness to their longed-for homes. Many of them were ship-wrecked, and some of these, stranded on alien shores, founded Greek colonies in Asia, the Aegean, and Italy. Menelaus, who had vowed that he would kill Helen, fell in love with her anew when the 'goddess among women' came to him in the calm majesty of her loveliness. Gladly he took her back to be his queen again in Sparta. When Agamemnon reached Mycenae he 'clasped his hand and kissed it, and many were the hot tears that streamed from his eyes.' But during his long absence Clytaemnestra had taken his cousin Aegisthus for husband and king. When Agamemnon entered the palace they slew him.

"Telemachus bids the suitors disperse, but they laugh at his youth. Secretly he embarks upon the sea in search of his father, while Penelope, mourning now for both husband and son, holds off the suitors by promising to wed one of them when she has completed her web -- of which she unweaves at night as much as she has woven by day.

"The wanderers took again to the sea and came to the land of the Laetrygonians. But these, too, were cannibals, and only Odysseus's ship escaped them. He and his mates reached next the isle of Aenea, where the lovely and treacherous goddess Circe lured most of them into her cave with song, drugged them, and turned them into swine. Odysseus was about to slay her when he changed his mind and accepted her love. He and his comrades, now restored to human form, remained with Circe a full year.

"Setting sail again, they came to a land perpetually dark, which proved to be the entrance to Hades. There Odysseus talked with the shades of Agamemnon, Achilles, and his mother.

"When Telemachus is led by the goddess to the same hut Odysseus makes himself known to his son, and both 'wail aloud vehemently.' He unfolds to Telemachus a plan for slaying all the suitors. In the guise of a beggar he enters his palace, sees the wooers feasting at his expense, and rages inwardly when he hears that they lie with his maidservants at night even while courting Penelope by day. He is insulted and injured by the suitors, but he defends himself with vigor and patience.

"By this time the wooers have discovered the trick of Penelope's web, and have forced her to finish it. She agrees to marry which ever of them can string Odysseus' great bow -- which hangs on the wall -- and shoot an arrow through the openings of twelve axes ranged in line. They all try, and all fail. Odysseus asks for a chance, and succeeds.

"Then with a wrath that frightenens everyone, he casts off his disguise, turns his arrows upon the suitors, and, with the help of Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Athena, slays them all. He finds it hard to convince Penelope that he is Odysseus. It is difficult to surrender twenty suitors for one husband.

From his accession the house of Pelops began to decline. Perhaps the decline had begun with Agamemnon, and that vacillating chieftain had used war as a means of uniting a realm that was already falling to pieces. But his victory completed his ruin. Few of his chieftains ever returned, and the kingdoms of many others had lost all loyalty to them.

"Cretan institutions, the Greeks believed, passed down into Sparta and the Achaean assembly remained the essential structure of even democratic Greece. The Mycenaean megaron probably provided the ground plan of the Doric temple, to which the Dorian spirit would add freedom, symmetry, and strength.

"The artistic tradition, slowly reviving, lifted Corinth, Sicyon, and Argos to an early Renaissance, and made even dour Sparta, for a while, smile with art and song. It nourished lyric poetry through all this historyless Dark Age. It followed Pelasgian, Achaean, Ionian, Minyan exiles in their flight-migration to the Aegean and Asia, and helped the colonial cities to leap ahead of their mother states in literature and art. When the exiles came to the islands and Ionia they found the remains of Aegean civilization ready to their hands.