legendary war across the sea, when historical Æolians found themselves fighting in the Troad against Hissarlik, and liked to identify their own enemies with those of their ancestors; the Migrations, which drew down the Northern heroes to the Peloponnese, when a stream of Greeks from the Inachus valley met in Asia a stream from Thessaly. The latter contributed their heroic saga; the former brought the memory of the gigantic castles and material splendour of Tiryns and Mycenæ.
These Migrations present a phenomenon common enough in history, yet one which in romantic horror baffles a modern imagination: the vague noise of fighting in the North; the silly human amusement at the troubles of one's old enemies over the border; the rude awakening; the flight of man, woman, and child; the hasty shipbuilding; the flinging of life and fortune on unknown waters. The boats of that day were at the mercy of any weather. The ordinary villagers can have had little seamanship. They were lost on the waves in thousands. They descended on strange coasts and died by famine or massacre. At the best, a friendly city would take in the wives and children, while the men set off grimly to seek, through unknown and monster-peopled seas, some spot of clear land to rest their feet upon. Aristarchus put Homer at the 'Ionic Migration.' This must be so far true that the Migrations—both Æolic and Ionic—stirred depths of inward experience which found outlet by turning a set of ballads into the great epos, by creating 'Homer.' It was from this adventurous exile that Ionia rose; and the bloom of Ionia must have been the bloom of the epos.
