were glad to return to their allegiance. Augustus dismantled their native capital Bibracte on Mont Beuvray, and substituted a new town with a half-Roman, half-Gaulish name, Augustodunum (mod. Autun). During the reign of Tiberias (A.D. 21), they revolted under Julius Sacrovir, and seized Augustodunum, but were soon put down by Gaius Silius (Tacitus Ann. iii. 43-46). The Aedui were the first of the Gauls to receive from the emperor Claudius the distinction of jus honorum. The oration of Eumenius (q.v.), in which he pleaded for the restoration of the schools of his native place Augustodunum, shows that the district was neglected. The chief magistrate of the Aedui in Caesar’s time was called Vergobretus (according to Mommsen, “judgment-worker”), who was elected annually, possessed powers of life and death, but was forbidden to go beyond the frontier. Certain clientes, or small communities, were also dependent upon the Aedui.
See A. E. Desjardins, Géographie de la Gaule, ii. (1876–1893); T. R. Holmes, Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul (1899).
AEGADIAN ISLANDS (Ital. Isole Egati; anc. Aegates Insulae), a group of small mountainous islands off the western coast of Sicily, chiefly remarkable as the scene of the defeat of the Carthaginian fleet by C. Lutatius Catulus in 241 B.C., which ended the First Punic War. Favignana (Aegusa), the largest, pop. (1901) 6414, lies 10 m. S.W. of Trapani; Levanzo (Phorbantia) 8 m. W.; while Maritimo, the ancient ἱερὰ νῆσος, 15 m. W. of Trapani, is now reckoned as a part of the group. They belonged to the Pallavicini family of Genoa until 1874, when they were bought by Signor Florio of Palermo.
AEGEAN CIVILIZATION, the general term for the prehistoric civilization, previously called “Mycenaean” because its existence was first brought to popular notice by Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae in 1876. Subsequent discoveries, however, have made it clear that Mycenae was not its chief centre in its earlier stages, or, perhaps, at any period; and, accordingly, it is more usual now to adopt a wider geographical title.
I. History of Discovery and Distribution of Remains.—Mycenae and Tiryns are the two principal sites on which evidence of a prehistoric civilization was remarked long ago by the classical Greeks. The curtain-wall and towers of the Mycenaean citadel, its gate with heraldic lions, and the great “Treasury of Atreus” had borne silent witness for ages before Schliemann’s time; but they were supposed only to speak to the Homeric, or at farthest a rude Heroic beginning of purely Hellenic, civilization. It was not till Schliemann exposed the contents of the graves which lay just inside the gate (see Mycenae), that scholars recognized the advanced stage of art to which prehistoric dwellers in the Mycenaean citadel had attained. There had been, however, a good deal of other evidence available before 1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have discounted the sensation that the discovery of the citadel graves eventually made. Although it was recognized that certain tributaries, represented e.g. in the XVIIIth Dynasty tomb of Rekhmara at Egyptian Thebes as bearing vases of peculiar forms, were of some Mediterranean race, neither their precise habitat nor the degree of their civilization could be determined while so few actual prehistoric remains were known in the Mediterranean lands. Nor did the Aegean objects which were lying obscurely in museums in 1870, or thereabouts, provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the Argolid, the Troad and Crete, to cause these to be taken seriously. Both at Sèvres and Neuchâtel Aegean vases have been exhibited since about 1840, the provenience being in the one case Phylakope in Melos, in the other Cephalonia. Ludwig Ross, by his explorations in the Greek islands from 1835 onwards, called attention to certain early intaglios, since known as Inselsteine; but it was not till 1878 that C. T. Newton demonstrated these to be no strayed Phoenician products. In 1866 primitive structures were discovered in the island of Therasia by quarrymen extracting pozzolana for the Suez Canal works; and when this discovery was followed up in 1870, on the neighbouring Santorin (Thera), by representatives of the French School at Athens, much pottery of a class now known immediately to precede the typical late Aegean ware, and many stone and metal objects, were found and dated by the geologist Fouqué, somewhat arbitrarily, to 2000 B.C., by consideration of the superincumbent eruptive stratum. Meanwhile, in 1868, tombs at Ialysus in Rhodes had yielded to M. A. Biliotti many fine painted vases of styles which were called later the third and fourth “Mycenaean”; but these, bought by John Ruskin, and presented to the British Museum, excited less attention than they deserved, being supposed to be of some local Asiatic fabric of uncertain date. Nor was a connexion immediately detected between them and the objects found four years later in a tomb at Menidi in Attica and a rock-cut “bee-hive” grave near the Argive Heraeum.
Even Schliemann’s first excavations at Hissarlik in the Troad (q.v.) did not excite surprise. But the “Burnt City” of his second stratum, revealed in 1873, with its fortifications and vases, and a hoard of gold, silver and bronze objects, which the discoverer connected with it, began to arouse a curiosity which was destined presently to spread far outside the narrow circle of scholars. As soon as Schliemann came on the Mycenae graves three years later, light poured from all sides on the prehistoric period of Greece. It was recognized that the character of both the fabric and the decoration of the Mycenaean objects was not that of any well-known art. A wide range in space was proved by the identification of the Inselsteine and the Ialysus vases with the new style, and a wide range in time by collation of the earlier Theraean and Hissarlik discoveries. A relation between objects of art described by Homer and the Mycenaean treasure was generally allowed, and a correct opinion prevailed that, while certainly posterior, the civilization of the Iliad was reminiscent of the Mycenaean. Schliemann got to work again at Hissarlik in 1878, and greatly increased our knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognize the Aegean remains in his “Lydian” city of the sixth stratum, which were not to be fully revealed till Dr W. Dörpfeld resumed the work at Hissarlik in 1892 after the first explorer’s death (see Troad). But by laying bare in 1884 the upper stratum of remains on the rock of Tiryns (q.v.), Schliemann made a contribution to our knowledge of prehistoric domestic life which was amplified two years later by Chr. Tsountas’s discovery of the Mycenae palace. Schliemann’s work at Tiryns was not resumed till 1905, when it was proved, as had long been suspected, that an earlier palace underlies the one he had exposed. From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenaean sepulchres outside the Argolid, from which, and from the continuation of Tsountas’s exploration of the buildings and lesser graves at Mycenae, a large treasure, independent of Schliemann’s princely gift, has been gathered into the National Museum at Athens. In that year were excavated dome-tombs, most already rifled but retaining some of their furniture, at Arkina and Eleusis in Attica, at Dimini near Volo in Thessaly, at Kampos on the west of Mount Taygetus, and at Maskarata in Cephalonia. The richest grave of all was explored at Vaphio in Laconia in 1889, and yielded, besides many gems and miscellaneous goldsmiths’ work, two golden goblets chased with scenes of bull-hunting, and certain broken vases painted in a large bold style which remained an enigma till the excavation of Cnossus. In 1890 and 1893 Staës cleared out certain less rich dome-tombs at Thoricus in Attica; and other graves, either rock-cut “bee-hives” or chambers, were found at Spata and Aphidna in Attica, in Aegina and Salamis, at the Heraeum (see Argos) and Nauplia in the Argolid, near Thebes and Delphi, and not far from the Thessalian Larissa. During the excavations on the Acropolis at Athens, terminated in 1888, many potsherds of the Mycenaean style were found; but Olympia had yielded either none, or such as had not been recognized before being thrown away, and the temple site at Delphi produced nothing distinctively Aegean. The American explorations of the Argive Heraeum, concluded in 1895, also failed to prove that site to have been important in the prehistoric time, though, as was to be expected from its neighbourhood to Mycenae itself, there were traces of occupation in the later Aegean periods. Prehistoric research had now begun to extend beyond the Greek mainland. Certain central Aegean
