Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/104

The People. 83 origin of Pelops is not open to doubt. Underlying much that is strange and fantastical in the tales relating to this family, one guesses a prince driven from the region of Sipylus by the collapse of a kingdom which had long been prosperous, but whose wealth had excited the cupidity of its neighbours, and finally succumbed under their repeated attacks. In his flight, Pelops takes with him part of the wealth which his ancestors had heaped in their mountain fastnesses ; partly owing to these, partly to his gallant companions, on landing on Grecian soil he is hailed as a predestined hero who will lead all his followers to victory. With his forces, the Achaeans invade Peloponnesus and take Mycenae, despite its stout ramparts. Under its new lords, the town is further enlarged and strengthened. The precious metals which Pelops found accumulated here or had brought with him, or those that were added by his successors, constituted a mass of fabulous wealth in the eyes of the natives. Long after these events, Mycenae was still exalted in the strains of the poets as '*the golden city" ; on no other spot of Greece have excavations yielded so great a quantity of gold as that which the late Dr. Schliemann brought out of its acropolis. When we sought to note the direction of such currents as carried to the shores of Hellas Oriental notions and industries, defining at the same time these influences and their mode of action, it was in truth equivalent to sketching the history of primitive Greece, so far as so vast an enterprise is possible. What we know best of prehistoric Greece, are her borrowings from Asiatics who were already civilized when Hellas was still in the trammels of barbarism, who wrote on wood, stone, metal, and clay, when she did not even suspect that such means existed for preserving the memory of the past What eludes our grasp are the repeated efforts made by these tribes to turn to the best advantage the new materials, whether of a spiritual or practical nature, which their large dealings with Orientals brought to them, along with the waking up of their slumbering impulses, and the several stages through which they passed between primitive rudeness and the point when, although as yet unequal to their teachers, the desire to imitate them began to stir them to action. Unfortunately, the myths dealing with the infancy of Hellas contain no data to lighten the mystery during which this slow and obscure travail went on ; nor will the Homeric poem be