Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/115

94 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. was accomplished by northern tribes, which in some sort had lagged behind the Eastern Greeks, before whom lay open the sources of Asiatic culture. We see this very plainly if we examine the successive migrations, invasions, and encounters which in the end built up — towards the eleventh century b.c. — ^a Greece set upon a solid basis, historical Greece. The movement came from Epirus, but was continued beyond its boundaries. Those of its inhabitants who never left it, the Chaones, Thesprotians, and Molossi, are of little or no account in history, where they made but a tardy and brief apparition with Pyrrhus. Epirus gave the impetus by sending over Pindus the surplus of its population. The easiest way of access is through the pass of Gomphi, which is open nearly the whole year round. Through it passed the Hellenes, who brought the worship of Dodonian Zeus to the Achaeans, with whom they amalgamated ; this was also the route taken by the warlike Thessalians, when leaving Thesprotis they descended into the valley of Peneiis, and gave the name which that country bears to this day. The Thessalians were savages of enormous strength and ungovernable passions. They reduced to a state of villein- age those of the inhabitants who preferred to submit to force rather than wander forth from their beautiful home. These Penests, or **poor people," as the men bound to the soil by servile tenure were called, tilled the land for their masters, who constituted a kind of warrior-nobility, and even when other habits prevailed in the rest of Greece, they continued to lead, in their castles scattered up and down the country, an existence which finds a parallel in those Anactse or lords described by Homer. The sort of existence it must have been, I can well picture to myself from the reminiscences which the hospitality of Turkish beys in the vicinity of Larissa and Pharsalia — before the province became incorporated with the Hellenic kingdom — has left on the memory. They loved feuds, booty, and adventure, good cheer and magnificent apparel ; above all, they prided themselves on the number and beauty of their horses, that fed in the rich pastures of the lowlands and fields thick with corn. Like the Spahis, who formerly were levied in this province and supplied the most gallant and best-mounted troops to the Turkish army, the Thessalians were accounted the best horsemen in Greece. The difference is one of race, for the Thessalians could claim