Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/239

ii6 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. instances, we should in vain look for it in the Mahabharatta^ nor should we fare much better in regard to the Shahnameh ; for though a faint echo of the warlike deeds of the Achemaenidae is traceable in it, the facts which it relates are so contorted and transformed as to be almost unrecognizable. The presentation of Theodoric and Attila in the Niebelungen is known to all. Without going from home, we find in the French Epic a striking example of this power and independence of the imagination. An insignificant affray relating to the destruction of a French detachment surprised in the ravine of Roncevaux, which Egin- hard mentions in a couple of lines, has assumed in the poem the proportions of a heroic and gigantic strife, in which all the forces of Islam are gathered together from every quarter of the globe in order that they may fight against the Christian hosts ; in it Charlemagne is depicted sls^ying with his own hand the Sultan of Babylon, to avenge the death of Roland and his gallant companions. The Epic was long held as a primitive and poetic form of history, which so far penetrated and merged into the latter as to be hardly separable therefrom. By a reaction natural in such matters, as soon as higher criticism became aware of its error, it sinned in the opposite direction. There were found scholars who maintained that the Iliad was to be viewed as a late form of the great heavenly battle sung by the early poets of the Aryan race, which is being perpetually fought on high between Indra and Vrita, between the sun and the cloud, a battle which the i^olian Greeks localized in the Trojan plain, just as the Hindus had placed theirs on certain sites of their peninsula. Like Rama, Achylles was to be considered a solar god. That there is here much fantastic exaggeration is manifest. We are not competent to discuss in detail the elements that go to the making of the Hindu Epic, and the type of the heroes that figure in it; but it is quite clear that if certain echoes of these naturalistic myths have found their way into the Iliad, the spirit that breathes through the latter is profoundly opposed to that wherein the poems of ancient India find their noblest and most characteristic expression. The Epos is not so much concerned with ethereal phenomena, as with events which are taking place on the earth ; to use a modern phrase, its main characteristics are distinctly feudal and warlike. The Greeks, with a disposition