VALUE OF THE STUDY OF ART. 205 



Not to go back to the Quaternary period or to the cave dwellers, 

 there are many of these mental ideas or conditions which would 

 remain hidden from the inquiry of the historian if he were limited 

 to written testimony. One example may suffice: the discoveries 

 of Schliemann, at Troy, Mycense, and Tiryns have rescued from ob- 

 livion a primitive Greece of which the Greeks themselves had pre- 

 served but a faint remembrance. Thus has been given to the 

 Homeric epoch a background of many centuries. Now this Greece, 

 contemporary of the Thutmoses and the Ramses of Egypt, anterior 

 to not only Grecian history but even to Grecian tradition, could 

 not write, but could work and use stone; could hew wood and fash- 

 ion it for carpentry; could mold and bake clay; could melt and 

 hammer lead, bronze, gold, and silver; and could carve ivory. 

 Every bit of material fashioned by the instruments of this period 

 has the value of an authentic document. How society was consti- 

 tuted, the life that was led, what notions were held of the hereafter 

 — all these things are revealed by the marks the hands of man have 

 left upon everything he touched. The colossal walls of Tiryns, 

 the majestic funeral cupolas of Mycenae, the divisions of the royal 

 abodes of which the outlines can still be traced on the surface of 

 the soil, and the arrangement of the sepulchres hidden beneath it 

 all testify. So, too, the weapons, the instruments, the vases, and 

 the jewels which have been found scattered about amid the ruins 

 of the buildings or buried in the tombs. Thanks to all these monu- 

 ments, we are beginning to recognize in a shadow which year by 

 year glows with a brighter light the features which characterized 

 the world of Achaean heroes of which the image, transformed by 

 oral tradition and singularly enlarged by power of invention, is re- 

 flected in the Iliad and the Odyssey. 



Erom these obscure and remote ages let us transport ourselves 

 to the Greece of Pisistratus, of Pericles, and of Alexander. In- 

 structors of youth tell of the losses which have been made, and of 

 how small a part of the literary work of Greek genius has escaped 

 the great shipwreck of antiquity. Should they not also indicate 

 where precious supplements of information may be found to fill the 

 voids of written tradition? There are many variations of impor- 

 tant myths, hardly mentioned in passing by obscure epitomizers of 

 the lower centuries, which have furnished to ceramic artists subjects 

 for pictures which make us acquainted with personages and with 

 episodes of which writers have hardly left a trace. But even if we 

 had the works of the cyclic poets, all of which have perished; if 

 we had the lyric poets, of whom only Pindar has survived, and 

 Bacchylides whose fragments are to-day the joy of Hellenists; if 

 we had the whole of tragedy, of- which we have but the remnants; 



