628 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913, 



naean," it is, artistically speaking, a period of barbarism and degra- 

 dation — a period when the great cities of whose rulers the poet sang 

 had for some two centuries been heaps of ruins. The old art had 

 passed away. The new was yet unborn. 



" Homer " lies too high up in time for it to be admissible to seek 

 for illustration among the works of renascent art in Greece, or the 

 more or less contemporary importations, such as Cypro-Phoenician 

 bowls of the seventh or sixth centuries B. C., once so largely drawn 

 on for comparison. On the other hand, the masterpieces of Minoan 

 and Mycenaean craftsmen were already things of the past in the days 

 in which the Iliad and Odyssey took their organic form. Even the 

 contents of the latest Mycenaean graves have nothing to do with a 

 culture in which iron was already in use for cutting purposes and 

 cremation practiced. 



How is it, then, that Homer, though professedly commemorating 

 the deeds of Achaean heroes, is able to picture them among surround- 

 ings which, in view of the absolute continuity of Minoan and Mj'^ce- 

 naean history, we may now definitely set down as non-Hellenic? 

 How explain the modes of combat borrowed from an earlier age and 

 associated with huge body shields that had long been obsolete. 

 "WTience this familiarity with the court of Mycenae and the domestic 

 arrangements of palaces that were no more? 



I venture to believe that there is only one solution of these grave 

 difficulties, and that this is to be found in the bilingual conditions 

 which in the Peloponnese, at least, rciaj have existed for a very con- 

 siderable period. The Arcadian-speaking Greek population of that 

 area, which apparently, at least as early as the eleventh century, be- 

 fore our era sent forth its colonists to Cyprus, had, as pointed out, 

 been already j:)enetrated with Minoan ideas to an extent which in- 

 volves a long previous juxtaposition with the element that formerly 

 dominated the country. They had assimilated a form of Minoan 

 worship, and the hymns and invocations to the Lady of the Dove can 

 hardly have been other than adaptations of those in use in the 

 Mycenaean ritual — in the same way as the Greek hymn of the 

 Dictaean Temple must be taken to reflect an original handed down 

 by Eteocretan choirs. 



We may well ask whether a far earlier heroic cycle of Minoan 

 origin might not to a certain extent have affected the lays of the 

 primitive Greek population. "When, in a bilingual medium, the pres- 

 sure of Greek conquest turned the scales finally on the Hellenic side, 

 may not something of the epic traditions of the Mycenaean society 

 have been taken over ? Englishmen, at least, who realize how largely 

 Celtic and Romance elements bulk in their national poetry should 

 be the last to deny such a possibility. Have we not. indeed, the 

 i)]-(>of of it in manv of the themes of the Homeric lavs, as already 



