THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 
THE cup-bearer: knossos 
"The colors were almost as brilliant as when laid down 
over three thousand years before. For the first time the 
true portraiture of a man of this mysterious Mycenaean 
race rises before us. The limbs are finely moulded, though 
the waist is tightly drawn in by a silver-mounted girdle, 
giving great relief to the hips. The profile of the face is 
pure and almost classically Greek. _ . . . _ There was 
something very impressive in the vision of brilliant youth 
and of male beauty, recalled after so long an interval to 
our upper air from what had been till j'esterday, a forgot- 
ten world. Our untutored Cretan workmen regarded the 
discovery of such a painting in the bosom of the earth as 
nothing less than miraculous, and saw in it the icon of a 
saint." — A. J. Evans (see pages 13 and 14). 
course, their pictures of ad- 
vanced civilization were more 
or less imaginative projections 
upon the past of the culture 
of the writer's own period or 
periods. Beyond that lay the 
great waste land of legend, in 
which gods and godlike heroes 
moved and enacted their ro- 
mances among "Gorgons and 
Hydras and Chimeras dire." 
What proportion of fact, if 
any, lay in the stories of Minos, 
the great law-giver, and his 
war fleet, and his Labyrinth, 
with its monstrous occupant ; 
of Theseus and Ariadne and 
the Minotaur; of Daedalus, the 
first aeronaut, and his wonder- 
ful works of art and science; 
or of any other of the thou- 
sand and one beautiful or tragic 
romances of ancient Hellas, to 
attempt to determine this lay 
utterly beyond the sphere of 
the serious historian. 
"To analyze the fables," says 
Grote, "and to elicit from them 
any trustworthy particular facts 
appears to me a fruitless at- 
tempt." 
Grote's frankly skeptical atti- 
tude represents fairly well the 
general opinion of the middle 
of last century. The myths 
were beautiful, but their value 
was not in any sense historical ; 
it arose from the light which 
they cast upon the workings of 
the active Greek mind, and the 
revelation which they gave of 
the innate poetic faculty which 
created myths so far excelling 
those of any other nation. 
Opinions like that so dog- 
matically expressed by our 
great historian are no longer 
held by any one who has fol- 
lowed the current of modern 
investigations, and remain only 
as monuments of the danger of 
dogmatizing on matters con- 
cerning which all preconceived 
ideas may be upset by the re- 
sult of a single season's spade- 
