III. MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

The remains of this culture are too fragmentary to give us a picture as distinct as those that take form in the ruins of Crete or the poetry of Homer. Life on the mainland was a little nearer to the hunting stage than in Crete. The bones of deer, wild boars, goats, sheep, hares, oxen, and pigs among the Mycenaean leavings—not to speak of fishbones and marine shells—indicate an appetite already Homeric, and unfriendly to the Cretan waist. Here and there the relics reveal the strange contemporaneity of “ancient” and “modern” modes—obsidian arrowheads lying beside a hollow bronze drill apparently used in boring dowel holes into stones.²⁴

Industry was less advanced than in Crete; there are no signs on the mainland of such industrial centers as Gournia. Trade grew slowly, for the seas were troubled with pirates, including the Mycenaeans; the kings of Mycenae and Tiryns had Cretan artists engrave for them, on their vases and rings, a proud record of their achievements in piracy.²⁵ To protect themselves against other pirates they built their cities inland, far enough from the sea to guard against sudden attack, close enough to take readily to their ships. Lying on the road from the Argolic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth, Tiryns and Mycenae were well situated both to plunder traders with feudal tolls, and to set out occasionally on buccaneering raids. Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy—like its civilized offspring, tariff dues—can strangle commerce and internationalize poverty; it reformed, and allowed piracy to subside into trade. By 1400 its mercantile fleet was strong enough to defy the sea power of Crete; it refused to ship its Africa-bound goods across the island, but sent them directly to Egypt; possibly this was the cause, or result, of a war that ended in the destruction of the Cretan citadels.

The wealth that grew from this trade was not accompanied by any commensurate culture visible in the remains. Greek tradition credited the Pelasgians with having learned the alphabet from Phoenician traders. At Tiryns and Thebes some jars have been found bearing unintelligible characters, but no clay tablets, or inscriptions, or documents have been discovered; probably when Mycenae decided to be literate it used perishable writing materials, as the Cretans did in their final period; and nothing has been preserved. In art the Mycenaeans followed Cretan models, and so faithfully that archeology suspects them of importing their major artists from Crete. But after Cretan art declined, painting flourished vigorously on the mainland. The decorative designs of borders and cornices are of the first order, and persist into classic Greece, while the surviving frescoes indicate a keen feeling for moving life. The Ladies in the Box are splendid dowagers, who might adorn any opera promenade today and be in full fashion of coiffure and gowns; they are more alive than the stiffly conscious Ladies in the Chariot, who are out for an afternoon drive in the park. Better still is the Boar Hunt, a fresco from Tiryns: the boar and the flowers are unconvincingly conventional, the incredibly pink hounds are disfigured with stylized spots of scarlet, black, or blue, and the hind quarters of the plunging boar taper away into the likeness of some high-heeled maiden falling from her palace bower; nevertheless the chase is real, the boar is desperate, the dogs are in fast flight through the air, and man, the most sentimental and terrible of all beasts of prey, stands ready with his murderous spear.²⁶ One may suspect from such samples the active and physical life of the Mycenaeans, the proud beauty of their women, the vivid adornment of their palaces.

The highest art of Mycenae was in metals. Here the mainland equaled Crete, and dared to use its own forms and decoration. If Schliemann did not quite find the bones of Agamemnon, he found their weight in silver and gold: jewelry of many kinds, in spendthrift quantities; stud buttons worthy of any king; intaglios alive with scenes of hunting, war, or piracy; and a cow’s head in shining silver, with horns and frontal rosette of gold—at any moment one expects from it the plaintive mooing to which Schliemann, never at a loss for explanations, traced the name Mycenae (Mükenai).²⁷ The finest of these metal relics from Tiryns and Mycenae are two bronze daggers inlaid with electron and burnished gold, and elegantly engraved with wildcats chasing ducks, and lions pursuing leopards or fighting men.²⁹ Most peculiar of all the remains are the golden masks, apparently laid over the faces of dead royalty. One mask³⁰ looks for all the world like the face of a cat; however, the gallant Schliemann ascribed it not to Clytaemnestra but to Agamemnon.

The unquestioned masterpieces of Mycenaean art were found neither at Tiryns nor at Mycenae but in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta, where a minor prince once emulated the magnificence of the northern kings. Here, amid another treasure of jewelry, were two thin cups of beaten gold, simply formed and yet worked with the loving patience of all great art. The craftsmanship is so like the best Minoan that most students are inclined to attribute these cups to some Cretan Cellini; but it would be a pity to deprive the Mycenaean culture of its most perfect memorials. The subject—the snaring and taming of a bull—seems characteristically Cretan; and yet the frequency with which such scenes are engraved upon Mycenaean rings and seals or painted upon the palace walls shows that the bull sport was as popular on the mainland as on the island. On one of the cups the bull is caught in a net of heavy rope; his mouth and nostrils gape with breathless anger and fatigue as he struggles to get free and imprisons himself the more; while on the other side a second bull gallops off in terror, and a third charges at a cowboy who catches it bravely by the horns. On the companion cup the captured bull is being led away; as we turn the vessel around we see him already reconciled to the restraints of civilization, and engaged, as Evans puts it, in “amorous conversation” with a cow.³¹ Many centuries were to pass before such skillful work would appear again in Greece.

The Mycenaean himself, as well as most of his art, is found in the tombs; for he folded and buried his dead in uncomfortable jars, and seldom cremated them as the Heroic Age would do. Apparently he believed in a future life, for many objects of use and value were placed in the graves. For the rest Mycenaean religion, so far as it reveals itself to us, gives every evidence of Cretan origin or kinship. Here as in Crete are the double ax, the sacred pillar, the holy dove, and the cult of a mother goddess associated with a young male deity, presumably her son; and here again are attendant divinities in the form of snakes. Through all the transformations of religion known to us in Greece the mother goddess has remained. After the Cretan Rhea came Demeter, the Mater Dolorosaof the Greeks; after Demeter the Virgin Mother of God. Today, standing on the ruins of Mycenae, one sees, in the little village below, a modest Christian church. Grandeur is gone; simplicity and consolation remain. Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

After the fall of Cnossus Mycenae prospered as never before; the rising wealth of the “Shaft Grave Dynasty” raised great palaces upon the hills of Mycenae and Tiryns. Mycenaean art took on a character of its own, and captured the markets of the Aegean. Now the commerce of the mainland princes reached eastward into Cyprus and Syria, southward through the Cyclades to Egypt, westward through Italy to Spain, northward through Boeotia and Thessaly to the Danube; and found itself balked only at Troy. Like Rome absorbing and disseminating the civilization of Hellas, so Mycenae, won by the culture of dying Crete, spread the Mycenaean phase of that culture throughout the Mediterranean world.