4. Culture

The most troublesome aspect of the Cretan is his language. When, after the Dorian invasion, he uses the Greek alphabet, it is for a speech completely alien to what we know as Greek, and more akin in sound to the Egyptian, Cypriote, Hittite, and Anatolian dialects of the Near East. In the earliest age he confines himself to hieroglyphics; about 1800 B.C. he begins to shorten these into a linear script of some ninety syllabic signs; two centuries later he contrives another script, whose characters often resemble those of the Phoenician alphabet; perhaps it is from him, as well as from the Egyptians and the Semites, that the Phoenicians gather together those letters they will scatter throughout the Mediterranean to become the unassuming, omnipresent instrument of Western civilization. Even the common Cretan composes, and like some privy councilor, leaves on the walls of Hagia Triada the passing inspirations of his muse. At Phaestus we find a kind of prehistoric printing: the hieroglyphs of a great disk unearthed there from Middle Minoan III strata are impressed upon the clay by stamps, one for each pictograph; but here, to add to our befuddlement, the characters are apparently not Cretan but foreign; perhaps the disk is an importation from the East.³²

The clay tablets upon which the Cretan writes may some day reveal to us his accomplishments in science. He has some astronomy, for he is famed as a navigator, and tradition hands down to Dorian Crete the ancient Minoan calendar. The Egyptians acknowledge their indebtedness to him for certain medical prescriptions, and the Greeks borrow from him, as the words suggest, such aromatic and medicinal herbs as mint (mintha), wormwood (apsinthon), and an ideal drug (daukos) reputed to cure obesity without disturbing gluttony.³³ But we must not mistake our guessing for history.

Though the Cretan’s literature is a sealed book to us, we may at least contemplate the ruins of his theaters. At Phaestus, about 2000, he builds ten tiers of stone seats, running some eighty feet along a wall overlooking a flagged court; at Cnossus he raises, again in stone, eighteen tiers thirty-three feet long, and, at right angles to them, six tiers from eighteen to fifty feet in length. These court theaters, seating four or five hundred persons, are the most ancient playhouses known to us—older by fifteen hundred years than the Theater of Dionysus. We do not know what took place on those stages; frescoes picture audiences viewing a spectacle, but we cannot tell what it is that they see. Very likely it is some combination of music and dance. A painting from Cnossus preserves a group of aristocratic ladies, surrounded by their gallants, watching a dance by gaily petticoated girls in an olive grove; another represents a Dancing Woman with flying tresses and extended arms; others show us rustic folk dances, or the wild dance of priests, priestesses, and worshipers before an idol or a sacred tree. Homer describes the “dancing-floor which once, in broad Cnossus, Daedalus made for Ariadne of the lovely hair; there youths and seductive maidens join hands in the dance . . . and a divine bard sets the time to the sound of the lyre.”³⁴ The seven-stringed lyre, ascribed by the Greeks to the inventiveness of Terpander, is represented on a sarcophagus at Hagia Triada a thousand years before Terpander’s birth. There, too, is the double flute, with two pipes, eight holes, and fourteen notes, precisely as in classical Greece. Carved on a gem, a woman blows a trumpet made from an enormous conch, and on a vase we see the sistrum beating time for the dancers’ feet.

The same youthful freshness and lighthearted grace that animate his dances and his games enliven the Cretan’s work in the arts. He has not left us, aside from his architecture, any accomplishments of massive grandeur or exalted style; like the Japanese of samurai days he delights rather in the refinement of the lesser and more intimate arts, the adornment of objects daily used, the patient perfecting of little things. As in every aristocratic civilization, he accepts conventions in the form and subject of his work, avoids extravagant novelties, and learns to be free even within the limitations of reserve and taste. He excels in pottery, gem cutting, bezel carving, and reliefs, for here his microscopic skill finds every stimulus and opportunity. He is at home in the working of silver and gold, sets all the precious stones, and makes a rich diversity of jewels. Upon the seals that he cuts to serve as official signatures, commercial labels, or business forms, he engraves in delicate detail so much of the life and scenery of Crete that from them alone we might picture his civilization. He hammers bronze into basins, ewers, daggers, and swords ornamented with floral and animal designs, and inlaid with gold and silver, ivory and rare stones. At Gournia he has left us, despite the thieves of thirty centuries, a silver cup of finished artistry; and here and there he has molded for us rhytons, or drinking horns, rising out of human or animal heads that to this day seem to hold the breath of life.

As a potter he tries every form, and reaches distinction in nearly all of them. He makes vases, dishes, cups, chalices, lamps, jars, animals, and gods. At first, in Early Minoan, he is content to shape the vessel with his hands along lines bequeathed to him from the Neolithic Age, to paint it with a glaze of brown or black, and to trust the fire to mottle the color into haphazard tints. In Middle Minoan he has learned the use of the wheel, and rises to the height of his skill. He makes a glaze rivaling the consistency and delicacy of porcelain; he scatters recklessly black and brown, white and red, orange and yellow, crimson and vermilion, and mingles them happily into novel shades; he fines down the clay with such confident thoroughness that in his most perfect product—the graceful and brightly colored “eggshell” wares found in the cave of Kamares on Mt. Ida’s slopes—he has dared to thin the walls of the vessel to a millimeter’s thickness, and to pour out upon it all the motifs of his rich imagination. From 2100 to 1950 is the apogee of the Cretan potter; he signs his name to his work, and his trade-mark is sought throughout the Mediterranean. In the Late Minoan Age he brings to full development the technique of faience, and forms the brilliant paste into decorative plaques, vases of turquoise blue, polychrome goddesses, and marine reliefs so realistic that Evans mistook an enamel crab for a fossil.³⁵ Now the artist falls in love with nature, and delights to represent on his vessels the liveliest animals, the gaudiest fish, the most delicate flowers, and the most graceful plants. It is in Late Minoan I that he creates his surviving masterpieces, the Boxers’ Vase and the Harvesters’ Vase: in the one he presents us crudely with every aspect and attitude of the pugilistic game, adding a zone of scenes from the bull-leaper’s life; in the other he follows with fond fidelity a procession probably of peasants marching and singing in some harvest festival. Then the great tradition of Cretan pottery grows weak with age, and the art declines; reserve and taste are forgotten, decoration overruns the vase in bizarre irregularity and excess, the courage for slow conception and patient execution breaks down, and a lazy carelessness called freedom replaces the finesse and finish of the Kamares age. It is a forgivable decay, the unavoidable death of an old and exhausted art, which will lie in refreshing sleep for a thousand years, and be reborn in the perfection of the Attic vase.

Sculpture is a minor art in Crete, and except in bas-relief and the story of Daedalus, seldom graduates from the statuette. Many of these little figures are stereotyped crudities seemingly produced by rote; one is a delightful snapshot in ivory of an athlete plunging through the air; another is a handsome head that has lost its body on the way down the centuries. The best of them excels in anatomical precision and in vividness of action anything that we know from Greece before Myron’s time. The strangest is the Snake Goddess of the Boston Museum—a sturdy figure of ivory and gold, half mammae and half snakes; here at last the Cretan artist treats the human form with some amplitude and success. But when he essays a larger scale he falls back for the most part upon animals, and confines himself to painted reliefs, as in the bull’s head in the Heracleum Museum; in this startling relic the fixed wild eyes, the snorting nostrils, the gasping mouth, and the trembling tongue achieve a power that Greece itself will never surpass.

Nothing else in ancient Crete is quite so attractive as its painting. The sculpture is negligible, the pottery is fragmentary, the architecture is in ruins; but this frailest of all the arts, easy victim of indifferent time, has left us legible and admirable masterpieces from an age so old that it slipped quite out of the memory of that classic Greece of whose painting, by contrast so recent, not one original remains. In Crete the earthquakes or the wars that overturned the palaces preserved here and there a frescoed wall; and wandering by them we molt forty centuries and meet the men who decorated the rooms of the Minoan kings. As far back as 2500 they make wall coatings of pure lime, and conceive the idea of painting in fresco upon the wet surface, wielding the brush so rapidly that the colors sink into the stucco before the surface dries. Into the dark halls of the palaces they bring the bright beauty of the open fields; they make plaster sprout lilies, tulips, narcissi, and sweet marjoram; no one viewing these scenes could ever again suppose that nature was discovered by Rousseau. In the museum at Heracleum the Saffron Picker is as eager to pluck the crocus as when his creator painted him in Middle Minoan days; his waist is absurdly thin, his body seems much too long for his legs; and yet his head is perfect, the colors are soft and warm, the flowers still fresh after four thousand years. At Hagia Triada the painter brightens a sarcophagus with spiral scrolls and queer, almost Nubian figures engrossed in some religious ritual; better yet, he adorns a wall with waving foliage, and then places in the midst of it, darkly but vividly, a stout, tense cat preparing to spring unseen upon a proud bird preening its plumage in the sun. In Late Minoan the Cretan painter is at the top of his stride; every wall tempts him, every plutocrat calls him; he decorates not merely the royal residences but the homes of nobles and burghers with all the lavishness of Pompeii. Soon, however, success and a surfeit of commissions spoil him; he is too anxious to be finished to quite touch perfection; he scatters quantity about him, repeats his flowers monotonously, paints his men impossibly, contents himself with sketching outlines, and falls into the lassitude of an art that knows that it has passed its zenith and must die. But never before, except perhaps in Egypt, has painting looked so freshly at the face of nature.

All the arts come together to build the Cretan palaces. Political power, commercial mastery, wealth and luxury, accumulated refinement and taste commandeer the architect, the builder, the artisan, the sculptor, the potter, the metalworker, the woodworker, and the painter to fuse their skills in producing an assemblage of royal chambers, administrative offices, court theaters, and arenas, to serve as the center and summit of Cretan life. They build in the twenty-first century, and the twentieth sees their work destroyed; they build again in the seventeenth, not only the palace of Minos but many other splendid edifices at Cnossus, and in half a hundred other cities in the thriving island. It is one of the great ages in architectural history.

The creators of the Cnossus palace are limited in both materials and men. Crete is poor in metal and quite devoid of marble; therefore they build with limestone and gypsum, and use wood for entablatures, roofs, and all columns above the basement floor. They cut the stone blocks so sharply that they can put them together without mortar. Around a central court of twenty thousand square feet they raise to three or four stories, with spacious stairways of stone, a rambling maze of rooms—guardhouses, workshops, wine press, storerooms, administrative offices, servants’ quarters, anterooms, reception rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, chapel, dungeon, throne room, and a “Hall of the Double Ax”; adding near by the conveniences of a theater, a royal villa, and a cemetery. On the lowest floor they plant massive square pillars of stone; on the upper floors they use circular columns of cypress, tapering strangely downward, to support the ceilings upon smooth round capitals, or to form shady porticoes at the side. Safe in the interior against a gracefully decorated wall they set a stone seat, simply but skillfully carved, which eager diggers will call the throne of Minos, and on which every tourist will modestly seat himself and be for a moment some inches a king. This sprawling palace in all likelihood is the famous Labyrinth, or sanctuary of the Double Ax (labrys), attributed by the ancients to Daedalus, and destined to give its name in aftertime to any maze—of rooms, or words, or ears.*³⁶

As if to please the modern spirit, more interested in plumbing than in poetry, the builders of Cnossus install in the palace a system of drainage superior to anything else of its kind in antiquity. They collect in stone conduits the water that flows down from the hills or falls from the sky, direct it through shafts to the bathrooms† and latrines, and lead off the waste in terra-cotta pipes of the latest style—each section six inches in diameter and thirty inches long, equipped with a trap to catch the sediment, tapering at one end to fit into the next section, and bound to this firmly with a necking of cement.³⁸ Possibly they include an apparatus for supplying running hot water to the household of the king.‡³⁹

To the complex interiors the artists of Cnossus add the most delicate decorations. Some of the rooms they adorn with vases and statuettes, some with paintings or reliefs, some with huge stone amphorae or massive urns, some with objects in ivory, faïence or bronze. Around one wall they run a limestone frieze with pretty triglyphs and half rosettes; around another a panel of spirals and frets on a surface painted to simulate marble; around another they carve in high relief and living detail the contests of man and bull. Through the halls and chambers the Minoan painter spreads all the glories of his cheerful art: here, caught chattering in a drawing room, are Ladies in Blue, with classic features, shapely arms, and cozy breasts; here are fields of lotus, or lilies, or olive spray; here are Ladies at the Opera, and dolphins swimming motionlessly in the sea. Here, above all, is the lordly Cupbearer, erect and strong, carrying some precious ointment in a slim blue vase; his face is chiseled by breeding as well as by art; his hair descends in a thick braid upon his brown shoulders; his ears, his neck, his arm, and his waist sparkle with jewelry, and his costly robe is embroidered with a graceful quatrefoil design; obviously he is no slave, but some aristocratic youth proudly privileged to serve the king. Only a civilization long familiar with order and wealth, leisure and taste, could demand or create such luxury and such ornament.