THE LEGEND OF EUROPA

IN the beginning, there was no Europe. All there was, for five million years, was a long, sinuous peninsula with no name, set like the figurehead of a ship on the prow of the world’s largest land mass. To the west lay the ocean which no one had crossed. To the south lay two enclosed and interlinked seas, sprinkled with islands, inlets, and peninsulas of their own. To the north lay the great polar icecap, expanding and contracting across the ages like some monstrous, freezing jellyfish. To the east lay the land-bridge to the rest of the world, whence all peoples and all civilizations were to come.

In the intervals between the Ice Ages, the Peninsula received its first human settlers. The humanoids of Neanderthal, and the cave people of Cromagnon, must have had names and faces and ideas. But it cannot be known who they really were. They can only be recognized dimly from their pictures, their artefacts, and their bones.

With the last retreat of the ice, only twelve thousand years ago, the Peninsula received new waves of migrants. Unsung pioneers and prospectors moved slowly out to the west, rounding the coasts, crossing the land and the seas until the furthest islands were reached. Their greatest surviving masterwork, as the Age of Stone gave way to that of Bronze, was built on the edge of human habitation on a remote, offshore island. But no amount of modern speculation can reveal for certain what inspired those master masons, nor what their great stone circle was called.1

At the other end of the Peninsula, another of those distant peoples at the dawn of the Bronze Age was founding a community whose influence has lasted to the present day. By tradition the Hellenes descended from the continental interior in three main waves, taking control of the shores of the Aegean towards the end of the second millennium BC. They conquered and mingled with the existing inhabitants. They spread out through the thousand islands which lie scattered among the waters between the coasts of the Peloponnese and of Asia Minor. They absorbed the prevailing culture of the mainland, and the still older culture of Crete. Their language distinguished them from the ‘barbarians’—the ‘speakers of unintelligible babble’. They were the creators of ancient Greece, [BARBAROS]

Later, when children of classical times asked where humankind had come from, they were told about the creation of the world by an unidentified opifex rerurm or ‘divine maker’. They were told about the Flood, and about Europa.

Europa was the subject of one of the most venerable legends of the classical world. Europa was the mother of Minos, Lord of Crete, and hence the progenitrix of the most ancient branch of Mediterranean civilization. She was mentioned in passing by Homer. But in Europa and the Bulkattributed to Moschus of Syracuse, and above all in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet, Ovid, she is immortalized as an innocent princess seduced by the Father of the Gods. Wandering with her maidens along the shore of her native Phoenicia, she was beguiled by Zeus in the guise of a snow-white bull:

And gradually she lost her fear, and he
Offered his breast for her virgin caresses,
His horns for her to wind with chains of flowers,
Until the princess dared to mount his back,
Her pet bull’s back, unwitting whom she rode.
Then—slowly, slowly down the broad, dry beach—
First in the shallow waves the great god set
His spurious hooves, then sauntered further out
Till in the open sea he bore his prize.
Fear filled her heart as, gazing back, she saw
The fast receding sands. Her right hand grasped
A horn, the other lent upon his back.
Her fluttering tunic floated in the breeze.2

Here was the familiar legend of Europa as painted on Grecian vases, in the houses of Pompeii (See Plate no. 1), and in modern times by Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese, and Claude Lorrain.

The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, was not impressed by the legend. In his view, the abduction of Europa was just an incident in the age-old wars over women-stealing. A band of Phoenicians from Tyre had carried off Io, daughter of the King of Argos; so a band of Greeks from Crete sailed over to Phoenicia and carried off the daughter of the King of Tyre. It was a case of tit for tit.3

The legend of Europa has many connotations. But in carrying the princess to Crete from the shore of Phoenicia (now south Lebanon) Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean. Phoenicia belonged to the orbit of the Pharaohs. Europa’s ride provides the mythical link between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Europa’s brother Cadmus, who roamed the world in search of her, orbe pererrato, was credited with bringing the art of writing to Greece, [CADMUS]

Europa’s ride also captures the essential restlessness of those who followed in her footsteps. Unlike the great river valley civilizations of the Nile, of the Indus, of Mesopotamia, and of China, which were long in duration but lethargic in their geographical and intellectual development, the civilization of the Mediterranean Sea was stimulated by constant movement. Movement caused uncertainty and insecurity. Uncertainty fed a constant ferment of ideas. Insecurity prompted energetic activity. Minos was famed for his ships. Crete was the first naval power. The ships carried people and goods and culture, fostering exchanges of all kinds with the lands to which they sailed. Like the vestments of Europa, the minds of those ancient mariners were constantly left ‘fluttering in the breeze’—tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes.4

Europa rode in the path of the sun from east to west. According to another legend, the Sun was a chariot of fire, pulled by unseen horses from their secret stables behind the sunrise to their resting-place beyond the sunset. Indeed, one of several possible etymologies contrasts Asia, ‘the land of the Sunrise’, with Europa, ‘the land of the Sunset’.5 The Hellenes came to use ‘Europe’ as a name for their territory to the west of the Aegean as distinct from the older lands in Asia Minor.

At the dawn of European history, the known world lay to the east. The unknown waited in the west, in destinations still to be discovered. Europa’s curiosity may have been her undoing. But it led to the founding of a new civilization that would eventually bear her name and would spread to the whole Peninsula.

Map 2. Queen Europe (Regina Europa)

An engraving from an edition of Sebastian Müntzer’s Cosmography
(Cosmographia Universalis lib. vi; Basel 1550–4) courtesy of Bodleian Library