Aegean Prelude: 3500 - 1000 B.C.

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 [p. 19] 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 is 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.

IV. The Fall of Cnossus
When in retrospect we seek the origin of this brilliant culture, we find ourselves vacillating between Asia and Egypt. On the one hand, the Cretans seem kin in language, race, and religion to the Indo-European peoples of Asia Minor; there, too, clay tablets were used for writing, and the shekel was the standard of measurement; there, in Caria, was the cult of Zeus Labrandeus, i.e., Zeus of the Double Ax [labrys]; there men worshiped the pillar, the bull, and the dove; there, in Phrygia, was the great Cybele, so much like the mother goddess of Crete that the Greeks called the latter Rhea Cybele, and considered the two divinities one.[40a] And yet the signs of Egyptian influence in Crete abound in every age. The two cultures are at first so much alike that some scholars presume a wave of Egyptian emigration to Crete in the troubled days of Menes.[41] The stone vases of Mochlos and the copper weapons of Early Minoan I are strikingly like those found in Proto-Dynastic tombs; the double ax appears as an amulet in Egypt, and even a "Priest of the Double Ax"; the weights and measures, though Asiatic in value, are Egyptian in form; the methods used in the glyptic arts, in faïence, and in painting are so similar in the two lands that Spengler reduced Cretan civilization to a mere branch of the Egyptian.[42]

We shall not follow him, for it will not do, in our search for the continuity of civilization, to surrender the individuality of the parts. The Cretan quality is distinct; no other people in antiquity has quite this flavor of minute refinement, this concentrated elegance in life and art. Let us believe that in its racial origins the Cretan culture was Asiatic, in many of its arts Egyptian; in essence and total it remained unique. Perhaps it belonged to a complex of civilization common to all the Eastern Mediterranean, in which each nation inherited kindred arts, beliefs, and ways from a widespread neolithic culture parent to them all. From the common civilization [p. 20] Crete borrowed in her youth, to it she contributed in her maturity. Her rule forged an order in the isles, and her merchants found entry at every port. Then her wares and her arts pervaded the Cyclades, overran Cyprus, reached to Caria and Palestine,[43] moved north through Asia Minor and its islands to Troy, reached west through Italy and Sicily to Spain,[44] penetrated the mainland of Greece even to Thessaly, and passed through Mycenae and Tiryns into the heritage of Greece. In the history of civilization Crete was the first link in the European chain.

We do not know which of the many roads to decay Crete chose; perhaps she took them all. Her once famous forests of cypress and cedar vanished; today two thirds of the island are a stony waste, incapable of holding the winter rains.[45] Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the vitality of the race, and weakened its will to live or to defend itself; a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. Possibly the collapse of Egypt after the death of Ikhnaton disrupted Creto-Egyptian trade, and diminished the riches of the Minoan kings. Crete had no great internal resources; her prosperity required commerce, and markets for her industries; like modern England she had become dangerously dependent upon control of the seas. Perhaps internal wars decimated the island's manhood, and left it disunited against foreign attack. Perhaps an earthquake shook the palaces into ruins, or some angry revolution avenged in a year of terror the accumulated oppressions of centuries.

About 1450 the palace of Phaestus was again destroyed, that of Hagia Triada was burned down, the homes of the rich burghers of Tylissus disappeared. During the next fifty years Cnossus seems to have enjoyed the zenith of her fortune, and a supremacy unquestioned throughout the Aegean. Then, about 1400, the palace of Cnossus itself went up in flames. Everywhere in the ruins Evans found signs of uncontrollable fire --charred beams and pillars, blackened walls, and clay tablets hardened against time's tooth by the conflagration's heat. So thorough was the destruction, and so complete the removal of metal even from rooms covered and protected by debris, that many students suspect invasion and conquest rather than earthquake.[46] [If archeological chronology would permit the deferment of this conflagration to the neighborhood of 1250 it would be convenient to interpret the tragedy as an incident in the Achaean conquest of the Aegean preliminary to the siege of Troy.] In any case, the catastrophe was sudden; the workshops of artists [p. 21] and artisans give every indication of having been in full activity when death arrived. About the same time Gournia, Pseira, Zakro, and Palaikastro were leveled to the ground.

We must not suppose that Cretan civilization vanished overnight. Palaces were built again, but more modestly, and for a generation or two the products of Crete continued to dominate Aegean art. About the middle of the thirteenth century we come at last upon a specific Cretan personality --that King Minos of whom Greek tradition told so many frightening tales. His brides were annoyed at the abundance of serpents and scorpions in his seed; but by some secret device his wife PasiphaÎ eluded these,[47] and safely bore him many children, among them Phaedra [wife of Theseus and lover of Hippolytus] and the fair-haired Ariadne. Minos having offended Poseidon, the god afflicted PasiphaÎ with a mad passion for a divine bull. Daedalus pitied her, and through his contrivance she conceived the terrible Minotaur. Minos imprisoned the animal in the Labyrinth which Daedalus had built at his command, but appeased it periodically with human sacrifice.[48]

Pleasanter even in its tragedy is the legend of Daedalus, for it opens one of the proudest epics of human history. Greek story represented him as an Athenian Leonardo who, envious of his nephew's skill, slew him in a moment of temperament, and was banished forever from Greece. He found refuge at Minos' court, astonished him with mechanical inventions and novelties, and became chief artist and engineer to the king. He was a great sculptor, and fable used his name to personify the graduation of statuary from stiff, dead figures to vivid portraits of possible men; the creatures made by him, we are informed, were so lifelike that they stood up and walked away unless they were chained to their pedestals.[49] But Minos was peeved when he learned of Daedalus' connivance with PasiphaÎ's amours, and confined him and his son Icarus in the maze of the Labyrinth. Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and Icarus, and by their aid they leaped across the walls and soared over the Mediterranean. Disdaining his father's counsel, proud Icarus flew too closely to the sun; the hot rays melted the wax on his wings, and he was lost in the sea, pointing a moral and adorning a tale. Daedalus, empty-hearted, flew on to Sicily, and stirred that island to civilization by bringing to it the industrial and artistic culture of Crete.[50] [Pausanias, father of all Baedekers, credits Daedalus with several statues, mostly of wood, and a marble relief of Ariadne dancing, as all extant in the second century A.D.[51] The Greeks never doubted the reality of Daedalus, and the experience of Schliemann warns us to be skeptical even of our skepticism. Old traditions have a way of being easily rejected by one generation of scholars, and laboriously confirmed by the next.] [p. 22]

More tragic still is the story of Theseus and Ariadne. Minos, victorious in a war against youthful Athens, exacted from that city, every ninth year, a tribute of seven girls and seven young men, to be devoured by the Minotaur. On the coming of the third occasion for this national humiliation the handsome Theseus --his father King Aegeus reluctantly consenting --had himself chosen as one of the seven youths, for he was resolved to slay the Minotaur and end the recurrent sacrifice. Ariadne pitied the princely Athenian, loved him, gave him a magic sword, and taught him the simple trick of unraveling thread from his arm as he penetrated the Labyrinth. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back to Ariadne, and took her with him on his flight from Crete. On the isle of Naxos he married her as he had promised, but while she slept he and his companions sailed treacherously away.[52] [The Athenians counted all this as history. They treasured for centuries, by continually repairing it, the ship in which Theseus had sailed to Crete, and used it as a sacred vessel in sending envoys annually to the feast of Apollo at Delos.]

With Ariadne and Minos, Crete disappears from history till the coming of Lycurgus to the island, presumably in the seventh century. There are indications that the Achaeans reached it in their long raid of Greece in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, and Dorian conquerors settled there towards the end of the second millennium before Christ. Here, said many Cretans and some Greeks,[53] Lycurgus, and in less degree Solon, had found the model for their laws. In Crete as in Sparta, after the island had come under Dorian sway, the ruling class led a life of at least outward simplicity and restraint; the boys were brought up in the army, and the adult males ate together in public mess halls; the state was ruled by a senate of elders, and was administered by ten kosmoi or orderers, corresponding to the ephors of Sparta and the archons of Athens.[54] It is difficult to say whether Crete taught Sparta, or Sparta Crete; perhaps both states were the parallel results of similar conditions --the precarious life of an alien military aristocracy amid a native and hostile population of serfs. The comparatively enlightened law code of Gortyna, discovered on the walls of that Cretan town in A.D. 1884, belongs apparently to the early fifth century; in an earlier form it may have influenced the legislators of Greece. In the sixth century Thaletas of Crete taught choral music at Sparta, and the Cretan sculptors Dipoenus and Scyllis instructed the artists of Argos and Sicyon. By a hundred channels the old civilization emptied itself out into the new. [p. 23]