Bab Bab 11 · Possession Of Greece

The Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the

first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been

dead and buried several centuries, when a small tribe of shepherds left

their homes along the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward

in search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after

Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the old myths

these were the only two human beings who had escaped the great flood,

which countless years before had destroyed all the people of the world,

when they had grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God,

who lived on Mount Olympus.

[Illustration: AN ÆGEAN CITY ON THE GREEK MAINLAND]

Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of

the fall of Athens, describing his earliest ancestors, said that they

“did not amount to very much,” and this was probably true. They were

very ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their

enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little

respect for other people’s rights, and they killed the natives of the

Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their farms

and took their cattle and made their wives and daughters slaves and

wrote endless songs praising the courage of the clan of the Achæans,

who had led the Hellenic advance-guard into the mountains of Thessaly

and the Peloponnesus.

[Illustration: THE ACHÆANS TAKE AN ÆGEAN CITY]

But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw the castles

of the Ægeans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal

swords and the spears of the Ægean soldiers and knew that they could

not hope to defeat them with their clumsy stone axes.

For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and

from mountain side to mountain side. Then the whole of the land had

been occupied and the migration had come to an end.

That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The Greek farmer,

living within sight of the Ægean colonies, was finally driven by

curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours. He discovered that he could

learn many useful things from the men who dwelt behind the high stone

walls of Mycenæ and Tiryns.

He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered the art of

handling those strange iron weapons which the Ægeans had brought

from Babylon and from Thebes. He came to understand the mysteries of

navigation. He began to build little boats for his own use.

[Illustration: THE FALL OF CNOSSUS]

And when he had learned everything the Ægeans could teach him he

turned upon his teachers and drove them back to their islands. Soon

afterwards he ventured forth upon the sea and conquered all the

cities of the Ægean. Finally in the fifteenth century before our era

he plundered and ravaged Cnossus and ten centuries after their first

appearance upon the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of

Greece, of the Ægean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy,

the last great commercial stronghold of the older civilisation, was

destroyed in the eleventh century B.C. European history was to begin in

all seriousness.