A Study of Phrygian Art

Abstract

It may be permitted me to return for a moment to the question, touched on in my first paper, as to the age of the Lion-Gate at Mycenae. The distinction which I drew between the age of the gateway and that of the tombs within the sacred precinct seems to me to be too much neglected, and its significance to be misunderstood. There is a whole class of legends whose object is to make out for the conquerors of the Peloponnesus a legitimate right to its possession. For example, the Aetolians who conquered Elis gave themselves a mythical justification by the tale that an ancestor of their chiefs had been expelled from Elis, and that they were returning to claim his inheritance when the crime for which he had been expelled had been expiated by generations of banishment. Similarly the Spartans found that they could make their cause a just one only by bringing to Sparta the bones of Orestes, the ancient and rightful king. When after a long search they found them, they brought them home, and no doubt instituted a cultus at the grave. After they had thus legitimised themselves by continuing the worship of the ancient chiefs of the land, they were strong to conquer the Tegeans. The worship of Helena and her sacred tree are also well known at Sparta. I believe that there existed at Mycenae a similar worship of the ancient chiefs of the land. The Dorian conquerors continued the family cultus of the chiefs whom they dispossessed. Probably there was both in Mycenae and in Sparta an interval during which the worship was discontinued by the Dorian conquerors, and then the ancient cultus was restored. We shall hardly be wrong if we attribute this zeal of the Dorians to prove themselves rightful heirs of the Achaean chiefs to the growing influence of Homer. It was incumbent on the Dorians to show respect to Homeric traditions, and to prove themselves the lawful possessors of the Homeric poems. Argos, the leading Dorian state, probably began this practice, and Sparta imitated it. The myth at last became a fixed belief, and the Spartan king Cleomenes, at the end of the sixth century, could say, ‘I am no Dorian, but Achaean.’