While our knowledge of Mycenæan religion is vague at the best, and we must recognise in the dove-idols and dove-temples the insignia of an imported Aphrodite-cult, we have beyond a reasonable doubt also to recognise a genuine Hellenic divinity with her historical attributes clearly foreshadowed in Artemis. Again, while the Homeric Greeks themselves are not presented to us as worshippers of the dead after the custom avouched by the altar-pits of Mycenæ and Tiryns, we do find in the poems an echo at least of this cult, and among the later Hellenes it resumes the power of a living belief. So, though Homer seems to know cremation only, and this has been taken for full proof that the Mycenæans were not Greeks, the traces of embalming in the poems clearly point to an earlier custom of simple burial as we find it uniformly attested by the Mycenæan tombs. And, here, again, historical Greece reverts to the earlier way. In Greece proper, at least in Attica, the dead were not burned,—not even in the age of the Dipylon vases,—and yet the Athenians of that day were Greeks. So, among the earlier Italians, burial was the only mode of dealing with the dead, and the usage was so rooted in their habits that even after cremation was introduced some member of the body (e.g., a finger) was always cut off and buried intact. We need not repeat what we have elsewhere said of the funeral banquet, the immolation of victims, the burning of raiment—all bearing on the same conclusion and cumulating the evidence that the Greeks of Homer, and so of the historic age, are the lineal heirs of Mycenæan culture.
If the proof of descent on these lines is strong, it is strengthened yet more by all we can make out regarding the political and social organisation. That monarchy was the Mycenæan form of government is sufficiently attested by the strong castles, each taken up in large part by a single princely mansion. But “the rule of one man” is too universal in early times to be a criterion of race. Far more significant is the evidence we have for a clan-system such as we afterwards find in full bloom among the Hellenes.
The clan, as we know it in historic times, and especially in Attica, was a factor of prime importance in civil, social, and religious life. It was composed of families which claim to be, and for the most part actually were, descended from a common ancestor. These originally lived together in clan-villages—of which we have clear reminiscences in the clan-names of certain Attic demes, as Boutadai, Perithoidai, Skanbonidai. Not only did the clan form a village by itself, but it held and cultivated its land in common. It built the clan-village on the clan-estate; and as the clansmen dwelt together in life, so in death they were not divided. Each clan had its burial-place in its own little territory, and there at the tomb it kept up the worship of its dead, and especially of its hero-founder.
That the Mycenæans lived under a like clan-system, the excavation of the tombs of the lower town has shown conclusively. The town was composed of villages more or less removed from one another, each the seat of a clan. We have no means of determining whether the land was held and tilled in common, but we do know that by each village lay the common clan-cemetery—a group of eight, ten, or more tombs, obviously answering to the number of families or branches of the clan. In the construction of the tombs, and in the offerings contained, we note at once differences between different cemeteries and uniformity in the tombs of the same group. The richest cemeteries lie nearer the acropolis, as the stronger clans would naturally dwell nearer the king. Thus, for its population, Mycenæ covered a large area, but its limits were not sharply defined, and the transition from the citadel centre to the open country was not abrupt. The villages were linked together by graveyards, gardens and fields, highways and squares; thus the open settlement was indeed a πόλις εὐρυάγυια—a town of broad ways.
Somewhat such must have been the aspect in primitive days of Sparta and Athens, not to mention many other famous cities. Indeed, even in historic times, as we know from the ruins, Sparta was still made up of detached villages spread over a large territory for so small a population. So, primitive Athens was composed of the central settlement on the Acropolis, with the villages encircling it from Pnyx to Lycabettus and back again. When the city was subsequently walled in, some of these villages were included in the circuit, others were left outside, while still others (as the Ceramicus) were cut in two by the wall. The same thing happened at Mycenæ; the town wall was built simply because the fortress was an insufficient shelter for the populace as times grew threatening; but it could not, and did not, take in all the villages.
Such, briefly, is the objective evidence—the palpable facts—pointing to a race connection between the Mycenæans and the Greeks of history. We have, finally, to consider the testimony of the Homeric poems. Homer avowedly sings of heroes and peoples who had flourished in Greece long before his own day. Now it may be denied that these represent the civilisation known to us as Mycenæan; but it is certainly a marvellous coincidence (as Schuchhardth observes) that “excavations invariably confirm the former power and splendour of every city which is mentioned by Homer as conspicuous for its wealth or sovereignty.”
Of all the cities of Hellas, it is the now established centres of Mycenæan culture which the poet knows best and characterises with the surest hand. Mycenæ “rich in gold” is Agamemnon’s seat, and Agamemnon is lord of all Argos and many isles, and leader of the host at Troy. In Laconia, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tomb which has given us the famous Vaphio cups, is the royal seat of Menelaus, which is likened to the court of Olympian Zeus. Bœotian Orchomenos, whose wealth still speaks for itself in the Treasury of Minyas, is taken by the poet as a twin type of affluence with Egyptian Thebes, “where the treasure-houses are stored fullest.” Assuredly, no one can regard all this and many another true touch as mere coincidence. The poet knows whereof he affirms. He has exact knowledge of the greatness and bloom of certain peoples and cities at an epoch long anterior to his own, with which the poems have to do. And there is not one hint in either poem that these races and heroes were not of the poet’s own kin.
It might be assumed that there had once ruled in those cities an alien people, and that the monuments of Mycenæan culture were their legacy to us, but that the Achæans who came after them have entered into the inheritance of their fame. Such usurpations there have been in history; but the hypothesis is out of the question here. At Mycenæ, where exploration has been unusually thorough, the genuine Mycenæan Age is seen to have come to a sharp and sudden end—a catastrophe so overwhelming that we cannot conceive of any lingering bloom. Had the place passed to a people worthy to succeed to the glory of the race who reared its mighty walls and vaulted tombs, then we should look for remains of a different but not a contemptible civilisation. But, in fact, we find built directly on the ruins of the Mycenæan palace mean and shabby huts which tell us how the once golden city was succeeded by a paltry village. Centuries were to pass before the Doric temple rose on the accumulated ruins of palace and hovels, and generations more before the brave little remnant returned with the laurels of Platæa and enough of the spoil (we may conjecture) to put the walls of the Atreidæ in repair.
If the structures peculiar to the Mycenæan age are the work of foreigners, what have we left for Agamemnon and his Achæans? Simply the hovels. Of the Dipylon pottery, with which it is proposed to endow them, there is none worth mentioning at Mycenæ, very little at Tiryns, hardly a trace at Amyclæ, or Orchomenos. In the Mycenæan acropolis, particularly, very few fragments of this pottery have been found, and that mainly in the huts already mentioned. Can these be the sole traces of the power and pride of the Atreidæ?