Civilization, Homeric; Epic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism; Homer; Homer -- Criticism and interpretation
If the so-called Ionian emigrants were thus mixed, and if some of
them possessed Achaean lays or legends, and at first practised only
the rites mentioned by Homer, such as cremation and cairn-burial, it
would appear that the pre-Hellenic element among these settlers in
Asia overpowered the other elements, or that the Cyclic poets of Ionia
were mainly of pre-Hellenic origin. Their poems, at all events, are
in harmony with Attic ideas and usages, not with Homer's statements:
and, as we shall show, the Ionian poets cannot have tampered much with
our Homer, for the two Epics never admit the Ionian manners which
are copiously illustrated by the Ionian poets of the Trojan war, the
Cyclics.
According to Thucydides as well as Herodotus, the so-called Ionian
migration was a movement of mixed peoples. The leading men of various
Achaean regions had found an asylum in Attica during the troubles
caused by the Dorian incursions, and "so greatly increased the number
of inhabitants that Attica became incapable of containing them, and was
at last obliged to send colonies to Ionia."[5]
We are thus on almost historic ground when we believe that the settlers
in Ionia, though their tendency was to claim Athenian connections, were
"a mixed multitude" from many States, mainly of the seacoasts; and it
is natural to suppose that they intermarried with Carians at Miletus,
as Herodotus says that they also did with Lycians, and other Asiatic
civilised peoples. Though alien religions might be accepted by the
settlers, these beliefs would be Hellenised, as usual; and the Olympian
Poseidon, the Homeric sea-god, patronised the Ionian league of cities.
We really have no historical evidence for the earliest conditions of
Ionian life in Asia. Mr. Murray supposes the early settlers to have
lost all "tribal obligations," all "old laws," and even "household
and family life." "It looks as if the ancestors of the Ionians had in
the extreme stress of their migrations lost hold upon their Achaean
traditions." But the Ionians had no _Achaean_ traditions to lose! They
built walls to their new cities, and inside the wall a man "could take
breath. He could become for a time a man again, instead of a frightened
beast." A terrible picture is drawn of the sufferings and ferocious
cruelties of the invaders, who, however, remain orthodox in religion
after all, and confident in "the manifest help of Zeus and Apollo."[6]
This is not the condition of frightened beasts. In fact, they were not
in that terror-stricken condition when they were able to build walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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