DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0409
THE MYCENAEAN WORLD AND HOMER 355
menos, whose prosperity was built up on the stable basis of
agriculture. Yet husbandry alone will not account for the
vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of the Danaid
kings of Mycenae which their stupendous public works as
well as the treasure of their tombs compel us to assume.
To obtain such store of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and the
like products of other lands required exchangeable values
■which their soil alone could not produce. The most mar-
ketable commodity Greece then had to offer must have been
slaves; but her immediate neighbors hardly afforded ade-
quate hunting-grounds for this human game. Commerce,
then, or piracy must have been reckoned among her
resources; but it is very easy to overestimate the role of
the latter. Homer's princes on occasion are not above a
little buccaneering or trafficking, but these are by no means
the common pursuits. It is only the restless and daring
spirits who take to them — rovers, as Odysseus in one of
his made-up autobiographies describes them, who cannot
bear to bide at home in peace, tending their flocks and
tilling their fields.1
The first colonial plantations on Melos, Thera, and other
islands, presuppose no great experience in navigation ; in
fact, these may have been among their earliest ColonM
ventures, and the more their colonies expanded a"d foreign
the more rapidly would maritime enterprise and rela'10,ls
skill increase. In making Danaos the first to build a ship
and sail over sea, tradition seems to point to the Danaans
as the earliest seafaring people in Greece; and many have
gone so far as to recognize the name of that people in an in-
scription at Karnak which mentions "the isles of the Tenau"
among the vassals of King Thothmes III. (circa 1550 b. c).
We lay no stress on this identification, which is at best
1 Odyssey, xiv. 222.
menos, whose prosperity was built up on the stable basis of
agriculture. Yet husbandry alone will not account for the
vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of the Danaid
kings of Mycenae which their stupendous public works as
well as the treasure of their tombs compel us to assume.
To obtain such store of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and the
like products of other lands required exchangeable values
■which their soil alone could not produce. The most mar-
ketable commodity Greece then had to offer must have been
slaves; but her immediate neighbors hardly afforded ade-
quate hunting-grounds for this human game. Commerce,
then, or piracy must have been reckoned among her
resources; but it is very easy to overestimate the role of
the latter. Homer's princes on occasion are not above a
little buccaneering or trafficking, but these are by no means
the common pursuits. It is only the restless and daring
spirits who take to them — rovers, as Odysseus in one of
his made-up autobiographies describes them, who cannot
bear to bide at home in peace, tending their flocks and
tilling their fields.1
The first colonial plantations on Melos, Thera, and other
islands, presuppose no great experience in navigation ; in
fact, these may have been among their earliest ColonM
ventures, and the more their colonies expanded a"d foreign
the more rapidly would maritime enterprise and rela'10,ls
skill increase. In making Danaos the first to build a ship
and sail over sea, tradition seems to point to the Danaans
as the earliest seafaring people in Greece; and many have
gone so far as to recognize the name of that people in an in-
scription at Karnak which mentions "the isles of the Tenau"
among the vassals of King Thothmes III. (circa 1550 b. c).
We lay no stress on this identification, which is at best
1 Odyssey, xiv. 222.