Tsuntas, Chrestos: The Mycenaean age: a study of the monuments and culture of pre-homeric Greece (London, 1897)

364 THE MYCENAEAN AGE

line the doom invoked by Agamemnon upon Troy; and
even the royal tombs without the walls were rifled.

The .

Achaean Such survivors of the old stock as could not bow
to foreign lords in their own land sought inde-
pendence in expatriation; and not a few of them doubt-
less set their faces toward the regions long familiar to them.
To the isles and shores of Asia Minor, the descendants of
the conquerors return as refugees; and of all they carry
with them the most precious possessions are the old songs.

But we are not to think of a single stream of eastward
migration. The Dorian invasion was not an isolated occur-
rence, but an incident of a more general movement which
disturbed Greece from beyond Pindus to Gape Taenarum.
In the displacements that followed, there went out to Asia
Minor from all parts of Eastern Greece — from Thessaly,
Boeotia, Attica, and Peloponnesus — swarms of people
carrying with them their various traditions, folk-lore, and
cults. In their colonial plantations these elements mixed
and mingled; and out of the ferment of races and conditions
Rise of the arose a more complex civilization. It was a slow
SorTl^n process. The wider world of Homer — the ulti-
mate Homer— is too manifold and symmetrical
for any mushroom growth. This is preeminently the case
with the Homeric religion : it was in this struggle of tribe
with tribe to establish itself anew—each under the sanc-
tions of its ethnic divinity — that Greek religion unfolded
in the marvelous form which was to remain fixed from that
time forth. The Olympian system owes its symmetry to
the Epos in which it first appears.1 In this evolution of
a new theology, involving now the degradation of gods to
be heroes only, and again the exaltation of heroes to be
gods, it is no wonder that ancestor-worship and the rites it

1 Cf. Herodotus, ii. 53.