Crete

“ Here old Anchises, father of Æneas, rich in the lore of old tradition, says:
Listen, lords of Troy, and learn where your hopes are. Crete lies in the midst of the deep, the island of mighty Jove. There is Mount Ida, and there the cradle of our race. It has a hundred peopled cities, a realm of richest plenty. ”

“ But at last they saw a long steep island, and a blue peak high among the clouds; and they knew it for the peak of Ida, and the famous land of Crete. And they said, ‘We will land in Crete, and see Minos the just king, and all his glory and his wealth; at least he will treat us hospitably, and let us fill our water-casks upon the shore.’
But when they came nearer to the island they saw a wondrous sight upon the cliffs. For on a cape to the westward stood a giant, taller than any mountain pine, who glittered aloft against the sky like a tower of burnished brass. ”

“ Of Paros' isle, with marble quarries white.
We pass the scatter'd isles of Cyclades,
That, scarce distinguish'd, seem to stud the seas.
The shouts of sailors double near the shores;
They stretch their canvas, and they ply their oars.
'All hands aloft! for Crete! for Crete!' they cry,
And swiftly thro' the foamy billows fly.
Full on the promis'd land at length we bore,
With joy descending on the Cretan shore.
With eager haste a rising town I frame,
Which from the Trojan Pergamus I name:
The name itself was grateful; I exhort
To found their houses, and erect a fort. ”

“ Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of life itself, and the original home of the Ægean or Mycenæan civilisation is probably to be found in the island of Crete. It is crammed with remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek tradition looks back to Crete "as the home of divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of maritime dominion." ”

“ The position of Crete—'a halfway house between three continents, flanked by the great Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller island stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'—marks it out as designed by Nature to be a centre of development in the culture of the early Ægean race, and, in point of fact, ancient traditions unanimously pointed to the great island as being the birthplace of Greek civilization. ”

“ Additional indications, indeed, have come to light which carry back the chronology of the earlier relics of Cretan culture far beyond the date of Schliemann's great discoveries on the mainland of Greece, and attest an intercourse with Egypt going back to the third and, it may be, even the fourth millennium before our era. We have here in Crete the first stepping-stone of European civilisation. ”

“ Men and Women, Clothes and Customs
When Knossos fell, Crete ceased to be the pre-eminent power in the Near East. The island itself was overrun by military or naval adventurers, and the centre of Mediterranean life shifted over to the mainland of Greece, whence, indeed, those adventurers came. The interesting thing, however, was that Cretan culture went with it, and neither for the last, nor probably for the first, time “the captive led captive her savage conqueror,” as Horace wrote centuries afterwards. Crete stooped to conquer Greece, just as Greece in her turn stooped to conquer Rome. ”

“ The long narrow island of Crete lies at what might be called the entrance to the Aegean Sea. This sea is dotted with islands which form stepping stones from the mainland of Europe to the coast of Asia Minor. Crete turns her face to these islands and her back to Egypt, and the Egyptians, who did not travel very much themselves, called the inhabitants the "Great Men of Keftiu," Keftiu meaning people at the back of. They were the men who dwelt beyond what was familiar to the Egyptians.
The Aegean world is a very beautiful one. ”

“ They are now young citizens of a fencèd city instead of young tribesmen of the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holds them together is the bond of social custom, social structure, “goodly Themis.” No man liveth to himself.
Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn. ”

“ When you grow older and read your classics, you will learn a great deal about the heathen gods and goddesses whom the Greeks worshipped in the days before Christianity had come to enlighten the world.
Crete, in the days of Grecian glory, was one of the most famous parts of that wonderful empire. From its favorable geographical position, it was at one time the place through which all the arts and wonders of Asia and the East were made known to the then rough and uncultivated Europeans. ”

“ It is not only the vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are more wonderful still.
This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. ”

“ Crete was an island, which, from its position, should have dominated over the whole of Greece, as it had for its neighbours the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Asia. The Cretans were remarkable amongst the Hellenic nations for their institutions, which bore a singular physiognomy. Diodorus describes all the legends relating to the Greek divinities of whom Crete boasted to be the cradle; he then adds that during the generations succeeding the birth of the gods, many heroes lived in the island, the most illustrious of whom were Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. ”

“ For it was not in Crete that Apollo bade thee dwell. There is a land which the Greeks call Hesperia; an ancient land, whose inhabitants are mighty men of valour; a land of vineyards and wheat. There is our proper home, and thence came Dardanus our father. Do thou, therefore, tell these things to the old man Anchises. Seek ye for the land of Hesperia, which men also call Italy; but as for Crete, Jupiter willeth not that ye should dwell there. ”

“ Whichever way we go, we soon find that we have run into a land older than those with which we have been familiar, whose legends greet us even at this distance over miles of tossing waves. Let those who are content to voyage with us through the pages that follow, be content to reserve Corfù for the homeward journey, and to assume that our prow is headed now toward Crete, through a tossing sea such as led the ancients to exclaim, “The Cretan sea is wide!” The shadowy mountains on the left are the lofty southern prongs of the Grecian peninsula. ”

“ About the same time the evidences of imports of Late Minoan or “Mycenaean” fabrics in Egypt definitely cease. In the Odyssey we already find the Achaeans together with Dorians settled in central Crete. In the extreme east and west of the island the aboriginal Greek settlements
in Crete. “Eteocretan” element, however, as represented respectively by the Praesians or Cydonians, still held its own, and inscriptions written in Greek characters show that the old language survived to the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era. ”

“ The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,823 Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. ”

“ In olden times it was thought that all the world centred round the Mediterranean Sea, that the earth consisted only of those lands bordering the Mediterranean. In bygone days, long before the dawn of history, it is possible that Crete dominated the known world of that day just as the Island of Great Britain dominates the world of our own day. ”

“ What distinguishes the mediæval history of Crete from that of the other Frank possessions in the Near East is the almost constant insubordination of the Cretan population. While in the Duchy of Athens we scarcely hear of any [178] restlessness on the part of the Greeks, while in the Principality of Achaia they gave comparatively little trouble, while in the Archipelago they seldom murmured against their Dukes—in Crete, on the other hand, one insurrection followed another in rapid succession, and the first 160 years of Venetian rule are little else than a record of insurrections. ”

“ On the wall of the Temple at Denderah.—From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo. HE way to Egypt is long and vexatious"—so Homer sings; and so also have sung other persons more modern. A chopping sea prevails off Crete, and whether one leaves Europe at Naples, Brindisi, or Athens, one's steamer soon reaches that beautiful island, and consumes in passing it an amount of time which is an ever-fresh surprise. Crete, with its long coast-line and soaring mountain-tops, appears to fill all that part of the sea. ”

“ To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key. ”

“ The recent exploration and excavation of early sites in Crete have entirely revolutionized our knowledge of its remote past, and afforded the most astonishing evidence of the existence of a highly advanced civilization going far back behind the historic period. Early, Middle and Late “Minoan” periods. Great “Minoan” palaces have been brought to light at Cnossus and Phaestus, together with a minor but highly interesting royal abode at Hagia Triada near Phaestus. “Minoan” towns, some of considerable extent, have been discovered at Cnossus itself, at Gournia, Palaikastro, and at Zakro. ”

“ The lying propensity of the Cretans is proved from the fact that the verb to Cretize, was used in Greek with the meaning “to speak falsely.” In Hebrew, Crete is called Caphtor (cypress) . It is mentioned in Jer. xlvii. 4. It was the native land of a tribe of Philistines called Caphtorim (Gen. x. 14; Deut. ii. 23; 1 Chron. i. 12) . The fact that the Philistines came partly from Crete is also affirmed in Amos ix. 7. Another branch of the Philistines came from Casloach in Egypt. The Caphtorim emigrated originally from Egypt to Crete, from which island they were probably driven by the Greeks. ”

“ I am much moved by the mention made of the services which my late illustrious husband was able to render to the cause of Greece in his youth, and to that of Crete in his later life. It is true that his earliest efforts, outside of his native country, were for Greek independence, and that his latest endeavors in Europe were made in aid of the Cretans, who have struggled with so much courage and perseverance to deliver their country from the yoke of Turkish oppression. ”

“ It is a wholly unheard of thing for the British to think or speak of Britain as “the Fatherland”: the Cretans, according to Plutarch, spoke of Crete as their Motherland, and not as the Fatherland: “At first,” says Mackenzie, “the Cretan Earth Mother was the culture deity who instructed mankind ... in Crete she was well developed before the earliest island settlers began to carve her images on gems and seals or depict them in frescoes. She symbolised the island and its social life and organisation.” ”

“ The seeds scattered over the earth bore their harvests to her garner.
III. Among the Grecian isles, the glory of Minos had long passed from Crete (about 800 B. C.) . The monarchical form of government had yielded to the republican, but in its worst shape—the oligarchic. But the old Cretan institutions still lingered in the habits of private life;—while the jealousies and commotions of its several cities, each independent, exhausted within itself those powers which, properly concentrated and wisely directed, might have placed Crete at the head of Greece. ”

“ In ancient times, if we may believe the myths of Hellas, Athens, after a disastrous campaign, was compelled by her conqueror to send once every nine years a tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens. ”

“ This, and some other considerations, have prompted the suggestion that the Ionians really came from Crete. But it seems more in accordance with the evidence to suppose that the main body of them came from Greece proper, where they had learned the “Mycenaean” culture, which was the gift of Crete. The calamitous Dorians wrecked that wonderful heritage, but for some time at least the settlers in their new “Ionian” home would remember how to fashion a pot fairly and chant their traditional lays. ”

“ But De Quincey makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better than any other part of the world. Many of the legends he records; many of the superstitions—to call them that;—many of the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to Crete. Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does not figure greatly in their legends. But in Crete the friendship of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they do in Homer. ”