Later Athenian writers of a rationalizing turn endeavoured to bring
down the noble old legend to the level of the commonplace by
transforming the Minotaur into a mere general or famous athlete
named Taurus, whom Theseus vanquished in Crete. But the rationalistic
version never found much favour, and the Athenian potter was always
sure of a market for his vases with pictures of the bull-headed
Minotaur falling to the sword of the national hero. No more fortunate
has been the German attempt to resolve the story of Minos and the
Minotaur, the Labyrinth and Pasiphae, into a clumsy solar myth.
The whole legend of the Minotaur, on this theory, was connected
with the worship of the heavenly host. The Minotaur was the Sun;
Pasiphae, 'the very bright one,' wife of Minos, was the Moon; and
the Labyrinth was the tower on whose walls the astronomers of the
day traced the wanderings of the heavenly bodies, 'an image of
the starry heaven, with its infinitely winding paths, in which,
nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely move about.' Among
rationalizing explanations this must surely hold the palm for
cumbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful that the explorer's
spade has demolished it along with other theories, and given back
to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance such
as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.

CHAPTER II

THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION

Between the Greece of such legends as those which we have been
considering and the Greece of the earliest historic period there
has always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land
of seemingly fabulous Kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous
palaces and cities; on the other side. Greece as we know it in
the infant stages of its development, with a totally different
state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and
in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning
which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing
but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous
fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something
unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of
splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath
the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain section of
students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming isolation
of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to seek
any pr