THE NATURE OF THE LITERARY EVIDENCE

Archaeological discovery affects our attitude to literary tradition in two ways. At first there is a tendency to dismiss the literary tradition as imprecise and faulty in comparison with the actual physical remains, from which a past civilization can be reconstructed upon precise foundations but within restricted limits. Then, when the material outlines of such a civilization grow firm, our knowledge of material conditions can be used to test the accuracy of details in the literary tradition. This stage has been reached for part at least of the Mycenaean period, and the literary tradition has been confirmed at many points. Thucydides was certainly correct in believing that Mycenae was a centre of importance, that its rulers spoke Greek for several generations before the Trojan War, and that the power of Mycenae finally overthrew that of Troy. The Homeric Epics, no less than the even more remarkable Epic of Gilgamesh, have merged into the world of fact and become historical documents. The Iliad provides in the Catalogue of Ships a political map of Mycenaean Greece to which excavation has added little but confirmation, and the poem tells us more of Mycenaean ideas and aspirations than the walls of the citadel can do. But the literary tradition contains much which can never be confirmed or refuted by archaeological discovery, and here we must rely on our own criteria for confidence or distrust.

Continuity of tradition was certainly maintained between the Mycenaean period and the archaic Greek period by the recitation of epic lays which were transmitted orally for several centuries, especially in central Greece, Ionia and Cyprus.