does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition. Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself. Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it, by two conditions: what he saw of the life of
his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of
civilization in Egyptianized Crete. He was consciously picturing
the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more
cultured than his own. Floating legends would tell him much
of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.
Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.
How would he go to work? In this way, I think. The Greeks,
says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not,
as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous. Now what is strength
like, and civilization? Why, I have them before me here to
observe, here in Crete. But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a
Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown
among Greeks.--I do not mean that he consciously set this plan
before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that
he, or anyone, would follow. Civilization would have meant for
him Cretan civilization: the civilization he knew: that part of
the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness. But in his
conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire
to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the
Egyptianized culture he knew. So I think that the conditions of
life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination,
working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and
Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that. He made his people
essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features