Modernist Minoans

Archaeology seems to be on the margins of cultural history, the province of antiquarians. In her fascinating Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism , though, Cathy Gere traces the impact of Arthur Evans’ excavation and reconstruction of Minoan civilization on modernists from Nietzsche to Freud, Joyce to Robert Graves. Evans convinced his readers that a matriarchal, pacifist, myth-based society was the foundation of Western civilization, the golden age before the fall into Homeric brutality. It wasn’t true, but it was highly attractive to “his war-torn age”: “Minoan society reconstructed as Western civilization’s earliest blossoming, a gilded infancy suckled by a benevolent mother goddess, a time of peace and plenty on a beautiful island protected by the sea.”