been a southward swoop parallel to that of the Indic group who took over
Mitanni at the same period. If it really happened, it would provide a channel
by which Aryan poetry might have directly influenced early Mycenaean
poetry, short-circuiting the stemma. It is hardly likely that all Greek–Indic
and Greek–Iranian parallels could be so accounted for, but it remains a
theoretical consideration to be borne in mind.
Both in the Mycenaean age and in subsequent centuries Greece was
much exposed to contacts with the Near East, including Anatolia. So if we
find parallels between Greek and Hittite myth, religion, or idiom, we must ask
whether it is a case of independent inheritance from Indo-European or of
horizontal transmission. At a later period the problem is similar with regard
to Greece and Italy.
Under the Roman empire there were extensive trade connections linking
southern with northern Europe. The literacy that gave us our Celtic and
Germanic texts was the gift of a clergy schooled in Latin letters. Some scholars
have sought to derive as much as possible in these literatures from Classical
models and to play down the element of native tradition. They have certainly
gone too far in this, but the possibility of Classical influence must always be
considered. The Germans were also subject to Celtic influences from an early
date, certainly from well before the beginning of the Christian era to long
after.^53
Let me give an example of horizontal transmission. The doctrine of
metempsychosis is both Greek and Indian. The Greek and Indian doctrines
must be historically connected, because they correspond point for point.
Souls pass into the body of a higher or lower creature according to their
conduct in their previous incarnation; this cyclical process continues over
thousands of years; pure conduct will eventually lead to the divine state; the
eating of meat is to be avoided. Such a system is not reliably attested for any
other people. But we cannot regard it as Graeco-Aryan heritage, because it is
absent from the earliest stratum of Indian literature, the Vedas, and equally
from the earliest Greek literature, and it stands out in sharp contrast to earlier
Indian and Greek ideas about death. It appears as it were from nowhere in
both countries at about the same time, around the sixth century , and we
must suppose that it reached them from a common source, probably across
the Persian empire, even though no such doctrine is attested in Iran.^54
It is not only contacts between Indo-European peoples that come into
question. In some cases others may have functioned as middlemen. Certain
shamanistic elements common to Nordic and Indian myth may have come to
(^53) Cf. Feist (1913), 483; de Vries (1956), i. 64, 137, 171. (^54) Cf. West (1971), 61–7.
22 Introduction