Nineteen fourteen was a hot year for European militarism and Minoan art. The triumphal delusions of the imperial powers, which were shortly to lead into the deaths of tens of millions, had developed out of an unsupported yet firm conviction of European historical continuity: the ancient, civilized past glided into the technologically sophisticated present.

In its latest form, this fantasy had been expanding for about 200 years. It now arrived at an about- to- burst phase, and this bizarrely, with the small, impressive “discovery” of a modern- looking Minoan Snake Goddess on Crete. While the connection between this probable fraud and the start of the First World War may look a tad gratuitous to the uninitiated, in fact it seems to have contributed in subtle ways to the atmosphere of nationalistic arrogance sweeping the European landscape in the early decades of the last century— to a European and later American patriotic fatalism that proved as adept at justifying international slaughter as in stimulating questionable aesthetic pleasures.

The Snake Goddess itself was an ivory and gold statuette unearthed at Knossos, or, as is far more likely, fabricated in a twentieth- century Cretan restorers’ workshop. It swiftly made its way to England on board the ominously named Minotaur, whence it almost immediately— and with perhaps a touch more grimness— left Europe altogether and crossed the Atlantic to come to rest at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, arriving on July 28, or one month after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and on the same day as the Austro- Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia.

An international yet nationalistic tocsin might as well have sounded. In Boston, a fine- tuned publicity machine began humming away, primed by over a decade's worth of other less magnificent “discoveries” of millennia- old “Snake Goddesses” in the ruins of the Minoan capital. Articles and photographs hailed this newest Cretan find in The Times (of London and New York), the Illustrated London News and mass- circulation magazines in England, America and Europe.