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Professor W.S. Milner
HISTORY OF GREECE
FOR BEGINNERS
HISTORY OF GREECE
FOR BEGINNERS
BY
B: P(URY, M.A.
HON. I.ITT.D. OXON. AND DURHAM ; HON. LL.D. EDINBURGH AND GLASGOW:
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES,
ST. PETERSBURG ; FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN,
AND OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; "REGIUS
PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
MAC MILL AN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1907
First Edition 1903. Reprinted 1904, 1905, 1907
3)5 • £95 I
NOTICE
THIS short history is an abridgment of my History of Greece (1900), and few changes have been made except those which were rendered necessary by the excisions. The work of abbreviation and revision was carried out by another hand, and it seems to me to have been skilfully done. The question occurred to us whether the first chapter, which deals with such uncertain matter, might not be omitted altogether, but we decided to retain it in an abridged shape, on the ground that it might interest boys reading Homer.
J. B. B.
January 1903.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE
SECT. PAGE
1. Greece and the Aegean •....••• *
2. Aegean Civilisation (3rd Millennium H.C.) . . .4
3. Inferences from the Relics of Aegean Civilisation . . 1 5
4. The Greek Conquest .....••• 20
5. Expansion of the Greeks to the Eastern Aegean ... 23
6. The Later Wave of Greek Invasion 28
7. Homer .......•••• 35
8. Political and Social Organisation of the Early Greeks . . 38
9. Fall of Greek Monarchies and rise of the Republics . . 42 IO. Phoenician Intercourse with Greece 43 n. Greek Reconstruction of Early Greek History ... 45
CHAPTER* II
p THE EXPANSION OF GREECE */
1. Causes and Character of Greek Colonisation •. . -49
2. Colonies on the Coasts of the Euxine, Propontis, and North
Aegean ......•••• 52
3. Colonies in the Western Mediterranean • • • • 55
4. Growth of Trade and Maritime Enterprise .... 64
5. Influence of Lydia on Greece ...... 67
6. The Opening of Egypt and Foundation of Cyrene . . 69
7. Popular Discontent in Greece . . . . • • 71
vii
vni HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAPTER III
7 GROWTH OF SPARTA. FALL OF THE ARISTOCRACIES
SECT. PAGE
1. Sparta and her Constitution ...... 74
2. Spartan Conquest of Messenia ...... 79
3. Internal Development of Sparta and her Institutions . . 82
4. The Supremacy and Decline of Argos. The Olympian Games 86
5. Democratic Movements. Lawgivers and Tyrants . . 88
6. The Tyrannies of Central Greece ..... 92
7. The Sacred War. The Panhellenic Games ... 97
CHAPTER IV-
THE UNION OF ATTICA AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
1. The Union of Attica ..... 100
2. Foundation of the Athenian Commonwealth . . . 102
3. The Aristocracy in the Seventh Century . . . .104
4. The Legislation of Solon and the Foundation of Democracy . 109
CHAPTER V
GROWTH OF ATHENS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY
1. The Conquest of Salamis . . . . . .j . 115
2. Athens under Pisistratus . . . . . . .116
3. Growth of Sparta, and th^ Peloponnesian League . . 121
4. Fall of tlie Pisistratids and Intervention of Sparta . .123
5. Reform of Cleisthenes . . . ^ . . . .126
6. First Victories of the Democracy . . . . . .130
CHAPTER VI
THE ADVANCE OF PERSIA TO THE AEGEAN
1. The Rise of Persia and the Fall of the Lydian Kingdom . 132
2. The Persian Conquest of Asiatic Greece. Polycrates of Samos I ^6
3. The First Years of Darius. Conquest of Thrace .
CONTENTS ix
CAGE
The Ionic Revolt against Persia . Jr .... 141 5 Second and third European Expeditions of Darius. Battle
of Marathon . 144
6. Struggle of Athens and Aegina . .... 151
7. Growth of the Athenian Democracy ..... 152
8. Athens to be a Sea- Power . . . . . . 154
CHAPTER VII
THE PERILS OF GREECE. THE PERSIAN AND PUNIC INVASIONS
1. The Preparations and March of Xerxes \ .... 156
2. Preparations of Greece, « . . . . . .159
3. Battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium f . . . . 160
4. Battle of Salamis ......... 165
5. Consequences of Salamis .... . . 170
6. Preparations for another Campaign . . . . .171
7. Battle of Plataea . . . „ 173
8. Battle of Mycale and Capture of Sestos . . .178
9. Gelon Tyrant of Syracuse . . . . . . .180
10. Syracuse under Hieron ....... 182
CHAPTER .VIII
E S
THE FOUNDATION OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE
1. The Position of Sparta and Career of Pausanias . . . 185
2. The Confederacy of Deios ..... . . 188 %
3. The Fortification of Athens and the Piraeus . . . . 190*
4. Ostracism and death of Themistocles . . . . . 193*^
5. The Confederacy of Delos becomes an Athenian Empire . i94
6. Policy and Ostracism of Cimon ...... 197
-^__ CHAPTER IX
THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF PERICLES
1. The Completion of the Athenian Democracy . . . 200
2. War of Athens with the Peloponnesians .... 203
X HISTORY OF GREECE
SECT. |.A,,K
3. Conclusion of Peace with Persia ...... 209
4. Athenian Reverses. The Thirty Years' Peace . . .210
5. The Imperialism of Pericles, and the Opposition to his Policy 21 1
6. The Restoration- of the Temples . . . . . 213
7. The Piraeus. Athenian Commercial Policy . . .218
8. The Revolt of Samos ........ 219
9. Higher Education. The Sophists . . . . .221
CHAPTER X
THE WAR OF ATHENS WITH THE PELOPONNESIANS (431-421 B.C.) /
1. The Prelude of the War ....... 223
2. General View of the War. Thucydides .... 227
3. 1 he Theban Attack on Plataea ' . . . . . . 228
4. The Plague ......... 229
5. The Siege and Capture of Platea ...... 232
6. Revolt of Mytilene ........ 234
f. Warfare in Western Greece. Tragic Events in Corcyra . 237
8. Nicias and Cleon. Politics at Athens ..... 238
9. The Athenian Capture of Pylos ...... 239
10. Athenian Expedition to Boeotia ...... 246
n. The War in Thrace. Athens loses Amphipolis . . . 247
12. Negotiations for Peace . . . . ... . 250
13. Battle of Amphipolis and Peace of Nicias .... 251
CHAPTER XI
THE DECLINE AND DOWNFALL OF THE ATHENIAN EMBIRE
t. New Political Combinations with Argos ... V 254
2. The Sicilian Expedition. First Operations in Sicily . . 257
3. Siege of Syracuse (414) B.C. ...... 261
4. The Second Expedition ....... 265
5. Consequences of the Sicilian Catastrophe .... 269
6. The Oligarchic Revolution . . . . . . .271
7. Fall of the Four Hundred. The Polity. The Democracy
Restored .......... 272
8. Downfall of the Athenian Empire . . . \J. 2""
9. Rule of the Thirty and Restoration of the Democracy .
CONTENTS x'i
CHAPTER XII
THE SPARTAN SUPREMACY AND THE PERSIAN WAR
SECT. PAGE
1. The Spartan Supremacy ....... 286
2. The Rebellion of Cyrus and the March of the Ten Thousand 287
3. War of Sparta with Persia ....... 294
4. Sparta at the Gates of the Peloponnesus (the "Corinthian
War") 296
5. The King's Peace ........ 301
CHAPTER XIII
THE REVIVAL OF ATHENS AND HER SECOND LEAGUE
1. High-handed Policy of Sparta ...... 303
2. Alliance of Athens and Thebes ...... 305
3. The Second Athenian League and the Theban Reforms . 307
4. The Battle of Naxos and the Peace of Callias . . . 308
5. Athens under the Restored Democracy .... 3^1
CHAPTER XIV
THE HEGEMONY OF THEBES
1. Jason of Pherae ; and the Battle of Leuctra .... 321
2. Policy of Thebes in Southern Greece, Arcadia, and Messenia 325
3. Policy and Action of Thebes in Northern Greece . . . 330
4. The Battle of Mantinea . . . . . . . . 334
CHAPTER XV
THE SYRACUSAN EMPIRE AND THE STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE
1. Carthaginian Destruction of Selinus and Himera . . . 338
2. Rise of Dionysius ........ 339
3. Punic Wars of Dionysius ....... 342
4. The Empire of Dionysius. His Death .... 343
5. Dionysius the Younger and Dion ...... 346
6. Timoleon .......... 350
Xli HISTORY OF GREECE
THE RISE OF MACEDONIA
SECT. PAGE
1. Philip II. of Macedonia ....... 352
2. Mausolus of Caria ........ 356
3. Phocis and the Sacred War ....... 358
4. The Advance of Macedonia ...... 362
5. The Peace of Philocrates ....... 366
6. Interval of Peace and Preparations for War (346-1 B.C.) . 370
7. Battle of Chaeronea ........ 374
8. The Synedrion of the Greeks. Philip's Death . . . 377
CHAPTER XVII.
THE CONQUEST OF PERSIA
1. Alexander in Greece and Thrace . ..... 382
2. Preparations for Alexander's Persian Expedition. Condition
of Persia .......... 386
3. Conquest of Asia Minor .....;. 388
4. Battle of Issus ......... 392
5. Conquest of Syria ........ 396
6. Conquest of Egypt ........ 402
7. Battle of Gaugamela, and Conquest of Babylonia . , . 403
8. Conquest of Susiana and Persis . ... . . . 407
9. Death of Darius ......... 410
10. Spirit of Alexander's Policy as Lord of Asia . . .411
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CONQUEST OF THE FAR EAST
1. Hyrcania, Areia, Bactria, Sogdiana ..... 413
2. The Conquest of India .... 421
3. Alexander's Return to Babylon ...... 435
4. Preparations for an Arabian Expedition. Alexander's Death 438
5. Greece under Macedonia ....... 439
6. The Episode of Harpalus and the Greek Revolt . . . 442
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE . 447
INDEX . 4 . , . 457
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG.
PAGE
1. Lion Gate (Mycenae) 9
2. Siege-scene on a silver vessel (Mycenae) . . . 12
3. Gem showing Female Dress . . . . . • J3
4. Troy, Sixth City M
5. The Argive Plain I?
6. Map of Greek Colonies in the Eastern Aegean 25
7. Gold Cup, with doves (Mycenae) . .28
8. Gem showing Female Dress (Mycenaean) . . 48
9. Map of Northern Greece 5°
10. Map of Greek Expansion in Propontis and Pontus . . 53 u. Coin of Potidaea ........ 55
12. Maj2_of Sicily and Magna Graecia . . 59
13. CoinofZancle 60
14. Coin of Himera .... .60
15. Coin of Syracuse . ........ 60
16. Coin of Taras ....... -63
17. Coin of Halicarnassus ..... • °9
18. Coin of Caulonia ....... 73
19. Coin of Lydia . . . . . • • • -74
20. Coin of Phocaea ..... 74
2 1 . Map of Peloponnesus ...... 80
22. Coin of CnosF.us ......... 85
23. Temple of Hera and Zeus at Olympia 87
24. Pillars of an old temple at Corinth 94
2;. Dipylon Vase, with ship (British Museum) .... 99
xiii
xiv HISTORY OF GREECE
KI«. PAGE
26. Coin of Athens ......... 100
27. Mag of Boeotia ......... 101
28. Map of Attica ......... 103
29. Athena and Poseidon on a vase painted by Amasis . . 114
30. Troops at Athens (vase of age of Pisistratus) . \/- • 118
31. Athena slaying a giant (from a pediment of the old temple at
Athens) ... ...... 121
32. Harmodius and Aristogiton . . . . . .127
33. Coin of Sardis ...... 132
34. Croesus on the pyre (Attic vase) .... 135
35. Coin of Samos ........ 137
36. Map_ of Marathon . . . . . . . .147
37. Map of Artemisium and Thermopylae ..... 162
38. Map for the Battle of Salamis 168
39- Map for the Battle of Plataea . . . . . 174
40. Coin of Gela ......... 180
41. Coin of Syracuse ........ 182
42. Helmet dedicated by Hiero (British Museum) . , . 183
43. Coin of Elis 188
44. Portrait head (of Cimon?) on a gem ..... 198
45. Bust of Pericles ......... 201
46. Coin of Thebes ......... 206
47. Coin of Cition ......... 209
48. Plan of the Athenian Acropolis . . . . . .215
49. Athena and Hephaestus, on the frieze of the Parthenon
(British Museum) 216
50. Map_of Athens and the Piraeus . 220
51. Coin of Elis . 222
52. Coin of Corcyra ......... 223
53. Plan of the Sieges of Pylos and Sphacteria . . . .241
54. Athena contemplating a stele (Acropolis Museum, Athens) . 253
55. Coin of Selinus ......... 258
56. Plan of Athenian and Carthaginian Sieges of Syracuse . 263
57. Coin of Eleusis 285
58. Coin of Trapezus 286
59. Mapjof the March of the Ten Thousand . 289
ILLUSTRATIONS XV
,,„.
60. Coin of Cniclus . . . . ..... 29°
Klis ......... 297
62. Daric ........... 3°2
63. Coin of Chalcidian League ....... 3°3
64. Coin of Kuboea ......... 3°7
65. Portrait head of Socrates ....... 3J3
66. Portrait head of Isocrates ....... 3J7
67. Plan of Position before the Battle of Leuctra, 371 B.C. . . 323
68. Coin of Messene ......... . 327
69. Coin of Amyntas ........ 331
70. Coin of Elis ......... 334
71. Coin of Syracuse ......... 33$
72. Coin of Acragas ...•••••• 33°
73. Map of the Dominions of Dionysius ..... 345
74. Alliance coin of Leontini and Catane . . . . • 351
75. Coin of Archqlaus 1 ......... 353
76. Coin of Philip II ......... 354
77. Coin of Mausolus ....•••• 357
78. Coin of Delphic Amphictiony .... . 359
79. Portrait head of Demosthenes ... . 364
80. Coin of Philippi ........ • 3Sl
8 1. Coin of Opuntian Locrians . . . . . • 3^1
82. Bust of Alexander the Great, British Museum . . . 383
83. Coin of Tarsus ......... 391
84. Plan of the Battle of Issus ....... 394
85. Coin of Sidon ........ -397
86. Plan of Tyre ......... 39s
87. Coin of Tyre ......... 399
88. Coin of Cyrene ......... 4°3
89. Propylaea of Xerxes at Persepolis ..... 4°9
90. Map cf Bactria and Sogdiana ...... 417
91. Map of North-Western India ...... 423
92. Plan of Battle of the Hydaspes ...... 427
93. Coin of Alexander ... • 434
/CHAPTER I THE BEGINNINGS! OF GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE
SECT. i. Greece and the Aegean. — The rivers and valleys, the mountains, bays, and islands of Greece will become familiar as our story unfolds itself. But it is useful at the very outset to grasp some general features which went to make the history of the Greeks what it was, and what otherwise it could not have been. The character of their history is so intimately connected with the character of their dwelling-places that we cannot conceive it apart from their land and seas. In a land of capes and deep bays and islands it was determined that waterways should be the ways of their expansion. They were driven as it were into the arms of the sea.
The most striking feature of continental Greece is the deep gulf which has cleft it asunder into two parts. The southern half ought to have been an island, — as its Greek name, " the island of Pelops," suggests, — but it holds on to the continent by a narrow bridge of land at the eastern extremity of the great cleft. Now this physical feature has the utmost significance for the history of Greece ; and its significance may be viewed in three ways, if we consider the existence of the dividing gulf, the existence of the isthmus, and the fact that the isthmus was at the eastern and not at the western end. i. The double effect of the gulf itself is
IE B
2 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
clear at once. It let the sea in upon a number of folks who would otherwise have been inland mountaineers, and in- creased enormously the length of the seaboard of Greece. Further, the gulf constituted southern Greece a world by itself; so that it could be regarded as a separate land from northern Greece. 2. But if the island of Pelops had been in very truth an island — if there had been no isthmus — there would have been from the earliest ages direct and constant intercourse between the coasts which are washed by the Aegean and those which are washed by the Ionian Sea. The eastern and western lands of Greece would have been brought nearer to one another, when the ships of trader or warrior, instead of tediously circumnavigating the Pelopon- nesus, could sail from the eastern to the western sea through the middle of Greece. The 'disappearance of the isthmus would have revolutionised the roads of traffic and changed the centres of commerce ; and the wars of Grecian history would have been fought out on other lines. How important the isthmus was may perhaps be best illustrated by a modern instance on a far mightier scale. Remove the bridge which joins the southern to the northern continent of America, and contemplate the changes which ensue in the routes of trade and in the conditions of naval warfare in the great oceans of the globe. 3. Again, if the bridge which attached the Peloponnesus to the mainland had been at the western end of the gulf, the lands along either shore of the inlet would have been accessible easily, and sooner, to the commerce of the Aegean and the Orient ; the civilisation of north-western Greece might have been more rapid and intense ; and the history of Boeotia and Attica, unhooked from the Pelo- ponnesus, would have run a different course.
The character of the Aegean basin was another determin- ing condition of the history of the Greeks. Strewn with count-less islaadssit seems meant to promote the intercourse of folk with folk. The Cyclades^pass- imperceptibly into
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 3
the isles which the Asiatic coast throws out, and there is formed a sort of island bridge, inviting ships to pass from Greece to Asia. The western coast of Lesser Asia belongs, in truth, more naturally to Europe than to its own con- tinent ; it soc n became part of the Greek world ; and the Aegean might be considered then as the true centre of Greece.
The west side of Greece too was well furnished with good, harbours. It was no long voyage from Corcyra to the heel of Italy, and the inhabitants of western Greece had a whole world open to their enterprise. But that world was barbarous in early times and had no civilising gifts to offer ; whereas the peoples of the eastern seaboard looked towards Asia and were drawn into contact with the immemorial civilisations of the Orient. The backward condition of western as contrasted with eastern Greece in early ages did not depend on the conformation of the coast, but on the fact that it faced away from Asia ; and in later days we find the Ionian Sea a busy scene of commerce and lined with prosperous communities which are fully abreast of Greek civilisation.
Greece is a land of mountains and small valleys ; it has fe,w plains of even moderate size and no considerable rivers. It is therefore well adapted to be a country nf separate com- munities, each protected against its neighbours by hilly rnirriers ; and the history of the Greeks is a story of small independent states. The political history of all countries is in some measure under the influence of geography ; but in Greece geography made itself pre-eminently felt, and fought along with other forces against the accomplishment of national unity. The islands formed states by themselves ; but, as seas, while like mountains they sever, may also, un- like mountains, unite, it was less difficult to form a sea than a land empire. In the same way, the Kills.,prpypnted the development oLa. brink teud^ traffic, while, as we have seen,
4 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
the broken character of the coast and the multitude of islands facilitated intercourse by water.
There is no barrier to break the winds which sweep over the Euxine towards the Greek shores. Hence the Greek climate has a certain severity and bracing quality, which promoted the vigour and energy of the people. Again, (Greece is by no means a rich and fruit-fn1 rnnnia-y. It has few well-watered plains of large size ; the cultivated valleys do not yield the due crop to be expected from the area ; the soil is good for barley, but not rich enough for wheat to grow freely. Thus the tillers of the earth had hard work. And the nature of the land had consequences which tended to promote maritime enterprise. On one hand, richer_Jands beyond the seas attracted the adventurous, especially when the growth of the population began to press on the means of support. On the other hand, it ultimately became necessary to supplement home-grown corn by whsaJL-i«fl- pnrj-pH frnm abroad. But if Demeter denied her highest favours, the vine and the olive grew abundantly in most parts of the country, and their cultivation was one of the chief features of ancient Greece.
SECT. 2. Aegean Civilisation (3rd Millennium B.C.). —It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at their destined task of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oldest known sanctuary of Zeus, their supreme god, is the oakwood of Dodona in Epirus. But it was specially in. TJisssaly, where the first Greek settlers were the Achaeans. that this race, living on the plains of Argos and the moun- tains round about it, fashioned legends which were to sink deep into the imagination of. Europe. Here they peopled Olympus, in whose shadow they dwelled, with divine inhabitants, so that it has become for ever the heavenly hill in the tongues of men. And here also they composed lays in the hexameter verse, that marvellous metre which is
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 5
probably of their invention. But the Achaeans were immigrants in Thessaly, having come from another home, in the mountains of Illyria : and their descendants migrated again, before the art of the hexameter was perfected in those lays sung at the banquets of their nobles, which give us in the Homeric literature our earliest picture of those ancient Aryan institutions which are common to ourselves and to the Greeks.
Moreover,
of the^ Aegean they found there a white race more advanced in_ civilisation th^n fr*Qnrig^1iMc This Aegean race, as it may be called, which, like the Ligurians in Italy or the Iberians in Spain, preceded the Aryan conqueror, was a race of traders, having intercourse with many lands. We have lately come to know a good deal of its life, from the remains of its civilisation, discovered at Troy and in the islands of Amorgos and Melos, and in Crete.
At the time when the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty were 2778-: reigning in Egypt, Qrgie was a land
munities, and was about to become, if it had not already become, a considerable sea power. It is probable that Cnossus was one of the strongest and richest settlements in Crete at the beginning of the second millennium. The remains of the palace, which in subsequent ages was trans- formed into a grander and more luxurious abode, have recently been dug out of the earth ; and its stones, on which the emblem of a double axe is inscribed, declare that the kings who dwelled therein were devoted to the worship of a great deity whose symbol was the double axe or lalrys.
It was from this gO<;l of thfi Iphryg that thP T.ahyrir^h nf
CrejTn legend .dpriverl J^ rp°^ ; and it seems probable that this palace on the hill of Cnossus was the original Labyrinth, afterwards converted by myth into the Daedalean maze which sheltered the Minotaur.
Modern research on the hill of Hissarlik, in the north-
6 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
west corner of Asia Minor, shows that in the same period a great city flourished on the hi]l_ofTrpy. It was built of sun-baked brick, and stood on the ruins of an older The brick city had three gates, and
towers protected the angles of its walls. Its inhabitants belonged to the stone and copper age ; bronze was still a rarity with them. But the palace, which can be traced, shows the same general ground -plan of a house as that which is described perhaps fifteen hundred years later in the poems of Homer. From an outer gate we pass through a courtyard, in which an altar stood, into a square preliminary chamber ; and from it we enter the great hall, in the centre of which was the hearth. Long before the Greeks came the Aegean race were building such houses as Homer tells of.
The great brick city was destroyed by fire, probably about 2000 B.C. ; and three other cities were reared and perished on that same site. Civilisation progressed ; bronze superseded stone tools, as tin was brought in more abun- dance from the west. We cannot trace the invasions and shiftings of the centres of power, but by about 1500 B.C. we find this material civilisation of the non- Aryan Aegean people existing in the Peloponnesus among Grecian folk. Its monuments of stone survive above ground after more than three thousand years : its objects of daily use and luxury have been unearthed from the houses of the dead. These records have been found specially ip-the -plain of the PeiuEonnjssiao— -Argos — at Tiryns, near the sea, and at Mycenae, which seems to have been the wealthiest and strongest city on the lands Hnrrlprjng _ r>n f^p Apgparij so that^£LoaiHr calls it "Goldpn Myrena.eT" and the name " Mycenaean " has been given to the whole civilisation to which the period of its greatness belongs.
Tiryns stands on a long low rock about a mile and a half from the sea, and the land around it was once a marsh. From north to south the hill rises in height, and was shaped by
i CREECH AND THF. IIKKOIC AGI 7
man's hand into three platforms, of which the southern and highest was occupied by the palace of the king. But the whole acropolis was strongly walled round by a structure of massive stones, laid in regular layers but rudely dressed, the crevices being filled with a mortar of clay. This fashion of building has been called Cyclopean from the legend that masons called Cyclopes were invited from Lycia to build the walls of Tiryns.
The stronghold of Mycenae, about twelve miles inland, at the north-eastern end of the Argive plain, was built on a hill which rises to 900 feet above the sea-level in a mountain glen. The shape of the citadel is a triangle, and the greater part of the wall is built in the same " Cyclopean " style as the wall of Tiryns, but of smaller stones. Another fashion of architecture, however, also occurs, and points to a later date than Tiryns. The gates and some of the towers are built of even layers of stones carefully hewn into rectangular shape. On the north-east side a vaulted stone passage in the wall led by a downward subterranean path to the foot of the hill, where a cistern was supplied from a perennial spring outside the walls. Thus the garrison was furnished with water in case of a siege. Mycenae had two gates. The lintel of the chief doorway is formed by one huge square block of stone, and the weight of the wall resting on it is lightened by the device of leaving a triangular space. This opening is filled by a sculptured stone relief represent- ing two lionesses standing opposite each other on either side of a pillar, on whose pedestal their forepaws rest. They are, as it were, watchers who ward the castle, and from them the gate is known as the Lion gate.
The ruins on the hill of Tiryns enable us to trace the plan of the palace of its kings. One chief principle of the construction of the palaces of this age seems to have been the separation of the dwelling-house of the women from that of the men, — a principle which continued to prevail
^8 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAI>. i
in Greek domestic architecture in historical times. The halls of king and queen alike are built on the same general plan as the palace in the old brick city on the hill of Troy and the palaces which are described in the poems of Homer. An altar stood in the men's courtyard (a^X^), which was enclosed by pillared porticoes; the portico (aiOova-a) which faced the gate being the vestibule of the house. Double-leafed doors opened from the vestibule into a preliminary hall (jr/joSo/ios) from which one passed through a curtained doorway over a great stone threshold (AuiVos ouSo's) into the men's hall (//.eyapov). In the midst of it was the round hearth — the centre of the house — encircled by four wooden pillars which supported the flat roof. The palace of Mycenae crowned the highest part of the hill, and its plan was, in general conception and in many details, alike. It was customary to embellish the walls by inlet sculptured friezes arid by paintings. A brilliant alabaster frieze, inset with cyanus or paste of blue glass, decorated the vestibule of the hall at Tiryns, and the men's halls in both palaces were adorned with mural pictures. i Besides their castle and palace, the burying-places of fhe kings of Mycenae are their most striking memorials. Close to the western wall, south of the Lion gate, the royal burial circle has been discovered, within which six tombs cut vertically into the rock had remained untouched by the hand of man since the last corpses were placed in them. Weapons were buried with the men, some of whose faces were covered with gold masks. The heads of the women were decked with gold diadems ; rich ornaments and things of household use were placed beside them. But a day came when this simple kind of grave was no longer royal enough for the rich princes of Mycenae, and they sought more imposing resting-places ; or else, as some believe, they were overthrown by lords of another race, who brought with them a new fashion of sepulchre. Nine
io HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
sepulchral domes, hewn in the opposite hillside, have been found not far from the acropolis. The largest of them is generally known as the " Treasury of Atreus," a name which arose from a false idea as to its purpose.
But besides the stately burying-places of the kings, the humbler tombs of the people have been discovered — square chambers cut into the rock. The town of Mycenae below the citadel consisted of a group of villages, each of which preserved its separate identity ; each had its own burying- ground. Thus My_cenae, and probably other towns of the age, repteseniexLan intermediate stag£_hetween— the-sullage and the city — a number of little communities gathered together in one place, and dominated by a fortress.
We have seen how in the royal graves on the castle hill treasures of gold, long hidden from the light of day, revealed the wealth of the Mycenaean kingdom. Treasures would perhaps have been found also in some of the great vaulted tombs if they had not been rifled by plunderers in subsequent ages. But for us the works of the potter, and the implements of war and peace fashioned by the bronze- smith, are of more value than the golden ornaments for studying this early civilisation ; and things of daily use have been found in the lowlier rock-tombs as well as in the royal sepulchres of hill or plain. From the implements which the people used, and also from the representations which artists wrought, we can win a rough picture of their dress, armour, and ornaments, and form an idea of their capacity in art.
Another memorial of this age, which possesses as great
historical interest even as the stronghold of Mycenae, is
the palace of Cretan Cnossus, of which the foundations
have recently been laid bare. In wealth and luxury the
I lords of Cnossus must have been at least as distinguished
las the lords of Mycenae; but between the Cretan mansion
and the Argive fortresses there is one difference which in
GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE
historian's eyes is of great significance. Nr)
like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, girt the royal residence of Cnossus ; it was "af^rH'fi^ pvrppt- _at- thp_gai-pg- This fact shows that the s<mercigns_of Cn^ssns were sea-kings ; thpir_jfrpp{rfh lay in thp[r ships The royal wealth was secured in a series of storerooms built side by side ; stone chests for treasure and large jars for storage have been found in abundance. And the kings kept accurate record and account of their possessions, for the art of writing was perfectly familiar in Crete in the days when she played the greatest part she was ever destined to play in the history of the world. Hundreds of written documents have been found in the Cnossian palace. The writing material was small tablets of clay, which were preserved in wooden boxes secured by seals. The writing, which is of linear character, cannot be read ; but it has been made out that about seventy signs were in common use.
The civilisation of the men whose monuments we havel been considering belonged to the age of bronze and' copper. Even in its later period iron was still so rare and costly that it was used only for ornaments — rings, for instance, and possibly for money. The arms with which the men of Mycenae attacked their foes were sword, spear, and bow. Their defensive armour consisted of huge helmets, probably made of leather ; shields of ox-hide reaching from the neck almost to the feet — complete towers of defence, but so clumsy that it was the chief part of a military education to manage them. The princes went forth to war in two-horsed war chariots, which consisted of a board to stand on and a breastwork of wicker. The fragment of a silver vessel (found in one of the rock-tombs of Mycenae) shows us a scene of battle in front of the walls of a mountain city, from whose battlements women, watching the fight, are waving their hands.
Men wore long hair, not, however, flowing freely, but
HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAP.
tied or plaited in tresses. In old times they let the beard grow both on lip and chin ; but the fashion changed, and in the later period, as we see from their pictures, they shaved the upper lip, and razors have been found in the tombs. Their garments were simple, a loin apron and a
FIG. 2. — Siege-scene on a silver vessel ; 8-shaped shield above in left corner (Mycenae).
cloak fastened by a clasp-pin ; in later times, a close-fitting tunic. High-born dames wore tight bodices and wide gown- skirts. Frontlets or bands round the brow were a distinction of their attire, and they wore their hair elaborately curled, or coiled high in rings, letting the ends fall behind. The ornaments which have been found in the royal tombs of
r GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 13
Mycenae show that its queens appeared in glittering gold array.
The remains at Mycenae. Tirvns. and Cnossus^ are, taken in their entirety, the rqpst impressive of the memorials- of a widespread ^ygrfln
tion. In the Peloponnesus no- where except at Tiryps and Mycenae have great fortresses or palaces been found ; but
SOme large Vaulted hill-tombs, Fl(i- 3--Gem showing Female Dress
on the same plan as those of the Argive plain, mark the existence of ancient principalities. The lords of Amyclae, which was the queen of the Laconian vale before the rise of Greek Sparta, hollowed out for themselves a lordly tomb, which, unlike the Treasury of Atreus, was never invaded by robbers. In this vault, among other costly treasures, were found the most precious of all the works of Mycenaean art that have yet been drawn forth from the earth : two golden cups on which a metal - worker of matchless skill has wrought vivid scenes of the snaring and capturing of wild bulls.
In Attica there are many relics. On the Athenian Acropolis there are a few stones supposed to belong to a palace of great antiquity, but we can look with more certainty on some of the ancient foundations of the fortress wall. This wall was called Pelargic or Pelasgic by the Athenians ; and it seems likely that the word preserves the name of the ancient inhabitants of the place, the Pelasgoi.
In Boeotia there are striking memorials. On the western shores of the great Copaic marsh a people dwelled, whose wealth was proverbial; and their city Orchomenus shared with Mycenae the attribute of "golden" in the Homeric poems. One of their kings built a great sepulchral vault under the hill of the citadel, and later generations took it
H
HISTORY OF GREECE
for a treasury. It approached, though it did not quite attain to, the size of the Treasure-house of Atreus itself.
But of all the cities which shared in the later bloom of Aegean culture, none was greater or destined to be more famous than that which arose on the southern side of the Hellespont, on that hill whereon five cities had already risen
FIG. 4. — Troy, Sixth City (view from east tower). Prehistoric wall on the left (Roman foundations on right).
and fallen. The new Troy, through whose glory the name of the spot was to become a household word for ever throughout all European lands, '"35 birlt ^n thf; IP^I^ ruins of {he older towns. The circuit of the new city was far wider, and within a great wall of well-wrought stone the citadel rose, terrace upon terrace, to a highest point. On that commanding summit, as at Mycenae, we must presume that the king's palace stood. The houses of which the
i GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 15
foundations have been disclosed within the walls have the same simple plan that we saw in the older brick city and in the palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns. The wall was pierced by three or four gates, the chief gate being on the south-east side, guarded by a flanking tower. The hnijders were mprp skilful than the masons of the ruder walls of the fortresses of Argolis ; and it is a question whether we are to infer that the foundation of Troy belongs to a later age, or that from the beginning the art of building was more advanced among the Trojans. But if Troy shows superior excellence in military masonry, its civilisation in other ways seems to have been simpler than that of the Argive plain. It im- ported indeed the glazed Mycenaean wares, and was in contact with Aegean civilisation. But Troy stands, in a measure, apart from the " Mycenaean " world — beside it, in contact with it, yet not quite of it. This was natural ; for in speech and race the Trojans stood apart. We know with full certainty who the people of Troy were ; we know that they were a Phrygian folk and spoke a tongue akin to our own.
SECT. 3. Inferences from the Relics of Aegean Civilisation. — Having taken a brief survey of the char- acter and range of the " Mycenaean civilisation." we come to inquire whether any evidence exists, amid these chronicles of stone and. clay, of gold and bronze, for determining the periods of its rise, bloom, and fall. In the first—pJarCr-iL }Wr»norc tr> ffrf» ^<y pf Krrmyji • the iron age had not begun. \Ico»*-rra.s stilL^a— «ite and precious metal in the later part Jof the period ; it was used for rings, but not yet for weapons. The iron age can hardly have commenced in Greece long before the tenth century ; and if we set the beginning of the bronze age at about 2000 B.C., we get roughlyjihe second millennium as a^delimitaHnn of thp pfiriod^withia-wliioh
The art of writing was known to the Cretans, but we can
16 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP, i
interpret neither their signs nor their language. But in Egypt, evidence has been discovered which teaches us in what centuries the potters of the Aegean made their wares and shipped them to distant shores. In the sixteenth century men of Aegean type bearing Mycenaean vases were represented on a wall-painting at Egyptian Thebes. At Gurob, a city which was built in the fifteenth century and destroyed two or three hundred years later, a number of " false-necked " jars imported from the Aegean have been found ; and they belong not to the earlier but to the later period of Mycenaean pottery.
But Egyptian evidence is found not only on Egyptian soil, but on both sides of the Aegean. Three pieces of porcelain, one inscribed with the name, the two others with the "cartouche," of Amenhotep III. of Egypt (before 1400 B.C.), and a scarab with the name of his wife, have been found in the chamber-tombs of Mycenae ; and a scarab of the same Amenhotep was discovered in the burying-place of lalysus in Rhodes. -Jit would follow that in the fifteenth century at latest the period of the chamber-tombs and the vaulted tombs began.
The joint witness of these and other independent pieces of evidence proves that the civilisation of which Mycenae and Cnossus were principal centres was flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century.
Such was the world which the Greeks had come to share, and soon to transform, on the borders of the Aegean Sea. It was a world created by folks who belonged to the European race which had been from of old in possession of this corner of the earth. Greek civilisation, it is well to repeat, was simply a continuation and supreme development >of that more primitive civilisation of which we caught glimpses before the bronze age began. There is no reason to suppose that these peoples were designated by any common name ; there were doubtless many different peoples
i8 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
with different names, which are unknown to us. We know that there were Pelasgians in Thessaly and in Attica; tradition suggests that the Arcadians were Pelasgians too. But it is probable that all these peoples, both on the main- land of Greece and in the Aegean islands, belonged to the same non-Aryan race, — a dark-haired stock, — which also included the Mysians, the Lydians, the Carians, perhaps the Leleges, on the coast of Asia Minor.
There seems little doubt that this prehistoric Aegean world was composed of many small states. Of the relation of these states to one another, of the political events of the period, we know almost nothing ; but the eminent position of " golden " Mycenae herself seems to be established. Her comparative wealth is indicated by the treasures of her tombs, which exceed all treasures found elsewhere in the Aegean. But her lords were not only rich ; their power stretched beyond their immediate territory. This fact may be inferred from the road system which connected Mycenae with Corinth and must have been constructed by one of her kings. Three narrow but stoutly built highways have been traced, the two western joining at Cleonae, the eastern going by Tenea. They rest on substructions of "Cyclopean" masonry ; streams are bridged and rocks are hewn through ; and as they were not wide enough for waggons, the wares of Mycenae were probably carried to the Isthmus on the backs of mules.
There was an active sea-trade, i" thp Aegean — a sea-trade which reached to the Troad and to Egypt ; but there is no proof that Mycenae was a naval power. Everything points to CreJ.e as the queen of the seas in this age, and to Cretan merchants as the carriers of the Aegean world. The predominance of Crete survived in the memories of Minos, whom tradition exalted as a mighty sea-king who cleared the Aegean of pirates and founded a maritime power.
The discoveries made by excavation on the hill of Cnossus
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 19
show that this tradition embodied historical fact. The remains of the great palace testify, as we have seen, to a dynasty, lasting for two or three hundred years, of rich sea- kings. It is another question whether the founder of this Cnossian sea- power actually bore the name of Minos. While we recognise that the Greek tradition which made Minos the son of Zeus does not in any wise exclude his historical reality, we may be more inclined to think that he was originally the deity worshipped by the Cnossian monarchs, and that afterwards, overcome and deposed by Zeus, the god of the Greek invaders, he was conciliated with that great usurper by becoming his son. In any cage whether King Minos was man, or god, or both, some incidents in the legend which afterwards enveloped him owe their origins to local facts. The story of the labyrinth, which the wonderful craftsman Daedalus built for Minos, may have originated from the palace of the labrys or Double Axe, which Minos or his historical prototype inherited from older potentates. According to Greek tradition the famous Cretan king was not only the lord of a navy, but also a giver of laws. The story was that he went down into the cavern of Dicte, and there received laws from his father Zeus. Dicte lies in the uplands south of Cnossus, and the holy cave, wherein Zeus himself was said to have been reared, has recently been searched, and has given up the votive offerings which have reposed in its deep and dark recesses since they were first placed there in the days of Cnossian greatness, to which the traditions of Minos belong.
That period of Cnossian . power had begun by the commencement of the fifteenth, and endured into the thirteenth century, though perhaps hardly beyond. Tt seems at least probable that the destruction of Cnossus occurred before the Hpstryrrinn of Mjc,e,pap.
Of the power and resources of the Aegean states, the
20 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
monuments hardly enable us to form an absolute idea. They were small, as we saw ; it was an age
When men might cross a kingdom in a day.
The kings had slaves to toil for them ; the fortresses and the large tombs were assuredly built by the hands of thralls. One fact shows in a striking way how small were these kingdoms, and how slender their means, compared with the powerful realms of Egypt and the Orient. If Babylonian or Egyptian monarchs, with their command of slave-labour, "'had ruled in Greece, they would assuredly have cut a canal across the Isthmus and promoted facilities for commerce by joining the eastern with the western sea.
SECT. 4. The Greek Conquest. — It must not be supposed that the non-Aryan Aegean population was either exterminated or wholly enthralled by the Aryan Greek invaders. In the first place, the invaders were not wholly Aryan, though they had men of Aryan blood among them, from whom they had taken their institutions, some of their gods, and their tongue. The blond type, which existed in historical Greece and was always the rarer and more prized, no doubt came in with the invaders, but probably many of them were dark-haired and dark-skinned. They were all men of Aryan speech, not all of Aryan stock. Secondly, though the older tongues disappeared entirely, that is due to the character of the Greek language, which,- as later history shows, was vigorous and masterful. Wherever the Greeks settled it became the language of the land. And so, in Greece itself, sometimes the Greeks came in as conquerors, predominant both in numbers and power, sometimes merely as settlers ; but everywhere the country was Graecised. In Attica and Arcadia, for example, there was little disturbance of the original inhabitants, and tradi- tion preserved the fact in various myths pointing to the antiquity of the two races
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 21
Thus what took place was not a single irruption, but a gradual infiltration of a new stock into an older om-, carrying the introduction of a new language. By some cause the Greeks were being pressed southward from their home in the north-west of the Balkan peninsula ; while at the same time — perhaps from a kindred reason — the Phrygians and Trojans, who dwelt in western Macedonia and southern Thrace, were moving eastward and across the straits into Asia Minor. And this process, so far as the Greeks were concerned, extended on over centuries. The north-western lands of Epirus, Acarnania, and Aetolia were certainly lands of Greek speech many years before the con- quest of the Peloponnesus ; and probably about the same time the Macedonian Greeks settled on the lower waters of the Axius (perhaps pushing the Phrygians eastward), while the Achaeans and others found abodes injvhat was known later as Thessaly. But it need not be supposed that northern Greece was completely overspread by the Greeks before they began to pass into the southern peninsula. The first Greek settlers of the ^Peloponnesus must have crossed by boat from the north-west shore of the Corinthian Gulf; and the countries afterwards called Achaea, Elis, and Messenia, together with the Arcadian highlands, had at least begun to be hellenized sooner than Laconia and Argolis. The Greeks reached Argolis from the eastern side. From Thessaly the new people spread southward along the eastern coast to Euboea, .and the shores of Attica, to the C^cJad islands, and lastly to Argolis. The Dryopes and Phocians found habitation about Mount Oeta and Parnassus. Other settlers penetrated into the fertile mountain - girt country after- wards to be called Boeotia. Some of these were perhaps the Minyae, who inhabited Orchomenus in the heroic age, though again this may have been the name of the natives whom the Greeks hellenized. In Attica some of the settlements seem to have been made by a tribe
22 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
called lavones or Romans, and these 'settled in Argolis also.
All this was a long and gradual process. It needed many years for the Greeks to blend with the older inhabi- tants and hellenize the countries in which they settled. In eastern Greece, where the Aegean civilisation flourished, the influence was reciprocal. While the Greeks gradually im- posed their language on the native races, they learned from a civilisation which was more advanced "than their own. Things shaped themselves differently in different places, according to the number of the Greek settlers and the power and culture of the native people. In some countries, as seemingly in Attica, a small number of Greek strangers leavened the whole population and spread the Greek tongue ; thus Attica became Greek, but the greater part of its inhabi- tants were sprung, not from Greeks, but from the old people who lived there before the Greeks came. In other countries the invaders came in larger numbers, and the inhabitants were forced to make way for them. In Thessaly it would seem that the Greeks drove the Pelasgians back into one region of the country and spread over the rest themselves. We may say, at all events, that there was a time for most lands in Greece when the Greek strangers and the native people lived side by side, speaking each their own tongue and exercising a mutual influence which was to end in the fusion of blood, out of which the Greeks of history sprang.
No reasonable system of chronology can avoid the con- clusion that Greeks had already begun to settle in the area of Aegean civilisation, when the Aegean civilisation of the bronze age was at its height. . .Coming by driblets, they fell under its influence in a way which could not have been the case if they had swept down in mighty hordes, conquered the land by a few swoops, and destroyed or enslaved its peoples. It is another question how far the process of assimilation had already advanced when the lords of
GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 23
Mycenae and Orchomenus and the other royal strongholds built their hill-tombs ; and it is yet another whether any of these lords belonged to the race of the Greek strangers. To these questions we can give no positive answers ; but this much we know : in the twelfth century, if not sooner, the Greeks began to expand in a new direction, eastward beyond the sea ; and they bore with them to the coast of Asia the Aegean civilisation. That civilisation is what we find described in pictures of the heroic age of Greece.
SECT. 5, Expansion of the Greeks to the Eastern Aegean. — The first Greeks who sailed across the Aegean were the Achaeans and their fellows from the hills and plains of Thessaly and the plain of the Spercheus. Along with the Achaeans there sailed as comrades and allies the Aeolians. It was to the northern part of Asia Minor, the island of Lesbos and the opposite shores, that the Achaean and Aeolian adventurers steered their ships, and here they planted the first Hellenic settlements on Asiatic soil. The coast -lands of western Asia Minor are, like Greece itself, suitable for the habitations of a seafaring people. A series of river-valleys are divided by mountain chains which run out into promontories so as to form deep bays; and the promontories are continued in islands. The valleys of the Hermus and the Caicus are bounded on the north by a chain of hills which runs out into Lesbos ; the valley of the Hermus is parted from that of the Cayster by mountains which are prolonged in Chios ; and the valley of the Cayster is separated from the valley of the Maeander by a chain which terminates in Samos. The Greek invaders won the coast-lands from the Mysian natives and seized a number of strong places which they could defend, — such as Cyme, Aegae, Old Smyrna. They pressed up the rivers, and on the Hermus they founded Magnesia under Mount Sipylus. All this, needless to say, was not done at once. It must have been a work of many years, and of successive expeditions
24 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP, i
from the mother-country. The only event which we can grasp, by a fragment of genuine tradition lurking in a legend, is the capture of the Lesbian town of Bresa. The story of the fair-cheeked maid of Bresa, of whom Agamemnon robbed Achilles, is the memorial of the Greek conquest of Lesbos.
The Greeks made no settlement in the Troad. But in occupying the country south of the Troad, they came into collision with the great Phrygian town of Troy, or Ilios, as it was called from King Ilos, who perhaps was its founder. There were weary wars. Then the mighty fortress fell ; and we need not doubt the truth of the legend which records that it fell through Grecian craft or valour. The Phrygian power and the lofty stronghold of "sacred Ilios" made a deep impression on the souls of the Greek invaders ; and the strife, on whatever scale it really was, blended by their imagination with the old legends of their gods, inspired the Achaean minstrels with new songs. Through their minstrelsy the struggle between the Phrygians and the Greek settlers assumed the proportion of a common expedi- tion of all the peoples of Greece against the town of Troy ; and the Trojan war established itself in the belief of the Greeks as the first great episode in the everlasting debate between east and west.
It is to be observed that the Greeks and Phrygians in that age do not seem to have felt that they were severed by any great contrast of race or manners. They were conscious perhaps of an affinity in language ; and they had the same kind of civilisation. This fact comes out in the Homeric noemSjjyhere, though some specially Phrygian features are recognised, the Trojans might be a Greek folk and their heroes have Greek names ; J and it bears witness to the constant intercourse between the Achaean colonists and their Phrygian neighbours.
1 Paris ( Phrygian ) = Alexander (Greek) is an instance of a double name
Ill LUC
EASTERN AEGEAN
Stadia o loo 200 300 400 5<x
24 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
The Achagajjijffg.ve of emigration was succeeded by an Ionian wave, (lowing mainly from the coasts of Attica and Argolis, and new settlements were planted, south of the elder Achaean settlements. The two-pronged peninsula between the Hermus and Cayster rivers, with the off-lying isle of Chios, the valleys of the Cayster and Maeander, with Samos and the peninsula south of Mount Latmos, were studded with communities which came to form a group distinct from the older group in the north. Each group of settlements came to be called by a collective name. As the Achaeans were the most illustrious of the settlers in the north, one might expect to find the northern group known as Achaean. But by some accident, it befell that the Aeolian and not the Achaean name was selected to de- signate the northern division of the Greek settlements in Asia ; just as our own country came to be called not Saxony but England. The southern and larger group of colonies received the name of lavones — or lones, as they called themselves, when they lost the letter v. The lavones were, as we saw, a people who had settled on the coasts of Argolis and Attica, but there the name fell out of use, and perhaps passed out of memory, until on Asiatic soil it attained celebrity and re-echoed with glory to their old homes.
Of the foundation of the famous colonies of Ionia, of the order in which they \^ere founded, and of the relations of the settlers with the Lydian natives, we know little. Clazomenae and Teos arose on the north and south sides of the neck of the peninsula which runs out to meet Chios ; and Chios, on the east coast of her island, faces Erythrae on the mainland — Erythrae, "the crimson," so called from its purple fisheries, the resort of Tyrian traders. Lebedus and Colophon lie on the coast as it retires east- ward from Teos to reach the mouth of the Cayster ; and there was founded Ephesus, the city of Artemis. South of
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 27
Ephesus and on the northern slope of Mount Mycale was the religious gathering-place of the lonians, the temple of the Heliconian Poseidon, which, when once the lonians became conscious of themselves as a sort of nation and learned to glory in their common name, served to foster a sense of unity among all their cities, from Phocaea in the north to Miletus in the south. South of Mycale, the cities of Myus and Priene were planted on the Maeander. Then the coast retires to skirt Mount Latmos and breaks forward again to form the promontory, at the northern point of which was Miletus with its once splendid harbour. There was one great inland city, Magnesia on the Maeander, which must not be confused with the inland Aeolian city, Magnesia on the Hermus.
The Greek settlers brought with them their poetry and their civilisation to the shores of Asia. Their civilisation is revealed to us in their poetry, and we find that it resembles in its main features the civilisation which has been laid bare in the ruins of Mycenae and other places in elder Greece The Homeric poems show us, in fact, a later stage of the civilisation of the heroic age. The Homeric palace is built on the same general plan as the palaces that have been found at Mycenae and Tiryns, at Troy and in the Copaic lake. The blue inlaid frieze in the vestibule of the hall of Tiryns proves that the poet's frieze of cyanus in the hall of Alcinous was not a fancy ; and he describes as the cup of Nestor a gold cup with doves perched on the handles, such as one which was found in a royal tomb at Mycenae. There is indeed one striking difference in custom. The Mycenaean tombs reveal no trace of the habit of burning the dead, which the Homeric Greeks invariably practised ', while the poems ignore the practice of burial. In later times both customs existed in Greece side by side.
It follows, first, that by the twelfth century the Greeks had assimilated the civilisation of the Aegean. Secondly,
28
HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAP.
that whatever fate befell the Mycenaean civilisation in the mother-country, it continued without a break in the new Greece beyond the seas, and developed into that luxurious Ionian civilisation which meets us some centuries later.
FIG. 7. — Gold Cup, with doves (Mycenae).
New elements were added in the meantime ; intercourse with Phrygia and Syria, for example, brought new influences to bear; but the permanent framework was the heritage from the ancient folks of the Aegean.
SECT. 6. The Later "Wave of Greek Invasion.— rhe colonisation of the Asiatic coasts and islands extended
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 29
over some hundreds of years, and it was doubtless accelerated and promoted at certain stages of its progress by changes and dislocations which were happening in the mother- country. The ultimate cause of these movements, which affected almost the whole of Greece from north to south, was probably the pressure, of thc_LU^£uw&.
This downward pressure was fatal to Aetolia. . In the Homeric poems we see that " Pleuron by the sea and rocky Calydon" and the other strong cities of that region were abreast of the civilisation of the heroic age; and the Aetolian myth of Meleager and the hunting of the Caly- donian boar became a part of the heritage of the national legend of Greece. But in the later ages of Greek history we find Aetolia regarded as a half-barbarous country, the abode of men who speak indeed a Greek tongue, but have lagged ages and ages behind the rest of Greece in science and civilisation. We find the neighbouring countries in the same case. Epirus suddenly lapses into comparative barbarism, and the sanctuary of Dodona remains a lonely outpost. The explanation of this falling away is the irrup- tion and conquest of Illyrian invaders, who swamped Greek civilisation instead of assimilating it. The Aetolians and Epirots of history are mainly of Illyrian stock.
This invasion naturally drove some of the Greek inhabi- tants across the gulf, and Aetolian emigrants, made their way to the river 1'eneus, where they settled, took to themselves the name of Eleans or " Dalesmen," and gradually extended their power to the Alpheus. Their land was a tract of downs with a harbourless coast, and they never became a maritime power.
In Epirus the pressure of the Illyrians led to two movements of great consequence, the Thessalian and the Boeotian migration. There is nothing to show decisively that these two movements happened at the same time or we .:e connected with each other, A folk named Petthaloi,
30 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
but called by men of other dialects Thessaloi, crossed the hills and settled in the western corner of the land which is bounded by Pelion and Pindus. They" gained the upper hand and spread their sway over northern Argos. They drove the Achaeans southwards into the mountains of Phthia, and henceforward these Achaeans play no part of any note in the history of Greece. The Thessalian name soon spread over the whole country, which is called Thessaly to the present day. Cranon, Pagasae, Larisa, and Pherae became the seats of lords who reared horses and governed the surrounding districts. The conquered people were reduced to serfdom and were known as the Labourers (Penestai) ; they cultivated the soil, at their own risk, paying a fixed amount to their lords ; and they had certain privileges ; they could not be sold abroad or arbitrarily put to death. We know almost nothing of the history of the Thessalian kingdoms ; in later times we find the whole country divided into four great divisions : Thessaliotis, in the south-west ; Phthiotis of the Achaeans in the south ; Pelasgiotis, a name which records the survival of the Pelasgians, one of the older peoples ; and Histiaeotis, the land of the Histiaeans, who have no separate identity in history. All the lordships of the land were combined in a very loose political organisation, which lay dormant in times of peace ; but through which, to meet any emergency of war, they could elect a common captain, with the title of tagos.
But all the folk did not remain to fall under the thraldom imposed by the new lords. A portion of the Achaeans migrated southward to the Peloponnesus, probably accom- panied by their neighbours the Hellenes, who lived on the upper waters of the river Spercheus. The Achaeans and Hellenes together founded settlements along the strip of coast which forms the southern side of the Corinthian Gulf ; and the whole country was called Achaea. Thus there were
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 31
two Achaean lands, the old Achaea in the north, now shrunk into the mountains of Phthia, and the new Achaea in the south ; while in the land which ought to have been the greatest Achaea of all, — the Asiatic land in which the poetry of Europe took shape, — the Achaean name was merged in the less significant title of Aeolis.
The lands of Helicon and ( 'ithaeron experienced a similar shock to that which unsettled and changed the lands of Olympus and Othrys ; they were occupied by the Boeotians. According to the Greek account, the Boeotians lived in Thessaly and moved southward in consequence of the Thessalian conquest. They first occupied places in the west of the land which they were to make their own. From Chaeronea and Coronea they won Thebes, which was held by an old folk called the Cadmeans. Thence they sought to spread their power over the whole land. They spread their name over it, for it was called Boeotia, but they did not succeed in winning full domination as rapidly as the Thessalians succeeded in Thessaly. The rich lords of Orchomenus preserved their independence for hundreds of years, and it was not till the sixth century that anything like a Boeotian unity was established. The policy of the Boeotian conquerors, who were perhaps comparatively few in number, was unlike that of the Thessalians ; the con- quered communities were not reduced to serfdom.
West of Boeotia, in-the land of the Phocians amid the regions of Mount Parnassus, there were dislocations of a less simple kind. Hither came the rjojjjans, who probably belonged to the same " north-western " group of the Greek race as the Thessalians and Boeotians. But the greater part of them soon went forth to seek fairer abodes in distant places. Yet a few remained behind in the small, basin-like district between Mount Oeta and Mount Parnassus, where thev preserved the illustrious Dorian name throughout the course of Grecian history in which they never played a part-
32 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
it would seem that the Dorians also took possession of_ Delphi, the " rocky threshold " of Apollo, and planted some families there who devoted themselves to the service of the god.
The departure of the Dorians from the regions of Parnassus was probably gradual, and it was accomplished by sea. They built ships — perhaps the name of Naupactus, "the place of the shipbuilding," is a record of their ventures ; and they sailed round the Peloponnesus to the south-eastern parts of Greece. The first band of adventurers brought a new element to Crete, the island of many races ; others settled in Thera, and in Melos. Others sailed away east- ward, beyond the limits of the Aegean, and found a home on the southern coast of Asia Minor, where, surrounded by barbarians and forgotten by the Greek world, they lived a life apart, taking no share in the history of Hellas. But they preserved their Hellenic speech, and their name, the Pamphylians, recorded their Dorian origin, being the name of one of the three tribes by which the Dorians were every- where recognised.
The ne^ct conquests of the Dorians were in the Pelopon- nesus. There were three distinct conquests — the conquest of Luconiu, the conquest of Argolis, the conquest of Corinth. The Dorians took possession of the rich vale of the Eurotas, overthrew the lords of Amyclae, and, keeping their own Dorian stock pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects. It seems probable that the Dorian invaders who subdued Laconia were more numerous than the Dorian invaders elsewhere. The eminent quality which distinguished the Dorian from other branches of the Greek race was that which we call " character " ; and it was in Laconia that this quality most fully displayed and developed itself, for here the Dorian seems to have remained more purely Dorian.
In Argolis the course of things ran otherwise. The in-
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 33
vaders, who landed under a king named Temenos, had doubtless a hard fight ; but their conquest took the shape not of subjection but of amalgamation. The Argive state was indeed organised on the Dorian system, with the three Dorian tribes — the Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes ; but otherwise few traces of the conquest remained. It is to the time of this conquest that the overthrow of Mycenae may best be referred ; and here, as in the case of Amyclae, it seems probable that the old native dynasty had already given place to Greek lords. Certain is it that both Mycenae and Tiryns were destroyed suddenly and set on fire. Hence- forward Argos under her lofty citadel was to be queen of the Argive plain.
Dorian ships were also rowed up the Saronic Gulf. It was the adventure of a prince whom the legend calls Errant, fhe son of Rider ('AAr/rrys, son of ' ITTTTOTT/S). He landed in .the Isthmus and seized the high hill of Acrocorinth, the key of the peninsula. This was the making of Corinth. Here, as in Argolis, there was no subjection, no distinc- tion between the conquerors and the conquered. The geographical position of Corinth between her seas deter- mined for her people a career of commerce, and her history shows that the Dorians had the qualities of bold, and skilful traders. For a time Corinth seems to have been dependent on Argos, whose power was predominant in the eastern Peloponnesus for more than three hundred years.
From Argos the Dorians made two important settlements in the nortr^ on the river Asopus — Sicyon on its lower, and Phlius on its upper, banks. And beyond Mount Geraneia, another Dorian city arose, called Megara, " the Palace," on the commanding hill which looks down upon the western shore of Salamis.
The island, whose conical mountain in the midst of the Saronic waters is visible to all the coasts around, also
D
34 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
c. 8. became a Dorian land. Aegina was conquered by Dorian settlers from Epidaurus.
The conquest of the eastern Peloponnesus was followed by a second Dorian colonisation of the Asiatic coast. The bold promontories below Miletus, the islands of Cos^ and Rhodes, were occupied by colonists from Argolis, Laconia, Corinth, and Crete. On the mainland Halicarnassus was the most important Dorian settlement, but it was formed in concert with the Carian natives, and was JjJJlf Carian.
The Greek fringe of western Asia Minor was complete. It was impossible for Doris to creep round the corner and join hands with Pamphylia ; for the Lycians presented an insuperable barrier. The Lycians were not a folk of Aryan"* speech ; their language is related to the Carian. But, though Lycia was not colonised, the Aegean was now entirely within the Greek sphere, excepting only its northern ngfargin, where* Greek enterprise in the future was to find a difficult field.
Before the completion of the Greek occupation^of the western coast of Asia Minor, another migration left the shores of the Peloponnesus to seek a more distant home in Q^nriis.- Much about the same time the Phoenicians also 1 .began to plant settlements in the island, and some places seem to have been colonised jointly by Phoenicians and Greeks, just as on the coast of Asia Minor Greiks and ( 'arians mingled. The Greeks brought thetf^A.ege^ijpvilisa- tion, now in a decadent stage, with them, and abundant relics of it have been found. But a new Cypriot cultun^rose out of the intermingling of the two races ; and the Greeks, under Phoenician influence, became so zealous in the worship of Aphrodite that she was universally known as the Cyprian goddess.
As for the chronology of all these movements which went to the making of historical Greece, we must be content with approximate limits : —
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 37
Achaean colonisation Fall of Cnossus Fall of Troy
Beginnings of Ionian colonisation
™ • uth-ioth centuries.
1 nessanan conquest
Boeotian conquest
Dorian conquest of Crete and islands
Dorian conquest of eastern Peloponnesus,
Colonisation of Cyprus . . . nth century.
Continuation of Ionian colonisation . loth century.
Dorian colonisation of Asia Minor . loth century.
SECT. 7. Homer. — No Greek folk has laid Europe under a greater debt of gratitude than the Achaeans, for the Achaeans originated epic poetry, and the beginning of European literature goes back to them. But their European epic was created on Asiatic soil. They brought with them to Asia old poetic tales which figured the strife of night and day, of winter and summer, and all nature's great processes. And, stimulated by the toils and adventures of settling in a new land, they began to re-tell these old tales, changing them into historical myths. Achilles may be a sea-god, Agamem- non (who was worshipped as Zeus Agamemnon at Sparta) a god of the sky. Achilles is his foe, as he is also foe of Memrion, the sun-god, whom he slays. But an event of actual history is introduced as the motive of the wrath of Achilles. He is wrotti for the sake of Briseis, a Lesbian captain, and the taking of Bresa was an actual event.
When legend and history began to be blended, the element of history triumphed, and the nature-myth dropped out of sight. In the early days the Trojan story seems to have ended with the death of Hector. The original concep- tion was not the tale of a siege which found its consummation in the fall of the fortress ; the siege was rather the setting for the strife between Agamemnon and Achilles, between Achilles and Hector., uThe story of Troy's fall and the wooden hor§ftion of a Serention.
34 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
"erlt was, perhaps, in the eleventh century, at Smyrna or some other Aeolian town, that the nucleus of the Iliad was composed, on the basis of those older lays, by a poet whom \\v ma}- call the first Homer, though it is not probable that he was the poet who truly bore that name. He sang in the Achaean, or as it came to be called the Aeolian, tongue. His poem was the wrath of Achilles and the Death of Hector, and it forms only the smaller part of the Iliad. It was not till the ninth century that the Iliad really came into being. Then a poet of supreme genius arose, and it may be that he was the singer whose name was actually Homer. He composed his poetry in rugged ChjflS, and he gives us a local touch when he describes the sun as rising over the sea. He took in hand the older poem of the wrath of Achilles and expanded it into the shape and compass of the greater part of the Iliad. He is the poet who created one of the noblest episodes in the whole epic, Priam's ransoming of Hector. Tradition made Homer the author of both the great epics, the Odyssey as well as the Iliad. This is not probable. It can hardly have been before the eighth century that the old lays of the wandering of Odysseus and the slaying of the suitors were taken in hand and wrought into a large poem.
__^. We may suppose, then, that Homer lived at Chios in the ninth century, and was the true author of the Iliad. He did not give it the exact shape in which it was ultimately transmitted ; for it received from his successors in the art additions and extensions which were not entirely to its advantage. But it was he, to all seeming, who first con- ceived and wrought out the idea of a mighty epic. He was no mere stringer together of ancient lays. He took the motives, he caught the spirit, of the older poems ; he wove them -into the fabric of his own composition; but he was himself as divinely inspired as P.IV of the elder minstrels,
and he was the father of epic po
in which
l GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 37
listinguish an epic poem with a large argument from a .short lay. Ho and his successors sang in Ionia, and rewrote the poems in Ionian dialect, though sometimes for the sake of metre they were obliged to keep the Aeolian form. But in rewriting they sought to reproduce not the atmosphere of their own age but that which was familiar to the original writers of the lays. For example, the weapons and gear described are those of the bronze age ; but now and then a slip betrays the later hand. Unwit- tingly the poet of the Odyssey allows it to escape that he lived in the iron age, for such a proverb as ''the men: gleam of iron lures a man to strife " could not have arisen until iron weapons had been long in use.
In the course of time the Trojan war began to assume the shape of a great national enterprise. All the Greeks looked back to it with pride ; all desired to have some share in its glory. Consequently, a great many stories were invented in various communities for the purpose of bringing their ancestors into connexion with the Trojan expedition. And the Iliad was regarded as something of far greater significance than an Ionian poem ; it was accepted as a national epic, and was, from the first, a powerful influence in promoting _among the Greeks community of feeling and tendencies towards national unity. For two hundred years after its birth the Iliad went on gathering additions ; and the bards were not unready to make insertions, in order to satisfy the pride of the princely and noble families at whose courts they sang. Finally, in the seventh century, the Catalogue of the Greek host was composed, formulating explicitly the i^' Hellenic character of the expedition against Troy.
I hjg Odyssey, affiliated as it was to the Trojan legend, becaiv* a national epic too. And the interest awakened in Greece by the idea of the Trojan war was displayed by the composition of a series of epic poems, dealing with
38 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
those events of the siege which happened both before and after the events described in the Iliad, and with the subsequent history of some of the Greek heroes. These poems were anonymous for the most part and passed under the name of Homer. Along with the Iliad and Odyssey, they formed a chronological series which came to be known &s the Epic Cycle.
SECT. 8. Political and Social Organisation of the Early Greeks. — The Homeric poems give us our earliest glimpse of the working of those political institutions which lie at the base of all the constitutions of Europe. They show us the King at the head. But he does not govern wholly of his own will ; he is guided by a Council of the chief men of the community whom he consults ; and the decisions of the council and king deliberating together are brought before the Assembly of the whole people. Out of these three elements — King, ^Council, *and Assembly — the constitutions of Europe have grown ; here are the germs of all the various forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
But in the most ancient times this political organisation was weak and loose. The true power in primitive society was the family. When we first meet the Greeks they live together in family communities. Their villages are habitations of a genos — that is, c£.a clan, or family in a wide sense ; all the members being descended from a common ancestor and bound together by the tie of blood. Originally the chief of the family had the power of life and death over all who belonged to the family ; and it was only as the authority of the state grew and asserted itself against the comparative independence of the family, that this •ymver gradually passed away. But the village communit'-'es are not isolated and independent; they are part of ;i larger community which is called the phyle or tribe. TP.'e tribe- is the whole people of the kingdom, in the kingdom's
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 39
<
simplest form ; and the territory which the tribe inhabited was called its tie me (O/J/AOS). When a king became powerful and won sway over the demes of neighbouring kings, a community consisting of more than one tribe would arise.
It was usual for several families to group themselves together into a society called a phratra or brotherhood, which had certain common religious usages. The signifi- cance of the brotherhood is illustrated by Homer's description of an outcast, as one who has no " brothers " and no hearth.
The importance of ''ffie 'family is most vividly shown in the manner in which the Greeks possessed the lands which they conquered. The soil did not become the private property of individual freemen, nor yet the public property of the whole community. The kigg^if the tribe or tribes marked out the whole territory into parcels, according to the number of families in the community ; and the families cast lots for the estates. Each family then possessed its own estate ; the land belonged to the whole kin, but not to any particular member. The right of property in land seems to have been based, not on the right of conquest, but on a religious sentiment. Each family buried their dead within their own domain ; and it was held that the dead possessed for ever and ever the soil where they lay, and that the land round about a sepulchre belonged rightfully to their living kinsfolk, one of whose highest duties was to protect and tend the tombs of their fathers.
The king was at once the chief priest, the chief judge, and the supreme leader of the tribe. He belonged to a family which claimed descent from the gods themselves. His relation to his people was conceived as that of a protecting deity ; "he was revered as a gp/j in th1" ffemf " The kingship passed from sire to .sun, but it is probable that the people might refuse to accept a degenerate son who was unequal to the tasks that his father had fulfilled. The sceptred king had various privileges — the seat of honour at
40 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
feasts, a large and choice share of booty taken in war and of food offered at sacrifices. A special close of land was marked out and set apart for him as a royal dpmain, distinct from that which his family owned.
A king had no power to enforce his will, if it did not meet the approval of the heads of the people. He must always look for the consent and seek the opinion of the deliberative Council of the EJders. Certain families had come to hold a privileged position above the others — had, in fact, been marked out as nojjle, and claimed descent from' Zeus ; and the Council was composed of this nobility. In the puissant authority of this Council of Elders lay the germ of future aristocracy.
More important than either King or Council for the future growth of Greece was the Gathering of the people, out of which democracy was to spring. All the freemen of the. .tribe — all the freemen of the nation, when more tribes had been united — met together, not at stated times, but whenever the king summoned them, to hear and acclaim what he and his councillors proposed, — to hear and acclaim, but not to debate or propose themselves. As yet, the Gathering of the folk for purposes of policy had not been differentiated from the Gathering for the purpose of war. The Assembly was not yet distinguished as an institution from the army ; and if Agamemnon summons his host to declare his resolutions in the plain of Troy, such a gathering is the Agora in no figurative sense : it is in the fullest sense the Assembly of the people — the fellow institution of the Roman comitia, our own gemot.
Though the monarchy of this primitive form, as we find it reflected in the Homeric lays, generally passed away, and was already passing away when the latest lays were written, it survived in a few outlying regions which lagged 'behind the rest of the Hellenic world in political development. Thus the Macedonian Greeks in the lower valley of the
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 41
Axius retained a constitution of the old Homeric type till the latest times — the royal power continually growing.
The constitutional fabric of the Greek states was thus simple and loose in the days of Homer. In the later part of the royal period a new movement is setting in, which is to decide the future of Greek history. The city begins to emerge and take form and shape out of the loose aggregate of villages. The inhabitants of a plain or valley are induced to leave their scattered villages and make their dwellings side by side in one place, which would generally be under the shadow of the king's fortress. Sometimes the group of villages would be girt by a wall ; sometimes the protection of the castle above would be deemed enough. The move- ment was promoted by the kings : and it is probable that strong kings often brought it about by compulsion. But in promoting it they were unwittingly undermining the monarchical constitution, and paving the way for their own abolition. A city-state naturally tends to be a republic.
In the heroic age, then, and even in the later days when the Homeric poems were composed, the state had not fully emerged from the society. No laws were enacted and main- tained by the state. Those ordinances and usages (#e'^urres) which guided the individual man in his conduct, and which are necessary for the preservation of any society, were main- tained by the sanction of religion. There were certain crimes which the gods punished. But it was for the family, not for the whole community, to deal .with the shedder of blood. The justice which the king administered was really arbitration. A stranger had no right of protection, and might be slain in a foreign community, unless he was bound by the bond of guest friendship with a member of that com- munity, and then he came under the protection of Zeus the Hospitable (Xenios). Wealth in these ages consisted of herds and flocks ; the value of a suit of armour, for instance, or a slave was expressed in oxen. Piracy was a common
42 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
trade, as was inevitable in a period when there was no organised maritime power strong enough to put it down. So many practised this means of livelihood that it bore no reproach ; and when seamen landed on a strange strand, the natural question to ask them was : " Outlanders, whence come ye ? are ye robbers that rove the seas ? "
SECT. 9. Fall x>f Greek Monarchies and rise of the Republics. — Under_their kings the Greks had conquered the coastf°and islands of the
created the city-states These were the two great contribu- ions ^r~rnonarrhp~to Grecian history^ Throughout The greater part of Greece in the eighth_century the monarchies were declining and disappearing, and republics were taking their place. It is a transformation of which we can only guess at probable causes ; but we may be sure that the deepest cause of all was the change to city-life. In some cases jgoss misrule may have led to the violent deposition of a king ; in other cases, if the succession to the sceptre devolved upon an infant_or a paltry man, the nobles may have taken it upon themselves to abolish the monarchy. In some cases, the rights of the king might be strictly limited, in consequence of his seeking to usurp undue authority; and the imposition of limitations might go on until the office of king, although maintained in name, became in fact a mere magistracy in a state wherein the real power had passed elsewhere. Of the survival_qf monarchy in a limited form we have an example atfSparta"> of its survival as a
* ^-. — * —
mere magistracy, in the Archon Basileus at Athens.
Where the monarchy was abolished, the government passed into the hands of those who had done away with it — the noble families of the state. When the nobles assume the government and become the rulers, an aristocratic republic arises. Sometimes the power is won, not by the whole body of the noble duns, but by the clan to which the king belonged. This was the case at Corinth, where the
i GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 43
royal family of the Bacchiads became an oligarchy of the narrowest form.
At this stage of society, birth was the best general test of excellence that could be found, and the -rule of the nobles was a true aristocracy, the government of the most excellent. They practised the craft of ruling ; they were trained in it, they handed it down from father to son ; and though no great men arose — great men are dangerous in an aristocracy — the government was conducted with knowledge and skill. Close aristocracies, like the Corinthian, were apt to become oppressive. But on the whole the Greek republics flourished in the aristocratic stage, and were guided with eminent ability.
TJ^eJ^wp great achievements of the aristocratic age are^ the p1anhng "f G™»f>V cities in lands far beyond thjs_Jimits of the Aegean sea, and the elaboration of political machinery. The first of these is simply the continuation of the expansion of the Greeks around the Aegean itself; it was systematically promoted by the aristocracies, and it took a systematic shape. The creation of political machinery carried on the work of consolidation which the kings had begun when they gathered together into cities the loose elements of their states. When royalty was abolished or put, as we say, " into commission," the ruling families of the republic had to substitute magistracies tenable for limited periods, and had to determine how the magistrates were to be appointed, how their functions were to be circumscribed, how the provinces of authority were to be assigned. New machinery had to be created, to replace that one of the three parts of the constitution which had disappeared.
SECT. 10. Phoenician Intercourse with Greece.— The Greeks were destined to become a great seafaring people : but sea-trade was a business which it took them many ages to learn. Their occupation of the islands was accompanied by a decline of the maritime supremacy which
44 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
the Aegean islanders and especially the Cretans enjoyed ; and there was a long interval during which the trade of the Aegean with the east was partly carried on by strangers. The "men who took advantage of this opening were the Phoenicians of the city-states of Sidon and Tyre on the Syrian coast, men of that Semitic stock to which Jew, Arab, and Assyrian alike belonged. The Phoenicians doubtless had marts here and there on coast or island ; they certainly had a station at Abdera in Thrace. Their ships were ever winding in and out of the Aegean isles from south to north, bearing fair naperies from Syria, fine-wrought bowls and cups from the workshops of Sidonian and Cypriot silver- smiths, and all manner of luxuries and ornaments ; and this constant commercial intercourse lasting for two centuries is amply sufficient to account for all the influence that Phoenicia exerted upon Greece.
One inestimable service the Phoenicians are said to'liave rendered to Hellas and thereby to Europe. It is generally supposed that they gave the Greeks the most useful instru- ment of civilisation, the art of writing. If this theory is true, it was perhaps at the beginning of the ninth century, hardly later, that the Phoenician alphabet was moulded to the needs of the Greek language. In this adaptation the Greeks showed their genius. The alphabet of the Phoenicians and their Semitic brethren is an alphabet of consonants ; the Greeks added the vowels. They took some of the consonantal symbols for which their own language had no corresponding sounds, and used these superfluous signs to represent the vowels. We may suppose that the original idea was worked out in Ionia. In Ionia, at all events, writing was introduced at an early period and was perhaps used by poets of the ninth century. Certain it is that the earliest reference to writing is in the Iliad, in the story of Bellerophon, who carries from Argos to Lycia " deadly symbols (cr^ara Auypa) in a folded tablet." It
GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 45
simpler to suppose that the poet had in his mind a letter written in the Greek alphabet, than that he was think- ing of the old pictorial forms of writing which were employed in ancient times.
SECT. ii. Greek Reconstruction of Early Greek History. — We must now see what the Greeks thought of their own early history. Their construction of it has considerable importance, since their ideas about the past affected their views of the present. Mythic events were often the basis of diplomatic transactions ; claims to territory might be founded on the supposed conquests or dominions of ancient heroes of divine birth.
At first, before the growth of historical curiosity, the chief motive for investigating the past was the desire of noble families to derive their origin from a god. For this purpose they sought to connect their pedigrees with heroic ancestors, especially with Heracles or with the warriors who had fought at Troy. For just as the Trojan war came to be regarded as a national enterprise, so Heracles was looked on as a national hero. The consequence was that the Greeks framed their history on genealogies and determined their chronology by generations, reckoning three generations to a hundred years. It was the poets of the school of Hesiod in the seventh century who did most to reduce to a historical systernlKe legends of the heroic age. Their poems are lost, but they were worked up into still more complete and elaborate schemes by the prose logographers or " story- writers " of the sixth and fifth centuries, of whom perhaps the most influential were Hecataeus. of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos. The original works of the logographers have also perished, but their teaching has come down f^> us in tin; works of later compilers.
In the first place, it had to be determined how the various branches of the Greek race were related. As soon as the Greeks came to be called by the common name of
46 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
Hellenes, they derived their whole stock from an eponyrhous ancestor, Hellen, who lived in Thessaly. They had then to account for its distribution into a number of different branches. On the farther side of the Aegean, they saw, as it were, a reflection of themselves, their own children divided into three homogeneous groups — Aeolians, lonians, and Dorians. This gave a simple classification : three families sprung from Aeolus, Ion, and Dorus, who must evidently have been the sons of Hellen. But there was one difficulty. Homer's Achaeans had still to be accounted for ; they could not be affiliated to Aeolians, or lonians, or Dorians, none of whom play a part in the Iliad. Accordingly it was arranged that Hellen had three sons, Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus ; and Ion and Achaeus were the sons of Xuthus. It was easy enough then, by the help of tradition and language, to fit the ethnography of Greece under these labels ; and the manifold dialects were forced under three artificial divisions, Aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian.
The two great events on which everything turned and to which all other events were related were the Trojan war and tk-e Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus. A most curious version of the Dorian conquest was invented in Argos and won its way into general belief. The Temenids, the royal family of Argos, derived themselves from Aegimius, to whom the foundation of the Dorian institutions was ascribed. But as the fame and glory of Heracles waxed great, the Temenids desired to connect themselves to him. The>problem was solved with wonderful skill. The eponymous ancestors of the three Dorian tribes, Hyllus, Pamphylus, and Dyman, were naturally regarded as the sons of Aegimius. According to the new story Hyllus was really the son of Heracles. It was said that Heracles fought against the Lapiths for Aegimius who was the Dorian king in Thessaly, and that he received a third of the kingdom as a reward for his valiant service. On his death, his children were protected by
I GREECE AND THE HEROIC AGE 47
aius, who adopted Hyllus, and confirmed him in the •^sion of his father's third. The sons of Hyllus failed in their attempts to recover the possessions of Heracles in the Peioponnesus ; the achievement was reserved for his grandchildren, Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aris- ;ius. With a Dorian host, they crossed from Naupactus, under the guidance oi <•<! Artolian man
tunned Oxylus, and conquered all the Peloponnesus except Arcadia. They gave Elis to Oxylus for his pains. Those of the Achaean inhabitants of the peninsula, who did not migrate beyond the sea, retreated to the northern coast- land — the historical Achaea. The other three parts of the 1'eloponnesus fell by lot to the three brothers: Messenia to Cresphontes, Laronia lo Aristodemus, and Argos to Temenus. An explanation was added how there were two royal houses at Sparta. Aristodemus died prematurely, and ^ Laconia was divided between his twin sons Eurysthenes and— Procles.1
The details of the famous legends — the labours of Heracles, the Trojan ,lUr, the voyage of the Argonauts, the t.ile . if ( 'a< I.';,YU.:,, V ,c life of Oedipus, the two sieges of Thebes fe Argive Adrastus, and all the other familiar stories— ,-; to mythology and lie beyond our present scope. But we have to realise that the later Greeks believed them and discussed them as sober history. Two powerful generating forces of these historic myths had been the custom—of"" families and cities to trace their origin to a god, and the • instinct of the Greeks to 'personify places, especially towns, rivers, and springs. Then, when men began both to become keenly conscious of a community of race and language, and to speculate upon the past, attempts were naturally made to bring the various myths of ''Greece into
1 Agis and Eurypon, the ancestors of the royal families, the Agids and Eurypontids, were made by tradition sons of Eurysthenes and Procles.
48
HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAP. I
harmony; since they were true, they mu"t be reconciled.1 Ultimately they were reduced into chronological systems. which were based upon genealogical reckonings by genera tions. According to the scheme which finally won the widest acceptance,2 Troy was taken in 1184 B.C., and the Dorians invaded the Peloponnesus under the leadership of the Heradids in 1104 B.C., and both these dates accord more closely than one might expect, considering the method by which they were obtained, with the general probabilities of the case.
1 Yet in many cases inconsistent stories remained. Cadmus founded Thebes, according to current legend ; but in the Odyssey Thebes is built by Amphion and Zethus. Corinth was traced in one tale to Ephyre. daughter of Ocean ; in another, to Sisyphus, son of Aeolus.
2 The system of Eratosthenes (c. 220 B.C.). It included the follow'ng dates : —
Cadmus, B.C. 1313 Seven against Thebes, B.C. 1213
Pelops, „ 1283 Fa - of Troy „ 1184
Heracles, ,, 1:61-1200, Th^ssalian conquest, ~k
Argonatus, „ 1225 Bot'otian, ,, > ,, 1124
Aeo'ic migration, J
Return of Heraclidae, B.C. 1104
Death of Codrus, ;, 1044
Ionic migration, 1 044
Lycurgus at Sparta, ' 88=;
FIG. 8. —Gem showing Female Dress (Mycenaean).
CHAPTER II
/
THE EXPANSION OF GREECE
Causes and Character of Greek Colonisa- tion. --The i-xpansion of the Greeks beyond Greece proper and the coasts of the Aegean, the plantation of Greek cokmies on the shores of Thrace and the Black Sea, in Italy and Sicily, even in Spain and Gaul, began in the eighth and reached its completion in the sixth century. It was the •ontinuation of the earlier expansion over the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor, the details of which
unknown to us. The great difference between Greek ind Phoenician colonisation is that, while the Phoenicians lime't solely at promoting their commerce, and only a few >f t.ieir settlements, notably Carthage, became more than trading-stations or factories, Greek colonisation^ satis- other needs than desire of commercial profit. It was the expression of the adventurous spirit which has been
tically reflected in tHe legends of the "Sailing of the
> " and the " Home-coming of Odysseus " — the same spirit, not to be expressed in any commercial formula, which orompted English colonisation.
>Wrade, of course, sometimes paved the way. The iiK-rchants of Miletus, who adventured themselves in the
serous waters of the Kuxine, observed natural harbours and inviting sites for cities, and when they returned home
mised parties of settlers. The adventurous, the dis-
:HAP. n THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 51
on tented, and the needy were always to be found. But in
le case of the early colonies_jit least, it was not over-
>pulation of the land, so much as the nature of the land
stem, that drove men to emigrate. In various ways, under
e family system, which was ill-suited to independent and
\vnturous spirits, it would come about that individual
ambers were excluded from a share in the common estate,
d separajed_from~their kin. Snrh lack larujkjvere^ ripe for
onial enterprise. Again, the political circumstances of
ist Greek states in the eighth and seventh centuries
oured emigration. We have seen that at this time the
•cratio form of government generally prevailed. There
r«' strong inducements for men to leave their native city,
lere they were of little account, and to join in the founda-
n of a r\&\\r polis where they might, themselves rule. (-In
•t, political discontent was an immediate cause of Greek
colonisation.
herever the Greek went, he retained his customs and
age, and made a Greek " polis." It was as if a bit of
•e were set down on the remote shores of the Euxine
the far west on the wild coasts of Gaul or Iberia.
olony was a private enterprise, but the bond of kinship
he "mother-city" was carefully fostered. Intercourse
n colonies and the mother-country was specially kept
the great religious festivals of the year, and various
of filial respect were shown by the daughter to the
\ iL-n, as frequently befell, the colony determined
in turn to throw off a new shoot, it was the recognised
that she should seek the oecisl or leader of the
ts from the mother-city. Thus the Megarian colony,
uin, \vhen it founded its own colony, Mesembria,
ave sought an oecist from Megara. The political
nee of colonisation was sanctified by religion, and it
iry formality, whenever a settlement was to be
.o asi the approbation of the Delphic god. The
52 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAI-. n
most ancient oracular god of Greece was Zeus of Dodona. But the oak-shrine in the highlands of Epirus was remote to become the chief oracle of Greece, and central position of Delphi enabled the astute priests of Pythian Apollo to exalt the authority of their god as a ti prophet to the supreme place in the Greek world.^ * Colonisation tended in two ways to promoted unity^among the Greek peoples. By the wide diffusion o their race on the fringe of barbarous lands, it brought homt to them more fully the contrast between Greek barbarian, and, by consequence, the community of Greeks. The Greek dwellers in Asia Minor were nati impressed with their own unity in a way which was strang to dwellers in Boeotia or Attica, who were surrounded sides by Greeks, and were therefore alive chiefly to differences. In the second place, colonisation led to th association of Greeks of different cities. An oecist wh decided to organise a party of colonists could not alwa> find in his own city a sufficient number of men willing t take part in the enterprise. He therefore enlisted comrad. from other cities ; and thus many colonies were joint u. takings and contained a mixture of citizens of va
nationality.
SECT. 2. Colonies on the Coasts of the Eu> Propontis, and North Aegean.— A mist of obs< hangs about the beginnings of the first Greek cities > arose on the Pontic shores. Here Miletus was 1 Merchants carrying the stuffs which were manufacl the wool of Milesian sheep may have established stations along the southern coast. But the work c
j tion beyond the gate of the Bosphorus can harrlh
begun until the gate itself was secured by the « Megara, which sent out men, in the first part of t
677 B.C. century, to found the towns of Chalcedon and
This is the first appearance of the little state of .
54 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
Greek history ; and none of her contemporaries took a step that was destined to lead to greater things than the settle- ment on the Bosphorus. Westward from Byzantium they also founded Selymbria, on the north coast of the Propontis; eastward they established " Heraclea in Pontus," on the coast of Bithynia.
The enterprise of the Megarians stimulated Miletus. At the most northerly point of the southern coast a strait-necked cape forms two natural harbours, an attractive site for settlers, and here the Milesians planted the city Sinope. Farther east arose another Milesian colony, Trapezus. At the Bosphorus the Milesians had been anticipated by Megara, but they partly made up for this by planting Abydus on the Hellespont opposite Sestus, and they also seized a jutting promontory on the south coast of the Propontis, where a narrow neck, as at Sinope, forms two harbours. The town was named Cyzicus ; the tunny-fish on her coins shows what was one of the chief articles of her trade. Lampsacus, at the northern end of the Hellespont, once a Phoenician factory, was colonised by another Ionian city, Phocaea, about the same time.
In the more remote parts of the Euxine, Dioscurias and Phasis were founded in the fabled land of Colchis. On the Tauric Chersonesus or "peninsula" (now the Crimea), Panticapaeum was founded, and Heraclea, or Chersonesus, on the western side of the peninsula.
If Miletus and Megara took the most prominent part in extending the borders of the Greek world eastward of the Hellespont, the north-western corner of the Aegean was the special domain of Euboea. The coast of Macedonia, between the rivers Axius and Strymon, runs out into a huge three-pronged promontory. * Here Chalcis planted so many towns that the whole promontory was named Chalci- dice. Some of the chief cities, however, were founded by other states, notably Corinthian Potidaea on the
i! THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 57
westerly of the three prongs, which was called Pallene.
Sithonia was the central prong, and Acte, ending in Mount
Athos, the eastern. Some of the
colonies on Pallene were founded by
Eretria, and those along the coast
north of Acte by Andros, which was
dependent on Eretria. Hence we
may regard this group of cities as
Euboean, though we cannot regard it
as Chalcidian. On the west side of
the Thermaic Bay. two Euboean FIG. n. — Early coin of
'* Potidaea (obverse).
colonies were planted — Pydna and Poseidon riding; star
/ . ' [legend: II].
Methone — on Macedonian soil.
SECT. 3. Colonies in the Western Mediterranean.
—The earliest mention of Sicilian and Italian regions in literature is to be found in some later passages of trie Odyssey, which should perhaps be referred to the eighth century. By the end of the seventh century Greek states stood thick on the east coast of Sicily and round the sweep of the Tarentine Gulf. These colonies naturally fall into three groups :
(1) The Euboean, which were both in Sicily and in Italy.
(2) The Achaean, which were altogether on Italian soil.
(3) The Dorian, which were, with few exceptions, in Sicily.
The earliest navigation of the western seas was ascribed to Heracles, who reached the limits of the land of the setting sun, and stood on the ledge of the world looking out upon the stream of Oceanus. From him the opposite cliffs which form the gate of the Mediterranean were called the Pillars of Heracles. The earliest colony founded by Greek sailors in the western seas was said to have been Cyme on the coast of Campania. Tradition assigned to it an origin before 1000 B.C. But though we place its origin in the eighth century, the tradition that it was the earliest
54 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
Greek city founded in Italy may possibly be true. Chalcis, Eretria, and Cyme, a town on the eastern coast of Euboea, joined togethbr, and succeeded in establishing their colony Cyme on a rocky height which rises above the sea where the Italian coast is about to turn sharply eastward to encircle the bay of Naples. Subsequently they occupied the harbour, which was inside the promontory, and estab- lished there the town of Dicaearchia, which afterwards became Puteoli ; farther east they founded Naples, " the new city."
The solitary position of Cyme in these regions — for no Greek settlement could be made northward on account of the great Etruscan power, and there was no rival southward until the later plantation of Posidonia — made her influence both wide and noiseless. There are no striking wars or struggles to record; but the work she did holds an im- portant and definite place in the history of European civilisation. To the Euboeans of Cyme we may say that we owe the alphabet which we use to-day, for it was from them that the Latins learned to write. Again, the Cymaeans introduced the neighbouring Italian peoples to a knowledge of the Greek gods and Greek religion. Heracles, Apollo, Castor, and Polydeuces became such familiar names in Italy that they came to be regarded as original Italian deities. The oracles of the Cymaean Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo, were believed to contain the destinies of Rome.
The next settlement of the Euboean Greeks was on Sicilian, not Italian, ground. The island of Sicily is the centre of the Mediterranean ; it parts the eastern from the western waters. It has been thus marked out by nature as a meeting - place of nations ; and the struggle between European and Asiatic peoples, which has been called the " Eternal Question," has been partly fought out on Sicilian soil. There has been in historical times no native Sicilian power. The greatness of the island was due to colonisation
u THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 57
— not migration — from other lands. Lying as a connecting link between Europe and Africa, it attracted settlers from both sides.
The earliest inhabitants of the island were the Sicans. From them the island was called Sicania. The next comers were the Sicels, and as we find Sicels in the toe of Italy, we know that tradition correctly described the Sicilian Sicels as settlers from the Italian peninsula. The likeness of the names Sicel and Sican has naturally led to the view that these two folks were akin in race and language. But likeness of names is deceptive ; and the Greeks always carefully distinguished the Sican from the Sicel as ethnically- different. The Sicels, at all events, wrested from the Sicans the eastern half of the island, which was thus cut up into two countries — Sicania in the west, Sicelia in the east. At a very early time Sicania was invaded by a mysterious people named Elymians, probably of Iberian race. They occupied a small territory in the north-west of the island. Of these three peoples who inhabited this miniature continent, soon about to become the battlefield of Greek and Phoenician, the Sicels were the most numerous and most important.
At an early age merchants from Phoenicia planted factories on the coasts of the island. At first they did not make any settlements of a permanent kind — any that could be called cities. For Sicily was to them only a house to call at, lying directly on their way to the land of the farthest west, when they went forth to win the golden treasures of Tarshish and planted their earliest colony, Gades, outside the straits which divide Europe from Africa. Their next colonies were on the coast of Africa over against Sicily, and this settlement had a decisive influence on the destinies of the island. The settlements of Hippo and Utica, older than Carthage, were probably the parents of the more abiding Phoenician settlements in Sicily. In the east of the island the Phoenicians had no secure foothold ;
58 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP, n
they appeared purely in the guise of traders. Hence when the Greeks came and seriously set to work to plant true cities, the Phoenicians disappeared.
Sicilian, like Italian history, really opens with the coming of the Greeks. They came under the guidance of Chalcis and the auspices of Apollo. It was naturally on the east coast, which faces Greece, that the first Greek settlement was made, and it is to be noticed that of the coasts of Sicily the east is that which most resembles in character the coast-line of Greece. The site, which was chosen by the Chalcidians, and the lonians of Naxos who accompanied them, was not a striking one. A little tongue of land, north of Mount Aetna, was selected for the foundation of Naxos. Here, as in the case of Cyme, the Chalcidians who led the enter- prise surrendered the honour of naming the new city to their less prominent fellow-founders. A sort of consecra- tion was always attached to Naxos as the first homestead of the Hellenes in the island. To Apollo Archegetes an altar was erected on the spot where the Greeks first landed, — driven, as the legend told, by contrary winds, under Apollo's dispensation, to the Sicilian shores. It was the habit of ambassadors from old Greece, as soon as they arrived in Sicily, to offer sacrifice on this altar. In the fertile plain south of Aetna the Chalcidians soon afterwards founded Catane, close to the sea, and inland Leontini. These sites were wrested from the Sicels. The Chalcidians also won possession of the north-east corner, and thus obtained com- mand of the straits between the island and the main- land. Here Cymaeans and Chalcidians planted Zancle on a low rim of land, which resembles a reaping-hook (£ay/cAov), and gave the place its name. The haven is formed by the curving blade ; and when Zancle came in after-days to mint money she engraved on her coins a sickle representing her harbour and a dolphin floating within it. A hundred years later the city was transformed by the
6o
HISTORY OF GREECE
immigration of a company of Messenians, and ultimately the old local name was ousted in favour of Messana. From Zancle the Euboeans founded Himera, the only Greek city on the northern coast. It was important for Zancle that the land over against her, the extreme point of the Italian
FIG. 13. — Coin of Zancle, early (ob- verse). Harbour of Zancle, with a dolphin [legend : AANK (\auav)].
FIG. 14. — Coin of Himera, early (obverse). Cock.
peninsula, should be in friendly hands, and therefore the men of Zancle incited their mother-city to found Rhegion ; and in this foundation Messenians took part.
While this group of Chalcidian colonies was being formed in north-eastern Sicily, Dorian Greeks began to obtain a footing in south-eastern Sicily. The earliest of the Dorian cities was also the greatest. Syracuse, destined to be the head of Greek Sicily, was founded by Corinthian emigrants under the leadership of Archias before the end of the eighth century. Somewhere about the same time Corinth also colonised Corcyra ; the Ionian islands were half-way stations to the west. Tradition placed both foundations in the same year. But in both cases Corinth had to dispossess previous Greek settlers, and in both cases the previous settlers were Euboeans. Her colonists had to drive Eretrians from Corcyra and Chal- cidians from Syracuse.
FIG. 15. — Coin of Syracuse, early (obverse). Head of Arethusa ; dolphins [legend : 2YPA?02ION].
ii THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 61
The great Haven of Syracuse, with its island and its hill, formed the most striking site on the east coast, and could not fail to invite the earliest colonists. Chalcidians occupied the island of Ortygia (Isle of quails), and it is possible that the Corinthians did not supersede the Chalcidians till many years later.
At an early date Megarians also sailed into the west to find a new home. After various unsuccessful attempts to establish themselves, they finally built their city on the coast north of Syracuse, beside the hills of Hybla, and perhaps Sicel natives joined in founding the Sicilian 728 B. Megara. But, like her mother, the Hyblaean Megara was destined to found a colony more famous than herself. This settlement, which was to be the westernmost outpost of Greek Sicily, was Selinus, a town named of wild celery 628 B. (o-eAivoy), situated on a low hill on the coast. In the meantime the south-eastern corner was being studded gradually with Dorian cities. At the beginning of the seventh century, Gela was planted by Rhodian colonists with Cretans in their train. At a later time Camarina was 688 B. planted from Syracuse. 595 B-
The latest Dorian colony of Sicily was only less con- spicuous than the first. The Geloans sought an oecist from their Rhodian metropolis, and founded, half-way 581 B. between their own city and Selinus, the lofty town of Acragas, which soon took the second place in Greek Sicily and became the rival of Syracuse. It was perched on a high hill near the sea-shore. The small poor haven was at some distance from the town ; " flock-feeding Acragas " never became a maritime power.
In planting their colonies and founding their dominion in Sicily, the Greeks had mainly to reckon with the Sicels. In their few foundations in the farther west they had to deal with the Sicans. These older inhabitants were forced to retire from the coasts, but they lived on in their fortresses
62 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
on the inland hills. The island was too large and its character too continental to invite the newcomers to attempt to conquer the whole of it. With the Phoenicians the Greeks had no trouble. Their factories and temples had not taken root in the soil, and on the landing of a stranger who was resolved to take root they vanished. But they did not abandon the western corner of the island, where the Greeks made no attempt to settle. There they maintained three places which now assumed the character of cities. These were Panormus, Solus, and Motya. The Elymian country lay between Motya and Panormus. The chief town of the Elymians, Segesta (which in Greek mouths became Egesta), was essentially a city, while Eryx, farther west, high above the sea but not actually on it, was their outpost of defence. On Eryx they worshipped some goddess of nature, soon to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite. The Elymians were on good terms with the Phoenicians, and western Sicily became a Phoenician corner. While the inland country was left to Sicel and Sican, the coasts were to be the scene of struggles between Phoenician and Greek.
The name by which we know the central of the three great peninsulas of the Mediterranean did not extend as far north as the Po in the time of Julius Caesar, and originally it covered a very small area indeed. In the fifth century Thucydides applies the name Italy to the modern Calabria — the western of the two extremities into which the peninsula divides. This extremity was inhabited, when the Greeks first visited it, by Sicels and Oenotrians, on whose seaboard the Achaeans of the Peloponnesus, probably towards the close of the eighth century, found a field for colonisation. The first colonies which they planted in Italy were perhaps Sybaris and Croton, famous for their wealth and their rivalry. Sybaris, on the river Crathis, in an unhealthy but most fruitful plain, soon extended her
ii THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 63
dominion across the narrow peninsula, and, founding the settlements of Laos and Scidros on the western coast, commanded two seas. Thus, having in her hands an overland route to the western Mediterranean, she could forward to her ports on the Tyrrhenian sea the valuable merchandise of the Milesians, whom Chalcidian jealousy excluded from the straits between Italy and Sicily. Thus both agriculture and traffic formed the basis of the remark- able wealth of Sybaris, and the result was an elaboration of luxury which caused the Sybarite name to pass into a proverb. Posidonia, famous for its temples and its roses, was another colony on the western sea, founded from Sybaris.
A good way to the south of Sybaris you come to Croton. 703 B.C. Like Sybaris, Croton widened its territory and planted colonies of its own. Caulonia, perhaps also a Crotoniate settlement, was the most southerly Achaean colony and was the neighbour of the western Locri.
The Achaeans and Locrians had more in common with each other than either had with the Dorians, and we may conveniently include Locri in the Achaean group. Thus the southern coast of Italy would have been almost a homogeneous circle if- a Dorian colony had not been established in a small sheltered bay at the extreme north point of the gulf, to which it gave the name it still bears — Taras or Tarentum. Taras was remark- able as the only foreign settlement ever made by the greatest of all the Dorian peoples. Laconian settlers occupied the
, , j j FIG. 16. — Coin of Taras,
place at some unknown date and made fifth century (reverse).
_r V T-\ • 'i T«I -i c Taras on a dolphin ;
of it a Dorian city. I he prosperity of shell [legend: TAPAS]. the Tarentines depended partly on the cultivation of a fruitful territory, but mainly on their manu- facturing industry. Their fabrics and dyed wools became
64 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
renowned, and their pottery was widely diffused. Taras in fact must be regarded as an industrial rather than as an agricultural state.
Thus the western coast of the Tarentine gulf was beset with a line of Achaean cities, flanked at one extremity by Western Locri, on the other by Dorian Taras. The common feature, which distinguished them from the cities settled by the men of Chalcis and Corinth, was that their wealth depended on the mainland, not on the sea. Their rich men were landownersj not merchants ; it was not traffic but rich soil that had originally lured them to the far west. These cities, with their dependencies beyond the hills, on the shores of the Tyrrhenian sea, came to be regarded as a group, and the country came to be called Great Hellas (Magna Graecia).
SECT. 4. Growth of Trade and Maritime Enter- prise.— While the colonies were politically independent of their mother-states, they reacted in many ways on the mother-country. We have seen how the system of family property was favourable to colonial enterprise. L^But the colonists, who had suffered under that system, were not likely to introduce it in their new settlements, and thus the institution of personal landownership was probably first established and regulated in the colonies. Their example reacted on the mother-country, where other natural causes were also gradually undermining the family system. In the first place, as the power of the state grew greater the power of the family grew less ; and the prestige of the head of the family, overshadowed by the power of the state, became insensibly weaker. In the second place, it was common to assign a portion of an estate to one member of the family, to manage and enjoy the undivided use of it; and the natural tendency must have been to allow it on his death to pass to his son on the same conditions. It is clear that such a practice tended to the ultii
n THE EXPANSION7 OF GREECE 65
establishment of personal proprietorship of the soil. Again, side by side of the undivided family estate, personal pro- perties were actually acquired. At this period there was much wild unallotted land, "which wild beasts haunt," especially on the hill-slopes, and when a man of energy reclaimed a portion of this land for tillage, the new fields became his own, for they had belonged to no man. We can thus see generally how inevitable it was that the old system should disappear and the large family estates break up into private domains.
The Boeotian poet Hesiod has given us a picture of rural
life in Greece at this period. He was a husbandman c. 700 B.(
himself near Ascra, where his father, who had come as a
stranger from Cyme in Aeolis, had put under cultivation a
strip of waste land on the slopes of Helicon. The farm was
divided between his two sons, Perses and Hesiod, but in
unequal shares ; and Hesiod accuses Perses of winning the
larger moiety by bribing the lords of the district. But
Perses managed his farm badly and did not prosper. Hesiod
wrote his poem the Works to teach such unthrifty farmers as
his brother true principles of agriculture and economy. His
view of life is profoundly gloomy, and suggests a condition
of grave social distress in Boeotia. This must have been
mainly due to the oppression of the nobles, "gift-devouring"
princes as he calls them. The poet looks back to the past
with regret. The golden age, the silver, and the bronze,
have all gone by, and the age of the heroes who fought at
and mankind is now in the iron age, and "will never
by day or night from weariness and woe." The poem
minute directions for the routine of the husbandman's
\\nrk, the times and tides of sowing and reaping, and the
other labours of the field, the fashion of the implements of
id all this is accompanied by maxims of proverbial
wisdom. Hesiod has a great significance as the first spokes-
•mmon folk. In the history of Europe, his is
F
66 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
the first voice raised from among the toiling classes and claiming the interest of mankind in their lot. It is a voice indeed of acquiescence, counselling fellow-toilers to make the best of an evil' case ; the stage of revolt has not yet been reached. But the grievances are aired, and the lords who wield the power are exhorted to deal just judgments, that the land may prosper.
Boeotia was always an unenterprising country of husband- men, and Hesiod had no sympathy with trade or foreign venture. But the growth of trade was the most important fact of the time, and here too the colonies reacted on the mother-country. By enlarging the borders of the Greek world they invited and facilitated the extension of Greek trade and promoted the growth of industries. Hitherto the Greeks had been mainly an agricultural and pastoral people ; many of them were now becoming industrial. They had to supply their western colonies with oil and wool, with metal and pottery, and they began to enter into serious competition with the Phoenician trader.
Greek trade moved chiefly along water-ways, and this is illustrated by the neglect of road-making in Greece. There were no paved roads, even in later times, except the Sacred Ways to frequented sanctuaries, like that from Athens to Eleusis and Delphi, or that from the sea-coast to Olympia. Vet the Greeks were still timorous navigators, and it was deemed hazardous to sail even in the most familiar waters, except in the late summer. Hesiod expresses the general fear of the sea : " For fifty days after the solstice, till the of the harvest, is the tide for sailing; then yoti will not wreck your ship, nor will the sea wash down your < unless Poseidon or Zeus wills their destruction." I
Seafaring states found it needful to build warships for protection against pirates. The usual type of the. Greek warship was the penteconter or "fifty-oar. narrow galley with twenty-five benches, on each of which
n THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 67
t\v» oursmen sat. The penteconter hardly came into use in Greece before the eighth century. The Homeric Greeks had only smaller vessels of twenty oars. But before the end of the eighth century a new idea revolutionised shipbuilding in Phoenicia. Vessels were built with two rows of benches, one above the other, so that the number of oarsmen and the speed were increased without adding to the length of the ship. The " bireme," however, never became common in Greece, for the Phoenicians had soon improved it into the " trireme," by the superposition of another bank of oars.1 The trireme, propelled by 170 rowers, was ultimately to come into universal use as the regular Greek warship, though for a long time after its first introduction by the Corinthians the old penteconters were still generally used. But pente- conters and triremes alike were affected by the new invention of the bronze ram on the prow — a weapon of attack which determined the future character of Greek naval warfare.
The Greeks believed that the first regular sea-fight between two Greek powers was fought before the middle of the seventh century between Corinth and her daughter-city 664 B.C. Corcyra. If the tradition is true, we may be sure that the event was an incident in the struggle for the trade with Italy and Sicily and along the Adriatic coasts. The chief com- petitors, however, with Corinth in the west were the Euboean cities, Chalcis and Eretria. In the traffic in eastern seas the island city of Aegina, though she had no colonies of her own, took an active part, and became one of the richest mercantile states of Greece.
SECT. 5. Influence of Lydia on Greece. — The Greeks of the Asiatic coast were largely dependent, for good or evil, on the adjacent inland countries. The inland trade added to their prosperity, but at any moment if a strong barbarian
1 The secret of building this kind of galley has been lost. Modern shipwrights cannot reproduce a trireme. In later times the Greeks built ships of many banks — five, ten, even forty.
68 HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAP.
power arose their independence might be gravely menaced. . At the beginning of the seventh century active intercourse was maintained between the Greeks and the kingdoms of Phrygia and Lydia. The Phrygian king Midas was said in later times to have dedicated a throne to the god of Delphi.
A considerable Phrygian element had won its way into Lydia, and had gained the upper hand. But the Phrygian rulers had become degenerate, and Gyges, a native Lydian, succeeded in slaying the king Candaules and seizing the crown. This revolution ushered in a new period for the Lydian kingdom. Gyges extended his power northward to the shores of the Propontis. But he also designed to make the Aegean his western boundary and bring the Greek cities under .his lordship. He pressed down the valley of the Hermus against Smyrna; down the valley of the Cayster .against Colophon ; down the valley of the Maeander against Miletus and Magnesia. It may be that Colophon was actually captured, and perhaps Magnesia ; but the other cities beat back the enemy. The poet Minnermus sings how a warrior, perhaps his own grandfather, wrought havoc in the ranks of the Lydian horsemen in the plain of the Hermus.
But the plans of Gyges were suddenly interrupted by an invasion of barbarians. The Cimmerians, driven out by Scythians from their original home about Lake Maeotis (where the Crimea still keeps their name) came to the southern shore of the Black Sea and defeated the Milesian colonists of Sinope. Starting from Sinope, they attacked Lydia, and Gyges was driven to seek help and protection from Assurbanipal of Assyria. The invasion was repelled, and Gyges sent their chief in chains to Nineveh. But the Cimmerians renewed their attack ; Gyges was slain in battle, and Sardis his capital was taken. Then the barbarians swooped down on the Greek cities. Ephesus repelled them,
ii THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 69
but the temple of Artemis outside the walls was burnt down. Magnesia on the Maeander was destroyed.
But the danger passed away. Ardys succeeded Gyges on the Lydian throne, and he not only finally drave out the Cimmerians from the land, but perhaps succeeded in extending his power into Cappadocia, as far as the Halys.
In the meantime Lydia had made an invention which revolutionised commerce. It is to Lydia that Europe owes the invention of coinage. The Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians made use of weighed gold and silver as a medium of exchange, a certain ratio being fixed be- tween the tWO metals. FlG. ,7._Coin of Halicarnassus sixth century. A piece Of Weighed Obverse : ^gj'egend : *AN02 EMI 2EMA].
metal becomes a coin
when it is stamped by the state, and is thereby warranted to have its professed weight and purity. This step was first taken in Lydia, where the earliest money was coined some- where about the beginning of the seventh century, probably by Gyges. Miletus and Samos soon adopted the new in- vention, which then spread to other Asiatic towns. Then Aegina and the two great cities of Euboea instituted monetary systems, and by degrees all the states of Greece gave up the primitive custom of estimating value in heads of cattle, and most of them had their own mints. As gold was very rare in Greece, not being found except in the islands of Siphnos and Thasos, the Greeks coined in silver. This invention, coming at the very moment when the Greeks were entering upon a period of great commercial activity, was of immense importance, not only in facilitating trade, but in rendering possible the accumulation of capital.
SECT. 6. The Opening of Egypt and Foundation of Cyrene. — Thus the merchants of Miletus and her
70 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
fellows grew rich. They were the intermediaries between Lydia and the Mediterranean ; while the Lydians carried Greek wares to the interior parts of Asia Minor and the far east. Their argosies sailed to the far west, as well as to the coasts of the Euxine. But a new field for winning wealth was opened to them, much about the same time as the invention of coinage revealed a new prospect to the world of commerce. The jealously guarded gates of Egypt were un- barred to Greek trade. •
:. 672 B.C. The greatest exploit of the Assyrian monarch Assarhad- don was the conquest of Egypt. The land had been split up into an endless number of small kingdoms, and the kings continued to govern as vassals of Assyria. But one of the kings, Psammetichus of Sais, in Lower Egypt, probably of
:. 645 B.C. Libyan stock, revolted against Assurbanipal, and, with the help of Ionian and Carian mercenaries, brought the whole of Egypt under his sway. Psammetichus and his successors completely departed from the narrow Egyptian policy of the Pharaohs. They opened Egypt to the trade of the world and allowed Greeks to settle permanently in the country.
The Milesians founded a factory on the western or Canobic channel of the Nile, not very far from Sais ; and around it a Greek city grew up, which received the name of Naucratis, "sea-queen." This colony became the haven of all Greek traders. At Naucratis the Milesians, the Samians, and the Aeginetans had each their own separate quarter and their own sanctuaries : all the other Greek settlers had one common enclosure called the Hellenion, girt by a thick brick wall and capable of holding 50,000 men. Here were their market-place and their temples. All the colonists of Naucratis were Greeks of the Asiatic coast, excepting alone the Aeginetans.
Egypt, as we see, offered a field not only for traders but for adventurous soldiers. At Abusimbel in Upper Egypt we have a relic of the Greek mercenaries, who accompanied
ii THE EXPANSION OF GREECE 71
King Psammetichus II. in an expedition against Ethiopia. 594-585 SOUK: of thrin scratched their names on the colossal statues B'C- of the temple ; and the very triviality of this relic, at such a distance of time, perhaps makes it the more interesting.
Not long after Egypt was thrown open to Greek trade, there arose to the west of Egypt a new Greek city. Civil dissension in the island of Thera led to an emigration ; c. 630 i and the exiles, having increased their band by Cretan adventurers, sailed for the shores of Barca. They founded their abiding settlement about eight miles from the sea near an abundant spring of water, on two white hills, which commanded the encompassing plain. The city was named Cyrene, and it was the only Greek colony on the coast of Africa which attained to eminence and wealth. The man who led the island folk to their new home became their king; his name seems to have been Aristoteles, but he took the strange name of Battus, which is said to mean "king "in the Libyan language, while its resemblance to the Greek word for " stammer " gave rise to the legend that Battus I. stammered in his speech. His son was Arcesilas ; and in the line of the Cyrenaean kings Battus and Arcesilas succeeded each other in alternation.
SECT. 7, Popular Discontent in Greece. — The advance of the Greeks in trade and industry produced many consequences of moment for their political and social development. The manufactures required labour, and a sufficient number of free labourers was not to be had. Slaves were therefore indispensable, and they were imported in large numbers from ~ Asia* Minor and Thrace and the coasts of the Euxine. The slave-trade became a profitable enterprise, and the men of Chios made it their chief pursuit. The existence of household slaves, generally war-captives, such as we meet in Homer, was an innocent institution which would never have had serious results; but the new organise^ slave-system which began in the seventh century
72 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
was destined to prove one of the_most— fatal causes of disease and decay to tlie_£laies_a£. Greece.
At first the privileged classes of the aristocratic republics benefited by the increase of commerce ; for the nobles were themselves the chief speculators. But the wealth which they acquired by trade undermined their political position. For, in the first place, their influence depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily declined. In the second place, wealth introduced a new political standard ; and aristocracies resting on birth tended to transform themselves into aristocracies resting on wealth. As nobility by birth cannot beTacquired, whereas wealth can, such a change is always a step in the direction of democracy.
The poorer freemen at first suffered. Their distress and discontent drove them into striving for full political equality, and in many cases they strove with success. The second half of the seventh century is marked in many parts of Greece by struggles between the classes ; and the wiser and. better o7 the nobles begarTlhemselves to see the necessity of extending political privileges to their fellow- citizens. The centralisation in towns, owing to the growth of industries and the declining importance of agriculture, created a new town population, and doubtless helped on the democratic movement.
In this agitated period lived a poet of great genius, Archilochus of Paros. It has been truly said that Archilo- chus is the first Greek " of flesh and blood " whom we can grasp through the mists of antiquity. Son of a noble by a slave mother, he tried his luck among' the adventurers who went forth to colonise Siris in Italy, but he returned having won an experience of seafaring ^which taught him to sing of the " bitter gifts of Poseidon " and the mariner's prayers for " sweet home." Then he took part in a Parian
Tin: KM :'CK 73
colonisation of Thasos, and was involved in party struggles which rent the island. It must have been at Tha^os that he witnessed an eclipse of the sun at noontide, which he describes ; and this gives us, as a date in the Thasian period of his life, the 6th of April 648 ».c. — the first exact date we have bearing on the histoTy~of Greece. He announces that he is " the servant of the lord of battle, and skilled in the delicious gift of the Muses." But when he fought in a war which the islanders waged with the Thracians of the opposite coast, he ran for his life and dropped his shield ; " Never mind," he said, " I will get me another as good." Poor, with a stain on his birth, tossed about the world, soured by adversity, Archilochus in his poetry gave full expression to his feelings, and used it to utter his passionate hatred against his enemies, such as the Parian Lycambes, for instance, who refused him his daughter Neobule.
Fie. 18.— Karly coin of Caulonia. Obverse : Apollo with bough, small figure on his arm ; stag [legend : KAYAOJ. Reverse : incuse back of these figures.
FIG. 19. — Electron coin of Lydia (beginning of seventh century). Obverse : striated surface. Reverse : oblong and two square sinkings.
FIG. 20. — Early coin of Phocaea (obverse). Seal (phoke).
CHAPTER III
GROWTH OF SPARTA. FALL OF THE ARISTOCRACIES
SECT. i. Sparta and her Constitution. — The. Dorian sfttfjprs fromjJag-i"**rfh) who took possession of the valley of the Eurotas, established themselves in a number of village communities throughout the land, and bor^ the nsimc^rrf Lacedaemonjans. In the course of time, a city-state grew np in tfrpjr rnirkf and won dominion over the_rest. The city was called Snarja, and took the dominant place in Laconia which had been formerly held by Amyclae. The other Lacedaemonian communities were called the perjoeci. or " ^wreiWc rrninrl ahonr " the ruling city, and, though they were free and managed their local affairs, they had no political rights in the Spartan, state. The chief—buuiens which fell on them were military service and the farming of the royal domains.
The^S par tans were always noted for their conservative. spirit. Hence we find in their constitution survivals of an old order of things which existed in the days of Homeric poetry. The most striking of these surviv.ala~ttaio royalty ; Sparta was nominally ruled by^kings.
This conservative spirit of the Spartans rendered them anxious to believe that their constitution had existed from very ancient times in just the same shape and feature which it displayed in the days of recorded history. There can be little doubt, however, that the -Spartan state, like most
74
HAP. in GROWTH OF SPARTA 75
other states, passed through the stages of royalty and aristocracy ; and that the final form of the constitution was the result of a struggle between the nobles and the people. The remarkable thing was that throughout these changes hereditary kingship survived.
The machine of the Spartan constitution had four pnrts : the Kings, the r.ounril, the Assemhiyj and the .Ephojs. The first three are the original institutions, common to the whole Greek race ; the Ephors were a later institution, and were peculiar to Sparta.
We saw that towards the end of the Homeric^ period the powers of the king were limited, and that this limited monarchy then died out, sometimes leaving a trace behind it, perhaps in the name of a magistracy — like the king- archon at Athens. In a few places it survived, and Sparta was one of them. But, if it survived here, its powers were limited in a twofold way. It was limited not only by the other institutions of the state, but by its own dual character. For there were two kings at Sparta, and had been since the memory of men. The kingship passed from father to son in the two roynl ^'"^ of the Agids and Eurypontids. Of the religious, military, and judicial functions, which belonged to them and to all other Greek kings, the Spartan kings lost some and retained others.
They were pn'vil^^H fr> hold certain priesthoods ; they offered solemn sacrifices for the city every month to Apollo ; they prepared the necessary sacrifices before warlike ex- peditions and battles ; they were priests, though not the sole priests, of the community.
They were the supreme commander; of jhe__ajmy. It is recorded that they had originally the right of making war upon whatever country they chose, though in historical times war and peace were decided not by the kings, but
by the Assembly. But in thp fipld^fh^y wrrn r
thev_ had unlimited right of life and death ; and they
76 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
had a bodyguard of a hundred men. It is clear that these large powers were always limited by the double nature. of the kingship. But at a date shortly before 500 B.C. it was defined by law that only one of the kings, to be chosen on each occasion by the people, should lead the army in time of war, and moreover they were~made responsibl£_to_the community for their conduct in their campaigns.
But while they enjoyed this supreme position as high- priests and leaders of the host^ they could hardly be considered judges any longer. The right of dealing out dooms like the Homeric Agamemnon had passed away from them ; only in special cases had they still judicial or legal powers.
There were rojyal domains in the territory of the perioed from which the kings derived their revenue. But they also had perquisites at public sacrifices ; on such occasions they were (like Homeric kings) given the first seat at the banquet, were served first, and received a double portion of every- thing, and the bides of the slaughtered beasts. The king was succeeded by his son ; if there were no children, the succession fell to the nearest male kinsman, who was like- wise the regent in the case of a minority.
The gerontes or elders^whom we find in Homer advis- ing the king and also acting as judges have developed at Sparta into the gerusia. This Council consisted of thirty members, including the two kings, who belonged to it by virtue of their kingship. The other twenty-eight must_ be over sixty years of age, so that the Council was a body of elders in the strict sense of the word. They held their office un- Ijfe and were chosen by acclamation in the general assembly of citizens, whose choice was supposed to fall on him whose moral merits were greatest; member- ship of the Council was described as a " prize for virtue." The Council prepared matters which were tocorne before the Assembly ; Jt exercised, as an advising body, a greaL,
GROWTH OF SPARTA 77
iniiuciK.v. ^ pn1;tirftf- nffniri ; and it formed a court ^>f justice for criminal cases.
But though the Councillors were elected by the people, they were not elected from the people. Only rnen of Jhe \ noble families could he rfrospn members nf fhp f.r>npril \ And thus the Council formed a.n oligarchical ^)^rp^nf i"-tV"* Lacedaemonian r.nnshtntinn.
Ev^ry Spartan who had passed his /thirtiet^Jkear was^u member <gf the Apella, or Assembly o,f rif1zpnt;] which met every month. In old days, no doubt, it was summoned by the kings, but in historical times we find that this right has passed to the ephors. The assembly did not debate, but having heard the proposals ofTcfngs or ephors, signified its will by acclimation. If it seemed doubtful to which opinion the rfTajority of the voices inclined, recourse was had to a division. The people elected the members of the Gerusia, the ephors and other magistrates ; determined questions of war and peace and foreign politics ; and decided disputed successions to the kingly office. Thus, theoretically, the Spartan constitution was a democracy. No Spartan was excluded from the apella of the people ; and the will of the people expressed at their apella was supreme. "To the people^Tuns an old statute, " shall belong the decision and the power." But the same statute granted to t'le executive authorities — "the elders and magistrates" — a ' ^ower which restricted this apparent supremacy of the people. It al- . lowed them " to be seceders, if the people make a crooked decree." It seems that the will of the people, declared by their acclamations, did not receive the force of law, unless it were Jhen formally proclaimed before the assembly was formally dissolved. If the elders and magistrates did not approve Qf_the_decisipn_nf the majority of the assembly, they could annul the proceedings by refusing to proclaim it "seceding" and dissolving the meeting, without waiting for the regular dissolution by king or ephor.
7 8 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
The five^pphflrs were the most characteristic part of the poliricalconsufution of Sparta. The origin of the office is veiled in obscurity ; it was supposed to have been instituted in the first half of the eighth century. But it cannot have been till the seventh century that the ephors won their great political power. They must have won that power in a conflict between the nobility, who governed in conjunction with tHe kings, and the people, who had no share in the government. In that struggle the^ kings represented the cause of the nobility, while the ephors were the repre- sentatives_of ,the- peopje. This is clear from the oaths which were every month exchanged between the kings and the ephors. The king swore that he would observe the laws of the state in discharging his .royal functions ; the ephor that he would maintain the royal power undiminished, so long as the king was true to his oath. In this ceremony we have the record of an acute conflict between the government and people. The democratic character of the ephorate appears from the fact that any Spartan might bejelected. The mode of election was practically equivalent to an election by lot.
The ephors entered upon their office at the beginning of the Laconian year. As chosen guardians__Qf_the rights of the people, they were called_jopj6n_to ^ watch jealously the con3ucTbf the kings. With this object two ephors always accompanied the king on warlike expeditions. They had the power of indicting the king and summoning him Jo appear bcfoiv them. The judicial functions which the kings lost passed^partly_taJjie_£ph.ors, partly .to the_ Council. The ephors_wf r^ Jj^_g]jj]j^rP ^ H vil-r^i i tt ; the Council, as we have seen, formed the supremejpriminal court. But in the case of the Perioeci the ephors were criminal judges also. They were moreover responsible for the strict maintenance of the order and discipline of the Spartan state, and, when they entered upon office, they issued a proclamation to the citizens to " shave their upper lips and obey the laws.''
in GROWTH OF SPARTA 79
i. 2. Spartan Conquest of Messenia. — In the
growth of Sparta the first and most decisive step was the conquest of Messenia. The southern portion of the Peloponnesus is divided into two parts by Mount Taygetus. Of these, the eastern part is again severed by Mount Parnon into two regions: the vale of the river Eurotas, and the rugged strip of coast between Parnon and the sea. The rn country is less mountainous, more fruitful, and Messed by a milder climate. Its natural fortress was the lofty rock of Ithome.
Of the Fitxf M^ss^nini ^v-"- which must be assigned to the eighth__cejiLury, all that we know with certainty is that the Spartan king, under whose auspices it was waged, was named Thcopompus ; that it was derided by the raptnr'J '^ the LTeat fortrfi* "f TtVirima.j and that the eastern part of the land became Laconian.
As the object of the Spartans was to increase the number of the lots of land for their citizens, many of the conquered ATpsspniajis-werp- reduced to fop; rnnditinn of Hflntt For some generations they submitted patiently, but at length, when victorious Sparta felt secure, a rebellion was organ- End of ised. The rebels were supported by their neighbours in centur Arcadia and Pisatis, and they are said to have found an able and ardent leader in Aristomenes, sprung from an old Messenian family. The revolt was at first successful. The Spartans fared ill, and their young men experienced the disgrace of defeat. The hopes of the serfs rose, and Sparta despaired of recovering the land. But a leader and a poet arose amongst them. The lame Tyrtaeus is recorded to have inspired his countrymen with such martial vigour that the tide of fortune turned, and Sparta began to retrieve her losses and recover her reputation. The warriors advanced to battle singing his " marches " to the sound of flutes, while his elegies are said to have been recited in the tents after the evening meal. P>ut we learn from himself that his strategy
THE PELOPONNESUS.
Longitude East 22° of Greenwich
FIG. 2T.
r •frfoutott ff.
CHAT, in GROWTH OF SPARTA 8l
was as effective as his poetry, and the Messenians were presently defeated in the Battle of the Great Foss. They .then retired to the northern stronghold of Eira on the river [Nedon, which plays the same part in the second war that Ithome played in the first. But Eira fell; legend says that [it was beleaguered for eleven years. Aristomenes was the (soul of the defence, and his wonderful escapes became the rgument of a stirring tale. On one occasion he was thrown, nth fifty fellow-countrymen, captured by the Spartans, into deep pit. His comrades perished, and Aristomenes iwaited certain death. But by following the track of a fox le found a passage in the rocky wall of his prison and jpeared on the following day at Eira. When the Spartans irprised that fortress, he made his escape wounded to Arcadia.
win) -Kege Igft^ in the land were_mostlv to the conHitmn of Helots, but the maritime immunities and even a few in the interior remained free, as perioeci, in the possession of their estates.
At this time Sparta, like most Greek stafes, suffered from domestic discontent. The pressing land question was uaxtlv solved by the conquest of thejyhole land of Messenia : and doubtless the foundation of the colony of Taras in southern Italy was undertaken for the purpose of relieving an excessive population.
The Messenian war, as recorded by Tyrtaeus, shows us that the power of the privileged classes had already been undermined by a great change in the method of warfare. The fighting is done^ and the victory won, by regiments of
mnjli'd fnof-bnct'rs- who mp.rrh nnrl fi^ht toirclhpr in rlo^e
ranks^ The secret had been discovered that such fmfclites (as they were called) were superior to cavalry ; but it was in_S]rut'i firrt tint thnir vnlnr wni> fnjly appreciated. There they became the main part of the military establishment. The city no longer depended chiefly on her nobles in time
82 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
of war ; she depended on her whole people. The progress of metal -smiths in their trade, which accompanied the general industrial advance of Greece, rendered possible this transformation in the art of war. Every well-to-do citizen could now provide himself with an outfit of armour andr; go forth to battle in panoply.1 (/The transformation was distinctly levelling and democratic ; for it placed the noble and the ordinary citizen on an equality in the field.
SECT. 3. Internal Development of Sparta and her Institutions. — When Sparta emerges into the full light of!^ history we find her under anjron_discipline, which invades every part of a man's life and controls all his actions from'; his cradle to his deathbed. Everything js_ subordinated t^ the art of war, and the sole aim of the state is to creat invincible warriors.
The whole Spartan people formed a military caste ; tl life of a Spartan citizen was devoted to the servke of tl state. In order to carry out this ideal it was necessary that every citizen should be freed from the care of providing for himself and his family. The nobles owned family domains of their own ; but the Spartan community also came into possession of common land, which was divided into a number of lots. Each Spartan obtained a lot, which passed from father to son, but could not be either sold or divided ; thus a citizen_could never be reduced to poverty. The original inhabitants, whom the Lacedaemonians dispossessed and reduced to the state of serfs, cultivated the land for their lords. Every year the owner of a lot was entitled to receive seventy medimni of corn for himself, twelve for his wife, and a stated portion of wine and fruit. All that the land produced beyond this, the Helot was allowed to retain for his own use. Though the Helots were not driven by task-
1 The metal breastplate had been introduced ; metal greaves were worn, and thigh-pieces. 'I he round shield borne on the arm had super- seded the clumsy shoulder-swung shield of the heroic period.
in GROWTH OF SPARTA 83
masters, and had the right of acquiring private property, their condition seems to have been hard ; at all events they were always bitterly dissatisfied and ready to rebel, when- ever an occasion presented itself. The system of Helotry was a source of danger from the earliest times, but especially after the conquest of Messenja ; and the state of constant military preparation in which the Spartans lived may have been partly due to the consciousness of this peril perpetually at their doors. The Krypteia or secretpolice was in- stituted— it is uncertain at what date — tooeal with this danger. Young Spartans were sent into the country and empowered to kill every Helot whom they had reason to '/egard with suspicion. By this device, the youths could slay dangerous Helots without any scruple or fear of the guilt of manslaughter. But notwithstanding these pre- cautions serious revolts broke out again and again.
Thus relieved from the necessity of gaining a livelihood, > the Spartans devoted themselves to the good of the state, I and the aim of the state was the cultivation of the art or war. Sparta was a large military school. Education, marriage, the details of daily life were all strictly regulated with a view to the maintenance of a perfectly efficient. army. Every citizen was to be a soldier, and the discipline began from birth. When a child was born, it was submitted to the inspection of the heads of the tribe, and if they judged it to be unhealthy or weak, it was exposed to die on the wild slopes of Mount Taygetus. At the age of seven years the boy was consigned to the care ot a state-officer, and the course of his education was entirely determined by the purpose of inuring him to bear hardships, training him to endure an exacting discipline, and instilling into his heart a sentiment of devotion to the state. The boys, up to the age of twenty, were marshalled in a huge school formed on the model of an army.
At the age of twenty the Spartan entered upon military
84 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
service and was permitted to marry. But he could not yet enjoy home-life ; he had to live in " barracks " with his companions, and could only pay stolen and fugitive visits to his wife. In his thirtieth year, having completed his train- ing, he became a "man," and obtained the full rights of citizenship. The Homoioi or peers, as the Spartan citizens were called, dined together in tents in the Hyacinthian Street. Each member of a common tent made a fixed monthly contribution, derived from the produce of his lot, consisting of barley, cheese, wine, and figs, and the members of the same mess-tent shared the same tent in the field in time of war. Three hundred " horsemen," chosen from the Spartan youths, formed the king's bodyguard ; but though, as their name shows, they were originally mounted, in later times they fought on foot. The light infantry was supplied by the Perioeci and Helots.
Thus Sparta was a camp in which the highest object of every man's life was to be ready at any moment to fight with the utmost efficiency for his city. The aim of every law, the end of the whole social order, was to fashion good soldiers. Private luxury was strictly forbidden : Spartan
- • •* ' J.
simplicity became proverbial. The individual man, entirely lost" irf the state, had no life of his own ; he had no problems of human existence to solve for himself. Sparta was not a place for thinkers or theorists ; the whole duty of man and the highest ideal of life were contained for a Spartan in the laws of his city.
It was inevitable that, as time went on, there should be many fallings away, and that some of the harder laws should, by tacit agreement, be ignored. From an early period it seems to have been a permitted thing for a citizen to acquire land in addition to his original lot. As such lands were not, like the original lot, inalienable, but could be sold or divided, inequalities in wealth necessarily arose, and the " communism " which we observed in the life of
in GROWTH OF SPARTA 85
the citizens was only superficial. But it was specially pro- vided by law that no Spartan should possess wealth in _the form of gold or silver. This law was at first eluded by the device of depositing money in foreign temples, • and it ultimately became a dead letter; Spartans even gained throughout Greece an evil reputation for avarice.
There is no doubt that the Spartan system of discipline grew up by degrees ; yet the whole fabric shows an artistic unity which might be thought to argue the work of a single mind. And until lately this was generally believed to be the case ; some still maintain the belief. A certain Lycurgus was said to have framed the Spartan institutions and enacted the Spartan laws about the beginning of the ninth century.
But the grounds for believing that a Spartan lawgiver named Lycurgus ever existed are of the slenderest kind. Herodotus states that the Spartans declared Lycurgus to have been the guardian of one of their early kings, and to have introduced from Crete their laws and institutions. But the divergent accounts of this historian's contemporaries, who ignore Lycurgus altogether, prove that it was simply one of many guesses and not a generally accepted tradition.
The guess was natural, for in Crete, which island was by its geographical situation withdrawn from the main course of Greek history, there existed very similar institutions among men of Dorian stock. There was a population divided into warriors and serfs. There was a board of ten annual magistrates (KOO-^OI) corresoonding to the Ephors ; and a council answering
. -, .p. . . -ij FIG. 22.— CoinofCnossus,
tO the GerUSia. But for the COUnCll and early (obverse). Mino- ,1 • . i 11 T *i i taur [legend : KNOi.1.
the magistracy only nobles were eligible,
and there were no kings. The real likeness lies in the
discipline of the youth, which was, like that of Sparta,
86 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP, in
designed solely for making good warriors, and which enforced on all a similar form of barrack life with common meals, with the same strict state regulation of existence and a more complete communism.
SECT. 4. The Supremacy and Decline of Argos. The Olympian Games. — TOm-inp; the seventh century
§was the leading state in the Peloponnesus. As gradually crushed out the Messenian resistance, weakened, and, fifty years after Messenia was finally :d, Argos had sunk to the level of a second-rate power, always able to maintain her independence, always a thorn in Sparta's side, but never leading. The various stages in this struggle for ascendency are marked by a varying presidency of the famous Olympian festival.
The. state of Pisa, on the river Alpheus, which helped the Messenians in their revolt, was the enemy of Sparta. Now J.he__<z#A&-or ^TPfl Qr<^vf^ ^f Otympia lay under jjie
WOoded mrmrvl-nfjrnnil^ W^PI-P fh^ *-)'vpf CladeilS flf>WS
into the Alpheus, in the angle between the two streams within the territory of Pisa. Games were the chief feature of the festival, which was held in honour of Zeus every fourth year, at the time of the second full moon after midsummer's day. The games at first included foot-races, hoy ing, and wrestling ; chariot-races and horse-races were added lg.ter. Such contests were an ancient institution in Greece. The funeral games of Patroclus, described in the Iliad, permit us to infer that they were a feature of Ionian life in the ninth century. The control of the Olympian sanctuary, which must originally have belonged to Pisa, was coveted by the Eleans, Pisa's northern neighbours; and they usurped the conduct of the festival, as it seems, with Sparta's approval. But in the middle of the seventh century, Pheidon, king of Argos, therlast ruler under whom she played a leading part, marched west to Olympia, took the management of the games from Elis, and restored it to
HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
Pisa. Pie himself presided at the games on this occasion, the first when they are mentioned in history. But when 572 B.C. Sparta had conquered Messenia, her influence after a certain period restored the management to Elis.
The mythical institution of the games was ascribed to Pelops or to Heracles ; and, when the Eleans usurped the presidency, the story gradually took shape that the celebra- tion had been revived by the Spartan Lycurgus and the Elean Iphitus in the year 776 B.C., and this year was reckoned as the first Olympiad. From that year until the visit of Pheidon, the Eleans professed to have presided over the feast ; and their account of the matter won its way into general belief.
By the beginning of the sixth century the festival was no longer an event of merely Peloponnesian interest. It had become famous wherever the Greek tongue was spoken, and, when the feast-tide came round in each cycle of four years, there thronged to the banks of the Alpheus, from all quarters of the Greek world, athletes and horses to compete in the contests, and spectators to behold them. During the celebration of the festival a sacred truce was observed, and the men of Elis claimed that in those days their territory was inviolable. The prize for victory in the games was a wreath of wild olive ; but rich rewards always awaited the victor when he returned home in triumph and laid the Olympian crown in the chief temple of his city. The Olympian festwa.1 fuinjshfid— a_. centre ,whprp GrppV^ Q£ all part&^met and exchangedthejr Jdeas_and e^nerienres ; it was one of the. insti{]jtiflris_jduclL^expressed and quickened the consciousness of fellowship among the scattered folks of the Greek race ; and it became a model, as we shall see, for other festivals of the same kind, which concurred in pro- moting a feeling of national unity.
SECT. 5. Democratic Movements. Lawgivers and Tyrants. — It is clear that there is no security that
in T.ROWTH OF SPARTA 89
equal justice will be meted out to all, so long as the laws by which the judge is supposed to act are not accessible to all. Naturally, therefore, one of the first demands which the people in Greek cities pressed upon their aristocratic govern- ments was for a written law. It must bo borne in mind that in olddays deeds whiqh injured only the individual and did. noj__toucb 'thf> gOfl< or ^h.ft_s.tar.e, were U^fL to the injured person todeal with as he— chose or ,£ould. Tu£_ slate did not interfere. Even in the case of bloodshedding, it devolveoT upon the kinsfolk of the slain man to wreak punishment upon the slayer. Then, -^ snrial nrrlpr ^dp- veloped, the state took justice partly into its own hands ; and tne injured nian, before he could punish the wrong- doer, was obliged to charge him before a judge, who decided the punishment. But no crime could come before a judge, unless the injured person came forward except jn a ragA °f blnnrkhpHrHng It was felt that shedder of blood-gag not only impure himselfi but har| aVgr> def71f5^heffnds_ of thp rom.muin'fy ; so that manslaughter of every form came under the r1a rtf thf*
The work of wr^n[j -fir>^n thp Jnws and fixiog_£iistoms shape, .was prQfohjy in mr.ct .I-QC^C f-omHnf
_j and thus the great codifiers of the
seventh century were also lawgivers. Of these the most famous were the Athenians, r^rop and Sglon-the Wise.
In many cases the legislation was accompanied by political concessions to the people, and it was part of the lawgiver's task to modify the constitution. But for the most part this was only the beginning of a long political conflict. Social^ distress was_ the sharp spur which drove the people on in this effort towards popular_govejnment. The struggle was in some cases to end in the establishment of a democracy ; in many cases, the oligarchy succeeded in maintaining itself and keeping the people down ; in most
90 HISTORY OF GREECE ni\i>.
cases, perhaps, the result was a perpetual oscillation between oligarchy and democracy — an endless series of revolutions, too often sullied by violence. But though democracy was not everywhere victorious — though even the states in which it was most firmly established were exposed to the danger of oligarchical conspiracies — yet everywhere the people aspired to it ; and we may say that the chief feature of the donystirjiistory of most Greek cities, from the_ejd- nf. the seventh century forward, is an endeavour to establish or maintain popular government.
As happens usually, or at least frequently, in such circumstances, the popular movement received help from within the camp of the adversary. Discontented nobles came forward to be the leaders of the discontented masses. But when the government was overthrown, the revolution generally resulted in a temporary return to monarchy. The mass of the people were not yet ripe for taking the power into their own hands ; and they were generally glad to entrust it to the man who had helped them to overthrow the hated government of the nobles. This newjdnd of moriarcjbjixlid not rest on hereditary right butj^a physical force.
Such" illegitimate monarchs were called tyrants, to dis- tinguish them from the hereditary kings, and this form of monarchy was called a tyrannis. The word in itself did not imply that the monarch was bad or cruel ; ther£_wasmothing self-contradicjojy_in__a_good__tyrant, and many tyrants were beneficent But the isolation oT these rulers, who, being without the support of legitimacy, depended on armed force, so often urged them to be suspicious and cruel, that
"tyrant" inclined — to the evil sense in which modern
languages .have adopted it. Yet the Greek dislike of the tyrannis was not mainly due to the fact that many tyrants were oppressors. Arbitrary control was repugnant to the Greek love of freedom.
The period which saw the fall of the aristocracies is often
m GROWTH OF SPARTA 91
called the age of the tyrants. The tyrannis first came into existence at this period; there was a large crop of tyrants ^uch about the same time in different parts of Greece; ||ley all performed the same function of overthrowing MJstocracies, and in many cases they paved the way for <Jemocracies. But there is no age in the subsequent history of ( Ireece which did not see the rise of tyrants here and then.-. Tyranny was always with the Greeks. It, as well as oligarchy, was a danger by which their democracies were threatened at all periods.
Ionia seems to have been the original home of the tyrannis, and this may have been partly due to the seductive example of the rich court of the Lydian " tyrants " at Sardis. The most famous of Ionian tyrants was Thrasybulus of c. 6101 Miletus, under whose rule that city held a more brilliant position than ever. In Lesbian Mytilene we see the tyrannis and also a method by which it might be avoided. Tyrants rose and fell in rapid succession ; the echoes of hatred and jubilation still ring to us from relics of the lyric poems of Alcaeus. " Let us drink and reel, for Myrsilus is c. 600-; dead." The poet was a noble and a fighter ; but in a war with the Athenians on the coast of the Hellespont he threw away his shield, like Archilochus, and it hung as a trophy at Sigeum. Pittacus, however, who distinguished himself for bravery in the same war with Athens, was to be the saviour of the state. He gained the trust of the people and was elected ruler for a period of ten years in order to heal the sores of the city. Such a governor, possessing supreme power but for a limi$d time, was called an aesymnetes. Pittacus gained the reputation of a wise lawgiver and a firm, moderate ruler. He- banished the nobles who opposed him — among others the two most famous of all Lesbians, the poets Alcaeus and Sappho. At the end of ten years he laid down his office, to be enrolled after his death in the number of the Seven Wise Men.
92 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
SECT. 6. The Tyrannies of Central Greece. -
About the middle of the seventh century, three tyrannies arose in central Greece in the neighbourhood of the Isthmus : at Corinth, at Sicyon, and at Megara. In each case the development was different, and is in each case in- structive. In Sicyon the tyranny was brilliant and beneficent, in Corinth brilliant and oppressive, in Megara short-lived and followed by long intestine struggles.
The ruling clan of the Bacchiads at Corinth was over- thrown by Cypselus, who had put himself at the head of the people. The Bacchiads were banished and their pro- perty confiscated ; dangerous persons were executed, and Cypselus took the reins of government into his own hands. Of the rule of Cypselus himself we know little ; he i* variously represented as harsh and mild. His son Periandet succeeded, and of him more is recorded. The general features of the Cypselid tyrannis were a vigorous colonial and commercial policy, and the encouragement of art.
One of the earliest triumphs of Cypselus was probably the reduction of Corcyra, which had formed a fleet of its own and had grown to be a rival of its mother in the Ionian seas. It has already been mentioned that the earliest battle of ships between two Greek states was supposed to have been fought between Corinth and Corcyra. The attempt of Corinth to form a colonial empire was an interesting experiment. The idea of Cypselus corresponded to our modern colonial system, in which the colonies are in a relation of dependence to the mother-country, and not to that of the Greeks, in which the colony was an independent sovereign state. Geographical conditions alone rendered it out of the question to apply the new principle to Syracuse, but the success at Corcyra was followed up by a develop- ment of Corinthian influence in the north-west of Greece. The Acarnanian peninsula of Leucas was occupied and made into an island by piercing a channel through the
in GROWTH OF SPARTA 93
narrow isthmus. Anactorion was founded on the south side of the Ambracian Gulf, and inland, on the north side, Ambracia. Apollonia was planted on the coast of Epirus ; and, farther north, Corcyra, under the auspices of her mother- city, colonised Epidamnus. In another quarter of the Greek world, a son of Periander founded Potidaea in the Chalcidic peninsula.
Cypselus and Periander did their utmost to promote the commercial activity of their city. In the middle of the seventh century the rival Euboean cities, Chalcis and Eretria, were the most important merchant states of Greece. But fifty years later they had somewhat declined ; Corinth and Aegina were taking their place. Their decline was brought about by their rivalry, which led to an exhausting war for the Lelantine plain.
While the most successful of the tyrants, like Periander, furthered material civilisation, -they often manifested an interest in intellectual pursuits, and did something for the promotion of art. A new form of poerry called the dithy- ramb was developed at Corinth during this period, the rude strains which were sung at vintage -feasts in honour of Dionysus being moulded into an artistic shape. The discovery was attributed to Arion, a mythical minstrel, who was said to have leaped into the sea under the compulsion of mariners who robbed him, and to have been carried to Corinth on the back of a dolphin, the fish of Dionysus.
In architecture, Corinthian skill had made an important contribution to the development of the temple. In the course of the seventh century men began to translate into stone the old shrine of brick and wood ; and stone temples arose in all parts of the Greek world — the lighter " Ionic " form in Ionia, the heavier " Doric " in the elder Greece. By the invention of roof-tiles, Corinthian workmen rendered it practicable to give a considerable inclination to the roof; and thus in each gable of the temple a large triangular space
94
HISTORY OF GREECE
CHAP.
was left, inviting the sculptor to fill it with a story in marble. The pediment, as we name it, was called by the Greeks the " eagle " ; and thus it was said that Corinth had discovered the eagle (deros).
The great tyrant died and was succeeded by his nephew . who having ruled for a few years was slain.
FIG. 24. — Pillars of an old temple at Corinth.
With him the tyranny of the Qypsejjds came to an end, and an aristocracy of merchants was firmly established. At the same time the Cypselid colonial system partly broke down, for Corcyra became independent and hostile, while the Ambraciots set up a democracy. But over her other colonies Corinth retained her influence, and was on friendly terms with all of them.
Some time after the inauguration of the Cypselid tyranny
in GROWTH OF SPARTA 95
a similar constitutional change occurred at Megara, and a friendship sprang up between the two cities. The mercantile development of Megara, famous for her weavers, had en- riched the nobles, who held the political power and oppressed the peasants with a grinding despotism. Then Theagenes arose as a deliverer and made himself tyrant, c. 640 Having obtained a bodyguard, he surprised and massacred the aristocrats. His term of tyranny was marked by one solid work, the construction of an aqueduct. He was over- thrown, and then followed a political struggle between the aristocracy, which had regained its power, and the people. Concessions were wrung from the government. The capitalists were forced to pay back the interest which they had extorted, while the political disabilities were relieved by extending citizenship to the country population and admitting the tillers of the soil to the Assembly. These conflicts and social changes are reflected in the poems of Theognis. who meditated and lamented them. He judges severely the short-sighted, greedy policy of his own caste, and sees that it is likely to lead to another tyranny. On the other hand, his sympathies are with an aristocratic form of government, and he discerns with dismay the growth of democratic tendencies. He cries :
Unchanged the walls, but, ah, how changed the folk !
The base, who knew erstwhile nor law nor right, But dwelled like deer, with goatskin for a cloak,
Are now ennobled ; and, O sorry plight !
The nobles are made base in all men's sight.
The rise of a tyranny in agricultural Sicyon seems to have occurred much about the same time as at mercantile Corinth. The first of the house of whom we have any historical record is rieisthenp.s. who ruled in the first c. 590 quarter of the sixth century. He was engaged in a war with Argos. which claimed lordship over Sicyon. He would not
96 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
permit rhapsodists to recite the Homeric poems at Sicyon, because there was so much in them about Argos and Argives.
Cleisthenes married his daughter Agarista to an Athenian noble, .Megacles, of the famous family of the Alcmaeonids. A legend is told of the wooing of Agarista, which illustrates the tyrant's wealth and hospitality and the social ideas of the age. On the occasion of an Olympian festival at which he had himself won in the chariot-race, Cleisthenes made proclamation to the Greeks that all who aspired to the hand of his daughter should assemble at Sicyon, sixty days hence, and be entertained at his court for a year. At the end of the year he would decide who was most worthy of his daughter. Then there came to Sicyon all the Greeks who had a high opinion of themselves or of their families. Cleisthenes tested their accomplishments for a year. He tried them in gymnastic exercises, but laid most stress on their social qualities. The two Athenians, Hippocleides and Megacles, pleased him best, but to Hippocleides of these two he most inclined. The day appointed for the choice of the husband came, and Cleisthenes sacrificed a hundred oxen and feasted all the suitors and all the folk of Sicyon. After the dinner, the wooers competed in music and general conversation. Hippocleides was the most brilliant, and, as his success seemed assured, he bade the flute-player strike up and began to dance. Cleisthenes was surprised and disconcerted at this behaviour, and his surprise became disgust when Hippocleides, who thought he was making a decisive impression, called for a table and danced Spartan and Athenian figures on it. The host controlled his feelings, but, when Hippocleides proceeded to dance on his head, he could no longer resist, and called out, " O son of Tisander, you have danced away your bride ! " But the Athenian only replied, " Hippocleides careth not," and danced on.
ill Sl'AKTA 97
Megacles was chosen for Agarista, and rich presents were given to the disappointed suitors. JT^
SECT. 7. The Sacred War. The Panhellenic Games. — The mmt important nrhinvf-ment nf Cli inth-nes, and -4fcftL which won him most fame in the Gr^pk wnrkT was, his championship of the Delphic oracle.
The temple of Delphi, or Pytho, lay in the territory of the Phocian town of Crisa. The sanctuary of "rocky . Pytho " was terraced on a steep slope, hard under the bare sheer cliffs of Parnassus, looking down upon the deep glen of the Pleistus,— an austere and majestic scene, supremely fitted for the utterance of the oracles of God. The men of Crisa claimed control over the Delphians and the oracle, and levied dues on the visitors who came to co_nsull~tlie deity. The Delphians desired to free themselves from the control of the Crisaeans, and they naturally looked for help to the great league of the north, in which the Thessalians, the ancient foes of the Phocians, were now the dominant member. The folks who belonged to this religious union were the " dwellers around " the shrine of Demeter at Anthela, close to the pass of Thermopylae ; and hence they were called the Amphictiones of Anthela or Pylae. The league included the Locrians, Phocians, Boeotians, and Athenians, as well as the Dorians, Malians, Dolopians, Enianes, Thessalians, Perrhaebians, and Magnetes.
The Amphictions espoused warmly the cause of Apollo c. 590 B and his Delphian servants, and declared a holy war against the men of Crisa who had violated the sacred territory. And Delphi found a champion in the south as well as in the north. The tyrant of Sicyon across the gulf went forth against the impious city. As Crisa was situated in such a strong position, commanding the road from the sea to the sanctuary, it was plain that the utter destruction of the city was the only conclusion of the war which could lead to the assured independence of the oracle. The Amphic-
H
98 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
tions and Sicyonians took the city after a sore struggle, rased it to the ground, and slew the indwellers. The Crisaean plain was dedicated to the god ; solemn and heavy curses were pronounced against whosoever should till it.
One of the consequences of this war was the establish- ment of a close connexion between Delphi and the Amphictiony of Anthela. The Delphic shrine became a second place of meeting, and the league was often called the Delphic Amphictiony. The temple was taken under the protection of the league ; the administration of the property of the god was placed in the hands of the Hieromnemones or sacred councillors, who met twice a year in spring and autumn, both at Anthela and at Delphi. Two Hieromnemones were sent as its representatives by each member of the league. The oracle and the priestly nobles of Delphi thus won a position of independence ; their great career of prosperity and power began. The Pythian games 582 B.C. were now reorganised on a more splendid scale, and the ordering of them was one of the duties of the Amphictions. The festival became, like the Olympian, a four-yearly celebra- tion, being held in the middle of each Olympiad.
Much about the same time two other Panhellenic festivals were instituted at Isthmus and at Nemea. Both the Isthmian and the Nemean festivals were two-yearly. Thus from the beginning of the sixth century four Pan- hellenic festivals are celebrated, two in the Peloponnesus, one on the isthmus, one in the north ; and throughout the course of Grecian history the prestige of these gatherings never wanes.
These four Panhellenic festivals helped to maintain a feeling of fellowship among all the Greeks, and Delphi, the meeting-place for pilgrims and envoys from all quarters of the Greek world, helped to keep distant cities in touch with one another. These two forces promoted the concep- tion of a common Hellenic race with common interests
Ill
GROWTH OF SPARTA
99
About the middle of the seventh century the name " Pan- Hellenes " was used in a poem by Archilochus, and the Homeric Catalogue of the ships, a^wOTk__ofthe_seventh century, gives to almost every state in Greece a share in th~e~gFeat Hellenic enterprise against Troy.
We saw that the Boeotians were a member of the northern Amphictiony. The unity of Boeotia itself had taken the form of a federation, in which Thebes was the dominant power. This unity had its weak points ; its maintenance depended upon the power of Thebes ; some of the cities were reluctant members. Orchomenus held out for independence till forced to join about the end of the seventh century. Above all, Plataea chafed j she had kept herself pure from mixture with the Boeotian settlers, and her whole history — of which some remarkable episodes will pass before us — may be regarded as an isolated con- tinuation of the ancient struggle between the elder Greek inhabitants of the land and the Boeotian conquerors.
N
FIG. 25. — Dipylon Vase, with ship (British Museum).
FlG. 26. — Coin of Athens, early (obverse). Head of Pallas.
CHAPTER IV •
THE UNION OF ATTICA AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
SECT. i. The Union of Attica. — Attica, like its neigh- bour Boeotia and other countries of Greece, was once occupied by a number of independent states. But of all the lordships between Mount Cithaeron and Cape Sunium the two most important were those of Eleusis and Athens, the stronghold in the midst of the Cephisian plain, five miles from the sea. This .Cephisian plain, on the south side open to the Saronic gulf, is enclosed by hills, on the west by Aegaleos; on the north-west by Parnes, on the east by Hymettus, while the gap in the north-east, between Parnes and Hymettus, is filled by the gable-shaped mass of Pentelicus. The river Cephisus flows not far from Athens to westward, but the Acropolis was girt by two smaller streams, the Illsus and the Eridanus. In the bronze age it was one of the strong places of (Greece. There still remain pieces of the wall of grey-blue limestone with which the Pelasgian lords of the castle secured the edge of their precipitous hill. The Acropolis is joined to the Areopagus by a high saddle, which forms its natural approach, and on this side walls were so constructed that the main western entrance to the citadel lay through nine successive gates.
The first Greeks who won the Pelasgic acropolis were
102 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP, iv
probably the Cecropes, and, the later Athenians were always ready to describe themselves as the sons of Cecrops. This Trad, date Cecrops was numbered among the imaginary prehistoric kings of Athens ; he was nothing more than the fabulous ancestor of the Cecropes. But the time came when other Greek dwellers in Attica won the upper hand over the Cecropes, and brought with them the worship of Athena. The Acropolis became Athenai ; the folks — whether Cecropes or Pelasgians — who dwelled in the villages around it, on the banks of the Illsus and Eridanus, became Athenians. They became Athenians in the full sense only after another great step in their history — the crvvoiKttr/xos or union of the small yet separate communities, which was annually commemorated by the feast of the owoutia. Athens .was no longer the head of a league like Thebes in Boeotia, nor the mistress of subject communities. The man of Marathon or any village in Attica was precisely on a level with a dweller in Athens herself. We do not know when this step was achieved, nor by whom. In after-times the Athenians thought that the hero Theseus, whom they had enrolled in the list of their early kings,1 was the author of the union of their country.
SECT. 2. Foundation of the Athenian Common- wealth.— At Athens, as in the other Greek states, there existed in early days a royalty, which passed into an aristoc- racy and therTmto a republic. The first step in the limita- tion of kingly^Dower was the institution of a fiolem(w3L~or commander of the army, elected by the nobles. The next was thlT establish merit of an 'afchfyi or regent, who usurped most of the kinglyjFunctions. Acastus was the first regent, created by his kinsmen the Medontids ; and he held office for life. All archons after him swore that they would be true to their oath even as Acastus. Next came the limita-
1 Old Attic tradition (preserved by Herodotus) counted only four kings before Theseus, viz. Cecrops, Erechtheus, Pandion, and Aegeus.
104 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
tion of the archonship to a period of ten years, though for some time still the archon must be a Medontid. This restriction of choice was abolished, but the first certain date which we have is ^8^-2. B.C.. when the archonship or regency became a yearly office.
The kings were notjormally abolished, but continued to hold office for ceremonial purposes, and to the last the title was retained in that of the archon basileus.
In the period of these changes, took place the_umon_6r synoecisnTof Attica. The united people of all the separate districts and villages were divided up among four tribes — Geleontes, Argadeis, Aigicoreis and Hopletes — whose names were borrowed from Miletus, and seem to have reference to the worship of special deities, e.g. Zeus Geleon. At the head of each tribe was a phylo-basileus. The Brotherhoods or phratries were rearranged under the tribes, three to each, making twelve phratries in all.
SECT. 3. The Aristocracy in the Seventh Century. — Early in the seventh century, then, the Athenian republic was an aristocracy, and the executive was in the hands of three annually elected officers, the archon, the Jong, and the pojemarch. The archon was_the__supreme judge in all civil suits. He held the chiefplace among the magistrates, and his name appeared at the head of official lists, whence he was called eponymus. The polenoaxch had judiciaUluties, besides being commander-in-chief of the army; he judged all cases in which non-citizens were involved. The king's functions were confined to the management of the state- religion, and the conduct of certain judicial cases connected with religion, which came before the Council of which he was president.
The Bule or Council__of_Elders came afterwards to be called at Athens the Council ofjhe Areopagus, to distinguish it from other councils of later growth. This name was derived from its place of meeting for a certain purpose
iv THE UNION OF ATTICA 105
According to early custom, murder and manslaughter were not regarded as crimes against the state, but the family of the slain man might either slay the slayer or accept a com- pensation. But gradually, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood was impure and needed cleansing. Accord- ingly when a murderer satisfied the kinsfolk of the murdered by paying a fine, he had also to submit to a process of purifica- tion, and satisfy the Chthonian gods and the Erinyes or Furies, who were, in the original conception, the souls of the dead clamouring for vengeance. And when a member of a community was impure, the stain drew down the anger of the gods upon the whole community, if the unclean were not driven out. Hence it came about that the state under- took the conduct of criminal justice. The Council itself formed the court, and the proceedings were closely associated with the worship of the Semnai. These Chthonian goddesses had a sanctuary, which served as a refuge for him whose hand was stained with bloodshed, on the north-east side of the Areopagus, outside the city wall. On this rugged spot the Council held its sittings to deal with cases of murder, violence with murderous intent, poisoning, and incendiarism.
Under the rule of the kings' and the aristocracies, the free population fell into three classes : the Eupatridae or nobles; the Georgi or peasants who cultivated their ^>wn farms ; and the Demiurgi (public workers) — those who lived by trade pr^cornrnerce. But besides these classes of citizens, who had the right of attending the Assembly, there was a mass of freemen who were not citizens, such as the agri- cultural labourers, who, having no land of their own, cultivated th~<=f estates of the nobles.
Although Attica seems to have taken no part in the colonising movements of the eighth and seventh centuries, the Athenians shared^ja<th^_tradiQg_a£tivities of thnt
The Cultivation of the olive was becoming a feature of Attica, and its oil a profitable article of exportation. At the same
io6 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
time Attic potters were actively developing their industry on lines of their own. It is easy to see how participation in trade began to undermine the foundations of the aristocracy of birth. The nobles engaged in mercantile ventures with vafiotre success, some becoming richer, and others poorer; and the industrial folk increased in wealth and importance. The result would ultimately be that wealth would assert , itself as well as birth, both socially and politically ; and in the second half of the seventh century we find that-the aristocracy had changed into a timocracy^ or constitution, in which political rights depend entirely on^wealtKr FoF~we~~ find the people divided into three classes according to their wealth. The principle of division was the annual yield of landed property, in corn, oil, or wine. The highest class was the Pentacosiomedimni, including those whose land produced at least so many measures (medimni) of corn and so many measures (metretae) of oil or wine as together amounted to five hundred measures. The second class included those whose property produced more than three hundred but less than five hundred such measures. These were called Knights, •&&&. so represented roughly those who could maintain a horse and take their part in war as mounted soldiers. The minimum income of the third class was two hundred measures, and their name, Zeugltai or Teamsters, shows that they were well-to-do peasants who could till their land with a pair of oxen. The chief magistracies of archon,. J king, and polemarch were confined to the first class, but" the principle wa£ admitted that a successful man, although not a Eupatrid, was eligible for the highest offices. It c. 640 B.C. is probable that .the institution of the Thesmothetae also marks a step in the self-assertion of the lower classes. The Thesmothetae were a college of six judges elected annually, who managed the whole judicial system of Athens. They were soon associated with the three chief magi- strates, the archon, basileus, and polemarch ; and the nine
iv THE UNION OF ATTICA 107
came to form a sort of college and were called the Nine Archons.
Outside these classes were the smaller peasants who had land of their own, of which, however, the produce did not amount to two hundred measures of corn or oil, and the humbler handicraftsmen. These were called Thetes. the name being perverted from its proper meaning of " labourers." The Thetes were citizens, but had no political rights. Yet as the conditions of a growing maritime trade led to the development of a navy, and as the duty of serving as marines in the penteconters mainly devolved upon the Thetes, this gave them a new signifi- cance in the state. The democracy of Athens was always closely connected with her sea power. And though the economic changes, caused in the seventh century by the invention of money, led to much hardship and social discontent, still an event happened about thirty years before the end of the century which shows that the peasants were still loyal to the existing constitution.
A certain Cylon, of noble family, married the daughter c. 632 of Theagenes, tyrant of Megara ; and, with Megarian help, ' • he tried to make himself master of the city. Cylon enlisted in his enterprise a number of noble youths, and a band of Megarian soldiers were sent by Theagenes; he had no support among the people. He succeeded in seizing the Acropolis, but the sight of foreign soldiers effectually quenched any lurking sympathy that any of the Athenians might have felt for an effort to overthrow the government. Cylon was blockaded in the citadel, and, after a long siege, he escaped with his brother from the fortress. The rest were soon constrained to capitulate. They sought refuge in the temple of Athena Polias, and left it when the archons promised to spare their lives. But Megacles, of the Alcmaeonid family, was archon this year; and at his instigation the conspirators were put to death. Such a
lo8 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAP.
violation of a solemn pledge to the suppliants who had trusted in the protection of the gods was an insult to the gods themselves; and the city was under a curse till the pollution should be removed. This view was urged by the secret friends of Cylon and those who hated the Alcmaeonids. And so it came to pass that while Cylon, his brother, and their descendants were condemned to perpetual banishment, the Alcmaeonids and those who had acted with them were also tried on the charge of sacrilege and condemned to a perpetual exile, with con- fiscation of their property. The banishment of the Alcmaeonids had consequences in the practical politics of Athens two hundred years later.
The outbreak of a war with Megara, in consequence of the plot of Cylon, aggravated the distress of the rural population ; for the Attic coasts suffered from the depre- dations of the enemy, and the Megarian market was closed to the oil-trade. And, probably to prevent an outbreak, it was decided that a code of law should be drawn up and written down. Dracon was appointed an extraordinary legislator (thesmothetes\ and empowered to codify and rectify the existing law. We know only the provisions of that part of his criminal law which dealt with the shedding of blood ; and his name became proverbial for a severe lawgiver. An Athenian orator won credit for his epigram that_ Dragon's laws were written noj; in ink but_in_blood. This idea arose from^Erie'lact that certain small offences, such as stealing cabbage, were punished by death. A broader view, however, of Dracon's code will modify this estimate. He drew careful distinctions between murder and various kinds of accidental or justifiable manslaughter ; and though, being appointed by the aristocracy, he was bound to provide for the interests of the rich power-holding class, it was at all events an enormous gain for the poor that those interests should be defined in writing.
dded
SECT. 4. The Legislation of Solon and thtal Foundation of Democracy. — Dracon's code was some- c thing, but it did not touch the root of~fFuTevil. Every ie year the oppressiveness of the rich few and the impoverish- -s. ment of the small farmer were increasing. Without capital, -d :md obliged to borrow money, which was still very scarce,1 es the small proprietors mortgaged their lands, which fell into ;y the hands of capitalists, who lent money at ruinous interest. ^ The co -.id it ion of the free labourers or hektemori was s. even more deplorable. The sixth part of the produce, i which was their wage, no longer sufficed, under the new economical conditions, to support life, and they were forced into borrowing from their masters. The interest was high, and the person of the borrower was forfeited t.o the lender in case of inability to pay. Thus while the wealthy few were becoming wealthier and greedier, the small proprietors were becoming landless, and the landless freemen were becoming slaves. And the evil was aggravated by unjust judgments, and the perversion of law in favour of the rich and powerful. The people were bitter against their remorseless oppressors, and only wanted a leader to rebel.
The catastrophe, however, was averted by the mediation of an eminent citizen — Spjon^ the son of Execestides, a noble connected with the house of the Medontids. He was a merchant, and belonged to the wealthiest class in the state. He had imbued himself with Ionic literature, and had mastered the art of writing verse in the Ionic idiom. We are fortunate enough to possess portions of poems — political pamphlets — which he published for the purpose of guiding public opinion ; and thus we have his view of the situation in his own words. The more
1 The value of silver at this time may be judged from the fact that a sheep cost a drachma, a bushel of barley a drachma, an ox five drachmae. (\ drachma = about lod.)
io8 HISTORY OF
CHAP.
moderate of the nobles seem to have seen the danger ar<* the urgent need of a new order of things ; and thus it cai to pass that Solon was solicited to undertake the work reform. He was elected archon, with extraordinary legislativ. powers ; and instead of making the usual declaration of the chief magistrate, that he would protect the property of all men undiminished, he proclaimed that all mortgages and debts by which the debtor's person or land was pJedged were annulled, and that all those who had become slaves for deb~t were free. By this proclamation the Athenians "shook off their burdens," and this .first act of Solon's social reform was called the Seisachtheia. The great deliverance was celebrated by a public feast. ^/
The character of the remedial measures of Solon -is imperfectly known. After the cancelling of old debts h c passedji_law_ which_ forbade debtors to be enslaved ; and he fixed a limit for the measure of land which could be owned by a single person, so as to prevent the growth of danger- ously large estates. These measures hit the rich hard, and created discontent with the reformer ; while, on the other hand, he was far from satisfying the desires and hopes of the masses. He would not confiscate and redistribute the estates of the wealthy, as many wished. And, though he rescued the free labourer from bondage, he made no change in the Sixth-part system, so that the condition of these landless freemen was improved only in so far as they could not be enslaved.
But Solon's title to fame as one of the great statesmen of Europe rests upon his reform of the constitution. The Athenian commonwealth did not actually~becbme a democ- racy till many years later ; but Solon not only laid the foundations — he shaped the framework. At first sight, indeed, the state as he reformed it might seem little more than an aristocracy of wealth — a timocracy — with certain democratic tendencies. He retained the old graduation of
IV THE UNION OF ATTICA IT I
tlu- people in classes according to property. lint he added the Thetes as a fourth class, and gave it certain political rights. On the three, higher classes devolved the public burdens, and -they served as cavalry or as hoplites. The Thetes wwe employed as light-armed troops or "as" marines. It is probable that Solon made. little or no change in regard to the offices which were open to each class. The Thetes were not eligible to any of the offices of state, but they were admitted to take part in the meetings of the Kcc[esi'n.T and -this gave thei^a.vQiceJn-th^^leetk>n-<)f-thema^strates.
But the radical measure of Solon was his constitution of the courts of justice. He composed a court out of all the citizens, including the Thetes; and as the panels of judges were enrolled by lot, the poorest burgher might have_his.. turn. Any . magistrate on laying down his office could be accused before the people, in.. _tb.ese-courts ; and thus the institution of popular courts invested the people with a supreme control over the administration. The people, sitting in "sections as sworn judges, were called the Heliaea, — as distinguished from the Ecclesia, in which they gathered to pass laws or choose magistrates, but were required to take no oath. At first the archons were not deprived of their judicial powers, and the heliaea acted as a court- of— appeal ; but by degrees only: the proceedings preiiminary_Jo_..a_. trial were left to the archons, and the heliaea became both the first and the final court.
The constitution of the judicial courts out of the whole
people was the secret of democracy which Solon discovered.
We can hardly hesitate to regard Solon as the founder
of the Athenian democracy. He deprived the Council
of the Areopagus of its deliberative functions, so that it
-fa rvn longer take any direct part in administration and
on the other hand he gave it wide and
s of control over the magistrates, and a
ity over the citizens. Its judicial and
112 HISTORY OF GREECE CHAI-.
religious functions it retained. Henceforward the nine \ archons at the end of their year of office became life- members of the Council of the Areopagus ; and this was the manner in which the Council was recruited. Thus the Areopagites were virtually appointed by the people in the Assembly, which elected the archons.
Having removed the Council of the Areopagus to this / place of dignity, above and almost outside the constitution, Solon was obliged to create a new body to prepare the business for the Assembly. This new Council which Solon instituted consisted of fouL hundred members ; a hundred being taken from each of. the four tribes, either chosen by the tribe itself or, more probably, picked by lot. _A11 citizens of the three higher classes were eligible ; the_Thetes alone were excluded.
The use _pf _lot_ for the purpose of appointing public officers was a feature of Solon's reforms. According to men's ideas in those days, lot committed the decision to the gods. It was doubtless as a security against the undue influence of clans and parties that Solon used it. He applied it to the appointment of the chief magistrates themselves. But, religious though he was, he could not be blind to the danger of taking no human precautions against the falling of the lot upon an incompetent candidate, and he therefore mixed the two methods of lot and election. Forty candi- dates were elected, ten from each tribe, by the voice of their tribesmen ; and out of these the nine archons were picked by lot.
Solon sought to keep the political balance steady by securing that each of the four tribes should have an equal share in the government. Yet_jhe gravest clanger ahead was in truth not the strife of poor and rich, but the deep- rooted and bitter jealousies which existed between many of the duns. While the dan had the tr.be behind it and the tribe possessed political weight, sue i feuds might at any
iv THE UNION OF ATTICA 113
moment cause a civil war or a revolution. But it was reserved for a future lawgiver to grapple with this problem.
One of Solon's first acts was to _rep_eal_alLthe legislation of Dracon^jixcept the laws relating^ to .manslaughter. His own laws were inscribed on wooden tables and kept in the Public hall.
Solon had done his work boldly, but he had done it constitutionally. He had not made himself a tyrant, as he might easily have done, and as many expected him to do. On the contrary, one purpose of his reform was to forestall the necessity, arid prevent the possibility, of a tyranny. To a superficial observer, caution seemed the note of his re- forms, and men were surprised, and many disgusted, by his cautiousness. When he laid down his office he was assailed by complaints; but he refused to entertain the idea of any modifications in his measures. Thinking that the reforms would work better in the absence of the reformer, he left Athens soon after his archonship and travelled for ten years. Though the remnants of his poems are fragmentary, though the recorded events of his life are meagre, and though the details of his legislation are dimly known and variously interpreted, the personality of Solon leaves a distinct im- pression on our minds. We know enough to see in him an embodiment of the ideal of intellectual and moral excellence of the early Greeks, and the greatest of their wise men.
Solon's social reforms inaugurated a permanent improve- ment. But his political measures, which he intended as a compromise, displeased many. Party .strife broke out again bitterly soon after his archonship, and only to end, after thirty years, in the tyranny which it had been his dearest object to prevent. The two great parties were those who were in the main satisfied with the new constitution of Solon, and those who disliked its democratic side and desired to return to the aristocratic government which he had subverted. The latter consisted chiefly of Eupatrids
1 1
114
HISTORY OF GREECE
-J -u ..
CHAP. IV
and were known as the men of the Plain. The opposite party of the Coast included the bulk of the middle classes, the peasants as well as the Demiurgi, who were bettered by the changes of Solon. They were led by Megacles, son of Alcmaeon, the same Megacles who married Agarista. For one of Solon's measures was an Act which permitted the return of the Alcmaeonidae.
FIG. 29. — Athena and Poseidon on a vase painted by Amasis.
GROWTH OK ATHENS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY
-*
SECT. i. The Conquest of Salamis. — Almost equally distant from Athens and Megara, parted by a narrow water from both, Salamis in the hands of either must be a con- stant menace to the other. The possession of Salamis must decide the future history of both Megara and Athens. At this period Megara, with her growing colonial connexions and her expanding trade, was a strong state and a formidable neighbour. The CyJoniaiLxonspiracy, as we saw, furnished 629 B c. an occasion of war. Theagenes sent his ships to harry the ~~ Attic coasts. The Athenians sought to occupy Salamis, but \
all their efforts to gain a permanent footing failed, and they abandoned the attempt in despair. Years passed away. At length Solon saw that the favourable hour had come. He composed a stirring poem which began : " I came my-