THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST

CHAPTER IV

THE OUTER GREEK WORLD IN THE SIXTH CENTURY

I

INTRODUCTION. SOURCES

AT the beginning of the sixth century bc the period of colonial expansion was practically at an end. From then onward till the time of Alexander the Great the limits of the Greek world remained practically unchanged. Where changes occurred they were mainly adverse to the Greeks. Massilia was founded by the Phocaeans about 600 bc, Miletus was captured by the Persians in 494, and these two events may be taken as typical. Both in the far east and the far west the Greek city states flourished during the sixth century in a way that they never did in any succeeding age.

The early history of the Greek cities of the far west, in Italy, Gaul and Spain, has an importance that has not always been fully recognized. It is only from recent researches and discoveries that historians have learned how very much of a half truth is the statement of Horace that captive Greece took captive her wild conquerors. Italy was first taken captive by Greek culture when the Greeks in Italy were still their own masters and the Roman power was still in its infancy. This fact is vital for a proper under­standing of ancient Rome as well as of ancient Greece, and it will be developed and documented later in this chapter. But before dealing with the youthful west it will be well to consider the eastern Greek world, the region where in the sixth century bc life was probably fuller and civilization more developed than even in Greece proper.

Here in the east the centre of interest is different, and needs a word of explanation. The source of all Greek achievement is generally admitted to have been the city-state. The ideal of all the best and most typical Greek thinkers was a Greece consisting of as many such states as possible, none of them overgrown, each of them independent, and all of them co-operating harmoniously. The practice was of course different. From the early part of the fifth century onwards the Greek cities were invariably under the hegemony of some centralizing power.

But in the sixth century the Asiatic Greeks were under no such central authority. What they suffered as a result is notorious.Their lack of cohesion led to enslavement by the great power farther east. But their intellectual activity and independence of thought were extraordinary. It is true that they eventually sacrificed first political and then (as a result) intellectual freedom to this perhaps impossible ideal of absolute autonomy. But the fact that their losses came after their gains does not prove that they outweighed them. The balancing of the account can only be accomplished by examining in detail the history of the period.

Unfortunately the sixth century comes before, though only just before, the fully documented epoch of Greek history. Hence it becomes doubly necessary to review briefly the sources on which our knowledge of it is based.

The principal source of our information is the history of Herodotus, written in the third quarter of the century succeeding. Of the nine Books into which his work is divided the first five are devoted to the earlier history of the conflict between East and West, and deal in special detail with the exploits of Croesus of Lydia, Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius. These five prefatory Books, leading up to the invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes which are narrated in the last four, contain many minor digressions into the history of Greece itself during the sixth century. A writer so invariably entertaining is plainly not exhaustive in his treatment of any subject. His accuracy too may be a matter of opinion. But recent research tends to show that his statements are not untrustworthy where he was in a position to ascertain the facts, and this he unquestionably was in the case of many of his statements about sixth-century events. For those with which this chapter is concerned his testimony is especially valuable. He was a native of south-west Asia Minor, spent some time as a refugee in Samos, and finally settled in south Italy when the Athenians re-colonized the site of Sybaris.

Still more valuable where available are the writings of sixth­century poets and philosophers, the more so since the philosophers fended to be also statesmen and the poets were apt to write about their own immediate surroundings. Unfortunately these writers are preserved only in scanty fragments, known partly from papyri, partly from the accident of their being quoted by learned writers of later ages. Where they are quotations the context in which they are quoted often becomes a valuable commentary.

There are of course also numerous incidental references to this period in many later writers both Greek and Latin, such as Aristotle, Plutarch, Livy. The value of these later sources varies very greatly, but it should not be forgotten that not only these ancient writers but also their earliest readers had access to a large literature that has since perished.

Finally an important mass of material is supplied by archaeology. Remains of the architecture and sculpture of the period exist in some numbers, coins and inscriptions are fairly abundant, while vases, many of them elaborately painted, have been unearthed in thousands. An ever-increasing number of these finds come from sites that have been excavated under more or less expert control. There are already many known types of statues, coins, and vases that can be assigned with some certainty not merely to sixth-century Greece, but to a closely defined period within the century and to some precise locality. Finds like these are of particular value for a period such as the sixth century bc, where the literary evidence is sufficiently abundant to add immensely to their significance, but at the same time so incomplete that archaeology serves not merely to illustrate the written docu­ments but also to fill gaps in our knowledge.

II

THE EASTERN POWERS

We may now turn to the first and main division of this chapter, that namely which deals with the history of the eastern Greeks. For the reasons already given the basis of study must be the individual city-state. But before dealing with these separate units a word must first be said about the great eastern powers that so decisively influenced the course of events in western Asia Minor throughout this period.

During the first great phase of Ionian civilization, which coincides roughly with the seventh century bc, the Asiatic Greeks had had as their immediate neighbour to the east the newly consolidated kingdom of Lydia, which had become the foremost power in Anatolia at just about the time when civilization began to make rapid strides in Ionia and Aeolis. The seventh-century kings of Lydia were not always on the best of terms with their Greek neighbours, but the Greek question seems not to have been that with which their foreign policy was most concerned. To the east they had the great power of Assyria, and within their own borders they had the Cimmerian invaders. The main object of their foreign policy had been to drive out the Cimmerians without becoming permanent vassals of the Assyrians. But at the end of the seventh century the situation changed. The Cimmerian peril passed away; Assyria was overthrown by the united efforts of the Babylonians and the Medes, and the Assyrian empire divided between the two conquerors. Lydia’s new neighbours, the Medes, held only about half the dominions of the Assyrian empire, and king Alyattes tried long and hard to extend his power eastwards at the Medes’ expense. It was not till more than twenty-five years after the fall of Nineveh that the two parties gave up the struggle by mutual agreement and sealed the peace by a marriage between the king of Lydia’s daughter and the heir to the throne of the Medes. This peace with the Medes (585 bc) allowed Alyattes to turn his attention to the west. Previous kings of Lydia had made occasional wars against individual Greek cities, but Alyattes seems to have initiated a policy of periodic invasions. His chief success was the capture and destruction of Smyrna, that most suffering of Greek cities. His campaigns against Miletus were less successful and ended in a negotiated peace. Alyattes was succeeded about 560 bc by Croesus, who completed the subjugation of the Greek cities of the western coast, conquering and annexing not only the Aeolic cities of the north and the Ionians of the centre, but also the Dorians of the south. When about 546 bc Croesus was overthrown by Cyrus and Lydia became a Persian satrapy, the Greeks of the coast were also incorporated in the Persian Empire. The Persians do not appear to have been particularly cruel conquerors. The various cities continued to be treated as separate political units. But the government in each city was put into the hands of a tyrant, a pro-Persian Greek who depended for his position on Persian support, and even the able administration of Darius, who employed Greeks in positions of high responsibility, failed to re­concile the Greek cities to the rule of the Great King. Hence perhaps arose the Persian policy of favouring Phoenician shipping as against Ionian, which may in turn explain why the opening of the fifth century witnessed the great Ionian revolt. The rebels, aided by the Athenians, who had themselves so recently expelled their tyrants and established a democracy, set up democracies in their various cities, proclaimed their independence of Persia, and actually succeeded in burning Sardes. The revolt was soon crushed, but it proved to be only the prelude to the great Persian wars. Its effects therefore go beyond the limits of the present chapter.

One other great foreign power exercised such an influence on sixth-century Ionia that a brief notice of it is here necessary. Egypt had witnessed a revival of its ancient civilization just at the time when the Ionian and Aeolic renaissance was in its first great phase. This Egyptian revival was the work of the Saite dynasty, of which the real founder, Psammetichus I, had made himself pharaoh about the year 663 bc. His ascendancy over the numerous petty chiefs who had previously divided up the country was established by the aid of Ionian and Carian mercenaries, and for the next century and a half Ionian mercenaries continued to be the basis of the pharaohs’ power. When Necho, the successor of Psammetichus, had defeated at Megiddo Josiah the pro-Babylonian king of Judah, he sent a thank-offering to the temple of Apollo at Miletus. When Psammetichus II sent an expedition against the Ethiopians, Greek troops took part in the advance to the far south. Some of these Greek soldiers scratched their names on an ancient monument at Abu-Simbel, and a kind chance has preserved these vandalisms for incorporation in modern handbooks of Greek epigraphy. Apries (the Biblical Hophra), who reigned from 588 to 566 bc, rested his power on 30,000 of these mercenaries, and though their unpopularity with the Egyptians brought about his downfall, his successor was soon forced to adopt the policy which he had been put on the throne to abolish. Some forty years later, just after his death, the Greek mercenaries are still found playing a prominent part in the struggle between Psammetichus III and Cambyses of Persia. Cambyses however proved the victor. Egypt became, like Lydia, a Persian province, and the event was disastrous not only to the Greek military establishment in the country, but also to the prosperous trading settlement of Naucratis.

III

MILETUS, SAMOS AND EPHESUS

This eastern background must be constantly before the eye when we turn, as we may now do, to the individual histories of the various Greek cities.

Of these the most important was Miletus, which is described by Herodotus as having been at this time the pride of Ionia. He tells us that during a period which must coincide roughly with the sixth century b.c. Miletus enjoyed two phases of great pros­perity separated by two generations of disastrous civil strife. There can be little doubt that these phases of prosperity and eclipse are to be correlated with the changes just recorded in the policy of Lydia and Persia. The earlier period of prosperity must coincide with the tyranny of Thrasybulus, a ruler who is dated by his dealings with the Corinthian tyrant Periander.

Of the subsequent period of dissension practically nothing is known. Its origin is perhaps to be sought in the tyrant’s persecution of the aristocracy, which he sought to teach his friend Periander to imitate by the acted parable of the cutting off of all the tallest ears of corn. The decline of the city must have been hastened by the wars it had to wage against Croesus and Cyrus. The second period of prosperity embraced the reign of a new tyrant, Histiaeus, who was a personal friend of the Persian king Darius. He had won the favour of Darius by help rendered during the Persian campaigns in Scythia and Thrace. He ultimately fell because he had sought to extend his own personal power in that same direction. After the Persian annexations in Thrace he begged Darius to make him a present of Myrcinus, a site on the Strymon rich both in timber and mines, and with a population, both native and settlers, ready to be employed in exploiting these riches. The request brought upon him the suspicions of the Great King, who sent for him and kept him in Persia in a sort of honourable confinement. Ultimately he is found again in Ionia involved in the great revolt that broke out there in 499 bc. The part assigned to him by Herodotus is picturesque but incomprehensible; but at this stage in his career the personal adventures of the tyrant cease to have much historical significance. The great and tragic fact was that the Greek cities of the west coast of Asia Minor had revolted and been crushed. The capture of Miletus in 494 bc ends its history as a free city-state.

It is interesting to notice how little these political occurrences appear to have reacted on the great movement in philosophy and natural science that was the chief glory of sixth-century Miletus. Thales may have begun his work during the first period of prosperity and Anaximenes have finished his after the opening of the second, but much of their scientific activity and most of that of Anaximander must have fallen within the two generations of civil strife.

The material prosperity of Miletus was due in the first place to her shipping, which also can have suffered only relatively from her internal dissensions. Except perhaps during the brief period of the Samian thalassocracy, Milesian mer­chantmen and the trades and industries that supplied both ships and cargoes must have been ceaselessly active. The colonization of the Black Sea coasts went on far into the century, and the Black Sea trade presumably right till the end. At Naucratis, the Greek emporium in Egypt, the Milesians held a position apart and presumably one of privilege, down to the Persian conquest of Egypt in 52 5 bc. The trade with Sybaris, the greatest and richest Greek city in south Italy, flourished till the Sybarites were overthrown in 510 bc by their neighbours and rivals the Crotonians. When Sybaris fell the Milesians were the chief mourners, “for these two cities more than any others that we know of had been closely united from of old”. The bond was a commercial one. The Sybarites were the middlemen of the trade between Miletus and the Etruscans, and further supplied Miletus with raw wool from which she manufactured her famous textiles.

Another industry of the seventh and earlier part of the sixth century that probably had its centre in Miletus is known from the numerous specimens to be found in modern museums. This is the pottery characteristic of sites (so far excavated) that fell at this time within the Milesian sphere of influence. It is a white­ground ware decorated with friezes of animals whose heads are drawn in outline but the bodies in silhouette. The best and most numerous examples of this pottery come from Rhodes, but that may be because Rhodes has been more fully excavated than most Anatolian sites. It is the characteristic pottery of Miletus itself so far as the site has been explored, and it is equally characteristic of the Milesian colonies. Milesian sculpture of the sixth century is best known from the series of draped seated figures that once adorned the approaches to the temple of Branchidae but are now for the most part housed in the British Museum. One of them bears an inscription which declares that it represents Chares of Teichiussa. These statues are easily distinguished from contemporary products of Greece proper by a certain massiveness and fleshiness that is a common feature in sixth-century Ionic art. It will be found reappearing in works found at Ephesus and Samos and in the Parian colony of Thasos.

Next to Miletus in importance, and even before it during the period of Milesian civil strife, was the island state of Samos. Till well into the sixth century it appears indeed to have been largely in the power of a landed class called geomoroi, but side by side with these landowners there was a strong and enterprising mercantile community. Well before the end of the seventh century a Samian named Colaeus made a voyage to Tartessus and became famous from the cargo that he brought back from the region of the Spanish mines. About 600 bc the city founded the colony of Perinthus on the north coast of the sea of Marmora. Somewhere towards the middle of the sixth century a certain Aeaces had a statue erected in his honour. The statue with its inscription was unearthed in 1906. The meaning of the inscription is uncertain, but a very plausible interpretation regards Aeaces as a priestly official engaged in collecting tithes for the state temple from the merchant-adventurers of the city. However that may have been, it is probable that this Aeaces is to be identified with Aeaces the father of Polycrates, the most outstanding figure in Samian political history.

Something like a biography may be constructed for Polycrates, though at the best it is a meagre one and some of the incidents are only weakly documented. If the father had a statue erected to him the son must have moved early in prominent circles. Hence it is not surprising that mention is made of his doings before he became the chief man in his state. The story, which is unfortunately not from the best extant authority, tells how in those early days of his career he used to lend out coverlets and drinking vessels to people who were holding great receptions or celebrating weddings. His next step was to make himself tyrant, at first in conjunction with two of his brothers, but subsequently as sole ruler. Herodotus mentions the bowmen who formed his body­guard. These bowmen were needed, for the tyrant had disaffected subjects. On one occasion he tried to get rid of them en masse by sending them to help in the Persian invasion of Egypt. The plan failed. The disaffected contingent came back regardless of instructions and turned their arms against the tyrant, being helped in this undertaking by a force from Sparta. Polycrates however overcame the rebels, and the Spartans returned ingloriously home. The report of this incident in Herodotus was derived by him from the grandson of one of the Spartans who took part in it.

Polycrates acquired his power just about the time when Miletus submitted to the Persians. The coincidence was no accident. Samos and Miletus had been rivals from the days of the Lelantine war.

When Miletus became subject to a foreign conqueror the Samians saw their opportunity. They took the place of Miletus not only as the chief trading port in the east Aegean but also as the chief opponents of expansion any farther westward on the part of the great eastern power. There is mention in late writers of a war waged by Polycrates against Cyrus himself. The account is obscure but not in its main outline improbable. The chief object of Polycrates’ foreign policy was to keep Samos independent of Persia. The chief means to this end were a strong navy and alliances with actual or potential enemies of the Persians, notably with Amasis the Egyptian pharaoh. The tyrant established something of a thalassocracy in the Aegean, where numerous islands were brought under his sway. One of them was Rheneia, the larger neighbour of Delos. As he dedicated this island to Apollo and celebrated the Delian games, there can be little doubt that he aimed at being recognized as having some sort of suzerainty over the whole archipelago. With a considerable naval power he main­tained what was practically a blockade of Persia, during which neutral and even friendly ships were systematically searched. The blockade was of course described as piracy by those whom it in­convenienced. Polycrates himself justified it by declaring that friends whose ships he captured and released were more grateful to him than they would have been if he had never interfered with them. The success however of this struggle with Persia depended on the Great King being much preoccupied in the east. When Cambyses began to concentrate his policy on the conquest of Egypt and the raising of a powerful fleet in his western dominions, Polycrates abandoned the struggle, broke off his alliance with Egypt, and sent a force to take part in the Persian invasion (525 bc). The picturesque narrative in Herodotus casts only the thinnest of disguises over these hard and disagreeable facts. But it shows also how reluctantly the Samian tyrant bowed to circum­stances. The force he sent to help Cambyses consisted of the disaffected contingent whose subsequent proceedings have been already described, and he himself took the first possible oppor­tunity to turn again against the Persian king. He was led to be­lieve that the Persian satrap at Sardes had quarrelled with his royal master and needed Samian help. The treacherous satrap promised him that if he gave it he should receive such sums of money as would make him rich enough to become tyrant of all Greece. Polycrates was induced to cross to the mainland for an interview, and was there taken prisoner and put to death with barbarous cruelty.

When Polycrates set out on his disastrous visit to the mainland he left in charge of the island a Samian of low birth named Maeandrius, who had a sad experience. ‘”He sought”, so Herodotus tells us, “to show himself the justest of men, but found it impossible”. What he proposed was to hand over all the tyrant’s power and wealth (except a priesthood of Zeus the Liberator and a sum of six talents) and establish freedom and equality in the island. But he quickly discovered that the proposal was too dangerous for himself personally to be carried into execution, so he changed his mind and established himself in Polycrates’ place. The murdered tyrant however had left surviving one of the two brothers who had originally shared his tyranny. This brother, Syloson by name, had some years before become a personal friend of the Persian prince Darius. Syloson now persuaded Darius to restore him to his native island. Maeandrius fled to Sparta where he sought in vain to purchase the support of king Cleomenes with the Samian drinking vessels that he had brought with him, and Syloson was left tyrant of Samos but only after it had become almost depopulated by massacres and reprisals. The saying “thanks to Syloson there’s lots of room” was long remembered in Samos, and though the citizen roll was to some extent made good by the admission to it of manumitted slaves, the island ceased altogether to be what it had been under Polycrates, “foremost among all cities, Greek and barbarian”.

Herodotus dilates the more over Samos because, as he explains, they have executed three works that are among the greatest in all Greece. The first is a tunnel through a mountain one hundred and fifty fathoms in height, that starts from below and runs right through. The length of the tunnel is seven stades, the height and breadth eight feet each. The whole length of this is traversed by another channel twenty cubits deep and three feet broad, through which the water conveyed in pipes reaches the city from a great spring. The architect of this tunnel was Eupalinus son of Naustrophus, a Megarian. This is one of the three works. The second is a mole round the harbour, twenty fathoms deep and more than two stades long. Their third work is a temple, the greatest of all temples that I know. Its first architect was Rhoecus son of Philes, a native of the island. This is why I have dilated the more over the Samians.

So writes Herodotus with the superficial irrelevance and inconsequence that help to make him so attractive. There is little doubt that these three works were all begun or completed during the reign of Polycrates. Rhoecus is associated with Theodorus who is known to have worked for the tyrant. The mole is naturally connected with the thalassocracy. All three, and especially the waterworks, are typical of the tyrannies of this period. The temple, mole and tunnel at Samos may therefore be identified fairly safely with the ‘public works of Polycrates,’ which Aristotle says that that tyrant executed to ensure that his subjects were kept fully employed and inadequately paid.

All three works are still partially extant. Of the temple there remains one headless column and of the foundations enough to confirm Herodotus’ dimensions. The line of the mole may still be traced in the waters of the harbour. The tunnel, rediscovered forty years ago, shows that the engineers had sufficient skill and confidence to begin simultaneously at both ends. When the two gangs met, the errors to be rectified amounted to under six yards in direction and about half that amount in height.

One other work that was erected in Samos at this time is definitely ascribed to Polycrates himself. It was called a laura and is said to have been put up as a rival to the ‘Sweet Corner’ at Sardes. Whether this laura was a bazaar or something less reputable is doubtful, but austerity was certainly not the predominant feature of life under Polycrates. Poets of love and wine such as Ibycus and Anacreon found a congenial home at his court. Pythagoras the philosopher migrated to south Italy.

Sculpture and the minor arts flourished in the island throughout the century. The artists Rhoecus and Theodorus are said to have invented the casting of statues in bronze, and though such legends generally sacrifice accuracy for simplicity and use the word ‘invented’ in a very loose way, they still bear witness to the fame of the artists they refer to and indicate the character of their achievements. Various works by both these artists are mentioned by ancient writers—more particularly the ring that Theodorus made for Polycrates which the tyrant cast into the sea when he was advised by his friend Amasis to try and avoid the consequences of his excessive prosperity by casting away his most precious possession. Another famous Samian gem-cutter of this period was Mnesarchus the father of the philosopher Pythagoras.

The extant material for forming an idea of the works of these artists is meagre. The statue of Aeaces has marked affinities with the Milesian figures from Branchidae. A draped standing male figiire similar in style to the Aeaces statue has features that recall a figure carved in relief on one of the sculptured columns from the temple of Artemis at Ephesus which were dedicated by king Croesus.

On the Ionian mainland the one city that rivalled Miletus in importance was Ephesus. About 600 bc the aristocratic govern­ment of the Basilidae was overthrown by a certain Pythagoras who established himself as tyrant. This ruler is said by a plainly unfriendly authority, a certain Baton of Sinope who wrote a history of the tyrants of Ephesus, to have been cruel and avaricious and to have confiscated the property of those who enjoyed reputation or power, “But with the people and the multitude he both was and appeared to be well liked, sometimes making them hopeful by his promises, sometimes secretly distributing small gratuities”. At the command of the Pythian oracle he built a temple, possibly the first great temple of Artemis. Four other tyrants are found ruling Ephesus in the course of the sixth century. Of these the earliest was probably Melas who became son-in-law of the Lydian king Alyattes. Melas was succeeded by his son Pindarus, who however failed to maintain his father’s good relations with Lydia, where Croesus had now succeeded to the throne. But even the story of this failure suggests the great wealth and importance of Ephesus at this time, when Miletus was no longer under Thrasybulus and Samos not yet under Polycrates. When Alyattes died there was a struggle for the Lydian throne between Croesus and his half-Greek half-brother Pantaleon. Croesus secured financial support from Ephesus, but it came from Pamphaes the son of Theocharides, not from any member of the house of Melas which may plausibly be supposed to have been backing the half-Greek candidate. The result of this mistake was that Croesus, when established on the throne, marched against Ephesus. Pindarus realized that the attack was directed more against him than against his city, advised the Ephesians to put themselves under the protection of Artemis, which they did by tying the city with a rope to the temple of the goddess, and himself retired to the Peloponnese. Ephesus must have become in fact if not in name a Lydian protectorate, but continued to enjoy internal freedom. The Ephesians were able to invite from Athens a certain Aristarchus who, under the title of Aesymnetes, held for five years a position not unlike that held in Athens by Solon, and established in Ephesus a limited democracy.

Under this new regime the city recovered the friendship of Lydia. Croesus was one of the chief contributors to the rebuilding of the Artemisium, and the Ephesians refused to side against him when attacked by Cyrus of Persia. To the time just after the Persian conquest should probably be assigned the rule of the obscure tyrants Comas and Athenagoras, of whom little is known except that they expelled from the city the somewhat provocative satiric poet Hipponax. The banishment of Hipponax must be roughly contemporary with the birth of the philosopher Heracleitus, whose whole life was spent in his native city.

The material remains of sixth-century Ephesus are limited to the finds made in excavating the great temple of Artemis. From these it appears that the earliest temple of any size dates from about the beginning of the sixth century. The enormous temple that made the city famous was in course of construction in the time of Croesus, though it appears to have been completed and dedicated more than a century later. The building was about 360 ft. long by some 180 ft. broad, with a double row of columns running all the way round. The lower parts of these columns were sculptured in relief with human figures of which one or two are preserved fairly complete. The work is of the highest excellence. One of the columns as restored in the British Museum (from fragments that may have not all belonged originally to the same column) has a mutilated inscription that can however be interpreted with certainty as saying that it was dedicated by king Croesus. The epigraphical evidence thus bears out the statement of Herodotus about the contributions made by Croesus to the temple. Theodorus of Samos, who is credited also with other work for Croesus, is said to have had a share in the building.

IV

THE NORTHERN IONIAN CITIES

Chios, the more northerly of the two great Ionian Islands, never played a leading part in the sixth century. About 600 bc the government was some sort of democracy with a demarch who seems to take precedence of the king and a public council containing 50 members from each tribe (yphyle) and meeting at least once a month to transact general public business and to act as a law court with the right of revising judgments and inflicting penalties. Unfortunately this early Chian constitution, which shows affinities with that of Solon, is known only from a single mutilated inscription and a possible reference in the Politics of Aristotle. The island became early a slave-owning state, and the land was largely given over to the cultivation of the vine. The wine-jar and vine-branch that appear on early coins of Chios suggest that by the second half of the sixth century wine making was one of the great industries of the island. The slaves and vineyards may account for the fact that the island seems to have been in constant need of food-supplying lands on the main­land opposite. Hence perhaps the constancy with which the same types are repeated on the Chian coins, the object of which may have been to preserve the credit of the Chian currency outside the island. Hence too perhaps the war with Erythrae of about 600 bc (in which the Chians were supported by Miletus) and the sacrilegious surrender to Cyrus of the Lydian refugee Pactyas in return for which the islanders received the rich corn­lands of Atarneus on the mainland. Under the Persians the island prospered. It had not been too well treated by the Lydians and may at first have welcomed the new masters of Ionia. A tyrant named Strattis is found attending Darius on his campaign of 516 bc; but in the Ionian revolt it came out strongly on the Greek side. At the battle of Lade in 494 bc it supplied 100 ships as against the 80 of Miletus, 70 of Lesbos and 60 of Samos, numbers which show how prosperous the island had been growing during the period of Persian suzerainty.

The elegant refinement of Chian civilization in the latter part of the sixth century is reflected in Chian art. A famous family of sculptors worked in the island, notably Archermus, who was reputed to have ‘invented’ the winged type of victory, and his sons Bupalus and Athenis who excelled in the rendering of draped female figures. The signature of Archermus has been found both at Delos and at Athens, and with the help of epigraphy and literary tradition one group of the great find of archaic female statues from the Athenian acropolis has been recognized as Chian. Clothes, coiffure, and facial expression are all elaborately delicate and graceful, while in technique these statues are beyond dispute superior to contemporary Attic work. Chian influence appears to have ceased with the fall of the Athenian tyranny in yio b.c. The Chian statues were of Parian marble and probably imported into Athens ready made. The favourite pottery was the delicate fabric known generally as Naucratite.

On the mainland Ionia extended northward to a point about level with the northern extremity of Chios and included the hammer-headed peninsula that faces the island. In this region the chief cities were Colophon, Teos, Clazomenae, Smyrna, and Phocaea. Three of the five soon fell on evil days. Smyrna, where at the opening of the sixth century Mimnermus may have been still composing his despondent elegies, was destroyed by Alyattes, and centuries elapsed before it was restored. Teos had been proposed by Thales as a federal capital of Ionia when he was trying to unite the Ionians in a federation to resist the Persians; but the scheme failed, Cyrus reached the Aegean, and the Teians, rather than submit to him, sailed away and founded Abdera on the Thracian coast. Phocaea at the same time lost a great part of its population. Its earlier importance is shown by the tradition of a Phocaean thalassocracy and by archaic electrum coins with the type-parlant of a seal and struck on a standard that became widely known as the Phocaic. About 600 bc it founded Massilia (Marseilles) and a generation later Alalia in Corsica. When the army of Cyrus threatened the city a large con­tingent of the Phocaeans fled to their Corsican colony.

Colophon had in the seventh century become the mother-city of Smyrna and reached an importance which was lost only temporarily, if at all, when for a while it fell into the hands of the Lydian Gyges. In the first part of the sixth century it waged with Alyattes a war in which the cavalry was prominent. But’its chief claim to fame is that it produced the philosopher Xenophanes. The works however of that remarkable critic of received opinions belong to the period after he had been driven from his native city (about 530 bc) and begun his long wanderings in south Italy. More may be known about the city if ever circumstances allow the archaeologists of the American school at Athens to resume the excavations that they began while the Greeks were administering western Asia Minor in the spring of 1922.

Of Clazomenae ancient historians have still less to say, but this lack of literary evidence is to some extent made good by archaeology. The city is now best known for its seventh- and sixth­century sarcophagi of painted terracotta. Some seventy of these were known to the French archaeologists who studied them in 1913. Systematic excavations were begun there by the Greek archaeologist Oikonomos in 1921 and were being successfully prosecuted in 1922 when the city once more passed out of Greek hands and the work and most of the finds had to be abandoned. The subjects depicted include scenes of war (Greeks fighting Cimmerians), of legend (the Doloneia), games (chariot races with Ionic pillars for turning-posts), and hunting. The style is distinctive but has a close kinship with that of the vases usually ascribed to Miletus. There is the same use of a combination of outline and silhouette, and the ornamental motives are also very similar. Vases decorated in the same style as these coffins have been found in Ionia, Aeolis, Rhodes, Athens, Egypt, the Black Sea, and Italy. The human figures on this pottery show a distinctive type of face that is presumably Ionic. The women with their receding foreheads, almond-shaped eyes, tiny mouths, and ears ornamented with pendant earrings are attractive in a naively sophisticated way. A few of the sarcophagi are decorated partly in the technique just described, partly in what is practically the red-figure style that was used from about 530 bc onwards by the great vase painters who worked in Athens. It may have been refugees from Ionia, perhaps from Clazomenae itself, who introduced the new style into Attica.

V

AEOLIANS, DORIANS AND THE CYCLADES

North of Ionia the land was occupied by another branch of the Greek race, the Aeolian, whose greatest achievements belong to an earlier epoch. These mainland Aeolian cities never became great naval powers. The best known of them is Cyme, the near neighbour of Phocaea. The attitude of the people of Cyme towards their harbour is enough to show that it long remained a dominantly agricultural state.

On the other hand, the great city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos was in the year 600 bc in some ways the most advanced community in the whole Greek world. Sappho, Alcaeus and Pittacus were all Mityleneans, and all three were very probably flourishing at that date. In the preceding period the hereditary aristocracy had been displaced by a series of tyrants, the last of whom had been overthrown by a movement in which Pittacus and Alcaeus were leaders. The two however soon quarrelled. The poet Alcaeus, himself an aristocrat, wished for a return to the old regime, while Pittacus aimed at a moderate democracy. The party of Pittacus triumphed: he was given a position much like that of Solon at Athens, and he used it with similar good sense and moderation. Like Solon he revised the laws of his city. One of his statutes imposed a specially severe penalty on any offence if committed under the influence of drink, another put a limit to the expenditure on funeral ceremonials. This position of consti­tutional dictator or Aesymnetes was held by Pittacus for ten years during which Alcaeus and perhaps Sappho were exiled from Mitylene. A brother of Alcaeus who was also banished took service as a soldier under the king of Babylon. At the end of the ten years Pittacus gave up his position voluntarily and Alcaeus returned from exile.

The time of these internal struggles in Mitylene was seized by Miletus to strengthen her control over the Hellespont, which was constantly threatened by a powerful and unfriendly Lesbos. It may have been with Milesian help that during the time of the Mitylenean tyranny Athens, the mother-city of Miletus, seized Sigeum in the Troad, just outside the entrance into the straits. Pittacus renewed the struggle and himself killed in single combat the Athenian commander. In the negotiations which ended the war Periander the tyrant of Corinth acted as arbitrator. Sigeum reverted to Mitylene, but only for a while. It was again seized for Athens by the tyrant Peisistratus who appointed one of his own sons to be ruler of the city.

The moderation and practical wisdom of Pittacus won him a place among the seven sages of archaic Greece, but in fame and importance he is easily eclipsed by the two great Lesbian poets, Alcaeus and Sappho. In one respect Sappho gives Mitylene a unique position. Not only her own achievements in poetry but also her band of women disciples show that in the Mitylene of her day women, at least of the most prosperous class, enjoyed a freedom found elsewhere only in Sparta and an oppor­tunity for self-development without parallel in Greek history.

Of specifically Aeolic works of art very little is certainly known. There is a rare and curious form of the volute capital which is found among the temple remains at Mitylene and a few mainland Aeolic sites. The style of these capitals recalls Egypt, and they have often been regarded as belonging to the type from which was developed the mature Ionic. A connection between Mitylene and Egypt is attested at least from the time of Sappho, whose brother exported Greek wine to Naucratis.

A third group of Greek settlements, Dorian by race, lay to the south of Ionia in the south-west corner of Asia Minor. Of the six chief cities of this group two, Cnidus and Halicarnassus, were on the mainland; three, Ialysus, Camirus, and Lindus, on the large island of Rhodes; the sixth being Cos, the second largest island of the Dodecanese. These six cities held periodically a common festival from which however Halicarnassus was early expelled, perhaps as not being of pure Doric stock. Within this group the three Rhodian cities showed a remarkable tendency to act as a unity. Rhodes for instance, not any particular Rhodian city, is mentioned by Herodotus as one of the four Dorian cities that had part in the Naucratite Hellenium. (The other three were Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Phaselis.) In 580 bc Rhodians, presumably from the whole island, combined with the Cnidians in an expedition which first attempted to seize Lilybaeum in west Sicily and ultimately founded a Greek state in the Lipari Islands. This Lilybaeum expedition formed part of awider colonial scheme, which, if successful, would have excluded the Phoenicians from Sicily and profoundly affected the history of the middle Mediterranean. About the same time Gela in south-east Sicily, itself a Rhodian foundation of about a century earlier, was establishing the great city of Acragas (Girgenti) about half-way along the south coast of the island. The two enterprises cannot have been quite independent of one another. It looks as though the Dorian hexapolis was aiming at the subjugation of the whole of west Sicily, perhaps in conjunction with the Dorian Selinus, the most westerly of Greek cities in Sicily. Any such projects were however dealt a fatal blow by the advance of Cyrus to the Aegean. The Dorians seem to have offered the Persians singularly little resistance. The only effort was made by the Cnidians and even that did not get as far as fighting. The Cnidians consulted the Delphic oracle on an engineering project for digging a canal to turn into an island the long peninsula on which their city was built, but the oracle discouraged them and they took its advice. Some of them may have migrated and taken service under Amasis of Egypt. At the battle of Pelusium in 525 bc, where the Egyptians were defeated and their country left at the mercy of the Persians, the Caro-Greek contingent which fought on the Egyptian side distinguished itself by the treachery of its Dorian com­mander, by the way it began the battle by sacrificing the deserter’s children and drinking their blood mingled with wine, and by the heroism with which it then proceeded to fight against the Persians. Cnidus was sufficiently important about the middle of the sixth century to erect a treasury of its own at.Delphi, but the remains are too scanty to give any idea of Cnidian art at the time.

The archaic pottery of Greek Asia Minor is best known from finds made in Rhodes, notably by Biliotti, the British consul on the island some seventy years ago, and more recently from the carefully conducted and admirably published excavations at Vroulia of the Danish scholar Kinch. Whether the typical pottery of the seventh and sixth centuries that has been found in such abundance on the island is a local fabric, as Kinch held, or Milesian, as is held by many archaeologists, it bears witness to the commercial importance of Rhodes at this period. The Cyclades, in spite of their central situation, never held a dominant political position in Greece. No single island was big enough to play for long the leading part, and as a group they were too much separated by the sea for any effective synoecismus or federation. The largest and most important was Naxos. Its early prosperity and the main source of its riches are alike indicated by the coins which it began to strike about 600 bc with a large wine cup (cantharus) as type. About the same time or only a little later the Naxians began to quarry their beautiful coarse­grained marble and to develop a school of sculpture of which remains attested by inscriptions are to be seen at Delos and at Delphi, while on Naxos itself there are several statues that from their unfinished condition as well as from their material are plainly local products. Some too of the earliest archaic statues found on the Athenian Acropolis are of Naxian marble and are held on high authority to be of Naxian workmanship. About the middle of the sixth century the island fell under a tyrant named Lygdamis, who had led a popular movement against the governing aristocracy. This Lygdamis was a close ally of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus. Each helped the other with men or money to secure the tyranny of his native city. Polycrates too is said to have received support from Lygdamis when he seized the tyranny at Samos. The Naxian tyranny, which was overthrown by the Spartans, perhaps in connection with their expedition to Samos, was followed by a reversion to an oligarchy which in its turn was overthrown and replaced by a democratic government that was still in power in 500 bc when the Persians were persuaded to make an expedition against the island with the alleged intention of restoring the exiled aristocrats. This expedition and the success of the Naxians in repelling it, show how prosperous and powerful the island must have been at the time. It appears for a while even to have succeeded Samos as the chief independent Greek naval power in the Aegean.

The people of Paros supplied the arbitrators who ended the period of discord at Miletus by giving the government to those of the citizens whose lands they found best cultivated. This decision in favour of the landed class may mean that the landed interest was dominant in Paros itself, a state of things which would explain why so little is heard at this time about this pros­perous island, the second largest of the Cyclades.

The little island of Siphnos owed its importance to the gold and silver mines which were already yielding richly by about the middle of the sixth century. The islanders distributed the output periodically among themselves. When the Samian exiles and their Spartan supporters had failed in their attack on Polycrates and Samos, the Samian exiles descended on Siphnos and extracted from the Siphnians the large sum of a hundred talents. Before this incident the Siphnians had already decorated their market place and town hall with Parian marble. Some idea of their prosperity at this period may still be gleaned from the remains of the treasury which they built at Delphi with the tithe of their income from the mines. It is of marble and decorated with finely carved reliefs and sculptured female figures in place of columns. The work is Ionic but is generally held not to be by Siphnian artists.

Delos itself during the sixth century played an important but somewhat passive part. The Athenian tyrant Peisistratus established a sort of protectorate over the island and purified it by removing all the graves within sight of the sacred precinct. We saw how Polycrates of Samos celebrated Delian games and presented Delos with the larger neighbouring island of Rheneia, which he joined to it by a chain stretched across the narrow intervening strait. By these particular attentions to the religious capital of the Aegean the tyrants of Athens and Samos sought successively to gain some sort of presidency among the island cities such as republican Athens secured in the succeeding century as president of the Delian confederacy. Actual remains of this period are comparatively scanty on the island, but the series of sixth-century female figures from the temple of Artemis excavated by the French in the ’seventies of the last century was the most striking of its kind known till the Athenian Acropolis revealed its treasures. They have been attributed to the younger school of Chian sculptors.

One other island of the Aegean that claims a brief notice is Thasos, close to the coast of west Thrace. Though so far from the Cyclades it had a close connection with them, having been colonized from Paros early in the seventh century. Like Siphnos the island became wealthy and important from its mines. About 550 bc it began issuing a coinage the type of which, a satyr carrying off a maenad, is executed in the full and fleshy style that is typical of Ionic workmanship. The same style is seen in sculptures of the period found on the island, as for example a relief representing a kneeling Heracles now in the museum of Constantinople. These coins and sculptures are enough to show that the importance of Thasos began some time before the Persian wars when, in recorded history, it first appears as a wealthy city.

VI

THE BLACK SEA AND ITS APPROACHES

This concludes the survey of the chief Greek cities on the islands and the east coast of the Aegean. It remains to consider the principal outlets which the Greeks, starting from this centre, had found for themselves in the eighth and seventh centuries and continued to develop during the sixth.

Of these the most important, at least for the eastern Greeks, was probably the Black Sea and its approaches. By the year 600 bc both sides of the Hellespont were fringed with Greek cities. On the European side in the Thracian Chersonese (Peninsula of Gallipoli) Lesbos had founded Madytus, Alopeconesos and Sestos, the Milesians and Clazomenians had planted Limnae and Cardia, the Teians Elaeus. These cities must at first have been much in the nature of factories, since the native Dolonci still occupied the peninsula. Hence perhaps the fact that in the cemetery of Elaeus, revealed by Turkish shells in 1915 and excavated by French troops during the campaign and in 1921—2, the finds appear to date only from towards the end of the sixth century. On the Asiatic side the two chief cities were the Milesian Abydos, near the modern Chanak, and the Phocaean Lampsacus nearer the Marmora end of the straits. The rivalries that must have inspired these various settlements during the days of Pittacus and Thrasybulus have left no record; but for the period from 560 bc onward we have a consecutive narrative in Herodotus. The Chersonese was being threatened by barbarian neighbours and the Dolonci sought help at Athens, where Peisistratus had recently established himself as tyrant. With the consent of Peisistratus a rival of his named Miltiades, a rich man who kept a chariot and four and had won a victory at the Olympian games, accompanied the Dolonci home, built a wall across the neck of the isthmus, and made himself tyrant of the whole Chersonese. He became a friend of the Lydian king Croesus, and when, in an attempt to secure a footing on the Asiatic side of the strait, he was captured by the Lampsacenes, Croesus forced them to release him. This Miltiades was succeeded by Stesagoras, the son of his half-brother, and he again by his brother, a second Miltiades. This latter was sent to succeed Stesagoras from Athens by Hippias, the son and successor of Peisistratus, who later in his reign married his own daughter Archedice to Aeantides the son of Hippoclus, the ruling tyrant of Lampsacus, at that time high in favour at the Persian court. This wedding of policy may have secured for Athens, at least for a time, what wars had failed to achieve, the control of both sides of the Dardanelles. Within the Chersonese Miltiades followed his patron’s policy and strengthened his position with his Thracian neighbours by himself marrying the daughter of their king Olorus. When Darius made his expedition to the Danube c. 516 bc. Miltiades accompanied him. In later times, after the Ionic revolt, when he had fled to Athens, he claimed to have conspired against Darius during this early campaign. The statement is beyond proof or refutation, but the whole history of the Miltiades family and the Chersonese is of unique interest both for the facts and the suggestions that it offers as to the interplay in these outlying Greek regions of the somewhat miscellaneous Greek settlements with one another, the surrounding natives, and the great powers of the period, both barbarian and Greek.

In the Sea of Marmora the foremost Greek city was Cyzicus, a Milesian foundation on the lofty peninsula that runs out from the south coast. Its early importance is shown by its coins, heavy electrum pieces which soon circulated all over Greece. Their type, a tunny fish, probably indicates the early source of Cyzicene prosperity. The city began early to erect imposing public buildings, as is shown from fragments of archaic sculptured reliefs and Ionic capitals now preserved in the Constantinople Museum. Its fame among the uncivilized tribes who dwelt beyond the Marmora and the Black Sea is perhaps reflected in the story of the Scythian Anacharsis and his visit to the city, from which he is said to have introduced the worship of the great mother-goddess into his native country. After the Persian conquest a Cyzicene named Pytharchus tried to make himself tyrant of his native city. He had previously been presented by Cyrus with seven obscure towns and advanced on Cyzicus with an army, but was beaten back by the Cyzicenes. The incident illustrates the considerable amount of freedom enjoyed by the city-states within the Persian dominion. In 516 however Cyzicus was under a tyrant Aristagoras who accompanied Darius on his expedition to Scythia.

A Black Sea trade such as existed from at least 600 bc presupposes an important station on the Bosphorus, and Byzantium, founded by Megara about 660 bc, must soon have attained to this position. Megara was consistently friendly with Miletus and so too presumably was its daughter-city. Hence perhaps the fact that so little is heard about it till the time when Darius crossed the Bosporus and Ariston, tyrant of the city, is found along with Aristagoras of Cyzicus and other Greek tyrants of the Marmora and Hellespont districts, attending Darius on his expedition to the Danube. Byzantium appears not to have been enthusiastic in the Persian cause, for it passed under a Persian governor, Megabazus. It is to him Herodotus attributes the saying that Chalcedon, the earlier settlement just opposite Byzantium on the Asiatic coast, must have been founded by men who were blind. Two monuments of the Persian passage of the Bosphorus survived at least till the time of Herodotus, one, a pair of pillars inscribed respectively in Greek and ‘Assyrian’ (i.e. Persian cuneiform) set up by Darius, the other, a set of paintings of the crossing that had been executed for the Samian Mandrocles, builder of the bridge.

In the Black Sea itself the opening of the sixth century probably saw the coasts already fringed with Greek settlements, mostly Milesian, along the west and north to beyond the Crimea, and along the south and east as far as the Caucasus. Sinope facing the Crimea, Trapezus (Trebizond) nearly 300 miles farther along the southern coast, and Phasis and Dioscorias on the eastern coast in the land of Colchis, supplied Miletus with raw materials such as flax, timber, and iron, and could maintain Greek trade with the far east behind the back of an unfriendly power in western Asia Minor. Our knowledge however of the Black Sea cities during the archaic period is derived mainly from excavations and is limited mainly to the Russian sites which alone have been systematically explored. At Panticapaeum (Kertch), Theodosia, and other Crimean sites, Attic vases of the latter part of the sixth century have been found in some numbers. At Taman on the Asiatic side of the Cimmerian Bosporus (the strait that connects the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea), similar Attic pottery has been found and also various Ionic fabrics of the same period. These finds establish a latest possible date at which the settlements grew to importance. It may be that the Greeks feeling their way gradually forward past Apollonia (Burghas), Odessus (Varna), Callatis, Tomi, Istrus (Costanza) and the mouths of the Danube and Dniester did not firmly establish themselves so far away till about this period, but they had reached the north-west corner of the Black Sea considerably earlier. Olbia in a sheltered position on the estuary of the Hypanis (Bug) and facing that river’s junction with the Borysthenes (Dnieper) was already a flourishing Greek city before 600 bc. Here and at the neighbouring site of Berezan (Borysthenes?) careful excavations have produced, besides some fine examples of early Ionian jewellery and other archaic objects, many examples of all the best known Greek potteries of the archaic period: Corinthian, Sicyonian (?), the Ionic fabrics provisionally assigned to Miletus, Samos, and Clazomenae, and specimens of the Greek ware of Naucratis in Egypt. About the middle of the sixth century these wares began to give way to the black-figure pottery of Athens, which again is succeeded by the red-figure pottery which Athens began putting on the market about 530 bc. Trade connections were various as well as extensive. One fact brought out by the Olbia excavations is particularly significant. Of the graves those of the sixth century are the farthest from the city; later ages buried nearer in. This can only mean that the city was shrinking and that the sixth century was its period of greatest prosperity. Before the end of the century and probably some time before it the people of Olbia were issuing coins. They are of two kinds, the one being large round copper pieces, the other curious pieces cast in the shape of fish, particularly dolphins. Some of these fish coins have been found in the hands of the dead where they are taken to represent, like the diobol that the Athenians put into the mouth of the departed, the passage-money for the journey to the other world. The numerous graffiti on the potsherds show that writing was a common accomplishment and that the dialect spoken till near the end of the sixth century was pure Ionic. Ionic influence was replaced by Attic, but in some ways these remote Greek cities must from the first have been curiously conservative. At Panticapaeum fifth- and fourth-century graves have been held to show Mycenaean features both in construction and furniture. Centuries later the Olbiopolitans still regarded Homer as the last word in literature. Early Greek products penetrated far inland. Archaic Ionian vases have been found in the middle Dnieper district and in Podolia near Nemirov on the upper Bug. In exchange for these articles the Greeks must have received the raw products that they are known in later ages to have exported to the mother-country, namely slaves, cattle, honey, wax, dried and pickled fish, hides, salt, timber, amber, drugs. Most important of all, perhaps even from this early period, was the trade in corn. The corn of the Agricultural Scythians, who according to Herodotus grew corn “not for consumption but for sale”, may explain why Thrasybulus of Miletus was able so successfully to withstand the invasion of his territories by the Lydians in spite of their systematic destruc­tion of the Milesian crops.

Detailed facts about these Pontic cities are wanting. The settlers must have been men who had found life hard or uncongenial in their old homes, or in some cases refugees from foreign invasion like the founders of Phanagoria on the Asiatic side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, who are said to have been men of Teos fleeing from the violence of the Persians. The sites of their settlements they seem generally to have rented from the previous occupants. Certainly the natives cannot have been very unfriendly, otherwise the colonies, depending as they did on their inland trade, could hardly have survived. The story told in Herodotus of the fifth-century Scythian chief who made periodic and prolonged visits to Olbia and aped Greek dress and manners is probably typical of the state of things from the time of the first settlers onwards. The chiefs derived both profit and pleasure from the neighbourhood of a superior civilization. The lower classes were less appreciative.

VII

THE GREEKS IN EGYPT AND GYRENE

In Egypt when the founder of the Saite dynasty died (609 bc) there were two main Greek settlements—‘The Camps’ at Daphnae on the east side of the Delta and Naucratis on one of its western arms. Both had grown out of the Milesians’ Fort, the original head-quarters of both the Greek mercenaries and the Greek merchants within the pharaoh’s dominions. Both continued to flourish till the anti-Greek outbreak that put Amasis on the throne (566 bc) and led to the concentration of all the Greeks in Naucratis. The Daphnae Camps were two in number; one was occupied by Carian mercenaries the other by Ionians, and the Nile flowed between them. It was from this camp that the Greeks marched out under Necho on the expedition which overthrew Josiah, and it was here that Jeremiah and many of his fellow-countrymen sought refuge from Nebuchadrezzar and found it till that monarch fell upon Egypt and led them away captive to Babylon. Daphnae was thus the scene of the first intercourse in Egypt between the Jews and the Greeks, an intercourse that was to have such notable developments four centuries later at Alexandria. The sojourn of distinguished Jewish refugees at Daphnae appears to have left its mark on the place to this day. The camp buildings, of which remains still exist, are known as Kasr Bint el-Yehudi, “the castle of the Jew’s daughter”.

A generation later the Greeks were forced to leave the site. The troops were transferred to Memphis, ostensibly to be more under the pharaoh’s eye but soon to be his trusted bodyguard. The merchants were removed to Naucratis. In the days of Herodotus their old homes at Daphnae and the slips for their ships there were already in ruins. The site has been excavated and the remains of Greek pottery confirm the tradition of the abandonment about 560 bc.

Amasis began his reign by prohibiting Greek traders from carrying on business anywhere in Egypt but at Naucratis.

And for those Greeks who did not wish to reside but merely made voyages there he gave sites to set up altars and precincts to the gods: the greatest of these and the most famous and the most used is called the Hellenium; these are the cities which united to establish it: of the Ionians Chios, Teos, Phocaea, Clazomenae, of the Dorians Rhodes, Cnidus, Halicarnassus and Phaselis, of the Aeolians only Mitylene: ...and these are the cities which supply superintendents of the mart.... Apart from these the Aeginetans established on their own a precinct of Zeus, the Samians another of Hera, and the Milesians one of Apollo (Herodotus).

Amasis was thus in a sense a founder of Naucratis, but he was only a second founder. Excavations have shown that the city flourished from about the middle of the seventh century. The unmistakable pottery of Greek Naucratis found its way to Aegina well before the reign of Amasis. Naucratis itself was being flooded with Greek pottery of several distinctive styles, mostly of uncertain East-Greek origin, but including some Corinthian. Charaxus, brother of Sappho, was bringing Lesbian wine to the city and falling victim there to the charms of a Greek hetaera. The various precincts contained temples of the protecting deity. Column fragments of an Apollo temple have been preserved which must belong to a building erected about the middle of the sixth century b.c. in a variety of the Ionian style details of which find parallels at Samos and in south Italian Locri. The ruins of the Apollo precinct measure 80 m. by 43 m.; those of Hera are considerably larger, those of the Hellenium larger still with traces of numerous internal buildings. South of the precinct lay the quarter of the Greek residents, a labyrinth of winding streets, and south again of that, a native quarter. The area excavated measured 800 m. by 400 m.; the total area occupied must have been larger still.

From the point of view of Greek history Naucratis and Daphnae are mainly interesting as the centres from which Egyptian influence reached Greece. Their existence meant that Egypt was known at first hand not merely to occasional enterprising travellers but to a large body of Greeks from a variety of cities; at all events during the long reign of Amasis many of these Greeks were constantly passing to and fro between Naucratis and their native cities. The effect of this intercourse must have been considerable. It may be illustrated from the figures of two scribes dressed in what is obviously a Greek imitation of Egyptian garb found among the pre-Persian remains on the Athenian Acropolis. Cases like this of direct Egyptian influence are few, perhaps surprisingly so; but it would be rash on that account to put a low estimate on the debt of Greece at this time to Egypt. The wise men of Greece like Pythagoras and Solon visited the land and tradition connected these visits with their search for wisdom. One service Egypt certainly rendered to Greek science. The pages of Herodotus and the fragments of his predecessor Hecataeus (born at Miletus c. 550 BC) show how much the Greeks were impressed when they discovered the extreme antiquity of Egyptian civilization. It seems indeed to have first inspired them with a real spirit for historical research. A particularly precious gift that the Greeks received from Egypt probably by way of Naucratis was the papyrus, the plant which provided them with a light and comparatively cheap material for book making.

The high plateau west of Lower Egypt that looks north across the sea to Greece received its first Greek settlers a little later than Egypt. About 630 bc Greeks from Thera and Crete established themselves on the island of Platea (Bomba) whence they moved a few years later to Cyrene on the mainland some 15 miles farther west. They brought no women with them and married Libyan wives. Some 50 years later the Cyrenaeans invited the Greeks at large to come and share in a distribution of land. The invitation was backed by Delphi and resulted in a large influx from the Peloponnese, Crete and other islands (570 bc). The new-comers were naturally unpopular with the natives whom they dispossessed, but the estrangement was temporary and partial. Quarrels among the Greeks themselves soon led to the foundation of Barca, which in turn became the mother of Euhesperides (Benghazi) and Taucheira (Tokrah) still farther west near the mouth of the gulf of Sydra (Syrtis Major). The natives sided with Barca, and the Libyan strain was soon stronger there than in Cyrene itself. At Cyrene the women would eat no cow’s flesh. At Barca they abstained from pork as well. Libyan names occur in both cities in the most exalted families (Battus, Alazir).

The leader of the original expedition became king of Cyrene, assuming the name of Battus, a Libyan word for king which became a personal name in the family. Battus founded a dynasty that was still ruling in the days of Pindar; the kings bore alter­nately the names of Battus and Arcesilas. The great immigration took place under Battus II (the Prosperous). The movement that led to the foundation of Barca began with a quarrel between Arcesilas II (the Cruel) and his brothers. When shortly afterwards Arcesilas II was murdered the throne would have passed to a usurper but for the vigorous action of his widow Eryxo, who secured the succession for her son Battus III (the Lame), under whom the Cyrenaeans enjoyed the blessings of a very limited monarchy: instructed by the Delphic oracle they called in as ‘reformer’ Demonax of Man tinea, who left Battus a titular king- ship but organized the city on democratic lines. We have few details as to his reforms, but the fact that he created or recognized three ‘tribes’, the original citizens from Thera and the perioikoi, the Peloponnesians and Cretans, and the islanders, shows that the problem was largely racial. Arcesilas III set about overthrowing this constitution, and though at first driven into exile he ultimately with the help of Polycrates of Samos established himself as despot. The two cities, so Herodotus tells us, had been close friends from the days of the settlement on Platea. Arcesilas was on good terms with his cousin Alazir (Aladdeir), king of Barca, whose daughter he married and with whom he was staying for fear of his own subjects when both he and Alazir were murdered (about 510 bc). Cyrene meanwhile had been governed by his mother Pheretime. It is noteworthy how active a part in Cyrenaic politics was played by the women of the royal house. Battus IV owed his throne to Pheretime and the army she secured from the Persian satrap of Egypt. Barca was reduced, the leading men and women mutilated and murdered by the queen-mother, the remnant transplanted to Bactria by the Great King and Battus became the vassal ruler of the whole Cyrenaic pentapolis.

The prosperity of Cyrene was due to its sheep (much adver­tised by the Delphic oracle) and still more to its crops. The soil is rich, and rain so abundant that the natives called it the place where there is a hole in the sky. The great plateau rises from the sea to a height of 2000 ft. in terraces which allowed of three successive harvests at four-month intervals. Its most valuable product was silphium, a medicinal plant which grew only in Cyrenaica. When some Libyans wished to make a dedication at Delphi they set up a column that represented a highly conventionalized silphium plant. Silphium appeared regularly on the coins of Cyrene from about 600 BC and also on those of Barca. It was a royal monopoly, and a vase that may well be of local make depicts Arcesilas, probably the second of the name, super­intending the weighing of packets of the precious plant on a ship’s deck while other consignments, already weighed and ready for export, are being placed in the hold. We are told by Ephorus that Battus I was a good ruler “but his successors governed more and more tyrannically, appropriating the public revenues and neglecting the observances of religion”. This change may perhaps be equated with the institution of the royal monopoly in silphium.

Inspite of the distances that separated Cyrene and her daughter­cities from their civilized neighbours, they maintained relations with them that illustrate the unity of Mediterranean civilization at this period. The earliest settlements do not indeed seem to have attracted much notice either in Sais or in Carthage, but the influx of 570 bc had immediate repercussions. The tribes of the interior appealed to the pharaoh Apries who sent to their help a large expedition the failure of which directly contributed to his overthrow by Amasis, who made friends with the Cyrenaeans, sent them a portrait of himself and a statue of Athena (Neith) and is even said to have taken a Cyrenaean wife. When Arcesilas II was murdered, Battus III went in person to Egypt with his mother and grandmother to secure recognition from Amasis. The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses led both Cyrene and Barca to acknowledge his supremacy and send gifts. Darius incorporated Cyrenaica in the nome of Egypt and it was as his vassal that Pheretime made her appeal for Persian help. This constant intercourse with Egypt explains the worship of Amon at Cyrene, de­rived probably from the famous oasis, and that of Isis by the Cyrenaean women. The magnificent rock tombs of Cyrene recall Egyptian tombs and imply Egyptian models. The Telegonia of Eugammon, who wrote at Cyrene, introduced an episode which may have been influenced and possibly inspired by the Egyptian story of Rhampsinitus.

With Greece Cyrene maintained constant communication. Two archaic female statues recently found in the city at once recall the finds made in Delos and on the Athenian Acropolis. A Lindian temple chronicle bears witness to early intercourse with Rhodes. The city had a treasury at Olympia. It is probable that as early as the sixth century Cyrenaic horses were often seen at the Olympian Games. Of close ties with Sparta the most interesting evidence is furnished by recent finds of pottery: the Arcesilas vase described above belongs to a very distinctive fabric that was formerly regarded as exclusively Cyrenaic. Recently, however, the British excavations at Sparta have shown that this was the normal kind of decorated pottery used in sixth-century Sparta, and the fabric shows a continuous development there from times before Cyrene was founded. Still more recently some fine specimens have been found in the Spartan colony of Tarentum. There is thus a strong probability that the pottery of this kind found at Sparta is a local product. But for the later phases at all events there is no need to assume that Sparta was the only seat of the industry. Besides the Arcesilas vase there are others painted with subjects that have been plausibly associated with Cyrene. When American archaeologists began digging at Cyrene in 1910 their rather meagre pottery finds included ‘one or two fragments that showed the characteristics of the so-called Cyrenaic ware.’ Whatever the place or places of origin of this pottery, its distribution is signi­ficant. It is not an all-pervading fabric like Corinthian and Attic. The places where it is best attested are Sparta, Tarentum and Cyrene. Examples have also been found at Phigalea in Arcadia, at Naucratis, Samos, Sardes and Massilia. The finds thus illustrate the written records which bring sixth-century Cyrene into special connection with Egypt, Samos and the Peloponnese. The Egyptian Amon was wor­shipped in Samos and Sparta as well as in Cyrene; Sparta and Egypt as well as Cyrene figure prominently in the history of Polycrates. The Spartan expedition to Samos was directed against the tyrant, but it dates from the time when he was deserting his Greek and Egyptian friends and going over to the Persians and Phoenicians. The Dorian thrust into Cyrenaica had barred the passage from Phoenicia to Carthage, and the Cyrenaeans and their friends must have been in constant fear of a combination between their Phoenician rivals to east and west. Samos, Egypt and Cyrene fell before Persia, and it was probably as a result of this that about 513 bc Dorieus of Sparta, half-brother of king Cleomenes, sailed to Libya and tried to settle Cinyps, the most fertile region in north Africa, roughly midway between Cyrene and Carthage. After two years he was driven out by the Carthaginians and Libyans, returned to Sparta, and set out on a still more unsuccessful expedition to wrest territory from the Punic settlers in west Sicily. His career suggests that the Peloponnesians were trying to prevent the Carthaginians from turning east and joining hands with the eastern Phoenicians. A Spartan Cinyps would have secured this object and held out the hope of liberating Cyrene from its Greek tyrants and Persian overlord. Persia and Carthage recognized the danger, and sought to prevent a repetition of the attempt by claiming between them all the intervening coast of Libya and fixing a common frontier.

VIII

MAGNA GRAECIA AND THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN

In south Italy for the greater part of the sixth century the most prominent Greek cities were Croton and Sybaris. Sybaris is said to have had a circuit of over eight miles and a population that is variously given as 100,000 (Scymnus) and even 300,000 (Diodorus), estimates which are sufficiently impressive even allowing for exaggeration and the possible inclusion of dependents living in the country round. Croton was much the same size. In situation the northern city had two great advantages. Ships from the east at this period always crossed from Greece to Italy where the sea is narrowest and then coasted down, so that Sybaris was the nearer city, and, secondly, the land-passage across to the western sea is shorter and brought the trader out nearer to the markets of central and northern Italy. The result was that in the sixth century bc Sybaris became one of the greatest commercial cities in the Greek world. It had specially close connections with both Miletus and Etruria, which means that it was the chief centre from which Ionian products found their way over Italy. There is reason to believe that it had a practical monopoly of the Etruscan trade, the extent of which is attested by the abundant finds of Greek pottery. “The Sybarites wore cloaks made of Milesian wool, and this was the origin of their friendship, as Timaeus states. For of the peoples of Italy they most loved the Etruscans, of those outside Italy, the Ionians”. The territory controlled by the city was considerable. It reached at least to Siris which lay half-way to Tarentum, while along the west coast it extended from Laus to Paestum. The close connection between the two coasts is illustrated by the coins of Siris, which have the Sybarite type of the bull, and are inscribed on the one side with the name of Siris and on the other with that of Pyxus (Buxentum) on the west coast. The wealth and luxury of the Sybarites became proverbial all over the Greek world. It is said that cooks were encouraged to invent new dishes by the grant of a sort of patent on their inventions, and that producers, importers, and purveyors of certain luxuries such as eels and purple dye were exempted from taxation. These stories plainly have their origin in satire, but they may none the less throw light both on staple industries and the fiscal policy of the people satirized. Something has been said already on the commercial aspects of the great Greek games. Those of Sybaris were on the same lines as those of Olympia and were deliberately held at the same thing.

Croton, in a bracing situation, had a more distinguished history. Medicine and physical culture were both carried to a high pitch in the city. A Crotonian named Democedes, son of a priest of Aesculapius who had migrated there from Cnidus, attained such fame as a physician that he was employed as a public practitioner at Aegina and Athens, then as court physician first to Polycrates of Samos and later to Darius of Persia. The city was famous for its athletes: on one occasion at the Olympic Games the first seven places in the foot-race all fell to competitors from Croton; Milo, the Crotonian statesman and soldier of the latter part of the sixth century, was one of the most famous of ancient athletes. But Croton’s chief claim to a prominent place in history comes from its connection with Pythagoras. His doctrines are dealt with in another chapter but his personal career and the way of life that he introduced first into Croton and then into other cities of south Italy is one of the outstanding facts in the history of Greater Greece. After migrating from Samos in the days of Polycrates he settled in Croton and gathered bands of devoted disciples, taught them his way of life with its doctrine of purification and inward harmony, and organized them in a sort of religious brotherhood. His appeal found in Croton a special response. Milo became one of his disciples.

The Italian Greek communities were even more quarrelsome than their parent cities. About 530 bc Croton, Sybaris and Metapontum combined to suppress the flourishing city of Siris (a Colophonian foundation), and in spite of assistance sent from Locri the city was annihilated. We hear of a plague that resulted from this campaign. When this had spent itself the Crotonians turned against Locri, but though the aggressor’s forces are said to have been immensely superior in numbers the Locrians won the day. It was after this chastening experience that Pythagoras is said to have come to Croton. In the next war the opponents are Sybaris and Croton. The casus belli as given in the tradition was that Croton on the advice of Pythagoras received some refugees who had been expelled from Sybaris by the tyrant Telys, but we may suspect that Croton, checked in her attempt to expand southward, had claimed some compensation in the Sybaris direction. In the fighting the Sybarites were completely defeated and their city utterly destroyed (510 bc). Herodotus gives a lively description of the dismay of the Milesians: ‘they all from youth upward shaved their heads and put on great mourning’ when they heard the news. This destructive rivalry is enough in itself to explain why these great cities did not make themselves more felt in later Italian history.

Tarentum stands apart as the one great Dorian foundation in Magna Graecia, a fact illustrated by the finds of pottery that have been made in the city. Its splendid harbour, now one of the chief bases of the Italian navy, and its position as the first important Greek city to be reached after crossing from Greece made it unique. When the isthmus route from Brindisi to Tarentum first came into use is uncertain, but tradition says that the founder of Tarentum died at Brindisi. The considerable collection of Greek pottery in Brindisi museum said to come from local finds dates from about 500 bc. A still shorter passage across the Adriatic may have been secured by crossing to Hydrus (Hydruntum, Otranto) and then proceeding by land to Gallipolis on the east coast of the Tarentine bay, a settlement that is known to have been a naval station of the Tarentines. The wealth of Tarentum was derived partly from agriculture and fishing, partly from industries, notably the making of fabrics and dies. To the purple dye works are due the ancient heaps of mussel shells still to be seen both at Gallipolis and at Tarentum itself.

The other cities of the east coast are of less importance. Metapontum lay too far from the western sea to offer a convenient isthmus route. Its wealth depended on its agriculture, whence both the ear of corn that from about 550 bc appears on its coins and the golden corn ear that the city offered to Delphi. Caulonia seems to have followed obediently the policy of its mother-city. The chief evidence for its importance in the sixth century is its coinage. Locri had outposts on the western sea which show that it must have taken advantage of its situation, which offered the nearest alternative route to the sea passage through the straits of Messina; but its early activities have left little record, the most notable remains being a fine series of terracotta reliefs that begin at the end of the sixth century. No early coins of the city are known, and the fact has been associated with the fame of its ancient lawgiver Zaleucus, who, like the Spartan Lycurgus, imposed laws that remained in force till a late period and may similarly have forbidden the use of coined money.

The Locrian lawgiver is a figure about whom we would gladly have fuller and more trustworthy information. He is represented variously as contemporary with the semi-mythical Lycurgus, as living early in the seventh century, and as a pupil of Pythagoras, while Timaeus maintains that he never lived at all. Timaeus is hardly to be taken seriously as against Plato and Aristotle, and an early date is rendered probable by the tradition that the laws of Zaleucus were the first Greek laws to be committed to writing, as also by the curious statement that they were put to music, and by the character of the laws themselves, which became proverbial for their severity. As with other early codes the main point gained was the simple fact of their being written, which meant that justice was administered in accordance with a fixed public code instead of the arbitrary discretion of the judge. For the first time the citizen knew definitely what the law regarded as a crime. Zaleucus is represented by Aristotle as a slave, by Diodorus as a nobleman. Both versions may have an element of truth. The lawgiver acted as a mediator between the privileged and unprivileged classes. If he did not, like Solon, belong to the middle class, he probably had connections with both extremes. Zaleucus is always associated with Charondas who a little later drew up for Catana a code which was adopted also at Rhegium. In the comparatively new communities of Magna Graecia and Sicily established usage was doubtless less sacrosanct than in the motherland, a fact that would explain the prominence that these regions play in the epoch-making change involved in the publication of a written code.

On the west coast the most southerly city, Rhegium, has its history closely bound up with that of Messana on the Sicilian side of the strait. North of the straits there lay a series of cities that acted as western ports for the cities of the east coast and were important for the part they played in forwarding Greek goods to central Italy and Etruria. Medma and Hipponium performed this service for Locri, Temesa and Terina for Croton, Laus and Scidrus for Sybaris. About 600 bc the Sybarites had planted still farther north the colony of Posidonia (Paestum), whose walls and temples are now the chief material witness to the ancient greatness of greater Greece. The walls are three miles in circum­ference. Of the temples the oldest (the so-called basilica) is dated by some modern writers a little before 550 bc: it is an unusual building some 178 by 80 ft. with nine columns at either end, 18 along either side, and a third row dividing the building longitudinally into two equal halves; a second and smaller building, 108 by 47 ft., known as the temple of Ceres, is dated by the same authorities only a decade or two later. The coinage begins about 550 bc with curious pieces that show the same type (Poseidon with trident) on both sides, in relief on the one, repoussé on the other. This peculiar technique is used also for the contemporary coins of other south Italian Greek cities, namely Laus, Caulonia, Croton, Sybaris, Metapontum and Tarentum (but not Cumae).

Paestum represents the utmost limit of this group, which embraced neither Cumae to the north of it nor Velia (Elea) to the south. Elea was founded about 535 bc by Phocaeans who had been ousted from Corsica by the Carthaginians and Etruscans. It owes its fame to Xenophanes and the other philosophers who lived there and came to be known as the Eleatic school.

Cumae, the home of the sibyl who taught the central Italians the art of letters, was the most ancient Greek settlement in Italy, but still in full vigour throughout the sixth century. About 600 bc she founded on the magnificent bay a little farther south a settlement that was called the New City (Nea Polis), and which now, with twenty-seven centuries of history and over half a million inhabitants, still bears the same name. Detailed history begins at Cumae some seventy or eighty years later, when Etruscans and other barbarian inhabitants of Campania, attracted by the city’s great wealth, made a united attack upon it. The Cumaeans successfully repelled the invaders, thanks especially to the exploits of a certain Aristodemus, who subsequently established himself as tyrant. He is said to have owed his tyranny to a popularity which he had acquired partly by his military prowess, partly by his eloquence, and partly by the distributions of money that he made to the poor. As tyrant he is accused of having forced the citizens to engage in manual work and wearied them with toils and labours. When the Tarquins were banished from Rome they sought refuge at his court.

In the far west Massilia (Marseilles) had been founded probably a little before 600 bc Greek pottery of various kinds dating from the seventh century has been found in the city. Its position was strengthened when, some forty years later, a fresh army of Phocaean emigrants founded Alalia and again when the Corsican settlement was reinforced by the refugees who left Phocaea to avoid the Persian domination. Ideas of settlement in these regions were much in the air. Bias, the ‘wise man’ of Priene, proposed that the Greeks should abandon Ionia to the Persians and found a new home in Sardinia. Meanwhile traders and probably settlers were extending Phocaean influence to the west side of the gulf of Lyons and down the coast of Spain. Agathe (Agde) between Massilia and the Pyrenees and Rhode and Emporiae (Rosas, Ampurias) on the Catalonian coast just south of the Pyrenees were founded by Massilia probably about the middle of the sixth century: at Emporiae excavation has revealed a considerable amount of sixth-century Greek pottery, some as early as 550 bc, and including a fair proportion of vases from the Greek east. Both here and at Massilia Attic pottery begins to prevail in the second half of the century. The Phocaean foundations of Hemeroscopium (Cape Nao) and Maenaca (east of Malaga) were probably due directly to the trade with Tartessus (Tarshish) at the mouth of the Baetis (Guadalquivir), an ancient town with something of a native civilization which from the seventh century was exploited by the Phocaeans for its silver. It seemed for a while as if the Phocaeans were destined to control the whole of this part of the Mediterranean; but Etruscans and Carthaginians combined against them and inflicted on them a great defeat about 535 bc. Alalia was lost and with it all prospects of Greek political domination in the far western sea. But despite this loss of power the Phocaeans long continued to diffuse a certain amount of Greek culture, or at least its products, among the inhabitants of south Gaul and east Spain. In the latter country the natives had welcomed the arrival of the Greeks and the consequent competition between them and the Phoenicians who had been earlier in the field. At Massilia too the Greeks appear to have been on good terms with the natives, and continued so without losing anything of their own hellenism. The city maintained relations with the mother-country and had a treasury at Delphi founded in 535 BC.

IX

CONCLUSION

It remains to attempt a brief general survey of the achievements of the Greek world outside the Balkan Peninsula during the sixth century, and of the conditions to which they may be attributed.

In every quarter there was a remarkable outburst of creative activity alike in architecture, sculpture and the minor arts and crafts, in poetry and thought, and in the sphere of social and political experiment.

In architecture Paestum is exceptional only in the state of preservation of its great buildings. Those of cities like Samos and Ephesus are shown both by ancient records and existing remains to have been both larger and more magnificent.

Hand in hand with architecture went sculpture. The schools of Chios and Samos are known from literary records as well as from actual remains, while the finds made at sites such as Miletus, Ephesus, Naxos, Paros, Thasos and Delos are enough to shbw that sculptors were busily employed throughout Ionia and the Aegean. If similar finds have been less frequent in south Italy it is probably the result of chance. A fine but isolated example is the seated goddess said to come from Locri, acquired in 1914 by the Museum of Berlin.

The best known art however in this as in all periods of Greek history is that of the potter and vase-painter. Here again sixth­century work is distinguished by the number and variety of the local schools into which it can be divided. The Ionians in particular were producing large quantities of several distinct fabrics. One of them (Phineus vase style) must be attributed to one of the islands, though it is uncertain at present to which; another (Caeretan) shows African affinities, another is probably Clazomenian. All these fabrics have in common the free use of the human figure in descriptive scenes as the main motive of the painting, as contrasted with the fabrics of the seventh century, which are mainly decorated with ornamental designs of animals and flowers. It is in great part to these humble vase-painters that we owe our ideas of the progress achieved during this period by the more ambitious artists who painted frescoes on the walls of public buildings. Neither painters nor sculptors had acquired complete technical mastery of their art, even at the end of the century; but both had reached the ripe archaic stage which, in ancient as in mediaeval art, is for many people more attractive than subsequent periods of complete mastery.

To complete the picture of the arts and crafts it is necessary to imagine in each city whole bands of craftsmen applying the new skill and inspiration to all manner of industries, both useful and ornamental, involving all manner of materials. A glance at the illustrations of any properly published excavation of an archaic Greek site is enough to show how varied these activities were and to suggest also how large are the gaps in our knowledge.

At the opening of the sixth century the invention of coinage was onlyabout a century old. Ionia here had led the way for Greece. It is interesting to note that throughout this century of rapid artistic development the Ionians went on striking coins of the most primitive sort. Their conservatism shows how quickly the various types won recognition, and how unwilling the various mints were to unsettle their customers by any innovation.

Trade both by land and still more by sea flourished exceedingly. Any city of any importance had special connections over a great part of the Mediterranean. Milesian vessels were constantly visiting Olbia in south Russia, Naucratis in Egypt, Athens and Sybaris. Phocaea was in constant communication with Massilia and Tartessus, and secured from a native Spanish prince the means of improving its fortifications. The Samian seamen were familiar with the straits of Gibraltar, the Cyrenaica, the Dardanelles.

Of the cargoes that they carried we know little in detail but can form a fairly good general idea. Samos was famous for its metal work and woollen goods, and it must have been these and the like that she bartered at Tartessus for the raw metal of the Spanish mines: the Samian wool industry was doubtless interested in the Samian connection with Cyrene and sheep-bearing Libya.

The pursuit of these mercantile adventures was intensely stimulating. The spirit of adventure permeated thought and literature; familiarity with the cities and minds of many men produced a versatility of outlook and a freedom from provincialism that has seldom been paralleled.

The poetry and the science of the period could have floiufiJned as they did only in societies where intellectual interest were particularly acute and fairly widely disseminated. Careers siuchas those of Alcaeus and Sappho and their seventh-century predecessor Archilochus imply an aristocrats society where thought was singularly free and direct and the passion for self-expression almost unprecedented. But by the beginning of the sixth century aristocracy had in many cities had its dally. The typical government was the tyranny. The tyrant became thej centre of all the main activities of his city. Polycrates with his court poets Anacreon and Ibycus, his skilled artists and physicians such as Theodoras and Democedes, his army engineers and craftsmen erecting harbours and waterworks anid temples, and his navy of warships and merchantmen scouring the Mediterranean sea, is only the latest of a whole series of similar rulers. Their government was anti-aristocratic, and the status of the middle classes was probably far higher than it had been before. Socially as well as politically the tyranny marked a transition stage between aristocracy and democracy. In the aristocratic period culture as well as power was the exclusive possession of a small class. The people consisted mainly of farmers and farm labourers whose condition in the Greek world at large was probably as pitiable as it is known to have been in Attica and Boeotia. The great development of trade and industry in the seventh century  meant a sudden demand for a large new supply of skilled labour of many diverse kinds—ship-builders, sailors, miners, metal workers, masons, sculptors, and the like. In the fifth century and afterwards this demand was met by developing the slave-trade. It was the plentiful supply of slave labour that allowed the citizens of Periclean Athens to become a community of politicians and critics of art, the drama, and philosophy. But in the sixth century the citizens themselves still met the new demand. The new outlet for free labour worked in two directions. It weakened the hold of the landed classes over the landless, and it created a new class of citizen which must obviously have contained some of the most discontented and some of the most enterprising elements in the free population. This new urban industrial class was the basis of the power of the tyrants. The great constructive works that distinguished the period—the aqueducts, harbour works, temples, and other public buildings—were executed by free workers in the employment of the tyrants. When tyranny was overthrown from within, one contributory cause may have been the failure to maintain the army of employees that these undertakings involved. A considerable amount of evidence has been adduced to show that tyrants not infrequently rose to power by securing some sort of economic control over this same element of the population.

The features just outlined seem to have been common to all the regions where Greek communities most flourished. But there were local variations. Ionian civilization in particular had a character determined by its constant contact with the great powers of Asia and Egypt. These powers were unquestionably civilized. The nearest of them was overwhelmingly superior from the military point of view. The result of this contact was a compara­tive freedom from the narrow provincialism of the European Greeks, a freedom which explains alike the failure of the Asiatic Greeks to maintain their own independence and their success in planting colonies. It explains likewise their literature and science. Athenian literature centres round the city-state. The Ionian was generally concerned either with the whole universe or with his own individual soul.

In south Italy the intellectual movement took yet other forms which are best represented by the philosophers Pythagoras and Xenophanes. The fact that these remarkable men both came from Ionia shows that the movements which they set on foot must have been largely conditioned by their new environments. But the Greeks of the far west did not merely react to their environment. They affected it widely. Greek art and artists, Greek wares and Greek traders permeated the whole Italian peninsula. Greek terracotta revetments of a highly ornate character were used to adorn and protect the temples of the native gods in many ‘barbarian’ cities of Campania, Latium, Etruria, and still farther north. The finds show that the same mould was sometimes used in all three provinces, and make it probable that Greek artists who had worked in such cities as Caulonia, Locri, Paestum and Cumae established themselves at Veii and other places in Etruria and there founded prosperous schools. Greek pottery of this period has been found in large quantities in non-Greek cities all over the peninsula, even as far north as Bologna, a fact which hardly surprises us when we remember that Spina near the mouth of the Po had a treasury at Delphi. The ancient accounts which tell how Demaratus the Corinthian fled from the tyranny of Cypselus and established himself with a band of Greek workmen at Tarquinii (Corneto) in Etruria conform entirely with all the archaeological evidence. Caere (Agylla) possessed a treasury at Delphi and consulted the Delphic oracle as early as 540 bc. Its Greek character is borne out by the abundant finds of Greek vases and architectural terracottas made on the site. One particularly distinctive type of sixth-century Ionian vase with African affinities has been named Caeretan and is known only from a fine series of specimens found at Caere. Archaic Greek finds from north Italy are not exclusively of pottery. Perugia for instance has yielded some fine archaic bronzes. A fairly representative series of Greek vases and architectural terracottas and other objects of the sixth century has been found in Rome itself. Most important of all, the art of writing made its way from Magna Graecia over a great part of Italy: the lettering of the earliest inscriptions in Latin and Etruscan shows that this happened in the sixth century, and points to the two languages having learned their letters independently direct from the Greeks. Modern discoveries have in fact revolutionized our attitude towards the statements of ancient writers about early relations between Rome and the Greek world. The evidence shows that there is a historical basis for the stories of Rome being visited by Phocaeans and of intercourse between Rome and Ephesus in the time of Servius Tullius, as also for the obviously Greek traits in the history of the Tarquins as recorded in our earliest extant authorities. Not only was Rome moulded by Greek influences from its earliest days, but so too were the states that were its earliest neighbours and first conquests. Witness the terracotta statues, Ionian in style, of about the end of the sixth century, recently found at Veii and now in the Villa Giulia Museum at Rome. These splendid figures at once recall Plutarch’s description of a terracotta group at Rome which he says was made by Veientine workmen for the Tarquins.

Nor did even west and north Italy mark the limit of Greek influence at this momentous and most plastic period. Finds like those from Elche in Spain make it probable that in the Iberian peninsula also the influence of Greece spread well beyond the pale of the Greek settlements. Marseilles had a considerable effect upon southern Gaul. The Rhone, Saone, and Loire may already have formed a route from the Phocaean city to the outer Ocean, where a succession of coasting ships may have linked up Tartessus with the British Isles.

CHAPTER V

COINAGE FROM ITS ORIGIN TO THE PERSIAN WARS