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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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COMPENDIUM OF HISTORY OF GREECE
Greece — that point of light in history !—Hegel.
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our
religion, our art, have their roots in Greece. — Shelley.
Except the blind forces of nature, there is nothing
that moves in the world today that is not Greek in origin. — Henry Sumner Maine.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY
SURVEY.
I. THE EUROPEAN
AND THE ASIATIC TYPE.
Asia had developed the first civilizations; but, at a later date, an
independent and more important culture began to rise in Southern Europe. This
new civilization was soon to draw from the Orient in many ways, but it remained
essentially European in character. Diversity succeeded to Asiatic uniformity,
moderation to extravagance, freedom to despotism.
a. It is a peninsula, oceanic rather than continental.
b. It has a more temperate climate and more varied products than the
semi-tropical river valleys of Asia.
These conditions demanded
greater exertion, physical and intellectual, and led to more diverse
occupations than Asiatic conditions did. The beginnings of culture were slower; but Man was finally to count for more, and Nature was to he less
all-sufficient and overpowering.
c. In contrast with the great Asiatic plain, the land is broken into
many small units fitted for the homes of distinct peoples, all close together and
so invited to friendly intercourse, but with natural defenses against hostile
attacks from one another. This has conduced to the existence, side by side, of
different but mutually helpful civilizations.
d. Europe as a whole holds a strategic position as against Asia.
Physical characteristics, such as those mentioned in the last three paragraphs,
were found, of course, in some districts of Asia, notably in Syria and some
parts of Asia Minor; and accordingly in these places there began civilizations
marked by the “European” characteristics of diversity and freedom; but their
vicinity to the earlier and mightier river-empires was fatal, and in the end
the Asiatic character was always imposed upon them. Europe was saved by its
distance and by its position behind the great moat of the Mediterranean. This
sea has been a decisive factor in European history in two respects,—as a road
for friendly intercourse, and even more as a barrier against hostile Asiatic
invasion.
II. GREECE TYPICAL
OF EUROPE.
“ The Greeks are moderns ...
Ptah-hotep or Ezekiel could not move in modern society. Aristotle or Menander in
all moral and social questions would at once find their way, and enjoy even our
poetry and fiction. Even the medieval baron would feel vastly more out of place
among us than would an intelligent Greek.”—Mahaffy.
“The Most
European of European Lands.”—Hellas, or Greece, meant not European Greece alone,
but all the lands of the “Hellenes,” as the Greeks called themselves. This
included (a) the peninsula in Europe, together with the shores and islands of
the Aegean; and (6) colonial Greece, that is, the Greeks onthe Black Sea on the
east, and Greek Sicily and southern Italy on the west, besides scattered
patches elsewhere along the Mediterranean.
Five controlling factors
deserve special mention: the breaking up into small districts; the sea roads;
the incitement to trade; the vicinity of the open side to Eastern civilization;
the moderation and beauty of nature.
a. The islands and patches of Greek settlements on distant coasts
were of course so many distinct divisions; and even little Greece proper
counted over twenty geographical units, each encompassed by its sea moats and
mountain walls. Some of these divisions were about as large as an American
township, and the larger ones (except Thessaly and Epirus) were only seven or
eight times that size.
b. Isolated mountainous tribes are always rude and conservative; but
from such tendencies Greece was saved by the sea. Her mountains, it is true,
with their many passes, were “guardians of liberty” rather than hostile
barriers; but it was the sea that really made friendly intercourse possible on
a large scale, and that brought Athens as closely into touch with Miletus (in
Asia) as with Sparta or Olympia. This value of the sea, too, held good for
neighboring parts of “European Greece” itself, which, with less area than
Portugal, has a longer coastline than all the Spanish peninsula. The very heart
of the land is broken into islands and promontories, so that it is hard to
find a spot distant from the coast more than thirty miles. Only two divisions
failed to touch the sea, and they were notoriously backward and unimportant.
c. Certain products made intercourse exceedingly desirable, and
invited to wider travel. The mountain slopes in some parts, as in Attica, grew
wine and oil better than grain. Wine and oil—much value in little space—were
especially suited for commerce; and with their limited food supply, if
population was to increase, the people in such districts were driven to trade.
Now, seafaring traders, exchanging commodities, are prone to exchange ideas
also; and thus the maritime Greeks became innovators centuries before Paul
commended them for “always seeking some new thing.”
d. These early seekers found valuable new things within easy reach.
Fortunately, this most European of all European lands lay nearest of all Europe
to the old civilization of Asia. Moreover, it faced this civilized East rather
than the barbarous West. On the side toward Italy, the coast is cliff or marsh,
with only three or four good harbors the whole length; but on the east the
whole line is broken by countless deep, inviting bays, from whose mouths, too,
chains of tempting islands lead on and on, so that in clear weather the mariner
may cross the Aegean without losing sight of land.
e. Most important of all, perhaps, was the element of diversity. A
great Oriental state found its one dominant life principle in some mighty
river; it spread over vast plains, and was bounded by terrible immensities of
desolate deserts. Greece contained no navigable river, and, except in Thessaly,
no plains of consequence. It was a land of marvelously varied sea and mountain.
This variety, and the moderation of the natural features, found a counterpart
in the versatile genius of the people, in their originality,
and in their lively imagination; while the beauty of intermingled hill and
sunlit sea, the exhilarating air, and the soft splendor of the radiant sky,
helped to make their intense joy in life.
Thus in their little peninsula
the Greeks produced many varieties of society, side by side. They inquired
fearlessly into all secrets, natural and supernatural, instead of abasing
themselves in Oriental awe; they had no controlling priesthood; and they never
submitted long to arbitrary government. Above all other peoples, too, they
developed a passion for the beautiful and a sense of harmony and proportion:
the same word stood to them for the good and the beautiful; and temperance, or
moderation, became their ideal virtue.
A Problem: the Land or the People?—Was the work of Greece in history the result of Greek genius or of these geographical conditions? As early as the year 2000 B.C. the
islands and coasts of the Aegean were peopled by a variety of tribes. Some of
these were “the stuff of which the Greeks were afterward made.” Some, so far
as we can tell, were wholly alien, like the Phoenicians and the Etruscans. The
great body were allied to the Latins on the west, to the Phrygians, Lycians,
and Carians on the east, and to the Thracians and Macedonians on the north.
Nature and history gradually differentiated those tribes that we call Greeks
from these neighbors, of whom they seem to have been at first only a part. So
some writers make the land everything, and speak as if even Homer were “only a
natural product of the smiling Ionian skies.” But those same skies, in the
three thousand years since, have produced no second Homer; and it is hard to
believe that Sennacherib’s Assyrians, for instance, if transplanted to Greece,
would have been made into Greeks.
The question, of course, goes
to the bottom of all history. About all we can say is, that the result was due
to land and people, and to outside history. Says Freeman: “Neither the Greeks in any other land, nor any other people in
Greece, would have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were”; nor, we may
add, the same people in the same land at a later and less plastic stage, or
with different influences from without. It was an instance of good seed falling
upon good ground under favorable conditions of time and history; but, to read
history truly, we must note that a larger portion of the same seed seems to
have gone to waste in the regions round about.
CHAPTER II.
PREHISTORIC GREECE
—TO 1000 B.C.
I. SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
Homer and his Age.—Writing of any kind came late in Greece. Until
recently our vague knowledge of early culture there was based on the Homeric
poems, which were handed down orally from generation to generation for some
centuries before they were put into manuscript. Homer’s Iliad describes part of
the siege of Troy by the Greeks, to recover the beautiful Helen, whom a Trojan
prince had carried off. The Odyssey narrates the wanderings of one of the heroes
in the return from the war. Now, the wars and the heroes may be pure fiction,
or the story may be based upon an attempt of the Greeks to punish pirates from
Asia; but, in either case, the poet’s pictures of society must have truth in
them. In rude ages a bard may invent stories, but not a
society. As has been well said, what such a poet tells us as history is apt to
be false, but what he mentions incidentally is sure to be history. The poems
were composed about 1000 B.C. They claim to describe events a century or two
earlier, but no doubt they paint that past in colors true for their own day.
Greece, however, had
possessed a much earlier life, of which Homer and the
historic Greeks never dreamed, but, of which we are now learning from another
source. The remains buried in the soil were neglected strangely by students of
Greek history long after the study of such objects had disclosed many wonders
in Asia; but in 1870 Dr. Schliemann turned to this kind of investigation in order to confirm Homer. The excavations since that
time have done this, but they have also opened up a thousand years of older
culture. Two incidents in this exploration we will note.
a. Homer places the capital of Agamemnon, leader of all
the Greeks, in Argolis at Mycenae, “rich in gold.” Here, in 1876, Schliemann
uncovered remains of an ancient city, with peculiar massive (“Cyclopean”)
walls. Within were found a curious group of tombs, where (to use
the brilliant picture of Walter Pater’s Greek Studies) lay in state rudely
embalmed bodies of ancient kings —
“in the splendor of their
crowns and breastplates of embossed plate of gold; their swords studded with
golden imagery; their faces covered strangely in golden masks. The very floor
of one tomb was thick with gold dust—the heavy gilding from some perished
kingly vestment; in another was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers; and
amid this profusion of fine fragments were rings, bracelets, smaller crowns, as
for children, dainty butterflies for ornaments, and that golden flower on a
silver stalk—all of pure, soft gold unhardened by alloy, the delicate films
of which one must touch but lightly, yet twisted and beaten, by hand and
hammer, into wavy, spiral relief.”
One tomb, with three female
bodies, contained eight hundred and seventy gold objects, besides vast
multitudes of very small ornaments and countless gold beads and pieces of
beaten gold. In another, five bodies were “literally smothered in jewels”; and,
with all this ornament, there were skillfully wrought, curiously inlaid weapons
for the dead, with whetstones to keep them keen, and graceful vases of marble
and alabaster carved with delicate forms, to hold the funeral food and wine;
while near the entrance lay other bodies, perhaps of slaves or captives who had
been offered in sacrifice.
It is true these particular
remains belong to a period long before that celebrated by Homer, but no doubt
in the poet’s time a like society was to be found in parts of Greece; after
these discoveries, the Homeric pictures of royal palaces (Odyssey) adorned with friezes of glittering blue glass, the walls flashing with
bronze and gleaming with plated gold, the heroes and their guests feasting
through the night, from gold vessels, in halls lighted by torches held on
massive golden statues, no longer seem poetic exaggerations.
b. In 1870 Dr.
Schliemann began his first excavations at a little village in the Troad, three
miles from the shore, where tradition had always placed the scene of the Iliad.
These explorations continued more than twenty years, and disclosed nine
distinct layers of debris—each layer the remains of a separate settlement. The
oldest, on native rock some fifty feet below the present surface, was a rude
village of indefinite antiquity. The second was thought by Dr. Schliemann to be
Homer’s Troy. It showed powerful walls, a citadel that had been destroyed by
fire, and a civilization marked by bronze weapons and gold ornaments. We know
now that this city passed away about 2500 B.C., so that no doubt the very
memory of its civilization had perished before the real Troy was built. Above
it came the remains of three successive inferior settlements, and then—the
sixth layer from the bottom—a much larger and finer city,
which had perished in a hostile conflagration some eleven or twelve hundred
years B.C. Extensive explorations in the year 1893, after Schliemann’s death, finally proved this sixth city to be the Troy of
Homer, with remarkable correspondence in detail to the picture in the Iliad.
The impressive fact, however,
was, not the confirmation of Homer’s story, but rather that not even a shadowy
tradition of this older culture of Schliemann’s Troy survived to be sung by any
poet of a later day. Men began to see that the Greeks were not so young as our
former ignorance had taught, but that “obscure millenniums preceded the sudden
bloom” of their historic life. A new interest led to important results.
For Further Reading. — Harry Reginald Hall,The oldest civilization of Greece: studies of the Mycenaean age Schliemann, Heinrich: Mycenae : a narrative of researches and discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns Tiryns. The prehistoric palace of the kings of Tiryns, the results of the latest excavations
II. TWO PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS.
Mycenaean Culture.—Excavations at many places on
the coasts and islands of the eastern Mediterranean prove now that this early
civilization reached from Sardinia to Cyprus, and that it was indigenous in
Greece. Steady progress appears, from rude stone implements and crude carvings,
through many stages, up to magnificent bronze work and highly developed art.
This was the slow work of the dark-skinned, long-headed people of Southern
Europe between 2500 and 1500 B.C.; and the culture seems to
have been helped to quicker bloom by contact with Phoenicians. These
adventurers bartered with the ruder natives, for centuries perhaps, much as
English traders did two hundred years ago with American Indians, tempting their
ignorant cupidity with strange wares of small value, and couuting
it best gain of all if they could lure curious maidens on board their black
ships for distant slave markets. In return, however, the strangers
made many an unconscious payment. Language shows that they gave to the Greeks
the names (and so, no doubt, the use) of linen, myrrh, cinnamon, frankincense,
soap, lyres, wine jars, cosmetics, and writing tablets. The Greek alphabet
itself is Phoenician, without question. The metal work found in the tombs is
often Phoenician or Egyptian. The smelting of metals and use of bronze, and the
substitution of fine wheel-made pottery for the ruder handmade article, may
have come from the same source. Indeed, it would not be strange if sometimes—as
Greek legends so delight to tell—wealthy Phoenician exiles or adventurers
actually established themselves as god-descended monarchs in gilded palaces on
high-lying citadels, to rule and civilize the Greek tribesmen clustered about
the foot of the castle hill.
On the whole, however,
scholars today refuse to believe that the European civilization was borrowed
in its essential elements, or that the Orient did more than afford the Greeks a
few hints. Certainly the lively Hellenes were not slavish imitators; and these
same early remains show that they at once made their own, and improved upon,
whatever the strangers brought them.
But this Mycenaean culture is
not that of which Homer tells. These earlier Greeks buried their dead,
worshiped ancestors, used no iron, and lived frugally on fish and vegetable
diet. Homer’s Greeks burn their dead; worship no ancestors, but adore a Sun
God; use iron swords; and feast all night mightily on whole roast oxen. So,
too, in dress, manners, and personal appearance, so far as we can tell, the two
are widely different.
Still, from lack of any other
theory, scholars have continued, for the most part, to regard the culture
pictured by Homer and that revealed in the older remains, as two stages in one
development or as two views of the same culture; and the Mycenaean civilization
has usually been known also as Achaean, from the name Homer uses for his
Greeks. This, however, is simply to ignore the many striking contradictions;
and recently Professor Ridgeway (Early Age of Greece) has suggested
an hypothesis which promises to straighten out the maze. The new theory is not
yet established thoroughly, but it has much to recommend it.
Achaean Culture.— About 1500 B.C., in Central
Europe there had grown up an independent civilization; it was ruder than that
of the South, but the people were more vigorous and were armed with
iron,—perhaps at first, through some happy accident, by the discovery of iron,
free so as not to need smelting. This culture has been named Hallstatt, from a
place in the Alps where its remains abound. Professor Ridgeway claims to prove
that it corresponds, even in minute details, with the culture Homer ascribes to
his Achaean chiefs, and argues forcefully that about 1300 B.C. bands of these
fairhaired, blue-eyed, ox-eating warriors from the North, drawn by the splendor
and riches of the Mycenaean South, must have broken into
Greece, as men of the North so many times since into Southern Europe. These
mighty-limbed strangers, armed with long iron swords, easily established
themselves among the short, dark, bronze-weaponed natives, dwelt in their
cities, became their chiefs, married their women, and possessed their wealth.
For a time the older culture was overridden by the practices and ideas of these
semi-barbaric Achaeans; but gradually the two civilizations blended, the
fair-skinned invaders adopted the native language, and after a while they
disappeared in the native population—as has happened to all northern invaders
in southern lands. Homer tells us mainly of the Achaeans, but the older society
persisted, no doubt, and was again, in modified form, to come to the surface.
Even Homer seems to show some mixture of customs as early as his day.
III. ECONOMIC SOCIETY.
No
doubt we are liable to exaggerate the “golden” side of the Homeric Age. The
poet naturally dwelt upon the deeds and homes of heroes, so that sometimes we
call the age “Heroic”; but this was only a small part of Greek life after all,
and, as a whole, society was primitive and manners were harsh. The culture of
Mycenae culminated only at a few points on the coast, and Homer himself, if we
look close, shows that wealthy princes were rare even among his kings. The son
of Odysseus, astounded by the splendor of Menelaus’ palace, with its “gleam as
of sun and moon,” whispers to his companion (Odyssey) : —
“Mark the flashing of bronze
through the echoing halls, and the flashing of gold and of amber and of silver
and of ivory. Such like, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus ... Wonder
comes over me as I look.”
The mighty Odysseus had built
his palace with his own hands,— “arude farmhouse, where swine wallow in the
court”; and the one petty island in which he was head-king held scores of
poorer kings.
Industry was still mainly agricultural. The mass of the people were small
farmers, though their houses were grouped in compact settlements. Even the
kings tilled their larger farms, in part at least, with their own hands. Slaves
were few, except in the houses of the greater chiefs. There had appeared,
however, a class of miserable landless freemen, who hired themselves to the
farmers. When the ghost of Achilles wishes to name to Odysseus the most unhappy
lot among mortals, he selects that of the hired servant ; and the poet
Hesiod (800 B.C.), himself of the farmer class and feeling keenly for its woes,
has no pity for these laborers, but advises the farmer to turn them out to
shift for themselves as winter comes on. Highly honored artisans and smiths
were found among the retainers of the greater chiefs. A separate class of
traders had not arisen. The chiefs, in the intervals of farm labor, varied
their profits by trading expeditions, or by piracy on sea or land. Telemachus,
son of Odysseus, is asked, evidently without offense intended or received,
whether he comes as a pirate or as a peaceful trader.
IV. THE TRIBE —UNITS AND TIES!
The Clan. —In early times the lowest
political unit in Greek society was a clan, or gens. Each gens, indeed, was a
kind of family, containing several such families as we have, and ranging in
size from a score, perhaps, to many score of members. The nearest descendant of
the forefather of the clan, counting from oldest son to oldest son, was the
clan elder, or “ king.” The two bonds of union were blood and worship—a common
descent and a common religion; and these two were really one, for the clan
religion was a worship of clan ancestors. If provided with pleasing periodic
meals and invoked with magic formulas (so the belief ran), the powerful ghosts
of the ancient clan elders would continue to aid their descendants.
In like manner in later times,
as the families of the clan more and more became distinct units, each came to
have its separate family worship. The father was the priest of the Hearth, or
family altar, near which were grouped the Penates, or images of ancestors.
There, before each meal, was poured out the libation, and there blessings were
invoked. Piety consisted in fulfilling strictly these obligations to the
ancestral deities; The family tomb anciently was near the house, “so that the
sons,” says Euripides, “in entering and leaving their dwelling, might always
meet their fathers and invoke them.”
Larger Units: Phratry and Tribe.— Long before history began,
clans united into larger units. In barbarous society the highest unit is the
tribe. The clan-elder of the leading clan was the tribal elder, or the
priest-king of the tribe. The tribe, too, had a common worship of a real or
pretended ancestor. If men at that stage of progress wished to combine in a
friendly way, they had to invent some such bond of union. Otherwise they must
think of each other as enemies. It is plain that in the larger units such bonds
must have been fictitious for the most part; but in credulous, savage society,
these “legal fictions.” come quickly to have all the force of fact.
The Tribal
City.— Originally, the
tribe dwelt in its separate clan-villages in the valleys around some convenient
hilltop. On the height was the place of common worship, and a ring wall turned
it easily into a citadel. In hilly Greece many of these fortified tribal
centers grew up close together; and so, very early, groups of tribes combined
further. Perhaps one of a group would conquer the others and compel them to
demolish their separate citadels and to transfer their temples to its center.
This was the way in which Cecrops and Theseus are said to have founded
Athens—by incorporating into one body the three hundred and sixty clan-villages
of Attica. In such cases, a new legal fiction set up a common city-worship,
with the king of the chief tribe for the city priest-king. Sometimes, of
course, a growing tribe might enter the city stage without artificially
widening its circle; but in general, as clans federated into tribes, so tribes
federated into cities, either peaceably or through war. The process seems to
have been well under way in Homeric times.
Though it involves a digression, it is well to note
here that the city was the limit of political union among the Greeks. If this
process of federation could have continued,—or, if by conquest and amalgamation
the cities could have been combined into larger units, they might have made a
nation-state, like modern England or France. But the city satisfied the
political ideal of the Greeks. To them the same word meant “city” and “state.”
A union of cities, by which any of them gave up complete sovereignty, was
repugnant to Greek feeling. One city might hold others in subjection ; but, in
historic times, it never admitted their people to any kind of citizenship. Nor
did the subject cities dream of asking such a thing. What they wanted, and
would never cease to strive for, was to recover their separate independence. No
one thought of union. To each Greek, his city was his country.
V. EARLY POLITICAL ORGANIZATION.
The King.—The tribal city had three political elements—king,
council of chiefs, and popular assembly. In these we may see the germs of later
monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic institutions. The kings varied in
authority. In centers like Mycenae they seem to have been almost absolute,
though even there they had no bodyguard; but in general they were limited
strictly by custom and by the two other political orders.
The Greeks in one council
before Troy break away to seize their ships for the homeward journey. Odysseus
hurries among them, and by persuasion and threats forces them back to the
council, until only Thersites bawls on,—“Thersites, uncontrolled of speech,
whose mind was full of words wherewith to strive against the chiefs idly”.
“Hateful was he to Achilles above all, and to Odysseus, for them he was wont to
revile. But now with shrill shout he poured forth his upbraidings even upon
goodly Agamemnon”. Then Odysseus with stem rebuke smites him into silence,
while the crowd laughs. Odysseus carries the crowd with him, but Thersites was
a cripple, and is represented as ugly and unpopular. Professor Mahaffy comments
: “The figure of Thersites
seems drawn with special spite and venom, as a satire upon the first critics
that rose up among the people and questioned the divine right of kings to do
wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture,
was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen
buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted and exposed by him in
the day, would over his evening cups enjoy the poet’s travesty, and long for
the good old times when he could put down all impertinent criticism by the
stroke of his knotty scepter. Indeed, the Homeric agora could hardly have
existed, had it been so idle a form as the poets represent.”
So Professor Freeman: “But,
after all, I think that the submission of the mass of Achaian freemen to
Agamemnon has been, if not exaggerated, at least misunderstood. It is not
the submission of slaves, but the submission of children. It is not the
submission of men who wish to oppose, but who dare not; it is the submission of
men who have not yet formed the wish to oppose ... The real thing to be
marked is that there should be any opposition speakers at all.”
Andrew Lang’s Homer and the Epic. The aim of this book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all, cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will follow that the poems themselves, as wholes, are the product of a single age, not a mosaic of the work of several changeful centuries.
CHAPTER III.
FROM THE
MIGRATIONS TO THE PERSIAN WARS.
1000-500 B.C.
I. SUB-PERIODS AND CHARACTER.
About 1000 B.C. the barbarous
but heavy-armed Dorians from the north destroyed the old civilization of the
Peloponnesus, then the most advanced part of Hellas, in a long series of
campaigns. A long blank follows, where we have not even such imperfect guides
as for the preceding age. Changes continued through the obscure centuries, but
the details have forever escaped us. In a rough way, however, we get at the
general trend of events by comparing Homeric Greece with the historic Greece
that is revealed when the curtain rises again.
II. RACES.
Ionians,
Achaeans, Dorians, Aeolians —The oldest inhabitants of Greece are sometimes called
Pelasgians. In historic times they seem to have been represented by the
Ionians, but over southern Greece they had been displaced as rulers by the fair
Achaeans before 1200 B.C. Both “Ionians” and “Achaeans” appear on Egyptian
monuments of the fourteenth century b.c. among the “peoples of the sea” who
attacked the Delta at that time.
Between 1000 and 800 B.C., the
Achaean preeminence in southern Greece passed to the invading Dorians. This
people and the aboriginal Ionians of the unconquered pails of Hellas were to be
the two leading peoples of historic Greece. Some other sections of the race,
especially the people of western Greece, were known as Aeolians, or “mixed”
peoples. They played a leading part too late, as the Achaeans had played their
part too early, for the brilliant period of Greek history.
The Ionians, at the opening of
history, held Attica and the islands of the Aegean. Athens, on a rock, was
their leading city. The Athenians were maritime, democratic, progressive,
artistic. The Dorians had their strength in the southern half of the
Peloponnesus. Sparta was their leading city—a military settlement of
conquerors, in a fertile valley, organized for defense and ruling over slave
tillers of the soil. The Spartans were warlike, aristocratic, conservative,
practical. There is a tendency to ascribe these characteristics of the two
leading cities to their respective races, and to class all Ionians as
democratic and progressive, and all Dorians as aristocratic and conservative ;
hut this distinction holds good only within narrow limits. Colonies of Ionians
and Dorians, under changed physical conditions, especially in Sicily and Italy,
exchanged these “race” characteristics. On the whole, Athens was
more nearly typical of the Ionians than Sparta was of the Dorians,—no doubt
because nearly all Ionians had much the same physical environment that Athens
had.
III. WHAT MADE A GREEK A GREEK ?
The Iliad does not make it
clear whether Homer regarded the Trojans as Greeks or not; apparently he cared
little about the question. Four hundred years later that question would have
been a first consideration to every Greek. The forces which, during these four
centuries, in the absence of political union, gave gradually to all Hellenes a
oneness of feeling, were chiefly the following: language and literature; belief
in kinship; and the Olympian religion, with its games and oracles.
a. The Greeks understood each other’s dialects, while the men of
other speech about them they called “Barbarians,” or babblers (Bar-bar-oi).
The universal allegiance to Homer (whose poems were sung and recited in every
Greek village for centuries), and the glories of the later common literature,
made this bond of union more vital.
b. Then the poets invented a system of relationship, through fabled
Ion, Achaeus, Dorus, Aeolus,— descendants of a mythic Hellen,—which confirmed
all Hellenes in their belief in a common blood relationship.
c. Besides the clan worship of ancestors and the city worship of local heroes, there was another religion common to all Greeks. This was originally a nature worship, such as most early peoples have; but the poetic imagination of the Greeks gave an intense reality and a human character to their personification of natural forces, and wove from this material the most complete and beautiful system of myths the world has ever known. The greater deities, to distinguish them from lesser ones and from the gods of the narrow ancestor religion, were called Olympian—from Mount Olympus, whose cloud-capped summit was once thought to be their home. Three special features of this religion helped to bind Greeks together—the Olympic Games, the Delphic Oracle, and the various Amphictyonies.
To the great festivals of some
of the gods, men flocked from all Hellas. Especially was this true of the games
in honor of Zeus, each fourth year, at Olympia in Elis. The contests consisted
of foot and chariot racing, wrestling, and boxing; and the victors, though they
received only an olive wreath at Olympia, were commonly honored at their homes
with inscriptions and statues. The four-year periods, or Olympiads, became the
Greek units in counting time; all events were dated from what was called the
first recorded Olympiad, beginning in 776 B.C.
At Delphi was a temple of
Apollo and an oracle whose advice was sought by individuals and governments
over all Hellas. An ancient league of Greek tribes to protect this temple was
known as The Amphictyonic League. Smaller amphictyonies (leagues of
dwellers-round-about) were common in other parts of Greece. They afforded the
only hint of a movement in the early history toward a union of states, but they
were strictly religious in purpose.
Table of Greater Deities.
(Latin names in parenthesisr)
Zeus (Jupiter), the supreme
god ; god of the sky.
Poseidon (Neptune), god of the
sea.
Apollo, the sun god ; god of
wisdom, poetry, and medicine.
Ares (Mars), god of war.
Hephaestus (Vulcan), god of
fire—the lame smith.
Hermes (Mercury), god of the
wind; messenger; god of cunning and wit. Hera (Juno), sister and wife of Zeus;
queen of the sky.
Athene (Minerva), goddess of
wisdom ; the female counterpart of Apollo, as Hera was of Zeus.
Artemis (Diana), goddess of
the moon; goddess of hunting.
Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of
love.
Demeter (Ceres), the earth
goddess — controlling fertility.
Hestia (Vesta), the deity of
the home ; goddess of the hearth fire.
IV. COLONIZATION.
A. First Period,
Readjustments in the Aegean,
The immediate cause of the
first great movements of population in Greece that we can trace was the Dorian
invasion. These conquerors and the dispossessed Achaeans, who were seeking new
homes, jostled other tribes into motion over all the peninsula. The age was one
of rearrangements and of moderate expansion into the Aegean.
One phase of the
expansion of Greek culture in this period deserves special mention. This is the
Hellenizing of the Asiatic coast. A great body of Ionian refugees, passing
through Attica, crossed the sea to the central coast of Asia Minor. There they
founded or conquered twelve great cities, of which Miletus and Ephesus were the
most important. The whole district took the name Ionia, and was united in a
religious amphictyony. Just to the north, a confused mass of fugitives from
central Greece founded a group of twelve Aeolian cities (also with an
amphictyony), while to the south was established a smaller circle of Dorian
colonies.
B. Second Period,
Wider Colonization, 800-600 B.C.
The real territorial
expansion came a century later. The movement went on for two hundred years, and
doubled the area of Hellas, carrying it far beyond its Aegean home. Curiously,
this dispersion came just when the Hellenes were growing to look upon
themselves as a distinct race. In this period of true colonization the colonies
were trading stations, not settlements of fugitives. They resulted not from
foreign force, but from state policy: one group to secure to the mother city a
monopoly of the Thracian gold and silver mines; another to control the corn
trade of southern Russia. Social and political motives cooperated with such
aims. The old cities were glad to find a vent for their rapidly increasing
population, especially as a tendency to class struggles just at that time made
the presence of discontented elements a political peril. Sometimes, indeed,
the colonists were a defeated faction in a civic conflict. The mother city,
however, always gave the sacred fire for the new city hearth, and
appointed the “founder,” to establish the new settlement with appropriate
religious rites and to distribute the mixed inhabitants, who thronged in from
all sides, into artificial tribes and gentes, after the fashion of Greek
society. The colonists ceased absolutely to be citizens in their old home, and
the new city enjoyed complete independence. Each colony recognized its
religious and social obligations to its “metropolis,” but neither mother nor
daughter city thought of converting the relation into a political union. Corinth
for a time made an exception; that city did retain some political supremacy
over its colonies. And Athens in a later period adopted another form of
colonization, of which we shall have occasion to speak .
The map shows the
distribution of the colonies. To the east, some sixty settlements fringed the
Black Sea and its straits; on the west, Sicily became almost wholly Greek, and
southern Italy took the proud name of Magna Graecia. The one city of Chalcis
(in Euboea) founded thirty-two colonies in Thrace. Among the more important
cities established in this period were Syracuse in Sicily, Tarentum in Italy,
Corcyra in the Adriatic, Massilia (Marseilles) in Gaul, Olynthus in Thrace,
Cyrene in Africa, and Byzantium on the Bosphorus. No one of the scores of these
colonies was an inland settlement.
V. THE POLITICAL
REVOLUTION.
During the obscure period the
old “kings” disappeared from every Greek city except Sparta and Argos; and in
those the Homeric king ship was modified. Religious feeling determined the
general character of the change. An Homeric king had had the triple functions
of priest, judge, and war chief. Plainly, the last could least safely be left
to the accident of birth; accordingly, it was this function that was first made
elective. Then, as judicial work increased, with the more complex city life,
special judges were chosen to take over that part of the king’s work. The
priestly dignity (powerless of itself, and connected most closely with family
descent) was left longest a matter of inheritance: in some cities we find a “king-archon” (basileus archon) for city priest, from the old royal family,
long after all other sign of royalty had vanished; and in democratic Athens,
all through her later history, the same title of king-archon was given to the
elected city priest.
This was the general order,
then, of the change by which the rule of the king became the rule of “the few.”
The process was gradual and commonly peaceful. The means and occasion varied. A
disputed succession, the dying out of a royal line, a minor or a weak king,—any
of these conditions would make it easy for the nobles to encroach upon the
royal power.
The Oligarchies overthrown by the Tyrants.— The origin of the oligarchies
varied. The original aristocratic or oligarchic element consisted of the
council of clan elders. But sometimes the families of a few greater chiefs had
come to overshadow the rest; sometimes, possibly, the various branches of one
royal clan established their rule; in places, groups of conquering families
ruled the descendants of the conquered; sometimes, perhaps, wealth helped to
draw the line between “the few” and “the many,” though the distinction was
always based fundamentally upon blood. Whatever the exact principle of
division, there was in all Greek cities a sharp line between two classes—one
calling itself “the few,” “the good,” “the noble,” and another called by these
“the many,” “the bad,” “the base.” “The few” had succeeded the kings. “The
many” were oppressed and misgoverned, and began to clamor for relief. They
were too ignorant as yet to govern themselves or to maintain themselves against
the more intelligent and better united “few.” The way was prepared for them by
the tyrants.
Everywhere in city Greece,
about 700 B.C, these tyrants sprang up, often several times, at short
intervals, in the same city. In the outlying parts of Hellas they were a common
phenomenon through all the later history, but by the year 500 they had
disappeared from the main peninsula, and so the two centuries from 700 to 500
B.C. are called the “Age of Tyrants.”
A tyrant in Greek history is
simply a man who by force seizes or holds royal power. Arbitrary rule was
hateful to all Greeks, and the murder of a tyrant seemed a virtuous act.
Sometimes, too, the selfish and wanton indulgence of such rulers justified the
detestation that clings to the name. But at the worst the tyrants seem to have
been a necessary evil, to break down the greater evil of the selfish, anarchic
oligarchies; and many of them were generous, far-sighted, beneficent rulers,
building public works, developing trade, patronizing art and literature. The
tyrant was made possible by the strife between the ruling few and the oppressed
many, and he always appeared as champion of the democracy. Sometimes he was a
noble opposed by his order; sometimes by birth a man of the people. At Argos,
King Pheidon massacred the nobles and made himself tyrant, without the city
passing through a complete oligarchic stage.
The tyrants surrounded
themselves with mercenaries, but they sought also to keep the favor of the
masses, who had helped them to the throne. The nobles they could not conciliate;
these they burdened with taxes, oppressed, exiled, and murdered in great numbers.
The story goes that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent to the tyrant of
Miletus, to ask his advice in government. The Milesian took the messenger
through a grain field, striking off the finest and tallest ears as they walked,
and sent him back without other answer. The story certainly does stand for what
necessarily became, to some degree, the policy of all tyrants toward the
nobles. And thus, when the tyrants themselves were overthrown, democracy had a
fairer chance of success. In the Ionian cities, the next step was usually a
democratic government. In Doric Greece, more commonly there followed a return
to a broader aristocracy, but never to quite the older and more objectionable
form of oligarchy. The tyrants had done their work effectively.
VI. THE RISE OF SPARTA.
Early Sparta: the Need of Reforms; Subsequent
Growth.— The invading
Dorians founded numerous petty states in the Peloponnesus. For a time one of
the weakest of these was Sparta. Her territory—just a few square miles in the rich
Eurotas valley—did not approach the sea, and it was surrounded by powerful and
grasping neighbors. Internally, too, Sparta was torn by faction.
The later Spartans attributed
their escape from these threatening conditions to the reforms of a certain
Lycurgus. Certainly about the year 900 B.C., whether the reformer’s name was
Lycurgus or not, the Spartans did adopt peculiar social and political
institutions that made them a marked people in later Greek history. Disciplined
and hardened by this code, they entered upon a career of conquest. Before 700 B.C.
they had subdued all Laconia; before 650, Messenia also; while the other states
of the Peloponnesus, except hostile Argos, had become their allies for war.
The Political Constitution.— Sparta had two kings. Legend
ascribed this to the birth of twin princes. Whatever the occasion, the nobles
in this city weakened the royal power by dividing it, and so were less tempted
to abolish it. In consequence, Sparta is the one Greek city which had no tyrant
in this period. The kings were members of a senate of thirty elders—originally,
no doubt, the heads of Sparta’s thirty clans. The other twenty-eight senators,
however, had become elective, but only from the old noble families. The office
was for life. Ho one under sixty years was eligible. The senate for the greater
part of Spartan history was the chief political body in the state. A popular
Assembly of all free Spartans chose senators and other officers, and decided
important matters laid before it, but it had no right to introduce new
measures. Discussion was limited to the chiefs and great officers, and at a
later time the senate secured the power, “if the people decide anything
crookedly, to put it back.”
So far this was a close
survival of the Homeric constitution, except that the two kings checked each
other’s authority, and that the Assembly elected the council. But about 725 B.C. Sparta took a great stride toward
democracy. Elected magistrates, called Ephors, assumed the headship of the
state. Eive of these were chosen each year by the Assembly, and any Spartan was
eligible to the office. The Ephors called the Assembly and presided over it,
and acted as judges in all important matters. Ho appeal from their decision was
allowed. One or more of them accompanied the king, even in war, with power to
control his movements and to arrest and condemn him. The kings had now become
simply priests, judges in certain unimportant matters of family law, generals
in war, and members of the senate. Sparta kept the form and dignity of ancient
royalty, and she was intensely aristocratic in feeling, but in reality she was
a military democracy under the annual dictatorship of an elected committee of
Ephors.
To the Greeks, however, such
delegation of power, even to officers elected for short terms, seemed
undemocratic. They would not have called our government by President, Congress,
and Supreme Court a democracy at allTo them democracy meant a government in
which each freeman took somewhat the same part that a member of Congress does
with us—a system such that each citizen voted, not occasionally, to elect
representatives, but constantly, on all matters of great state policy, which
matters’also he might discuss in the ruling assembly of his city-country. By
this standard Sparta was aristocratic.
Classes in Laconia.—Moreover, after the conquest
of Laconia, the Spartans as a whole were a ruling oligarchy in the midst of a
subject class eight or ten times their number. They were simply a camp of eight
or nine thousand conquerors (with their families) living under arms in their
unwalled city, and holding the most fertile lands of Laconia. They themselves,
wholly given to camp life, could not work, and each man’s land was tilled by
certain slaves of the state, called Helots.
The Helots numbered four or
five to one Spartan, and so were a standing danger, though they were the
indispensable basis for any such system. They furnished light-armed troops in
war. A secret police of active Spartan youth busied itself in detecting plots
among them and sometimes, it is claimed, carried out secret and widespread
massacre of the more intelligent and ambitious slaves. Each year, too, the
Ephors declared war against the Helots in the name of the State,—that it might
be lawful for any Spartan to kill them without trial,—and ancient critics are
prone to refer to the mysterious way in which crowds of Helots vanished
sometimes, when their numbers threatened Spartan safety. On one occasion, in
the great death struggle with Athens in the fifth century, the Spartans had
given the Helots heavy armor, but afterward became terrified at the possible
consequences. Thucydides tells how they met the danger: —
“They proclaimed that a
selection would he made of those Helots who claimed to have rendered the best
service to the Lacedaemonians in the war, and promised them liberty. The
announcement was intended to test them; it was thought that those among them
who were foremost in asserting their freedom would be most high-spirited and
most likely to rise against their masters. So they selected about two thousand,
who were crowned with garlands, and went in procession round the temples ; they
were supposed to have received their liberty, but not long afterwards the
Spartans put them all out of the way, and no man knew how any of them came to
their end.”
The inhabitants of the hundred
small subject “cities” of Laconia were called Perioeci. They were free in
person. They kept their own customs and a share in the government of their
respective cities, under the supervision of Spartan harmosts. They had also
their own lands, and they carried on such trades and commerce as existed in
Laconia. They were three or four to one Spartan; and the heavy-armed soldiers
of the Spartan army came in large measure from them. They had no voice in the
supreme state, and the Ephors could put them to death without trial, but they
seem, as a rule, to have been well treated and well content.
Thus the inhabitants of Laconia
fall into three classes:
(1) a small ruling oligarchy,
living in one central settlement, itself an elective military dictatorship; (2)
a large class of cruelly treated agricultural serfs, to support these
aristocratic soldiers; (3) another large class of well-treated city
populations, without political rights except for a limited local
self-government.
Social Institutions.— The garrison at Sparta
maintained its superiority in Laconia by an unrelaxing vigilance and by a rigid
discipline, which is sometimes lauded as “the Spartan training.” That training
made good soldiers, as was its sole aim; but naturally it was harsh, and in
many ways brutalizing. The family, as well as the man, belonged absolutely to
the army-state.
At the birth of each child,
the Ephors decided whether it should be reared at all or be exposed to die as a
weakling. At seven years each boy was taken from his parents, to be trained in
a public institution until he was twenty—never again to sleep under his
mother’s roof. The system of education aimed to harden and strengthen the body
and to render the mind self-controlled and obedient to authority. On certain
festival days, boys were whipped at the altars to test their endurance; and
Plutarch states that they often died under the lash rather than utter a cry. A
bare knowledge of reading and a little martial music were the only germs of
culture.
From twenty to thirty the
youth lived under arms in barracks. He was one of a mess of fifteen, each of
whom must provide from his land his part of the barley meal, cheese, and black
broth, with meat on holidays. The mess drilled and fought side by side; and
this long exclusive devotion to military drill made it possible for the
Spartans to adopt a more complex system of tactics than was natural for their
neighbors. The other Greeks continued much longer to fight in masses, with a
few heralds to shout the orders of the general. The Spartans were trained in
small regiments and companies, so as to maneuver readily at the word of
command. This made their great superiority in the field; they stood to the
other Greeks as disciplined, professional soldiery to a relatively untrained
militia.
At thirty the man was required
by law to marry, in order to rear more soldiers; but he must still eat and, for
the most part, live, in barracks. Said an Athenian, “The Spartan’s life is so
unendurable that it is no wonder he throws it away lightly in battle.”
Certain virtue there was, of course, in this training. The Spartans had the quiet dignity of born rulers. The pithy brevity of their speech (“laconic” speech), their use of only iron money, and their austere simplicity of life, made them a moral force in the Greek world; and the changeless character of their constitution for five hundred years after the introduction of the Ephors was a protest against the kaleidoscopic revolutions of surrounding states. Their women, too, kept a freedom which unhappily was lost in more civilized Greek cities. But, after all, the value of the Spartans to the world lay in the fact that they made a garrison for all Greece, and helped to save something better than themselves. In themselves, they were hard, ignorant, narrow. They did nothing to create art, literature, science, or philosophy. So far as they were concerned, these glories of Greece never had an existence. If the Greeks had all been Spartans, we could well afford to omit the study of Greek history.
Fling's Studies in Greek and Roman Civilization VII. ATHENS TO 500
B.C.
The history of
Athens is for us the history of Greece.—Holm.
A. Preliminary Considerations.
Two Peculiar Conditions did much to fix the place of
Athens in Greek history: (1) Athens was the sole city of Attica (a considerable
territory); (2) her population was mingled of many elements, but without the
sharp divisions that elsewhere followed conquest by aliens.
As to the first consideration:
Sparta and Athens became leading cities in Greece because they, and they alone,
were more than single cities. They had both carried the political consolidation
of neighboring territory farther than any other Greek state. In other
territories as large as Attica or Laconia there were always groups of
independent cities. In Boeotia, for instance, Thebes at best could aspire to
only a limited leadership among a dozen jealous rivals. In Attica, happily, the
germs of such separate cities had been consolidated in one. What Sparta was to
Laconia by later conquest, Athens had become to Attica before the opening of
history—and something over. It had carried consolidation further. It was the
real home of all the free inhabitants of Attica, not merely the camp of one
dominant tribe. In Laconia political union came through subjection, which left
lasting class distinctions between a ruling city and the other Laconians. In
Attica union came through incorporation, which wiped out such distinctions of
locality. In legend, Lycurgus made the Spartans an army to hold down
neighboring hostile subjects, while Theseus made all inhabitants of Attica
Athenians.
As to the second
consideration: Ionian Attica seems to have been the one spot of southern Greece
not overrun by conquest at the time of the Dorian migration. Naturally, it
became an asylum for refugees, especially for Ionian clans driven from the
Peloponnesus. The wealthier and more powerful of these were admitted into the
tribes of Attica; others, no doubt, were received as dependants. It followed
that subsequent class struggles were less bitter than in most of Greece, where
class divisions were connected with ancient conquests and race hatreds, instead
of with friendly patronage.
The repeated introduction of
fresh elements from many sources, under such conditions, in itself made for a
progressive, democratic people, open to outside influence. Happily, the
tendency was reenforced by the later commercial life of Athens, to which her
thin soil impelled her no less than location tempted her.
Despite her peculiar
conditions, it is right and convenient to regard Athens as a type. Hellas
comprised hundreds of cities, each with its internal history of progress and
revolution, and with its foreign relations. No study can survey many of these.
Sparta and Athens are selected because they became the leading states. Sparta,
however, is less fit than Athens to stand for the history of Greece; and even
Athens exaggerates the size, the democracy, and the many-sidedness of the
average city.
The chief danger, however, is
that the student will not realize the infinite complexity of Greek history, and
that he will think of Athens as the whole, instead of as a type. It must be
borne in mind constantly that the internal history of this city was paralleled,
with slight modifications, by that of scores of others which this volume does
not even name.
B. Eupatrid Rule — after the First Political Revolution.
Like other Greek cities, Athens had lost her kings in
the obscure period following the Migrations; and when history begins
again, her government is an oligarchy. According to the common tradition,
restrictions upon the royal power began in Athens about 1000 B.C., after the
death of King Codrus. The royal office was still for life, and hereditary in
the family of Codrus, but alongside the king-archon (basileus) with his
priestly function, arose a new war-archon (polemarch), and—a little later,
perhaps—a chief-archon, usually styled The Archon, to act as judge and
administrator. These latter officers were elected by the Eupatrids
(“well-born”), or chiefs; and in 752 B.C., the office of king-archon also was
made elective and limited to a ten years’ term. For some time, however, the
choice was still made from the old royal family; then it was thrown open to any
Eupatrid. In 682 B.C. the archons were all made annual officers; and alongside
them were set six lesser archons, called “ decision-givers,” to assist in the
growing judicial work.
Apparently the Eupatrids were the chiefs, or clan elders, of the numerous clans in Attica. Their council was called the Areopagus, from the hill where it met. They ruled Attica in this assembly and through this committee of archons from their own number. The other tribesmen must have had an assembly.for religious and military purposes; but it seems to have had even less voice than in Homeric times. The worst hardships of the
tribesmen, however, were economic. Most of the land had come to belong to the
Eupatrids. They tilled it largely by tenants, who paid five sixths the produce
for rent. A bad season or hostile ravages often compelled these tenants to
borrow seed or food, and to mortgage their persons for payment. If the debtor
failed to pay promptly, he could be dragged off in chains and sold with his
family into slavery.
Apparently, alongside the
great Eupatrid landlords and these tenants, there stood a class of small
farmers owning their lands; but they also were reduced frequently to borrow of
the Eupatrids, and in consequence to pass into much the condition of the poorer
tenants. Aristotle says: —
“The poor with their wives
and children were the very bondsmen of the rich, who named them Sixth-men,
because it was for this wage they tilled the land. The entire land was in the
hands of a few. If the poor 'failed to pay their rents they were liable to be
haled into slavery. Their very persons were mortgaged,
until Solon’s time; for it was he first advocated the people’s cause.” And
again — “They [the people] were discontented with every other feature of their
lot, for, to speak generally, they had no share in anything.” — Constitution of
Athens, 2.
By 593 B.C. very different
institutions, political and economic, had come into being, but the steps from
the old order to the new are in part uncertain. It does seem clear, however,
that the first attempts at reform were only partially successful, because they
did not touch these social conditions; and that Solon’s work at the close of
the period was more important mainly because it did begin with the economic evils.
C. The Early Attempts to Overthrow the
Eupatrids.
The supremacy of the
Eupatrids rested largely on superiority in war. They composed the knights, or
heavy-armed cavalry of Attica, in comparison with whom the early foot soldiery
was only a light-armed mob.
The Four Classes: Political Power based in part
upon Wealth.—Better to maintain the military system, a census distributed the
tribesmen into four classes, based upon annual income from land—500-measure
men, 300-measure men, 200-measure men, and those whose income was less than 200
measures. The first two classes were under obligation to serve as knights, and
were doubtless at this time all Eupatrids; the third class were thought able to
equip themselves as hoplites; the fourth class were called into the field less
often and only as light-armed troops.
This system, designed to
regulate obligation to the State, became also, to some degree, a basis for the
distribution of privilege. Erom the three higher classes (all the heavy-armed
soldiery) was formed a new Assembly, which elected archons (from the first
class) and other officers and created a new elective senate to take some of the
power of the Areopagus. The exact details of this “Constitution of Classes” are
so uncertain that it seems best to leave them to be stated as they appear more
clearly after the legislation of Solon.
Much that was attributed to
Solon by tradition and by ancient historians, and until recently by modern
authorities, is credited to these earlier changes, in a lately discovered
treatise by Aristotle on the Athenian constitution. Aristotle wrote, of course,
over three hundred years after these early reforms; and while his authority
makes the old accounts uncertain, it does not always establish a satisfactory
substitute.
In practice, however,
authority certainly remained with the old oligarchy, who seemed as securely
intrenched under the new system by their monopoly of land as they had been
before by birth. The hoplites, too, must have come largely from their immediate
dependents. Their rule continued selfish and incompetent, and nothing had been
done to remedy the economic distress. Finally, ambitious adventurers began to
try to make themselves tyrants by help of the bitter dissatisfaction of the
people, and one young noble, Cylon, with his forces, actually held the
Acropolis, or citadel, for a time.
The Eupatrids were frightened
into further concessions, and in 621 B.C. one of the archons, Draco, was
commissioned to draw up a written code of laws, for which the people had been
clamoring. Oftentimes the old custom-law was known only to the Eupatrid judges;
the growing complexity of society must have made new regulations needful; and
the judges had to meet these needs by their own arbitrary.discretion. The
people did not yet ask for new laws, but only for fixed and known laws, so that
the judges should have a smaller range of discretion to abuse in the interests
of their own class.
It seems probable that Draco
only reduced ancient customs to more definite form. If any changes were made,
they must have concerned some slight rearrangements of political power, without
touching the root of existing evils. The laws were engraved on wooden blocks
and set up where all might see them. The immediate result was to make men feel
how inadequate and harsh the old laws were— “written in blood rather than
ink,” as was said in a later age. Now the Athenians were ready to demand new
laws.
D. Solon — Overthrow of the Eupatrids.
Solon—poet, general, statesman,
philosopher, merchant—was a descendant of Codrus. He was loved by the poorer
Athenians and trusted by all. His patriotism had been proven. Some years
before, class dissensions had so reduced Athens that little Megara, under the
firm rule of an enterprising “tyrant,” had taken Salamis and blockaded the
Athenian ports. Efforts to recover the important island failed so miserably
that in despair the Athenians had agreed to put to death any one who should
again propose the attempt. Solon shammed madness,—to claim a crazy man’s
privilege,—and, by reciting a warlike patriotic poem, roused his countrymen to
fresh efforts, which, under his generalship, proved successful. Now, in this
internal crisis, all factions concurred in giving him authority to remodel the
constitution. Solon had blamed the greed of the rich as the cause of trouble,
but had urged reconcilation, in a poem beginning, “My eyes are opened, and I
see with anguish the plight of this oldest home of the ancient Ionian race.”
This was the immediate occasion, Aristotle says, of Solon’s appointment. The
Delphic oracle advised him to make himself tyrant, and his friends certainly
hoped that he would not lay down his power. He was really an “ elected tyrant ”
for two years.
The first year Solon dealt
with economic evils.
a. Out of the old tenants he created a class of free peasant
proprietors. .The lands which they had cultivated for the Eupatrids he made
their own; he boasts in a poem of “ freeing the enslaved land” by removing the
stone pillars (of religious significance) which had marked Eupatrid ownership.
b. He canceled all debts. c. He freed all Athenians who were in slavery in Attica.
d. He made it illegal, for the future, to reduce Athenians to slavery,
or to own more than a certain quantity of land.
The last regulation aimed to
prevent any recurrence of the old evils. The first three measures roughly
redressed the past. They were, of course, a sweeping confiscation of property.
The Eupatrids showed a singular moderation in submitting to them without a
death struggle. Happily, the act did not become a precedent. The Athenians
never again went so far as to confiscate debts. In later times the whole people
celebrated the acts of Solon by a yearly “Festival of the Shaking off of
Burdens.”
Indirectly, a political
revolution went with these economic changes, although, so far, the letter of
the constitution was untouched. Political power was already based upon landed
property. Accordingly, these land reforms carried with them a redistribution of
political power. The process continued, too, of itself. Merchants, by the
purchase of land, rose into the first class, while Eupatrids sank into other
classes until the very name soon disappeared. But, in a second year, Solon did
directly introduce political changes that carried Athens well into the current
of democracy. He seems not to have created new offices or institutions; but, as
he had already redistributed the people within the old political classes, so
now he redistributed power among these classes and among the old governing
bodies.
a. The fourth class, who had had no political rights, were now
admitted to the Assembly.
b. A senate of four hundred (one hundred by lot from the higher
classes of each Athenian tribe) took over the general administration from the
Areopagus, and prepared measures to submit to the Assembly.
c. The new Assembly (all Athenians) discussed and decided upon
proposals of the senate; elected archons from the first class, and minor
officers from the three higher classes; and tried officers at the expiration of
their terms, if any citizen accused them.
d. The Areopagus was no longer a Eupatrid council. It was composed
of ex-archons, and was shorn of most of its powers. Its deliberative and
administrative office had gone to the senate; its power of electing archons to
the Assembly; its judicial function (for the most part) to the Assembly and to
new courts. It remained a court to try murder cases, and to exercise a moral
censorship over the life of the citizens, with power to impose fines for
extravagance, insolence, or gluttony.
Solon also substituted a
milder code for Draco’s bloody laws, introduced a new coinage better suited for
foreign commerce, made it the duty of each father to teach his son a trade
(upon penalty of forfeiting obligation for support in his old age), limited the
wealth that might be buried with the dead, restricted the appearance of women
in public, and enacted that any Athenian who remained neutral in civic strife
should forfeit citizenship.
Summary of the Solonian Constitution and of the
Changes of a Century.
682 B.C. — A few noble
families owned most of the soil, and held the rest of the people in virtual
servitude. These same families of course possessed all political power, and
ruled through the assembly of their order on the Areopagus, and through annual
.committees chosen by that body.
693 B.C. —Nearly all Athenian
tribesmen were land owners. All tribesmen were members of the political
Assembly, which elected officers (so far as election was not settled by lot),
tried them upon occasion, and decided public questions: Administrative power
rested partly in annual officers and partly in a senate chosen by tribes. Eligibility
to office was based upon property qualification.
The economic change was all
Solon’s. The political reforms were largely his, and any that had been
introduced before gained increased significance from his work. The lot was
introduced, doubtless, to check the tendency to elect only the old chiefs. It
was regarded as an appeal to the gods, and its use was always accompanied by
religious ceremonies.
E. The Tyrants.
The reforms of Solon did not
end the turbulent strife of factions. Bitter feuds followed between the Plain
(wealthy landowners), the Shore (merchants), and the Mountain (shepherds and
small farmers). Twice within ten years, anarchy prevented the election of an
archon at all, and once an archon tried to make himself tyrant by holding over
without reelection.
Peisistratus, 560-527.— From such anarchy the city
was saved by Peisistratus, a kinsman of Solon, who in 560 B.C. made himself
tyrant by help of the democratic faction. Twice the nobles drove liim into
exile, once for ten years, but each time he recovered his power almost without
bloodshed. His rule was mild, wise, and popular. He lived simply, like other
citizens, and appeared in a law court to answer in a suit against him; and he
always treated the aged Solon with deep respect, despite the latter’s bitter
opposition. Indeed, he governed through the forms of Solon’s constitution, and
enforced his laws, taking care only to have his own friends elected to the
chief offices,—more like the “boss” of a great political “machine” than like
a “tyrant.” During his third rule, however, he did secure himself by mercenary
soldiers and by banishing many hostile nobles. He encouraged commerce, enlarged
and beautified Athens, built aqueducts and roads, and drew to his court a
brilliant circle of poets, painters, architects, and sculptors from all Hellas.
The first complete edition of the Homeric poems is said to have been put
together at his command and expense. Anacreon wrote his graceful odes at the Peisistratid court, and Thespis began Greek tragedy at
the magnificent festivals there instituted to Dionysus (god of wine). The
public worship was given new splendor in other ways, and rural festivals were
instituted to make country life more attractive. Solon’s peasant proprietors
were increased in number by the division of the confiscated estates of banished
nobles among landless freemen. The three higher property classes paid a five
per cent income tax (at first ten per cent), but in return they were taught the
value of peace and order. Attica was no longer plundered by invasion or torn by
dissension. Since the Athenians could not yet govern themselves, it was well
they had a Peisistratus.
Expulsion of the Peisistratidae.— In 527, Peisistratus was
succeeded by his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus. The latter was murdered because
of a private grudge, and the terrified Hippias exchanged his previous kindly
rule for a cruel and suspicious policy that ripened revolt. Cleisthenes, one of
the exiled nobles, saw his opportunity. His family (wealthy even in exile) had
just rebuilt the burned temple of Apollo at Delphi with much greater
magnificence than the contract had demanded, using Parian marble for the
prescribed limestone; and now (according to Herodotus) Cleisthenes “bribed” the
oracle to order the Spartans, whenever they applied for advice on any matter,
to “set free the Athenians.” In consequence a reluctant Spartan army did
finally march against Hippias, and he was expelled in 510 B.C.
F. Cleisthenes— A Democracy.
The Athenians were now in
confusion again, but the outcome proved that they had gained in strength and in
power to govern themselves. An oligarchic party that strove for a reaction was
defeated by the democrats, led by the returned Cleisthenes. A Spartan army
restored the oligarchs for a moment, but was itself soon besieged in the
Acropolis, and captured by the aroused democracy. The Thebans and Euboeans had
seized what seemed a time of confusion and weakness to invade Attica, but were
routed by a double engagement in one day. The Athenians had enjoyed little fame
in war, “but now,” says Aristotle, they showed that men would fight more
bravely for themselves than for a master.” Chalcis in Euboea was stormed, and
its trade with Thrace fell to Athens. At the same time Athens began her special
kind of colonization by sending four thousand citizens to possess the best land
of Chalcis, and to serve as a garrison there. These men retained full Athenian
citizenship. They were known as cleruchs, or out-settlers. In this way Athens was
to find land for her surplus population, to strengthen her democratic
tendencies, and to fortify her influence abroad ç— all without decreasing her
fighting strength.
During the war Athens made fresh strides toward completing the work of
Solon by adopting a more democratic constitution, proposed by Cleisthenes. The
general design was to develop the democratic features of the older constitution
and to weaken the aristocratic ones. It also aimed to get rid of family and
local faction, and to strengthen the state by bringing in new citizens.
The tendency to factiousness
arose (a) from the method of voting by clans and tribes in tbe Assembly, so
that the clans rallied voluntarily each around its clan chief, and (b) from the
continued jealousy of Plain, Shore, and Mountain.
The presence of a non-citizen
class needs a longer explanation. Solon’s reforms had concerned tribesmen only;
and probably in his day few strangers lived permanently in Attica. But in the
intervening ninety years, especially under the good rule of Peisistratus, the
growing trade of Athens had drawn many aliens there. These were men of
enterprise and sometimes of wealth; but though they lived in the city, they had
no part in its religion, its politics, its law, or its society. No alien could
marry an Athenian or hold land. The city might find it pay to protect his
property, in order to attract other strangers to add to the prosperity of the
State; but he had no secure legal rights of any kind, because law was a matter
of city and clan religion. Nor could his son or his son’s son, nor any later
descendant, acquire any of these rights by residence in Athens. Society was
based on blood relationship. By adoption into an Athenian clan, single strangers
from time to time won positions as citizens; but only a revolution could bring
the aliens as a class into the city. The descendants of fugitives and freedmen
swelled their numbers, and discontent might make them a danger. Cleisthenes’
plan was to take them into the state, and so make them strengthen it.
This problem was not simply
political, like the question of extending the suffrage among a modern people,
because there was a religious barrier to be broken down, and because this
religious element with the Greeks was the soul of the State. It was different,
too, because the outsiders were asking, not political rights, but status, or
legal standing. They wanted more secure property rights, and to get these, they
had first to get admission into the religion of the city.
The Demes and Geographical Tribes.— The fundamental political
change introduced by Cleisthenes was the substitution of geographical units for
the old blood units (clans and tribes). This was the soul of his reform, as the
land legislation was of Solon’s. Directly or indirectly, it made possible the
correction of other chief evils. The plan itself was very simple. Attica was
marked off into a hundred divisions called demes. Each citizen was enrolled in
one of these, and his son after him. Such eurollment, instead of the old clan
connection, became the proof of citizenship. Indeed, in future, a man took his
surname from his deme, and no longer from Tiis clan. The clan survived only for
religious and social purposes. In all political respects it was superseded by
the deme, which became the unit of local government within the city. Each deme
had its demarch, or chief, its deme-assembly, and its deme-treasury.
Ten of these demes—not
adjacent, but scattered as widely as possible so as to include the various
local interests—composed a “tribe,” or ward; and these artificial tribes
replaced the old blood tribes in the Assembly. By this arrangement, a clan—whose
members now made parts, perhaps, of several “tribes”—could no longer act
politically as a unit. Thus the influence of the clan chiefs declined, and
other citizens were more likely to be chosen to office. Shore and Mountain,
too, no longer had distinct rallying points. This one device cut away the
fulcrum of both family and local faction and also of aristocratic power. It
helped likewise to solve the more difficult problem of admitting the
non-citizen class.
The Power of the Assembly was greatly enlarged. Any citizen
might now introduce new business directly, and the senate was expected to
submit to the Assembly all matters of importance. The Assembly also elected
archons and other officers, and tried them. It dealt with foreign affairs,
taxation, and even with the details of military campaigns. To be sure, it took
time for the Assembly to realize its full power and to learn how to control its
various agents, but its rise to supreme authority was now only a matter of
natural growth.
The senate was enlarged to
five hundred—fifty by lot from each of the ten “tribes.” The five hundred
divided themselves into ten committees of fifty each, and one of these
committees was always in session. Ten generals, or strategic were elected
annually from Solon’s first three classes, to share the control of military
matters with the pole-march. The archons and the Areopagus were not seriously
affected. .
Ostracism.— The most peculiar and original device of Cleisthenes aimed in another way to prevent faction. Solon had thought civil strife inevitable, and had sought only to force all to take sides, so that the bad man might not win through the indifference of the multitude. Cleisthenes tried by ingenious means to head off civil strife altogether. Once a year the Assembly was given a chance to vote by ballot (on pieces of pottery, “ostraka”), each one against any man whom he deemed dangerous to the State. If six thousand votes were cast, the man receiving the largest number went into honorable exile for ten years. The plan was abused by politicians to remove, not dangerous men, but personal rivals, and was dropped after about a century. Only three or four cities ever imitated it. VIII. INTELLECTUAL
DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL LIFE.
This brilliant, jostling
society, which had just awakened to national consciousness, which had been
sowing Hellenic cities broadcast along the Mediterranean shores, and which was
now developing political democracy, was marked also by new forms of
intellectual activity.
In poetry there was a more
complete development. Verse is older than prose; and in this age Solon argued
his politics, and Thales his philosophy, in verse. This section, however, is
concerned with that poetry which is more properly literature.
In contrast, the seventh and
sixth centuries are styled the Lyric Age. The prevailing poetry consisted of
odes and songs in a great variety of complex meters—expressive of the more
varied life of the time. These poems (to be accompanied by the lyre) were
descriptive of feelings rather than of outward events. Love and pleasure are
the common themes; and, if a story is told at all, it is always in order to
appeal to some emotion. The more famous poets of the period are grouped below.
a.
Lyric and Elegiac Poets. —
Seventh and sixth centuries.
From Lesbos : Alcaeus; Avion,
patronized by Periander, tyrant of Corinth; Sappho, whom the ancients were
wont to designate simply “the poetess,” just as they referred to Homer as “the
poet”; Terpander. From Ceos: Simonides, whose odes incited to Hellenic
patriotism, and who lived over into the next age.
From Teos: Anacreon.
From Paros: Archilochus, who
wrote war songs.
From Ephesus: Callinus.
From Attica (?): Tyrtaeus, a
war poet at Sparta in the Second Mes-senian War.
From Ionia (?), but living at
Sparta: Aleman.
From Sicily: Stesichorus.
From Megara: Theognis, poet of
the oligarchs against the people.
From Boeotia: Corinna, a
woman; and Pindar, who belongs also to the next age.
Pindar was a Theban noble, and
was accounted the greatest Greek lyric poet. Professor Jebb says of him
(Primer, 68) : “The glory of his song has passed forever from the world, with
the sound of the rolling harmonies on which it once was borne, with the splendor
of rushing chariots and athletic forms around which it threw its radiance, with
the white-pillared cities of the Aegean in which it wrought its spell, with the
beliefs and joys which it ennobled; but those who love his poetry, and who
strive to enter into its high places, can still know that they breathe a pure
and bracing air, and can still feel vibrating through a clear, calm sky the
strong pulse of an eagle’s wings, as he soars with steady eyes against the
sun.”
b. Other Poets.— Hesiod (eighth century), from Boeotia: poetic
history of creation and of the gods (Theogony), and didactic poems on
agriculture in the different seasons (Works and Days); Thespis, of Megara, who
under patronage of Peisistratus at Athens begins dramatic poetry (which was to
be the characteristic form of literature in the next century and was to remain
centered at Athens).
Philosophy. — It was in the sixth century,
too, that Greek philosophy was born. Its home was in Ionia. There first the
Greek mind set out fearlessly and systematically to explain the origin of
things. Thales of Miletus, father of Greek philosophy, taught that all things
came from Water, or moisture. His pupil Anaximines substituted Air for Water as
the universal first principle. Pythagoras, born at Samos, but teaching in Magna
Graecia, sought the fundamental principle, not in a kind of matter, but in
Number, or harmony. Xenophanes of Ionia, but also living in Italy, affirmed
that the only real existence was that of God, one and changeless—neither in
body like unto mortals, neither in mind; the changing world, he said, did not
exist; it was only a deception of men’s senses. To Heracleitus of Ephesus, on
the other hand, ceaseless change itself was the very principle of things; the
world had evolved from a fiery ether, and was in constant flux. Heradeitus
lived on well into the fifth century, and was the last of the great Ionian
philosophers.
This early speculative philosophy was closely related to early science. Thales was the first Greek to predict eclipses. Anaximander of Miletus (whose philosophical doctrines are too abstruse to deal with here) made maps and globes. The Pythagoreans naturally paid special attention to Geometry, and to Pythagoras is ascribed the famous demonstration regarding the square on the hypothenuse of a triangle. His followers had many mystical ideas, but they were the first to regard Philosophy as a guide to human life. The harmony in the material universe must be matched, they held, by a harmony in the soul of man. Religion and Morality.— The two religions, of the
clan and of Olympus, have been briefly described. Neither had much to do with
conduct toward men until the later moral sense of the people put morality into
them and explained away, as allegorical, the old immoral stories of the gods.
The early Greeks believed in a
place of terrible punishment for a few great offenders against the gods, and in
an Elysium of supreme pleasure for a very few others particularly favored by the
gods. For the mass of men, however, the future life was to be “a washed-out
copy of the brilliant life on earth”—its pleasures and pains both shadowy. Thus
Ulysses meets Achilles in the home of the dead: —
“And he knew me straightway
when he had drunk the dark blood; yea, and he wept aloud, and shed big tears as
he stretched forth his hands in his longing to reach me. But it might not be,
for he had now no steadfast strength nor power at all in moving, such as was
aforetime in his supple limbs ... But lo, other spirits of the dead that be
departed stood sorrowing, and each one asked of those that were dear to them.”
— Odyssey.
And in their discourse,
Achilles exclaims sorrowfully: —
“Nay, speak not comfortably
to me of death, O great Ulysses. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling
of another, even with a lack-land man who had no great livelihood, than bear
sway among all the dead.”
Later philosophers, like
Socrates, rose to higher conceptions; but for most Greeks, even in the best
periods, the future life remained unreal and unimportant. The remarkable
quotations given below represent the mountain peaks, not the general level, of
Greek thought on this subject
The Greeks accepted frankly
the search for pleasure as natural and proper. Self-sacrifice had little place
in their ideal; and Christianity, in its aspect as a worship of divine sorrow,
is altogether foreign to their ideas. They were moved, not by the Christian
spiritual passion for the beauty of holiness, but by an intellectual perception
of the beauty of moderation and temperance.
Individual characters at once
lofty and lovable were not numerous. No society ever produced so many great
men, but many societies have produced better men. Greek excellence was
intellectual rather than moral. Trickery and wily deceit mark most of the
greatest names, and not even physical or moral bravery can be called a national
characteristic.
At the same time, a few
individuals do tower to great heights, though those heights were very different
from the nobler ideals of modern society; and a few Greek teachers give us some
of the noblest morality of the world. Says Mahaffy, after
acknowledging the cruelty and barbarity of Greek life: —
“ Socrates and-Plato are far
superior to the Jewish moralists; they are superior to the average Christian
moralist; it is only in the matchless teaching of Christ himself that we find
them surpassed.”
Mahaffy : Social life in Greece from Homer to Menander
IX. ILLUSTRATIVE EXTRACTS. (Mostly from the fifth
century.)
Odyssey, xiv. 83-84. — “Verily,
the blessed gods love not froward deeds, but they reverence justice and the
righteous acts of men.”
From Theognis.— “I will
teach you, Cyrnus, a lesson which as a child I learned from the good: ‘ Never,
for the honor, or excellence, or wealth, that may come of it, do aught that is
base, or shameful, or unjust.’ ”
“Never taunt a poor man with
his poverty: God gives wealth as he will; a man may be very rich and very base,
but virtue is the portion of the few.”
“We live like children, and
the Almighty plan controls the fro ward children of weak men.”
From Menander (a later
period). — “He is the best man who knows how to control himself when injured,
for this hot temper and bitterness is evidence of a little mind.”
“Prefer to be injured rather
than to injure.”
From Aeschylus.
“The lips of Zeus know not
to’speak a lying speech,
But will perform each single
word.”
“I think not any of the gods
is bad.”
“Justice shines in
smoke-grimed houses and holds in regard the life that is righteous; she leaves
with averted eyes the gold-bespangled palace which is unclean, and goes to the
abode that is holy.”
From Sophocles.
“Nor did I deem thy edicts
strong enough That thou, a mortal man, should’st overpass The unwritten laws of
God that know no change.”
Socrates, to his Judges
after his condemnation to death. (Plato’s Apology.)
“Wherefore, O judges, be of
good cheer about death, and know this of a truth — that no evil can happen to a
good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the
gods. . . . The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our waysI to die, you
to live. Which is better, God only knows.”
From Plato’s Republic.— “
My counsel is that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow justice and
virtue, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of
good and every sort of evil. Thus we shall live dear to one another and to the
gods, both while remaining here, and when, like conquerors in the games, we go
to receive our reward.”
A Prayer of Socrates (from Plato’s Phaedrus). — “Beloved Pan, and
all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in The inward soul; and
may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the
wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can
carry.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE PERSIAN
ATTACK.
I. A NEW ERA.
In the sixth century this
bustling, aggressive Greek world had seemed on the point of conquering the East
merely by diffusing its influence through all lands. The expansion of Greek
colonies has been noted; but the movement was wider than mere colonization.
Greek cities were formed within the ancient monarchy of Egypt; Greek
mercenaries upheld the throne of the Pharaohs, and at the same time made the
strength of the armies of Babylon and Lydia; even the commerce of the East was
passing from Phoenician to Greek hands.
The contest fills two hundred
years and falls into three periods. In the first (500-479 B.C., the period of
this chapter), the European Hellenes are on the defensive. In the second and
longest period (479-338 B.C.), the struggle is fitful, and concerns the freedom
of the Asiatic Greeks. In the third period (338-323 B.C.), Hellas—her
civilization now perfected—conquers and Hellenizes Asia. In all this
time the relations with Persia dominate Greek politics.
II. CONDITIONS FOR RESISTANCE TO PERSIA.
Three Sections of Hellas were prominent in power and
culture: the European peninsula (which we may call Greece), Asiatic Hellas with
the coast islands, and Magna Graecia. Elsewhere the cities were too scattered,
or too small, or too busy with their own defense against surrounding savages,
to be of great significance for the approaching contest. Asiatic Greece was
already subject to Persia. The two other sections were now to be attacked
simultaneously by Persia and Carthage respectively.
Carthage, on the north
coast of Africa, was a colony of Phoenicia. It had built up a great empire of
an Oriental nature, and was now about to try to seize Sicily. That island,
bringing Africa and Europe within reach of each other, was an important point
from which to Control Mediterranean trade. The Greek cities in Sicily and Italy
were ruled by tyrants; and thpse, uniting under Celon of Syracuse, were to
meet the Carthaginian onset successfully witlrtheir armies of disciplined
mercenaries. That story need not be told in detail.
In Greece,
small as the forces seemed that could be mustered against the master of the
world, they were further wasted and divided in internal struggles. Athens was
at war with Aegina and with Thebes; Sparta had renewed the ancient strife with
Argos, and had crippled her for a generation by slaying in one battle almost the whole body of adult Argives; and
Phocis wras engaged in a wasting struggle with Thessalians on one side and with
Boeotians on the other.
Sparta was in a sense the head
of Greece. She lacked the enterprise and daring that were to make Athens the
city of the coming century; but her government was firm, her army was large
and disciplined, and so far she had shown more genius than any other Greek
state, in organizing her neighbors into a military league. Two fifths of the
Peloponnesus she ruled directly, and all the other cities of the peninsula,
except Argos, including Corinth and Megara on the Isthmus, formed a
war-confederacy of which Sparta was the center. The union was very slight, it
is true. On special occasions, at the call of Sparta, the states sent deputies
to a conference to discuss peace or war; but there was no constitution, no
common treasury, not even a general treaty. Each state was bound to Sparta by
its separate treaty, and in case of war it was expected to maintain a certain
number of troops for the confederate army; but the union was so loose that the
separate cities might, and did, make war upon each other inside the league.
Still, this Peloponnesian League was unquestionably the greatest war power in
Hellas, and it afforded the one rallying-point for disunited Greece in the
coming struggle with the Barbarian.
III. THE IONIC REVOLT.
Croesus became king of
Lydia in the same year in which Peisistratus became tyrant of Athens. He soon
added to his kingdom all the Greek cities of Asia Minor. To this tme, the
Asiatic Hellenes had excelled all other branches of the race in culture. Their
names show their preeminence in letters and science. Luxury and refinement were
developed among them, and to these qualities their failure to maintain their
independence is sometimes ascribed; but it seems unlikely that European Greeks
themselves could have preserved their liberty, had they dwelt in so close
vicinity to the great Asiatic empires.
Croesus had favored his Greek
subjects, and they aided him cordially against Persia. When he was overthrown,
the Greek cities continued, their resistance. They applied in vain to Sparta
for aid. Then Thales, the philosopher, at a council of the Ionian Greeks, urged
a federation. The Greeks could not rise to so wise a plan. Some of the people
emigrated to found free colonies; but the cities fell one by one to Cyrus, and
under Persian despotism their old superiority over other Greeks soon vanished.
Before the conquest by
Persia, the Ionian cities had begun to get rid of tyrants; but the Persians
set them up everywhere again, as the easiest means of control. In the year 500 B.C.,
however, by a general rising, the Ionians deposed their tyrants and broke into
revolt against Persia. Another appeal to Sparta proved fruitless; but Athens
sent them twenty ships, and little Eretria sent five. The allies took Sardis,
the old capital of Lydia, and were then joined by the other Asiatic Greeks. But
treachery and mutual suspicion were rampant; Persian gold was used skillfully;
and one defeat broke np the league, after which the cities
were again subdued, one by one, in the four years following.
IV. THE FIRST TWO ATTACKS UPON GREECE, 492-490
B.C.
According to legend, the
Persian attack upon European Greece was caused directly by the desire to punish
Athens for sending aid to the Ionian rebels. No doubt Athens was pointed out by
this act for special vengeance; but the Persian invasion would have come in any
case, and would have come some years sooner had the war in Ionia not occupied
the Persians. Their steadily expanding frontier had reached Thessaly just
before 500 B.C., and the same motives that had carried their arms through
Thrace and Macedonia would have carried them on into Greece. The real
significance of the Ionian war was that it helped to delay the main Persian
onset until the Greeks were better prepared.
Now that the Ionian
disturbance was over, the Persian advance began again. Heralds appeared in the
cities of Greece to demand “earth and water,” in token of submission to the
Great King. The island states yielded at once; in continental Greece in general
the demand was quietly refused; but at Athens and Sparta, despite the sacred
character of all ambassadors, the messengers were thrown at the one city into a
pit, and at the other into a well, to “take thence what they wanted.”
Marathon.— The first great attack came
by way of Thrace, and was rendered harmless by a storm: the Persian fleet
accompanying the army was shattered on the rocks of Mount Athos. Two years
later, Darius sent a second expedition directly across the Aegean. Eretria was
captured, through treachery, and her citizens sent in chains to Persia. Then the
armament landed at the plain of Marathon in Attica, to punish the greater city
that had dared to send troops to Asia. From the rising ground where the hills
of Pentelicus meet the plain, the ten thousand Athenian hoplites faced the
Persian host for the first struggle between Greeks and Asiatics on European
ground. A swift runner had run the hundred and fifty miles of rugged hill
country to implore the promised aid from Sparta, reaching that city on the
second day; but the Spartans waited a week, on the ground that an old law
forbade them to set out on a military expedition before the full moon. The
Boeotian city of Plataea, however, remembering how Athens had protected it
against Thebes, joined the little Greek army with its full strength of a
thousand hoplites. Without other help, the Athenians won a marvelous victory
over ten times their number of the most famous soldiery in the world. The
result was due to the generalship of Miltiades, the Athenian commander, and to
the superior equipment of the Greek hoplites. The charge of their dense array,
with long, outstretched spears, by its sheer weight broke the light-armed
Persian lines, utterly unprepared for conflict on such terms. The darts and
light scimeters of the Persians made little impression upon the heavy bronze
armor of the Greeks, while linen tunics and wicker shields counted for little
against the thrust of the Greek spear. One hundred and ninety-two Athenians
fell. The Persians left over sixty-four hundred dead upon the field
Natural as the result came to
seem in later times, it took high courage at that day to stand before the
hitherto unconquered Persians, even without such adverse odds. “The Athenians,”
says Herodotus, “were the first of the Greeks to face the Median garments, whereas up to this time the very name of Mede
had been a terror to the Hellenes.” Athens broke the spell, and grew herself to heroic stature in an hour. The memory of
Marathon became the richest inheritance of the Athenians, and inspired them to
daring enterprise. The sons of the men who conquered on that field could find
no odds too crushing, no prize too dazzling, in the years to come. It was now
that the Athenian character first showed itself as Thucydides described it a
century later: “The Athenians are the only people who succeed to the full
extent of their hope, because they throw themselves without reserve into
whatever they resolve to do.”
V. ATHENS —FROM MARATHON TO THERMOPYLAE.
Themistocles.— Marathon, together with an
Egyptian revolt against Persia, gained the Greeks ten years more of respite;
but except in Athens little use was made of the interval. In that city the
guiding spirit had come to be Themistocles, one of the most energetic and statesman-like
leaders in all history. Under his guidance the Athenian democracy grew in unity
and power. Two especially important measures are noted in the following
sections.
Athens crushed Internal Faction by weakening and terrorizing
the oligarchs. This involved the ruin of Miltiades, the hero of Marathon. He
was an Athenian noble who had formerly made himself tyrant of Chersonese. Not
long before the Persian invasion he had incurred the hatred of the Great King
and had fled to Athens, where he became at once a prominent supporter of the
oligarchic party. The democrats tried to prosecute him for his previous
“tyranny,” but the attempt failed, and his genius was available at Marathon.
Soon after, he failed in a military expedition against Paros, and this time the
democrats secured his condemnation. He died shortly after in prison; and the
blow was followed by the ostracism of some
oligarchic leader each season for several years, until that party was utterly
broken and Athens was freed from danger of internal dissension.
The victorious democrats
divided into new parties on questions of policy. Aristeides, “the Just” led the
more moderate wing, content with the Cleisthenian constitution and inclined to
follow old customs. Themistocles headed the more radical faction, and was bent
upon a great departure from all past custom. The two appealed to the ostracism,
and fortunately Aristeides was banished.
Some new and rich veins of silver had just been discovered in the mines of Attica, and it had been proposed to divide the large revenue among the citizens. Themistocles now persuaded his countrymen to reject this tempting plan; and instead to bnild a great fleet. He saw that the real struggle with Persia was yet to come, and that for a country like Hellas, the final issue must be decided by the command of the sea,—where, too, the Greeks could not be so infinitely outnumbered. The policy, wise though it was, broke with all tradition. No European Greeks up to this time had used ships in war in any considerable measure; and Attica was utterly insignificant upon the sea. But, thanks to Themistocles, in the next three years Athens became the greatest naval power in Hellas; and the decisive victory of Salamis was to be the result. The Greeks and the PersiansVI. THE MAIN ATTACK, 480-479 B.C.
Meantime, happily for the
world, Darius had died, and the invasion of Greece fell to his vain and feeble
son, Xerxes. Marathon had proved that no Persian fleet could transport troops
sufficient for the enterprise, so the route through Thessaly was tried again.
Another such accident as had wrecked the first expedition was guarded against
by the construction of a ship-canal through the isthmus of Mount Athos — a
great engineering work that took three years. Meantime, supplies were collected
at stations along the way; the Hellespont was bridged; and finally, in the
spring of 480 B.C., Xerxes in person led a mighty host of many nations into
Europe. Ancient reports put the Asiatics at from one and a half to two millions
of soldiers, with followers and attendants to raise the total to five millions.
Modern critics think Xerxes may have had some half-million effective troops,
with numerous followers. A fleet of twelve hundred ships accompanied the army.
The danger forced the Greeks
into something like common action: into a greater unity, indeed, than they had
ever known so far, unless in the legendary war against Asiatic Troy. Sparta and
Athens joined in calling an Hellenic congress at the Isthmus, in the spring of
480 B.C. The deputies that appeared bound their cities by oath to mutual aid,
and pledged their common efforts to punish any states that should “Medize,” or
join Persia. Plans of campaign were discussed, and Sparta was recognized formally
as leader. Ancient feuds were pacified, and messengers were sent to implore aid
from outlying portions of Hellas, though with little result. Crete excused
herself on a superstitious scruple; Corcyra promised a fleet, but took care it
should not arrive; and Gelon of Syracuse had his hands full at home with the
Carthaginian invasion. Indeed, the double attack by Asia and Africa upon the
two sections of the Greek race was probably concerted to prevent any joining of
Hellenic forces.
The outlook was full of gloom.
Argos, out of hatred of Sparta, and Thebes, from jealousy of Athens, refused to
attend the congress, and were ready to join Xerxes. Even the Delphic oracle
predicted ruin, advised submission, and warned the Athenians to flee to the
ends of the earth.
Against a land attack the
Greeks had three lines of defense. The first was at the Vale of Tempe near
Mount Olympus, where only a narrow pass opened into Thessaly. The second was at
Thermopylae, where the mountains shut off northern from central Greece, except
for a still narrower road. The third was behind the Isthmus of Corinth.
At the congress, the
Peloponnesians had wished selfishly to abandon the first two lines. They urged
that all patriotic Greeks should retire at once within the Peloponnesus, the
final citadel of Greece, and fortify the Isthmus by an impregnable ^vall. This
plan was as foolish as it was selfish. Greek troops might have held the Isthmus
against a land army; but the Peloponnesus was readily open to attack by sea,
and the Persian fleet would have found it easier here than at either of the
other lines of defense to land troops in the Greek rear without losing touch
with its own army. Such a surrender of two thirds of Greece, too, would have
meant a tremendous reenforcement of the enemy by excellent Greek soldiery.
The Loss of Thessaly.— Sparta had no gift for going
to meet an enemy, but must await its attack on its own
terms. From fifty thousand to one hundred thousand men should have held the
Vale of Tempe. The feeble and insufficient garrison sent there retreated wisely
before the Persians appeared. Xerxes entered Greece without a blow, and the
Thessalian cities, so deserted by their allies, joined the invaders with their
powerful cavalry.
Thermopylae.—This made it evident, even to
Spartan statesmen, that to abandon central Greece would strengthen Xerxes
further, and it was decided in a half-hearted way to make a stand at
Thermopylae. The pass was only some twenty feet wide between the cliff and the
sea, and the only other path was one over the mountain, equally easy to defend.
The long island of Euboea approached the mainland just opposite the pass, so
that the Greek fleet in the narrow water passage could guard the land army against
having troops landed in the rear. The Athenians furnished and manned one
hundred and twenty-seven ships of the fleet (out of a total of two hundred and
seventy). The land defense had been left to the Peloponnesian league and the
other non-maritime states. A shamefully small force was sent for this important
duty. The Spartan king Leonidas lay in the pass with three hundred Spartans and
three thousand other Peloponnesian hoplites, besides light-armed Helots and a
few thousand allies from central Greece. The main force of Spartans was again
left at home, on the ground of a religious festival. Battle was joined on land
and sea, and raged for three days. Four hundred Persian ships were wrecked in a
storm, and the rest were checked by the Greek fleet in a sternly contested
conflict at Artemisium. On land, Xerxes flung column after column of chosen
troops into the pass, to be beaten back each time in rout. But on the second
night Ephialtes, “The Judas of Greece,” guided a force of Persians over the
mountain path, which, with criminal carelessness, had been left insufficiently
guarded. Leonidas’ position could no longer be held. The allies withdrew, but
the three Hundred Spartans remained with their king to die in the pass their
country had sent them to protect. Sparta had shown no capacity to command in
this great crisis, but her citizens could set Greece an example of calm heroism
that has stirred the world ever since. In later times the burial place of the
three hundred was marked by this inscription: “ Stranger, tell at Sparta that
we lie here in obedience to her laws.”
At the moment, Thermopylae
was disastrous. Xerxes advanced on Athens and was joined by nearly all the
states of central Greece, while the Theban oligarchs welcomed him with genuine
joy. The Peloponnesians would risk no further battle outside their own
peninsula, and the Athenians took refuge on their fleet. Delphi had finally
prophesied safety for them within “wooden walls.” Some thought the palisade of
the Acropolis was meant, but Themistocles, who perhaps had
secured the prophecy, persuaded his fellow-citizens to put their trust in the
wooden walls of their ships. The Spartan admiral, by persistent entreaty, had
been brought to delay the retreat of the fleet long enough to help remove the
women and children from Athens. But Themistocles was determined also that the
decisive battle should be fought at this spot.
The narrow strait between the shore and Salamis helped to compensate for the
smaller numbers of the Greeks; and it was evident to his insight that if the
fleet withdrew to Corinth, as the Corinthians insisted it should do, all chance
of united action would be lost: some contingents would sail home to defend
their own cities against Persian demonstrations; and
others, like those of Megara and Aegina, their cities deserted, might join the
Persians. The Athenians furnished two hundred of the three hundred and
seventy-eight ships now in the fleet; and though with wise and generous
patriotism they had yielded the chief command to Sparta, with her ten ships,
still of course Themistocles carried weight in the council of captains. It was
he who, by persuasion, entreaties, and bribes had kept the despairing allies
from abandoning the land forces at Thermopylae. A similar but greater task now fell to him. Debate waxed fierce in
the night council. Arguments were exhausted, and Themistocles had recourse to
threats and stratagems. The Corinthian admiral sneered that they need not
regard a man who no longer represented a Greek city; the Athenian retorted that
he represented two hundred ships and could make a city where he chose; and by a
threat to sail away to found a new Athens in Italy he forced the allies to
remain. Even then the decision would have been reconsidered had not the wily
Athenian induced Xerxes, by a secret message,
pretending treachery, to block up the strait. The news of this Persian move was
brought to the Greek chiefs by Aristeides, whose ostracism had been revoked and
who now slipped through the hostile fleet in his single ship to join his
countrymen.
The Battle of Salamis.— The Persian fleet more than
doubled the Greek, and was itself largely made up of Asiatic Greeks, while the
Phoenicians who composed the remainder were redoubtable sailors. The conflict
lasted the next day from dawn to night, but the Greek victory was overwhelming.
“A king sat on the rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-horn
Salamis ;
And ships by thousands lay
below,
And men in nations, — all were
his.
He counted them at break of
day,
And when the sun set, where
were they ?”
Aeschylus, who fought on board
an Athenian ship, gives a noble picture of the battle in his drama, The Persians. The speaker is a Persian
recounting the event to the Persian queen mother: —
“ Not in flight
The Hellenes then their solemn
paeans sang,
But with brave spirits
hastening on to battle. ,
With martial sound the trumpet
tired those ranks:
And straight with sweep of
oars that flew thro’ foam,
They smote the loud waves at
the boatswain’s call;
And swiftly all were manifest
to sight.
Then first their right wing
moved in order meet;
Next the whole line its
forward course began ;
And all at once we heard a
mighty shout —
‘Osons of Hellenes, forward,
free your country ;
Free, too, your wives, your
children, and the shrines
Built to your fathers' Gods,
and holy tombs
Your ancestors now rest in.
The fight
Is for our all. . . .
. . . And the hulls of ships
Floated capsized, nor could
the sea he seen,
Filled as it was with wrecks
and carcasses;
And all the shores and rocks
were full of corpses,
And every ship was wildly
rowed in flight,
All that composed the Persian
armament.
And they, as men spear
tunnies, or a haul
Of other fishes, with the
shafts of oars,
Or spars of wrecks, wrent
smiting, cleaving down;
And bitter groans and wailings
overspread
The wide sea waves, till eye
of swarthy night
Bade it all cease: —and for
the mass of ills,
Not, tho’ my tale should run
for ten full days,
Could I in full recount them.
Be assured
That never yet so great a multitude
Died in a single day as died
in this.”
On the day of Salamis the
Sicilian Greeks won their decisive victory over the Carthaginians at Himera.
That battle closed the struggle for a while in the west. In Greece the Persian
chances were still good. Xerxes returned at once to Asia with his shattered
fleet, but his general Mardonius remained in Thessaly with three hundred
thousand chosen troops to renew the struggle in the spring.
The Athenians began
courageously to rebuild their city, which Xerxes had laid in ashes. In the
early spring, Mardonius sent them an offer of favorable alliance, with the
restoration of their city at Persian expense—a compliment which showed that he
at least knew where lay the soul of the Greek resistance. The terrified
Spartans sent in haste to beg the Athenians, with many promises, not to desert
the cause of Hellas. There was no need of such anxiety. The Athenians sent back
the Persian messenger: “Tell Mardonius that so long as the sun holds on his way
in heaven the Athenians will come to no terms with Xerxes.” They courteously
declined the Spartan offer of aid in rebuilding their city, but did urge them
to take the field early enough so that Athens need not be again abandoned.
Mardonius approached rapidly. The Spartans found another sacred festival before
which it would not do to leave their homes, and the Athenians in bitter
disappointment a second time took refuge at Salamis. With their city in his
hands, Mardonius offered them again the same favorable terms of honorable
alliance. Only one of the Athenian Council favored even submitting the matter
to the people, and he was instantly stoned by the enraged populace while the
women inflicted a like cruel fate upon his wife and children. We may regret
that the nobility of the Athenian policy should have been sullied by such
violence, but nothing can seriously obscure their heroic self-sacrifice,
unparalleled in history. Mardonius burned Athens second time, laid waste the farms
over Attica, cut down the olive groves, and then retired to the level plains of
Boeotia.
Plataea, 479 B.C. — Athenian envoys had been at
Sparta for weeks entreating instant action, but had been put off with
meaningless delays. The fact was, Sparta still clung to the stupid plan of
defending only the Isthmus. Some of her keener allies, however, at last made
the ephors see the uselessness of the wall at Corinth if the Athenians should
be forced to join Persia with their fleet; then Sparta finally acted with
energy, and gave a striking proof of her resources. One morning the Athenian
envoys, who were about to announce their wrathful departure, were told, to
their amazement, that fifty thousand Peloponnesian troops had been put in
motion during the night. The Athenian forces and other reenforcements raised
the total to about one hundred thousand. The final contest with Mardonius was
fought near the little town of Plataea. Spartan generalship blundered sadly,
and most of the allies were not brought into the fight; but the stubborn
Spartan valor and the Athenian skill and dash won a victory which
became a massacre. It is said that of the two hundred and sixty thousand
Persians engaged, only three thousand escaped. The Greeks lost in the battle itself
only one hundred and fifty-four men.
Plataea closed the first
period of the Persian War. The Persians and Carthaginians were not barbarians
in our sense of the word. In some respects they stood for at least as high a civilization
as the Greeks then did. They possessed refinement and high moral ideals.
Ancient Greece as a Persian province would have had an infinitely happier and
more prosperous fate than modern Greece has had for many centuries as a Turkish
province. But, none the less, a Persian victory would have meant the extinction
of the world’s best hope. The victory of the Greeks decided that the despotism
of the East should not crush the individuality of the West in this first home
until it had been transplanted into other European lands.
To the Greeks themselves their
victory opened a new epoch. It was not only that they were cast back upon
themselves for a more European development; they were victors over the greatest
of world empires. It was a victory of intellect and spirit over matter.
Unlimited confidence gave them still greater power. New energies stirred in
their veins and found expression in manifold forms. The matchless bloom of
Greek art and thought, in the next two generations, had its roots in the soil
of Marathon and Plataea.
CHAPTER V.
THE AGE OF
PERICLES — FROM THE PERSIAN THROUGH THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR.
I. GROWTH OF THE
ATHENIAN EMPIRE.
Immediately after Plataea, the Athenians began once more to
rebuild their temples and homes; but Themistocles persuaded them to leave even
these in ashes until they should have surrounded the city with walls. Corinth,
jealously eager to keep Athens helpless, urged Sparta to interfere, and, to her
shame, that city did send a protest. Such walls, she said, might prove an
advantage to the Persians if they should again occupy Athens. The interference
was the more cruelly unjust since the helpless condition of the Athenians was
due to their heroic sacrifice for Hellas. A Peloponnesian army, however, could
hardly have been resisted by ravaged Attica, and Themistocles had recourse to
wiles. As Thucydides tells the story: —
“The Athenians, by the advice
of Themistocles, replied that they would send an embassy to discuss the matter,
and so got rid of the Spartan envoys. He then proposed that he should himself
start at once for Sparta, and that they should give him colleagues who were not
to go immediately, but were to wait until the wall had reached the lowest
height which could possibly be defended. ... On his arrival, he did not at once
present himself officially to the magistrates, but delayed and made excuses,
and when any of them asked him why he did not appear before the assembly, he
said that he was waiting for his colleagues, who had been detained by some
engagement ... The friendship of the magistrates for Themistocles induced them
to believe him, but when everybody who came from Athens declared positively
that the wall was building, and had already reached a
considerable height, they knew not what to think. He, aware of their
suspicions, desired them not to he misled by reports, but to send to Athens men
whom they could trust out of their own number, who would see for themselves and
bring back word. They agreed; and he, at the same time, privately instructed
the Athenians to detain the envoys as quietly as they could, and not let them
go till he and his colleagues had got safely home. For by this time, those who
were joined with him in the embassy had arrived, bringing the news that the
wall was of sufficient height, and he was afraid that the Lacedaemonians,
when they heard the truth, might not allow them to return. So the
Athenians detained the envoys, and Themistocles, coming before the Lacedaemonians,
at length declared, in so many words, that Athens was now provided with walls
and would protect her citizens; henceforward, if the Lacedaemonians wished at
any time to negotiate, they must deal with the Athenians as with men who knew
quite well what was best for their own and the common good.”
Neglecting all private
concerns, the Athenians had toiled with feverish haste—men, women, children,
and slaves. To later generations the story was told in part by the irregular
nature of the walls. No material was held too precious. Inscribed tablets and
fragments of sacred temples, and even monuments from the burial grounds, had
been seized for the construction.
Before these events at Athens, while the Greek army was still encamped at Plataea after the victory, it had been agreed to hold there an annual congress of all Greek cities, and constantly to maintain eleven thousand troops and a hundred ships for war against Persia. The proposal for this Pan-Hellenic confederation came from Athens. Of course it looked to Spartan leadership. It was a wise and generous attempt to render permanent the makeshift union that the Persian danger had forced upon the allies. But the episode of the walls proved the hollow nature of the union, and the plan never really went into effect. Instead, Greece fell into two rival leagues, and Athens became head of the more brilliant one.
Prominence of Athens —The repulse of Persia had
counted more for the glory of Athens than of Sparta. Athens had made greater
sacrifices than any other state. She had shown herself free from petty vanity,
and had acted with a broad, Hellenic patriotism. Herodotus, in his history of
the war, feels constrained to insist that the victory over Persia was due
mainly to the skill, wisdom, and energy of the Athenians. They furnished the
best ideas and ablest leaders; and even in the field,
Athenian enterprise and vigor had accomplished at least as much as Spartan
discipline and valor.
Sparta had been indispensable
as a rallying point: but she had shown miserable judgment; her leaders, too
often, had proved incapable or corrupt; and now that war was to be carried on
at a distance, her lack of enterprise became even more conspicuous. Indeed,
events in Asia Minor were already forcing Athens into the leadership to which
she was entitled. The European Greeks had been unwilling to follow any but
Spartan generals on sea or land; but on the Ionian coast Athens was the more
popular city, and her superior activity and fitness at once won recognition.
Athens assumes Leadership of the Ionian Greeks (479 B.C.).—
While the Persians on Greek soil still threatened conquest, the Greeks had
taken the offensive. In the early spring of 479 B.C., a fleet had crossed the
Aegean to assist Samos in a revolt. A Spartan king commanded the expedition, of
course, but three fifths of the whole fleet were Athenian ships. On the very
day of Plataea, a double victory was won at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor:
the Greeks defeated a great Persian army, and then, storming the fortified
camp, seized and burned the three hundred Persian ships. Ho Persian fleet was to show itself again in the Aegean for nearly a
hundred years,—until after the fall of Athens. In this decisive battle, the
Athenians were fortunate enough to have practically completed the work before
the Spartans and their wing of the army were able to reach the field.
A general rising of the Ionian
cities followed, but the Spartans shrank from the responsibility of admitting
them into the Hellenic league and of defending so distant allies against
Persia. They proposed instead to transport the Ionians to European Greece and
to give them the cities of the Medizing Greeks there. The Ionians of course
would not leave their homes, and the Athenians denied the right of Sparta so to
decide the fate of “Athenian colonies.” The Spartans seized the excuse to sail
home, leaving the Athenians to manage as best they could by themselves. The
latter gallantly undertook the task, and began the reduction of the scattered
Persian garrisons in the Aegean.
The next year, thinking better
of it, Sparta sent Pausanias, the general of Plataea, to take command; but he
entered into treasonable correspondence with Xerxes, and by his unendurable
insolence so offended the allies that, though his treason was only suspected as
yet, they formally invited the Athenians to take the leadership. Another
Spartan general arrived to replace Pausanias; but the allies chose to remain
under Athenian command, and Sparta, with all the Peloponnesian league, withdrew
finally from the war. Athens was thenceforth the recognized head in the
struggle to preserve the freedom of the Asiatic Greeks. The league of Plataea
was still nominally in existence, but the war was to be waged henceforth on
Asiatic shores, and by Greeks who (excepting the Athenians) had had no share in
Plataea.
The Confederacy of Delos, 477.— The first step was to
organize a more definite confederacy. This work fell to Aristeides; and Athens
was as fortunate in her representative as Sparta had been unfortunate in hers.
The courtesy and tact of the Athenian won universal
favor, and his known integrity inspired a rare confidence in the settlement of
the money contributions. The arrangements he proposed were ratified by all the
allies, and created the Confederacy of Delos. A congress of the states to
direct the affairs of the league was to be held annually at Delos—the seat of
an ancient Ionic amphictyony. Each state had one vote. Each paid a yearly contribution
to the treasury, and the larger cities furnished also ships and men. Athens was
the president city. Her generals commanded the allied fleet, and her delegates
presided at the congresses. In return, Athens seems to have borne far more
thanher share of the burdens. The purpose of the league was to
complete the process of freeing the Aegean and to prevent the return of the
Persians. Any city in the vicinity of Asia that should have refused to join
would have appeared desirous of reaping the benefit of the confederacy without
contributing to its support. The allies seem to have planned a perpetual union.
Lumps of iron were thrown into the sea, when the oath of federation was taken,
as a symbol that it should be binding until the iron should float. The league
remained to the last predominantly Ionian and maritime. It was therefore a
natural rival of Sparta’s Dorian continental league.
The confederacy grew rapidly
until it took in nearly all the islands of the Aegean and the cities of the
northern and eastern coasts. The Persians were expelled from the whole region.
Then the great general of the league, Cimon, son of Miltiades, carried the war
beyond the Aegean, and won his most famous victory, in 466 B.C., at the mouth
of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia, where in one day he destroyed a Persian land
host and captured a fleet of two hundred and fifty vessels. After this the
Carian and Lycian coasts joined the confederacy. The cities at the mouth of the
Black Sea, too, were added; and the trade of that region streamed through the
Hellespont to the Peiraeus. Aristophanes speaks of a thousand cities in the
league, but only two hundred and eighty are known by name.
After a few years the
character of the union altered radically. The details are not known, but we can
discover two general tendencies.
a. The change came largely by a natural growth—because the Athenians
were willing to bear burdens and accept responsibilities, while their less
energetic allies preferred peace and quiet. Many cities chose to increase their
money payments in place of furnishing men and ships, so that before long the
navy was solely Athenian. As a natural result, Athens no longer felt it needful
to consult the allies as to the operations of the war; the congress ceased to
meet; and finally the treasury was removed from Delos to Athens.
b. The second process was even more significant, changing not only
the practice, but also the theory, of the union. Even before the first tendency
became prominent, single states here and there began to refuse their quotas and
to attempt secession. Persia, they thought, was no longer a danger, and the
need for the league had passed away. But of course the Athenian fleet
patrolling the Aegean was the only reason why the Persians did not reappear
there, and Athens was certainly right in holding the allies to their
engagements. Cities that rebelled were conquered by the very navy their
contributions had built up; but, instead of being brought back into the union,
they were reduced to the position of subjects of Athens. That is, they were no
longer connected with the other cities of the league except through
their subjection to the conquering city, to which they were bound in each case
by a separate treaty imposed by the conqueror. Athens took away their fleets,
leveled their walls, sometimes remodeled their governments upon a democratic
basis, and made them pay tribute.
The League becomes an Athenian Empire.—We know of only a few such
rebellions; but it is clear that gradually Athens came to treat most of the
other cities of the old league much as she did these conquered cities. The
confederacy of equal states became an empire, with Athens for its “tyrant
city.”
By 450 B.C. Lesbos, Chios, and
Samos were the only states of the league possessing anything like their
original independence, and even these had no voice in the imperial management.
Besides these, however, now or later, Athens had other independent allies that
had never belonged to the Delian Confederacy—like Plataea, Corcyra,
Naupactus, and Acarnania, in central Greece, Neapolis and Begium in Italy and
Segesta and other Ionian cities in Sicily.
On the whole, despite the
strong Greek tendency to city sovereignty, the subject cities seem to have been
attached to Athens. Revolts were infrequent, and enemies confessed that the
bulk of the people looked gratefully to Athens for protection against
oligarchic faction. Athens was the true mother of Ionian democracy. As the
Athenian Isocrates said, “Athens was the champion of the masses, the enemy of
dynasties, denying the right of the many to be at the mercy of the few.”
Everywhere throughout the empire, as thousands of inscriptions show, the ruling
power became an Assembly and Council like those at Athens; but the arrangement
was commonly brought about without violence. Later, during the
Peloponnesian war, most of the cities remained faithful long after they might
have revolted with impunity: and when rebellion did come it was usually
preceded by internal oligarchic revolution. In the next century, too, after a
period of Spartan tyranny, many of these same cities again sought protection
and democracy in a new Athenian league.
In 465 B.C. Athens made war upon Thasos, a revolted member of the
league. After a two years’ siege, the Thasians applied to Sparta for aid. That
city purposed secretly to invade Attica, although the two states were still in
alliance under the league of 481 B.C. The treacherous project was prevented by
a destructive earthquake at Sparta, which was followed at once by a desperate
revolt of the Messenian Helots. Instead of attacking Athens, the hard-pressed
Spartans called upon her for aid. Ephialtes, leader of the democratic party,
opposed such a step, but Cimon urged that Athens should not let her yokefellow
be destroyed or Greece be lamed. The generous but shortsighted policy of the
aristocratic party prevailed, and Cimon led an Athenian army into the
Peloponnesus. A little later, however, the Spartans, suspecting the same bad
faith of which they knew themselves guilty, dismissed the Athenians
insultingly. The anti-Spartan party in Athens was strengthened by this act.
Cimon was ostracized, and his party was left utterly helpless for many years.
Athens now formally renounced her alliance with Sparta, and entered into treaty
with Argos, Sparta’s sleepless enemy. Megara, too, joined the Athenian league,
to secure protection against Corinth, and so gave Athens command of the passes
from the Peloponnesus.
A rush of
startling events followed. Corinth and Aegina declared war upon Athens. Aegina
was blockaded, and reduced after a long siege; Corinth was struck blow after
blow, even in the Corinthian gulf; and Athenian fleets ravaged the coasts of
Laconia and burned the Spartan dockyards. At the same time, while keeping up
her fleet in the Aegean, Athens sent a great armament of two hundred ships (and
more, later) to aid Egypt in a revolt against Persia. The expedition was at
first brilliantly successful, and Persia seemed on the point of being deprived
of all contact with the Mediterranean. Elsewhere also for a time Athens was
almost uniformly victorious. A Spartan army crossed the Corinthian gulf and
appeared in Boeotia to check Athenian progress there. It won a partial victory
at Tanagra,—the first real battle between the two great states,—but used it
only to secure an undisturbed retreat into the Peloponnesus. The Athenians at
once reappeared in the field, crushed the Thebans in a great battle at
Oenophyta, became masters of all Boeotia, and, expelling the oligarchs, set up
democracies in the various towns. Phocis and Locris at the same time allied
themselves to Athens, so that she seemed in a fair way to extend her land
empire over all central Greece, to which she held the two gates, Thermopylae
and the passes of the Isthmus. A little later, part of Thessaly was
brought under Athenian influence, and Achaea in the Peloponnesus itself was
added to the league. Indeed it is impossible even to mention the multiplied
instances of limitless energy and splendid daring on the part of Athens for the
few years after 460 B.C., while her empire was at its height. For one instance:
just when Athens’ hands were fullest in Egypt and in the siege of Aegina,
Corinth tried a diversion by invading Megaris. Athens did not recall a man,
but, arming the youths and the old men past age of service, repelled the
invaders. The Corinthians, stung by shame, made a second, more determined,
attempt, and were again repulsed with great slaughter. It was at this time,
too, that the city completed her fortifications by building the Long Walls from
Athens to Peiraeus—a measure which added also a large open space to the city,
where the country people might take refuge in case of invasion.
But the resources of Athens
were severely strained, and a sudden series of stunning blows well-nigh
exhausted her. Two hundred and fifty ships and the whole army in Egypt were
lost—a disaster that would have annihilated almost any other Greek state.
Megara, which had itself invited an Athenian garrison, now treacherously
massacred it and joined the Peloponnesian league. A Spartan army entered Attica
through the recovered passes; and, at the same moment, Euboea—absolutely
essential to Athenian safety —burst into revolt. All Boeotia, too, except
Plataea, fell away: after an Athenian defeat, the oligarchs won the upper hand
in its various cities and joined themselves to Sparta.
The activity and address of
Pericles saved Attica and Euboea, but the other continental possessions and
alliances were for the most part lost, and in 445 B.C. a Thirty Years’ Truce
was concluded between the contending leagues.
A little before this,
according to a somewhat vague account, by the Peace of Callias, Persia had
recognized the freedom of the Asiatic Greeks and had
promised to send no warship into the Aegean. In any case, these conditions were
effectively secured, whether by express treaty or not, and the long war with
Persia, too, came to a close.
II. THE EMPIRE AND
THE IMPERIAL CITY IN PEACES
A. Material
Strength.
Athens had failed to keep her
continental dominion, and the second chance for a united Hellas had passed; but
at the moment the loss of this territory did not seem to impair her strength.
The maritime empire was saved and consolidated, and, for a generation more, the
Greeks of that empire were the leaders of the world in power as in culture.
They had proved themselves more than a match for Persia; the mere magic of the
Athenian name sufficed to restrain Carthage from any renewal of her attack upon
the now weakened Sicilian Greeks; the Athenian power in Thrace easily held in
check the rising Macedonian kingdom; Rome was still a barbarous village on the
Tiber bank. The center of physical power in the world was imperial Athens.
Population.— The cities of the empire
counted some three millions of people. The number seems small to moderns; but
it must be kept in mind that the population of the world was small, and that the
Athenian Empire was made up—as no other empire ever has been—solely of select,
cultured, wealthy, progressive communities. Of course, slaves made a large
fraction of this population. Thus Attica itself contained from two hundred and
thirty-five thousand to two hundred and seventy-five thousand people, of whom
from forty thousand to one hundred thousand were slaves. Thirty thousand or
forty-five thousand more were metics. This left a citizen population of some
ona hundred and twenty thousand or one hundred and fifty thousand, of whom
perhaps thirty-five thousand were adult males. To this number should be added
half as many cleruchs whom Pericles had settled as garrison colonies in
outlying parts of the empire. The cleruchs—like the Roman colonists later,
and unlike other Greek colonists—kept their enrollment in the Attic demes
with all the rights of citizenship, though of course they could not exercise
the higher political rights unless they came to Athens in person. They were
mostly from the poorer classes, and were given lands in the new settlements
sufficient to raise them at least to the class of hoplites.
The chief steps from the
constitution of Cleisthenes to that of Pericles were: (a) the growth of the
office of general; (6) the continued extension of the sphere of the Assembly,
with the subordination of all other parts of the government to it; (c) the
limitation of the Areopagus and the growth of the dicast courts; and (d) the
introduction and wide extension of state pay for public service. There was no
general recasting of the constitution at one moment, as there had been at the
time of Solon and of Cleisthenes; and the change was much more in the spirit of
the people than in the outer form of institutions. The first two steps
mentioned above were altogether the result of a gradual development,
independent of legislation. The others were brought about by piecemeal enactment.
Ephialtes, and afterward Pericles, were the guiding spirits in the development.
In 487 B.C. Solon’s method of choosing archons by lot had
been restored. Partly as a result of this, the office grew unimportant, and its
powers passed to the board of ten generals, who became the real administrators
of the empire, subject to the sovereign Assembly. It was on their proposals, as
a rule, that troops were levied and equipped, ships built and manned, and
moneys raised. In particular, they managed foreign relations, carried on all
intercourse with ambassadors, and watched the movements of other powers through
their agents abroad. They could call special meetings of the Assembly at will,
and were conceded precedence in addressing it.
With the development of the
Assembly’s power there grew up, alongside these official administrators, a
semi-official position of “leader of the people.” The written law knew no such
office; but the statesman most trusted by the popular party could exercise an
authority greater than that of any officer of the constitution. It became
desirable, therefore, from every point of view, that the Board of Generals
should contain the “leader of the people” for the time being, to advocate its
plans in the Assembly; and such a union was kept up through all this period. A
“leader of the people” who was also president of the Board of Generals, held a
position in some ways similar to an English prime minister’s.
The Assembly.— Cleisthenes had left the
Assembly theoretically sovereign, but in fact its various agents at first
exercised independent authority. It was only after some time that the Assembly
came to think it proper to supervise and check these other forces day by day;
and it was only by practice that it learned how to do so effectively. But in
the Age of Pericles this had come to pass. All other powers had become the
obedient servants of the Assembly. The Council of Five Hundred existed not to
guide it, but to do its bidding. The generals were its creatures and might be
deposed by it any day of their short term of office. Ho act of government was
too small or too great for it to deal with. The Assembly of Athens was to the
greatest empire of the world in that day all, and more than all, that a Hew
England town meeting a century ago was to its little unit of government. The
world has never seen such a phenomenon elsewhere.
The Assembly held forty stated
meetings a year and many special meetings, so that a patriotic citizen was
called upon to give one day in six or seven to the state in this regard
alone.
After the period of Athenian
greatness was past, it was found needful to pay citizens for the time given to
these meetings; but, while Athens ruled an empire, patriotism alone brought
men to grant this serious tax upon their time.
The Waning of the Areopagus .—The decline of the archonship to an ornamental office involved a like
fate for the Areopagus—made up, as it was, of ex-archons. As a body holding
office for life, it was always unpopular. During the Persian War, it is true,
it had won high credit, justly; and for some years afterward it was allowed to
resume something of its ancient importance in the state, but, after the
banishment of Cimon, Ephialtes reduced it to a minor criminal
court.
The Dicasteries.— The chief judicial business
fell now to large popular courts, whose importance became fully developed under
Pericles. Six thousand citizens were chosen by lot each year (probably only
from those who offered themselves), of whom one thousand were held in reserve,
while the others were divided into ten jury courts of five hundred each, called
dicasteries. For important cases, several of these were sometimes thrown
together.
To these bodies the Assembly
turned over the trial of officials, so that they became high courts of
impeachment. It was with a view to this duty that each dicast took an oath “above all things to favor neither tyranny nor oligarchy, nor in any way to
prejudice the sovereignty of the people.” Besides performing this
semi-political function, the dicasteries made: (a) supreme imperial courts to
settle all disputes between separate cities of the empire; (6) courts of appeal
for all important law cases in each of the subject cities; and (c) the ordinary
courts for all Athenians. A dicastery was both judge and jury; it decided by
majority vote, and no appeal was possible.
Large bodies of this kind,
without the check that even our smaller juries have in trained judges to guide
them, gave many wrong and evil verdicts, no doubt. Passion and emotion and
bribery all interfered, at times, with even-handed justice ; but, on the whole, the system worked astonishingly well.
Probably no other community has ever been educated up to a point where it could
have made so great a success of such judicial machinery. In particular, it is
notable that any citizen of a subject city was sure to get redress, if wronged
by an Athenian officer. The public conscience was commendably sensitive upon
that matter.
State Pay.— Since these courts exercised
so great weight and tried political offenders, it was essential to the
democratic idea that they should not fall altogether into the hands of the
rich. To prevent this Pericles introduced payment for jury duty. The amount
(three obols a day, or about ten cents) would furnish a day’s sustenance for
one person in Athens, but it did not suffice for a family. Moreover,
even at such pay, a dicast could hardly count upon employment on more than two
hundred days in the year; and it is clear that jury pay could not have been a
serious financial object with any large portion of the citizens, especially
when it is remembered that Athens had no pauper class.
Afterward, Pericles extended
the principle of public payment to other political services. Aristotle says
that some twenty thousand men—over half the whole body of citizens—were
constantly in the pay of the state. Half of this number, however, were engaged
in some form of military service, and in some cases were not citizens. But,
besides the six thousand jurymen, there were the five hundred senators, seven
hundred city magistrates, seven hundred more officials representing Athens
throughout the empire, and many inferior state servants—keepers of public
buildings, overseers of markets and the ports, jailers, and the like; so that
always from a third to a fourth of the citizens were in the civil service.
Pericles has been accused
sometimes of corrupting the Athenians by the introduction of such payment. But
there is no evidence that the Athenians were corrupted under the system; and
further, such a system was inevitable when the democracy of a little city
became the master of an empire. It was quite as natural and proper as is the
payment of congressmen and judges with us.
Sparta, it will be remembered,
attained a less desirable end in a less desirable manner. She kept her whole
citizen class on constant military footing by giving them the free use of state
slaves to till their lands. In both Athens and Sparta the practice was totally
different from the later custom, with which it is sometimes classed, of
distributing free corn as a gratuity or a bribe to the rabble of Rome.
Political Capacity of the Average Athenian.— Many of the numerous offices
in Athens (nearly all the higher ones, in fact) could be held only once by the
same man, so that each Athenian citizen could count upon serving his city at
some time in almost every public capacity. Politics was his occupation;
office-holding, his normal function. An unusually high average of intelligence
is the only explanation of the fact that such a system worked. It certainly did
work well. With all its faults, the empire was vastly superior to the rude
despotism that followed in Greece under Sparta, or the anarchy under Thebes; it
gave to a large part of the Hellenic world a peace and security never enjoyed
before, nor again until the rise of Roman power; while Athens itself, during
and after its empire, was better and more gently governed than oligarchic
cities like Corinth.
Indeed, there is reason in the
contention of Edward Freeman that the average Athenian’s political training and
ability resembled more nearly that of the average member of Parliament (or of
the American Congress) than that merely of the average citizen of England or
America.
“Moderns are apt to blame the
Athenian Democracy for putting power in hands unfit to use it. The truer way of
putting the case would be to say that the Athenian Democracy made a greater
number of citizens fit to use power than could be made fit by any other system
... The Assembly was an assembly of citizens—of average citizens without
sifting or selection; but it was an assembly of citizens among whom the
political average stood higher than it ever did in any other state ... The
Athenian, by constantly hearing questions of foreign policy and domestic
administration argued by the greatest orators the world ever saw, received a
political training which nothing else in the history of mankind has been found
to equal.”
Pericles.— A few words will summarize
party history up to the leadership of Pericles. All factions in Athens had
coalesced patriotically against Persia, and afterward in fortifying the city;
but the brief era of good feeling was followed by a renewal of party strife.
The aristocrats rallied around Cimon, while the two wings of the democrats were
led at first, as before the invasion, by Aristeides and Themistocles.
The aristocratic party had been
ruined by its pro-Spartan policy; the two divisions of the democrats reunited,
and for a quarter of a century Pericles was in practice as absolute as a
dictator, so that Thucydides characterizes Athens during this period of her
greatness as “a democracy in name only, in reality ruled by its ablest
citizen.” Pericles belonged to the ancient nobility of
Athens, though to families that had always taken the side of the people. His
mother was the niece of Cleisthenes the reformer, and his father had impeached Miltiades,
so that the enmity between Cimon and Pericles was hereditary. The supremacy of
Pericles rested in no way upon the flattering arts of later popular leaders.
His proud, austere reserve verged on haughtiness, and he was rarely seen in
public. He scorned to display emotion. His stately gravity and unruffled calm
were styled Olympian by his admirers—who added that, like Zeus, he could on
occasion overbear opposition by the majestic thunder of his oratory. His great
authority came from no public office. He was elected general, it is true,
fifteen times, but in the board he had most weight chiefly because of his unofficial
position as recognized “leader of the people”. It must be remembered that,
general or not, he was master only so long as he could carry the Assembly, and
that he was compelled to defend each of his measures against all who chose to
attack it. The long and steady confidence given him honors the people of Athens
no less than the statesman, and his noblest eulogy is that which he claimed for
himself upon his death-bed—that, with all his authority, and despite the
virulence of party strife, “no Athenian has had to put on mourning because of
me.”
He stated his own policy
clearly, and in his lifetime, on the whole, carried it to success. As to the
empire, he sought to make Athens at once the ruler and the teacher of Hellas,
the political, intellectual, and artistic center; and, within the city itself,
he wished the people to rule not merely in theory, but in fact, as the best
means of training themselves for high responsibilities.
C. Intellectual
and Artistic Athens.
After all, in politics and
war, Hellas has had superiors. Her true service to mankind and her imperishable
glory lie in her intellectual and artistic development. It was in the Athens of
Pericles that these phases of Greek life developed most fully, and this fact
makes the real significance of that city in history.
The center of this
architectural splendor was the ancient citadel of the Acropolis, no longer
needed as a fortification, but crowned with white marble, and devoted to
purposes of religion and art. The “holy hill” was inaccessible except on the
west. Here was built a stately stairway of sixty marble steps, leading to a
series of noble colonnades and porticoes (the Propylaea) of surpassing beauty.
From these the visitor emerged upon the leveled top of the Acropolis, to find
himself surrounded by temples and statues, any one of which alone might make
the fame of the proudest modern city. Just in front of the entrance stood the
colossal bronze statue of Athena the Defender, whose broad spear point
glittering in the sun was the first sign of the city to the mariner far out at
sea. On the right of the entrance and a little to the rear was the temple of
the Wingless Victory, and near the center of the open space rose the larger
structures of the Erechtheum and the Parthenon. This last, the temple of the
virgin goddess Athene (Parthenon means “maiden’s chamber”), remains absolutely peerless in its loveliness among the buildings of the
world. It was of no great size,—only some one hundred feet by two hundred and fifty (the proportions, more exactly, are
as four to nine),—while the marble pillars supporting its low pediment rose
only thirty-four feet from their base of three receding steps, so that the
effect was due wholly, not to the sublimity and grandeur of vast masses, but to
the perfection of proportion, to exquisite beauty of line, and to the delicacy
and profusion of ornament. On this structure, indeed, was lavished without
stint the highest art of the art capital of all time. Pheidias and his
disciples cared for the ornamentar tion within and without. Fifty life-size, or
colossal, statues in the pediments, and the four thousand square feet of
smaller reliefs in frieze and metopes, were all finished with the
same perfect skill, even in the unseen parts.
Pheidias still ranks the
greatest of sculptors, rivaled, if at all, only by his pupil, Praxiteles. Much
of the work on the Acropolis he merely designed, but the great statues of
Athene were his special work. The bronze statue has already been mentioned.
Beside this, there was, within the Parthenon, a smaller, but still colossal,
statue in gold and ivory, even more notable. These two works divide the honor
of Pheidias’ great fame with his Zeus at Olympia, which, in the opinion of the
ancients, surpassed all other sculpture in grandeur of conception and in
awe-inspiring attributes. Pheidias said that he planned the latter work,
thinking of Homer’s Zeus, at the nod of whose ambrosial locks Olympus trembled.
The Hermes of Praxiteles is one of the few great works of antiquity that
survive to us; of his Marble Faun we have a famous copy, which plays a part in
Hawthorne’s novel.
Painting.— In sculpture, then, the
Greeks remain easily masters. About their painting we know less. Until the age
of Pericles that art had been used chiefly to decorate vases; now first it
became independent in the work of Polygnotus, an alien Greek,
upon whom the Athenians conferred citizenship, and who assisted in adorning the
temples of the Acropolis. A higher development in technique came later,
but Polygnotus remains famous for a lofty sublimity of style. It was said that
it was good for the young to look upon his work, for he painted men “as they
ought to be.”
The Drama.—In the age of Pericles, the
chief form of poetry became the tragic drama—the highest development of Greek literature. As the tenth century was the epic
age, and the seventh and sixth the lyric, so the fifth century begins the
dramatic period.
The Greek drama will not admit
readily of comparison with the modern drama. Sophocles and Shakespeare differ
somewhat as the Parthenon differs from a vast Gothic cathedral. The “unities”
of time and place were strictly preserved by the Greek; the scene never
changed, and all the action had to be such as could have taken place within one
day; everything else necessary to understand the action had to be told by one
of the actors. The plays were presented, however, in sets of three (a trilogy),
so that a longer series of connected events could be treated by the same
dramatist. Never more than three actors appeared at once,
but the important factor, to add explanations and to voice the spectators’ judgment, “to breathe forth the fire and shed the tears of the play.”
Attic comedy arose also from
the worship of the wine god—not from the great religious festivals, however,
but from the ruder village merrymakings, marked by indecent rites and orgies.
It kept a scurrilous license throughout the century, and was used to attack
public characters like Pericles and Socrates. Still, its great master,
Aristophanes, for his wit and genius, must ever remain one of the bright names
in literature.
Pericles’ Policy as to Theater Money.— The great Theater of
Dionysus, in Athens, was on the southeast slope of the Acropolis—the
rising seats, cut in a semicircle into the rocky hill, looking forth, beyond
the stage, over the blue Aegean. It could accommodate practically the whole
free male population of the city. Here, twice a year, for some days, the
masterpieces of the Greek drama were presented. Pericles secured from the
public treasury the admission fee for each citizen who chose to ask for it.
This measure was altogether different from the payment of officers and dicasts,
and perhaps came nearer the vicious distribution of
gratuities to a populace; but it must be kept in mind that the Greek stage was
the modern pulpit and press in one. The practice, on the whole, was rather to
advance religious and intellectual training than to give amusement. It was a
form of adult education at state expense.
History.— Prose literature appears in
history, philosophy, and the essay. The three great historians of the period
are Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. For charm of narrative they have never
been excelled. Herodotus was a native of Halicarnassus; he traveled widely,
lived long at Athens as the friend of Pericles, and finally in Italy composed
his great History of the Persian War, with an introduction covering the world's
history up to that event. Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War
to the year 410 B.C. Xenophon, who belongs rather to the next century,
completed this story, and gave us, with other works, the Anabasis, an account
of the expedition of the Ten Thousand Greeks through the Persian Empire in 401 B.C.
Philosophy — The age saw a rapid
development in philosophy—centered also at Athens. Anaxagoras of Ionia, the
friend of Pericles, taught that the ruling principle was Mind: “In the
beginning, all things were chaos; then came Intelligence, and set all in
order." He also attempted rational explanations of strange natural
phenomena, which had been regarded as miraculous.
But Anaxagoras, like
Democritus and Empedocles of the same period, turned in the main from the old
problem of a fundamental principle to a new problem—how man knows the universe.
Their early attempts at explanation were not very satisfactory, and so next
came the Sophists, to close one era by a skeptical philosophy. Man, they held,
cannot reach truth itself, but must be content to know appearances. They taught
Rhetoric, and were the first of the philosophers to accept pay for their
services. Thus they were accused by conservative men of advertising, for gain,
to teach youth how to make the worse appear the better reason, and the name
sophist received an evil significance; but many of them were certainly
brilliant thinkers, who did much to clear away old mental rubbish. The most
famous were Gorgias, the rhetorician, a Sicilian Greek at Athens, and his
pupil, Isocrates, whose essays and orations represent the most famous Greek
prose, and were the models on which Cicero trained himself—to influence all
later prose.
Socrates, the founder of a new
philosophy, is sometimes confounded with these sophists. Like them, he
abandoned the attempt to understand the material universe, and ridiculed gently the explanations of Anaxagoras; but he took for his
motto, “know thyself,” and considered philosophy to consist in rightthinking
upon human conduct. Socrates was a poor man, an artisan-sculptor who neglected
his trade to talk in the market place. He wore no sandals and dressed meanly;
and his large, bald head and ugly face, with its thick lips and flat nose, made
him good sport for the comic poets. His practice was to entrap unwary
antagonists into public conversation by innocent-looking questions, and then,
by the inconsistencies of their answers, to show up the shallowness of their
conventional opinions. This of course afforded huge merriment to the crowd of
youths who followed him, and it raised him bitter enemies among his victims;
but his method of conversation was a permanent addition to our intellectual
weapons, and his beauty of soul, his devotion to knowledge, and his largeness
of spirit make him the greatest name in Greek history. Late in life (399 B.C.)
he was accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth, and was condemned to
death by the dicasts on a close vote, mainly because he would not condescend to
defend himself in any ordinary way. He refused to escape from prison, and after
memorable conversations with his friends upon immortality, he drank the fatal
hemlock with a gentle jest upon his lips. His execution is the greatest blot
upon the intelligence of the Athenian democracy; but it must be remembered that
that body was keenly religious and jealous of attacks upon its deities.
Socrates’ disciple, Plato, pictures him for us in his Dialogues, but rather,
perhaps, as the mouthpiece of Plato than as the real Socrates. Xenophon’s
Memorabilia is a truer portrait.
Plato (the “broad-browed”),
with his great pupil and rival Aristotle, belongs really to the following
period of history, but may be best treated at this point. Plato taught that
ideas are the only real things, eternal and unchangeable; the phenomena of this
world are only shadows of the ideas, which exist in heaven. He was much
influenced by the Pythagoreans, and his philosophy is shot through with noble
poetic imagination. His pupil Aristotle (born at Stagira in Macedonia)
established a systematic body of philosophy that dominated the world until very
modern times. His work was too many-sided to be summed up in any brief phrase.
Besides his philosophical treatises he wrote upon rhetoric, logic, poetry,
politics, and physics. He is by far the most modern in spirit of all the Greek
philosophers.
Education.—Education at Athens typifies
that of Ionian Greece. It aimed to train harmoniously the intellect, the sense of beauty, the moral nature, and the body. At
the age of seven the boy entered school, but he was constantly under the eye
not only of the teacher, but of a trusted servant of his own family, called a
pedagogue. Indeed, no other people have ever been so solicitous to preserve
their boys and youth from evil and contamination; and Professor Mahaffy thinks
that Greek boys retained a delicacy of thought and
feeling found among no other people. The chief instruments of instruction were
Homer and music.
When the youth left school it
was but to enter on a wider training of a like kind—in the Assembly, in the
lecture halls of the rhetoricians and sophists, in the countless festivals and
religious processions and dramatic representations of his city, and in the
constant enjoyment of the noblest and purest works of art.
Physical training began with
the child and continued through old age. Ho Greek youth would pass a day
without devoting some hours to the development of his body and to overcoming
any physical defect or awkwardness.
All classes of citizens,
except those bound by necessity to the workshop, met for exercise.
The result was a perfection of
physical power and beauty never attained so universally by any other people. Indeed
it was from this perfection of the body, and
from the unrivaled opportunity to study it constantly in all the exercises of
the gymnasium, that the surpassing excellence of Greek sculpture came. Says
Symonds: “The whole race rehearsed the great works of Pheidias and Polygnotus
in physical exercises, before it learned to express itself in marble or in
color.”
Summary: Extent and Degree of Culture.—The amazing extent and
degree of Athenian culture overpower the imagination. With the few exceptions
indicated, the famous men mentioned in the paragraphs above were all Athenian
citizens. That one city with its small free population gave birth to more
famous men of the first rank in this one century, it has been said, than all
the world has ever produced in any other equal period of time. Others swarmed
to the same center from less favored parts of Hellas; for, despite the
condemnation of Socrates and some other such crimes, it remains true that no
other city in the world afforded such freedom of thought, and that nowhere else
was artistic merit so appreciated. The lists of names that have been mentioned
give but a faint impression of the splendid throngs of brilliant poets,
artists, philosophers, and orators, who jostled each other in the streets of
Athens. This, after all, is the final justification of the Athenian democracy;
and Abbott, one of its sternest modern critics, is forced to exclaim, “Never
before or since has life developed so richly as it developed in the beautiful
city which lay at the feet of the virgin goddess.”
Summary: Limitations. — At the same time two
limitations in Greek culture must be noted.
a. It rested necessarily on
slavery and consequently could not honor labor, as modern culture at least
tries to do. It was militant rather than industrial. Trades and commerce were
left largely to the free non-citizen class, and actual manual labor was
performed mainly by slaves. As a rule, it is true, this slavery was not harsh.
In Athens, in particular, the slaves were ordinarily hardly to be distinguished
from the poorer citizens, and indeed they were better treated than were poor
citizens in many oligarchic states; but there was always the possibility of
cruelty and of judicial torture, aud in the mines, even in Attica, the slaves
were killed off brutally by the merciless hardships to which they were
subjected.
b. Greek culture was for males
only. It is not probable that the wife of Pheidias or of Thucydides could read.
Women had lost the freedom of the semi-barbaric society of Homer’s time,
without gaining much in return. Except at Sparta, where physical training was
thought needful for them, they passed a secluded life in separate women’s
apartments, with no public interests, appearing rarely on the streets. At best
they were only higher domestic servants. The chivalry of the medieval knight
toward woman and the love of the modern gentleman for his wife were equally
unthinkable by the finest Greek society of this age.
A rare exception proves the
rule. No account of the Athens of Pericles should omit mention of Aspasia. She
was a native of Miletus, loved by Pericles. Since she was not an Athenian
citizen he could not marry her; but he lived with her in all respects as his
wife, a union not grievously offensive to Greek ideas; and her dazzling wit
and beauty made his home the focus of the intellectual life of Athens.
Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pheidias, delighted in her conversation, and she has
sometimes been credited with inspiring the policy of Pericles himself; but she
is the only woman who need be named in Greek history after the time of Sappho
and Corinna.
III. THE
PELOPONNESIAN WAR.
The Thirty Years’ Truce
between Athens and Sparta ran only half its length. The immediate occasion for
the renewal of the conflict was some assistance that the Athenians gave Corcyra
against Corinth in 432 B.C., but the real causes lay in natural antagonism of
character and in a standing conflict of interests. Sparta began to pose as the
champion of a free Hellas, and finally sent an ultimatum: Athens must let all
the Greek cities go free; that is, abandon her empire. Athens replied that
Sparta might first set free Messenia and the Perioeci towns of Laconia; and the
war began.
The Peloponnesian League with
its allies could muster a hundred thousand hoplites, against whom in that day
no army in the world could stand; but it could not keep in the field any
considerable fraction of that force longer than a few weeks. Sparta could not
capture Athens, therefore, and must depend upon ravaging Attic territory and
inducing Athenian allies to revolt. Athens had only some twenty-six thousand
hoplites at her command, half of whom were needed for distant garrison duty;
but she had a navy even more unmatched on the sea than the Peloponnesian army
was on laud; her walls were impregnable; the islands of Euboea and Salamis, and
the open spaces within the Long Walls, could receive her country people with
their flocks and herds; the corn trade of south Russia was securely in her
hands, the grain ships entering the Peiraeus as usual, however the Spartans
might hold the open country of Attica; and Athens could easily afford to
support her population, for a time from her annual revenues, to say nothing of
the immense surplus of six thousand talents in the treasury. Under these
conditions Pericles refused to meet the Spartans in battle, and confined
himself to ravaging the Peloponnesian coasts with his navy. Neither party could
get at the other. The war promised to be a matter of patience and endurance.
Pericles died in the third
year of the war, but his plan apparently would have worked well except for a
tragic fatality that had already fallen upon Athens. A terrible plague had been
ravaging Asia, and, just at this time, reached the Aegean. In general, in
Greece it did little harm; but in Athens—the streets
overcrowded with the population of all Attica living in unusual and unsanitary
conditions—the pestilence returned each summer for some years and was deadly
beyond description. It is estimated that a fourth of the population was swept
away, and the demoralization of society was even more fatal.
Still, Athens recovered her
buoyant hope, and the war lasted from 431 to 404 B.C., with one short and
ill-kept truce. The notable matters for special reports or for further study
are: —
(1) Athenian superiority in naval tactics—the easy equality of an Athenian
squadron in the early years to triple its numbers (illustrated by Phormio’s
engagements in the Corinthian gulf).
(2) Massacres of prisoners: Thebans by Plataeans,431 B.C.; Plataeans by
Thebans, 427 B.C.; Mytilenaean oligarchs by Athens (the story of the decree and
the reprieve); the Melians by Athens, 415 B.C.; thousands of Athenians in the
mines of Syracuse; the four thousand Athenians by Sparta after Aegospotami.
(3) The condemnation of the Athenian generals after the victory of
Arginusae.
(4) Cleon's leadership at Athens.
(5) The surrender of one hundred and twenty Spartans at Sphacteria.
(6) The war in Thrace.
(7) The “Peace of Nicias.”
(8) Alcibiades.
(9) The Syracusan expedition—Nicias.
The turning-point in the war was the unwise and misconducted
Athenian expedition against Syracuse. Two hundred perfectly equipped ships and
over forty thousand men—among them eleven thousand of the flower of the
Athenian hoplites—were pitifully sacrificed by the superstition and miserable
generalship of their leader, the good but stupid Nicias (413 B.C.). Even after
this crushing disaster Athens refused peace that should limit her empire. Every
nerve was strained, and the last resources and reserve funds exhausted to build
and man new fleets. Indeed, the war lasted nine years more, and part of the
time Athens seemed as supreme in the Aegean as ever. Two things are notable in
the closing chapters of the struggle—the attempt at political reaction in Athens,
and the betrayal of the Asiatic Greeks to Persia by Sparta.
a. In 411 B.C., after a century of quiet, the oligarchs tried to
secure the government. Wealthy men of moderate opinion were wearied by the
ruinous taxation of the war. The democracy had blundered sadly and had shown
its unfitness for dealing with foreign relations, where secrecy and dispatch
are so essential; and at home it had fallen under the control of a new class of
leaders—men of the people, like Cleon the tanner, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker,
men of strong will and of ability, but rude, unscrupulous, and demagogic. Under
these conditions the officers of the fleet conspired with the oligarchic secret
societies at home and terrorized the city by the assassination of leading
democrats. The Assembly was induced to pass a decree for a new constitution.
Five of the conspirators chose ninety-five others, and each of the hundred
added three more, making a council of Four Hundred. This body was to govern the
city and appoint all magistrates. It was pledged to create an Assembly of the
five thousand wealthier citizens. This step the oligarchs hesitated to take.
Meantime, they betrayed Athenian interests to Sparta, and proved generally
incompetent, except in murder and plunder. After a few months, the Athenian
fleet at Samos revolted and deposed its oligarchic officers; then the democracy
at home expelled the Four Hundred and restored the old constitution.
b. In 412 B.C., immediately after the destruction of the Athenian
army and fleet in Sicily, Persian satraps appeared again upon the Aegean coast,
and Sparta bought the aid of their gold by promising to betray the freedom of
the Asiatic Greeks, to whom the Athenian name had been a shield for seventy
years.
Aegospotami: the Surrender.—Persian funds now built fleet
after fleet for Sparta, and slowly Athens was exhausted, despite some brilliant
victories. In 405 B.C. her last fleet, discouraged and demoralized and
possibly betrayed by its commanders, was surprised and routed at Aegospotami.
Lysander, the Spartan commander, executed in cold blood the four thousand
Athenian citizens among the prisoners.
Athens still held out through
a terrible siege, until it was starved into submission in 404 B.C. Corinth and
Thebes wished to raze it to the earth; but Sparta had no mind to remove so
useful a check upon Thebes, and was content with gentler terms. Athens
renounced her empire and all her old alliances, surrendered all her ships but
twelve, and bound herself to follow Sparta in peace and war. Then the Long Walls
and the fortifications of the Peiraeus were demolished, to the music of
Peloponnesian flutes, and Hellas was declared free. In reality it remained only
to see to what master Hellas would fall.
IV. THE WESTERN GREEKS IN THE FIFTH AND FOURTH
CENTURIES.
A Brief Sketch of Events in Magna Graecia ought to be included in this
portion of Greek history. The tyrant Gelon and his brother and successor Hiero
for a few years after the repulse of Carthage (480 B.C.) made Syracuse the most
powerful city in the West; indeed, for a short time just before the full bloom
of Athens, it was the center of Greek civilization and the most brilliant city
in the world. Between 475 and 450 B.C. the tyrants gave way to democracies in
Magna Graecia; but the old political union of the cities was lost, and petty
wars and incessant strife of faction blasted the rising culture.
It was these dissensions and
the wars between Ionians and Dorians in Sicily that called in Athens (415-413 B.C.),
to her own ruin, during the Peloponnesian War. Then, in 409 B.C., like Persia
in the East, Carthage renewed her designs, and quickly overran all the island
except Syracuse, which was saved by a new tyrant, Dionysius. This remarkable
ruler built up a great military power, and in a long war won back much of the
island, setting up dependent tyrants in the various cities, after the fashion
of Gelo before him. Thus the prize of Sicily hung between Greek and
Carthaginian for a century more, until it was finally seized by Rome. The only
episode worthy of attention here was the career of Timoleon the Liberator
(344-336 B.C.), a Corinthian hero, who for a brief period drove out the,
tyrants, preserved order, and checked the barbarians. Soon after his death the
noted Agath-ocles restored the rule of tyrants, which lasted until Rome became
mistress.
Further Reading.—
Cox, Athenian Empire; W.W. Lloyd, The history of Sicily to the Athenian war; with elucidations of the Sicilian odes of Pindar The age of Pericles : a history of the politics and arts of Greece from the Persian to the Peloponnesian war : VOLUME ONE --- VOLUME TWO Grant’s Greece in the Age of Pericles; Cox, Greek Statesmen : Solon & Temisthocles
CHAPTER VI
FROM THE FALL OF
ATHENS TO THE FALL OF HELLAS. 404-338 B.C.
At Aegospotami the brilliant
political work of Athens was undone. Persia and Carthage had already begun
again to enslave the Sicilian and Asiatic Greeks: and in the European peninsula
the power which so long had kept these barbarians in check was crushed.
The Athenian Empire had lasted
seventy glorious years. Nearly an equal time was yet to elapse before Hellas
fell under Macedonian sway; but this period is one of shame or of profitless
conflict, and it need not detain us long. It falls into three divisions—the
brutal terrorism of Sparta, the hopeless anarchy under Thebes, and the subtle
encroachments of the northern monarchy. In the whole period, the city state is
declining,—to give way to the system of great monarchies. Neither Thebes nor
Sparta make any contributions toward the accomplishment of Hellenic unity.
I. THE SPARTAN
SUPREMACY.
A. Character in General.
For thirty years Sparta was
to be physical mistress of Greece more completely than ever Athens was; and had
she been capable of enlightened leadership, this opportunity would have been
the fairest of all to make a single Greek state. But the cities of the old
Athenian Empire found that they had exchanged a wise, mild rule for a coarse
and stupid despotism. Their old tribute was doubled; a Spartan harmost
(military governor), supported by a garrison, held supreme authority in each
cityand such local control as was left to the citizens was everywhere taken
from the old democracies and given to boards of oligarchs—commonly made up of
ten persons each, and so called decarchies. The garrisons plundered at will;
the harmosts grew rich from extortion and bribes; the decarchies were slavishly
subservient to their masters and protectors, the harmosts, while they wreaked a
long pent-up vengeance upon their fellow-citizens in confiscation, outrage,
expulsion, assassination, and massacre. With regard to these decarchies, an
Athenian exclaimed, just after their overthrow: —
“What form of oppression
escaped them? Or what deed of shame or cruelty did they not perpetrate? They
found their friends among the most lawless; they considered traitors as
benefactors; they chose to be themselves slaves.to Helots [the harmosts were
often of low birth] that they might be supported while they outraged their
country.” — Isocrates.
The “Thirty Tyrants” at Athens.— For a brief time Athens
itself suffered from this form of Spartan rule. Lysander had appointed a
committee of thirty from the oligarchic clubs of Athens to “reestablish the
constitution of the fathers”; meantime they were to exercise dictatorial power.
Their guiding genius was Oritias, a brilliant and unscrupulous pupil of Socrates.
The more cautious members rallied around Theramenes, a shifty politician who
had played many parts. The Thirty filled all offices with their followers, and
plotted to establish their ride permanently. They installed in the Acropolis a
Spartan harmost and garrison, disarmed the citizens, except some three thousand
of their own adherents, and began against wealthy democrats and metics a career
of bloody proscription and greedy confiscation. The victims were counted by
hundreds—perhaps by thousands. Larger numbers fled, and, despite the orders of
Sparta, were sheltered by Thebes. The more conservative faction of the Thirty
tried to check the wholesale butchery, only to become themselves the victims of
the extremists. Theramenes was seized and sent to immediate execution. He seems
to have expected his fall to drag down his opponents, and as he drank the
hemlock he ponred out the dregs with the mocking salutation, “Here’s to the
gentle Critias.” But Critias had crushed all opposition within the city, and he
relied upon Lysander to protect him from without.
Finally, however, in 403 B.C.,
after something over a year of this reign of terror, one of the democratic
exiles, Thrasybulus, with a band of companions from Thebes, seized the
Peiraeus. The men of the Port rose to his support. The Lacedaemonian garrison
and the forces of the Thirty were defeated; a quarrel between Lysander and the
Spartan king prevented serious Spartan interference, and the old democracy was
restored. Thrasybulus, one of the most liberal of Greek statesmen, urged that
the metics and sailors of the Peiraeus, who had fought the Thirty, should be
incorporated in the State. Unfortunately, this just measure, which would have
compensated Athene partly for her terrible losses in the Peloponnesian War, was
not adopted; but in other respects the restored democracy showed itself
generous and self-controlled. Critias had fallen in battle. A few of the most
guilty of the Thirty were punished, but all their adherents were admitted to a
general amnesty—the first sweeping measure of the kind in history. The good
faith and moderation of the democracy contrasted so favorably with the
cutthroat rule of the two recent experiments at oligarchy that Athens was
undisturbed in future by internal revolution.
In Sparta itself a social
revolution had been going on. Spartan officials abroad had yielded to
corruption before, but now wealth and luxury replaced the old simplicity at
home. Moreover, the number of full citizens was rapidly decreasing. Through the
accumulation of property in the hands of a few men, it came to pass that many
Spartans lost the power to support themselves at the public mess, and so ceased
to enjoy political rights. The nine or ten thousand citizens of 700 B.C. shrank
to two thousand. The resulting class of “Inferiors” added by their discontent
to the standing menace of the Helots, and a successful rising seems to have
been averted only by an accident. The Spartan Empire even at home rested on a
volcano.
B. Wars and Leagues to the Peace of Antalcidas.
The March of the Ten Thousand; Renewal of War with
Persia.—In 401 B.C.the weakness of the Persian Empire was made strikingly
manifest. Cyrus the Younger, brother of the king Artaxerxes, endeavored to
seize the Persian throne. As satrap in Asia Minor he had given Sparta decisive
help against Athens, and now Sparta gave some countenance to his expedition.
Through her aid, Cyrus enlisted ten thousand Greeks in his army. He penetrated
to the heart of the empire, but in the battle of Cunaxa, near Babylon, he was
killed and his Asiatic troops routed. The Ten Thousand, however, proved
unconquerable by the Persian host of half a million, but the Greek leaders were
entrapped afterward by treachery and murdered; still, under the inspiration of
Xenophon the Athenian (whose Anabasis is our history of these events), the Ten
Thousand chose new generals and made good a remarkable retreat to the coast.
Until this time the Greeks had
waged their contests with Persia only along the coasts of Asia; after this, the
dream of conquering and Hellenizing the continent became a fixed idea in the
Greek mind, and at length Alexander made it fact. First, however, the attempt
was made by Agesilaus, king of Sparta. Sparta had incurred the wrath of Persia
by favoring Cyrus, and Agesilaus burned with a noble ambition to free and
protect the Asiatic Greeks, who a little before had been abandoned to Persia by
his country. He invaded Asia Minor with a large army, and seemed in full career
of conquest, when he was checked by the progress of events in Hellas.
League against Sparta, 395 B.C.—No sooner was Sparta engaged
with Persia than enemies rose against her in Greece itself.
Thebes, Corinth, Athens, and Argos leagued in a struggle called the Corinthian
War. Persia supplied the allies with funds, and the two wars became
intermingled. The contest turned upon two remarkable battles: in the first, an
Athenian general in Persian service shattered the maritime empire of .Sparta;
and in the second, Athens for the first time shook Spartan supremacy on land.
Conon.— Conon was the ablest of the
Athenian generals in the latter period of the Peloponnesian War. At Aegospotami
he was the only one who had kept his squadron in fighting order, and after all
was lost he had escaped to Rhodes and entered Persian service. Now, in 394 B.C.,
in command of a Phoenician fleet, at the battle of Cnidus he completely
destroyed the Spartan naval power. Spartan authority in the Aegean fell at
once. Conon sailed from island to island, expelling the Spartan harmosts and
garrisons, and restoring the democracies; and in the next year he anchored in
the Peiraeus and rebuilt the Long Walls. These events raised Athens again to
the place of one of the great powers, and threw Sparta back into her old
position as head of the powerful Peloponnesian league only.
Iphicrates.— Shortly after, even this
position was threatened. The Athenian Iphicrates introduced the first striking
innovation in land warfare since the hoplite overcame the chariot and the
knights, five hundred years before. His work was to increase the efficiency of
lightarmed mercenaries so as to make them a match for the citizen hoplites.
This he did by making their pikes and swords heavier and longer (to do which he
lightened even their former defensive armor), and by training them to a nimble
dexterity that the hoplite could not imitate. The result was seen in 390 B.C.,
when, with these peltasts, Iphicrates cut to pieces a Spartan battalion of
seven hundred hoplites near Corinth. The leadership of Sparta had rested
upon her acknowledged superiority in the field, and now this supremacy was
challenged.
Peace of Antalcidas, 387 B.C.— Accordingly, Sparta sought
peace with Persia. The two powers invited all the Greek states to send deputies
to Sardis, where the Persian king dictated the terms. The document read: —
“King Artaxerxes deems it just
that the cities in Asia, with the islands of Clazomenae and Cyprus, should belong
to himself; the rest of the Hellenic cities, both great and small, he will
leave independent, save Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyrosj which three are to belong
to Athens as of yore. Should any of the parties not accept this peace, I,
Artaxerxes, together with those who share my views [the Spartans], will war
against the offenders by land and sea.” — Xenophon, Hellenica.
These terms were taken by
Sparta to dissolve all the other leagues (like the Boeotian, of which Thebes
was the head), but not to affect the control of Sparta over her subject towns
in Laconia, nor to weaken the Peloponnesian confederacy. Thus Persia and Sparta
again conspired to betray the Greeks. Persia would help Sparta keep the
European Greek states divided and weak, as they were before the Persian War; and
Sparta would help Persia recover her old authority over the Asiatic Greeks. By
this crowning iniquity the tottering Spartan supremacy was bolstered up a few
years longer.
Of course the shame of
betraying the Asiatic Greeks must be shared by the enemies of Sparta who had
used Persian aid against her; but the policy had been first introduced by
Sparta in seeking Persian assistance in 412 against Athens, and so far no other
Greek state had offered to surrender Hellenic cities to barbarians as the price
of such aid.
C. From the Betrayal of Hellas to Leuctra.
The power so infamously
recovered by Sparta was used with the same brutal cunning as in the past, and
with even more arrogant contempt for justice. The Spartan government cynically
announced the maxim that anything was right which, was expedient and avowed a policy of keeping down all beginnings of greatness in
Greece. Arcadia had shown signs of growing strength, but the leading city,
Mantinea, was now broken up and the inhabitants dispersed in villages; by
treachery in time of peace a Spartan force seized the citadel of Thebes; and, a
little later, when the Athenian naval power began to revive, a like
treacherous, though unsuccessful, attempt was made upon the Peiraeus.
Ruin of the Chalcidic Confederacy.—These outrages were all to
recoil finally upon the head of the offenders; but first there occurred an
event, deplorable for Greece. After the overthrow of the Athenian power on the
north coast of the Aegean in the Peloponnesian War, Olynthus, a leading Greek
city of the district, had built up a promising Hellenic confederacy, to check
the Thracian and Macedonian barbarians. From the little that we know of this
league, it seems probable that a definite advance in federal government was
made here. The cities retained their equality and separate independence in
local matters; but they were merged in a large state with new bonds of union
never before seen in Greek leagues. The citizens of any city could live and
hold land and intermarry in anu other city of the confederacy; and no one city
had superior right or privileges, as Athens had had in the Delian League.
The forty states so united
made already a formidable power, and if left to grow, this union might have
saved Hellas from Macedonian conquest, or even have brought all Hellas into
union. Athens and Thebes had declined to join, however, and now Sparta
destroyed the confederacy, leaving the ground cleared for the subsequent growth
of Macedon.
Revolt of Thebes, New Athenian
Confederacy. — The attack upon Spartan rule came from Thebes, and Athens, who had been
so wantonly injured. The Spartan garrison at Thebes supported
an oligarchic Theban government whose terrorism drove crowds of citizens into
exile. Athens received them, as Thebes had sheltered Athenian fugitives in the
time of the Thirty Tyrants; and from Athens their leader Pelopidas struck the
return blow. Thebes was surprised and seized by the exiles, and the government
passed into the hands of the democrats.
An indecisive war with Sparta
followed for some years. During this conflict, in 377-376 B.C., the cities of
the Aegean began to seek protection against Sparta in a new league with Athens.
This confederacy had a definite written constitution. Each state was to send a
deputy to a congress at Athens. Athens herself was to have no representative in
the congress, but she was to have a veto upon its decisions. Thus the
confederacy consisted of two parts,—Athens and the allies, neither of which could
coerce the other. The old arrangement of contributions of money and ships was
adopted under new names. The league came to count seventy communities; but it
was designed only to check Sparta, and it faded away when Sparta became too
weak to be feared.
Leuctra; Overthrow of Sparta.— In 371 B.C.the contending
parties, wearied with war, concluded peace. But when the deputies were about to
sign for their cities, Epaminondas, the Theban representative, demanded the
right to sign for all Boeotia, as Sparta did for all Laconia. Sparta,
therefore, excluded Thebes from the peace and turned to crush her, now left
alone. A powerful army at once invaded Boeotia,—and met with an overwhelming
defeat by a smaller Theban force at Leuctra.
This amazing result was due to
the military genius of Epaminondas. Hitherto the Greeks had fought in extended
lines, from eight to twelve men deep. Against such a Spartan line Epaminondas
adopted a new arrangement that marks a step in warfare. He massed
his best troops in a solid column, fifty deep, on the left, opposite the
Spartan wing in the Peloponnesian army. His other troops were spread out as
thin as possible. The solid phalanx was set in motion first; then the thinner
center and right wing advanced more slowly, so as to engage the attention of
the enemy opposite, but not to come into action until the battle should have
been won by the massed column.
In short, Epaminondas simply
adopted a device whereby he could safely mass a great part of his force against
one part of his enemy’s line. The weight of the Theban charge crushed through
and trampled under the Spartan force. Four hundred of the seven hundred
Spartans, with their king and with a thousand Perioeci, went down in ten
minutes. The field was won, and Sparta was a second-rate power. The mere loss
was a fatal enough blow, now that Spartan citizenship was so reduced,—the
number of full citizens after this battle did not exceed fifteen hundred,—but
the effect upon the military prestige of Sparta was more deadly. Hone the less,
the Spartan character never showed to better advantage. Sparta was always
greater in defeat than in victory. Her virtue was that of endurance rather than
of action; and she met her fate with heroic courage. The news of the overthrow
did not interfere with a festival that was going on, and only the relatives of
the survivors of the battle appeared in mourning.
II. THEBAN SUPREMACY.
The Interest in the Brief Supremacy of Thebes centers in two facts—the
personality of Epaminondas and the connection with young Philip of Macedon.
Epaminondas marks one of the
fair heights to which human nature ascends. With a more lovable and more justly
balanced character, he sought to do for Thebes what Pericles had done for
Athens; and while he lived, success seemed possible. Sparta was humiliated and
Laconia ravaged. Messenia was liberated on one side, with its new capital,
Messene, and Arcadia was organized into a federal union on another side—“to
surround Sparta with a perpetual blockade.” In the latter district, Mantinea
was restored, and Epaminondas united forty scattered villages into a new city,
Megalopolis (the Great City). Except for aid from Athens, Sparta probably would
have been totally destroyed. Epaminondas then turned upon Athens, built fleets,
swept the Athenian navy from the seas, and made Euboea a Theban possession.
Meantime Pelopidas had been active in the north. Both Thessaly and Macedonia
were brought under Theban influence, and the young Philip, prince of Macedon,
spent some years in Thebes as a hostage, learning lessons in war and in
politics that were to result in the conquest of Greece and of Asia.
Thus Thebes had replaced
Sparta as head of Greece, and a humiliating embassy to the Persian court
obtained express recognition of that fact from the Great King. This leadership,
however, rested solely on the supreme genius of one statesman, and vanished
instantly at his death. In 362 B.C., for the fourth time Epaminondas marched
against Sparta, and at Mantinea won another great victory, by tactics like
those of Leuctra. This was the greatest land battle ever fought between
Hellenes, and nearly all the states of Greece took part on one side or the
other. The victory of Thebes ought to have made her supremacy lasting; but
Epaminondas himself fell on the field, and his city sank at once to a slow and
narrow policy.
No state was left in Greece to
assume leadership. Even within the Peloponnesus, Arcadians and Messenians
proved incapable of steady government; and a turbulent anarchy, in place of the
stern Spartan rule, seemed the only fruit of the brief glory of the great
Theban.
III. THE RISE OF MACEDON.
The
failure of the Greek cities to federate or consolidate made it certain that
sooner or later they must fall to some outside power. Sparta and Thebes (with
Persian aid) had been able to prevent Athenian leadership; Thebes and Athens
had overthrown Sparta; Sparta and Athens had still been able to stalemate
Thebes. Each state had been discredited and exhausted in turn; and each, in
varying degree, had sinned by calling in Persia or by recognizing her as
arbiter in Hellenic politics. No one of the three had thought of empire
primarily as involving duties to the subjects. The Greeks had not degenerated, as
is sometimes taught; but the imperfections of their political system had become
apparent, and it was to be replaced by something stronger.
Macedon.— The Macedonians were part of
the “outer rim of the Greek race.” They were still barbaric, and perhaps were
mixed somewhat with non-Hellenic elements. They had remained in the tribal
stage until just before this time, when a series of able kings had consolidated
them into a real nation. The change was so recent that Alexander a little later
could say, in his one reproachful speech to his army: —
“My father, Philip, found you
a roving people, without fixed habits tions and without resources, most of you
clad in the skins of animals, pasturing
a few sheep among the mountains, and, to defend these, waging a luckless
warfare with the Illyrians, the Triballans, and the Thracians on your borders.
But he gave you the soldier’s cloak to replace the skins and led you down from
the mountains into the plain, making you a worthy match in war against the
barbarians on your frontier, so that you no longer trusted to the security of
your strongholds so much as to your own personal valor for safety. He made you
to dwell in cities and provided you with wholesome laws and institutions. Over
those same barbarians, who before had plundered you and carried off as booty
both yourselves and your substance, he made you, instead of
slaves and underlings, to be masters and lords.” — Arrian.
This Philip II is one of the
most remarkable men in history. He was ambitious, crafty, sagacious,
persistent, unscrupulous, an unfailing judge of character, and a marvelous
organizer. He set himself to make his people true Greeks by making them the
leaders of Greece. He was determined to secure that primacy for which Athens, Sparta,
and Thebes had all vainly striven. The struggle revealed the advantages of a
consolidated national monarchy as against divided, mutually jealous city
states, and of a single powerful ruler, able to keep his own council and to
pursue one policy unwaveringly, as against public discussions, changing votes,
and conflicting plans, in city assemblies. The result was foregone.
At Philip’s accession
Macedon was still a poor country without a safe harbor. The first need was an
outlet on the sea. Philip found one by conquering the Chalcidic peninsula.
Though Sparta had ruined the Athenian power there, and afterward the Olynthian,
yet both Athens and Olynthus kept important possessions in that region, and, at
this stage, by combining they might still have checked Macedon. By playing them
off against each other, Philip won; and his energy developed the gold mine of
the district until they furnished him a yearly revenue of a thousand
talents—as large as that of Athens at her greatest power. Then he turned to
Greece itself, and here, too, he used an adroit mingling of cunning, bribery,
and force. In all Greek states, among the pretended patriot statesmen, there
were secret emissaries in his pay. He set city against city; and the constant
tendency to quarrels among the Greeks played into his hands.
The only man who saw clearly
the designs of Philip, and who at the same time constantly opposed them, was
Demosthenes the Athenian, the greatest orator of Greece. To check Macedonia
became the one passionate aim of his life; and the last glow of Greek political
independence flames up in his appeals to Athens to champion Hellas against
Macedon as she had once done against Persia, irrespective of all selfish ends:
—
“Suppose that you have one of
the gods as surety that Philip will leave you untouched, in the name of all the
gods, it is a shame for you in ignorant stupidity to sacrifice the rest of
Hellas! ”
The noble orations by which he
sought to move the Athenian assembly to action against Philip (the Philippics),
are still unrivaled in that form of literature, but their practical effeot was
to secure only a halting policy.
Meantime, Philip built up an
army as superior to the four-months citizen armies of Hellas as his diplomacy
was superior to that of a popular assembly. His wealth enabled him to keep
ready for action a disciplined force of veterans. He enlarged the Theban
phalanx, and improved it, so that the ranks presented five rows of bristling
spears projecting beyond the front soldier. The flanks were protected by
light-armed troops modeled after the peltasts of Iphicrates; and the
Macedonian nobles furnished the finest of cavalry. At the same, time a field
“artillery” first appears, able to throw darts and great stones three hundred
yards. Such a mixture of troops, and on a permanent footing, was altogether
novel. Philip was organizing the engine with which his son was to conquer the
world.
Chaeronea and the Congress of Corinth. — In 338 B.C.Philip threw off
the mask and invaded Greece. Athens and Thebes combined against him—to be
hopelessly crushed at Chaeronea. Then a congress of Greek states at Corinth
recognized Macedonia as the head of Greece. A formal constitution provided that the separate states should
retain their local self-government without payment of tribute, but that foreign
matters, including war and peace, should be committed to Philip. Philip was
also declared general-in-chief of the armies of Greece for a war against
Persia.
Thus Philip
posed, wisely, not as the vanquisher, but as the champion of Greece against the
great foe of all Hellenes. He showed a patient magnanimity, too, toward
fickle Greek states, and in particular he strove to reconcile Athens. Indeed,
Philip needed, not reluctant subjects, but willing followers.
Cartledge, Paul (2002). Sparta and Lakonia: A regional history 1300–362 BC.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MINGLING OP
EAST AND WEST.
I.
THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER.
Benjamin Wheeler , Alexander the Great : the merging of East and West in universal history
Two great men engaged in the
same work could hardly differ more widely than Philip of Macedon and his
greater son, Alexander. The contrast was due no doubt to Alexander’s mother,
Olympias, a half-barbaric Epirot princess of intense passions and generous
enthusiasms, which mounted sometimes into frenzied religious ecstasies. Says
Benjamin Wheeler:-
“While it was from his father
that Alexander inherited his sagacious insight into men and things, and his
brilliant capacity for timely and determined action, it was to his mother that
he undoubtedly owed that passionate warmth of nature which betrayed itself not
only in the furious outbursts of temper occasionally characteristic of him, but
quite as much in a romantic fervor of attachment and love for friends, a
delicate tenderness of sympathy for the weak, and a princely largeness and
generosity of soul toward all, that made him so deeply beloved of men and so
enthusiastically followed.”
Much, too, in Alexander’s
character was due to careful training. As a boy, he had been fearless and
self-willed, with fervent affections and with a restless eagerness for action;
but his earliest tutors taught him to curb his impulses, to endure hardship,
and to despise ease and luxury. His later education had been directed by
Aristotle. The young prince had phown an impatient ambition to master all
departments of knowledge, and he was devoted to Homer, whose poems he knew by
heart. Homer’s Achilles he claimed as an ancestor and took for his ideal.
Philip was assassinated two
years after Chaeronea, when just ready to begin the invasion of Asia. Alexander
was a stripling of twenty years. He was to prove a rare military genius;
indeed, he never refused an engagement and never lost a battle; and also, on
occasion, he could be shrewd and adroit in diplomacy. But at this time he was
known only as an impetuous youth; and it was natural enough to expect a rash
boy to fail to hold together the empire that had been built up by the force and
fraud of the most astute ruler of the time. Revolt and disorder broke out
everywhere; but the young king showed himself at once both
statesman and general. With marvelous rapidity he struck crushing blows on this
side and on that. A hurried expedition conciliated Greece; the savage and
semi-dependent tribes of the north were quieted by a rapid march beyond the
Danube; then, turning on Illyria, Alexander forced the mountain passes and overran the country; and while it was believed
that he was killed or defeated among the barbarians, he suddenly appeared a second
time in rebellious Greece, falling with swift and terrible vengeance upon
Thebes, the center of revolt. The city was taken by storm and leveled to the
ground, except for the house of Pindar; and the thirty thousand surviving
inhabitants were sold as slaves. The other states were terrified into abject
submission, and were treated generously. A congress at Corinth renewed the
compact formerly made with Philip; and, like his father, Alexander now turned,
as the champion of Hellas, to the attack upon Persia. With the cool and
practical Philip, this attitude may perhaps have been only a politician’s
device to secure empire in Hellas. With the enthusiastic Alexander, in the full
flush of power, it became at once an all-controlling ideal.
The Persian Campaigns.—In the spring of 334 B.C.Alexander
crossed the Hellespont with thirty-five thousand disciplined troops. The number
was quite enough to scatter any Oriental army, and as large as any general
could handle in long and rapid marches in a hostile country; but it contrasts
strangely with the huge hordes Xerxes had led against Greece a century and a
half before.
a. Battle of the Granicus.—The Persian satraps of Asia
Minor met the invaders at the Granicus, a small stream in the Troad. With the
personal rashness that was the one blot upon his supreme military skill,
Alexander led the Macedonian charge through the river and up the steep bank
into the midst of the Persian cavalry, where he barely escaped death. The
Persian nobles fought, as always, with gallant self-devotion, but were utterly
routed. Then the Greek mercenaries in Persian pay were surrounded and cut down
to a man. No quarter was to be given Hellenes fighting as traitors to the cause
of Hellas. The victory cost Alexander only one hundred and twenty men, and it
made him master of all Asia Minor. He then set up democracies in the Greek
cities,—requiring them, however, to grant amnesties to other factions,—and he
spent some months in receiving the submission and organizing the government of
the various provinces.
b. Battle of Issus.—To strike at the heart
of the empire at once would have been to leave in the rear a large Persian
fleet which might encourage revolt in Greece. Alexander wisely determined to
secure the entire coast before marching into the interior. Turning south, just
after crossing the mountains that separate Asia Minor from Syria, at Issus he
defeated a Persian host of six hundred thousand men, led by King Darius in
person. The cramped space between the mountains and the sea made the very
numbers of the Persians an embarrassment to themselves, and they soon became a
huddled mob of fugitives. Alexander now assumed the title of King of Persia.
The sieges of Tyre and Gaza detained him a year, but Egypt welcomed him
as a deliverer, and by the close of 332 B.C. all the sea power of the world was
his. While in Egypt he showed his constructive genius by founding Alexandria at
one of the mouths of the Kile—a city destined to be the commercial and
intellectual capital of the world for centuries, where before there had been a
mere haunt of pirates.
c. Battle of Arbela.—Rejecting
contemptuously a proposed division of the empire with Darius, Alexander resumed
his march. Following the ancient routes from Egypt to Assyria, he met Darius at
Arbela, near ancient Nineveh. The Persians are said to have numbered a million
men. Alexander purposely allowed them choice of time and place, and by a third
decisive victory proved the hopelessness of resistance in the field. Darius
never gathered another army. The capitals of the empire—Babylon, Susa,
Ecbatana, Persepolis— surrendered, with enormous treasure in gold and silver,
and the Persian Empire had fallen (331 B.C.)
Campaigns in the Far
East.—The next six years went, however, to much more desperate warfare in the
eastern mountain regions, and in the Punjab. Alexander carried his arms almost
twice as far east from Babylon as Babylon was from Macedonia. He traversed
great deserts, subdued the warlike and princely barons of Bactria and Sogdiana
up to the steppes of the wild Tartar tribes beyond the Oxus, twice forced the
passes of the Hindukush (a feat almost unparalleled), subdued the valiant
mountaineers of what is now Afghanistan, and led his army into the fertile and populous
plains of northern India. He crossed the Indus, won realms beyond the ancient
Persian province of the Punjab, and planned still more distant empires; but on
the banks of the Hyphasis his faithful Macedonians refused to be led farther to
waste aWay in inhuman perils, and the chagrined conqueror was compelled to
return to Babylon—to die there of a fever two years later (323 B.C.) in the
midst of preparations to extend his conquests both east and west. The last
years, however, were given mainly to organizing the empire; and to the results
of this constructive work we will now turn.
II. THE RESULTS OF
ALEXANDER’S WORK.
Alexander began his conquest to avenge the West upon the East; but as he came
to see the excellent and noble qualities in Oriental life also, he rose rapidly
with the years to a broader vision. He aimed no longer to hold a world-empire
in subjection by the force of a small conquering tribe, but to amalgamate
Persian and Greek into one people on terms of equality and cooperation; he
wished to marry the East and the West—“to bring them together into a composite
civilization, to which each should contribute its better elements.”
Persian youth were trained by
thousands in Macedonian fashion to replace the veterans of Alexander’s army;
Persian nobles were welcomed at court and given high preferment; and in general
the government of Asia was entrusted largely to Asiatics, on a system similar
to that of Darius the Great. Alexander himself adopted Persian manners and
customs, and married Persian wives, and he bribed and coaxed his officers and
soldiers to do the like. This was all part of a deliberate design to encourage
the fusion of the two peoples. The Macedonians jealously protested, and even
rebelled, but were quickly reduced to obedience; and there is no question as
to the statesmanlike wisdom of Alexander’s plan.
At the
same time Alexander saw that to fulfill this mission he must throw open the
East to Greek ideas. The races might mingle their blood; the Greek
might learn from the Orient, and in the end be absorbed by it; but the thought
and art of little Hellas must leaven with its active energy the vast passive
mass of the East.
This building of Greek cities
was continued by Alexander’s successors. Once more, and on a vaster scale than
ever before, the Greek genius for colonization found vent. Each of these cities
from the first had a Greek nucleus. Usually this consisted only of worn-out
veterans left behind as a garrison; but enterprising youth emigrating from old
Hellas, almost to its depopulation, continued to reenforce the Greek influence.
The native village people roundabout were gathered in to make the bulk of the
inhabitants, and these also soon took on Greek character: from scattered,
ignorant rustics, they became artisans and merchants, devotedly attached to
Greek rule and zealous missionaries of Greek culture. The cities “were all
built on a large and comfortable model; they were well paved; they had ample
provision for lighting by night, and a good water supply; they had police
arrangements, and good thoroughfares.” They received extensive privileges and
enjoyed a large amount of self-government, even in the despotic East: they met
in their own assemblies, managed their own courts, and collected their own
taxes. They made the backbone of Hellenism throughout the world for centuries,
and were truly Greek in character. Greek was the ordinary speech of their
streets; Greek architecture built their temples and houses; Greek sculpture
adorned them; they celebrated Greek games and festivals; and, no longer in
little Hellas alone, but over the whole East, in Greek theaters, vast audiences
were educated by the plays of Euripides.
The unity of this widespread
civilization cannot he insisted upon too strongly. Political unity, it is true,
was soon lost; hut the oneness of culture endured for centuries, and maintained
its character even after Roman conquest. Over all that vast area there was for
all cultivated men a single common language, a common literature, a common mode
of thought. The civilization that had been developed by one small people became
now the heritage of a great world.
Hellenic
Civilization.—Hellas itself lost importance relatively, and even absolutely. It was
drained of its intellect and enterprise, which wandered to the east to win
fortune and distinction. And, of course, the victorious Hellenic civilization
was modified by its victory, both in the old and in the new home. Sympathies
were broadened. The barrier between Greek and barbarian faded away.
a. Economic.—The wealth of the world, and especially of Europe, was
enormously augmented. The vast treasure hoards of Oriental monarchs were thrown
again into circulation, and large sums were brought back to Europe by returned
mercenaries and adventurers. Trade was stimulated; a higher standard of living
arose for the many; manifold new comforts and enjoyments adorned and enriched
life. In its economic aspects, the conquest had results not unlike those of the
discovery of Mexico and Peru upon medieval Europe. Somewhat later, perhaps as a
result of this increase of wealth, there came other and unfortunate changes.
Extremes of wealth and poverty appeared side by side, as in our modern society;
the great cities had their hungry, sullen, dangerous mobs; and socialistic
agitation began on a large scale. These last phenomena, however, concerned only
the last days of the Hellenic world before its absorption by Rome.
b. Scientific.— A new era of scientific progress began. Alexander
himself always manifested the zeal of an explorer, and one of the most
important scientific expeditions ever sent out by any government is due to him
while in India. When he first touched the Indus, he thought it the upper course
of the Nile; but he built a great fleet of two thousand vessels, sailed down
the river to the Indian Ocean, and then dispatched his friend
Nearchus to explore that sea and to find a water route to the mouth of the
Euphrates. After a voyage of many months, Nearchus reached Babylon, thus
reopening an ancient route of commerce between Chaldea and India. He had mapped
the coast line, made frequent landings, and collected a mass of observations
upon natural phenomena and a multitude of strange plants and animals.
Like collections were made by
Alexander at other times, to be sent to his old instructor Aristotle, who
embodied the results of his study upon them in a Natural History of fifty
volumes. The Greek intellect, indeed, attracted by the marvels of a new world
opened before it, turned from metaphysics and verbal discussions to scientific
observation and to the classification of the facts of the universe. Again the
result was not unlike that of the discovery of America upon the intellect of
medieval Europe. This impulse was intensified by the discovery of the long
series of astronomical observations of the Babylonians and of the historical
records and traditions of the Orientals, reaching back to an antiquity of which
the Greeks had not dreamed. The active Greek mind, seizing upon all this
confused wealth of material, began to compare and put in order, and to erect,
with principles of scientific criticism, a great system of knowledge about man
and nature.
Summary.— Thus the new product was not
simply either of the old factors. Alexander’s victories are not merely events
in military history. They make an epoch in the onward march of humanity.
Alexander enlarged the map of the world again and made these vaster spaces the
home of a higher culture. He grafted the new West upon the old East, and from
this graft sprang the plant of our later civilization.
Alexander died at thirty-two.
Had he lived to seventy, it is hard to say what he might not have done in
providing for lasting political union, and perhaps even in bringing India and
China into the current of our civilization. His lamentably early death brought
about the political disruption of his empire, and has left the world in two
halves from that day to this.
“No single personality,
excepting the carpenter’s son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world
we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon
which European history built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests
contributed its part to form that Mediterranean
civilization, which under Rome’s administration became the basis of European
life. What lay beyond was as if on another planet.” — Wheeler, Alexander the
Great.
Further Reading. —
Mahaffy, Story of Alexander’s
Empire
CHAPTER II.
THE
GRAECO-ORIENTAL WORLD — TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST.
I. THE POLITICAL
STORY.
Wars of the Succession (323-280 B.C.).— For nearly half a century
after Alexander’s death the political history of the civilized world was a horrible
welter of war, intrigue, and assassination, while his generals strove with one
another for empire. For a time it seemed possible that some able leader might
prove strong enough to hold together all Alexander’s conquests. Antigonus came
nearest such success; but four other great generals and satraps united against
him, and after his defeat at Ipsus in Phrygia (301 B.C.), the contest became
one merely over shifting lines of partition.
Finally, about 280 B.C., something
like a fixed order emerged, and then followed a period of sixty years known as
the Glory of Hellenism. The Greek world reached from the Adriatic to the
Indus, and consisted of: (a) three great powers, the kingdoms of Syria, Egypt,
and Macedonia ; (b) a broken chain of smaller monarchies scattered from Media
to Epirus, some of them, like Pontus and Armenia, under dynasties descended
from Persian princes; and (c) single free cities like Cos and Byzantium, or
leagues of such cities, like that under the leadership of Rhodes.
nvasion by the Gauls.— The chief event of general
interest in this period was the great Gallic invasion of 278 B.C. It was the
first formidable barbarian attack upon the Eastern world since the Scythians
had been chastized by the early Persian kings. A century before, however,
hordes of these same Gauls had devastated northern Italy and sacked Rome. Now
(fortunately not until the ruinous Wars of the Succession were over) they
poured into exhausted Macedonia, penetrated into Greece as far as Delphi, and,
after horrible ravages there, carried havoc into Asia. For a long period every
great sovereign of the Greek world turned his arms upon them, and they were
finally settled as peaceful colonists in a region of Asia
Minor, called Galatia from their name. Perhaps we are most interested in noting
that the Hellenic patriotism roused by the attack—in some measure like that in
little Hellas, two hundred years earlier, by the Persian invasions—played a
part in the national outburst of art and literature which followed and which
found its themes largely in this conflict. The Dying Gaul and the Apollo Belvidere, among the noblest surviving works of the
period, commemorate incidents in the struggle.
The Decline of the Hellenic World may be dated from 220 B.C. At
that time the thrones of the three larger kingdoms received youthful occupants
who were all to illustrate the too common degeneracy in Oriental royal lines a
few generations after great founders; and at almost the moment of this decay, there
began the final attack from without upon the Hellenic East. Sixty years before,
the rising Roman power had come into conflict with the Greek states in southern
Italy and in Sicily. Complications with the eastern Greek
kingdoms followed. Then came the Punic wars between Kome and Carthage. The
Second .Punic War began in 218 B.C. and involved all the great Greek powers,
one by one, in its consequences.
II. SOME SINGLE STATES IN OUTLINE.
Syria was the largest of the great
monarchies. It comprised most of Alexander’s empire in Asia, except the small
states in Asia Minor. After the battle of Ipsus, it fell to Seleucus, whose
descendants (Seleucidae) ruled it to the Roman conquest. They excelled all
other successors of Alexander in building cities and extending Greek culture
over distant regions. Seleucus alone founded seventy-five cities. About 250 B.C. Indian
princes reconquered the Punjab, and the Parthians arose on the northeast to cut
off the frontier Bactrian provinces from the rest of the Greek world, though
these isolated districts remained under independent Greek kings, as their coins
show, some two centuries more. Thus Syria shrank up to the area of the ancient
Assyrian Empire—the Euphrates-Tigris basin and old Syria proper—but it was
still, in common opinion, the greatest world power. After the second Punic War,
the Syrian monarch gave shelter to Hannibal, the defeated Carthaginian leader,
and so incurred Roman hostility. His power was shattered at Magnesia in the
year 190 B.C., but the country did not become a part of the Roman dominions
until 63 B.C. During this last, and weak, period of Syrian power, occurred the
heroic rebellion of the Jews under the Maccabees; the Jewish state secured
independence and maintained it a hundred years, until the East fell under Roman
sway (162-163 B.C.).
251. Egypt included Cyprus, and exercised a vague
suzerainty over many coast towns of Syria aud Asia Minor. Immediately upon
Alexander’s death, one of his generals, Ptolemy, chose Egypt for his province,
and his descendants ruled it until Cleopatra yielded to
Augustus Caesar (30 B.C.), though it had become a Roman protectorate some time
before. The first Ptolemies were wise, energetic sovereigns. They aimed to make
Egypt the commercial emporium of the world, and to make their capital
Alexandria the world’s intellectual center. Ptolemy I established a great naval
power, improved harbors, and built the first great lighthouse. Ptolemy II.
(Philadelphus) restored the old canal of Neco from the Red Sea to the Nile, and
constructed roads. Ptolemy III, in war with Syria, carried his arms to Bactria,
and on his return secured the circumnavigation of Arabia which Alexander had
planned. The even more remarkable progress in intellectual development under
these kings will be treated below. The later Ptolemies were weaklings or
infamous monsters, guilty of every despicable folly and crime; but even they
fostered learning.
Macedonia ceases to be of great
interest after the death of Alexander, except from a military point of view.
Naturally it was the first part of the empire of Alexander to come into hostile
contact with Rome. King Philip V joined Carthage in the second Punic War a
little before the year 200 B.C. A series of struggles resulted, and Macedonia,
with parts of Greece, became Roman in 146 B.C.
Rhodes and Pergamum.— Among the many smaller
states, two deserve special mention. Rhodes had been a member of the second
Athenian confederacy, but had become independent before the Macedonian era.
Later on she headed a maritime confederacy herself, and in the third century
she became the leading commercial state of the Mediterranean. Her policy was
one of peace and freedom of trade. Pergamum was a small Greek kingdom in Asia
Minor, which the genius and liberality of its rulers (the Attalids) raised to
prominence in politics and art. When the struggles with Rome began, Pergamum
allied itself with that power, and long remained a favored state under Roman
protection.
III. SOCIETY.
General Culture.—From 280 to 150 B.C.was the
period of the chief splendor of the new, widespread Hellenism. The age was a
great and fruitful one. Society was refined; the position of woman improved;
private fortunes abounded, and private houses possessed works of art, which, in
earlier times, would have been found only in palaces or temples. For the
reverse side, there was corruption in high places, hungry and threatening mobs
at the base of society, and, in general, shallowness and insincerity.
Literature.— Some new forms appeared in art and literature :
especially, (a) the prose romance, a story of love and adventure, the forerunner
of the modern novel; (6) the pastoral idyllic poetry of Theocritus, which was
to influence Vergil and Tennyson; and (c) personal memoirs. These make a part
of the debt we owe to this many-sided Alexandrian age. The old Attic comedy,
too, became the New Comedy of Menander and his followers, devoted to satirizing
gently the life and manners of the time.
Painting gained prominence
at the expense of calmer, more monumental sculpture—as befitted a complex
society that loved great passions and exciting moments. Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and
Apelles are the three great names connected with this art. These men seem to
have carried realistic painting to great perfection. According to the stories, Zeuxis painted a cluster of grapes so that
birds pecked at them, while Apelles painted a horse so that real horses neighed
at the sight.
Despite the attention given to
painting, Greek sculpture produced some of its greatest work in this period.
Multitudes of splendid statues were created—so abundantly, indeed, that even the
names of the artists are not preserved. Among the famous pieces that
survive, besides the Dying Gaul and the Apollo Belvidere, are
the Venus of Milo (Melos) and the Laocoon group.
Philosophy separates itself finally from
science, and turns to theories of human conduct. It also leaves the closet for
the street; it ceases to be the province of the secluded thinker, and seeks
converts and proselytes. The period of the Wars of the Succession saw two new
philosophical systems born—Epicureanism and
Stoicism. These were both essentially practical; they dwelt mainly upon ethics
and the laws of moral action, and sought human happiness and virtue, not
knowledge.
Epicurus was an Athenian
citizen. He taught that every man must pursue happiness as an end, but he held
that the most and the highest pleasure was to be obtained not by gratification
of lower appetites, but by a wise choice of the refined pleasures of the
intellect and of friendship. He advised temperance and virtue as means to happiness;
and he himself lived an abstemious life, saying that with a crust of bread and
a cup of cold water he could rival Zeus in happiness. But, under cover of his
theories, some of his followers taught and practiced a grossness which Epicurus
himself would have earnestly condemned. Epicureanism produced some lovable
characters, but no exalted ones. On the speculative side, the Epicureans denied
the supernatural altogether, and held death the end of all things. Contemporary
with Epicurus, Zeno the Stoic taught at Athens. His followers made virtue, not
happiness, the end of life. If happiness were to come at all, it would come as
a result, not as an end. They placed emphasis upon the dignity of human nature.
The wise man, they held, should be superior to all the accidents of fortune.
They believed in the gods as manifestations of one Divine Providence that
ordered all things well. The noblest characters of the Greek and Roman world
from this time belonged to this sect. Stoicism was inclined, however, to ignore
the gentler and kindlier side of human life; and with weak and bitter natures
it merged into the philosophy of the Cynics, of whom Diogenes with his tub and
lantern is the great example.
Both Stoics and Epicureans
held to a wide brotherhood of man. Philosophy, like Greek civilization, became
cosmopolitan. It took the place of religion as a real guide to life, and the great body of philosophers were the clergy of the
next few centuries much more truly than were the various priesthoods of the
temples.
Libraries and Museums (“Universities”).— Two new institutions
appeared, which, when combined as at Alexandria, made the forerunner of the
modern university. The union of a body of teachers and learners into a
corporation, with permanent endowment and legal succession, began at this time
in Athens and Alexandria, and the idea has never since died out of the world.
Plato had bequeathed his gardens at Athens, with other property, to his
followers, on the basis of a worship of the Muses (since the Athenian law could
not recognize property rights in. a club unless it avowed some religious
purpose). This was the first endowed academy. The model and name were used a
little later by the first and second Ptolemies at Alexandria in their Museum.
Here was founded a great library of over half a million volumes (manuscripts),
with scribes to make careful editions and copies of them; here also were
established observatories and zoological and botanical gardens, with
collections of rare plants and animals from distant parts of the world. The
librarians and other scholars who were gathered about the institution by the
Ptolemies corresponded in some measure to the faculty of a university, and
devoted their lives to a search for knowledge and to teaching.
“The external appearance was
that of a group of buildings which served a common purpose—temple of the Muses,
library, porticoes, dwellings, and a hall for meals, which were taken together.
The inmates were a community of scholars and poets, on whom the king bestowed
the honor and privilege of being allowed to work at his expense with all
imaginable assistance ready to hand. It was a foundation which had something of
the Institute of France, and something of the Colleges at Oxford. The managing
board was composed of priests, but the most influential post was that of
librarian.”—Holm.
One enterprise, of
incalculable benefit to the later world, may illustrate the zeal of the
Ptolemies in regard to collecting and translating texts. Alexandria had many
Jews in its population, but they were coming to use the Greek language.
Philadelphus, for their benefit, had the Hebrew Scriptures translated into
Greek, the famous Septuagint translation, so called from the tradition that it
was the work of seventy scholars.
Science.— As compared with all
previous time, science made great strides. Medicine, surgery, botany, and
mechanics first appear as real sciences. Archimedes of Syracuse discovered the
principle of the lever, and of specific gravity, and constructed burning
mirrors and new hurling engines that made effective siege artillery. Euclid at
Alexandria produced the geometry which, with
little modification, is still taught in our schools. Eratosthenes (born 276
B.C.), the librarian at Alexandria, wrote a systematic treatise on geography, invented
delicate astronomical instruments, and devised the present method of measuring
the circumference of the earth—with results nearly accurate. A little later,
Aristarchus taught that the earth moved round the sun; and Hipparchus
calculated eclipses, catalogued the stars, and wrote scientific treatises on
astronomy; indeed, he is regarded as the founder of mathematical astronomy and
of plane and spherical trigonometry. Aristotle had already given all the proofs of the sphericity of the earth that are
common in our text-books now (except that of actual circumnavigation), and had
asserted the probability that men could reach Asia by sailing west from Europe.
CHAPTER III.
GREECE—FROM
ALEXANDER TO ROME.
I. THE FEDERAL
CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD.
During the ruinous Wars of
the Succession, Greece was the battle ground for Egypt, Syria, and Macedonia.
Those struggles left the land for a time in vassalage to Macedonia, and that
country tried to secure her rule by garrisons in important places or by local
tyrants subservient to her. But, almost at once, a new champion of Hellenic
liberty appeared in a spot hitherto obscure. A league of small Achaean towns
grew into a formidable power, gallantly freed most of historic Greece, brought
much of it into its federal union on equal terms, and for a glorious
half-century maintained Greek freedom successfully.
The story offers curious
resemblances and contrasts to the period of Athenian leadership just two
hundred years earlier. Greece could no longer hope to become one of the great
physical powers; we miss the intellectual brilliancy, too, of the fifth
century; but the epoch affords even more instructive political lessons—especially
to Americans, interested, as we are, in federal institutions.
In early centuries the more
backward and tribal parts of Greece had offered many examples of confederation,
as in the cases of the Phocians, Locrians, Acarnanians, and Epirots. In city
Greece, however, no such league had flourished. The ancient Boeotian
confederacy sank under the rule of a predominant city; the later attempts of Athens and Olynthus to apply the federal principle
to numerous city states had failed, the one from internal causes, the other
from Spartan interference. Now, two of the older confederacies— Aetolia and
Achaea— stepped forth as champions of Hellas, and the federal organization
gained a prominence wholly new in history.
The Aetolian League seems to have been originally
a loose union of mountain cantons for defence. The Wars of the Succession, however,
made the Aetolians famous as the boldest soldiers of fortune in the Hellenic
world; and this repute, together with the wealth brought home by the thousands
of such adventurers, led to a more aggressive policy on the part of the league.
The people remained, on the whole, rude mountaineers, “brave, boastful,
rapacious, and utterly reckless of the rights of others.” They did play a part
in saving southern Greece from the invading Gauls, but their confederacy became
more and more an organization for lawless plunder. Their original constitution
seems to have been much like the Achaean (which, however, we know more in
detail).; but as they extended their authority over distant cities by conquest
or by threats of blackmail, they did not incorporate these new elements into
the union on equal terms, as the great Achaean League was to do with its new
members. The Aetolian Union, therefore, soon comes to be less valuable as an
example of federal government than is its great rival.
II. THE ACHAEAN LEAGUE.
The people of Achaea were
unwarlike, and not particularly enterprising or intellectual. They gave no
great name to literature or art, nor did they even furnish great statesmen, for
all the heroes of the league, were to come from outside old Achaea. But, still,
the Achaean League is one of the most remarkable federations in history before
the adoption of the present Constitution of the United States.
A federal union of Achaean
townships existed as early as the Persian wars, as a common
coinage of that time proves. Under the Macedonian kings the league was
destroyed, and tyrants were set up in several of the ten Achaean cities. But,
about 280 B.C., four small towns revived the ancient confederacy. Neighboring
tyrants were driven out; indeed, Iseas of Ceryneia voluntarily resigned his
tyranny, and brought his city into the league. The union swiftly absorbed all
Achaea. The ruin that followed the Gallic invasion in the north seems to have
prevented Macedonian interference until the federation was securely established.
During this period the
constitution took Torm. The supreme authority of the league was vested in a
federal, congress. This was not a representative body, but a primary assembly,
or mass meeting, of all citizens of the league who chose to attend. To prevent
the city where the meeting was held from outweighing the others, each city was
given only one vote. The Assembly was held twice a year, for only three days at
a time, and in a small place, so that a great capital should not overshadow the
rest of the league. It chose yearly a General (or president), with various
subordinate officers, a Council of Ten, and a Senate. The same general could
not be chosen two years in succession.
This government raised federal
taxes and armies, and represented Achaea in all foreign relations. Each city
remained a distinct state, with full control over all its internal matters—with
its own Assembly, Council, and Generals; but no city of itself could make peace
or war, enter into alliances, or send ambassadors to another state. That is,
the Achaean League was a true federation, and not a mere alliance.
In theory the constitution was
extremely democratic; in practice it proved otherwise. Men attended the
Assembly at their own expense; any Achaean might come, but only the wealthy
could afford to do so habitually. Then, since the meetings were necessarily so
few and brief, great authority had to be left in the intervals to the general
and council. Any Achaean was eligible to these offices; but as they were
unsalaried, poor men could hardly afford to take them, and, in any case, could
not get them from the wealthy class that dominated the Assembly. Thus a
decidedly aristocratic character resulted from applying to a large territory
the Greek system of a primary assembly, suited only to single cities. A primary
assembly made the city of Athens a perfect democracy; the same institution made
Achaea intensely aristocratic.
The constitution, it is plain,
avoided several dangers and evils common in early attempts at federation. Its
two weaknesses were: (a) that it made no use of the representative system,
which no doubt would have seemed to the Achaeans less democratic, but which in
practice would have enabled a larger part of the citizens to have a voice in
the government; and (ib) that all cities, great or small, had the same vote.
This last did not matter so much perhaps at first, for the little Achaean towns
did not differ materially in size; but it became a manifest injustice, and
therefore an element of weakness, when the union came later to contain some of
the most powerful cities in Greece. However, this feature was almost universal
in early confederacies that did not change into consolidated empires, and it
was the principle of the American Union until 1789.
The one exception of note was
the Lycian confederacy in Asia Minor, The Lycians were not Greeks, apparently ;
but they had taken on some Greek culture, and their federal union was an
advance even upon the Achaean, though it was absorbed by Rome before it played
an important part in history. In its Assembly, the vote was taken by cities,
but the cities were divided into three classes: the largest had three votes
each, the next class two each, and the smallest only one. This was the nearest
approach in ancient history to a federation wherein the states should have
weight according to their importance. Even the Lycians had no representative
assemblies, and, at the league gathering, the numerical value of the vote of a
city depended, of course, not upon the size of its contingent at that meeting
but upon the relative place assigned it by the constitution.
The power vested in the
general makes the history of the league the biography of a few great men. The
most remarkable of these leaders was Aratus of Sicyon, who now entered upon the
stage to extend the union far beyond Achaea. As a youth of twenty he had
returned from exile to free his native city from a bloody and despicable
tyranny (251 B.C.). The daring venture was brilliantly successful, but it
aroused the enmity of Macedon; and to preserve the freedom so nobly won, Aratus
brought Sicyon into the Achaean federation. Five years later he was first
elected general of the league, and he held that office each alternate year (as
often as the constitution permitted) from this time until his death, thirty-two
years later, while the generals in the odd years were commonly his partisans.
Aratus hated tyrants and
longed for a free and united Greece. He aimed at a noble end, but did not
refuse base means. He was personally incorruptible, and he lavished his own
vast wealth for the union: but he was jealous of other leaders; he betrayed to
death on the field of battle the noblest hero of the league; and finally, to
maintain his supremacy, he called in Macedonia, and himself undid all his work.
With abounding daring in a dashing project, as he many times showed, he lacked
nerve to command in battle; he frequently showed cowardice, and he never won a
real victory in the field; but, despite his many defeats, his persuasive power
and his merits kept him the confidence of the union to the end of a long public
life.
In his second generalship,
Aratus freed Corinth from her Macedonian tyrant by a desperate night attack
upon the garrison of the citadel. That powerful city then entered the union. So
did Megara, which itself drove out its Macedonian garrison. The league now
commanded the Isthmus, and was safe from attack by Macedonia. Then several
cities in Arcadia joined, and in 234 B.C.Megalopolis was added—at this time one
of the leading cities in Greece. Some years earlier its
tyranny had been seized by Lydiadas, a gallant youth animated by enthusiasm for
beneficent autocratic reform. The growth of the Achaean League opened a nobler
way; Lydiadas resigned his tyranny, and as a private citizen brought the Great
City into the union. This made him a candidate for popular favor, and Aratus
became his bitter foe. The new leader was the more lovable and heroic figure—generous
and ardent, a soldier as well as a statesman. He several times became general
of the league, but even in office he was often thwarted by the disgraceful
trickery of the older man.
For many years Aratus had
aimed to free Athens and Argos—sometimes by heroic endeavors, sometimes by assassination
and poison. In 229 B.C. he succeeded. He bought the withdrawal of Macedonian
troops from the Peiraeus, and Athens became an ally, though not a member of the
league. The tyrant of Argos was persuaded or frightened into following the
example of Lydiadas,—as indeed had happened meanwhile in many smaller cities,—
and Argos joined the confederacy. The league now was the commanding power in
Hellas. It included all Peloponnesus except Sparta and Elis. Moreover, all
Greece south of Thermopylae had become free,—largely through the influence of
the confederacy,—and most of these states also had entered into friendly
alliance with it.
Social Reforms in
Sparta.— But now came a
conflict with Sparta. The struggle was connected with a great reform within
that ancient city. The forms of the Lycurgan constitution had survived through
many centuries, but at this time Sparta had only seven hundred full citizens.
This condition brought about a violent agitation for social reform, the beginning
of which indeed was noticeable one hundred and fifty years before. About the
year 243 B.C. Agis, one of the kings, set himself to do again what Lycur-gus
had done in legend. Agis was a youthful hero, full of noble daring and pure
enthusiasm. He gave his own property to the state and persuaded his relatives
and friends to do the like. He planned to abolish all debts and to divide the
land among forty-five hundred Spartans and fifteen thousand Perioeci—thus
reestablishing the state upon a broad and democratic basis. He refused to use
violence, and sought his ends by constitutional means only; but the
disciplined conservative party rose in fierce opposition and, by order of the
ephors, Agis was seized, with his noble mother and grandmother, and murdered in
prison,— “the purest and noblest spirit,” says Freeman, “that ever perished
through deeming others as pure and uoble as himself.”
But the ideals of the martyr
lived on. His wife was forced to marry Cleomenes, son of the other king; and
from her this prince adopted the hopes of Agis. Cleomenes had less of high
sensitiveness and stainless honor, but he is a grand and colossal figure. He
bided his time; and then, when the ephors were planning to use force against
him, he struck first. He became king in 236 B.C.Aratus had led the Achaean
League into war with Sparta in order to consolidate the Peloponnesus; but the
military genius of the young king made even old, enfeebled Sparta a match for
the league under the miserable leadership of its general. Cleomenes won two
great victories. Then, the league being helpless for the moment, he used his
popularity to effect reform at home. The oligarchs were plotting against him,
but he was enthusiastically supported by the disfranchised multitudes. Leaving
his Spartan troops at a distance, he hurried to the city by forced marches with
some chosen followers, seized and slew the ephors, and proclaimed a new
constitution, which embodied the economic designs of Agis and which virtually
placed all political power in the hands of the king.
Cleomenes designed to make
this new Sparta the head of the Peloponnesus. He and Aratus each desired a free
united Greece, but under different leadership. Moreover Sparta now stood forth
the advocate of socialism, and so was particularly hateful and dangerous to the
aristocratic government of the league. The struggle between the two powers was
renewed with fresh bitterness. Cleomenes won more victories, and then, with the
league at his feet, he offered generous terms. He demanded that Sparta enter
the union as virtual leader. This would have altered the character of the
confederacy, but it would have created the greatest power ever seen in Greece,
and, for the time, it would have insured a free Hellas. The Achaeans were
generally in favor of accepting the proposal; but Aratus—jealous of Cleomenes
and fearful of social reform—broke off the negotiations by underhanded methods,
and bought the aid of Macedon by betraying Corinth, a free member of the league
and the city connected with his own most glorious exploit. As a result, the
federation became a protectorate of Macedonia, holding no relations with
foreign states except through that power; and the war became a struggle for
Greek freedom, waged by Sparta under her hero-king against the overwhelming
power of Macedon assisted by the confederacy as a vassal state.
The date (222 B.C.) coincides
with the general decline of Hellenic power in the world. For a while, Sparta
showed surprising vigor, and Cleomenes was marvelously successful. The league
indeed dwindled to a handful of petty cities. But in the end Macedonia
prevailed. Cleomenes fled to Egypt, to die in exile; and Sparta opened her
gates for the first time to a conquering army. The league was restored to nearly
its full extent, but its glory was gone. It still served a useful purpose in
maintaining internal peace and order over a large part of Peloponnesus, but it
was no longer a champion of a free Hellas.
A war followed between Achaea
and Aetolia. This soon became a struggle between Macedonia and her vassals on
the one side, and Aetolia aided by Rome on the other; for as Achaea had called
in Macedon against Sparta, so now Aetolia called in Rome against Achaea and
Macedonia,—and Greek history is closed.
Some gleams of glory shine out
at the last in the career of Philopoemen of Megalopolis, the greatest general
the Achaean League ever produced, and one of the noblest characters in history;
but the doom of Achaea was already sealed. “Philopoemen,” says Freeman, “ was
one of the heroes who struggle against fate, and who are allowed to do no more
than to stave off a destruction which it is beyond their power to avert.” The
sentence may stand not unfittingly for the epitaph of the great league itself.
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