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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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HISTORY OF GREECEHISTORY OF GREECE FROM LYKURGUS TO SOLONI.LAWS
AND DISCIPLINE OF LYCURGUS AT SPARTA.
PLUTARCH
begins his biography of Lycurgus with the following ominous words :
“Concerning
the lawgiver Lycurgus, we can assert absolutely nothing which is not
controverted : there are different stories in respect to his birth, his
travels, his death, and also his mode of proceeding, political as well as
legislative : least of all is the time in which he lived agreed upon“.
And
this exordium is but too well borne out by the unsatisfactory nature of the
accounts which we read, not only in Plutarch himself, but in those other
authors out of whom we are obliged to make up our idea of the memorable
Lycurgean system. If we examine the sources from which Plutarch’s life of
Lycurgus is deduced, it will appear that—excepting the poets Alkman, Tyrtaeus,
and Simonides, from whom he has borrowed less than we could have wished—he has
no authorities older than Xenophon and Plato: Aristotle is cited several times,
and is unquestionably the best of his witnesses, but the greater number of them
belong to the century subsequent to that philosopher. Neither Herodotus nor
Ephorus are named, though the former furnishes some brief, but interesting
particulars, —and the latter also (as far as we can judge from the fragments
remaining) entered at large into the proceedings of the Spartan lawgiver.
Lycurgus
is described by Herodotus as uncle and guardian to king Labotas, of the
Eurystheneid or Agid line of Spartan kings; and this would place him, according
to the received chronology, about 220 years before the first recorded Olympiad
(about BC 996). All the other accounts, on the contrary, seem to represent him
as a younger brother, belonging to the other or Prokleid line of Spartan kings,
though they do not perfectly agree respecting his parentage. While Simonides
stated him to be the son of Prytanis, Dieutychidas described him as grandson of
Prytanis, son of Eunomus, brother of Polydektes, and uncle as well as guardian
to Charilaus, thus making him eleventh in descent from Heracles. This latter
account was adopted by Aristotle, coinciding, according to the received
chronology, with the date of Iphitus the Eleian, and the first celebration of
the Olympic games by Lycurgus and Iphitus conjointly, which Aristotle accepted
as a fact. Lycurgus, on the hypothesis here mentioned, would stand about BC
880, a century before the recorded Olympiads. Eratosthenes and Apollodorus placed
him “not a few years earlier than the first Olympiad.” If they meant hereby the
epoch commonly assigned as the Olympiad of Iphitus, their date would coincide
pretty nearly with that of Herodotus : if, on the other hand, they meant the
first recorded Olympiad (BC 776), they would be found not much removed from the
opinion of Aristotle. An unequivocal proof of the inextricable confusion in
ancient times respecting the epoch of the great Spartan lawgiver is indirectly
afforded by Timaeus, who supposed that there had existed two persons named
Lycurgus, and that the acts of both had been ascribed to one. It is plain from
hence that there was no certainty attainable, even in the third century before
the Christian era, respecting the date or parentage of Lycurgus.
Thucydides,
without mentioning the name of Lycurgus, informs us that it was “400 years and
somewhat more” anterior to the close of the Peloponnesian war, when the
Spartans emerged from their previous state of desperate internal disorder, and
entered upon “their present polity”. We may fairly presume that this alludes to
the Lycurgean discipline and constitution, which Thucydides must thus have
conceived as introduced about BC 830-820,— coinciding with something near the
commencement of the reign of king Teleklus. In so far as it is possible to form
an opinion, amidst evidence at once so scanty and so discordant, I incline to
adopt the opinion of Thucydides as to the time at which the Lycurgean
constitution was introduced at Sparta. The state of “eunomy” and good order
which that constitution brought about, — combined with the healing of great
previous internal sedition, which had tended much to enfeeble them,— is
represented (and with great plausibility) as the grand cause of the victorious
career beginning with king Teleklus, the conqueror of Amyklae, Pharis, and
Geronthrae. Therefore it would seem, in the absence of better evidence, that a
date, connecting the fresh stimulus of the new discipline with the reign of
Teleklus, is more probable than any epoch either later or earlier.
Marriage
was almost universal among the citizens, enforced by general opinion at least,
if not by law. The young Spartan carried away his bride by a simulated
abduction, but she still seems, for some time at least, to have continued to
reside with her family, visiting her husband in his barrack in the disguise of
male attire, and on short and stolen occasions. To some married couples,
according to Plutarch, it happened, that they had been married long enough to
have two or three children, while they had scarcely seen each other apart by
daylight. Secret intrigue on the part of married women was unknown at Sparta;
but to bring together the finest couples was regarded by the citizens as
desirable, and by the lawgiver as a duty. No personal feeling or jealousy on
the part of the husband found sympathy from any one, and he permitted without
difficulty, sometimes actively encouraged, compliances on the part of his wife,
consistent with this generally acknowledged object. So far was such toleration
carried, that there were some married women who were recognized mistresses of
two houses, and mothers of two distinct families, a sort of bigamy strictly
forbidden to the men, and never permitted, except in the remarkable case of
king Anaxandrides, when the royal Herakleidan line of Eurysthenes was in danger
of becoming extinct. The wife of Anaxandrides being childless, the ephors
strongly urged him, on grounds of public necessity, to repudiate her and marry
another. But he refused to dismiss a wife who had given him no cause of
complaint; upon which, when they found him inexorable, they desired him to
retain her, but to marry another wife besides, in order that at any rate there
might be issue “to the Eurystheneid line”. He thus (says Herodotus)
married two wives, and inhabited two family-hearths, a proceeding unknown at
Sparta; yet the same privilege which, according to Xenophon, some Spartan women
enjoyed without reproach from any one, and with perfect harmony between the
inmates of both their houses. O. Müller remarks — and the evidence, as far as
we know it, bears him out — that love-marriages and genuine affection towards a
wife were more familiar to Sparta than to Athens; though in the former, marital
jealousy was a sentiment neither indulged nor recognized,—while in the latter,
it was intense and universa1.
CHAPTER VII.
FIRST
AND SECOND MESSENIAN WARS.
That there were two long contests
between the Lacedaemonians and Messenians, and that, in both, the former were
completely victorious, is a fact sufficiently attested. And if we could trust
the statements in Pausanias—our chief and almost only authority on the
subject—we should be in a situation to recount the history of these wars in
considerable detail. But unfortunately the incidents narrated in that writer
have been gathered from sources which arc, even by his own admission,
undeserving of credit—from Rhianus, the poet of Bene in Krete, who had composed
an epic poem on Aristomenes and the second Messenian war, about b.c. 220—and fom Myron of Priene, a
prose author whose date is not exactly known, but belonging to the Alexandrine
age, and not earlier than the third century before the Christian era. From
Rhianus we have no right to expect trustworthy information, while the accuracy
of Myron is much depreciated by Pausanias himself—on some points even too much,
as will presently be shown. But apart from the mental habits cither of the
prose writer or the poet, it does not seem that any good means of know ledge
were open to either of them, except the poems of Tyrtaeus, which we are by no
means sure that they ever consulted. The account of the two wars, extracted
from these two authors by Pausanias, is a string of tableaux, several of them,
indeed, highly poetical, but destitute of historical coherence or sufficiency;
and O. Muller has justly observed that “absolutely no reason is given in them
for the subjection of Messenia.” They are accounts unworthy of being
transcribed in detail into the pages of general history, nor can we pretend to
do anything more than verify a few leading facts of the war.
The
poet Tyrtaeus was himself engaged on the side of the Spartans in the second
War, and it is from him that we learn the few indisputable facts respecting
both the first and the second. If the Messenians had never been re-established
in Peloponnesus, we should probably never have heard any further details
respecting these early contests. That re-establishment, together with the first
foundation of the city called Messene on Mount Ithome, was among the capital
wounds inflicted on Sparta by Epaminondas, in the year b.c. 369—between 300 and 250 years after the conclusion of
the second Messenian war. The descend mts of the old Messenians, who had
remained for so long a period without any fixed position in Greece, were
incorporated in the new city, together with various Helots and miscellaneous
settlers who had no claim to a similar genealogy. The gods and heroes of the
Messenian race were reverentially invoked at this great ceremony, especially
the great hero Aristomenes; and the sight of Mount Ithome, the ardor of the
newly established citizens, the hatred and apprehension of Sparta, operating as
a powerful stimulus to the creation and multiplication of what are called traditions,
sufficed to expand the few facts known respecting the struggles of the old
Messenians into a variety of details. In almost all these stories we discover a
coloring unfavorable to Sparta, contrasting forcibly with the account given by
Isokrates in his discourse called Archidamus, wherein we read the view which a
Spartan might take of the ancient conquests of his forefathers. But a clear
proof that these Messenian stories had no real basis of tradition is shown in
the contradictory statements respecting the principal hero Aristomenes, for
some place him in the first, others in the second, of the two wars. Diodorus
and Myron both placed him in the first; Rhianus in the second. Though Pausanias
gives it as his opinion that the account of the latter is preferable, and that
Aristomenes really belongs to the second Messenian war, it appears to me that
the one statement is as much worthy of belief as the other, and that there is
no sufficient evidence for deciding between them—a conclusion which is
substantially the same with that of Wesseling, who thinks that there were two
persons named Aristomenes, one in the first and one in the second war. This
inextricable confusion respecting the greatest name in Messenian antiquity
show’s how little any genuine stream of tradition can here be recognized.
Pausanias
states the first Messenian war as beginning in b.c. 743 and lasting till b.c. 724—the second as beginning in b.c. 685 and lasting till b.c. 668.
Neither of these dates rests upon any assignable positive authority; but the
time assigned to the first war seems probable, while that of the second is
apparently too early. Tyrtaeus authenticates both the duration of the first
war, twenty years, and the eminent services rendered in it by the Spartan king
Theopompus. He says, moreover (speaking during the second war), “the fathers of
our fathers conquered Messene;” thus loosely indicating the relative dates of
the two.
The
Spartans (as we learn from Isokrates, whose words date from a time when the
city of Messene was only a recent foundation) professed to have seized the
territory, partly in revenge for the impiety of the Messenians in killing their
own king the Herakleid Kresphontes, whose relative had appealed to Sparta for
aid—partly by sentence of the Delphian oracle. Such were the causes which had
induced them first to invade the country, and they had conquered it after a
struggle of twenty years. The Lacedaemonian explanations, as given in
Pausanias, seem for the most part to be counter-statements arranged after the
time when the Messenian version, evidently the interesting and popular
account, Lad become circulated.
It
has already been stated that the Lacedaemonians and Messenians had a joint
border temple and sacrifice in honor of Artemis Limnatis, dating from the
earliest times of their establishment in Peloponnesus. The site of this temple
near the upper course of the river Nedon, in the mountainous territory
north-east of Kalamata, hut west of the highest ridge of Tayretus, has recently
been exactly verified—and it seems in these early days to have belonged to
Sparta. That the quarrel began at one of these border sacrifices was the
statement of both parties, Lacedaemonians and Messenians. According to the
latter, the Lacedaemonian king Teleklus laid a snare for the Messenians, by
dressing up some youthful Spartans as virgins and giving them daggers;
whereupon a contest ensued, in which the Spartans were worsted and Teleklus
slain. That Teleklus was slain at the temple by the Messenians, was also the
account of the Spartans—but they affirmed that he was slain in attempting to
defend some young Lacedaemonian maidens, who were sacrificing at the temple,
against outrageous violence from the Messenian youth. In spite of the death of
this king, however, the war did not actually break out until some little time
after, when Alkamenes and Theopompus were kings at Sparta, and Antiochus and
Androkles, sons of Phintas, kings of Messenia. The immediate cause of it was a
private altercation between the Messenian Polychares (victor at the fourth
Olympiad, b.c. 764) and the
Spartan Euaephnus. Polychares, having been grossly injured by Euaephnus, and
his claim for redress having been rejected at Sparta, took revenge by
aggressions upon other Lacedaemonians. The Messenians refused to give him up;
though one of the two kings, Androkles, strongly insisted upon doing so, and
maintained his opinion so earnestly against the opposite sense of the majority
and of his brother Antiochus, that a tumult arose, and he was slain. The
Lacedaemonians, now resolving upon war, struck the first blow without any
formal declaration, by surprising the border town of Ampheia, and putting its
defenders to the sword. They farther overran the Messenian territory, and
attacked some other towns, but without success. Euphaes, who had now succeeded
his father Antiochus as king of Messenia, summoned the forces of the country
and carried on the war against them with energy and boldness. For the first
four years of the war the Lacedaemonians made no progress, and even incurred
the ridicule of the old men of their nation as faint-hearted warriors. In the
fifth year, however, they undertook a more vigorous invasion, under their two
kings, Theopompus and Polydorus, who were met by Euphaes with the full force of
the Messenians. A desperate battle ensued, in which it does not seem that
either side gained much advantage: nevertheless the Messenians found themselves
so much enfeebled by it, that they were forced to take refuge on the fortified
mountain of Ithome, abandoning the rest of the country. In their distress they
sent to solicit counsel and protection from Delphi, but their messenger brought
back the appalling answer that a virgin of the royal race of Aepytus must be
sacrificed for their salvation. At the tragic scene which ensues, Aristodemus
puts to death his own daughter, yet without satisfying the exigences of the
oracle. The war still continued, and in the thirteenth year of it another
hard-fought battle took place, in which the brave Euphaes was slain, but the
result was again indecisive. Aristodemus, being elected king in his place,
prosecuted the war strenuously. The fifth year of his reign is signalized by a
third general battle, wherein the Corinthians assist the Spartans, and the
Arcadians and Sicyonians are on the side of Messenia; the victory is here
decisive on the side of Aristodemus, and the Lacedaemonians are driven back
into their own territory. It was now their turn to send envoys and ask advice
from the Delphian oracle. The remaining events of the war exhibit a series,
partly of stratagems to fulfil the injunctions of the priestess,—partly of
prodigies in which the divine wrath is manifested against the Messenians. The
king Aristodemus, agonized with the thought that he has slain his own daughter
without saving his country, puts an end to his own life. In the twentieth year
of the war the Messenians abandoned Ithome, which the Lacedaemonians razed to
the ground: the rest of the country being speedily conquered, such of the
inhabitants as did not flee either to Arcadia or to Eleusis, were reduced to
complete submission.
Such
is the abridgment of what Pausanias gives as the narrative of the first
Messenian war. Most of his details bear the evident stamp of mere late romance;
and it will easily be seen that the sequence of events presents no plausible
explanation of that which is really indubitable—the result. The twenty years’
war, and the final abandonment of Ithome is attested by Tyrtaeus beyond all
doubt, as well as the harsh treatment of the conquered, “Like asses worn down
by heavy burthens” (says the Spartan poet), “they were compelled to make over
to their masters an entire half of the produce of their fields, and to come in
the garb of woe to Sparta, themselves and their wives, as mourners at the
decease of the kings and principal persons.” The revolt of their descendants, against
a yoke so oppressive, goes by the name of the second Messenian war.
Had
we possessed the account of the first Messenian war as given by Myron and
Diodorus, it would evidently have been very different from the above, because
they included Aristomenes in it, and to him the leading parts would be
assigned. As the narrative now stands in Pausanias, we are not introduced to
that great Messenian hero—the Achilles of the epic of Rhianus—until the second
war, in which his gigantic proportions stand prominently forward. He is the
great champion of his country in the three battles which are represented as
taking place during this war: the first, with indecisive result, at Dene; the
second, a signal victory on the part of the Messenians, at the Boar’s Grave; the
third, an equally signal defeat, in consequence of the traitorous flight of
Aristokrates, king of the Arcadian Orchomenus, who, ostensibly embracing the
alliance of the Messenians, had received bribes from Sparta. Thrice did
Aristomenes sacrifice to Zeus Ithomates the sacrifice called Hekatomphonia,
reserved for those who had slain with
their own hands 100 enemies in battle. At the head of a chosen band he carried
his incursions more than once into the heart of the Lacedaemonian territory,
surprised Amyklae and Pharis, and even penetrated by night into the unfortified
precinct of Sparta itself, where he suspended his shield as a token of defiance
in the temple of Athene Chalkioekus. Thrice was he taken prisoner, but on two
occasions marvelously escaped before he could be conveyed to Sparta: the third
occasion was more fatal, and he was east hv order of the Spartans into the
Keadas, a deep rocky cavity in Mount Taygetus into which it was their habit to
precipitate criminals. But even in this emergency the divine aid was not
withheld from him. While the fifty Messenians who shared his punishment were
all killed by the shock, he alone was both supported by the gods so as to reach
the bottom unhurt, and enabled to find an unexpected means of escape. For when,
abandoning all hope, he had wrapped himself up in his cloak to die, he
perceived a fox creeping about among the dead bodies: waiting until the animal
approached him, he grasped its tail, defending himself from its bites as well
as he could by means of his cloak; and being thus enabled to find the aperture
by which the fox had entered, enlarged it sufficiently for crawling out
himself. To the surprise both of friends and enemies he again, appeared alive
and vigorous at Eira. That fortified mountain, on the banks of the river Nedon,
and near the Ionian sea, had been occupied by the Messenians after the battle
in which they had been betrayed by Aristokrates the Arcadian; it was there that
they had concentrated their whole force, as in the former war at Ithome, abandoning
the rest of the country. Under the conduct of Aristomenes, assisted by the
prophet Theoklus, they maintained this strong position for eleven years. At
length they were compelled to abandon it. Yet as in the case of Ithome, the
final determining circumstances are represented to have been, not any
superiority of bravery or organization on the part of the Lacedaemonians, but
treacherous betrayal and stratagem, seconding the fatal decree of the gods.
Unable to maintain Eira longer, Aristomenes, with his sons and a body of hu
countrymen, forced his way through the assailants and quitted the country—some
of them retiring to Arcadia and Elis, and finally migrating to Rhegium. He
himself passed the remainder of his days in Rhodes, where he dwelt along with
his son-in-law Damagetus, the ancestor of the noble Rhodian family called the
Diagorids, celebrated for its numerous Olympic victories.
Such
are the main features of what Pausanias calls the second Messenian war, or of
what ought rather to be called the Aristomeneis of the poet Rhianus. That after
the foundation of Messene, and the recall of the exiles by Epaminondas, favor
and credence was found for many tales respecting the prowess of the ancient
hero whom they invoked in their libations—tales well calculated to interest the
fancy, to vivify the patriotism, and to inflame the anti-Spartan antipathies,
of the new inhabitants—there can be little doubt. And the Messenian maidens of
that day may well have sung in their public processional sacrifices, how “Aristomenes
pursued the flying Lacedaemonians down to the mid-plain of Stenyklerus and up
to the very summit of the mountain.” From such stories t(raditions they ought
not to be denominated) Rhianus may doubtless have borrowed; but if proof were
wanting to show how completely he looked at his materials from the point of
view of the poet and not from that of the historian, we should find it in the
remarkable fact noticed by Pausanias. Rhianus represented Leotychides as having
been king of Sparta during the second Messenian war: now Leotychides (as
Pausanias observes) did not reign until near a century and a half afterwards,
during the Persian invasion.
To
the great champion of Messenia, during this war, we may oppose on the side of
Sparta another remarkable person, less striking as a character of romance, but
more interesting in many ways to the historian—I mean the poet Tyrtaeus, a
native of Aphidnae in Attica, an inestimable ally of the Lacedaemonians during
most part of this second struggle. According to a story—which, however, has the
air partly of a boast of the later Attic orators—the Spartans, disheartened at
the first successes of the Messenians, consulted the Delphian oracle, and were
directed to ask for a leader from Athens. The Athenians complied by sending
Tyrtaeus, whom Pausanias and Justin represent as a lame man and a
schoolmaster, despatched with a view of nominally obeying the oracle, and yet
rendering no real assistance. This seems to be a coloring put upon the story by
later writers, but the intervention of the Athenians in the matter in any way
deserves little credit. It seems more probable that the legendary connection of
the Dioskuri with Aphidnae, celebrated at or near that time by the poet Alkman,
brought about through the Delphian oracle the presence of the Aphidnaean poet
at Sparta. Respecting the Iameness of Tyrtaeus, we can say nothing. But that he
was a schoolmaster (if we are constrained to employ an unsuitable term) is
highly probable—for in that day, minstrels who composed and sung poems were the
only persons from whom the youth received any mental training. Moreover his
sway over the youthful mind is particularly noted in the compliment paid to him
in after-days by king Leonidas—“Tyrtaeus was an adept in tickling the souls of
youth.” We see enough to satisfy us that he was by birth a stranger, though he
became a Spartan by the subsequent recompense of citizenship conferred upon
him—that he was sent through the Delphian oracle—that he was an impressive and
efficacious minstrel—and that he had moreover sagacity enough to employ bis
talents for present purposes and diverse needs; being able not merely to
reanimate the languishing courage of the baffled warrior, but also to soothe
the discontents of the mutinous. That his strains, which long maintained
undiminished popularity among the Spartans, contributed much to determine the
ultimate issue of this war, there is no reason to doubt; nor is his name the
only one to attest the susceptibility of the Spartan mind in that day toward
music and poetry. The first establishment of the Karneian festival with its
musical competition at Sparta, falls during the period assigned by Pausanias to
the second Messenian war: the Lesbian harper Terpander, who gained the first
recorded prize at this solemnity, is affirmed to have been sent for by the
Spartans pursuant to a mandate from the Delphian oracle, and to have been the
means of appeasing a sedition. In like manner, the Kretan Thaletas was invited
thither during a pestilence, which his art (as it is pretended) contributed to
heal (about 620 b.c.); and
Alkman, Xenokritus, Polymnastus, and Sakadas, all foreigners by birth, found
favorable reception, and acquired popularity by their music and poetry. With
the exception of Sakadas, who is a little later, all these names fall in the
same century as Tyrtaeus, between 660 b.c.—610 b.c The fashion which the Spartan
music continued for a long time to maintain, is ascribed chiefly to the genius
of Terpander.
The
training in which a Spartan passed his life consisted of exercises warlike,
social, and religious, blended together. While the individual, strengthen by
gymnastics, went through his painful lessons of fatigue, endurance, and
aggression—the citizens collectively were kept in the constant habit of
simultaneous and regulated movement in the warlike march, in the religious
dance, and in the social procession. Music and song, being constantly employed
to direct the measure and keep alive the spirit of these multitudinous
movements, became associated with the most powerful feelings which the habitual
self-suppression of a Spartan permitted to arise, and especially with those
sympathies which are communicated at once to an assembled crowd. Indeed the
musician and the minstrel were the only persons who ever addressed themselves
to the feelings of a Lacedaemonian assembly. Moreover the simple music of that
early day, though destitute of artistical merit and superseded afterwards by
more complicated combinations, had nevertheless a pronounced ethical character.
It wrought much more powerfully on the impulses and resolutions of the hearers,
though it tickled the ear less gratefully, than the scientific compositions of
after-days. Farther, each particular style of music had its own appropriate
mental effect—the Phrygian mode imparted a wild and maddening stimulus; the
Dorian mode created a settled and deliberate resolution, exempt alike from die
desponding and from the impetuous sentiments. What is called the Dorian mode
seems to be in reality the old native Greek mode as contradistinguished from
the Phrygian and Lydian—these being the three primitive modes, subdivided' and
combined only in later times, with which the first Grecian musicians became
conversant. It probably acquired its title of Dorian from the musical celebrity
of Sparta and Argos, during the seventh and sixth centuries before the
Christian era; but it belonged as much to the Arcadians and Achaeans as to the
Spartans and Argeians. And the marked ethical effects, produced both by the
Dorian and the Phrygian modes in ancient times, are facts perfectly
well-attested, however difficult they may be to explain upon any general theory
of music.
That
the impression produced by Tyrtaeus at Sparta, therefore, with his martial
music, and emphatic exhortations to bravery in the field, as well as union at
home, should have been very considerable, is perfectly consistent with the
character both of the age and of the people; especially as he is represented to
have appeared pursuant to the injunction of the Delphian oracle. From the
scanty fragments remaining to us of his elegies and anapests, however, we can
satisfy ourselves only of two facts—first, that the war was long, obstinately
contested, and dangerous to Sparta as well as to the Messenians; next, that
other parties in Peloponnesus took part ok both sides, especially on the side of the Messenians. So frequent and harassing
were the aggressions of the latter upon the Spartan territory, that a large portion
of the border land was left uncultivated: scarcity ensued, and the proprietors
of the deserted farms, driven to despair, pressed for a redivision of the
landed property in the state. It was in appeasing these discontents that the
poem of Tyrtaeus called Eunomia, “Legal order,” was found signally beneficial.
It seems certain that a considerable portion of the Arcadians, together with
the Pisatae and the Triphylians, took part with the Messenians; there are also
some statements numbering the Eleians among their allies, but this appears not
probable. The state of the case rather seems to have been that the old quarrel
between the Eleians and the Pisatae respecting the right to preside at the
Olympic games, which had already burst forth during the preceding century in
the reign of the Argeian Pheidon, still continued. Unwilling dependents of
Elis, the Pisatae and Triphylians, took part with the subject Messenians, while
the masters at Elis and Sparta made common cause, as they had before done
against Pheidon. Pantaleon, king of Pisa, revolting from Elis, acted as commander
of his countrymen in co-operation with the Messenians; and he is further noted
for having, at the period of the 34th Olympiad (644 b.c.), marched a body of troops to Olympia, and thus
dispossessed the Eleians, on that occasion, of the presidency: that particular
festival — as well as the 8th Olympiad, in which Pheidon interfered—and the 104
Olympiad, in which the Arcadians marched in—were always marked on the Elian
register as non-Olympiad or informal celebrations. We may reasonably connect
this temporary triumph of the Pisatans with the Messenian war, inasmuch as they
were no match for the Eleian single-handed, while the fraternity of Sparta with
Elis is in perfect harmony with the scheme of Peloponnesian politics which we
have observed is prevalent even before and during the days of Pheidon. The
second Messenian war will thus stand as beginning somewhere about the 33d
Olympiad, or 645 BC, between seventy and eighty years after the close of the
first, and lasting, according to Pausanias, seventeen years; according to
Plutarch, more than twenty years.
Many
of the Messenians who abandoned their country after this second conquest are
said to have found shelter and sympathy among the Arcadians, who admitted them
to a new home and gave them their daughters in marriage; and who, moreover,
punished secretly the treason of Aristokrates, king of Orchomenus, in
abandoning the Messenians at the battle of the Trench. That perfidious leader
was put to death and his race dethroned, while the crime as well as the punishment
was farther commemorated by an inscription, which was to be seen near the altar
of Zeus Lykreus in Arcadia. The inscription doubtless existed in the days of
Kallisthenes, in the generation after the restoration of Messene. But whether
it had any existence prior to flint event, or what degree of truth there may be
in the story about Aristokrates, we are unable to determine; the son of
Aristokrates, named Atistodemus, is alleged in another authority to have
reigned afterward at Orchomenus. 3 hat which stands strongly marked is the
sympathy of Arcadians and Messenians against Sparta—a sentiment which was in
its full vigor at the time of the restoration of Messene.
The
second Messenian war was thus terminated by the complete subjugation of the
Messenians. Such of them as remained in the country were reduced to a servitude
probably not less hard than that which Tyrkeus described them as having endured
between the first war and the second. In after-times, the whole territory which
figures on the map as Messenia—south of the river Medon, and westward of the
summit of Taygetus—appears as subject to Sparta, and as forming the western
portion of Laconia; distributed (in what proportion we know not) between
Perioekic towns and Helot villages. By what steps, or after what degree of
further resistance, the Spartans conquered this country we have no
information; but we are told that they made over Asine to the expelled Dryopes
from the Argolic peninsula, and Mothone to the fugitives from Nauplia. Nor do
we hear of any serious revolt from Sparta in this territory until 150 years
afterward, subsequent to the Persian invasion—a revolt which Sparta, after
serious efforts, succeeded in crushing, so that the territory remained in her
power until her defeat at Leuktra, which led to the foundation of Messene by
Epaminondas. The fertility of the plains —especially of the central portion
near the river Pamisus, so much extolled by observers, modern as well as
ancient—rendered it an acquisition highly valuable. At some time or other it
must of course have been formally partitioned among the Spartans, but it is
probable that different and successive allotments were made, according as the
various portions of territory, both to the east and to the west of Taygetus,
were conquered. Of all this we have no information.
Imperfectly
as these two Messenian wars are known to us, we may see enough to warrant us in
making two remarks. Both were tedious, protracted, and painful, showing how
slowly the results of war were then gathered, and adding one additional
illustration to prove how much the rapid and instantaneous conquest of Laconia
and Messenia by the Dorians, which the Herakleid legend sets forth, is
contradicted by historical analogy. Both were characterized by a similar
defensive proceeding on the part of the Messenians—the occupation of a mountain
difficult of access, and the fortification of it for the special purpose and
resistance—Ithome (which is said to have had already a small town upon it) in
the first war, Eira in the second. It is reasonable to infer from hence that
neither their principal town, Stenyklerus, nor any other town in their country,
was strongly fortified so as to be calculated to stand a siege; that there were
no walled towns among them analogous to Myken and Tiryns on the eastern portion
of Peloponnesus; and that perhaps what were called towns were, like Sparta
itself, clusters of unfortified villages. The subsequent state of Helotism into
which they were reduced is in consistency with this dispersed village residence
during their period of freedom.
The
relations of Pisa and Elis form a suitable counterpart and sequel to those of
Messenia and Sparta. Unwilling subjects themselves, the Pisatans had lent
their aid to the Messenians—and their king Pantaleon, one of the leaders of
this combined force, had gained so great a temporary success, as to dispossess
the Eleians of the agonothesia or administration of the games for one Olympic
ceremony, in the 34th Olympiad. Though again reduced to their condition of
subjects, they manifested dispositions to renew the revolt at the 48th
Olympiad, under Damophon, the son of Pantaleon, and the Eleians marched into
their country to put them down, but were persuaded to retire by protestations
of submission. At length, shortly afterward, under Pyrrhus, the brother of
Damophon, a serious revolt broke out. The inhabitants of Dyspontium and the
other villages in the Pisatid, assisted by those of Makistus, Skillus, and the
other towns in Triphylia, took up arms to throw off the yoke of Elis; but their
strength was inadequate to the undertaking. They were completely conquered;
Dyspontium was dismantled, and the inhabitants of it obliged to flee the
country, from whence most of them emigrated to the colonies of Epidamnus and
Apollonia in Epirus. The inhabitants of Makiltus and Skillus were also chased
from their abodes, while the territory became more thoroughly subject to Elis
than it had been before. These incidents seem to have occurred about the 50th
Olympiad, or BC 580; and the dominion of Elis over her I’erimkid territory was
thus as well assured as that of Sparta. The separate denominations both of Pisa
and Triphylia became more and more urged in the sovereign name of Elis: the
town of Lepreum alone, in Triphylia, seems to have maintained a separate name
and a sort of half-autonomy down to the time of the Peloponnesian war, not without
perpetual struggles against the Eleians. But toward the period of the
Peloponnesian war, the political interests of Lacedaemon had become considerably
changed, and it was to her advantage to maintain the independence of the
subordinate states against the superior: accordingly, we find her at that time
upholding the autonomy of Lepreum. From what cause the devastation of the
Triphylian towns by Elis which Herodotus mentions as having happened in his
time, arose, we do not know; the fact seems to indicate a continual yearning
for their original independence, which was still con memorated, down to a much
later period, by the ancient Amphictyony at Samikum in Triphylia in honor of
Poseidon—a common religious festival frequented by all the Triphylian towns and
celebrated by the inhabitants of Makistus, who sent round proclamation of a
formal truce for the holy period. The Lacedaemonians, after the close of the
Peloponnesian war had left them undisputed heads of Greece, formally upheld
the independence of the Triphylian towns against Elis, and seem to have
countenanced their endeavors to attach themselves to the Arcadian aggregate,
which however was never fully accomplished. Their dependence on Elis became
loose and uncertain, but was never wholly shaken off.
CHAPTER
VIII.
I
HAVE described in the last two chapters, as far as our imperfect evidence
permits, how Sparta came into possession both of the southern portion of
Laconia along the coast of the Eurotas down to its mouth, and of the Messenian
territory westward. Her progress towards Arcadia and Argolis is now to be
sketched, so as to conduct her to that position which she occupied during the
reign of Pisistratus at Athens, or about 560-540 BC, a time when she had
reached the maximum of her territorial possessions, and when she was
confessedly the commanding state in Hellas.
The
central region of Peloponnesus, called Arcadia, had never received any
emigrants from without. Its indigenous inhabitants, a strong and hardy race of
mountaineers, the most numerous Hellenic tribe in the peninsula, and the
constant hive for mercenary troops, were among the rudest and poorest of
Greeks, retaining for the longest period their original subdivision into a
number of petty hill-villages, each independent of the other; while the union
of all who bore the Arcadian name, though they had some common sacrifices, such
as the festival of the Lykaean Zeus, of Despoina, daughter of Poseidon and
Demeter, and of Artemis Hymnia, was more loose and ineffective than that of
Greeks generally, either in or out of Peloponnesus. The Arcadian villagers were
usually denominated by the names of regions, coincident with certain ethnical
subdivisions, the Azanes, the Parrhasii, the Maenalii (adjoining Mount
Maenalus), the Eutresii, the Aegytae, the Skiritae, etc. Some considerable
towns, however, there were, aggregations of villages or demes which had been
once autonomous. Of these, the principal were Tegea and Mantinea, bordering on
Laconia and Argolis, Orchomenus, Pheneus, and Stymphalus, towards the
north-east, bordering on Achaia and Phlius, Kleitor and Heraea, westward, where
the country is divided from Elis and Triphylia by the woody mountains of Pholoe
and Erymanthus, and Phigaleia, on the south-western border near to Messenia.
The most powerful of all were Tegea and Mantinea, conterminous towns, nearly
equal in force, dividing between them the cold and high plain of Tripolitza,
and separated by one of those capricious torrents which only escapes through
katabothra. To regulate the efflux of this water was a difficult task,
requiring friendly cooperation of both the towns : and when their frequent
jealousies brought on a quarrel, the more aggressive of the two inundated the
territory of its neighbor as one means of annoyance. The power of Tegea, which
had grown up out of nine constituent townships, originally separate, appears to
have been more ancient than that of its rival; as we may judge from its
splendid heroic pretensions connected with the name of Echemus, and from the
post conceded to its hoplites in joint Peloponnesian armaments, which was
second in distinction only to that of the Lacedaemonians.
If
it be correct, as Strabo asserts, that the incorporation of the town of
Mantinea, out of its five separate demes, was brought about by the Argeians, we
may conjecture that the latter adopted this proceeding as a means of providing
some check upon their powerful neighbors of Tegea. The plain common to Tegea
and Mantinea was bounded to the west by the wintry heights of Maenalus, beyond
which, as far as the boundaries of Laconia, Messenia, and Triphylia, there was
nothing in Arcadia but small and unimportant townships, or villages, without
any considerable town, before the important step taken by Epaminondas in
founding Megalopolis, a short time after the battle of Leuctra. The
mountaineers of these regions, who joined Epaminondas before the battle of
Mantinea, at a time when Mantinea and most of the towns of Arcadia were opposed
to him, were so inferior to the other Greeks in equipment, that they still
carried as their chief weapon, in place of the spear, nothing better than the
ancient club.
CHAPTER
IX.
THE
preceding volume brought down the history of Sparta to the period marked by the
reign of Pisistratus at Athens; at which time she had attained her maximum of
territory, was confessedly the most powerful state in Greece, and enjoyed a
proportionate degree of deference from the rest. I now proceed to touch upon
the three Dorian cities on and near to the Isthmus, Corinth, Sicyon, and
Megara, as they existed at this same period.
It
would have been instructive if we had possessed a faithful record of these
changes of government in some of the more considerable of the Grecian towns;
but in the absence of such evidence we can do little more than collect the
brief sentences of Aristotle and others respecting the causes which produced
them. For as the like change of government was common, near about the same
time, to cities very different in locality, in race of inhabitants, in tastes
and habits, and in wealth, it must partly have depended upon certain general
causes which admit of being assigned and explained.
As
there was no new feeling upon which a perpetual chief could rest his power, so
there was nothing in the circumstances of the community which rendered the
maintenance of such a dignity necessary for visible and effective union: in a
single city, and a small circumjacent community, collective deliberation and
general rules, with temporary and responsible magistrates, were practicable
without difficulty. To maintain an irresponsible king, and then to contrive
accompaniments which shall extract from him the benefits of responsible
government, is in reality a highly complicated system, though, as has been
remarked, we have become familiar with it in modern Europe : the more simple
and obvious change is, to substitute one or more temporary and responsible
magistrates in place of the king himself. Such was the course which affairs
took in Greece. The inferior chiefs, who had originally served as council to
the king, found it possible to supersede him, and to alternate the functions of
administration among themselves; retaining probably the occasional convocation
of the general assembly, as it had existed before, and with as little practical
efficacy. Such was in substance the character of that mutation which occurred
generally throughout the Grecian states, with the exception of Sparta :
kingship was abolished, and an oligarchy took its place, a council deliberating
collectively, deciding general matters by the majority of voices, and selecting
some individuals of their own body as temporary and accountable administrators.
It was always an oligarchy which arose on the defeasance of the heroic kingdom
: the age of democratical movement was yet far distant, and the condition of
the people the general body of freemen was not immediately altered, either for
better or worse, by the revolution; the small number of privileged persons,
among whom the kingly attributes were distributed and put in rotation, being
those nearest in rank to the king himself, perhaps members of the same large
gens with him, and pretending to a common divine or heroic descent. As far as
we can make out, this change seems to have taken place in the natural course of
events and without violence. Sometimes the kingly lineage died out and was not
replaced; sometimes, on the death of a king, his son and successor was
acknowledged only as archon, or perhaps set aside altogether to make room for a
prytanis, or president, out of the men of rank around.
The
first shock which they received, and by which so many of them were subverted,
arose from the usurpers called Despots, who employed the prevalent discontents
both as pretexts and as aids for their own personal ambition, while their very
frequent success seems to imply that such discontents were wide-spread as well
as serious. These despots arose out of the bosom of the oligarchies, but not
all in the same manner. Sometimes the executive magistrate, upon whom the
oligarchy themselves had devolved important administrative powers for a certain
temporary period, became unfaithful to his choosers, and acquired sufficient
ascendency to retain his dignity permanently in spite of them, perhaps even to
transmit it to his son. In other places, and seemingly more often, there arose
that noted character called the Demagogue, of whom historians both ancient and
modern commonly draw so repulsive a picture : a man of energy and ambition,
sometimes even a member of the oligarchy itself, who stood forward as champion
of the grievances and sufferings of the non-privileged Many, acquired their
favor, and employed their strength so effectively as to put down the oligarchy
by force, and constitute himself despot. A third form of despot, some
presumptuous wealthy man, like Kylon at Athens, without even the pretense of
popularity, was occasionally emboldened by the success of similar adventures in
other places to hire a troop of retainers and seize the acropolis; and there
were examples, though rare, of a fourth variety, the lineal descendant of the
ancient kings, who, instead of suffering himself to be restricted or placed
under control by the oligarchy, found means to subjugate them, and to extort by
force an ascendency as great as that which his forefathers had enjoyed by
consent. To these must be added, in several Grecian states, the Aesymnete, or
Dictator, a citizen formally invested with supreme and unresponsible power,
placed in command of the military force, and armed with a standing body-guard,
but only for a time named, and in order to deal with some urgent peril or
ruinous internal dissension. The person thus exalted, always enjoying a large
measure of confidence, and generally a man of ability, was sometimes so
successful, or made himself so essential to the community, that the term of his
office was prolonged, and he became practically despot for life; or, even if
the community were not disposed to concede to him this permanent ascendency, he
was often strong enough to keep it against their will.
The
despots, who in so many towns succeeded and supplanted this oligarchical
government, though they governed on principles usually narrow and selfish, and
often oppressively cruel, “taking no thought”, to use the emphatic words of
Thucydides, “except for their own body and their own family”, yet since they
were not strong enough to crush the Greek mind, imprinted upon it a painful but
improving political lesson, and contributed much to enlarge the range of
experience as well as to determine the subsequent cast of feeling.
They
partly broke down the wall of distinction between the people properly so
called, the general mass of freemen and the oligarchy; indeed, the
demagogue-despots are interesting, as the first evidence of the growing
importance of the people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as
representing the feelings and interests of the people against the governing
few, probably availing himself of some special cases of ill-usage, and taking
pains to be conciliatory and generous in his own personal behavior; and when
the people, by their armed aid, had enabled him to overthrow the existing
rulers, they had thus the satisfaction of seeing their own chief in possession
of the supreme power, but they acquired no political rights and no increased
securities for themselves. What measure of positive advantage they may have
reaped, beyond that of seeing their previous oppressors humiliated, we know too
little to determine; but even the worst of despots was more formidable to the
rich than to the poor, and the latter may perhaps have gained by the change, in
comparative importance, notwithstanding their share in the rigors and exactions
of a government which had no other permanent foundation than naked fear.
A
remark made by Aristotle deserves especial notice here, as illustrating the political
advance and education of the Grecian communities. He draws a marked distinction
between the early demagogue of the seventh and sixth centuries, and the later
demagogue, such as he himself and the generations immediately preceding had
witnessed : the former was a military chief, daring and full of resource, who
took arms at the head of a body of popular insurgents, put down the government
by force, and made himself the master both of those whom he deposed and of
those by whose aid he deposed them; while the latter was a speaker, possessed
of all the talents necessary for moving an audience, but neither inclined to,
nor qualified for, armed attack, accomplishing all his purposes by pacific and
constitutional methods. This valuable change, substituting discussion and the
vote of an assembly in place of an appeal to arms, and procuring for the
pronounced decision of the assembly such an influence over men’s minds as to
render it final and respected even by dissentients, arose from the continued
practical working of democratical institutions.
I
shall have occasion, at a later period of this history, to estimate the value
of that unmeasured obloquy which has been heaped on the Athenian demagogues of
the Peloponnesian war, Cleon and Hyperbolus; but, assuming the whole to be
well-founded, it will not be the less true that these men were a material
improvement on the earlier demagogues, such as Kypselus and Pisistratus, who
employed the armed agency of the people for the purpose of subverting the
established government and acquiring despotic authority for themselves.
The
demagogue was essentially a leader of opposition, who gained his influence by
denouncing the men in real ascendency, and in actual executive functions. Now,
under the early oligarchies, his opposition could be shown only by armed
insurrection, and it conducted him either to personal sovereignty or to
destruction; but the growth of democratical institutions insured both to him
and to his political opponents full liberty of speech, and a paramount assembly
to determine between them; whilst it both limited the range of his ambition,
and set aside the appeal to armed force. The railing demagogue of Athens, at
the time of the Peloponnesian war (even if we accept literally the
representations of his worst enemies), was thus a far less mischievous and
dangerous person than the fighting demagogue of the earlier centuries ; and the
“growth of habits of public speaking”, to use Aristotle’s expression, was the
cause of the difference : the opposition of the tongue was a beneficial
substitute for the opposition of the sword.
The
rise of these despots on the ruins of the previous oligarchies was, in appearance,
a return to the principles of the heroic age, the restoration of a government
of personal will in place of that systematic arrangement known as the City. But
the Greek mind had so far outgrown those early principles, that no new
government founded thereupon could meet with willing acquiescence, except under
some temporary excitement. At first, doubtless, the popularity of the usurper,
combined with the fervor of his partisans and the expulsion or intimidation of
opponents, and farther enhanced by the punishment of rich oppressors, was
sufficient to procure for him obedience; and prudence on his part might prolong
this undisputed rule for a considerable period, perhaps even throughout his
whole life. But Aristotle intimates that these governments, even when they
began well, had a constant tendency to become worse and worse, discontent
manifested itself, and was aggravated rather than repressed by the violence
employed against it, until at length the despot became a prey to mistrustful
and malevolent anxiety, losing any measure of equity or benevolent sympathy
which might once have animated him. If he was fortunate enough to bequeath his
authority to his son, the latter, educated in a corrupt atmosphere and
surrounded by parasites, contracted disposition yet more noxious and unsocial :
his youthful appetites were more ungovernable, while he was deficient in the
prudence and vigor which had been indispensable to the self-accomplished rise
of his father. For such a position, mercenary guards and a fortified acropolis
were the only stay, guards fed at the expense of the citizens, and thus
requiring constant exactions on behalf of that which was nothing better than a
hostile garrison. It was essential to the security of the despot that he should
keep down the spirit of the free people whom he governed; that he should
isolate them from each other, and prevent those meetings and mutual
communications which Grecian cities habitually presented in the school, the
lesche, or the palaestra; that he should strike off the overtopping ears of
corn in the field (to use the Greek locution) or crush the exalted and
enterprising minds. Nay, he had even to a certain extent an interest in
degrading and impoverishing them, or at least in debarring them from the
acquisition either of wealth or leisure : and the extensive constructions
undertaken by Polycrates at Samos, as well as the rich donations of Periander
to the temple at Olympia, are considered by Aristotle to have been extorted by
these despots with the express view of engrossing the time and exhausting the
means of their subjects.
It
is not to be imagined that all were alike cruel or unprincipled; but the
perpetual supremacy of one man and one family had become so offensive to the
jealousy of those who felt themselves to be his equals, and to the general
feeling of the people, that repression and severity were inevitable, whether
originally intended or not. And even if an usurper, having once entered upon
this career of violence, grew sick and averse to its continuance, abdication
only left him in imminent peril, exposed to the vengeance of those whom he had
injured, unless, indeed, he could clothe himself with the mantle of religion,
and stipulate with the people to become priest of some temple and deity; in
which case his new function protected him, just as the tonsure and the
monastery sheltered a dethroned prince in the Middle Ages. Several of the
despots were patrons of music and poetry, and courted the good-will of
contemporary intellectual men by invitation as well as by reward; and there
were some cases, such as that of Pisistratus and his sons at Athens, in which
an attempt was made (analogous to that of Augustus at Rome) to reconcile the
reality of personal omnipotence with a certain respect for preexisting forms.
In such instances the administration, though not unstained by guilt, never
otherwise than unpopular, and carried on by means of foreign mercenaries, was
doubtless practically milder. But cases of this character were rare, and the
maxims usual with Grecian despots were personified in Periander, the Kypselid
of Corinth, a harsh and brutal person, but not destitute either of vigor or
intelligence.
PHILOSOPHERS’
VIEW OF DESPOTS.
The
position of a Grecian despot, as depicted by Plato, by Xenophon and by Aristotle,
and farther sustained by the indications in Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Isocrates, though always coveted by ambitious men, reveals clearly enough
“those wounds and lacerations of mind”, whereby the internal Erinnys avenged
the community upon the usurper who trampled them down. Far from considering
success in usurpation as a justification of the attempt (according to the
theories now prevalent respecting Cromwell and Bonaparte, who are often blamed
because they kept out a legitimate king, but never because they seized an
unauthorized power over the people), these philosophers regard the despot as
among the greatest of criminals : the man who assassinated him was an object of
public honor and reward, and a virtuous Greek would seldom have scrupled to
carry his sword concealed in myrtle branches, like Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
for the execution of the deed. A station which overtopped the restraints and
obligations involved in citizenship, was understood at the same time to forfeit
all title to the common sympathy and protection, so that it was unsafe for the
despot to visit in person those great Pan-Hellenic games in which his own
chariot might perhaps have gained the prize, and in which the theors, or sacred
envoys, whom he sent as representatives of his Hellenic city, appeared with
ostentatious pomp. A government carried on under these unpropitious
circumstances could never be otherwise than short-lived. Though the individual
daring enough to seize it, often found means to preserve it for the term of his
own life, yet the sight of a despot living to old age was rare, and the
transmission of his power to his son still more so.
Amidst
the numerous points of contention in Grecian political morality, this rooted
antipathy to a permanent hereditary ruler stood apart as a sentiment almost
unanimous, in which the thirst for preeminence felt by the wealthy few, and the
love of equal freedom in the bosoms of the many, alike concurred. It first
began among the oligarchies of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, a complete
reversal of that pronounced monarchical sentiment which we now read in the
Iliad; and it was transmitted by them to the democracies, which did not arise
until a later period.
The
conflict between oligarchy and despotism preceded that between oligarchy and
democracy, the Lacedaemonians standing forward actively on both occasions to
uphold the oligarchical principle : a mingled sentiment of fear and repugnance
led them to put down despotism in several cities of Greece during the sixth
century BC, just as, during their contest with Athens in the following century,
they assisted the oligarchical party, wherever they could, to overthrow
democracy. And it was thus that the demagogue-despot of these earlier times,
bringing out the name of the people as a pretext, and the arms of the people as
a means of accomplishment, for his own ambitious designs, served as a preface
to the reality of democracy, which manifested itself at Athens a short time
before the Persian war, as a development of the seed planted by Solon.
EARLY
OLIGARCHIES
As
far as our imperfect information enables us to trace, the early oligarchies of
the Grecian states, against which the first usurping despots contended,
contained in themselves far more repulsive elements of inequality, and more
mischievous barriers between the component parts of the population, than the
oligarchies of later days. What was true of Hellas as an aggregate, was true,
though in a less degree, of each separate community which went to compose that
aggregate : each included a variety of clans, orders, religious brotherhoods,
and local or professional sections, which were very imperfectly cemented
together: and the oligarchy was not, like the government so denominated in
subsequent times, the government of a rich few over the less rich and the poor,
but that of a peculiar order, sometimes a patrician order, over all the
remaining society. In such a case, the subject Many might number opulent and
substantial proprietors as well as the governing Few; but these subject Many
would themselves be broken into different heterogeneous fractions, not heartily
sympathizing with each other, perhaps not intermarrying together, nor partaking
of the same religious rites. The country-population, or villagers, who tilled
the land, seem in these early times to have been held to a painful dependence
on the proprietors who lived in the fortified town, and to have been
distinguished by a dress and habits of their own, which often drew upon them an
unfriendly nickname. These town proprietors seem to have often composed the
governing class in early Grecian states, while their subjects consisted, 1. Of
the dependent cultivators living in the district around, by whom their lands
were tilled. 2. Of a certain number of small self-working proprietors, whose
possessions were too scanty to maintain more than themselves by the labor of
their own hands on their own plot of ground residing either in the country or
the town, as the case might be. 3. Of those who lived in the town, having no
land but exercising handicraft, arts, or commerce.
The
governing proprietors went by the name of the Gamori, or Geomori, according as
the Doric or Ionic dialect might be used in describing them, since they were
found in states belonging to one race as well as to the other. They appear to
have instituted a close order, transmitting their privileges to their children,
but admitting no new members to a participation, for the principle called by
Greek thinkers a timocracy, the appointment of political rights and privileges
according to comparative property, appears to have been little, if at all,
applied in the earlier times, and we know no example of it earlier than Solon.
So that, by the natural multiplication of families and mutation of property,
there would come to be many individual gamori possessing no land at all, and
perhaps worse off than those small freeholders who did not belong to the order;
while some of these latter freeholders, and some of the artisans and traders in
the towns, might at the same time be rising in wealth and importance.
Under
a political classification such as this, of which the repulsive inequality was
aggravated by a rude state of manners, and which had no flexibility to meet the
changes in relative position amongst individual inhabitants, discontent and
outbreaks were unavoidable, and the earliest despot, usually a wealthy man of
the disfranchised class, became champion and leader of the malcontents. However
oppressive his rule might be, at least it was an oppression which bore with
indiscriminate severity upon all the fractions of the population; and when the
hour of reaction against him or against his successor arrived, so that the
common enemy was expelled by the united efforts of all, it was hardly possible
to revive the preexisting system of exclusion and inequality without some
considerable abatements.
CLASSES
OF THE PEOPLE.
As
a general rule, every Greek city-community included in its population,
independent of bought slaves, the three elements above noticed, considerable
land proprietors with rustic dependents, small self-working proprietors, and
town-artisans, the three elements being found everywhere in different
proportions. But the progress of events in Greece, from the seventh century BC
downwards, tended continually to elevate the comparative importance of the two
latter, while in those early days the ascendency of the former was at its
maximum, and altered only to decline. The military force of most of the cities
was at first in the hands of the great proprietors, and formed by them; it
consisted of cavalry, themselves and their retainers, with horses fed upon
their lands. Such was the primitive oligarchical militia, as it was constituted
in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, at Chalcis and Eretria in Euboea, as
well as at Kolophon and other cities in Ionia, and as it continued in Thessaly
down to the fourth century BC; but the gradual rise of the small proprietors
and town-artisans was marked by the substitution of heavy-armed infantry in
place of cavalry; and a farther change not less important took place when the
resistance to Persia led to the great multiplication of Grecian ships of war,
manned by a host of seamen who dwelt congregated in the maritime towns. All the
changes which we are able to trace in the Grecian communities tended to break
up the close and exclusive oligarchies with which our first historical
knowledge commences, and to conduct them either to oligarchies rather more
open, embracing all men of a certain amount of property, or else to
democracies. But the transition in both cases was usually attained through the
interlude of the despot.
In
enumerating the distinct and unharmonious elements of which the population of
these early Grecian communities was made up, we must not forget one farther
element which was to be found in the Dorian states generally, men of Dorian, as
contrasted with men of non-Dorian race. The Dorians were in all cases emigrants
and conquerors, establishing themselves along with and at the expense of the
prior inhabitants. Upon what terms the cohabitation was established, and in
what proportions invaders and invaded came together, we are without
information; and important as this circumstance is in the history of these
Dorian communities, we know it only as a general fact, and are unable to follow
its results in detail. But we see enough to satisfy ourselves that in those
revolutions which overthrew the oligarchies both at Corinth and Sicyon, perhaps
also at Megara, the Dorian and non-Dorian elements of the community came into
conflict more or less direct.
The
despots of Sicyon are the earliest of whom we have any distinct mention : their
dynasty lasted one hundred years, a longer period than any other Grecian
despots known to Aristotle; they are said, moreover, to have governed with mildness
and with much practical respect to the preexisting laws. Orthagoras, the
beginner of the dynasty, raised himself to the position of despot about 676 BC,
subverting the preexisting Dorian oligarchy; but the cause and circumstances of
this revolution are not preserved. He is said to have been originally a cook.
In his line of successors we find mention of Andreas, Myron, Aristonymus, and
Cleisthenes; but we know nothing of any of them until the last, except that
Myron gained a chariot victory at Olympia in the 33d Olympiad (648 BC), and
built, at the same holy place, a thesaurus containing two ornamented alcoves of
copper for the reception of commemorative offerings from himself and his
family.
KLEISTHENES
DESPOT OF SIKYON.
Respecting
Cleisthenes (whose age must be placed between 600-560 BC, but can hardly be
determined accurately) some facts are reported to us highly curious, but of a
nature not altogether easy to follow or verify. We learn from the narrative of
Herodotus that the tribe to which Cleisthenes himself (and of course his
progenitors Orthagoras and the other Orthagoridae also) belonged, was distinct
from the three Dorian tribes, who have been already named in my previous
chapter respecting the Lycurgean constitution at Sparta, the Hylleis, Pamphyli,
and Dymanes. We also learn that these tribes were common to the Sicyonians and
the Argeians; and Cleisthenes, being in a state of bitter hostility with Argos,
tried in several ways to abolish the points of community between the two.
Sicyon originally Dorized by settlers from Argos, was included in the “lot of
Temenus”, or among the towns of the Argeian confederacy : the coherence of this
confederacy had become weaker and weaker, partly without doubt through the
influence of the predecessors of Cleisthenes; but the Argeians may perhaps have
tried to revive it, thus placing themselves in a state of war with the latter,
and inducing him to disconnect, palpably and violently, Sicyon from Argos.
There were two anchors by which the connection held, first, legendary and
religious sympathy; next, the civil rites and denomination current among the
Sicyonian Dorians : both of them were torn up by Cleisthenes. He changed the
names both of the three Dorian tribes, and of that non-Dorian tribe to which he
himself belonged : the last he called by the complimentary title of archelai
(commanders of the people); the first three he styled by the insulting names of
hyatae, oneatae, and choereatae, from the three Greek words signifying a boar,
an ass, and a little pig. The extreme bitterness of this insult can only be
appreciated when we fancy to ourselves the reverence with which the tribes in a
Grecian city regarded the hero from whom their name was borrowed. That these
new denominations, given by Cleisthenes, involved an intentional degradation of
the Dorian tribes as well as an assumption of superiority for his own, is
affirmed by Herodotus, and seems well-deserving of credit.
But
the violence of which Cleisthenes was capable in his anti-Argeian antipathy, is
manifested still more plainly in his proceedings with respect to the hero
Adrastus and to the legendary sentiment of the people. Something has already
been said, in my former volume, about this remarkable incident, which must,
however, be here again briefly noticed. The hero Adrastus, whose chapel
Herodotus himself saw in the Sicyonian agora, was common both to Argos and to
Sicyon, and was the object of special reverence at both : he figures in the
legend as king of Argos, and as the grandson and heir of Polybus, king of
Sicyon. He was the unhappy leader of the two sieges of Thebes, so famous in the
ancient epic, and the Sicyonians listened with delight both to the exploits of
the Argeians against Thebes, as celebrated in the recitations of the epical
rhapsodes, and to the mournful tale of Adrastus and his family misfortunes, as
sung in the tragic chorus. Cleisthenes not only forbade the rhapsodes to come
to Sicyon, but farther resolved to expel Adrastus himself from the country,
such is the literal Greek expression, the hero himself being believed to be
actually present and domiciled among the people. He first applied to the
Delphian oracle for permission to carry this banishment into direct effect, but
the Pythian priestess returned an answer of indignant refusal, “Adrastus is
king of the Sicyonians, but thou art a ruffian”. Thus baffled, he put in
practice a stratagem calculated to induce Adrastus to depart of his own accord.
He send to Thebes to beg that he might be allowed to introduce into Sicyon the
hero Melanippus, and the permission was granted. Now Melanippus was celebrated
in the legend as the puissant champion of Thebes against Adrastus and the
Argeian besiegers, and as having slain both Mekisteus the brother, and Tydeus
the son-in-law, of Adrastus; and he was therefore preeminently odious to the
latter. Cleisthenes brought this anti-national hero into Sicyon, assigning to
him consecrated ground in the prytaneium, or government-house, and even in that
part which was most strongly fortified (for it seems that Adrastus was
conceived as likely to assail and do battle with the intruder); moreover, he
took away both the tragic choruses and the sacrifice from Adrastus, assigning
the former to the god Dionysus, and the latter to Melanippus.
The
reigns of the early Orthagoridae, then, may be considered as marking a predominance,
newly acquired but quietly exercised of the non-Dorians over the Dorians in
Sicyon : the reign of Cleisthenes, as displaying a strong explosion of
antipathy from the former towards the latter; and though this antipathy and the
application of those opprobrious tribe-names in which it was conveyed stand
ascribed to Cleisthenes personally, we may see that the non-Dorians in Sicyon
shared it generally, because these same tribe-names continued to be applied not
only during the reign of that despot, but also for sixty years longer, after
his death. Of course, it is needless to remark that such denominations could
never have been acknowledged or employed among the Dorians themselves. After
the lapse of sixty years from the death of Cleisthenes, the Sicyonians came to
an amicable adjustment of the feud, and placed the tribe-names on a footing
satisfactory to all parties; the old Dorian denominations (Hylleis, Pamphyli,
and Dymanes) were reestablished, and the name of the fourth tribe, or
non-Dorians, was changed from Archelai to Aegialeis, Aegialeus son of Adrastus
being constituted their eponymus. This choice of the son of Adrastus for an
eponymus, seems to show that the worship of Adrastus himself was then revived
in Sicyon, since it existed in the time of Herodotus.
Of
the war which Cleisthenes helped to conduct against Kirrha, for the protection
of the Delphian temple, I shall speak in another place. His death and the
cessation of his dynasty seem to have occurred about 650 BC, as far as the
chronology can be made out. That he was put down by the Spartans, as K. F.
Hermann, O. Müller, and Dr. Thirlwall suppose, can be hardly admitted
consistently with the narrative of Herodotus, who mentions the continuance of
the insulting names imposed by him upon the Dorian tribes for many years after
his death. Now, had the Spartans forcibly interfered for the suppression of his
dynasty, we may reasonably presume that, even if they did not restore the
decided preponderance of the Dorians in Sicyon, they would at least have
rescued the Dorian tribes from this obvious ignominy.
But
it seems doubtful whether Cleisthenes had any son : and the extraordinary
importance attached to the marriage of his daughter, Agariste, whom he bestowed
upon the Athenian Megacles of the great family of Alkmaeonidae, seems rather to
evince that she was an heiress, not to his power, but to his wealth. There can
be no doubt as to the fact of that marriage, from which was born the Athenian
leader Cleisthenes, afterwards the author of the great democratical revolution
at Athens after the expulsion of the Pisistratidae; but the lively and amusing
details with which Herodotus has surrounded it, bear much more the stamp of
romance than of reality. Dressed up, apparently, by some ingenious Athenian, as
a compliment to the Alkmaeonid lineage of his city, which comprised both
Cleisthenes and Pericles, the narrative commemorates a marriage-rivalry between
that lineage and another noble Athenian house, and at the same time gives a
mythical explanation of a phrase seemingly proverbial at Athens “Hippokleides
don’t care”.
Plutarch
numbers Aeschines of Sicyon among the despots put down by Sparta : at what
period this took place, or how it is to be connected with the history of
Cleisthenes as given in Herodotus, we are unable to say.
KYPSELUS
AND HIS DYNASTY AT CORINTH
Contemporaneous
with the Orthagoridae at Sicyon, but beginning a little later and closing
somewhat earlier, we find the despots Kypselus and Periander at Corinth. The
former appears as the subverter of the oligarchy called the Bacchiadae. Of the
manner in which he accomplished his object we find no information : and this
historical blank is inadequately filled up by various religious prognostics and
oracles, foreshadowing the rise, the harsh rule, and the dethronement, after
two generations, of these powerful despots.
According
to an idea deeply seated in the Greek mind, the destruction of a great prince or
of a great power is usually signaled to him by the gods beforehand, though
either through hardness of heart or inadvertence, no heed is taken of the
warning. In reference to Kypselus and the Bacchiadae, we are informed that
Melas, the ancestor of the former, was one of the original settlers at Corinth
who accompanied the first Dorian chief Aletes, and that Aletes was in vain
warned by an oracle not to admit him; again, too, immediately before Kypselus
was born, the Bacchiadae received notice that his mother was about to give
birth to one who would prove their ruin : the dangerous infant escaped
destruction only by a hair’s breadth, being preserved from the intent of his
destroyers by lucky concealment in a chest. Labba, the mother of Kypselus, was
daughter of Amphion, who belonged to the gens, or sept, of the Bacchiadae; but
she was lame, and none of the gens would consent to marry her with that
deformity. Eetion, son of Echekrates, who became her husband, belonged to a
different, yet hardly less distinguished heroic genealogy : he was of the
Lapithae, descended from Kaeneus, and dwelling in the Corinthian deme called
Petra. We see thus that Kypselus was not only a high-born man in the city, but
a Bacchiad by half-birth; both of these circumstances were likely to make
exclusion from the government intolerable to him. He rendered himself highly
popular with the people, and by their aid overthrew and expelled the
Bacchiadae, continuing as despot at Corinth for thirty years until his death
(BC 655-620). According to Aristotle, he maintained throughout life the same
conciliatory behavior by which his power had first been acquired; and his
popularity was so effectually sustained that he had never any occasion for a
body-guard. But the Corinthian oligarchy of the century of Herodotus, whose
tale that historian has embodied in the oration of the Corinthian envoy
Sosikles to the Spartans, gave a very different description, and depicted
Kypselus as a cruel ruler, who banished, robbed, and murdered by wholesale.
PERIANDER
DESPOT AT CORINTH.
His
son and successor Periander, though energetic as a warrior, distinguished as an
encourager of poetry and music, and even numbered by some among the seven wise
men of Greece, is, nevertheless, uniformly represented as oppressive and
inhuman in his treatment of subjects. The revolting stories which are told
respecting his private life, and his relations with his mother and his wife,
may for the most part be regarded as calumnies suggested by odious associations
with his memory; but there seems good reason for imputing to him tyranny of the
worst character, and the sanguinary maxims of precaution so often acted upon by
Grecian despots were traced back in ordinary belief to Periander, and his
contemporary Thrasybulus, despot of Miletus. He maintained a powerful
body-guard, shed much blood, and was exorbitant in his exactions, a part of
which was employed in votive offerings at Olympia; and this munificence to the
gods was considered by Aristotle and others as part of a deliberate system,
with the view of keeping his subjects both hard at work and poor.
On
one occasion, we are told that he invited the women of Corinth to assemble for
the celebration of a religious festival, and then stripped them of their rich
attire and ornaments. By some later writers, he is painted as the stern foe of
everything like luxury and dissolute habits, enforcing industry, compelling
every man to render account of his means of livelihood, and causing the
procuresses of Corinth to be thrown into the sea. Though the general features
of his character, his cruel tyranny no less than his vigor and ability, may be
sufficiently relied on, yet the particular incidents connected with his name
are all extremely dubious : the most credible of all seems to be the tale of
his inexpiable quarrel with his son, and his brutal treatment of many noble
Corcyraean youths, as related in Herodotus.
Periander
is said to have put to death his wife, Melissa, daughter of Prokles, despot of
Epidaurus; and his son Lykophron, informed of this deed, contracted an
incurable antipathy against him. After vainly trying, both by rigor and by
conciliation, to conquer this feeling on the part of his son, Periander sent
him to reside at Corcyra, then dependent upon his rule; but when he found himself
growing old and disabled, he recalled him to Corinth, in order to insure the
continuance of the dynasty. Lykophron still obstinately declined all personal
communication with his father, upon which the latter desired him to come to
Corinth, and engaged himself to go over to Corcyra. So terrified were the
Corcyraeans at the idea of a visit from this formidable old man, that they put
Lykophron to death, a deed which Periander avenged by seizing three hundred
youths of their noblest families, and sending them over to the Lydian king,
Alyattes at Sardis, in order that they might be castrated and made to serve as
eunuchs. The Corinthian vessels in which the youths were dispatched fortunately
touched at Samos in the way; where the Samians and Cnidians, shocked at a
proceeding which outraged all Hellenic sentiment, contrived to rescue the
youths from the miserable fate intended for them, and, after the death of
Periander, sent them back to their native island.
GREAT
POWER OF PERIANDER.
While
we turn with displeasure from the political life of this man, we are at the
same time made acquainted with the great extent of his power, greater than that
which was ever possessed by Corinth after the extinction of his dynasty.
Corcyra, Ambracia, Leukas, and Anaktorium, all Corinthian colonies, but in the
next century independent states, appear in his time dependencies of Corinth.
Ambracia is said to have been under the rule of another despot named Periander,
probably also a Kypselid by birth. It seems, indeed, that the towns of
Anaktorium, Leukas, and Apollonia in the Ionian gulf, were either founded by
the Kypselids, or received reinforcements of Corinthian colonists, during their
dynasty, though Corcyra was established considerably earlier.
The
reign of Periander lasted for forty rears (BC 625-585) : Psammetichus son of
Gordius, who succeeded him, reigned three years, and the Kypselid dynasty is
then said to have closed, after having continued for seventy-three years. In
respect of power, magnificent display, and widespread connections both in Asia
and in Italy, they evidently stood high among the Greeks of their time. Their
offerings consecrated at Olympia excited great admiration, especially the gilt
colossal statue of Zeus, and the large chest of cedar-wood dedicated in the
temple of Here, overlaid with various figures in gold and ivory : the figures
were borrowed from mythical and legendary story, and the chest was a
commemoration both of the name of Kypselus and of the tale of his marvelous
preservation in infancy. If Plutarch is correct, this powerful dynasty is to be
numbered among the despots put down by Sparta; yet such intervention of the
Spartans, granting it to have been matter of fact, can hardly have been known
to Herodotus.
Coincident
in point of lime with the commencement of Periander’s reign at Corinth, we find
Theagenes despot at Megara, who is also said to have acquired his power by
demagogic arts, as well as by violent aggressions against the rich proprietors,
whose cattle he destroyed in their pastures by the side of the river. We are
not told by what previous conduct on the part of the rich this hatred of the
people had been earned, but Theagenes carried the popular feeling completely
along with him, obtained by public vote a body of guards ostensibly for his
personal safety, and employed them to overthrow the oligarchy. But he did not
maintain his power, even for his own life : a second revolution dethroned and
expelled him; on which occasion, after a short interval of temperate
government, the people are said to have renewed in a still more marked way
their antipathies against the rich; banishing some of them with confiscation of
property, intruding into the houses of others with demands for forced
hospitality, and even passing a formal palintokia, or decree, to require from
the rich who had lent money on interest, the refunding of all past interest
paid to them by their debtors. To appreciate correctly such a demand, we must
recollect that the practice of taking interest for money lent was regarded by a
large proportion of early ancient society with feelings of unqualified
reprobation; and it will be seen, when we come to the legislation of Solon, how
much such violent reactionary feeling against the creditor was provoked by the
antecedent working of the harsh law determining his rights.
GOOD
AND BAD AS UNDERSTOOD BY THEOGNIS.
We
hear in general terms of more than one revolution in the government of Megara,
a disorderly democracy, subverted by returning oligarchical exiles, and these
again unable long to maintain themselves; but we are alike uninformed as to
dates and details. And in respect to one of these struggles, we are admitted to
the outpourings of a contemporary and a sufferer, the Megarian poet Theognis.
Unfortunately, his elegiac verses, as we possess them, are in a state so
broken, incoherent, and interpolated, that we make out no distinct conception
of the events which call them forth, still less, can we discover in the verses
of Theognis that strength and peculiarity of pure Dorian feeling, which, since
the publication of O. Müller’s History of the Dorians, it has been the fashion
to look for so extensively. But we see that the poet was connected with an
oligarchy, of birth and not of wealth, which had recently been subverted by the
breaking in of the rustic population previously subject and degraded, that
these subjects were contented to submit to a single-headed despot, in order to
escape from their former rulers, and that Theognis had himself been betrayed by
his own friends and companions, stripped of his property, and exiled, through
the wrong doing “of enemies whose blood he hopes one day to be permitted to
drink”.
The
condition of the subject cultivators previous to this revolution he depicts in
sad colors; they “dwelt without the city, clad in goatskins, and ignorant of
judicial sanctions or laws”, after it, they had become citizens, and their
importance had been immensely enhanced. And thus, according to his impression,
the vile breed has trodden down the noble, the bad have become masters, and the
good are no longer of any account. The bitterness and humiliation which attend
upon poverty, and the undue ascendency which wealth confers even upon the most
worthless of mankind, are among the prominent subjects of his complaint, and his
keen personal feeling on this point would be alone sufficient to show that the
recent revolution had no way overthrown the influence of property; in
contradiction to the opinion of Welcker, who infers without ground, from a
passage of uncertain meaning, that the land of the state had been formally
redivided.
The
Megarian revolution, so far as we apprehend it from Theognis, appears to have
improved materially the condition of the cultivators around the town, and to
have strengthened a certain class whom he considers “the bad rich”, while it
extinguished the privileges of that governing order, to which he himself
belonged, denominated in his language “the good and the virtuous”, with ruinous
effect upon his own individual fortunes.
How
far this governing order was exclusively Dorian, we have no means of
determining. The political change by which Theognis suffered, and the new
despot whom he indicates as either actually installed or nearly impending, must
have come considerably after the despotism of Theagenes; for the life of the
poet seems to fall between 570-490 BC, while Theagenes must have ruled about
630-600 BC. From the unfavorable picture, therefore, which the poet gives as
his own early experience of the condition of the rural cultivators, it is evident
that the despot Theagenes had neither conferred upon them any permanent
benefit, nor given them access to the judicial protection of the city.
It
is thus that the despots of Corinth, Sicyon, and Megara serve as samples of
those revolutionary influences, which towards the beginning of the sixth
century BC, seem to have shaken or overturned the oligarchical governments in
very many cities throughout the Grecian world. There existed a certain sympathy
and alliance between the despots of Corinth and Sicyon : How far such feeling
was farther extended to Megara, we do not know. The latter city seems evidently
to have been more populous and powerful during the seventh and sixth centuries
BC, than we shall afterwards find her throughout the two brilliant centuries of
Grecian history : her colonies, found as far distant as Bithynia and the
Thracian Bosphorus on one side, and as Sicily on the other, argue an extent of
trade as well as naval force once not inferior to Athens : so that we shall be
the less surprised when we approach the life of Solon, to find her in
possession of the island of Salamis, and long maintaining it, at one time with
every promise of triumph, against the entire force of the Athenians.
CHAPTER
10.
IONIC
PORTION OF HELLAS. ATHENS BEFORE SOLON
HAVING
traced in the preceding chapters the scanty stream of Peloponnesian history,
from the first commencement of an authentic chronology in 776 BC to the maximum
of Spartan territorial acquisition, and the general acknowledgment of Spartan
primacy, prior to 547 BC, I proceed to state as much as can be made out
respecting the Ionic portion of Hellas during the same period. This portion comprehends
Athens and Euboea, the Cyclades Islands, and the Ionic cities on the coast of
Asia Minor, with their different colonies.
In
the case of Peloponnesus, we have been enabled to discern something like an
order of real facts in the period alluded to,—Sparta makes great strides, while
Argos falls. In the case of Athens, unfortunately, our materials are less
instructive. The number of historical facts, anterior to the Solonian
legislation, is very few indeed; the interval between 776 BC and 624 BC, the epoch
of Drako’s legislation a short time prior to Kylon’s attempted usurpation,
gives us merely a list of archons, denuded of all incident.
In
compliment to the heroism of Kodrus, who had sacrificed his life for the safety
of his country, we are told that no person after him was permitted to bear the
title of king, his son Medon, and twelve successors, Akastus, Archippus,
Thersippus, Phorhas, Megakles, Diognetus, Pherekles, Ariphron, Thespieus,
Agamestor, Aeschylus, and Alkmaeon, were all archons for life. In the second
year of Alkmaeon (752 BC), the dignity of archon was restricted to a duration
of ten years : and seven of these decennial archons are numbered, Charops,
Aesimides, Kleidikus, Hippomenes, Leokrates, Apsandrus, Eryxias. With Kreon who
succeeded Eryxias, the archonship was not only made annual, but put into
commission and distributed among nine persons and these nine archons, annually
changed, continue throughout all the historical period, interrupted only by the
few intervals of political disturbance and foreign compression. Down to
Kleidikus and Hippomenes (714 BC), the dignity of archon had continued to
belong exclusively to the Medontidae or descendants of Mean and Kodrus : at
that period it was thrown open to all the Eupatrids, or order of nobility in
the state.
Such
is the series of names by which we step down from the level of legend to that
of history. All our historical knowledge of Athens is confined to the period of
the annual archons; which series of eponymous archons, from Kreon downwards, is
perfectly trustworthy. Above 683 BC, the Attic antiquaries have provided us
with a string of names, which we must take as we find them, without being able
either to warrant the whole or to separate the false from the true. There is no
reason to doubt the general fact, that Athens, like so many other communities
of Greece, was in its primitive times governed by an hereditary line of kings,
and that it passed from that form of government into a commonwealth, first
oligarchical, afterwards democratical.
ATHENS
BEFORE SOLON.
We
are in no condition to determine the civil classification and political
constitution of Attica, even at the period of the archonship of Kreon, 683 BC,
when authentic Athenian chronology first commences, much less can we pretend to
any knowledge of the anterior centuries. Great political changes were
introduced first by Solon (about 594 BC), next by Cleisthenes (509 BC),
afterwards by Aristides, Pericles, and Ephialtes, between the Persian and
Peloponnesian wars: so that the old ante-Solonian,— nay, even the real
Solonian, — polity was thus put more and more out of date and out of knowledge.
But all the information which we possess respecting that old polity, is derived
from authors who lived after all or most of these great changes,— and who,
finding no records, nor anything better than current legends, explained the
foretime as well as they could by guesses more or less ingenious, generally
attached to the dominant legendary names. They were sometimes able to found
their conclusions upon religious usages, periodical ceremonies, or common
sacrifices, still subsisting in their own time; and these were doubtless the
best evidences to be found respecting Athenian antiquity, since such practices
often continued unaltered throughout all the political changes. It is in this
way alone that we arrive at some partial knowledge of the ante-Solonian
condition of Attica, though as a whole it still remains dark and
unintelligible, even after the many illustrations of modern commentators.
Philochorus,
writing in the third century before the Christian era, stated that Cecrops had
originally distributed Attica into twelve districts,— Cecropia, Tetrapolis,
Epakria, Dekeleia, Eleusis, Aphidnae, Thorikus, Brauron, Kytherus, Sphettus,
Kephisia, Phalerus, — and that these twelve were consolidated into one
political society by Theseus. This partition does not comprise the Megarid,
which, according to other statements, is represented as united with Attica, and
as having formed part of the distribution made by king Pandion among his four
sons, Nisus, Aegeus, Pallas, and Lykus, — a story as old as Sophocles, at
least. In other accounts, again, a quadruple division is applied to the tribes,
which are stated to have been four in number, beginning from Cecrops, called in
his time Kekropis, Autochthon, Aktaea, and Paralia. Under king Kranaus, these
tribes, we are told, received the names of Kranais, Atthis, Mesogaea, and
Diakria, —under Erichthonius, those of Dias, Athenais, Poseidonias, Hephaestias
: at last, shortly after Erechtheus, they were denominated after the four sons
of Ion (son of Kreusa, daughter of Erechtheus, by Apollo), Geleontes, Hopletes,
Aegikoreis, Argadeis. The four Attic or Ionic tribes, under these
last-mentioned names, continued to form the classification of the citizens
until the revolution of Cleisthenes in 509 BC, by which the ten tribes were
introduced, as we find them down to the period of Macedonian ascendency.
It
is affirmed, and with some etymological plausibility, that the denominations of
these four tribes must originally have had reference to the occupations of
those who bore them,—the Hopletes being the warrior-class, the Aegikoreis
goatherds, the Argadeis artisans, and the Geleontes (Teleontes, or Gedeontes)
cultivators : and hence some authors have ascribed to the ancient inhabitants
of Attica an actual primitive distribution into hereditary professions, or
castes, similar to that which prevailed in India and Egypt. If we should even
grant that such a division into castes might originally have prevailed, it must
have grown obsolete long before the time of Solon: but there seem no sufficient
grounds for believing that it ever did prevail. The names of the tribes may
have been originally borrowed from certain professions, but it does not
necessarily follow that the reality corresponded to this derivation, or that
every individual who belonged to any tribe was a member of the profession from
whence the name had originally been derived. From the etymology of the names,
be it ever so clear, we cannot safely assume the historical reality of a
classification according to professions. And this objection (which would be
weighty, even if the etymology had been clear) becomes irresistible, when we
add that even the etymology is not beyond dispute; that the names themselves
are written with a diversity which cannot be reconciled : and that the four
professions named by Strabo omit the goatherds and include the priests; while
those specified by Plutarch leave out the latter and include the former.
All
that seems certain is, that these were the four ancient Ionic tribes —
analogous to the Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes among the Dorians — which
prevailed not only at Athens, but among several of the Ionic cities derived
from Athens. The Geleontes are mentioned in inscriptions now remaining
belonging to Teos in Ionia, and all the four are named in those of Kyzikus in
the Propontis, which was a foundation from the Ionic Miletus. The four tribes,
and the four names (allowing for some variations of reading), are therefore
historically verified; but neither the time of their introduction nor their
primitive import are ascertainable matters, nor can any faith be put in the
various constructions of the legends of Ion, Erechtheus, and Cecrops, by modern
commentators.
TRIBES,
PHRATRIES, GENTES, ETC.
These
four tribes may be looked at either as religious and social aggregates, in
which capacity each of them comprised three phratries and ninety gentes; or as
political aggregates, in which point of view each included three trittyes and
twelve naukraries. Each phratry contained thirty gentes; each trittys comprised
four naukraries : the total numbers were thus three hundred and sixty gentes
and forty-eight naukraries. Moreover, each gens is said to have contained
thirty heads of families, of whom therefore there would be a total of ten
thousand eight hundred.
Comparing
these two distributions one with the other, we may remark that they are
distinct in their nature and proceed in opposite directions. The trittys and
the naukrary are essentially fractional subdivisions of the tribe, and resting
upon the tribe as their higher unity; the naukrary is a local circumscription, composed
of the naukrars, or principal householders (so the etymology seems to
indicate), who levy in each respective district the quota of public
contributions which belongs to it, and superintend the disbursement,— provide
the military force incumbent upon the district, being for each naukrary two
horsemen and one ship, — and furnish the chief district-officers, the prytanes
of the naukrari. A certain number of foot soldiers, varying according to the
demand, must probably be understood as accompanying these horsemen, but the
quota is not specified, as it was perhaps thought unnecessary to limit
precisely the obligations of any except the wealthier men who served on
horseback, — at a period when oligarchical ascendency was Paramount, and when
the bulk of the people was in a state of comparative subjection. The
forty-eight naukraries are thus a systematic subdivision of the four tribes,
embracing altogether the whole territory, population; contributions, and
military force of Attica, — a subdivision framed exclusively for purposes
connected with the entire state.
But
the phratries and gentes are a distribution completely different from this.
They seem aggregations of small primitive unities into larger; they are
independent of, and do not presuppose, the tribe; they arise separately and
spontaneously, without preconcerted uniformity, and without reference to a
common political purpose; the legislator finds them preexisting, and adapts or
modifies them to answer some national scheme. We must distinguish the general
fact of the classification, and the successive subordination in the scale, of
the families to the gens, of the gentes to the phratry, and of the phratries to
the tribe,— from the precise numerical symmetry with which this subordination
is invested, as we read it, —thirty families to a gens, thirty gentes to a
phratry, three phratries to each tribe. If such nice equality of numbers could
ever have been procured, by legislative constraint operating upon preexistent
natural elements, the proportions could not have been permanently maintained.
But we may reasonably doubt whether it did ever so exist: it appears more like
the fancy of an author who pleased himself by supposing an original systematic
creation in times anterior to records, by multiplying together the number of
days in the month and of months in the year. That every phratry contained an
equal number of gentes, and every gens an equal number of families, is a
supposition hardly admissible without better evidence than we possess. But
apart from this questionable precision of numerical scale, the phratries and
gentes themselves were real, ancient, and durable associations among the
Athenian people, highly important to be understood. The basis of the whole was
the house, hearth, or family, — a number of which, greater or less, composed
the gens, or genos. This gens was therefore a clan, sept, or enlarged, and
partly factitious, brotherhood, bound together by, —
1.
Common religious ceremonies, and exclusive privilege of priesthood, in honor of
the same god, supposed to be the primitive ancestor, and characterized by a
special surname.
2.
By a common burial-place.
3.
By mutual rights of succession to property.
4.
By reciprocal obligations of help, defence, and redress of injuries.
5.
By mutual right and obligation to intermarry in certain determinate cases,
especially where there was an orphan daughter or heiress.
6.
By possession, in some cases at least, of common property, an archon and a
treasurer of their own.
Such
were the rights and obligations characterizing the gentile union: the phratric
union, binding together several gentes, was less intimate, but still included
some mutual rights and obligations of an analogous character, and especially a
communion of particular sacred rites and mutual privileges of prosecution in
the event of a phrator being slain. Each phratry was considered as belonging to
one of the four tribes, and all the phratries of the same tribe enjoyed a
certain periodical communion of sacred rites, under the presidency of a magistrate
called the phylo-basileus, or tribe-king, selected from the Eupatrids; Zeus
Geleon was in this manner the patron-god of the tribe Geleontes. Lastly, all
the four tribes were linked together by the common worship of Apollo Patrons,
as their divine father and guardian; for Apollo was the father of Ion, and the
eponyms of all the four tribes were reputed sons of Ion.
Such
was the primitive religious and social union of the population of Attica in its
gradually ascending scale, —as distinguished from the political union, probably
of later introduction, represented at first by the trittyes and naukraries, and
in after times by the ten Kleisthenean tribes, subdivided into trittyes and
demes. The religious and family bond of aggregation is the earlier of the two:
but the political bond, though beginning later, will be found to acquire
constantly increasing influence throughout the greater part of this history. In
the former, personal relation is the essential and predominant characteristic,—
local relation being subordinate: in the latter, property and residence become
the chief considerations, and the personal element counts only as measured by
these accompaniments. All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger
as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of
the Grecian mind, — a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry,
or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood,
real or supposed. The god, or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their
sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor, to whom they owed their
origin; often through a long list of intermediate names, as in the case of the
Milesian Hekataeus, so often before adverted to. Each family had its own sacred
rites and funereal commemoration of ancestors, celebrated by the master of the
house, to which none but members of the family were admissible : the extinction
of a family, carrying with it the suspension of these religious rites, was held
by the Greeks to be a misfortune, not merely from the loss of the citizens
composing it, but also because the family gods and the manes of deceased
citizens were thus deprived of their honors, and might visit the country with
displeasure. The larger associations, called gens, phratry, tribe, were formed
by an extension of the same principle,—of the family considered as a religious
brotherhood, worshipping some common god or hero with an appropriate surname,
and recognizing him as their joint ancestor; and the festivals Theoenia and
Apaturia— the first Attic, the second common to all the Ionic race, — annually
brought together the members of these phratries and gentes for worship,
festivity, and maintenance of special sympathies; thus strengthening the larger
ties without effacing the smaller.
Such
were the manifestations of Grecian sociality, as we read them in the early
constitution, not merely of Attica, but of other Grecian states besides. To
Aristotle and Dikaearchus, it was an interesting inquiry to trace back all
political society into certain assumed elementary atoms, and to show by what
motives and means the original families, each having its separate mealbin and
fireplace, had been brought together into larger aggregates. But the historian
must accept as an ultimate fact the earliest state of things which his
witnesses make known to him; and in the case now before us, the gentile and
phratric unions are matters into the beginning of which we cannot pretend to
penetrate.
Pollux
—probably from Aristotle’s last work on the Constitutions of Greece — informs
us, distinctly, that the members of the same gens at Athens were not commonly
related by blood, and even without any express testimony we might have
concluded such to be fact: to what extent the gens, at the unknown epoch of its
first formation, was based upon actual relationship, we have no means of
determining, either with regard to the Athenian or the Roman gentes, which were
in all main points analogous. Gentilism is a tie by itself; distinct from the
family ties, but presupposing their existence and extending them by an
artificial analogy, partly founded on religious belief and partly on positive
compact, so as to comprehend strangers in blood. All the members of one gens,
or even of one phratry, believed themselves to be sprung, not, indeed, from the
same grandfather or greatgrandfather, but from the same divine or heroic
ancestor: all the contemporary members of the phratry of Hekataeus had a common
god for their ancestor in the sixteenth degree; and this fundamental belief,
into which the Greek mind passed with so much facility, was adopted and
converted by positive compact into the gentile and phratric principle of union.
It is because such a transfusion, not recognized by Christianity, is at
variance with modern habits of thought, and because we do not readily
understand how such a legal and religious fiction can have sunk deep into the
Greek feelings, that the phratries and gentes appear to us mysterious : but
they are in harmony with all the legendary genealogies which have been set
forth in the preceding volume. Doubtless Niebuhr, in his valuable discussion of
the ancient Roman gentes, is right in supposing that they were not real
families, procreated from any common historical ancestor : but it is not the
less true, though he seems to suppose otherwise, that the idea of the gens
involved the belief in a common first father, divine or heroic, — a genealogy
which we may properly call fabulous, but which was consecrated and accredited
among the members of the gens itself, and served as one important bond of union
between them. And though an analytical mind like Aristotle might discern the
difference between the gens and the family, so as to distinguish the former as
the offspring of some special compact, still, this is no fair test of the
feelings usual among early Greeks; nor is it certain that Aristotle himself,
son of the physician Nikomachus, who belonged to the gens of the Asklepiads,
would have consented to disallow the procreative origin of all these religious
families without any exception. The natural families of course changed from
generation to generation, some extending themselves while others diminished or
died out; but the gens received no alterations, except through the procreation,
extinction, or subdivision of these component families; accordingly, the
relations of the families with the gens were in perpetual course of
fluctuation, and the gentile ancestorial genealogy, adapted as it doubtless was
to the early condition of the gens, became in process of time partially
obsolete and unsuitable. We hear of this genealogy but rarely, because it is
only brought before the public in certain cases preeminent and venerable. But
the humbler gentes had their common rites, and common superhuman ancestor and
genealogy, as well as the more celebrated : the scheme and ideal basis was the
same in all.
Analogies,
borrowed from very different people and parts of the world, prove how readily
these enlarged and factitious family unions assort with the ideas of an early
stage of society. The Highland clan, the Irish sept, the ancient legally
constituted families in Friesland and Dithmarsch, the phis, or phara, among the
Albanians, are examples of a similar practice : and the adoption of prisoners
by the North American Indians, as well as the universal prevalence and efficacy
of the ceremony of adoption in the Grecian and Roman world, exhibit to us a
solemn formality under certain circumstances, originating an union and
affections similar to those of kindred. Of this same nature were the phratries
and gentes at Athens, the curiae and gentes at Rome, but they were peculiarly
modified by the religious imagination of the ancient world, which always traced
back the past time to gods and heroes : and religion thus supplied both the
common genealogy as their basis, and the privileged communion of special sacred
rites as means of commemoration and perpetuity. The gentes, both at Athens and
in other parts of Greece, bore a patronymic name, the stamp of their believed
common paternity : we find the Asklepiadae in many parts of Greece, the
Aleuadae in Thessaly, the Midylidae, Psalychidae, Blepsiadae, Euxenidae, at
Aegina, the Branchidae at Miletus, the Nebridae at Kos, the Iamidae and
Klytiadae at Olympia, the Akestoridae at Argos, — the Kinyradae in Cyprus, —
the Penthilidae at Mitylene, the Talthybiadae at Sparta, not less than the
Kodridae, Eumolpidae, Phytalidae, Lykomedae, Butadae, Euneidae, Hesychidae,
Brytiadae, &c., in Attica. To each of these corresponded a mythical
ancestor more or less known, and passing for the first father as well as the
eponymous hero of the gens, — Kodrus, Eumolpus, Butes, Phytalus, Hesychus,
&c.
GENTES
AND DEMES IN ATTICA.
The
revolution of Cleisthenes in 509 BC abolished the old tribes for civil
purposes, and created ten new tribes, leaving the phratries and gentes
unaltered, but introducing the local distribution according to demes, or
cantons, as the foundation of his new political tribes. A certain number of
demes belonged to each of the ten Cleisthenean tribes (the demes in the same
tribes were not usually contiguous, so that the tribe was not coincident with a
definite circumscription), and the deme, in which every individual was then
registered, continued to be that in which his descendants were also registered.
But the gentes had no connection, as such, with these new tribes, and the
members of the same gens might belong to demes. It deserves to be remarked,
however, that to a certain extent, in the old arrangement of Attica, the
division into gentes coincided with the division into demes; that is, it
happened not unfrequently that the gennetes or members of the same gens lived
in the same canton, so that the name of the gens and the name of the deme was
the same : moreover, it seems that Cleisthenes recognized a certain number of
new demes, to which he gave names derived from some important gens resident
near the spot. It is thus that we are to explain the large number of the
Cleisthenean demes which bear patronymic names.
There
is one remarkable difference between the Roman and the Grecian gens, arising
from the different practice in regard to naming. A Roman patrician bore
habitually three names, —the gentile name, with one name following it to denote
his family, and another preceding it peculiar to himself in that family. But in
Athens, at least after the revolution of Cleisthenes, the gentile name was not
employed : a man was described by his own single name, followed first by the
name of his father, and next by that of the deme to which he belonged,— as
Aeschine’s, son of Atrometus, a Kothókid. Such a difference in the habitual
system of naming, tended to make the gentile tie more present to every one’s
mind at Rome than in the Greek cities.
Before
the pecuniary classification of the Atticans introduced by Solon, the phratries
and gentes, and the trittyes and naukraries, were the only recognized bonds
among them, and the only basis of legal rights and obligations, over and above
the natural family. The gens constituted a close incorporation, both as to
property and as to persons. Until the time of Solon, no man had any power of
testamentary disposition : if he died without children, his gennetes succeeded
to his property, and so they continued to do even after Solon, if he died
intestate. An orphan girl might be claimed in marriage of right by any member
of the gens, the nearest agnates being preferred if she was poor, and he did
not choose to marry her himself, the law of Solon compelled him to provide her
with a dowry proportional to his enrolled scale of property, and to give her
out in marriage to another; and the magnitude of the dowry required to be
given, — large, even as fixed by Solon, and afterwards doubled, — seems a proof
that the lawgiver intended indirectly to enforce actual marriage. If a man was
murdered, first his near relations, next his gennetes and phrators, were both
allowed and required to prosecute the crime at law; his fellow demots, or
inhabitants of the same deme, did not possess the like right of prosecuting.
All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile
and phratric divisions, which are treated throughout as extensions of the
family. It is to be observed that this division is completely independent of
any property qualification, — rich men as well as poor being comprehended in
the same gens. Moreover, the different gentes were very unequal in dignity,
arising chiefly from the religious ceremonies of which each possessed the
hereditary and exclusive administration, and which, being in some cases
considered as of preeminent sanctity in reference to the whole city, were
therefore nationalized. Thus the Eumolpidae and Kerykes, who supplied the
Hierophant, and superintended the mysteries of the Eleusinian Demeter, — and
the Butadae, who furnished the priestess of Athene Polias as well as the priest
of Poseidon Erechtheus in the acropolis, — seem to have been reverenced above
all the other gentes. When the name Butadae was adopted in the Cleisthenean
arrangement as the name of a deme, the holy gens so called adopted the
distinctive denomination of Eteobutadae, or “The True Butadae”.
A
great many of the ancient gentes of Attica are known to us by name; but there
is only one phratry (the Achniadae) whose title has come down to us. These
phratries and gentes probably never at any time included the whole population
of the country, —and the proportion not included in them tended to become
larger and larger, in the times anterior to Cleisthenes, as well as afterwards.
They remained, under his constitution, and throughout the subsequent history,
as religious quasi-families, or corporations, conferring rights and imposing
liabilities which were enforced in the regular dikasteries, but not directly
connected with the citizenship or with political functions : a man might be a
citizen without being enrolled in any gens. The forty-eight naukraries ceased
to exist, for any important purposes, under his constitution : the deme,
instead of the naukrary, became the elementary political division, for military
and financial objects, and the demarch became the working local president, in
place of the chief of the naukrars. The deme, however, was not coincident with
a naukrary, nor the demarch with the previous chief of the naukrary, though
they were analogous and constituted for the like purpose. While the naukraries
had been only forty-eight in number, the demes formed smaller subdivisions,
and, in later times at least, amounted to a hundred and seventy-four.
But
though this early quadruple division into tribes is tolerably intelligible in
itself; there is much difficulty in reconciling it with that severally of
government which we learn to have originally prevailed among the inhabitants of
Attica. From Cecrops down to Theseus, says Thucydides, there were many
different cities in Attica, each of them autonomous and self-governing, with
its own prytaneium and its own archons; and it was only on occasions of some
common danger that these distinct communities took counsel together under the authority
of the Athenian kings, whose city at that time comprised merely the holy rock
of Athene on the plain,— afterwards so conspicuous as the acropolis of the
enlarged Athens,— together with a narrow area under it on the southern side. It
was Theseus, he states, who effected that great revolution whereby the whole of
Attica was consolidated into one government, all the local magistracies and
councils being made to center in the prytaneium and senate of Athens: his
combined sagacity and power enforced upon all the inhabitants of Attica the
necessity of recognizing Athens as the one city in the country, and of
occupying their own abodes simply as constituent portions of Athenian
territory. This important move, which naturally produced a great extension of the
central city, was commemorated throughout the historical times by the Athenians
in the periodical festival called Synoekia, in honor of the goddess Athene.
TWELVE
LOCAL SUBDIVISIONS OF ATTICA
Such
is the account which Thucydide’s gives of the original severalty and subsequent
consolidation of the different portions of Attica. Of the general fact there is
no reason to doubt, though the operative cause assigned by the historian, the
power and sagacity of Theseus, belongs to legend and not to history. Nor can we
pretend to determine either the real steps by which such a change was brought
about, or its date, or the number of portions which went to constitute the
full-grown Athens,— farther enlarged at some early period, though we do not
know when, by voluntary junction of the Boeotian, or semi-Boeotian, town
Eleutherae, situated among the valleys of Kithaeron between Eleusis and
Plataea. It was the standing habit of the population of Attica, even down to
the Peloponnesian war, to reside in their several cantons, where their ancient
festivals and temples yet continued as relics of a state of previous autonomy:
their visits to the city were made only at special times, for purposes
religious or political, and they yet looked upon the country residence as their
real home. How deep-seated this cantonal feeling was among them, we may see by
the fact that it survived the temporary exile forced upon them by the Persian
invasion, and was resumed when the expulsion of that destroying host enabled
them to rebuild their ruined dwellings in Attica.
How
many of the demes recognized by Cleisthenes had originally separate
governments, or in what local aggregates they stood combined, we cannot now
make out; it will be recollected that the city of Athens itself contained several
demes, and Piraeus also formed a deme apart. Some of the twelve divisions,
which Philochorus ascribes to Cecrops, present probable marks of an ancient
substantive existence,— Cecropia, or the region surrounding and including the
city and acropolis; the tetrapolis, composed of Oenoe, Trikorythus,
Probalinthus, and Marathon; Eleusis; Aphidnae and Dekeleia, both distinguished
by their peculiar mythical connection with Sparta and the Dioskuri. But it is
difficult to imagine that Phalerum, which is one of the separate divisions
named by Philochorus, can over have enjoyed an autonomy apart from Athens.
Moreover, we find among some of the domes which Philochorus does not notice,
evidences of standing antipathies, and prohibitions of intermarriage, which might
seem to indicate that these had once been separate little states. Though in
most cases we can infer little from the legends and religious ceremonies which
nearly every deme had peculiar to itself, yet those of Eleusis are so
remarkable, as to establish the probable autonomy of that township down to a
comparatively late period. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, recounting the visit,
of that goddess to Eleusis after the abduction of her daughter, and the first
establishment of the Eleusinian ceremonies, specifies the eponymous prince
Eleusis, and the various chiefs of the place, — Keleos, Triptolemus, Diokles,
and Eumolpus; it also notices the Rharian plain in the neighborhood of Eleusis,
but not the least allusion is made to Athens or to any concern of the Athenians
in the presence or worship of the goddess. There is reason to believe that at
the time when this Hymn was composed, Eleusis was an independent town: what
that time was we have no means of settling, though Voss puts it as low as the
30th Olympiad. And the proof hence derived is so much the more valuable,
because the Hymn to Demeter presents a coloring strictly special and local;
moreover, the story told by Solon to Croesus, respecting Tellus the Athenian,
who perished in battle against the neighboring townsmen of Eleusis, assumes, in
like manner, the independence of the latter in earlier times. Nor is it
unimportant to notice that, even so low as 300 BC, the observant visitor
Dikaearchus professes to detect a difference between the native Athenians and the
Atticans, as well in physiognomy as in character and taste.
In
the history set forth to us of the proceedings of Theseus, no mention is made
of these four Ionic tribes; but another and a totally different distribution of
the people into eupatridae, geomori, and demiurgi, which he is said to have
first introduced, is brought to our notice; Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives
only a double division, — eupatridae and dependent cultivators; corresponding
to his idea of the patricians and clients in early Rome: As far as we can
understand this triple distinction, it seems to be disparate and unconnected
with the four tribes above mentioned. The eupatridae are the wealthy and
powerful men, belonging to the most distinguished families in all the various
gentes, and principally living in the city of Athens, after the consolidation
of Attica: from them are distinguished the middling and lower people, roughly
classified into husbandmen and artisans. To the eupatridae, is ascribed a
religious as well as a political and social ascendency; they are represented as
the source of all authority on matters both sacred and profane; they doubtless
comprised those gentes, such as the Butadae, whose sacred ceremonies were
looked upon with the greatest reverence by the people : and we may conceive
Eumolpus, Keleos, Diokles, etc., as they are described in the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter, in the character of eupatridae of Eleusis. The humbler gentes, and the
humbler members of each gens, would appear in this classification confounded with
that portion of the people who belonged to no gens at all.
SENATE
OF AEROPAGUS
From
these eupatridae exclusively, and doubtless by their selection, the nine annual
archons — probably also the prytanes of the naukrari —were taken. That the
senate of areopagus was formed of members of the same order, we may naturally
presume : the nine archons all passed into it at the expiration of their year
of office, subject only to the condition of having duly passed the test of accountability;
and they remained members for life. These are the only political authorities of
whom we hear in the earliest imperfectly known period of the Athenian
government, after the discontinuance of the king, and the adoption of the
annual change of archons. The senate of areopagus seems to represent the
Homeric council of old men; and there were doubtless, on particular occasions,
general assemblies of the people, with the same formal and passive character as
the Homeric agora,— at least, we shall observe traces of such assent bliss
anterior to the Solonian legislation. Some of the writers of antiquity ascribed
the first establishment of the senate of areopagus to Solon, just as there were
also some who considered Lycurgus as having first brought together the Spartan
gerusia. But there can be little doubt that this is a mistake, and that the
senate of areopagus is a primordial institution, of immemorial antiquity,
though its constitution as well as its functions underwent many changes. It
stood at first alone as a permanent and collegiate authority, originally by the
side of the kings and afterwards by the side of the archons: it would then of
course be known by the title of The Boulé, — The Senate, or council; its
distinctive title, “Senate of Areopagus”, borrowed from the place where its
sittings were held, would not be bestowed until the formation by Solon of the
second senate, or council, from which there was need to discriminate it.
This
seems to explain the reason why it was never mentioned in the ordinances of
Drako, whose silence supplied one argument in favor of the opinion that it did
not exist in his time, and that it was first constituted by Solon. We hear of
the senate of areopagus chiefly as a judicial tribunal, because it acted in
this character constantly throughout Athenian history, and because the orators
have most frequent occasion to allude to its decisions on matters of trial. But
its functions were originally of the widest senatorial character, directive
generally as well as judicial. And although the gradual increase of democracy
at Athens, as will be hereafter explained, both abridged its powers and
contributed still farther comparatively to lower it, by enlarging the direct
working of the people in assembly and judicature, as well as that of the senate
of Five Hundred, which was a permanent adjunct and adminicle of the public
assembly, — yet it seems to have been, even down to the time of Pericles, the
most important body in the state. And after it had been cast into the
background by the political reforms of that great man, we still find it on
particular occasions stepping forward to reassert its ancient powers, and to
assume for the moment that undefined interference which it had enjoyed without
dispute in antiquity. The attachment of the Athenians to their ancient
institutions gave to the senate of areopagus a constant and powerful hold on
their minds, and this feeling was rather strengthened than weakened when it
ceased to be an object of popular jealousy, — when it could no longer be
employed as an auxiliary of oligarchical pretensions.
Of
the nine archons, whose number continued unaltered from 638 BC to the end of
the free democracy, three bore special titles, — the archon eponymus, from
whose name the designation of the year was derived, and who was spoken of as
The Archon; the archon basileus (king), or more frequently, the basileus; and
the polemarch. The remaining six passed by the general title of Thesmothetae.
Of the first three, each possessed exclusive judicial competence in regard to
certain special matters : the thesmothetae were in this respect all on a par,
acting sometimes as a board, sometimes individually. The archon eponymus
determined all disputes relative to the family, the gentile, and the phratric
relations : he was the legal protector of orphans and widows. The archon
basileus, or king archon, enjoyed competence in complaints respecting offences
against the religious sentiment and respecting homicide. The polemarch,
speaking of times anterior to Cleisthenes, was the leader of the military force
and judge in disputes between citizens and non-citizens. Moreover, each of
these three archons had particular religious festivals assigned to him, which
it was his duty to superintend and conduct. The six thesmothetae seem to have
been judges in disputes and complaints, generally, against citizens, saving the
special matters reserved for the cognizance of the first two archons. According
to the proper sense of the word thesmothetae, all the nine archons were
entitled to be so called, though the first three had especial designations of
their own : the word thesmoi, analogous to the themistes of Homer, includes in
its meaning both general laws and particular sentences, —the two ideas not
being yet discriminated, and the general law being conceived only in its
application to some particular case. Drako was the first thesmothet who was
called upon to set down his thesmoi in writing, and thus to invest them
essentially with a character of more or less generality.
In
the later and better-known times of Athenian law, we find these archons
deprived in great measure of their powers of judging and deciding, and
restricted to the task of first hearing the parties and collecting the
evidence, next, of introducing the matter for trial into the appropriate
dikastery, over which they presided. Originally, there was no separation of
powers : the archons both judged and administered, sharing among themselves
those privileges which had once been united in the hands of the king, and
probably accountable at the end of their year of office to the senate of
areopagus. It is probable also, that the functions of that senate, and those of
the prytanes of the naukrars, were of the same double and confused nature. All
of these functionaries belonged to the eupatrids, and all of them doubtless
acted more or less in the narrow interest of their order : moreover, there was
ample room for favoritism, in the way of connivance as well as antipathy, on
the part of the archons. That such was decidedly the case, and that discontent
began to be serious, we may infer from the duty imposed on the thesmothet
Drako, BC 624, to put in writing the thesmoi, or ordinances, so that they might
be “shown publicly”, and known beforehand. He did not meddle with the political
constitution, and in his ordinances Aristotle finds little worthy of remark
except the extreme severity of the punishments awarded: petty thefts, or even
proved idleness of life, being visited with death or disfranchisement.
TRIAL
OF HOMICIDE AT ATHENS.
But
we are not to construe this remark as demonstrating any special inhumanity in
the character of Drako, who was not invested with the large power which Solon
afterwards enjoyed, and cannot be imagined to have imposed upon the community
severe laws of his own invention. Himself of course an eupatrid, he set forth
in writing such ordinances as the eupatrid archons had before been accustomed
to enforce without writing, in the particular cases which came before them; and
the general spirit of penal legislation had become so much milder, during the
two centuries which followed, that these old ordinances appeared to Aristotle
intolerably rigorous. Probably neither Drako, nor the Lokrian Zaleukus, who
somewhat preceded him in date, were more rigorous than the sentiment of the age
: indeed, the few fragments of the Drakonian tables which have reached us, far
from exhibiting indiscriminate cruelty, introduce, for the first time, into the
Athenian law, mitigating distinctions in respect to homicide; founded on the variety
of concomitant circumstances. He is said to have constituted the judges called
Ephetae, fifty-one elders belonging to some respected gens or possessing an
exalted position, who held their sittings for trial of homicide in three
different spots, according to the difference of the cases submitted to them. If
the accused party, admitting the fact, denied any culpable intention and
pleaded accident, the case was tried at the place called the palladium; when
found guilty of accidental homicide, he was condemned to a temporary exile,
unless he could appease the relatives of the deceased, but his property was
left untouched. If, again, admitting the fact, he defended himself by some
valid ground of justification, such as self-defence, or flagrant adultery with
his wife on the part of the deceased, the trial took place on ground
consecrated to Apollo and Artemis, called the Delphinium. A particular spot
called the Phreattys, close to the seashore, was also named for the trial of a
person, who, while under sentence of exile for an unintentional homicide, might
be charged with a second homicide, committed of course without the limits of
the territory : being considered as impure from the effects of the former
sentence, he was not permitted to set foot on the soil, but stood his trial on
a boat hauled close in shore. At the prytaneium, or government-house itself,
sittings were held by the four phylo-basileis, or tribe-kings, to try any
inanimate object (a piece of wood or stone, etc.) which had caused death to any
one, without the proved intervention of a human hand : the wood or stone, when
the fact was verified, was formally cast beyond the border. All these
distinctions of course imply the preliminary investigation of the case, called
anakrisis, by the king-archon, in order that it might be known what was the
issue, and where the sittings of the ephetae were to be held.
So
intimately was the mode of dealing with homicide connected with the religious
feelings of the Athenians, that these old regulations were never formally
abrogated throughout the historical times, and were read engraved on their
column by the contemporaries of Demosthenes. The areopagus continued in
judicial operation, and the ephetae are spoken of as if they were so, even
through the age of Demosthenes; though their functions were tacitly usurped or
narrowed, and their dignity impaired, by the more popular dikasteries
afterwards created. It is in this way that they have become known to us, while
the other Drakonian institutions have perished : but there is much obscurity
respecting them, particularly in regard to the relation between the ephetae and
the areopagites. Indeed, so little was known on the subject, even by the
historical inquirers of Athens, that most of them supposed the council of areopagus
to have received its first origin from Solon : and even Aristotle, though he
contradicts this view, expresses himself in no very positive language. That
judges sat at the areopagus for the trial of homicide, previous to Drako, seems
implied in the arrangements of that lawgiver respecting the ephetae, inasmuch
as he makes no new provision for trying the direct issue of intentional
homicide, which, according to all accounts, fell within the cognizance of the
areopagus: but whether the ephetae and the areopagites were the same persons,
wholly or partially, our information is not sufficient to discover. Before
Drako, there existed no tribunal for trying homicide, except the senate,
sitting at the areopagus, and we may conjecture that there was something connected
with that spot, —legends, ceremonies, or religious feelings, — which compelled
judges there sitting to condemn every man proved guilty of homicide, and
forbade them to take account of extenuating or justifying circumstances. Drako
appointed the ephetae to sit at different places; and these places are so
pointedly marked, and were so unalterably maintained, that we may see in how
peculiar a manner those special issues, of homicide under particular
circumstances, which he assigned to each, were adapted, in Athenian belief, to
the new sacred localities chosen, each having its own distinct ceremonial and
procedure appointed by the gods themselves. That the religious feelings of the
Greeks were associated in the most intimate manner with particular localities,
has already been often remarked; and Drako proceeded agreeably to them in his
arrangements for mitigating the indiscriminate condemnation of every man found
guilty of homicide, which was unavoidable so long as the areopagus remained the
only place of trial. The man who either confessed, or was proved to have shed
the blood of another, could not be acquitted, or condemned to less than the
full penalty (of death or perpetual exile, with confiscation of property) by
the judges on the hill of Ares, whatever excuse he might have to offer: but the
judges at the palladium and del phinium might hear him, and even admit his
plea, without contracting the taint of irreligion. Drako did not directly
meddle with, nor indeed ever mention, the judges sitting in areopagus.
In respect to homicide, then, the Drakonian ordinances were partly a reform of the narrowness, partly a mitigation of the rigor, of the old procedure; and these are all that come down to us, having been preserved unchanged from the religious respect of the Athenians for antiquity on this peculiar matter. The rest of his ordinances are said to have been repealed by Solon, on account of their intolerable severity. So they doubtless appeared, to the Athenians of a later day, who had come to measure offences by a different scale; and even to Solon, who had to calm the wrath of a suffering people in actual mutiny That
under this eupatrid oligarchy and severe legislation the people of Attica were
sufficiently miserable, we shall presently see, when I recount the proceedings
of Solon : but the age of democracy had not yet begun, and the government
received its first shock from the hands of an ambitious eupatrid who aspired to
the despotism. Such was the phase, as has been remarked in the preceding chapter,
through which, during the century now under consideration, a large proportion
of the Grecian governments passed.
CONSPIRACY
OF KYLON.
Kylon,
an Athenian patrician, who superadded to a great family position the personal
celebrity of a victory at Olympia, as runner in the double stadium, conceived
the design of seizing the acropolis and constituting himself despot. Whether
any special event had occurred at home to stimulate this project, we do not
know: but he obtained both encouragement and valuable aid from his
father-in-law Theagenes of Megara, who, by means of his popularity with the
people, had already subverted the Megarian oligarchy, and become despot of his
native city. Previous to so hazardous an attempt, however, Kylon consulted the
Delphian oracle, and was advised by the god in reply, to take the opportunity
of “the greatest festival of Zeus” for seizing the acropolis. Such expressions,
in the natural interpretation put upon them by every Greek, designated the
Olympic games in Peloponnesus, — to Kylon, moreover himself an Olympic victor,
that interpretation came recommended by an apparent peculiar propriety. But
Thucydides, not indifferent to the credit of the oracle, reminds his readers
that no question was asked nor any express direction given, where the intended
“greatest festival of Zeus” was to be sought,—whether in Attica or elsewhere,
—and that the, public festival of the Diasia, celebrated periodically and
solemnly in the neighborhood of Athens, was also denominated the “greatest
festival of Zeus Meilichius”. Probably no such exegetical scruples presented
themselves to any one, until after the miserable failure of the conspiracy;
least of all to Kylon himself, who, at the recurrence of the next ensuing
Olympic games, put himself at the head of a force, partly furnished by
Theagenes, partly composed of his friends at home, and took sudden possession
of the sacred rock of Athens. But the attempt excited general indignation among
the Athenian people, who crowded in from the country to assist the archons and
the prytanes of the naukrari in putting it down. Kylon and his companions were
blockaded in the acropolis, where they soon found themselves in straits for
want of water and provisions; and though many of the Athenians went back to
their homes, a sufficient besieging force was left to reduce the conspirators
to the last extremity. After Kylon himself had escaped by stealth, and several
of his companions had died of hunger, the remainder, renouncing all hope of
defence, sat down as suppliants at the altar. The archon Megakles, on regaining
the citadel, found these suppliants on the point of expiring with hunger on the
sacred ground, and to prevent such a pollution, engaged them to quit the spot
by a promise of sparing their lives. No sooner, however, had they been removed
into profane ground, than the promise was violated and they were put to death:
some even, who, seeing the fate with which they were menaced, contrived to
throw themselves upon the altar of the venerable goddesses, or eumenides, near
the areopagus, received their death-wounds in spite of that inviolable
protection.
Though
the conspiracy was thus put down, and the government upheld, these deplorable
incidents left behind them a long train of calamity, profound religious remorse
mingled with exasperated political antipathies. There still remained, if not a
considerable Kyionian party, at least a large body of persons who resented the
way in which the Kylonians had been put to death, and who became in consequence
bitter enemies of Megakles the archon, and of the great family of the
Alkmaeonidae, to which he belonged. Not only Megakles himself and his personal
assistants were denounced as smitten with a curse, but the taint was supposed
to be transmitted to his descendants, and we shall hereafter find the wound
reopened, not only in the second and third generation, but also two centuries
after the original event. When we see that the impression left by the
proceeding was so very serious, even after the length of time which had elapsed,
we may well believe that it was sufficient, immediately afterwards, to poison
altogether the tranquility of the state. The Alkmaeonids and their partisans
long defied their opponents, resisting any public trial, — and the dissensions
continued without hope of termination, until Solon, then enjoying a lofty
reputation for sagacity and patriotism, as well as for bravery, persuaded them
to submit to judicial cognizance, — at a moment so far distant from the event,
that several of the actors were dead. They were accordingly tried before a
special judicature of three hundred eupatrids, Myron, of the demo Phlyeis,
being their accuser. In defending themselves against the charge that they had
sinned against the reverence due to the gods and the consecrated right of
asylum, they alleged that the Kylonian suppliants, when persuaded to quit the
holy ground, had tied a cord round the statue of the goddess and clung to it
for protection in their march; but on approaching the altar of the eumenides,
the cord accidentally broke, and this critical event, so the accused persons
argued, proved that the goddess had herself withdrawn from them her protecting
band and abandoned them to their fate. Their argument, remarkable as an
illustration of the feelings of the time, was not, however, accepted as an
excuse: they were found guilty, and while such of them as were alive retired
into banishment, those who had already died were disinterred and cast beyond
the borders. Yet their exile, continuing as it did only for a time, was not held
sufficient to expiate the impiety for which they had been condemned. The
Alkmaeonids, one of the most powerful families in Attica, long continued to be
looked upon as a tainted race, and in cases of public calamity were liable, to
be singled out as having by their sacrilege drawn down the judgment of the gods
upon their Countrymen.
Nor
was the banishment of the guilty parties adequate in other respects to restore
tranquility. Not only did pestilential disorders prevail, but the religious
susceptibilities and apprehensions of the Athenian community also remained
deplorably excited: they were oppressed with sorrow and despondency, saw
phantoms and heard supernatural menaces, and felt the curse of the gods upon
them without abatement. In particular, it appears that the minds of the
women—whose religious impulses were recognized generally by the ancient
legislators as requiring watchful control — were thus disturbed and frantic.
The sacrifices offered at Athens did not succeed in dissipating the epidemic, nor
could the prophets at home, though they recognized that special purifications
were required, discover what were the new ceremonies capable of appeasing the
divine wrath. The Delphian oracle directed them to invite a higher spiritual
influence from abroad, and this produced the memorable visit of the Cretan
prophet and sage Epimenides to Athens.
EPIMENIDES
OF CRETE
The
century between 620 and 500 BC appears to have been remarkable for the first
diffusion and potent influence of distinct religious brotherhoods, mystic
rites, and expiatory ceremonies, none of which, as I have remarked in a former
chapter, find any recognition in the Homeric epic. To this age belong Thaletas,
Aristeas, Abaris, Pythagoras, Onomakritus, and the earliest provable agency of
the Orphic sect. Of the class of men here noticed, Epimenides, a native of
Phaestus or Knossos in Crete, was one of the most celebrated,— and the old
legendary connection between Athens and Crete, which shows itself in the tales
of Theseus and Minos, is here again manifested in the recourse which the
Athenians had to this island to supply their spiritual need. Epimenides seems
to have been connected with the worship of the Cretan Zeus, in whose favor he
stood so high as to receive the denomination of the new Kurete—the Kurete
having been the primitive ministers and organizers of that worship. He was
said to be the son of the nymph Balte; to be supplied by the nymphs with
constant food, since he was never seen to eat; to have fallen asleep in his
youth in a cave, and to have continued in this state without interruption for
fifty-seven years; though some asserted that he remained all this time a
wanderer in the mountains, collecting and studying medicinal botany in the
vocation of an Iatromantis, or leech and prophet combined. Such narratives mark
the idea entertained by antiquity of Epimenides, the Purifier, who was now
called in to heal both the epidemic and the mental affliction prevalent among
the Athenian people, in the same manner as his countryman and contemporary
Thaletas had been, a few years before, invited to Sparta to appease a
pestilence by the effect of his music and religious hymns. The favor of
Epimenides with the gods, his knowledge of propitiatory ceremonies, and his
power of working upon the religious feeling, was completely successful in
restoring both health and mental tranquility at Athens. He is said to have turned
out some black and white sheep on the areopagus, directing attendants to follow
and watch them, and to erect new altars to the appropriate local deities on the
spots where the animals lay down. He founded new chapels and established
various lustral ceremonies; and more especially, he regulated the worship paid
by the women, in such a manner as to calm the violent impulses which had before
agitated them. We know hardly anything of the details of his proceeding, but
the general fact of his visit, and the salutary effects produced in removing
the religious despondency which oppressed the Athenians, are well attested:
consoling assurances and new ritual precepts, from the lips of a person
supposed to stand high in the favor of Zeus, were the remedy which this unhappy
disorder required. Moreover, Epimenides had the prudence to associate himself
with Solon, and while he thus doubtless obtained much valuable advice, he
assisted indirectly in exalting the reputation of Solon himself, whose career
of constitutional reform was now fast approaching. He remained long enough at
Athens to restore completely a more comfortable tone of religious feeling, and
then departed, carrying with him universal gratitude and admiration, but
refusing all other reward, except a branch from the sacred olive-tree in the
acropolis. His life is said to have been prolonged to the unusual period of one
hundred and fifty-four years, according to a statement which was current during
the time of his younger contemporary Xenophanes of Kolophon; and the Cretans
even ventured to affirm that he lived three hundred years. They extolled him
not merely as a sage and a spiritual purifier, but also as a poet,—very long
compositions on religious and mythical subjects being ascribed to him;
according to some accounts, they even worshipped him as a god. Both Plato and
Cicero considered Epimenides in the same light in which he was regarded by his
contemporaries, as a prophet divinely inspired, and foretelling the future
under fits of temporary ecstasy : but according to Aristotle, Epimenides
himself professed to have received from the gods no higher gift than that of
divining the unknown phenomena of the past.
The
religious mission of Epimenides to Athens, and its efficacious as well as
healing influence on the public mind, deserve notice as characteristics of the
age in which they occurred. If we transport ourselves two centuries forward, to
the Peloponnesian war, when rational influences and positive habits of thought
had acquired a durable hold upon the superior minds, and when practical
discussions on political and judicial matters were familiar to every Athenian
citizen, no such uncontrollable religious misery could well have subdued the
entire public; and if it had, no living man could have drawn to himself such
universal veneration as to be capable of effecting a cure. Plato, admitting the
real healing influence of rites and ceremonies, fully believed in Epimenides as
an inspired prophet during the past; but towards those who preferred claims to
supernatural power in his own day, he was not so easy of faith. He, as well as
Euripides and Theophrastus, treated with indifference, and even with contempt,
the orpheotelestae of the later times, who advertised themselves as possessing
the same patent knowledge of ceremonial rites, and the same means of guiding
the will of the gods, as Epimenides had wielded before them. These
orpheotelestae unquestionably numbered a considerable tribe of believers, and
speculated with great effect, as well as with profit to themselves, upon the
timorous consciences of rich men : but they enjoyed no respect with the general
public, or with those to whose authority the public habitually looked up.
Degenerate as they were, however, they were the legitimate representatives of
the prophet and purifier from Knossos, to whose presence the Athenians had been
so much indebted two centuries before: and their altered position was owing
less to any falling off in themselves, than to an improvement in the mass upon
whom they sought to operate. Had Epimenides himself come to Athens in those
days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative to all public
purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phye, clothed and equipped as the
goddess Athene, which had succeeded so completely in the days of Peisistratus,—
a stratagem which even Herodotus treats as incredibly absurd, although, a
century before his time, both the city of Athens and the demes of Attica had
obeyed, as a divine mandate, the orders of this magnificent and stately woman,
to restore Peisistratus.
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