ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF
SALAMIS
“Here, stranger, seek no tyrant. This our state is ruled Not of
one man. ’Tis free. The people year by year As kings succeed
each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s
poor has equal share.”
EURIPIDES, _Supplices_.
Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its
art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from
Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a
disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian
columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis,
embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and
plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but
reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The
atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and
form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and
space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description
of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold
and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic
and so calm, each member of every group is at once so individual and so
finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the
harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine
the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.”
In making such a study of this city as is demanded for turning the quick
appreciation of its external charm into the more permanent possession of
its underlying qualities, we must submit to some analysis of the great
moments in its history and its literature.
When Athenian literature begins with Solon, in the sixth century, B. C.,
the Greeks have emerged from a dim antiquity. In the two preceding
centuries, the mother cities of Achæan and Dorian Greece had been
sending out colonists east and west, not merely in a spirit of Phœnician
commercialism, but also with adventuresome, intellectual curiosity. The
heroes of their earliest traditional literature sailed with them.
Associations half slumbering in the popular consciousness thrilled them
as they steered again over the course of the Argo or as they followed
once more the later track of Odysseus to the west, and in lower Italy
and Sicily reëstablished Great Hellas as an integral part of Hellenic
civilization.
In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but
it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was
born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths
of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia Minor
had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently
to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting
to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens
meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of
the sea.
The Athenians, more than most Greeks, could boast that they were
autochthonous, earth-born children of their own soil. Isocrates in his
“Panegyricus” makes proudly the claim: “We dwell in the land not after
expelling others, nor even finding it a desert, nor even coming as a
mixed breed collected from many nations, but ... sprung from the soil
and able to address our city by the same names as we give to the closest
relations.” The prehistoric Greek invaders of Attica had fused with
rather than driven out the former occupants, the Pelasgians or whoever
they may have been. Erichthonius, Erechtheus, or Poseidon, “one form for
many names,” was born of Earth but mothered on Athena, and it would have
been as futile as it was impious to challenge the pedigree of the
Erechtheidæ. Erechtheus-Poseidon might coil forever undisturbed beneath
the sheltering shield of the Virgin-goddess. Cecrops, too, the mythical
king and Attic hero, owned a perpetual ground-rent on the Acropolis and
the Athenians were Cecropidæ. They were also the “Sons of Hephæstus,”
who was often associated with Athena, a partnership of the heavenly
wisdom with the arts and crafts. An ancient festival of the whole city,
held in honour of Athena, became afterwards specialized among the
artisans, under the name of Chalkeia, in honour of Hephæstus; and the
god may yet win back as his own “Hephæsteum” the so-called “Theseum” on
the hill above the classic market-place.
The age of the heroes merges with that of the Kings. Theseus moves, a
grandiose figure, through art and literature. Thus when the “Hill party”
of Pisistratus became preëminent, Theseus, the aristocrat, came into
prominence in vase painting. He appears in all the forms of didactic
sculpture, and the “City of Theseus,” the older Athens, is recalled
again in the Roman renaissance by the Arch of Hadrian. This still offers
to the modern pilgrim, on the west side facing the Acropolis, the
inscription: “This is the Athens of Theseus, the old city,” and on the
other, facing the Olympieum of Hadrian: “This is the City of Hadrian and
not the City of Theseus.” Thus meet the old and the new, with classic
Athens ignored.
To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that
the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since
overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time
went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although
the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the
person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia
or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic
demesmen. All Attica was Athens. All its free inhabitants, class by
class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an
aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the
laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the
people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only
served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of
irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the
tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the
returning despot.
The picture of the old city of Theseus is vague to our imagination, but
the Athens of Solon’s administration emerges somewhat more clearly as we
take away, one after another, some of the prominent features of the
later Athens that we know best. The Acropolis lacked the Propylæa, the
Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, its barrenness being relieved by little
save the “old” temple of Athena Polias. Not only the Dionysiac theatre,
but even its earliest forerunner were things of the future. The drama
was yet unborn. The Market-place of later centuries, adorned with
statues and stoas, was represented by a simpler centre of civic life at
the west end of the Acropolis, where were the public buildings of
administration, the communal winepress of the Lenæum and the old
Callirrhoë spring.
Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still
greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the
picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order
to violate with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the
question of conquering Salamis, he cried:—
“Forward to Salamis, forward, to fight for the isle that we yearn for,
Thrusting dishonour aside, casting off grievous disgrace.”
The Athenians were aroused. They went with him across the narrow strait,
and Salamis, the “lovely island,” thenceforward was their own, destined
to serve them as refuge in their hour of greatest need. Solon used his
popularity, thus acquired, in no self-seeking way. Chosen archon and
virtual dictator he moulded proletariat and noble to his own noble will.
Again and again his verse reënforces his pedestrian arguments. “The
black earth is enslaved,” he says, and presently the mortgage stones,
dotted over the farms, are mere cancelled records. Many such, of a later
date, have been found. The “Penurious Man” in Theophrastus “inspects his
boundary stones daily to make sure that they are in place.” Solon
proudly appeals to the constituency of the future to justify his laws:—
“Be witness unto this before the bar of time,
Thou greatest Mother of the gods Olympian—
Aye witness best—black Earth, whose mortgage border-stones
Fixed here and there on every side, I took away,
And she who erst was slave is set at liberty.”
Again, even more proudly, he says:—
“I set myself as border stone inscribed betwixt
Contending factions.”
The citizens, he says, by their folly and their greed would themselves
destroy the city, but Athena, the Watcher, is there upon the hill:—
“Never by Zeus’s decree nor by will of the blessed immortals
Ruin shall come to our town, causing our city to fall.
Never, while yonder that great-hearted Guardian, sired majestic,
Pallas Athena above stretches her sheltering hands.”
In the Athenian memory as well as in these vigorous elegiacs he embedded
the epithet of “Guardian” (ἐπίσκοπος) that would in after days lend
significance to the great bronze statue, overlooking the city and sea,
and would remain after Macedon had come and gone as a semi-official
title of the goddess.
Legend tells us that Solon in his old age, when the tyranny had now
come, piled his armour in front of his house door—probably near the
Market-place of Pisistratus—and turned from politics to a serene
enjoyment of the pleasures of ear and eye and intellect to which he had,
indeed, never been a stranger. His life had always been consistent with
his own epigram:—
“And still as I age, learning many a lesson.”
Like many of his countrymen subsequently, he combined active
participation in public affairs with the character of poet and writer.
In literature, as in political life, he had his preferences. Perhaps
nothing more distinctly places him in the old Athens than his
disapprobation of the Tragedy that was born in his later years. He is
said to have taken Thespis to task for the falsehood of the drama. On
the other hand the direct sincerity of lyric poetry accorded with his
manner of thought. From Ælian’s variegated patch-work the story drifts
down to us that to Solon, seated one day over his wine, his nephew sang
one of Sappho’s songs. Solon at once commanded the boy to teach him the
song, and when a bystander asked why he was so eager, he replied: “When
I have learned it, then that I may die!”
To subsequent generations he seemed the embodiment of wisdom over
against excess, and readers of Herodotus who were not troubled by the
chronological difficulties must have especially enjoyed the story of his
interview with Crœsus and his reproof of the rich king for his
exultation in his wealth. The famous apothegm, “One must wait for the
end before praising,” was repeated in one form or another by Simonides,
Æschylus, and Sophocles. Of Solon’s own end a dramatic story is
mentioned by Plutarch, although he refuses to lend it his credence:
“That his ashes, after his body was burned, were scattered about the
island of Salamis is a story absolutely mythical and incredible by
reason of its outlandishness. It stands recorded, however, both by other
noteworthy men and by Aristotle the philosopher.”
After years of varying fortune Pisistratus finally (540 or 539 B. C.)
established himself as Tyrant of Athens. But tyranny at Athens was never
more than an episode. The inbred spirit of freedom must be reckoned
with. Pisistratus respected popular rights, and after the accession of
his sons the suspicion of a tendency to introduce such measures as were
acquiesced in, for example, at Corinth, brought death to the one and
subsequent banishment to the other. But the result of the tyranny of
Pisistratus was beneficent. Under him and his sons the city began to
take on both externally and intellectually more of the characteristics
which are in mind when we think of Athens. Architect, sculptor, and
painter began to contribute enriching details to the Acropolis,
including the first Propylæa. Engineers skilfully brought water from
near and far into the old Market-place, and in front of the town spring
of Callirrhoë Pisistratus built the spacious “Nine Spouts”—the
Enneakrounos—where women filled their water-jars and stayed to gossip.
The newer market-place, to the north of the Areopagus, was developed. A
great Olympieum was begun on the site of the present columns, which date
from Hadrian’s time. Gymnasium life became important and the Academy was
made ready as if in anticipation of its great future. Doubtless within
this lovely grove many a youth of the period might have served as a
model for Aristophanes’s fifth-century picture of palæstra life in the
good old times:—
“But you will go enter as Academe sprinter and under the olives contend
With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed with some excellent
rival and friend:
All fragrant with yew and leisure time too, and the leaf which the white
poplars fling
When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the beautiful
season of spring.”[5]
Footnote 5:
_Clouds_, 992, translation (modified) by Rogers.
A distinctive part of Pisistratus’s policy was the encouragement of
country life and of agriculture. All over the Attic plain the olive
orchards were cultivated, to become an important source of revenue to
the Athenian state and immeasurably to enhance the charm of its
environment. Herodotus recounts that a tall, handsome woman named Phye,
from the hill country, had impersonated Athena come down in mortal guise
and, riding in a chariot with Pisistratus, had lent divine sanction to
his original _coup d’état_. The Attic demesmen might still more easily
accept this new measure as a command transmitted from Athena who had
herself first created the olive tree and taught its culture on the
Acropolis:—
“A heaven-sent grey-gleaming crown for her Athens,
Her city of light.”
Aristotle, in his “Constitution of Athens,” lays great stress on the
effort of Pisistratus to develop the prosperity of the farmers. He tells
how Pisistratus, walking in the country and seeing one digging among the
rocks, asked what sort of a crop grew there, and the man, unaware that
it was the Tyrant, replied: “Such a crop of evils and pain that it were
right that Pisistratus should have his tithe of them.” Pisistratus,
pleased both with his industry and his free speech, relieved the farmer
of his burdens. And so, Aristotle continues, he was not troubled during
his reign but could secure peace and quiet and “the word was often on
the lips of many that the tyranny of Pisistratus was a regular life
under Kronos,” or Golden Age.
Pisistratus did much toward securing for Athens the intellectual
hegemony of Greece. Whatever the Panathenæa, inherited from Theseus (or
even from Erichthonius), may have been previously, the Greater
Panathenaic festival was now solemnized every four years with more
magnificence and became at Athens the necessary and dignified offset to
the quadrennial games at Olympia and Delphi. Games, sacrifices, and
amusements of varied character were added from time to time. Horse,
chariot, torch, and foot races were included. Visitors came from abroad.
But neither local nor intercantonal athletics gave the keynote.
Rhapsodists recited Homer, and flute, cithara, and song were heard.
Everything tended to focus itself upon the worship of Athena, who was
the Athenian consciousness glorified and made objective.
Under Pisistratus or his sons (or, less probably, under Solon) Homer was
recalled from Ionia and domiciled on the mainland. Whatever may be the
details about a formal recension and publication at this time,
recitations from Homer were made an integral part of the public
festivals, and Athens became the clearing-house for an intellectual
currency good throughout all Hellas. The name “Pan-Athenian,” passing
even beyond Pan-Ionian, was to be equated with a culture that was
Pan-Hellenic. This befitted the epic breadth transcending mere local
traditions. “The Iliad was not composed for any king or tyrant. If it is
aristocratic, its appeal is not to any given set of noble families, but
to all brave men of Greek legend.” And the spirit in which this epic
trust was administered tallies well with the restraint of Pisistratus in
respecting, as far as possible, the laws of Solon. If there were Attic
interpolations in the poems, they do not glorify his house. In the
“Catalogue of the Ships” the Athenians received honourable but not
excessive mention. The brief reference to the ships from Salamis, as
ranged under the command of the Athenians, would seem to suggest the
recent conquest of the island under Solon or even the suspicion that
Solon had himself interpolated it beforehand as proof of the ancient
suzerainty of Athens:—
“Twelve ships from Salamis Aias commanded. He brought them and placed
them there where Athenian squadrons were marshalled.”
But perhaps the easiest solution of all questions in regard to
interpolations in the Homeric poems is to pin our uncritical faith to
the authenticity of Lucian’s interview with Homer in Elysium: “I went up
to Homer the poet, when we were both at leisure, and after making other
inquiries ... I asked him further about the rejected verses, whether
they were written by him. And he declared that he wrote them all!”
The greatest and most characteristically Attic contribution of the sixth
century was the fostering of the drama, in connection with the worship
of Dionysus. This Thracian divinity, on his journey southwards, had been
welcomed in the villages of Attica, where vineyard and winepress awaited
his blessing. The Pisistratidæ, who have been called “the providential
defenders of the faith of Dionysus” against the aristocratic disdain
felt for a peasant’s god, invited him to a new temple in the Lenæa—the
Marshes—below the Acropolis, where, at the time of the winter solstice,
the Feast of the Winepress once more identified the capital with the
country it had outgrown. But Pisistratus went further in establishing
the City Dionysia, a spring festival destined to a long life and
splendid renown. Instead of private performances at rural feasts, the
drama now became part of the official administration of the city. The
first dated performance of a play by Thespis was in 534 B. C. This may
have been on the occasion of the opening of the “orchestra,” north of
the Areopagus, near the new Market-place, where the spectators
henceforth found seats on wooden scaffolding until the more permanent
theatre was erected south of the Acropolis. Athens was now ready for the
great dramatists. The wine-god looms up as a rival to Athena, as may be
seen by his ubiquity on the vase paintings and his dominant presence in
the Attic calendar. “In the actual religious ritual Dionysus became of
more importance at Athens than Zeus, Apollo, or even Athena.”
Thus in diverse ways does Pisistratus present a fair claim for having
made Athens greater, in steady progression from the wise policies of
Solon. Solon himself must often have feared an excess of luxury and
splendour. No one of his generation could have dreamed of a regretful
modern desire to have seen, because of its charming simplicity, “the
little earlier Athens of Pisistratus.” But many a Periclean Greek may
have forestalled it. Aristophanes was forever seeking for a revival of—
“the precepts which taught
The heroes of old to be hardy and bold, and the men who at Marathon
fought!”[6]
These were the precepts which taught Æschylus. We are apt to think of
him only in his maturity, a fighter at Marathon, a seasoned warrior at
Salamis, a poet of the post-Persian epoch. But his childhood fell in the
time of the Pisistratidæ, and it is by no means idle to speculate on the
influences which then encompassed him. The memory of Solon’s ethics and
vocabulary he carried with him through life. Foreign poets also,
attracted to Athens by the sons of Pisistratus, must have seemed to him
important personages. Two of the “ten” lyric poets were at this time
identified with the city. Anacreon, when Polycrates, the tyrant of
Samos, had no longer a home to offer him, was brought in triumph to
Athens in a fifty-oared galley sent by Hipparchus. And Simonides of
Ceos, who was to be the chief mouthpiece of liberated Greece, was well
content to enjoy the patronage of the despot.
Footnote 6:
_Clouds_, 973, translated by Rogers.
Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been
assassinated earlier, at one of the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants
at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their
memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed
as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues
were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of
their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the
Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five
he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating
their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for
centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his
comic stock in trade.
“In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
When the twain on Athena’s day
Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.
“For aye shall your fame in the land be told,
Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman’s town.”[7]
Footnote 7:
Callistratus, translated by Conington. For the complete song see
Symonds, “Greek Poets,” chap. x.
With the victory at Marathon Athens came of age. The struggle between
Orientalism and Hellenism was just begun. Salamis and Platæa and
Eurymedon were yet to be. But the Greeks with a divine improvidence
discounted their ultimate success. Their twenty years of democratic
education made impossible any compromise with despotism. Whatever
necessary vagueness may still have existed at Athens in the attempted
fusion of polytheistic tradition with the awakening conception of
monotheism, there now stands forth in a law-abiding conscience the
barrier of Law, clear and bold as the outline of Pentelicus above
Marathon. The contemporary Athenian feeling is reflected by Æschylus in
the answer of the old Persian men to Darius’s widowed queen, who has
asked about the Greeks:—
ATOSSA
“‘And who’s their herdsman? Who the people’s overlord?’
CHORUS
‘There’s no man’s name they bear as slaves and underlings.’”
At this time another country god was naturalized at Athens, a friend and
comrade of Dionysus in secret mountain places, but not intruding upon
him in the formalities of city worship. Pan had helped the Athenians at
Marathon and had stopped the swift courier Pheidippides, sent to hurry
reënforcements from Sparta, and bidden him ask his people “why they made
no account of him, although he had been useful to them many times
already and would be again.” The Athenians at once “dedicated a
sanctuary to Pan under the brow of the Acropolis and in consequence of
this message they propitiated him by yearly sacrifices and a torch
race.” His cave at the northwest end of the Acropolis still exists to
convince the sceptic. He lived on here, overlooking the Areopagus and
Agora, to come forth, “horned, panpipe in hand, with his shaggy legs,”
and greet the lady Justice sent by Zeus to investigate the charlatan
philosophers of Athens in Lucian’s day. Pan gives Justice a fluent
account of their frailties and is about to add certain details, when her
sense of propriety cuts him short. “If I must,” says he, “tell the truth
in full, without holding anything back—for I live, as you see, where I
can take a bird’s-eye view—many’s the time I’ve seen scores of them,
well along towards evening—” (_Justice_) “Stop there, Pan!”
While Pan was accumulating details of the “Private Life of the
Athenians,” as they passed and repassed before his grotto, the public
energy of the city was transmuted into enduring memorials above him on
the calm heights of the Acropolis.