CHAPTER I.

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MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

OF

ANCIENT GREECE.

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VOL. I.

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_Price_ 31_s._ 6_d._

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NOTICE.

The Proprietors of CIRCULATING LIBRARIES in all parts of the country are

compelled by the new Copyright Act to discontinue purchasing and lending

out a single copy of a foreign edition of an English work. _The mere

having it in their possession ticketed and marked as a library book_,

exposes them to

A PENALTY OF TEN POUNDS.

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Several clauses of the new Copyright Act award severe punishments for

introducing and exposing for sale or hire pirated editions of English

works, both in Great Britain and in the Colonies. The Government

absolutely prohibits the introduction of these nefarious reprints

through the Custom-houses on any pretence whatever. The public should be

made fully and perfectly aware that, in consequence of a Treasury Order

to that effect, even single copies of works so pirated, brought in a

traveller’s baggage, which were formerly admissible, are so no longer,

_unless they be cut, the name written in them, and, moreover, so_ WORN

_and used as to render them unfit for sale_; and that if afterwards they

are found in a Circulating Library, the Proprietor is subject to a

severe penalty. Two clauses of the new Customs’ Act, moreover, exclude

them altogether after the commencement of the next financial year. These

measures will, no doubt, be rigorously enforced both at home and in the

Colonies.

[Illustration: TOPOGRAPHY OF SPARTA.]

THE HISTORY

OF THE

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

OF

ANCIENT GREECE.

BY J. A. ST. JOHN.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

=Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.=

1842.

LONDON:

_PRINTED BY S. AND J. BENTLEY, WILSON, AND FLEY,_

Bangor House, Shoe Lane.

DEDICATION.

---

TO BAYLE ST. JOHN.

I DEDICATE the following work to you, my dear Son, as a token of my

gratitude for the cheerful patience with which you have aided me in

completing it, despite the calamity that overtook me in the midst of my

labours. Whatever may be the fate of the publication it will always

recall to me some of the happiest hours of my life, rendered so chiefly

by beholding the contented serenity with which you subdued the

irksomeness of studies so little suited to your years. At length,

however, you are delivered from lexicographers and scholiasts. The final

page has been written, the last proof read. I escape from a task

commenced before you were born, and you from a four years’

apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of authorship. All that now

remains is to watch the reception which the fruit of our toil may meet

with in the world. It has been produced and has grown up under very

peculiar circumstances. Whithersoever we have travelled, the wrecks of

Grecian literature have accompanied us, and the studies to which these

pages owe their existence have been pursued under the influence of

almost every climate in Europe. Nay, if I pushed my researches still

further and visited the portion of Africa commonly supposed to have been

the cradle of Hellenic civilisation, it was solely in the hope of

qualifying myself to speak with some degree of confidence on the subject

of those arts which represent to the Modern World so much of the

grandeur and genius of Greece. Here, probably, the action of

pestilential winds, and of the sands and burning glare of the desert

commenced that dimming of the “visual ray,” which, in all likelihood,

will wrap me gradually in complete darkness, and veil for ever from my

sight those forms of the beautiful which have been incarnated, if I may

so speak, in marble. This is a language which neither you nor your

sister can read to me. All that sweet Olympian brood which used to smile

upon me with kindly recognition when I was a solitary wayfarer in lands

not my own, will, as far as I am concerned, be annihilated. Those twelve

mystical transformations of Aphroditè into stone, which may be beheld

all together at Naples, and appeared to me more lovely than its vaunted

bay, or even the sky that hangs enamoured over it, will, I conjecture,

be seen of me no more, or seen obscurely as through a mist. Homer,

however, and Æschylus, with Plato and Thucydides and Demosthenes, will

be able still through the voices of my children—voices more cheerful and

willing than ministered to the old age and blindness of Milton—to

project their beauty into my soul. I will not, therefore, repine; but,

imitating the example of wiser and better men, submit unmurmuringly to

the will of God. Had things been otherwise ordered, I might have

continued these researches. As it is, I take leave of them here. Our

friend, Mr. Keightley, who has visited Italy for the purpose, will

perform for the Romans what I have endeavoured to accomplish for the

Greeks; and his extensive and varied learning, the excellence of his

method, and the pleasing vivacity of his style, will, probably, ensure

for his work a still greater degree of popularity even than that which

his very successful productions already enjoy.

Believe me, my dear son,

Ever affectionately yours,

J. A. ST. JOHN.

London,

October 13th, 1842.

INTRODUCTION.

Many moral phenomena appear to baffle the sagacity of statesmen,

because, confiding too implicitly in experience, they omit to widen the

range of their contemplation so as to embrace the whole circle of the

people’s existence whose fortunes and character they desire to

comprehend. To be successful in such an inquiry it is requisite to lay

open, as far as possible, the influence on that people of climate and

geographical position, to break through the husk and shell of customs,

manners, laws, religions, that we may come to the kernel of its moral

nature, to that inner organization, intellectual and physical, of which

the external circumstances of its civil and political life are but so

many fluctuating symbols.

To accomplish this, however, even in the case of a contemporary nation,

among whom we may behold in full activity all the material movements of

society, is no easy task. But the difficulty must be very much

augmented, when, in addition to the obstacles which necessarily under

the most favourable circumstances beset every avenue to a people’s inner

life, those are added arising out of the distance on the track of time

at which the nation we are considering happens to stand, the scantiness

and contradictory nature of the reports that reach us, and more,

perhaps, than all, the atmosphere of prejudice through which we are apt

to view whatever in any degree differs from our own manners and

institutions. But this consideration, though it should bespeak

indulgence for the unavoidable errors even of the most diligent

investigator, can certainly be no reason for abstaining from all further

investigation. For, notwithstanding the disadvantages under which we

labour, it is still possible to extract from the fragments remaining of

ancient literature materials for reconstructing something more than the

skeleton of antiquity. We can invest the bones with sinews and muscles,

clothe them with flesh and skin, spread over the whole colours that

shall resemble life; and if we cannot steal from heaven celestial fire

to kindle this image of surpassing beauty, that, at least, is the only

thing which exceeds our power.

In saying this, I merely state my opinion of what is possible, not by

any means what I conceive myself to have effected in the present work. I

am but too sensible of how far the execution falls short of “the ample

proposition that hope made,” when, many years ago, the idea suggested

itself to me at that ardent and flattering season of life in which we

are apt to imagine all things within our reach. But as

Every action that hath gone before

Whereof we have record, trial did draw

Bias, and thwart; not answering the aim

And that unbodied figure of the thought

That gave ’t surmised shape;

so, no doubt, in my own case, the realisation will be found to be a very

imperfect embodying of the ideal plan.

Few subjects, however, abound more in interest or instruction than the

one I have here ventured to treat. The inquiry turns upon the

institutions and moral condition of a people to whose fortunes history

affords no parallel; of a people that, like the cloud no bigger than a

man’s hand, which the servant of the prophet saw from the top of Carmel,

contained within itself the seeds of mightiest and most momentous

events. The Hellenes can never, in fact, by any but the uninformed be

regarded in the same light as ordinary political communities. Their

power, vast and astonishing for the age in which they flourished, arose

entirely out of their national character and the spirit of their

institutions. It was the power of intellect. They were in reality the

sun and soul of the ancient world, and darted far into the darkness

around them those vivifying rays which, reflected from land to land,

have since lighted up the world.

Athens, the wisest and noblest of Grecian states,

Mother of arts

And eloquence,

was the great preceptress of mankind. The spirit of her laws,

transmitted through those of Rome, still pervades the whole civilized

world. Her wisdom and her arts form, in all polished communities, a

principal object of study; and to comprehend and to enjoy them is to be

a gentleman. Sallust, therefore, notwithstanding his genius and

sagacity, took but a commonplace view of national greatness, when he

considered that of Athens to be chiefly based on the splendour shed

around her achievements by historians. Her triumphs, it is true, were

not effected by vast military masses, such as those which many barbarous

nations in different ages have put in motion for the purpose of spoil or

conquest. Athens built her glory on other foundations. She could not,

indeed, lead countless armies into the field, but she knew how, with a

little band, to defeat those who could. In the days of her freedom no

human force could subdue her. To effect this, every man within the

borders of Attica must have been exterminated; for so long as an

Athenian was left, the indomitable spirit of democracy would have

survived in him and sufficed to kindle up fresh contests.

But the energies of Athens, how great soever, did not, like those of

most other states, develope themselves chiefly in war. It is the

characteristic of barbarians to destroy, but to create nothing. The

delight and glory of the people of Athens consisted, on the contrary, in

the exercise of creative power, in calling into existence new arts,

founding colonies, widening the circle of civilisation, covering the

earth with beautiful structures, sacred and civil; in producing

pictures, statues, vases, and sculptured gems, of conception and

delicacy of workmanship inimitable. Wherever the Athenian set his foot,

the very earth appeared to grow more lovely beneath it. His genius

beautified whatever it touched. His imagination vivified everything. He

spread a rich mythological colouring over land and sea. Gods, at his

bidding, entered the antique oak, sported in the waters of brook and

fountain, scattered themselves in joyous groups over the uplands and

through the umbrageous valleys, and their voices and odoriferous breath

mingled with every breeze that blew.

In the distant colonies whither he betook himself, when poverty had

relaxed the chain that bound him indissolubly to the Attic soil, a few

years saw a new diminutive Athens springing up. The Pnyx, the Odeion,

the Theatre of Bacchos, the Prytaneion, the Virgin’s Fane, rose on a

diminished scale around him, presenting an image, though faint, of his

earlier home, the loveliest, undoubtedly, and, after Jerusalem, the most

hallowed spot ever inhabited by man. Above all things, he was everywhere

careful to enjoy the blessings of his ancestral institutions, and

listened, as in the mother city, to those popular thunders which, thrice

in every month, rolled from the bema over the assembled crowd,

communicating pleasurable emotions to his mind, and rousing continually

the passion for freedom.

It were needless to dwell at any considerable length on the naval and

military achievements of the Athenians. The world is still full of the

victories of Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, and the soil, drenched in

defence of liberty with Attic blood, is to this day sacred in the eyes

of the most phlegmatic. I appeal in proof of this to every man’s daily

experience: for does not the bare mention of any spot where the great

Demos triumphed or suffered some national calamity, make the blood bound

more rapidly and tingle in our veins? Even the grovelling and

worldly-minded, who affect to consider nothing holy but Mammon, can have

fire struck out of their cold natures by the spell of those glorious

syllables; for virtue, and valour, and that religious link which binds

the soul to the spot where a mother’s dust reposes, are found, and will

ever be found, to kindle warm admiration in every heart. And never since

society began did these great qualities develope themselves more visibly

than among the people of Athens. For this reason, who can visit

Syracuse, or the shores of the Hellespont, or the site of Memphis’s

White Castle, without experiencing as he gazes on the scene an

electrical thrill of mental anguish at the recollection of what Athenian

citizens more than two thousand years ago suffered there? Even

Thermopylæ, glorious as it is, scarcely stirs our nature so deeply as

Marathon; for the coarser and more material genius and institutions of

Sparta, the nurse of those heroes who fell at the Gates of Hellas

inspire less of that fervent admiration which the great actions and

great men of Athens awaken in every cultivated mind.

Of the political institutions which throughout Hellas influenced so

powerfully the developement of the national character, it is not my

design in the present volumes to speak. I confine myself entirely to the

other causes which rendered the ancient Greeks what they were; reserving

the examination of their forms of government for a separate treatise.

The subject here discussed possesses sufficient interest of itself. It

has been my aim to open up as far as possible a prospect into the

domestic economy of a Grecian family, the arts, comforts, conveniences,

regulations affecting the condition of private life, and those customs

and manners which communicated a peculiar character and colour to the

daily intercourse of Greek citizens. For, in all my investigations about

the nature and causes of those ancient institutions which, during so

many ages constituted the glory and the happiness of the most highly

gifted race known to history, I found my attention constantly directed

to the circumstances of their private life, from which, as from a great

fountain, all their public prosperity and grandeur seemed to spring.

Indeed, the great sources of a nation’s happiness and power must always

lie about the domestic hearth. There or nowhere are sown, and for many

years cherished by culture, all those virtues which bloom afterwards in

public, and form the best ornaments of the commonwealth. Men are

everywhere exactly what their mothers make them. If these are slaves,

narrow-minded, ignorant, unhappy, those in their turn will be so also.

The domestic example, small and obscure though it be, will impress its

image on the state; since that which individually is base and little,

can never by congregating with neighbouring littleness, become great, or

lead to those heroic efforts, those noble self-sacrifices, which elevate

human nature to a sphere in which it appears to touch upon and partake

something of the divine.

By minutely studying, as far as practicable, those small obscure

sanctuaries of Greek civilisation—the private dwellings of Attica--I

hoped to discover the secret of that moral alchemy by which were formed

Those dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule

Our spirits from their urns.

In these haunts, little familiar to our imagination, lay concealed the

germs of law, good government, philosophy, the arts, and whatever else

has tended to soften and render beautiful the human clay. That this was

the case is certain; why it should have been so, we may perhaps be

unable satisfactorily to explain; but that is what we shall at least

attempt in the present work, and for this purpose, it will at the first

glance be apparent, that the most elaborate delineation of the political

institutions of Athens must prove altogether insufficient. These were

but one among many powerful causes. The principal lay deeper in a

combination of numerous circumstances:—a peculiarly perfect and

beautiful physical organization; a mind fraught with enthusiasm, force,

flexibility, and unrivalled quickness; a buoyancy of temper which no

calamity could long depress; consequent, probably, upon this, a strong

religious feeling ineradicably seated in the heart; an unerring

perception of the beautiful in art and nature; and lastly, the enjoyment

of a genial climate, and an atmosphere pure, brilliant, and full of

sunshine as their minds.

Races of men, though not in precisely the same manner as individuals,

yet exhibit, at particular periods of their history, a freshness, a

vigour, a disinterestedness, like that of youth; and, because this state

of feeling may more than once occur in the course of their career, they

seem to spring, like Æson, out of convulsions and apparent dissolution

to a state of perfect rejuvenescence. Calamity and suffering purify

whole communities as they do individuals. In the boiling and commotion

of revolutions the impurities of the national character bubble upwards

and are skimmed away by the iron hand of misfortune. These political

convulsions are, in fact, so many efforts of nature to expel some

disease lurking in the constitution, and which, though the race be

immortal, might, if suffered to remain in the frame, produce a lethargy

worse than death. This truth we should bear constantly in mind; for

among the characteristics of the Athenian constitution, not the least

remarkable are the many efforts it made to right itself, and adapt its

framework to the changing circumstances of the times.

In the present inquiry we must, as I have already said, discover, if we

can, how much Hellas owed to its climate, to its position on the globe,

and to the physical organization of its inhabitants. It would be absurd

to infer with some writers, that the influence of these circumstances is

imaginary, because Greece seems to remain where it was of old, and the

constitution and temperament of the people to be likewise unchanged. But

this is not the case. Greece no longer occupies in the map of the world

the position it occupied in antiquity. It has been lifted out of the

centre of civilisation, to be cast upon its outskirts, or, which is the

same thing, civilisation has shifted its seat. Nor are the Greeks any

longer what they formerly were, though perhaps by a fortunate

combination of circumstances they might still be rendered so. At present

there is the same difference between them and their ancestors as between

a jar of Falernian, and an empty jar. The clay, indeed, is there,

beautifully moulded, and the purple hue of life is on the cheek; but

tyranny from the battle of Cheronæa,

“That dishonest victory

Fatal to liberty!”

until now has been draining out the soul. In the day when Hellas was

itself its children walked in light, in the first beautiful light of the

morning, which long seemed to shine only upon them; and now, perhaps,

after the revolution of a cycle almost equal to the Great Year, they

may, probably, be approaching another dawn.

Comparing the several states of Greece together, it is customary to

bestow the palm of energy and military valour upon the Spartans, who

made war their sole profession, and passed their lives as it were in the

camp from the cradle to the grave. But, in thus deciding, justice is

scarcely done to the character of Athens; for, if the former excelled in

discipline, to the latter belonged, indisputably, the superiority in

native courage. Trained or not trained they faced whatever enemy

presented himself, and won at least as many laurels from Sparta, on the

ocean, as the Doric State, in all its wars, ever gathered on land. And,

lastly, at Platæa, among which race, among Ionians or Dorians, was most

activity manifested? In whose ranks was found the greatest ardour to

engage? Who bore the first brunt of the Median horse, and broke the

dreaded shock of that vaunted Asiatic chivalry which the Barbarian hoped

would have trampled down with its innumerable hoofs the spirit of

Grecian freedom? This was effected by the Athenians; by those gay and

seemingly effeminate soldiers, who went forth from their beautiful city

curled, perfumed, clad in purple, as to the mimic combats of the

theatre. The spirit of their commonwealth, all splendour without and all

energy within, urged them to the field. Their cry at the approach of the

king was “Freedom or honourable graves!”—such as their countrymen had

ever been wont to repose in.

In fact, the Athenians, under a free government, had learned what it was

to live—had imbibed from their education the feeling, that if deprived

of such a government, if reduced to bow beneath the yoke of despotism,

to die, if the Apostle’s words may without blame be thus applied, would

be gain. It will readily be conceived that the citizens of such a state

felt an impassioned attachment to their country,—an attachment

unintelligible to persons living under any other form of civil polity.

Athens was the cradle of their freedom and their happiness. There was a

religion in the love they bore it; they had, according to mythical

traditions, which they believed, sprung on that spot from the bosom of

the earth. It stood, therefore to them in the dearest of all relations,

being, to sum up everything holy in one word,—their MOTHER; and they

embodied their profound veneration for the sacred spot in every fond,

every endearing, epithet their matchless language could supply. Even the

gods, in their patriotic partiality, were believed to look on Athens as

the most lovely, no less than the most glorious city on the broad

earth,—an idea which they expressed by representing Poseidon and Athena

contending for the honour of becoming their tutelar divinity.

To persons so thinking no calamity short of the entire extinction of

their race could appear so intolerable as beholding that sacred city,

with the tombs of their ancestors, the sanctuaries of their gods, the

venerable but immoveable symbols of their faith and mythological

history, delivered over to be trodden down or obliterated with sword and

fire by barbarian slaves, strong only from their countless numbers. Yet

even to this did the love of freedom reconcile the Athenian people. They

abandoned their holy place, and, embarking on board the fleet with their

wives and children, took refuge in Trœzen and Salamis. History has

described in touching language the circumstances of this event, than

which it has nothing more pathetic to record save, peradventure, the

carrying away of Judea and her children into captivity. I will not

disturb its archaic simplicity. No eloquence could heighten its effect.

It goes at once to the heart and rouses our noblest sympathies. “The

embarkation of the people of Athens was a very affecting scene. What

pity, what admiration of the firmness of those men who, sending their

parents and families to a distant place, unmoved with their cries and

embraces, had the fortitude to leave the city and embark for Salamis!

What greatly heightened the distress was the number of citizens whom, on

account of their extreme old age, they were forced to leave behind. And

some emotions of tenderness were due even to the tame domestic animals

which, running to the shore with lamentable howlings, expressed their

affection and regret for the persons by whom they had been fed. One of

these, a dog belonging to Xanthippos, the father of Pericles, unwilling

to be left, is said to have leaped into the sea and to have swam by the

side of the galley till it reached Salamis, where, quite spent with

toil, it immediately died. And they show, to this day, a place called

Cynossema—‘the dog’s grave’—where they tell us it was buried.”[1]

Footnote 1:

Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, in Langhorne’s plain and vigorous

translation.

The Athenian people, on this and similar occasions, were enabled to

resolve and perform boldly from the generous spirit inspired by their

national system of education. Their institutions, also, were eminently

calculated to bring into play the energies of every individual citizen,

and to diffuse in consequence through the whole community a grandeur of

sentiment and an heroic enthusiasm peculiar to free states. At Athens

whoever possessed the means of serving his country could easily,

whatever might be his rank, make those means known, and bring them into

operation. If he were virtuous his virtue was remarked and placed him on

the road to promotion. If genius constituted his title to distinction,

if nature had gifted him with the power to serve the state, the state,

without inquiry whether he were poor or rich, readily availed itself of

his capacity, rewarded him during his life with political honours and

authority, and, after his death, with imperishable glory. If in war he

performed any act of superior conduct or courage, a general’s name was

his reward; if he received wounds that name, or the hope of it, healed

them; if in the achieving of any heroic deed he perished, his country,

he knew, would honour his ashes, watch over his memory, and, with words

powerfully soothing because embodying a nation’s sympathy, dry up the

tears of his parents and beloved children. He knew that his glory,

heightened by matchless masters of eloquence, would flash like lightning

from the bema; that lovely bosoms would beat high at his name; that

hands, the fairest in Greece, would yearly wreath his tomb with

garlands; and that tears would be shed for ever on the spot by the

brave.

If children remained behind him, the state would become their parent;

every Athenian would share with them his salt; would impart to them

their best inheritance—the feeling of patriotism and an inextinguishable

hatred of tyranny; would repeat to them with unenvious pride the eulogy

of their father, and point daily to the laurels which kept his grave

ever green. The Athenian was taught, from the cradle, to consider death

beautiful when met on the red battle-field in defence of his home. And,

according to the creed of his country, he believed that his spirit would

in such an event be numbered among the objects of public worship. Hence

the sublimity, the thrilling power of that oath in Demosthenes, who, in

swearing by the souls of those that fell at Marathon, accomplished their

apotheosis and placed them among the gods of Athens.

That such were the habitual feelings of this most gallant and

generous-minded people appears even from the admission of their

bitterest enemies. “They,” observe, in Thucydides, the Corinthian

ambassadors, when urging Sparta into the Peloponnesian war,—"they push

victory to the utmost, and are least of all men dejected by defeat;

exposing their bodies for their country as if they had no interest in

them, yet applying their minds in the public service as if that and

their private interest were one. Disappointment of a proposed

acquisition they consider as a loss of what already belonged to them;

success in any pursuit they esteem only as a step towards farther

advantages; and, defeated in any attempt, they turn immediately to some

new project by which to make themselves amends: insomuch, that, through

their celerity in executing whatever they propose, they seem to have the

peculiar faculty of at the same time hoping and possessing. Thus they

continue ever amid labours and dangers, enjoying nothing through

sedulity to acquire; esteeming that only a time of festival in which

they are prosecuting their projects; and holding rest as a greater evil

than the most laborious business. To sum up their character, it may be

truly said, that they were born neither to enjoy quiet themselves, nor

to suffer others to enjoy it."[2]

Footnote 2:

Mitford, History of Greece, iii. 53.

The feeling that what they fought for was their own, which accounts for

the heroism of Hellenic armies, likewise led, particularly at Athens, to

the beautifying and adorning of the city, and the perfection of public

taste. The people saw among them no palaces devoted to the private

luxuries of a despotic court, where persons maintained at the public

expense learn to look with contempt on the honest hands that support

them. There, whatever was magnificent belonged to the people at large,

no private individuals, during the best ages of the commonwealth,

presuming, how great soever might be their talents or their influence,

to arrogate to themselves more than can be due to individuals, or to

enshrine their perishable bodies in buildings suited only to the worship

of God. Yet, in genuine grandeur, no monarch, with the wealth of half a

world at the disposal of his caprice, ever rivalled the Athenian people.

True taste, the genuine sense of the beautiful and the sublime, will,

while the world endures, refuse to be the subject of a tyrant, or to

inhabit the same city with him; because no patronage, pensions, or

lavish expenditure, can create in one state of society what belongs to

another; and pure taste being nothing more than the cultivated popular

feeling spontaneously expanding, can nowhere exist but in a free state.

A prince may, doubtless, know what pleases him; but the people only can

tell what pleases the people, which nothing certainly will unless it be

produced expressly for them, without the slightest reference to any

other person.

Such, in the best periods of Grecian history, were the Athenians. Among

them Nature generally was allowed to make herself heard; from the cradle

upwards it was their guide. A pure religion they had not, or pure

morality. Far from it; they barely caught indistinct glimpses of what in

faith and practice is true and beautiful. Nor could it be otherwise; for

the sun had not then risen, and men but felt their way uncertainly and

timidly amid the obscurities of the dawn. Nevertheless, the light

vouchsafed them they did not spurn. According to the best notions then

prevailing, they were of all men the most pious; and though of this

piety much, nay, the greater part, was superstition, yet, doubtless,

God, according to the saying of the Apostle, accounted it unto them for

righteousness, that, having not the law, they were a law unto

themselves.

The Spartans, on the other hand, were mere monastic soldiers, brave,

indeed, and true as their swords, but ungifted with those loftier and

more exquisite sympathies which properly constitute the beauty of human

character, and are alone the parents of love. Few, perhaps, were all

things within their reach, would choose to be citizens of Sparta; while

no one, for whom the poetry of life has any charms, would hesitate,

after his own country, perhaps, to select Athens for his home. And that

this is no scholastic fancy created by literary preferences is clear

from the practice of antiquity. Every man possessing superior genius,

whether sprung from Ionic or Doric race, betook himself to Athens, as to

the Greece of Greece—the common country of letters, sciences, and arts.

Thither, too, as now to London, fled the oppressed and persecuted of all

lands, and there they found welcome and encouragement. It was the great

asylum, the common city of refuge to all men. Strangers who could be

content with hospitality and generous protection were never driven from

thence. There every man might live as he pleased, think as he pleased,

and utter freely what he thought. The recorded instances of persecution

are barely sufficiently numerous to serve as exceptions to the general

rule; and in Gorgias of Leontium, Polos, Protagoras, Prodicos, Hippias,

“and what the Cynic impudence uttered,” we discover to how great an

extent the spirit of toleration was carried at Athens. It would be

absurd to object the examples of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; for

these were merely instances of the rage of party spirit, from which,

while men continue men, no state will ever be free, and can no more be

imputed to the Athenian people, or to the spirit of their government,

than the execution of Sir Thomas More, or Cranmer, or Fisher, can be

laid to the charge of the English Constitution.

CONTENTS

OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

-------

BOOK I.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Original Inhabitants of Hellas 1

II. Character of the Greeks 29

III. Geographical Outline 51

IV. Capital Cities of Greece—Athens 70

V. Capital Cities of Greece—Sparta 92

BOOK II.

EDUCATION.

I. Theory of Education.—Birth of Children.—Infanticide 107

II. Birth-feast.—Naming the Child.—Nursery.—Nursery 128

Tales.—Spartan Festivals

III. Toys, Sports, and Pastimes 144

IV. Elementary Instruction 164

V. Exercises of Youth 189

VI. Hunting and Fowling 206

VII. Schools of the Philosophers and Sophists 233

VIII. Education of the Spartans, Cretans, Arcadians,&c. 265

IX. Influence of the Fine Arts on Education 289

X. Hellenic Literature 314

XI. Spirit of the Grecian Religion 349

BOOK III.

WOMEN.

I. Women in Heroic Ages 369

II. Women of Doric States 382

III. Condition of unmarried Women.—Love. 401

THE HISTORY

OF THE

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

OF

ANCIENT GREECE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF HELLAS.

The country of the Hellenes, which, in imitation of the Romans, we

denominate Greece, was to its own inhabitants known by the name of

Hellas. But the signification of this term was not fixed, being

sometimes confined to Greece Proper, at others, comprehending likewise

the possessions of the Hellenes in Asia; that is, Hellas within and

beyond the Ægæan, as we now say, India within and beyond the Ganges.[3]

The progress of the name seems to have been as follows: it designated,

originally,[4] a city of Thessaly, built by Hellen son of Deucalion;

next, Phthiotis; the whole of Thessaly; all Greece, with the exception

sometimes of Peloponnesos, sometimes of Macedonia, sometimes,—which is

very remarkable,—of Thessaly itself; sometimes of Epeiros; then all

Greece within the Ægæan; afterwards all countries inhabited by Greeks in

whatever part of the world; and, lastly, it would appear to have been

occasionally employed to signify Athens alone.[5] The most ancient name,

Pelasgia, sprang from the race who first, perhaps, peopled that part of

Europe.

Footnote 3:

Paus. v. 21. 10. Palm. Desc. Gr. Ant. p. 32. Exercit. p. 397.

Footnote 4:

Il. β. 190. Strab. ix. 5. 297. Tauchnitz. with the authorities quoted

by Palmerius, Græc. Ant. i. 3.

Footnote 5:

Fisch. ad Theoph. Char. p. 5. L. Bos. Ant. Gr. Zeun. i. 1.

Nearly all writers who treat of Grecian history or antiquities, have

ventured more or less upon inquiries respecting the original inhabitants

of the country, some contending that it was peopled by many independent

races, while others content themselves with supposing one primary stock.

To arrive at certainty in such investigations is scarcely to be hoped

for, since, over the whole field, facts have moved in so close a

conjunction with fables, “that the most which remaineth to be seen, is

the show of dark and obscure steps where some part of the truth hath

gone.”[6] It appears, however, to be a fact established, that the

Hellenes were not the first who occupied Greece. They were preceded by a

number of tribes all apparently of Pelasgian origin. But who and what

the Pelasgians were, how and whence they came into the country, and by

what gradations and influences they were ripened into Hellenes, or were

by these expelled from the land, are questions to which no satisfactory

answers have ever been given, but must still be discussed whatever the

result of the investigation may be.

Footnote 6:

Hooker, Ecc. Pol. i. p. 95.

Even the name of this people has opened up an endless labyrinth of

conjecture, at least among the moderns, for the ancients when such

points were to be cleared up, easily removed the difficulty by inventing

a hero or a demigod, with an appellation exactly suited to their

purpose. Thus from Hellen they derived the name of the Hellenes, from

Heracles that of Heracleidæ, from Ion that of the Ionians, and from

Pelasgos, the son sometimes of Zeus, sometimes of Poseidon, sometimes of

Triops or Inachos or Lycaon or Palachthon or of the earth itself,[7]

that of the Pelasgi. An Attic writer, familiar with this question, and

hinting at a part of the theory which I have adopted, imagines the name

of Pelasgi to have been at first bestowed on the race because they

usually made their appearance on the shores of Hellas like migratory

birds in spring.[8] But though conjecture in such matters may amuse, it

is not likely, at this distance of time, to lead to truth.

Footnote 7:

Paus. viii. 1. 6; ii. 14. 4; 22. 1. Herod, ii. 56. Æsch. Prom. 859.

Supp. 248. Nieb. Hist. of Rome, i. 24. Apollod. ii. 1. Serv. ad Æn. i.

628; ii. 83. Sch. Apol. Rhod. i. 580. Tzetz. ad Lyc. 177. 481. Natal.

Com. p. 96. and conf. Palm. Græc. Ant. p. 41. sqq. Exercit. p. 527.

with Buttm. Lexil. p. 155.

Footnote 8:

Philochor. Siebel. p. 14.

The ancients had evidently formed no theory as to whence the Pelasgi

came, but were satisfied with the notion of their autochthoneïty,[9]

which we cannot adopt. It must be acknowledged, however, that we are

little able to trace them with certainty beyond the limits of Greece,

before their arrival in that country. My own opinion is, that when the

migrations began from that vast and lofty table land of Central Asia,

which formed the primitive abode of mankind, and where the mother

language of the Sanskrit, the Greek, and many other dialects was first

spoken, the illustrious race, afterwards known under the name of

Pelasgi, moved westward by the Caspian, along the Caucasian range,

through Armenia and Kourdistân, until they descended into the plains of

Asia Minor. Here we seem to touch upon the obscurest verge of Grecian

fable, for the tradition which sent Argo to Colchis, at the Eastern

extremity of the Black Sea, evidently contemplated the people of the

land as a kindred race, of similar faith, character, and manners. By

what precise channel the stream of population rolled westward, cannot be

determined: but here and there, on the southern shores of the Euxine, we

discover some obscure footsteps of the parents of the Greeks, as they

continued their journeyings towards the land which they were afterwards

to encircle with glory. Moving through Pontos, Paphlagonia, and

Bithynia, they appear everywhere to have made settlements on the coast,

until they reached the narrow stream of the Bosporos, over which they

threw themselves into Europe.

Footnote 9:

Marsh. Chron. Sec. ix. p. 130.

Up to this point we have little whereon to build our conclusions, save

what is supplied by the general theory of ancient migrations, and what

appear to be facts dimly seen within the extreme orbit of mythology. The

ancients themselves seem to have obtained some uncertain glimpses of

links connecting their ancestors with Asiatic Scythia, for there were

those among them who represented the Caucons of Paphlagonia stretching

along the banks of the Parthenios, and between the Maryandinians and the

sea, as a nation of Scythian origin. Now the Caucons were undoubtedly

Pelasgians, as were the Phrygians, the Carians, and the Leleges, who,

united by the ties of blood, flocked to the defence of Troy.[10] In a

much remoter age, the heroes of the traditional Argo were, it is said,

confounded by night at Cyzicos,[11] in Mysia, with the warlike Pelasgi,

even then masters of the sea, and accustomed with their galleys to vex

the coast and plunder the settled inhabitants. I regard the working of

the gold and silver mines on the southern shores of the Euxine, anterior

to the Trojan war, as another proof of the settlement of the Pelasgi in

that part of Asia Minor;[12] and who but they, at a period beyond the

reach of tradition, could have opened those gold mines on the shores of

Thrace, which on his conquest of the country Philip of Macedon found to

have been long ago worked and abandoned by some unknown people?[13]

Footnote 10:

Strab. viii. 3. p. 127.

Footnote 11:

Apollod. i. 9. 18. The mythology describes the Pelasgi as driven out

of Thessaly by the Æolians, and, under the guidance of Cyzicos, taking

possession of the peninsula of that name previous to the Argonautic

expedition. They fought with the Argonauts, and were afterwards

expelled by the Tyrrhenians, who in their turn were driven out by the

Milesians. Phot. Bib. p. 139. a. 25. Bekk.

Footnote 12:

Il. β 857.

Footnote 13:

Payne Knight, on the Worship of Priapus, p. 147.

Be this as it may, it was over the Bosporos and through Thrace that the

Pelasgi seem to have made their earliest approaches towards Greece. The

Thracians themselves were of Pelasgian origin. Thracians inhabited both

sides of the Bosporos; traces of Pelasgian settlements and Pelasgian

names are likewise found on both sides. The stream of knowledge

unquestionably poured through Thrace into Greece; and it is highly

probable that the stream of population had, at a remoter period, flowed

in the same channel. Once in Macedonia, the adventurers would be tempted

southward by the beauty of the climate and country; so that while some

moved up the valley of the Haliacmon, others, perhaps, took possession

of the ridge of Olympos, Ossa and Pelion, where they were known under

the names of Centaurs and Lapithæ.[14] From these lofty ridges they

looked down upon the great lake which in those ages covered the whole

plain of Thessaly, and, following the ramifications of the mountains,

peopled Pelasgian Argos, Phthiotis, and the roots of Œta, while the

lowlands were still under water: thence, too, they crossed over into

Eubœa, where they assumed the names of Macrones[15] and Curetes. This

latter tribe settling at Chalcis,[16] and having been worsted in a

contest for the Lalantian plain, fled across the Euripos, and traversing

the whole of Bœotia, founded a new settlement about Pleuron in Ætolia,

and gave the name of Curetis to the whole country. Hence, also, in

process of time, they were driven by the Ætolians from Pisa in Elis,

upon which they took refuge in Acarnania.[17]

Footnote 14:

Λέλεγας γάρ φασι πρότερον αὐτοὺς προσαγωρευομένους, διὰ τὸ ἀποκεντῆσαι

τοὺς ἵππους προσαγορευθῆναι Ἱπποκενταύρους. Sch. Pind. Pyth. ii. 78.

Cf. Schœll. Hist. de la Lit. Grecq. i. 4. seq.

Footnote 15:

Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1024. Cf. Winkel. Hist. de l’Art. i. 317.

Footnote 16:

Strab. x. 3. p. 349.

Footnote 17:

Strab. x. 3. p. 349. Sch. Pind. Olymp. iii. 19. Pliny, iv. 2. Eustath.

ad Il. β. 637. Certain ancient writers maintained that the Ætolians

were called Curetes by Homer; and at a still earlier period Hyantes,

and the country Hyantis.—Steph. Byzant. _v._ Αἰτωλ. p. 71. a. Palm. G.

Ant. p. 426.—Acarnania itself was formerly called Curetis.—Demet. ap.

Steph. _v._ Ἀθῆν. p. 45. a. Hard. ad Plin. iv. 2. p. 7.

But the principal tribe, and that which subsequently spread throughout

Greece, after filling with population the valley of the Haliacmon,

traversing the Caulavian range, and descending along the course of the

Aoös, seem on the banks of the Celydnos, to have turned their faces

southward. Following that stream upwards towards its source, they found

themselves in Epeiros, a land abounding with water brooks, with lovely

mountains, and lovelier valleys, and at length settled, and erected

themselves lasting habitations in the sacred neighbourhood of

Dodona,[18] where the first oracle known to the Hellenes flourished

under the protection of the Pelasgian Zeus.[19]

Footnote 18:

Strab. vii. 7. p. 124. seq. Hesiod. Frag. 54. et 124. Gœttl.—A second

Dodona is supposed to have existed in Thessaly.—See Thirl. Hist. of

Greece, i. 36.—Cf. Buttm. Diss. de orac. Dodon. Orat. Att. vii. 133.

sqq.

Footnote 19:

Il. π. 233.

Up to this point we have been treading, with little or no light to guide

us, over a soil shifting, unsure, and treacherous; but here we touch

upon comparatively firm ground, while the light of poetry dawns around,

and enables us to direct our footsteps towards the luminous terra firma

of history.

It must not be denied that much of the foregoing theory is erected on

inference and conjecture. Nevertheless, it rests in part on facts which

an historian ought not to reject. For example, though it be nowhere,

perhaps, distinctly stated that the Thracians were entirely of Pelasgian

origin, we are compelled by various circumstances to believe that such

was the case: first, Samothrace on the coast was undoubtedly peopled by

Pelasgi;[20] secondly, the Macedonians, plainly of the same stock with

the Thracians, are acknowledged to have been Pelasgi;[21] and since the

Illyrians likewise were a kindred people,[22] we have a line of

Pelasgian settlements stretching along the whole northern frontier of

Greece, the Ægæan, the Hellespont, and the Propontis, from the Adriatic

to the Black Sea. The chain of proofs, indeed, is not complete, but

appears and disappears alternately, like the stream of the Alpheios,

though little doubt can be entertained of the existence of the links

which happen to lie out of sight. In nearly every part of Macedonia the

footsteps of the Pelasgi are clearly discernible; at Crestona,[23] on

the Echidoros in Pœonia; in Emathea, and Bottiœa;[24] and looking at the

language of the country, we find it at all times to have been identical

with that of Greece. That the same thing must be predicated of Thrace,

even in the remotest ages, appears indisputably from this, that her

bards, Thamyris and Orpheus traversed the whole of Hellas, and sang

their wisdom to its inhabitants; while Olen coming from Lycia, a

Pelasgian settlement,[25] likewise brought his kindred songs to the same

tolerant and hospitable land.

Footnote 20:

Herod. ii. 51.

Footnote 21:

Justin. vii. 1. Thucyd. ii. 99.

Footnote 22:

Müller, Dor. i. 2.

Footnote 23:

Herod, i. 57.—On the situation of this city see Poppo, Proleg. ad

Thucyd. ii. p. 383.

Footnote 24:

Justin, vii. 1. Æsch. Supp. p. 261. Cf. Thucyd. iv. 109.

Footnote 25:

Diod. v. p. 396. Wesseling.

But to follow the movements of the Pelasgi through Greece itself, where,

though no chronology of events can be attempted, our views rest on a

stable foundation. Much, however, of our reasoning will be confused or

perhaps unintelligible, if it be not borne in mind that the name of the

Pelasgi, like that of the Tartars or Arabs, was a general appellation

applied to the whole race, while the several tribes bore separate

denominations; as the Chaones,[26] the Dryopes, the Leleges, the

Caucons, the Cranaans, with many others,[27] precisely as among the

Arabs, we find the Ababde, the Mahazi, the Beni Sakker, &c. The

Pelasgian tribe which first made its appearance, and became powerful in

Epeiros, a country not to be separated from Greece, was that of the

Chaones, whose chief seat was Cheimera,[28] at the foot of the Ceraunian

mountains. An obscure scholiast, indeed, denominates them

barbarians;[29] but as from the best authority we know them to have been

Pelasgi, this shows the value of the term in the mouth of the later

writers. Another class,—the Levites, perhaps, of those primitive

people,—settled amid the oak forests which surrounded the lovely lake of

Dodona, where under the name of Selli,[30] they founded the most

celebrated oracle of early antiquity. In their habits they remind us of

the Sanyasis, and other religious anchorites of India, living from views

of penance with unwashed feet, and sleeping on the bare ground. Other

tribes renowned of old in Epeiros, and all Pelasgian,[31] were the

Thesprotians, the Molossians, the Perrhæbians, and the Dolopians, the

last rough mountaineers inhabiting both the eastern and western slopes

of Pindos.[32]

Footnote 26:

Steph. Byz. _v._ Χαονία, p. 753. g.

Footnote 27:

Hermann, however, (Polit. Ant. p. 14,) imagines that the Caucons,

Leleges, &c. were independent races, though less civilised and

illustrious than the Pelasgi.

Footnote 28:

Plin. iv. 1.

Footnote 29:

Schol. ad Aristoph. Eq. 78.

Footnote 30:

Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 39.—Il. π. 234. seq.

Footnote 31:

Steph. Byz. _v._ Ἔφυρα, p. 367. c. Strab. vii. 7 p. 119. See also

Müll. Dor. i. 6. Plut. Pyrrh. 1.—See the authorities collected by

Niebuhr, i. 26.

Footnote 32:

Dolops was the son of Hermes, and dying in the city of Magnesia in

Thessaly, had there a tomb erected by the sea-shore. Sch. Apoll. Rhod.

i. 587. 558.

When Epeiros had been thus thickly sprinkled with settlements, an

earthquake appears to have produced in the range of Pelion the narrow

precipitous gap, afterwards known as Tempe, by which the waters of the

Thessalian lake discharged themselves into the sea. This happened, we

are told, while one Pelasigos[33] reigned over the mountaineers in the

district of Hæmonia. They were celebrating a great feast, when a certain

slave named Peloros, brought them tidings of what had come to pass,

speaking with admiration of the vast plains which were appearing through

the ebbing waters. In gratitude for the news he communicated, they

caused the man to seat himself at table while both the king and his

attendants, in the joy and fulness of their hearts ministered to him.

This, it is said, was the origin of the Pelorian festival, afterwards,

down to a very late period, celebrated with great pomp and magnificence

in Thessaly, where, for the day, masters changed condition with their

slaves, and became their servants.[34] The same festival in the

Pelasgian settlements of Italy was known down to the latest times, under

the name of Saturnalia.

Footnote 33:

Palmer. Exercit. p. 527.—Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 500.—Dion. Hal. i. 3. 1.

Footnote 34:

Athen. xiv. 45.

On the interior of Thessaly becoming thus habitable, the Pelasgian

tribes of Epeiros, beginning to be straitened for room, and feeling

still the original wandering impulse, poured over the heights of Pindos

into the valleys of Histiæotis, and moved eastward along the foot of the

Cambunian mountains, settling every where as they advanced. The tribe

which took this direction bore the name of Perrhæbians, and left traces

of their movements in the great Perrhæbian forest, stretching to the

foot of Olympos, and in the name of the whole district extending from

the Peneios to the northern limits of Thessaly. In this rich and fertile

tract they became powerful, spreading their dominion along the banks of

the Peneios, quite down to the sea. But the Lapithæ rising into

consequence and overcoming the Perrhæbians in battle, reduced a portion

of the tribes under their yoke, while the remainder, enamoured of

independence, retreated inland, again crossed the Pindos, and

established themselves in the upper valley of the Acheloös. About the

same time, perhaps, a fragment of this tribe traversing the whole of

Thessaly crossed over into Eubœa, where they subdued and took possession

of Histiæotis. It was possibly the entrance of these adventurers into

the island, pushing fresh waves of population southward, that caused the

contest for the Lalantian plain, and the emigration of the Curetes to

the continent.

Other Pelasgian tribes established themselves, and became illustrious in

Thessaly. The Centaurs, for example, a Lelegian clan inhabiting Mount

Pelion, where they were, perhaps, the first tamers of the horse, whence

the fable of their double form. Other sections of the Leleges were also

found in Thessaly,[35] as were also the Dryopes. In this country,[36]

notwithstanding that it must be regarded upon the whole as only the

second stage of the Pelasgians in their migrations southward, we find

more traces of their power and influence than anywhere else in Northern

Greece. Here were two cities, called Larissa; here was Pelasgian

Argos;[37] here, too, was a great district known by the name of

Pelasgiotis, while that of Pelasgia seems to have preceded Thessaly as

the appellation of the whole province.[38] This people, like most

others, seem to have had a number of names, to which they were

peculiarly attached, which we nearly always find reappearing wherever

they formed a settlement. Generally, too, it may be regarded as certain

that the more northern were the most ancient: thus we find Pelagonia in

the kingdom of Macedon and in Thessaly; Larissa[39] on the Peneios;

Larissa Cremaste near the shore. The Dryopes,[40] again, appear first in

Epeiros, not far from Dodona; next we find them in Thessaly, then in

Doris, finally in Peloponnesos; and Strabo is careful to remark that the

last-mentioned were an off-shoot from those in the north.

Footnote 35:

Serv. ad. Æn. viii. 725.

Footnote 36:

Paus. iv. 36. 1. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 1239.

Footnote 37:

Pliny, iv. 14.—Even Phthiotis itself, one of the earliest cradles of

the Hellenes, is recorded to have been a Pelasgian settlement. Sch.

Apoll. Rhod. i. 14.—Cf. ad. i. 40. 580.

Footnote 38:

Sch. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 26.; i. 906. 580.

Footnote 39:

Steph. Byzant. _v._ Λάρισσ. p. 511. b, c, d. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 40.

Footnote 40:

That the Dryopes were Pelasgi, appears from this:—they received their

national appellation from Dryops, son of Lycaon, (Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i.

1218,) who was himself the son of Pelasgos.—Suid. _v._ Λυκ. Cf. Etym.

Mag. 154, 7. 288, 32. Paus. viii. 2. 1.

From Thessaly the tide of population rolled southward;[41] different

tribes of Pelasgi, under the name of Leleges, Hyantes, Aones, and

Dryopes taking possession of the mountains and valleys of Doris, Locris,

Phocis, and extending their migrations into the plains of Bœotia. From

thence, across the isthmus, some few straggling hordes appear to have

found their way into Peloponnesos, where, as shepherds, they gradually

diffused themselves over its rich plains. All the Pelasgi in fact appear

like the Arabs and Tartars to have been originally Nomades, different

tribes of whom, as they were tempted by the beauty of particular

regions, quitted their wandering life, as the Arabs have done in Egypt,

Yemen, and elsewhere, and from shepherds became husbandmen. In process

of time, the descendants of the settlers, accustomed to the easy and

luxurious life of cities, learned to look back upon their wandering

ancestors as a wretched and a barbarous race. Indeed, they sometimes

speak of them[42] after their arrival in Peloponnesos as cannibals,

naked, houseless, ignorant of the use of fire, on a level, in short,

with the fiercest and most brutal savages existing in the islands of the

Pacific. But these erroneous ideas evidently arose from the theory of

autochthoneïty which supposes man to have gradually ripened out of a

beast into a man; whereas, the low savages discovered in various parts

of the world, do not represent the original state of mankind, but are

mere instances of extreme degeneracy. In fact, a different set of

traditions also prevailed among the Greeks, which, referring evidently

to the period when their ancestors were Nomades, spoke with rapture and

enthusiasm of their happy and tranquil life, when, following their

flocks from vale to vale and from stream to stream, they fed upon the

spontaneous productions which nature spread before them. On this period

the poets bestowed the name of the Golden Age, and, perhaps, if examined

philosophically, there is no stage in the history of civilisation at

which there is so much to enjoy and so little to suffer, as when the

whole nation are shepherds, and happen to light upon a land where, as

yet too few to inconvenience each other, they can live unmolested by

foreign tribes.

Footnote 41:

Just. xiii. 4.—The Epicnemidian Locrians were anciently called

Leleges, and by them the channel of the Cephissos was opened to the

sea.—Pliny, iv. 12. Solin. vii. p. 55. Bipont. Hesiod. Frag. 25.

Gœttl. Strab. vii. 7. p. 115; ix. 1. p. 248. Scymn. Chius, p.

24.—Phot. Bib. 321. b.

Footnote 42:

Mnaseas of Patræ ap. Sch. Pind. Pyth. iv. 104.—Dion. Hal. (Ant. Rom.

i. 31) is one of those writers who considers the Pelasgi miserable

because they were wanderers. Upon this notion Palmerius remarks

judiciously: “Sed si tales migrationes miseræ sunt, miserrimi olim

Galli majores nostri, qui usque in Asiam, post multas errores, armis

victricibus penetrâsse historiæ omnes testantur, et hoc seculo

miserrimi Tartari et Arabes, qui Nomadice vivunt, et sedes identidem

mutantes, non se miseros existimant, et id genus vitæ Attalicis

conditionibus mutare recusarent.”—Græc. Antiq. p. 60.

It has now been shown how Hellas might have been entirely peopled from

the north; but certain traditions, prevailing from the earliest times,

compel us to admit that some portion, at least, of its population

reached it by a different route; that is, through Asia Minor and the

islands. I have already alluded briefly to the existence of a Pelasgian

tribe in Paphlagonia,[43] that is to say, the Caucons, whose

establishment in this region supplies a link in the chain of proofs by

which we endeavour to connect the Pelasgi with the Scythians of Central

Asia; for the Caucons are admitted to have been of Pelasgian origin, and

an opinion prevailed among the ancients that they were likewise

Scythians.[44] Thus we find that certain Scythians settled in

Paphlagonia, were called Caucons, that the Caucons were Pelasgi, and

that the Pelasgi peopled Greece. The Greeks, therefore, by this account,

traced their origin to Scythia. Circumstances connected with the

geography of Asia Minor and of Hellas, seem to furnish traces of the

route of the Pelasgi westward. It appears to have been among the

primitive articles of their creed, that the deity delighted to abide on

the summits of lofty and even of snowy mountains; and whenever in their

settlements the features of the earth presented any such towering

eminence, they seem to have bestowed on it the name of Olympos, or

Celestial Mansion.[45] Immediately south of the Cauconian settlements,

on the limits of Bithynia and Galacia, we accordingly find a mountain of

this name; again, travelling westward, we have another Mount Olympos, on

the northern confines of Phrygia; a third meets us in the island of

Lesbos;[46] a fourth in Cypros, a fifth in Arcadia,[47] a sixth in Elis,

and a seventh, best known of all, near the cradle of the Hellenes in

Thessaly. In Mysia,[48] the footsteps of the race are numerous;

Pelasgian cities—Placia, Scylace, Cyzicos, Antandros—studded the coast;

inland there was a Larissa;[49] and the lovely-leafed evergreen, which

shaded the slopes and crags of the Trojan Ida, was named the Pelasgian

laurel.[50] Other facts there are connecting the Trojans with the

Pelasgian stock: thus the Caucons, whom we find among their allies in

Homer, are called a Trojan tribe; the language of Troy was evidently a

Pelasgian dialect, closely allied to the Greek,[51] which may likewise

be predicated of the Phrygian, the Lydian, the Carian, the Lycian

extending along the whole western coast of Asia Minor. The gods,

oracles, rites, ceremonies of all these people appear in early times to

have been identical with those of Hellas, and mythology represents the

heroes of both continents as sprung from the same gods. Nay, positive

testimony describes the Pelasgi as a great nation, holding the whole

western coast of Asia Minor, from Mycale to the Hellespont;[52] and

speaks of the Leleges as inhabiting a part of Caria, where their

deserted fortifications, called Lelegia,[53] apparently of Cyclopian

construction, were still found in the time of Strabo,[54] together with

their tombs, probably barrows, resembling those scattered through

Peloponnesos, and called the “Tombs of the Phrygians.”[55] Similar

sepulchral relics of Carian dominion were found and opened by the

Athenians in the purification of Delos.[56] Possibly, too, the tumuli,

existing to this day in Tartary, and occasionally rifled by the

Siberians, mark the original seat of the Pelasgi in Asia; though similar

monuments are found in other parts of the East, as in Nubia, where I

counted a cluster of ten or twelve, and nearly all over Europe. Homer

speaks of one on the plains of Troy, and the Greeks themselves cast up

barrows over their heroes, as Ajax, where

“Far by the solitary shore he sleeps.”

Footnote 43:

According to the reading of Callisthenes, Homer himself fixes their

residence in Paphlagonia.—Cf. Strab. xiii. p. 16. viii. p. 157. Sch.

Hom. Υ. 329.—Unless we adopt this reading we must suppose with the

Scholiast, that they were not separately mentioned in the catalogue,

because Homer confounded them with the Leleges, or because they

arrived late in the war.

Footnote 44:

Οἱ μὲν Σκύθας φασὶν, οἱ δὲ τῶν Μακεδόνων τινὰς, οἱ δὲ τῶν Πελασγῶν.

Strab. xiii. p. 16.—To the same tradition alludes the Scholiast: Ἔθνος

Παφλαγονίας, οἱ δὲ Σκυθίας· οἱ δὲ τοὺς λεγομένους Καυνίους εἴπον. Il.

κ. 429.

Footnote 45:

In the dialect of the Dryopes, this mountain was known by the name of

Βηλὸς, by which word the Chaldæans denoted the highest circle of the

heavens.—Etym. Mag. 196. 19 seq.

Footnote 46:

Plin. v. 39.

Footnote 47:

Paus. viii. 38. 2. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 599. Meurs. Cypr. i. 28. p.

76. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Ὄλυμπ. p. 612. e.—Mention, moreover, is made

of an eighth Olympos in Cilicia. (Sch. Apoll. ut sup.)—A ninth in

Lycia. (Plin. xxi. 7.)

Footnote 48:

Phot. Bib. 139. a. 12. 25. Herod. vii. 42. cf. i. 57. Pomp. Mela. i.

19.

Footnote 49:

Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 40.

Footnote 50:

Pliny, xv. 39.

Footnote 51:

Plato, Cratyl. I. iv. p. 58.—See, likewise, Müller (Dor. i. 9–11),

where, however, too much ingenuity by far is displayed. Another proof

of relationship is supplied by Homer (Il. ρ. 288) who represents

Hippothoös, a Pelasgian, insulting the body of Patroclos.—Strab. xiii.

3. p. 142.—Niebuhr (i. 28) conjectures that the Trojans were not a

Phrygian, but a Pelasgian tribe; though, in reality, both Phrygians

and Trojans sprang from the same stock.

Footnote 52:

Strab. xiii. 3. p. 144.

Footnote 53:

Paus. vii. 2. 8.

Footnote 54:

W. f. 7. p. 114.—The Carians themselves are said to have lived

habitually amid inaccessible rocks.—Schol. Arist. Av. 292.

Footnote 55:

Athen. xiv. 21.

Footnote 56:

Thucyd. i. 8.

Not to omit any material facts, on which my view of Pelasgian history is

founded, I shall proceed to mention in order the principal points on the

Asiatic shore where the footsteps of the Pelasgi appear. We find, then,

that they occupied the greater part of Lydia,[57] and at the time of the

Ionian migration held the citadel of Ephesos. They, too, in conjunction

with the Nymphs were the founders of the temple of Hera at Samos,[58]

and crossing the Mæander they re-appear again at Miletos on the coast of

Caria. Indeed this city[59] was originally, from its inhabitants, called

Lelegeis, though it afterwards was known under a variety of names, as

Pituoussa from the surrounding pine woods, Anactoria, and lastly,

Miletos. A little further southward was another Lelegian settlement at

Pedasos on the Satneios.[60] From a passage in Homer it has been

supposed that the Carians and Lelegians were distinct races, but in

reality the Carians were a Lelegian tribe;[61] that is Pelasgi, who like

the Hellenes in Greece, gradually acquired power and dominion, and

eclipsed their brethren. This they were enabled to do by applying

themselves passionately to the use of arms, a circumstance which at a

later period led them to make a traffic of their valour and hire their

swords to the best bidder. In earlier and better times they achieved

conquests for themselves, and rivalling the Phœnicians in maritime

enterprise and success, reduced under their sway the greater number of

the Ægæan islands,[62] and even some portion of the Hellenic continent

itself.[63] Certain clans of this martial race sought an outlet for

their restless daring by joining the Cilicians[64] in their piratical

enterprises, and probably it was in this character that they first

obtained possession of some of the smaller isles. Positive historical

testimony there seems to be none for fixing the Pelasgi in Cypros,[65]

though we cannot doubt that it was included in their dominions, from the

ruins of Cyclopian fortresses still found there, and the Olympian Mount

already mentioned. In Rhodes, however, and Samos antiquity speaks of

their settlements;[66] they, too, were the earliest inhabitants of

Chios,[67] whence they sent forth a colony to Lesbos,[68] which received

from them the name of Pelasgia. They expelled the Minyans from

Lemnos,[69] which afterwards, through fear of Darius, their king ceded

to the Athenians,[70] and held Imbros[71] and Samothrace[72] in the

north; Scyros, too, was originally named Pelasgia.[73] Andros was

peopled by one[74] of their colonies, and Delos, as we have already

seen, held their bones until they were cast forth by the Athenians. But

it is unnecessary to enumerate each separate point, since we know

generally that all the Ægæan isles were anciently in their

possession,[75] and that even the great island of Crete formed, in

remote ages, a portion of their empire. Here under the names of Curetes,

Corybantes, Telchines and Dactyli,[76] they flourished in the mythical

times, and were the reputed preservers and nurses of the infant Zeus, a

god pre-eminently Pelasgian, so that wherever his worship was found I

regard it as a proof that the Pelasgi had settled there.

Footnote 57:

Paus. vii. 2. 8. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Ἀγύλλα, p. 30, d. Ed. Berkel.

Footnote 58:

Athen. xv. 12. Thirl. Hist. of Greece, i. 43. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 14.

Footnote 59:

Pliny, ii. 31. Steph. de Urb. _v._ Μίλετ. p. 559. b. c. Eustath. in

Dion. Perieg. 825. 456. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 186.

Footnote 60:

Il. φ. 86. Cf. Sch. ad κ. 429.

Footnote 61:

A glimpse of this fact is obtained from a tradition preserved by

Hecatæos:—Τοὺς δὲ Λέλεγας τινὲς μὲν τοὺς αὐτοὺς Καρσὶν εἰκὰζουσιν.

Strab. vii. 7. p. 114. From other authorities we learn that the

Carians were regarded as Pelasgians.—Habitator incertæ originis. Alii

indigenas, sunt qui Pelasgos, quidam Cretas existimant. Pomp. Mela, i.

16.—See likewise Barnes ad Eurip. Heracl. 317. But the strongest

testimony is that of Herodotus, i. 171.

Footnote 62:

Strabo, xiv. 2. p. 208. Thucyd. i. 8.

Footnote 63:

Strabo, viii. 6. p. 204.

Footnote 64:

Strab. ap. Palmer. Gr. Ant. i. 10, p. 65. Serv. ad Æn. viii. 725. We

again find these two people united at Troy; but not mentioned in the

catalogue, because their leader had fallen and there were few of them

left to be ranged under Hector. Their leaders were Helicon and his

sons. Their capital city “Thebes with lofty gates” had been sacked by

Achilles. Strab. xiii. 3. p. 141.

Footnote 65:

Travels of Ali Bey.

Footnote 66:

Phot. Bib. 141. a.

Footnote 67:

According, however, to a tradition preserved by Ephoros, the city of

Karides, in this island, was founded by those who escaped with Macar

from the Deluge of Deucalion. Athen. iii. 66.

Footnote 68:

Plin. v. 39.

Footnote 69:

Paus. vii. 22.

Footnote 70:

Suid. _v._ Ἑρμώνιος χάρις. t. i. p. 1044.

Footnote 71:

Herm. Pol. Antiq. p. 13. Herod. vi. 138, 140. v. 26.

Footnote 72:

Herod. ii. 51.

Footnote 73:

Thucyd. i. 98. cum not. Wass.

Footnote 74:

Phot. Bib. 139. a.

Footnote 75:

Phot. Bib. 141. a. Both the island of Lesbos, and its city Himera were

called Pelasgia. Pliny, v. 39.

Footnote 76:

Serv. ad Æn. iii. 131. Strabo, x. 3. Pelasgic remains are still found

in the island. Pashley, Trav. in Crete, i. 152.

Passing thus from island to island in the very infancy of navigation,

the Pelasgi appear by way of the Sporades and Cycladæ, to have migrated

into Peloponnesos, first landing at Argos. Probably on their arrival

they found there some few inhabitants who by the isthmus had entered and

scattered themselves at leisure over the peninsula. But whether this was

so or not, certain it is that the oldest legends of Hellenic mythology

allude to the peopling of Argos by sea, representing Inachos, its first

ruler, as a son of the ocean.[77] From this chief, whether historical or

fabulous, the principal river of Argos received its appellation, and

members of his family bestowed their names on Argolis first, and

afterwards on the whole of Peloponnesos, which from Apis was denominated

Apia;[78] from Pelasgos, Pelasgia;[79] and from another prince so

called, it received the name of Argos.[80] In this division of Hellas,

which the rays of poetry and mythology unite to render luminous, the

Pelasgi[81] seem early to have struck deep root, and made a rapid

progress in civilisation. Here, accordingly, in historical times were

found the most numerous monuments of their power and grandeur; and here,

in the treasury of Atreus and the walls of Tiryns denominated Cyclopian,

we still may contemplate proofs of their opulence and progress in the

arts. Among them would appear to have existed a class or caste named

Cyclops, addicted extremely to handicrafts, particularly building. These

it was who erected the walls and citadel of Argos,[82] on which they

bestowed the name of Larissa, together with certain labyrinths, said to

have existed in the neighbourhood of Nauplia. Mycenæ appears to have

been the most ancient capital of the country, built while the site of

Argos was yet a marsh,[83] or perhaps under water; then came Tiryns, and

lastly Argos. Other early seats of the Pelasgi were at Epidauros and

Hermione.[84]

Footnote 77:

Apollod. ii. 1. Keightley, Mythol. 405.

Footnote 78:

Cf. Athen. xiv. 63.

Footnote 79:

Tzet. ad Lyc. 177. Plin. iv. 5. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1024. Nic.

Damasc. in Exc. p. 492.

Footnote 80:

Sch. Eurip. Orest. 1245.

Footnote 81:

Æsch. Supp. 642. 919.

Footnote 82:

Strab. viii. 6. p. 202. Müll. Dor. i. 90. Frag. Incert. Pind. p. 660.

Diss.

Footnote 83:

Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 38.

Footnote 84:

Strab. viii. 6. p. 204.

But the province of Peloponnesos which the Pelasgi most delighted to

consider their home, was the rough, wild, and elevated table land of

Arcadia,[85] resembling on a small scale their original seat in central

Asia; belted round by mountains with many streams and rivers pouring

down their sides: here long shut out from commerce with the rest of

mankind they multiplied in ease and security, and became a great

nation,[86] who, to express the idea of their own extreme antiquity,

professed themselves to be older than the moon.[87] Having lost all

tradition of their arrival in the country, they looked upon themselves

as autochthons, and regarded their mountain-girt land as the great

reservoir of Pelasgian population,[88] whence its colonies like streams,

flowed outwards, and peopled the rest of Hellas; and probably it was

thence that the first emigrants descended into the valley of the

Eurotas, spread themselves through Laconia, and found a mountain on

which they bestowed the holy name of Olympos. In this province one of

the most famous of the Pelasgian tribes, is by some traditions said to

have had its origin; for Lelex,[89] who gave his name to the Leleges,

they fabled to have been an autochthon of Laconia, and down even to the

times of Pausanias an heroum was shown at Sparta erected in honour of

his name. Undoubtedly a mythical legend connected with this hero was

deeply interwoven with the fabulous history of Laconia. His son Eurotas

was the father of Sparta, wife of Lacedæmon, who gave his name to the

country. He had two daughters, Amycla and Eurydice, the latter of whom

became the wife of Acrisios.[90] The Acarnanians, however, had among

them a tradition which made Lelex an autochthon of Leucadia,[91] and the

people of Megara spoke of one Lelex[92] who arrived in their country by

sea from Egypt.

Footnote 85:

Which Strabo (viii. 3, 157,) says was the original seat of the

Caucons.

Footnote 86:

Sch. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 264.

Footnote 87:

Clem. Alex. i. 6.

Footnote 88:

Herod. i. 146. Pliny iv. 10. Nic. Damasc. in Exc. p. 494. Paus. viii.

1. 4.

Footnote 89:

Paus. iii. 12. 5.—i. 1. The country, moreover, obtained the name of

Lelegia, iv. i. 1.

Footnote 90:

Apollod. iii. 10. 3.

Footnote 91:

Strab. vii. 7. p. 115.

Footnote 92:

From whom the people were called Leleges. Paus. i. 39. 6. He was said

to be the son of Poseidon and Libya, and his tomb was shown near the

sea-shore, 44. 3.

To proceed, however, with the traces of the Pelasgi in Peloponnesos. It

has sometimes been supposed that no proof exists of their having held

any part of this peninsula excepting Argos, Achaia and Arcadia;[93] but

erroneously, for we have seen the Leleges, a Pelasgian tribe, in

Laconia; and we find a settlement of the Pelasgi in Messenia. Here also

at Andania flourished the Pelasgian worship of the Dii Kabyri from

Samothrace;[94] colony of Leleges, under Pylos, son of Cleison, settled

at Pylos on the Coryphasian promontory.[95] The Caucons held

Cyparissos;[96] that is both in the interior of Messenia and along the

sea coast we find settlements of the race which peopled the whole

peninsula. Passing northward into Elis, we immediately on crossing the

Neda find Caucons in the Lepreatis,[97] where, probably, in proof that

the tribe originated there, they showed in Strabo’s[98] time the tomb of

Caucon. They had likewise a river Caucon[99] in the north of Elis, and

in short the whole country from the Neda to the Larissos bore anciently

the name of Cauconia.[100] Some, however, maintain that they were found

only at three points on the coast, that is, in the south of

Triphylia,[101] in the north near Dyme, and at Hollow Elis on the

Peneios, which Aristotle considered their chief seat.[102] Nevertheless

Antimachos regarded the Epeians as Caucons,[103] and since these

inhabited the whole western coast from Messenia northward, we must

consider Elis as the principal though not the original seat of this

tribe; for we find them represented as issuing from Arcadia, and we have

already shown that they were settled in Paphlagonia, and were

denominated a Trojan tribe.

Footnote 93:

Thirl. Hist. of Greece, i. 38.

Footnote 94:

Paus. iv. 1. Müll. Dor. i. 116.

Footnote 95:

Paus. iv. 36. i.

Footnote 96:

Strab. viii. 3. 156.

Footnote 97:

Ibid. viii. 3. 152.

Footnote 98:

Ibid. viii. 3. 157.

Footnote 99:

Ibid. viii. 3. 151.

Footnote 100:

Ibid. viii. 3. 157.

Footnote 101:

Ibid. viii. 3. 151. The Caucons, however, mentioned by Athena in the

Odyssey (θ. 366.) were different from those of Triphylia. The

Triphylian Caucons held all the land lying south-east of Pylos on the

way to Lacedæmon. Strab. viii. 3. 157.

Footnote 102:

Strab. viii. 3. 157.

Footnote 103:

Ibid.

Turning our faces eastward from the promontory Araxos, we discover along

the coast a chain of Pelasgian settlements founded by Ionians from

Athens.[104] To complete our list of proofs that there was no spot in

all Hellas not possessed by the Pelasgi, we find a prince of that race,

and named Pelasgos, receiving the goddess Demeter at Corinth in the

remotest periods of the mythology.[105]

Footnote 104:

Herod. vii. 14.

Footnote 105:

Paus. i. 14. 2.

Thus, then, we have traced this illustrious people under various names

through every region of Greece, save Attica; and there also they were

found, but whether they arrived by land or sea, I profess myself wholly

unable to determine. A modern historian[106] who experienced the same

difficulty, observes, that the Ionians appear to have dropped from

heaven into Attica. Unquestionably we do not know whence they came, and

as their own legends represent them as autochthons[107] we can expect no

aid from tradition. The most probable supposition is, that when the

migratory hordes were pushing southward from Thessaly, some clans, more

fortunate than the rest, traversing the heights of Cithæron soon found

themselves in possession of this unfertile but lovely land, covered in

those ages with forests, diversified by hill and dale, and breathing

perfume from every thicket. The succeeding tide of emigration breaking

against the ridge of Cithæron seems to have turned westward and flowed

into the Peloponnesos, leaving Attica unmolested. Some have regarded its

own barrenness as the rampart which protected it from invasion. But why

may we not suppose that the inhabitants finding themselves thriving and

tranquil, resolved early to fight for their possessions, and hedged

themselves from invasion by courage and arms? be this as it may, Attica

was the first part of Hellas that enjoyed permanent exemption from war,

so that the olive, its principal ornament and riches, became in all

after ages the emblem of peace. Once settled in this country the Pelasgi

were never driven thence,[108] nor did they ever receive any

considerable mixture of foreign settlers. Individuals from time to time

were permitted to take up their abode among them; but, in this favoured

spot, unalloyed by foreign mixture, the Pelasgic genius completely

developed itself, and reached the highest pitch of civilisation known to

the ancient world.

Footnote 106:

Müll. Dor. i. 12.

Footnote 107:

Sch. Arist. Acharn. 75.—Nubb. 971.

Footnote 108:

Herod. i. 56. vii. 161. Lesbon. Protrept. ii. 22. f. Conf. Wessel. ad

Herod. p. 26.

The earliest name bestowed on the Pelasgian tribe which held Attica was

that of Cranaans;[109] but whether they were so distinguished before

their migration thither, or, which is more probable, derived their

appellation from the rocky nature[110] of their country, does not

appear. Like most of the ancient nations, however, they frequently

changed their name: at first perhaps simply Pelasgi, next Cranaans, then

Cecropidæ and Ionians; afterwards, under the reign of Erechtheus they

obtained from their patron divinity the name of Athenians, by which they

have been known down to the present day. Among the fables of the

mythology we discover traces of several attempts at disputing with the

Aborigines the sovereignty of Attica. Thus Eumolpos, with a colony of

Thracians, is by one tradition said to have obtained possession of the

whole country,[111] while another and more probable legend represents

him as settling with a small band at Eleusis, where his family during

the whole existence of Paganism exercised the office of priests of

Demeter.[112] The Cretans again under Minos sought to obtain a footing

in the country; but the close of the tradition which speaks of this

invasion shows that though disgraceful to Attica it was without any

permanent result. Afterwards, when the unsettled Pelasgi had degenerated

into pirates and freebooters, a powerful band of them appears to have

found its way thither, and obtained a settlement in the immediate

neighbourhood of the capital,[113] on condition, apparently, of

labouring at the erection of walls round the Acropolis. A portion of the

fortifications is said to have been completed by these marauders, and to

have obtained from them the name of the Pelasgian wall. But even these

strangers were not suffered to remain; quarrels arising either about the

land which the Pelasgi had obtained on the slopes of Hymettos, or on

account of violence offered to certain Athenian maidens descending to

the fountain of Callirrhoë for water. The emigrants were expelled and

took refuge in Lemnos. In revenge for what they regarded as an injury,

they carried away a number of Attic virgins who were celebrating the

festival of Artemis at Brauron, which led in after times to the capture

of Lemnos by Miltiades.

Footnote 109:

Herod. i. 57. viii. 44.

Footnote 110:

Suid. _v._ Κραν. t. i. p. 1518. d.

Footnote 111:

Strab. vii. 7. p. 114.

Footnote 112:

Palmer. Græc. Antiq. p. 62.

Footnote 113:

Paus. ii. 8. 3. Philoch. p. 13. Siebel. Herod. ii. 51. seq.

It seems to result from the above inquiry that every district in Hellas

was originally peopled by the Pelasgi, which the poets in after ages

expressed by saying that a king of that nation reigned over the whole

country as far northward as the Strymon in Thrace.[114]

Footnote 114:

Æschyl. Suppl. 259. sqq.

We have shown that their dominions extended much further, and included

not Thrace only, beyond the limits of Greece, but a great part likewise

of Asia Minor and nearly every island in the Ægæan. But even these

spacious limits were not wide enough to contain the whole Pelasgian

population; for traversing the Adriatic, they penetrated into Etruria,

and there and elsewhere in Italy, under the name of Tyrrhenians, erected

Cyclopian cities, and deposited the germs of its future

civilisation.[115] Hence the great resemblance which historians and

antiquaries have observed between the Etruscans and the Greeks. Both

were offshoots from the great Pelasgic stem; though the simplicity of

the original race in religion and manners maintained longer its ground

in Italy than under the warmer skies of Greece. In these more western

settlements, however, new tribes sprang up, who in glory eclipsed the

mother race, which they learned to regard with contempt, so that they

bestowed the name of Pelasgi on their slaves. A similar circumstance had

previously occurred in Asia Minor, where the Carians reduced to

servitude such of their brethren as in later times retained the name of

Leleges.[116]

Footnote 115:

Gœttl. ad Hes. Theog. 311. 1014. Οἱ Τυρσηνοὶ δὲ, Πελασγοί. Sch. Apoll.

Rhod. 580. The Pelasgi were the founders of Agylla, afterwards Cære in

Etruria. Steph. Byzant. v. Ἀγύλλα, p. 30. d. Plin. iii. 8. Serv. ad

Æn. viii. 479, who also gives another tradition according to which

Agylla was built by Tyrrhenians from Lydia. Cf. Vibius, Sequest. 421,

who says that the Tuscans were Pelasgi. The Poseidoniatæ, a Tuscan

tribe, entirely forgot their original language, the manners of their

country, and all its festivals, save one, in which they assembled to

repeat the ancient names of kings, and recall the remembrance of their

original home. They then separated with groans, cries, and mingling

together their tears.—Athen. xiv. 81. The Bruttii are said to have

been driven out of their country by the Pelasgi (Plin. iii. 8); who

also settled in Lucania and Bruttium (9, 10). Pelasgi came out of

Peloponnesos into Latium, settled on the Sarna, called themselves

Sarrhastes, and built, among others, the town of Nuceria.—Serv. ad Æn.

vii. 738. A different tradition brings them from Attica; another from

Thessaly, because of the many Pelasgian relics found there.—Idem.

viii. 600. Dion. Hal. i. 33.

Footnote 116:

Nieb. i. 22. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Χῖος, p. 758. b. Victor. Var. Lect.

i. 10. Athen. vi. 101.

If now we cast a rapid glance over the sciences and civilisation of the

Pelasgi, we shall probably have acquired as complete an idea of that

ancient people as existing monuments enable us to frame.[117] Tradition

attributed to them the invention of several arts of primary necessity,

as those of building houses and manufacturing clothing, which they did

from the skins of wild boars, the animals first slain by man for food. A

relic of this primitive style of dress remained, we are told, to a very

late age among the rustics of Phocis and Eubœa.[118] Other traditions

will have it that mankind fed on grass and herbs until the Pelasgi

taught them the greater refinement of feeding upon acorns. But leaving

these poetical fancies, we shall find in many genuine monuments and

facts undisputed proofs of the power and knowledge of the Pelasgi. In

the first place, they it was who bequeathed to their Hellenic

descendants some knowledge, though imperfect and obscure, of the true

God.[119] In their minds the recognition of the unity of the Divine

Being formed the basis of theology, and the philosophers of after ages

who reasoned best and thought most correctly rose no higher on these

points than their rude ancestors.

Footnote 117:

See Nieb. i. 24.

Footnote 118:

Paus. viii. 1. 5.

Footnote 119:

Herod. ii. 32. 51. Plato, Tim. t. vii. 22–31. 96. 142.

But the natural tendency of the human mind to error soon disturbed the

simplicity of their faith; for as the tribes separated, each taking a

different direction, they all in turns learned to consider the God as

their patron, so that speedily there were as many gods as tribes, and

polytheism was created. Thus the Pelasgi, who had at first like the

polished nations of modern times no name for _the gods_, because they

believed in but one, degenerated in the course of time, and invented

that system of divinities and heroes which afterwards prevailed in

Greece. They, too, it was, who in the developement of their superstition

made the first steps towards the arts by setting up rude images of the

powers they worshipped, and to them accordingly the introduction of the

Hermæan statues at Athens is attributed.[120] There was likewise in a

temple of Demeter between mount Eboras and Taygetos, a wooden statue of

Orpheus, supposed to be the workmanship of the Pelasgi.[121] Evidently

too, the worship of Demeter, and of all the rural gods grew up

originally among them, as did likewise the adoration of supreme power

and supreme wisdom in Zeus and Athena.[122]

Footnote 120:

Herod. ii. 51.

Footnote 121:

Paus. iii. 20. 5.

Footnote 122:

We find mention, too, of a Pelasgian Hera, Alex. ab. Alex. p. 321.

Sch. Apol. Rhod. i. 14.

Usually the Pelasgi are considered as a much wandering people,[123]

though it would be more correct to represent them, like the Anglo-Saxon

race in modern times, as the prolific parents of many settlements,

spreading widely, but taking root wherever they spread. A proof of this

still exists in the vast structures[124] which they reared, whose ruins

are yet found scattered through Asia, Greece, and Italy. These Cyclopian

buildings, palaces, treasuries, fortresses, barrows, were not the works

of nomadic hordes, but of a people attached to the soil and resolute in

defending it. Navigation, likewise, they cultivated, and were among the

earliest nations who possessed a power at sea,[125] which led

necessarily to the study of astronomy, together with the occult science

of the stars.[126] Of their progress in the more ordinary arts of

utility we have very little knowledge, but we find in the Iliad a

Pelasgian woman staining ivory to be used as ornaments of a

war-horse;[127] the invention of the shepherd’s crook was attributed to

them; so likewise was the religious dance called Hyporchema;[128] their

proficiency in music is spoken of;[129] and their pre-eminence in war

was signified by representing them as inventors of the shield.[130]

Footnote 123:

Strab. xiii. 3. p. 144.

Footnote 124:

Serv. ad Æn. vi. 630. Winkelmann, ii. 557. On the Cyclopian walls of

Crotona. Mus. Cortonen. pl. i. Rom. 1756.

Footnote 125:

Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 60. Herm. Pol. Ant. p. 13.

Footnote 126:

Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 72.

Footnote 127:

δ. 142. Sch. Apol. Rhod. iii. 1323. Natal. Com. 611.

Footnote 128:

Phot. Bib. 320. b.

Footnote 129:

They were the inventors of the trumpet. Πελασγιὰς ἔβρεμε σάλπιγξ,

Nonn. Dion. 47. 568. Cf. Paus. ii. 21. 3. Gœttl. ad Hes. Theog. 311.

Footnote 130:

Serv. ad Æn. ix. 505.

On the language of the Pelasgi various opinions are entertained. Some,

relying on particular passages in ancient writers, have imagined that it

was very different from the Greek,[131] but although in support of such

an opinion much ingenuity may be exhibited there are circumstances which

compel us to reject it. The Athenians and Arcadians, for example, though

of Pelasgian origin, spoke, and that from the remotest times, the same

language with the rest of the Greeks; and though the Æolic dialect,[132]

the most ancient in Arcadia, or indeed in all Greece, was transformed to

Latin in Italy, we are not on that account to infer that Latin bore a

closer resemblance than the Greek to the mother tongue of both. The

Pelasgian language indeed appears to have been the Hellenic in the

earlier stages of its formation, just as the Pelasgi themselves were

Greeks under another name and in a ruder state of civilisation. Whether

they possessed any knowledge of written characters before[133] the

introduction of the Phœnician we have now no means of ascertaining, the

passages usually brought forward in behalf of such an opinion being of

small authority. To them, however, tradition attributes the introduction

of letters into Latium,[134] and there can be no doubt that the use of

written characters was known in Greece before its inhabitants had ceased

to be called Pelasgi.

Footnote 131:

Nieb. i. 23.

Footnote 132:

Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 55.

Footnote 133:

See, however, the question discussed in Palmerius, Gr. Ant. p. 49.

sqq. Conf. Eustath. ad Il. β. 841.

Footnote 134:

Plin. vii. 56. Tacit. Annal. xi. 14. et Rupert ad loc. Hygin. Fab.

277. p. 336.

I have now, I imagine, proved that the Pelasgi whencesoever they came,

occupied, under one name or another, the whole continent of Greece and

most of the islands. The Athenians, and consequently the Ionians, are on

all hands acknowledged to have sprung from the Pelasgian stock. It only

remains to be shown that the Dorians also traced their origin to this

people, and we shall be satisfied that the whole of the illustrious

nation, known to history under the name of Greeks, flowed from one and

the same source. The Hellenes, of whom the Dorians were a tribe,[135]

occupied in later times the south of Thessaly, but at a much earlier

period, along with the Selli,[136] dwelt in the mountainous tracts about

Dodona, where they were known under the name of Greeks or

mountaineers,[137] which was the original signification of the term.

This district of Epeiros, it has been shown, was among the very earliest

of the Pelasgian settlements, from which of itself it might be inferred

that the Hellenes were Pelasgi. We are not left to rely in this matter

on mere inference, since Herodotus states distinctly that they were a

fragment of the Pelasgi.[138]

Footnote 135:

Serv. ad Æn. ii. 4.

Footnote 136:

Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 39.

Footnote 137:

Palm. Gr. Ant. 5.

Footnote 138:

I. 58.

It will be seen that I have hitherto made no allusion to the received

fables about Egyptian and Phœnician colonies.[139] Nevertheless it is

quite possible that on many occasions certain fugitives, both from

Phœnicia and Egypt, may have taken refuge in Greece, and been permitted,

as in after ages, to settle there. These persons, coming from countries

farther advanced in civilisation, would undoubtedly bring along with

them a superior degree of knowledge in many useful arts, which, in

gratitude for their hospitable reception, they would undoubtedly

communicate to the inhabitants. But the most active agent in the

diffusion of civilisation was probably commerce, which, by bringing

neighbouring nations into close contact, by enlarging the sphere of

their experience, and teaching them the advantages to be derived from

peaceful intercourse, has in all ages softened and refined mankind. When

the use of letters began first to prevail in the East is not known, but

it was probably communicated early to the Pelasgi, along with the

materials for writing; and whatever inventions were made on either side

of the Mediterranean passed rapidly from shore to shore, so that the

civilisation of the Egyptians, Phœnicians, and Greeks, advanced

simultaneously, though the beginnings of improvement were undoubtedly

more ancient on the banks of the Nile and among the maritime Arabs than

in Hellas. The amount, however, of eastern influences I conceive was not

great, and as to colonies, properly so called, with the exception of

those already described from Asia Minor, I believe there never were any.

Footnote 139:

See Mitford (Hist. of Greece, 81. ff.) who is full of these colonies.

Herod. i. 2. Conf. Thirl. i. 185. Keightley, Hist. of Greece, p. 11.

Müll. Dor. i. 16.

CHAPTER II.

CHARACTER OF THE GREEKS.

Having in the foregoing chapter endeavoured to ascertain by what races

Greece was originally peopled, we shall next speak of the character and

physical organization of its inhabitants. In doing this it may be useful

to consider them in three different stages of their progress: first, in

the heroic and poetical times; secondly, in the historical and

flourishing ages of the Hellenic commonwealth; thirdly, in their corrupt

and degenerate state under the dominion of the Macedonians and Romans.

The most distinguishing characteristic of the Hellenes, when poetry

first places them before us, is a profound veneration for the divinity

and every thing connected with the service of religion. By the force of

imagination heaven and earth were brought near each other, not so much,

indeed, by elevating the latter, as by bringing down the former within

the sphere of humanity. Gods and men moved together over the earth,

cooperated in bringing about events, keeping up a constant interchange

of beneficence; the god aiding, the mortal repaying his aid with

gratitude;[140] the god guiding, the mortal submitting to be directed,

until, sometimes, as in the case of Odysseus and Athena, the feeling of

grace and favour on the one side, and of veneration and gratitude on the

other, ripened into something like friendship and affection.

Footnote 140:

Cf. Plut. Pericl. § 13.

No man entered on any important enterprise without first consulting the

gods, and throwing himself upon their protection, by sacrifice,

divination, and prayer.[141] They conceived, according to the best

lights afforded them by their rude creed, that although means existed of

warping the judgment, perverting the affections, and vitiating the

decisions of their divinities, yet upon the whole and in the natural

order of things they were just and beneficent, mercifully caring for the

poor and the stranger, the guardians of friendship and hospitality, and

avenging severely the offences committed against their laws. Habitually,

when not provoked to vengeance by impiety or crimes, the gods they

believed were not only beneficent towards mankind, but given among

themselves to cheerfulness and mirth, loving music, songs, and laughter,

feasting jovially together in a joy serene and almost imperturbable,

save when interrupted by solicitude for some favoured mortal.

Philosophy, in more intellectual times, condemned this rude conception

of divine things; but men’s ideas, like their offerings, belong to the

state of society in which they live, and the Greeks of the heroic ages

unquestionably attributed to their gods the qualities most in esteem

among themselves.

Footnote 141:

See Man. Moschop. ap Arist. Nubb. 982.

Next to religion the most prominent feeling in the mind of the early

Greeks was filial piety.[142] Nowhere among men were parents held in

higher honour. The reverence paid to them partook largely of the

religious sentiment. Regarded as the instruments by which God had

communicated the mysterious and sacred gift of life, they were supposed

by their children to be for ever invested with a high degree of sanctity

as ministers and representatives of the Creator. Hence the anxiety

experienced to obtain a father’s blessing and the indescribable dread of

his curse. A peculiar set of divinities, the terrible Erinnyes, all but

implacable and unsparing, were entrusted with the guardianship of a

parent’s rights, and indescribable were the pangs and anguish supposed

to seize upon transgressors. These were the powers who tracked about the

matricides Orestes and Alcmæon, scaring them with spectral terrors and

filling their palaces with the alarms and agonies of Tartaros. On the

other hand, nothing can be more beautiful than the pictures of filial

piety exhibited by the nobler characters of heroic times. The examples

are innumerable, but none is so striking or complete as that of Achilles

towards his father Peleus. Fierce, vehement, stern in the ordinary

relations of life, towards his aged father he is gentle as a child. His

heart yearns to him with a strength of feeling incomprehensible to a

meaner nature. He submits to his sway and authority not from any

apprehension of his power, not even from the fear of offending him, but

from the fulness of his love, from the natural excellence and purity of

his heart. He would erect his valour and the might of his arm into a

rampart round the old man, to protect him from injury and insult; and

even in the cold region of shadows beyond the grave this feeling is

represented as still alive, so that in death, as in life, the uppermost

anxiety of the hero’s soul is for the happiness of his father. Even in

the government of his impetuous passions during his mortal career, in

the choice of the object of his love, Achilles expresses a desire to

render his feelings subordinate to those of his parent, thus verging on

the utmost limits of self-denial and self-control conceivable in a state

of nature. Homer understood his countrymen well when he gave these

qualities to his hero. Without them, he knew that no degree of courage

or wisdom would have sufficed to render him popular, and, therefore, we

find him not only pre-eminent for his piety towards the gods, but at the

same time the most affectionate and dutiful of sons, the warmest, most

disinterested, and unchangeable of friends.

Footnote 142:

Respect for old age is still a remarkable feature in the Greek

character. Thiersch. Etat Actuel de la Grèce, i. 292. On the same

trait in their ancestors see Mitf. i. 186. Odyss. ω. 254. Plat. Repub.

vi. p. 6. f. Æsch. cont. Tim. § 7.

And this leads us to consider another remarkable feature of the Greek

character,—its peculiar aptitude for friendship. No country’s history

and traditions abound with so many examples of this virtue as those of

Greece. In truth, it was there regarded as the most unequivocal mark of

an heroic and generous nature, being wholly inconsistent with anything

base, sordid, or ignoble, and flourishing only in company with virtues

rarest and most difficult of acquisition. Poetry, no doubt, has clad the

friendship of heroic times with a splendour scarcely belonging to real

life, but the experience of history warrants us in making but slight

deductions. Nature in those ages appeared to delight in producing men in

pairs, each suited to be the ornament and solace of the other,

possessing different qualities, imperfect when apart, but complete,

united. Men thus constituted were a sort of moral twins, an extension,

if we may so speak, of unity, the same yet different, bringing two souls

under the yoke of one will, desiring the same, hating the same,

possessing the same, valuing life and the gifts of life only as they

were shared in common, seeking adventures, facing dangers together,

conforming their thoughts, opinions, feelings, each to the other, having

no distinct interest, no distinct hope, but engrafting two lives on the

chances of one man’s fortune, and both perishing by the same blow.

This feeling has by some been supposed to have owed its strength, in

part at least, to the degraded position of women in society; a subject

on which I shall have more to say hereafter, but may here remark that

such an opinion is wholly incompatible with an impartial interpretation

of the Homeric poems and the older traditions of Greece. Throughout

fabulous times women are the prime movers in all great events; and the

respect which as mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters they received,

though expressed in uncourtly language, was perhaps as great as has ever

been paid them in any age or country. Every distinguished woman in Homer

is the centre of a circle of tender and touching associations. We behold

them beloved by their relatives, honoured by their dependants, enjoying

every decent freedom, every becoming pleasure, with all the influence

and authority appertaining to their sex. Thus Helen, both before and

after her fall, is entire mistress of her house, and treated with all

possible deference and delicacy: so Hecuba, Andromache, Penelope, Arete,

Nausicaa, and Iphigeneia in their respective positions, are held in the

highest esteem, and command as great a share of love from those whose

duty it was to love and honour them, as any other women in history or

fiction. Nor were due respect and tenderness confined to the high and

the noble; for innumerable proofs occur in Homer that even among the

humblest ranks, that delicate self-respect which is shown by respect to

our other self, and may be regarded as the pivot of civilisation, was

already in that age very generally diffused.

But if the Greeks of heroic times possessed the good qualities we have

attributed to them, they were still more, perhaps, distinguished for

others, which often obliterated the footsteps of their virtues, and

appeared to be the guiding principles of their lives. Chief among these

was their passion for war and violence,[143] which engaged them in

everlasting struggles with their neighbours, developed overmuch their

fierce and destructive qualities, and threw into comparative shade such

of their propensities as were gentler and more humane. War by land,

piracy by sea, filled the whole country with incessant alarms. Commerce

was checked and confined within very narrow channels, both travelling

and navigation being exceedingly unsafe, while bands of marauders

traversed land and sea in quest of rapine and plunder. In some states no

other mode was known of arriving at opulence, and the humbler classes of

society were wholly subsisted by it.[144] The laws of war, too, were

proportionably savage. It was customary either to give no quarter, or to

devote all prisoners taken to servitude; and, accordingly, every petty

state was filled with unfortunate captives, many of them of illustrious

birth and qualities, reduced to the humblest conditions, being compelled

to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. In peace, too, and in

their own homes their warlike habits led frequently to the perpetration

of violence; their passions being strong and unbridled they resented

insults on the spot, and numerous homicides were, in consequence, found

flying from the country whose infant institutions their passions had

sought to overthrow.

Footnote 143:

See Thirlwall i. 180. sqq. and Mitford i. 181.—Among the Sauromatæ, in

the time of Hippocrates, even the women mounted on horseback and

fought in battle. They were not allowed to marry until they had slain

three enemies.—De Aër. et. Loc. § 78. A circumstance is related of the

Parthian court, illustrative of the ferocity which prevailed generally

in antiquity. The monarch, it is said, kept a humble friend, whom he

fed like a dog, and whipped till the blood flowed, for the slightest

offence at table, apparently for the amusement of the guests.—Athen.

iv. 38. This trait of barbarism was imitated by the Czar Peter, by

servile historians denominated the Great, who used brutally to

maltreat the princess Galitzin before his whole court.—Mem. of the

Margrav. of Bayreuth, vol. i. p. 34.

Footnote 144:

Thucyd. i. 5.

But in all stages of society it has been ordained by Providence that out

of the wickedness of man some compensating good shall flow: thus, from

the dangers and difficulties surrounding the stranger the virtue of

hospitality[145] sprang up in generous minds. From the distress and

misery of the passionate or accidental slayer of man arose the merciful

rites of expiation, and all the friendly ties which subsisted between

the purifier and the purified. Wanderers driven from their home often

found a better in a foreign land; and thus even the transgressions and

misfortunes of men, by breaking down the narrow enclosures of families

and clans, and connecting persons of distant tribes together by benefits

and gratitude, hastened the progress of refinement and paved the way for

the greatness and glory of succeeding ages.

Footnote 145:

Il. ρ. 212. seq. The word ξένος signified, actively and passively, the

host and the guest. The rights of hospitality were hereditary, the

descendants of men being compelled to entertain the descendants of

those with whom their forefathers had contracted hospitable ties.

Πρόξενοι sometimes signified persons who publicly received

ambassadors, as Antenor among the Trojans. Agamemnon had hospitable

ties with the Phrygians, because he came of Phrygian ancestors. Damm.

_v._ ξένος. Sch. Aristoph. Eq. 347. Cf. Virg. Æn. viii. 165. et Serv.

ad loc. Plat. Soph. t. iv. p. 125, where Socrates alludes to a passage

in Homer, in which Zeus is said to be the companion of the wanderer,

observing jocularly that the Eleatic stranger might probably have been

some deity in disguise. Cf. Tomas. Tess. Hosp. c. 23. ap. Gronov.

Thesaur. ix. 266. sqq. It was a proverb at Athens that the doors of

the Prytaneion would keep out no stranger.—Sch. Aristoph. Ach. 127.

The Lucanians had a law thus expressed: “If a stranger arriving at

sunset ask a lodging of any one, let him who refuses to be his host be

fined for want of hospitality.” The object, I imagine, of the law,

says Ælian (Var. Hist. iv. i.) was at once to avenge the stranger and

Hospitable Zeus.

It will, from what has been said, be seen that among the elements of the

Greek character passion greatly predominated; but, even from the

earliest times, the existence was apparent of other powerful principles,

by the influence of which the nation was led to emerge rapidly from its

period of barbarism. These were an innate love of magnificence, and a

striking inclination towards all social enjoyments; the former leading

to the cultivation of commerce and industry, the latter communicating an

extraordinary impetus to the natural desire common to mankind for

companionship and society. But in developing these principles nature

pursued in Greece a peculiar route. Instead of establishing a common

centre, towards which the energies of the whole nation might tend,

society was broken up into numerous parts, each forming, when considered

separately, a whole, but united with its neighbours by identity of

origin, language, religion, and national character.

Philosophers usually seek in geographical position a key to the fact of

the formation of so many separate states as the Hellenic population was

divided into; but the cause was probably of a different kind. Among

every other people, a difficulty has always been experienced in

discovering men capable of conducting public affairs; and, when any such

have arisen, they have easily subdued to their will their less

intellectual and, consequently, less ambitious neighbours. Among the

Greeks the case was wholly different: every province, every district,

nay, every town and village abounded with men endowed with the ability

and passion for governing. These feelings begot the aversion to submit

to the government of others; this aversion engendered strife; and it was

only the accident of a numerical superiority existing in one division of

the country, or of a statesman of extraordinary genius springing up,

that enabled one village to subdue its neighbours for a few miles

around, and thus establish a small political community.

History rarely penetrates back so far as the period in which this state

of things existed. But we have an example in the annals of Attica, where

the twelve small municipal states, if one may so speak, were, partly by

persuasion, partly by force, brought under the authority of one city,

possessing the advantages of a superior position and wiser and more

enterprising leaders.

These diminutive polities once formed, many causes concurred to preserve

their integrity, of which the most obvious and powerful was the pride of

race, and, next to this, certain religious feelings and peculiarities,

which stationed gods along the frontier line of states, and rendered it

impious for the worshippers of other divinities to invade or dispossess

them of their lands. Communities having at first been thus isolated,

numerous circumstances arose to make eternal the separation. The ready

invention of the people gave to each state its heroes and heroic

traditions, based, perhaps, on the exploits of border warfare, in which

the ancestors of one community had suffered or inflicted injuries on the

ancestors of another. Poets sprang up who celebrated these deeds in

song, and every assembly, every festival, every merry-making resounded

with the commemoration of deeds as galling to one people as they were

glorious to the other. These prejudices, this cantonal patriotism, this

tribual vanity, if I may coin a new word to express a new idea,

constituted a far more impassable barrier between the diminutive states

of Greece, than either mountains or rivers; though, in process of time,

some few cases occurred in which very small communities were immersed

and lost in greater ones. The heroism, however, with which the smallest

commonwealth struggled to preserve its separate existence, the watchful

jealousy, the undying solicitude, the fierce and sanguinary valour by

which it hedged round its independence, the indescribable agonies of

political extinction, may be seen in the examples of Ægina, Megara,

Platæa, and Messenia.

In fact the most remarkable peculiarity in the Greek character was a

certain centrifugal force, or abhorrence of centralisation, which

presented insurmountable obstacles to the union of the whole Hellenic

nation under one head. The inhabitants of ancient Italy exhibited on

this point an entirely dissimilar character. Though differing from each

other widely in manners, customs and laws, they still possessed so much

of affinity as enabled them successively to unite themselves with Rome,

and melt into one great people. The causes lay in their moral and

intellectual character: possessing little genius or imagination, but

much good sense, they experienced less keenly the misery of inferiority,

the anguish of defeat, the tortures of submission, and calculated more

coolly the advantages of protection and tranquillity, and all the other

benefits of living under a strong government. Where the masses are but

slightly impregnated with the fire of genius they are naturally disposed

to amalgamation, and form a vast body necessarily subjected to one head.

But where a nation is everywhere pervaded and quickened by genius, where

imagination is an universal attribute, where to soar is as natural as to

breathe, where the principal enjoyment of life is the exercise of power,

where men hunger and thirst more for renown than for their daily bread,

where life itself without these imaginary delights is insipid and

despicable, no force, while the vigour of the national character

continues unbroken, can erect a central government, or achieve extensive

conquests, that is, subject one part of the nation to the sway of the

other. And perhaps it may be found when we shall farther have perfected

the science of government, that in politics as in physics the largest

bodies are not the most valuable, or the most difficult to be shattered.

The diamond resists when the largest rock yields. The true tendency of

civilisation, therefore, is to reduce unwieldy empires into compact

bodies, which the light of education can penetrate and render luminous.

Vast empires are but opaque masses of ignorance.

From precisely the same causes arose the peculiar notions of the Greeks

on the subject of government; that is, the citizens of each state

applied to one another the principle which regulated the conduct of

communities. Every man experienced an aversion to yield obedience to his

neighbour, every man was ambitious to rule; but, as this was impossible,

it became necessary to invent some means by which public business could

be carried on without offering too much violence to the national

character. Hence the origin of republicanism and the establishment of

commonwealths, in which the sovereignty was acknowledged to reside in

the body of the people, and where such of the citizens as by abilities,

rank, friends, were qualified, might rule in vicarious succession.

But the various families of the Hellenes were not all equally endowed

with the energy and intellect which belonged to their race; some

possessed more of these qualities, others less, and there were besides

in operation numerous peculiar and local causes which modified the forms

of polity adopted by the various states of Greece. The heavier, the

colder, the more inert naturally chose that form of government which

would least tax their mental faculties, and most completely relieve them

from the care of public affairs, in order the more sedulously to attend

to their own; while the fierier, the busier, more active and buoyant

preferred that political constitution which would afford their energetic

natures most employment, and supply a legitimate outlet for the ardour

and impetuosity of their temperament. Thus, in certain communities there

was a leaning towards monarchy, in others towards oligarchy; in a third

class towards aristocracy; while Athens and some few smaller states

preferred the stir, bustle, and incessant animation of democracy.

Again these institutions, springing at first out of national

idiosyncrasies, became in their turn among the most active causes which

impressed the stamp of individuality on the population of each separate

state: for the principle which animates a form of government is not a

barren principle, but impregnates, leavens, and vivifies the community

subjected to its influence, and produces an offspring analogous to the

source from which it sprang. Thus, in monarchies the summits of a nation

are rich with verdure and glorious with light; in aristocracies a broad

table-land is fertilized and rendered beautiful; while in commonwealths,

properly so called, the whole surface of society unrolls itself like a

vast plain to the sun, and receives the light and comfort, and

invigorating influence of its beams:—and all these various modifications

of civil polity were at different times and in different parts of the

country beheld in Greece, where they produced their natural fruits.

Among the principal results of the causes we have enumerated were a high

intellectual cultivation, the profoundest study of philosophy, the most

ardent pursuit of literature, a matchless taste for the beautiful in

nature and in art, an irrepressible enthusiasm in the search after

knowledge of every kind, and, joined with these, as their cause

sometimes, and sometimes as their consequence, an invincible and

limitless craving after fame. And these characteristic qualities of the

people exhibited themselves in various ways. Sometimes, as in Thessaly,

men sought to distinguish themselves by their wealth and the pomp by

which they were surrounded:—sometimes their ruling passion urged them to

pluck, amidst blood and slaughter, the laurels of war, as in Crete and

Sparta, where military discipline was carried to its utmost perfection,

where men lived perpetually encamped around their domestic hearths,

cultivated the habits, preferences, tastes, and feelings of soldiers,

and looked upon dominion as the supreme good:—sometimes religion, with

its rites and pomp and sacrifices, absorbed a whole people, as in Elis,

where the worship of supreme Zeus and the celebration of sacred games

conferred a sanctity upon the land and people which all men of Hellenic

blood respected:—elsewhere mountaineers,[146] of indomitable valour,

hired out their swords to the best bidder, and became, as it were, the

journeymen of war:—elegant pleasures in many cities, and commerce and

magnificence, occupied and depraved the whole community; while

others,[147] of grosser minds and more sordid propensities, passed their

whole lives in indolent gluttony round the festive board, amid crowds of

singers, flute-players, and dancers; or else, like the Delphians, were

ever seen hovering amid the smoke of the altars, whetting their

sacrificial knives or feasting on the savoury victims; and yet the

triumphs of the Thebans proved that even the lowest of the Greeks, when

circumstances led them to cultivate the arts of war, were capable of

planning and executing great designs, and acquiring lasting celebrity.

The arts, however, by which the Greeks rose to greatness,[148] and

became the instructors and everlasting benefactors of mankind,

flourished chiefly at Athens, and in the numerous colonies which she

planted in various parts of Asia and the islands. To men of Ionian race

we owe, in fact, the invention and most successful culture of poetry and

philosophy, and those plastic and mimetic arts which added to the world

of realities another world more beautiful still. If the Greeks borrowed,

as no doubt they did, certain varieties and forms of art and learning

from the barbarians, they immediately so refined and improved them, that

the original inventors would no longer have recognised the works of

their own hands. The glory of giving birth to several of the arts and

sciences belongs to them: they were the inventors of the art of war;

among them alone, in the ancient world, painting and sculpture assumed

their proper dignity; and in politics and statesmanship, and that art of

arts, philosophy, they led the way, and taught mankind the steps by

which to arrive at perfection.

Footnote 146:

According to Hippocrates, the inhabitants of lofty mountains, well

watered, are generally hardy and of tall stature, but fierce and

ferocious. In saying this, the philosopher describes the Arcadians

without naming them. De Aër. et Loc. § 120.

Footnote 147:

Athen. iv. 74.

Footnote 148:

Clem. Alex. Strom. i. p. 355. l. 12. Wink. Hist. de l’Art, i. 316.

Greece, by the means we have described, was gradually reclaimed from the

state of nature, covered with beautiful cities, harbours, docks,

temples, palaces adorned with infinite variety of works of art, with

sculpture in ivory and gold, with paintings, gems, and vases, which

converted her principal cities into so many museums. Her plains, her

dells, her mountain recesses were studded with sanctuaries and sacred

groves, conferring the external beauty of religion on the whole face of

the country. Public roads, branching from numerous capital cities,

traversed the land in every direction; bridges spanned her rivers,

agriculture covered her hills and plains with harvests, the vine hung in

festoons from tree to tree, the foliage of the olive clothed the

mountain sides, and a belt of beautiful gardens surrounded every city,

town, and village.

The primary cause of all this amazing activity has, by philosophers,

been sought for in various circumstances of the condition of the Greeks,

in the form of their institutions, in the rivalry of so many small

communities, in the fact of their being inventors, and the consequent

freshness of their pursuits. But although all these circumstances and

many others contributed, as we have shown, to expedite the progress of

the Greeks in civilisation, they were none of them the fountain head,

which lies far beyond our ken. It were in fact as easy to tell why one

star differs from another star in glory, as why one nation or one man

rises in intellect above his fellows. But we are supplied with a link in

the chain which connects the above effects with their cause, by the

physical organisation of the Greeks, who possessed the most perfect

forms in which humanity ever appeared. Their frame exhibiting all the

beauty of which the human body is susceptible, uniting strength with

lightness, dignity and elegance with activity, the utmost robustness of

health with extreme delicacy of contour, the muscles developed by

exercise, and developed over the whole structure alike, suggested the

idea of power and indefatigable energy; the stature, generally above the

middle size, the free and unembarrassed gait, the features[149] full of

beauty, the expression replete with intellect, and the eye flashing with

a consciousness of independence:—all these united conferred upon the

form of the Greek an elevation, a grandeur, a majesty which we still

contemplate with admiration in their sculpture, and denominate the

ideal. Above all things, the form of the Grecian head was most

exquisite, with its smooth, expansive, almost perpendicular forehead and

majestic outline, describing a perfect oval. Generally the complexion

was of a clear olive, the hair and eyes black, the temperament inclined

to melancholy, though numerous instances occurred of sanguine fair

persons with light eyes and chesnut or auburn hair, which the youth

wore, as now, in a profusion of ringlets falling to the shoulders.

Instances likewise occurred among the Greeks of individuals, who, like

our own Chatterton, had eyes of different colours. Thus the poet

Thamyris[150] is said to have had one eye grey, the other black. Nay,

this peculiarity was even remarked among the inferior animals, more

particularly the horses.[151]

Footnote 149:

Among the ancient Scythians an extraordinary uniformity of feature was

observable, as also among the Egyptians, (the same is the case at

present,) supposed to proceed, in the one case from the rigour, in the

other from the extreme heat, of the climate. Hippoc. de Aër. et Loc. §

91. But in every country, the climate being alike for all, the same

effect ought to be produced on the whole population. The similitude is

chiefly to be traced to the absence of all mixture with foreign races;

and the equal indevelopement of the mind.

Footnote 150:

Poll. iv. 141.

Footnote 151:

Aristot. de Gen. Anim. v. i.

The characteristic beauty of the nation displayed itself in every stage

of life, only assuming new phases in its progress from the beauty of

infancy to the beauty of old age, inspiring the mingled feelings of love

and admiration; and notwithstanding the effects of time, and

inter-marriage with barbarous races, the same is the case still. For

nowhere in Europe do we meet with infants so lovely, with youths so

soft, so virginal, so beautiful in their incipient manliness, with old

men so grave, stately, and with countenances so magnificent, as among

the living descendants of the Hellenes, whose destiny may yet be, one

day, as enviable as their forms.

To push our enquiry one step further; it may be questioned, whether the

glorious organisation we have been describing was not itself an effect

of air, climate, and soil.[152] Certain at any rate it is, that the

atmosphere of Greece is clearer, purer, more buoyant and elastic, than

that of any other country in our hemisphere. At night, particularly,

there is a transparency in the air, which appears to impart additional

lustre and magnitude to the stars and moon. Its mountain tops, the

intervening space being, as it were, removed, seem to mingle with the

constellations which cluster in brightness on the edge of the horizon.

Footnote 152:

Cf. Hippoc. de Aër. et Loc. § 125, seq. § 23, seq. Casaub. ad Theoph.

Char. p. 94. seq.

A principal cause of this clearness and pellucidness is the great

prevalence of the north wind,[153] which brings with it few or no

vapours, but gathers together the clouds in heaps and rolls them from

the land towards the Mediterranean. The reason why this wind so often

prevails may be discovered in the geographical configuration of the

country, which is not, like Italy, divided from the rest of the

continent by a range of Alps that might have screened it from the colder

blasts, but lies open like an elevated threshing-floor, to be purged and

winnowed on all sides by the winds, which in many parts are so violent

that no tree can attain to any great height, while the stunted woods

throw all their branches in one direction, and the vines and other

climbing shrubs are laid prostrate along the rocks. These winds,

however, prevail not constantly, but the southern and western breezes,

blowing at intervals, bring along with them the warm atmosphere of Syria

or Egypt, or the cooling freshness of the ocean. Another cause, which

greatly tends to promote the purity of the air, is the lightness,

friability, and dryness of the soil, which, distributed for the most

part in thin layers over ledges of rocks, permits no stagnation of

moisture, but enables the rain that falls to trickle through, collect in

rills and brooks, and find its way rapidly to the sea. The plains and

irregular valleys, which form an exception to this rule, are not

numerous enough, or of sufficient magnitude to affect the general

proposition. There appear, moreover, to be many peculiar properties and

virtues in the soil itself, causing all fruits transplanted thither to

attain to speedy ripeness and superior flavour, while odoriferous plants

and flowers, as the jasmine, the wild thyme, and the rose exhale sweeter

and more delicious fragrance. This is more particularly the case in

Attica, which accordingly produced in antiquity, where due care was

bestowed on gardening and agriculture, the finest fruits and sweetest

honey in the world.[154]

Footnote 153:

This wind, wherever it prevails, increases the appetite; and the

Greeks were a hearty-eating people.—Aristot. Probl. xxvi. 45. The wind

Ornithias was often so cold as to strike birds dead on the wing.

Schol. Aristoph. Ach. 842.

Footnote 154:

Aristot. Probl. xx. 20. The black myrtle, which is much larger than

the white, grew wild about the hills. (xx. 36.) The southern breezes

were considered highly salutary to the plants of the Thriasian plain.

(xxvi. 18.)

The same qualities in soil and climate which affect vegetation, likewise

powerfully influence the character and temperament of men and animals.

It is, for example, well known in the Levant, that the Bedouins

inhabiting Arabia Proper and the Eastern Desert degenerate both in

character and physical organisation when transplanted to the Libyan

wastes on the western banks of the Nile. But if particular soil and

situation engender particular diseases; if the air of fens and marshes

blunt the senses and paralyse, to a certain degree, the intellectual

faculties, the converse of the proposition must also hold good; so that

it is conceivable that the light soil and pure air of Greece may have

produced corresponding effects on the bodies and minds of its

inhabitants. The experiment, in fact, is made daily; for strangers

arriving there with the germs of disease in their constitution, are, in

most cases, speedily destroyed by the force of the climate; while the

healthy and vigorous acquire the vivacity, the cheerfulness, the nervous

and impetuous energy of the natives themselves, and, like them, extend

the term of life to its utmost span. Greece, indeed, has always been the

habitation of longevity; its philosophers in antiquity,—its monks,

anchorites, and rural population in modern times, furnishing, perhaps,

more examples of extreme old age than could be found on the same extent

of territory in any other part of the globe.

Now this excess of vitality, this superabundance of the principle of

life, which constitutes what we intend by physical or moral energy,

almost inevitably produces, among an ill-governed, ill-educated people,

a large harvest of crime, and, accordingly, the modern Greeks have often

been distinguished for audacious villany; the intrepid vigour of their

character, controlled neither by religion nor philosophy, easily

breaking through the restraints of tyranny and unjust laws in the chase

after power or excitement. That Frenchman spoke more truly than he

thought, who said the Greeks were still the same “canaille” as in the

days of Themistocles: for, give them the same laws, the same education,

the same incentives to virtue and to heroism, and they will probably be

again as virtuous, as wise, and as heroic as their illustrious

ancestors. I judge in this way partly from my own experience, for I have

seldom become acquainted with a Greek,—and I have known many,—who has

not improved upon acquaintance, won my esteem, and, in most cases, my

affection, and impressed me with the firm belief that there is no nation

in the varied population of Europe which, if ruled with wisdom and

justice, would exhibit loftier or more exalted qualities. In these views

I am happy to be borne out by the testimony of Monsieur Frederic

Thiersch, whose facilities for studying the modern Greek have been far

more ample than mine, and whose opinions are marked by the cautious

acuteness of the statesman with the depth and originality of the

philosopher.

In alluding to the causes which pervert the feelings and misdirect the

energies of the existing race, I have touched also at the great source

of crime among their ancestors,—I mean, defective laws and institutions;

for although the Greek character was, in force and excellence, all that

I have said, and more, it, nevertheless, contained other elements than

those I have described, which it now becomes my duty to speak of. From a

very early period there existed in Greece two political parties,

variously denominated in various states, but upholding,—the one, the

doctrine that the many ought to be subjected to the few; the other, that

the few ought to be subjected to the many: in other words, the

oligarchical and democratical parties. From the struggles of these two

factions the internal history of Greece takes its form and colour, as to

them may be traced most of the fearful atrocities, in the shape of

conspiracies, massacres, revolutions, which, instructing while they

shock us, stain the Greek character with indelible blots.[155] Ambitious

men are nowhere scrupulous. To enjoy the delight imparted by the

exercise of power, individuals have in all ages stifled the dictates of

conscience; and where, as in modern Italy and in ancient Greece,

numerous small states border upon each other, sufficiently powerful to

dream of conquest though too weak to achieve it, the number of the

ambitious is of necessity greatly multiplied. In proportion, however, to

the thirst of power in one class was the love of freedom and

independence in the other, so that the process of encroachment and

resistance, of tyranny and rebellion, of usurpation and punishment, was

carried on perpetually,—the oligarchy now predominating, and cutting off

or sending into exile the popular leaders, while the democratic party,

triumphing in its turn, inflicted similar sufferings on its enemies. By

degrees, moreover, there sprang up two renowned states to represent

these opposite principles, and the contests carried on by them assumed

consequently many characteristics of civil war,—its obstinacy, its

bitterness, its revenge.

Footnote 155:

See the savage anecdote of Stratocles in Plutarch. Demet. § 12.

In these struggles seas of blood were shed, and crimes of the darkest

dye perpetrated. Cities, once illustrious and opulent, were razed to the

ground; whole populations put to the sword or reduced to servitude;

fertile plains rendered barren; men most renowned for capacity and

virtue made a prey to treachery or the basest envy; the morals of great

states corrupted, their glory eclipsed, their power undermined, and a

way paved for the inroads of barbarian conquerors who ultimately put a

period to the grandeur of the Hellenes.

Examples without number might be collected of these horrors. It will be

sufficient to advert briefly to a few, more to remind than to inform the

reader. In the troubles of Corcyra[156] the nobles and the commons

alternately triumphing over each other, carried on with the utmost

ruthlessness the work of extermination with abundant baseness and

perfidy, some portion of which attached to the Athenian generals: the

wrongs and sufferings inflicted by the Spartans on the brave but

unfortunate inhabitants of Messenia, with the annual butchery of the

Helots, the treacherous withdrawal of suppliants from sanctuary, and

their subsequent slaughter,[157] the extermination of the people of

Hysia,[158] the precipitating of neutral merchants into pits,[159] the

betrayal of the cities of Chalcidice and the islands, the massacre in

cold blood of the Platæans, of four thousand Athenians in the

Hellespont,[160] the reduction of innumerable cities to servitude: by

the Athenians, the extermination of the people of Melos,[161] the

slaughter of a thousand Mitylenians, the cruelties at Skione, Ægina, and

Cythera;[162] but beyond these, and beyond all, the fearful excesses of

civil strife at Miletos where the common people called Gergithes having

risen in rebellion against the nobles and defeated them in battle, took

their children and cast them into the cattle stalls where they were

crushed and trampled to death by the infuriated oxen; but the nobles

renewing the contest and obtaining ultimately the victory, seized upon

their enemies,—men, women, children, and covered them with pitch, to

which setting fire they burnt them alive.[163]

Footnote 156:

Thucyd. iii. 70. sqq.

Footnote 157:

Ælian. Var. Hist. vi. 7. Cf. Eurip. Andr. 445. seq.

Footnote 158:

Thucyd. v. 83.

Footnote 159:

Thucyd. ii. 67.

Footnote 160:

Pausan. ix. 32. 9.

Footnote 161:

Thucyd. v. 126; iii. 50.

Footnote 162:

Thucyd. v. 32; iv. 57.

Footnote 163:

Heracl. Pont. ap. Athen. xii. 26.

From these glimpses of guilt and suffering, we may learn to what

extremes the Greek was sometimes hurried by passion and the thirst of

power. But propensities so wolfish were not predominant in his

nature.[164] On the contrary, in private life, even the Spartans and the

Dorians generally put off their cruel and severe habits, and relaxed on

all proper occasions into joviality and mirth. In their social

intercourse, in fact, few nations have been more cheerful or addicted to

jokes and pleasantry than the Greeks, and above all the Athenians, whose

hours of leisure were one continued round of gossip, sport, and

laughter.[165] Never in any city were news-mongers, or even

news-forgers, so numerous. In the mouth of young and old no question was

so frequent as, “What is the news?” These were the sounds that

circulated from rank to rank in the assembly of the people before the

orators began their harangues, that were bandied to and fro in the

Agora, that filled by their incessant repetition the shops of barbers

and perfumers.[166] Akin to this itching ear was the passion for show

and magnificence, every man, from highest to lowest, affecting as far as

possible spacious dwellings, superb furniture and costly apparel. Even

the bravest of the brave, the heroes of Marathon, were _petits-maîtres_

at their toilette, and went forth to the field in purple cloaks, their

hair curled, adorned with golden ornaments, and perfumed with essences.

The study of philosophy itself failed in most cases to subdue this

ostentatious spirit. Plato loved rich carpets and splendid raiment. Even

Aristotle was an exquisite, and Æschines an acknowledged coxcomb.

Footnote 164:

Cf. Wink. Hist. de l’Art, i. 320. Thiersch, Etat. Act. de la Grèce, i.

p. 290. sqq; and for their disinterestedness, Pashley, Trav. in Crete,

i. 221.

Footnote 165:

Loud laughter was nevertheless considered vulgar among the

Greeks.—Plat. Repub. t. vi. 112. The Athenians were addicted to the

language of shrugging and nodding, κ.τ.λ. To nod upwards was to deny,

downwards to confess. Sch. Aristoph. Ach. 112.

Footnote 166:

Aristotle says that the orators of Athens, who governed the people,

passed sometimes the whole of the day seeing mountebanks or jugglers,

or talking with those who had travelled as far as the Phasis or

Borysthenes; and that they never read anything save the Supper of

Philoxenos and that not all.—Athen. i. 10. It was in the opinion of

these persons perhaps, that “a great book was a great evil.”—Id. iii.

1.

From several of these weaknesses the Spartans were free. They cared

little for news, still less for dress, and less still for cleanliness;

so that their beautiful long hair and waving beards swarmed with those

autochthonal beasts, for the expulsion of which there was no law in

Sparta. Though neither a knowing nor cleanly race, however, their wit

was bright and piercing. No people uttered pithier or finer sayings, and

their taste both in music and poetry was cultivated and refined.

Probably, therefore, the dining halls and gymnasia and public walks of

Sparta were enlivened by as much mirth as those of any other Grecian

city, where usually cheerfulness was so prevalent, that “to be as merry

as a Greek,” has become a proverb in all countries.

On the third period of the Greek character it is unnecessary to speak at

any length. Most of their good qualities having departed with their

freedom they degenerated into a dissembling, hypocritical, fawning and

double-dealing race, with little or no respect for truth, without

patriotism, and without genuine valour. The literature, painting, and

sculpture, to which in their period of degradation they gave birth, bore

evident marks of their degeneracy, and tended by the corruption they

diffused to avenge them on their conquerors the Romans; whose minds and

morals they vitiated, and whose career of freedom and glory they cut

short. Through their vices, however, the fame of their more noble and

virtuous ancestors has greatly suffered, for the Romans contemplating

the Greeks they saw before them, and implanting their opinion throughout

the whole civilised world, their false and unjust views have been

bequeathed to posterity; for it is still in a great measure through the

Romans that people study the Greeks.

CHAPTER III.

GEOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE.

To render still clearer the point we have been insisting on in the

foregoing chapter, it may be useful to take a rapid survey of the

geography of the country, and enter somewhat more at length into its

peculiar configuration and productions.[167] Considered as a whole, the

most remarkable feature in the aspect of Greece consists in the great

variety of forms which its surface assumes in the territories of the

numerous little states into which the country was anciently divided. Of

these no two resemble each other, whether in physical structure, climate

or productions; so that it may be said that in general the atmosphere of

Greece is mild,[168] but not in every part, for within its narrow

boundaries are found nearly all grades of temperature. The inhabitants

of Elis and the valley of the Eurotas are exposed to a degree of heat

little inferior to that of Egypt, while the settlers about Olympos,

Pindos and Dodona, with the rough goat-herds of Parnassos, Doris and the

Arcadian mountains experience the rigours of an almost Scandinavian

winter. In this extraordinary country the palm tree and the myrtle

flourish within sight of the pine, the larch, and the silver fir of the

north. In several of the islands and on parts of the continent certain

tropical birds, as the peacock and the golden pheasant, have long been

naturalised, while in other districts snipes and woodcocks[169] appear

early; storms of sleet and hail are frequent, and the summits of

mountains are capped with eternal snow.[170] A no very elevated range of

hills separates the marsh miasmata and wit-withering fogs of

Bœotia,[171] the home of gluttony and stupidity, from the bland

transparent cheerful atmosphere and sweet wholesome soil of Attica,

where, as a dwelling-place for man, earth has reached her highest

culminating point of excellence, and where, accordingly, her noblest

fruits, wisdom and beauty, have ripened most kindly.

Footnote 167:

Cf. Hermann, Pol. Ant. § 6. Müll. Dor. ii. 425.

Footnote 168:

Varro gave the preference to the soil and climate of Italy, where

everything good was produced in perfection. He thought no barley to be

compared with the Campanian, no wheat with the Apulian, no rye with

the Falernian, no oil with the Venafran. The whole country was so

thickly planted with trees that it seemed to be an orchard. Not even

Phrygia itself abounded more in vineyards; nor was Argos so fertile as

parts of Italy, though it was said to produce from ten to fifteen

pipes the juger. De Re Rustica, i. 2. p. 46. b.

Footnote 169:

“Woodcocks and snipes, I am informed, visited the neighbourhood of

Attica during the winter in considerable quantities. I heard the

curlew and the red shank cry along the marsh to the right of the

Piræus.” Sibth. in Walp. Mem. i. 76.

Footnote 170:

Cramer, Desc. of Greece, i. 8.

Footnote 171:

Βοιωτία ὗς. Pind. Olymp. vi. 151. Cram. ii. 200.—Thick and foggy

atmosphere. Hipp. de Aër. § 55. Plat. De Legg. v. t. vii. p. 410.

seq—Cicero observes:—“Etenim licet videre acutiora ingenia et ad

intelligendum acutiora eorum, qui terras incolant eas, in quibus aër

sit purus ac tenuis, quàm illorum, qui utantur crasso cœlo atque

concreto.” De Nat. Deor. ii. 16. “The purple and the grey heron

frequent the marshes of Bœotia.” Sibth. in Walp. Mem. i. 76.

To proceed, however, with an outline of the country: along the shores,

more especially towards the west, rugged cliffs of great elevation

impend over the deep, and in stormy weather present an appearance highly

desolate and forbidding. But descending the Ionian sea, and doubling

Cape Crio, the south westernmost promontory of Crete, the approach

towards the tropics is felt both in the air and in the landscape. The

nights are beyond description lovely, the stars appear with increased

size and brilliancy,[172] and morning spreads over both land and wave a

beauty but faintly reflected even in poetry. Every rock and headland,

clothed with the double light of mythology and the sun, emerges from the

obscurities of the dawn glittering with dew and fresh as at the

creation. The slopes of the mountains, feathered with hanging woods,

lead the eye upwards to those aspiring peaks, the cradle of many a

Hellenic legend, where snows pale and shining as those of Mont

Blanc,[173] descending on all sides in wavy gradations to meet the

forests, rest for ever, and at the opening and the close of day exhibit

that crimson blush which we observe among the higher Alps. All the

lowlands at their base are meantime covered, perhaps, with heavy mists,

while lighter and more fleecy vapours hang here and there upon the

mountain tops, augmenting their grandeur by allowing the imagination

like a Titan to pile them up as high as it pleases towards heaven. The

coasts of eastern Hellas, including those of Eubœa, along the whole line

of Thessaly to the confines of Macedonia, are bold and rocky, frowning

like the ramparts of freedom upon the slaves of the Asiatic plains.

Footnote 172:

I never saw the Pleiades appear so large as on the coast of Messenia.

See Coray, Disc. Prel. ad Hipp. de Aër. et Loc. § 115.

Footnote 173:

Even the Cheviot hills are sometimes (as in 1838) covered all the

summer with patches of snow, on which occasions the peasants are said

to pay no rent. _Tyne Mercury_, July 1, 1838.

Traversed in almost every direction by mountain chains infinitely

ramified and towering in many places to a vast height, Greece has,

likewise, its elevated table-lands, lakes, bogs, morasses, with

extensive open downs and heaths. Lying between the thirty-sixth and

forty-first degrees of north latitude, and excepting on the Illyrian and

Macedonian frontier everywhere surrounded by the sea, it may in many

respects be said to enjoy the most advantageous position on the globe.

From the barbarian countries of Macedonia and Illyria it is divided by a

series of contiguous mountain ridges, which commencing with Olympos,

(covered all the year round with snow, amid which the poet Orpheus[174]

was interred,) and including the Cambunian range, with the lofty peak of

Lacmos, stretches westward across the continent, and terminates in the

stormy Acroceraunian promontory. The most northern provinces of Hellas,

immediately within this boundary and west of the Pindos range, were

Chaonia and Molossia, and towards the east Thessaly—a circular valley of

exceeding fertility, encompassed by chains of lofty mountains. This

province contains the largest and richest plains in Greece; and many of

the names most hallowed by its religious traditions and most renowned in

poetry, belong to Thessaly. Here, in fact, was the supposed cradle of

the Hellenes. From hence sailed the Argo and incomparably the greatest

of all the heroes who fought at Troy

“—--mixed with auxiliar gods.”

Footnote 174:

Paus. ix. 30. 9. Anthol. Græc. vii. 9. Menag. ad Diog. Laert. Proœm. §

5. Here, too, one of the three Corybantes, when he had been slain by

his brethren, found a grave. Clem. Alex. Protrept. c. xi. t. i. p. 16.

From the blood of this man sprang the herb parsley.

The geography of Thessaly is remarkable. According to a tradition

already mentioned it was once a mountain-girt lake, the waters of which

augmented by unusual rains burst their stupendous barriers and tore

themselves a way through opposing rocks to the sea. Among the tribes of

northern Hindùstân a similar tradition prevails respecting the formation

of the Vale of Kashmèr; and whether in these cases the voice of fame has

preserved or not an historical truth, such events may be regarded as not

improbable in countries abounding with mountain lakes whose beds lie

considerably above the level of the sea. The lofty ridge which skirts

the shores of the Ægæan, and is said to have been rent in remote

antiquity by the waters of the lake, presents a highly varied aspect to

the approaching mariner. First on sailing northward Pelion comes in

sight: a broad ridge rising from the waves like a huge uncrenalated

wall, and covered in Homeric times with fiercely waving woods. To this

succeeds Ossa, with its steep conical peak, clothed with durable snows

and divided by a narrow dusky gap from Olympos. This gap is Tempe,[175]

whose savage beauties poets and sophists have vied with each other in

describing, though the reality is still finer than their pictures. On

entering the defiles of the mountains a narrow glen hemmed in by

precipitous rocks, bare in some places, in others verdant with hanging

oaks, receives the waters of the Peneios, which, like the Rhone at St.

Maurice and the Nile at Silsilis, in some places fill up the whole

breadth of the pass, leaving scarcely room for a straitened road carried

over rocky ledges. Farther on they diffuse themselves over a broad

pebbly bed, and narrow prospects are opened up through woody vistas into

soft pastural recesses, carpeted with emerald turf, and perfumed with

flowers and shrubs of the richest fragrance. Anon the vale contracts

again, gloomy cliffs frown over the stream and sadden its surface with

their shadows, until at length the whole chain is traversed and the

Peneios precipitates its laughing waters into the Ægæan.[176] Crossing

the great range of Pindos we enter Epeiros,[177] a country anciently

divided into many provinces, and partly inhabited by semi-barbarous

tribes, where on the borders of a lake singularly beautiful and

picturesque stood the fane and oracle of Dodonæan Zeus. Homer,

accustomed to the mild skies of Ionia, speaks of its climate as rude and

severe. But Byron, born among the hungry rocks of Caledonia, and

habituated to the savage features of the north, was smitten with its

wild charms, and thus describes one of the scenes in the neighbourhood

near the sources of the Acheron.

Monastic Zitza, from thy shady brow,

Thou small but favoured spot of holy ground,

Where’er we gaze,—around, above, below,

What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!

Rock, river, forest, mountain,—all abound;

And bluest skies that harmonize the whole.

Beneath, the distant torrent’s rushing sound

Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll

Between those hanging rocks which shock yet please the soul.

Footnote 175:

Æl. Var. Hist. iii. 1. Holland 291–95. Clarke iv. 290–97. Dodwell,

109. sqq. Gell. Itiner. of Greece, 280.

Footnote 176:

Aristotle accounts for what every traveller will have remarked, the

extreme blueness of this sea, which he contrasts with the whitish

waves of the Pontos Euxeinos. In the latter case, he observes, the

air, thick and whitish, is reflected from the surface of the turbid

waters; while, in the Ægæan, the sea, transparent to a great depth,

reflects the bright rich colour of the sky.—Prob. xxiii. 6. He adds

that the sea is more transparent during the prevalence of the north

wind.

Footnote 177:

Though this country be not generally included by geographers within

the limits of Hellas, I have considered it as a part of Greece,

because Homer evidently so thought it. He reckons the Perrhæbi and

Ænianes, and the dwellers about the cold Dodona, among the followers

of Agamemnon, that is classes them among the Greeks.—Il. β. 749–755.

The ancient name of the country is said to have been Æsa.—Etym. Mag.

39. 19. Cf. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Δωδών. p. 319. d. sqq.

Clusters of islands clothed with poetical verdure stretch along the

coast thickly indented by diminutive bays and embouchures of rivers. On

a point of the Acarnanian shore[178] in the mouth of the Ambracian gulf,

the Commonwealth of Rome which had foundered so many rival states

suffered final shipwreck, and the shores of avenged Hellas were strewed

with the wrecks of Roman freedom. Ætolia, Doris, Locris, Phocis, in

which was the mystic navel of Gaia,[179] and the deep valley of Bœotia,

divided from each other by mountains or by considerable rivers, minutely

intersected by streams, and broken up into a perpetual succession of

hill and dale, conduct us southward to the Corinthian Gulf and the

borders of Attica.

Footnote 178:

Where stood a celebrated Temple of Apollo.—Thucyd. i. 29.

Footnote 179:

The “rocky Pytho” afterwards Delphi. Iliad, β. 519.

Reserving this illustrious division of Hellas, and Megaris which

originally formed a part of it, for the close of our rapid outline, we

enter the Peloponnesos,—a country remarkable both for its physical

configuration, and for the races which anciently inhabited it. Connected

with the continent by the narrow isthmus of Corinth it immediately

expands westward and southward into a peninsula of large dimensions, in

form resembling a ragged plantain leaf or outstretched palm.[180] Like

the northern division of Hellas the Peloponnesos is rough with mountain

chains, and belted round with cliffs. Towards the centre it swells into

a lofty plateau, known to antiquity under the name of Arcadia. Foreign

poets, misapprehending the nature of the country, have described this

province as a succession of soft pastoral scenes.[181] But its real

character is very different, consisting chiefly of an extensive

table-land, supported by vast mountain buttresses, which in some places

tower into peaks of extraordinary elevation. It is broken up into

innumerable valleys and deep glens, overhung with wild precipitous

rocks, clothed with gloomy forests, and buried during a great part of

the year in clouds and snow. The inhabitants were rough and unpromising

as the soil, distinguished like the modern Swiss for no quality but

bravery, which, like them too, they sold with a mercenary recklessness

to the best bidder.[182] Achaia is a slip of sea-coast sloping towards

the north. Elis, a succession of beautiful plains with few eminences

intervening, well watered and renowned for their fine breed of mares.

This, the Holy land of the Hellenes, sacred every rood to Zeus, was to

the Greeks a place of pilgrimage, as Mecca to the Arabs and Palestine to

the Christians of the West. In the Homeric age it was confined within

narrow limits, its sea-coast only extending from Buprasion to the

promontory of Hyrminè, scarcely indeed, so far, as Myrsinos is said to

be its last city towards the north, and Buprasion is mentioned rather as

a separate state. It was divided from Achaia by Mount Scollis, which

Homer calls “the rock Olenia,” and Aleision is the boundary to the

south; consequently, neither Mount Pholöe nor Olympia, nor the Alpheios

was then included in Elis, still less Triphylia.

Footnote 180:

Strb. viii. 2. 140. Dion. Perieg. ap. Palm. Gr. Ant. 16.

Footnote 181:

Cf. Palm. Gr. Ant. 61. On the climate of Arcadia see Aristot. Problem.

xxvii. 60. He observes that the winds, blowing in from the sea, were

not colder there than in other parts of Greece; but that during calms

the exhalations from the stagnant waters were particularly chill. See

also Hippoc. de Aër. et Loc. § 120.

Footnote 182:

Cf. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Ἀρκας. p. 166. b. seq.

Argolis, on the opposite side of the peninsula, is traversed by a broad

ridge of hills, which, branching off from Mount Cyllene and Parthenion

in Arcadia, abounds in deep ravines and spacious natural caverns. It

contains, however, several plains of much fertility; but, though marshy

and subject to malaria, the neighbourhood of the capital is deficient in

good water. The fame of Argos[183] rests almost wholly on a fabulous

basis: it was great in the infancy of Greece; it took the lead in the

Trojan war; but, with the irruption of the half-barbarous Dorians into

the Peloponnesos, the glory of the old heroic race

“that fought at Thebes and Ilion,”

waned visibly, and Argos and its twin city, Mycenæ, sank into

comparative insignificance.

Footnote 183:

Il. β. 559. Mases, an Argive city, is mentioned by Homer in

conjunction with Ægina, which island also belonged at that time to

Argos. This place, in later ages, was the harbour of the

Hermioneans.—Pausan. ii. 36, 83. Cf. Müll. Æginet. p. 85.

Laconia consists of a hollow valley, enclosed between two mountain

chains, proceeding from the great Arcadian barrier, Parnon and Kronios,

and stretching southward to the sea. Down the centre of this vale flows

the Eurotas, whose sources lie above Belemina, among the steep recesses

of Taygetos.[184] Though enlarged by several tributary brooks, it

preserves, until some way below Sparta, the character of a mountain

torrent; but after precipitating itself in a romantic sparkling cascade,

appears for some time to be lost in a morass. Escaping, however, from

the swamp, it flows during the remainder of its course over a firm

gravelly bed to the Laconian gulf. Immediately above Sparta the valley

narrows exceedingly; but, at this point, the hills receding suddenly on

both sides, sweep round a small circular plain, and, a short distance

below the city, again approach, and press upon the bed of the

Eurotas.[185] The site of Sparta, therefore, resembles on a small scale

that of the Egyptian Thebes, which is similarly hemmed round by the

Arabian and Libyan mountains. It follows, too, that the condition of the

atmosphere must to a certain extent be alike in both places; for the

ridges of Taygetos and Thornax rising to a great height, not only

intercept the cooler breezes from the west and north, but, bending

amphitheatrically round the plain, concentrate the sun’s rays, which,

being bare and rocky, they reflect with great force. In summer,

therefore, the heat is intense: in winter, on the other hand, their

great elevation suffices morning and evening to exclude the slanting

beams, thus causing a degree of cold little inferior, perhaps, to what

is felt in the highlands of Arcadia.

Footnote 184:

This mountain (which in one place Vibius Sequester converts into a

river, p. 19, Cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 487,) was sacred to Bacchos. Serv.

ad. Virg. ut sup.—Strabo describes it at length, and Pausanias

observes that it was adapted to the chase. On its summit horses were

sacrificed to the sun.—Paus. iii. 20. 2. Cf. Oberlin, ad Vib. Sequest.

p. 375.

Footnote 185:

Coronelli, Mém. Hist. et Géog. du Roy. de la Morée, &c. p. 90. sqq.

Poucqueville, Travels in the Morea, p. 87. Chateaubriand, Itinéraire,

t. i. pp. 102–118. Cf. Thiersch, Etat Actuel de la Grèce, i. 287, who

gives the following romantic glimpse of the Laconian valley:—“Oh! que

ce pays était beau, lorsqu’au mois de Mai 1832, nous traversâmes ses

ravissantes vallées au milieu des montagnes de la Laconie, et ses

villages situés au bord de ruisseaux limpides et entourés d’arbres

fruitiers tout en fleurs! Quelle était belle cette terre, lorsque, le

soir, revenant des ruines de Sparte à Mistra, nous étions comme

baignés de ces parfums qu’exhalent les orangers qui remplissent la

plaine, et rafraichis par la brise délicieuse descendue des montagnes

majestueuses du Taygète, dont les cimes, encore couvertes de neige,

semblaient toucher le ciel parsemé d’étoiles! Nôtre sommeil fut

interrompu la nuit par le chant mélodieux d’une troupe de rossignols.”

But though lofty and bleak, the uplands of Laconia are not incapable of

cultivation, and in many places were anciently covered with forests of

plane trees. Their eastern slopes were likewise clothed with vines,

irrigated, as in Switzerland and Burgundy, by small rills, conducted

through artificial channels from springs high up in the mountains.[186]

The summits of Taygetos are waste and wild; rent and shattered by

frequent earthquakes, lashed by rain-storms, and here and there bored

and undermined by gnawing streams, working their way to the valley, it

presents the aspect of a fragment of nature in its decrepitude. South,

however, of Mount Evoras the country opens into a plain of considerable

fertility, extending eastward towards Mount Zarax and the sea. On the

Messenian frontier, also, are many valleys highly productive. This

portion of Lacedæmon obtained in the time of Augustus the name, given

perhaps in mockery, of the land of the Eleuthero Lacones, or “Free

Laconians.”[187]

Footnote 186:

Aleman, ap. Athen. i. 57.

Footnote 187:

Strab. viii. 6. p. 190. Paus. iii. 21. 6.

Protected on the land side by mountains difficult to be traversed, and

presenting towards the sea an inhospitable harbourless coast, Laconia

seems marked out by nature to be the abode of an unsocial people. Like

that of many Swiss cantons, its climate is generally harsh and rude,

vexed by cold winds alternating with burning heats, and appears to

communicate analogous qualities to the minds of its inhabitants, who

have been in all ages remarkable for valour untempered by humanity. In

such a country the nobler arts can never be completely naturalised. The

virus imbibed from nature will find its way into the character, and defy

the influence of culture and of government.

Messenia presents, in every respect, a contrast to Laconia. Along the

sea-coast, indeed, particularly from Pylos to Cape Aeritas, its

barrenness is complete; neither woods nor thickets, nor any vestige of

verdure being visible upon the red cinder-like precipices beetling over

the sea, or sloping off into grey mountains above. But having passed

this Alpine barrier, we find the land sinking down into rich plains,

which on the banks of the broad Pamisos were anciently, for their

luxuriant fertility,[188] denominated “the Happy.” North, and about the

sources of the Balyra, the Amphitos, and the Neda the scenery grows

highly romantic and picturesque, the eye commanding from almost every

elevated point innumerable narrow meandering glens, each with its

bubbling streamlet circling round green eminences, clothed to their

summits with hanging woods. Messenia, which, as soon inhabited, must

have been wealthy, appears to have been a favourite resort of poets in

remote antiquity. Here the Thracian Thamyris, in a contest, as was

fabled, with the Muses, lost his sight, together with the gift of song;

and in a small rocky island on its coast,—the haunt, when I saw it, of

sea-mews and cormorants,—Sparta received from an Athenian general of

mean abilities one of the most galling defeats recorded in her annals.

Footnote 188:

Cf. Sibth. in Walp. Mem. i. 60.

Returning out of the Peloponnesos by way of the Isthmos, and quitting at

the Laconian rocks the territories of Corinth, we enter the

Megaris,[189] originally, as I have before observed, a part of the

Athenian territories. Attica is a triangular promontory, of small

extent, projecting into the Myrtöan sea, between Argolis and Eubœa. A

mountain chain, of no great elevation, forms, under several names, the

boundary between this country and Bœotia; and Mount Kerata, in later

times, divided it from Megaris. On every other side Attica is washed by

the sea, which, together with nearly all the circumjacent islands, was,

in antiquity, regarded as a part of its empire.[190] This minute

division of Greece, fertile in nothing but great men, is seldom viewed

with any eye to the picturesque. Satisfied that Athens stood there, we

commonly ask no more. Genius has breathed over it a perfume sweeter than

the thyme of its own hills,—has painted it with a beauty surpassing that

of earth,—rendered its atmosphere redolent for ever of human greatness

and human glory,—and cast so dazzling an illusion over its very dust and

ruins, that they appear more beautiful than the richest scenes and most

perfect structures of other lands.

Footnote 189:

Strab. ix. i. p. 232.

Footnote 190:

Strab. ix. 1. Philoch. Siebel. p. 28.

Independently, however, of its historical importance, Attica is invested

with numerous charms. Consisting of an endless succession of hill and

dale,[191] with many small plains interspersed; and swelling towards its

northern frontier into considerable mountains, it presents a miniature

of the whole Hellenic land.[192] In antiquity its uplands and ravines

and secluded hollows were clothed with wood,—oaks, white poplars, wild

olive-trees, or melancholy pines. The arbutus, the agnus castus, wild

pear, heath, lentisk, and other flowering shrubs decked its hill-sides

and glens; on the brow of every eminence wild thyme, sweet marjoram,

with many different kinds of odoriferous plants exhaled their fragrance

beneath the foot;[193] while rills of the clearest and sweetest water in

the world, leaped down the rocks, or conducted their sparkling currents

through its romantic and richly cultivated valleys. Southward, among the

mountains of scoriæ of the mining district, springs of silver[194] may

be said to have usurped the place of fountains. The face of the country

is nearly everywhere arid and barren,—the plains are parched,—the

gullies encumbered with loose shingle,—the eminences unpicturesque and

dreary; yet wherever vegetation takes place, the virtue of the Attic

soil displays itself in the production of fragrant flowers, whence the

bee extracts the most delicious honey in the world, superior in quality

to that of Hybla or Hymettos.

Footnote 191:

Mardonius, in fact, found Attica too hilly for the operations of

cavalry:—οὔτε ἱππασίμη ἡ χώρη ἦν ἡ Ἀττική.—Herod. ix. 13.

Footnote 192:

See, in Plato’s Critias, t. vii. p. 153. the eulogium of its beauty

and fertility. At present “the plain of Attica, if we except the

olive-tree, is extremely destitute of wood, and we observed, on our

return, the peasants driving home their asses laden with Passerina

hirsuta for fuel.”—Sibthorp in Mitchell, Knights, p. 155. But the

description by no means applies to the whole country. At the foot of

Cithæron there are still forests four hours in length.—Sibth. in Walp.

Mem. i. 64.

Footnote 193:

This is accounted for by the dryness and purity of the atmosphere;

for, as Pliny remarks, “hortensiorum odoratissima quæ sicca; ut ruta,

mentha, apium, et quæ in siccis nascantur.”—Hist. Nat. xxi. 18. p. 46.

Footnote 194:

Ἀργύρου πηγή τις αὐτοῖς ἐστι, βησαυρὸς χθονός.—Æschyl. Pers. 238. In

all countries the waters of mining cantons are bad.—Hippocr. de Aër.

et Loc. § 35.

Comparative barrenness may, however, upon the whole, be considered as

characteristic of Attica. Indeed, Plato,[195] in a very curious passage,

likens to a body emaciated by sickness the hungry district round the

capital, where the soil has collapsed about the rocks. But from this

innumerable advantages have arisen. The earth being light and porous

permits whatever rain falls immediately to sink and disappear, as in

Provence,[196] which, more than any other part of Europe, resembles

Attica. Hence, except in some few inconsiderable spots,[197] no bogs, no

marshes exist to poison the air with cold effluvia: a ridge of mountains

protects it against the northern blasts: mild breezes from the ocean

prevail in almost all seasons: snow seldom lies above a few hours on the

ground. The atmosphere, accordingly, kept constantly free from terrene

exhalations, is buoyant and sparkling as on the Libyan desert, when, at

noon, every elevated rock appears to be encircled by a luminous

halo.[198] In air so pure the act of breathing is a luxury which

produces a smile of satisfaction on the countenance; the mind performs

its operations with ease and rapidity; and life, everywhere sweet,

appears to have a finer relish than in countries exposed to watery and

unwholesome fogs. It was perfectly philosophical, therefore, in

Plato,[199] to regard Attica as a place designed by nature to bring the

human intellect to the greatest ripeness and perfection, a quality

extended by Aristotle to Greece at large. The same atmospheric

properties were favourable to health and long life, warding off many

disorders common in other parts of the country.

Footnote 195:

Critias, t. vii. p. 154. Words. Athens and Attica, 62.

Footnote 196:

Coray, Notes sur Hippoc. De Aër. et Loc. § 126. t. ii. p. 403.

Footnote 197:

Vide Sch. Aristoph. Lys. 1032.

Footnote 198:

Aristid. i. 187. Jebb. Aristophanes appears to speak of the brilliance

of its atmosphere in the following verse (Ran. 155):

ὅψει τι φῶς κάλλιστον, ὥσπερ ἐνθάδε.

though Spanheim supposes him to mean the light of the world

generally.—Not. in loc.

Footnote 199:

Plat. Tim. t. vii. pp. 12. 15. sqq. Bekk. Aristot. Pol. vii. 6. Cf.

Coray, Disc. Prelim. ad Hippoc. De Aër. et Loc. p. cxxix. sqq.

A learned and ingenious but fanciful writer[200] considers Peloponnesos

to have been the heart of Greece. Following up this idea, we must

unquestionably pronounce Athens to have been the head, the seat of

thought, the place where its arts and its wisdom ripened. But ere we

touch upon the capital, which cannot be slided over with a cursory

remark, it will be necessary to enter into some little detail respecting

the demi or country towns of Attica,[201] of which in the flourishing

times of the republic there existed upwards of one hundred and

seventy-four. Of these small municipal communities, of which too little

is known, several were places of considerable importance, possessing

their temples, their Agoræ, their theatres, filled with walks and

surrounded by impregnable fortifications. The Athenians regarded Athens,

indeed, as the Hebrews did Jerusalem, in the light of their great and

holy city, the sanctuary of their religion and of their freedom. But

this did not prevent their preferring the calm simplicity of a country

life to the noisier pleasures of the town. Many distinguished families,

accordingly, had houses in these demi, or villas in their vicinity.

Here, also, several of the greatest men of Athens were born: Thucydides

was a native of Halimos,[202] Sophocles of Colonos, Epicurus of

Gargettos, Plato of Ægina, Xenophon of Erchia, Tyrtæos, Harmodios, and

Aristogeiton of Aphidnæ, Antiphon of Rhamnos, and Æschylus of Eleusis.

Footnote 200:

Müll. Dor. i. 76.

Footnote 201:

See Col. Leake, Trans. Roy. Soc. Lit. i. 114–283.

Footnote 202:

Poppo, Prolegg. in Thucyd. i. 22.

In other points of view, also, the towns and villages of Attica

possessed great interest. They long continued to be the seats of the

primitive worship of the country, where the tutelar deities of

particular districts, of earth-born race, were adored with that

affectionate faith and that fervency of devotion which peculiarly belong

to small religious communities. The gods they worshipped appeared almost

to be their fellow citizens, and to exist only for their protection. In

fact, they were the patron saints of the villages. Fabulous legends and

historical traditions combined with religion to shed celebrity over the

Attic demi. There was hardly in the whole land a single inhabited spot

which did not figure in their poetry or in their annals as the scene of

some memorable exploit. Aphidnæ[203] was renowned, for example, as the

place whence the Dioscuri bore away their sister Helen, after her rape

by Theseus, in revenge for which the youthful heroes devastated the

whole district. “Grey Marathon,”[204] as Byron aptly terms it, was

embalmed for ever in Persian blood, and rendered holy by the vast

barrows raised there by the state over the ashes of its fallen warriors.

Rhamnos on the Attic Dardanelles became famous for its statue of

Nemesis, originally of Aphrodite, the work of Diodotos or Agoracritos of

Paros, not unworthy to be compared for size and beauty with the

productions of Pheidias. The irruption of the Peloponnesians conferred a

melancholy celebrity on Deceleia,[205] and Phylæ obtained a place in

history as the stronghold where Thrasybulos gathered together the small

but gallant band which avenged the cause of freedom upon the thirty. Of

Eleusis,[206] it is enough to say that there the ceremonies of

initiation into the mysteries were performed.

Footnote 203:

Paus. i. 17. 5.

Footnote 204:

Paus. i. 32. 3. sqq. “We observed the long-legged plover near

Marathon; the grey plover and the sand plover on the eastern coast of

Attica.” Sibth. Walp. Mem. i. 76. Chandler, ii. 83.

Footnote 205:

Where Sophocles and his ancestors were buried. Chandler, ii. 95.

Footnote 206:

Clem. Alex. Protrept. § 2. t. i. p. 16. seq. where he relates the

story of Demeter and Baubo.

The capital of Megara, like Athens, stood a short distance from the sea;

but was joined by long walls to its harbour Nisæa, protected from the

weather by the Minoan promontory. In sailing thence to the Peiræeus we

pass several islands, none of which, however, are of any magnitude, save

Salamis, in remote antiquity a separate state governed by its own laws.

The old capital, already deserted in the time of Strabo, stood on the

southern coast over against Ægina; but the principal town of later times

was situated on a bay at the root of a tongue of land projecting toward

that part of Attica[207] where Xerxes sat to behold his imperial armada

annihilated by the republicans of Hellas. Salamis was known of old under

various names,—Skiras, Cychræa and Pituoussa, from the Pitus, or pine

tree, by which its rocks and glens were in many places shaded.

Immediately before the engagement in which his navy was destroyed, the

Persian monarch sought to unite Salamis to the continent by a dam two

stadia in length; his project, had it succeeded, would have ruined the

ferrymen of Amphialè, a class of individuals whose operations Solon

judged of sufficient importance to be regulated by a particular article

in his code. Of the smaller islets that form the outworks of the Attic

coast, little need be said, since they were nearly all barren, and

inhabited only by a few legendary traditions. The tomb of Circe was

shown on the larger of the Pharmacoussæ; and the island of Helena, east

of the Samian promontory obtained the reputation of having been the spot

where the faithless queen of Menelaus consummated her guilt.[208]

Footnote 207:

On one of the projecting roots of Mount Ægaleus, which anciently,

according to Statius, was well-wooded, and clothed like Hymettos with

thyme.—Theb. xii. 631. Suid. _v._ Μᾶσσον. This mountain produced

likewise an abundance of figs (Theoc. Eidyll. i. 147), which were

considered the best in Attica.—Athen. xiv. 66. Meurs. Rel. Att. c. i.

p. 4. seq. Cf. Leake, Topog. 71.

Footnote 208:

Il. γ. 445. where we find its ancient name to have been Kranäe.—Cf.

Eurip. Helen. 1672. Strab. ix. 1. p. 245.—Pausanias (i. 35. 1) has

preserved another tradition representing Helen as landing here on her

return from Troy.—Chandler, ii. 7.

Ægina belonged to Attica only by conquest; but as when subdued its

subjection was complete and lasting, it must not be altogether omitted

in this glance over the home territories of the Great Demos. Like Attica

itself, the island lying in the Saronic Gulf is of a triangular shape.

By proximity it belongs to the Peloponnesos, being within thirty stadia

of the Methanæan Chersonesos, while to Salamis is a voyage of ninety

stadia, and to the Peiræeus one hundred and twenty. But the sea itself

having been considered a part of Attica, whose flag, like that of

England, streamed for ages triumphantly over its billows, the islands

also which it surrounded fell one by one into the hands of the people,

and this small Doric isle among the rest. A number of diminutive islets,

or rather rocks, cluster round the shores of Ægina, some barren and

treeless, others indued with a certain degree of fertility and verdant

with pine woods.

The most remarkable objects in Ægina were placed at the angles of the

island. The city and harbour towards the west, on the east looking

towards Attica the temple of Athena, and, near its southern extremity,

“a magnificent conical mountain, which from its grandeur, its form, and

its historical recollections, is the most remarkable among the natural

features of Ægina.”[209] An eminence so lofty and in shape so beautiful

would naturally be an object of much interest in so small an island. The

local superstitions would necessarily cluster round it, as around Ida in

Crete and Olympos in Thessaly. Accordingly on the summit of this

mountain the fables of Ægina represent King Æacos praying, in the name

of the whole Hellenic nation, to Zeus for rain, as the prophet prayed

for the Israelites, and with equal success. Here, therefore, a recent

traveller has with great judgment fixed the site of the Panhellenion,

near the spot where a chapel, dedicated to the prophet Elias, now

stands. In dimensions Ægina, according to Scylax, ranked twelfth among

the isles of Hellas. Strabo attributes to it a circumference of one

hundred and eighty stadia; but Sir William Gell, in his Argolis,[210]

considers its perimeter, not including the fluctuations of the bays and

creeks, to be not less than two hundred and ten stadia, and its square

contents three thousand one hundred and sixty-four stadia, or forty-one

square miles.[211] The interior is rocky, rough, and perforated with

caverns, in which, according to fabulous legends, the Myrmidons resided,

and Chabrias afterwards lay in ambush for the Spartan Gorgopos and his

Æginetan allies.[212] A light thin soil nourishes but sparing vegetation

on the mountains, but several of the small valleys, filled with earth

washed down by rains from the uplands, are rich and fertile, watered by

springs and rivulets, and beautified with groves of imperishable

verdure.[213]

Footnote 209:

Wordsworth, Athens and Attica, p. 262.

Footnote 210:

Ib. 28. ap. Müll. Æginet. p. 8.

Footnote 211:

Cf. Clint. Fast. Hellen. ii. 335.

Footnote 212:

Xen. Hellen. v. 1. 11.

Footnote 213:

Chandler (ii. 12) speaks of the whole island as covered with trees.

Much has been written on the extent and population of Attica, respecting

which most of the philosophers of the last generation entertained very

erroneous ideas. An examination of their statements might still,

perhaps, be interesting; but it would lead me far beside the scope of my

present work, and occupy space that can be better filled up. According

to the most careful calculation Attica contained seven hundred and

twenty square miles, or taking into account the island of Salamis seven

hundred and forty-eight. The whole of this extremely limited space

swarmed, however, with population; for even so late[214] as 317 B. C.

after all the calamities which the republic had undergone, Attica still

contained five hundred and twenty-seven thousand six hundred and sixty

persons, or nearly seven hundred and seventy-three to the square mile, a

proportion much higher than is found in the most thickly peopled

counties of England.

Footnote 214:

Clint. Fast. Hellen. ii. 386. sqq. Cf. Boeckh, Pub. Econ. of Athens,

i. 44. seq. On the number of the citizens _vide_ Philoch. Siebel, p.

17. 28. Schol. Vesp. Aristoph. 709. Strab. ix. i. t. ii. p. 234.

Hermann. Pol. Ant. § 18. Bochart, Geog. Sac. i. 286.

This, however, taking into account the form of government, the

industrious habits, and extreme frugality of the people, is entirely

within the bounds of probability. But in what is related of the

population of Ægina, the calculations current among learned authors are

so extravagant as to exceed all belief. Müller and Boeckh,[215] who on

other occasions, and sometimes very unseasonably affect scepticism,

unhesitatingly admit the account in Athenæus, which attributes four

hundred and seventy thousand slaves to the Æginetans.[216] To these the

former adds a free population of forty thousand, making the whole amount

to upwards of half a million, or twelve thousand four hundred and

fifty-seven to the square mile. Mr. Clinton,[217] clearly perceiving the

absurdity of this calculation, proposes to read seventy thousand, which

will leave a population in the proportion of two thousand six hundred

and eighty-two to the square mile. The passage in Athenæus is no doubt,

as Bochart suspects,[218] corrupt, and this being the case nothing is

left but to determine from analogy the population of Ægina, which,

supposing it equally dense with that of Attica would have amounted to

something more than thirty thousand souls.

Footnote 215:

Æginet. 128. Econ. of Athens, i. 55, seq.

Footnote 216:

Deipnosoph. vi. 103. Cf. Schol. Pind. Olymp. viii. 30.

Footnote 217:

Fast. Hellen. ii. 423.

Footnote 218:

Geog. Sac. Pars Prior, l. iv. c. 20, p. 286.

CHAPTER IV.

CAPITAL CITIES OF GREECE.—ATHENS.

From these more general considerations, into which it was perhaps

necessary to enter, let us now pass to the picture antiquity has left us

of the principal capitals, confining ourselves chiefly to Athens and

Sparta, which may be regarded as the representatives of all the rest.

The physiognomy of these, like the features of an individual, may in

some respects be considered as a key to the character of the

inhabitants; a remark which, with great truth, may be applied to all

capitals.

In the structure of the one, external and internal,[219] there was

everywhere visible an effort to embody the principle of beauty,

improving the advantages and overcoming the difficulties of position. In

the other little could be discovered indicative of imaginative power, of

the thirst to create, of the yearning of the mind after the ideal, of

the desire of genius to breathe a soul into stone, to live and obtain a

perpetuity of existence in the works of its own hands, to gaze on its

own beauty reflected on all sides from its own creations as from a

concave mirror. At Athens everything public, everything which had

reference to the united efforts of the people wore an air of grandeur.

The Acropolis inhabited only by the gods appeared worthy to be the

dwelling place of immortal beings: all the poetry of architecture was

there; it seemed to have owed its birth to a concentration of the best

religious spirit of the ancient world, aiming at giving earth a

resemblance to heaven; at peopling it with mute deities, speaking only

through their beauty and surrounding these representatives of the

invisible Olympos with everything most excellent, most valuable, most

cherished among men. At Sparta a spirit of calculating economy entered

into the very worship of the gods. They seemed, in the manner they

lodged and entertained them, to have always had an eye to their common

tables and their black broth. Between the temples of Athens and Sparta

there was, in fact, the same contrast that now exists between St.

Peter’s at Rome and a Calvinistic conventicle. Accordingly, several

ancient writers have vied with each other in heaping encomiums upon

Athens, which they regarded as at once the most glorious and the most

beautiful of cities. Athenæus denominates it the “Museum of Greece;”

Pindar, “the stay of Greece;” Thucydides, in his epigram upon Euripides,

“the Greece of Greece;” and the Pythian Apollo, “the home and place of

council of all Greeks.”[220] By others it was termed “the Opulent;”

though the principal part of its riches consisted in the wise and great

men whom it produced, and whose achievements covered it with glory. In

the same spirit the Arabs call Cairo the “Mother of cities;” and all

nations concentrate more or less upon their capital, their affection and

their pride.

Footnote 219:

Dem. Olynth. iii. 9. Palm. Exercit. in Auct. Græc. p. 622. Zander, De

Luxu Athen. c. iii. 5, § 6.

Footnote 220:

Athen. v. 12. Soph. Œdip. Col. 107. seq.

The superior magnificence of Athens appears from this; that it was

always the place to which the Greeks referred when desirous of

magnifying the splendour of their own country, in comparison with what

could be found elsewhere. Thus Dion Chrysostom[221] affirms that Athens

and Corinth in all that constitutes real grandeur surpassed the famous

capitals of Persia, Syria, and Ecbatana, and Babylon, and the metropolis

of Bactriana. Nay, in the opinion of this writer the Kraneion with its

gymnasia, fountains, and shady walks, and the Acropolis with its

Propylæa, antique altars, temples, and population of gods, exceeded in

magnificence the palaces of the Great King, though there was something

exceedingly striking in the site and structure of what may properly be

called the Acropolis of Ecbatana.[222] The city itself was unwalled, but

the citadel, which probably rose in the midst of it, occupied the slopes

of a conical hill, not unlike Mount Tabor, and was girt by seven walls

of different colours and elevation, rising in concentric circles above

each other to the summit. The circumference of the lowest is said to

have equalled that of Athens including the Peiræeus. The colour of this

wall was white; the next being black for the sake of contrast, was

succeeded by one of light purple, which was followed by walls of sky

blue, of scarlet, of silver and of gold.

Footnote 221:

Orat. vi. t. i. p. 199.

Footnote 222:

Herod. i. 98. Bochart, Geog. Sac. Pars Prior, l. iii. c. 14. p. 222.

Aristot. De Mund. ch. 6. Apuleius, p. 19.

In mere magnitude the great capitals of the East far exceeded Athens.

The circuit, for example, of Babylon, is said to have been at least four

hundred stadia, while, according to the orator Dion, that of Athens was

in round numbers two hundred stadia, or twenty-five miles. Aristeides

probably adopted the same calculation when he pronounced it to be a

day’s journey in compass. But there is some exaggeration in these

accounts; for, according to Thucydides, the total extent of the walls

did not exceed one hundred and seventy-eight stadia. The area, however,

of the city was not proportioned to the vast range of its

fortifications, consisting of two distinct systems of buildings, the

Astu, or city proper, and the Peiræeus or harbour, connected together by

three walls more than four miles in length. There were other capitals in

the western world equal in dimensions, as Syracuse, one hundred and

eighty stadia in circumference, and Rome, which in the time of Dionysios

of Halicarnassos did not command a larger circuit, though the space

included within the walls was much greater.

In order, however, to convey a more complete idea of the ancient home of

Democracy and the Arts, we must, as far as possible, open up a view into

the interior of Athens, which, with its harbours, docks, arsenals, its

market-places, bazārs, porticoes, public fountains and gymnasia,

probably formed the noblest spectacle ever presented to the eye by a

cluster of human dwellings. From whatever side approached, whether by

land or by sea, the city appeared to be but one vast group of

magnificence. In sailing up along the shore from the promontory of

Sunium, the polished brazen helmet and shield of the colossal

Athena,[223] standing on the brow of the Acropolis, were beheld from

afar flashing in the sun. On drawing nearer, the Parthenon, the

Propylæa, the temple of Erectheus, with the other marble edifices

crowning the Cecropian rock, glittered above the pinnacles of the lower

city, and the deep green foliage of the encircling plain and olive

groves. Among its principal ornaments in the later ages of the republic

was a remarkable monument in the road to Eleusis,—the tomb of the

hetaira Pythionica, who dying while her beauty still bloomed and her

powers of fascination were unimpaired, the love she had inspired

survived the grave and manifested itself by rearing a costly pile of

marble over her ashes.[224]

Footnote 223:

Paus. i. 28. 2.

Footnote 224:

Athen. xiii. 67.

Upon sailing into the Peiræeus,[225] where generally ships from every

quarter of the ancient world lay at anchor, the stranger was immediately

struck by manifestations of the people’s power and predilection for

stateliness and grandeur. The entrance into the port, barely wide enough

to admit a couple of galleys abreast, with their oars in full sweep, lay

between two round towers, in which terminated on either hand the

maritime fortifications of the city. Across the mouth vast chains were

extended in time of war, rendering the Peiræeus a closed port;[226]

arrived within which, the pleased eye wandered over the spacious quays,

wharfs, and long ranges of warehouses extending round the harbour, with

tombs and sepulchral monuments rising here and there in open spaces

between. Among them was a cenotaph in the form of an altar, raised by

the repentant people in memory of Themistocles,[227] the founder of the

naval power of Athens, whose bones however it has sometimes been

supposed were brought thither from Magnesia. The Peiræeus consisted of

three basins, Zea, Aphrodision, which was by far the largest, and

Cantharos. On the western shore were the vast docks and arsenals of the

commonwealth erected by Philon,[228] in which, during peace, all that

portion of the public navy not engaged in protecting its trade in

distant colonies, was drawn up in dry docks, roofed over and surrounded

by massive walls. Towards the centre of the town stood the

Hippodameia,[229] an agora or market place, which appears to have

resembled Covent Garden, with ranges of stalls in the area and

surrounded by dwelling-houses. This building derived its name from

Hippodamos of Miletos, the architect who erected it, and laid out the

whole maritime city in the regular and beautiful style of which he was

the inventor.[230] Here, also, were several other market-places or

bazārs, among which may be reckoned a place[231] resembling the Laura of

Samos, the Sweet Ancon of Sardis, the Street of the Happy at Alexandria,

and the Tuscan Street at Rome, in which fruit, confectionary, with

delicacies and luxuries of every kind were exposed for sale. In these

agora, as now in the bazārs of Cairo, Damascus, and Constantinople, were

beheld, in close juxtaposition, the wines of Spain and Portugal, amber

from the shores of the ocean, the carpets, shawls, and jewels of the

East, fruit and gold from Thasos, ivory and ostrich feathers from

Africa, and beautiful female slaves from Syria, Dardania, and the

southern shores of the Euxine, the Mingrelians and Georgians of the

modern world.[232] Around these singular groups the young men of Athens,

in an almost oriental pomp of costume, might be seen lounging, some

perhaps purchasing, others merely looking on, half in haste to return to

the gymnasium or to the lectures of Socrates.

Footnote 225:

Cf. Steph. De Urb. v. Πειραιός. p. 633. G. sqq.

Footnote 226:

Leake, Top. of Ath. p. 311. sqq.

Footnote 227:

Paus. i. 1, 2. Plut. Them. § 32. Meurs. Pir. c. 3.

Footnote 228:

Strab. ix. 1. p. 239.

Footnote 229:

Harp. _v._ Ἱπποδ. Xen. Hell. ii. 4. Dem. in Timoth. § 5. Andoc. de

Myst. § 10.

Footnote 230:

Arist. Polit. vi. 8. p. 40. 16. vii. 11. p. 199. 25. Hesych. v. Ἱπποδ.

νέμησις.

Footnote 231:

Athen. xii. 57, 58. Animad. t. 11. p. 468. Sch. Aristoph. Pac. 98.

Footnote 232:

See for the authorities, Book vi. chapters 11 and 12.

Among the public buildings[233] in the harbour were the Deigma[234] or

Exchange, where the merchants met to transact business, bringing along

with them samples of their goods; the Serangion[235] or public baths;

the superb temples of Zeus and Athena adorned with exquisite pictures

and statues, where in an open court seems to have stood the celebrated

altar erected by Demosthenes[236] in commutation of his fine of thirty

talents; the Long Portico which served as an agora to those living near

the shore;[237] the theatre,[238] and the court of Phreattys[239] on the

beach, where the accused pleaded his cause from a galley lying afloat.

Somewhere in the Peiræeus was an altar to “the unknown Gods,”[240]

which, notwithstanding that the plural form is used, may possibly have

been that to which Saint Paul alludes in his speech to the Athenians on

the hill of Areiopagos.

Footnote 233:

Meurs. Pir. c. 4, 5, 6.

Footnote 234:

Harpocrat. in v. p. 74. Maussac. Etymol. Mag. 259. 51. Suid. in v. t.

i. p. 665. Xen. Hellen. v. 1. 21. Aristoph. Eq. 975. et Schol. Dem.

adv. Lacrit. § 7. Lys. cont. Tynd. frag. 120. Polyæn. Strat. vi. 2. 2.

Footnote 235:

Harpocrat. in v. p. 166. Suid. in v. t. ii. 734 a. Isaeus De Philoct.

Hered. § 6.

Footnote 236:

Meurs. Pir. c. 7.

Footnote 237:

Paus. i. 13.

Footnote 238:

Xen. Hellen. ii. 4. 33.

Footnote 239:

Paus. i. 28. 11.

Footnote 240:

Paus. i. 1. 4; v. 14. 8.

Besides the Peiræeus, Athens possessed two other harbours Munychia and

Phaleron, which were enclosed by the same line of fortifications, and in

process of time formed but one city, superior in extent to the Astu

itself. Of these the latter was the most ancient, and from hence

Mnestheus sailed for Troy and Theseus for Crete.[241] The Munychian

promontory,[242] abounding in hollows and artificial excavations, and

connected by a narrow neck of land with the continent, was the strongest

position on the coast, and may be regarded as the key of Athens, since

whoever held possession of it could command the city. In this Demos

stood the Bendideion[243] where shows were exhibited in honour of Bendis

the Thracian Artemis, to behold which Socrates and his friends came down

from the city, when at the house of Cephalos that conversation took

place with Glaucon and Adimantos, out of which arose the Republic of

Plato. This division of the port likewise possessed its theatre,[244]

and here were fought some of those battles with the thirty that

re-established the liberty of the commonwealth.

Footnote 241:

Paus. i. 1, 2.

Footnote 242:

Strab. ix. 1. t. ii. p. 239.

Footnote 243:

Xen. Hellen. ii. 4, 11.

Footnote 244:

Thucyd. viii. 93. Lys. in Agorat. § 7.

Footnote 245:

Of which there were three. Plat. Gorg. t. iii. p. 22. Wordsworth,

Athens and Attica, p. 187. Dr. Cramer, Desc. of Greece, ii. 346, seq.

understands the long walls to have been but two in number.

Proceeding inland towards the Astu or city of Athens proper, the

stranger beheld before him a straight street upwards of five miles in

length, extending from the Peiræeus to the foot of the Acropolis,

between walls[245] of immense elevation and thickness, flanked by square

towers at equal distances. Along the summit of these vast piles of

masonry a terrace was carried, commanding superb views of the Saronic

bay and distant coasts of Peloponnesos; and, on the other hand, of the

city relieved against the green slopes of Lycabettos[246]. The space

between the long walls abounded with remarkable monuments. Here were the

tombs of Diopethes, Menander, and Euripides, the temple of Hera, burned

by the Persians, and left in ruins as a memento to revenge, and numerous

cenotaphs and statues of illustrious men.

Footnote 246:

Marin. vit. Procl. p. 74. ed. Fabric.

Spacious and lofty gates admitted you into the Astu, through a belt of

impregnable fortifications: and the appearance of the interior,[247]

though the streets for military purposes were mostly narrow and winding,

and the houses low, projecting over the pavement or concealed by

elevated front-walls, surpassed in all probability the promise of its

distant aspect. The grandeur which peculiarly belonged to the Athenian

democracy was visible at every step. But it would weary the reader to

lead him in succession through all the public places—the Pnyx, the

Agora, the Cerameicos: let us ascend the Acropolis, from whose ramparts

the plan of the whole city will unfold itself before us like a map.

Footnote 247:

Boeckh, Pub. Econ. of Athens, i. 88. seq.

Half the beauty of all civilised countries springs out of their

religion. At Athens nearly everything costly or magnificent belonged to

the Gods; even the Propylæa,[248] apparently a mere secular or military

structure, probably owed its erection in so expensive a style to the

circumstance of its adorning the entrance to the sacred enclosure of

Athena, and the other tutelary divinities of Athens, and spanning the

road by which the pomp of the Panathenaic procession descended and

ascended the mount. Be this as it may, a road[249] which, by running

zigzag up the slope, was rendered practicable for chariots, led from the

lower city to the Acropolis, on the edge of the platform of which stood

the Propylæa, erected by the architect Mnesicles in five years, during

the administration of Pericles. A pile of architecture, similar in name,

is usually found at the entrance of the court of Egyptian temples, and

the Propylæa Luxor and Karnak, with their aspiring obelisks, couchant

sphynxes, and ranges of colossal statues, may be reckoned among the most

chaste and beautiful monuments in the valley of the Nile. The Propylæa

of Athens, richer in design and materials, and executed with a grace and

perfection unknown to the Egyptians, enjoyed in its mere site an immense

advantage over their noblest works which, the pyramids and the great

temple of Koom Ombos excepted, stand on a dead level, while this

occupies the brow of a precipitous rock, visible on every side from

afar. Pillars, architraves, pediments, walls, and roof, were all of

snow-white marble, with mouldings of bright red and blue, and ceilings

of azure bedropped with stars.[250] Externally, on either hand, were

equestrian statues of the sons of Xenophon,[251] placed on lofty square

basements; and, overlooking the whole on the left, stood the colossal

statue of Athena Promachos.[252]

Footnote 248:

Suid. in v. t. ii. p. 611. d. Harpocrat. in v. p. 254. Paus. i. 22. 4.

Leake, Topog. p. 177. Wordsworth, Athens and Attica. p. 112.

Footnote 249:

Up this road goats were never allowed to ascend (Athen. xiii. 51).

Even crows were said never to alight on the top of the sacred rock;

and Chandler (ii. 61) remarks, that although he frequently saw these

birds flying about the Acropolis, he never observed one on the summit.

“The hooded crow, which retires from England during the summer, is a

constant inhabitant of Attica, and is probably that species noticed by

the ancients under the name of κορώνη. It is the word applied at

present to it by the Greek peasants, who are the best commentators on

the old naturalists.” Sibthorp in Walp. Mem. l. 75.

Footnote 250:

Wordsworth, Athens and Attica, p. 114.

Footnote 251:

Paus. i. 22. 4.

Footnote 252:

Müll. De Phid. Vit. p. 18 seq.

On entering through the gates of the Propylæa a scene of unparalleled

grandeur and beauty burst upon the eye. No trace of human dwellings

anywhere appeared, but on all sides temples of more or less elevation,

of Pentelic marble, beautiful in design and exquisitely delicate in

execution, sparkled like piles of alabaster in the sun. On the left

stood the Erectheion or fane of Athena Polias; to the right that

matchless edifice known as the Hecatompedon of old, but to later ages as

the Parthenon. Other buildings, all holy to the eye of an Athenian, lay

grouped around these master structures, and in the open spaces between,

in whatever direction the spectators might look, appeared statues, some

remarkable for their dimensions, others for their beauty, and all for

the legendary sanctity which surrounded them. No city of the ancient or

modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled

museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of

fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled

the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts, where all the divinities

of the pagan heaven appeared grouped in immortal youth and beauty round

the Thunderer and his virgin daughter. Many volumes were written in

antiquity on the pictures, statues, and architectural monuments which

thronged the summit of this rock, and though those works have perished,

a long and curious list might still be given of the objects of this kind

which we know to have existed there.[253] It will, however, be

sufficient to glance over a few of the more striking features of the

scene.

Footnote 253:

Somewhere in a cavern in the rock of the Acropolis was a slab called

the pillar of infamy, on which were engraved the names of traitors and

other public delinquents. Thrasybulos accused Leodamas of having had

his name on this pillar.—Aristot. Rhet. ii. 23.

On one side of the entrance stood a chariot drawn by four horses in

bronze, and directly opposite a chapel of Aphrodite, containing a bronze

lioness, with a statue of the goddess herself by Calamis; a little

further the eye rested on Diitrephes, pierced like St. Sebastian with

arrows; two figures of the goddess Health; a youth in bronze, by Lycios,

bearing the Perirrhanterion, or brush for sprinkling holy water; Myron’s

group of Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, and the three Graces

draped by Socrates,[254] son of Sophroniscos. Advancing past the chapel

of Artemis Brauronia you beheld, amid numerous groups of less striking

monuments, the Attic conception of the Trojan horse; Athena smiting

Marsyas; Heracles strangling the serpents in his cradle; Phrixos

sacrificing the ram; and Theseus, the national hero, slaughtering the

Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth.[255] Here, too, was an Athena issuing

from the head of Zeus, together with the figure of a bull presented by

the Senate of Areiopagos; and, a little beyond, an embodiment of a very

pious and a very beautiful thought,—a figure of Earth, the mother of

gods and men, praying to the ruler of Olympos for rain. Of Zeus, the

Cloud-Compeller, there were numerous representations by artists of

celebrity; the figure of Apollo, by Pheidias, standing before the

eastern front of the Parthenon, was lighted up by the first rays of the

morning. But the tutelar gods of Attica, Athena and Poseidon, the genii

of political wisdom and maritime power, exhibited as struggling for the

mastery over the Athenian mind, met the eye in various parts of the

Acropolis,—the piety of the people delighting to reproduce with various

attributes the objects of their affectionate adoration. Among these

divinities, the statues of several poets, orators, and generals were

found; Anacreon, Epicharmos, Phormio, Timotheus, Conon, Pericles, and

Isocrates. On drawing near the Parthenon, its sculptured pediments and

metopes, representing legends in the mythology and religious processions

of Athens, excited admiration, and still excite it, by their original

design and matchless workmanship: and, suspended from its highly painted

friezes, and resting on its white marble architraves, were rows of

highly burnished shields of gold.[256]

Footnote 254:

Paus. i. 22. 8.

Footnote 255:

On the labyrinth at present shown in Crete, see Tournefort, i. 76.

sqq.

Footnote 256:

They were votive offerings, and the impressions they made are still

visible upon the marble.—Words. Athens and Attica, 117. Lachares

afterwards, when Athens was besieged by Demetrius, carried them away

with him into Bœotia.—Paus. i. 25. 7. To facilitate his escape, he is

said to have scattered handfuls of golden Darics on the road, which,

tempting the cavalry in pursuit, prevented his capture.—Polyæn. iii.

7. 1.

Technical descriptions of buildings, whether religious or civil, would

be out of place in the present work; but a compendious account of the

Erectheion and Parthenon, the two great sanctuaries of the Acropolis,

could not with propriety be omitted. To commence with the former, as the

more ancient and sacred:—this edifice, of irregular design though highly

beautiful, contained three chapels, with the same number of porticoes.

The chapel of Erectheus, entered through a portico of six columns, faced

the east, where stood the altar of supreme Zeus, never stained by blood

or libations of wine. The pavement of this portion of the edifice was

raised eight feet above the level of the other chapels. Here the piety

of Athens had erected altars to Erectheus, Poseidon, Butas, and

Hephaistos, and pictures dedicated by the sacred family of the

Eteobutadæ adorned the walls. In a subterraneous chamber beneath the

floor lay the mortal remains of Ericthonios, a man sprung in a

mysterious manner from the gods. The Erectheion being about twenty-four

feet square, some have imagined it must have been hypæthral, unless the

stone blocks of the roof were supported by pillars. But the ancients

employed slabs of much greater dimensions in building and roofing their

temples; for at the Egyptian quarries of Hajjar Silsilis and Essouan we

observed blocks from forty-two to seventy feet in length and of suitable

proportions, while others equally vast had been removed. Volney, too, as

the reader will remember, found masses of no less magnitude in the walls

of Syrian temples: besides, several obelisks, now on their pedestals,

fall little short of a hundred feet in height.

Between the Erectheion and the chapel of Athena Polias there was no door

of communication. Having surveyed the former, therefore, the stranger

again issued into the open air, and turning to the left entered the

stately portico leading from the north into the temple of Pandrosos,

where, constructed of Pentelic marble, stood the altar of frankincense.

Passing this, and traversing the Pandrosion, he entered the ancient

sanctuary of Athena, unwindowed and gloomy, whither not even that “dim

religious light” which contends with obscurity in our gothic cathedrals

could find its way. This is the case in many Egyptian temples where the

adyta are totally dark. But sunshine and the splendour of day would ill

have suited the mystic rites here celebrated; for which reason these

sacred recesses were lighted up with lamps, magnificent in form and

materials, that shed a soft pale ray over the worshippers. The

many-branched[257] golden candelabrum of Athena’s sanctuary was

furnished with asbestos wicks, and, according to the temple-wardens, of

sufficient dimensions to contain oil for a whole year. Once lighted,

therefore, it burned with perennial flame, and the smoke was received

and conducted to the roof by a hollow bronze palm tree reversed.

Footnote 257:

A conjecture of Müller, Minerv. Pol. v. 25.

This inextinguishable lamp was kindled and kept burning, through

reverence for that antique image of Athena in wood of olive which

constituted one of the palladia of Attica. In honour, moreover, of this

primitive statue the Panathenaic procession is said to have been

instituted, during which, like the velabrum of the temple of Mekka, the

peplos,[258] whatever this may have been, was dedicated with vast pomp

and ceremony to the service of the goddess.

Footnote 258:

Antiquarians have formed many ingenious conjectures; but to me it

appears evidently to have been a female veil, such as Helenos in the

Iliad (σ. 734) commands to be offered to the same goddess of citadels,

by his mother and the other matrons of Troy.

The principal argument, however, against supposing the peplos to have

been designed for the gold and ivory statue of the Parthenon,—that it

was not needed, is of very little weight. None of the ceremonies

attending its presentation were necessary. The offering was a work of

devotion; and however costly in itself and elaborately adorned, may have

been simply designed to protect the image from dust and the action of

the air. That Pheidias represented the goddess without her peplos, is no

argument that his statue needed none, but the contrary. He may have

omitted it expressly that it might be supplied by the piety of the

state. Besides, the sculptured metopes of the Parthenon, representing

the Panathenaic procession, are themselves a strong argument for

connecting the presentation of the peplos and the other ceremonies of

the festival with that more splendid structure and image rather than

with the Erectheion. As the Athenians supposed the Islands of the

blessed and the dwelling-place of their gods to have been somewhere in

the regions of the west, they were accustomed to pray with their faces

turned in that direction;[259] and so also buried they their dead. For

this reason, desiring to behold the countenance of their divinities

during this religious service, the statues of the gods were generally

set up with their faces eastward; and hence, too, the front of the

temples looked in the same direction. This was the case with the

olive-wood image of Athena Polias; and in the reign of Augustus the

Athenians, rendered more superstitious than ever by their misfortunes,

were vehemently terrified on finding that the goddess had turned her

back upon them,[260] as if preparing to seek her ancient home in the

Atlantic Ocean. But her real presence had forsaken the city long before

the battle of Chæroneia.

Footnote 259:

Plut. Sol. § 10. Visconti, Mem. p. 18. Müll. Minerv. Pol. p. 27.

Footnote 260:

Dion. Cass. iv. 7.

But Athena, though the principal, was not the sole inhabitant of her

sanctuary. On one side of the door stood a phallic statue of Hermes,

originally set up by the Pelasgians,[261] and in later ages nearly

concealed by a profusion of myrtle branches. Here, also, in a very

extraordinary inmate were found traces of that animal worship which

extended so widely over the ancient world. In a den constructed for its

use lived a great serpent, considered as the guardian of the temple, and

supposed to be animated by the soul of Ericthonios, who here performed

the part assigned in the fane of Demeter to Cadmos, likewise believed to

have undergone a similar transformation after death. The snake-god of

the Acropolis received its daily sustenance from the priestess of

Athena; and once every month was propitiated with pious offerings of

cakes of the purest honey.[262] Relics of this worship are still found

in Egypt. In a deep chasm, among the wild rocky mountains on the Arabian

side of the Nile, we were shown a fissure in a hermit’s cell, whence a

large reptile of this species is said to issue forth at stated days to

receive the offerings of food brought him by the neighbouring peasants.

This creature, as well as the guardian of the Athenian Temple, is

supposed to possess a human soul, that of the holy Sheikh Haridi.

Footnote 261:

Herod. ii. 51.

Footnote 262:

Herod. viii. 41. Combe, Terra-cottas of the British Museum, pl. 28.

Petit. Radel, Musée Napol. iv. 33.

Like most other Hellenic sanctuaries, the chapel of the goddess was a

kind of museum filled with memorials of Athenian victories and other

remarkable objects. Here were shown curious or beautiful specimens of

arms or armour, taken from the enemy; among which were the breast-plate

and scimitar of Masistios,[263] commander of the Median cavalry at the

battle of Platæa. Close beside these warlike memorials, stood a folding

camp-stool, the invention, it was said, and workmanship of Dædalos; the

archetype of all those portable seats borne after the maidens of Attica

by the daughters of aliens in the grand Panathenaic procession.

Footnote 263:

Paus. i. 27. 1. The Athenians in the age of this traveller confounded,

it seems, Masistios with Mardonios, nothing very extraordinary several

hundred years after the event referred to. Pausanias speaks of it as a

mistake; Mr. Müller, who is less ceremonious, as a falsehood. Minerv.

Pol. 29. The passion for relics, which led to the preservation of

these objects, existed in all its whimsicality among the ancients. But

they were scarcely so ingenious as the Roman Catholics of the

continent, whose sacred treasures include a number of feathers from

the wings of the angel Gabriel, a small bone of one of the cherubim,

and a few rays of the star by which the wise men of the East were led

to Bethlehem. They have also a small phial, containing some of the

darkness that overspread the land of Egypt. (Cf. Fabric. ad Cod.

Pseud. epigr. v. i. p. 93. t. 11. and Christophori Carmen, ap

Boissonade ad Eunap. p. 277. seq.) In the temples of antiquity relics

nearly as curious were preserved: they had an egg of Leda, possibly,

as Lobeck conjectures, an ostrich’s (Aglaoph. i. 52; Paus. iii. 16.

1); the teeth of the Erymanthean boar (Paus. viii. 24. 2), whose

spoils were also shown at Tegea (Lucian adv. Indoct. § 13); the teeth

of the Calydonian boar were preserved at Beneventum (Procop. Bell.

Goth. i. 15. 349. c); they had also the sword of Memnon (Paus. iii. 3.

6); the iron spear of Epeios (Justin. xx. 7), the brazen vessel in

which Pelias was boiled, the arrows of Teucer, the chlamys of

Odysseus, were preserved in the temple of Apollo at Sicyon. (Ampel.

Memor. viii. 68. Beckm. Hist. of Invent. ii. 364. Germ. in Lobeck.) In

the Troad the anvils were shown which Zeus suspended to the heels of

Hera, when he hung her up between heaven and earth (Eustath. p. 15. l.

30); here, too, anyone might see the cithara of Paris. (Plut. Alex. §

15.) Like the Catholics, too, they showed the same thing in two or

three places; for example, the hair of Isis might be seen at Koptos

(Etym. Mag. _v._ κόπτος, 522. 12), and at Memphis. (Luc. adv. Ind. §

13.) The Romans, according to Horace (Carm. ii. 3. 21), possessed the

bronze wash-hand-basin of Sisyphos. A much more extensive list may be

found in Beckmann, Hist. of Inven. ii. 42. seq. _Eng. Tr._

Not the least interesting portion of this extraordinary edifice

dedicated to the worship of so many gods and heroes, was the small

chapel of Pandrosos, where Pandora and Thallo were said to have lived,

and where the ashes of Cecrops reposed. Here dwelt the priestess, shut

up for several months with the Ersephoræ. This cella may, therefore, be

said to have belonged not only to Pandrosos, who was one of the earliest

ministers of these rites, but to all who from her received the office.

The building opened on the south into a portico, adorned with Caryatides

instead of columns, and filled with ceremonial and religious

associations. Here grew the Pancuphos, or sacred olive tree, which,

burned by the Persians, shot up a cubit in a single night, and was

thought to be endued with the power of undying vegetation, for, if the

trunk were cut down, new shoots immediately succeeded. Near the sacred

olive was the salt well, called the sea of Erectheus, which Poseidon is

said to have produced by smiting the rock with his trident. In the

hollow of this fountain, during the prevalence of the south wind, a

sound like the murmuring of the waves was supposed to be heard. This

well has not been discovered in modern times; but in another part of the

citadel there existed a spring of brackish water, known by the name of

the Clepsydra, which, about the rising of the dog-star, while the

Etesian winds were blowing, overflowed; but on their cessation again

subsided.[264]

Footnote 264:

This fountain was likewise called Empedo.—Sch. Arist. Vesp. 857. I may

here mention, by the way, that most ancient cities were supplied with

water by pipes underground, as Syracuse.—Thucyd. vi. 100. Cf. Sch.

Arist. Achar. 1145.

We have perhaps too long lingered among the dusky recesses of this

ancient fane, spell-bound by the charms of a beautiful mythology. We

emerge now into the light of history, and approach that matchless

structure erected by Ictinos where the Athenian people offered up their

daily prayers to heaven.[265] The Parthenon occupies the most elevated

platform of the Acropolis, the pavement of its peristyle being on a

level with the capitals of the columns of the Propylæa. It was

constructed entirely of white Pentelic marble,[266] and consisted of a

cella surrounded by a Doric peristyle having eight columns on either

front, and seventeen on the sides. These pillars, thirty-four feet in

height, sprang from a pavement elevated three steps above the rocky

platform, from whence the total height of the building was about

sixty-five feet. The arrangement of the interior like that of the great

temples of Egypt had reference rather to utility and the convenience of

public worship, than to the effect which long ranges of lofty pillars,

extending through unencumbered space, would have produced upon the mind:

for the cella, sixty-two feet in breadth, was divided into two chambers

of unequal size,—the western about forty-four feet in length, the

eastern nearly one hundred. In both these chambers the ceiling was

supported by columns.

Footnote 265:

It is worthy of remark that from this temple all persons of Doric race

were excluded. King Cleomenes, therefore, when desirous of obtaining

admission, denied his birth-right, and called himself an

Achæan.—Herod. v. 72.

Footnote 266:

The quarries of this mountain, worked to so great an extent by the

ancients, are now filling again with marble which grows

rapidly.—Chandler, ii. 191. Cf. Magius, Var. Lect. t. iv. 182. b.

Gemme Fisica Sotterranea, l. 1. c. ix. § 6. p. 87.—For the manner in

which it is thought to vegetate, see Tournefort, i. pp. 225. 228. sqq.

Colonel Leake, to whose elaborate work I beg to refer the reader

desirous of entering into minute details, concludes his general

description as follows:—"Such was the simple construction of this

magnificent building, which, by its united excellencies of materials,

design, and decoration was the most perfect ever erected. Its dimensions

of two hundred and twenty-eight feet by a hundred and two, with a height

of sixty-eight feet to the top of the pediment, were sufficiently great

to give an impression of grandeur and sublimity, which was not disturbed

by any obtrusive division of parts, such as is found to diminish the

effect of some larger modern buildings. In the Parthenon, whether viewed

at a small or at a great distance, there was nothing to divert the

spectator’s contemplation from the simplicity and majesty of mass and

outline which forms the first and most remarkable object of admiration

in a Greek temple; and it was not until the eye was satiated with the

contemplation of the entire edifice that the spectator was tempted to

examine the decorations with which this building was so profusely

adorned; for the statues of the pediments the only elevation which was

very conspicuous by its magnitude and position, being enclosed within

frames, which formed an essential part of the design of either front,

had no more obtrusive effect than an ornamental capital has to a single

column."[267]

Footnote 267:

Topog. of Athens, pp. 211, 212. See also Chandler, ii. 49. sqq.

That object of art, whatever its dimensions, is sufficiently great,

which fills the mind with high ideas of grandeur and beauty. There is,

moreover, in mere size, a point, beyond which if we proceed, the eye

will fail to grasp the whole at a glance, and create a feeling of want

of unity; but, in proportion as we fall short of that point will be our

sense of the absence of sublimity. In this predicament, perhaps, the

temples of Greece too generally stood. Considerations of expense, which

in the end affected their habits of thinking, cramped the ideas of the

architects, or forced them to direct their studies towards beauty of

form unconnected with that grandeur which springs out of mass and

elevation.

Among the barbarous nations of the East, where the whole resources of

the country lay at the disposal of the monarch or of the priestly caste,

as in Hindùstân, Persia, and Egypt, full scope, on the contrary, was

given to the imagination of the architect, who, if his invention were

equal to it, might give his structures the elevation of a mountain and

the spaciousness of a vast city. Hence, the grandeur arising from

magnitude, is, in most cases, found to belong to the sacred edifices of

Egypt;[268] and in some instances a feeling of symmetry, a sense of the

beautiful, appears to have restrained the artist within due bounds, as

in the great temple of Apollinopolis Magna, which, whatever may be the

imperfections of its architectural details, is invested, as a whole,

with an air of genuine magnificence and sublimity. Proceeding from the

contemplation of these to the religious structures of Greece, there

would be found, I imagine, in most minds a slight feeling of

disappointment, and though afterwards, the delight imparted by the

presence of extreme beauty,—a delight serene, soft, and inexpressibly

soothing, may more than compensate for the want of awe and wondering

admiration, their absence will still be felt.

Footnote 268:

Of these temples Lucian says: ὅμοιαι ... τοῖς Αἰγυπτίοις ἱεροῖς: κᾀκεῖ

γὰρ, αὐτὸς μὲν ὁ νεὼς κάλλιστός τε καὶ μέγιστος, λίθοις τοῖς

πολυτελέσιν ἠσκημένος, καὶ χρυσῷ, καὶ γραφαῖς διηνθισμὲνος. ἔνδον δὲ

ἢν ζητῆς τὸν βεὸν ἢ πιθηκός ἔστιν, ἢ ἴβις, ἢ τράγος, ἢ αἴλουρος.

Imagin. § 11.

But to proceed: in rich and elaborate decorations the Parthenon

resembled the temple of Tentyris. Every part of its exterior, where

ornament was admissible, presented to the eye some creation of Hellenic

taste and fancy, figures in high and low relief, grouped in action or

repose, conceived and executed in a style worthy of the prince of the

mimetic art.[269] Many wrecks of these matchless compositions are now

protected from further defacements in the metropolis of Great Britain,

but withal so mutilated and decayed that none but a practised eye can

discern, through the ravages of age, all the sunshine of beauty and

loveliness which beamed from them when fresh from the Pheidian chisel.

One of the greatest works of this artist filled the interior of the

Parthenon with the emanations of its beauty, the statue of Athena in

ivory and gold,[270] which, representing a form distinguished for all

the softness and roundness belonging to womanhood, and a countenance

radiant with the highest intellect, must in some respects have borne

away the palm from the Olympian Zeus; for in the latter, after all,

nothing beyond masculine energy, dignity, majesty could have existed.

These indeed were so blended, so subdued into a glorious and god-like

serenity, that this creation of human genius, like the august being of

which it was a mute type, possessed in a degree the celestial power of

chasing away sadness and sorrow, and shedding benignity and happiness

over all who beheld it.[271] But for men at least, the Zeus must have

lacked some attributes possessed by the Athena. She was in all her

etherial loveliness, a woman still, but without a woman’s weakness, or a

single taint of earth. The Athenians paid the highest possible

compliment to womanhood when they gave wisdom a female form; and the

delicacy of the thought was enhanced by surrounding this mythological

creation with an atmosphere of purity which no other divinity of the

pagan heaven could lay claim to. Nor in beauty did Athena yield even to

Aphrodite herself. Her charms partook indeed of that noble severity

which belongs to virtue; and to intimate that she was rather of heaven

than of earth, her eyes were of the colour of the firmament. Yet this

spiritual elevation above the reach of the passions, only appears to

have enhanced, in the estimation of the Athenians, the splendour of her

personal beauty, which shed its chastening and ennobling influence among

her worshippers like the droppings of a summer cloud.

Footnote 269:

Vid. Müll. De Parthenon. Fastig. p. 72, sqq.

Footnote 270:

Thucyd. ii. 13. Schol. t. v. p. 375. Bipont. Müll. De Phid. Vit. p.

22.

Footnote 271:

Arrian. Epict. I. 6. p. 27, seq.

According to Philochoros,[272] this colossus was set up during the

archonship of Theodoros, that is, in the third year of the eighty-fifth

Olympiad. The Athenians, it has been ingeniously conjectured, seized for

the dedication of the statue, on the period of the celebration of the

most gorgeous festival in their calendar, the greater Panathenaia, which

like a kind of jubilee occurred but once in an Olympiad.[273] What

length of time Pheidias employed in finishing this statue we possess no

means of determining; but as the Parthenon itself is supposed not to

have been completed in less than ten years, the artist need not have

been hurried in his work.[274]

Footnote 272:

Frag. ed. Siebel. p. 54. Müll. Phid. Vit. § 11. p. 22.

Footnote 273:

Boeckh. Corp. Inscrip. p. 182.

Footnote 274:

Quatremère de Quincy, Jup. Olymp. p. 222.

In the temple of Zeus at Olympia and in every sacred structure we

visited in Egypt and Nubia, there was a staircase conducting to the

roof. No positive testimony remains to prove this to have been the case

in the Parthenon, though antiquarians, with much probability, have

supposed it to have been so.[275] Let us therefore assume the fact, and

ascending to the summit of the edifice survey the surrounding scene and

the superb city encircling the rock at our feet. Few landscapes in the

world are more rich or varied, none more deeply interesting. History has

peopled every spot within the circle of vision with spirit-stirring

associations; or if history has passed over any, there has poetry been

busy, building up her legends from the scattered fragments of tradition.

Carrying our eye along the distant edge of the horizon we behold the

promontory of Sunium, Ægina rising out of the Myrtoan sea, Trœzen, the

birth-place of Theseus the national hero, the mountains of Argolis, the

hostile citadel of Corinth, with Phylæ and Deceleia rendered too famous

by the Peloponnesian war. Nearer the shore is “sea-born” Salamis, and

that low headland where the barbarian took his seat to view the battle

in the straits. Yonder at the extremity of the long walls are the ports

of Munychia, Phaleron and Peiræeus; on our left is Hymettos with its bee

swarms and odoriferous slopes;[276] to the right Colonos, the grove of

the terrible Erinnyes, and the chasm in the rock by which the wretched

Œdipus, having reached the end of his career, descended to the infernal

world.[277] Beyond lies Eleusis and the Sacred Way.[278] Yonder in the

midst of groves is the Academy; here is the Cerameicos[279] filled with

the monuments which the republic erected to its heroes, there the

Cynosarges and the Lyceium. The hill of Areiopagos, contiguous to the

rock of the Acropolis, divides the Pnyx from the Agora planted by Conon

with plane trees. Near at hand, encircled by ordinary dwellings, are the

Leocorion, the temple of Theseus, the Odeion, the Stoa Pœcile, and the

Dionysiac theatre, with various other monuments remarkable for their

beauty or historical importance.[280]

Footnote 275:

Leake, Topog. p. 215.

Footnote 276:

About half a mile from Athens in this direction was a temple of

Artemis (Ἄγρα), on the Ilissos, with an altar to Boreas; where,

according to the fable, the god carried away Orithyia while playing on

the rock with Pharmacia.—Plat. Phæd. i. 7. In consequence of the

alliance thus contracted Boreas always felt a particular friendship

for the Athenians, to whose succour he hastened with his aërial forces

during the Median war.—Herod, vii. 189.

Footnote 277:

Antigone, in Sophocles, (Œdip. Col. 14-18) speaks of the towers of

Athens as seen from Colonos, and describes that village, the

birth-place of the poet, as rendered beautiful by the sacred grove of

the Eumenides, consisting of the laurel, the olive, and the vine, in

which a choir of nightingales showered their music on the ear.

Footnote 278:

Near this road stood the Hiera Suke. Athen. iii. 6.

Footnote 279:

Κεραμεικός, ἀπὸ τοῦ κεραμεύς. Etym. Mag. 504. 16. Cf. Suid. et

Harpocrat. in voce. Paris, in like manner, has given the name of

Tuileries to its principal palaces and gardens, from the tiles

(_tuiles_) which were anciently manufactured on the spot.

Footnote 280:

Strab. ix. 1. 239–241.

CHAPTER V.

CAPITAL CITIES OF GREECE.—SPARTA.

From what has been said, the reader will, perhaps, have acquired a

tolerably correct idea of the city of Athens, its splendour and extent.

But the remaining fragments of Hellenic literature do not enable us to

be equally clear or copious in our account of Sparta.[281] In fact so

imperfect and confused is the information that has come down to us

respecting it, so vague, unsatisfactory, and in many respects

contradictory are the opinions of modern scholars and travellers, that

after diligently and patiently examining their accounts, and comparing

them with the descriptions of Pausanias, the hints of Xenophon, Livy,

Polybius, and Plutarch, with the casual references of the poets, I am

enabled to offer the following picture only as a series of what appear

to me probable conjectures based upon a few indisputable facts.

Footnote 281:

The plan which accompanies the present chapter, based on the

description of Pausanias, agrees in many of the main points with that

given by Mr. Müller in his map of the Peloponnesos. M. Barbie du

Bocage’s Essay on the Topography of Sparta, upon the whole faulty, is,

nevertheless, in my opinion, right with respect to the portion of the

bridge Babyx which Mr. Müller throws over the Tiasa, contrary to all

the reasonable inferences to be derived from history. Colonel Leake’s

plan, given in his travels in the Morea, conveys a different idea of

Spartan topography; but I am unable to reconcile his views with the

account of the city in Pausanias, though I very much regret that the

plan I have adopted should not be recommended by the support of a

writer so learned and so ingenious.

The reader who has endeavoured to discover anything like order in

Pausanias’ topography of Sparta,[282] will fully comprehend the

difficulty of constructing from his information anything like an

intelligible plan of the city. Nevertheless, by setting out from a fixed

point, by laboriously studying the thread of his narration, by divining

the secret order he seems to follow in enumerating and delineating the

various public buildings of which he speaks, and by comparing his

fragmentary disclosures with the present physiognomy of the site, I have

formed a conception of the features of ancient Sparta which may,

perhaps, be found to bear some resemblance to the original.

Footnote 282:

III. 11–20. Cf. Polyb. v. 22. Liv. xxxiv. 26. seq.

We will suppose ourselves to have passed the Eurotas, and to be standing

on the summit of the loftiest building of the Acropolis, the Alpion for

example, or the temple of Athena Chalciœcos,[283] from which we can

command a view of the whole site of Sparta from the Eurotas, where it

flows between banks shaded with reeds and lofty rose laurels[284] on the

east, to the brisk sparkling stream of the Tiasa, and the roots of the

Taygetos on the west. North and south the eye ranges up and down the

valley,[285] discovering in the latter direction the ancient cities of

Therapne[286] and Amyclæ,[287] celebrated for their poetical and heroic

associations. Beyond the Eurotas eastward, occupying the green and

well-wooded acclivities upwards, from the banks of the stream towards

the barren and red-tinted heights of the Menelaion,[288] lay scattered

the villas of the noble Spartans, filled with costly furniture and every

other token of wealth,[289] while here and there, on all sides,

embosomed in groves or thickets, arose the temples and chapels of the

gods surrounded by a halo of sanctity and communicating peculiar beauty

to the landscape.

Footnote 283:

In the precincts of this temple, evidently the strongest place in the

city, the Ætolian mercenaries took refuge after the assassination of

Nabis.—Liv. xxxv. 36.

Footnote 284:

Plut. Instit. Lacon. § 10. Chateaubriand, Itin. xi. 110.

Poucqueville’s description of the stream is striking and picturesque:

“The banks,” he says, “are bordered with never-fading laurels, which,

inclining towards each other, form an arch over its waters, and seem

still consecrated to the deities of whom its purity is a just emblem;

while swans, even of a more dazzling whiteness than the snows that

cover the mountain-tops above, are constantly sailing up and down the

stream.”—Travels, p. 84. The Viscount Chateaubriand, however, sought

in vain for these poetical birds, and, therefore, evidently considers

them fabulous.

Footnote 285:

Strabo’s brief description of the site deserves to be mentioned: ἔστι

μὲν οὖν ἐν κοιλοτέρῳ χωρίῳ τὸ τῆς πόλεως ἔδαφος, καίπερ ἀπολαμβάνον

ὄρη μεταξύ. viii. 5. t. ii. p. 185.

Footnote 286:

Xen. Hellen. v. 5. 2.

Footnote 287:

At this ancient city Castor and Polydeukes were worshipped not as

heroes but as divinities. Isoc. Encom. Helen. § 27. Cf. Pind. Pyth.

xi. 60, sqq. Nem. x. 56. Dissen supposes these tombs to have been

vaults under ground in the Phœbaion.—Comm. p. 508.

Footnote 288:

Steph. de Urb. v. Μενέλαος, p. 551, a. Berkel.—Polyb. v. 22.

Footnote 289:

Xen. Hellen. vi. 5. 27.

Contracting now our circle of vision, and contemplating the distinct

villages or groups of buildings of which the capital of Laconia

anciently consisted,[290] we behold the encampments as it were of the

five tribes, extending in a circle about the Acropolis.[291] The quarter

of the Pitanatæ,[292] commencing about the Issorion and the bridge over

the Tiasa on the west, extended eastward beyond the Hyacinthine

road[293] to the cliffs overhanging the valley of the Eurotas above the

confluence of that river with the Tiasa. Immediately contiguous to the

dwellings of this tribe in the north eastern division of the city,

opposite that cloven island in the Eurotas, which contained the temple

of Artemis, Orthia, and the Goddess of Birth, dwelt the Limnatæ,[294]

who possessed among them the temple erected by the Spartans to Lycurgus.

North again of these, and clustering around that sharp eminence which

constituted as it were a second Acropolis, were the habitations of the

Cynosuræ,[295] whose quarter appears to have extended from the old

bridge over the Eurotas to the temple of Dictynna, and the tombs of the

Euripontid kings on the west. From this point to the Dromos, lying

directly opposite the southern extremity of the Isle of Plane Trees,

formed by the diverging and confluent waters of the Tiasa, lay the

village of the Messoatæ,[296] where were situated the tomb of Alcman,

the fountain Dorcea, and a very beautiful portico overlooking the

Platanistas. The road extending from the Dromos to the Issorion formed

the western limits of the tribe of the Ægidæ,[297] whose quarter

extending inward to the heart of the city, appears to have comprehended

the Acropolis, the Lesche Pœcile, the theatre, with all the other

buildings grouped about the foot of the ancient city.

Footnote 290:

Thucyd. i. 10.

Footnote 291:

See Müller, Dor. ii. 48.

Footnote 292:

Paus. Olymp. vi. 27. Diss. ἡ Πιτάνη φυλή. Hesych. Cf. Herod. iii. 55.

ix. 53. Eurip. Troad. 1101. Thucyd. I. 20. et schol. Plut. de Exil. §

6. Apophth. Lacon. Miscell. 48. Plin. H. N. iv. 8. Athen. i. 57. Near

this κώμη were the villages of Œnos, Onoglæ and Stathmæ, celebrated

for their wines.

Footnote 293:

Athen. iv. 74.

Footnote 294:

Strab. viii. 4. p. 184. 5. p. 187. The marshes existing in this

quarter anciently had been drained by the age of Strabo:—ἀλλ᾽ οὐδέν γε

μέρος αὐτοῦ λιμνάζει· τὸ δὲ παλαιὸν ἐλίμαζε τὸ προάστειον, καὶ ἐκάλουν

αὐτὸ Λίμνας· καὶ τὸ τοῦ Διονύσου ἱερὸν ἐν Λίμναις ἐφ᾽ ὑγροῦ βεβήκος

ἐτύγχανε· νῦν δ᾽ ἐπὶ ξηροῦ τὴν ἵδρυσιν ἔχει. 5. p. 185. seq.

Footnote 295:

Hesych. in v. Berkel. ad Steph. Byzant. p. 490. Schol. ad Callim. in

Dian. 94. Spanh. Observ. in loc. p. 196.

Footnote 296:

Steph de Urb. in v. p. 554. b. who refers to Strabo (viii. 6. p. 187).

The words of the geographer are Μεσόαν δ᾽ οὐ τὴς χώρας εἶναι μέρος,

τῆς Σπάρτης δὲ καθάπερ καὶ τὸ Λιμναῖον. Paus. vii. 20. 8.

Footnote 297:

Herod. iv. 149.

The prospect presented by all these villages, nearly touching each

other, and comprehended within a circle of six Roman miles, was once, no

doubt, in the days of Spartan glory, singularly animated and

picturesque. The face of the ground was broken and diversified, rising

into six hills of unequal elevation, and constituting altogether a small

table-land, in some places terminating in perpendicular cliffs;[298] in

others, shelving away in gentle slopes to meet the meadows on the banks

of the surrounding streams. Over all was diffused the brilliant

light[299] which fills the atmosphere of the south, and paints, as

travellers uniformly confess, even the barren crag and crumbling ruin

with beauty.

Footnote 298:

Leake, Trav. in Morea, v. i. p. 154.

Footnote 299:

Cf. Chateaub. Itin. i. 112. Similar, also, is the testimony of Mr.

Douglas. “The mixture of the romantic with the rich, which still

diversifies its aspect, and the singularly picturesque form of all its

mountains, do not allow us to wonder that even Virgil should generally

desert his native Italy for the landscape of Greece; whoever has

viewed it in the tints of a Mediterranean spring, will agree with me

in attributing much of the Grecian genius to the influence of scenery

and climate.” Essay, &c. p. 52.

The structures that occupied the summit of the Acropolis appear to have

been neither numerous nor magnificent. The central pile, around which

all the others were grouped, was the temple of Athena Chalciœcos,[300]

flanked on the north and south by the fanes of Zeus Cosmetas and the

Muses. Behind it rose the temple of Aphrodite Areia, with that of

Artemis Cnagia, and in front various other edifices and statues,

dedicated to Euryleonis, Pausanias, Athena Ophthalmitis, and Ammon.

Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the temenos of Athena stood two

edifices, one called Skenoma and the other Alpion. The relative position

of all these it is now extremely difficult, if not impossible, to

determine. Let us therefore descend into the agora, and having briefly

described the objects which there offered themselves to the eye of the

stranger, endeavour to thread our way through the various streets of

Sparta, pointing out as we go along the most remarkable monuments it

contained.

Footnote 300:

Plut. Apophtheg. Lacon. Archid. 6. Lycurg. 7.

In all Greek cities the point of greatest importance, next to the

citadel, was the market-place, where the body of the citizens assembled

not only to buy and sell, but to transact public business, and perform

many ceremonies of their religion. Thus, in the agora of Sparta, in the

centre of which probably stood an altar, surrounded by the statues of

Apollo, Artemis, Leto, and the soothsayer Hagias who foretold the

victory of Lysander at Ægospotamos, sacred chorusses and processions

were exhibited during the Gymnopædia in honour of Phœbos Apollo, in

consequence of which, a part at least of the place obtained the name of

Choros: here, likewise, was a colossal statue, erected in honour of the

Spartan Demos, with a group representing Hermes bearing the infant

Dionysos in his arms, and a statue of King Polydoros, doubtless set up

in the neighbourhood of his house, Boonetos, lying between the street

Aphetæ and the steep road leading up to the citadel. The edifices by

which the agora was encircled, though in most cases, perhaps, far from

magnificent, when separately considered, presented a grand _coup-d’œil_.

This will be made evident if, placing ourselves near the central altar,

we enumerate and briefly describe them in the order in which they

followed each other in the great circle of the agora. First, beginning

on the right-hand corner of the street Aphetæ we behold the palace of

the Bidiæi, the five magistrates who watched over the education of the

youth; next succeeds that of the Nomophylaces, or guardians of the laws;

then that of the Ephori; and, lastly, the senate-house, standing at the

corner of the street leading to Therapne. Crossing over to the

south-eastern side of the Agora we behold a spacious and stately portico

called the Persian, because erected from the spoils of the Persians. Its

columns of white marble were adorned with bassi relievi representing

Persian warriors, among others Mardonios and Artemisia daughter of

Lygdamis queen of Halicarnassos, who fought in person at the battle of

Salamis. Beyond the road to Amyclæ, we meet with a range of temples to

Gaia, Zeus Agoræos, Athena, Poseidon the Preserver, Apollo, and Hera;

and traversing the western street opening into the Theomelida, and

affording us a glimpse in passing of the tombs of the Agid kings we

arrive at the ancient halls of the Ephori, containing the monuments of

Epimenides and Aphareus. To this edifice succeed the statues of Zeus

Xenios and Athena Xenia. Next follows the temple of the Fates, near

which was the tomb of Orestes lying on the left hand of the road leading

to the sanctuary of Athena Chalciœcos. On the other side stands the

house of King Polydoros, which obtained in after ages the name of

Boonetos because purchased of his widowed queen with a certain number of

oxen. With this terminates the list of the buildings by which the Agora

was encompassed.

Quitting, now, this central point, we proceed northward through the

street called Aphetæ, and observe on the right hand at a short distance

from each other three temples of Athena Keleuthia, together with the

heroa of Iops, Lelex, and Amphiaraos. On the opposite side apparently,

stood the temenos of Tænarian Poseidon, with a statue of Athena, erected

by the Dorian colonists of Italy. We next arrive at a place called the

Hellenion, probably nothing more than a large open space or square in

which the deputies or ambassadors of foreign states assembled on

extraordinary occasions. Close to this was erected the monument of

Talthybios. A little further on were the altar of Apollo Acreitas, the

Gasepton, a temple of earth, and another altar sacred to Apollo

Maleates. At the end of the street, near the walls of the late city, was

a temple of Dictynna, with the tombs of the kings called Eurypontidæ.

Returning to the Hellenion, and proceeding eastward up the great public

road leading to the bridge Babyx, you saw the temple of Arsinoë,

daughter of Leucippos, and sister to the wives of Castor and Polydeukes.

Further on, near the Phrouria or Barriers, stood a temple of Artemis;

and advancing a little you came to the monument of the Eleian

soothsayers called Iamidæ, and the temple of Maron and Alpheios, who

were among the bravest of those who fell with Leonidas at Thermopylæ.

Beyond this stood the fane of Zeus Tropæos erected after the reduction

of Amyclæ, when all the ancient inhabitants of Laconia had been brought

under the yoke of the Dorians. Next followed the temple of the Great

Mother and the heroic monuments of Hippolytos and Aulon. On a spot

commanding the bridge stood the temple of Athena Alea.

Setting out once more from the Agora, and advancing up the street

leading towards the east the first building on the left-hand was called

Skias[301] contiguous to the senate-house: it was of a circular form

with a roof like an umbrella, and erected about seven hundred and sixty

years before Christ, by Theodoros of Samos, inventor of the art of

casting statues in iron. Here the Spartan people held their assemblies

even so late as the age of Pausanias, who relates that the lyre of

Timotheus[302] the Milesian, confiscated as a punishment for his having

added four strings to the seven already in use, was suspended in this

building as a warning to all innovators. Near the Skias was another

circular building erected by Epimenides, containing statues of Olympian

Zeus and Aphrodite. On the other side apparently of the street, in front

of the Skias, were the tombs of Idas and Lynceus, the temple of Kora

Soteira, said to have been built by Orpheus, or Abaris the Hyperboræan,

the tomb of Cynortas and the temple of Castor. Near these were the

statues of Apollo Carneios, and Aphetæos, the latter of which marked the

point whence the suitors of Penelope started in their race for a wife,

running up the street Aphetæ, whence the name. Immediately beyond this

was a square surrounded with porticoes, where all kinds of cheap wares

were anciently sold. Further on stood altars of Zeus, Athena, and the

Dioscuri, all surnamed Amboulioi; opposite which was the hill called

Colona whereon was erected a temple of Dionysos, and close at hand a

temenos sacred to the hero who conducted the god to Sparta. Not far from

the Dionysion was a temple of Zeus Euanemos, giver of gentle breezes;

and immediately to the right the heroon of Pleuron. On the summit of a

hill at a little distance stood a temple of the Argive Hera, together

with the fane erected in honour of Hera Hypercheiria, built by order of

the oracle after the subsiding of an inundation of the Eurotas. In this

edifice was a very ancient wooden statue of Aphrodite Hera. Close to the

road which passed to the right of the hill was a statue of Etymocles

many times victor in the Olympic games. In descending towards the

Eurotas you beheld a wooden statue of Athena Alea, and a little above

the banks a temple of Zeus Plousios. On the further side of the river

were temples of Ares and Asclepios.

Footnote 301:

Σκιὰς, τὸ ᾠδεῖον ἐκαλεῖτο τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων κατὰ τὴν ἀρχαίαν φωνήν. κ.

τ. λ.—Etym. Mag. 717. 36. seq.

Footnote 302:

Cf. Plut. Agis, § 10.

Once more retracing our steps to the Agora, and quitting it by a street

leading towards the west, the first remarkable object that struck the

eye was the cenotaph of Brasidas, and a little beyond it a spacious and

beautiful theatre of white marble.[303] Directly opposite were the tombs

of Leonidas and Pausanias, and near these a cippus, on which were

engraved the names of the heroes who fell at Thermopylæ, together with

those of their fathers. At this spot games were annually celebrated, in

which none but Spartans were allowed to contend for the prizes.

Discourses were likewise here pronounced in honour of the dead. The

multitudes at these games required a large clear space in which to

congregate, and this I suppose to have been the place called Theomelida,

opening on both sides of the road, and extending as far as the tombs of

the Agid Kings, and the Lesche of the Crotoniatæ. Near this edifice

stood the temple of Asclepios, the tomb of Tænaros, and temples of

Poseidon Hippocourios, and Artemis Ægeinea. Turning back towards the

Lesche, probably round the foot of the Hill of the Issorion,[304] you

observed on the slope of the eminence towards the Tiasa the temple of

Artemis Limnæa the Britomartis of the Cretans, somewhere in the vicinity

of which were temples of Thetis, Chthonian Demeter, and Olympian Zeus.

Footnote 303:

This theatre, as Mr. Douglas has observed, is the only remaining

fragment of ancient Sparta, the other ruins still visible on its site,

belonging all to Roman times.—Essay on certain Points of Resemblance

between the Ancient and Modern Greeks, p. 23.

Footnote 304:

Ἰσσώριον, ὄρος τῆς Λακωνικῆς ἀφ’ οὗ ἡ Ἄρτεμις Ἰσσωρία.—Steph. Byz. in

v. 426. d. with the note of Berkel. Cf. Hesych. in v. Polyæn. Strat.

ii. 1. 14. Plut. Agesil. § 32.

Starting from the crossroad at the north-west foot of the Issorion, on

the way to the Dromos, the first edifice which presented itself on the

left was the monument of Eumedes, one of the sons of Hippocoon. A little

further on was a statue of Heracles, and close at hand, near the

entrance to the Dromos, stood the ancient palace of Menelaos, inhabited

in Pausanias’ time by a private individual. Within the Dromos itself

were two gymnasia. This was the most remarkable building in the western

part of the city, from whence branched off many streets, while numerous

public structures clustered round it; to the north, for example, the

temples of the Dioscuri, of the Graces, of Eileithyia, of Apollo

Carneios, and Artemis Hegemona: on the east the temple of Asclepios

Agnitas, and a trophy erected by Polydeukes after his victory over

Lynceus. On the west towards the Platanistas were statues of the

Dioscuri Apheterii, and a little further was the heroon of Alcon, near

which stood the temple of Poseidon Domatites, near the bridge leading

over to the island covered with plane trees. On the other hand

apparently of the road a statue was erected to Cynisca, daughter of

Archidamos, the first lady who ran horses at Olympia.

Along the banks of the Tiasa from the Dromos to a line extending

westward from the temple of Dictynna to the upper bridge leading to the

Platanistas, lay a road adorned with numerous public buildings, among

others a portico, behind which were two remarkable monuments, the heroa

of Alcimos and Enaræphoros. Immediately beyond were the heroa of Dorceus

and Sebros, and the fountain Dorcea flowing between them. The whole of

this little quarter obtained from the latter hero the name of Sebrion.

To the right of the last mentioned heroon was the monument of the poet

Alcman;[305] beyond which lay the temple of Helen, and near it that of

Heracles close to the modern wall.

Footnote 305:

Ἀλκμάν, Λάκων ἀπὸ Μεσσόας.—He was an erotic poet said to have been

descended from servile parents.—Suid. i. p. 178. ed. Port.

Hard by a narrow pathway, striking into the fields from the road leading

eastward from the Dromos, was the temple of Athena Axiopænos, said to

have been erected by Heracles.

Leaving the Dromos by another road running in a south-easterly direction

through the midst of the quarter of the Ægidæ, we behold, on one hand,

the temples of Athena and Hipposthenes, and directly opposite the

latter, a statue of Ares in chains. At a short distance beyond these was

the Lesche Pœcile, and in front of it, the heroon of Cadmos son of

Agenor, those of two of his descendants, Œolycos and his son Ægeus, and

that of Amphilocos. Farther on lay the temples of Hera Ægophagos, so

called because she-goats were sacrificed to her, and at the foot of the

Acropolis, near the theatre, the temples of Poseidon Genethlios, on

either side of which probably stood an heroon, the one sacred to

Cleodæos son of Hyllos, and the other to Œbalos.

We must now return to the Lesche Pœcile, and following a road skirting

round the hill of the Acropolis, towards the east-south-east, pass by

the monument of Teleclos, and the most celebrated of all the temples of

Asclepios at Sparta, situated close to the Boonetos. Traversing the

street Aphetæ and proceeding along the road leading to the Limnæ, the

first temple on the left was that of Aphrodite, on a hill, celebrated by

Pausanias for having two stories. The statue of the goddess was here

seated, veiled and fettered. A little beyond was the temple of Hilaeira

and Phœbe wherein were statues of the two goddesses, the countenance of

one of which was painted and adorned by one of the priestesses according

to the later rules of art, but warned by a dream she suffered the other

to remain in its archaic simplicity. Here was preserved an egg adorned

with fillets and suspended from the roof, said to have been brought

forth by Leda. In a building near at hand, certain women wove annually a

tunic for the Apollo of Amyclæ, from which circumstance the edifice

itself obtained the name of Chiton. Next followed the house of the

Tyndaridæ, the heroa of Chilon and Athenæus, and the temple of Lycurgus,

with the tomb of Eucosmos behind it. Near them was the altar of Lathria

and Anaxandra, and directly opposite the monuments of Theopompos and

Eurybiades and Astrabacos. In an island in the marshes were the temple

and altar of Artemis Orthia, and the fane of Eileithyia.

On the road leading from the Agora to Amyclæ[306] there were few

remarkable monuments. One only, the temple of the Graces, is mentioned

north of the Tiasa, and beyond it the Hippodrome; towards the west the

temple of the Tyndaridæ near the road, and that of Poseidon Gaiouchos

towards the river.[307]

Footnote 306:

Οὗ τὸ τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος ἱερόν. Strab. viii. 5. t. ii. p. 185.

Footnote 307:

Xen. Hellen. vi. 5. 30.

Let us now consider the proofs on which the above description is based.

Pausanias informs us that the citadel was the highest of the hills of

Sparta. Colonel Leake observes that the eminence found in the quarter

which I have assigned to the Cynosuræ is equal in height to that

immediately behind the theatre; but the former is pointed and appears to

have retained its natural shape, while the summit of the latter has been

levelled for building. Now if its height be still equal, it must have

been considerably greater before the levelling process took place.

Therefore the hill behind the theatre was the Acropolis. Admitting this,

the spacious flat or hollow immediately at its foot on the south-east

side must have been the Agora,[308] for that the Agora was close to the

citadel is clear from history, which represents Lycurgus and king

Charilaos escaping thither from the market-place.[309] Again we know

from Pausanias that it lay a little to the east of the theatre, having

nothing between them but the cenotaph of Brasidas. The position of the

Agora being thus fixed beyond dispute, we arrive with certainty at the

direction of the four great streets that diverge from it; for, first, we

know that the road to the Issorion lay towards the west; the road to

Amyclæ towards the south. The street called Skias terminated at the

extremity of the city between two small hills. These two hills are still

there on the brink of the high ground overlooking the valley of the

Eurotas on the east. This therefore was the direction of the Skias. As

an additional proof, it may be mentioned that the temple of Hera

Hypercheiria was erected in commemoration of the subsiding of an

inundation of the Eurotas, which shows it must have been somewhere

nearly within reach of the waters of that stream. For the street Aphetæ

no direction is left but that towards the north-west or the north-east;

but the latter led to the temple of Artemis Orthia in the Limnæ, the

former to the temple of Dictynna. The street Aphetæ led therefore to the

north-west, no other road being mentioned but that leading from Mount

Thornax over the bridge Babyx, which was not the street called Aphetæ.

Thus we have the direction of every one of the great streets of Sparta

incontrovertibly determined. Proceed we now to establish the position,

with respect to the citadel, of each of the five tribes who occupied as

many quarters of the city. First we learn from Pausanias that the

Pitanatæ inhabited the quarter round the Issorion:[310] from Pindar[311]

and his scholiast that they dwelt likewise near the banks of the

Eurotas. They possessed therefore the whole southern quarter of the

city.[312] As the Limnatæ obtained their name from the marshes near

which they lived, the position of the Limnæ determined by the chain of

reasoning given above, proves them to have occupied the eastern quarter

of the city directly opposite the temple of Artemis Orthia. That the

tribe of the Ægidæ inhabited all that part extending in one direction

from the Issorion to the Dromos, and in the other from the banks of the

Tiasa to the Boonetos, may almost with certainty be inferred from the

circumstance that the tomb of Ægeus, their founder, was situated in this

quarter, close to the Lesche Pœcile. The quarter of the Mesoatæ lay in

the north-west, between the Dromos and the temple of Dictynna; for here

was found the tomb of Alcman who belonged to that tribe. All the rest of

the site being thus occupied, there remains only for the tribe of the

Cynosuræ that part lying between the road to Thornax and the temple of

Dictynna, where accordingly we must suppose them to have lived.

Footnote 308:

Plut. Lycurg. § 11. Lacon. Apoph. Lycurg. 7.

Footnote 309:

Plut. Lycurg. § 5.

Footnote 310:

Polyæn. Stratag. ii. 1. 14. with the notes of Casaub. and Maasvic.

Footnote 311:

Olymp. vi. 28. Cf. Spanheim, ad Callim. in Dian. 172.

Footnote 312:

Cf. Athen. i. 57.

With respect to the bridge Babyx, if bridge it really was, it appears

very difficult[313] to believe that it spanned the Tiasa, though we

still find massive ruins of arches in the channel of that stream. There

seems to be much stronger reason for supposing it to have been thrown

over the Eurotas, where the road from the Isthmus traversed it.[314] We

should then understand by the oracle which commanded Lycurgus to

assemble his people between Babyx and Cnacion,[315] that he was to

gather them together anywhere within the precincts of the city.

Accordingly we find in the time of Lycurgus, that the Agora in the

centre of Sparta was the place were the Apellæ[316] were held. This,

too, is evident, by the sense in which the matter was understood by

Plutarch, who, speaking of the victory of the Bœotians over the Spartans

at Tegyra, observes, that by this event it was made manifest that not

the Eurotas, or the space between Babyx and Cnacion alone produced brave

and warlike men.[317] Now it appears to me, that a few meadows without

the city on which assemblies of the people were occasionally convened

could never be said to produce these people. I have therefore supposed

that Babyx was the bridge by which travellers coming from the Isthmus

entered Sparta.

Footnote 313:

This, however, is the opinion of Mr. Müller, Dor. ii. 456.

Footnote 314:

See the passage in which Xenophon (v. 5. 27), describes the advance of

the Thebans upon Sparta.

Footnote 315:

Plut. Lycurg. § 6.

Footnote 316:

Gœttl. ad Aristot. Pol. Excurs. i. p. 464.

Footnote 317:

Pelop. § 17.

BOOK II.

EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

THEORY OF EDUCATION.—BIRTH OF CHILDREN.—INFANTICIDE.

Whether on education the Greeks thought more wisely than we do or

not,[318] they certainly contemplated the subject from a more elevated

point of view. They regarded it as the matrix in which future

generations are fashioned, and receive that peculiar temperament and

character belonging to the institutions that presided at their birth.

Their theories were so large as to comprehend the whole developement of

individual existence, from the moment when the human germ is quickened

into life until the grave closes the scene, and in many cases looked

still further; for the rites of initiation and a great part of their

ethics had reference to another world. On this account we find their

legislators possessed by extreme solicitude respecting the character of

those teachers into whose hands the souls of the people were to be

placed, to receive the first principles of good or evil, to be

invigorated, raised, and purified by the former, or by the latter to be

perverted, or precipitated down the slopes of vice and effeminacy, by

which nations sink from freedom to servitude. Among them, moreover, it

was never matter of doubt, whether the light of knowledge should be

allowed to stream upon the summits of society only, or be suffered to

descend into its lower depths and visit the cottages of the poor.

Whatever education had to impart was, in most states, imparted to all

the citizens, as far as their leisure or their capacity would permit

them to receive it. The whole object, indeed, of education among the

Greeks was to create good citizens, from which it has by some been

inferred that they confined their views to the delivering of secular

instruction. But this is to take a narrow and ignorant view of the

subject, since religion was not only an element of education but

regarded as of more importance than all its other elements taken

together. For it had not escaped the Hellenic legislators, that in many

circumstances of life man is placed beyond the reach and scrutiny of

laws and public opinion, where he must be free to act according to the

dictates of conscience, which, if not rightly trained, purified, and

rendered clearsighted by religion, will often dictate amiss. It is of

the utmost moment, therefore, that in these retired situations man

should not consider himself placed beyond the range of every eye, and so

be tempted to lay the foundation of habits which, begun in secrecy, may

soon acquire boldness to endure the light and set the laws themselves at

defiance. Accordingly over those retired moments in which man at first

sight appears to commune with himself alone, religion was called in to

teach that there were invisible inspectors, who registered, not only the

evil deeds and evil words they witnessed, but even the evil thoughts and

emotions of the heart, the first impulses to crime in the lowest abysses

of the mind. Consistently with this view of the subject, we discover

everywhere in Greek history and literature traces of an almost

puritanical scrupulousness in whatever appeared to belong to religion,

so that in addressing the Athenians St. Paul himself was induced to

reproach them with the excesses of their devotional spirit, which

degenerated too frequently into superstition. But the original design

with which this spirit was cultivated was wise and good, its intention

being to rescue men from the sway of their inferior passions,—from envy,

from avarice, from selfishness, and to inspire them with faith in their

own natural dignity by representing their actions as of sufficient

importance to excite the notice, provoke the anger, or conciliate the

favour of the immortal gods. This religion, which base and sordid minds

regard as humiliating to humanity, was by Grecian lawgivers and founders

of states contemplated as a kind of holy leaven designed by God himself,

to pervade, quicken, and expand society to its utmost dimensions.

Footnote 318:

Dion Chrysostom tells a curious story respecting a blunder of the

Athenians on this subject. Apollo once commanding them, if they

desired to become good citizens, to put whatever was most beautiful in

the ears of their sons, they bored one of the lobes, and inserted a

gold earring, not comprehending the meaning of the God. But this

ornament would better have suited their daughters or the sons of

Lydians or Phrygians; but for the offspring of Greeks, nothing could

have been intended by the God but education and reason, the possessors

of which would probably become good men, and the preservers of their

country.—Orat. xxxii. t. i. p. 653. sqq.—The popular maxim that

knowledge is power may be traced to Plato.—De Rep. v. t. vi. p. 268.

The question which commands so much attention in modern states, viz.

whether education should be national and uniform, likewise much occupied

the thoughts of ancient statesmen, and it is known that in most cases

they decided in the affirmative. It may however be laid down as an

axiom, that among a phlegmatic and passive-minded people, where the

government has not yet acquired its proper form and developement, the

establishment of a national system of education, complete in all its

parts and extending to the whole body of the citizens, must be

infallibly pernicious. For such as the government is at the commencement

such very nearly will it continue, as was proved by the example of Crete

and Sparta. For the Cretan legislators, arresting the progress of

society at a certain point by the establishment of an iron system of

education, before the popular mind had acquired its full growth and

expansion, dwarfed the Cretan people completely, and by preventing their

keeping pace with their countrymen rendered them in historical times

inferior to all their neighbours. In Sparta, again, the form of polity

given to the state by Lycurgus, wonderful for the age in which it was

framed, obtained perpetuity solely by the operation of his pædonomical

institutions. The imperfection, however, of the system arose from this

circumstance, that the Spartan government was framed too early in the

career of civilisation. Had its lawgiver lived a century or two later,

he would have established his institutions on a broader and more

elevated basis, so that they would have remained longer nearly on a

level with the progressive institutions of neighbouring states. But he

fixed the form of the Spartan commonwealth when the general mind of

Greece had scarcely emerged from barbarism; and as the rigid and

unyielding nature of his laws forbade any great improvement, Sparta

continued to bear about her in the most refined ages of Greece

innumerable marks of the rude period in which she had risen. From this

circumstance flowed many of her crimes and misfortunes. Forbidden to

keep pace with her neighbours in knowledge and refinement, which by

rendering them inventive, enterprising, and experienced, elevated them

to power, she was compelled, in order to maintain her ground, to have

recourse to astuteness, stratagem, and often to perfidy.

The Spartan system, it is well known, made at first, and for some ages,

little or no use of books. But this, at certain stages of society, was

scarcely an evil;[319] for knowledge can be imparted, virtues implanted

and cherished, and great minds ripened to maturity without their aid.

The teacher, in this case, rendered wise by meditation and experience,

takes the place of a book, and by oral communication, by precept, and by

example, instructs, and disciplines, and moulds his pupil into what he

would have him be. By this process both are benefited. The preceptor’s

mind, kept in constant activity, acquires daily new force and expansion;

and the pupil’s in like manner. In a state, therefore, like that of

Sparta, in the age of Lycurgus, it was possible to acquire all necessary

knowledge without books, of which indeed very few existed. But

afterwards, when the Ionian republics began to be refined and elevated

by philosophy and literature, Sparta, unable to accompany them, fell

into the background: still preserving, however, her warlike habits she

was enabled on many occasions to overawe and subdue them.

Footnote 319:

Montagne relates, in his Travels (t. iii. p. 51), an instance of how

the mind may be cultivated, particularly in poetry, by persons

ignorant of the art of reading and writing. His Lucchese

improvisatrice may be regarded as a match for the ancient rhapsodists.

Among the Athenians,[320] though knowledge was universally diffused,

there existed, properly speaking, no system of national education. The

people, like their state, were in perpetual progress, aiming at

perfection, and sometimes approaching it; but precipitated by the excess

of their intellectual and physical energies into numerous and constantly

recurring errors. While Sparta, as we have seen, remained content with

the wisdom indigenous to her soil, scanty and imperfect as it was,

Athens converted herself into one vast mart, whither every man who had

anything new to communicate hastened eagerly, and found the sure reward

of his ingenuity. Philosophers, sophists, geometricians, astronomers,

artists, musicians, actors, from all parts of Greece and her most

distant colonies, flocked to Athens to obtain from its quick-sighted,

versatile, impartial, and most generous people that approbation which in

the ancient world constituted fame. Therefore, although the laws

regulated the material circumstances of the schools and gymnasia,

prescribed the hours at which they should be opened and closed, and

watched earnestly over the morals both of preceptors and pupils, there

was a constant indraught of fresh science, a perpetually increasing

experience and knowledge of the world, and, consequent thereupon, a

deep-rooted conviction of their superiority over their neighbours, an

impatience of antiquated forms, and an audacious reliance on their own

powers and resources which betrayed them into the most hazardous schemes

of ambition.

Footnote 320:

Cf. Plat. De Legg. vii. t. viii. p. 1.

But, by pushing too far their literary and philosophical studies, the

Athenians were induced at length to neglect the cultivation of the arts

of war, which they appeared to regard as a low and servile drudgery. And

this capital error, in spite of all their acquirements and achievements

in eloquence and philosophy,—in spite of their lofty speculation and

“style of gods,” brought their state to a premature dissolution; while

Sparta, with inferior institutions, and ignorance which even the

children at Athens would have laughed at, was enabled much longer to

preserve its existence, from its impassioned application to the use of

arms, aided, perhaps, by a stronger and more secluded position. From

this it appears that of all sciences that of war is the chiefest, since,

where this is cultivated, a nation may maintain its independence without

the aid of any other; whereas the most knowing, refined, and cultivated

men, if they neglect the use of arms, will not be able to stand their

ground against a handful even of barbarians. They mistake, too, who look

upon literature and the sciences as a kind of palladium against

barbarism,[321] for a whole nation may read and write, like the

inhabitants of the Birman empire, without being either civilised or

wise; and may possess the best books and the power to read them, without

being able to profit by the lessons of wisdom they contain, as is proved

by the example of the Greeks and Romans, who perished rather from a

surfeit of knowledge than from any lack of instruction. But it is time,

perhaps, to quit these general speculations, and proceed to develope, as

far as existing monuments will enable us, the several systems of

education which prevailed in the different parts of Greece.

Footnote 321:

Notwithstanding that Plato regards knowledge as the medicine of the

soul.—Crit. t. vii. p. 145.—Cf. t. viii. p. 2. seq.—Aristot. Ethic.

vi. 13.

Among Hellenic legislators the care of children commenced before their

birth. Their mothers were subject while pregnant to the operation of

certain rules; their food and exercises were regulated, and in most

cases the laws, or at least the manners, required them to lead a

sedentary, inactive, and above all a tranquil life.[322] Physicians,

guided by experience, prescribed a somewhat abstemious diet; and wine

was prohibited, or only permitted to be taken with water, which, where

reason is consulted, we find to be the practice at the present day. But

Lycurgus, in the article of exercise, gave birth to, or, at least,

sanctioned, customs wholly different.[323] Even while _enceinte_ his

women were required to be abroad, engaged in their usual athletic

recreations, eating as before and drinking as before.

Footnote 322:

Plat. de Legg. l. vii. t. viii. pp. 4. et 11.—During the pregnancy of

women great care was taken not to bring into the house the wood of the

ostrya or carpinus ostrys, the appearance of which was ominous of

difficult births, or even of sudden death. Theoph. Hist. Plant. iii.

10. 3.

Footnote 323:

Xenoph. de Rep. Laced. i. 3. Perizon. ad Ælian. Var. Hist. x. 13.

On this occasion, too, as on all others, the deep-rooted piety of the

nation displayed itself. Prayers and sacrifices were habitually offered

up by all married persons for children, as afterwards by Christian

ladies to the saints;[324] and these of course were not discontinued,

when it appeared by unequivocal signs that their desires had begun to

receive their fulfilment. What the divinities were whom on these

occasions the Athenian matrons invoked under the name of _Tritopatores_,

it seems difficult to determine. Demon in Suidas[325] supposes them to

be the winds; but Philochoros, the most learned of ancient writers on

the antiquities of Attica, imagined them to be the first three sons of

Helios and Gaia. According to some they were called Cottos or Coros,

Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus; according to others Amalcides, Protocles,

and Protocleon, the watchers and guardians of the wind. There are

authors, moreover, by whom they have been confounded with the Dii Kabyri

of Samothrace.

Footnote 324:

Theodoret. iv. 921.

Footnote 325:

_v._ Τριτοπ. t. ii. p. 947. b. seq. Cf. Siebel. ad Frag. Philoch. p.

11. Meurs. Græc. Fer. p. 264. Lect. Att. iii. 1. Vales. in Harpoc. p.

223. seq.

During the period of their confinement women were supposed to be under

the protection of Eileithyia. This goddess, who by Olen the Lycian was

considered older than Kronos,[326] had the honour as certain mythical

legends relate, of being the mother of love,[327] though several ancient

authors appear to have confounded her with Pepromene or Fate, others

with Hera, and others again with Artemis or the moon. The traditions of

the mythology respecting this divinity were various. Her worship seems

to have made its first appearance among the Greeks in the island of

Delos, whither she is said to have come from the country of the

Hyperboreans, to lend her aid to Leto, when beneath the palm tree, which

Zeus caused to spring up over her,[328] she gave birth to the gods of

night and day. From that time forward she was held in veneration by the

Delians, who in her honour offered up sacrifices, chaunting the hymns of

Olen, whence we may infer she was a Pelasgian deity.

Footnote 326:

Paus. viii. 21. 3.

Footnote 327:

Paus. ix. 27. 2. Cf. Cic. de Nat. Deor. iii. 23.

Footnote 328:

Callim. ii. 4.

From thence her name and worship were diffused through the other islands

and states of Hellas; though the Cretans pretended that she was born at

Amnisos in the Knossian territory, and was a daughter of Hera. The

Athenians, who erected a temple to Eileithyia appeared to favour both

traditions, since of the two statues which were found in her fane the

more ancient was said to have been brought from Delos by Erisicthon,

while the second, dedicated by Phædra, came from Crete. Among the

Athenians, alone, as an indication of the national modesty, the wooden

images of this mysterious divinity were significantly veiled to the

toes.[329]

Footnote 329:

Paus. i. 18. 5. Cf. Keightley, Mythol. p. 193. In Arcadia, also, this

goddess was so closely draped that nothing was visible but the

countenance, fingers, and toes.—Paus. vii. 23. 5.

The simple delicacy of remoter ages required women to be attended, while

becoming mothers, by individuals of their own sex. But the contrary

practice, now general among civilised nations, prevailed early at

Athens, where the study of medicine, in which the accoucheur’s[330] art

is included, was prohibited to women and slaves. The consequences bear

stronger testimony to the refined taste and truly feminine feelings of

the Athenian ladies than a thousand panegyrics. Numbers, rather than

submit to the immodest injunctions of fashion, declined all aid, and

perished in their harems: observing which, and moved strongly by the

desire to preserve the lives of her noble-minded countrywomen, a female

citizen named Agnodice, disguised as a man, acquired a competent

knowledge of the theory and practice of physic in the medical school of

Herophilos; she then confided her secret to the women who universally

determined to avail themselves of her services, and in consequence her

practice became so extensive that the jealousy of the other

practitioners was violently excited. In revenge, therefore, as she still

maintained her disguise, they preferred an accusation against her in the

court of Areiopagos as a general seducer. To clear herself Agnodice made

known her sex, upon which the envious Æsculapians prosecuted her under

the provisions of the old law. In behalf of their benefactress the

principal gentlewomen appeared in court, and mingling the highest

testimony in favour of Agnodice with many bitter reproaches, they not

only obtained her acquittal, but the repeal of the obnoxious law, and

permission for any free woman to become an accoucheuse.[331]

Footnote 330:

The duties of an accoucheuse are briefly enumerated by Max. Tyr.

Dissert. xxviii. p. 333. Cf. Pignor. de Serv. 184.

Footnote 331:

Hygin. Fab. 274.

Mention is made by ancient writers of several rude and hardy tribes,

whose women, like those of Hindùstân at the present day, stood in very

little need of the midwife’s aid. Thus Varro,[332] speaking of the rough

shepherdesses of Italy, observes that among the countrywomen of Illyria,

bringing forth children was regarded as a slight matter; for that,

stepping aside from their work in the fields, they would return

presently with an infant in their arms, having first bathed it in some

fountain or running stream, appearing rather to have found, than given

birth to, a child. Nor are the manners of these uncultivated people at

all altered in modern times, as appears from an anecdote related to

Pietro Vittore,[333] by Francesco Sardonati, professor of Latin at

Ragusa, who said that he saw a woman go out empty-handed to a forest for

wood, and return shortly afterwards with a bundle on her head and a

new-born infant in her arms. At Athens, however, where the women were

peculiarly tender and delicate, the young mother remained within doors

full six weeks,[334] when the festival of the fortieth day was

celebrated, after which she went forth, as our ladies do to be churched,

to offer up sacrifices and return thanks in the temple of Artemis or

some other divinity.

Footnote 332:

De Re Rust. ii. 10.

Footnote 333:

Var. Lect. xxxiv. 2.

Footnote 334:

Meurs. Græc. Fer. p. 260. sqq. Censor. de Die Natali. c. 11.

New-born infants, when designed to be reared, were at Athens and in the

rest of Greece bathed in cold water: at Sparta in wine, with the view of

producing convulsions and death should the child be feeble, whereas,

were its constitution strong and vigorous, it would thus they imagined,

“acquire a greater degree of firmness, and get a temper in proportion,

as Potter[335] expresses it, like steel in the quenching.”

Swaddling-bands[336] also, in use throughout the rest of Greece, were

banished from Sparta, which led the way therefore to that improved

system of infant management advocated by Rousseau, Lacépède and

others,[337] and now generally adopted in this country, though but

partially in France. The ceremonies and customs of the Greeks were a

kind of symbolical language, many times containing important meaning,

and always perhaps indicative of the character and familiar feelings of

the race. Much stress was laid on the thing wherein the infant was

placed upon its entrance into the world. This, among the Athenians,

consisted of a wrapper adorned with an embroidered figure of the

Gorgon’s head, the device represented on the shield of Athena, tutelar

divinity of the state. From the beginning every citizen seemed thus to

be placed under the immediate shelter of that goddess’s ægis which

should be extended over him in peace and in war. In other parts of

Greece the child’s first bed, and too frequently his last, was a

shield.[338] In accordance with this custom we find Alcmena cradling her

twin boys Heracles and Iphicles in Amphytrion’s buckler; and the same

practice prevailed, as might have been expected, at Sparta, where war

constituted to men the sole object of life.[339] Elsewhere other symbols

spoke to the future sense rather than the present of the new citizen. In

agricultural countries the military symbol was replaced by a winnowing

van, not unfrequently of gold or other costly materials;[340] though it

may be doubted whether the word so rendered meant not rather a cradle in

the form of that rustic implement.

Footnote 335:

Antiq. ii. 320.

Footnote 336:

Coray, ad Hippoc. de Aër. et Loc. ii. 309.

Footnote 337:

Even so early as the age of Montaigne the necessity of some change was

felt. “Les liaisons et emmaillottements des enfans ne sont non plus

necessaires.” He then alludes to the practice of the Spartan

nurses.—Essais, ii. 12. However, in certain habits of body, swaddling

is not merely useful, but necessary: as Hippocrates remarks in his

account of the Scythians (de Aër. et Loc. § 101), and as his able

commentator, Coray, confirms by example. _ubi sup._

Footnote 338:

Theoc. Eidyll. xxiv. 4. ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τὰς. Plut. Lacæn. Apophtheg. t.

ii. p. 187.

Footnote 339:

Nonn. Dionys. xli. 168. seq. Sch. Thucyd. ii. 39.

Footnote 340:

Callim. Hymn. in Jov. 48.

In another custom, long on these occasions observed, we discern traces

of that serpent-worship which at different epochs diffused itself so

widely over the world. Among opulent and noble families at Athens

new-born children were laid on golden amulets in the form of dragons by

which they were supposed to commemorate Athena’s delivery of

Erichthonios to the care of two guardians of that description.[341]

Footnote 341:

Eurip. Ion. 15. sqq.—There were certain amulets, too, called περίαπτα

which superstitious mothers hung about the necks of their children to

defend them from fascination and the evil eye. Pollux, iv. 182. Vict.

in Arist. Ethic. Nicom. p. 42.

But under certain circumstances, instead of the joy and gladness by

which the noble and the great are greeted on their entrance into the

world, the birth of a child was, as in Thrace,[342] an event fraught

with sorrow and misery. It announced in fact the approach of an enemy,

of one who, if he survived, must snatch from them a portion of what

already would scarcely sustain life. Together with the announcement of

his birth, therefore, came the awful consciousness that war must be made

on him—that he must in short be cast forth, a scape-goat for the sins of

society, not for his own—that his parents who should have cherished him,

whose best solace he should have been, must steel their hearts and close

fast their ears against the voice of nature, and become his

executioners. The poor-laws of Greece, or rather their substitutes for

poor-laws, were exceedingly imperfect, and foundling hospitals had not

been introduced. They got rid of their surplus population, as many

nations still do, by murder; for infanticide, under various forms, has

more or less prevailed in all civilised countries, if the term civilised

can properly be applied to nations among whom crimes so demoralising are

habitually perpetrated. No doubt the sullen reluctance of a father to

imbrue his hands in the blood of his child produced daily many a

heart-rending scene; no doubt the sting of want must have been keenly

felt before the habit of slaughter was confirmed;—but the fashion once

set, children were thrown into an earthen pot and exposed in mountainous

and desert places to perish of cold, or fall a prey to carnivorous

birds[343] or wolves, as coolly as they are murdered by their young and

frail mothers in our own Christian land.

Footnote 342:

Sext. Empir. p. 186.

Footnote 343:

Vict. (Var. Lect. ii. 3) has an useful chapter on the exposing of

infants, in which he has collected several valuable testimonies.

Under all circumstances, however, the parents thus criminal are objects

of pity. Misery is blind, and crime is blind. But what shall we say to

those priests of humanity, those sacred and reverend interpreters of

nature,—the philosophers who come forward to sanction and justify the

practice? It would be criminal to disguise the fact, that both Plato and

Aristotle, the great representatives of the wisdom of the Pagan

world,[344] conceived infanticide, under certain circumstances, to be

allowable. Near, therefore, as the former stood to the truths of

Christianity, there was still a cloud between him and them. What he saw,

he saw through a glass darkly. Christ had not then stamped the seal of

divinity upon human nature, had not shed abroad that light by which

alone we discover the true features of crime, no less than the true

features of holiness. Philosophy is beautiful; but with the beauty of

one involuntarily polluted. Religion alone, breathing of heaven, radiant

with light, reflected on its whole form from the face of God, is lovely

altogether without spot or blemish. The Greeks wanting this guide went

astray. They looked at the question of population as coarse

utilitarians,—all but the gross, unintellectual Thebans, who, relying on

the vast fertility of their soil, or led by some better instinct, on

this point soared high above their cultivated neighbours, an example of

how the foolish things of this world, even in the unregenerate state of

nature, may sometimes confound the wise. Among the Tyrrhenians,[345]

likewise, a people of Pelasgian origin, infanticide was unknown,

probably because among them it was accounted no disgrace to be the

parents of illegitimate offspring; indeed the sense of shame could not,

in any case, be very keen among a people whose female slaves served

naked at table, and where even the ladies appeared at public

entertainments in the same state, drinking bumpers and joining freely in

the conversation of the men.

Footnote 344:

Plato, de Rep. v. § 9. p. 359. Stallb. Aristot. Pol. vii. 16. Cf.

Lips. Epist. ad Belg. Cent. 1. c. 85. with the work of Gerard Noodt,

entitled “Julius Paulus,” in opp. Lugd. Bat. 1726. pp. 567, seq. 591.

seq. Elmenhorst. ad Minuc. Felic. Octav. 289. ed. Ouzel.

Footnote 345:

Athen. xii. 14.

In the modern world to take the life of an infant is a capital offence,

yet we see with how little fear or ceremony the law is set at nought. It

will, therefore, readily be supposed that in those countries of

antiquity where neither law nor public opinion opposed the practice, but

in some cases winked at, in others enjoined it, the number of

child-murders must have been enormous. Sparta very naturally took the

lead in this guilty course.[346] Here it was not permitted to private

individuals to make away with their offspring stealthily, and with those

marks of shame and compunction inseparable from individual guilt. The

state monopolized the right to Herodise, and by sharing the criminality

among great numbers appeared to silence the objections of conscience.

Fathers were compelled by law to bring their new-born infants to certain

officers, old, grave men,[347] who held their sittings in the Lesche of

their tribe, and after due deliberation determined on the claim of each

child to live or die. By what rules they decided, rude and ignorant of

physiology as they were, it would now be impossible positively to

affirm. Little skill no doubt had they in detecting the latent seeds of

robustness and physical energy, still less those of splendid mental

endowments lurking in the crimson countenance of helpless infancy. They

who might have proved the wise and good of their generation no doubt

often went instead of the mere animal. However, giving orders that the

strong and apparently healthy should be nursed, the weakly and delicate,

often the noblest men, and the bravest soldiers, as witness Lucius

Sulla, were condemned to be cast like so many puppy dogs into the

Apothetæ, a deep cavern at the foot of Mount Taygetos. This den of death

relieved the Spartans from the necessity of erecting workhouses or

enacting poor-laws. The surplus population went into that pit.

Footnote 346:

Compare the coolness of Hase. p. 190. Müller. ii. 313. with Lamb. Bos.

p. 212. seq. and the humane remarks of Ubbo Emmius iii. 83. Potter,

too (ii. 326. sqq.), seems to disapprove of the practice.

Footnote 347:

Plut. Lycurg. 16.

To a certain extent, and in a mitigated form, the same practice

prevailed at Athens. Here, however, it was more a matter of custom than

of law, and in this respect differed materially[348] from the practice

of Sparta, that it was left entirely to the father to determine the fate

of his children. Accordingly, the more cold-blooded had recourse to

murder, while the less atrocious exposed them in jars in desert places

to perish, or in the thronged and crowded quarters of the city in the

hope that they might excite in others that compassion, which he, their

father, denied them.[349] And humane individuals were often found who,

like our Squire Allworthy, would sympathise with these deserted

creatures.[350] Numerous examples occur in the comic poets. In these

cases poverty was no doubt the motive, particularly when boys were

exposed; but even wealthy persons, reasoning like the Rajpoots of

northern India, would prefer exposing their daughters, to the care and

expense of educating them to an uncertain destiny. On these occasions

the child was dressed and swaddled more or less carefully, placed in a

large earthen vessel called a chytra,[351]—the same in which soup was

made, and which ought, therefore, to have awakened humane

associations,—and laid at the mouth of some cave without the walls, or

in such situations as I have above described. To this custom allusion is

made in the anecdote of a foundling, who amusing himself by rolling a

chytra before him with his foot, “What! exclaimed some one desirous of

reminding him of his origin, have you the impiety to kick your mother in

the belly?”[352]

Footnote 348:

Petit is of the contrary opinion, but his authorities by no means bear

him out.—Legg. Att. lib. ii. tit. 4. p. 144.

Footnote 349:

Paulus, ap. Petit. ubi sup.

Footnote 350:

On the ceremony of adoption, see Potter ii. 335. Compare Lady

Montague’s Works, iii. 12.

Footnote 351:

Sch. Aristoph. Vesp. 289, or sometimes ὄστρακον, Ran. 1221.

Footnote 352:

Sch. Aristoph. Thesmoph. 509.

Sometimes when the object was rather to escape shame than to shun the

expense of education, rings, jewels, or other valuable tokens were

suspended about the child, or put along with it into the chytra.[353]

And in the comic writers these usually assist in bringing about a

discovery. If they fell into the hands of the poor the costly marks of

noble birth, always held in honour by the ignorant and needy, would

perhaps tempt them to preserve and cherish the off-cast, as in the case

of Shakespeare’s Perdita, or in the event of death, would defray the

expenses of their funerals. Sometimes superstition operated on their

minds, urging them into a mock show of sharing their possessions with

the little wretches they abandoned.[354] Thus Sostrata, wife of Chremes,

in the Self-tormentor delivered along with her little daughter to the

person who was to expose it, a ring from her own finger to be left with

the child, that should it die it might not be wholly deprived of all

share of their property. Such also is the behaviour of Creusa in

Euripides; for Hermes, whom the poet introduces unfolding the argument

of the drama, relates that when the young princess laid her new-born son

to perish in the cavern, where he had been conceived, she took off her

costly ornaments and with them decked her devoted boy.[355]

Footnote 353:

Vict. Var. Lect. ii. 3. Aristot. Poet. xvi.

Footnote 354:

Terent. Heautontim. iv. i. 36 seq. Victor. Var. Lect. ii. 3. Cf. Ter.

Hecyr. iii. 3. 31. sqq.

Footnote 355:

Eurip. Ion, 26. seq. Cf. 15. sqq.

From another part of the same play it may be inferred that children were

often exposed on the steps of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, and nurtured by

the Pythoness.[356] Indeed the priestess, on discovering Ion, who had

been brought thither by Hermes from Attica, concludes at once that some

unfortunate Delphian girl[357] is his mother, and adopts him under that

impression. From the sequel it would appear that such children were the

slaves of the temple, and under the immediate protection of the

god.[358]

Footnote 356:

Conf. Hypoth. Ion.

Footnote 357:

Δελφίδων τλαίη κόρη. κ. τ. λ. Ion, 44. sqq.

Footnote 358:

Ion, 53. sqq.

In the plain of Eleutheræ, near the temple of Dionysos, is a cavern, and

close beside it a fountain. Here, according to the poets, Antiope

brought forth Zethos and Amphion, twin sons of Zeus, whom, to conceal

her shame, she abandoned where they were born. The infants were

immediately afterwards discovered by a shepherd, who, having bathed them

in the neighbouring spring, took them to his cot, where they were

brought up as his own children.[359] The catastrophe of many an ancient

play was brought about by a discovery of the real characters of persons

who had been exposed in infancy. Thus Œdipus, whose story is too well

known to need repetition, was abandoned on Mount Cithæron. The daughters

of Phineus,[360] of whom nothing else has come down to us, had been cast

forth in infancy and preserved, and were afterwards brought to be put to

death on the same spot; by alluding to which their lives were saved. The

sons,[361] likewise, of Tyro, Peleus and Neleus, were deserted by their

mother, who placed them in a little bark or chest on the banks of the

Enipeus, a circumstance which served afterwards to reveal the parentage

of the twins. The story of Romulus and Remus, who were thus abandoned by

their vestal mother, is familiar to every reader; and from the example

of Moses recorded in the sacred volume, we may infer that the exposing

of children was common in remoter ages in Egypt. Pindar,[362] in

relating the birth of the prophet Iamos, presents us with a poetical

picture of one of these unhappy transactions. Evadne, daughter of

Poseidon by the river-nymph Pitana, dwelling at the court of Æpytos a

king of Arcadia, going forth, like the daughters of the Patriarchs, to

draw water from a fountain, is overtaken by her birth-pangs.

“Her crimsoned girdle down was flung,

The silver ewer beside her laid,

Amid a tangled thicket, hung

With canopy of brownest shade;

When forth the glorious babe she brought,

His soul instinct with heavenly thought.

Sent by the golden-tressed god,

Near her the Fates indulgent stood,

With Eileithyia mild.

One short sweet pang released the child,

And Iamos sprang forth to light.

A wail she uttered; left him then,

Where on the ground he lay;

When straight two dragons came,

With eyes of azure flame,

By will divine awaked out of their den;

And with the bees’ unharmful venom they

Fed him, and nursled through the night and day.

The king meanwhile had come

From stony Pytho driving, and at home

Did of them all after the boy inquire

Born of Evadne; for, he said, the sire

Was Phœbos, and that he

Should of earth’s prophets wisest be,

And that his generation should not fail.

Not to have seen or heard him they avouched,

Now five days born. But he, on rushes couched,

Was covered up in that wide brambly maze;

His delicate body met

With yellow and empurpled rays

From many a violet:

And hence his mother bade him claim

For ever this undying name.”

Footnote 359:

Paus. ii. 6. 4.—Cf. Casaub. Diatrib. in Dion. Chrysost. ii. 469.

Footnote 360:

Aristot. Poet. xvi. 8. cum not. Herm. p. 156.

Footnote 361:

Arist. Poet. xvi. 3.

Footnote 362:

Olymp. vi. 39. sqq. Diss. I give the passage as it is elegantly

translated by Mr. Cary.

Generally, it would appear, illegitimate children were exposed in the

neighbourhood of the Gymnasium, in the Cynosarges, because, as suggested

by Suidas, Heracles, who was himself a bastard, had a temple there.

On the subject of infanticide the Thebans,[363] as I have said,

entertained juster sentiments than the rest of their countrymen. By

their institutions it was made a capital crime; but because severe laws

would not furnish the indigent with the means of supporting the children

they were forbidden to kill, they by another enactment provided for

their maintenance. If a poor man found himself unable to support an

addition to his family, he was commanded to bear his children

immediately from the birth, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, to the

magistrates, who disposed of them for a small sum to wealthy people in

want of children or servants: for, according to the Theban laws, they

who undertook the charge of foundlings, if they may be so called, were

entitled to their services in return for their nursing and education.

Footnote 363:

Ælian, Var. Hist. ii. 7.—Cf. Phil. Jud. de Legg. Special. p. 543.

Connected with infanticide is another subject equally important, but of

very difficult treatment; that is practices to destroy the infant before

the birth.[364] In modern nations all such offences are theoretically

visited with very severe punishment by the law, and public opinion so

strongly condemns them that no one solicitous of upholding a respectable

character in society will dare to be their apologist. It was otherwise

in antiquity. The greatest dread of a superabundant population was in

many states felt, and led to customs and acts of a very nefarious

nature; for some classes of which, if not for all, writers of highest

eminence are found to plead. Thus Pliny,[365] commonly a great declaimer

in behalf of virtue, admits that some artificial limit should be put to

female productiveness; and Aristotle, despite his far nobler and more

generous ethics, had on this point no loftier views. The regulations

also of the Cretan Minos—but let them remain in the obscurity which

encompasses his entire code.

Footnote 364:

See in Pollux, ii. 7. and iv. 208. a whole vocabulary of terms

connected with this practice. In his note on the former passage, p.

297. Iungermann refers to the Commentaries of Camerarius, c. 32. Cf.

Comm. in Poll. p. 507. seq. p. 541. et 891. seq. Tim. Lex. Plat. v.

ἐξαμβλοῦν. cum. not. Ruhnken. p. 62. ed. Lond. Plat. Theæt. t. iii. p.

190. Max. Tyr. xvi. p. 179. Jacob Gensius (Victimæ Humanæ, pt. ii. p.

247. seq.), enters fully into the question of abortion, which at Rome,

according to Justin, was procured to preserve the shape. The same

practice prevails in Formosa.—Richteren, Voyage de la Compagnie des

Indes, v. p. 70. Compare Lactant. v. p. 278. Phocyl. v. 172. seq.

Footnote 365:

Hist. Nat. xxxix. 27. t. viii. p. 404. Franz. Impie satis, as Kühn

observes in his note on Ælian, Var. Hist. ii. 7. Arist. Pol. vii. 15.

253. Gœttl. Cf. Foës. Œcon. Hippoc. vv. Ἀμβλῶσαι and ἀποφθορά.

Among the Romans several modern writers appear to suppose the existence

of more humane feelings, for which it would certainly have been

difficult to account. An ancient law attributed to Romulus has misled

them. By this it was enacted that no male child should be exposed; and

that of daughters the first should be permitted to live, while the

others having been brought up till they were three years old, might then

if judged expedient be destroyed.[366] The legislator, it is argued,

knew human nature too well to fear that parents who had preserved their

children three years would after that take away their lives. But infants

exceedingly mutilated or deformed might be killed at once, having first

been shown to five neighbours, and these neighbours, like the overseers

of murder at Lacedæmon, were probably lax in interpreting the law,

which, acknowledging the principle, would easily tolerate variations in

the practice.[367] Be this, however, as it may, child-murder and child

dropping were in imperial times of ordinary occurrence at Rome. There

was in the Herb-market a pillar called the “Milky column,”[368] whither

foundlings were brought to be suckled by public nurses, or to be fed

with milk—for the passage in Festus may be both ways interpreted, and

their numbers would seem to have been considerable. The Christian

writers constantly object the practice of infanticide to the Romans.

“You cast forth your sons,” says Tertullian,[369] “to be picked up and

nourished by the first woman that passes.” And the poor, as Ambrose

remarks, would desert and expose their little ones, and if caught deny

them to be theirs.[370] Others adopted more decisive measures, and

instead of exposing strangled them.[371] Probably, moreover, it was the

atrocious device of legislators to get rid of their superabundant

population that gave rise to the rite of child-sacrificing known to have

prevailed among the Phœnicians, who passed their children through fire

to Moloch; and among their descendants the Carthaginians,[372] who

offered up infants to their gods, as at the present day our own

idolatrous subjects in the East cast forth their first-born infants on

islands at the mouth of the Ganges, to be devoured by the alligators. In

China Christianity has performed for infancy the same humane duty as in

ancient Rome, as many of the converts made by the Jesuits consisted of

foundlings whom they had picked up when cast forth by their parents to

perish in the streets.

Footnote 366:

Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. i. 81; ii. 15.

Footnote 367:

Seneca, de Irâ, l. i. Apuleius Metam. x. where a husband gives command

for the destruction of his daughter immediately on her birth.—Ap.

Lips. Epist. ad Belgas, Cent. i. p. 818. seq.

Footnote 368:

Fest. v. Lactaria Columna.

Footnote 369:

Apolog. c. 9.

Footnote 370:

Hexæm. l. v. c. 18.

Footnote 371:

Arnob. cont. Gent. viii. Lactant. Instit. vi. 20. ap. Lips. Epist. ad

Belg. 819.

Footnote 372:

Vid. Festus, v. Puelli.—In Syria children were sacrificed to the

goddess, in like manner with other victims, by being tied up in a sack

and then flung down from the lofty propylæa of her temple, their

parents, in the mean while, overwhelming them with contumely, and

protesting they were not children, but oxen.—Lucian. De Syriâ Deâ, §

58.