All these heroes of whom we have been telling lived, if they lived at
all, about the time of the Judges of Israel. Troy is thought to have
been taken at the time that Saul was reigning in Israel, and there is no
doubt that there once was a city between Mount Ida and the AEgean Sea,
for quantities of remains have been dug up, and among them many rude
earthenware images of an owl, the emblem of Pallas Athene, likenesses
perhaps of the Palladium. Hardly anything is told either false or true
of Greece for three hundred years after this time, and when something
more like history begins we find that all Greece, small as it is, was
divided into very small states, each of which had a chief city and a
government of its own, and was generally shut in from its neighbours by
mountains or by sea. There were the three tribes, Ionian, Dorian, and
AEolian, dwelling in these little states, and, though they often
quarrelled among themselves, all thinking themselves one nation, together
with their kindred in the islands of the AEgean, on the coasts of Asia,
and also in Sicily and Southern Italy, which was sometimes called Greater
Greece.
Some time between the heroic age and the historical time, there had been
a great number of songs and verses composed telling of the gods and
heroes. Singers and poets used to be entertained by the kings, and
sometimes to wander from one place to another, welcomed by all, as they
chanted to the harp or the lyre the story of the great forefathers of
their hosts, especially when they had all joined together, as in the hunt
of the great boar of Calydon, in the voyage for the Golden Fleece, and,
above all, in the siege of Troy. The greatest of all these singers was
the blind poet Homer, whose songs of the wrath of Achilles and the
wanderings of Ulysses were loved and learnt by everyone. Seven different
cities claimed to be his birth-place, but no one knows more about him
than that he was blind--not even exactly when he lived--but his poems did
much to make the Greeks hold together.
And so did their religion. Everybody sent to ask questions of the oracle
of Apollo at Delphi, and there really were answers to them, though no one
can tell by what power. And at certain times there were great festivals
at certain shrines. One was at Olympia, in Elis, where there was a great
festival every five years. It was said that Hercules, when a little boy,
had here won a foot-race with his brothers, and when the Heracleids
returned to Sparta they founded a feast, with games for all the Greeks to
contend in. There were chariot races, horse races, foot races, boxing
and wrestling matches, throwing weights, playing with quoits, singing and
reciting of poems. The winner was rewarded with a wreath of bay, of
pine, of parsley, or the like, and he wore such an one as his badge of
honour for the rest of his life. Nothing was thought more of than being
first in the Olympic games, and the Greeks even came to make them their
measure of time, saying that any event happened in such and such a year
of such an Olympiad. The first Olympiad they counted from was the year
776 B.C., that is, before the coming of our blessed Lord. There were
other games every three years, which Theseus was said to have instituted,
on the isthmus of Corinth, called the Isthmean Games, and others in two
different places, and no honour was more highly esteemed than success in
these.
There were also councils held of persons chosen from each tribe, called
Amphictyons, for arranging their affairs, both religious and worldly, and
one great Amphictyonic council, which met near Delphi, to discuss the
affairs of all Greece. In truth, all the great nations who long ago
parted in Asia have had somewhat the same arrangement. A family grew
first into a clan, then into a tribe, then into a nation, and the nation
that settled in one country formed fresh family divisions of clans,
tribes, and families. At first the father of a family would take council
with the sons, the head of a clan with the fathers of families, the chief
of a tribe with the heads of clans, and as these heads of clans grew into
little kings, the ablest of them would lead the nation in time of war, as
Agamemnon did the chiefs against Troy. However, the Greeks seem for the
most part, between the heroic and historical ages, to have dropped the
king or chief of each state, and only to have managed them by various
councils of the chief heads of families, who were called _aristoi_, the
best, while those who were not usually called into council, though they
too were free, and could choose their governors, and vote in great
matters, were termed _demos_, the people. This is why we hear of
aristocracy and democracy. Under these freemen were the people of the
country they had conquered, or any slaves they had bought or taken
captive, or strangers who had come to live in the place, and these had no
rights at all.
Greek cities were generally beautiful places, in valleys between the
hills and the sea. They were sure to have several temples to the gods of
the place. These were colonnades of stone-pillars, upon steps, open all
round, but with a small dark cell in the middle, which was the shrine of
the god, whose statue, and carvings of whose adventures, adorned the
outside. There was an altar in the open-air for sacrifices, the flesh of
which was afterwards eaten. In the middle of a town was always a
market-place, which served as the assembling-place of the people, and it
had a building attached to it where the fire of Vesta was never allowed
to go out. The charge of it was given to the best men who could be
found; and when a set of citizens went forth to make a new home or colony
in Asia, Sicily, or Italy, they always took brands from this fire,
guarded them carefully in a censer, and lighted their altar-fires
therefrom when they settled down.
[Picture: Greek Interior]
These cities were of houses built round paved courts. The courts had
generally a fountain in the middle, and an altar to the hero forefather
of the master, where, before each meal, offerings were made and wine
poured out. The rooms were very small, and used for little but sleeping;
and the men lived chiefly in the cloister or pillared walks round the
court. There was a kind of back-court for the women of the family, who
did not often appear in the front one, though they were not shut up like
Eastern women. Most Greeks had farms, which they worked by the help of
their slaves, and whence came the meat, corn, wine, and milk that
maintained the family. The women spun the wool of the sheep, wove and
embroidered it, making for the men short tunics reaching to the knee,
with a longer mantle for dignity or for need; and for themselves long
robes [Picture: Greek robe] reaching to the feet--a modest and graceful
covering--but leaving the arms bare. Men cut their hair close; women
folded their tresses round their heads in the simplest and most becoming
manner that has yet been invented. The feet were bare, but sandalled,
and the sandals fastened with ornamented thongs. Against the sun
sometimes a sort of hat was worn, or the mantle was put over the head,
and women had thick veils wrapping them.
In time of war the armour was a helmet with a horse-hair crest, a
breast-plate on a leathern cuirass, which had strips of leather hanging
from the lower edge as far down as the knee; sometimes greaves to guard
the leathern buskin; a round shield of leather, faced with metal, and
often beautifully ornamented; and also spears, swords, daggers, and
sometimes bows and arrows. Chariots for war had been left off since the
heroic times; indeed Greece was so hilly that horses were not very much
used in battle, though riding was part of the training of a Greek, and
the Thessalian horses were much valued. Every state that had a seaboard
had its fleet of galleys, with benches of oars; but the Greek sailors
seldom ventured out of sight of land, and all that Greece or Asia Minor
did not produce was brought by the Phoenicians, the great sailors,
merchants, and slave-dealers of the Old World. They brought Tyrian
purple, gold of Ophir, silver of Spain, tin of Gaul and Britain, ivory
from India, and other such luxuries; and they also bought captives in
war, or kidnapped children on the coast, and sold them as slaves.
Ulysses' faithful swineherd was such a slave, and of royal birth; and
such was the lot of many an Israelite child, for whom its parents' "eyes
failed with looking and longing."
[Picture: Male costume] The Greeks had more power of thought and sense of
grace than any other people have ever had. They always had among them
men seeking for truth and beauty. The truth-seekers were called
philosophers, or lovers of wisdom. They were always trying to understand
about God and man, and this world, and guessing at something great, far
beyond the stories of Jupiter; and they used to gather young men round
them under the pillared porches and talk over these thoughts, or write
them in beautiful words. Almost all the sciences began with the Greeks;
their poems and their histories are wonderfully written; and they had
such great men among them that, though most of their little states were
smaller than an ordinary English county, and the whole of them together
do not make a country as large as Ireland, their history is the most
remarkable in the world, except that of the Jews. The history of the
Jews shows what God does for men; the history of Greece shows what man
does left to himself.
Greece was not so small as what is called Greece now in our modern maps.
It reached northwards as far as the Volutza and Khimera mountains, beyond
which lay Macedon, where the people called themselves Greeks, but were
not quite accepted as such. In this peninsula, together with the
Peloponnesus and the isles, there were twenty little states, making up
Hellas, or Greece. {109}
[Picture: Decorative chapter ending]