In my first course of public lectures I did my best to speak in
a general way of the nature of historical study, of its kindred
pursuits, of the difficulties by which it is beset and of the most
hopeful means of overcoming them. I spoke of the nature of the
evidence with which we have to deal in the search after historic
truth, and of the nature of the witnesses by whom that evidence is
handed down to us. In future courses I trust to apply the principles
which I then strove to lay down to the study of some of the most
memorable periods since the point at which, if at any point, the
special business of this chair begins. That we have ruled to be the
point at which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations first began to play
a chief part in the great drama of the history of Western man. In the
present term I ask your attention to a course which will attempt to
fill a place intermediate between these two, and which may naturally
serve as a link between them. Now that we have laid down rules for
the general guidance of our studies, while we are looking forward to
a more minute dealing with the history of some specially memorable
lands and times, we may, as the intermediate stage, do our best to
part off the history of man, such parts of it at least as concern
us, into a few great and strongly-marked periods. In my former
course, while taking a very general view of my whole subject, I did
not feel myself bound to keep within any artificial limits, whether
of my own fixing or of any other man’s. When speaking of evidence
and of authorities, I drew my illustrations as freely from centuries
before our æra as from centuries after it. In my present course I
must make a yet more direct and open raid into the territories of
my ancient brother. The history of the Teuton and the Slave, since
the days when those races came to the forefront of the nations in
the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our æra, will be
simply unintelligible if we do not attempt at least a general picture
of that elder world into which they made their way, and of the course
of events which gave that world the shape in which they found it.
But my sojourn in the lands which are ruled to belong to another
will not be a long one; before a ξενηλασία or an Alien Act can be
hurled at me, I shall be gone. It will be only for the space of about
a thousand years that I need tarry beyond the frontier which after
all is a frontier of my own choosing. And I shall always welcome my
ancient brother on a return visit of at least the same length. If I
claim to walk lightly at his side through the ages between the first
Olympiad and the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul, I bid him walk more
steadily, more abidingly, at my side through the ages between the
Teutonic invasion of Gaul and the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond. In
my next academic year I shall not need to ask leave to play truant
even for so short a space as I have spoken of. My main subject will
then lie fully within the barrier. We shall cross the Rhine and the
Channel with the Vandal and the Saxon of the fifth century. And
if it may still be sometimes needful to look back to Arminius and
Ariovistus, to remember that men of our own stock fought against
Gaius Julius and Gaius Marius, we can in return again call on our
elder brethren to look forward for a far longer space, to assure them
that we hold them thoroughly at home, not only in the Rome, Western
or Eastern, of any age, but in the Aquæ Grani of Frankish Cæsars and
in the Jerusalem of Lotharingian Kings.
* * * * *
There is one truth which in one sense I need not set forth again--it
has been my lot to set it forth so often--but which I must none the
less set forth almost every time that I open my mouth among you,
for it must be the groundwork of my whole teaching, as it is the
groundwork of all sound historic teaching. This is the truth that the
centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which
all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to
be found in Rome and her abiding power. It is, as I said the first
time I came before you, one of the greatest of the evils which spring
from our artificial distinctions where there are no distinctions in
nature, from our formal barriers where there are no barriers in fact,
that this greatest and simplest of historic truths is thereby wholly
overshadowed. He who ends his work in 476 and he who begins his
work in 476 can neither of them ever understand in its fulness the
abiding life of Rome, neither can fully grasp the depth and power of
that truest of proverbial sayings which speaks of Rome as the Eternal
City. And none but those who have thoroughly grasped the place of
Rome in the history of the world can ever fully understand the most
notable historic feature of the age in which we ourselves live. We
live in an age from which Rome has passed away, an age at least in
which Rome has lost her headship. And, by one of the wonderful cycles
of history, the Romeless world from which Rome has passed away is in
not a few points a return to the elder Romeless world on which Rome
had not yet risen. In both alike the European world lacks a centre;
in both alike, each city or nation does what is right in its own
eyes, without even the theory of a controlling power. The fuller
carrying out of this analogy I keep for the last lecture of the
present course. I have now only to divide my subject into three great
and marked periods. We have Europe before the headship of Rome arose.
We have Europe under the headship of Rome, even if that headship was
sometimes disputed and divided. Lastly, we have Europe since the
headship of Rome has altogether passed away. It is the first of these
three periods of which I wish to give such a sketch to-day as may at
least put it in its right relation to the periods which follow it.
But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole;
there is one tie which binds all three together; there has been
one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe in all her
phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One “question”
has, in the cant of the day, been “awaiting its solution,” from the
beginning of recorded history, and from a time long before recorded
history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the
lucky wisdom of his blindness, bestowed the epithet of “Eternal.”
Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet
of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is
the “Eternal Eastern Question,” the undying question between the
civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question
which has here and there taken into its company such side issues
as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and
Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of
whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a
strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar
shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife,
that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla,
Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged
before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemnôn and
Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codrington
and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before
the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from
Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe
and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on
to develope the common institutions of the great family within its
own borders; and they have been called on to defend those borders and
those institutions against the inroads of the barbarian from without.
When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid
on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that
dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause
that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia--we might almost
add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe--are
in their physical construction the most European of European lands.
Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas; the
lands round the Ægæan, its Asiatic as well as its European shore,
form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas
than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was
made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember
well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight
is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any
other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece
actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers,
the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were
to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of
time; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point,
to give models of every form of political constitution, of every
form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves
and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human
speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of
the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world
in the sense of being the world’s highest intellectual teacher; it
was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which
that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern
Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on
every later age, her influence has been almost wholly indirect; it
has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning; it has not
been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world
could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not
lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense
from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is
if the men of old Rome had not lived and fought, and--we will not
say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed
no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of
thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same
great family as ourselves, men whose institutions and whose speech
are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of
our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts
on a keener charm when we see in the _Agorê_ before Ilios the same
gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the _Marzfeld_
beneath the walls of Rheims and in the _Gemót_ beneath the walls
of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the
ἑταῖροι, the θεράποντες, that fought around Achilleus rise again in
the true _gesiðas_, the faithful _þegnas_, of our own folk, in Lilla
who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like,
their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still
all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common
source; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren.
The laws of Lykourgos and Solôn have passed away; it is the laws of
Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Mykênê, the
democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the
past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if
it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember
that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am
myself not old enough to have seen its funeral; but I have before now
seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth
for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the
Romans.
* * * * *
The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the
preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the
porch of a building which still stands and which architects to come
may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters
of the book itself begin; it is Rome that reared the first still
inhabited chambers of the house. Or we may rather say that the tale
of the days before Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all
that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified
ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what
man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long.
And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest
value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest
and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we
so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in
none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who
have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and
the barbarians--sometimes the self-condemned barbarians--who stand
without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our
own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people
who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us
all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the
toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business,
something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier
height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops
the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is
still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life,
because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own
law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of
Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common
speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength,
brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered
utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who
can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher
himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly
strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long
years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when
those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê,
the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the
common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the
doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut
out from it.
* * * * *
The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the
beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history,
will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the
islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of
history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history
of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood,
ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their
works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our
own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the
recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional
date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as
our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave
to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be
sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I
have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave
out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those
who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first
Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it
were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the
Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin
with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan
history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us
to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very
beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in
the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers
against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages
of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations
as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest
forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary
as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my
ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on
the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and
as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the
barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side
by side, to be dealt with as _ebenbürtig_, with the men of Hellas.
In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals
who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had
ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and
commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts
the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest
picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear
in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first
have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the
stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and
on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own;
that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and
Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied
had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the
Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if
we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers
of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of
Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the
world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece
the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down
to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed
away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the
Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue
of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of
the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people
should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of
cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.
Our scene then opens with the picture of the Greek while still
shut up in his own special land of islands and peninsulas. We ask
not for our purposes how and whence he came thither; we ask not
the exact measure of his kindred in blood and speech to the other
nations around him. It is enough for us that the Greek is not wholly
isolated, that he is not merely one of the great Aryan family, but
that he is the foremost among a group of nations who are bound to him
by some closer tie than that which binds together all the branches of
the great Aryan family. The exact degree of kindred between Greeks
and Thracians or Phrygians we may leave to other inquirers; it is
enough for us that there was the common Aryan kindred, and seemingly
something more. But it is one of the leading facts of history that
Greece had to deal on her immediate northern frontier, on the
opposite coasts of Asia, on the opposite coasts of Italy and Sicily,
with nations which, for historical purposes at least, were nearer
still. Those nations had, to say the least, a power of adopting
Greek ways, a power of becoming Greeks by adoption if not by birth.
The boundary line between the Greek and the Epeirot, faint in the
earliest days of Greece, seems for some ages to be drawn sharper and
sharper. Then the tide turns; suddenly the Epeirots, the people of
the oldest Hellas, the guardians of the oldest of Hellenic oracles,
stand forth again in their elder character. Molottian Pyrrhos wages
Western wars as a Hellenic champion and the kingdom of Pyrrhos
settles down at last into a well-ordered Greek confederation.
So it is in Macedonia; so it is in Sicily; so it is in the Greater
Hellas on Italian soil. All these lands, and other lands beside,
become, for a longer or shorter time, part of the immediate Greek
world, no less than Attica or Peloponnêsos. Greek colonization and
Macedonian conquest had, each in its turn, a share in the work, and
both were in many lands not a little helped by real, if unconscious,
kindred on the part of those whom colonists and conquerors found
already in possession. Every colony, every conquest, not only won
new lands for the Greek settlers themselves, but increased the Greek
nation in its wider sense by multitudes who became Greek by adoption,
and in whose case the work of adoption was made more easy by the
existence of earlier ties of which neither side had thought. As time
goes on, as we reach the days when Greek influences were most widely
spread over the Mediterranean lands, we may easily trace out zones
within zones, marking out the different stages by which the Greek
element grows fainter and fainter. First there is the centre of all,
the original Hellas itself. Then there are the genuine colonies
of old Hellas, detached fragments of Hellenic soil translated to
foreign coasts. Then there are the kindred lands whose people were
fully adopted into the Hellenic fold. Beyond them again lie the
kingdoms ruled by Macedonian princes, where a few great cities which
we must call Greek by the law of adoption are planted in lands which
have received at the outside only the faintest varnish of Hellenic
culture. Lastly, beyond these again, there are the barbarian lands
whose princes, like barbarian princes in our own day, made a show
of adopting Greek speech and Greek culture, but where the foreign
tastes of the princes had no real effect on their kingdoms, and which
we cannot look on as forming part of the Greek world in the laxest
sense. Such was Parthia; such was Pontos. Is it too much to add to
the barbarian kingdoms of the East the mighty commonwealth of the
West which had once been in Greek eyes no less barbarian? It is no
small part of our œcumenical story to mark how far Rome became Greek
and how far Rome refused to become Greek. The facts belong to a later
time; yet in some sort they form part of our present survey. The
Rome which brought the Greek lands step by step, first under Roman
influence, then under Roman dominion, was a Rome which had already
come within the magic circle of Hellenic teaching; while keeping the
essential essence of the national life untouched, while remaining
truly Roman in every political institution, in every detail of law
and government, she became Greek for every purpose of refined and
intellectual life. Nay, Rome became, like Macedonia, a disciple that
gathered in fresh disciples. Wherever Rome’s political life spread,
some measure, greater or less, of Greek intellectual life spread with
it.
The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history
of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general
supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the
bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of
the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy
of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had
become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never
ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intellectual dominion has formed
one side of the whole modern world; the advance of Greek political
power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unimportant, work of
forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek
nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of
the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times,
is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian
conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the
modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut
out the work of earlier Greek colonization, above all in those lands
of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been
admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth
is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has
nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where
Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This enables us to fix
a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the
immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the
Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in
Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to
be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being.
Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by
their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased
to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders
of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain
to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek
world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the
West was largely done by his more famous nephew and namesake in the
East. If a great part of Alexander’s conquests were but for a short
time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alexander
and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the
Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed
Tauros, the boundary of Alexander’s first Asiatic conquests, as a
far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out
in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the
actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old
Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and
it has gone back at others; but its general extent is wonderfully
the same. It is an extent which in both ages has been fixed by
the genius of the people. Nowhere out of the old continuous Hellas
does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by
adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern
Europe and western Asia the Greek is the representative of European
and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. The world of peninsulas
and islands is the world of the Greek now, exactly as it was in the
days of the Homeric Catalogue.
It is, as we held in our former course, with that Catalogue, the
first written record of European politics, that our survey of Europe
before the Roman Power must open. With all who can take a general
grasp of history and who understand the nature of evidence, the
Domesday of the Empire of Mykênê, puzzling to the mere porer over
two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, commands full belief. We
ruled it in our former inquiry to be the highest example of a general
rule, “Credo quia impossibile.” In the Catalogue we see the people
of many islands and of all Argos, grouped under the Bretwalda of
Hellas, already engaged in a stage, and not the earliest stage, of
the Eternal Question. Herodotus, who better knew the meaning of the
world’s history than the diplomatists of modern days, could point,
in a mythical shape indeed, to stages earlier still. Whether there
ever was a personal Agamemnôn and a personal Odysseus matters but
little; it matters far more that the keen eye of Ælfred, who knew
the relation of an overlord and his vassal princes, could see the
relation between Ulixes with his two kingdoms and the _Casere_
Agamemnôn of whom he held them. That _Casere_, kingliest among the
kingly, βασιλεύτερος in the throng of βασιλῆες, is already doing the
work of a Trajan or a Frederick; he is fighting for Europe on the
shores of Asia. The work of Greek colonization has begun; Crete, to
be won again ages after from the Saracen, is already won from the
Phœnician; Rhodes is already admitted to Hellenic fellowship, to
see in after days the might of Antigonos and the might of Mahomet
shattered beneath her walls. The southern coast of Asia is still
untouched; Milêtos is a barbarian city; but Achilleus has won Lesbos
as his own prize, and on the mainland the work is doing which was
to make the coasts of the Hellespont and the Propontis a foremost
outpost of Greece and Europe, the land which was to witness the first
exploits of the first crusaders and to behold the Eastern Rome rise
to a fresh life under the firm rule of the Emperors of Nikaia. Deem
we as we will as to minuter details, as we have in the Homeric poems
our first glimpse of Aryan society in peace and war, so we have in
them our first record, if only in a poetic form, of one stage of the
great strife which changed the barbarian peninsula of Asia into that
solid home of Grecian speech and Roman law which for ages held up
against the ceaseless inroads of the Arabian conquerors. To the west,
to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos
and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily; Akarnania is
still part of the vague _Mainland_, the still undefined _Epeiros_;
Korkyra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth
has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred
of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells
on both coasts; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing
glimpse. The northern coast of the Ægæan is known; but that coast
is not yet Hellenic; it significantly sends its warriors to fight
on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all
is wonder and mystery; we may as well ask whether the poet had any
conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of
the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the
East; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the
river Ægypt; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in
some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to
tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of
Tartêssos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious
knowledge that the pillars of Hêraklês--if Greece had as yet heard
their name--opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the
living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was
as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails.
Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later
time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and
scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It
is one of the gains or losses of the wider study of history that it
often teaches us to look at this and that period with different eyes
from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged
only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well
remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned,
from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly
look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century
before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is
that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd
of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens
for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to see Herodotus
saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the
age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the
scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The
fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece,
is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that
process had already begun which is still not ended, the long and
gloomy work of which Finlay steeled himself to write the story, the
History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove
Finlay’s point that Milêtos had learned to groan, as thrice-betrayed
Jôannina groans still, beneath the yoke of the barbarian. The periods
when Greek influences had most sway over the whole world are two,
one earlier, one later, than the more brilliant times of our usual
studies. The earlier is the greater; for it is the time when Hellas
grew and spread and made wide her borders among the nations, by her
own unaided strength, the time when Hellenic colonization carried
everywhere, not only Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts, but the
higher boon of free Hellenic political life. In the later period
Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts are spread more widely than they
had ever been spread before; but Hellenic political life is no longer
carried with them. The external might of Greece is wielded for her
by the kings of the adopted lands; we have passed from Hellenic
colonization to Macedonian conquest. In neither of those periods was
the most vigorous Greek life to be found in old Greece itself; the
most brilliant recorded period of old Greece is the period between
the two, the period of our most usual Greek studies. But it was the
most brilliant because the outer bounds of Hellas had fallen back
before victorious barbarians, and because old Greece rose up in a
renewed strength to avenge the wrongs of her colonies and to ward
off the like bondage from herself. The Greece of the fifth century
before Christ is like the Rome of the fourth century after Christ.
Its warfare is essentially defensive; it seldom gains new ground;
it has much ado to defend old ground. It gains victories; it wins
territories; but the victories are gained over threatening invaders,
the territories that are won are won back from the grasp of those
invaders. The work of Kimôn, the work of Agêsilaos, answers rather
to the work of Galerius and Valentinian than to the work of those
conquerors of realms wholly new who made Sicily a Greek and Gaul a
Roman land.
It is hard to fix on the exact moment when free and independent
Hellas--for remember that wherever Hellênes dwell there is
Hellas--had spread itself most widely over the Mediterranean coasts.
For boundaries fluctuate, and Hellas still advanced at some points
after she had begun to fall back at others. But we cannot be far
wrong in picking out some time not far from the beginning of the
sixth century before Christ as the most brilliant time of the free
Hellênes throughout the world. Then, as Herodotus puts it, all
Greeks were still free; it was in the course of the next century
that some Greeks were brought under the power of barbarian masters.
If some Greek colonies were still to be planted, all the fields of
Greek colonization had already been opened. And in most of them
the Greek cities were at the height of their power and greatness,
positive and relative; they were greater than they were in after
days, greater than the cities of old Greece were at the same time.
It is one of the truths which it is hardest to take in, that there
was a time when Milêtos and Sybaris and Akragas, rather than Athens
or Sparta, were the greatest cities of the Hellenic name. The like
came again at a later time, when the greatest of Greek cities were
Alexandria and Antioch. That the life of Athens and Sparta was the
more abiding proves that the Greek was after all more at home on
the soil on which he grew to be a Greek; but the fact that, at one
time the colonial, at another the Macedonian, cities altogether
outshone the older and truer Hellas is a fact which should be ever
borne in mind. In the great days of the Greek colonies the greater
part of the Mediterranean coasts was divided between settlers from
Greece and settlers from Phœnicia. In the eastern seas the Greek
had the supremacy; the true life and strength of the men of Canaan
had passed away from Sidon and Tyre to the Phœnician cities in the
western Mediterranean, to Panormos in the great central island, to
Gadeira on the Ocean, to Utica on the Libyan coast, to the New City
which outshone her parents and elder sisters, to mighty Carthage,
chief and in course of time mistress of her fellows. From the
Ægæan islands the Phœnician had withdrawn before the Greek; even
in more distant Cyprus the Greek had gained the upper hand. Far to
the south, on the Libyan mainland, the fertile coast between the
Egyptian and the Carthaginian had beheld the growth of Kyrênê and
her sisters of the Greek Pentapolis. The Greek cities of Asia were
among the most flourishing in the world; the gates of the Bosporos
had been thrown open; the Pontos was no longer the Inhospitable but
the Hospitable Sea; if the most abiding seat of Hellenic freedom,
Cherson on her Tauric peninsula, had not already sprung into being,
the path had at least been opened for her. On the western side of her
own peninsula, Greece was creeping up the Hadriatic coast; setting
aside later settlements, setting aside doubtful tales of earlier
settlements, Akarnania was now part of the Greek mainland, Korkyra
was numbered among Greek islands, Ambrakia, perhaps Epidamnos and
Apollônia, had begun their course; Greek culture was spreading among
the kindred nations; if narrower Hellenic feeling forbade to the
Thesprotian and the Molottian any share in the Hellenic name, wider
and more liberal inquirers did not deny their right. But, above all,
this is the age of the greatness of the Greek folk in the lands
west of Hadria, that greatness which so soon dwindled away, and
which adventurous kings from Sparta and Epeiros strove in vain to
restore. The Phœnician, whose settlements once studded the eastern
and southern coasts of Sicily, is now driven into the north-western
corner of the island; the Sicilian cities are among the foremost of
the Greek name; if Syracuse is less great than she was in days to
come, it is because Akragas and Gela have not yet fallen from their
first greatness. In southern Italy, alone in lands out of the old
home, in a peninsular land recalling the old home, Hellas spreads
from sea to sea; the Greater Greece holds the land firmly with her
great cities; Sybaris has reached the greatness from which she is
soon to fall into utter nothingness; Taras, not yet Latin Tarentum,
has begun the long life some traces of which hang about her even in
our own day. As for the Greek cities in the Western Mediterranean,
Massalia and her fellows, their full day of greatness, their day
of widest influence over barbarian neighbours, had as yet hardly
come. But it was coming; the work was begun. In that day Hellenic
life is fully as vigorous and flourishing in the Western as in the
Eastern lands. Continuous Hellas lies between the two, for a moment
less brilliant, of less influence in the world, than the two great
ranges of Greek colonization on either side of it. But when the whole
Mediterranean coast might seem to be divided between the Greek and
the Phœnician, two lands stand marked as having supplied no home for
the settlements of either. There was the land whose day of greatness
had gone by, and the land whose day of greatness was coming. By the
banks of the Nile the site of Alexandria still stood unnoticed by
all the wisdom of a thousand Pharaohs; the Greek was already known
in Egypt as a mercenary; he had not yet come to reign as a Preserver
and a Benefactor. By the banks of the Tiber, Rome, perhaps already
the head of Latium, not yet aspiring to be the head of the world or
the head of Italy, was biding her time; not yet herself conquering or
colonizing, but strong enough, along with her valiant neighbours, to
keep central Italy as an Italian land, in which neither the men of
Hellas nor the men of Canaan should find a dwelling-place.
This then, from the point of view of œcumenical history, is the
time which saw the full height of strictly Hellenic greatness, the
greatness of Hellenic commonwealths, the greatness of states which
were Greek by birth and not only Greek by adoption. Let us pass on to
the next strongly marked period, the days, stretching not very much
beyond a century and a half, which are undoubtedly the most brilliant
days in the life of some of the greatest cities of the elder Hellas,
and which have therefore often been mistaken for the whole history
of the Greek people. Now, as Herodotus says, we can no longer say
that all Greeks are free. In the course of the sixth century B.C.
the work of Mummius and Mahomet begins; Greeks now begin to be the
subjects of foreign rulers. Barbarian powers such as Greeks had never
yet had to deal with have arisen in East and West. Two such powers
above all have come to the front, a mighty empire in the East, a
mighty commonwealth in the West, an empire and a commonwealth which
for some generations were to be names of fear throughout the Hellenic
world. On the one side the old barbarian powers of Asia, powers
which lay beyond the range of European history, have given way to a
new barbarian power which forced itself within the European range,
and which we may almost say had a right to force itself. It was not
against the Hittite or the Assyrian that the strife had to be waged,
but against the kindred Persian. An Aryan people had been misled in
their course of wandering; they had strayed into the land of morning;
they now turned their faces towards the setting sun, but they turned
them only when it was too late, when they had already put on the
guise of the lands of their sojourn and could show themselves among
their European kinsfolk in no light but that of barbarian invaders.
Yet we must pay our tribute to the long abiding national life and
national energy which could so often rise again in full freshness
after ages of bondage. It was no mean people which could twice
spring into fresh being at the preaching of a national religion. It
was in truth no small mission in the world’s history that fell to
the lot of the Aryan of Persia. Once the worthy rival of Greece, he
rose again to be the worthy rival of Rome; like the Greek, he could
lead captive successive conquerors; in the grasp of the Saracen, in
the grasp of the Turk, his old life could still abide, and, if he
bowed to the creed of Arabia, it was only by changing it into a new
shape which made it before all things the creed of Persia. The Lydian
reaped the first-fruits of Greek subjection; the Persian threatened
to turn the whole eastern half of Hellas, continuous and scattered,
into part of a world-wide dominion. The King--βασιλεύς--forestalling
in that simple word the titles and controversies of days to come, was
indeed beaten back from old Hellas; he was beaten back from Europe;
he was for a while forced to withdraw his fleets and armies from
the Hellenic coasts of Asia. But the fact that he had to be driven
back from all of them of itself showed what an enemy it was against
whom Greece had now to strive. For a moment Thebes was the willing
ally, Athens was the defenceless conquest, of the lord of Susa and
Ekbatana. And after all the Persian did cut Hellas short on the side
of Asia; he even declared his will as a master in the councils of
Europe. A century had not passed since the day of Salamis when, by
the peace of Antalkidas, the peace which the King sent down, the
Greek cities of Asia, the Greek cities of Cyprus, were formally
acknowledged to be the King’s.
In the West meanwhile Hellas had to strive against a rival yet more
worthy of her rivalry, not against a barbarian empire, but against
a barbarian commonwealth. The old Phœnicia on the Syrian shore had
fallen from its glory; its commonwealths, still rich and flourishing,
had sunk into dependencies of the Persian power. The great field of
Phœnician enterprise now lay in the western seas. One Phœnician city,
the youngest of the great Phœnician cities, had risen to a place in
the world and the world’s history such as the cities of the elder
Canaan had never reached. The New City, Carthage, was now the centre
and representative of Phœnician life far more than Sidon or Tyre.
Carthage, in after days the rival of Rome, was now before all things
the rival of Greece. She was to bring Rome nearer to destruction
than was ever done by any other power of the Mediterranean world;
she was to destroy for a season, to weaken for ever, more than one
of the greatest among the western cities of Hellas. At the head
of a mighty following of dependencies of her own race, swollen by
barbarian subjects and mercenaries of every race, the Asiatic city
planted on the shores of Africa came nearer than any other power of
those days to rooting up the elder life of Europe, the life of which
first Greece and then Italy was the centre. We do not rightly take
in the full significance of the struggle which Greece went through
at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. if we do not at every
moment bear in mind how the whole Greek folk was attacked on both
sides at once. It may or may not be true that Xerxes entered into
an actual league with Carthage; it may or may not be true that the
fight of Salamis and the fight of Himera were fought on the same
day. True or false, both beliefs set forth the true position of the
Greek states at that moment, threatened by Persia on one side and
by Carthage on the other. The Persian was beaten back; from the
actual soil of continuous Hellas he was beaten back for ever. The
Carthaginian was beaten back only for a moment; he still kept his
hold on Sicily; he was yet to destroy Selinous and Akragas, to come
within a hair’s-breadth of destroying Syracuse. In earlier days the
scattered Phœnician settlements in eastern Sicily had withdrawn
before the coming of the Greek colonists; but now the Phœnician power
was wielded by a single mighty commonwealth which held some of its
strongest outposts, Panormos at their head, in the north-western
corner of the great island. In Sicily things seem to have turned
round; the European holds the eastern, the Asiatic holds the western
coast. And it is now the masters of the western coast that threaten
the eastern.
But the Persian and the Phœnician were not the only enemies against
whom the scattered Greek nation had to strive. Foes nearer to the
Greek in race than the Phœnician, less widely removed in political
and social institutions than the Persian, were threatening the power
and the being of one great division of the Greek name. The second
of the great peninsulas of southern Europe, the central one of the
three, the peninsula which held Rome and Capua and the cities of the
Etruscan, was beginning to come to the front in the drama of history.
There was as yet no sign that Italy was to be the ruling land of the
world; but there were signs that Italy was no longer to be a land
in which settlers of foreign races might carve themselves homes at
pleasure. The name of Rome was beginning to be heard in Hellenic
ears, but it was as yet hardly a name of fear. It was as yet the
native races of southern Italy that the Greek cities had to dread,
and Rome was for a while the enemy of their enemies. The Persian and
the Carthaginian were strictly enemies from without; the Persian
was in every sense an invader of the soil of the oldest Hellas; the
Carthaginian was at most winning a land in which other branches of
his race had once made settlements; but the Lucanians and the other
nations of southern Italy were, in the strictest sense, winning back
their own land from strangers. When Kymê and Poseidônia ceased to be
cities of Hellas, in one sense the boundaries of the civilized world
fell back; in another we may say that they advanced, as the nations
of Italy began to show that the time was come for the men of the
central peninsula to play their part in the world’s history as well
as the men of the older peninsula to the east of them.
By the middle of the fourth century B.C. the decline of Greece
is, even on the shallowest view, allowed to have begun. But it is
commonly held to have begun merely because the Macedonian kingdom
was beginning to step into that position of primacy among the Greek
powers which had been held at different times by the cities of Argos,
Sparta, Athens, and Thebes. And as regards the political life of
the great Greek cities, above all, as regards the political life of
that Athens which we are so often tempted to mistake for Greece, the
change was great indeed, sad indeed. But we must not forget that the
political decline of the great cities of old Greece was but one part
of the general political decline of the Hellenic people, and also
that a large part of old Greece itself looked on the change in quite
another light from that in which we are used to look at it from the
purely Athenian point of view. With the voice of Dêmosthenês ringing
in our ears, it is hard to listen to the calm comments of Polybios,
when he hands on to us the traditions of Megalopolis and of so many
other cities by whom Philip was looked on as a friend and deliverer,
a pious crusader against the sacrilegious Phokian. But yet more
important it is to remember that, if old Hellas lost much through
the advance of the Macedonian, the younger Hellas beyond Hadria lost
immeasureably more through the advance of the Phœnician and the
native Italian. Cry after cry for help went up from Italy and Sicily
to the motherland in Greece. A series of adventurers, republican and
princely, crossed the sea to bear help to their threatened brethren
or to carve out a dominion for themselves. Some went to free Greek
cities from domestic tyrants, others to free them from the yoke of
the advancing barbarian. That men from the motherland were needed for
either work shows that the great day of the Western Greeks had passed
away, that they could no longer keep either internal freedom or
external independence by their own strength. And, dark as is the tale
of Dionysios and Agathoklês, we cannot wholly put out of sight that
even they had a brighter side as in some sort champions of Hellas
against the barbarian. We must not forget Dionysios as the planter of
Greek colonies on both sides of Hadria, nor Agathoklês as the man who
carried the arms of Europe to the shores of Africa, the forerunner of
Regulus and Scipio, of Roger of Sicily and Charles of Austria. But
the mission of Diôn and of the nobler Timoleôn, the warfare of the
Spartan and the Epeirot, of Archidamos and Alexander and Pyrrhos,
showed that the Greeks of the West could no longer stand, even by the
help of the Greeks of the old Hellenic lands or of the lands which
had become Hellenic by adoption. Their doom was sealed; so before
long was the doom of all lands, the lands of the Macedonian and the
Carthaginian no less than the lands of the Sicilian and the Italian
Greek. But the fall of Macedon and the fall of Carthage were yet far
distant; those lands were reaching their highest pitch of greatness
at the moment when it became plain that all that was left for the
Greeks of the West was to become subjects or dependents of an Italian
power.
Another point to be noticed is the close connexion between the
destiny of the Eastern and of the Western Greeks. The Spartan princes
sought for a career in Italy because, in face of the advance of
Macedonia, there was no career left for them in old Greece. Moreover
the Epeirot kings Alexander and Pyrrhos are themselves part of the
_Hellênismos_; they are among the chiefest signs that the Hellenic
name and culture had spread beyond the genealogical bounds of the
Hellenic nation. Their people might have an ancient kindred with the
Greeks; they themselves might come of the blood of Achilleus; but
they were still, in the wider aspect of the time, Greeks by adoption
only. And the career of the Epeirot kings in the West was directly
suggested by the career of the Macedonian kings in the East. Their
land looked towards Italy and Sicily yet more directly than Macedonia
looked towards Asia; and perhaps Alexander, certainly Pyrrhos, sought
to found beyond the Hadriatic a Western Greek dominion to balance the
Eastern Greek dominion which the Macedonians had founded beyond the
Ægæan. So it was not to be. The decree had gone forth that Greece, in
her new guise, was to leaven the East, for a while to rule over the
East, but that in the West the political power of the Greek race was
to die out, that even its intellectual influence was to be indirect,
an influence which had to accept Roman masters and disciples as its
instruments.
Yet the day was coming when Rome was to rule in the East as well
as in the West; she was step by step to draw all the Greek powers,
those that were Greek by adoption as well as those that we may call
Greek by birth, within the spell of that influence which silently
changed from alliance to subjection. The details of that process, the
picture of the world into which Rome burst as it were in a moment,
the history in short of the third and second centuries, have, in the
common course of so-called classical studies, met with a neglect
which can be measured only by their paramount importance in universal
history. The distinctive aspect of that age I shall have to speak
of again. I wish now to point out how rich in political instruction
of every kind, rich perhaps beyond every other age of so-called
classical times, the age of Polybios really is. The Greek world of
his day was made up of an assemblage of states, of every degree of
power and of every form of political constitution. There was nothing
like it in the earlier days of Greece; there was nothing like it in
the after days when Rome practically became the world. But the Greek
world of those days gives us a lively image of the political state
of modern Europe for some ages past. The political experience of
Polybios was immeasureably wider than that of Thucydides; he had in
truth an experience fully as wide and varied as that of any modern
statesman. Thucydides knew only the independent city, oligarchic or
democratic, and the city which would fain be independent but was
not. In his day kingship and federation--federation worthy to be
so called--were still in the background; they hardly stood forth
on the political stage; kingship was not the constitution of any
acknowledged Greek power; federation was not the constitution of any
Greek power of the first or even of the second rank. But Polybios
could study, within the range of Greek or Greek-speaking powers,
every form of kingship and every form of commonwealth. There was the
national kingship of Macedonia, the king ruling over his own people.
There was the local kingship of Egypt, the rule of Greek kings over
a foreign nation. There was the Seleukid dominion, fallen indeed
from its old greatness, but whose kings still kept up some memory of
the position alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, the position of the
Great King, the King of Kings, ruling over lands and cities, Greek
and barbarian, of every speech, of every form of life, of every kind
of relation to the central power. And the Greek city-commonwealth,
fully free and independent, was still a familiar form of political
life; nor need it shock us that the purest and noblest example of a
Greek democracy was now to be found, not at Athens but at Rhodes.
But the highest political life of Greece, above all of old European
Greece, was now to be found in the federal states, in Polybios’ own
Achaia, in gallant and faithful Akarnania, in the adopted Greek
land of Epeiros, nay too in after days beyond the sea, among worthy
imitators of Hellenic models, in that land of Lykia whose people, in
the latest day as in the earliest, stand forth as the worthiest folk
of Asia, alongside of the men of Achaia, worthiest folk of Europe.
Achaia, Rhodes, Pergamon; it was no mean lesson to be able to study
the federal commonwealth, the single city commonwealth, the kingship
of a house worthy to reign, each standing forth in a model example of
those three several forms of government. In such a system of states
as this, instead of the simpler relations of earlier days, we come
across all the complications of modern international politics. While
the old republican life goes on, we see beside it the working of
dynastic interests, the influence of queens and ministers, exactly
as in the modern world. Diplomacy has its work to do, and a busy and
constant work it is. Nor is the history of these times simply the
history of petty states. Not only Macedonia and Egypt, but Pergamon,
Achaia, Rhodes, were all great powers according to the standard of
any earlier age. They were the leading states of their own world,
the chief members of an established system in which each held its
place exactly like the states of the modern world. Suddenly a foreign
power broke in among them, a power far stronger than any of them, a
power which came from another world beyond their range, and which
in a moment changed the face of the world into which it entered.
The suddenness of this irruption of Rome into the Greek world, the
speed with which she sprang at once to the first place in the East
as well as in the West, are among the most striking parts of the
story. They stand out in marked contrast alike to the slow steps by
which Rome had marched to the headship of the West and to the slow
steps by which her leadership in the East was changed into direct and
universal rule. Next to the delusion that the Empire of Rome came to
an end in 476 A.D. stands the delusion that free Greek states came
to an end in 146 B.C. This last delusion may be easier to get rid of
than the other. The third and second centuries B.C. have at least the
advantage of being left pretty clear from the touch of the crammer.
It is easier to write on white paper than to make parchment ready for
a palimpsest. It may be easier to set forth the true aspect of the
age which ruled that Rome should be the head of the world than it
is to set forth the true aspect of the age which answers to it, the
age which ruled in what shape Rome should still remain the head of
the world, though her political dominion over half her provinces was
broken in pieces.