north as well as to the south of the Black Sea, and ultimately, as these
seas shrank and made way for them, to the north and east of the Caspian,
and so began to come into conflict with and mix also with Mongolian
peoples of the Ural-Altaic linguistic group, the horse-keeping people of
the grassy steppes of Central Asia. From these Mongolian races the
Aryans seem to have acquired the use of the horse for riding and
warfare. There were three or four prehistoric varieties or sub-species
of horse in Europe and Asia, but it was the steppe or semi-desert lands
that first gave horses of a build adapted to other than food uses.[170]
All these peoples, it must be understood, shifted their ground rapidly,
a succession of bad seasons might drive them many hundreds of miles, and
it is only in a very rough and provisional manner that their “beats” can
now be indicated. Every summer they went north, every winter they swung
south again. This annual swing covered sometimes hundreds of miles. On
our maps, for the sake of simplicity, we represent the shifting of
nomadic peoples by a straight line; but really they moved in annual
swings, as the broom of a servant who is sweeping out a passage swishes
from side to side as she advances. Spreading round the north of the
Black Sea, and probably to the north of the Caspian, from the range of
the original Teutonic tribes of Central and North-central Europe to the
Iranian peoples who became the Medes and Persians and (Aryan) Hindus,
were the grazing lands of a confusion of tribes, about whom it is truer
to be vague than precise, such as the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, and
those Scythians who, together with the Medes and Persians, came into
effective contact with the Assyrian Empire by 1000 B.C. or earlier.
East and south of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Medes and
Persians, and to the north of the Semitic and Mediterranean peoples of
the sea coasts and peninsulas, ranged another series of equally
ill-defined Aryan tribes, moving easily from place to place and
intermixing freely--to the great confusion of historians. They seem, for
instance, to have broken up and assimilated the Hittite civilization,
which was probably pre-Aryan in its origin. They were, perhaps, not so
far advanced along the nomadic line as the Scythians of the great
plains.
The general characteristics of the original Aryan peoples we have
already discussed in Chapter XV. They were a forest people, not a steppe
people, and, consequently, wasteful of wood; they were a cattle people
and not a horse people. The Greeks appear in the dim light before the
dawn of history (say 1500 B.C.), as one of the wandering imperfectly
nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually extending the range of their
pasturage southward into the Balkan peninsula and coming into conflict
and mixing with that preceding Ægean civilization of which Cnossos was
the crown.
[Illustration: Map showing Distribution of
ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES between about 1,000 & 500 B.C.]
[Illustration: Distribution of the Hellenic Races 1000 to 800 B.C.]
In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common language, and a
common tradition upheld by the epic poems keeps them together in a loose
unity; they call their various tribes by a common name, _Hellenes_. They
probably came in successive waves. Three main variations of the ancient
Greek speech are distinguished; the Ionic, the Æolic, and the Doric.
There was a great variety of dialects in Greece, almost every city
having its own output of literature.[171] The Doric apparently
constituted the last and most powerful wave of the migration. These
Hellenic tribes conquered and largely destroyed the Ægean civilization
that had preceded their arrival; upon its ashes they built up a
civilization of their own. They took to the sea and crossed by way of
the islands to Asia Minor; and, sailing through the Dardanelles and
Bosphorus, spread their settlements along the south, and presently along
the north borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of
Italy, which was called at last Magna Græcia, and round the northern
coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town of Marseilles on the
site of an earlier Phœnician colony. They began settlements in Sicily
in rivalry with the Carthaginians as early as 735 B.C.
In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Macedonians and
Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians crossed by the Bosphorus
into Asia Minor.
[Illustration: An early Greek sea-fight. From a painted vase, about 550
B.C.]
We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the
beginnings of written history. By the seventh century B.C.--that is to
say, by the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews--the landmarks
of the ancient world of the pre-Hellenic civilization in Europe have
been obliterated. Tiryns and Cnossos are unimportant sites; Mycenæ and
Troy survive in legend; the great cities of this new Greek world are
Athens, Sparta (the capital of Lacedemon), Corinth, Thebes, Samos,
Miletus. The world our grandfathers called “Ancient Greece” had arisen
on the forgotten ruins of a still more Ancient Greece, in many ways as
civilized and artistic, of which to-day we are only beginning to learn
through the labours of the excavator. But the newer Ancient Greece, of
which we are now telling, still lives vividly in the imaginations and
institutions of men because it spoke a beautiful and most expressive
Aryan tongue akin to our own, and because it had taken over the
Mediterranean alphabet and perfected it by the addition of vowels, so
that reading and writing were now easy arts to learn and practise, and
great numbers of people could master them and make a record for later
ages.[172]
§ 2
Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South Italy and
Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C., is a civilization
differing in many important respects from the two great civilized
systems whose growths we have already traced, that of the Nile and that
of the Two Rivers of Mesopotamia. These civilizations grew through long
ages where they are found; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a
primitive agriculture; priest kings and god kings consolidated such
early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herdsmen raiders
came southward into a world whose civilization was already an old story.
Shipping and agriculture, walled cities and writing, were already there.
The Greeks did not grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one
and put another together upon and out of the ruins.
To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple-state stage, no
stage of priest kings, in the Greek record. The Greeks got at once to
the city organization that in the east had grown round the temple. They
took over the association of temple and city; the idea was ready-made
for them. What impressed them most about the city was probably its wall.
It is doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away.
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a continual
suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place in a time of
strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper feature of the city.
They came into this inheritance of a previous civilization with the
ideas and traditions of the woodlands still strong in their minds. The
heroic social system of the _Iliad_ took possession of the land, and
adapted itself to the new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks
became more religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered
welled up from below.[173]
We have already said that the social structure of the primitive Aryans
was a two-class system of nobles and commoners, the classes not very
sharply marked off from each other, and led in warfare by a king who was
simply the head of one of the noble families, _primus inter pares_, a
leader among his equals. With the conquest of the aboriginal population
and with the building of towns there was added to this simple social
arrangement of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled
and unskilled workers, who were for the most part slaves. But all the
Greek communities were not of this “conquest” type. Some were “refugee”
cities representing smashed communities, and in these the aboriginal
substratum would be missing.
In many of the former cases the survivors of the earlier population
formed a subject class, slaves of the state as a whole, as, for
instance, the Helots in Sparta. The nobles and commoners became
landlords and gentlemen farmers; it was they who directed the
shipbuilding and engaged in trade. But some of the poorer free citizens
followed mechanic arts, and, as we have already noted, would even pull
an oar in a galley for pay. Such priests as there were in this Greek
world were either the guardians of shrines and temples or sacrificial
functionaries; Aristotle, in his _Politics_, makes them a mere
subdivision of his official class. The citizen served as warrior in
youth, ruler in his maturity, priest in his old age. The priestly
_class_, in comparison with the equivalent class in Egypt and Babylonia,
was small and insignificant. The gods of the Greeks proper, the gods of
the heroic Greeks, were, as we have already noted, glorified human
beings, and they were treated without very much fear or awe; but beneath
these gods of the conquering freemen lurked other gods of the subjugated
peoples, who found their furtive followers among slaves and women. The
original Aryan gods were not expected to work miracles or control men’s
lives. But Greece, like most of the Eastern world in the thousand years
B.C., was much addicted to consulting _oracles_ or soothsayers. Delphi
was particularly famous for its oracle. “When the Oldest Men in the
tribe could not tell you the right thing to do,” says Gilbert Murray,
“you went to the blessed dead. All oracles were at the tombs of Heroes.
They told you what was ‘Themis,’ what was the right thing to do, or, as
religious people would put it now, what was the Will of the God.”
[Illustration: Rowers in an Athenian warship, about 400 B.C. (Fragment
of relief found on the Acropolis)]
The priests and priestesses of these temples were not united into one
class, nor did they exercise any power as a class. It was the nobles and
free commoners, two classes which, in some cases, merged into one common
body of citizens, who constituted the Greek state. In many cases,
especially in great city states, the population of slaves and
unenfranchised strangers greatly outnumbered the citizens. But for them
the state did not exist; it existed for the select body of citizens
alone. It might or might not tolerate the outsider and the slave, but
they had no legal voice in their treatment--any more than if it had been
a despotism.[174]
This is a social structure differing widely from that of the Eastern
monarchies. The exclusive importance of the Greek citizen reminds one a
little of the exclusive importance of the children of Israel in the
later Jewish state, but there is no equivalent on the Greek side to the
prophets and priests, nor to the idea of an over-ruling Jehovah.
Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the human
communities to which we have hitherto given attention is their
continuous and incurable division. The civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria,
China, and no doubt North India, all began in a number of independent
city states, each one a city with a few miles of dependent agricultural
villages and cultivation around it, but out of this phase they passed by
a process of coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end
of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. Commonly, this
is ascribed to the geographical conditions under which they lived.
Greece is a country cut up into a multitude of valleys by mountain
masses and arms of the sea that render intercommunication difficult; so
difficult that few cities were able to hold many of the others in
subjection for any length of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on
islands and scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city
states of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and some
had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, the largest of the Greek
cities, at the climax of its power had a population of perhaps a third
of a million. Hardly any other Greek cities ever exceeded 50,000. Of
this, half or more were slaves and strangers, and two-thirds of the free
body women and children.
§ 3
The government of these city states varied very widely in its nature. As
they settled down after their conquests the Greeks retained for a time
the rule of their kings, but these kingdoms drifted back more and more
to the rule of the aristocratic class. In Sparta (Lacedemon) kings were
still distinguished in the sixth century B.C. The Lacedemonians had a
curious system of a double kingship; two kings, drawn from different
royal families, ruled together. But most of the Greek city states had
become aristocratic republics long before the sixth century. There is,
however, a tendency towards slackness and inefficiency in most families
that rule by hereditary right; sooner or later they decline; and as the
Greeks got out upon the seas and set up colonies and commerce extended,
new rich families arose to jostle the old and bring new personalities
into power. These _nouveaux riches_ became members of an expanded ruling
class, a mode of government known as oligarchy--in opposition to
aristocracy--though, strictly, the term oligarchy (= government by the
few) should of course include hereditary aristocracy as a special case.
In many cities persons of exceptional energy, taking advantage of some
social conflict or class grievance, secured a more or less irregular
power in the state. This combination of personality and opportunity has
occurred in the United States of America, for example, where men
exercising various kinds of informal power are called _bosses_. In
Greece they were called _tyrants_. But the tyrant was rather more than a
boss; he was recognized as a monarch, and claimed the authority of a
monarch. The modern boss, on the other hand, shelters behind legal forms
which he has “got hold of” and uses for his own ends. Tyrants were
distinguished from kings, who claimed some sort of right, some family
priority, for example, to rule. They were supported, perhaps, by the
poorer class with a grievance; Peisistratus, for example, who was tyrant
of Athens, with two intervals of exile, between 560 and 527 B.C., was
supported by the poverty-struck Athenian hillmen. Sometimes, as in Greek
Sicily, the tyrant stood for the rich against the poor. When, later on,
the Persians began to subjugate the Greek cities of Asia Minor, they set
up pro-Persian tyrants.
Aristotle, the great philosophical teacher, who was born under the
hereditary Macedonian monarchy, and who was for some years tutor to the
king’s son, distinguishes in his _Politics_ between kings who ruled by
an admitted and inherent right, such as the King of Macedonia, whom he
served, and tyrants who ruled without the consent of the governed. As a
matter of fact, it is hard to conceive of a tyrant ruling without the
consent of many, and the active participation of a substantial number of
his subjects; and the devotion and unselfishness of your “true kings”
has been known to rouse resentment and questioning. Aristotle was also
able to say that while the king ruled for the good of the state, the
tyrant ruled for his own good. Upon this point, as in his ability to
regard slavery as a natural thing and to consider women unfit for
freedom and political rights, Aristotle was in harmony with the trend of
events about him.
A third form of government that prevailed increasingly in Greece in the
sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., was known as _democracy_. As
the modern world nowadays is constantly talking of democracy, and as the
modern idea of democracy is something widely different from the
democracy of the Greek city states, it will be well to be very explicit
upon the meaning of democracy in Greece. Democracy then was government
by the commonalty, the Demos; it was government by the whole body of the
citizens, by the many as distinguished from the few. But let the modern
reader mark that word “citizen.” The slave was excluded, the freedman
was excluded, the stranger; even the Greek born in the city, whose
father had come eight or ten miles from the city beyond the headland,
was excluded. The earlier democracies (but not all) demanded a property
qualification from the citizen, and property in those days was land;
this was subsequently relaxed, but the modern reader will grasp that
here was something very different from modern democracy. At the end of
the fifth century B.C. this property qualification had been abolished in
Athens, for example; but Pericles, a great Athenian statesman of whom we
shall have more to tell later, had established a law (451 B.C.)
restricting citizenship to those who could establish Athenian descent on
both sides. Thus, in the Greek democracies quite as much as in the
oligarchies, the citizens formed a _close corporation_, ruling
sometimes, as in the case of Athens in its great days, a big population
of serfs, slaves, and “outlanders.” A modern politician used to the
idea, the entirely new and different idea, that democracy in its
perfected form means that every adult man and woman shall have a voice
in the government, would, if suddenly spirited back to the extremist
Greek democracy, regard it as a kind of oligarchy. The only real
difference between a Greek “oligarchy” and a Greek democracy was that in
the former, the poorer and less important citizens had no voice in the
government, and in the latter every citizen had. Aristotle, in his
_Politics_, betrays very clearly the practical outcome of this
difference. Taxation sat lightly on the rich in the oligarchies; the
democracies, on the other hand, taxed the rich, and generally paid the
impecunious citizen a maintenance allowance and special fees. In Athens
fees were paid to citizens even for attending the general assembly. But
the generality of people outside the happy order of citizens worked and
did what they were told, and if one desired the protection of the law,
one sought a citizen to plead for one. For only the citizen had any
standing in the law courts. Greek democracy was, in fact, a sort of
government by a swarm of hereditary barristers. Our modern idea, that
any one in the state is a citizen, would have shocked the privileged
democrats of Athens profoundly.[175]
One obvious result of this monopolization of the state by the class of
citizens was that the patriotism of these privileged people took an
intense and narrow form. They would form alliances, but never coalesce
with other city states. That would have obliterated every advantage by
which they lived. There would have been no more fees, no more
privileges. The narrow geographical limits of these Greek states added
to the intensity of their feeling. A man’s love for his country was
reinforced by his love for his native town, his religion, and his home;
for these were all one. Of course the slaves did not share in these
feelings, and in the oligarchic states very often the excluded class got
over its dislike of foreigners in its greater dislike of the class at
home which oppressed it. But in the main, patriotism in the Greek was a
personal passion of an inspiring and dangerous intensity. Like rejected
love, it was apt to turn into something very like hatred. The Greek
exile resembled the French or Russian _émigré_ in being ready to treat
his beloved country pretty roughly in order to save her from the devils
in human form who had taken possession of her and turned _him_ out.
In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relationships with a
number of other Greek city states which is often spoken of by historians
as the Athenian Empire. But all the other city states retained their own
governments. One “new fact” added by the Athenian Empire was the
complete and effective suppression of piracy; another was the
institution of a sort of international law. The law, indeed, was
Athenian law; but actions could now be brought and justice administered
between citizens of the different states of the League, which of course
had not been possible before. The Athenian Empire had really developed
out of a league of mutual defence against Persia; its seat had
originally been in the island of Delos, and the allies had contributed
to a common treasure at Delos; the treasure of Delos was carried off to
Athens because it was exposed to a possible Persian raid. Then one city
after another offered a monetary contribution instead of military
service, with the result that in the end Athens was doing almost all the
work and receiving almost all the money. She was supported by one or two
of the larger islands. The “League” in this way became gradually an
“Empire,” but the citizens of the allied states remained, except where
there were special treaties of intermarriage and the like, practically
foreigners to one another. And it was chiefly the poorer citizens of
Athens who sustained this empire by their most vigorous and incessant
personal service. Every citizen was liable to military service at home
or abroad between the ages of eighteen and sixty, sometimes on purely
Athenian affairs and sometimes in defence of the cities of the Empire
whose citizens had bought themselves off. There was probably no single
man over twenty-five in the Athenian Assembly who had not served in
several campaigns in different parts of the Mediterranean or Black Sea,
and who did not expect to serve again. Modern imperialism is denounced
by its opponents as the exploitation of the world by the rich; Athenian
imperialism was the exploitation of the world by the poorer citizens of
Athens.
Another difference from modern conditions, due to the small size of the
Greek city states, was that in a democracy every citizen had the right
to attend and speak and vote in the popular assembly. For most cities
this meant a gathering of only a few hundred people; the greatest had no
more than some thousands of citizens. Nothing of this sort is possible
in a modern “democracy” with, perhaps, several million voters. The
modern “citizen’s” voice in public affairs is limited to the right to
vote for one or other of the party candidates put before him. He, or
she, is then supposed to have “assented” to the resultant government.
Aristotle, who would have enjoyed the electoral methods of our modern
democracies keenly, points out very subtly how the outlying farmer class
of citizens in a democracy can be virtually disenfranchised by calling
the popular assembly too frequently for their regular attendance. In the
later Greek democracies (fifth century) the appointment of public
officials, except in the case of officers requiring very special
knowledge, was by casting lots. This was supposed to protect the general
corporation of privileged citizens from the continued predominance of
rich, influential, and conspicuously able men.
Some democracies (Athens and Miletus, _e.g._) had an institution called
the ostracism,[176] by which in times of crisis and conflict the
decision was made whether some citizen should go into exile for ten
years. This may strike a modern reader as an envious institution, but
that was not its essential quality. It was, says Gilbert Murray, a way
of arriving at a decision in a case when political feeling was so
divided as to threaten a deadlock. There were in the Greek democracies
parties and party leaders, but no regular government in office and no
regular opposition. There was no way, therefore, of carrying out a
policy, although it might be the popular policy, if a strong leader or a
strong group stood out against it. But by the ostracism, the least
popular or the least trusted of the chief leaders in the divided
community was made to retire for a period without loss of honour or
property. Professor Murray suggests that a Greek democracy, if it had
found itself in such a position of deadlock as the British Empire did
upon the question of Home Rule for Ireland in 1914, would have probably
first ostracized Sir Edward Carson, and then proceeded to carry out the
provisions of the Home Rule Bill.
This institution of the ostracism has immortalized one obscure and
rather illiterate member of the democracy of Athens. A certain Aristides
had gained a great reputation in the law court for his righteous
dealing. He fell into a dispute with Themistocles upon a question of
naval policy; Aristides was for the army, Themistocles was a “strong
navy” man, and a deadlock was threatened. There was resort to an
ostracism to decide between them. Plutarch relates that as Aristides
walked through the streets while the voting was in progress, he was
accosted by a strange citizen from the agricultural environs
unaccustomed to the art of writing, and requested to write his own name
on the proffered potsherd.
“But why?” he asked. “Has Aristides ever injured you?”
“No,” said the citizen. “No. Never have I set eyes on him. But, oh! I am
so _bored_ by hearing him called Aristides the Just.”
Whereupon, says Plutarch, without further parley Aristides wrote as the
man desired....
When one understands the true meaning of these Greek constitutions, and
in particular the limitation of all power, whether in the democracies or
the oligarchies, to a locally privileged class, one realizes how
impossible was any effective union of the hundreds of Greek cities
scattered about the Mediterranean region, or even of any effective
co-operation between them for a common end. Each city was in the hands
of a few or a few hundred men, to whom its separateness meant everything
that was worth having in life. Only conquest from the outside could
unite the Greeks, and until Greece was conquered they had no political
unity. When at last they were conquered, they were conquered so
completely that their unity ceased to be of any importance even to
themselves; it was a unity of subjugation.
Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between all the
Greeks, based on a common language and script, on the common possession
of the heroic epics, and on the continuous intercourse that the maritime
position of the states made possible. And, in addition, there were
certain religious bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines
of the god Apollo in the island of Delos and at Delphi, for example,
were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or
Amphictyonies (= League of neighbours), which in such instances as the
Delphic amphictyony became very wide-reaching unions. The league
protected the shrine and the safety of pilgrims, kept up the roads
leading thereunto, secured peace at the time of special festivals,
upheld certain rules to mitigate the usages of war among its members,
and--the Delian league especially--suppressed piracy. A still more
important link of Hellenic union was the Olympian games that were held
every four years at Olympia. Foot races, boxing, wrestling, javelin
throwing, quoit throwing, jumping, and chariot and horse racing were the
chief sports, and a record of victors and distinguished visitors was
kept. From the year 776 B.C. onward[177] these games were held regularly
for over a thousand years, and they did much to maintain that sense of a
common Greek life (pan-Hellenic) transcending the narrow politics of the
city states.
Such links of sentiment and association were of little avail against the
intense “separatism” of the Greek political institutions. From the
History of Herodotus the student will be able to gather a sense of the
intensity and persistence of the feuds that kept the Greek world in a
state of chronic warfare. In the old days (say, to the sixth century
B.C.) fairly large families prevailed in Greece, and something of the
old Aryan great household system (see Chap. XV), with its strong clan
feeling and its capacity for maintaining an enduring feud, still
remained. The history of Athens circles for many years about the feud of
two great families, the Alcmæonidæ and the Peisistratidæ; the latter
equally an aristocratic family, but founding its power on the support of
the poorer class of the populace and the exploitation of their
grievances. Later on, in the sixth and fifth centuries, a limitation of
births and a shrinkage of families to two or three members--a process
Aristotle notes without perceiving its cause--led to the disappearance
of the old aristocratic clans, and the later wars were due rather to
trade disputes and grievances caused and stirred up by individual
adventurers than to family vendettas.
It is easy to understand, in view of this intense separatism of the
Greeks, how readily the Ionians of Asia and of the islands fell first
under the domination of the kingdom of Lydia, and then under that of the
Persians when Cyrus overthrew Crœsus, the king of Lydia. They
rebelled only to be reconquered. Then came the turn of European Greece.
It is a matter of astonishment, the Greeks themselves were astonished,
to find that Greece itself did not fall under the dominion of the
Persians, these barbaric Aryan masters of the ancient civilizations of
Western Asia. But before we tell of this struggle we must give some
attention to these Asiatics against whom they were pitted; and
particularly to these Medes and Persians who, by 538 B.C., were already
in possession of the ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, and
about to subjugate Egypt.
§ 4
We have had occasion to mention the kingdom of Lydia, and it may be well
to give a short note here upon the Lydians before proceeding with our
story. The original population of the larger part of Asia Minor may
perhaps have been akin to the original population of Greece and Crete.
If so, it was of “Mediterranean” race. Or it may have been another
branch of those still more generalized and fundamental darkish peoples
from whom arose the Mediterranean race to the west and the Dravidians to
the east. Remains of the same sort of art that distinguishes Cnossos and
Mycenæ are to be found scattered over Asia Minor. But just as the Nordic
Greeks poured southward into Greece to conquer and mix with the
aborigines, so did other and kindred Nordic tribes pour over the
Bosphorus into Asia Minor. Over some areas these Aryan peoples prevailed
altogether, and became the bulk of the inhabitants and retained their
Aryan speech. Such were the Phrygians, a people whose language was
almost as close to that of the Greeks as the Macedonian. But over other
areas the Aryans did not so prevail. In Lydia the original race and
their language held their own. The Lydians were a non-Aryan people
speaking a non-Aryan speech, of which at the present time only a few
words are known. Their capital city was Sardis.
Their religion was also non-Aryan. They worshipped a Great Mother
goddess. The Phrygians also, though retaining their Greek-like language,
became infected with mysterious religion, and much of the mystical
religion and secret ceremonial that pervaded Athens at a later date was
Phrygian (when not Thracian) in origin.
At first the Lydians held the western seacoast of Asia Minor, but they
were driven back from it by the establishment of Ionian Greeks coming by
the sea and founding cities. Later on, however, these Ionian Greek
cities were brought into subjection by the Lydian kings.
The history of this country is not clearly known, and were it known it
would scarcely be of sufficient importance to be related in this
historical outline, but in the eighth century B.C. one monarch, named
Gyges, becomes noteworthy. The country under his rule was subjected to
another Aryan invasion; certain nomadic tribes called the Cimmerians
came pouring across Asia Minor, and they were driven back with
difficulty by Gyges and his son and grandson. Sardis was twice taken and
burnt by these barbarians. And it is on record that Gyges paid tribute
to Sardanapalus, which serves to link him up with our general ideas of
the history of Assyria, Israel, and Egypt. Later, Gyges rebelled against
Assyria, and sent troops to help Psammetichus I to liberate Egypt from
its brief servitude to the Assyrians.
It was Alyattes, the grandson of Gyges, who made Lydia into a
considerable power. He reigned for seven years, and he reduced most of
the Ionian cities of Asia Minor to subjection. The country became the
centre of a great trade between Asia and Europe; it had always been
productive and rich in gold, and now the Lydian monarch was reputed the
richest in Asia. There was a great coming and going between the Black
and Mediterranean Seas, and between the East and West. We have already
noted that Lydia was reputed to be the first country in the world to
produce coined money, and to provide the convenience of inns for
travellers and traders. The Lydian dynasty seems to have been a trading
dynasty of the type of Minos in Crete, with a banking and financial
development.... So much we may note of Lydia by way of preface to the
next section.
§ 5
Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had developed along the
lines we have described in Greece, Magna Græcia, and around the shores
of the Black Sea, another series of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose
originally Nordic blood was perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian
element, were settling and spreading to the north and east of the
Assyrian and Babylonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like
dispersion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black and
Caspian Seas; it was probably by this route that the Aryan-speaking
races gradually came down into what is now the Persian country, and
spread, on the one hand, eastward to India (? 2000 to 1000 B.C.), and on
the other, increased and multiplied in the Persian uplands until they
were strong enough to assail first Assyria (650 B.C.) and then Babylon
(538 B.C.).
There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of climate that
have been going on in Europe and Asia during the last 10,000 years. The
ice of the last glacial age receded gradually, and gave way to a long
period of steppe or prairie-like conditions over the great plain of
Europe. About 12,000 or 10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this
state of affairs was giving place to forest conditions. We have already
noted how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse
hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer hunters; and
these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agriculturists. For some
thousands of years the European climate seems to have been warmer than
it is to-day. A great sea spread from the coast of the Balkan peninsula
far into Central Asia and extended northward into Central Russia, and
the shrinkage of that sea and the consequent hardening of the climate of
south Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with the
development of the first civilizations in the river valleys. Many facts
seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe and western Asia, and
still more strongly to a greater luxuriance of plant and vegetable life,
4000 to 3000 years ago, than we find to-day. There were forests then in
south Russia and in the country which is now Western Turkestan, where
now steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1500 and
2000 years ago, the Aral-Caspian region was probably drier and those
seas smaller than they are at the present time.
We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the fifteenth
century B.C.), in his expedition beyond the Euphrates, hunted a herd of
120 elephants in that region. Again, an Ægean dagger from Mycenæ, dating
about 2000 B.C., shows a lion-hunt in progress. The hunters carry big
shields and spears, and stand in rows one behind the other. The first
man spears the lion, and when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat
under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to repeat
his stroke, and so on, until the lion is speared to death. This method
of hunting is practised by the Masai to-day, and could only have been
worked out by a people in a land where lions were abundant. But abundant
lions imply abundant game, and that again means abundant vegetation.
About 2000 B.C. the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the
Old World, to which we have already referred, which put an end to
elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece,[178] was turning the faces
of the nomadic Aryan peoples southward towards the fields and forests of
the more settled and civilized nations.
These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian regions into history
about the time that Mycenæ and Troy and Cnossos are falling to the
Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle the different tribes and races
that appear under a multitude of names in the records and inscriptions
that record their first appearance, but, fortunately, these distinctions
are not needed in an elementary outline such as this present history. A
people called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya and
Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia to Elam. In the
ninth century B.C. a people called the Medes, very closely related to
the Persians to the east of them, appear in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II, names already familiar in this story,
profess to have made them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the
inscriptions as the “dangerous Medes.” They are as yet a tribal people,
not united under one king.
About the ninth century B.C. Elam and the Elamites, whose capital was
Susa, a people which possessed a tradition and civilization at least as
old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish from history. We do not know what
happened. They seem to have been overrun and the population absorbed by
the conquerors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians.
[Illustration: Scythians ... as portrayed by a Greek artist....
ONE OF THE FEW EXISTING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ANCIENT SCYTHIANS. FROM A
GREEK ELECTRUM VASE.]
A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear at this time
in the narrative of Herodotus, are the “Scythians.” For a while the
monarchs of Assyria play off these various kindred peoples, the
Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Scythians, against each
other. Assyrian princesses (a daughter of Esarhaddon, _e.g._) are
married to Scythian chiefs. Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the other hand,
marries a daughter of Cyaxares, who has become king of all the Medes.
The Aryan Scythians are for the Semitic Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for
the Semitic Babylonians. It was this Cyaxares who took Nineveh, the
Assyrian capital, in 606 B.C., and so released Babylon from the Assyrian
yoke to establish, under Chaldean rule, the Second Babylonian Empire.
The Scythian allies of Assyria drop out of the story after this. They go
on living their own life away to the north without much interference
with the peoples to the south. A glance at the map of this period shows
how, for two-thirds of a century, the Second Babylonian Empire lay like
a lamb within the embrace of the Median lion.
Into the internal struggles of the Medes and Persians, that ended at
last in the accession of Cyrus “the Persian” to the throne of Cyaxares
in 550 B.C., we will not enter. In that year Cyrus was ruling over an
empire that reached from the boundaries of Lydia to Persia and perhaps
to India. Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian rulers, was, as we have
already told, digging up old records and building temples in Babylonia.
§ 6
But one monarch in the world was alive to the threat of the new power
that lay in the hands of Cyrus. This was Crœsus, the Lydian king. His
son had been killed in a very tragic manner, which Herodotus relates,
but which we will not describe here. Says Herodotus:
“For two years then, Crœsus remained quiet in great mourning, because
he was deprived of his son; but after this period of time, the
overthrowing of the rule of the son of Cyaxares by Cyrus, and the
growing greatness of the Persians, caused Crœsus to cease from his
mourning, and led him to a care of cutting short the power of the
Persians if by any means he might, while yet it was in growth and before
they should have become great.”
He then made trial of the various oracles. His method of trial we will
not relate here, but it led him to the belief that the Delphi Oracle was
alone trustworthy. What follows is rather a lengthy passage, but it is
so characteristic of the garrulousness and wonder-loving mind of the
Father of History, and with such a pleasant touch of spite against the
Lacedemonians, that it is impossible to resist the quotation.
[Illustration: Map showing the relation of the MEDIAN and second
BABYLONIAN (Chaldean) EMPIRES in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great]
“After this, with great sacrifices, he endeavoured to win the favour of
the god at Delphi: for of all the animals that are fit for sacrifice he
offered three thousand of each kind, and he heaped up couches overlaid
with gold and overlaid with silver, and cups of gold, and robes of
purple, and tunics, making of them a great pyre, and this he burnt up,
hoping by these means the more to win over the god to the side of the
Lydians; and he proclaimed to all the Lydians that every one of them
should make sacrifice with that which each man had. And when he had
finished the sacrifice, he melted down a vast quantity of gold, and of
it he wrought half-plinths, making them six palms in length and three in
breadth, and in height one palm; and their number was one hundred and
seventeen. Of these four were of pure gold weighing two talents and a
half each, and the others of gold alloyed with silver weighing two
talents. And he caused to be made also an image of a lion of pure gold
weighing ten talents; which lion, when the temple at Delphi was being
burnt down, fell from off the half-plinths, for upon these it was set,
and is placed now in the treasury of the Corinthians, weighing six
talents and a half, for three talents and a half were melted away from
it. So Crœsus, having finished all these things, sent them to Delphi,
and with them these besides: two mixing-bowls of great size, one of gold
and the other of silver, of which the golden bowl was placed on the
right hand as one enters the temple, and the silver on the left, but the
places of these also were changed after the temple was burnt down....
Moreover, Crœsus sent four silver wine-jars, which stand in the
treasury of the Corinthians, and two vessels for lustral water, one of
gold and the other of silver, of which the gold one is inscribed ‘from
the Lacedemonians,’ who say that it is their offering; therein, however,
they do not speak rightly, for this also is from Crœsus, but one of
the Delphians wrote the inscription upon it, desiring to gratify the
Lacedemonians; and his name I know, but I will not make mention of
it.... And many other votive offerings Crœsus sent with these, not
specially distinguished, among which are certain castings of silver of a
round shape, and also a golden figure of a woman three cubits high,
which the Delphians say is a statue of the baker of Crœsus. Moreover,
Crœsus dedicated the ornaments from his wife’s neck and her
girdles....
“To the Lydians who were to carry these gifts to the temples Crœsus
gave charge that they should ask the Oracles this question also: whether
Crœsus should march against the Persians, and, if so, whether he
should join with himself any army of men as his friends. And when the
Lydians had arrived at the places to which they had been sent and had
dedicated the votive offerings, they inquired of the Oracles, and said:
‘Crœsus, king of the Lydians and of other nations, considering that
these are the only true Oracles among men, presents to you gifts such as
your revelations deserve, and asks you again now whether he shall march
against the Persians, and, if so, whether he shall join with himself any
army of men as allies.’ They inquired thus, and the answers of both the
Oracles agreed in one, declaring to Crœsus that if he should march
against the Persians he should destroy a great empire.... So when the
answers were brought back and Crœsus heard them, he was delighted
with the Oracles, and expecting that he would certainly destroy the
kingdom of Cyrus, he sent again to Pytho, and presented to the men of
Delphi, having ascertained the number of them, two staters of gold for
each man: and in return for this the Delphians gave to Crœsus and to
the Lydians precedence in consulting the Oracle and freedom from all
payments, and the right to front seats at the games, with this privilege
also for all time, that any one of them who wished should be allowed to
become a citizen of Delphi.”
But here we may not run on as Herodotus loved to do. Suffice it to say
that Crœsus made a defensive alliance both with the Lacedemonians and
the Egyptians. We will not quote the story of how a great bronze
mixing-bowl that the Lacedemonians sent to Crœsus went astray, but we
will note a light on the life of the Medes and Persians of that time.
“Thus, then, it happened about the mixing-bowl; but meanwhile Crœsus,
mistaking the meaning of the Oracle, was making a march into Cappadocia,
expecting to overthrow Cyrus and the power of the Persians; and while
Crœsus was preparing to march against the Persians, one of the
Lydians, who even before this time was thought to be a wise man, but in
consequence of this opinion got a very great name for wisdom among the
Lydians, had advised Crœsus as follows: ‘O king, thou art preparing
to march against men who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their
clothing is of leather also; and they eat food not such as they desire,
but such as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and,
moreover, they make no use of wine but drink water; and no figs have
they for dessert, nor any other good thing. On the one hand, if thou
shalt overcome them, what wilt thou take away from them, seeing they
have nothing? and, on the other hand, if thou shalt be overcome,
consider how many good things thou wilt lose; for once having tasted our
good things, they will cling to them fast, and it will not be possible
to drive them away. I, for my own part, feel gratitude to the gods that
they do not put it into the minds of the Persians to march against the
Lydians.’ Thus he spoke not persuading Crœsus; for it is true indeed
that the Persians before they subdued the Lydians had no luxury nor any
good thing.”
Crœand Cyrus fought an indecisive battle at Pteria, from which
Crœretreated. Cyrus followed him up, and he gave battle outside his
capital town of Sardis. The chief strength of the Lydians lay in their
cavalry; they were excellent, if undisciplined, horsemen, and fought
with long spears.
“Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians being arrayed for battle, fearing their
horsemen, did on the suggestion of Harpagos, a Mede, as follows: All the
camels which were in the train of his army carrying provisions and
baggage he gathered together, and he took off their burdens and set men
upon them provided with the equipment of cavalry; and, having thus
furnished them, forth he appointed them to go in front of the rest of
the army towards the horsemen of Crœsus; and after the camel-troop he
ordered the infantry to follow; and behind the infantry he placed his
whole force of cavalry. Then, when all his men had been placed in their
several positions, he charged them to spare none of the other Lydians,
slaying all who might come in their way, but Crœsus himself they were
not to slay, not even if he should make resistance when he was being
captured. Such was his charge: and he set the camels opposite the
horsemen for this reason--because the horse has a fear of the camel and
cannot endure either to see his form or to scent his smell; for this
reason then the trick had been devised, in order that the cavalry of
Crœsus might be useless, that very force wherewith the Lydian king
was expecting most to shine. And as they were coming together to the
battle, so soon as the horses scented the camels and saw them, they
turned away back, and the hopes of Crœsus were at once brought to
nought. The Lydians, however, for their part did not upon that act as
cowards, but when they perceived what was coming to pass, they leapt
from their horses and fought with the Persians on foot. At length,
however, when many had fallen on either side, the Lydians turned to
flight; and having been driven within the wall of their fortress, they
were besieged by the Persians.”
In fourteen days Sardis was stormed and Crœsus taken prisoner....
“So the Persians having taken him brought him into the presence of
Cyrus; and he piled up a great pyre and caused Crœsus to go up upon
it bound in fetters, and along with him twice seven sons of Lydians,
whether it was that he meant to dedicate this offering as first-fruits
of his victory to some god, or whether he desired to fulfil a vow, or
else had heard that Crœsus was a god-fearing man, and so caused him
to go up on the pyre because he wished to know if any one of the divine
powers would save him, so that he should not be burnt alive. He, they
say, did this; but to Crœsus as he stood upon the pyre there came,
although he was in such evil case, a memory of the saying of Solon, how
he had said with divine inspiration that no one of the living might be
called happy. And when this thought came into his mind, they say that
he sighed deeply and groaned aloud, having been for long silent, and
three times he uttered the name of Solon. Hearing this, Cyrus bade the
interpreters ask Crœsus who was this person on whom he called; and
they came near and asked. And Crœsus for a time, it is said, kept
silence when he was asked this, but afterwards, being pressed, he said:
‘One whom more than much wealth I should have desired to have speech
with all monarchs.’ Then, since his words were of doubtful import, they
asked again of that which he said; and as they were urgent with him and
gave him no peace, he told how once Solon, an Athenian, had come and
having inspected all his wealth had made light of it, with such and such
words; and how all had turned out for him according as Solon had said,
not speaking at all especially with a view to Crœsus himself, but
with a view to the whole human race, and especially those who seem to
themselves to be happy men. And while Crœsus related these things,
already the pyre was lighted and the edges of it round about were
burning. Then they say that Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what
Crœsus had said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself
also was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who had been
not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire; and, moreover,
he feared the requital, and reflected that there was nothing of that
which men possessed which was secure; therefore, they say, he ordered
them to extinguish as quickly as possible the fire that was burning, and
to bring down Crœsus and those who were with him from the pyre; and
they, using endeavours, were not able now to get the mastery of the
flames. Then it is related by the Lydians that Crœsus, having learned
how Cyrus had changed his mind, and seeing that every one was trying to
put out the fire, but that they were no longer able to check it, cried
aloud, entreating Apollo that if any gift had ever been given by him
which was acceptable to the god, he would come to his aid and rescue him
from the evil which was now upon him. So he with tears entreated the
god, and suddenly, they say, after clear sky and calm weather clouds
gathered and a storm burst, and it rained with a very violent shower,
and the pyre was extinguished. Then Cyrus, having perceived that
Crœsus was a lover of the gods and a good man, caused him to be
brought down from the pyre and asked him as follows: ‘Crœsus, tell
me who of all men was it who persuaded thee to march upon my land and so
to become an enemy to me instead of a friend?’ And he said: ‘O king, I
did this to thy felicity and to my own misfortune, and the causer of
this was the god of the Hellenes, who incited me to march with my army.
For no one is so senseless as to choose of his own will war rather than
peace, since in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the
fathers bury their sons. But it was pleasing, I suppose, to the divine
powers that these things should come to pass thus.’”
But Herodotus is too alluring a companion for one who would write an
Outline of History; and the rest of the life of Crœsus, and how he
gave wise counsels to Cyrus, must be read in his ampler page.
When Lydia was subdued, Cyrus turned his attention to Nabonidus in
Babylon. He defeated the Babylonian army, under Belshazzar, outside
Babylon, and then laid siege to the town. He entered the town (538
B.C.), probably as we have already suggested, with the connivance of the
priests of Bel.
§ 7
Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who took an army into Egypt
(525 B.C.). There was a battle in the delta, in which Greek mercenaries
fought on both sides. Herodotus declares that he saw the bones of the
slain still lying on the field fifty or sixty years later, and comments
on the comparative thinness of the Persian skulls. After this battle
Cambyses took Memphis and most of Egypt.
In Egypt, we are told, Cambyses went mad. He took great liberties with
the Egyptian temples, and remained at Memphis “opening ancient tombs and
examining the dead bodies.” He had already murdered both Crœsus,
ex-king of Lydia, and his own brother Smerdis before coming to Egypt,
and he died in Syria on the way back to Susa of an accidental wound,
leaving no heirs to succeed him. He was presently succeeded by Darius
the Mede (521 B.C.), the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors
of Cyrus.
The empire of Darius I was larger than any one of the preceding empires
whose growth we have traced. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, that
is to say, the ancient Lydian and Hittite empires, all the old Assyrian
and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media,
Persia, and it extended, perhaps, into India to the Indus. The nomadic
Arabians alone of all the peoples of what is nowadays called the Near
East, did not pay tribute to the satraps (provincial governors) of
Darius. The organization of this great empire seems to have been on a
much higher level of efficiency than any of its precursors. Great
arterial roads joined province to province, and there was a system of
royal posts;[179] at stated intervals post horses stood always ready to
carry the government messenger, or the traveller if he had a government
permit, on to the next stage of his journey. Apart from this imperial
right-of-way and the payment of tribute, the local governments possessed
a very considerable amount of local freedom. They were restrained from
internecine conflict, which was all to their own good. And at first the
Greek cities of the mainland of Asia paid the tribute and shared in this
Persian Peace.
Darius was first incited to attack the Greeks in Europe by a homesick
Greek physician at his court, who wanted at any cost to be back in
Greece. Darius had already made plans for an expedition into Europe,
aiming not at Greece, but to the northward of Greece, across the
Bosphorus and Danube. He wanted to strike at South Russia, which he
believed to be the home country of the Scythian nomads who threatened
him on his northern and north-eastern frontiers. But he lent an
attentive ear to the tempter, and sent agents into Greece.[180]
This great expedition of Darius opens out our view in this history. It
lifts a curtain upon the Balkan country behind Greece about which we
have said nothing hitherto; it carries us to and over the Danube. The
nucleus of his army marched from Susa, gathering up contingents as they
made their way to the Bosphorus. Here Greek allies (Ionian Greeks from
Asia) had made a bridge of boats, and the army crossed over while the
Greek allies sailed on in their ships to the Danube, and, two days’ sail
up from its mouth, landed to make another floating bridge. Meanwhile,
Darius and his host advanced along the coast of what is now Bulgaria,
but which was then called Thrace. They crossed the Danube, and prepared
to give battle to the Scythian army and take the cities of the
Scythians.
But the Scythians had no cities, and they evaded a battle, and the war
degenerated into a tedious and hopeless pursuit of more mobile enemies.
Wells were stopped up and pastures destroyed by the nomads. The Scythian
horsemen hung upon the skirts of the great army, which consisted mostly
of foot soldiers, picking off stragglers and preventing foraging; and
they did their best to persuade the Ionian Greeks, who had made and were
guarding the bridge across the Danube, to break up the bridge, and so
ensure the destruction of Darius. So long as Darius continued to
advance, however, the loyalty of his Greek allies remained unshaken.
But privation, fatigue, and sickness hindered and crippled the Persian
army; Darius lost many stragglers and consumed his supplies, and at last
the melancholy conviction dawned upon him that a retreat across the
Danube was necessary to save him from complete exhaustion and defeat.
In order to get a start in his retreat he sacrificed his sick and
wounded. He had these men informed that he was about to attack the
Scythians at nightfall, and under this pretence stole out of the camp
with the pick of his troops and made off southward, leaving the camp
fires burning and the usual noises and movements of the camp behind him.
Next day the men left in the camp realized the trick their monarch had
played upon them, and surrendered themselves to the mercy of the
Scythians; but Darius had got his start, and was able to reach the
bridge of boats before his pursuers came upon him. They were more mobile
than his troops, but they missed their quarry in the darkness. At the
river the retreating Persians “were brought to an extremity of fear,”
for they found the bridge partially broken down and its northern end
destroyed.
[Illustration: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its
greatest extent.]
At this point a voice echoes down the centuries to us. We see a group of
dismayed Persians standing about the Great King upon the bank of the
streaming river; we see the masses of halted troops, hungry and
war-worn; a trail of battered transport stretches away towards the
horizon, upon which at any time the advance guards of the pursuers may
appear. There is not much noise in spite of the multitude, but rather an
inquiring silence. Standing out like a pier from the further side of the
great stream are the remains of the bridge of boats, an enigma.... We
cannot discern whether there are men over there or not. The shipping of
the Ionian Greeks seems still to be drawn up on the further shore, but
it is all very far away.
“Now there was with Darius an Egyptian who had a voice louder than that
of any other man on earth, and this man Darius ordered to take his stand
upon the bank of the Ister (Danube) and to call Histiæus of Miletus.”
This worthy--a day is to come, as we shall presently tell, when his
decapitated head will be sent to Darius at Susa--appears approaching
slowly across the waters in a boat.
There is a parley, and we gather that it is “all right.”
The explanation Histiæus has to make is a complicated one. Some
Scythians have been and have gone again. Scouts, perhaps, these were. It
would seem there had been a discussion between the Scythians and the
Greeks. The Scythians wanted the bridge broken down; they would then,
they said, undertake to finish up the Persian army and make an end to
Darius and his empire, and the Ionian Greeks of Asia could then free
their cities again. Miltiades, the Athenian, was for accepting this
proposal. But Histiæus had been more subtle. He would prefer, he said,
to see the Persians completely destroyed before definitely abandoning
their cause. Would the Scythians go back and destroy the Persians to
make sure of them while the Greeks on their part destroyed the bridge?
Anyhow, whichever side the Greeks took finally, it was clear to him that
it would be wise to destroy the northern end of the bridge, because
otherwise the Scythians might rush it. Indeed, even as they parleyed the
Greeks set to work to demolish the end that linked them to the Scythians
as quickly as possible. In accordance with the suggestions of Histiæus
the Scythians rode off in search of the Persians, and so left the Greeks
safe in either event. If Darius escaped they could be on his side; if he
was destroyed, there was nothing of which the Scythians could complain.
Histiæus did not put it quite in that fashion to Darius. He had at least
kept the shipping and most of the bridge. He represented himself as the
loyal friend of Persia, and Darius was not disposed to be too critical.
The Ionian ships came over. With a sense of immense relief the remnant
of the wasted Persians were presently looking back at the steely flood
of the Danube streaming wide between themselves and their pursuers....
The pleasure and interest had gone out of the European expedition for
Darius. He returned to Susa, leaving an army in Thrace, under a trusted
general Megabazus. This Megabazus set himself to the subjugation of
Thrace, and among other states which submitted reluctantly to Darius was
a kingdom, which thus comes into our history for the first time, the
kingdom of Macedonia, a country inhabited by a people so closely allied
to the Greeks that one of its princes had already been allowed to
compete and take a prize in the Olympian games.
Darius was disposed to reward Histiæus by allowing him to build a city
for himself in Thrace, but Megabazus had a different opinion of the
trustworthiness of Histiæus, and prevailed upon the king to take him to
Susa, and, under the title of councillor, to keep him a prisoner there.
Histiæus was at first flattered by this court position, and then
realized its true meaning. The Persian court bored him, and he grew
homesick for Miletus. He set himself to make mischief, and was able to
stir up a revolt against the Persians among the Ionian Greeks on the
mainland. The twistings and turnings of the story, which included the
burning of Sardis by the Ionians and the defeat of a Greek fleet at the
battle of Ladé (495 B.C.), are too complicated to follow here. It is a
dark and intricate story of treacheries, cruelties, and hate, in which
the death of the wily Histiæus shines almost cheerfully. The Persian
governor of Sardis, through which town he was being taken on his way
back to Susa as a prisoner, having much the same opinion of him as
Megabazus had, and knowing his ability to humbug Darius, killed him
there and then, and sent on the head only to his master.
Cyprus and the Greek islands were dragged into this contest that
Histiæus had stirred up, and at last Athens. Darius realized the error
he had made in turning to the right and not to the left when he had
crossed the Bosphorus, and he now set himself to the conquest of all
Greece. He began with the islands. Tyre and Sidon were subject to
Persia, and ships of the Phœnician and of the Ionian Greeks provided
the Persians with a fleet by means of which one Greek island after
another was subjugated.
§ 8
The first attack upon Greece proper was made in 490 B.C. It was a sea
attack upon Athens, with a force long and carefully prepared for the
task, the fleet being provided with specially built transports for the
conveyance of horses. This expedition made a landing near Marathon in
Attica. The Persians were guided into Marathon by a renegade Greek,
Hippias, the son of Peisistratus, who had been tyrant of Athens. If
Athens fell, then Hippias was to be its tyrant, under the protection of
the Persians. Meanwhile, so urgent was the sense of a crisis in the
affairs of Hellas, that a man, a herald and runner, went from Athens to
Sparta, forgetful of all feuds, to say: “Lacedemonians, the Athenians
make request of you to come to their help, and not to allow a city most
anciently established among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the
means of Barbarians; for even now Eretria has been enslaved and Hellas
has become the weaker by a city of renown.” This man, Pheidippides, did
the distance from Athens to Sparta, nearly a hundred miles as the crow
flies, and much more if we allow for the contours and the windings of
the way, in something under eight and forty hours.
But before the Spartans could arrive on the scene the battle was joined.
The Athenians charged the enemy. They fought--“in a memorable fashion:
for they were the first of all the Hellenes about whom we know who went
to attack the enemy at a run, and they were the first also who endured
to face the Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to
this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a terror to
hear.”
The Persian wings gave before this impetuous attack, but the centre
held. The Athenians, however, were cool as well as vigorous; they let
the wings run and closed in on the flanks of the centre, whereupon the
main body of the Persians fled to their ships. Seven vessels fell into
the hands of the Athenians; the rest got away, and, after a futile
attempt to sail round to Athens and seize the city before the army
returned thither, the fleet made a retreat to Asia. Let Herodotus close
the story with a paragraph that still further enlightens us upon the
tremendous prestige of the Medes at this time:
[Illustration: The WARS of the GREEKS and PERSIANS]
“Of the Lacedemonians there came to Athens two thousand after the full
moon, making great haste to be in time, so that they arrived in Attica
on the third day after leaving Sparta: and though they had come too late
for the battle, yet they desired to behold the Medes; and accordingly
they went on to Marathon and looked at the bodies of the slain: then
afterwards they departed home, commending the Athenians and the work
which they had done.”
§ 9
So Greece, unified for a while by fear, gained her first victory over
Persia. The news came to Darius simultaneously with the news of a
rebellion in Egypt, and he died while still undecided in which direction
to turn. His son and successor, Xerxes, turned first to Egypt and set up
a Persian satrap there; then for four years he prepared a second attack
upon Greece. Says Herodotus, who was, one must remember, a patriotic
Greek, approaching now to the climax of his History:
“For what nation did Xerxes not lead out of Asia against Hellas? and
what water was not exhausted, being drunk by his host, except only the
great rivers? For some supplied ships, and others were appointed to
serve in the land-army; to some it was appointed to furnish cavalry, and
to others vessels to carry horses, while they served in the expedition
themselves also; others were ordered to furnish ships of war for the
bridges, and others again ships with provisions.”
[Illustration: Monument of Athenian foot soldier, found near Marathon.]
Xerxes passed into Europe, not as Darius did at the half-mile crossing
of the Bosphorus, but at the Hellespont (the Dardanelles). In his
account of the assembling of the great army, and its march from Sardis
to the Hellespont, the poet in Herodotus takes possession of the
historian. The great host passes in splendour by Troy, and Xerxes, who
although a Persian and a Barbarian, seems to have had the advantages of
a classical education, turns aside, says our historian, to visit the
citadel of Priam. The Hellespont was bridged at Abydos, and upon a hill
was set a marble throne from which Xerxes surveyed the whole array of
his forces.
“And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships and all the
shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then Xerxes pronounced
himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanus, his
uncle, therefore perceiving him--the same who at first boldly declared
his opinion advising Xerxes not to march against Hellas--this man, I
say, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: ‘O king, how
far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now
and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man,
thou art now shedding tears.’ He said: ‘Yea, for after I had reckoned
up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the
whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive
when a hundred years have gone by.’”
This may not be exact history, but it is great poetry. It is as splendid
as anything in _The Dynasts_.
The Persian fleet, coasting from headland to headland, accompanied this
land multitude during its march southward; but a violent storm did the
fleet great damage and 400 ships were lost, including much corn
transport. At first the united Hellenes marched out to meet the invaders
at the Vale of Tempe near Mount Olympus, but afterwards retreated
through Thessaly, and chose at last to await the advancing Persians at a
place called Thermopylæ, where at that time--2300 years have altered
these things greatly--there was a great cliff on the landward side and
the sea to the east, with a track scarcely wide enough for a chariot
between. The great advantage to the Greeks of this position at
Thermopylæ was that it prevented the use of either cavalry or chariots,
and narrowed the battle front so as to minimize their numerical
inequality. And there the Persians joined battle with them one summer
day in the year 480 B.C.
For three days the Greeks held this great army, and did them much damage
with small loss to themselves, and then on the third day a detachment
of Persians appeared upon the rear of the Greeks, having learnt of a way
over the mountains from a peasant. There were hasty discussions among
the Greeks; some were for withdrawing, some for holding out. The leader
of the whole force, Leonidas, was for staying; and with him he would
keep, he said, 300 Spartans. The rest of the Greek army could,
meanwhile, make good its retreat to the next defensible pass. The
Thespian contingent of 700, however, refused to fall back. They
preferred to stay and die with the Spartans. Also a contingent of 400
Thebans remained. As Thebes afterwards joined the Persians, there is a
story that these Thebans were detained by force against their will,
which seems on military as well as historical grounds improbable. These
1400 stayed, and were, after a conflict of heroic quality, slain to a
man. Two Spartans happened to be away, sick with ophthalmia. When they
heard the news, one was too ill to move; the other made his helot guide
him to the battle, and there struck blindly until he was killed. The
other, Aristodemus, was taken away with the retreating troops, and
returned to Sparta, where he was not actually punished for his conduct,
but was known as Tresas, “the man who retreated.” It was enough to
distinguish him from all other Spartans, and he got himself killed at
the Battle of Platæa a year later, performing prodigies of reckless
courage.... For a whole day this little band had held the pass, assailed
in front and rear by the whole force of the Persians. They had covered
the retreat of the main Greek army, they had inflicted great losses on
the invaders, and they had raised the prestige of the Greek warrior over
that of the Mede higher even than the victory of Marathon had done.
The Persian cavalry and transport filtered slowly through the narrow
passage of Thermopylæ, and marched on towards Athens, while a series of
naval encounters went on at sea. The Hellenic fleet retreated before the
advance of the Persian shipping, which suffered seriously through its
comparative ignorance of the intricate coasts and of the tricks of the
local weather. Weight of numbers carried the Persian army forward to
Athens; now that Thermopylæ was lost, there was no line of defence
nearer than the Isthmus of Corinth, and this meant the abandonment of
all the intervening territory, including Athens. The population had
either to fly or submit to the Persians. Thebes with all Bœotia
submitted, and was pressed into the Persian army, except one town,
Platæa, whose inhabitants fled to Athens. The turn of Athens came next,
and great efforts were made to persuade her to make terms; but, instead,
the whole population determined to abandon everything and take to the
shipping. The women and non-combatants were carried to Salamis and
various adjacent islands. Only a few people too old to move and a few
dissentients remained in the town, which was occupied by the Persians
and burnt. The sacred objects, statues, etc., which were burnt at this
time, were afterwards buried in the Acropolis by the returning
Athenians, and have been dug up in our own day with the marks of burning
visible upon them. Xerxes sent off a mounted messenger to Susa with the
news, and he invited the sons of Peisistratus, whom he had brought back
with him, to enter upon their inheritance and sacrifice after the
Athenian manner upon the Acropolis.
Meanwhile, the Hellenic confederate fleet had come round to Salamis, and
in the council of war there were bitter differences of opinion. Corinth
and the states behind the Isthmus wanted the fleet to fall back to that
position, abandoning the cities of Megara and Ægina. Themistocles
insisted with all his force on fighting in the narrows of Salamis. The
majority was steadily in favour of retreat, when there suddenly arrived
the news that retreat was cut off. The Persians had sailed round Salamis
and held the sea on the other side. This news was brought by that
Aristides the Just, of whose ostracism we have already told; his sanity
and eloquence did much to help Themistocles to hearten the hesitating
commanders. These two men had formerly been bitter antagonists; but with
a generosity rare in those days, they forgot their differences before
the common danger. At dawn the Greek ships pulled out to battle.
The fleet before them was a fleet more composite and less united than
their own. But it was about three times as great. On one wing were the
Phœnicians, on the other Ionian Greeks from Asia and the Islands.
Some of the latter fought stoutly; others remembered that they too were
Greeks. The Greek ships, on the other hand, were mostly manned by
freemen fighting for their homes. Throughout the early hours the battle
raged confusedly. Then it became evident to Xerxes, watching the
combat, that his fleet was attempting flight. The flight became
disaster.
[Illustration:
Soldiers of the Persian body-guard.
(From frieze in the audience hall of Darius at Susa.)]
Xerxes had taken his seat to watch the battle. He saw his galleys rammed
by the sharp prows of other galleys; his fighting-men shot down; his
ships boarded. Much of the sea-fighting in those days was done by
ramming; the big galleys bore down their opponents by superior weight of
impact, or sheared off their oars and so destroyed their manœuvring
power and left them helpless. Presently, Xerxes saw that some of his
broken ships were surrendering. In the water he could see the heads of
Greeks swimming to land; but “of the Barbarians the greater number
perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim.” The clumsy attempt of the
hard-pressed first line of the Persian fleet to put about led to
indescribable confusion. Some were rammed by the rear ships of their
own side. This ancient shipping was poor, unseaworthy stuff by any
modern standards. The west wind was blowing and many of the broken ships
of Xerxes were now drifting away out of his sight to be wrecked on the
coast beyond. Others were being towed towards Salamis by the Greeks.
Others, less injured and still in fighting trim, were making for the
beaches close beneath him that would bring them under the protection of
his army. Scattered over the further sea, beyond the headlands, remote
and vague, were ships in flight and Greek ships in pursuit. Slowly,
incident by incident, the disaster had unfolded under his eyes. We can
imagine something of the coming and going of messengers, the issuing of
futile orders, the changes of plan, throughout the day. In the morning
Xerxes had come out provided with tables to mark the most successful of
his commanders for reward. In the gold of the sunset he beheld the sea
power of Persia utterly scattered, sunken and destroyed, and the Greek
fleet over against Salamis unbroken and triumphant, ordering its ranks,
as if still incredulous of victory.
The Persian army remained as if in indecision for some days close to the
scene of this sea fight, and then began to retreat to Thessaly, where it
was proposed to winter and resume the campaign. But Xerxes, like Darius
I before him, had conceived a disgust for European campaigns. He was
afraid of the destruction of the bridge of boats. With part of the army
he went on to the Hellespont, leaving the main force in Thessaly under a
general, Mardonius. Of his own retreat the historian relates:
“Whithersoever they came on the march and to whatever nation they seized
the crops of that people and used them for provisions; and if they found
no crops, then they took the grass which was growing up from the earth,
and stripped off the bark from the trees and plucked down the leaves and
devoured them; alike of the cultivated trees and of those growing wild;
and they left nothing behind them: thus they did by reason of famine.
Then plague too seized upon the army and dysentery, which destroyed them
by the way, and some of them also who were sick the king left behind,
laying charge upon the cities where at the time he chanced to be in his
march, to take care of them and support them; of these he left some in
Thessaly, and some at Siris in Paionia, and some in Macedonia.... When,
passing on from Thrace they came to the passage, they crossed over the
Hellespont in haste to Abydos by means of the ships, for they did not
find the floating bridges still stretched across, but broken up by a
storm. While staying there for a time they had distributed to them an
allowance of food more abundant than they had had by the way, and from
satisfying their hunger without restraint and also from the changes of
water there died many of those in the army who had remained safe till
then. The rest arrived with Xerxes at Sardis.”
§ 10
The rest of the Persian army remained in Thessaly under the command of
Mardonius, and for a year he maintained an aggressive campaign against
the Greeks. Finally, he was defeated and killed in a pitched battle at
Platæa (479 B.C.), and on the same day the Persian fleet and a land army
met with joint disaster under the shadow of Mount Mycale on the Asiatic
mainland, between Ephesus and Miletus. The Persian ships, being in fear
of the Greeks, had been drawn up on shore and a wall built about them;
but the Greeks disembarked and stormed this enclosure. They then sailed
to the Hellespont to destroy what was left of the bridge of boats, so
that later the Persian fugitives, retreating from Platæa, had to cross
by shipping at the Bosphorus, and did so with difficulty.
Encouraged by these disasters of the imperial power, the Ionian cities
in Asia began for a second time to revolt against the Persians.
With this the ninth book of the _History_ of Herodotus comes to an end.
He was born about 484 B.C., so that at the time of the battle of Platæa
he was a child of five years old. Much of the substance of his story was
gathered by him from actors in, and eye-witnesses of, the great events
he relates. The war still dragged on for a long time; the Greeks
supported a rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt, and tried
unsuccessfully to take Cyprus; it did not end until about 449 B.C. Then
the Greek coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek cities in the Black Sea
remained generally free, but Cyprus and Egypt continued under Persian
rule. Herodotus, who had been born a Persian subject in the Ionian city
of Halicarnassus, was five and thirty years old by that time, and he
must have taken an early opportunity after this peace of visiting
Babylon and Persia. He probably went to Athens, with his History ready
to recite, about 438 B.C.
The idea of a great union of Greece for aggression against Persia was
not altogether strange to Herodotus. Some of his readers suspect him of
writing to enforce it. It was certainly in the air at that time. He
describes Aristagoras, the son-in-law of Histiæus, as showing the
Spartans “a tablet of bronze on which was engraved a map of the whole
earth with all the seas and rivers.” He makes Aristagoras say: “These
Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You, on the other hand, have now
attained to the utmost skill in war. They fight with bows and arrows and
a short spear: they go into battle wearing trousers and having caps on
their heads. You have perfected your weapons and discipline. They are
easily to be conquered. Not all the other nations of the world have what
they possess: gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and
slaves; _all this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired_.”
[Illustration: The World according to HERODOTUS]
It was a hundred years before these suggestions bore fruit.
Xerxes was murdered in his palace about 465 B.C., and thereafter Persia
made no further attempts at conquest in Europe. We have no such
knowledge of the things that were happening in the empire of the Great
King as we have of the occurrences in the little states of Central
Greece. Greece had suddenly begun to produce literature, and put itself
upon record as no other nation had ever done hitherto. After 479 B.C.
(Platæa) the spirit seems to have gone out of the government of the
Medes and Persians. The empire of the Great King enters upon a period of
decay. An Artaxerxes, a second Xerxes, a second Darius, pass across the
stage; there are rebellions in Egypt and Syria; the Medes rebel; a
second Artaxerxes and a second Cyrus, his brother, fight for the throne.
This history is even as the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt in
the older times. It is autocracy reverting to its normal state of palace
crime, blood-stained magnificence, and moral squalor. But the last-named
struggle produced a Greek masterpiece, for this second Cyrus collected
an army of Greek mercenaries and marched into Babylonia, and was there
killed at the moment of victory over Artaxerxes II. Thereupon, the Ten
Thousand Greeks, left with no one to employ them, made a retreat to the
coast again (401 B.C.), and this retreat was immortalized in a book, one
of the first of personal war books, the _Anabasis_, by their leader
Xenophon.
Murders, revolts, chastisements, disasters, cunning alliances, and base
betrayals, and no Herodotus to record them. Such is the texture of
Persian history. An Artaxerxes III, covered with blood, flourishes dimly
for a time. “Artaxerxes III is said to have been murdered by Bagoas, who
places Arses, the youngest of the king’s sons, on the throne only to
slay him in turn when he seemed to be contemplating independent
action.”[181] So it goes on. Beneath the crimes and disorders of the
palaces, the life of the city and country ran a similar course.
Justice was fitful and law venal. Wars that were unmeaning catastrophes
swept down upon any little gleam of prosperity or decency to which this
or that community clambered. Athens, prospering for a time after the
Persian repulse, was smitten by the plague, in which Pericles, its
greatest ruler, died (428 B.C.). But, as a noteworthy fact amidst these
confusions, the Ten Thousand of Xenophon were scattering now among the
Greek cities, repeating from their own experience the declaration of
Aristagoras that the Persian empire was a rich confusion which it would
be very easy to conquer.
XXIII
GREEK THOUGHT AND LITERATURE[182]
§ 1. _The Athens of Pericles._ § 2. _Socrates._ § 3. _What was the
Quality of the Common Athenians?_ § 4. _Greek Tragedy and Comedy._
§ 5. _Plato and the Academy._ § 6. _Aristotle and the Lyceum._ § 7.
_Philosophy becomes Unworldly._ § 8. _The Quality and Limitations
of Greek Thought._
§ 1
Greek history for the next forty years after Platæa and Mycale is a
story of comparative peace and tranquillity. There were wars, but they
were not intense wars. For a little while in Athens, for a section of
the prosperous, there was leisure and opportunity. And by a combination
of accidents and through the character of a small group of people, this
leisure and opportunity produced the most remarkable and memorable
results. A beautiful literature was produced; the plastic arts
flourished, and the foundations of modern science were laid. Then, after
an interlude of fifty odd years, the long-smouldering hostility between
Athens and Sparta broke out into a fierce and exhausting war, which
sapped at last the vitality of this creative movement.
This war is known in history as the Peloponnesian War; it went on for
nearly thirty years, and wasted all the power of Greece. At first Athens
was in the ascendant, then Sparta. Then arose Thebes, a city not fifty
miles from Athens, to overshadow Sparta. Once more Athens flared into
importance as the head of a confederation. The story must be told at
considerable length or not told at all. It is a story of narrow
rivalries and inexplicable hatreds that would have vanished long ago
out of the memories of men, were it not that it is recorded and
reflected in a great literature.
Through all this time Persia appears and reappears as the ally first of
this league and then of that. About the middle of the fourth century
B.C., Greece becomes aware of a new influence in its affairs, that of
Philip, King of Macedonia. Macedonia does, indeed, arise in the
background of this incurably divided Greece as the Medes and Persians
arose behind the Chaldean Empire. A time comes when the Greek mind turns
round, so to speak, from its disputes, and stares in one united dismay
at the Macedonian.
Planless and murderous squabbles are still planless and murderous
squabbles even though Thucydides tells the story, even though the great
beginnings of a new civilization are wrecked by their disorders; and in
this general outline we can give no space at all to the particulars of
these internecine feuds, to the fights and flights that sent first this
Greek city and then that up to the sky in flames. Upon a one-foot globe
Greece becomes a speck almost too small to recognize; and in a short
history of mankind, all this century and more of dissension between the
days of Salamis and Platæa and the rise of King Philip, shrinks to a
little, almost inaudible clash of disputation, to a mere note upon the
swift passing of opportunity for nations as for men.
But what does not shrink into insignificance, because it has entered
into the intellectual process of all subsequent nations, because it is
inseparably a part of our mental foundation, is the literature that
Athens produced during such patches and gleams of tranquillity and
security as these times afforded her.
Says Professor Gilbert Murray:[183]
“Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other nations,
is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and deceit. It is the
inner history, the history of thought and feeling and character, that is
so grand. They had some difficulties to contend with which are now
almost out of our path. They had practically no experience, but were
doing everything for the first time; they were utterly weak in material
resources, and their emotions, their ‘_desires and fears and rages_,’
were probably wilder and fiercer than ours. Yet they produced the Athens
of Pericles and of Plato.”
This remarkable outbreak of creative power, which for three and twenty
centuries has been to men of intelligence a guiding and inspiring beacon
out of the past, flared up after the battles of Marathon and Salamis had
made Athens free and fearless, and, without any great excesses of power,
predominant in her world. It was the work of a quite small group of men.
A number of her citizens lived for the better part of a generation under
conditions which, in all ages, have disposed men to produce good and
beautiful work; they were secure, they were free, and they had pride;
and they were without that temptation of apparent and unchallenged power
which disposes all of us to inflict wrongs upon our fellow men. When
political life narrowed down again to the waste and crimes of a
fratricidal war with Sparta, there was so broad and well-fed a flame of
intellectual activity burning that it lasted through all the windy
distresses of this war and beyond the brief lifetime of Alexander the
Great, for a period altogether of more than a hundred years after the
wars began.
Athens, it must be understood, was by far the largest of all the Greek
city democracies. Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly
won, her people did for a time rise towards nobility. Under the guidance
of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief official of the Athenian
general assembly, and a politician statesman rather of the calibre of
Gladstone or Lincoln in modern history, they were set to the task of
rebuilding their city and expanding their commerce. For a time they were
capable of following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a
generous leader. In Pericles there was mingled in the strangest fashion
political ability with a real living passion for deep and high and
beautiful things. He kept in power for over thirty years. He was a man
of extraordinary vigour and liberality of mind. He stamped these
qualities upon his time. As Winckler has remarked, the Athenian
democracy had for a time “the face of Pericles.” He was sustained by
what was probably a very great and noble friendship. There was a woman
of unusual education, Aspasia, from Miletus, whom he could not marry
because of the law that restricted the citizenship of Athens to the
home-born, but who was in effect his wife. She played a large part in
gathering about him men of unusual gifts. All the great writers of the
time knew her, and several have praised her wisdom. Plutarch, it is
true, accuses her of instigating a troublesome and dangerous but finally
successful war against Samos, but, as he himself shows later, this was
necessitated by the naval hostility of the Samians, which threatened the
overseas trade of Athens, upon which all the prosperity of the republic
depended.
Men’s ambitions are apt to reflect the standards of their intimates.
Pericles was content, at any rate, to serve as a leader in Athens rather
than to dominate as a tyrant. Alliances were formed under his guidance,
new colonies and trading stations were established from Italy to the
Black Sea; and the treasures of the league at Delos were brought to
Athens. Convinced of his security from Persia, Pericles spent the war
hoard of the allies upon the beautification of his city. This was an
unrighteous thing to do by our modern standards, but it was not a base
or greedy thing to do. Athens had accomplished the work of the Delian
League, and is not the labourer worthy of his hire? This sequestration
made a time of exceptional opportunity for architects and artists. The
Parthenon of Athens, whose ruins are still a thing of beauty, was but
the crown set upon the clustering glories of the Athens Pericles
rebuilt. Such sculptures as those of Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus that
still survive, witness to the artistic quality of the time.
The reader must bear in mind that illuminating remark of Winckler’s,
which says that this renascent Athens bore for a time the face of
Pericles. It was the peculiar genius of this man and of his atmosphere
that let loose the genius of men about him, and attracted men of great
intellectual vigour to Athens. Athens wore his face for a time as one
wears a mask, and then became restless and desired to put him aside.
There was very little that was great and generous about the common
Athenian. We have told of the spirit of one sample voter for the
ostracism of Aristides, and Lloyd (in his _Age of Pericles_) declares
that the Athenians would not suffer the name of Miltiades to be
mentioned in connection with the battle of Marathon. The sturdy
self-respect of the common voters revolted presently against the
beautiful buildings rising about them; against the favours shown to such
sculptors as Phidias over popular worthies in the same line of
business; against the donations made to a mere foreigner like Herodotus
of Halicarnassus; against the insulting preference of Pericles for the
company and conversation of a Milesian woman. The public life of
Pericles was conspicuously orderly, and that presently set the man in
the street thinking that his private life must be very corrupt. One
gathers that Pericles was “superior” in his demeanour; he betrayed at
times a contempt for the citizens he served.
“Pericles acquired not only an elevation of sentiment, and a loftiness
and purity of style far removed from the low expression of the vulgar,
but likewise a gravity of countenance which relaxed not into laughter, a
firm and even tone of voice, an easy deportment, and a decency of dress
which no vehemence of speaking ever put into disorder. These things, and
others of a like nature, excited admiration in all that saw him. Such
was his conduct, when a vile and abandoned fellow loaded him a whole day
with reproaches and abuse; he bore it with patience and silence, and
continued in public for the despatch of some urgent affairs. In the
evening he walked softly home, this impudent wretch following, and
insulting him all the way with the most scurrilous language. And as it
was dark when he came to his own door, he ordered one of his servants to
take a torch and light the man home. The poet Ion, however, says he was
proud and supercilious in conversation, and that there was a great deal
of vanity and contempt of others mixed with his dignity of manner.... He
appeared not in the streets except when he went to the forum or the
senate house. He declined the invitations of his friends, and all social
entertainments and recreations; insomuch that in the whole time of his
administration, which was a considerable length, he never went to sup
with any of his friends but once, which was at the marriage of his
nephew Euryptolemus, and he stayed there only until the ceremony of
libation was ended. He considered that the freedom of entertainments
takes away all distinction of office, and that dignity is but little
consistent with familiarity....”[184]
There was as yet no gutter journalism to tell the world of the vileness
of the conspicuous and successful; but the common man, a little out of
conceit with himself, found much consolation in the art of comedy,
which flourished exceedingly. The writers of comedy satisfied that
almost universal craving for the depreciation of those whose apparent
excellence offends our self-love. They threw dirt steadily and
industriously at Pericles and his friends. Pericles was portrayed in a
helmet; a helmet became him, and it is to be feared he knew as much.
This led to much joy and mirth over the pleasant suggestion of a
frightfully distorted head, an onion head. The “goings on” of Aspasia
were of course a fruitful vineyard for the inventions of the street....
[Illustration: Athene of the Parthenon.]
Dreaming souls, weary of the vulgarities of our time, have desired to be
transferred to the sublime Age of Pericles. But, plumped down into that
Athens, they would have found themselves in very much the atmosphere of
the lower sort of contemporary music-hall, very much in the vein of our
popular newspapers; the same hot blast of braying libel, foul
imputation, greedy “patriotism,” and general baseness would have blown
upon them, the “modern note” would have pursued them. As the memories of
Platæa and Salamis faded and the new buildings grew familiar, Pericles
and the pride of Athens became more and more offensive to the homely
humour of the crowd. He was never ostracized--his prestige with the
quieter citizens saved him from that; but he was attacked with
increasing boldness and steadfastness. He lived and died a poor man; he
was perhaps the most honest of demagogues; but this did not save him
from an abortive prosecution for peculation. Defeated in that, his
enemies resorted to a more devious method; they began to lop away his
friends.
Religious intolerance and moral accusations are the natural weapons of
the envious against the leaders of men. His friend Damon was ostracized.
Phidias was attacked for impiety. On the shield of the great statue of
the goddess Athene, Phidias had dared to put, among the combatants in a
fight between Greeks and Amazons, portraits of Pericles and himself.
Phidias died in prison. Anaxagoras, a stranger welcomed to Athens by
Pericles--when there were plenty of honest fellows already there quite
willing to satisfy any reasonable curiosities--was saying the strangest
things about the sun and stars, and hinting not obscurely that there
were no gods, but only one animating spirit (_nous_) in the world.[185]
The comedy writers suddenly found they had deep religious feelings that
could be profoundly and even dangerously shocked, and Anaxagoras fled
the threat of a prosecution. Then came the turn of Aspasia. Athens
seemed bent upon deporting her, and Pericles was torn between the woman
who was the soul of his life and the ungracious city he had saved,
defended, and made more beautiful and unforgettable than any other city
in history. He stood up to defend Aspasia, he was seized by a storm of
very human emotion, and as he spoke he wept--a gleeful thing for the
rabble. His tears saved Aspasia for a time.
The Athenians were content to humiliate Pericles, but he had served them
so long that they were indisposed to do without him. He had been their
leader now for a third of a century.
In 431 B.C. came the war with Sparta. Plutarch accuses Pericles of
bringing it on, because he felt his popularity waned so fast that a war
was needed to make him indispensable.
“And as he himself was become obnoxious to the people upon Phidias’s
account, and was afraid of being called in question for it, he urged on
the war, which as yet was uncertain, and blew up that flame which till
then was stifled and suppressed. By this means he hoped to obviate the
accusations that threatened him, and to mitigate the rage of envy,
because such was his dignity and power, that in all important affairs,
and in every great danger, the republic could place its confidence in
him alone.”
But the war was a slow and dangerous war, and the Athenian people were
impatient. A certain Cleon arose, ambitious to oust Pericles from his
leadership. There was a great clamour for a swift ending of the war.
Cleon set out to be “the man who won the war.” The popular poets got to
work in this fashion:
“Thou king of satyrs ... why boast thy prowess,
Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords,
Spite of the flaming Cleon?”
An expedition under the leadership of Pericles was unsuccessful, and
Cleon seized the opportunity for a prosecution. Pericles was suspended
from his command and fined. The story goes that his oldest son--this was
not the son of Aspasia, but of a former wife--turned against him, and
pursued him with vile and incredible accusations. This young man was
carried off by the plague. Then the sister of Pericles died, and then
his last legitimate son. When, after the fashion of the time, he put the
funeral garlands on the boy he wept aloud. Presently he himself took the
contagion and died (428 B.C.).
The salient facts of this brief summary will serve to show how
discordant Pericles was with the normal life of his time and city. This
intellectual and artistic outbreak in Athens was no doubt favoured by
the conditions of the time, but it was also due in part to the
appearance of some very unusual men. It was not a general movement; it
was the movement of a small group of people exceptionally placed and
gifted.
§ 2
Another leading figure in this Athenian movement, a figure still more
out of harmony with the life around him, and quite as much an original
source and stimulant of the enduring greatness of his age, was a man
called Socrates, the son of a stone-mason. He was born about sixteen
years later than Herodotus, and he was beginning to be heard of about
the time when Pericles died. He himself wrote nothing, but it was his
custom to talk in public places. There was in those days a great
searching for wisdom going on; there was a various multitude of teachers
called sophists who reasoned upon truth, beauty, and right living, and
instructed the developing curiosities and imaginations of youth. This
was so because there were no great priestly schools in Greece. And into
these discussions this man came, a clumsy and slovenly figure,
barefooted, gathering about him a band of admirers and disciples.
His method was profoundly sceptical; he believed that the only possible
virtue was true knowledge; he would tolerate no belief, no hope that
could not pass the ultimate acid test. For himself this meant virtue,
but for many of his weaker followers it meant the loss of beliefs and
moral habits that would have restrained their impulses. These weaklings
became self-excusing, self-indulging scoundrels. Among his young
associates were Plato, who afterwards immortalized his method in a
series of philosophical dialogues, and founded the philosophical school
of the Academy, which lasted nine hundred years, Xenophon, of the Ten
Thousand, who described his death, and Isocrates, one of the wisest of
Greek political thinkers; but there were also Critias, who, when Athens
was utterly defeated by Sparta, was leader among the Thirty Tyrants
appointed by the Spartans to keep the crushed city under;[186]
Charmides, who was killed beside Critias when the Thirty were
overthrown; and Alcibiades, a brilliant and complex traitor, who did
much to lead Athens into the disastrous expedition against Syracuse
which destroyed her strength, who betrayed her to the Spartans, and who
was at last assassinated while on his way to the Persian court to
contrive mischief against Greece. These latter pupils were not the only
young men of promise whose vulgar faith and patriotism Socrates
destroyed, to leave nothing in its place. His most inveterate enemy was
a certain Anytus, whose son, a devoted disciple of Socrates, had become
a hopeless drunkard. Through Anytus it was that Socrates was at last
prosecuted for “corrupting” the youth of Athens, and condemned to death
by drinking a poisonous draught made from hemlock (399 B.C.).
His death is described with great beauty in the dialogue of Plato called
by the name of Phædo.
§ 3
The preceding section raised an interesting discussion between Professor
Gilbert Murray and the writer upon the character and quality of the
common Athenian citizen. Professor Murray thought several phrases used
by the writer harsh and unjust. But what he had to say was so
interesting and informing, and the writer was so entirely in agreement
with his spirit, that it seemed better, instead of modifying what had
been written in § 1, to leave that as it stood and to supplement it by
quoting Professor Murray. He objected to the parallelism with a
twentieth-century crowd. “What I want you to do,” he wrote, “is to take
them at the level of the people round them and before them and see how
they differ. For example, the first thing that strikes one is that they
use all their powers for a different purpose than most peoples: for
intellectual and artistic things. No more enormous works here to glorify
divine kings; no private splendour, no luxury, but a wonderful output of
art, poetry, philosophy, and--within limits--science. Compare them with
Rome.
“In the matter of slavery; all nations had slaves; some treated them
very cruelly, some with moderate cruelty. The Greeks alone argued
whether it was right to have them--and ‘cranks’ occasionally proposed
emancipation. You get strong testimony, sometimes indignant testimony,
that the Athenians were too soft altogether in their treatment of
slaves. As soon as you get to Carthaginian or Roman history you get
appalling cruelty (the 6000 crucified by Crassus, the gladiatorial
games, the habitual leg-breaking of slaves, etc.); such things seem
never to have occurred in Greece. As soon as you get to Alexander you
get, of course, the Oriental despotic touch--fantastic vanity and
cruelty; and at length the recurrence of human sacrifice.
“The greatness of Greece comes out only in the art and literature and
thought; not in the political and social history--except in dim flashes.
By all means emphasize clearly to start with that the Greeks of, say,
the ninth century, were practically savages, and those of even the sixth
and in places right on to the fifth and fourth were in many things on
the ‘Lower Cultures’ level. Clothes like Polynesians; tools very poor;
religion ... fragments of the Polynesian all about, when you got outside
the educated Attic world. But the _characteristic_ is that, on this very
low level, you have extraordinary flashes of very high inspiration, as
the poetry and art and philosophy witness. Also, an actual achievement
in social life--what one calls ‘Hellenism,’ _i.e._, republicanism,
simplicity of life, sobriety of thought, almost complete abolition of
torture, mutilation, etc., and an amazing emancipation of the individual
and of the human intellect. It is impossible to speak, really, of the
‘Greek view’ of anything. Because all the different views are put
forward and represented: polytheism, monotheism, atheism; pro-slavery,
anti-slavery; duty to animals, no duty to animals; democracy, monarchy,
aristocracy. The characteristic is that _human thought got free_. (Not
absolutely, of course; only to an amazing extent.) This emancipation was
paid for by all sorts of instability; awful political instability,
because stability in such things is produced exactly by the opposite--by
long firm tradition and cohesiveness.
“It is not fair to say I idealize the Athenian mob; see, for example, my
_Euripides and his Age_. But I don’t think it was like our music-hall
mob. It was much more artistic, much more intellectual and yet more
primitive, more indecent but less lascivious; more capable of atrocious
misconduct; also probably more capable of idealism. But we don’t really
know much about the crowd. It is only a hostile average-sensual-man
background against which the philosophers and poets stand out. There was
no ‘city mob,’ as in Rome. They were nearly all small farmers or
craftsmen. I can’t help thinking that their badness was more like the
faults of a superior South Sea Islander than like the viler side of the
‘crowd’ to-day.”
§ 4
The most characteristic feature of the opening years of this brilliant
century and a half (475 to 325 B.C.) of Greek intellectual life was the
appearance of the great tragedies.
Before the age of Pericles the main literature of the Greek peoples had
been their epic poetry, of which we have already said something in our
account of the earlier nomadic Aryan life. It was made up of songs of
free adventure, aristocratic and valiant in spirit. The main Greek epics
were reduced to writing, and the text of the chief ones put in its
present order in the time of the tyrant Peisistratus (_i.e._,
immediately before the first Persian wars). Chanted originally to the
chiefs and leading men in hall, they were now recited at the public
festivals. In addition, there were also poems of more homely character,
love songs, war lyrics, and the like.
A third stream of poetry also ran into the Greek tradition, perhaps not
of Aryan origin at all, but preserving the religious ideas of the dark
whites whom the Greeks had conquered. There were religious chants and
hymns associated with the secret religious practices of the worship of
Demeter, the earth goddess, and of Orpheus and Dionysus. They are mixed
up with ideas of self-abasement, self-mutilation, and the like, that
were altogether foreign to the healthy directness of the hardy
barbarians from the north. These ideas were creeping out from their
hiding-places, and expressing themselves in Greek in Athens during this
period in the Orphic religious poetry. It seems probable that in the
Athenian population among all the Greek cities the pre-Aryan strain was
unusually strong. This dark strain was subtle, artistic,
creative--Cnossos witnesses to that; but it had no great courage of the
mind; it was afraid of the stars and of life. Whenever that strain is
found in any race, there are to be found also thoughts and legends of
sacrificial murders.
And perhaps also indigenous to the Greek soil, rooted deeply there in
the time of the world-wide ancient heliolithic culture, were religious
dances. Such dances we can trace from the Atlantic to Peru. There is a
drawing in a Spanish cave at Cogul, near the Ebro, which is supposed to
represent a later palæolithic ritual dance. There is little evidence of
the primitive Aryans engaging in religious dances. But running through
the rural life of Greece was the tradition of a dressing-up and a
dancing and chanting associated with the worship of another god, who is
killed and lives again as a part of the ceremonies, the god Dionysus.
After the coming of the Aryans into Greece, the vocal element became
stronger in these proceedings, and thrust into the dance came a
recitation. There was first one reciter, then two, and then three, and
the rest of the company became the chorus to the declamations of these
principal actors. Out of the public performance at festivals and
anniversaries of these choir songs or dithyrambs with one actor grew the
great art of tragedy with three and more. Side by side with tragedy,
comedy developed from another and merrier series of dressings-up and
singing. Here we can but name those who were supreme in these arts who
flourished in the days of Pericles, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,
the masters of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the writer of comedies. We can
say nothing of the splendour and beauty of the former, nor of the
fantastic invention and wit of the latter. Æschylus won his first prize
for tragedy in the year that Herodotus was born (484 B.C.); Sophocles
came some eighteen years later; Euripides was four years old when
Æschylus was beginning his career. The mockery of Aristophanes broke out
(427 B.C.) only when the days of great tragedy and sculpture and
building were drawing to a close.[187]
§ 5
The influence of Socrates also began to bear fruit after the days of
Pericles and Aspasia. This old questioner, at whose touch faith,
speculation, and illusion shrivelled together, was the centre of a group
of young men who lived through and after the years of the Peloponnesian
War. Of all these young men, one stands out as the greatest of them all,
Plato. He was born 427 B.C., the year of the first performance of the
work of Aristophanes, and he lived for eighty years.
In mental temperament Plato was of an altogether different type from the
older man. He was a most artistic and delicate writer, and Socrates
could write nothing consecutive. He cared for beautiful things and
Socrates despised them. He was supremely concerned with the ordering of
public affairs and the scheming of happier human relationships, while
Socrates, heedless of heat and cold and the opinion of his fellow
creatures, concentrated his mind upon a serene disillusionment. Life,
said Socrates, was deception; only the Soul lived. Plato had a very
great affection for this rugged old teacher, he found his method of the
utmost value in disentangling and cleaning up opinions, and he made him
the central figure of his immortal dialogues; but his own thoughts and
disposition turned him altogether away from the sceptical attitude. In
many of the dialogues the voice is the voice of Socrates, but the
thought is the thought of Plato. Plato was living in a time of doubt and
questioning about all human relationships. In the great days of
Pericles, before 450 B.C., there seems to have been a complete
satisfaction in Athens with social and political institutions. Then
there seemed no reason for questioning. Men felt free; the community
prospered; one suffered chiefly from jealousy. The History of Herodotus
displays little or no dissatisfaction with Athenian political
institutions.
But Plato, who was born about the time Herodotus died, and who grew up
in the atmosphere of a disastrous war and great social distress and
confusion, was from the first face to face with human discord and the
misfit of human institutions. To that challenge his mind responded. One
of his earlier works and his latest are bold and penetrating discussions
of the possible betterment of social relations. Socrates had taught him
to take nothing for granted, not even the common relations of husband
and wife or parent and child. His _Republic_, the first of all Utopian
books, is a young man’s dream of a city in which human life is arranged
according to a novel and a better plan; his last unfinished work, the
_Laws_, is a discussion of the regulation of another such Utopia. There
is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but it is a
landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the development of
mankind, this appearance of the idea of wilfully and completely
recasting human conditions. So far mankind has been living by tradition
under the fear of the gods. Here is a man who says boldly to our race,
and as if it were a quite reasonable and natural thing to say, “Take
hold of your lives. Most of these things that distress you, you can
avoid; most of these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You
can do as you will with them.”
One other thing besides the conflicts of the time perhaps stimulated the
mind of Plato in this direction. In the days of Pericles Athens had
founded many settlements overseas, and the setting up of these
settlements had familiarized men with the idea that a community need not
grow, it could also be made.
Closely associated with Plato was a younger man, who later also
maintained a school in Athens and lived to an even greater age. This was
Isocrates. He was what we should call a publicist, a writer rather than
an orator, and his peculiar work was to develop the idea of Herodotus,
the idea of a unification of Greece against the Persian Empire, as a
remedy for the baseness and confusion of her politics and the waste and
destruction of her internecine wars. His political horizon was in some
respects broader than Plato’s, and in his later years he looked towards
monarchy, and particularly towards the Macedonian monarchy of Philip, as
a more unifying and broadening method of government than city democracy.
The same drift to monarchist ideas had occurred in the case of that
Xenophon whose _Anabasis_ we have already mentioned. In his old age this
retired mercenary wrote the _Cyropædia_, a “vindication both
theoretically and practically of absolute monarchy as shown in the
organization of the Persian Empire.”[188]
§ 6
Plato taught in the Academy. To him in his old age came a certain
good-looking youngster from Stagira in Macedonia, Aristotle, who was the
son of the Macedonian king’s physician, and a man with a very different
type of mind from that of the great Athenian. He was naturally sceptical
of the imaginative will, and with a great respect for and comprehension
of established fact. Later on, after Plato was dead, he set up a school
at the Lyceum in Athens and taught, criticizing Plato and Socrates with
a certain hardness. When he taught, the shadow of Alexander the Great
lay across the freedom of Greece, and he favoured slavery and
constitutional kings. He had previously been the tutor of Alexander for
several years at the court of Philip of Macedon.[189] Intelligent men
were losing heart in those days, their faith in the power of men to make
their own conditions of life was fading. There were no more Utopias. The
rush of events was manifestly too powerful for such organized effort as
was then practicable between men of fine intelligence. It was possible
to think of recasting human society when human society was a little city
of a few thousand citizens, but what was happening about them was
something cataclysmal; it was the political recasting of the whole known
world, of the affairs of what even then must have amounted to something
between fifty and a hundred million people. It was recasting upon a
scale no human mind was yet equipped to grasp. It drove thought back
upon the idea of a vast and implacable Fate. It made men snatch at
whatever looked stable and unifying. Monarchy, for instance, for all its
manifest vices, was a conceivable government for millions; it had, to a
certain extent, _worked_; it imposed a ruling will where it would seem
that a collective will was impossible. This change of the general
intellectual mood harmonized with Aristotle’s natural respect for
existing fact. If, on the one hand, it made him approve of monarchy and
slavery and the subjection of women as reasonable institutions, on the
other hand it made him eager to understand fact and to get some orderly
knowledge of these realities of nature and human nature that were now so
manifestly triumphant over the creative dreams of the preceding
generation. He is terribly sane and luminous, and terribly wanting in
self-sacrificial enthusiasm. He questions Plato when Plato would exile
poets from his Utopia, for poetry is a power; he directs his energy
along a line diametrically opposed to Socrates’ depreciation of
Anaxagoras. He anticipates Bacon and the modern scientific movement in
his realization of the importance of ordered knowledge. He set himself
to the task of gathering together and setting down knowledge. He was the
first natural historian. Other men before him had speculated about the
nature of things, but he, with every young man he could win over to the
task, set himself to classify and compare things. Plato says in effect:
“Let us take hold of life and remodel it;” this soberer successor: “Let
us first know more of life and meanwhile serve the king.” It was not so
much a contradiction as an immense qualification of the master.
The peculiar relation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great enabled him to
procure means for his work such as were not available again for
scientific inquiry for long ages. He could command hundreds of talents
(a talent = about £240) for his expenses. At one time he had at his
disposal a thousand men scattered throughout Asia and Greece, collecting
matter for his natural history.[190][191] They were, of course, very
untrained observers, collectors of stories rather than observers; but
nothing of the kind had ever been attempted, had even been thought of,
so far as we know, before his time. Political as well as natural science
began. The students of the Lyceum under his direction made an analysis
of 158 political constitutions....
This was the first gleam of organized science in the world. The early
death of Alexander and the breaking up of his empire almost before it
had begun, put an end to endowments on this scale for 2000 years. Only
in Egypt at the Alexandria Museum did any scientific research continue,
and that only for a few generations. Fifty years after Aristotle’s death
the Lyceum had already dwindled to insignificance.
§ 7
The general drift of thought in the concluding years of the fourth
century B.C. was not with Aristotle, nor towards the laborious and
necessary accumulation of ordered knowledge. It is possible that without
his endowments from the king he would have made but a small figure in
intellectual history. Through them he was able to give his splendid
intelligence substance and effect. The ordinary man prefers easy ways so
long as they may be followed, and is almost wilfully heedless whether
they end at last in a cul-de-sac. Finding the stream of events too
powerful to control at once, the generality of philosophical teachers
drifted in those days from the scheming of model cities and the planning
of new ways of living into the elaboration of beautiful and consoling
systems of evasion.
Perhaps that is putting things coarsely and unjustly. But let Professor
Gilbert Murray speak upon this matter.[192]
“The Cynics cared only for virtue and the relation of the soul to God;
the world and its learning and its honours were as dross to them. The
Stoics and Epicureans, so far apart at first sight, were very similar in
their ultimate aim. What they really cared about was ethics--the
practical question how a man should order his life. Both, indeed, gave
themselves to some science--the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to
logic and rhetoric--but only as a means to an end. The Stoic tried to
win men’s hearts and convictions by sheer subtlety of abstract argument
and dazzling sublimity of thought and expression. The Epicurean was
determined to make Humanity go its way without cringing to capricious
gods and without sacrificing Free-Will. He condensed his gospel into
four maxims: ‘God is not to be feared; Death cannot be felt; the Good
can be won; all that we dread can be borne and conquered.’”
And meanwhile the stream of events flowed on, with a reciprocal
indifference to philosophy.
§ 8
If the Greek classics are to be read with any benefit by modern men,
they must be read as the work of men like ourselves. Regard must be had
to their traditions, their opportunities, and their limitations. There
is a disposition to exaggeration in all human admiration; men will treat
the rough notes of Thucydides or Plato for work they never put in order
as miracles of style, and the errors of their transcribers as hints of
unfathomable mysteries; most of our classical texts are very much
mangled, and all were originally the work of human beings in
difficulties, living in a time of such darkness and narrowness of
outlook as makes our own age by comparison a period of dazzling
illumination. What we shall lose in reverence by this familiar
treatment, we shall gain in sympathy for that group of troubled,
uncertain, and very modern minds. The Athenian writers were, indeed, the
first of modern men. They were discussing questions that we still
discuss; they began to struggle with the great problems that confront us
to-day. Their writings are our dawn.[193]
They began an inquiry, and they arrived at no solutions. We cannot
pretend to-day that we have arrived at solutions to most of the
questions they asked. The mind of the Hebrews, as we have already shown,
awoke suddenly to the endless miseries and disorders of life, saw that
these miseries and disorders were largely due to the lawless acts of
men, and concluded that salvation could come only through subduing
ourselves to the service of the one God who rules heaven and earth. The
Greek, rising to the same perception, was not prepared with the same
idea of a patriarchal deity; he lived in a world in which there was not
God but the gods; if perhaps he felt that the gods themselves were
limited, then he thought of Fate behind them, cold and impersonal. So he
put his problem in the form of an enquiry as to what was right living,
without any definite correlation of the right-living man with the will
of God.... To us, looking at the matter from a standpoint purely
historical, the common problem can now be presented in a form that, for
the purposes of history, covers both the Hebrew and Greek way of putting
it. We have seen our kind rising out of the unconsciousness of animals
to a continuing racial self-consciousness, realizing the unhappiness of
its wild diversity of aims, realizing the inevitable tragedy of
individual self-seeking, and feeling its way blindly towards some
linking and subordinating idea to save it from the pains and accidents
of mere individuality. The gods, the god-king, the idea of the tribe,
the idea of the city; here are ideas that have claimed and held for a
time the devotion of men, ideas in which they have a little lost their
individual selfishness and escaped to the realization of a more enduring
life. Yet, as our wars and disasters prove, none of these greater ideas
have yet been great enough. The gods have failed to protect, the tribe
has proved itself vile and cruel, the city ostracized one’s best and
truest friends, the god-king made a beast of himself....
As we read over the speculative literature of this great period of the
Greeks, we realize three barriers set about the Greek mind, from which
it rarely escaped, but from which we now perhaps are beginning to
escape.
The first of these limitations was the obsession of the Greek mind by
the idea of the city as the ultimate state. In a world in which empire
had followed empire, each greater than its predecessor, in a world
through which men and ideas drove ever more loosely and freely, in a
world visibly unifying even then, the Greeks, because of their peculiar
physical and political circumstances, were still dreaming impossibly of
a compact little city state, impervious to outer influences, valiantly
secure against the whole world. Plato’s estimate of the number of
citizens in a perfect state varied between 1000 (the _Republic_) and
5040 (the _Laws_) citizens.[194] This state was to go to war and hold
its own against other cities of the same size. And this was not a couple
of generations after the hosts of Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont!
Perhaps these Greeks thought the day of world empires had passed for
ever, whereas it was only beginning. At the utmost their minds reached
out to alliances and leagues. There must have been men at the court of
Artaxerxes thinking far away beyond these little ideas of the rocky
creek, the island, and the mountain-encircled valley. But the need for
unification against the greater powers that moved outside the
Greek-speaking world, the Greek mind disregarded wilfully. These
outsiders were barbarians, not to be needlessly thought about; they were
barred out now from Greece for ever. One took Persian money; everybody
took Persian money; what did it matter? Or one enlisted for a time in
their armies (as Xenophon did) and hoped for his luck with a rich
prisoner. Athens took sides in Egyptian affairs, and carried on minor
wars with Persia, but there was no conception of a common policy or a
common future for Greece.... Until at last a voice in Athens began to
shout “Macedonia!” to clamour like a watch-dog, “Macedonia!” This was
the voice of the orator and demagogue Demosthenes, hurling warnings and
threats and denunciations at King Philip of Macedon, who had learnt his
politics not only from Plato and Aristotle, but also from Isocrates and
Xenophon, and from Babylon and Susa, and who was preparing quietly,
ably, and steadfastly to dominate all Greece, and through Greece to
conquer the known world....
There was a second thing that cramped the Greek mind, the institution of
domestic slavery. Slavery was implicit in Greek life; men could conceive
of neither comfort nor dignity without it. But slavery shuts off one’s
sympathy not only from a class of one’s fellow subjects; it puts the
slave-owner into a class and organization against all stranger men. One
is of an elect tribe. Plato, carried by his clear reason and the noble
sanity of his spirit beyond the things of the present, would have
abolished slavery; much popular feeling and the New Comedy were against
it; the Stoics and Epicureans, many of whom were slaves, condemned it as
unnatural, but finding it too strong to upset, decided that it did not
affect the soul and might be ignored. With the wise there was no bound
or free. To the matter-of-fact Aristotle, and probably to most practical
men, its abolition was inconceivable. So they declared that there were
in the world men “naturally slaves.”...
Finally, the thought of the Greeks was hampered by a want of knowledge
that is almost inconceivable to us to-day. They had no knowledge of the
past of mankind at all; at best they had a few shrewd guesses. They had
no knowledge of geography beyond the range of the Mediterranean basin
and the frontiers of Persia. We know far more to-day of what was going
on in Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, and Memphis in the time of Pericles
than he did. Their astronomical ideas were still in the state of
rudimentary speculations. Anaxagoras, greatly daring, thought the sun
and moon were vast globes, so vast that the sun was probably “as big as
all the Peloponnesus.” The forty-seventh proposition of the first book
of Euclid was regarded as one of the supreme triumphs of the human mind.
Their ideas in physics and chemistry were the results of profound
cogitation; it is wonderful that they did guess at atomic structure. One
has to remember their extraordinary poverty in the matter of
experimental apparatus. They had coloured glass for ornament, but no
white glass; no accurate means of measuring the minor intervals of time,
no really efficient numerical notation, no very accurate scales, no
rudiments of telescope or microscope. A modern scientific man dumped
down in the Athens of Pericles would have found the utmost difficulty in
demonstrating the elements of his knowledge, however crudely, to the men
he would have found there. He would have had to rig up the simplest
apparatus under every disadvantage, while Socrates pointed out the
absurdity of seeking Truth with pieces of wood and string and metal such
as small boys use for fishing. And our professor of science would also
have been in constant danger of a prosecution for impiety.
Our world to-day draws upon relatively immense accumulations of
knowledge of fact. In the age of Pericles scarcely the first stone of
our comparatively tremendous cairn of things recorded and proved had
been put in place. When we reflect upon this difference, then it ceases
to be remarkable that the Greeks, with all their aptitude for political
speculation, were blind to the insecurities of their civilization from
without and from within, to the necessity for effective unification, to
the swift rush of events that was to end for long ages these first
brief freedoms of the human mind.
It is not in the results it achieved, but in the attempts it made that
the true value for us of this group of Greek talkers and writers lies.
It is not that they answered questions, but that they dared to ask them.
Never before had man challenged his world and the way of life to which
he found his birth had brought him. Never had he said before that he
could alter his conditions. Tradition and a seeming necessity had held
him to life as he had found it grown up about his tribe since time
immemorial. Hitherto he had taken the world as children still take the
homes and habits in which they have been reared.
So in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. we perceive, most plainly in
Judea and in Athens, but by no means confined to those centres, the
beginnings of a moral and an intellectual process in mankind, an appeal
to righteousness and an appeal to the truth from the passions and
confusions and immediate appearances of existence. It is like the dawn
of the sense of responsibility in a youth, who suddenly discovers that
life is neither easy nor aimless. Mankind is growing up. The rest of
history for three and twenty centuries is threaded with the spreading
out and development and interaction and the clearer and more effective
statement of these main leading ideas. Slowly more and more men
apprehend the reality of human brotherhood, the needlessness of wars and
cruelties and oppression, the possibilities of a common purpose for the
whole of our kind. In every generation thereafter there is the evidence
of men seeking for that better order to which they feel our world must
come. But everywhere and wherever in any man the great constructive
ideas have taken hold, the hot greeds, the jealousies, the suspicions
and impatience that are in the nature of every one of us, war against
the struggle towards greater and broader purposes. The last twenty-three
centuries of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty
immortal to think clearly and live rightly. Blunder follows blunder;
promising beginnings end in grotesque disappointments; streams of living
water are poisoned by the cup that conveys them to the thirsty lips of
mankind. But the hope of men rises again at last after every
disaster....
We pass on now to the story of one futile commencement, one glorious
shattered beginning of human unity. There was in Alexander the Great
knowledge and imagination, power and opportunity, folly, egotism,
detestable vulgarity, and an immense promise broken by the accident of
his early death while men were still dazzled by its immensity.
XXIV
THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT[195]
§ 1. _Philip of Macedonia._ § 2. _The Murder of King Philip._ § 3.
_Alexander’s First Conquests._ § 4. _The Wanderings of Alexander._
§ 5. _Was Alexander Indeed Great?_ § 6. _The Successors of
Alexander._ § 7. _Pergamum a Refuge of Culture._ § 8. _Alexander as
a Portent of World Unity._
§ 1
The true hero of the story of Alexander is not so much Alexander as his
father Philip. The author of a piece does not shine in the limelight as
the actor does, and it was Philip who planned much of the greatness that
his son achieved, who laid the foundations and forged the tools, who had
indeed already begun the Persian expedition at the time of his death.
Philip, beyond doubting, was one of the greatest monarchs the world has
ever seen; he was a man of the utmost intelligence and ability, and his
range of ideas was vastly beyond the scope of his time. He made
Aristotle his friend; he must have discussed with him those schemes for
the organization of real knowledge which the philosopher was to realize
later through Alexander’s endowments. Philip, so far as we can judge,
seems to have been Aristotle’s “Prince”; to him Aristotle turned as men
turn only to those whom they admire and trust. To Philip also Isocrates
appealed as the great leader who should unify and ennoble the chaotic
public life of Greece.
In many books it is stated that Philip was a man of incredible cynicism
and of uncontrolled lusts. It is true that at feasts, like all the
Macedonians of his time, he was a hard drinker and some times
drunken--it was probably considered unamiable not to drink excessively
at feasts; but of the other accusations there is no real proof, and for
evidence we have only the railings of such antagonists as Demosthenes,
the Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric. The
quotation of a phrase or so will serve to show to what the patriotic
anger of Demosthenes could bring him. In one of the _Philippics_, as his
denunciations of Philip are called, he gives vent in this style:
“Philip--a man who not only is no Greek, and no way akin to the Greeks,
but is not even a barbarian from a respectable country--no, a pestilent
fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never get even a decent
slave.” And so on and so on. We know, as a matter of fact, that the
Macedonians were an Aryan people very closely akin to the Greeks, and
that Philip was probably the best educated man of his time. This was the
spirit in which the adverse accounts of Philip were written.
[Illustration: Philip of Macedon]
When Philip became king of Macedonia in 359 B.C., his country was a
little country without a seaport or industries or any considerable city.
It had a peasant population, Greek almost in language and ready to be
Greek in sympathies, but more purely Nordic in blood than any people to
the south of it. Philip made this little barbaric state into a great
one; he created the most efficient military organization the world had
so far seen, and he had brought most of Greece into one confederacy
under his leadership at the time of his death. And his extraordinary
quality, his power of thinking out beyond the current ideas of his
time, is shown not so much in those matters as in the care with which he
had his son trained to carry on the policy he had created. He is one of
the few monarchs in history who cared for his successor. Alexander was,
as few other monarchs have ever been, a specially educated king; he was
educated for empire. Aristotle was but one of the several able tutors
his father chose for him. Philip confided his policy to him, and
entrusted him with commands and authority by the time he was sixteen. He
commanded the cavalry at Chæronea under his father’s eye. He was nursed
into power--generously and unsuspiciously.
To any one who reads his life with care it is evident that Alexander
started with an equipment of training and ideas of unprecedented value.
As he got beyond the wisdom of his upbringing he began to blunder and
misbehave--sometimes with a dreadful folly. The defects of his character
had triumphed over his upbringing long before he died.
Philip was a king after the old pattern, a leader-king, first among his
peers, of the ancient Nordic Aryan type. The army he found in Macedonia
consisted of a general foot levy and a noble equestrian order called the
“companions.” The people were farmers and hunters and somewhat drunken
in their habits, but ready for discipline and good fighting stuff. And
if the people were homely, the government was intelligent and alert. For
some generations the court language had been Attic (= Athenian) Greek,
and the court had been sufficiently civilized to shelter and entertain
such great figures as Euripides, who died there in 406 B.C., and Zeuxis
the artist. Moreover, Philip, before his accession, had spent some years
as a hostage in Greece. He had had as good an education as Greece could
give at that time. He was, therefore, quite familiar with what we may
call the idea of Isocrates--the idea of a great union of the Greek
states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world; and he knew, too, how
incapable was the Athenian democracy, because of its constitution and
tradition, of taking the opportunity that lay before it. For it was an
opportunity that would have to be shared. To the Athenians or the
Spartans it would mean letting in a “lot of foreigners” to the
advantages of citizenship. It would mean lowering themselves to the
level of equality and fellowship with Macedonians--a people from whom
“we” do not get “even a decent slave.”[196]
There was no way to secure unanimity among the Greeks for the
contemplated enterprise except by some revolutionary political action.
It was no love of peace that kept the Greeks from such an adventure; it
was their political divisions. The resources of the several states were
exhausted in a series of internecine wars--wars arising out of the
merest excuses and fanned by oratorical wind. The ploughing of certain
sacred lands near Delphi by the Phocians was, for example, the pretext
for a sanguinary Sacred War.
[Illustration:The growth of MACEDONIA]