THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE
It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder
how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had
happened rather differently. Sometimes it seems as if just one event
turned the whole course of what happened afterwards.
So here in this great story of ours we may wonder what would have
happened to the world if the Persians, pushing their way westward,
had not come up against that strong wall of opposition which they
found in the Greek phalanx. There was no other power, so far as we
know, at this time, in the west, that was at all likely to be able to
stop them.
If we look at what happened in the more southward direction of their
advance, in Egypt, we shall perhaps be inclined to think that they
would not have gone very much farther westward than they did, for the
Egyptian story of that time shows that they were not able to
establish their power very securely in that country. For nearly
forty years after the Persian conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, the son
of Cyrus, Egypt was held as a province of Persia, but in 488 B.C. the
Egyptians made a successful revolt and threw off the Persian yoke for
a time. Three years later they were again subdued by Xerxes, who was
then king of Persia, but only fifteen years afterwards they were
{130} again revolting, and through the whole of that century, 500 to
400 B.C., they were continually rising against their Persian masters,
never quite succeeding in winning their freedom, but constantly
giving trouble, never completely subdued. It is evident that the
Persians, after their first and most effective conquest, never had a
very secure hold over the people of the Nile.
Then, if we turn to look at what was going on farther north, where
the Persian cavalry were coming up against that famous Greek phalanx,
we shall see good reason why the Persians were not able to give a
great deal of attention to making their position good in Egypt. The
wonder is that they should have found any forces at all to spare for
that enterprise.
The Persian monarch had assumed the title of King of Kings. He
claimed dominion over the whole world, as the Persians knew it. It
must have been most vexatious to him, and to that great claim and
title of his, to find the claim opposed and contested. He had
conquered Greeks before--those Spartans whom he had met fighting in
the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He
would crush them and take possession of their country.
After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot
have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece,
as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states,
but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the
supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens.
Each of these would form alliances from time to time with other
states to fight against the other. Just at this moment, that is just
before 500 B.C., the contention between them was most severe. The
forms of the government in the two {131} were sharply opposed. The
government of Athens had lately fallen into the hands of the people.
The people, the democracy (from _demos_, the people, and _kratos_,
power) had deposed their king and driven him out of the country. The
Spartans, who hated the idea of a democratic government, sympathised
with him, and no doubt would have restored him to power had they been
able to do so; but he went to Asia Minor, to the court of Darius, who
was then king of Persia, and besought his help. The Persian was very
willing to give it, but it was not until some years later, in 490
B.C., that the first actual invasion of Greece by the Persians took
place. That invasion practically began and ended with what was one
of the most famous battles in the world's history, the battle of
Marathon.
[Sidenote: Marathon]
It was fought on a small plain, only some three miles wide, on the
seashore, where the Persians had disembarked their forces. And here
I would give you a word of warning which must apply to all this story
of the glorious days of Greece. The battles--Marathon, Thermopylæ,
and Salamis--have become very famous, and rightly famous. They were
of importance in the story because they--Marathon and Salamis, at all
events, which were Grecian victories--put a stop to that westward
advance of the Persians which might have extended we cannot say how
far but for those victories. But they were battles in which the
forces engaged on the one side or the other were almost ridiculously
small in comparison with the armies which we have seen put into the
field. They were fought over very small spaces of land or sea, and
they were very quickly over.
But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have
spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in
which their story has been told {132} to us by the great historian
Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made
to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made
interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their
extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very
well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good
stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather
apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because
their story is told so very well.
That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these
stories of the glorious days of Greece.
In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am
trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these
battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to
tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it
was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon,
defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the
success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could
have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not
until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different
manner.
There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that
which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast
of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been
aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian
expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to
punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the
Persians {133} had easily repressed. It set out both by land and
sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army,
but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the
Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as
far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up
by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever
reaching Greek territory at all.
But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and
sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise,
only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King
of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King
Xerxes himself was the leader.
[Sidenote: Xerxes]
I think we may be safe in saying that no forces as large as these, in
the number of men enrolled in them, had ever before been collected
for a military purpose, and also that no former expedition had ever
been planned with so much care and forethought. Xerxes made two
bridges for the passing of his army across the Hellespont; he cut a
canal through the Isthmus at Mount Athos for the passage of his
fleet. The fleet, you see, if you will look at the map, would coast
round along the south of Thrace, accompanying the army, till it came
to the Peninsula at the end of which is Mount Athos. Xerxes had
established stations in Thrace for the supply of his army with food
and all needful things as it went along. It was just off Mount Athos
that the storm had scattered the fleet of the former expedition that
he had sent against Greece. By making this canal, and so letting the
ships go through the Isthmus, he avoided the danger of another storm
off the end of the Peninsula.
But there were other dangers besides those from {134} the wind and
waves, for a fleet in any part of the Mediterranean. Although the
Persian monarch might style himself King of Kings, there was another
power that ruled the sea at this time, the power of Carthage, that
colony of the Phœnicians of which I asked you to take note the
first time that it found a place in this story. The Phœnicians,
as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient
places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had
grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as
the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and
half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the
waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the
battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief
naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with
the Greeks.
For the Greeks, too, as we know, sent out their colonies. They sent
them to Ionia, eastward along the coast of Asia Minor, and they also
sent them westward, round the heel and toe of Italy, as far as that
great island of Sicily lying nearly opposite to where you see
Carthage on the African shore. Sicily and the African continent lie
at no great distance from each other at the nearest points. And the
Carthaginians and other Phœnicians had come into conflict with the
Greek colonists in Sicily long before Greece was threatened by the
Persians. Xerxes, before making his attempt on Greece, assured
himself that his fleet would not be attacked by the great naval
power, by making an alliance with Carthage. Phœnician ships were
among the best that fought for him. His plans seem to have been laid
with every possible care and completeness. The overthrow of Greece,
and of {135} that liberty which all Grecian states, in spite of their
jealousy of each other and of their incessant quarrels, prized so
very highly, seemed certain. It looked as if the King of Kings, who
would rule absolutely, according to the Eastern idea, was sure to
bring them under his subjection. The danger was so great that for
the moment the states of Greece were able to put their jealousies on
one side. Athens and Sparta, and the less powerful states with which
one or other was in alliance at the time, drew together. It was a
terrible moment for them.
The first great battle of the war made it more terrible still.
Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the
hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but
little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually
Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the
small population of those city states of Greece.
[Sidenote: Thermopylæ]
With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general,
encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of
Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make
little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held
back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed
than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been
prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors
of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the
mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were
already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was
informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He
{136} bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat
and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band
of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the
Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of
gallantry to all future ages.
And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once
they had come through the difficult pass--what hope was there for
her? None. Her doom seemed certain.
The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only
been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow
at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved
city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved
themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where
they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet
encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named
Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and
Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian
fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished.
The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all
the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.
It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great
victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one
single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles.
The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner.
He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own
shores.
[Sidenote: Platæa]
The following year made the repulse of the Persians {137} complete.
Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very
same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet
which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not
the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This
second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland
from which the battle had its name--Mycale.
That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more;
it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the
Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And
that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it
actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of
the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the
fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of
the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real
danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now
find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast
cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the
states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The
Persian could still set one combination of states against another.
The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each
other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.
We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never
could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the
marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the
Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline
if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions
and their government. Their great idea {138} was that the individual
man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the
state--that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers
to defend it and to attack its enemies. It was with that purpose in
view that all its laws were made. The Spartans lived not for
themselves but for the state. Hardihood, therefore, and courage were
what they aimed at in themselves and their children, so that the
state might be well served. The Spartan punishments for offences
against the laws were fearfully severe. So were the punishments of
children by their parents, and for a child to cry or utter a sound
under such punishment was regarded as a dreadful disgrace to it.
"Spartan fortitude" is a proverbial saying even amongst us to-day.
It was training of this kind which made the Spartan troops so
steadfast in battle and which gave the Spartans on the whole the
leadership over the other states.
It was a very noble idea, very self-sacrificing--this of each citizen
living not for himself alone but for the state; but these people were
not large-minded enough to carry the idea a little farther and see
that it would be for the advantage of all Greece if each state could
sacrifice its own interests and good for the sake of the whole. They
could sacrifice themselves as individuals for Sparta, but they had no
idea of sacrificing Sparta for Greece. On the contrary, they were
terribly eager to build up the power of Sparta at the cost of Athens
or of any other state. They would even ally themselves with the
enemy of all Greece, with Persia, in order to do so.
The other states were equally selfish about their own state
interests, but their individuals had not the same idea of
self-sacrifice for the good of the state; {139} and therefore their
states were not so powerful as Sparta, nor their soldiers so brave
and well disciplined.
The Athenians, however, were far more cultivated, better artists,
musicians, orators, writers and so on, than the Spartans.
The most glorious days of Greece, we may say, reached from 500 B.C.
to 350 B.C. I have made it a rule in this story to bother you as
little as possible with names, either of places or persons, and only
now and then with dates, because too many names and figures always
seem to me to confuse a story; but I am going to name now a few of
the greatest persons in these glorious days of Greece because they
are the persons who have been makers of the world's very best
thoughts and best artistic products.
[Sidenote: Greek literature]
Homer, that great singer, sang--it is much to be doubted whether he
ever wrote---long before this period. There were also Sappho, the
poetess, and Alcæus, who wrote in those metres from which we have
named our Sapphics and Alcaics. These did not come within the most
glorious days. But in that splendid time, and inspired no doubt by
its splendour, came Sophocles and Æschylus, writers of the finest
tragedies; there was Euripides, who was a tragic writer for the stage
too, yet has imagined some of his scenes in a lighter and livelier
way than those older and fearfully grim writers of the drama. Later
came Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, who brings on birds and frogs
as actors in his plays. There was the mighty orator, Demosthenes.
Oratory and speech-making were very much studied and practised.
Probably there were a large number of speakers whom even to-day we
would think extraordinarily fine. There were a host of painters
{140} and musicians; but we cannot hear their music and the pictures
have perished.
Then there was Socrates, the great philosopher, and Plato, who wrote
the dialogues in which Socrates, who was his master, was the chief
speaker. Socrates was not a writer. I suppose we can never know how
much in the dialogues is Plato's and how much Socrates'. We may
suspect that very much is due to Plato, though he gives Socrates
nearly all the credit. Later came Aristotle, who wrote about
everything--about philosophy, about science, about morality, about
natural history, about government. Plato, before him, or Socrates
speaking to us by Plato's pen, had been very much interested in the
art of government--in discussing the best form of government. But
the government which they all discussed was the government of those
small city states which we have seen in Greece. They did not concern
themselves with government of large nations and empires.
[Sidenote: Sculpture]
But almost more glorious than any of these were the sculptors, of
whom the greatest were Phidias and Praxiteles. The work of the
sculptors was employed chiefly in connection with the work of the
architects, of the builders of the temples and the public buildings.
The temples were splendidly ornamented with the most perfect statues
and cuttings in marble that man has ever produced. The architecture
of the Greeks was more perfect than that of any nation before or
since. We may suppose, as we have seen, that it owed much to the
example of that very fine Minoan art which was produced in Crete very
long before, and which was carried to the mainland of Greece, and is
especially seen in excavations at Mycenæ.
What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the
Babylonian, architecture of temples and {141} tombs is their enormous
size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by
buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no
bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being
impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do
not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty
which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done.
[Illustration: CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).]
The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the
temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes
who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those
divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their
art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been
of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in
the lives of any of {142} the people whom we have met in the whole
course of our story.
The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine,
and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to
their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing
what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks,
religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act,
hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems
pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to
which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that
the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount
Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere
with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine
will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these
later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to
have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a
charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was
actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the
gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by
enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as
these.
At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that
these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference
in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews,
and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles--which
means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.
But they had strong and clear ideas, for all that, of right and
wrong, of justice and so on. If they believed {143} at all in a life
after death it was of a life so shadowy, and their idea of it was so
vague, that it certainly made no difference to their life on earth.
The Egyptians were very careful in preserving their dead, in the form
of mummies. The Greeks did not treat their dead with quite so much
respect. They often burned the bodies, so they had no occasion for
immense tombs. A small vase would contain the ashes.
[Sidenote: Life of Greek cities]
It is interesting to try to imagine the way of life of these people
in their city states. We may suppose them to have been a people of
very busy active minds, always ready to discuss any new thing,
whether it were in art, in philosophy, or science. We may imagine
endless discussions going on under the porticoes which gave them
shelter from the hot sun. "Stoa," these porticoes or colonnades were
called in Greek, and it is from the people disputing there that we
get the name of the "Stoic" philosophers. Opposed to them in dispute
would be the "Epicureans," or disciples of Epicurus.
These would be disputing, and pupils listening to them, imbibing
lessons in oratory and philosophy, and then out in the street might
perhaps pass some important person like Pericles, the great
statesman, or Alcibiades, or Nicias, the admiral. Any of these would
be followed by a great retinue of friends and hangers-on and slaves.
In another part of the city there would be busy shops. Most of the
Grecian cities were on the coast; and there would be the port and
ships coming and going. Then there would be the gymnasia, where the
athletes could be watched, doing exercises, playing games, throwing
the javelin or the discus, wrestling, and so on.
Some half of the population of the city would {144} probably be
slaves, slaves taken in war or by purchase from their parents in
Thrace or other barbarous lands. There was a great slave market in
Athens itself, and the sea-faring traders and pirates of whom we have
spoken did a little slave-trading among their other business.
Probably it was seldom that the slaves were badly treated, and we
know that they often were set free and often had quite a good time
even while they were slaves. The name "slave" really comes from
Slav. It is taken from the name of the Slavonic people, because it
was from them that most of the slaves were taken. It is not derived
from that Latin word "servus," which is translated "slave," and from
which our "serf"--the serfs of the Anglo-Saxons--is taken. A slave
might rise to quite high employment, and it is curious to think that
the large police force in Athens was at one time composed of more
than a thousand slaves from Scythia, that land of wild tribes even
farther north and east than Thrace.
It seems that the disputations and all the business were very much
the affair of the men only. The women took hardly any part. We have
spoken of the poetess Sappho; but this was long before. It is
evident that the ladies were more important in the Greek society of
Homer's day than they were later. We read of no Greek lady of the
glorious days as famous in art or music or literature; and only a
very few seem to have been allowed to give their opinions on
philosophy or politics. It seems as if they counted for less than
they ought to count.
The Greeks were great game-players, especially great at athletic
games; and we must not forget that though religion appears to have
made little difference in their lives, they were a people who had
great respect {145} for old customs and were therefore careful to
keep up and perform in proper manner religious ceremonies. In some
of them the women took a part.
Even in the very midst of their struggle against the Persians, the
Greek states were only with the greatest difficulty able to lay aside
their jealousy of each other and to come together to fight; and after
that danger from the east had been dispelled they were free to fight
with each other, or to quarrel about the leadership. They did fight
and quarrel unceasingly for some 150 years. After the final repulse
of the Persians, Athens for a time gained the leadership, owing to
the disgust of the states at the insolence of the Spartans, who had
been leaders before. But Sparta was too strong to be put down
easily. At last a combination of the rest of the states under the
leadership of Thebes fairly conquered Sparta and took possession of
the Spartan territory.
[Sidenote: Peloponnesian War]
The most famous of this long succession of fights is that between
Sparta on the one side and Athens, as the leader, on the other. It
is usually called the Peloponnesian War, the Peloponnese being all
that part of Greece below the Isthmus of Corinth, and it is chiefly
famous because its story has been so wonderfully well told by
Thucydides.
Thucydides was a very famous Greek historian. So, too, was
Herodotus, who wrote long before him. But Herodotus was more of a
story-teller. He was a traveller who wrote about what he saw; and
always writes truly when he is telling us of what he himself saw. He
has strange tales to tell, about one-eyed men and men who carried
their heads under one arm, and so on, which were told him by people
whom he met; but he tells them with a warning that he will not vouch
for them, because he did not see such things himself.
{146}
But he has no idea of telling us the real reason why the stories that
he tells happened as they did--the political causes, as we should
say, of the events. Any trivial reason seems good enough to him to
account for a great war. He would have been quite ready to accept
the beautiful lady idea as the reason of the siege of Troy.
Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the
events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history."
There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon,
who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks---10,000 in
number--who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had
to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He
went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it.
But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of
the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the
Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther
afield--or oversea--and not for the first time, to Sicily.
And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and
another people--of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the
story---Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city
established on the Tiber.
The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C.
or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that
island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and
to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or
stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met
there.
{147}