the fine arts among the Greeks.--The origin of their philosophy and
natural science.--Their political degeneracy.
It would be difficult to point out a more striking difference, a more
decided opposition in the whole circle of the intellectual and moral
character and habits of nations, as far at least as the sphere of known
history extends, than that which exists between the seclusive and
monotonous character of Asiatic intellect--the generally unchangeable
uniformity of oriental manners and oriental society, and the manifold
activity--the varied life of the Greeks, in the first flourishing ages
of their history. This amazing diversity in the moral and intellectual
habits of the Greeks appears not only in their legislation, their forms
of government, their manners, occupations, and usages of life, but in
their various and widely dispersed settlements and colonies, in their
descent, which was composed of so many heterogeneous elements, in the
first seeds of their civilization--as well as their distribution into
hostile tribes and great and petty states, and even in their traditions,
their history, and the arts and forms of art to which those gave
rise--finally in a science, engaged in incessant strife, and marching
from system to system, amid the noise and tumult of opposition. In Asia,
even in those countries such as India, where the poetry, the views of
life, and the systems of philosophy were extremely various, and bore in
this respect an external resemblance to those of Greece; where even the
country in ancient times was never permanently united into one compact
empire; yet the whole way of thinking, the prevalent feeling was
entirely monarchical, proceeding from, and returning again to,
unchangeable unity. On the other hand, in Greece, science, like life
itself, was thoroughly republican--and if we meet with particular
thinkers, who leaned to this Asiatic doctrine of unity, we must regard
this as only an exception--a system adopted from a love of change, or
out of a spirit of opposition to the vulgar and generally received
opinion that all in nature and the world, as well as in man, was in a
state of perpetual movement, constant change, and freedom of life. Even
the fabulous world of Grecian divinities, as it has been painted by
their poets, has a republican cast; for there every thing is in a state
of change, of successive renovation, and of mutual collision in the war
of Nature's elements, in the hostility of old and new deities of the
superior and inferior Gods--of giants and of heroes--presenting, as it
does, a state of poetical anarchy. Hence, even the historical traditions
of the Greeks, and the first accounts of their early seats, settlements,
and the migrations of their different races, present to the eye of the
historical enquirer a dense forest of truth and fiction, of fanciful
conjecture, absolute fable, and ancient and venerable knowledge--a
labyrinth of poetry and of history, in whose various and intricate mazes
it is often difficult for the critic to find the true outlet, and to
hold fast by the guiding clue of Ariadne, when he wishes to adopt a
lucid arrangement, and assign to each part its due place in the system
of the whole. The Greek tribes and nations inhabited not only the proper
Greece, the Peninsula Peloponnesian, the contiguous islands, the
Southern plains of the Continent (on whose Northern frontiers it is
often difficult to draw the line of demarcation between the tribes of
Greek and foreign extraction); and also the Western coasts of Asia
Minor; but they had founded a number of small states and planted many
flourishing colonies in the remotest corners of the Euxine, in the Lower
Egypt, where, long prior to the Persian wars, many Greek settlements
existed--along the Northern shore of Africa, where the flourishing
Cyrene was situated, on the Southern coasts of Spain and Gaul, in
Sicily, and throughout the whole of Southern Italy. Their navigation
extended even to the Baltic, as the voyage of Pytheas evinces; and,
though they did not circumnavigate Africa,--a thing which it is still
doubtful whether the Phoenicians accomplished,--they rather surpassed
than yielded to the latter nation in the activity of their trade, and
the wealth and extent of their Colonies. The stupendous monuments and
edifices of the Egyptians are indeed of more colossal dimensions; yet
the works of Grecian sculpture and architecture, while some of them are
on a very large scale, are incomparably more various, more rich in
ornament, more animated, and beautiful, than those of Egypt. The Greeks
were not a mere sea-faring and commercial people, like the
Phoenicians; nor did they compete with the Egyptians in those proud
monuments of architecture whose erection required such thousands of
human hands; but they were from their earliest period a martial people,
well trained to war. Independently of every feeling of patriotic
enthusiasm and national defence, they looked on war as a trade and a
living, and they loved it accordingly. This is proved by the fact that,
in the age preceding the Persian conquest, and long before the Persians
waged war with Greece, the Kings of Egypt had not only Greek squadrons
in their service, but that the whole Egyptian army was for the most part
composed of Grecian mercenaries. Such, too, was the case in Carthage,
and, at a later period, in Persia, where whole legions and armies of
Greeks were engaged in the service of the great king. This old custom
among the Greeks of enlisting in the military service of foreign states,
may have been indeed an excellent preparation for their great national
wars, though in these the first great exploits were achieved by small
companies of troops from Athens, Sparta, and other free states, as well
as by a select body of free citizens. But this custom could have had no
very favourable influence on national opinions and feelings, and the
mutual relations of the Greek tribes and states.
The Republican form of government mostly prevailed in the various Greek
settlements and Colonies, established round the shores of the
Mediterranean; for it is to this species of government that maritime
nations, commercial cities, and petty states almost always incline, as
long as their territories remain circumscribed. Yet in these states, we
find a great variety of political constitutions; for along with that
multitude of small commercial Republics, there were many, like Sparta
and others, that depended exclusively, or for the most part, on
agriculture and the riches of the soil. In these, the hereditary
nobility, the proprietors of the soil, formed the principal class; for
in general the Greeks attached a very high importance to the noble races
and princely families that deduced their descent from the old heroic
times. The original constitution of many, of almost the greater part of
these small Greek Republics, was a tolerably mild aristocracy, headed by
an hereditary Prince, or chieftain. In some states, as for instance in
Athens, the transition from this old aristocratical government, headed
by an hereditary prince, to a thoroughly democratic constitution, was
but slow and gradual; as the memory of their ancient kings, for example,
of Codrus, who fell in the defence of his country, was ever cherished by
the Athenian people with love and reverence. The popular hatred in
Athens was directed only against those leaders of the state who, like
Pisistratus, after having obtained their power by means of popular
influence, sought to stretch and perpetuate it by force of arms and the
use of foreign mercenaries. Yet even Pisistratus possessed great
qualities, and his sway was in general mild, and conformable to the laws
of Solon;--it cannot be denied, however, that his was an usurped
authority, and one founded on illegitimate force. At a later period, and
when the Athenian state became more and more democratic--as there is not
a more thankless being in all nature than the sovereign people, in its
lawless and capricious rule, the people of Athens, jealous of their
freedom, and too easily deluded by the arts of oratorical sophistry,
pointed their hatred at all the great men and deserving citizens of the
state. The general Miltiades perished in prison; Aristides the just,
Cimon and many others fell the victims of ostracism, and died in exile,
as did the great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. Themistocles
himself, who had been the liberator of Athens and of Greece, was obliged
to take refuge at the court of the Persian monarch, from whom he
received protection and hospitality. The wisest of the Athenians, the
master of Plato, who had ever proved himself an honest citizen and a
valiant defender of his country, received the cup of poison for his
recompence.
But we no where discover in the early ages of Athens, and of the other
Greek Republics, that hatred to kings and to royalty in general, which
even the primitive history of Rome displays. Nay, in Sparta, amid a
Republican constitution, the kingly power and dignity were preserved
inviolate down to the latest period; while in Macedon a new monarchy
grew up, which at first asserted a sort of Protectorate over the other
states, and at last established a very despotic ascendancy over all
Greece. Even in those states where the constitution was more
democratical, that is to say, where it was founded, not on an hereditary
nobility and the possession of the soil, but chiefly on moveable
property, on trade, and manufactures, we must not look for that sort of
arithmetical freedom and equality which exists in some modern Republics,
for instance, in the United States of America. The number of citizens
really free, eligible, and possessed of the right of suffrage, was
exceedingly small when compared with the bulk of the population--by far
the greater part were not so, and a multitude of bought slaves,
especially in the commercial states, was employed in manufactures, and
in the tillage of the land. This universally prevalent custom--the harsh
treatment and oppression of slaves--forms a very painful contrast in the
ancient Republics, little corresponding to our own ideal of social
happiness, and in itself very degrading to humanity. In the interior and
more aristocratic states, slavery assumed another shape--the remnant of
the original inhabitants of the soil, that had survived the conquest of
their country, such as the Helots of Sparta, and the Penestae of
Thessaly, were not merely reduced by the conquerors in their
newly-founded governments to the condition of vassals, as we should term
them, or even of serfs; but were degraded to a state of absolute
slavery, and generally treated with great severity. If we except this
one circumstance, the aristocracy, that ruled in most of the ancient
Republics of Greece, was on the whole, tolerably well constituted; a
number of accessory circumstances had tended to soften its sway, and
even, in some instances, it was ennobled by high worth. Ancestral
manners and customs--the very smallness of the states--all tended to
mitigate its rule--a wise legislation, like that of Solon, and of other
law-givers animated by the same spirit, had at once consolidated and
tempered its power; while it was adorned by republican virtues and many
personal qualities in those elder and better times, ere the ancient
simplicity of manners was yet totally corrupted.
In most of the Greek Republics, besides, commerce daily acquired greater
influence and importance, and it was impossible in such a state of
things that any rigidly exclusive aristocracy could have been formed, or
could have long maintained its ascendancy. Even the priesthood in Greece
(for there there was no danger of the political predominance of an
hereditary sacerdotal caste, as in Egypt), even the priesthood, by
maintaining ancient manners, customs and laws, on which indeed their own
existence depended, exerted a mild and beneficial influence in the
state; for they at least formed a counterpoise to a mere selfish
aristocracy, and sometimes opposed the last barrier to democratic
tyranny.
The Mysteries too, in particular, which, although they did not at a
later period, as in their origin, diffuse a sounder morality than the
popular mythology, yet certainly inculcated more serious doctrines, and
more spiritual views of life, exerted, together with the Olympic and
Isthmian games, a gentle, and on the whole, a very beneficial,
influence, and served as a bond of connection between the variously
divided and discordant nations of Greece. Nay these public and gymnastic
games, which were celebrated in the festive poetry of the Greeks, served
to knit more firmly the bond of national union, so exceedingly loose
among this people; and many times, in a moment of danger, has the oracle
of Delphi roused and united all the sons of Hellas. These political
decisions of the oracle were not false, so far at least as in these
critical moments they gave no other counsel to the Greeks, but that of
patriotic courage, prudent firmness, and national concord.
Widely dissimilar as were the Greek tribes and nations in their original
seats and settlements, their occupations and modes of living, their
manners and political institutions, they differed not less in the
primitive elements of their civilization. The Phoenician Cadmus,
according to tradition, brought the alphabet, and with it, undoubtedly,
many other elements of knowledge to the city of Thebes--the Egyptian
Cecrops laid the ground-work of the old Athenian manners and
government--the Thracian Orpheus, though his doctrines had much analogy
to those of Egypt, founded the widely diffused Mysteries that bore his
name, while he sought by song to mitigate the terrors of the lower
world, and to overcome the powers of darkness. To these many other names
might be added; and among them many which did not deduce their descent,
like most indeed, from Phoenicia and Egypt, but are clearly to be
traced, as well as the doctrines and sacred customs they introduced, to
the North; and, though they sprang more immediately from Asiatics on the
northern side of the Caucasus, they were nearly allied to the nations
dwelling further towards the North and West. The profound and concurrent
researches of many modern scholars have adduced such numerous and
repeated proofs from antiquity, of the existence of this Northern
stratum in Greek antiquities, that this branch of Grecian history,
formerly neglected, must no longer pass unobserved. The Greeks were of
very various extraction; and in the different countries of Greece we may
distinguish, along with the Hellenes, two if not more, principal
nations, clearly distinct from the former. These were the Thracians in
the Northern provinces, or at least in those immediately contiguous--a
race for the most part of Northern descent, and, together with the
Indian, the most numerous on the earth according to Herodotus--perhaps
of the same origin with the nations on the banks of the Danube, or even
those further northward. There were, next, the Pelasgi, the real
aborigines of Greece, the authors of those gigantic walls and
constructions, which are known in Italy by the name of Cyclopean, and in
Greece by that of Pelasgic, and some of which still exist, besides
several others that existed in the Peloponnesus, and which are mentioned
by the ancients. These Aborigines, or this primitive race of people,
occur in many countries under the same, or at least very similar,
traits--to them we must ascribe those monuments of architecture we have
just spoken of, a certain knowledge of metals, some rude religious
rites, without any mythology, which was only of later origin, nay
without any names of specific divinities;--human sacrifices--manners and
customs, if not absolutely savage, still very rude and barbarous, and a
constant restlessness and a disposition to roam. Deucalion alone is to
be considered as the ancestor of the Hellenes, as all the noble families
of kings and heroes derived their descent from him, and the later tribes
of Greece, the AEolians, the Dorians, and Ionians, took their names from
his sons. According to every indication, this people would appear to be
a Caucasian race of Asiatics, of Indian, or at least of a cognate,
origin. When these Hellenes, AEolians and Dorians, had taken possession
of Thessaly, of the adjacent countries, and the Peloponnesus, and had
there formed settlements, the Pelasgi were every where dispossessed, or
oppressed, and thrown into the back-ground. But they certainly were not
entirely extirpated, nor did they emigrate in full numbers; and it is
beyond a doubt that various causes contributed to unite the old and new
inhabitants of Greece; for here intermarriages were not entirely
prohibited and rigidly prevented, as in India or Egypt, by the
institution of castes; and the two nations were gradually formed into
one race and one people, according as the circumstances or situation of
one country or the other favoured such an union. And hence we can
understand why Herodotus, for example, should have attributed to the
Ionians in particular much that was Pelasgic, as if under this new
denomination they were in all essential points the ancient Pelasgi, or
had mingled more with the latter, and were not of such a pure Hellenic
race as the Dorians: for in other respects, the Pelasgi and Hellenes are
represented as being originally two perfectly distinct nations. The
people of Thrace, too, although they continued as a separate nation to a
much later period, undoubtedly mingled considerably with the Hellenic
tribes that inhabited the borders of Thrace, or that lived among the
inhabitants of that country.
The primitive inhabitants of Greece were in general extremely rude and
barbarous in their manners and tenets; until the noble race of
Prometheus, the sons of Deucalion, who had come from the regions of
Mount Caucasus, and colonies still more civilized that had emigrated
from Phoenicia, Egypt, and other countries of Asia, exerted their
beneficial influence, and gave by degrees an entirely new form and
fashion to the people of Greece, and even to the country itself. For
that region, which afterwards presented so beautiful an aspect, which
was so richly endowed, and splendidly embellished by the hand of Nature,
was, until it had been well cultivated and fertilized, and until the
power of boisterous elements had been subdued, a complete wilderness,
and the scene of many violent revolutions of nature; which were very
naturally considered as a sort of partial and feeble imitation of the
destructive and universal flood of elder times, when water was the
all-prevailing element on the earth. In Greece there was an old obscure
tradition, of the original existence of a continent called Lectonia,
which occupied a portion of the subsequent Greek sea, and of which the
islands form now the only existing remains; the rest of the continent
having been sunk and destroyed, at the very time when the Black Sea,
which had been originally connected with the Caspian, burst through the
Bosphorus, and precipitated its waves into the Mediterranean. At this
very remote period, all Thessaly was one vast lake, till, in a natural
catastrophe of a similar kind, the river Peneus burst its way through a
defile of rocks, and found an outlet into the sea. The lake Copais in
Baeotia in an inundation overflowed the whole circumjacent flat country
in the time of Ogyges; and thus the name and tradition of Ogyges served
afterwards to designate the epoch of those early floods. At a later
period, and when the civilization of the Greeks was more advanced, in
the true flourishing era of their power and literature, the two
principal races among this people, the Ionians and the Dorians, were
completely opposed to each other in arts and manners, in government,
modes of thinking, and even in philosophy. Athens was at the head of the
Ionic race; Sparta took the lead in the Doric confederacy; and this
internal discord did not a little contribute towards the utter ruin of
Greece, and towards the consummation of that internal and external
anarchy that dragged all things into its abyss.
Now that we enter upon that period when all the great political events
have been sufficiently described, and partly, at least, set forth with
incomparable talent, by the great classical historians of antiquity; by
a multitude of writers that have borrowed from that source, or have
worked upon those lofty models; it would be idle to repeat what is
universally known, and to recount, in long historical detail, how, after
contests and struggles of less importance, the glory of Greece burst
forth in all its lustre in her resistance to Persian might; how, soon
after, she exhausted her best strength in the great Peloponnesian civil
war betwixt Sparta and Athens, and how both those states ruined
themselves in the idle ambition of maintaining the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} as
they called it, or the superiority and preponderance in the political
system of Greece;--how, after the short dominion of the Thebans under
their single great man, Epaminondas, the Macedonians became lords of the
ascendant, and ruled for a longer time with despotic sway;--and finally
how Greece obtained an apparent freedom under the generous protection of
Rome, and was soon after reduced to a state of permanent vassalage under
her prefects and her legions. This instructive and, we may well say,
eternal history may be read, studied, and meditated on in all its ample
details and living clearness in the pages of the great classical
historians of antiquity. The knowledge of all these historical facts
must be here pre-supposed, and I must confine myself to a rapid and
lively sketch of the intellectual character and moral life of the
Greeks, in their relation to the rest of mankind, and according to the
place which they occupy in universal history.
In this point of view, all that is universally interesting in the
character, life, and intellect of the Greeks will be best and most
easily classed under three categories. The first is the _divine_ in
their system of art, or the mythology that was so closely interwoven
with their traditions and their fictions, their whole arrangement of
life, their customs, and political institutions; and which so much
excites our astonishment and admiration. The second is their science of
Nature--a science so natural to them, and which embraced all the objects
of Nature and the world, as well as of history, and even man himself,
with the utmost clearness of perception, sagacity of intellect, and
beauty and animation of expression--a science that, from its earliest
infancy down to its complete perfection in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle, has established the lasting glory of the Greeks, and has had
a deep and abiding influence on the human mind, through all succeeding
ages. The third and last category, in this portrait of the Greek
intellect and character, is the political rationalism in Greece's latter
days, founded on those maxims and principles which had finally triumphed
after the most violent contest of parties, and under which the state was
entirely swayed by the arts of eloquence and the power of rhetoric, now
become a real political authority in society. All that can be said truly
to the honour of the ancient Greek states, and their Republican virtues,
has been briefly noticed above. Their decay and general anarchy, and
final subjugation by Rome, may be well accounted for by the decline of
the Greek philosophy, and the consequent corruption of morals and
doctrine--by that dominion of sophists, unparalleled at least in ancient
history, and whose pernicious art of a false rhetoric was the bane of
public life, government, and all national greatness.