The history of the Grecian states commences about 1800 years before
Christ, when the Egyptians on the opposite side of the Mediterranean
were in a high state of civilization; but the portion of history which
precedes 884 B. C. is understood to be fabulous, and entitled to
little credit.
According to the Greek poets, the original inhabitants of the country,
denominated Pelasgians, were a race of savages, who lived in caves,
and clothed themselves with the skins of the wild beasts. Uranus, an
Egyptian prince, landed in the country, and became the father of a
family of giants, named Titans, who rebelled against, and dethroned
him. His son Saturn, who reigned in his stead, in order to prevent the
like misfortune from befalling himself, ordered all his own children
to be put to death as soon as they were born. But one named Jupiter
was concealed by the mother, and reared in the island of Crete, from
which in time he returned, and deposed his father. The Titans, jealous
of this new prince, rebelled against him, but were vanished and
expelled for ever from the country.
Jupiter divided his dominions with his brothers Neptune and Pluto.
The countries which he reserved to himself he governed with great
wisdom, holding his court on Mount Olympus, a hill in Thessaly, 9000
feet in height, and the loftiest in Greece. Any truth which there
might be in the story of the Titans and their princes was completely
disguised by the poets, and by the popular imagination. Saturn,
Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, were looked back to, not as mortals, but
as deities; and the top of Mount Olympus was supposed to be the
heavenly residence of gods, by whom the affairs of mortals were
governed. And for ages after the dawn of philosophy, these deified
sons of Saturn, and numberless others connected with them, were the
objects of the national worship, not only among the Greeks, but also
among the Romans.
At an uncertain but very early date an Asiatic people named the
Hellenes immigrated into Greece, in some cases expelling the Pelasgi,
and in others intermingling with them, so that in process of time all
the inhabitants of Greece came to be called Hellenes. They were,
however, divided into several tribes the principal of which were the
Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians, each of whom spoke a dialect differing
in some respect from those made use of by the others. These dialects
were named the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic, in reference to the tribes
which used them; and a fourth, which was afterwards formed from the
Ionic, was named the Attic, from its being spoken by the inhabitants
of Attica.
In the year 1856 B. C., Inachus a Phœnician adventurer, is said to
have arrived in Greece at the head of a small band of his countrymen.
Phœnicia, a petty state on the coast of the Mediterranean, in Asia
Minor, was at this time one of a few countries, including Egypt and
Assyria, in which some degree of civilization prevailed, while all the
rest of the people of the earth remained in their original barbarism
like the Pelasgians before the supposed arrival of Uranus. Navigation
for the purposes of commerce, and the art of writing, are said to have
originated with the Phœnicans. On their arrival in Greece, Inachus and
his friends founded the city of Argos, at the head of what is now
called the Gulf of Napoli, in the Peloponnesus.
Three hundred years after this event (1556 B. C.), a colony, led by an
Egyptian named Cecrops, arrived in Attica, and founded the celebrated
city of Athens, fortifying a high rock which rose precipitously above
the site afterwards occupied by the town.
Egypt is situated in the north-eastern part of Africa. It is bounded
on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and is watered by the great
river Nile, the periodical overflowings of which by supplying the
moisture necessary for vegetation, render the soil very fertile. From
this country, which had at a very early period made considerable
advances in some of the arts and sciences (see ANCIENT HISTORY),
Cecrops imparted much valuable knowledge to the rude inhabitants of
Attica, whom he had persuaded or obliged to acknowledge him as their
chief or king. He placed his rocky fastness under the protection of an
Egyptian goddess, from whose Greek name, _Athena_ (afterwards changed
by the Latins into Minerva), the city which subsequently rose around
the eminence was called Athens.
About the year 1493 B. C., Cadmus, a Phœnician, founded the city of
Thebes in Bœotia; and among other useful things which he communicated
to the Greeks, he is said to have taught them alphabetical writing,
although it is certain that that art did not come into common use in
Greece until several centuries after this period.
The city of Corinth, situated on the narrow isthmus which connects the
Peloponnesus with the mainland of Greece, was founded in the year 1520
B. C., and from its very advantageous position on the arm of the sea
to which it anciently gave its name, but which is now known as the
Gulf of Lepanto, it very soon became a place of considerable
commercial importance. Sparta or Lacedæmon, the celebrated capital of
Laconia in the Peloponnesus, is said to have been founded about 1520
B. C. by Lelex, an Egyptian.
In the year 1485 B. C., an Egyptian named Danaus, accompanied by a
party of his countrymen, arrived at Argos, the inhabitants of which
must have been at that period in an exceedingly rude state, since it
is said that he excited their gratitude so much by teaching them to
dig wells, when the streams from which they were supplied with water
were dried up with the heat, that they elected him as their king.
Fully more than a century after this period (about 1350 B. C.),
Pelops, the son of a king of Phrygia, a country in Asia Minor, settled
in that part of Greece which was afterwards called from him
Peloponnesus, or the island of Pelops, where he married the daughter
of one of the native princes, whom he afterwards succeeded on the
throne. In the course of his long reign, he found means to strengthen
and greatly extend his influence in Greece, by forming matrimonial
alliances between various branches of his own house and the other
royal families of the Peloponnesus. Agamemnon, king of Mycenæ, in
Argolis, who was, according to the poet Homer, the commander-in-chief
of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and Menelaus, king of Sparta, on
account of whose wrongs that war was undertaken, were descended from
this Phrygian adventurer.
Hercules, a Theban prince, was another of the descendants of Pelops.
The numerous and extraordinary feats of strength and valor of Hercules
excited the admiration of his cotemporaries, and being afterwards
exaggerated and embellished by the poets, caused him at length to be
regarded as a person endowed with supernatural powers, and even to be
worshiped as a god.
Theseus succeeded his father on the Athenian throne (1234 B. C.), and
by his wise regulations greatly consolidated the strength and
increased the prosperity of his kingdom. Cecrops, the founder of
Athens, had divided Attica into twelve districts, each of which
possessed its own magistracy and judicial tribunals. As the country
advanced in wealth and population, these districts became less closely
connected with each other, and at the period of the accession of
Theseus, they could hardly be regarded in any other light than as so
many little independent communities, whose perpetual disputes kept the
whole district in broils and confusion. But Theseus had influence
enough with all parties to obtain their consent to the abolition of
the separate jurisdictions, and to the fixing of all civil and
judicial authority in the capital. He at the same time voluntarily
resigned into their hands a portion of his own power. Having divided
the people into three classes――the nobles, the artisans, and the
cultivators of the soil――he intrusted the first of these with the
administration of public affairs, and the dispensation of justice,
while he conferred upon every freeman or citizen, without distinction
of class, a vote in the legislative assemblies. The command of the
army, and the presidency of the state, he retained in his own person.
To strengthen the political union of the various districts of his
kingdom by the tie of a common religion, he instituted a solemn
festival, to be celebrated annually at Athens by all the inhabitants
of Attica, in honor of Minerva, the tutelary deity of the city. This
festival he denominated Panathenæ, or the Feast of all the Athenians,
the name by which the whole of the people of Attica were thenceforth
called.
The wise and liberal policy of Theseus caused Attica to advance
considerably beyond the other states of Greece in prosperity and
civilization; and the ancient historian, Thucydides, informs us that
the Athenians were the first of the Greeks who laid aside the military
dress and arms, which till now had been constantly worn. The example
of Athens was not lost on the other Grecian communities, all of which
gradually adopted, to a greater or less extent, those political
institutions which had conferred so many advantages upon Attica.
Notwithstanding the judicious and exemplary conduct of Theseus in the
early part of the reign, he appears to have afterwards allowed his
restless and adventurous disposition to hurry him into many
extravagances, and even crimes, by which he forfeited the respect of
his people, and brought disgrace and suffering on his latter years. If
we may believe the traditionary accounts, he accompanied Hercules in
some of his celebrated expeditions, and assisted by Pirithoüs, a king
of Thessaly, engaged in many martial and predatory adventures,
conformably rather with the very imperfect morality and rude manners
of the age, than with his own previous character. There reigned in
Lacedæmon at this period a king named Tyndarus, who had a beautiful
daughter called Helen, and according to the ancient historians,
Theseus and his friend Pirithous formed the design of stealing away
this young lady, and a princess of Epirus named Proserpine. They
succeeded in carrying off Helen; but in their attempt to obtain
Proserpine, they fell into the hands of her father, by whom Pirithoüs
was put to death, and Theseus thrown into prison. Meanwhile, Castor
and Pollux, the twin-brothers of Helen, who were afterwards deified,
and whose names have been bestowed upon one of the signs of the Zodiac
(Gemini), rescued their sister from the men to whom Theseus had given
her in charge, and ravaged Attica in revenge for the injury they had
received from its king.
Theseus was afterwards released from imprisonment by the assistance of
Hercules, and returned home; but the Athenians had become so offended
with his conduct, and were so angry at his having exposed them to ill
treatment from the Lacedæmonians by his wicked attempt upon Helen,
that they refused to receive him again as their sovereign. He
therefore withdrew into exile, and soon after died in the island of
Scyros. The Athenian people, however, never forgot the benefits he had
in his wiser days conferred upon the state; and many centuries after
his death, his bones, or some which were supposed to be his, were
conveyed to Athens with great pomp, and a splendid temple was erected
above them to his memory.
The Lacedæmonian princess who was stolen away by Theseus afterwards
became the occasion of a celebrated war. The fame of her great beauty
having spread far and wide, many of the princes of Greece asked her
from her father Tyndarus in marriage; but he, being fearful of
incurring the enmity of the rejected suitors, declined showing a
preference for any of them. Assembling them all, he bound them by an
oath to acquiesce in the selection which Helen herself should make,
and to protect her against any attempts which might afterwards be made
to carry her off from the husband of her choice. Helen gave the
preference to Menelaus, a grandson of Pelops, and this successful
suitor, on the death of Tyndarus, was raised to the Spartan throne.
* * * * *
At this period, in the north-western part of Asia Minor, on the shores
of the Hellespont and the Ægean Seas, there existed a kingdom, the
capital of which was a large and well-fortified city named Troy, or
Ilium. Priam the king of Troy, had a son whose name was Paris; and
this young chief, in the course of a visit to Greece, resided for a
time in Sparta at the court of Menelaus, who gave the Asiatic stranger
a very friendly reception. Charmed with Helen’s beauty, Paris employed
the opportunity afforded by a temporary absence of her husband to gain
her affections, and persuade her to elope with him to Troy. It was
not, according to the old poets, to his personal attractions, great as
they were, that Paris owed his success on this occasion, but to the
aid of the goddess of Love, whose favor he had won by assigning to her
the palm of beauty, on an occasion when it was contested between her
and two other female deities.
When Menelaus returned home, he was naturally wroth at finding his
hospitality so ill requited; and after having in vain endeavored, both
by remonstrances and threats, to induce the Trojans to send him back
his queen, he applied to the princes who had formerly been Helen’s
lovers, and called upon them to aid him according to their oaths, in
recovering her from her seducer. They obeyed the summons; and all
Greece being indignant at the insult offered to Menelaus, a general
muster of the forces of the various states took place at Aulis, a
seaport town of Bœotia preparatory to their crossing the Ægean to the
Trojan shore. This is supposed to have happened in the year 1194 B. C.
Of the chiefs assembled on this occasion, the most celebrated were
Agamemnon, king of Mycene; Menelaus, king of Sparta; Ulysses, king of
Ithaca; Nestor, king of Pylos; Achilles, son of the king of Thessaly;
Ajax, of Salamis; Diomedes, of Ætolia; and Idomeneus, of Crete.
Agamemnon, the brother of the injured Menelaus, was elected
commander-in-chief of the confederated Greeks. According to some
ancient authors, this general was barbarous enough to sacrifice his
daughter Iphigenia, to induce the gods to send a favoring gale to the
Grecian fleet when it was detained by contrary winds in the port of
Aulis; but as the earliest writers respecting the Trojan war make no
mention of this unnatural act, it is to be hoped that it never was
performed.
The Grecian armament consisted of about 1200 vessels, with from 50 to
120 men in each, and the army which warred against Troy is supposed to
have amounted altogether to about 100,000 men. The Trojans, although
reinforced by auxiliary bands from Assyria, Thrace, and Asia Minor,
were unable to withstand the Greeks in the open country, and they
therefore soon retired within the walls of their city.
In those early times men were unskilled in the art of reducing
fortified places, and the Greeks knew of no speedier way of taking
Troy than blockading it till the inhabitants should be compelled by
famine to surrender. But here a new difficulty arose. No arrangements
had been made for supplying the invaders with provisions during a
lengthened seige; and after they had plundered and laid waste the
surrounding country, they began to be in as great danger of starvation
as the besieged. The supplies which arrived from Greece were scanty
and irregular, and it became necessary to detach a part of the
beleaguering forces to cultivate the plains of the Chersonesus of
Thrace, in order to raise crops for the support of themselves and
their brethren in arms.
The Grecian army being thus weakened, the Trojans were encouraged to
make frequent sallies, in which they were led generally by the valiant
Hector, Priam’s eldest and noblest son. Many skirmishes took place,
and innumerable deeds of individual heroism were performed, all of
which led to no important result, for the opposing armies were so
equally matched, that neither could obtain any decisive advantage over
the other. At length, after a siege of no less than ten years, in the
course of which some of the most distinguished leaders on both sides
were slain, Troy was taken, its inhabitants slaughtered, and its
edifices burnt and razed to the ground.
According to the poets, it was by a stratagem that this famous city
was at last overcome. They tell us that the Greeks constructed a
wooden horse of prodigious size, in the body of which they concealed a
number of armed men, and then retired towards the sea-shore, to induce
the enemy to believe that the besiegers had given up the enterprise,
and were about to return home. Deceived by this manœuvre, the Trojans
brought the gigantic horse into the city, and the men who had been
concealed within it, stealing out in the night-time, unbarred the
gates, and admitted the Grecian army within the walls. The siege of
Troy forms the subject of Homer’s sublime poem, the ‘Iliad,’ in which
the real events of the war are intermingled with many fictitious and
supernatural incidents.
* * * * *
The Greek princes discovered that their triumph over Troy was dearly
paid for by their subsequent sufferings, and the disorganization of
their kingdoms at home. Ulysses, if we may believe the poets, spent
ten years in wandering over seas and lands before arriving in his
island of Ithaca. Others of the leaders died or were shipwrecked on
their way home, and several of those who succeeded in reaching their
own dominions, found their thrones occupied by usurpers, and were
compelled to return to their vessels, and seek in distant lands a
place of rest and security for their declining years. But the fate of
Agamemnon, the renowned general of the Greeks, was the most deplorable
of all. On his return to Argos, he was assassinated by his wife
Clytemnestra, who had formed an attachment during his absence to
another person. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, was driven into exile, but
afterwards returned to Argos, and putting his mother and her
accomplices to death, established himself upon the throne. About
eighty years after the termination of the Trojan war, an extensive
revolution took place in the affairs of Greece, in consequence of the
subjugation of nearly the whole Peloponnesus by the descendants of
Hercules. That hero, who was a member of the royal family of Mycenæ or
Argos, had been driven into exile by some more successful candidate
for the throne of that state. After the hero’s death, his children
sought refuse in Doris, the king of which became subsequently so much
attached to Hyllus, the eldest son of Hercules, that he constituted
him the heir of his throne. Twice the Heraclidæan princes
unsuccessfully attempted to establish themselves in the sovereignty of
the Peloponnesus, which they claimed as their right; but on the third
trial, they accomplished their object. In the year 1104 B. C., three
brothers named Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, said to have
been the great-grandsons of Hyllus, invaded the Peloponnesus at the
head of the Dorians, and conquered the greater part of it, with the
exception of the province of Arcadia, the mountainous character of
which enabled its inhabitants to defend it with success against the
invaders.
Temenus obtained the kingdom of Argos, Cresphontes established himself
in Messenia, and as Aristodemus had died during the war, his twin sons
Eurysthenes and Procles shared between them the throne of Sparta. The
thrones of Corinth and Elis were occupied by other branches of the
Heraclidæan family. The Dorian troops were rewarded with the lands of
the conquered inhabitants, who were driven out of the Peloponnesus, or
reduced to slavery. Great numbers of the Peloponnesians, who were
expatriated by the Dorian invaders, passed over into Asia Minor, where
they founded several colonies in a district afterwards called _Æolia_,
from the name of the people by whom these colonies were established.
Others took refuge in Attica, where the Athenians received them in a
friendly manner. This, it would appear, gave offence to the new rulers
of the Peloponnesian states, and war was commenced between the Dorians
and the Athenians. In the year 1070 B. C., Attica was invaded by a
numerous army of the Peloponnesians, and Athens itself seemed menaced
with destruction. This emergency produced a display of patriotic
devotion on the part of Codrus, the Athenian king, which has rarely
been paralleled in the annals of mankind, and deserves to be held in
everlasting remembrance:――
At Delphi in Phocis there was a temple of Apollo, to the priests of
which the Greeks were wont to apply for information regarding future
events, in the same manner as the people of comparatively recent times
were accustomed to consult astrologers, soothsayers, and other artful
imposters on similar questions. Now Codrus had learned that the
Peloponnesians had received at Delphi a prophetical response, to the
effect that they should not be victorious in the war, if they did not
kill the Athenian king. Determined to save his country at the expense
of his own life, Codrus disguised himself in a peasant’s dress, and
entering the Peloponnesian camp, provoked a quarrel with a soldier, by
whom he was killed.
It was not long until the dead body was recognized to be that of the
Athenian king, and the Peloponnesians, remembering the condition on
which the oracle had promised them success, were afraid to continue
the contest any longer, and hastily retreated into their own
territories. The Athenians were filled with admiration when they heard
of the noble conduct of their monarch, and in the height of their
gratitude, they declared that none but Jupiter was worthy of being
their king after such a prince as Codrus.
It is supposed that they were partly induced to make this declaration
by finding the sons of Codrus evince an inclination to involve the
country in a civil war regarding the succession to the throne. The
Athenians therefore abolished royalty altogether, and appointed Medon,
Codrus’s eldest son, under the title of _Archon_, as chief magistrate
of the republic for life; the office to be hereditary in his family as
long as its duties should be performed to the satisfaction of the
people. And as Attica was overcrowded with the Peloponnesian refugees,
these, together with a large body of Athenians, were sent into Asia
Minor, under the charge of Androclus and Neleus, the younger sons of
Codrus, to plant colonies to the south of those already formed in
Æolia. The settlers founded twelve cities, some of which afterwards
rose to great wealth and splendor. _Ionia_ was the name bestowed upon
the district, in reference to the Ionic stock from which the Athenians
drew their descent.
Several Dorian colonies in Caria, a province still farther south than
Ionia, completed the range of Grecian settlements along the western
coast of Asia Minor. Cyprus, Rhodes, the coast of Thrace, and the
islands of the Ægean Sea, together with a considerable portion of
Italy and Sicily, and even of France and Spain, were also colonized by
bands of adventurers, who at various periods emigrated from Greece; so
that, in process of time, the Grecian race, language, religion,
institutions, and manners, instead of being confined to the
comparatively small country constituting Greece proper, were diffused
over a very extensive region, comprising the fairest portions of
Europe and of western Asia.
While this work of colonization was going forward, the parent states
of Greece were torn with internal dissensions, and were perpetually
harassing each other in wars, of which the objects and incidents are
now equally uncertain. Almost all that is known of the history of the
two centuries immediately following the death of Codrus is, that they
were characterized by great turbulence and confusion, and that, during
their lapse, many of the Grecian states and colonies followed the
example of Athens by abolishing monarchy. Others did not, till a later
period, become republican, and Sparta long retained the singular form
of regal government established there at the accession of the twin
brothers Eurysthenes and Procles, the descendants of whom continued
for several centuries to reign jointly in Lacedæmon, though,
practically speaking, no state of Greece was more thoroughly
republican in many important respects.
Greece had been all along divided into a number of independent states,
and after the abolition of kingly government, several of these were
split up into as many distinct republics as the state contained of
towns. These divisions of the country, and the obstacles which the
almost incessant wars interposed to a free communication between the
inhabitants of the different districts, necessarily prevented the
advancement of the Greeks in knowledge and civilization; but
fortunately, a king of Elis, named Iphitus, at length devised an
institution by which the people of all the Grecian states were
enabled, notwithstanding their quarrels and wars with one another, to
meet periodically on friendly terms, and communicate to each other
such information as might be useful for the improvement and welfare of
the whole.
This institution was the Olympic Festival. From a very remote period,
the Greeks had been accustomed to engage in contests of strength and
agility during their times of festivity, and also at the funerals of
distinguished personages. Iphitus conceived the idea of establishing a
periodical festival in his own dominions for the celebration of these
ancient games, and of religious rites in honor of Jupiter and
Hercules; and having obtained the authority of the Delphian oracle for
carrying his design into execution, he instituted the festival, and
appointed that it should be repeated every fourth year at Olympia, a
town of Elis.
To this festival he invited all the people of Greece; and that none
might be prevented from attending it by the wars in which any of the
states might be engaged, the Delphic oracle commanded that a general
armistice should take place for some time before and after each
celebration. The date of the establishment of the Olympic games (884
B. C.) was afterwards assumed by the Greeks as the epoch from which
they reckoned the progress of time; the four years intervening between
each recurrence of the festival being styled an _Olympiad_.
Three other institutions of a similar nature were afterwards
established: namely, the Isthmian Games, celebrated near Corinth; the
Pythian, at Delphi; and the Neméan, in Argolis. These took place on
the various years which intervened between the successive festivals at
Olympia; but although they acquired considerable celebrity, none of
them rose to the importance and splendor of that of Iphitus. The games
which were celebrated at the festivals consisted of foot and chariot
races, wrestling and boxing matches, and other contests requiring
strength and agility, together with competitions in poetry and music.
The victors were crowned with an olive wreath; an honor which it was
esteemed by the Greeks one of the highest objects of ambition to
attain.