[Sidenote: Plutarch's account of it.]

This is the main topic on which I claim to have shown strong reasons for

rejecting what Grote, Curtius, and even the recent sceptical historians

have accepted. They have all agreed in giving up such dates as 1184

B.C. for the siege of Troy, or 1104 B.C. for the Return of the

Heracleids[58:1]; and yet they accept 776 for the first Olympiad, and

736 for the first colony (Naxos) in Sicily, on nearly the same kind of

evidence. And they do this in spite of the most express evidence that

the list of Olympiads was edited or compiled _late_ (after 400 B.C.),

_and starting from no convincing evidence_, by Hippias of Elis. This

passage from Plutarch's _Life of Numa_, which I cited and expounded in

an article upon the Olympiads in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ which

I have reprinted in the Appendix to this book, is so capital that it

shows either ignorance or prejudice to overlook its importance. 'To be

accurate,' says Plutarch, 'as to the chronology [of Numa], is difficult,

and especially what is inferred from the Olympic victors, whose register

they say that Hippias the Eleian published late, starting from nothing

really trustworthy[59:1].' Nor is it possible to hold that this was some

sudden and undue scepticism in the usually believing Plutarch; for I

showed at length that the antiquarian Pausanias, whose interest in very

old things was of the strongest, could find at Olympia no dated monument

older than the thirty-third Olympiad. If he had seen an old register

upon stone, he would most certainly have mentioned it, nor can I find in

any extant author any direct evidence that such a thing existed. I

predicted confidently, when the recent excavations began, that no such

list, or fragment of a list, would be found, and negatively at least, my

prediction was verified[59:2].

[Sidenote: The date of Pheidon of Argos]

[Sidenote: revised by E. Curtius]

§ 30. It is curious, moreover, that on one point this traditional

chronology had been rejected, and an important date in early Greek

history revised, by Ernst Curtius; and yet he holds to the tradition in

every other case. The date of Pheidon of Argos, the famous tyrant who

first coined money in Greece, and who celebrated an Olympic contest in

spite of Sparta and Elis, was placed by most of the old chronologers in

747 B.C., the eighth Olympiad, I believe, because Pheidon counted as the

tenth from Temenus, the first Heracleid king of Argos. All the rational

inferences, however, to be made from his life and work pointed to a much

later date[60:1]; so that by a simple emendation the twenty-eighth

Olympiad--also an irregular festival, according to Hippias' list--was

substituted; and thus Curtius has made a most instructive and

interesting combination, by which this tyrant and his relation to Sparta

become part of the rational development of Peloponnesian history.

[Sidenote: Since abandoned.]

[Sidenote: The authority of Ephorus]

There seems to be an agreement in the more recent historians[60:2] to

abandon even this gain, and go back to the old date,--probably because

such a step would imperil many other old dates, and cast the historians

into the turmoil of revising their traditional views. For when you once

root up one of these early dates, many others are bound to follow. The

uncertainty and hesitation of the critics seem now to arise from doubts

about the authority of Ephorus, from whom most of our knowledge is

ultimately derived[61:1]. As I have elsewhere said, I regard this

_Quellenkritik_ as little more than a convenient way of airing acuteness

and learning, and therefore highly useful for theses or exercises of

philological candidates for honours. But as regards what we can really

trace to Ephorus, concerning the date of Pheidon, the reforms of

Lycurgus, and other such questions, two separate inquiries must be

satisfied before we accept his word: first, what documents or other

evidence were accessible to Ephorus; secondly, with what honesty and

judgment did he use them? There are scholars who believe him implicitly,

and even believe implicitly statements which they have fathered upon him

by very doubtful inference. There are others who treat him with

contempt. There is even a third class which accepts him sometimes, and

rejects him at others, because he will not fit in with their

preconceived opinions.

[Sidenote: not first-rate.]

The question now before us is this: If Ephorus did put Pheidon in the

eighth Olympiad, or about 747 B.C., upon what authority did he do so?

Had he any evidence to go upon different from that which we can still

name and criticise? I will here add my opinion to the many which the

reader of German can consult for himself. Ephorus was a pupil of

Isocrates, brought up to consider style and effect the main objects of

the historian. To this he added the usual prejudices of the Greek for

his native city, Kyme, which he glorifies upon every occasion. Thus it

is to Ephorus that we owe the absurd date of the founding of the Italian

Cumæ (1050 B.C.) as an evidence of the early greatness of the Æolic

city. It has been shown by A. Bauer and by Busolt that, in telling the

story of the Persian Wars, Ephorus (as appears in the second-hand

Diodorus) not only rearranged facts in such order as seemed to him

effective, but often invented details. Whenever he adds to the narrative

of Herodotus, this seems to be the case. The night attack of the Greeks

on the Persians at Thermopylæ (Diod. xi. 9) is a signal instance of

this, not to speak of the rhetorical display, which is so widely

different from the admirable and simple narrative of Herodotus. All such

early history, therefore, as depends upon Ephorus, is to me highly

suspicious.

[Sidenote: Archias, the founder of Syracuse,]

There is another 'tenth Temenid,' specially connected in the legends

with Pheidon as a contemporary and opponent, Archias of Corinth, who is

said to have led the first colony to Sicily. I have no doubt that the

same chronography which placed Pheidon in the eighth Olympiad (747 B.C.)

placed Archias there, and, allowing for a few years of domestic

struggles, sent him to Sicily in 735 B.C.[62:1] To my mind this legend

is quite unhistorical, nay, it may possibly have falsified real history;

for though it may have suited the national vanity of Antiochus of

Syracuse and other old historians to magnify their own city by putting

it first, or practically first, in the list, the whole situation points

to a different course of events.

[Sidenote: associated with legends of Corcyra and Croton.]

[Sidenote: Thucydides counts downward from this imaginary date.]

Archias, when on his way, is said to have left a party to settle at

Corcyra; he is also said to have helped the founder of Croton. It is

surely improbable that Greek adventurers in search of good land and

convenient harbours should fix on Sicily, passing by the sites of

Tarentum, Sybaris, Croton, and Locri. That these sites were fully

appreciated is shown by the flourishing cities which the legend asserts

to have been founded in the generation succeeding the origin of

Syracuse. Will any unprejudiced man believe all this most improbable

history? The one fact which the old chronologers of Syracuse could not

get over was this: from time immemorial Greek ships arriving in Sicily

offered sacrifices at the temple of Apollo Archegetes at Naxos. Hence

Naxos must have been the first settlement. In the following year, says

Thucydides, Syracuse was founded; and then all the dates which he copies

from his authority--most likely Antiochus--are, as usual, downward from

the date of Syracuse, and almost all in numbers divisible by five.

I will pause a moment, and give the reader a summary of the conclusions

to which critical scholars in general have given their assent. It is

conceded that Thucydides must have used Antiochus of Syracuse as his

principal source in narrating the archæology of Sicily. This opinion,

first stated by Niebuhr, has been argued out fully by Wölfflin, and

accepted with some reluctance by Holm, Classen (the best editor of

Thucydides), and Busolt[64:1].

[Sidenote: Antiochus of Syracuse]

[Sidenote: not trustworthy;]

[Sidenote: his dates illusory,]

Even the language of Thucydides in these chapters shows phrases which we

recognize in the fragments of Antiochus cited by Strabo. The prominence

of Syracuse, the city of Antiochus, and the mention of the constitutions

of the new cities, are also features pointing to the work of Antiochus.

In his special article Busolt has shown with great acuteness that all

the later authorities, cited by some in support of Thucydides' data,

really rest upon him or upon Antiochus[64:2]. What was the character of

this author? He was an early contemporary of Herodotus, and is never

cited by the ancients as a specimen of critical acumen, but rather

as possessing special knowledge on an outlying part of the Greek

world. We have, moreover, his opening words quoted by Dionysius of

Halicarnassus[65:1], which are most important in the present connection:

+Antiochos Xenophaneos tade synegrapse peri Italiês ek tôn archaiôn

logôn ta pistotata kai saphestata+. In other words he used oral

tradition for his facts, and this he also did in his account of early

Sicily[65:2]. He was, at best, one of the most serious, if you please,

of the _logopoioi_, or chroniclers, who are always being contrasted with

critical historians such as Thucydides. Such being the state of the

facts, we are compelled to accept as our only authority for the early

traditions concerning Sicily this solitary chronicler, who seems to have

had no difficulty in fixing dates centuries before the first immigration

of the Greeks. In a loose thinker of this kind, patriotism may be fairly

assigned as a strong moving cause in determining his facts and dates.

Indeed, when Archias is said by this Antiochus to have aided at the

founding of Croton, Grote and Holm are quite ready to set it down to his

desire to magnify Syracuse. When Ephorus of Kyme sets down the Italian

colony of his city (Cumæ) at 1050 B.C., all critical historians reject

this date upon the same ground. If this criticism be indeed valid, are

we only to use it when we choose, or to apply it generally? Busolt shows

(in his article) that the actual year of the founding of Syracuse (and

hence of the other Sicilian colonies) cannot be regarded as certain.

Surely he and his brother critics stop short illogically, and refrain

from pushing their doubts as far as they are bound to do. To me not only

the exact year, but the exact generation--it is by generations and round

numbers that Antiochus counted--is quite uncertain; and we are thrown

back on arguments from general probability such as those which I have

indicated.

[Sidenote: though supported by Thucydides,]

[Sidenote: who is not omniscient.]

§ 31. It is the authority of Thucydides which has imposed upon the

learned an artificial chronology. The scholar is often wanting in

acuteness. There are, I suppose, plenty of philologers who believe

Thucydides far more implicitly than their Bible, and because he appears

careful and trustworthy in contemporary affairs, actually assume that he

must be equally credible in matters wholly beyond his ken. I suppose

they imagine, though they do not state it, that the historian consulted

State archives in Sicily, and set down his conclusions from a careful

analysis of their evidence. We have no trace or mention of any such

systematic archives; and if the historian indeed confined himself to

these, what shall we say to his assertion that the Sikels passed from

Italy to Sicily just three hundred years before the advent of the

Greeks? How could he know this? But the solemn manner of the man and his

habitual reticence concerning his authorities have wonderfully imposed

upon the credulity of the learned.

[Sidenote: Credulity in every sceptic.]

Nobody rates Thucydides higher than I do, wherever he is really

competent to give an unbiassed opinion. His accuracy is not, to my mind,

impeached by the fact that he is found to have made a slovenly copy of a

public document lately recovered on the Acropolis[67:1]. The variations,

though many, are trifling, and do not affect the substance of the

document. Yet this may do more to discredit him with the pedants than

what seems to me dangerous credulity in larger questions. He is hardly

to be blamed; no man escapes entirely from the prejudices of his age.

The most sceptical in some points, as I have already noticed[67:2], let

their credulity transpire in others. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose

whole life was spent in framing sceptical arguments against early

history, is found to accept the unity of authorship and unity of design

of the Homeric poems. Grote, so careful and precise in accepting

documents, subscribes to the genuineness of the Platonic _Letters_,

which no other competent scholar admits; and so I suppose that in every

sceptic, however advanced, some nook of belief will be found, often far

less rational than the faith he has rejected.

[Sidenote: Its probable occurrence in ancient critics.]

[Sidenote: Value of Hippias' work.]

[Sidenote: Even Eratosthenes counts _downward_.]

[Sidenote: Clinton's warning.]

This truth, which applies to modern scholars so signally, applies no

less to the ancient critics of the Greek legends. When we find that

Thucydides accepts a piece of ancient history like this account of the

Greek settlement of Sicily, we must first of all be sure that he is not

the victim of a fit of acquiescence in an older chronicler. When we hear

that Aristotle and Polybius, two great and sceptical men, accepted the

Olympiads, we must first know exactly what they said about the earlier

dates[68:1], and then we must be assured that they did not simply

acquiesce in the work of Hippias. For this Hippias was clearly a man

writing with a deliberate policy. He must produce a complete catalogue;

he must make his documents conform to it. And so there is evidence in

Pausanias that he not only succeeded in his purpose, but that he

modified or re-wrote certain inscriptions which we may suppose did not

suit his purpose. I refuse to put faith in such an authority, and I

refuse to accept as the first real date in Greek history an epoch fixed

by all the Greek chronologers in a downward calculation from the Trojan

war,--as may be seen even in the scientific and accurate Eratosthenes.

His fragments, written at a time when there really existed Greek

science, in a day rich with all the learning of previous centuries,

still manifest the old faith in the Trojan war, the Return of the

Heracleids, the colonization of Ionia, and the guardianship of Lycurgus,

as events to be fixed both absolutely and in relation to one another,

and to serve as a basis for all the succeeding centuries down to the day

of real and contemporary records. 'In these early dates and eras,' says

Fynes Clinton in a remarkable passage[69:1], 'by a singular error in

reasoning, the authority of Eratosthenes is made to be binding upon his

predecessors; while those who come after him are taken for original and

independent witnesses in matters which they really derived from his

chronology. The numbers given by Isocrates for the Return of the

Heracleidæ[69:2] are repeated three times, and are more trustworthy; and

yet the critics try to correct them by the authority of Eratosthenes.'

§ 32. What, then, is the outcome of all this discussion?

[Sidenote: Summary of the discussion.]

The first three stages of Greek history are, so to speak, isolated, and

separated by two blank periods, one of which has to this day remained a

great gulf, over which no bridge has yet been constructed. Over the

second, which immediately precedes proper history, the Greeks made a

very elaborate bridge, which they adorned with sundry figures recovered

from vague tradition and arranged according to their fancy. But it is

only after this reconstructed epoch of transition that we can be sure of

our facts.

[Sidenote: The stage of pre-Homeric remains.]

[Sidenote: Prototype of the Greek temple.]

The first stage is that represented by the pre-historic remains, which,

though they are plainly very various in development, and therefore

probably in age, are yet by most of us classed together as 'without

father, mother, or descent,' discovering to us the earliest civilization

in Greek lands. But to assert this foundling character is perhaps too

sceptical a position. For there can hardly be any likelihood that the

Eastern parentage of this early luxury, suggested by the legends, will

hereafter be disproved. And now even the most extreme advocates of Greek

originality must allow this early intercourse with, and influence of,

the older civilizations. As to their effects upon historic Greek art,

there seemed to be a gap between the bee-hive tomb or fortress-wall and

the pillared temple, which was a 'great gulf fixed,' till Dr. Schliemann

found the doorways of the palace of Tiryns. They are all planned like a

temple _in antis_,--the earliest form, from which the _peripteral_

easily follows. And early vases are adorned with rude figures which may

be copies of old models such as those found at Mycenæ. But the

intermediate steps are still hopelessly obscure.

[Sidenote: Degrees in this stage.]

The earliest and rudest of these remains are not in Greece, but at the

island of Santorin, under the lava, and in the fort of Ilion (Troy)

excavated by Dr. Schliemann[71:1]. The more developed, both in

architectural skill and in ornamental designs, are in Argolis (Mycenæ,

Tiryns) and in Attica (Spata, Menidi). As I have already mentioned, this

civilization does not appear to be the same as that of the epic poems,

and the verdict of the learned declares that it dates from a long

anterior epoch. What occurred in Greece between the epoch of this

curious pre-Hellenic and, partially at least, imported culture, and the

age of Homer, none of us can as yet do more than guess[71:2]. But the

fact that the popular poetry chose for the scenes of its adventures the

very sites of this pre-historic culture, seems to show that the

importance of Troy, Mycenæ, and Tiryns either lasted down to the 'epic'

time, or was so recent as to hold the popular imagination.

[Sidenote: Probably not so old as is often supposed.]

[Sidenote: Mr. Petrie's evidence.]

On the whole, therefore, I am disposed to consider these pre-historic

splendours as not so extravagantly old,--surviving, perhaps, till 1000

B.C.; though of course the Trojan remains may be far older than the

Mycenæan. Duncker, in his very careful discussion[72:1], thinks the end

of this period came about 1100 B.C. I look upon this, in an author who

is always liberal with his figures, as a substantial agreement with me,

but I can now add a remarkable corroboration. Mr. Flinders Petrie,

coming fresh from a prolonged and scientific study of Egyptian

art-remains, has examined with care the pre-historic collections in

Greece, and has established[72:2] (1) a very early and widespread

communication between the peoples of the Ægean and Egypt; (2) a close

similarity, both in materials and workmanship, between the Mycenæan

ornaments and the Egyptian of about 1200-1000 B.C. The Egyptian pottery,

&c., from dynasties earlier or later than this epoch show marked

contrasts, and are easily to be distinguished. At the same time, I

protest against making the _rudeness_ of pottery in itself, without any

corroboration, a proof of great antiquity. For there is such a thing as

neo-barbarism, especially in pottery; and moreover, simple people will

go on for a thousand years making their plain household utensils in the

same form and with the same decoration.

[Sidenote: The epic stage.]

[Sidenote: The earliest historical stage.]

§ 33. As regards the second stage, or 'epic age,' I have already, in my

_Greek Literature_, shown ample reasons for not dating it very early;

and further researches since made rather confirm this view. The

personages described seem to belong to the ninth century before Christ;

but it was gone before the poets brought together their work into the

famous epics which were the opening of Greek literature. The _Iliad_ and

the _Odyssey_ therefore seem to me to describe the second, then already

bygone, stage of Greek history, which was certainly separated by a gap

from the third. This last begins with the contemporary allusions of the

earliest lyric poets, Archilochus, Callinus, Tyrtæus,--none of whom were

earlier than 700 B.C., and who more probably lived from 660 B.C.

onward[73:1].

According to the theory of the Greeks, which is not yet extinct, three

centuries separated this real history from the epic period, when the

Trojan heroes and their singers lived; and even among recent critics

there are some who wish to place the composition of the _Iliad_ as far

back as 900 B.C.

[Sidenote: The gap between Homer and Archilochus.]

[Sidenote: Old lists suspicious, and often fabricated.]

[Sidenote: No chronology of the eighth century B.C. to be trusted.]

I do not believe in so huge a gap in Greek literature. It seems to me

impossible that the stream of original epic should have dried up long

before Archilochus arose towards the middle of the seventh century B.C.

And here it is that the moderns have been deceived by the elaborate

construction of four centuries of history made by the Greeks to fill the

void between the events of the _Iliad_ and the events of the earliest

history. In the seventh century we have contemporary allusions to Gyges,

king of Lydia, known to us from Assyrian inscriptions; we have yearly

archons at Athens, and a series of priestesses at Argos; presently we

have historical colonies and many other real evidences on which to rely.

But before 700 B.C. it is not so. Some stray facts remained, as when

Tyrtæus tells us that he fought in the second Messenian war, and that

the first had been waged by the grandfathers of his fellow-soldiers[74:1].

The double kingship of Sparta was there, though I am at a loss to know

how we can trust a list of names coming down from a time when writing

was not known[74:2]. Nay, we have even distinct examples of fabricated

lists. Hellanicus wrote concerning the list of the priestesses at

Argos,--in after days a recognized standard for fixing events. But this

list reached back far beyond the Trojan war, as it started with Io,

paramour of Zeus. The name of the priestess marking the date of the war

was solemnly set down. The lists of the Spartan kings came straight down

from Heracles. Again, at Halicarnassus has been found a list on stone of

twenty-seven priests, starting from Telamon, son of Poseidon, and

bringing back the founding of the city to 1174 B.C.[75:1] The tail of

this list also was historical; the beginning must have been deliberately

manufactured! From such data the early history of Greece was

constructed[75:2]. Lycurgus is a half-mythical figure, and probably

represents the wisdom of several lawgivers. But however individual cases

may be judged, in chronology all the early dates are to be mistrusted,

and to reconstruct the Greece of the eighth century B.C. requires as

much combination and as much imagination as to construct a real account

of the Homeric age. I am convinced that two capital features in the

usual Greek histories of the eighth century, the reign of Pheidon and

the colonization of Sicily, belong, not to that century, but to the

next.

[Sidenote: Cases of real antiquity.]

Let not the reader imagine that he finds in me one of those who delight

in reducing the antiquity of history, and who advocate the more recent

date in every controversy. There are nations whose culture seems to be

undervalued in duration; to me, for example, those arguments are most

convincing[76:1] which place the great Sphinx at the Pyramids in an

epoch before any written records, even in Egypt, so that it remains a

monument of sculptured art many thousand years before the Christian era.

But the Greeks were mere children in ancient history, and they knew

it[76:2].

FOOTNOTES:

[54:1] Printed in C. Müller's _Geographi Graeci_.

[55:1] We shall soon come to a similar instance in Xenophon's

_Anabasis_.

[55:2] The Greek name is +logopoioi+, seldom +logographoi+, which

usually means a speech-writer. Cf. below, § 31, a passage from Clinton

which also applies here.

[57:1] The solitary exception is Sir G. Cox, whose _History of Greece_

has found little favour, in spite of its originality. He will not set

down any date earlier than 660 B.C. as worthy of acceptance; and I think

he is right. But he also rides the solar theory of the myths to death,

and so repels his reader at the very outset of his work.

[58:1] The arguments of Busolt (G. G. i. 86) which I had intended to

discuss, will be antiquated by the appearance of his 2nd edition, which

is now in the press, and which discusses the prehistoric conditions by

the light of evidence which has accrued since the first publication of

his important work. But for the printers' strike (November, 1891) I

should probably have been able to quote his revised and amended views.

Holm's appears to me a reasonable view. After stating that Apollodorus

(ii. 7), Diodorus (4, 33), Plato (_Legg._ iii. 6, 7), and Isocrates

(_Archidam._ 119) are all at variance, he adds (i. 181): 'One of these

is just as historical as the other; the current traditions are not

better than the accounts of Plato and of Isocrates; they are all mere

tales (_Sagen_) which can neither be proved or refuted.' Here we have

the attitude of Grote, pure and simple, but applied to a

quasi-historical period.

[59:1] Will it be believed that E. Curtius paraphrases this remark (+ap'

oudenos hormômenon anankaiou pros pistin+) by 'zuerst wissenschaftlich

bearbeitet von Hippias'?

[59:2] It is an axiom, to which I shall revert, that all sceptics have

their credulous side; and so we find that Mr. Evelyn Abbott, a learned

and able man, who will not accept anything as real fact from the Homeric

poems, takes with childish faith the list in Eusebius, and tells us that

there we can read the names of the actual victors from 776 B.C. to 221

A.D.! (_History of Greece_, i. 246.) And he adds, with charming

_naïveté_, that the alleged fact of one thousand years' record of

foot-races 'would be incredible if it were not true. But it is true,'

etc. That a critical historian should tell us these things dogmatically,

without touching upon any of the difficulties involved, can only be

accounted for by the theory that he was following some authority he

respected, such as Duncker, without thinking the matter out for himself.

[60:1] I notice that older scholars, such as Newton, in his

_Chronology_, and Mitford, show quite a wholesome scepticism concerning

Pheidon's date, which they are disposed to bring down even lower than

Curtius proposes.

[60:2] _E. g._ Duncker, Abbott, Duruy, Busolt (i. 140) with the recent

literature cited, Holm (i. 256).

[61:1] The reader may consult a long list of tracts on the credibility

of Ephorus, and the accuracy with which our extant Greek authors cited

him, with the general conclusions to be inferred, in Busolt (i. 97 and

elsewhere) or Holm (i. 11-15).

[62:1] Though the Return of the Heracleids was placed by Eratosthenes in

1104 B.C., older authorities, just as competent, placed it later. Thus

Isocrates, in three of his orations, delivered 366-342 B.C., repeats

that the Dorians had now been four hundred years in Peloponnesus.

Applying this round number, we obtain 1066-1042 for the Return of the

Heracleids. The tenth generation, according to Greek counting, down from

this date for Temenus, would give us 760-730 B.C. This may be the very

computation by which the dates of Archias and Pheidon were fixed.

Duncker (i. 139) thinks the Dorians cannot have come before 1000 B.C. If

he reasoned like a Greek, and held Pheidon to be the tenth Temenid, he

would straightway put him below 700 B.C.

[64:1] The last has given a summary of the arguments in his _History_,

pp. 224, 241, and in the _Rhein. Museum_ for 1885, pp. 461 _seq._

[64:2] That Hippys of Rhegium lived during the Persian Wars, and wrote

+Sikelika+, is stated by Suidas only and without any evidence.

[65:1] _Arch._ i. 12.

[65:2] Diod. xii. 71. I now repeat these facts, which I had urged long

ago, from the recent summary of Busolt (_op. cit._ p. 224).

[67:1] It is the treaty which he professes to give verbatim in v. 47,

with which the reader may compare the actual, though somewhat mutilated

text in C. I. A. i. Suppl. 46{b}.

[67:2] Cf. above, § 29.

[68:1] The excerpt alluding to Polybius (printed in his text as vi. 2,

2) merely asserts that in the book of Aristodemus of Elis it was stated

that no victors were recorded till the twenty-eighth Olympiad, when

Coroebus the Elean won and was recorded as the first victor; from which

time the Olympiads were then reckoned. Aristotle is reported to have

called Lycurgus the founder (fr. 490). Aristodemus was later than

Hippias (cf. above, p. 58); and still _it is to his book, and not to old

registers_, that the Greek writers refer. The recurrence of the 28th as

an improper Olympiad shows that this number had some important place in

the whole discussion. I think it likely that Coroebus really belonged to

the twenty-eighth after 776, and not to that year. The oldest actual

record of a victor which Pausanias could find was from Ol. 33, and this

he describes as of extraordinary antiquity. Other details are given in

the Appendix.

[69:1] _Fasti Hell._, vol. ii. p. vii.

[69:2] Cf. above, § 30, note.

[71:1] I incline, with Mr. Bent, to place the remains of Santorin before

those of Hissarlik, even though they may be in some respects superior in

development. As is obvious, the culture of one place need not keep pace

with that of another. But the total disappearance from the legends of

any mention of the eruption which must have disturbed the whole Ægean

Sea, compared with the living memories of Troy, is to me a proof that

the latter and its destruction must be far more recent than the former.

Mr. E. Abbott, who refers to Bent's _Cyclades_, is disposed to the other

view (_History of Greece_, i. 43); and so are Duruy (vol. i. chap. ii. §

1) and Holm.

[71:2] Many writers put the Dorian immigration and the resulting changes

of population, and emigration to Asia Minor, in the gap.

[72:1] i. 131. Busolt, as he informs me, now agrees with this view.

[72:2] In two remarkable articles (_Hellenic Journal_ for 1890 and

1891).

[73:1] The date of Archilochus, the earliest of the historical figures

among Greek poets, used to be fixed about 709 B.C. The researches of

Gelzer, _Das Zeitalter des Gyges_, make it certain that this date is

wrong, and must be reduced to at least 670 B.C.; for Archilochus names

Gyges in an extant fragment, and Gyges appears on a cuneiform

inscription as the vassal of an Assyrian king whose time is

determinable. Moreover, an eclipse which Archilochus mentions seems to

be that in April, 647 B.C., which was total at Thasos, where the poet

spent his later years. Even the conservative Duncker (vol. ii. p. 175,

English ed.) adopts these arguments. Nevertheless, some recent histories

still acquiesce in the exploded date!

[74:1] The connected history was, however, not set down then, but by a

late epic poet, Rhianus, and a late prose historian, Myron, both of whom

Pausanias, who gives us what we now know of these wars, criticises

severely, saying that the prose author is the worse of these bad or

incomplete authorities (Pausanias, iv. 6), since he conflicts with

Tyrtæus. How modern historians in the face of this passage can set down

fixed dates for these wars, beginning with 785 B.C., passes my

comprehension.

[74:2] It is perhaps the most extraordinary fact in the results of the

excavations pointed out to me by Mr. Sayce, that in none of the early

Greek tombs or treasures discovered have we a single specimen of early

writing, though both Egyptians and Phoenicians, who supplied so much to

them, must have been long familiar with that art. The author of the

Sixth Book of the Iliad refers once to writing as a strange or

mysterious thing, and yet on a folded tablet, which could not have been

used at the origin of writing, or indeed till far later times.

[75:1] C. I. G. 2655.

[75:2] These inventions were produced at a comparatively late period,

and therefore do not conflict with what I said of the rarity of

invention in a primitive age which had no theories to support.

[76:1] I allude to the views of M. G. Maspero, in his admirable

_Archéologie égyptienne_.

[76:2] We have now positive evidence that the Athenians registered their

public acts on stone as early as 570-560 B.C. On the Acropolis has been

found (in 1884) the broken slab which contained the decree as to the

legal status of the first cleruchs sent to Salamis upon its conquest by

Athens. (See the article of Koehler in the _Mittheilungen_ of the German

Institute at Athens, vol. ix. p. 117 sq., and the _Bull. de Corresp.

hell._ xii. 1 _sq._ where Foucart comments upon the inscription.) Three

conditions are implied: (1) the _cleruch_ is assimilated to Athenian

citizens, as to taxes and military service, though he is bound to reside

on Salamis and not leave his land. This was no doubt a novelty, and

distinguishes the Athenian cleruch from the older colonist who had gone

to Pontus or Magna Græcia. (2) If he did not reside, or while he did

not, he must pay a special absentee's tax to the State. (This is

understood differently by Koehler and by Busolt, G. G. i. 548.) The

original number of cleruchs was apparently 500 (Foucart _op. cit._

ibid.). (3) If he defaulted in his payment there was a fine of thirty

drachmæ--a very small penalty, even regarding the modest means of the

early Greek states.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DESPOTS; THE DEMOCRACIES.

[Sidenote: Brilliant age of the great lyric poets.]

[Sidenote: The Sparta of Alcman's time.]

§ 34. At last we emerge into the open light of day, and find ourselves

in the seventh century (more strictly 650-550 B.C.), in that brilliant,

turbulent, enterprising society which produced the splendid lyric poetry

of Alcæus and Sappho, of Alcman and Terpander, and carried Greek

commerce over most of the Mediterranean[77:1]. We have still but scanty

facts to guide us; yet they are enough to show us the general condition

of the country,--aristocratical governments which had displaced

monarchies, and beside them the ancient twin-monarchy of Sparta,

gradually passing into the oligarchy of the ephors. There is evidence in

the character of Alcman's poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all

resembling the so-called Sparta of Lycurgus. The remains of early art

found there point in the same direction, as do also the strange funeral

customs described by Herodotus on the death of the kings[78:1]. It

would seem that there was luxury, that there was artistic taste, that

there was considerable license in this older society. The staid sobriety

and simplicity of what is known as Spartan life seems therefore rather a

later growth, than the original condition of this Doric aristocracy. And

so this type is far more explicable, in its exceptional severity, and

its contrast to all other Dorian states, if we take it to be the gradual

growth of exceptional circumstances, than if we regard it as a primitive

type, which would naturally appear in other branches of the race.

[Sidenote: Its exceptional constitution.]

At all events the Greeks had before them the example of an ancient, a

respectable and a brilliant monarchy. It is nevertheless most remarkable

that in all the changes of constitution attempted through the various

States, amid the universal respect in which the Spartans were held, no

attempt was ever made in practical[78:2] Greek history to copy their

institutions. The distinct resemblances to Spartan institutions in some

of the Cretan communities were probably not imitations, nor can we say

that they were Dorian ideas, for the many Dorian States we know well,

such as Argos, Corinth, Syracuse, did not possess them.

[Sidenote: E. Curtis on the age of the despots.]

The Spartan State may therefore be regarded as standing outside the

development of Greece, even in the political sense[78:3]. In one respect

only was its policy an aggressive one,--in interfering on the side of

the aristocracies against the despots who took up the cause of the

common people against their noble oppressors. It is one of those

brilliant general views which make Curtius' history so attractive, that

he interprets this great conflict as partly one of race, so far as Ionic

and Doric can severally be called such. The Doric aristocracies of the

Peloponnesus were opposed by their Ionic subjects, or by Ionic States

rising in importance with the growing commerce and wealth of the Asiatic

cities. The tyrants generally carried out an anti-Dorian policy, even

though they were often Dorian nobles themselves. There was no more

successful aspirant to a tyranny than a renegade nobleman who adopted

the cause of the people.

[Sidenote: Grote's view.]

§ 35. I have already alluded to the chapter in Grote's

history[79:1]--indeed there is such a chapter in most

histories--entitled the 'Age of the Despots.' The mistake which such a

title is likely to engender must be carefully noticed. If we mean the

age when this kind of monarch first arose, no objection need be urged;

but if it be implied that such an age ceased at any definite moment,

nothing can be further from the truth. For this form of government was a

permanent feature in the Greek world. When the tyrants were expelled

from Athens and from the Peloponnesus, they still flourished in Sicily,

Italy, the Black Sea coasts, and Cyprus, till they reappeared again in

Greece[80:1]. There was no moment in old Greek history when there were

not scores of such despots. The closing period, after the death of

Alexander, shows us most of the Greek States under their control. It was

the great boast of Aratus that he freed his neighbours from them, and

brought their cities under the more constitutional Achæan League. But at

this period a despot, if he ruled over a large dominion, called himself

a king; and we may therefore add to the list most of the so-called

kings, who close the history of independent Greece, as they commenced it

in the legends.

[Sidenote: Greek hatred of the despot,]

[Sidenote: how far universal in early days.]

The despot, or tyrant[80:2] as he is called, has a very bad reputation

in Greek history. The Greeks of every age have not only loved individual

liberty, but are a singularly jealous people, who cannot endure that one

of themselves shall lord it over the rest. Even in the present day

Greeks have often told me that they would not for a moment endure a

Greek as king, because they all feel equal, and could not tolerate that

any one among them should receive such honour and profit. This is why

the ancient tyrant, however wisely and moderately he ruled, was always

regarded with hatred by the aristocrats he had deposed; so that to them

the killing of him was an act of virtue approved by all their society. I

very much doubt whether in early days the common people generally had

any such feeling, as the tyrant usually saved them from much severer

oppression. Of course any individual might avenge a particular wrong or

insult, and in later days, when a despot overthrew a democratic

constitution, the lower classes might share in the old aristocratic

hatred of the usurper.

[Sidenote: Literary portraits of the Greek despot.]

[Sidenote: How far exaggerated.]

§ 36. But Greek literature was in the hands of the aristocrats; and so

we have a long catalogue of accusations from Alcæus, Herodotus,

Xenophon, Plato, Polybius, Plutarch,--in fact all through Greek

literature; according to which the tyrant is a ruffian who usurps power

in order that he may gratify his lusts at the expense of all justice and

mercy. Feeling himself the enemy of mankind, he is perpetually in a

panic of suspicion, and surrounds himself with mercenaries who carry out

his behests. He plunders, confiscates, and violates the sanctity of the

family and the virtue of the young.

This terrible indictment, of which the climax was Lycophron's

_Casandreans_, has been indorsed by the great democratic historian of

our century[81:1], to whom the completeness of political liberty is the

great goal of all civilization, and who therefore looks with horror upon

those who retard its growth.

But it seems to me that the problem has not been fairly handled, and

that there is a great deal to be said for these tyrants, in the face of

all this literary evidence[82:1]. Of course their irresponsible powers

were often abused. Coming without the shackles of tradition or the

scruples of legitimacy to a usurped throne, the same Greek who was so

jealous of his neighbour was sure to feel insolent elation at his own

success, and deep suspicion of his unsuccessful rivals. And if a case

can be found of a tyrant overthrowing a fairly working constitution, I

surrender it to the verdict of the jury of historians from Herodotus to

Grote.

[Sidenote: _Reductio ad absurdum_ of the popular view.]

But if the _tyrannis_ was so unmixed an evil, how comes it to have been

a constant and permanent phenomenon in Greek politics? Man may indeed,

as Polybius says, be the most gullible of all animals, though professing

to be the most sagacious, and may ever be ready to fall into the same

snares that he has seen successful in entrapping others[82:2]. But

surely it exceeds all the bounds of human, not to say Greek, stupidity

that men should perpetually set a villain over them to plunder, violate,

and exile men and women.

[Sidenote: The real uses to politics of temporary despots.]

The fact is that the tyrant was at one time a necessity, and even a

valuable _moment_, in the march of Greek culture. The aristocratic

governments had only substituted a many-headed sovranty over the poor

for the rule of a single king, who might be touched by compassion or

reached by persuasion. But who could argue with the clubs of young

patricians, who thought the poor no better than their slaves, and swore

the solemn oath which Aristotle has preserved: 'I will be at enmity with

the Demos, and will do it all the harm I can.' To these gentlemen the

political differences with the people had gone quite beyond argument;

whatever they urged was true, whatever was against them false: each side

regarded its opponents as morally infamous. Whenever politics reach this

condition, it is time to abandon discussion and appeal to an umpire who

can enforce his decision with arms.

[Sidenote: Questionable statement of Thucydides.]

When the commons had gained wealth and acquired some cohesion, there

were consequently violent revolutions and counter-revolutions, massacres

and confiscations, so that 'peace at any price' was often the cry of the

State. Thucydides has drawn a famous picture of the political factions

of his day, in which he declares their violence, fraud, and disregard of

every obligation but that of party interests to be novel features of his

times. That clever rhetorician knew well enough that these frauds and

violences were no new thing in Greek politics. The poems of Alcæus,

still more those of Theognis, and many more that were known to him, must

have taught him that this war of factions was as old as real Greek

history, and that the earliest solution of this terrible problem was the

tyrant, who made peace by coercing both sides to his will and punishing

with death or exile those that were refractory.

[Sidenote: The tyrant welds together the opposing parties.]

§ 37. In the shocking condition of cities like Athens before

Peisistratus, or the Megara of Theognis, we may even go so far as to say

that, without an interval during which both parties were taught simply

to obey, no reasonable political life was possible. The haughty noble

must be taught that he too had a master; he must be taught to treat his

plebeian brother as another man, and not merely as a beast of burden.

The poor must learn that they could be protected from every rich man's

oppression, that they could follow their business in peace, and that

they could appeal to a sovran who ruled by their sympathy and would

listen to their voice.

[Sidenote: Cases of an umpire voluntarily appointed.]

There were even a few cases where the opposing parties voluntarily

elected a single man, such as Pittacus or Solon, as umpire, and where

their trust was nobly requited. But even in less exceptional cases, such

as that of Peisistratus of Athens, I make bold to say that the

constitution of Cleisthenes would not have succeeded, had not the people

received the training in peace and obedience given them by the

Peisistratid family. The despots may have murdered or exiled the leading

men; they at all events welded the people into some unity, some

homogeneity, if it were merely in the common burdens they inflicted, and

the common antipathies they excited. And this is the most adverse view

that can be urged. The picture we have of Peisistratus, especially in

the _Polity of the Athenians_ of recent fame, is that of a just and

kindly man, wielding his power of coercion for the general happiness of

his subjects.

[Sidenote: Services of the tyrants to art.]

[Sidenote: Examples.]

This then was the _political_ value of the early tyrants, and a feature

in them which is generally overlooked. Their services to the _artistic_

progress of Greece in art and literature are more manifest, and

therefore less ignored. The day of great architectural works, such as

the castles and tombs of Argolis, the draining of Lake Copais, had

passed away with the absolute rulers of pre-historic times. Even

Agamemnon and his fellows, who probably represent a later stage in Greek

society, would not have dared to set their subjects to such task-work.

So long as there were many masters in each city and State, all such

achievements were impossible. With the tyrants began again the building

of large temples, the organizing of fleets, the sending out of colonies,

the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts. It

was the care of Peisistratus for the study of Homer, and no doubt for

other old literature, which prepared the Athenian people to understand

Æschylus. Nay, this tyrant is said to have specially favoured the

nascent drama, and so to have led the way to the splendid results that

come upon us, with apparent suddenness, in liberated Athens. The

Orthagorids, the Cypselids, and single tyrants such as Polycrates of

Samos and Pheidon of Argos, did similar services for Greek art: they

organized fleets and promoted commerce; they had personal intercourse of

a more definite and intimate kind with one another than States as such

can possibly have; they increased the knowledge and wealth of the lower

classes, as well as their relative position in the State; and so out of

apparent evil came real good[86:1].

[Sidenote: Verdict of the Greek theorists.]

Even after all the full experience of Greek democracies, of the complete

liberty of the free citizen, of the value of public discussion, and of

the responsibility of magistrates to the people, we find all the later

theorists deliberately asserting that if you could secure the right man,

a single-headed State was the most perfect. All the abuses of tyranny,

therefore, so carefully pictured by literary men, had not seemed to them

equal to the abuses of mob-rule,--the violence and the vacillation of an

incompetent or needy public. I cannot but repeat, that if we regard the

world at large, and the general fitness of men for democratic liberties,

we shall hesitate to pronounce the majority of races even now fit for

government by discussion and by vote of the majority.

[Sidenote: Peisistratus and Solon.]

It is very instructive to reflect that Peisistratus, the most

enlightened of tyrants, was contemporary with Solon, the father of Greek

democracy. The theory, therefore, of a constitution in which wealth as

well as birth should have influence, and which should also regard the

rights and the burdens of the poor, was not only alive, but represented

by Solon, when Peisistratus made himself master of the State. Solon's

theory, though supported by his _law against neutrality_[87:1], was

unable to overcome the turbulence of faction; and it required a

generation of strong rule to prepare the whole people for the revival of

Solon's theory, with many further developments, by Cleisthenes.

Nevertheless, Solon remains a capital figure in early Greek history,

known to us not by legends and legislation only, but also by the

fragments of his poetry[87:2].

[Sidenote: Contrast of Greek and modern democracy.]

§ 38. This is the right place to consider the nature of those Greek

democracies that followed upon the expulsion of aristocrats and tyrants,

and that have been so lauded in modern histories. The panegyric of

Grote is well known; and there is also a very fine chapter[88:1] in

which Duruy, without being intimate, apparently, with Grote (for he only

quotes Thirlwall in his support), has not only defended and praised this

form of government at Athens, but even justified the coercion of all

recalcitrant members of the Delian confederacy. The student has,

therefore, the case of democracies in Greece ably and brilliantly

stated.

[Sidenote: Slave-holding democracies.]

[Sidenote: Supported by public duties.]

But in the first place let me repeat that they were one and all

slave-holding democracies, and that for each freeman with a vote there

were at least three or four slaves. Hence a Greek democracy can in no

wise be compared with the modern democracies of artisans and labourers

who have to do all their own drudgery, and have hardly any servants.

Even very poor Athenians kept a slave or two; they were saved the worry

of much troublesome or degrading manual labour; and so the Athenian or

the Tarentine, even when poor and over-worked, was in a serious sense an

aristocrat as well as a democrat: he belonged to a small minority ruling

a far greater population. Still more eminently was this the case, when

the democracy was, like Athens or Rhodes, an Imperial one, ruling over

subjects, or allied with smaller polities which were little better than

subjects. Holm argues that under Pericles the poorest citizen was paid

by public money for doing public duties, and was thus above all care

concerning his daily bread[89:1]. But when he adds that by this means

Pericles succeeded in making the Athenians in one respect (materially)

equal to the Spartans, in that they could be (if they performed public

duties) noblemen and gentlemen like the latter, he surely overstates the

case. The traditions of a landed aristocracy are wholly different from

those of salaried paupers, however great may be the power wielded by

these latter, or the privileges that they enjoy.

[Sidenote: Athenian leisure.]

Still it is quite possible that all the modern aids which our poor can

use are not as efficient in helping them to attain culture as the

leisure granted to the Greek democrat by slave-labour at home. Nor have

we as yet any instance of a society becoming really refined without the

aid of some inferior class, some Gibeonites, to hew wood and draw water.

[Sidenote: The assembly an absolute sovran.]

But if from this point of view the ancient artisan was far freer than

his modern counterpart, in another he was not so. As against his

brother-citizen, the laws secured him equality and justice; but against

the demands of the State he had no redress. The Greek theory required

that all citizens should be regarded simply as the property of the

State; and such a thing as an appeal to a High Court of Judicature

against the decree of the Assembly would have been regarded as

absurd[90:1]. The Demos was indeed 'the sovran people,' but sovran in

the sense of a tyrant, or irresponsible ruler, as Aristophanes tells the

Athenians.

These are the general features of Greek democracy, which are not always

understood by foreign, and not urged with sufficient clearness by

English, historians.

FOOTNOTES:

[77:1] The reader who desires fuller details may consult the chapter on

the 'Lyric Age' in my _Social Life in Greece_, and the chapters on the

lyric poets in my _History of Greek Literature_.

[78:1] Herodotus, vi. 58.

[78:2] The theorists were always framing policies after Spartan ideas.

[78:3] The two accounts of early Sparta which are cited with general

approval are those of Duncker in his history, and Busolt's monograph,

_Die Lakedaimonier_ (Leipzig, 1878). But there is a host of additional

literature, cf. Busolt, G. G. i. 95.

[79:1] Above, § 8.

[80:1] It is likely enough that at no time were they really extinct in

the Peloponnesus or in the lesser towns of northern Greece.

[80:2] There is a good note upon this word in the Greek argument to the

_Oedipus Tyrannus_.

[81:1] Cf. above, § 8.

[82:1] Mitford, who wrote in the days when tirades against tyrants were

in high fashion, brought down a torrent of censure upon his head by

saying his word for absolute government against democracy.

[82:2] Cf. my _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 416.

[86:1] I shall return to this subject of tyrants in connection with

their later and Hellenistic features. Cf. below, § 71.

[87:1] Three remarkable laws, all intended to save the Athenian

democracy, whose ministers had no standing-army at their control, from

sudden overthrow, seem to me never to have been clearly correlated by

the historians. Solon's law (1) ordained that where an actual +stasis+

had arisen, every citizen must take some side, calculating that all

quiet and orderly people, if compelled to join in the conflict, would

side with the established Government. Cleisthenes saw that this appeal

to the body of the citizens came too late, and indeed had failed when

the usurpation of Peisistratus took place. He (2) established

_Ostracism_, which interfered before the +stasis+, but when the rivalry

of two leaders showed that the danger was at hand. So far Grote expounds

the development. But this expedient also failed when the rivals

combined, and turned the vote against Hyperbolus. It is from that date

only--about 416 B.C.--that I can find cases (3) of the +graphê

paranomôn+, or prosecution for making illegal _proposals_, thus

interfering at a still earlier stage. This last form of the safeguard

replaced Ostracism, and lasted to the end of Athenian history. It was a

democratic engine often abused, but always safe to be applied in good

time.

[87:2] These have been increased for us by the text of the Aristotelian

+Athênaiôn Politeia+, from which Plutarch cited, but not fully, his

quotations in the _Life of Solon_.

[88:1] _Hist. of Greece_, vol. ii. chap. xix. § 2. He claims in his

interesting preface to the last edition to have attained Grote's

conclusions independently thirty years ago, when they were regarded in

France as dangerous paradoxes.

[89:1] G. G. ii. 391. There is a very curious summary of the various

classes of public employments on which the Attic citizen lived in the

Aristotelian +Athênaiôn Politeia+, § 24. The author estimates the total

number of civil servants or pensioners at over 20,000.

[90:1] This has for the first time been clearly put by Duruy in his

_History of Rome_. Our irresponsible and final Houses of Parliament,

whose acts may annul any law, are a very dangerous modern analogy.

CHAPTER V.

THE GREAT HISTORIANS.

§ 39. I now pass on to the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and their

treatment by ancient and modern critics.

[Sidenote: Herodotus and Thucydides.]

[Sidenote: Herodotus superior in subject.]

It is our peculiar good fortune to have these two wars narrated

respectively by the two greatest historians that Greece

produced,--Herodotus and Thucydides. Unfortunately, perhaps, after the

manner of most historians, they have made wars their chief subject; but

this criticism applies less to Herodotus, who in leading up to his great

climax has given us so many delightful digressions on foreign lands and

their earlier history, that his book is rather a general account of the

civilized world in the sixth century, with passages from older history,

than a mere chronicle of the great war. Nor does he disdain to tell us

piquant anecdotes and unauthorized gossip,--all giving us pictures of

his own mind and time, if not an accurate record of older history.

Making, therefore, every allowance for the often uncritical, though

always honest[92:1], view he took of men and affairs, there can be no

doubt that the very greatness of his subject puts him far above

Thucydides, whose mighty genius was unfortunately confined to a tedious

and generally uninteresting conflict, consisting of yearly raids,

military promenades, very small battles, and only one large and tragic

expedition, throughout the whole course of its five-and-twenty years.

[Sidenote: Narrow scope of Thucydides.]

[Sidenote: His deliberate omissions,]

Still sadder is that this great man, having undertaken to narrate a very

small, though a very long, war, so magnifies its importance as to make

it out the greatest crisis that ever happened, and therefore excludes

from his history almost everything which would be of real interest to

the permanent study of Greek life. He passes briefly over the deeply

interesting but now quite obscure period of the rise of the Athenian

power. A detailed history of the fifty years preceding his war would

indeed have been an inestimable boon to posterity. He passes in

contemptuous silence over all the artistic development of Athens. The

origin of the drama, Æschylus, Susarion, Cratinus; the growth of

sculpture, Pheidias, Ictinus, the building of the Parthenon, of the

temple of Theseus,--all this is a blank in his narrative. And yet he

does not think it inconsistent with his plan to give us a sketch of the

famous _fifty years_ that elapsed between the Persian and Peloponnesian

Wars. He proposes to correct the inaccuracies of Hellanicus, his only

predecessor in this field, and there can be no doubt that what he has

condescended to give us is both accurate and valuable. But so scanty are

his details, so frequent his silence on really important public events,

that we are fain to turn to any inferior author to fill the gap.

[Sidenote: supplied by inferior historians.]

[Sidenote: Diodorus.]

[Sidenote: Date of the destruction of Mycenæ.]

Of these there are (apart from the poets) two extant, Diodorus and

Plutarch. Both these men lived long after the events, and were beholden

to literary sources for their information. The whole tone and the

arrangement of Diodorus' eleventh book show that he used Ephorus as his

chief authority. The citations from Ephorus by other authors make this

conclusion unavoidable. The value of Diodorus' account, when it adds to

what Thucydides has said, is therefore to be estimated by the value of

Ephorus as an independent historian. On this I have already declared my

opinion (§ 30), to which I need only add that I fully agree with Busolt

when he says that for the early years of the period Ephorus had no other

authority than Thucydides of any value. The only new fact that Diodorus

preserves for us is the alleged destruction of Mycenæ by the Argives

(_circ._ 464 B.C.), at a moment, he infers, when Sparta was in the

crisis of the Helot insurrection, and unable to interfere.

[Sidenote: Silence of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.]

I have long since explained (in Schliemann's _Mycenæ_) why I discredit

the whole story. Holm is the only writer who seems to feel with me the

difficulty of supposing such an event to have been passed over with

indifference by the patriotic Greek States, whom the Mycenæans and

Tirynthians had joined in the great Persian crisis. And when Holm urges

political expediency to account for Sparta's non-interference, he surely

forgets that the literary men of Athens were restrained by no such

considerations. Thucydides (i. 102) mentions Argos at this moment: is it

likely that even he would pass over this territorial aggrandisement of

Argos without a syllable of notice? But apart from this mass of

reticences, what of Æschylus, the comrade of the Mycenæans on the field

of battle, what of Sophocles, what of Euripides, all of whom ought to

have celebrated Mycenæ, and who celebrate Argos instead? They seem to

have absolutely forgotten Mycenæ! What of the absolute reticence of the

remains found by Schliemann, not one of which belongs to the fifth or

sixth century B.C., but all to a long anterior period? The whole affair

is, therefore, placed two centuries too late, and, for all we know, may

not be derived from Ephorus at all, but from some inferior source, or

from Diodorus' own combination. Even if Ephorus was the source, I refuse

to accept his authority.

[Sidenote: Value of Plutarch's _Lives_.]

When we turn to Plutarch, whose object was indeed rather artistic and

moral than historical, we are in a far better plight. For although his

_Lives_ of Themistocles and Cimon do not give us much material of a

trustworthy kind beyond what we know from Thucydides, this is not the

case with the _Life of Pericles_, in which he has collected much

valuable information from sources now lost to us, which all the

researches of the Germans have not even succeeded in specifying by name.

Our whole picture of the splendour of Athens in her greatest moment is

derived not so much from the vague phrases of the speeches in Thucydides

as from the deeply interesting facts preserved by Plutarch. His

brilliant sketch and the narrative of Thucydides have been illustrated,

since the days of Curtius and of Grote, by the recovery of a large

number of inscriptions, chiefly from the Acropolis at Athens, recording

the quotas paid from the tribute of the several allied cities to Athena

and to the other gods. These lists, together with several fragments of

treaties with the various cities, and the lists of offerings recently

found at Delos, have afforded Holm the materials for his fascinating

chapters upon Imperial Athens[96:1].

[Sidenote: The newly-found tract _On the Constitution of Athens_.]

But even since the appearance of his book (1889) a new and important

review of the obscure moments of Athenian growth has been recovered in

the work of Aristotle on _The Polity of the Athenians_[96:2]. He does

not indeed concern himself either with the foreign policy or with the

artistic grandeur of the city. But as regards her internal development

he brings us several new and curious facts. He ascribes the creation of

the sovran Demos living at Athens on salaries for public duties, not to

Pericles, but to Aristides. The whole democratic reform is in fact

completed before the former arrives at power. The political activity of

Themistocles is also prolonged for several years later than we had

suspected, and it is even at his instigation that Ephialtes attacks the

Areopagus. The political _rôle_ of Pericles is in fact so reduced, that

we almost suspect an _animus_ against him in the author, who elsewhere

shows his preference for the conservative side in politics. We should

indeed rejoice could we confront this Aristotle with Thucydides, and see

what truth there is in his departure from our received histories.

Plutarch, who uses the work constantly in the _Life_ of Solon,

evidently disregards it when he comes to treat of Themistocles and

Pericles. Had Thucydides been a little fuller, had he given himself the

trouble to preserve a few more details, we should be in a better

position to face this new historical problem, and estimate the really

great period of the history of Athens.

[Sidenote: Effects of his literary genius.]

[Sidenote: The Peloponnesian war of no world-wide consequence.]

And yet such was his literary genius, such his rhetorical force, that,

crabbed and sour as he may have been, he has so impressed his own and

his subject's importance upon the learned world as to bring the

Peloponnesian war into much greater prominence than the greater events

of Greek history. Thus in a well-known selection of fifteen decisive

battles from the world's history, the defeat of the Athenians at

Syracuse figures as a world event; whereas it only settled the question

whether one kind of Greek or another should dominate in Sicily, and

perhaps in Greece. The domestic quarrels within the limits of a single

nationality are not of this transcendent import. If the Carthaginians

had crushed Rome, or the northern hordes of Asia destroyed the

civilization of Persia when it was growing under Cyrus, there indeed a

great battle might be called a decisive event. But even had the

Athenians conquered Syracuse, it is quite certain that their domination

of the Greek world would have broken down from within, from the inherent

weaknesses in all Greek democracies, which Plato and Aristotle have long

ago analyzed and explained.

[Sidenote: No representation in Greek assemblies.]

§ 40. This statement requires some further illustration to the modern

reader, who thinks, I suppose rightly, that the surest and most stable

of governments is that based upon the free resolve of the whole nation.

But the Athenian imperial democracy was no such government. In the first

place, there was no such thing as _representation_ in their

constitution. Those only had votes who could come and give them at the

general Assembly, and they did so at once upon the conclusion of the

debate[98:1]. There was no Second Chamber or Higher Council to revise or

delay their decisions; no Crown; no High Court of Appeal to settle

claims against the State. The body of Athenian citizens formed the

Assembly. Sections of this body formed the jury to try cases of

violation of the constitution either in act or in the proposal of new

laws.

[Sidenote: No outlying members save Athenian citizens settled in subject

towns.]

The result was that all outlying provinces, even had they obtained

votes, were without a voice in the government. But as a matter of fact

they had no votes, for the States which became subject to Athens were

merely tributary; and nothing was further from the ideas of the

Athenians than to make them members of their Imperial Republic in the

sense that a new State is made a member of the present American

Republic.

[Sidenote: Similar defect in the Roman Republic.]

This it was which ruined even the great Roman without any military

reverses, and when its domination of the world was unshaken. Owing to

the absence of _representation_, the Empire of the Roman Republic was in

the hands of the city population, who were perfectly incompetent, even

had they been in real earnest, to manage the government of the vast

kingdoms their troops had conquered. In both cases the outsiders were

governed wholly for the benefit of the city crowd.

[Sidenote: Hence an extended Athenian empire not maintainable.]

The mistakes and the injustices which resulted in the Roman executive

were such that any able adventurer could take advantage of the

world-wide discontent, and could play off one city faction against the

other. It is not conceivable that any other general course of events

would have taken place at Athens, had she become the ruler of the

Hellenic world. Her Demos regarded itself as a sovran, ruling subjects

for its own glory and benefit; there can, therefore, be no doubt that

the external pressure of that widespread discontent which was the

primary cause of the Peloponnesian war, would have co-operated with

politicians within, if there were no enemies without, and that

ambitious military chiefs, as at Rome, would have wrested the power

from the sovran people either by force or by fraud.

Hence I contend that the result of the Peloponnesian war even in its

largest crisis had little import in the world's history. That the little

raids and battles, the capture of a couple of hundred Spartans, or the

defeat of twenty ships should still be studied with minuteness, and

produce libraries of modern criticism, is due solely to the power of the

historian and the just preeminence of the famous language in which he

wrote his book.

[Sidenote: The glamour of Thucydides.]

§ 41. This is, I think, the most signal instance on record of the

falsification of the proper _perspective_ of history by individual

literary genius. It was a commonplace in old days that Achilles and

Agamemnon, Ulysses and Diomede, all the famous heroes of the Trojan war,

would have died in obscurity and passed out of sight but for the voice

of the inspired poet. How much truer is it that Phormion and Brasidas,

Gylippus and Lamachus would have virtually disappeared from history but

for the eloquence of the Attic historian! Pericles would have remained

an historic figure, and so does Lysander (who is almost beyond the

period), whether any single historian intended it or not. The rest were

important in their day and to their city, not beyond these limits. The

really great spirits from whom the Athens of that day derives her

eternal supremacy, which no Lysander could take away, are, except

Pericles, never mentioned in all his work. No one could ever suspect,

from this severe and business-like narrative, that the most splendid

architects, sculptors, and dramatic poets the world has yet seen were

then jostling each other in the streets of Athens.

[Sidenote: His calmness assumed.]

It seems thankless to complain of what Thucydides has not done, instead

of acknowledging what he undertook to do and has performed with

extraordinary ability. Never was the history of a long war written with

more power, judgment, and, I was going to say, impartiality. But I

honestly believe that his book would have been far inferior had it

indeed been coldly impartial; and I think Grote has shown, what I have

supplemented in my _Greek Literature_, that strong personal feelings

underlie the apparent calmness of his decisions[101:1].

[Sidenote: He is backed by the scholastic interest,]

§ 42. This estimate of Thucydides is, however, one which will make its

way but slowly in the English classical world,--by which I mean that

large and important body who teach classics to schoolboys and college

students,--and the schoolmaster interest so completely commands our

literary journals that any opinion which runs counter to scholastic

traditions is sure to be set down there also as the outcome of rashness

or of ignorance. For Thucydides, in addition to his just influence as a

great writer, has enlisted in his favour all those to whom Greek grammar

with its intricacies is the most divine of all pursuits.

[Sidenote: on account of his grammatical difficulties.]

If his speakers, as one of them tells us, strove hard to conceal what

they had to say under new and startling forms, in order to outrun in

smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of

intellectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself

plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To

make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it

with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many

acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable

reputations depend. It is but natural that this school, or these

schoolmen, should become so enamoured of his intricacies as to love them

with a love passing the love of women, and consequently to resent

bitterly any word of depreciation which affects the importance of their

idol.

[Sidenote: He remains the special property of critical scholars.]

Enthusiastic study of any subject is always praiseworthy; the insistence

upon minute accuracy, and contempt for slovenliness in writing, are

always to be admired and encouraged, for it is to these qualities in the

minute scholars that we owe much of our precision in thinking, and still

more the sense of clearness and correctness in style. To this class,

therefore, let Thucydides remain forever the foremost of books; but let

them not bully us into the belief that because they have studied his

grammar more carefully than any other, they are therefore to decide that

he is absolutely faultless as a narrator, and absolutely trustworthy as

a historian.

[Sidenote: Herodotus underrated in comparison.]

I have already dealt with this latter point[103:1]; what I am here

concerned with is the exaggerated place given in our modern histories to

the petty feuds and border-raids of his often tedious chronicle,--tedious

only because the events he describes are completely trivial. Herodotus,

on the other hand, is apt to be underrated in these modern days. The

field he covers is so wide, and the chances of error in observation so

great, that it is impossible he should not often be found wrong. But

what would our notions of earlier Greece or Asia Minor be without his

marvellous prose epic?

[Sidenote: The critics of Thucydides.]

The reader will pardon me for expressing my satisfaction, that this

comparative estimate of the two great historians which I published some

twenty years ago, and which is still regarded by many of my English

critics as a mere paradox, has now become a widely and solidly defined

belief among the best German critics. Of course they began by

exaggerating the new view. Müller-Strübing especially, as has been

freely exposed by his opponents, has advanced from criticism to censure,

from censure to contempt of Thucydides. This is of course silly

pedantry. Thucydides was a very great historian, and whoever cannot

recognize it, shows that he has no proper appreciation for this kind of

genius. But let the reader consult the passages in which the newest, and

perhaps the best, of Greek histories, Holm's, gives a summary of the

researches on the contrasted masters of historiography, and he will see

that the result is much the same as that which I have long advocated.

Holm argues (ii. pp. 346 _sq._) that Herodotus has been underrated; he

argues (_ibid._ pp. 369 _sq._) that Thucydides has been overrated. Let

me call particular attention to the details of the latter estimate, as

one to which I thoroughly subscribe. But let no one charge me with

despising the great Athenian; I believe I appreciate his greatness far

better than do his random panegyrists.

§ 43. Let us pass by anticipation to another remarkable case of

distorted perspective, likewise due to transcendent literary ability.

[Sidenote: The Anabasis of Xenophon.]

The next great author who has fascinated the world by the grace and

vividness of his style is the Athenian Xenophon. In his famous

_Anabasis_, or Expedition of the Ten Thousand to assist the insurgent

Cyrus, he has told us the story of what must have happened (on a smaller

scale) many times before, of Greek mercenaries being induced by large

pay to serve in the quarrels of remote Asiatic sovrans, and finding

their patron assassinated or defeated. They had then their choice of

taking service under his rival (with the chance of being massacred), or

of cutting their way out of the country to some Hellenic colony. It

seems to have been mainly due to the ability and eloquence of Xenophon

that the present very large and formidable body of mercenaries chose and

carried out the latter course. His narrative of this Retreat, in which

he claims to have played the leading part, is one of the most delightful

chapters of Greek history.

[Sidenote: The weakness of Persia long recognized.]

But in all the modern accounts, without exception, both the events and

the narrator have assumed what seem to me gigantic proportions. It is

not the least true that the Greeks were dependent upon this source for

their knowledge of the weakness of the Persian Empire. The campaigns of

Agesilaus in Asia Minor, which were almost synchronous, and not by any

means suggested (so far as we know) by the expedition, showed the same

facts clearly enough. The military weakness of the Empire was already a

commonplace. Its financial power, in the face of the poor and divided

Greek States, was the real difficulty in the way of a Hellenic conquest.

[Sidenote: Reception of the Ten Thousand on their return.]

The manner in which the Ten Thousand were received, upon their return to

Greek lands, shows all this plainly enough. Instead of being hailed as

pioneers of a new conquest, as heroes who had done what nobody dreamed

of doing before, they were merely regarded as a very large and therefore

very dangerous body of turbulent marauders, who had acquired cohesion

and discipline by the force of adversity, and who might make a dangerous

attack on any civilized city, unless a little time were gained, during

which their strength and harmony would give way to defections, and

quarrels among themselves. Their ill-gotten wealth would soon be

squandered, and they must then be induced to seek new service

separately, and not in such a mass as to intimidate their employers.

[Sidenote: The army dissipated.]

This is the rational account of what historians often represent as the

shabby, or even infamous, conduct of the Lacedæmonians, then the leading

power in Greece. The policy they adopted was as prudent as it was

successful, and the Ten Thousand melted away as quickly as they were

gathered; but we can hardly hope that many of them retired into so

innocent and cultivated a leisure as Xenophon did in after years.

[Sidenote: Xenophon's strategy.]

[Sidenote: His real strategy was literary.]

§ 44. So much for the expedition; now a word or two concerning this

famous Xenophon. If his expedition had indeed made the figure in the

contemporary world that it does in his _Anabasis_ and in modern

histories, who can doubt that he would have been recognized as one of

the chief military leaders of the age; and, as his services were in the

market, that he would have been at once employed, either as a general or

as a minister of war, in the memorable campaigns which occupied the

Greeks after his return? Why did he never command an army again[106:1]?

Why was he never tried as a strategist against Epaminondas, the rising

military genius of the age? The simple fact is that he has told us the

whole story of his Retreat from his own point of view; he has not failed

to put himself into the most favourable light; and it is more than

probable that the accounts given by the other mercenaries did not place

him in so preeminent a position. The _Anabasis_ is a most artistic and

graceful self-panegyric of the author, disguised under an apparently

candid and simple narrative of plain facts, perhaps even brought out

under a false name,--Themistogenes of Syracuse,--to help the illusion;

nor was it composed at the spur of the moment, and when there were many

with fresh memories ready to contradict him, but after the interest in

the affair had long blown over, and his companions and rivals were

scattered or dead.

[Sidenote: A special favourite of Grote.]

It is of course an excellent text for Grote to develop into his

favourite historical sermon, that the broad literary and philosophical

culture of the Athenian democracy fitted any man to take up suddenly

any important duties, even so special as the management of a campaign.

But however true or false this may be, it is certain that Xenophon's

contemporaries did not accept him as a military genius, and that he

spent his after years of soldiering in attendance upon a second-rate

Spartan general as a volunteer and a literary panegyrist.

[Sidenote: Xenophon on Agesilaus and Epaminondas.]

[Sidenote: Injustice of the Hellenica.]

§ 45. For in me the suspicion that Xenophon may have been guilty of

strong self-partiality in the _Anabasis_ was first awakened by the

reflection that his later works show the strongest partiality for his

patron, and the most niggardly estimate of the real master of them all,

the Theban Epaminondas. If instead of spending his talents in glorifying

the Spartan king--a respectable and no doubt able but ordinary

personage, he had undertaken with his good special knowledge to give us

a true account of the military performances of Epaminondas, then indeed

he would have earned no ordinary share of gratitude from all students of

the world's greatness. He was in the rare position of being a

contemporary, a specialist, standing before the greatest man of the age,

and capable of both understanding his work and explaining it to us with

literary perfection; yet his _Hellenica_ is generally regarded as a work

tending to diminish the achievements of the Theban hero[108:1].

Happily we have here means to correct him, and to redress the balance

which he has not held with justice. Shall we believe that when he had no

one to contradict him, and his own merits to discuss, he is likely to

have been more strictly impartial?

[Sidenote: Yet Xenophon is deservedly popular.]

Xenophon will never cease to be a popular figure, and most deservedly;

for he added to the full education of an Athenian citizen in general

intelligence, in politics, and in art, the special training given by the

conversations of Socrates, and the tincture of occasional abstract

thinking. But this was only a part of his education. He learned

knowledge of the world and of war by travel and exciting campaigns, and

completed his admirable and various training by a close intimacy with

the best and most aristocratic Spartan life, together with that devotion

to field-sports which is so far more gentlemanly and improving than

training for athletics. In the whole range of Greek literature he

appears the most cultivated of authors, in his external life he combines

everything which we desire in the modern gentleman, though his

superficiality of judgment and lesser gifts place him far below

Thucydides, or even Polybius.

FOOTNOTES:

[92:1] Mr. Sayce will not admit even this, and indeed the habit of

appropriating previous work, which Greek literary honesty seems to have

allowed, must naturally offend an original inquirer like Mr. Sayce,

whose ideas are so often pilfered without acknowledgment. But Greek

historians seldom name their authority unless they are about to differ

from it, and criticise or censure it. It is for this reason that I

distrust the usual enumeration of Herodotus' travels (e.g. Busolt, G. G.

ii. 90 _sq._), which assumes that whatever lands he describes he must

himself have seen. I feel sure that he borrowed a great deal, even a

great many bare facts, from other books. But I call attention with

pleasure to the suggestion of Holm (ii. 330), who shows that with the

extended trade relations of Periclean Athens, information upon Pontus,

Persia, and Egypt was of great practical value, and that the story of

the ten talents reward given him by the Athenians may point to a real

reward for his valuable reports, which were most important to their

'Foreign Office.' Hence the great and immediate popularity of his work.

Holm feels as I do, that Herodotus has been underrated, in comparison

with Thucydides (G. G. ii. 346).

[96:1] ii. 11, 12, 16-20.

[96:2] I call it the work of Aristotle, in spite of the many critical

doubts expressed in England, for I cannot ignore the persistent

citations of Plutarch and of many good Greek grammarians and

antiquarians, who express no word of doubt, nor do the peculiarities of

style seem to me to prove anything more than carelessness in revision,

or perhaps the work of a pupil under the master's direction. Cf. § 53.

[98:1] Cicero specially mentions this as a grave defect in Greek

democracies, and compares it with the Roman precaution of making the

voting by tribes or centuries a formal act at a distinct time. Here is

this important and little-known passage (_pro Flacco_, cap. vii.):

'Nullam enim illi nostri sapientissimi et sanctissimi viri vim concionis

esse voluerunt; quae scisceret plebes, aut quae populus juberet, summota

concione, distributis partibus, tributim et centuriatim descriptis

ordinibus, classibus, aetatibus, auditis auctoribus, re multos dies

promulgata et cognita, juberi vetarique voluerunt. _Graecorum autem

totae respublicae sedentis concionis temeritate administrantur._' The

Roman safeguards were, however, quite insufficient, as the course of

history proved. The Athenians also had some safeguards, especially in

preparing resolutions for the assembly by a previous council; but these

too were almost useless.

[101:1] Cf. my _Hist. Gk. Lit._ ii. 1, chap. 5.

[103:1] Above, § 28.

[106:1] Some of the historians note naïvely enough, that the performance

of Xenophon is very wonderful, seeing he had never learned the art of

war, or commanded in any previous campaign. Wonderful indeed, but was it

a real fact? Holm, who seems to me really awake to the common-sense

difficulties which seldom strike learned men, feels this, but accounts

for it (iii. 182) in a very surprising way. I may premise that Xenophon

is perhaps his favourite authority, whom he defends against all attacks

with great spirit. His answer to the question why Xenophon never again

commanded an army, is this: He could have, but he would not, because he

was exiled from his native city, and despised the career of a mercenary

chief! In other words a very ambitious young man, who had deliberately

chosen the profession of foreign adventure, when he had succeeded and

shown his transcendent powers, stops short because he despises that

profession. Is not this most improbable? Had Xenophon brought home with

him a really first-rate reputation, he would not have been required to

fight the battles of his native city as a mercenary leader: he would

very soon have recovered himself in popularity, and have become a

leading Athenian. It was not therefore because he could and would not,

but because he would and could not, that he retired into obscurity.

There is no reason to think he had excited any great or lasting odium at

Athens. We hardly know for certain why he was banished.

[108:1] This is stoutly denied by Holm, G. G. iii. 15, and 181 _sq._,

who cites Breitenbach's Edition and Stern's researches in support of his

opinion. He regards Xenophon as perfectly impartial to others throughout

his _Hellenica_. Whether he was so to himself in the _Anabasis_ is of

course another question, which Holm has not touched. It may be perfectly

true, as Holm insists, that not a single false statement has ever been

proved against the author of the _Hellenica_, but does this demonstrate

that he was impartial? It is in the selection, in the suppression, in

the marshalling of his facts; it is in his _perspective_ that disguised

partiality seems to have been shown.

CHAPTER VI.

POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY B.C.

[Sidenote: Literary verdict of the Greeks against democracy.]

§ 46. What may most properly make the modern historian pause and revise

his judgment of the Athenian democracy, is the evident dislike which the

most thoughtful classes, represented by these great historians, and by

the professed pupils of Socrates, displayed to this form of

society[110:1]. We are now so accustomed to histories written by modern

Radicals, or by men who do not think out their politics, that we may

perhaps be put off with the plea that the democracy which these authors

and thinkers disliked and derided, and which some of them tried to

overthrow, was a debased form of what had been established under

Pericles, and that it was the accidental decay or the accidental abuses

of democracy which disgusted them, whereas its genuine greatness had

been clearly manifested by the great century of progress which had now

come sadly to a close.

[Sidenote: Vacillation of modern critics.]

[Sidenote: Grote's estimate of Pericles]

Ernst Curtius, a German _savant_ of the highest type, has so little

thought out this subject that on one page we find him saying that the

voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a

proof of the high condition of their State; whereas on another he says

their voluntary submission to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its

degeneracy. But we can hardly expect any real appreciation of the

working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last

generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and

regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably

dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360

B.C.[111:1] But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly the

conditions of the problem. He argues that Cleon, on the whole, and

without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and

that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would

have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered

to it.

§ 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the

Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great

successes would soon have brought about its fall.

[Sidenote: compared with Plato's.]

[Sidenote: The war policy of Pericles.]

But I join issue with Grote, and side with Plato, in thinking that the

policy of Pericles, even within the conditions imposed upon him by the

circumstances just mentioned, was so dangerous and difficult that no

cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure. Plato goes

so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, frivolous,

and sensual. Without actually indorsing this, we are warranted by the

course of history to say that the hope of holding a supremacy by merely

keeping up with all energy and outlay a naval superiority already

existing and acknowledged, was truly chimerical. Pericles thought that

by making the city impregnable--which was then, against the existing

means of attack, quite feasible--and by keeping the sea open, he could

amply support his city population and make them perfectly independent

even of the territory of Attica. While they could derive money and food

from their subjects and their commerce, they might gather in the rural

population from the fields, and laugh at the enemy from their walls

until his means were exhausted, or he was compelled to retreat for the

purpose of protecting his own coasts against a hostile fleet.

[Sidenote: His miscalculations.]

Thucydides tells us in affecting language how this experiment actually

turned out,--what was the misery of the country people crowded into the

city without proper houses or furniture, sleeping in sheds and nooks of

streets; what was the rage of the farmers when they saw their homesteads

go up in flames, and the labour of years devastated with ruthless

completeness. Pericles had not even reckoned with the immediate effects

of his singular policy. Still less had he thought of the sanitary

consequences of overcrowding his city, which must in any case have

produced fatal sickness, and therefore deep indignation among those who

suffered from its visitation, even though no one could have anticipated

the frightful intensity of the plague which ensued.

[Sidenote: He depended on a city population against an army of yeomen.]

But a far larger and more philosophical objection may be based upon the

consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a

supply of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own permanently

against an agricultural population fighting, not for pay, but for the

defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriotism. If

you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan,

you destroy the backbone of your fighting power; and no outlay will

secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field

against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides'

day; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially

comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather

than native[113:1]; and on this he bases his anticipation that the army

of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer

and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a

supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military

and naval power.

[Sidenote: Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops.]

§ 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in those days, that mercenary

forces could be kept at sea more permanently than a body of farmers, who

must go home frequently to look after their subsistence and work their

fields. This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to

keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbulent and

unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance

of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next

century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a

monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the

discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating

assembly[114:1].

[Sidenote: The smaller States necessarily separatists.]

The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility

of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal; and

his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a

ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so

long as these were _subjects_, liable to oppression in any moment of

panic or of passion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no

real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion,

since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all

attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and

the love of separatism in their small States. I fancy that at no period

in the world's history could any small communities have easily been

persuaded to submit to this kind of union, which was built on far too

narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost

exclusive benefit of the leading city.

It is necessary to insist upon these things,--the want of representation

in a common assembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying

States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they

transgressed their State-treaties,--especially for a practical writer,

who holds that historical analogies are most serviceable, and help to

explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that

the analogies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an

irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent.

[Sidenote: Attempt at federation]

Yet the necessity of combination was so great, and so keenly felt during

the tyrannical ascendency of Sparta at the opening of the next century,

that several attempts were made to obtain the advantages, while avoiding

the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made

immediately after the battle of Cnidos (394 B.C.) and which seems to

have been originated by Thebes, is passed over in silence by all our

literary authorities, and was only discovered upon the evidence of

coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to

it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban

emblem--Heracles throttling the snakes. The existence of this

confederation seems to justify the hopes of Epaminondas to make his

city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of

political vanity, often repeated[116:1].

[Sidenote: The second Athenian Confederacy;]

[Sidenote: its details,]

The second was the well-known Athenian Confederacy of 377 B.C. of which,

however, the details are only preserved in an important inscription (No.

81 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most interesting

information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Euboea, and

also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to

seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these

members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian

supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which

were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions of

_cleruchies_, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at

Athens, in which Athens was not represented. Decrees proposed either in

the Athenian assembly or in this synod (_synedrion_) must be sanctioned

by the other body before becoming law[116:2].

[Sidenote: its defects.]

As might be expected, all these Leagues failed. The precautions against

the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness

of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or

ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are

important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the

history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achæan

League.

[Sidenote: Political theories in the fourth century.]

§ 49. The century at which we have now arrived in our survey--the fourth

before Christ--was eminently the age of political theories devised by

philosophers in their studies; and they give us the conclusions to which

able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the

capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at

home, or power abroad. The Athenian supremacy had broken down; the

Spartan, a still more complete _hegemony_, as the Greeks called it, had

gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power,

as by its own inherent defects. Epaminondas has passed across the

political sky, a splendid meteor, but leaving only a brief track of

brilliancy which faded into night.

[Sidenote: Greece and Persia.]

[Sidenote: Theoretical politics.]

And in every generation, if the military efficiency of Persia grew

weaker, her financial supremacy became more and more apparent. In the

face of all these brilliant essays and signal failures, in the face of

the acknowledged intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, coupled with

their continued exhibitions of political impotence in foreign policy, it

was fully to be expected that Greek thinkers should discuss the causes

of these contrasts, and endeavour to ascertain the laws of public

happiness and the conditions of public strength. And so there were a

series of essays, of which several remain, on the Greek State and its

proper internal regulation, and a series of solutions for the practical

difficulties of the day, especially the external dangers to which the

Hellenic world was exposed. These documents form the main body of the

splendid prose Literature of the Attic Restoration, as I have elsewhere

called it[118:1], and of the period which closed with the actual

solution of the difficulties in foreign politics by the famous Philip of

Macedon[118:2].

[Sidenote: Inestimable even to the practical historian.]

The historian of Greece must evidently take into account these

speculations, though they be not strictly history; but the facts can

hardly be understood and appreciated without the inestimable comments of

the greatest thinkers and writers whom the country produced.

[Sidenote: Plato.]

[Sidenote: Xenophon.]

[Sidenote: Aristotle.]