GREEKS AND BARBARIANS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE GREEK TRADITION
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“Here is scholarship with a bright and eager face. Mr. Thomson’s essays
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“He has written with great charm.... Mr. Thomson brings an active
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GREEKS & BARBARIANS
BY
J. A. K. THOMSON
[Illustration]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
_First Published in 1921_
(_All rights reserved_)
_Stets wird geschieden sein der Menschheit Heer_
_In zwei Partein: Barbaren und Hellenen._
HEINE, “_Für die Mouche_.”
To
MY MOTHER
PREFACE
There have been many explanations of ancient Greece and its peculiar
spirit. If I may say so, the only original thing about the explanation
offered in this book is its want of originality; for it is the
explanation of the Greeks themselves. They believed that Hellenism
was born of the conflict between the Greeks and the Barbarians. As
Thucydides puts it (I. 3), “Greek” and “Barbarian” are correlative
terms; and Herodotus wrote his great book, “seeking,” as he says,
“digressions of set purpose,” to illustrate just that. About such
an explanation there is obviously nothing startling at all. It is
indeed (at first sight) so colourless and negative, that it must be
dissatisfaction with it which has provoked all the other explanations.
Scholars must have said to themselves, “What is the use of repeating
that Hellenism is the opposite of Barbarism? We know that already.”
But they knew it only in a formal or abstract way. It is but the other
day that classical scholars have begun to study the Barbarian and to
_work out_ the contrast which alone can give us the material for a rich
understanding of the Greek himself. Without this study one’s ideas of
the Greek could not fail to be somewhat empty and colourless. But any
one who cares to read even the meagre outline which these essays supply
will hardly complain that there is a lack of colour.
The subject indeed is so vast that one is compelled to be selective and
illustrative. Even to be this is far from easy. For instance, it seems
extraordinary to write upon the meaning of Hellenism without a chapter
on Greek art. Such a chapter, however, is excluded by the design of
this book, which must dispense with illustrations; whereas in dealing
with literature I could always drive home my point by simple quotation.
Then again it may appear a little old-fashioned and arbitrary that I
confine myself to the centuries before Alexander. But after all it was,
in these centuries that Hellenism rose into its most characteristic
form—and in any case a man must stop somewhere.
We lovers of Greece are put very much on our defence nowadays, and
no doubt we sometimes claim too much for her. She sinned deeply and
often, and sometimes against the light. Things of incalculable value
have come to us not from her. There probably never was a time when she
had not something to learn from the Barbarians about her—from Persia,
from Palestine, from distant China. But when all is said, we owe it to
Greece that we think as we do, and not as Semites or Mongols. I believe
that on the whole our modes of thought are preferable. At any rate they
have on the whole prevailed. And what we students of Greece argue is
that she was fighting our battle; that in the deepest and truest and
most strictly historical sense the future of the things we cherish most
was involved in her fortunes. How then could we fail to sympathise with
her? I have tried to be just; I could not be dispassionate.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 9
THE AWAKENING 13
KEEPING THE PASS 32
THE ADVENTURERS 45
ELEUTHERIA 82
SOPHROSYNE 105
GODS AND TITANS 122
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC 147
NOTES 205
INDEX 213
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS
I
THE AWAKENING
It began in Ionia. It may in truth have been a reawakening. But if this
be so (and it is entirely probable), it was after so long and deep a
slumber that scarcely even dreams were remembered. The Ionians used to
say that they remembered coming from Greece, long ago, about a thousand
years before Christ—as we reckon it—driven from their ancient home on
the Peloponnesian coast of the Corinthian Gulf by “Dorians” out of the
North. They fled to Athens, which carried them in her ships across
the Aegean to that middle portion of the eastern shore which came
to be known as Ionia. For this reason they were in historical times
accounted (by the Athenians at least) “colonists of the Athenians.”
Nobody in antiquity appears seriously to have disputed this account of
the Ionians. There may be considerable truth in it; and if not, the
Ionians were pretty good at disputing. The Athenians belonged to that
race. But if you questioned the Ionians further and asked them about
their origins in prehistoric Greece, you had to be content with the
Topsy-like answer that the first Ionians grew out of the ground. They
were _Autochthones_, Earth-Children. The critical Thucydides puts it
this way: he says the same stock has _always_ inhabited Attica. People
in his time could remember when old Athenian gentlemen used to wear
their hair done up in a top-knot fastened by a golden pin in the form
of a cicala—because the cicala also is an Earth-Child.
Of course in historical times the Ionians were Greeks. But they may
not always have been Greeks. Herodotus apparently thinks they were
not. He says they learned to speak Greek from their Dorian conquerors.
The natural inference from this would be that they were of a different
racial stock. Herodotus, however, is nearly as fond of a hypothesis
as Mr. Shandy, and it is quite possible that he is here labouring an
argument (which in turn may have been mere Dorian propaganda), that the
only pure-blooded Hellenes were the Dorian tribes, who admittedly came
on the scene much later than the Ionians. In fact the Ionians may have
been simply an earlier wave of a great invasion of Greek-speakers which
came to an end with the Dorians. We do not know, and Herodotus did not
know. The Ionians themselves did not know. There are two possibilities.
Either they were an indigenous people who became Hellenized (as
Herodotus supposes), or they were a folk of Hellenic affinities who
were long settled in Greece in the midst of a still earlier population.
What of that? Only this, that we have suddenly discovered a great
deal about this prehistoric Aegean population, above all that it
had developed a civilization which seems almost too brilliant to be
true. Now if the fugitives who escaped to Ionia were a fragment of
this race, or even were aliens who had only imbibed a portion of its
culture, the awakening which came so long after may have been in fact a
reawakening.
Archæologists, digging in the sites of old Ionian cities, have
discovered evidence that the early settlers possessed something of the
Aegean culture. The crown and centre of that culture was the island
of Crete, and there existed some dim traditions of Cretans landing in
Ionia; only then it was probably not called Ionia. This, and some other
considerations, have prompted the suggestion that the Ionians really
came from Crete. But it seems more in accordance with the evidence to
suppose that the main body of them came from Greece proper, where they
had learned the “Mycenaean” culture, which was the gift of Crete. The
calamitous Dorians wrecked that wonderful heritage, but for some time
at least the settlers in their new “Ionian” home would remember how to
fashion a pot fairly and chant their traditional lays. Then, it would
seem, they all but forgot; little wonder, when you consider how dire
was their plight. Yet even in that uneasy sleep into which they fell
of a recrudescent barbarism the Ionians remembered something as in a
dream; and it became the most beautiful dream in the world, for it is
Homer.
Now let us appeal to history. The history of Ionia is a drama in little
of what afterwards happened on a wider stage in Greece.
The settlers found a beautiful land with (so Herodotus, not alone,
exclaims) “the best climate in the world.” Considerable rivers, given
to “meandering,” carve long valleys into the hilly interior of Asia
Minor and offered in their mouths safe anchorages for the toy-like
ships of the ancients. It is typical Aegean country and would have
no unfamiliar look to the settlers. Naturally they did not find the
new land empty. It contained a native population who were called, or
came to be called, by the general appellation of “Carians”—barbaric
warriors with enormous helmets crowned by immense horse-hair crests,
and armed with daggers and ugly-looking falchions like reaping-hooks.
The newcomers fought with them, slew largely among them, made some
uncertain kind of truce with them, married their women, got their
interested help against the Persian when he grew powerful. But that
was all. They never succeeded in making them truly Greek or completely
civilized. They only mast-headed them on their hills and, if they
caught one, made a slave of him. Throughout Greek history the Carians
maintained a virtual independence in the highlands of Ionia, keeping
their ancient speech and customs, cherishing the memory of their
old-world glory when they rowed in the ships of King Minos of Crete and
fought his battles, and professing no interest in the wonderful cities
growing up almost or quite in view of their secluded eyries. Very
strange it seems. Yet it is typical. If we think of Greek civilization
as a miracle wrought in a narrow valley with sullen Carians hating it
from the surrounding hills, we shall get no bad picture—for I will not
call it an allegory—of the actual situation all through antiquity till
Alexander came. So near was the Barbarian all the time.
The Ionians had always to struggle against being crowded into the sea
by the more or less savage races of Anatolia. That vast region has
always been full of strange and obscure races and fragments of races.
It is so formed that the migrating peoples flooding through it were
sure to lose side-eddies down its deep, misleading valleys, to stagnate
there. It must, when Ionia was founded, have had a peculiarly sombre
and menacing aspect. The mighty empire of the Hittites had fallen and
left, so far as we can see, a turmoil of disorganized populations
between the sea and the dreadful Assyrians. Here and there no doubt
traces of the Hittite civilization were discernible, sculptures of a
god in peasant dress—a sort of moujik-god—or of that eternal trinity
of Divine Father, Son, and Mother. The wondering Greeks saw a great
cliff at Sipylos fashioned like a weeping woman, and called her Niobe.
They seem to have admired Carian armour and borrowed that. There was
probably nothing else they could borrow from the Carians except their
lands. There was a numerous people dwelling farther inland called the
Lydians, who even then must have had some rudimentary civilization and
who afterwards, absorbing what they could of Ionian culture, threatened
the cities with slavery. Further down the coast, in the south-western
corner of the peninsula, where somewhat later the Dorians settled,
lived the Lycians, who had the kind of civilization which counts
descent on the mother’s side and buries its dead in holes of a cliff,
as sea birds lay their eggs. The northern part of the Aegean coast was
occupied by Mysians, Phrygians and kindred races, who never could get
themselves cultivated. They worshipped gods like Papaios, which is
Papa, and Bagaios, which must be the same as Bog, which is the Russian
for God.
This was the kind of world into which the fugitives were thrown. It
mattered the less perhaps because their real home was the sea. Yet
even the sea gave them only a temporary escape from the Barbarian.
Wherever they landed they met him again on the beach. Imagine, if you
will, a ship trading from the chief Ionian harbour, Miletus. Imagine
her bound for the south-east coast of the Black Sea for a cargo of
silver. She would pick her way by coast and island till she reached the
Dardanelles. From that point onwards she was in unfriendly waters. On
one side were the hills of Gallipoli (Achi Baba and the rest—we do not
know their ancient names), inhabited by “Thracians” of the sort called
Dolonkoi; on the other side was the country of the kindred “Phrygians.”
It was likely to go hard with a Greek ship cast away on either shore.
Thence through the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus into the Euxine.
Then came days and days of following the long Asiatic coast, dodging
the tide-races about the headlands, finding the springs of fresh water
known to the older hands, pushing at night into some rock-sheltered
cove, sleeping on the beach upon beds of gathered leaves. And so at
last to some harbour of “Colchians,” men whose complexion and hair
would make you swear they were Egyptians, circumcised men, violently
contrasting with their neighbours the Phasianoi, who live in the misty
valley of the romantic Phasis—large, fat, sleepy-looking men, flabby
men with pasty faces, who grow flax in the marshy meadows of their
languid stream. From these partially civilized peoples the Greeks would
glean news of the mountain-tribes of the interior, uncanny “Chalybes,”
who know where to find iron and silver in the ribs of their guarded
hills, and the utter savages of the Caucasus, whose single art is
printing the shapes of beasts in colours upon their clothes, and who,
like the beasts, are without shame in love.
Or suppose our ship bound for the corn-bearing region behind the
modern port of Odessa in South Russia. Once through the Bosphorus, she
would make her course along the shore of a wide and wintry territory
inhabited by red-haired, blue-eyed Thracians, a race akin to certain
elements in the population of Greece itself, warlike, musical,
emotional, mystical, cruel. Here and there the merchant would land
for water or fresh meat—at Salmydessos, at Apollonia, at Mesembria,
at Odessos, at Tomi (but we do not know when these places got their
names)—till he reached the mouths of the Danube. Wherever he touched
he might have the chance to hear of wild races further inland, such
as the Getai, very noble savages, who believed in the immortality of
men, or at least of the Getai. They were of the opinion that when
one of them left this life he “went to Salmoxis.” Salmoxis, he lived
in an underground house and was their god. Every four years they
sent a messenger to him to tell what they wanted. Their method was
this. First they told the messenger what he must ask, and then they
tossed him in the air, catching him as he fell on the points of their
spears. If he died, this meant a favourable answer from Salmoxis.
But if the messenger did not die, then they blamed the messenger and
“dispatched” another. Also they used to shoot arrows at the sun and
moon, defying those luminaries and denying their godhead. These were
“the most righteous of the Thracians,” according to Herodotus, who
expresses and perhaps shared the sentiment, at least as old as Homer,
which attributed exceptional virtue to remote and simple peoples like
the Hyperboreans and the Ethiopians and the “Koumiss-Eaters,” the
Hippemolgoi or Glaktophagoi. If the Getai were the most righteous of
the Thracians, one rather wonders what the rest were like. These were
certainly capable of nearly anything in their moments of religious
frenzy. They would tear raw flesh with their teeth, sometimes (it
was whispered) the living flesh of children. At certain times of the
year the Thracian women went mad upon the midnight hills, worshipping
Dionysus. (The wild splendour of that scene shines and shudders like
one of their own torches through the _Bacchae_ of Euripides.) The
Thracians of the coast had an evil reputation as wreckers....
Beyond the Danube was “Scythia.” All that district between the river
and the Crimea was from the earliest times of which we have record what
it is to-day, a grain-growing country. Its capital was the “Market
of the Borysthenites,” which preferred to call itself Olbia, “the
City of Eldorado.” Here the merchant would find a curious population,
very fair in type, great horsemen, wearing peaked caps of felt and
carrying half-moon shields. In the Russian army which fought Napoleon
in 1814 were Siberian archers whom the French nicknamed Les Amours.
I do not venture to say that these were Scythians, but it is clear
that an ancient Scythian (half naked, with his little recurved bow)
must have looked rather like an overgrown barbaric Cupid. At Athens
it was thought comic to stage a Scythian. Only, as to that, it should
be remembered that the Athenians recruited their police from Scythia,
and that the human mind seems to find something inherently comic in a
policeman.
The Scythians were not all savages. Some of them were skilled farmers.
With these the Greek settlers intermarried, and as early as Herodotus
there was a considerable half-breed population. A motley town like
Olbia was the place for stories—stories of the “Nomads” who neither
plough nor sow, but wander slowly over the interminable steppes with
their gipsy vans in which the women and children huddle under the
stretched roof of skins; stories of the Tauri, who live in the Crimea,
and sacrifice the shipwrecked to their bloody idol, clubbing them on
the head like seals. _And their enemies when they subdue them they
treat as follows. Every man cuts off a head and carries it away to his
house, and then fixing it on a long pole sets it up high above the
house, generally above the chimney; for they will have it that the
whole house is protected by the heads up there. They live by plunder
and fighting._ The Neuroi, another of these Scythian tribes, were
driven from their original home by “serpents,” and _look as if they
might be sorcerers. For the Scyths and the Greeks who live in Scythia
say that once a year every man of the Neuroi turns into a wolf, but
is restored to human shape after a day or two. Now when they say this
they do not convince me_—Herodotus—_still they say it and even take an
oath in saying it. But the Man-Eaters are the worst savages of all, for
they follow neither rule nor law of any kind. They are nomads, and are
dressed like Scyths, and have a language of their own, and are the
only cannibals among those peoples. The Black-Cloaks all wear black
cloaks. Hence their name. Their customs are Scythian. The great tribe
of the Boudinoi have all bright blue eyes and excessively red hair.
They live in a wooden town. They are aboriginal nomads and eat lice._
Beyond the Boudinoi lived a folk that were bald from birth—men _and_
women—besides having snub noses and large chins. The bald ones lived
upon wild cherries, straining the juice off thick and dark, and
then licking it up or drinking it mixed with milk. They dwelt under
trees, every man under his tree, on which in winter he stretched a
piece of white felt to make a kind of tent. On the mountains leaped
goat-footed men; and beyond the goat-footed lived men who slept away
six months of the year. The Issêdones ate their dead fathers, whose
skulls they afterwards gilded and honoured with sacrifices. “In other
respects” they were accounted just, and the women had as much authority
among them as the men. Then came the one-eyed Arimaspeans and the
gold-guarding griffins....
Suppose we change the scene, and send the Milesian ship on a voyage
to the African coast. What would the merchant find there? Herodotus
will tell us. By the shores of the Greater Syrtis live the Nasamônes.
They in summer (he tells us) leave their flocks by the seashore and go
up-country to gather dates at an oasis. They catch locusts, dry them,
pound them, sprinkle the dust on milk, and swallow the draught. Beyond
their territory are the Garamantes “in the Wild Beast Country.” They
run away when they see anybody, and do not know how to fight. West of
the Nasamônes on the coast are the Makai, who dress their hair in the
fashion of a cock’s comb and fight with shields of ostrich skin. Beyond
the Makai live the Gindânes, whose women wear leathern anklets, putting
on a new anklet for every new lover. “And each woman has many anklets.”
On a promontory of this region dwell the Lotos Eaters....
The Nomads roam from oasis to oasis over a land of salt and sand. Here
is found the race of Troglodytes or Cave Men, swiftest of human beings;
whom the Garamantes hunt in four-horse chariots. The Troglodytes feed
upon snakes and lizards and other reptiles. Their language does not
sound human at all but like the squeaking of bats. At some distance
from the Garamantes dwell the Atarantes, among whom nobody has a name.
These, when the sun is excessively hot, curse him and cry him shame for
scorching them and their land. The Atlantes, whose dwelling is under
Mount Atlas and its shrouded peaks, are said to be vegetarians and to
have no dreams. Beyond these stretches the unknown desert, where men
live in houses built of salt, for it never rains there. Hereabouts
wander a number of tribes concerning whom Herodotus remarks generally,
“All these peoples paint themselves vermilion and eat monkeys.”
Well, that was the kind of world in which Greek civilization was born.
Do not say I have been describing a remote barbarism. Remoteness is
relative to more than space, and to the Ionians the sea was no barrier,
but the contrary. They knew the whole south coast of the Black Sea,
for instance, better than their own Asiatic hinterland. But even if
we exclude the Black Sea and Libya as remote, where did they not at
first find barbarism? In Hellas? But they had just escaped from Hellas,
driven out by the wild first “Dorians,” who were steadily engaged in
ruining what the Ionians in their new home were trying to save. In
Mesopotamia? But between it and them lay all mountainous Anatolia
crowded with diverse races, most of them savage, all of them hostile.
Egypt at first and for long was closed to them by an exclusive foreign
policy. The unoriginal and materialistic culture of Phoenicia was
withheld (for what it was worth) by commercial rivalry. The West as yet
had nothing to give. Weak in numbers, in want of everything, shut in
with such neighbours, Ionia discovered in herself the force to rescue
her feet from this mire, and to found our modern civilization of reason
and freedom and imaginative energy.
Naturally the process took time. The first century or so must have
been largely lost in the mere struggle for survival. There may
even have been in some ways a retrogression—a fading out of the
Mycenaean culture, the admission of “Carian” elements needing gradual
assimilation. That period is historically so much of a blank to us,
that when we do begin to note the signs of expansion they give us the
surprise of suddenness. Miletus is all at once the leading city of
the Greek world. It plants colony after colony on the Dardanelles, in
the Sea of Marmara, along the shores of the Euxine. Ionia is awake
while Hellas is still asleep. Ionian traders, Ionian soldiers, Ionian
ships are everywhere. The men of Phokaia opened to trade the Adriatic,
Etruria, Spain. In the reign of Psammetichos—the First or Second—some
Ionian and Carian pirates were forced to land in Egypt. They were clad
according to their fashion in panoply of bronze. An Egyptian came to
the Marshes and told the king that “bronze men from the sea are wasting
the plain,” having never before seen men in such armour. Now the words
of the messenger were the very words of an oracle that had bidden
Psammetichos seek the help of “bronze men from the sea,” so the king
hired the strangers to serve in his army, and by their aid overcame his
enemies. The story (which is in Herodotus) is told in a way to provoke
the sceptical. But wait a moment. At Abusimbel in Upper Egypt there is
a great temple, and before the temple stand colossal statues. On the
legs of one of these are scratched Greek words: _When King Psamatichos
came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psamatichos the son of
Theokles wrote this; and they went above Kertis, as far up as the
river let them, and Potasimpto led the men of alien speech, and Amasis
the Egyptians. Archon the son of Hamoibichos and Pelekos the son of
Houdamos wrote me_—this is, the inscription. Beneath are the signatures
of Greek-speaking soldiers. The writers must have been Ionian
mercenaries under a leader who for some reason adopted the king’s name.
It is to such fellows we owe our names for Egyptian things. “Crocodile”
is just the Ionian word for a lizard, and “pyramid” really means a
wheaten cake. Ostriches they called “sparrows.” The British private
soldier in Egypt is probably making similar jokes to-day. To return to
the inscription, the “men of alien speech” commanded by Potasimpto—an
Egyptian name—were probably Carians. The date of the writing cannot be
later than 589 B.C. when Psammetichos II ceased to reign. The date is
not so striking as the fact that these fighters (who, to put it gently,
are not likely to have had the best Ionian education) could legibly
write. Their spelling, I admit, is not affectedly purist; but then,
spelling is a modern art.
The first great Ionian (discounting the view of some that Homer was
an Ionian poet) was the greatest of all. This was Archilochus, who
was born in the little island of Paros somewhere about the end of the
eighth century before Christ. His poetry is all but lost, his life
little more than a startling rumour. The ancients, who had him all to
read, spoke of him in the same breath with Homer. He was not only so
great a poet, but he was a new kind of poet. Before him men used the
traditional style of the heroic epic. This Archilochus sings about
himself. We hear in him a voice as personal, as poignant, as in Villon
or Heine or Burns; it is a revolutionary voice. Modern literature has
nothing to teach Archilochus. One can see that in the miserable scanty
fragments of his astonishing poetry that have come down to us.
As for the man himself, the case against him looks pretty black. He
himself is quite unabashed. But he also complains of hard luck, and
there may be something in this plea. If he was a bastard, much could
be forgiven him; but that theory seems to rest on a misapprehension
of his meaning. His father was evidently an important man among the
Parians. There does not appear to be any good reason why Archilochus
should have had so bad a time of it except the reason of temperament.
_One great thing I do know_, quoth he, _how to pay back in bitter kind
the man who wrongs me._ He certainly did know that, but the knowledge
was not going to make him popular. He never could get on with people.
He hated Paros, where, one would have thought, his father’s son had
a fair chance of happiness. _Damn Paros—and those figs—and a life at
sea._ Later he accompanied a colony, led by his father, to the island
of Thasos off the Thracian coast; and he did not like Thasos any more
than Paros. _It sticks up_, he says in his vivid way, _like a donkey’s
backbone, wreathed in wild woods._ He also grumbles that _the plagues
of all Hellas have run in a body to Thasos_. He did not like the sea,
and yet he was a good deal on it. Pulling at an oar and munching onions
no doubt seemed to him a poor conception of life, but a thrilling line
_Let us hide the bitter gifts of the Lord Poseidon_ rather breathes
an imaginative horror. The man is a master of this kind of sinister
beauty. _There were thirty that died—we overtook them with our feet—a
thousand were we who slew._ There you have it again. Oh yes, he had
an overpowering sense of beauty, and a wonderful imagination—but also
he had something else. That was just the tragedy. His genius had a
twist in it which hurt himself as well as other people. He had loved a
girl whom he saw _playing with a branch of myrtle and a rose, in the
shadow of her falling hair_. He believed that she had been promised in
marriage to him; but something happened, and they did not marry. It
may be said for Neoboule and her father that Archilochus was not the
sort they made good husbands of; and if any one is still disposed to
condemn them, he may relent when he hears that the poet assailed them
with a fabulous bitterness of tongue—assailed them till, according to
the story, they hanged themselves. He meantime followed the call of his
temperament, or of the poverty into which his temperament had brought
him, and became a professional soldier. _I shall be called a mercenary
like a Carian_, he says with a touch of what looks like bravado. What
a life for a poet! _I am the servant of the Lord of War, and I know
the lovely guerdon of the Muses_, he says superbly. His way of living
is reflected in his speech. There is lust and drunkenness in it, and a
kind of soldierly joviality. _Wild-fig-tree of the rock feeding many
crows, good-natured Pasiphile who makes strangers welcome_. Pasiphile
hardly needs a commentator. Nor does the half-line preserved by a
grammarian (who quoted it to illustrate the dative case)—_plagued with
lice_.
Archilochus was sent to fight the Saioi, a wild tribe of the Thracian
mainland opposite Thasos. It would seem that the Greeks were defeated.
At any rate, he for one ran away, abandoning his shield—to Greek
sentiment an unforgivable offence. Who tells us this? Archilochus
himself, adding impudently that he doesn’t care; he can easily get
another shield, and meantime his skin is whole. The ancient world never
quite got over the scandal of this avowal. Archilochus aggravated it
by a poem to a friend in which he remarks that a man who pays much
attention to charges of cowardice won’t have very many pleasures. But
cowards don’t become soldiers, and don’t write humorous accounts of
their misbehaviour. He was a fighter to the last. A man of Naxos killed
him.
There are in the fragments of Archilochus notes of tenderness and even
delicacy, notes of a singularly impressive pathos. There are indeed all
notes in him, from the bawdy to the divine. It would be absurd to call
him a bad man—quite as absurd as to call him a good one. He is a man.
And what makes him so fascinating is just this, that for the first time
in literature a man expresses himself. His extraordinary greatness is
almost a secondary matter by the side of that portentous phenomenon. It
was the Ionians who produced him.
Archilochus was absorbed in his own adventures, but even he must have
noted the tremendous events which were changing the nations before his
eyes. A fierce and numerous folk, known to the Greeks as the Cimmerians
(_Kimmerioi_—their name survives in Crimea and Crim Tartary), broke
loose or were thrust from their homes in the steppes and poured into
Asia Minor, apparently through what is called the “Sangarios Gap”
in Phrygia. You may see them fighting Ionians on a sarcophagus from
Clazomenae which is in the British Museum. They rode bareback on
half-tamed horses and slew with tremendous leaf-shaped swords. They
destroyed the power of Phrygia, then the greatest in the peninsula, and
King Midas, last of his race, killed himself (by drinking bull’s blood,
men said). Lydia succeeded to the place and the peril of the Phrygians.
She was under the rule of a new king (called “Gugu”), who made a
strong fight of it, but was ultimately, about 650 B.C., defeated and
slain by the half-naked riders under their king Tugdammi, who sacked
the Ionian towns. The Ionians, however, made common cause with Ardys
the son of Gugu or Gyges, as the Greeks called him, and along with
the Lydians they beat this Tugdammi and drove away his people. Then
the kings of Lydia, secure and strong and wealthy, turned their arms
against Ionia, which thenceforward has to fight one long and losing
battle with overmastering enemies. Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes,
Croesus—they all attacked her. Meantime, in the reign of Alyattes, the
greatest of these monarchs, a new and far more imposing power had got
itself consolidated to the east of the Lydian empire. This was the
kingdom of the Medes. The rivals fought a great battle, which ended in
the twilight and alarm of a total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 585
B.C. They made peace for the time, and Alyattes could proceed with the
gradual reduction of the ports. But in the next generation—for all
the East had been set in motion—the Medes in their turn had fallen
under the authority of the kindred Persians and the great conqueror
Cyrus, who in due time rushed west with his invincible footmen and his
unfamiliar camels, destroyed Lydia in a moment, and contemptuously left
a general to complete the conquest of Ionia.
All this time, and even under the Persian, the Ionians continued to
develop and enrich the mind of the world. If science means the effort
to find a rational instead of a mythological explanation of things,
then the Ionians invented science. Thales of Miletus predicted that
eclipse. Anaximander of Miletus held a theory about the origin of
life which anticipates modern speculation. He wrote a book about it,
which was probably the first example of literary prose in Greek.
He also made the first map. His fellow-citizen Hecataeus invented
history.... These are just some of the things the Ionians did. The
rest of the Hellenes—first the colonies in Italy and Sicily, then the
Athenians—caught the flame from them and kept it alive through later
storms. But there was no more than time for this when the eastern cloud
descended on Ionia. Athens could take up the torch. But Ionia was down.
II
KEEPING THE PASS
The innumerable East was pouring out of Thessaly into the Malian Plain,
flooding in by two main channels, the hill-road through the pass of
Thaumaki and the coast-road along the shore of the westward-bending
Gulf of Malis. First came the pioneers, then the fighters, then the
multitude of camp-followers and trains of supply which had fed all
those numbers over so many leagues of hostile and unharvested regions.
On attaining the brow of the steep climb to Thaumaki, had one looked
back upon the view which gave this point its name of _The Place of
Wondering_, he must have seen the wide Thessalian plain alive with an
unwonted stir of men and baggage-wains and animals, and touched with
shifting points of barbaric colour. As the continuous stream flowed
past him he could note everything in greater detail—“Persians and Medes
and Elamites,” the different contingents with their varying armature;
footmen and horsemen; sumpter-mules and a number of high-necked,
slow-striding camels, some of them showing on their flanks the proof
that there were lions in Macedonia. Through the noise of the march
would come the babel of strange oriental tongues. Enclosing all this,
very far away could be descried a shadowy girdle of great mountains,
from the highest and most distant of which the gods of Olympus looked
down upon the invasion of Greece.
But Xerxes, driving along the coast-road to where it meets the Thaumaki
route at Lamia, beheld a different sight. Mount Oeta stretched its
wild massif there before him. At its western extremity (which he was
approaching) the range piles itself into a shapeless bulk, crowding
together its summits, which here in a surprising manner suddenly leap
up some six or seven thousand feet from the plain. As the system trends
eastward it sags down to a much lower level, but is there formidably
guarded by the black precipices of the Trachinian Cliffs. Eastward yet
it continues declining, until it is perhaps not three thousand feet
high, then rises again another two thousand. This is the part that was
called Kallidromos. Between the marshy shore of the Gulf and the broken
cliff-wall of the mountain runs the Pass. Towering over all, at a vast
distance rises the strange, enormous peak called Giona; while far to
the south may be descried the most famous mountain in the world.
In the fierce sunlight of that sweltering day the King could not have
failed to mark on his side of the Pass, under the very highest peaks of
the range, a great black gash in the rocky barrier. As he approached
it revealed itself to be the gorge through which the tormented Asôpos
bores its narrow way between sheer walls of an altitude that disturbs
the mind. A little space beyond the gorge, on the farther side of the
Asôpos where it enters the Gulf, begins the Pass. The army was halted.
Xerxes sent forward a scout.
The scout entered the Pass at a point where the sea barely left room
for the road between it and the mountain, which here, gradually
accentuating the gentle slope near the summit, comes down precipitously
in the last few hundred feet. He rode a mile and met no one. Then
the Pass, opening out a little towards the right, showed him the old
temples where the Amphiktyones, the “Dwellers Round,” used to meet
upon their sacred business. The road kept skirting the sea-marsh for a
little, then rose in a long slope. He made his way cautiously to the
summit. Arrived there, he all at once saw, thrust as it were into his
face (so near they seem) the monstrous precipices of Kallidromos, three
thousand feet high, all glistening at its eastern end with the whitish
deposit of those clear bluish-green sulphur springs which gave its name
to this famous place—the “Hot Gates,” _Thermopylae_. But the scout
had no eyes for this great vision, for he saw, where the road again
approaches the rocky wall, the red tunics of Spartan hoplites.
What were they doing? Some of them were practising the use of their
weapons. Some were sitting on the ground and—yes—combing their long
hair! One of them must have made a jest, for the others broke out
laughing. The scout could not understand it at all. He counted them:
a ridiculous handful. There were in fact rather more of them than he
could see; an ancient wall across the Pass hid the rest. The scout rode
quietly back with his information. Now one reason why the Spartans
were combing their hair was this. It was customary among them to comb
the hair of the dead.
They knew what was before them. Two of their spies had been captured
by Xerxes, who let them go after fully showing them his whole array.
The report of the spies was not likely to fall short of the facts as
a result of this policy. All the East was on the march! Besides the
Persians, Medes and Kissians, who formed the flower of the invading
army, were coming the Assyrians, one of the great conquering races
of history, distinguishable by their helmets of bronze and leathern
straps curiously interwoven, by their clubs studded with iron nails,
and by their linen breastplates. There were coming, the Bactrians with
their bows of cane; the Sakai wearing their pointed sheepskin caps
and armed with their native battleaxes; dark Indians in their cotton
garments, carrying their bows of bamboo and iron-tipped arrows. There
were hide-wrapped Caspians bearing sword and bow; Sarangians in dyed
raiment and booted to the knee; Paktyes, Outioi, Mykoi, Parikanioi....
There were Arabians in flowing burnous who shot with the long bow;
Ethiopians in the pelts of leopards and lions bearing spears of
antelope’s horn and bossy maces and huge bows of split palm-wood with
little arrows tipped with agate, who when they went to battle coloured
half their black bodies with chalk and half with vermilion. (The
“Eastern Ethiopians” wore on their heads the scalps of horses with
the mane and ears attached; their shields were the backs of cranes.)
There were Libyans from North Africa in goatskin garments; and buskined
Paphlagonians in plaited headpieces. There were Phrygians, Armenians,
Lydians, Mysians. There were Thracians with their foxskin caps, their
deer-skin buskins, their long, many-coloured mantles. There were tribes
armed with little shields of cow-hide and hunting-spears, two for each
warrior; on their heads were bronze helmets and on the helmets the ears
and horns of an ox in bronze, their legs were bound in crimson puttees.
The Milyai were there, their cloaks fastened by brooches and with
leathern skull-caps on their heads; the Moschoi, whose helmets were
made of wood; the Tibarenes, the Makrônes, the Mossynoikoi; the Mares;
the Colchians with wooden helms and raw-hide shields; the Alarodians
and the Saspeires; the tribes from the islands of the Red Sea....
These (and more) were the infantry of the King. In addition there were
the cavalry and the fleet.
There was the fine Persian cavalry. There were the Sagartians, who
fought with the lasso; Medes and Kissians; Indians, some riding on
steeds, some in chariots drawn by horses or by wild asses; Bactrians
and Sakai; the Libyan charioteers; Perikanians; Arabians on camels.
To form the vast fleet came the famous mariners of Phoenicia and
Syrians of Palestine—helmeted men with linen breastplates and rimless
shields, throwers of the javelin. The Egyptians sent their navy, whose
men had defences of plaited work on their heads, and carried hollow
shields with enormous rims, and were armed with boarding-pikes and
poleaxes and great triangular daggers. The Cyprian contingent could
be recognized by the turbans of their “kings” and the felt hats of
the common sort. The Cilician seamen were there in woollen jerseys.
Pamphylians were there. The Lycian crews wore greaves and cuirasses,
and were armed with bows of cornel wood and reed arrows without
feathers, and with casting-spears; you knew them by the goatskins
floating from their shoulders, their plumed hats, their daggers and
crescent-shaped falchions. The Dorians of Asia were there, men of
Greek race; the subject Ionians, alas; some from the Greek isles; the
Aeolians; the “Hellespontians.” On board of every ship was a band of
fighting men.
To defend the Pass there were three hundred Spartans; to be exact, 297,
all picked men and, that their race might not perish out of Sparta,
all fathers of sons. They were accompanied by their less heavily armed
attendants. There were 2,196 men from Arcadia, 400 from Corinth, 200
from Phlius, 30 from Homeric Mycenae, now a ruinous little town, 700
Thespians, 400 Thebans of doubtful loyalty, 1,000 Phocians, the whole
levy of the Opuntian Locrians; in all not eight thousand men. The whole
force was under the command of one of the two Spartan kings. You know
his name.
The right flank of the Greeks rested upon the narrow seas between the
Malian coast and Euboea. The Athenian fleet was at Artemision guarding
the narrows against the vastly superior navy of the enemy. From the
heights above the road Leonidas could signal to the Athenian admiral.
The King prepared to attack simultaneously by land and sea. While the
great army was making its way into Malis, his fleet was sailing along
the iron coast of Magnesia, where the sea breaks under the imminent
range of wooded Pelion. A squadron was detached to circumnavigate
Euboea and cut off the retreat of the Greek ships in the Straits. Next
morning everything would be ready for the concerted assault. The main
portion of the fleet would enter the Malian Gulf, while the other ships
were entering the “Hollows of Euboea.” Then Xerxes would rush at the
Pass.
Only—in the sultry night following the long, hot day thunder began to
mutter along the heights of Pelion. It increased to a violent storm,
and the watchers on the Euboean mountains saw every now and then the
whole range lit up by vivid lightning. Then the wind—the “Hellesponter”
from the north-east—rose to so great a fury that the sea was quickly
all in a turmoil. For three days the tempest raged, for three nights
the bale-fires of the Greeks tossed their red beards in the wind.
Great numbers of Persian ships were cast away upon the rocks about
Cape Sepias. The squadron sent to round Kaphareus was wrecked in the
Hollows. So rich a treasure was lost that a farmer near Sepias became
the wealthiest Greek of his time by merely picking up what was washed
upon the beach. And for these three days Xerxes must mark time before
the Pass.
On the fourth day the Persian fleet succeeded in entering the Pagasaean
Gulf. Then Xerxes ordered the attack. His Persian bodyguard, the ten
thousand “Immortals” who were his best troops, were held in reserve.
Meanwhile the Medes and Kissians, admirable infantry to whom victory
had long become a habit, were sent forward to wear down the Spartan
resistance. They were dressed in close-fitting leathern garments, in
trousers (which surprised the Greeks) and curious fez-like caps, of
soft felt or cotton, projecting in a kind of drooping horn at the
front. (But the Kissians wore turbans.) They had sleeved tunics of many
colours and cuirasses of bronzen scales like the skin of some great
fish. They had wicker shields from behind which they cast their long
spears (but the Greek spears were longer) and shot the reed arrows
from their little bows (but the Greek bows were smaller). At their
right sides swung from their girdles their foot-long stabbing swords.
Their emperor, throned on a golden chair with silver feet, watched
them advance to the assault. On his head was a stiff upright fez, on
his feet saffron-tinted slippers. His mantle was purple, purple his
trousers and flowing robe embroidered in white with the sacred hawks of
his god Ahuramazda. He was girt with a golden zone, from which was hung
his Persian sword thickly set with precious stones.
The Medes and Kissians attacked with fury. Against these lighter-armed
troops the Spartans with their metal panoply and great heavy spears
would have been at a terrible disadvantage. It was vital for them to
keep the enemy engaged at close quarters. The tactics of Leonidas
therefore were designed to effect this. His men made short rushes into
the thick of the foe; feigned flights; reformed again and renewed
the charge. They did this again and again. What discipline! In that
narrow space, fifty feet wide, the ponderous Lacedaemonian spears
of the Greek vanguard went through the wicker shields and the scale
armour of the Barbarians like papyrus, while the points of the Median
lances bent or broke against the solid buckler and breastplate of the
Spartan hoplite. Leonidas hardly lost a man. Still the enemy came on,
yelling; their dead choked the mouth of the Pass. Hour after hour in
that late-summer weather the fight raged on. Loaded with their armour,
trusting much to mere superiority of physical strength as they thrust
back the assailants with their shields, all that time the Spartans kept
up these violent rushing tactics. And then Xerxes sent the “Immortals”
at them.