Aided by a thousand men from Plataea, then on terms of intimate

friendship with the Athenians, the little army marched from the city,

and advanced to the entrance of the plain of Marathon. Here they

arrayed themselves in martial order, near the temple of Hercules, to

the east of the hills that guard the upper part of the valley. Thus

encamped, and in sight of the gigantic power of the enemy, darkening

the long expanse that skirts the sea, divisions broke out among the

leaders;--some contended that a battle was by no means to be risked

with such inferior forces--others, on the contrary, were for giving

immediate battle. Of this latter advice was Miltiades--he was

supported by a man already of high repute, though now first presented

to our notice, and afterward destined to act a great and splendid part

in the drama of his times. Aristides was one of the generals of the

army [278], and strenuously co-operated with Miltiades in the policy

of immediate battle.

Despite, however, the military renown of the one, and the civil

eminence of the other, the opposite and more tame opinion seemed

likely to prevail, when Miltiades suddenly thus addressed the

Polemarch Callimachus. That magistrate, the third of the nine

archons, was held by virtue of his office equal in dignity to the

military leaders, and to him was confided the privilege of a casting

vote.

“On you, Callimachus,” said the chief of the Chersonese, “on you it

rests, whether Athens shall be enslaved, or whether from age to age

your country, freed by your voice, shall retain in yours a name dearer

to her even than those of Aristogiton and Harmodius [279]. Never

since the foundation of Athens was she placed in so imminent a peril.

If she succumb to the Mede, she is rendered again to the tyranny of

Hippias--but if she conquer, she may rise to the first eminence among

the states of Greece. How this may be accomplished, and how upon your

decision rests the event, I will at once explain. The sentiments of

our leaders are divided--these are for instant engagement, those for

procrastination. Depend upon it, if we delay, some sedition, some

tumult will break out among the Athenians, and may draw a part of them

to favour the Medes; but if we engage at once, and before a single

dissension takes from us a single man, we may, if the gods give us

equal fortune, obtain the victory. Consider the alternative--our

decision depends on you.”

V. The arguments of Miltiades convinced Callimachus, who knew well

the many divisions of the city, the strength which Hippias and the

Pisistratidae still probably possessed within its walls, and who could

not but allow that a superior force becomes ever more fearful the more

deliberately it is regarded. He interposed his authority. It was

decided to give battle. Each general commanded in turn his single

day. When it came to the turn of Aristides, he gave up his right to

Miltiades, showing his colleagues that it was no disgrace to submit to

the profound experience of another. The example once set was

universally followed, and Miltiades was thus left in absolute and

undivided command. But that able and keen-sighted chief, fearing

perhaps that if he took from another his day of command, jealousy

might damp the ardour of the general thus deprived, and, as it were,

degraded, waited till his own appointed day before he commenced the

attack.

VI. On the night before Hippias conducted the barbarians to the

plains of Marathon, he is said to have dreamed a dream. He thought he

was with his mother! In the fondness of human hopes he interpreted

the vision favourably, and flattered himself that he should regain his

authority, and die in his own house of old age. The morning now

arrived (B. C. 490) that was to attest the veracity of his

interpretation.

VII. To the left of the Athenians was a low chain of hills, clothed

with trees (and which furnished them timber to break the charge of the

Persian horse)--to their right a torrent;--their front was long, for,

to render it more imposing in extent, and to prevent being outflanked

by the Persian numbers, the centre ranks were left weak and shallow,

but on either wing the troops were drawn up more solidly and strong.

Callimachus, the polemarch, commanded the right wing--the Plataeans

formed the left. They had few, if any, horsemen or archers. The

details which we possess of their arms and military array, if not in

this, in other engagements of the same period, will complete the

picture. We may behold them clad in bright armour, well proof and

tempered, which covered breast and back--the greaves, so often

mentioned by Homer, were still retained--their helmets were wrought

and crested, the cones mostly painted in glowing colours, and the

plumage of feathers or horse-hair rich and waving, in proportion to

the rank of the wearer. Broad, sturdy, and richly ornamented were

their bucklers--the pride and darling of their arms, the loss of which

was the loss of honour; their spears were ponderous, thick, and long--

a chief mark of contradistinction from the slight shaft of Persia--

and, with their short broadsword, constituted their main weapons of

offence. No Greek army marched to battle without vows, and sacrifice,

and prayer--and now, in the stillness of the pause, the soothsayers

examined the entrails of the victims--they were propitious, and

Callimachus solemnly vowed to Diana a victim for the slaughter of

every foe. Loud broke the trumpets [280]--the standards wrought with

the sacred bird of Athens were raised on high [281];--it was the

signal of battle--and the Athenians rushed with an impetuous vehemence

upon the Persian power. “The first Greeks of whom I have heard,” says

the simple Halicarnassean, “who ever ran to attack a foe--the first,

too, who ever beheld without dismay the garb and armour of the Medes;

for hitherto in Greece the very name of Mede had excited terror.”

VIII. When the Persian army, with its numerous horse, animal as well

as man protected by plates of mail [283]--its expert bowmen--its lines

and deep files of turbaned soldiers, gorgeous with many a blazing

standard,--headed by leaders well hardened, despite their gay garbs

and adorned breastplates, in many a more even field;--when, I say,

this force beheld the Athenians rushing towards them, they considered

them, thus few, and destitute alike of cavalry and archers [284], as

madmen hurrying to destruction. But it was evidently not without

deliberate calculation that Miltiades had so commenced the attack.

The warlike experience of his guerilla life had taught him to know the

foe against whom he fought. To volunteer the assault was to forestall

and cripple the charge of the Persian horse--besides, the long lances,

the heavy arms, the hand-to-hand valour of the Greeks, must have been

no light encounter to the more weakly mailed and less formidably-armed

infantry of the East. Accustomed themselves to give the charge, it

was a novelty and a disadvantage to receive it. Long, fierce, and

stubborn was the battle. The centre wing of the barbarians, composed

of the Sacians and the pure Persian race, at length pressed hard upon

the shallow centre of the Greeks, drove them back into the country,

and, eager with pursuit, left their own wings to the charge of

Callimachus on the one side and the Plataean forces on the other. The

brave polemarch, after the most signal feats of valour, fell fighting

in the field; but his troops, undismayed, smote on with spear and

sword. The barbarians retreated backward to the sea, where swamps and

marshes encumbered their movements, and here (though the Athenians did

not pursue them far) the greater portion were slain, hemmed in by the

morasses, and probably ridden down by their own disordered cavalry.

Meanwhile, the two tribes that had formed the centre, one of which was

commanded by Aristides [285], retrieved themselves with a mighty

effort, and the two wings, having routed their antagonists, now

inclining towards each other, intercepted the barbarian centre, which,

thus attacked, front and rear (large trees felled and scattered over

the plain obstructing the movements of their cavalry), was defeated

with prodigious slaughter. Evening came on [286]:--confused and

disorderly, the Persians now only thought of flight: the whole army

retired to their ships, hard chased by the Grecian victors, who, amid

the carnage, fired the fleet. Cynaegirus, brother to Aeschylus, the

tragic poet (himself highly distinguished for his feats that day),

seized one of the vessels by the poop: his hand was severed by an axe;

he died gloriously of his wounds. But to none did the fortunes of

that field open a more illustrious career than to a youth of the tribe

Leontis, in whom, though probably then but a simple soldier in the

ranks, was first made manifest the nature and the genius destined to

command. The name of that youth was Themistocles [287]. Seven

vessels were captured--six thousand four hundred of the barbarians

fell in the field--the Athenians and their brave ally lost only one

hundred and ninety-two; but among them perished many of their bravest

nobles. It was a superstition not uncharacteristic of that

imaginative people, and evincing how greatly their ardour was aroused,

that many of them (according to Plutarch) fancied they beheld the

gigantic shade of their ancestral Theseus, completely armed, and

bearing down before them upon the foe.

So perished the hopes of the unfortunate Hippias; obscure and

inglorious in his last hour, the exiled prince fell confounded amid

the general slaughter. [288]

IX. Despite the capture of some vessels, and the conflagration of

others, the Persians still retained a considerable fleet, and,

succeeding in boarding their Eretrian plunder (which they had left on

the Euboean Isle), they passed thence the promontory of Sunium, with

the intention of circumventing the Athenians, and arriving at Athens

before them--a design which it was supposed they were induced to form

by the treachery of some one suspected, without sufficient proof, to

belong to the house of the Alcmaeonids, who held up a shield as a

signal to the Persians while they were under sail [289]. But the

Athenians were under a prompt and vigilant commander, and while the

barbarian fleet doubled the Cape of Sunium, they reached their city,

and effectually prevented the designs of the foe. Aristides, with the

tribe under his command, was left on the field to guard the prisoners

and the booty, and his scrupulous honesty was evinced by his jealous

care over the scattered and uncounted treasure [290]. The painter of

the nobler schools might find perhaps few subjects worthier of his art

than Aristides watching at night amid the torches of his men over the

plains of Marathon, in sight of the blue Aegean, no longer crowded

with the barbarian masts;--and the white columns of the temple of

Hercules, beside which the Athenians had pitched their camp.

The Persian fleet anchored off Phalerum, the Athenian harbour, and

remaining there, menacing but inactive, a short time, sailed back to

Asia.

X. The moon had passed her full, when two thousand Spartans arrived

at Athens: the battle was over and the victory won; but so great was

their desire to see the bodies of the formidable Medes, that they

proceeded to Marathon, and, returning to Athens, swelled the triumph

of her citizens by their applause and congratulations.

XI. The marble which the Persians had brought with them, in order to

erect as a trophy of the victory they anticipated, was, at a

subsequent period, wrought by Phidias into a statue of Nemesis. A

picture of the battle, representing Miltiades in the foremost place,

and solemnly preserved in public, was deemed no inadequate reward to

that great captain; and yet, conspicuous above the level plain of

Marathon, rises a long barrow, fifteen feet in height, the supposed

sepulchre of the Athenian heroes. Still does a romantic legend, not

unfamiliar with our traditions of the north, give a supernatural

terror to the spot. Nightly along the plain are yet heard by

superstition the neighings of chargers and the rushing shadows of

spectral war [291]. And still, throughout the civilized world

(civilized how much by the arts and lore of Athens!) men of every

clime, of every political persuasion, feel as Greeks at the name of

Marathon. Later fields have presented the spectacle of an equal

valour, and almost the same disparities of slaughter; but never, in

the annals of earth, were united so closely in our applause,

admiration for the heroism of the victors, and sympathy for the

holiness of their cause. It was the first great victory of OPINION!

and its fruits were reaped, not by Athens only, but by all Greece

then, as by all time thereafter, in a mighty and imperishable

harvest,--the invisible not less than the actual force of despotism

was broken. Nor was it only that the dread which had hung upon the

Median name was dispelled--nor that free states were taught their

pre-eminence over the unwieldy empires which the Persian conquerors had

destroyed,--a greater lesson was taught to Greece, when she discovered

that the monarch of Asia could not force upon a petty state the

fashion of its government, or the selection of its rulers. The defeat

of Hippias was of no less value than that of Darius; and the same blow

which struck down the foreign invader smote also the hopes of domestic

tyrants.

One successful battle for liberty quickens and exalts that proud and

emulous spirit from which are called forth the civilization and the

arts that liberty should produce, more rapidly than centuries of

repose. To Athens the victory of Marathon was a second Solon.

FOOTNOTES.

[1] In their passage through the press I have, however, had many

opportunities to consult and refer to Mr. Thirlwall’s able and careful

work.

[2] The passage in Aristotle (Meteorol., l. I, c. 14), in which,

speaking of the ancient Hellas (the country about Dodona and the river

Achelous), the author says it was inhabited by a people (along with

the Helli, or Selli) then called Graeci, now Hellenes (tote men

Graikoi, nun de Hellaenes) is well known. The Greek chronicle on the

Arundel marbles asserts, that the Greeks were called Graeci before

they were called Hellenes; in fact, Graeci was most probably once a

name for the Pelasgi, or for a powerful, perhaps predominant, tribe of

the Pelasgi widely extended along the western coast--by them the name

was borne into Italy, and (used indiscriminately with that of Pelasgi)

gave the Latin appellation to the Hellenic or Grecian people.

[3] Modern travellers, in their eloquent lamentations over the now

niggard waters of these immortal streams, appear to forget that Strabo

expressly informs us that the Cephisus flowed in the manner of a

torrent, and failed altogether in the summer. “Much the same,” he

adds, “was the Ilissus.” A deficiency of water was always a principal

grievance in Attica, as we may learn from the laws of Solon relative

to wells.

[4] Platon. Timaeus. Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici, vol. i., p. 5.

[5] According to some they were from India, to others from Egypt, to

others again from Phoenicia. They have been systematized into

Bactrians, and Scythians, and Philistines--into Goths, and into Celts;

and tracked by investigations as ingenious as they are futile, beyond

the banks of the Danube to their settlements in the Peloponnese. No

erudition and no speculation can, however, succeed in proving their

existence in any part of the world prior to their appearance in

Greece.

[6] Sophoc. Ajax, 1251.

[7] All those words (in the Latin) which make the foundation of a

language, expressive of the wants or simple relations of life, are

almost literally Greek--such as pater, frater, aratrum, bos, ager,

etc. For the derivation of the Latin from the Aeolic dialect of

Greece, see “Scheid’s Prolegomena to Lennep’s Etymologicon Linguae

Grecae.”

[8] The Leleges, Dryopes, and most of the other hordes prevalent in

Greece, with the Pelasgi, I consider, with Mr. Clinton, but as tribes

belonging to the great Pelasgic family. One tribe would evidently

become more civilized than the rest, in proportion to the social state

of the lands through which it migrated--its reception of strangers

from the more advanced East--or according as the circumstances of the

soil in which it fixed its abode stimulated it to industry, or forced

it to invention. The tradition relative to Pelasgus, that while it

asserts him to have been the first that dwelt in Arcadia, declares

also that he first taught men to build huts, wear garments of skins,

and exchange the yet less nutritious food of herbs and roots for the

sweet and palatable acorns of the “fagus,” justly puzzled Pausanias.

Such traditions, if they prove any thing, which I more than doubt,

tend to prove that the tribe personified by the word “Pelasgus,”

migrated into that very Arcadia alleged to have been their aboriginal

home, and taught their own rude arts to the yet less cultivated

population they found there.

[9] See Isaiah xxiii.

[10] The received account of the agricultural skill of the Pelasgi is

tolerably well supported. Dionysius tells us that the Aboriginals

having assigned to those Pelasgi, whom the oracle sent from Dodona

into Italy, the marshy and unprofitable land called Velia, they soon

drained the fen:--their love of husbandry contributed, no doubt, to

form the peculiar character of their civilization and religion.

[11] Solinus and Pliny state that the Pelasgi first brought letters

into Italy. Long the leading race of Italy, their power declined,

according to Dionysius, two generations before the Trojan war.

[12] Paus. Arcad., c. xxxviii. In a previous chapter (II.) that

accomplished antiquary observes, that it appeared to him that Cecrops

and Lycaon (son of Pelasgus and founder of Lycosura) were

contemporaries. By the strong and exaggerating expression of

Pausanias quoted in the text, we must suppose, not that he considered

Lycosura the first town of the earth, but the first walled and

fortified city. The sons of Lycaon were great builders of cities, and

in their time rapid strides in civilization appear by tradition to

have been made in the Peloponnesus. The Pelasgic architecture is

often confounded with the Cyclopean. The Pelasgic masonry is

polygonal, each stone fitting into the other without cement; that

called the Cyclopean, and described by Pausanias, is utterly

different, being composed by immense blocks of stone, with small

pebbles inserted in the interstices. (See Gell’s Topography of Rome

and its Vicinity.) By some antiquaries, who have not made the mistake

of confounding these distinct orders of architecture, the Cyclopean

has been deemed more ancient than the Pelasgic,--but this also is an

error. Lycosura was walled by the Pelasgians between four and five

centuries prior to the introduction of the Cyclopean masonry--in the

building of the city of Tiryns. Sir William Gell maintains the

possibility of tracing the walls of Lycosura near the place now called

Surias To Kastro.

[13] The expulsion of the Hyksos, which was not accomplished by one

sudden, but by repeated revolutions, caused many migrations; among

others, according to the Egyptians, that of Danaus.

[14] The Egyptian monarchs, in a later age, employed the Phoenicians

in long and adventurous maritime undertakings. At a comparatively

recent date, Neco, king of Egypt, despatched certain Phoenicians on no

less an enterprise than that of the circumnavigation of Africa.

[Herod., iv., 12. Rennell., Geog. of Herod.] That monarch was indeed

fitted for great designs. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea already

received his fleets, and he had attempted to unite them by a canal

which would have rendered Africa an island. [Herod., ii., 158, 159.

Heeren., Phoenicians, c. iii. See also Diodorus.]

[15] The general habits of a people can in no age preclude exceptions

in individuals. Indian rajahs do not usually travel, but we had an

Indian rajah for some years in the Regent’s Park; the Chinese are not

in the habit of visiting England, but a short time ago some Chinese

were in London. Grant that Phoenicians had intercourse with Egypt and

with Greece, and nothing can be less improbable than that a Phoenician

vessel may have contained some Egyptian adventurers. They might

certainly be men of low rank and desperate fortunes--they might be

fugitives from the law--but they might not the less have seemed

princes and sages to a horde of Pelasgic savages.

[16] The authorities in favour of the Egyptian origin of Cecrops

are.--Diod., lib. i.; Theopomp.; Schol. Aristoph.; Plot.; Suidas.

Plato speaks of the ancient connexion between Sais and Athens. Solon

finds the names of Erechtheus and Cecrops in Egypt, according to the

same authority, I grant a doubtful one (Plat. Critias.) The best

positive authority of which I am aware in favour of the contrary

supposition that Cecrops was indigenous, is Apollodorus.

[17] To enter into all the arguments that have been urged on either

side relative to Cecrops would occupy about two hundred pages of this

work, and still leave the question in dispute. Perhaps two hundred

pages might be devoted to subjects more generally instructive.

[18] So, in the Peruvian traditions, the apparition of two persons of

majestic form and graceful garments, appearing alone and unarmed on

the margin of the Lake Titiaca, sufficed to reclaim a naked and

wretched horde from their savage life, to inculcate the elements of

the social union, and to collect a people in establishing a throne.

[19] “Like the Greeks,” says Herodotus (book ii., c. 112), “the

Egyptians confine themselves to one wife.” Latterly, this among the

Greeks, though a common, was not an invariable, restraint; but more on

this hereafter.

[20] Hobhouse’s Travels, Letter 23.

[21] It is by no means probable that this city, despite its fortress,

was walled like Lycosura.

[22] At least Strabo assigns Boeotia to the government of Cecrops.

But I confess, that so far from his incorporating Boeotia with Attica,

I think that traditions relative to his immediate successors appear to

indicate that Attica itself continued to retain independent tribes--

soon ripening, if not already advanced, to independent states.

[23] Herod., ii., c. i.

[24] Ibid., ii., c. liii.

[25] That all the Pelasgi--scattered throughout Greece, divided among

themselves--frequently at war with each other, and certainly in no

habits of peaceful communication--each tribe of different modes of

life, and different degrees of civilization, should have concurred in

giving no names to their gods, and then have equally concurred in

receiving names from Egypt, is an assertion so preposterous, that it

carries with it its own contradiction. Many of the mistakes relative

to the Pelasgi appear to have arisen from supposing the common name

implied a common and united tribe, and not a vast and dispersed

people, subdivided into innumerable families, and diversified by

innumerable influences.

[26] The connexion of Ceres with Isis was a subsequent innovation.

[27] Orcos was the personification of an oath, or the sanctity of an

oath.

[28] Naith in the Doric dialect.

[29] If Onca, or Onga, was the name of the Phoenician goddess!--In

the “Seven against Thebes,” the chorus invoke Minerva under the name

of Onca--and there can be no doubt that the Grecian Minerva is

sometimes called Onca; but it is not clear to me that the Phoenicians

had a deity of that name--nor can I agree with those who insist upon

reading Onca for Siga in Pausanias (lib. ix., chap. 12), where he says

Siga was the name of the Phoenician Minerva. The Phoenicians

evidently had a deity correspondent with the Greek Minerva; but that

it was named Onca, or Onga, is by no means satisfactorily proved; and

the Scholiast, on Pindar, derives the epithet as applies to Minerva

from a Boeotian village.

[30] De Mundo, c. 7.

[31] The Egyptians supposed three principles: 1st. One benevolent and

universal Spirit. 2d. Matter coeval with eternity. 3d. Nature

opposing the good of the universal Spirit. We find these principles

in a variety of shapes typified through their deities. Besides their

types of nature, as the Egyptians adopted hero gods, typical fables

were invented to conceal their humanity, to excuse their errors, or to

dignify their achievements.

[32] See Heeren’s Political History of Greece, in which this point is

luminously argued.

[33] Besides, it is not the character of emigrants from a people

accustomed to castes, to propagate those castes superior to then own,

of which they have exported no representatives. Suppose none of that

privileged and noble order, called the priests, to have accompanied

the Egyptian migrators, those migrators would never have dreamed of

instituting that order in their new settlement any more than a colony

of the warrior caste in India would establish out of their own order a

spurious and fictitious caste of Bramins.

[34] When, in a later age, Karmath, the impostor of the East, sough

to undermine Mahometanism, his most successful policy was in declaring

its commands to be allegories.

[35] Herodotus (b. ii, c. 53) observes, that it is to Hesiod and

Homer the Greeks owe their theogony; that they gave the gods their

titles, fixed their ranks, and described their shapes. And although

this cannot be believed literally, in some respects it may

metaphorically. Doubtless the poets took their descriptions from

popular traditions; but they made those traditions immortal. Jupiter

could never become symbolical to a people who had once pictured to

themselves the nod and curls of the Jupiter of Homer.

[36] Cicero de Natura Deorum, b. ii.--Most of the philosophical

interpretations of the Greek mythology were the offspring of the

Alexandrine schools. It is to the honour of Aristarchus that he

combated a theory that very much resembles the philosophy that would

convert the youthful readers of Mother Bunch into the inventors of

allegorical morality.

[37] But the worship can be traced to a much earlier date than that

the most plausibly ascribed to the Persian Zoroaster.

[38] So Epimenides of Crete is said to have spent forty-five years in

a cavern, and Minos descends into the sacred cave of Jupiter to

receive from him the elements of law. The awe attached to woods and

caverns, it may be observed, is to be found in the Northern as well as

Eastern superstitions. And there is scarcely a nation on the earth in

which we do not find the ancient superstition has especially attached

itself to the cavern and the forest, peopling them with peculiar

demons. Darkness, silence, and solitude are priests that eternally

speak to the senses; and few of the most skeptical of us have been

lost in thick woods, or entered lonely caverns, without acknowledging

their influence upon the imagination: “Ipsa silentia,” says

beautifully the elder Pliny, “ipsa silentia adoramus.” The effect of

streams and fountains upon the mind seems more unusual and surprising.

Yet, to a people unacquainted with physics, waters imbued with mineral

properties, or exhaling mephitic vapours, may well appear possessed of

a something preternatural. Accordingly, at this day, among many

savage tribes we find that such springs are regarded with veneration

and awe. The people of Fiji, in the South Seas, have a well which

they imagine the passage to the next world, they even believe that you

may see in its waters the spectral images of things rolling on to

eternity. Fountains no less than groves, were objects of veneration

with our Saxon ancestors.--See Meginhard, Wilkins, etc.

[39] 2 Kings xvi., 4.

[40] Of the three graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, the

Spartans originally worshipped but one--(Aglaia, splendour) under the

name of Phaenna, brightness: they rejected the other two, whose names

signify Joy and Pleasure, and adopted a substitute in one whose name

was Sound (Cletha,)--a very common substitute nowadays!

[41] The Persian creed, derived from Zoroaster, resembled the most to

that of Christianity. It inculcated the resurrection of the dead, the

universal triumph of Ormuzd, the Principle of Light--the destruction

of the reign of Ahrimanes, the Evil Principle.

[42] Wherever Egyptian, or indeed Grecian colonies migrated, nothing

was more natural than that, where they found a coincidence of scene,

they should establish a coincidence of name. In Epirus were also the

Acheron and Cocytus; and Campania contains the whole topography of the

Virgilian Hades.

[43] See sect. xxi., p. 77.

[44] Fire was everywhere in the East a sacred symbol--though it

cannot be implicitly believed that the Vulcan or Hephaistus of the

Greeks has his prototype or original in the Egyptian Phta or Phtas.

The Persian philosophy made fire a symbol of the Divine intelligence--

the Persian credulity, like the Grecian, converted the symbol into the

god (Max. Tyr., Dissert. 38; Herod., lib. 3, c. 16). The Jews

themselves connected the element with their true Deity. It is in fire

that Jehovah reveals himself. A sacred flame was burnt unceasingly in

the temples of Israel, and grave the punishment attached to the

neglect which suffered its extinction.--(Maimonides, Tract. vi.)

[45] The Anaglyph expressed the secret writings of the Egyptians,

known only to the priests. The hieroglyph was known generally to the

educated.

[46] In Gaul, Cesar finds some tribes more civilized than the rest,

cultivating the science of sacrifice, and possessed of the dark

philosophy of superstitious mysteries; but in certain other and more

uncivilized tribes only the elements and the heavenly luminaries (quos

cernunt et quorum opibus aperte juvantur) were worshipped, and the

lore of sacrifice was unstudied. With the Pelasgi as with the Gauls,

I believe that such distinctions might have been found simultaneously

in different tribes.

[47] The arrival of Ceres in Attica is referred to the time of

Pandion by Apollodorus.

[48] When Lobeck desires to fix the date of this religious union at

so recent an epoch as the time of Solon, in consequence of a solitary

passage in Herodotus, in which Solon, conversing with Croesus, speaks

of hostilities between the Athenians and Eleusinians, he seems to me

to fail in sufficient ground for the assumption. The rite might have

been instituted in consequence of a far earlier feud and league--even

that traditionally recorded in the Mythic age of Erechtheus and

Eumolpus, but could not entirely put an end to the struggles of

Eleusis for independence, or prevent the outbreak of occasional

jealousy and dissension.

[49] Kneph, the Agatho demon, or Good Spirit of Egypt, had his symbol

in the serpent. It was precisely because sacred with the rest of the

world that the serpent would be an object of abhorrence with the Jews.

But by a curious remnant of oriental superstition, the early

Christians often represented the Messiah by the serpent--and the

emblem of Satan became that of the Saviour.

[50] Lib. ii., c. 52, 4.

[51] And this opinion is confirmed by Dionysius and Strabo, who

consider the Dodona oracle originally Pelasgic.

[52] Also Pelasgic, according to Strabo.

[53] “The Americans did not long suppose the efficacy of conjuration

to be confined to one subject--they had recourse to it in every

situation of danger or distress.------From this weakness proceeded

likewise the faith of the Americans in dreams, their observation of

omens, their attention to the chirping of birds and the cries of

animals, all which they supposed to be indications of future events.”

--Robertson’s History of America, book iv.

Might not any one imagine that he were reading the character of the

ancient Greeks? This is not the only point of resemblance between the

Americans (when discovered by the Spaniards) and the Greeks in their

early history; but the resemblance is merely that of a civilization in

some respects equally advanced.

[54] The notion of Democritus of Abdera, respecting the origin of

dreams and divination, may not be uninteresting to the reader, partly

from something vast and terrible in the fantasy, partly as a proof of

the strange, incongruous, bewildered chaos of thought, from which at

last broke the light of the Grecian philosophy. He introduced the

hypothesis of images (eidola,), emanating as it were from external

objects, which impress our sense, and whose influence creates

sensation and thought. Dreams and divination he referred to the

impressions communicated by images of gigantic and vast stature, which

inhabited the air and encompassed the world. Yet this philosopher is

the original of Epicurus, and Epicurus is the original of the modern

Utilitarians!

[55] Isaiah lxvi. I.

[56] This Lucian acknowledges unawares, when, in deriding the popular

religion, he says that a youth who reads of the gods in Homer or

Hesiod, and finds their various immoralities so highly renowned, would

feel no little surprise when he entered the world, to discover that

these very actions of the gods were condemned and punished by mankind.

[57] Ovid. Metam., lib. ix.

[58] So the celebrated preamble to the laws for the Locrians of Italy

(which, though not written by Zaleucus, was, at all events, composed

by a Greek) declares that men must hold their souls clear from every

vice; that the gods did not accept the offerings of the wicked, but

found pleasure only in the just and beneficent actions of the good.--

See Diod. Siculus, lib. 8.

[59] A Mainote hearing the Druses praised for their valour, said,

with some philosophy, “They would fear death more if they believed in

an hereafter!”

[60] In the time of Socrates, we may suspect, from a passage in

Plato’s Phaedo, that the vulgar were skeptical of the immortality of

the soul, and it may be reasonably doubted whether the views of

Socrates and his divine disciple were ever very popularly embraced.

[61] It is always by connecting the divine shape with the human that

we exalt our creations--so, in later times, the saints, the Virgin,

and the Christ, awoke the genius of Italian art.

[62] See note [54].

[63] In the later age of philosophy I shall have occasion to return to

the subject. And in the Appendix, with which I propose to complete

the work, I may indulge in some conjectures relative to the Corybantes

Curetes, Teichines, etc.

[64] Herodotus (I. vi., c. 137) speaks of a remote time when the

Athenians had no slaves. As we have the authority of Thucydides for

the superior repose which Attica enjoyed as compared with the rest of

Greece--so (her population never having been conquered) slavery in

Attica was probably of later date than elsewhere, and we may doubt

whether in that favoured land the slaves were taken from any

considerable part of the aboriginal race. I say considerable part,

for crime or debt would have reduced some to servitude. The assertion

of Herodotus that the Ionians were indigenous (and not conquerors as

Mueller pretends), is very strongly corroborated by the absence in

Attica of a class of serfs like the Penestae of Thessaly and the

Helots of Laconia. A race of conquerors would certainly have produced

a class of serfs.

[65] Or else the land (properly speaking) would remain with the

slaves, as it did with the Messenians an Helots--but certain

proportions of the produce would be the due of the conquerors.

[66] Immigration has not hitherto been duly considered as one of the

original sources of slavery.

[67] In a horde of savages never having held communication or

intercourse with other tribes, there would indeed be men who, by a

superiority of physical force, would obtain an ascendency over the

rest; but these would not bequeath to their descendants distinct

privileges. Exactly because physical power raised the father into

rank--the want of physical power would merge his children among the

herd. Strength and activity cannot be hereditary. With individuals

of a tribe as yet attaching value only to a swift foot or a strong

arm, hereditary privilege is impossible. But if one such barbarous

tribe conquer another less hardy, and inhabit the new settlement,--

then indeed commences an aristocracy--for amid communities, though not

among individuals, hereditary physical powers can obtain. One man may

not leave his muscles to his son; but one tribe of more powerful

conformation than another would generally contrive to transmit that

advantage collectively to their posterity. The sense of superiority

effected by conquest soon produces too its moral effects--elevating

the spirit of the one tribe, depressing that of the other, from

generation to generation. Those who have denied in conquest or

colonization the origin of hereditary aristocracy, appear to me to

have founded their reasonings upon the imperfectness of their

knowledge of the savage states to which they refer for illustration.

[68] Accordingly we find in the earliest records of Greek history--in

the stories of the heroic and the Homeric age--that the king possessed

but little authority except in matters of war: he was in every sense

of the word a limited monarch, and the Greeks boasted that they had

never known the unqualified despotism of the East. The more, indeed,

we descend from the patriarchal times; the more we shall find that

colonists established in their settlements those aristocratic

institutions which are the earliest barriers against despotism.

Colonies are always the first teachers of free institutions. There is

no nation probably more attached to monarchy than the English, yet I

believe that if, according to the ancient polity, the English were to

migrate into different parts, and establish, in colonizing, their own

independent forms of government; there would scarcely be a single such

colony not republican!

[69] In Attica, immigration, not conquest, must have led to the

institution of aristocracy. Thucydides observes, that owing to the

repose in Attica (the barren soil of which presented no temptation to

the conqueror), the more powerful families expelled from the other

parts of Greece, betook themselves for security and refuge to Athens.

And from some of these foreigners many of the noblest families in the

historical time traced their descent. Before the arrival of these

Grecian strangers, Phoenician or Egyptian settlers had probably

introduced an aristocratic class.

[70] Modern inquirers pretend to discover the Egyptian features in

the effigy of Minerva on the earliest Athenian coins. Even the golden

grasshopper, with which the Athenians decorated their hair, and which

was considered by their vanity as a symbol of their descent from the

soil, has been construed into an Egyptian ornament--a symbol of the

initiated.--(Horapoll. Hierogl., lib. ii., c. 55.) “They are the only

Grecian people,” says Diodorus, “who swear by Isis, and their manners

are very conformable to those of the Egyptians; and so much truth was

there at one time (when what was Egyptian became the fashion) in this

remark, that they were reproached by the comic writer that their city

was Egypt and not Athens.” But it is evident that all such

resemblance as could have been derived from a handful of Egyptians,

previous to the age of Theseus, was utterly obliterated before the age

of Solon. Even if we accord to the tale of Cecrops all implicit

faith, the Atticans would still remain a Pelasgic population, of which

a few early institutions--a few benefits of elementary civilization--

and, it may be, a few of the nobler families, were probably of

Egyptian origin.

[71] It has been asserted by some that there is evidence in ancient

Attica of the existence of castes similar to those in Egypt and the

farther East. But this assertion has been so ably refuted that I do

not deem it necessary to enter at much length into the discussion. It

will be sufficient to observe that the assumption is founded upon the

existence of four tribes in Attica, the names of which etymological

erudition has sought to reduce to titles denoting the different

professions of warriors, husbandmen, labourers, and (the last much

more disputable and much more disputed) priests. In the first place,

it has been cogently remarked by Mr. Clinton (F. H., vol. i., p. 54),

that this institution of castes has been very inconsistently

attributed to the Greek Ion,--not (as, if Egyptian, it would have

been) to the Egyptian Cecrops. 2dly, If rightly referred to Ion, who

did not long precede the heroic age, how comes it that in that age a

spirit the most opposite to that of castes universally prevailed--as

all the best authenticated enactments of Theseus abundantly prove?

Could institutions calculated to be the most permanent that

legislation ever effected, and which in India have resisted every

innovation of time, every revolution of war, have vanished from Attica

in the course of a few generations? 3dly, It is to be observed, that

previous to the divisions referred to Ion, we find the same number of

four tribes under wholly different names;--under Cecrops, under

Cranaus, under Ericthonius or Erectheus, they received successive

changes of appellations, none of which denoted professions, but were

moulded either from the distinctions of the land they inhabited, or

the names of deities they adored. If remodelled by Ion to correspond

with distinct professions and occupations (and where is that social

state which does not form different classes--a formation widely

opposite to that of different castes?) cultivated by the majority of

the members of each tribe, the name given to each tribe might be but a

general title by no means applicable to every individual, and

certainly not implying hereditary and indelible distinctions. 4thly,

In corroboration of this latter argument, there is not a single

evidence--a single tradition, that such divisions ever were

hereditary. 5thly, In the time of Solon and the Pisistratida we find

the four Ionic tribes unchanged, but without any features analogous to

those of the Oriental castes.--(Clinton, F. H., vol. i., p. 55.)

6thly, I shall add what I have before intimated (see note [33]), that

I do not think it the character of a people accustomed to castes to

establish castes mock and spurious in any country which a few of them

might visit or colonize. Nay, it is clearly and essentially contrary

to such a character to imagine that a handful of wandering Egyptians,

even supposing (which is absurd) that their party contained members of

each different caste observed by their countrymen, would have

incorporated with such scanty specimens of each caste any of the

barbarous natives--they would leave all the natives to a caste by

themselves. And an Egyptian hierophant would as little have thought

of associating with himself a Pelasgic priest, as a Bramin would dream

of making a Bramin caste out of a set of Christian clergymen. But if

no Egyptian hierophant accompanied the immigrators, doubly ridiculous

is it to suppose that the latter would have raised any of their own

body, to whom such a change of caste would be impious, and still less

any of the despised savages, to a rank the most honoured and the most

reverent which Egyptian notions of dignity could confer. Even the

very lowest Egyptians would not touch any thing a Grecian knife had

polluted--the very rigidity with which caste was preserved in Egypt

would forbid the propagation of castes among barbarians so much below

the very lowest caste they could introduce. So far, therefore, from

Egyptian adventurers introducing such an institution among the general

population, their own spirit of caste must rapidly have died away as

intermarriage with the natives, absence from their countrymen, and the

active life of an uncivilized home, mixed them up with the blood, the

pursuits, and the habits of their new associates. Lastly, If these

arguments (which might be easily multiplied) do not suffice, I say it

is not for me more completely to destroy, but for those of a contrary

opinion more completely to substantiate, an hypothesis so utterly at

variance with the Athenian character--the acknowledged data of

Athenian history; and which would assert the existence of institutions

the most difficult to establish;--when established, the most difficult

to modify, much more to efface.

[72] The Thessali were Pelasgic.

[73] Thucyd., lib. i.

[74] Homer--so nice a discriminator that he dwells upon the barbarous

tongue even of the Carians--never seems to intimate any distinction

between the language and race of the Pelasgi and Hellenes, yet he

wrote in an age when the struggle was still unconcluded, and when

traces of any marked difference must have been sufficiently obvious to

detect--sufficiently interesting to notice.

[75] Strabo, viii.

[76] Pausan., viii.

[77] With all my respect for the deep learning and acute ingenuity of

Mueller, it is impossible not to protest against the spirit in which

much of the History of the Dorians is conceived--a spirit than which

nothing can be more dangerous to sound historical inquiry. A vague

tradition, a doubtful line, suffice the daring author for proof of a

foreign conquest, or evidence of a religious revolution. There are

German writers who seem to imagine that the new school of history is

built on the maxim of denying what is, and explaining what is not?

Ion is never recorded as supplanting, or even succeeding, an Attic

king. He might have introduced the worship of Apollo; but, as Mr.

Clinton rightly observes, that worship never superseded the worship of

Minerva, who still remained the tutelary divinity of the city.

However vague the traditions respecting Ion, they all tend to prove an

alliance with the Athenians, viz., precisely the reverse of a conquest

of them.

[78] That connexion which existed throughout Greece, sometimes pure,

sometimes perverted, was especially and originally Doric.

[79] Prideaux on the Marbles. The Iones are included in this

confederacy; they could not, then, have taken their name from the

Hellenic Ion, for Ion was not born at the time of Amphictyon. The

name Amphictyon is, however, but a type of the thing amphictyony, or

association. Leagues of this kind were probably very common over

Greece, springing almost simultaneously out of the circumstances

common to numerous tribes, kindred with each other, yet often at

variance and feud. A common language led them to establish, by a

mutual adoption of tutelary deities, a common religious ceremony,

which remained in force after political considerations died away. I

take the Amphictyonic league to be one of the proofs of the affinity

of language between the Pelasgi and Hellenes. It was evidently made

while the Pelasgi were yet powerful and unsubdued by Hellenic

influences, and as evidently it could not have been made if the

Pelasgi and Hellenes were not perfectly intelligible to each other.

Mr. Clinton (F. H., vol. i., 66), assigns a more recent date than has

generally been received to the great Amphictyonic league, placing it

between the sixtieth and the eightieth year from the fall of Troy.

His reason for not dating it before the former year is, that until

then the Thessali (one of the twelve nations) did not occupy Thessaly.

But, it may be observed consistently with the reasonings of that great

authority, first, that the Thessali are not included in the lists of

the league given by Harpocratio and Libanius; and, secondly, that even

granting that the great Amphictyonic assembly of twelve nations did

not commence at an earlier period, yet that that more celebrated

amphictyony might have been preceded by other and less effectual

attempts at association, agreeably to the legends of the genealogy.

And this Mr. Clinton himself implies.

[80] Strabo, lib. ix.

[81] Mueller’s Dorians, vol. i.

[82] Probably chosen in rotation from the different cities.

[83] Even the bieromnemons (or deputies intrusted with religious

cares) must have been as a class very inferior in ability to the

pylagorae; for the first were chosen by lot, the last by careful

selection. And thus we learn, in effect, that while the hieromnemon

had the higher grade of dignity, the pylagoras did the greater share

of business.

[84] Milton, Hist. of Eng., book i.

[85] No man of rank among the old northern pirates was deemed

honourable if not a pirate, gloriam sibi acquirens, as the Vatzdaela

hath it.

[86] Most probably more than one prince. Greece has three

well accredited pretenders to the name and attributes even of the

Grecian Hercules.

[87] Herodotus marks the difference between the Egyptian and Grecian

deity, and speaks of a temple erected by the Phoenicians to Hercules,

when they built Thasus, five hundred years before the son of

Amphitryon was known to the Greeks. The historian commends such of

the Greeks as erected two temples to the divinity of that name,

worshipping in the one as to a god, but in the other observing only

the rites as to a hero.-B. ii., c. 13, 14.

[88] Plot. in Vit. Thes.--Apollod., l. 3. This story is often

borrowed by the Spanish romance-writers, to whom Plutarch was a

copious fountain of legendary fable.

[89] Plut. in Vit. Thes.

[90] Mr. Mueller’s ingenious supposition, that the tribute was in

fact a religious ceremony, and that the voyage of Theseus had

originally no other meaning than the landings at Naxos and Delos, is

certainly credible, but not a whit more so than, and certainly not so

simple as, the ancient accounts in Plutarch; as with mythological, so

with historical legends, it is better to take the plain and popular

interpretation whenever it seems conformable to the manners of the

times, than to construe the story by newly-invented allegories. It is

very singular that that is the plan which every writer on the early

chronicles of France and England would adopt,--and yet which so few

writers agree to*****[three illegible words in the print copy]*****

the obscure records of the Greeks.

[91] Plutarch cites Clidemus in support of another version of the

tale, somewhat less probable, viz., that, by the death of Minos and

his son Deucalion, Ariadne became possessed of the throne, and that

she remitted the tribute.

[92] Thucydides, b. ii., c. 15.

[93] But many Athenians preferred to a much later age the custom of

living without the walls--scattered over the country.--(Thucyd., lib.

ii., 15.) We must suppose it was with them as with the moderns--the

rich and the great generally preferred the capital, but there were

many exceptions.

[94] For other instances in which the same word is employed by Homer,

see Clinton’s Fast Hell., vol. i., introduction, ix.

[95] Paus., l. i., c. 19; l. ii., c. 18.

[96] Paus., l. vii., c. 25. An oracle of Dodona had forewarned the

Athenians of the necessity of sparing the suppliants.

[97] Herod. (lib. v., 76) cites this expedition of the Dorians for

the establishment of a colony at Megara as that of their first

incursion into Attica.

[98] Suidas. One cannot but be curious as to the motives and policy

of a person, virtuous as a man, but so relentless as a lawgiver.

Although Draco was himself a noble, it is difficult to suppose that

laws so stern and impartial would not operate rather against the more

insolent and encroaching class than against the more subordinate ones.

The attempt shows a very unwholesome state of society, and went far to

produce the democratic action which Solon represented rather than

created.

[99] Hume utters a sentiment exactly the reverse: “To expect,” says

he, in his Essay on the rise of Arts and Sciences, “that the arts and

sciences should take their first rise in a monarchy, is to expect a

contradiction;” and he holds, in a subsequent part of the same essay,

that though republics originate the arts and sciences, they may be

transferred to a monarchy. Yet this sentiment is utterly at variance

with the fact; in the despotic monarchies of the East were the

elements of the arts and sciences; it was to republics they were

transferred, and republics perfected them. Hume, indeed, is often the

most incautious and uncritical of all writers. What can we think of

an author who asserts that a refined taste succeeds best in

monarchies, and then refers to the indecencies of Horace and Ovid as

an example of the reverse in a republic--as if Ovid and Horace had not

lived under a monarchy! and throughout the whole of this theory he is

as thoroughly in the wrong. By refined taste he signifies an

avoidance of immodesty of style. Beaumont and Fletcher, Rochester,

Dean Swift, wrote under monarchies--their pruriencies are not excelled

by any republican authors of ancient times. What ancient authors

equal in indelicacy the French romances from the time of the Regent of

Orleans to Louis XVI.? By all accounts, the despotism of China is the

very sink of indecencies, whether in pictures or books. Still more,

what can we think of a writer who says, that “the ancients have not

left us one piece of pleasantry that is excellent, unless one may

except the Banquet of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Lucian?” What!

has he forgotten Aristophanes? Has he forgotten Plautus! No--but

their pleasantry is not excellent to his taste; and he tacitly agrees

with Horace in censuring the “coarse railleries and cold jests” of the

Great Original of Moliere!

[100] Which forbade the concentration of power necessary to great

conquests. Phoenicia was not one state, it was a confederacy of

states; so, for the same reason, Greece, admirably calculated to

resist, was ill fitted to invade.

[101] For the dates of these migrations, see Fast. Hell., vol. i.

[102] To a much later period in the progress of this work I reserve a

somewhat elaborate view of the history of Sicily.

[103] Pausanias, in corroboration of this fact, observes, that

Periboea, the daughter of Alcathous, was sent with Theseus with

tribute into Crete.

[104] When, according to Pausanias, it changed its manners and its

language.

[105] In length fifty-two geographical miles, and about twenty-eight

to thirty-two broad.

[106] A council of five presided over the business of the oracle,

composed of families who traced their descent from Deucalion.

[107] Great grandson to Antiochus, son of Hercules.--Pausanias, l. 2,

c. 4.

[108] But at Argos, at least, the name, though not the substance, of

the kingly government was extant as late as the Persian war.

[109] Those who meant to take part in the athletic exercises were

required to attend at Olympia thirty days previous to the games, for

preparation and practice.

[110] It would appear by some Etruscan vases found at Veii, that the

Etruscans practised all the Greek games--leaping, running,

cudgel-playing, etc., and were not restricted, as Niebuhr supposes,

to boxing and chariot-races.

[111] It however diminishes the real honour of the chariot-race, that

the owner of horses usually won by proxy.

[112] The indecorum of attending contests where the combatants were

unclothed, was a sufficient reason for the exclusion of females. The

priestess of Ceres, the mighty mother, was accustomed to regard all

such indecorums as symbolical, and had therefore refined away any

remarkable indelicacy.

[113] Plut. in Alex. When one of the combatants with the cestus

killed his antagonist by running the ends of his fingers through his

ribs, he was ignominiously expelled the stadium. The cestus itself

made of thongs of leather, was evidently meant not to increase the

severity of the blow, but for the prevention of foul play by the

antagonists laying hold of each other, or using the open hand. I

believe that the iron bands and leaden plummets were Roman inventions,

and unknown at least till the later Olympic games. Even in the

pancratium, the fiercest of all the contests--for it seems to have

united wrestling with boxing (a struggle of physical strength, without

the precise and formal laws of the boxing and wrestling matches), it

was forbidden to kill an enemy, to injure his eyes, or to use the

teeth.

[114] Even to the foot-race, in which many of the competitors were of

the lowest rank, the son of Amyntas, king of Macedon, was not admitted

till he had proved an Argive descent. He was an unsuccessful

competitor.

[115] Herodotus relates an anecdote, that the Eleans sent deputies to

Egypt, vaunting the glories of the Olympic games, and inquiring if the

Egyptians could suggest any improvement. The Egyptians asked if the

citizens of Elis were allowed to contend, and, on hearing that they

were, declared it was impossible they should not favour their own

countrymen, and consequently that the games must lead to injustice--a

suspicion not verified.

[116] Cic. Quaest. Tusc., II, 17.

[117] Nero (when the glory had left the spot) drove a chariot of ten

horses in Olympia, out of which he had the misfortune to tumble. He

obtained other prizes in other Grecian games, and even contended with

the heralds as a crier. The vanity of Nero was astonishing, but so

was that of most of his successors. The Roman emperors were the

sublimest coxcombs in history. In men born to stations which are

beyond ambition, all aspirations run to seed.

[118] Plut. in Sympos.

[119] It does not appear that at Elis there were any of the actual

contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian

games. But still it was a common exhibition for the cultivation of

every art. Sophist, and historian, and orator, poet and painter found

their mart in the Olympic fair.

[120] Plut. in vita Them.

[121] Pausanias, lib. v.

[122] When Phidias was asked on what idea he should form his statue,

he answered by quoting the well-known verses of Homer, on the curls

and nod of the thunder god.

[123] I am of course aware that the popular story that Herodotus read

portions of his history at Olympia has been disputed--but I own I

think it has been disputed with very indifferent success against the

testimony of competent authorities, corroborated by the general

practice of the time.

[124] We find, indeed, that the Messenians continued to struggle

against their conquerors, and that about the time of the battle of

Marathon they broke out into a resistance sometimes called the third

war.--Plato, Leg. III.

[125] Suppose Vortigern to have been expelled by the Britons, and to

have implored the assistance of the Saxons to reinstate him in his

throne, the Return of Vortigern would have been a highly popular name

for the invasion of the Saxons. So, if the Russians, after Waterloo,

had parcelled out France, and fixed a Cossack settlement in her

“violet vales,” the destruction of the French would have been still

urbanely entitled “The Return of the Bourbons.”

[126] According to Herodotus, the Spartan tradition assigned the

throne to Aristodemus himself, and the regal power was not divided

till after his death.

[127] He wrote or transcribed them, is the expression of Plutarch,

which I do not literally translate, because this touches upon very

disputed ground.

[128] “Sometimes the states,” says Plutarch, “veered to democracy--

sometimes to arbitrary power;” that is, at one time the nobles invoked

the people against the king; but if the people presumed too far, they

supported the king against the people. If we imagine a confederacy of

Highland chiefs even a century or two ago--give them a nominal king--

consider their pride and their jealousy--see them impatient of

authority in one above them, yet despotic to those below--quarrelling

with each other--united only by clanship, never by citizenship;--and

place them in a half-conquered country, surrounded by hostile

neighbours and mutinous slaves--we may then form, perhaps, some idea

of the state of Sparta previous to the legislation of Lycurgus.

[129] When we are told that the object of Lycurgus was to root out

the luxury and effeminacy existent in Sparta, a moment’s reflection

tells us that effeminacy and luxury could not have existed. A tribe

of fierce warriors, in a city unfortified--shut in by rocks--harassed

by constant war--gaining city after city from foes more civilized,

stubborn to bear, and slow to yield--maintaining a perilous yoke over

the far more numerous races they had subdued--what leisure, what

occasion had such men to become effeminate and luxurious?

[130] See Mueller’s Dorians, vol. ii., p. 12 (Translation).

[131] In the same passage Aristotle, with that wonderful sympathy in

opinion between himself and the political philosophers of our own day,

condemns the principle of seeking and canvassing for suffrages.

[132] In this was preserved the form of royalty in the heroic times.

Aristotle well remarks, that in the council Agamemnon bears reproach

and insult, but in the field he becomes armed with authority over life

itself--“Death is in his hand.”

[133] Whereas the modern republics of Italy rank among the causes

which prevented their assuming a widely conquering character, their

extreme jealousy of their commanders, often wisely ridiculed by the

great Italian historians; so that a baggage-cart could scarcely move,

or a cannon be planted, without an order from the senate!

[134] Mueller rightly observes, that though the ephoralty was a

common Dorian magistrature, “yet, considered as an office, opposed to

the king and council, it is not for that reason less peculiar to the

Spartans; and in no Doric, nor even in any Grecian state is there any

thing which exactly corresponds with it.”

[135] They rebuked Archidamus for having married too small a wife.

See Mueller’s Dorians, vol. ii. (Translation), p. 124, and the

authorities he quotes.

[136] Aristot. Pol., lib. ii., c. 9.

[137] Idem.

[138] These remarks on the democratic and representative nature of

the ephoralty are only to be applied to it in connexion with the

Spartan people. It must be remembered that the ephors represented the

will of that dominant class, and not of the Laconians or Perioeci, who

made the bulk of the non-enslaved population; and the democracy of

their constitution was therefore but the democracy of an oligarchy.

[139] Machiavel (Discourses on the first Decade of Livy, b. i., c.

vi.), attributes the duration of the Spartan government to two main

causes--first, the fewness of the body to be governed, allowing

fewness in the governors; and secondly, the prevention of all the

changes and corruption which the admission of strangers would have

occasioned. He proceeds then to show that for the long duration of a

constitution the people should be few in number, and all popular

impulse and innovation checked; yet that, for the splendour and

greatness of a state, not only population should be encouraged, but

even political ferment and agitation be leniently regarded. Sparta is

his model for duration, republican Rome for progress and empire. “To

my judgment,” the Florentine concludes, “I prefer the latter, and for

the strife and emulation between the nobles and the people, they are

to be regarded indeed as inconveniences, but necessary to a state that

would rise to the Roman grandeur.”

[140] Plut. de Musica.

[141] At Corinth they were abolished by Periander as favourable to an

aristocracy, according to Aristotle; but a better reason might be that

they were dangerous to tyranny.

[142] “Yet, although goods were appropriated, their uses,” says

Aristotle, “were freely communicated,--a Spartan could use the horses,

the slaves, the dogs, and carriages of another.” If this were to be

taken literally, it is difficult to see how a Spartan could be poor.

We must either imagine that different times are confounded, or that

limitations with which we are unacquainted were made in this system of

borrowing.

[143] See, throughout the Grecian history, the Helots collecting the

plunder of the battle-field, hiding it from the gripe of their lords,

and selling gold at the price of brass!

[144] Aristotle, who is exceedingly severe on the Spartan ladies,

says very shrewdly, that the men were trained to submission to a civil

by a military system, while the women were left untamed. A Spartan

hero was thus made to be henpecked. Yet, with all the alleged

severity of the Dorian morals, these sturdy matrons rather discarded

the graces than avoided the frailties of their softer contemporaries.

Plato [Plat. de legibus, lib. i. and lib. vi.] and Aristotle [Aristot.

Repub., lib. ii.] give very unfavourable testimonials of their

chastity. Plutarch, the blind panegyrist of Sparta, observes with

amusing composure, that the Spartan husbands were permitted to lend

their wives to each other; and Polybius (in a fragment of the 12th

book) [Fragm. Vatican., tom. ii., p. 384.] informs us that it was an

old-fashioned and common custom in Sparta for three or four brothers

to share one wife. The poor husbands!--no doubt the lady was a match

for them all! So much for those gentle creatures whom that grave

German professor, M. Mueller, holds up to our admiration and despair.

[145] In Homer the condition of the slave seems, everywhere, tempered

by the kindness and indulgence of the master.

[146] Three of the equals always attended the king’s person in war.

[147] The institution of the ephors has been, with probability,

referred to this epoch--chosen at first as the viceroys in the absence

of the kings.

[148] Pausanias, Messenics.

[149] See Mueller’s Dorians, vol. i., p. 172, and Clinton’s Fast.

Hell. vol. i., p. 183.

[150] For the dates here given of the second Messenian war see Fast.

Hell., vol. i., 190, and Appendix 2.

[151] Now called Messina.

[152] In Phocis were no less than twenty-two states (poleis); in

Boeotia, fourteen; in Achaia, ten. The ancient political theorists

held no community too small for independence, provided the numbers

sufficed for its defence. We find from Plato that a society of five

thousand freemen capable of bearing arms was deemed powerful enough to

constitute an independent state. One great cause of the ascendency of

Athens and Sparta was, that each of those cities had from an early

period swept away the petty independent states in their several

territories of Attica and Laconia.

[153] Machiavel (Discor., lib. i., c. ii.).

[154] Lib. iv., c. 13.

[155] Aristotle cites among the advantages of wealth, that of being

enabled to train horses. Wherever the nobility could establish among

themselves a cavalry, the constitution was oligarchical. Yet, even in

states which did not maintain a cavalry (as Athens previous to the

constitution of Solon), an oligarchy was the first form of government

that rose above the ruins of monarchy.

[156] One principal method of increasing the popular action was by

incorporating the neighbouring villages or wards in one municipality

with the capital. By this the people gained both in number and in

union.

[157] Sometimes in ancient Greece there arose a species of lawful

tyrants, under the name of Aesymnetes. These were voluntarily chosen

by the people, sometimes for life, sometimes for a limited period, and

generally for the accomplishment of some particular object. Thus was

Pittacus of Mitylene elected to conduct the war against the exiles.

With the accomplishment of the object he abdicated his power. But the

appointment of Aesymnetes can hardly be called a regular form of

government. They soon became obsolete--the mere creatures of

occasion. While they lasted, they bore a strong resemblance to the

Roman dictators--a resemblance remarked by Dionysius, who quotes

Theophrastus as agreeing with Aristotle in his account of the

Aesymnetes.

[158] For, as the great Florentine has well observed, “To found well

a government, one man is the best--once established, the care and

execution of the laws should be transferred to many.”--(Machiavel.

Discor., lib. i., c. 9.) And thus a tyranny builds the edifice, which

the republic hastens to inhabit.

[159] That of Orthagoras and his sons in Sicyon. “Of all

governments,” says Aristotle, “that of an oligarchy, or of a tyrant,

is the least permanent.” A quotation that cannot be too often pressed

on the memory of those reasoners who insist so much on the brief

duration of the ancient republics.

[160] Besides the representation necessary to confederacies--such as

the Amphictyonic League, etc., a representative system was adopted at

Mantinea, where the officers were named by deputies chosen by the

people. “This form of democracy,” says Aristotle, “existed among the

shepherds and husbandmen of Arcadia;” and was probably not uncommon

with the ancient Pelasgians. But the myrioi of Arcadia had not the

legislative power.

[161] “Then to the lute’s soft voice prolong the night,

Music, the banquet’s most refined delight.”

Pope’s Odyssey, book xxi., 473.

It is stronger in the original--

Moltae kai phormingi tu gar t’anathaemata daitos.

[162] Iliad, book ix., Pope’s translation, line 250.

[163] Heyne, F. Clinton, etc.

[164] Pope’s translation, b. iv., line 75, etc.

[165] At least this passage is sufficient to refute the arguments of

Mr. Mitford, and men more learned than that historian, who, in taking

for their premises as an indisputable fact the extraordinary

assumption, that Homer never once has alluded to the return of the

Heraclidae, arrive at a conclusion very illogical, even if the

premises were true, viz., that therefore Homer preceded the date of

that great revolution.

[166] I own that this seems to me the most probable way of accounting

for the singular and otherwise disproportioned importance attached by

the ancient poets to that episode in the Trojan war, which relates to

the feud of Achilles and Agamemnon. As the first recorded enmity

between the great Achaeans and the warriors of Phthiotis, it would

have a solemn and historical interest both to the conquering Dorians

and the defeated Achaeans, flattering to the national vanity of either

people.

[167] I adopt the analysis of the anti-Homer arguments so clearly

given by Mr. Coleridge in his eloquent Introduction to the Study of

the Greek Poets. Homer, p. 39.

[168] en spanei biblon, are the words of Herodotus. Leaves and the

bark of trees were also used from a very remote period previous to the

common use of the papyrus, and when we are told that leaves would not

suffice for works of any length or duration, it must not be forgotten

that in a much later age it was upon leaves (and mutton bones) that

the Koran was transcribed. The rudest materials are sufficient for

the preservation of what men deem it their interest to preserve!

[169] See Clinton’s F. H., vol. i., p. 145.

[170] Critics, indeed, discover some pretended gaps and

interpolations; but these, if conceded, are no proof against the unity

of Homer; the wonder is, that there should be so few of such

interpolations, considering the barbarous age which intervened between

their composition and the time in which they were first carefully

edited and collected. With more force it is urged against the

argument in favour of the unity of Homer, derived from the unity of

the style and character, that there are passages which modern critics

agree to be additions to the original poems, made centuries afterward,

and yet unsuspected by the ancients; and that in these additions--such

as the last books of the Iliad, with many others less important--the

Homeric unity of style and character is still sustained. We may

answer, however, that, in the first place, we have a right to be

skeptical as to these discoveries--many of them rest on very

insufficient critical grounds; in the second place, if we grant them,

it is one thing whether a forged addition be introduced into a poem,

and another thing whether the poem be all additions; in the third

place, we may observe, that successful imitations of the style and

characters of an author, however great, may be made many centuries

afterward with tolerable ease, and by a very inferior genius,

although, at the time he wrote or sung, it is not easy to suppose that

half a dozen or more poets shared his spirit or style. It is a very

common scholastic trick to imitate, nowadays, and with considerable

felicity, the style of the greatest writers, ancient and modern. But

the unity of Homer does not depend on the question whether imitative

forgeries were introduced into a great poem, but whether a multitude

of great poets combined in one school on one subject. An ingenious

student of Shakspeare, or the elder dramatists, might impose upon the

public credulity a new scene, or even a new play, as belonging to

Shakspeare, but would that be any proof that a company of Shakspeares

combined in the production of Macbeth? I own, by-the-way, that I am a

little doubtful as to our acumen in ascertaining what is Homeric and

what is not, seeing that Schlegel, after devoting half a life to

Shakspeare (whose works are composed in a living language, the

authenticity of each of which works a living nation can attest),

nevertheless attributes to that poet a catalogue of plays of which

Shakspeare is perfectly innocent!--but, to be sure, Steevens does the

same!

[171] That Pisistratus or his son, assisted by the poets of his day,

did more than collect, arrange, and amend poems already in high

repute, we have not only no authority to suppose, but much evidence to

contradict. Of the true services of Pisistratus to Homer, more

hereafter.

[172] “The descent of Theseus with Pirithous into hell,” etc.--Paus.,

ix., c. 31.

[173] Especially if with the Boeotians we are to consider the most

poetical passage (the introductory lines to the muses) a spurious

interpolation.

[174] A herdsman.

[175] I cannot omit a tradition recorded by Pausanias. A leaden

table near the fountain was shown by the Boeotians as that on which

the “Works and Days” was written. The poems of Hesiod certainly do

not appear so adapted to recital as perusal. Yet, by the most

plausible chronology, they were only composed about one hundred years

after those of Homer!

[176] The Aones, Hyantes, and other tribes, which I consider part of

the great Pelasgic family, were expelled from Boeotia by Thracian

hordes. [They afterward returned in the time of the Dorian

emigration.] Some of the population must, however, have remained--the

peasantry of the land; and in Hesiod we probably possess the national

poetry, and arrive at the national religion, of the old Pelasgi.

[177] Welcker.

[178] The deadly signs which are traced by Praetus on the tablets of

which Bellerophon was the bearer, and which are referred to in the

Iliad, are generally supposed by the learned to have been pictorial,

and, as it were, hieroglyphical figures; my own belief, and the

easiest interpretation of the passage, is, that they were alphabetical

characters--in a word, writing, not painting.

[179] Pausanias, lib. i., c. 27, speaks of a wooden statue in the

Temple of Pohas, in Athens, said to have been the gift of Cecrops;

and, with far more claim to belief, in the previous chapter he tells

us that the most holy of all the images was a statue of Minerva,

which, by the common consent of all the towns before incorporated in

one city, was dedicated in the citadel, or polis. Tradition,

therefore, carried the date of this statue beyond the time of Theseus.

Plutarch also informs us that Theseus himself, when he ordained divine

honours to be paid to Ariadne, ordered two little statues to be made

of her--one of silver and one of brass.

[180] All that Homer calls the work of Vulcan, such as the dogs in

the palace of Alcinous, etc., we may suppose to be the work of

foreigners. A poet could scarcely attribute to the gods a work that

his audience knew an artificer in their own city had made!

[181] See Odyssey, book vii.

[182] The effect of the arts, habits, and manners of a foreign

country is immeasurably more important upon us if we visit that

country, than if we merely receive visits from its natives. For

example, the number of French emigrants who crowded our shores at the

time of the French revolution very slightly influenced English

customs, etc. But the effect of the French upon us when, after the

peace, our own countrymen flocked to France, was immense.

[183] Herod., lib. ii., c. 178.

[184] Grecian architecture seems to have been more free from

obligation to any technical secrets of Egyptian art than Grecian

statuary or painting. For, in the first place, it is more than

doubtful whether the Doric order was not invented in European Greece

long prior to the reign of Psammetichus [The earliest known temple at

Corinth is supposed by Col. Leake to bear date B. C. 800, about one

hundred and thirty years before the reign of Psammetichus in Egypt.];

and, in the second place, it is evident that the first hints and

rudiments both of the Doric and the Ionic order were borrowed, not

from buildings of the massive and perennial materials of Egyptian

architecture, but from wooden edifices; growing into perfection as

stone and marble were introduced, and the greater difficulty and

expense of the workmanship insensibly imposed severer thought and more

elaborate rules upon the architect. But I cannot agree with Mueller

and others, that because the first hints of the Doric order were taken

from wooden buildings, therefore the first invention was necessarily

with the Dorians, since many of the Asiatic cities were built chiefly

of wood. It seems to me most probable that Asia gave the first

notions of these beautiful forms, and that the Greeks carried them to

perfection before the Asiatics, not only from their keen perception of

the graceful, but because they earlier made a general use of stone.

We learn from Herodotus that the gorgeous Sardis was built chiefly of

wood, at a time when the marble of Paros was a common material of the

Grecian temples.

[185] Thales was one of the seven wise men, B. C. 586, when

Pherecydes of Syrus, the first prose writer, was about fourteen years

old. Mr. Clinton fixes the acme of Pherecydes about B. C. 572.

Cadmus of Miletus flourished B. C. 530.

[186] To this solution of the question, why literature should

generally commence with attempts at philosophy, may be added another:

--When written first breaks upon oral communication, the reading

public must necessarily be extremely confined. In many early nations,

that reading public would be composed of the caste of priests; in this

case philosophy would be cramped by superstition. In Greece, there

being no caste of priests, philosophy embraced those studious minds

addicted to a species of inquiry which rejected the poetical form, as

well as the poetical spirit. It may be observed, that the more

limited the reading public, the more abstruse are generally prose

compositions; as readers increase, literature goes back to the fashion

of oral communication; for if the reciter addressed the multitude in

the earlier age, so the writer addresses a multitude in the later;

literature, therefore, commences with poetical fiction, and usually

terminates with prose fiction. It was so in the ancient world--it

will be so with England and France. The harvest of novels is, I fear,

a sign of the approaching exhaustion of the soil.

[187] See chapter i.

[188] Instead of Periander of Corinth, is (by Plato, and therefore)

more popularly, but less justly, ranked Myson of Chene.

[189] Attributed also to Thales; Stob. Serm.

[190] Aristotle relates (Pol., lib. i.) a singular anecdote of the

means whereby this philosopher acquired wealth. His skill in

meteorology made him foresee that there would be one season an

extraordinary crop of olives. He hired during the previous winter all

the oil-presses in Chios and Miletus, employing his scanty fortune in

advances to the several proprietors. When the approaching season

showed the ripening crops, every man wished to provide olive-presses

as quickly as possible; and Thales, having them all, let them at a

high price. His monopoly made his fortune, and he showed to his

friends, says Aristotle, that it was very easy for philosophers to be

rich if they desire it, though such is not their principal desire;--

philosophy does not find the same facilities nowadays.

[191] Thus Homer is cited in proof of the progenital humidity,

“‘Okeanos hosper ginesis pantos tet ktai;”

The Bryant race of speculators would attack us at once with “the

spirit moving on the face of the waters.” It was not an uncommon

opinion in Greece that chaos was first water settling into slime, and

then into earth; and there are good but not sufficient reasons to

attribute a similar, and of course earlier, notion to the Phoenicians,

and still more perhaps to the Indians.

[192] Plut. de Plac. Phil.

[193] Ap. Stob. Serm.

[194] Laert.

[195] According to Clinton’s chronology, viz., one year after the

legislation of Draco. This emendation of dates formerly received

throws considerable light upon the causes of the conspiracy, which

perhaps took its strength from the unpopularity and failure of Draco’s

laws. Following the very faulty chronology which pervades his whole

work, Mr. Mitford makes the attempt of Cylon precede the legislation

of Draco.

[196] A cap.

[197] The expedition against Salamis under Solon preceded the arrival

of Epimenides at Athens, which was in 596. The legislation of Solon

was B. C. 594--the first tyranny of Pisistratus B. C. 560: viz.,

thirty-four years after Solon’s legislation, and at least thirty-seven

years after Solon’s expedition to Salamis. But Pisistratus lived

thirty-three years after his first usurpation, so that, if he had

acted in the first expedition to Salamis, he would have lived to an

age little short of one hundred, and been considerably past eighty at

the time of his third most brilliant and most energetic government!

The most probable date for the birth of Pisistratus is that assigned

by Mr. Clinton, about B. C. 595, somewhat subsequent to Solon’s

expedition to Salamis, and only about a year prior to Solon’s

legislation. According to this date, Pisistratus would have been

about sixty-eight at the time of his death. The error of Plutarch

evidently arose from his confounding two wars with Megara for Salamis,

attended with similar results--the first led by Solon, the second by

Pisistratus. I am the more surprised that Mr. Thirlwall should have

fallen into the error of making Pisistratus contemporary with Solon in

this affair, because he would fix the date of the recovery of Salamis

at B. C. 604 (see note to Thirlwall’s Greece, p. 25, vol. ii.), and

would suppose Solon to be about thirty-two at that time (viz.,

twenty-six years old in 612 B. C.). (See Thirlwall, vol. ii., p. 23,

note.) Now, as Pisistratus could not have been well less than

twenty-one, to have taken so prominent a share as that ascribed to him

by Plutarch and his modern followers, in the expedition, he must,

according to such hypothesis, have been only eleven years younger than

Solon, have perpetrated his first tyranny just before Solon died of old

age, and married a second wife when he was near eighty! Had this been

the case, the relations of the lady could not reasonably have been angry

that the marriage was not consummated!

[198] We cannot suppose, as the careless and confused Plutarch would

imply, that the people, or popular assembly, reversed the decree; the

government was not then democratic, but popular assemblies existed,

which, in extraordinary cases--especially, perhaps, in the case of

war--it was necessary to propitiate, and customary to appeal to. I

make no doubt that it was with the countenance and consent of the

archons that Solon made his address to the people, preparing them to

receive the repeal of the decree, which, without their approbation, it

might be unsafe to propose.

[199] As the quotation from Homer is extremely equivocal, merely

stating that Ajax joined the ships that he led from Salamis with those

of the Athenians, one cannot but suppose, that if Solon had really

taken the trouble to forge a verse, he would have had the common sense

to forge one much more decidedly in favour of his argument.

[200] Fifty-seven, according to Pliny.

[201] Plut. in Vit. Sol.

[202] Arist. Pol., lib. ii., c. 8.

[203] This regulation is probably of later date than the time of

Solon. To Pisistratus is referred a law for disabled citizens, though

its suggestion is ascribed to Solon. It was, however, a law that

evidently grew out of the principles of Solon.

[204] A tribe contained three phratries, or fraternities--a phratry

contained three genes or clans--a genos or clan was composed of thirty

heads of families. As the population, both in the aggregate and in

these divisions, must have been exposed to constant fluctuations, the

aforesaid numbers were most probably what we may describe as a fiction

in law, as Boeckh (Pol. Econ. of Athens, vol. i., p. 47, English

translation) observes, “in the same manner that the Romans called the

captain a centurion, even if he commanded sixty men, so a family might

have been called a triakas (i.e., a thirtiad), although it contained

fifty or more persons.” It has been conjectured indeed by some, that

from a class not included in these families, vacancies in the

phratries were filled up; but this seems to be a less probable

supposition than that which I have stated above. If the numbers in

Pollux were taken from a census in the time of Solon, the four tribes

at that time contained three hundred and sixty families, each family

consisting of thirty persons; this would give a total population of

ten thousand eight hundred free citizens. It was not long before that

population nearly doubled itself, but the titles of the subdivisions

remained the same. I reserve for an appendix a more detailed and

critical view of the vehement but tedious disputes of the learned on

the complicated subject of the Athenian tribes and families.

[205] Boeckh (Pub. Econ. of Athens, book iv., chap. v.) contends,

from a law preserved by Demosthenes, that the number of measures for

the zeugitae was only one hundred and fifty. But his argument,

derived from the analogy of the sum to be given to an heiress by her

nearest relation, if he refused to marry her, is by no means

convincing enough to induce us to reject the proportion of two hundred

measures, “preserved (as Boeckh confesses) by all writers,” especially

as in the time of Demosthenes. Boeckh himself, in a subsequent

passage, rightly observes, that the names of zeugitae, etc., could

only apply to new classes introduced in the place of those instituted

by Solon.

[206] With respect to the value of “a measure” in that time, it was

estimated at a drachma, and a drachma was the price of a sheep.

[207] The law against idleness is attributable rather to Pisistratus

than Solon.

[208] Athenaeus, lib. xiv.

[209] Plutarch de Gloria Athen. I do not in this sketch entirely

confine myself to Solon’s regulations respecting the areopagus.

[210] The number of the areopagites depending upon the number of the

archons, was necessarily fluctuating and uncertain. An archon was not

necessarily admitted to the areopagus. He previously underwent a

rigorous and severe examination of the manner in which he had

discharged the duties of his office, and was liable to expulsion upon

proofs of immorality or unworthiness.

[211] Some modern writers have contended that at the time of Solon

the members of the council were not chosen by lot; their arguments are

not to me very satisfactory. But if merely a delegation of the

Eupatrids, as such writers suppose, the council would be still more

vicious in its constitution.

[212] Pollux.

[213] Aeschines in Timarch.

[214] Each member was paid (as in England once, as in America at this

day) a moderate sum (one drachma) for his maintenance, and at the

termination of his trust, peculiar integrity was rewarded with money

from the public treasury.

[215] When there were ten tribes, each tribe presided thirty-five

days, or five weeks; when the number was afterward increased to

twelve, the period of the presidency was one month.

[216] Atimos means rather unhonoured than dishonoured. He to whom,

in its milder degree, the word was applied, was rather withdrawn (as

it were) from honour than branded with disgrace. By rapid degrees,

however, the word ceased to convey its original meaning; it was

applied to offences so ordinary and common, that it sunk into a mere

legal term.

[217] The more heinous of the triple offences, termed eisangelia.

[218] This was a subsequent law; an obolus, or one penny farthing,

was the first payment; it was afterward increased to three oboli, or

threepence three farthings.

[219] Sometimes, also, the assembly was held in the Pnyx, afterward

so celebrated: latterly, also (especially in bad weather), in the

temple of Bacchus;--on extraordinary occasions, in whatever place was

deemed most convenient or capacious.

[220] Plato de Legibus.

[221] Plutarch assures us that Solon issued a decree that his laws

were to remain in force a hundred years: an assertion which modern

writers have rejected as incompatible with their constant revision.

It was not, however, so contradictory a decree as it seems at first

glance--for one of the laws not to be altered was this power of

amending and revising the laws. And, therefore, the enactment in

dispute would only imply that the constitution was not to be altered

except through the constitutional channel which Solon had appointed.

[222] See Fast. Hell., vol. ii., 276.

[223] Including, as I before observed, that law which provided for

any constitutional change in a constitutional manner.

[224] “Et Croesum quem vox justi facunda Solonis

Respicere ad longae jussit spatia ultima vitae.”

Juv., Sat. x., s. 273.

The story of the interview and conversation between Croesus and Solon

is supported by so many concurrent authorities, that we cannot but

feel grateful to the modern learning, which has removed the only

objection to it in an apparent contradiction of dates. If, as

contended for by Larcher, still more ably by Wesseling, and since by

Mr. Clinton, we agree that Croesus reigned jointly with his father

Alyattes, the difficulty vanishes at once.

[225] Plutarch gives two accounts of the recovery of Salamis by

Solon; one of them, which is also preferred by Aelian (var. c. xix.,

lib. vii.), I have adopted and described in my narrative of that

expedition: the second I now give, but refer to Pisistratus, not

Solon: in support of which opinion I am indebted to Mr. Clinton for

the suggestion of two authorities. Aeneas Tacticus, in his Treatise

on Sieges, chap. iv., and Frontinus de Stratagem., lib. iv., cap.

vii.--Justin also favours the claim of Pisistratus to this stratagem,

lib. xi., c. viii.

[226] The most sanguine hope indeed that Cicero seems to have formed

with respect to the conduct of Cesar, was that he might deserve the

title of the Pisistratus of Rome.

[227] If we may, in this anecdote, accord to Plutarch (de Vit. Sol.)

and Aelian (Var. lib. viii., c. xvi.) a belief which I see no reason

for withholding.

[228] His own verses, rather than the narrative of Plutarch, are the

evidence of Solon’s conduct on the usurpation of Pisistratus.

[229] This historian fixes the date of Solon’s visit to Croesus and

to Cyprus (on which island he asserts him to have died), not during

his absence of ten years, but during the final exile for which he

contends.

[230] Herod., l. i., c. 49.

[231] The procession of the goddess of Reason in the first French

revolution solves the difficulty that perplexed Herodotus.

[232] Mr. Mitford considers this story as below the credit of

history. He gives no sufficient reason against its reception, and

would doubtless have been less skeptical had he known more of the

social habits of that time, or possessed more intimate acquaintance

with human nature generally.

[233] Upon which points, of men and money, Mr. Mitford, who is

anxious to redeem the character of Pisistratus from the stain of

tyranny, is dishonestly prevaricating. Quoting Herodotus, who

especially insists upon these undue sources of aid, in the following

words--‘Errixose taen tyrannida, epikouroisi te polloisi kai

chraematon synodoisi, ton men, autothen, ton de, apo Strumanos potamou

synionton: this candid historian merely says, “A particular interest

with the ruling parties in several neighbouring states, especially

Thebes and Argos, and a wise and liberal use of a very great private

property, were the resources in which besides he mostly relied.” Why

he thus slurs over the fact of the auxiliary forces will easily be

perceived. He wishes us to understand that the third tyranny of

Pisistratus, being wholesome, was also acceptable to the Athenians,

and not, as it in a great measure was, supported by borrowed treasure

and foreign swords.

[234] Who, according to Plutarch, first appeared at the return of

Solon; but the proper date for his exhibitions is ascertained (Fast.

Hell., vol. ii., p. 11) several years after Solon’s death.

[235] These two wars, divided by so great an interval of time,--the

one terminated by Periander of Corinth, the other undertaken by

Pisistratus,--are, with the usual blundering of Mr. Mitford, jumbled

together into the same event. He places Alcaeus in the war following

the conquest of Sigeum by Pisistratus. Poor Alcaeus! the poet

flourished Olym. 42 (611 B. C.); the third tyranny of Pisistratus may

date somewhere about 537 B. C., so that Alcaeus, had he been alive in

the time ascribed by Mr. Mitford to his warlike exhibitions, would

have been (supposing him to be born twenty-six years before the date

of his celebrity in 611) just a hundred years old--a fitting age to

commence the warrior! The fact is, Mr. Mitford adopted the rather

confused account of Herodotus, without taking the ordinary pains to

ascertain dates, which to every one else the very names of Periander

and Alcaeus would have suggested.

[236] For the reader will presently observe the share taken by

Croesus in the affairs of this Miltiades during his government in the

Chersonesus; now Croesus was conquered by Cyrus about B. C. 546--it

must, therefore, have been before that period. But the third tyranny

of Pisistratus appears to have commenced nine years afterward, viz.,

B. C. 537. The second tyranny probably commenced only two years

before the fall of the Lydian monarchy, and seems to have lasted only

a year, and during that period Croesus no longer exercised over the

cities of the coast the influence he exerted with the people of

Lampsacus on behalf of Miltiades; the departure of Miltiades, son of

Cypselus, must therefore have been in the first tyranny, in the

interval 560 B. C.--554 B. C., and probably at the very commencement

of the reign--viz., about 550 B. C.

[237] In the East, the master of the family still sits before the

door to receive visiters or transact business.

[238] Thucydides, b. vi., c. 54. The dialogue of Hipparchus,

ascribed to Plato, gives a different story, but much of the same

nature. In matters of history, we cannot doubt which is the best

authority, Thucydides or Plato,--especially an apocryphal Plato.

[239] Although it is probable that the patriotism of Aristogiton and

Harmodius “the beloved” has been elevated in after times beyond its

real standard, yet Mr. Mitford is not justified in saying that it was

private revenge, and not any political motive, that induced them to

conspire the death of Hippias and Hipparchus. Had it been so, why

strike at Hippias at all?--why attempt to make him the first and

principal victim?--why assail Hipparchus (against whom only they had a

private revenge) suddenly, by accident, and from the impulse of the

moment, after the failure of their design on the tyrant himself, with

whom they had no quarrel? It is most probable that, as in other

attempts at revolution, that of Masaniello--that of Rienzi--public

patriotism was not created--it was stimulated and made passion by

private resentment.

[240] Mr. Mitford has most curiously translated this passage thus:

“Aristogiton escaped the attending guards, but, being taken by the

people (!!!) was not mildly treated. So Thucydides has expressed

himself.” Now Thucydides says quite the reverse: he says that, owing

to the crowd of the people, the guard could not at first seize him.

How did Mr. Mitford make this strange blunder? The most charitable

supposition is, that, not reading the Greek, he was misled by an error

of punctuation in the Latin version.

[241] “Qui cum per tormenta conscios caedis nominare cogeretur,” etc.

(Justin., lib. ii., chap. ix.) This author differs from the elder

writers as to the precise cause of the conspiracy.

[242] Herodotus says they were both Gephyraeans by descent; a race,

according to him, originally Phoenician.--Herod. b. v., c. 57.

[243] Mr. Mitford too hastily and broadly asserts the whole story of

Leaena to be a fable: if, as we may gather from Pausanias, the statue

of the lioness existed in his time, we may pause before we deny all

authenticity to a tradition far from inconsonant with the manners of

the time or the heroism of the sex.

[244] Thucyd., b. vi., c. 59.

[245] Herodotus, b. vi., c. 103. In all probability, the same

jealousy that murdered the father dismissed the son. Hippias was far

too acute and too fearful not to perceive the rising talents and

daring temper of Miltiades. By-the-way, will it be believed that

Mitford, in is anxiety to prove Hippias and Hipparchus the most

admirable persons possible, not only veils the unnatural passions of

the last, but is utterly silent about the murder of Cimon, which is

ascribed to the sons of Pisistratus by Herodotus, in the strongest and

gravest terms.--Mr. Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, vol. ii., p. 223)

erroneously attributes the assassination of Cimon to Pisistratus

himself.

[246] Suidas. Laertius iv., 13, etc. Others, as Ammonius and

Simplicius ad Aristotelem, derive the name of Cynics given to these

philosophers from the ridicule attached to their manners.

[247] Whose ardour appears to have been soon damped. They lost but

forty men, and then retired at once to Thessaly. This reminds us of

the wars between the Italian republics, in which the loss of a single

horseman was considered no trifling misfortune. The value of the

steed and the rank of the horseman (always above the vulgar) made the

cavalry of Greece easily discouraged by what appears to us an

inconsiderable slaughter.

[248] Aelian. V. Hist. xiii., 24.

[249] Wachsm, l. i., p. 273. Others contend for a later date to this

most important change; but, on the whole, it seems a necessary

consequence of the innovations of Clisthenes, which were all modelled

upon the one great system of breaking down the influence of the

aristocracy. In the speech of Otanes (Herod., lib. iii., c. 80), it

is curious to observe how much the vote by lot was identified with a

republican form of government.

[250] See Sharon Turner, vol. i., book i.

[251] Herod., b. i., c. xxvi.

[252] Ctesias. Mr. Thirlwall, in my judgment, very properly contents

himself with recording the ultimate destination of Croesus as we find

it in Ctesias, to the rejection of the beautiful romance of Herodotus.

Justin observes that Croesus was so beloved among the Grecian cities,

that, had Cyrus exercised any cruelty against him, the Persian hero

would have drawn upon himself a war with Greece.

[253] After his fall, Croesus is said by Herodotus to have reproached

the Pythian with those treacherous oracles that conduced to the loss

of his throne, and to have demanded if the gods of Greece were usually

delusive and ungrateful. True to that dark article of Grecian faith

which punished remote generations for ancestral crimes, the Pythian

replied, that Croesus had been fated to expiate in his own person the

crimes of Gyges, the murderer of his master;--that, for the rest, the

declarations of the oracle had been verified; the mighty empire,

denounced by the divine voice, had been destroyed, for it was his own,

and the mule, Cyrus, was presiding over the Lydian realm: a mule might

the Persian hero justly be entitled, since his parents were of

different ranks and nations. His father a low-born Persian--his

mother a Median princess. Herodotus assures us that Croesus was

content with the explanation--if so, the god of song was more

fortunate than the earthly poets he inspires, who have indeed often,

imitating his example, sacrificed their friends to a play upon words,

without being so easily able to satisfy their victims.

[254] Herod., l. v., c. 74.

[255] If colonists they can properly be called--they retained their

connexion with Athens, and all their rights of franchise.

[256] Herod., l. v., c. 78.

[257] Mr. Mitford, constantly endeavouring to pervert the simple

honesty of Herodotus to a sanction of despotic governments, carefully

slurs over this remarkable passage.

[258] Pausanias, b. iii., c. 5 and 6.

[259] Mr. Mitford, always unduly partial to the Spartan policy,

styles Cleomenes “a man violent in his temper, but of considerable

abilities.” There is no evidence of his abilities. His restlessness

and ferocity made him assume a prominent part which he was never

adequate to fulfil: he was, at best, a cunning madman.

[260] Why, if discovered so long since by Cleomenes, were they

concealed till now? The Spartan prince, afterward detected in bribing

the oracle itself, perhaps forged these oracular predictions.

[261] Herod., b. v. c. 91.