synœcising Athens--that is, transforming Attica from a number of
villages with a capital into a city-state with surrounding territory. We
know that he sent judges on circuit round the country demes. The other
indications are that Peisistratus pulled down the city wall in order
that she might be able to expand, that he constructed a proper
water-supply, and that he fostered the worship of the Olympian or city
deities. At the same time he fostered agriculture, and tried to get the
poor of Athens back to the land. As he had owed his return to Athena, he
signalised his gratitude by surrounding the old temple of Athena Polias
with a marble peristyle and sculptures. Some of the sculptures of this
period are preserved on the Acropolis of Athens. They were generally
carved of the softer _porus_ or rough limestone, and freely adorned with
colour. But the decorations of Peisistratus’ temple are of Parian
marble. Heracles and his labours seem to have been preferred to Theseus
as a subject for representation. On the plain below the Acropolis
Peisistratus began a temple to Olympian Zeus on so huge a scale that
republican Athens was unable to complete it until the Emperor Hadrian
brought his immense resources into play.
But Peisistratus did more than building for religion. He may fairly be
called the founder of the State cults of Athens. He founded the Greater
Panathenæa, as the symbol of union for Attica. This was a most solemn
yearly procession of all the people, to carry up a new embroidered robe
as a gift to the Virgin Goddess on the Acropolis. That is the scene
depicted on the frieze of the Parthenon which is now the chief glory of
the British Museum. Later Athenians, of course, ascribed the Panathenæa
to Theseus or Erechtheus. Along with the procession there were athletic
games and sacrifices. And the prizes in the games were those fine big
oil-jars, the Panathenaic amphoræ, of which we have a long series
preserved.[34] This gave a great impulse to pottery. It is about now
that we begin the black-figured type of vase, in which the figures are
painted with a lustrous black glaze on the rich brown of the
earthenware.
Peisistratus greatly encouraged the idea of Athens as the leading member
of the Ionic States of Greece. Up to this time great Ionian cities like
Miletus and Ephesus had been far ahead of Athens in wealth and
civilisation. It is hard to say how Peisistratus persuaded them that
Athens was in some sort their mother city unless such was the fact. He
inaugurated the solemn purification of Delos, by removing the dead from
the island. Henceforth the Apollo of Delos was to share with the
Poseidon of Mycale the patronage of Ionia. Both at the Panionic
festivals of Delos and the Panathenaic festivals at Athens the solemn
recitation of Homer formed an important part of the proceedings. It was
Peisistratus who caused an authorised version of Homer to be prepared at
Athens. Certain portions were selected and edited. Thus at length Homer
became a fixed canon.
Another festival instituted by Peisistratus led to important literary
results. This was the Great Dionysia. Dionysus was a late-comer in
Olympian mythology, probably from Thrace. As the god of wine, his coming
had to face some opposition from the temperance party, but like a god he
triumphed. It was at the Dionysia that, as we shall see, the Athenian
drama took its rise as a service of worship to the god.
Literature found a whole-hearted patron in the great
[Illustration:
1. CORINTHIAN VASE.
2. RED-FIGURED VASE.
3. BLACK-FIGURED VASE.
4. WHITE POLYCHROME VASE.]
tyrant’s younger son Hipparchus. At his court were, among others,
Simonides, Anacreon, and Onomacritus. Simonides of Ceos is specially
associated with the dithyramb, the chorus in honour of Dionysus, which
played a great part in the development of the chorus of tragedy. He was
also a composer of odes of victory for successful athletes, though here
his fame was eclipsed by his younger rival Pindar. But it is chiefly as
a writer of elegies and epitaphs and epigrams that his fame survives.
Every one knows that epitaph he wrote on Leonidas and his Three Hundred
Spartans at Thermopylæ.
“Go tell at Sparta, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to her word, we lie.”
His fine ode on the same subject is still extant. Anacreon is known even
to the “general reader,” through Byron:
“Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon’s song divine,
He served--but served Polycrates--
A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.”
Anacreon’s main business was, as our poet suggests, the writing of
banquet songs on love and wine. It is rather melancholy to reflect that
his anacreontics were composed--according to his own prescription--on
ten parts of water to five of wine; but all the ancients watered their
liquor. How closely tyranny is to be associated with the revival of
culture is proved by the careers of these two poets. Anacreon passed
from the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, to Hipparchus, one of the
tyrants of Athens. When he fell Anacreon went to the still more
brilliant court of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. Simonides went with him,
and there they were joined by Bacchylides, Pindar, and Æschylus.
Onomacritus was a strange person. It seems that Hipparchus had a hobby
of collecting oracles, and had commissioned Onomacritus to edit a famous
collection of poetical prophecies by Musæus, a half-mythical bard.
Onomacritus was detected inserting some of his own compositions, and
very properly expelled for a forger. If all the historical forgers of
this period had been detected the modern historian’s lot would be a
happier one.
One monument of this period is of especial interest, the _stēlē_ or
gravestone of Aristion.[35] It is a bas-relief, once adorned with
colour, of a warrior in armour with a long spear in his hand. It is not
likely that any attempt was made at a portrait of the deceased. As the
_stēlē_ was found at Peisistratus’ birthplace it has been suggested that
this may be that very Aristion who proposed the decree which gave the
tyrant his bodyguard. It certainly belongs to the right period of art,
but Aristion was a common name; and is it likely that a record of such a
man would have been permitted to survive?
It was the custom after dinner at Athens to pass round the harp, and for
each guest as it came to him either to improvise a verse or to cap his
neighbour’s impromptu or to sing a stave of some famous song. The most
popular of all these “skolia” was “The Myrtle Bough.” One version of it
runs:
“I will wear my sword in a myrtle bough,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton
When they killed the tyrant
And made Athens free.
“Dearest Harmodius, thou art not yet dead.
They say thou art in the Isles of the Blessed,
Where dwells Achilles swift of foot
And Diomede, Tydeus’ son.
“I will wear my sword in a myrtle bough,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton
When at the sacrifice of Athena
They killed Hipparchus the tyrant lord.
“Everlasting shall be your glory upon earth,
Dearest Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
For that ye killed the tyrant
And set Athens free.”
[Illustration:
_English Photo Co., Athens_
FIG. 1. STELE OF ARISTION
_Alinari_
FIG. 2. HARMODIUS
PLATE XXIX]
Right down in the days of Demosthenes, nearly two hundred years later,
these two men were still mentioned in most of the public decrees,
because immunities had been granted to their descendants for ever. They
are the only private individuals who had statues erected to them for
more than a hundred years. All this extraordinary honour was theirs
because they had killed a tyrant.
Although we can see the blessings that the tyrants of Greece had brought
to their cities, it is to the credit of the Greeks that they could not.
They much preferred to govern themselves badly than to be governed ever
so efficiently by some one else. A tyrant might give them wealth, peace,
culture, and happiness, but no Greek ever lost sight of the tyrant’s
_telos_, or goal. The tyrant governed, as Aristotle says, “for his own
advantage, not that of his subjects.” Hence their execration of tyranny
and the extraordinary honour they paid to tyrannicides. Such a sentiment
has had an enormous influence in history. The Greeks taught it in their
schools, their orators embroidered the theme, the Roman schoolboys
learnt declamations against tyrants from their Greek teachers of
rhetoric, until finally this old legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton
whetted the daggers of Brutus and Cassius against Cæsar.
It was a legend, I am afraid. The Athenian tyranny was put down by a
Spartan army persuaded by a bribed oracle at the bidding of the
Alcmæonids. All that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had done was to kill
Hipparchus, the younger brother of Hippias, by surprise, as he was
marshalling the Panathenaic procession. Apparently, too, the motive was
merely a love affair of a kind that we consider disreputable; but that
only added the necessary touch of romance to the story. No ancient
historian supports the belief of the common folk at Athens that
Harmodius and Aristogeiton had set Athens free.
This story provided the subject of one of the most famous of archaic
statues, the “Harmodius and Aristogeiton” of Antenor. It was carried
off by Xerxes to Persia when he sacked Athens in 480, but returned
eventually by Antiochus the Great. Meanwhile two other sculptors had
been set to reproduce Antenor’s group. It is probably this reproduction
from which our many copies have been made. We have them on coins, on
vases, on a marble throne, and above all in two separate statues in the
Naples Museum, where unfortunately Aristogeiton, who should have been
the bearded elder, has been degraded by the addition of one of the
pretty curly-haired heads of the fourth or third century. But the
Harmodius is a fine type of archaic work, even though it has been freely
restored and is of course only a copy. We note how much more successful
is the body than the head. But uncouth as the head is it is full of
dignity and virility.[36]
From Aristophanes it would appear that it was the mark of a jingo
democrat at Athens to sing “the Harmodius” on every possible occasion.
Hippias, as I have said, was expelled by the machinations of the
Alcmæonids and the strong arm of Sparta in 510 B.C. It was the Alcmæonid
Cleisthenes who was called upon to draw up a new constitution. After
emerging from the tyrannical stage all the Greek states developed a
republic, either oligarchical or democratic. In the oligarchic type the
citizenship was confined to a few hundreds of the richer citizens and
the actual government was carried on by a small council of ten or
fifteen members. This was the normal type of Greek government. The
democracy of Athens was unique. All Greek states had inherited from the
earliest times the public meeting in the market-place as one of the
rights of citizenship. At Athens eventually all administrative decrees
were made at this Assembly, or Ecclesia, without any revision
whatsoever, and all adult male citizens could attend and speak if they
chose. It amounted to government by mass meeting. It was, of course, an
ignorant, fickle, excitable body, especially in conducting a war or a
piece of foreign policy. But it was a wonderful instrument of
education, and it gave the Athenian citizen that sense of direct
participation in the affairs of his state which alone could satisfy the
political aspirations of a Greek. Who shall call it a failure because it
bungled a war and an empire, if it made Athens the eye of the world for
ever and ever? Cleisthenes set up a Council of five hundred members,
fifty elected from each of his new ten tribes, but that was only a
committee to prepare business for the Assembly. Also there still
remained the old patrician council of notables, now chiefly consisting
of ex-magistrates, who met upon the Areian Hill and were called the
Council of the Areopagus. These had the guardianship of the laws,
amounting probably to a veto upon the Assembly’s proceedings, and a
general censorship over morals. They were also the highest criminal
court for cases of blood-guilt--a solemn and awful tribunal. Consisting
of ex-officials, they naturally had great influence over the merely
annual magistrates, or _archons_; and, in fact, as we have recently
learnt from Aristotle, they managed most things in Athens until after
the Persian wars. The chief executive magistrates were still the nine
annual _archons_, still chosen by popular election. With his new ten
tribes Cleisthenes instituted ten _strategoi_, or generals, to lead them
under command of the War Archon. The ten tribes were so grouped as to
prevent any recurrence of the local factions which had enabled
Peisistratus to rise. And Cleisthenes devised the ingenious system
called ostracism, by which any unpopular statesman who had a certain
number of votes cast against him was sent into polite and honourable
banishment. It was generally the leader of the Opposition who suffered
this fate, and such was the intention. Though Greek democracy inevitably
developed a party system, it was never recognised. Opposition was
considered treachery to the state, as, indeed, it generally was.
Such in general was the constitution under which Athens rose to glory.
It was modified, as we shall see, in a democratic direction by
Pericles. As yet it can hardly, with its powerful Areopagus and elective
magistrates, be called a democracy. But it tends that way, and the
course before it is plain. Cleisthenes has lost much of the credit due
to him in the process which has assigned superhuman wisdom to Solon. He,
with Pericles, is the father of the Athenian democracy.
IONIA
At this time, when the mainland cities of Greece were beginning to
revive the old Ægean culture under changed conditions, their kinsmen
across the sea on both sides had gone in advance of them in
civilisation. Why this was so it is hard to say--impossible, on the old
theory that all these great cities from Miletus to Sybaris were merely
colonies of Athens or Corinth or poor little Megara. But if it be true
that one and the same gifted race had dwelt from Neolithic times on the
coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, then it is quite natural that the
cities furthest removed from the main focus of Northern invasion should
be the first to recover from the turmoil of the Dark Ages caused by the
coming of Achæans and Dorians. The Ionians at any rate bear all the
characteristics that we should expect from the kinsfolk of those
pre-Achæan peoples without the Northern stiffening. They are
intelligent, artistic, commercial, without any military virtues to speak
of. They tend towards naturalistic deities like the Diana of Ephesus,
and they scoff at the Olympian system. Their patron god is the sea-god.
No deep gulf, such as that of race, separates them from the Lydian and
Carian peoples behind them. Moreover, we can find the period and the
political motive when the legends of their foundation from Athens first
came into vogue. In the East “Javan” was the collective name for the
Greeks.
In the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries cities like Miletus,
Ephesus, and Mitylene on Lesbos were the greatest cities of the Greek
world, in size, riches, and culture. They in their turn were sending
colonies into the Black Sea, to tap its rich corn-growing and
wool-producing regions. We have seen something of the wisdom of Thales,
and we must allow our imaginations to suggest what a vast amount of
preliminary knowledge and culture is required before a man can calculate
an eclipse. It is likely that this learning came in the merchant ships
from Egypt. We have seen also what a great part Ionia played in the
development (if not the authorship) of the Homeric epics. It is here too
that lyric poetry reaches its apotheosis. We have agreed, I hope, that
the epic did not come into being out of the void, but that there must
have been songs before there were long poems. Hence we are not driven to
the extravagant assumption that Sappho and Alcæus were beginners at
their trade.
The great lyric period of the seventh and sixth centuries belongs
politically to an era of aristocracies and tyrannies. The aristocracies
here were composed, not of farmers, as at Athens, nor of
warrior-knights, as at Sparta, but of merchant princes who have always
proved lavish patrons of a certain kind of art and literature. Most of
the great poets seem to have been members of the aristocracy.
Sappho is a remarkable figure in the history of literature, the only
woman who has ever reached the front rank among poets. We have of her
only a few score lines of broken fragments, only two poems that exceed
ten lines, and not one of thirty. Yet even from these ruined remnants we
can feel across the ages the vital throb of her passion, speaking in
music of altogether unequalled beauty. It is impossible to describe the
emotion which scholars and poets of all ages have felt when they first
stumbled upon
“Immortal Aphrodite of the starry throne,
Daughter of God, weaver of guile, I beseech thee
Neither to disgust nor to distress subdue,
Lady, my heart....”
Or the broken marriage chorus:
MAIDENS
“Like the sweet apple blushing on the topmost twig,
Top of the topmost, which the gatherers forgot.
Forgot? Nay, but they could not reach to it.
YOUTHS
“Like the hyacinth on the hills which the shepherd swains
Tread underfoot, and down to the earth the bright flower....”
But translation inevitably spoils the fragrance, as even Rossetti and
Swinburne have found. It is of Sappho that Swinburne writes in her own
metre:
“Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,
While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel
Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead,
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples,
White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,
Ravaged with kisses,
Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.
Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite
Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song....”
The fertile and prurient invention of late Greek scholarship have given
this sublime poetess a biography which is as false as it is unpleasant.
From her own works, however, we can gather some interesting details. She
belonged to the governing aristocracy of Lesbos, and, for a time at
least, went into exile with it. The women of Lesbos seem to have formed
rival salons of literary culture, and Sappho herself was the head of
one. There was a good deal of jealousy between them. Strangely, the most
ardent of her verse is addressed to one of her own sex, and since it
cannot be true that she is only writing the amatory language of male
poets, we must conclude that the women of Ionia imitated the men in that
strange passion which ignored sex. To contradict the celebrated fable of
her dramatic suicide from a cliff in consequence of an unrequited love,
we have a fragment of her message to her daughter from a calm deathbed:
“ ... For it is not right that in a house the Muses haunt
Mourning should dwell: such things befit us not.”
We cannot lightly dismiss as mere gossip the story of tender feeling, or
at any rate tender expressions, between Sappho and Alcæus. They were
contemporary love-poets of the same city. Sappho sometimes used the
alcaic measure, and Alcæus the sapphic. Besides, we have it on the
authority of Aristotle. One line of Alcæus to Sappho is preserved:
“Sappho, pure sweet-smiling weaver of violets.”
Alcæus too was a member of the Lesbian aristocracy. He alludes to a
short-lived tyranny which was ended by the appointment of a
constitutional tyrant or dictator, the wise and generous Pittacus. In
the course of these disturbances Alcæus went into exile--among other
places, we should note, to Egypt--while his brother took service under
the King of Babylon. Such were the cosmopolitan relations of this
period. The poet also fought for his country against the Athenians in
the struggle for Sigeum, and humorously records the fact that he lost
his shield in the rout. Such a loss was the regular mark of defeat, and
generally regarded as a brand of ignominy to a soldier. But the Ionians
took nothing seriously, not even war. It is strangely illustrative of
the prevalence of types in Greek art that many lyric poets lost their
shields in battle--Alcæus, Archilochus, and Anacreon--while the Roman
Horace was too careful an imitator of the Greek lyric tradition to
neglect their example in this respect. The poetry of Alcæus falls into
two classes--banquet-songs in praise of love and wine, and political
songs attacking his enemies. He too chiefly survives in fragments like
“Wine is the mirror to mortals....”
“Wine, dear child, and Truth....”
Though there is not the fire of Sappho in his work, it is singularly
artistic, polished, and rich in the language of pure poetry. For the
rest we must be content to admit his great reputation in antiquity and
to enjoy him through the medium of Horace’s Latin.
These two great poets, who both flourished about 600 B.C., their
predecessors Archilochus, Arion, Callinus, and Terpander, and their
successors of the next generation Anacreon and Simonides, are the best
representatives of the early culture of Ionia. To complete the picture
we must remember her philosophers. Besides Thales and Bias, the two
Sages (Bias, by the way, is credited with having proposed that the
Ionians should leave their homes _en masse_ and found a united state in
the west), there were students of natural philosophy like Anaximander,
who made the first map and the first sundial and explained the evolution
of life from chaos by the interaction of heat and cold, Heracleitus of
Ephesus, “the weeping philosopher,” or Hecatæus of Miletus, the
grandfather of history and geography. Hecatæus first explained away the
gods as only deified mortals of past ages, a doctrine afterwards called
Euhemerism. This was the Ionian attitude of scepticism which doubtless
is to be discerned in Homer’s attitude to the gods. Even Sappho, the
worshipper of Aphrodite, says in one fragmentary line:
“I know not what the gods are: two notions have I....”
Language is the easiest medium for art. We must not be surprised to find
this high poetic and philosophic standard accompanied chronologically by
plastic work, still to be called archaic, which shows the artist
painfully struggling with his
[Illustration:
_Mansell & Co._
Fig. 1. SCULPTURED COLUMN FROM THE OLD TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS
_Mansell & Co._
FIG. 2. RELIEF FROM THE HARPY TOMB, NORTH SIDE
PLATE XXX]
material. Though Miletus was already growing rich with commerce the
Ionian coin types are still very primitive. It is generally believed
that coinage was invented by the Lydians in the seventh century, but for
a long time the marks upon their coins were only mechanical impressions.
One of the earliest attempts at an artistic motive is the coin found at
Halicarnassus bearing a stag and an inscription which seems to mean “I
am the mark of Phanes.” We know of a Phanes at Halicarnassus late in the
sixth century, but this must be the token of an ancestor of his. Most of
these coins are of electrum, a natural mixture of gold and silver.
[Illustration: Coin of Phanes]
Of the sculpture of this region we must be content with two examples.
One is the so-called Harpy Tomb from Xanthus, in Lycia.[37] It shows us
the “harpies” conceived as angels of death--by no means malignant, as
the harpies afterwards became--carrying away the dead. Perhaps it would
be better to call them Kēres, or Fates. In the centre of this north side
is the dead warrior yielding up his helmet to Hades. On the west side
the Queen of the Dead (Persephone) sits in majesty. Over the door is the
common heraldic motive of the suckling goat, and to the right of her
three worshippers bring offerings of poppies and sesame to another
seated goddess. Archæologists date this monument in the latter half of
the sixth century.