PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY* BY J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A., D.D. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin', Knight (Gold Cross) of the Order of the Redeemer i Hon. Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford' Author of ' Prolegomena to Ancient History' 'Social Life in Greece, 1 ' A History of Classical Greek Literature,' <3r., &c. UNIVERSITY ILoniron MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1892 \_All rights reserved} jforfc HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY PREFACE EVEN since the following sheets were printed, the researches into prehistoric Greek life, and its relation both to the East, to the Homeric poems, and to the Greece we know in the 7th century B. C, have progressed, and we are beginning to see some light through the mist. I can refer the reader to two books, of which one has just been published in English. The other, the second edition of Busolt's History of Greece^ though still in the press, will be accessible to those that read German in a few weeks. I prefer to cite the former fechuchardt's account of Schliemanris Ex- cavations in its English form, as it is there enriched with an Introduction, and apparently a revision of the text, by Mr. Walter Leaf. This is the first systematic attempt to bring into a short compass, with the illustrations, and with some regard to chronology, the great body of facts discovered and hastily consigned to many large volumes by the gifted discoverer. There is, moreover, a separate chapter (vi.) which gathers these facts under a theory, not to speak of the acute and cautious criticism of Mr. Leaf, which will be found in the VI PREFACE. Introduction to the volume. The Introduction to Busolt's History, of which (by the author's courtesy) I have seen some 130 pages, contains a complete critical discussion of the same evidence. Here is the general result in Busolt's own ex- position (G. G. 2nd ed. pp. 113 sq.): 'The Homeric culture is younger than the Mykenaean, it is also simpler and in better proportion. The former had come to use iron for arms and tools, the latter is strictly in the age of bronze l . If the culture of the Epics does show a lower stage of technical develop- ment, we perceive also a decline of oriental influ- ences. In many respects, in matters of interment, dress and armour, the epic age contrasts with the Mykenaean, but in many points we find transitions and threads which unite the two civilizations. The Homeric palace shows remarkable agreements with those of Mykenae and Tiryns. The Homeric heroes fight with sword, spear, and bow, like the Mykenaean. Splendid vases, too, and furniture, such as occur 1 ' In the whole range of the Mykensean culture, there have only been found in the later graves of the lower city, and in the beehive tomb of Vaphio, remains of some finger-rings of iron, used for ornaments. Iron tools and weapons were unknown to the My- kenaeans in spite of Beloch's opinion to the contrary. In the Iliad bronze is mentioned 279 times, iron 23; in the Odyssey they are named 80 and 25 times respectively, but the use of the later metal was far more diffused than the conventional style of the Epos betrays. Iron weapons are indeed only mentioned in the Iliad IV, 123; VII, 141, 144; and XVIII, 34. Books IV and VII are undoubtedly of later origin. Still the use of iron for tools was known throughout the whole Homeric age, and was gradually in- creasing during the growth of the Epos/ PREFACE. Vll within the range of the Mykenaean culture,agree even in details with the descriptions of the Epos. The Epos, too, knows Mykenae " rich in gold," and the " wealthy " Odeomenos. In general the homes of the Mykenaean culture are prominent in the Iliad. The splendour of the Mykenaean epoch was there- fore still fresh in the memory of the ^Eolians and lonians when the Epos arose. 1 If the life thus pictured in the Epos thus shows many kindred features to that of Mykenae, the Doric life of the Peloponnesus stands in harsh contrast. Not in strong fortresses, but in open camps, do we find the Dorian conquerors. The nobles do not fight on chariots in the van, but serried infantry decides the combat 1 . It was about from 1550 to 1150, that Mykenaean culture prevailed, and was then replaced, as the legends asserted, by the Dorian invaders/ Let us note that the earlier and ruder civilisation of Troy may be contrasted with that of Mycenae, though both of them show successive stages the later stage of the (second) city of Troy approach- ing to the intermediate stage of Tiryns, and in- deed, forming an unbroken chain with this, Mycenae, and even the later and more finished 1 Probably, Busolt adds in the sequel, the use of iron weapons by the Dorian invaders may have been one cause of their victory. But it seems to me mainly to have been the victory of infantry over cavalry, and thus a very early type of the decisive day at Orchomenus, when the Spanish infantry of the Grand Catalan Company destroyed Guy de la Roche and his Prankish knights, and seized the country as their spoil. Vlll PREFACE. relics of prehistoric art found at Menidi and at Vaphio (Amyclae). The whole series is homo- geneous. The long-misunderstood palace of Troy is of the same kind in plan and arrangement as that of Tiryns and that of Mycenae; the gold ornaments of Mycenae are akin to those of Amyclae ; we stand in the presence of an old and organised civilisation which was broken off or ceased in prehistoric days, and recommenced on a different basis, and upon a somewhat different model, among the historical Greeks. And yet the prehistoric dwellers at Tiryns and Mycenae had certainly some features in common with the later race. Not to speak of details such as the designs in pottery, or in the architecture of the simpler historic temples, they were a mercantile and a maritime people, receiving the products of far lands, and sending their own abroad ; above all, they show that combination of receptivity and originality in their handicrafts which gives a pecu- liar stamp to their successors. While the ruder Trojan remains are said to show no traces of Phoenician importation, the Mycenaean exhibit objects from Egypt, from northern Syria, and from Phoenicia ; while on the other hand all the best authorities now recognise in much of the pottery, and of the other handicrafts, intelligent home production, which can even be traced in exports along a line of islands across the southern ^Egean and as far as Egypt. This latter fact, and the closer trade-relations with Hittite Syria than PREFACE. IX with Egypt or Phoenicia, are brought out by Busolt in his new Introduction. In what relation do these facts, now reduced to some order, stand to the Homeric poems ? Accord- ing to Schuchardt they vindicate for our Homer an amount of historical value which will astonish the sceptics of our generation. In the first place, how- ever, it is certain that Homer (using the name as a convenient abstraction) has preserved a true tradi- tion of the great seats of culture in prehistoric days. He tells us rightly that Tiryns had gone by when Mycenae took the lead, and that the civili- sation of this great centre of power in Greece was kindred to that of Troy, an equally old and splendid centre, which however was destroyed by fire before it had attained to the perfection of the later stages of Mycenaean art. Homer also implies that sea- faring connections existed between Asia Minor and Greece, and that early wars arose from reprisals for piratical raids, as Herodotus confirms. Some advanced kinds of handicraft, such as the inlaying of metals, which have been brought to light in Mycenaean work, are specially prominent in the Homeric poems. It is hard to conceive the nucleus of the poems having originated elsewhere than in the country where Mycenaean grandeur was still fresh. The legend which brings the rude Dorians into Greece about noo B.C. (the date need not be so early) accounts for the disappear- ance of this splendour, and the migration of the Achaeans with their poems to Asia Minor. So far X PREFACE. Mr. Leaf agrees, as well as with the theory of Fick, that the earliest poems were composed, not in Ionic, but in the old dialect of Greece, which may be called ^Eolic, provided (he adds) we do not identify it with the late ^Eolic to which it has been reduced by Fick. It is added by Schuchardt that the great body of Nostoi seems irreconcilable with E. Curtius 5 theory that the lays were composed for the early yEolic settlers, who made Asia Minor their permanent home ; so that the Trojan War may really have been a mercantile war of Mycenae against the Trojan pirates, who were outside the zone of the Mycenaean trade-route, but may have seriously injured it. Mr. Leaf justly points out that the obscure islands along this route, Cos, and Carpathus, together with Rhodes, in which My- cenaean wares have been found, are counted by the Homeric Catalogzie as Achaean allies of Mycenae, while the (Carian) Cyclades, though much larger and perhaps more populated, are ignored. So far the case for the early date and historic basis of Homer seems considerably strengthened by recent research. Nevertheless, the marked contrasts between the Mycenaean Greeks and the society in Homer create a great difficulty. Some of these have been removed by the aid of (perhaps legitimate) ingenuity, but differences of dress, of burial customs, in the use of iron, &c., remain. The seafaring too of the Homeric Greeks does not seem to me at all what we may infer the Mycenaean seafaring to have been. Minos, or PREFACE. XI somebody else, must have suppressed piracy, and prehistoric trading cannot have been so ex- clusively in the hands of the Phoenicians. The old Mycenaeans were perfectly ignorant of the art of writing, a fact which seems to preclude any sys- tematic dealing with the Phoenicians, though Busolt rather infers from it a want of personal intercourse with the Hittites, and a mere reception of Asiatic luxuries through rude and semi-hostile Sidonian adventurers. Busolt thinks we can follow down prehistoric art through its various steps to that which leads into the Homeric epoch, but as yet such a gradual transition seems to me not clearly shown ; I cannot but feel a gulf between the two. Either therefore the original poets of the Iliad were separated by a considerable gap of time from the life they sought to describe there may have been a period of decadence before the Dorians appeared or the Ionic recension was far more trenchant than a mere matter of dialect, and by omission or alteration accommodated the already strange and foreign habits of a bygone age to their own day; or else the Alexandrian editors have destroyed traces of old customs far more than has hitherto been suspected x . It does not therefore appear to me that the anti- quity of the Homer which we possess is materially 1 This last clause is suggested by the fragment of the Iliad, published in my Memoir on the Petrie Papyri, which shows, in thirty-five lines, five unknown to modern texts. Cf. Plate III and p. 34 of that Memoir. xii PREFACE. established by these newer researches. That the earliest lays embodied in the Iliad were very old has never been doubted by any sane critic, and has always been maintained by me on independent grounds. But I now think it likely that the great man who brought dramatic unity into the Iliad, and who may have lived near 800 B. C., did far more than merely string together, and make in- telligible, older poems. He made the old life of Mycenae into the newer Ionic life of Asia Minor. I am sorry to disagree with Mr. Leaf when he calls that Ionic society ' democratic to the core.' Any one who will read what even Pausanias records of its traditions will see that it was aristocratic to the core, and quite as likely to love heroic legends as any other Greek society of that day. I must not conclude this Preface without ac- knowledging, the constant help of my younger col- leagues in correcting and improving what I write. Of these I will here specify Mr. L. Purser and Mr. Bury. TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, February ', 1892. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Our Earlier Historians of Greece. PAGE Definite and indefinite problems i Examples in theology and metaphysics ..... i Examples in literature . 2 The case of history generally ....... 3 Special claims of Greek history ...... 4 The claims of Rome and of the Jews 4 ~Greek influences in our religion ...... 4 Increasing materials 5 Plan of this Essay 6 Universal histories 6 Gillies 7. Effects of the French Revolution on the writers of the time . 8 Mitford writes a Tory history of Greece 8- He excites splendid refutations 9 Thirl wall : his merits 10 his coldness n his fairness and accuracy, but without enthusiasm . . 1 1 Clinton's Fasti : his merits 12 Contrast of Grote's life 13 His theory Radicalism 13 The influences of his time 14 To be compared with Gibbon 14 His eloquence ; his panegyric on democracy . . . .15 XIV CONTENTS. PAGE Objections : that democracies are short-lived . . . .16 that the Athenian democrat was a slave-holder and a ruler over subjects 16 The Athenian not the ideal of the Greeks . . . 17 Grote's treatment of the despots .18 Their perpetual recurrence in the Greek world . . .18 Advantages of despotism . . . . . . .18 Good despots not infrequent 19 Grote a practical politician ... . . . . .20 His treatment of Alexander the Great 20 Contrast of Thirlwall . . ' 20 Grote ignores the later federations, and despises their history . 2 1 His treatment of the early legends .22 Even when plausible, they may be. fictions . . . .22 Thirl wall's view less extreme , 23 Influence of Niebuhr on both historians 23 Neither of them visited Greece, which later historians generally regard as essential . * 24 Ernst Curtius and Victor Duruy . . . . . 25 The value of autopsy in verifying old authors . . 2 5 Example in the theatre of Athens . . . . . -25 Its real size . . . . 26 No landscape for its background 26 Greek scenery and art now accessible to all . . . . 27 CHAPTER II. Recent Treatment of the Greek Myths. The newer histories . .28 Not justifiable without particular reasons . . . .28 Max Duncker 28 Not suited to English readers 29 Busolt and Holm 29 Return to Grote 3 Holm's postulate 30 The modern attitude 31 Pure invention a rare occurrence 31 CONTENTS. XV PAGE Plausible fiction therefore not an adequate cause ... 32 Cases of deliberate invention, at Pergamum, which breed general suspicion of marvellous stories .... 32 Example of a trustworthy legend from Roman history . . 33 Niebuhr, Arnold, Mommsen 34 The rex sacrorum at Rome 34 The king-archon at Athens 35 Legends of foreign immigrants 35 -Corroborative evidence of art, but not of language ... 35 Corroboration of legends in architecture 37 Explanation of myths by the solar theory . . . 37 The analogy of Indian and Persian mythology, expounded by Professor Max Miiller, founded on very wide learning . 38 long since shown inadequate, because it implies sentimental savages, which is contrary to our experience ... 39 K. O. Miiller's contribution . 40 The transference of myths 41 Old anecdotes doing fresh duty . . . . . .41 Example from the Trojan legend . . . . . 41 but not therefore false 42 The contribution of Dr. Schliemann 42 History not an exact science 43 Historical value of the Homeric poems 44 Mycense preserved in legend only 44 General teaching of the epic poems 44 Social life in Greece 45 Alleged artificiality of the poems ., 45 Examples from the Iliad 45 not corroborated by recent discoveries 46 Pick's account of the Homeric dialect 46 Difficulties in the theory 47 Analogies in its favour 48 Its application to the present argument 48 Illustration from English poetry 49 The use of stock epithets 49 High excellence incompatible with artificiality ... 50 The Homeric poems therefore mainly natural . . . .50 but only generally true 51 and therefore variously judged by various minds . . 52 XVI CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. Theoretical Chronology. PAGE Transition to early history 53 The Asiatic colonies ........ 53 Late authorities for the details 54 ... The colonization of the West 54 The original authority . . . . . . . -55 What was nobility in early Greece ? 55 Macedonian kings . . 56 Romans 56 Hellenistic cities 56 Glory of short pedigrees 56 The sceptics credulous in chronology 57 The current scheme of early dates . . . . . -57 The so-called Olympic register . . . . . 58 Plutarch's account of it .58 .The date of Pheidon of Argos -59 revised byt E. Curtius 60 since abandoned .60 The authority of Ephorus .61 not first-rate . . . . . . . . .62 Archias, the founder of Syracuse 62 associated with legends of Corcyra and Croton . . -63 Thucydides counts downward from this imaginary date . . 64 Antiochus of Syracuse 64 not trustworthy 65 his dates illusory 66 though supported by Thucydides ..... 66 who is not omniscient 66 Credulity in every sceptic . . . . . .67 Its probable occurrence in ancient critics .... 68 Value of Hippias' work ........ 68 Even Eratosthenes counts downward 69 Clinton's warning ......... 69 Summary of the discussion 69 The stage of pre-Homeric remains 70 CONTENTS. XV11 PAGE Prototype of the Greek temple 70 Degrees in this stage . . . . . . . 7 1 Probably not so old as is often supposed . . . 72 Mr. Petrie's evidence 72 The epic stage 7 2 The earliest historical stage . . . . . . -73 The gap between Homer and Archilochus 73 Old lists suspicious, and often fabricated .... 74 No chronology of the eighth century B. C. to be trusted . . 75 Cases of real antiquity 76 CHAPTER IV. The Despots ; The Democracies. Brilliant age of the great lyric poets . . . . -77 The Sparta of Alcman's time . . . . . . -77 Its exceptional constitution . . . . . . 78 E. Curtius on the age of the despots . . . . 78 Grote's view 79 Greek hatred of the despot 80 how far universal in early days 81 Literary portraits of the Greek despot 81 How far exaggerated . . . . . . . .82 Reductio ad absurdtim of the popular view . . . .82 The real uses to politics of temporary despots . . . 82- Questionable statement of Thucydides . . . . -83 The tyrant welds together the opposing parties ... 84 Cases of an umpire voluntarily appointed .... 84 Services of the tyrants to art . . . . . . -85 Examples 85 Verdict of the Greek theorists . . . ... 86 ~ -xPeisistratus and Solon ........ 86 ^Contrast of Greek and modern democracy . . . 87 slave-holding democracies .... . . . . .88 Supported by public duties 89 Athenian leisure . . . . . . . . .89 The assembly an absolute sovran 89 b XV111 CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. The Great Historians. PAGE -^ Herodotus and Thucydides .91 Herodotus superior in subject . . . . . 92 Narrow scope of Thucydides . . . . . . 92 His deliberate omissions 93 supplied by inferior historians . 93 Diodorus ..,...... 93 Date of the destruction of Mycenae ...... 94 Silence of ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides ... 94 Value of Plutarch's Lives . . . . . . -95 The newly-found tract on The Polity of the Athenians . . 96 Effects of Thucydides' literary genius ..... 97 The Peloponnesian war of no world- wide consequence . . 97 No representation in Greek assemblies ..... 98 No outlying members save Athenian citizens settled in subject towns .......... 99 Similar defect in the Roman Republic ..... 99 Hence an extended Athenian empire not maintainable . . 99 The glamour of Thucydides . . . . . . .100 His calmness assumed . . . . . . . . 101 He is backed by the scholastic interest . . . . . 101 on account of his grammatical difficulties . . . .102 He remains the special property of critical scholars . .102 Herodotus underrated in comparison . . . . .103 The critics of Thucydides . . . . . . .103 ^ The Anabasis of Xenophon . . . . . . .104 The weakness of Persia long recognized 3 05 Reception of the Ten Thousand on their return . . .105 The army dispersed . . . , . , ... 1 06 Xenophon's strategy . . . . . . . .106 His real strategy was literary . . . . . .107 A special favourite of Grote . . . . . . .107 Xenophon on Agesilaus and Epaminondas "~"T-^ . . .108 Injustice of the Hellenica 108 Yet Xenophon is deservedly popular . . . . .109 CONTENTS. XJX CHAPTER VI. Political Theories and Experiments in the Fourth Century B.C. PAGE Literary verdict of the Greeks against democracy , . .no Vacillation of modern critics . . , . . , .in """Grote's estimate of Pericles, compared with Plato's . .in The war policy of Pericles 112 His miscalculations . . . , . . . .112 He depended on a city population against an army of yeomen. 113 Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops . . .114 The smaller States necessarily separatists . . . .114 Attempts at federation 115 The second Athenian Confederacy 116 its details ; its defects 116 Political theories in the fourth century . . . . . 1 1 7 Greece and Persia . . . . . . . . .117 Theoretical politics 117 inestimable even to the practical historian . . . .118 Plato s . 118 Xenophon . . . 118 Aristotle 118 Sparta ever admired but never imitated 119 Practical legislation wiser in Greece than in modern Europe . 119 Sparta a model for the theorists . . . . . .120 A small State preferred . 120 Plato's successors 120 Their general agreement; (i) especially on suffrage . .121 even though their suffrage was necessarily restricted . .122 (2) Education to be a State affair 122 Polybius' astonishment at the Roman disregard of it . .123 The practical result in Rome . . . . . .123 Can a real democracy ever be sufficiently educated ? . .124 Christianity gives us a new force .124 Formal religion always demanded by the Greeks . . .125 Real religion the property of exceptional persons . . . 125 ba XX CONTENTS. PAGE Greek views on music ; discussed in my Rambles and Studies in Greece . . . . . . . . .126 Xenophon's ideal . . . . . . . . .127 Aristotle's ideal . . . . . . . . .127 Aristotle's Politics ignore Alexander . . . . .128 Evidence of the new Politeia . . . . . .128 Alexander was to all the theorists an incommensurable quantity 129 Mortality of even perfect constitutions . . . . .130 Contrast of Greek and modern anticipations . . . .130 CHAPTER VII. Practical Politics in the Fourth. Century. The practical politicians . . . . . . . 131 *Ar Isocrates, his anti-Persian policy . . . . .131 No large ideas of spreading Hellenic culture . . . .132 Who is to be the leader of Greece? . . . . .132 Demosthenes another ideal figure in this history . . . 133 He sees the importance of a foreign policy for Athens . . 134 against Persia, or Macedonia . . . . . . 1 34 Grote on Demosthenes . . . . . . . . 135 A. Schafer on Demosthenes . . . . . . . 135 Very different estimate of the ancients 136 Conditions of the conflict . . . . . . .136 made Philip's victory certain . . . . . . 137 Demosthenes fights a losing game . . . . . .138 The blunders of his later policy . . . . . . 139 Compared with Phocion . . . . . . . 139 Old men often ruinous in politics . . . . . . 139 Hellenism despised . . . . . . . .140 The author feels he is fighting a losing game against demo- cracy and its advocates ....... 140 The education of small free States . . . . . .141 Machiavelli and Aristotle ....... 141 Greek democratic patriotism . . . . . . .141 Its splendid results 142 appear to be essentially transitory ..... 142 from internal causes . . . . . . . , 143 CONTENTS. XXI PAGE The case of America 143 The demagogue . . . . . T 44 Internal disease the real cause of decadence . . . *44 The Greek States all in this condition 144 as Phocion saw ; but which Demosthenes ignored . . 145 The dark shadows of his later years . . . . J 45 His professional character as an advocate . . . .146 The affair of Harpalus .146 Was the verdict against Demosthenes just ? . . . . 147 The modern ground of acquittal . . . . . .148 Morality of politicians expounded by Hypereides . . .148 Modern sentiment at least repudiates these principles . 149 As regards practice we have Walpole . . . . 149 and the Greek patriots of our own century . . . 1 50 analogous to the case of Demosthenes . . . . 1 50 The end justified the means . . . . . . 151 Low average of Greek national morality . . . -152 Demosthenes above it 15 2 Deep effect of his rhetorical earnestness . . . . . 153 The perfection of his art is to be apparently natural . . 153 CHAPTER VIII. Alexander the Great. The further course of Greek history . . . . . 155 Droysen's Geschichte des Hellenismus . . . . . 155 This period much neglected by English historians . . . 155 Nature of our authorities . . . . . . .156 Alexander's place in history still disputed . . . . 157 Grote's unfairness in accepting evidence against him . .157 Droysen's estimate . .158 Tendency to attribute calculation to genius . . . .158 Its spontaneity . . 159 Alexander's military antecedents 159 He learns to respect Persian valour and loyalty . . .160 He discovers how to fuse the nations in Alexandria . .160 His development of commerce .161 Diffusion of gold 161 XX11 CONTENTS. PAGE Development of Alexander's views . . 162 His romantic imagination . . . . . . .162 No pupil of Aristotle 162 His portentous activity . . . . . . . .163 Compared with Napoleon . , . . . . .163 and Cromwell ......... 164 Use of artillery 164 Vain but not envious . . . . . . . . 165 His assumption of divinity questioned . . . . .165 An ordinary matter in those days . . . . . .166 Perhaps not asserted among the Greeks . . . - . .166 CHAPTER IX. Post-Alexandrian Greece. Tumults of the Diadochi : their intricacy . . . .168 their wide area ......... 169 The liberation of Greece 169 Spread of monarchies . . . . . . . .169 The three Hellenistic kingdoms . . . . . .170 New problems . . . . . . . . I 7i Politics abandoned by thinking men 171 except as a purely theoretical question, with some fatal exceptions . . . . . . . . .172 - Dignity and courage of the philosophers . . . .172 shown by suicide . . . . , , . 173 Rise of despots on principle . . . . . . . 173 Probably not wholly unpopular . . ' . . . . 1 74 Contemptible position of Athens and Sparta in politics, except in mischievous opposition to the new federations, whose origin was small and obscure . . . . . . 1 74 The old plan of a sovran State not successful . . .176 The leading cities stood aloof from this experiment . .176 Athens and the ^Etolians, or the Achaeans . . . J 77 Sparta and the Achseans . . . . . . .178 A larger question . . . . . . . .178 What right has a federation to coerce its members ? . .178 Disputed already in the Delian Confederacy by Athens and the lesser members . 179 CONTENTS. XX111 PAGE Duruy's attitude on this question . . . . . . 179 Greek sentiment very different . . . . . .180 Nature of the Achaean League . . . . . . 1 80 Statement of the new difficulty . . . . . .181 In its clearest form never yet settled except by force . .182 Case of the American Union ....... 182 Arguments for coercion of the several members . . .183 Cases of doubtful or enforced adherence . . . .184 Various internal questions . . . . . . .185 Looser bond of the ^Etolian League . . . . .185 Radical monarchy of Cleomenes . . . . . .186 CHAPTER X. The Romans in Greece. Position of Rome towards the Leagues 187 Roman interpretation of the ' liberty of the Greeks ' . .187 Opposition of the ^Etolians 188 Probably not fairly stated by Polybius 189 Rome and the Achaeans . . . . . . .189 Mistakes of Philopoemen gave Rome excuses for interference . 189 Mommsen takes the Roman side 190 Hertzberg and Freeman on the Achaean question . . .190 Senility of the Greeks 191 Decay of the mother-country . . . . . . . 191 The advocates for union with Rome . . . . .192 The advocates of complete independence .... 192 The party of moderate counsels . . . . . . 193 Money considerations . . . ; 193 acted upon both extremes 194 Exaggerated statements on both sides . . . . .194 The Separatists would not tolerate separation from themselves 195 Democratic tyranny . . . . . . -195 Modern analogies forced upon us . . . . . . 195 and not to be set aside ....... 196 The history of Greece is essentially modern . . . .196 therefore modern parallels are surely admissible, if justly drawn . . 197 The spiritual history not closed with the Roman conquest . 197 XXIV CONTENTS. PAGE The great bequests of the Roman period ' . . . .199 The Anthology, Lucian, Julian, Plotinus .... 200 Theological Greek studies ....... 200 Have the Greeks no share in our religion? .... 201 Or is it altogether Semitic ? 201 The language of the New Testament exclusively Greek . . 202 Saint Paul's teaching ........ 202 Stoic elements in Saint Paul ....... 203 The Stoic sage ......... 203 The Stoic Providence ........ 203 Saint John's Gospel . .204 Neo-Platonic doctrine of the Logos ..... 205 The Cynic independence of all men ..... 205 The Epicurean dependence upon friends .... 206 The university of Athens . . . . . . .206 Greece indestructible 207 Greek political history almost the private property of the English writers, . . . . . . . .207 who have themselves lived in practical politics . . .208 Not so in artistic or literary history . . . . .208 where the French and Germans are superior . . . 209 especially in art . . . . . . . . . 209 Importance of studying Greek art . . . . . . 209 Modern revivals of ancient styles, Gothic, Renaissance . . 210 Probability of Hellenic revival . . . . . .211 Greek art only recently understood. "Winckelmann, Penrose, Dorpfeld . . . . . . . . .212 Its effect upon modern art when properly appreciated . .212 and upon every detail of our life . . . . . .212 Greek literature hardly noticed in this Essay . . . .213 Demands a good knowledge and study of the language . .213 Other languages must be content to give way to this pursuit . 214 The nature and quality of Roman imitations . . . .215 The case of Virgil . . . . . . . . . 215 Theocritus only a late flower in the Greek garden of poetry . 216 APPENDIX. On the Authenticity of the Olympian Kegister . 217 PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY. CHAPTER I. OUR EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. i. THERE are scientific problems and literary Definite tasks which can be worked out once for all, or ^ "^f" which, at least, admit of final solution, to the lasting blems. fame of him that finds that solution, as well as to the permanent benefit of civilized man. There are others, more numerous and far more interesting, which are ever being solved, finally perhaps in the opinion of the discoverer, and even of his genera- tion, but ever arising again, and offering fresh difficulties and fresh attractions to other minds and to newer generations of men. I will cite the largest instances, as the most ob- Examples vious illustration of this second class. The deep j^i meta^ mysteries of Religion, the dark problems of Know- physics, ing and Being, which have occupied the theologian and the metaphysician for thousands of years, are still unsettled, and there is hardly an age of think- ing men which does not attack these questions V B 2 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [i. afresh, and offer new systems and new solutions for the acceptance of the human race. Nor can we say that in these cases new facts have been dis- covered, or new evidence adduced ; it is rather that mankind feels there is more in the mystery than is contained in the once accepted explanation, and endeavours by some new manipulation of the old arguments to satisfy the eternal craving for that mental rest which will never be attained till we know things face to face. Examples But perhaps these are instances too lofty for my in litera- T 1,1 tnre. present purpose : I can show the same pertinacious tendency to re-solve literary problems of a far hum- bler kind. How striking is the fact that the task of translating certain great masterpieces of poetry seems never completed, and that in the face of scores of versions, each generation of scholars will attack afresh Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divina Corn- media^ Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Goethe's Faust \ There are, I believe, forty English versions of Faust. How many there are of the Iliad and the Divina Commedia, I have not ascertained ; but of the former there is a whole library, and of the latter we may predict with certainty that the latest ver- sion will not be the last. Not only does each generation find for itself a new ideal in translation, the fine version of the Iliad by Pope is now re- garded with scorn, but each new aspirant is dis- contented with the earlier renderings of the passages he himself loves best ; and so year after year we see the same attempt made, often with great but I.] NO HISTORY FINAL. 3 never with universally accepted success. For there are always more beauties in the old masterpiece than have been conveyed, and there are always weaknesses in the translation, which show after a little wear. This eternal freshness in great masterpieces of The case ... 1-1 of history poetry which ever tempts new translators, is also to generally. be found in great historical subjects, especially in the history of those nations which have left a per- manent mark on the world's progress. There is no prospect that men will remain satisfied with the extant histories, however brilliant, of England or of France, even for an account of the periods which have long since elapsed, and upon which no new evidence of any importance can be found. Such is likewise the case with the histories of Greece and Rome. No doubt there is frequently new material discovered ; the excavator may in a month's dig- ging find stuff for years of speculation. No doubt there is an oscillation in the appreciation even of well-sifted materials : a new theory may serve to rearrange old facts and present them in a new light. But quite apart from all this, men will be found to re-handle these great histories merely for the sake of re-handling them. In the words of the very latest of these attempts : ' Though we can add nothing to the existing records of Greek history, the estimate placed upon their value and the con- clusions drawn from them are constantly changing ; and for this reason the story which has been told B 2 4 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [2. so often will be told anew from time to time so long as it continues to have an interest for mankind, that is, let us hope, so long as mankind continues to exist.' 1 Special 2. Perhaps the history of Greece has more Greek his- right than any other to excite this interest, since tor y- the effects of that country and its people are proba- bly far greater, certainly more subtle and various, than those of any other upon our modern life. It is curious that this truth is becoming recognized universally by the very generation which has begun to agitate against the general teaching of Greek in our higher schools. Nobody now attributes any real leading to the Romans in art, in philosophy, in the sciences, nay, even in the science of politics. If their literature was in some respects great, every Roman knew and confessed that this greatness was due to the Greeks ; if their practical treatment of law and politics was certainly admirable, the theory of the latter was derived from Hellenic speculation. The claims And when the originality of our Roman teachers and ofthe * s re duced to its very modest proportions, there is Jews. no other ancient nation that can be named among our schoolmasters except the Hebrews. Here there has been great exaggeration, and it has not yet been sifted and corrected, as in the case of Greek in- Rome. It is still a popular truism that while we our reli- " owe a ^ we have of intellectual and artistic refine- gion. ment to the Greeks, in one great department of civilization, and that the highest, we owe them 1 Mr. Evelyn Abbott's History of Greece, preface. 2.] THE SUBJECT GROWING. 5 nothing, but are debtors to the Semite spirit, to the clear revelation and the tenacious dogma con- veyed to the world by the Jews. Like many such truisms, this statement contains some truth, but a great deal of falsehood. When we have sur- veyed the earlier centuries, we shall revert to this question, and show how far the prejudice in favour of the Semite has ousted the Greek from his rightful place. Even serious history is sometimes unjust, much more the hasty generalizations of theologians or mere literary critics. For the history of religion will be found to rest, like everything good which we possess, partly upon a Greek basis ; but of course mainly on that portion of Greek history which has only recently risen into public notice among our scholars, I mean the later and the spiritual de- velopment of the nation when the conquests of Alexander had brought the whole ancient world under its sway. So the subject is still quite fresh, and even the Increasing evidence of books is as yet unexhausted, not to m speak of the yearly increment we obtain from the keen labour of many excavators. The Mitthei- lungen of the German Institute at Athens, the Bulle- tin de Correspondence hellenique, the English Hellenic Journal, and even the daily papers at Athens, teem with accounts of new discoveries. A comparison of the newest guide to Greece, the Guide- Joanne(\ 891), with the older books of the kind will show the wonderful increase in our knowledge of pre-historic antiquities. These recent books and reviews are 6 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [3. following in the wake of Dr. Schliemann, whose great researches have set us more new problems than we are likely to solve in the present century. Plan of this 3. What I purpose, therefore, to do in this Essay is to review the general lines followed by the great historians of Greece of the last three genera- tions ; to show the main points in which each of them excels, and where each of them still shows a deficiency. I shall then notice some current mis- conceptions, as well as some errors to be corrected by interesting additions to our evidence, even since the last of our larger histories has appeared ; and in doing this shall specially touch on those more disputed and speculative questions which are on principle omitted in practical and non-controversial books. By this means we shall ascertain in a general way what may be expected from any fresh attempt in Greek history, and where there still seems room for discovery or for the better estab- lishing of truths already discovered, but not yet accepted in the current teaching of our day. Whatever occasional digressions may occur will all be subordinate to this general plan, which is in fact an essay, not upon Greek history, but upon the problems of Greek history. We shall conclude with 'some reflections upon the artistic lessons of Greek life which are at last becoming accessible to the larger public. Universal 4. I need not go back to the period of histories. u n j versa i Histories, such as that of Bossuet or of Rollin, which were only adequate before special 4 .] FROM GOLDSMITH TO MITFORD. 7 studies had accumulated vast materials from the records of each separate nation. In our own day there are not wanting universal histories 1 9 though even the acknowledged genius and the enormous experience of Ranke were insufficient for the task as it now presents itself 2 . The first larger Greek histories known to me are those of Gillies and of Mitford 3 , the former now totally forgotten ; the latter only remembered because it stimulated a great successor to write his famous antidote. Yet the work of Gillies, first published in 1786, Gillies, was continued by the author, thirty-five years later, down to the reign of Augustus, when the sixth edition, a stately book in eight volumes, was pub- lished. There is no lack of merit in the work ; but the writer's standpoint will be apparent from the opening of his Dedication to the King : ' Sir, the history of Greece exposes the dangerous tur- bulence of democracy, and arraigns the despotism of tyrants. By describing the incurable evils in- herent in every form of republican policy, it evinces the inestimable benefits resulting to liberty itself from the lawful domination of hereditary kings/ 1 More numerous, and much better, in France and Germany than they are in England. 2 The first volume of his work has recently been translated by Mr. Prothero, of King's College, Cambridge. 3 I have seen but not read Stanyan's Grecian History in 2 vols. (1739), and Cast's History of Greece, published in Dublin (1793). O. Goldsmith's Handbook is one of a number published about a hundred years ago, all of which are forgotten. Of these I have looked through at least six. They have LOW no value. 8 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [4. One might imagine Gillies a Hellenistic author dedicating his work to a Ptolemy or a Seleucus. Effects of It is clear enough, though I know not the details Revolution f ms 1^ that tne horrors of the French Revolution on the wn- ^ a( j sun k deep into his soul. This is quite certain ters of the \ ^ time, m the case of Mitford, a gentleman of fortune, whose education in Greek was early interrupted, but whose Mitford : long residence at Nice brought him into contact with St. Croix and Villoison, two of the most famous Grecians of that day. After his return in 1777 from France, he found himself a man of leisure and importance, in the same Yeomanry corps with Gibbon, whose friendship he gained, and at whose suggestion he wrote his once popular history 1 . writes a Mitford wrote in a Tory spirit, and with a distinct tor7of S feeling of the political significance of Greek history Greece ; a s an example to modern men. He had upon his side the authority of almost every great thinker produced in the days of Hellenic greatness. All these speculators, in their pictures of ideal, as well as their criticisms of the actual, States, regard thorough-going democracy as an evil, and its abuses as the main cause of the early decay of Hellenic greatness. They all point with respect and pride to the permanence and consistency of Spartan life as indicating the sort of government likely to pro- duce the best and most enduring results. Mitford, therefore, not only deserves the credit of having taken up Greek history as a political study, but he 1 It is remarkable that he never mentions his contemporary, Gillies, so far as I know. 5 .] REACTION AGAINST MITFORD. 9 undoubtedly represents the body of learned opinion among the Greeks themselves upon the subject. The literary classes, so far as we can judge from what is extant of their works, were not usually radical or democratic, and it was very natural, in a generation which had witnessed the awful results of a democratic upheaval in France, to appeal to this evidence as showing that the voice of history was against giving power to the masses, and taking it from the classes, of any society. What popularity Mitford attained can only now be inferred from the editions of his work demanded l , coupled with the all-important fact that he called forth two tremendous refutations, the monumental works of Thirlwall and of Grote. 5. It is very curious that these two famous he excites histories should have been undertaken (like Gillies' refutations. and Mitford's) nearly at the same time, and both of them by way of correction for the strong anti- republican views of Mitford. It is also remarkable that each author explicitly declared himself so satisfied with the work of the other that he would not have entered upon the task, had he known of his rival's undertaking. This, however, seems hard to fit in with the dates, seeing that Thirlwall's book began to appear many years earlier than that of 1 The new (second) edition of 1829 has an interesting defence of his history by Lord Redesdale, his younger brother. There is also a cabinet edition in 8 vols., published in 1835, and continued from the death of Agesilaus, where Mitford had stopped, to that of Alex- ander, by R. A. Davenport. 10 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [5. Grote 1 . In any case the former represents a different kind of work, or I should rather say an earlier stage of work, and therefore comes logically as well as chronologically first. Thirlwall : The Bishop of St. David's was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, a scholar trained in all the precision and refinement of the public schools, a man accustomed to teach the classics and to enforce accuracy of form and correctness of critical judg- ment. He had also what was then rather a novelty, and what separates him from his distinguished Oxford contemporaries Gaisford and Clinton a competent knowledge of German, as well as of other languages, and a consequent acquaintance with the recent studies of the Germans, who were then beginning to write about classics in German instead of using the Latin language. John Stuart Mill, who, when a young man, be- longed to a debating society along with Thirlwall, thought him the very best speaker he had ever his merits; heard. The qualities which attracted Mill were not passion or imaginative rhetoric, but clear, cold, reasoning powers, together with a full command of the language best suited to express accurately the speaker's argument. These are the qualities which made all Thirlwall's work enduring and universally respected. His epis- 1 The dates are, Thirlwall's history, 1835, Crete's first two volumes, 1846. But Grote says he had his materials collected for some years. Upon the publication of these volumes, Thirlwall at once confessed his inferiority, and wrote no more upon trie subject. 5.] COLDNESS OF THIRLWALL. II copal charges were certainly the best delivered in his day, and his history, without ever exciting any enthusiasm, has so steadily maintained its high position, that of recent years it is perhaps rather rising than falling in popular esteem 1 . But the absence of passion, since it checks enthu- his cold- siasm in the reader, is a fatal want in any historian. ne The case before us is a remarkable instance. Both the learning and fairness of Thirlwall are conspicuous, his fairness It is difficult for any competent reader to avoid ^a^ 00 wondering at his caution in receiving doubtful evi- dence, and his acuteness in modestly suggesting solutions which have since been proved by further evidence. Of course the great body of our materials, the Greek classics, lay before him ; the pioneers of modern German philology such as Wolf, Hermann, K. O. Muller, Welcker, were accessible to him. In ordering and criticising these materials he left nothing to be desired, and the student of to-day butwithout , H . ... ..i -ri i m i - . enthusiasm. who is really intimate with Thirl walls history may boast that he has a sound and accurate view of all the main questions in the political and social de- velopment of the Hellenic nation. But he will never have been carried away with enthusiasm ; he will never remember with delight great passages of burning force or picturesque beauty such as those which adorn the histories of Gibbon or of Arnold. 1 The most obvious proof of this is the price of the book in auction catalogues. The second (octavo) edition is both rare and expensive. The first is the cabinet edition in Lardner's series, the editor of which suggested the work. 12 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [5. He has before him the type of a historian like Hallam, whose work would be the most instructive possible on its period, were it not the dullest of writing. It would be unfair to Thirlwall to say he is dull, but he is too cold and passionless for modern readers. To use the words of Bacon : Lumen siccum et aridum ingenia madida offendit et torret. The mention of these qualities in Thirlwall sug- gests to me that I ought not to omit some mention of the great work of a very similar student this, Clinton's too, stimulated by Mitford I mean the Fasti Hel- lenici) * a civil and literary chronology of the Greeks from the earliest times to the death of Augustus 1 .' It is not, properly speaking, a history, but the ma- terials for the fullest possible history of Greece, with all its offshoots, such as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Hither Asia, arranged and tabulated with a patience and care to which I know no parallel. Any one who examines this work will wonder that it could have been accomplished within the fifteen years during which the several volumes appeared. It is astonishing how difficult the student finds it to detect a passage in the obscurest author that Clinton His merits, has not seen ; and his ordinary habit is not to indi- cate, but to quote all the passages verbatim. The book is quite unsuited for a schoolboy, but to any serious enquirer into the history of Greece it is positively indispensable. The influence of Gaisford, then probably the greatest of Greek scholars, ob- 1 Published by the Clarendon Press. <. linton alludes to Mitford's effect upon him in his Journal. 6.] THIRLWALL AND GROTE CONTRASTED. 13 tained for the book the adequate setting of the Clarendon Press. Clinton worked with a calmness and deliberation quite exceptional ; and though he knew no German, had so completely mastered his subject that the Germans have since indeed trans- lated, re-edited, and abridged him : they have never been able to supersede him. Even when he is wrong or obsolete, he can be corrected by the full materials he has laid before the reader. But the perfect cold- ness of his reasoning, the absence of all passion, the abnegation of all style, make the book unapproach- able except to a specialist. $ 6. For the same reason Thirl wall's great and Contrast of 1-111 c i- G rote's life. solid book was ousted at once from public favour by the appearance of Grote's history. Two minds more unlike can hardly be imagined, admitting that they were both honest and hard workers, and that both knew German as well as Greek, Latin, and French. Instead of a cold, calm college don, loving cautious statement and accurate rendering as the highest of virtues ; instead of a mild and orthodox Liberal both in religion and politics, we have a business man, foreign to university life and its tra- His theory ditions, a sceptic in religion, a Positivist in philo- is ^ lc sophy, and above all an advanced Radical in politics, invading the subject hitherto thought the preserve and apanage of the pedagogue or the pedant. Of course he occasionally missed the exact force of an optative, or the logic of a particle ; he excited the fury of men like Shilleto, to whom accuracy in Greek prose was the one perfection, 14 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [6. containing all the Law and the Prophets. What was far worse, he even mistook and misstated evi- dence which bore against his theories, and was quite capable of being unfair, not from dishonesty, but from prejudice. The in- He lived in the days when the world was recov- hiTtime^ erm g ^ rom i ts horror at the French Revolution, and the reaction against the monarchical restorations in central Europe was setting in. He was per- suaded that the great social and political results of Greek history were because of, and not in spite of, the prevalence of democracy among its States, and because of the number and variety of these States. He would not accept the verdict of all the old Greek theorists who voted for the rule of the one or the enlightened few ; and he wrote what may be called a great political pamphlet in twelve volumes in vindication of democratic princi- ples. It was this idea which not only marshalled his facts, but lent its fire to his argument ; and when combined with his Radicalism in religion and philo- sophy, produced a book so remarkable, that, how- ever much it may be corrected and criticised, it will To be com- never be superseded. It is probably the greatest G^on Wlth history among the many great histories produced in this century ; and though very inferior in style to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, will rank next to it as a monument of English historical genius. There are chapters of speculation, such as those on the Greek myths and their historical value, on the Homeric question, on Socrates and the Sophists, 6.] THE VIRTUES OF DEMOCRACY. 1 5 which mark an epoch in the history of their respec- tive subjects, and have been ever since gradually moulding even the most obstinate opponents, who at first rejected his theories with scorn 1 . There are chapters of narrative, such as that on the battle of Platsea, or the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, where he so saturates himself with the tragic gran- His elo- deur of the events, and with the consummate art of quei his great Greek predecessors, that his somewhat clumsy and unpolished style takes their colour and rises to the full dignity of his great subject. But the greatest novelty among the many which adorn his immortal work is his admirable apologia for His pane- democracy, for that form of government where Democracy, legislation is the result of discussion ; where the minority feels bound to acquiesce in the decision of the majority ; and where the administrators of the law are the servants, not the masters, of the nation, appointed with defined powers to terminable magistracies, and liable to indictment for exceeding or abusing these powers. He occupied the whole body of the book in illustrating how the voluntary submission of the free citizen to control of this kind, the alternation in the same men of commanding 1 Thus the recent book on the Homeric theory, by Professor Jebb, a scholar who in an .earlier primer had inclined to the views of Theodor Bergk, now advocates mainly Grote's theory. Thus Zeller's latest edition of the History of Greek Philosophy, a masterly work, treats the Sophists with constant reference to Grote's views. Both the recent German histories of Greece, Holm's and Busolt's, acknowledge fully the great merits of Grote, whose attitude towards the Greek myths is indeed maintained by Holm. l6 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [7. and obeying, and the loyalty and patriotism thus engendered, were far higher social factors than the enforced or unreasoning submission of the masses to the dictates of a monarch or a close aristocracy. Objections: 7. To the first great objection, that of the that demo- * ' cracies are Greek theorists, that the greatness of democracies short-lived; j s j^ transient, and must rapidly degenerate into the fickle and violent rule of a mob, he might have answered, that these theorists themselves never contemplated human institutions as permanent, and even assumed that the ideal State of their dreams must be subject to exhaustion and decay. Still more might he have urged that not a long life, but a great life, was the real test of the excellence of the body politic, and that centuries of Spartan respec- tability had done nothing for the world in com- parison with the brief bloom of Attic genius, that the Another and more serious objection to the posi- democrat ^ on tna ^ Athens was a typical democracy, and that was a slave- its high culture was the direct result of its political holder and ... . a ruler over institutions, he seems to me to have practically subjects, ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. But the Athenian citizen, however poor, was a slaveholder, and the member of an imperial class, ruling with more or less absolutism over communities of subjects, treating as manifest inferiors even the many resident aliens, who pro- moted the mercantile wealth of his city. Hence, after all, he was one of a minority, controlling a 7.] ARISTOCRATIC DEMOCRACIES. 17 vast majority of subjects and slaves with more or less despotic sway. Lord Redesdale l tells us that this was the point which his brother Mitford thought of capital importance, and which prompted him to write his history. He met, all through revolutionary France, and among the democrats in England, perpetual assertions that Greek demo- cracy was the ideal at which modern Europe should aim, and he felt that these enthusiasts had con- sidered neither the size of modern States, nor the essential difference just stated between the Athenian and the modern democrat. And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense, the mem- ber of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, The Athe- i i i i i r j_i .,1 niannotthe as a people, ever held before them was not the ideal of the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristo- Greeks - crat of Sparta. This latter was admired and copied, so far as he could be copied, in like manner as the English aristocrat has been admired by all the nations of the world, not because he lives under free institutions, but because he shows in him the traditions and the breeding of a dominant race long accustomed to the dignity and the splendour of ancient wealth and importance. 1 In his Editorial Preface to the 2nd ed. of Mitford's Greece. C 1 8 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [8. As Grote could see no superiority whatever in aristocracy over democracy, so he ignored com- pletely this, the aristocratic side of all the Hellenic democracies. Grote's 8. But, when he comes to treat of the despots, of the des- or tyrants, who overthrew governments and made pots. themselves irresponsible rulers, he falls in with all the stock accusations of the aristocratic Greek writers, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, and represents these despots as an unmixed evil to their country 1 . He treats them in a special chapter as a sort of epidemic at a certain epoch of Greek history, whereas the facts show that through the whole series of centuries, from the dawn of history Their per- to the conquest by Rome, despots were a constantly currence 6 "in recurring phenomenon all over the Greek world. the Greek We find them mentioned by scores, and in every corner of Hellas and Asia Minor. Even Sparta ceased in time to form the almost solitary exception. This persistence of tyrants shows that either the people who tolerated them were politically fools, or that despotic government had really some good points, and recommended itself at least as an escape Advan- from greater evils 2 . The political value of this despotism, phase of Greek life I shall treat more fully in the sequel. 1 This curious contrast should be carefully noted in estimating Grote. The justified and reasonable objections of Greek historians to ultra-democracy he ignores ; their violent and personal objections to the despots he adopts without one word of qualification. 2 I am glad to see this point dwelt on with great justice and dis- crimination in Mr. E. Abbott's recent History of Greece, i. 368. 8.] THE TYRANTS IN LITERATURE. 19 We hear, of course, of many violent and vicious Good des- despots in Greek history ; and these are the cases frequent, always cited as proving the unsoundness of that form of government. But if a list could be procured of the numerous tyrants who governed wisely or moderately, and who improved the manners and the culture of their subjects, it would probably comprise an immense number of names. The good specimens passed by without notice ; the criminal cases were paraded in the schools and upon the stage 1 : and so a one-sided estimate has passed into history. This estimate was taken up with warmth, and paraded with great amplitude by the Radical historian. And yet the very history of Europe since he wrote has shown us strong reasons to doubt that every nation is best managed by a parliamentary system. But on this point Grote had no misgivings. The will of the majority was to him the inspired l ' Thus Strabo says, when speaking of Sicyon, that the tyrants who had long ruled the city before its liberation by Aratus were for the most part good men ; and this accounts for the high reputation of Sicyon for culture. It was Lycophron, in his tragedy entitled the Casandreans, who painted the typical portrait of a tyrant in the monster Apollodorus. (Cf. my Greek Life and Thought, p. 283.) Whether he was really as bad as he was painted, and whether his Galatian guards really drank human blood, &c., depends on the com- parative weight the critic assigns to general improbability, as against the veracity of a stage portrait. We have no other evidence, for the late historians borrow the traditional features without criticism. But let us suppose that in the next century the evidence concerning the character of Napoleon III depended upon Mr. Freeman's allu- sions in his Federal Government, and upon V. Hugo's monograph, would the inferences from these great writers be even near the real truth? 20 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [9. voice, and he trusted to better education and larger experience to correct the occasional errors from which not even the fullest debate will save an ex- cited populace. Grote a * Q^ These observations, though meant as stric- practical politician, tures upon the sanguine enthusiasm of Grote s Radical views, are not to be understood as detracting from the charm of his work. It is this very enthu- siasm which has led him to understand and to interpret political movements or accommodations completely misunderstood by many learned con- tinental professors ; for he was a practical politician, accustomed to parliamentary life, above all to the conservative effects of tradition and practice, even in the face of the most innovating theories. He has, therefore, put the case of an educated democracy with more power and more persuasive- ness than any other writer ; and for this reason alone his book must occupy a prominent place even in the library of the mere practical politician. His treat- io. Far more serious are the objections to his Alexander last volume, on the life and conquests of Alexander the Great. ^ Great. So unequal, indeed, is this episode, which to him was a mere appendix to the story of independent Greece, that a fabulous anecdote pre- vails of his publisher having persuaded him against his will to pursue his narrative beyond the battle of Contrast of Chseronea 1 . Here it is that the calmness and can- dour of Thirlwall stand out in marked contrast. The 1 The original preface to his first volume marks out the limits which he duly attained. io.] THE LAST VOLUME OF GROTE. 21 history of the great conqueror and of the recovered independence (such as it was) of Greece, are treated by the scholar-bishop with the same care and fair- ness which mark all the rest of his work. But Grote is distinctly unfair to Alexander ; his love of democracy led him to hate the man who made it impossible and absurd for Greece, and he; shows this bias in every page of his twelfth volume. As regards the subsequent history, which em- Grote ig- braces the all-important development of federal j^r feder- government throughout Greece, he does not con- ations > descend to treat it at all. His great work is therefore incomplete in plan, and stops before the proper conclusion of his subject. Of course he would have found it hard to panegyrize his favourite democracies when he came to the Hellenistic age. There the inherent weaknesses of a popular govern- ment in days of poverty and decay, in the face of rich and powerful monarchy showed themselves but too manifestly. But he will not confess this weak point ; he even and de- covers his retreat by the bold assertion in his pre- ^tory. C face that Greek history from the generation of Alexander has no interest in itself, or any influence on the world's history a wonderful judgment ! However great therefore and complete the work of Grote is on the earlier periods, this may be added as a warning, the reader of Greek history should stop with the death of Philip of Macedon, and read the remainder in other books. It is indeed necessary for schoolmasters to limit the bounds of Greek 22 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [n. literature in school studies, and so with common consent they have admitted nothing later than the golden age. But the vast interest and para- mount importance of Greek ideas in the culture of the Roman world have tempted me to sketch the subject in my Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman C cnque st and Greek Life under Roman Sway. Any reader of these volumes will at least concede the vastness, the importance, and the deep interest of the period which Grote despised. But so intricate are the details, and so little arranged, that to write upon it is rather pioneer's work than anything else. Mistreat- & TJ . Let us now, before passing to his suc- ment of the * early cessors, turn back to the very beginning of the legends. subject, and say a word on his treatment of the elaborate mythical system which the Greeks pre- fixed to their historical annals. Here the Positivism of the man was sure to bear fruit and produce some remarkable results. He gives, accordingly, with all deliberation and fulness of detail, a complete recital of the stories about the gods and heroes, telling all their acts and adventures, and then proceeds to argue that they are to be regarded as quite distinct from, and unconnected with, any historical facts. Even when He argues that as there is in the legends a large they S may' quantity of assertions plainly false and incredible, be fictions. b u t; intertwined indissolubly with plausible and credible statements, we have no right to pick out the latter and regard them as derived from actual facts. There is such a thing as plausible fiction ; ii.] INFLUENCE OF NIEBUHR. 23 and we have no guarantee that the authors of in- credible stories about gods and their miracles did not invent this plausible kind as well. Rejecting, therefore, all historical inferences from the Greek legends, he merely regards them as conclusive evi- dence of the state of mind of their inventors, a picture of the Greek mind in what Comte called the ' theological stage.' It is remarkable how fully Thirlwall states this Thirlwall's view of the Greek myths, and how clearly his cautious mind appreciates the indisputable weak- ness of all such legends in affording proper and trustworthy evidence. But when we come to per- sistent bodies of legend which assert that Oriental immigrants Cadmus, Danaus, Pelops,&c. brought civilization to yet barbarous Greece, Thirlwall, with all his doubts, with all his dislike to vague and shift- ing stories, cannot make up his mind to regard these agreeing myths as mere idle inventions. Moreover, he urged the point, which Grote omitted to con- sider, that early art might so corroborate a story as to make its origin in fact morally certain. No doubt both historians were considerably under Influence of the influence of Niebuhr, whose rejection of the old Roman legends, which were often plausible fiction, torians. produced a very great sensation in the literary world 1 . Nor did they live to see the great dis- 1 The first edition of Niebuhr's history appeared in 1811. The second, a wholly different and enlarged work, was published in 1827, and translated into English by Thirlwall and Hare in 1828. Grote quotes Niebuhr constantly, and takes from his Lectures on Ancient History more than from any other modern source. 24 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [12. coveries in early art and prehistoric culture which have since been made by the archaeologists. It seems to me, therefore, that as regards the incuna- bula of Greek history these great men came at the moment when little more than a negative attitude was possible. The mental history of the nation in its passage from easy faith to utter scepticism was expounded by Grote in a masterly way ; but for the construction of the myths he would not admit any other than subjective causes. Here, then, was the point on which some further advance might fairly be expected. is. There was another matter also, connected with the life and habits of the time, which made the appreciation of the facts less keen and pictu- Neither of resque than it might have been. Neither Thirlwall e^Greece*' nor Grote, though each of them possessed ample means and leisure, seems ever to have thought of visiting the country and seeking to comprehend the geographical aspects of their histories from personal experience. They both Thirlwall especially cite the earlier travellers who had explored and pic- tured the Hellenic peninsula; but in those days the traveller was regarded as a different kind of man from the historian, who wrote from books in his closet. which later It is in the last two features the interpre- generally" tat i n f tne legends, and the personal acquaint- regardas ance with the country that the more recent at- cssential. . , , . . ++";.*+... tempts excel the older masterpieces. Krnst Lurtius spent several years in Greece, and published a 1 3.] VIVIDNESS OF ERNST CURTIUS. 25 complete and scholarly account of the Pelopon- nesus before he produced his history. Duruy Ernst Cur- often gives life and colour to his narrative by vktor references to his personal experiences in Greece. Duruy. To visit and study the scenes of great events is now so easy and so habitual to scholars, that we may count it one of the necessary conditions for any future history which is to take a high place in the ever- increasing series of Hellenic studies 1 . In his opening chapters Ernst Curtius breathes such freshness and reality into the once dry preamble of Tne value geographical description that we feel we have n verifying attained a fresh epoch, and are led to expect great old authors. things from an experience gained upon the spot, which can verify the classical descriptions by the local features which remain. It is of course idle to think that this kind of familiarity will compensate for'imperfect study. The modern Greek antiquarians, living upon the spot, have not yet shown themselves equal to many who have never seen what they discuss. Nevertheless, this is certain, that new force, and directness, are attained by a personal acquaintance with the coasts, the mountains, the rivers of Greece, and that many a wrong inference from ancient texts may be avoided by knowing that the scene of the events precludes it. 13. Here is an example. It is commonly in- Example in ferred from a passage in Plato's Symposium^ which speaks of thirty thousand citizens being addressed 1 Thus Duncker's chapter on the Olympic games shows at once that he never was at Olympia, and does not understand the site. 26 EARLIER HISTORIANS OF GREECE. [13. by Agathon in his plays, that the theatre held that number of spectators. This is copied into book after book, though I have long ago called attention to the impossibility of maintaining such an interpreta- tion 1 . I need not urge the absurdity of speaking Itsrealsize. from an open-air stage to thirty thousand people. The actual theatre is now recovered, and any one who has seen it and possesses reasonable common- sense will perceive that about fifteen thousand peo- ple was the utmost it could ever have contained 2 . To expect a larger crowd to hear any performance of human voices would be ridiculous. What the passage, therefore, means is that the whole popula- tion of freemen in Athens were in the habit of en- joying the drama, not, of course, all at the same moment. Other fancies, which have given rise to elo- quent musings concerning the picturesque view of the No land- sea and islands enjoyed by the Athenian as a natural kTback- background to his tragedy, can be disposed of in ground. the same way by simply sitting even on the top row and making the experiment 3 , not to speak of 1 Rambles and Studies in Greece, p. 107. See also the excellent note in Duruy's History, ii. chap. vii. sect, i, on the frequent exag- gerations of the number of Athenian citizens, which never reached this high figure. 2 Dr. Dorpfeld, with his new map before him, estimated the area for me the last time I was at Athens, lie found that counting in every available space, such as gangways, &c., 16,000 was the limit. It seems, therefore, highly probable that an average audience would not exceed 10,000. I cannot remember in Attic literature any allu- sion to crowding or want of room in this theatre. 3 Op. cit., pp. 108-9. Duruy, at the opening of his twentieth chap- ter, has given excellent pictures and plans of the theatre in question. 13.] VALUE OF MODERN ILLUSTRATIONS. 27 the false notion of attributing to the Athenian citizen a conscious love of picturesque scenery, or an attempt to combine two heterogeneous and incongruous aesthetic interests. If the writer of Greek history is bound to have visited Greece, this cannot be expected of the reader. But for him too our generation has brought its benefits. In the fine illustrations now published of all the objects of interest in Greek museums, and of the finest scenery throughout the country, the general public can find some equivalent ; and from this point of view the history of Duruy marks a fresh epoch, even as compared with that of Cur- tius. For I am not aware that there has hitherto been any accessible collection of all the interesting Greek things in Nature and Art which the student Greek history ought to have seen, at least in repro- cessible to duction. There are, of course, splendid monographs a on special buildings, such as the works of the Dilet- tanti Society, or on special discoveries, such as the original and richly adorned volumes of Dr. Schlie- mann on Mycenae and Tiryns. But these are beyond the reach of moderate fortunes. The gal- lery of photographs begun by Mr. Stillman, and now in process of publication by the Hellenic Society, are both more varied and less expensive, and will make the treasures of Greece perfectly familiar to any student who chooses to acquire them. CHAPTER II. RECENT TREATMENT OF THE GREEK MYTHS. The newer 14. We may now pass to the more modern histories. treatment o f t he myths and mythical history of Greece. There are before us the essays of several men since the monumental work of Grote. First there is that of Ernst Curtius ; then Duncker's (both translated into English) ; still more recently the shorter histories of Holm, Busolt, Hertzberg, and other Germans, not to speak of Sir George Cox's history and the first volume of that of Mr. Not justifi- Evelyn Abbott. In fact they are so many and out par- so various that the production of a new work on ticular Greek history requires some special justification. reasons. For the time has really come when we may begin to complain of new histories that are not new, but merely reproduce the old facts and the old argu- ments, without regard to what specialists have been Max doing to clear up particular questions. Duncker's Duncker. ] ar g e WO rk, of which the earlier period of Greek history forms the closing part, is indeed an im- portant book, and cannot be dismissed so easily. But if I may venture to speak out, I do not think it was worth translating into English. Scholars I4-] DUNCKER, BUSOLT, HOLM. 29 earnest and patient enough to read through it can Not suited hardly fail to have learned German, and therefore readel. 13 require no English version. I cannot believe that the English-speaking public will ever read it, nor do I think this should be expected. For in the first place the book is sadly deficient in style, not merely in the graces of style, which are seldom attained by professional scholars, but in that higher quality of style produced either by burning passion or delicate aesthetic taste. Duncker is not, like most of the English historians, a politician. To him despot and democracy are mere things to be analyzed. Nor does he strive to advocate novel and picturesque views, like Ernst Curtius. His mind is so conserva- tive that he rather takes a step backward, and reverts, especially in his chronology, to statements which of late seemed likely to be discarded as obsolete. He is always sensible and instructive ; he has an excellent habit of making his authorities speak for themselves : but he wants verve as well as originality in treating old, unsettled problems, though he has made some remarkable re-construc- tions of history from conflicting myths. The two best recent histories to which I have Busolt and referred, Busolt's in 1885, Holm's in 1886 (I speak Holm< of the first volumes), are by no means so conservative as Duncker ; Holm is as advanced in his scepticism as Grote ; but, as I shall show in the sequel, their scepticism is still spasmodic, or shall I say varied with touches of credulity, which are probably the necessary relief of all scepticism. Nothing strikes 3 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. ['5. Return to Grote. Holm's postulate. the reader of these new Greek histories more forci- bly than their abandonment of the combinations of the school of E. Curtius, and their return to the atti- tude of Grote, whose decision concerning the utter untrustworthiness of legends for historical purposes they all quote with approval. The ground taken by Grote was the possibility of ' plausible fiction ' which could not possibly be distinguished, as miraculous stories can, from sober history. Holm adds to this some excellent arguments showing the strong temptations to deliberate invention which must have actuated the old chronographers and genealogists 1 . Nevertheless, Holm devotes 200 izmo pages, Busolt 100 8vo, of their 'short histories' to the analysis and discussion of the legends and dis- coveries concerning pre-historic Greece, in the course of which they cannot avoid many inferences from very doubtful evidence. Holm very justly demands that historians should let the reader know in the stating of it, what has been handed down to us, and what is modern hypothesis, and claims to have observed this distinction himself. But there are traditions which are manifestly late and untrust- worthy, such as that which fixes the dates of Arktinos and Eumelos, and tells us of written registers in the eighth century B.C., which he accepts without a due caution to his readers. 15. I think, moreover, that even the most tren- 1 Cf. his early chapters, especially i. pp. 43 sq. Busolt's 2nd edition, now in the press, contains an exhaustive analysis of all the recent discoveries. I5-] PURE INVENTION UNFREQUENT. 31 chant of sceptics does not consistently deny that The there must be some truth in legendary history, though we may not be able to disentangle it from miracles and misunderstandings. And when once we have abandoned Grote's position, and hold it more probable that old legends are based on facts than purely invented, nothing will prevent the sanguine student from striving to pick out for himself the facts and making a probable, if not a certain, sketch of the otherwise unrecorded incuna- bula of a nation's history. This view and these attempts are based upon an Pure inven- ascertained truth in the psychology of all human Recurrence; societies. Just as people will accommodate a small number of distinct words to their perpetually increasing wants, and will rather torture an old root in fifty ways than simply invent a new combi- nation of sounds for a new idea ; so in popular legends the human race will always attach itself to what it knows, to what has gone before, rather than set to work and invent a new series of facts. Pure invention is so very rare and artificial that we may almost lay it aside as a likely source for old legends * ; 1 The main causes of invented legends are : first, the glorification of national heroes ; secondly, the desire of chronographers to obtain synchronisms, and make the heroes of one place contemporaneous with, and related to, those of another. In the former case it is gene- rally an older or better known story which is transferred to the new case, with more or less modification ; in the latter there may be de- liberate fraud, as Holm has argued. Of all old Greek legend the chronology is the most suspicious part, because this has been invented in comparatively late times, and by learned men, not by, but for, the people. RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [li. plausible fiction therefore not an ade- quate cause. Cases of deliberate invention, and we may assume either a loose record of real facts, or the adoption and adaptation of the legends of a previous age, as our real, though treacherous, materials for guessing pre-historic truth. This is the reason why we later students have not adhered with- out hesitation to the sceptical theory that plausible fiction may account for all the Greek myths, and we look for some stronger reason to reject them alto- gether. 1 6. There are cases, for example, where we can see distinct reasons why people in a historic age should have invented links to attach themselves to some splendid ancestry. Just as the heralds of our own day are often convicted of forging the gene- rations which connect some wealthy upstart with an ancient house, so it is in Greek history. No larger and more signal instances of this can be found than the barefaced genealogies made by the learned in the days of Alexander's successors 1 , when any of the new foundations, Antioch, Seleucia, &c. 3 1 A fine specimen is the pedigree of the Ptolemies direct from Dionysus and Heracles, given by the historian Satyrus. Cf. C. Miiller, Fragg. Histor. Graec., iii. 165. The substance of it is as follows : From Dionysus and Althea was born Dejanira, from her and Heracles, Hyllus, and from him in direct descent Kleodaos, Aris- tomachas, Temenos, Keisos, Mason, Thestios, Akoos, Aristodamidas, Karanos, Koenos, Turimmas, Perdikkas, Philippos, Aerope, Alketas, Amyntas, Balakros, Meleager, Arsinoe. From her Lagus, Ptolemy Soter, &c., down to Philopator, the then reigning king. Hence, he adds, were derived the names of the demes in the Dionysiac phyle at Alexandria, viz. Dejaniris, Ariadnis, &c. Here is a most instructive fabrication. 1 7.] DELIBERATE FABRICATIONS. 33 wanted to prove themselves ancient Hellenic cities, re-settled upon a mythical foundation. Not differ- ent in spirit were the Pergamene fabrications, which at Per- not only invented a mythical history for Perga- gaiE mum, but adopted and enlarged the Sicilian fables which connected a Pergamene hero, ^Eneas, with the foundation of Rome 1 . What capital both the Ilians and the people of Pergamum made out of these bold mendacities, is well known. I shall return in due course to another remarkable instance, which I have set before the world already, where a great record of Olympic games was made up at a late date by a learned man in honour of Elis and Messene. Later Greek history does show us some of these deliberate inventors, Lobo the Argive, Euhemerus the Messenian, and a few more ; a list which the Greeks themselves augmented by adding which the travellers who told wonderful tales of distant lands which conflicted with Hellenic climate and cion of mar- experience. But here too the Greeks were over- stories. sceptical, and rejected, as we know, many real truths only because they found them marvellous. In the same way, modern inquirers who come to estimate the doubtful and varying evidence for older history must be expected to differ according to the peculiar temper of their minds. 17. But perhaps the reader will desire to hear Example of of a case where a legend has conveyed acknow- ledged truth, rather than the multifarious cases gend from , 1 j : M. T -11 Roman his- where it may lead us into error. I will give an t0 ry. 1 Cf. Mommsen, R. G. i. 466-8. D 34 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [17- instance from Roman history, all the more remark- able from the connection in which it is found. That history, as we all know, used to commence with a pretty full account of the seven kings, who Niebuhr, ruled for very definitely stated periods. The diffi- Mommsen. culties * n accepting this legend were first shown by Niebuhr; and then came Arnold, who told again the legend as a mere nursery tale, refusing to call it history. Mommsen, in his very brilliant work, goes further, and omits the whole story contemp- tuously, without one word of apology. The modern reader who refers to his book to know who the kings of Rome were, would find one casual and partial list, no official chapter. I am not sure that Mommsen names most of them more than once in any passing mention. But does it follow that Mommsen denies there ever were kings at Rome ? Far from it. For there were laws and ordinances, lasting into historical times, which would be wholly inexplicable had they not come down from a monarchy. Thus there re- mained a priest of great dignity, though of little The rex importance, whose very title rex sacrorum an^me* s ^ows that his office was created to perform those priestly functions once performed by the abolished kings, and not otherwise provided for in the reformed constitution. The fact therefore asserted by the famous legend, that there were once kings in Rome, is established to the satisfaction of any reasonable man by the evidence of surviving usages. 1 8.] LEGENDS BASED ON FACT. 35 In the same way we have at Athens legends of The king- kings, but all of such antiquity as to make us hesi- Athens. tate in believing them, had there not survived into historical days the king-archon, whose name and functions point clearly to their being a survival of those kingly functions which were thought indis- pensable on religious or moral grounds, even after the actual monarchs had passed away 1 . The legends, therefore, which tell of a gradual change from a monarchy to an aristocracy, and a gradual widening of the Government to embrace more members by making its offices terminable, are no mere plausible fictions, but an obscure, and perhaps inadequate, yet still real account of what did happen in Attica in the days before written records existed. 1 8. Larger and more important is the great Legends of body of stories which agree in bringing Phoenician, Egyptian, and Asianic princes to settle in early Greece, where they found a primitive people, to whom they taught the arts and culture of the East. To deny the general truth of these accounts now would be to contradict facts scientifically ascertained ; it is perfectly certain that the Greek alphabet is Corrobora- derived from the Phoenician, and it is equally cer- tain that many of the artistic objects found at art > but not Orchomenos, in Attica, and at Mycenae, reveal a guage. 1 We have not a few instances in Greek polities Megara, Borys- thenes, Calymnos occur to me where there still existed in late days magisterial (3affi\is and even novapx 01 - Cf. Bull, de Corr. hell. viii. 30; ix. 286. D 2 36" RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [18. foreign and Oriental origin. At the same time Duruy, in the luminous discussion he has devoted to the subject 1 , shows that, however certain the early contact with the East, there is hardly any trace in Greece of the language of any non-Hellenic con- querors, as there is, for example (he might have added), in the names of the letters, which mostly bear in Greece their Semitic names. He thinks, therefore, that although early Asianic Greeks were the real intermediaries of this culture, they merely stimulated the latent spark in the natives, which shows itself in certain original non- Asiatic features which mark pre-historic Greek remains. But those who in their enthusiasm for Greece go even further in rejecting any foreign parentage for the higher Greek art 2 , will now no longer deny that the occurrence of amber, ostrich-eggs, and ivory, which surely were not all imported in a rude or unmanipulated condition, prove at least the lively traffic in luxuries which must have existed, and which cannot exist without many other far-reaching connections. 1 Hist, of Greece, chap. ii. sect. 3. 2 Holm (G. G. i. 125) admits this motive for the Germans : 'Im Grande leugnet man phonizische Siedelungen in Griechenland be- sonders deswegen, weil man nicht will, dass die Griechen jenen Leuten Wichtiges verdanken ' that is to Semites. He himself asserts early contacts, and thinks their influence upon Greece but trifling. The general body of opinion in Germany seems to agree with what I have cited from Duruy in the text. The words just quoted may serve to put the English reader upon his guard against the subjec- tive tone of many of the most learned modern studies on Greek history. I9-] THE COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGERS. 37 There are even lesser matters, where legends Corrobora- might seem only to set before us the difficulty of legends harmonizing conflicting statements ; and yet archae- m archl " * tecture. ology finds that there is something real implied. Thus the legend which asserts that the older Perseids were supplanted by the Pelopids in the dominion of Mycenae is in striking agreement with the fact that there are two styles of wall-building in the extant remains, and that the ruder work has actually been re-faced with the square hewn blocks of the later builders 1 . 19. But we have here been dealing with politi- cal legends, which are less likely than genealogical or adventurous legends to excite the imagination, and so to be distorted from facts. Let us turn to consider some of these latter. When we approach such a story as the rape of Explana- Helen by Paris, the consequent expedition of the ^ h b Greeks, and the siege of Troy, we are confronted. the solar i ' r -. r i theory. or at least we were confronted a few years ago, with a theory which professed to explain all such stories as mere modifications or misunderstandings of the great phenomena of Nature expressed in pictorial language. The break of day, the conquest of the Sun over the morning mists, his apparent defeat at night, and the victory of the Powers of Darkness, all this was supposed to have affected so power- fully the imaginations of primitive men that they repeated their original hopes and fears in all man- ner of metaphors, which lay and by became mis- 1 On this cf. Adler's remarkable preface to Schliemann's Tiryns. 38 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [19. interpreted, and applied to the relations, friendly or hostile, of the various superhuman powers known The as gods or heroes. Helen, if you please, was the indiaiPand Dawn, carried off by Paris, the Powers of Night, Persian anc [ imprisoned in Troy. Achilles was only the mythology, Sun-god, who struggles against the Night, and after a period of brilliancy succumbs to his enemies. It appeared that in the Vedas and the Zend- Avesta^ which may be regarded as older cousins of the Greek mythologies, the names of the gods pointed clearly to their original connection with solar phenomena, and some of the Greek names were shown to be merely the Greek forms of the same words. expounded It is not necessary for me here to expound more f2sorMax full >" this celebrate ^ theory, seeing that it has Miiller, acquired great popularity in England from the brilliant statement of it by Professor Max Miiller in his early Lectures on the Science of Language. It was a learned theory, requiring a knowledge of the various languages as well as the various mytholo- gies of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and even other branches of the great Indo-European founded on family. It required, too, a knowledge of that won- derful new science, the science of comparative ety- mology, by which two names as diverse as possible could be shown to be really akin. The ordinary reader was surprised at the scientific legerdemain by which Helen was identified with Sarama> and was disposed to accept a great deal from men who claimed to have made such astonishing discoveries. 20.] THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS. 39 20. It is now very long since I first declared myself against this theory 1 , not as false, but as wholly inadequate to explain the great wealth and variety of the Greek legends. On that occasion I long since argued the case at length, and showed more espe- adequate, daily that the mental condition presupposed in the primitive Indo-Europeans by this theory was not provable, and was, moreover, contradicted by every- because it thing which we know of the psychological condi- sentimental tion of any such people. The theory implies such savages, a daily joy and a nightly terror, when the sun rose and set, as coloured the whole language of the primitive race, and gave them one topic which wholly occupied their imaginations. Seeing that men must have existed for a long time before they invented legends, perhaps even before they used which is language, such fresh and ever-recurring astonish- to^ur^ ment would be indeed a marvellous persistence of experience, childish simplicity 2 . Moreover, what we do know of savage men shows us that surprise and wonder imply a good deal of intellectual development, and that the primitive savage does not wonder at, but 1 Cf. my Prolegomena to Ancient History, Longmans, 1872. A reductio ad absurdum which attained serious attention, in spite of its patent jocoseness, appeared in an early number of the Dublin University Kottabos. 2 Accordingly, some use was made of the exceptional and alarm- ing phenomena, such as thunder-storms and eclipses, to supply a more reasonable and adequate cause for the violent transitions from terror and grief to joy, which the theory demanded. But it was the regular daily phenomena which figured in the leading rdle of the comparative mythologers. 40 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [21. ignores, those phenomena which interest higher men. It is a much more reasonable view to discard the changes of the day, and adopt those of the year, as having suggested early myths of the death of beau- tiful youths, and the lamentation of those that loved them. I do not know a more masterly treatment of this cause for early myths, such as the death of Adonis, of Linus, of Maneros (in Egypt), than the K. O. Mill- opening of K. O. Miiller's History of Greek Litera- tr[bution~ t ure - It is a book now fifty years old, and our knowledge has so much advanced that Miiller's views are in many points antiquated, as I have shown in re-writing the history of the same great subject 1 . But nothing could antiquate the genius of K. O. Miiller, or the grace with which he shows that the plaintive lays of shepherd and of vine-dresser express the poignant regrets ex- cited by the burning up of green and bloom in the fierce heats of a semi-tropical summer. We now know that Nature provides this rest for her vegetation in meridional climates ; but the sleep of plants in the drought of torrid sunshine seems to men far less natural than their rest in the long nights and under the white pall of a northern winter, and thus were suggested myths of violence and cruelty. 2i. These things, however, account for only a 1 A History of Greek Classical Literature (3rd ed.), Macmillan, 1891. The history of K. O. Miiller has since been re-edited and sup- plemented by Heitz, but in a very different style. 22.] THE TRANSFERENCE OF MYTHS. 43 small fraction of the great volume of Greek legend. The trans- It is indeed true that the same story will be re- m newed, the same ideas repeated, by succeeding generations. There is such a principle as the spontaneous transference of myths, similar to the Old anec- constant recurrence of the same old stories in our { ^ duty 2 modern society under new scenery and with new characters. If, for example, a man of odd ways and ridiculous habits haunts any society for a long time, and becomes what is called ' a character,' a number of anecdotes cluster about his name, which are told to illustrate his peculiarities. Any old person who hears these stones will be certain to recognize some of them as much older than the character in question, and as having been told about some other oddity long passed away ; and we may predict with confidence that by and by they will be fitted on again to some new person who is a suitable subject for them. But what would be thought of the logic which inferred that the story must be false from the beginning because it wanders down the lapse of time, making itself a new home in each epoch, or that the person to whom it is fitted must be unreal because he is the hero of a tale which does not originally belong to him ? Yet I could show that this has been the very attitude assumed by some of the comparative philologers. 22. I will take an instance which the reader Example will naturally expect to find discussed in this Essay Trojan G the legend of the siege of Troy. It may be quite legend, true that old names and old metaphors about the 42 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [22. sun or the summer lie hidden in the names of the heroes. It is to me certain that older stones were taken from their place and fitted on to the newer and more celebrated circumstances of this famous but not wan B u t all this I take to be not inconsistent therefore . . , false. with fact, but even to imply as a necessity that there must really have been such a war, which excited the minds of all the Greeks of a certain date, and so formed the obvious nucleus for all the poetical adventures which clung around it. The contri- The brilliant researches of Dr. Schliemann have Dr. Schlic- demonstrated that the locus of the legend was not mann. chosen at random, but that Troy, or Iliom, was in the first place the site of a prehistoric settlement ; in the next, that it was conquered and burned, and re-settled again and again. There existed, more- over, a venerable shrine in the obscure historic town, to which the Locrians, at an early date, sent donations of virgins to atone for the outrage of their mythical ancestor, the lesser Ajax of the Iliad. These facts show that here, as else- where, the legend formed itself about a historic site, and with some nucleus of historic fact, how much will probably for ever remain a subject of dispute 1 . 1 Duruy, in speaking of the controversy as to the site (is it His- sarlik, or Bunarbaschi ?) , says that even this will never be settled, in spite of the striking discoveries by which Dr. Schliemann has shown that Hissarlik was a prehistoric city, and the total absence of any evidence for a city upon the other site. And Duruy is probably right, because on these matters writers are too often pedants, who, if once committed to a theory, will not accept the most convinc- ing evidence that they have been mistaken. They seem to think 23.] THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 43 If history were an exact science, in which strict History not demonstration were required at every step, this \ conclusion might warrant our pursuing Grote's course and rejecting the whole legend as imaginary. But history is really a science of probabilities, in which this perhaps is the greatest charm, that it leaves large room to the imagination in framing hypotheses to supply a rational explanation of results which come before us full-grown, without their beginnings being recorded. I am not concerned here with the problem of the origin of the Homeric poems. Those who desire a summary of modern research in this great field, and care to know what conclusions I have adopted, may consult my Greek Liter atiire, in which the English reader for the first time found a full conspectus of this great controversy 1 , What now comes before us is to estimate the amount of historical truth which can be extracted from our so-called Homer. It is certain that there was a great struggle round the very site given in the poems. It was alleged the chief merit of a scholar is to maintain an outward show of im- peccability, and therefore hold the candid confession of a mistake to be not honourable, but disgraceful. Duruy himself inclines to follow E. Curtius, who holds the wrong opinion. Holm (i. 96) sees clearly that in the light of Schliemann's discoveries there can hardly remain a doubt that Hissarlik was the site which the Homeric poets had in view, though their details may be inaccurate. This conclusion would have been universally accepted, had not certain scholars pledged themselves to the other site. 1 It has since been treated in a separate form by Professor Jebb. The third edition of my Greek Literature, being still more recent (1891), gives additional material. 44 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [33. Historical value of the Homeric poems. Mycense preserved in legend only. General teaching of the epic poems. to be a struggle of many Greek chiefs, at a time when Mycenae was the richest capital, against the wealth and discipline of the princes about the Troad, of whom the chief of Ilion was the head. This, too, is remarkable, that in spite of the superior wealth and larger population of Asia Minor, the superiority of the Greek peninsula over this greater and richer land is plainly asserted. The whole course of known history has verified the broad fact taught by the legend. Greece has always been the poorer sister, and the superior, of Asia Minor. That Mycense was really the most powerful city in the Greece of some early period, is another fact which nobody would ever have suspected but for the teaching of the legend. Even Dr. Schliemann's new demonstration of its truth, by the display of wealth and of high art which he found in the royal tombs, would never have been attempted had he not been guided by the consistent assertions of the Iliad. For the massive remains of the fortifi- cations, and the tombs, proved no guides to the historical Greeks, who knew Argos only as the head of that province, and early forgot the splen- dour of Mycense so far as it was not kept alive in their epic Bible. 23. Quite apart from such particular facts, which teach us that the statements of Greek legend are never to be despised, there are large general conclusions which most of us think warranted by the Homeric poems. We may infer the political ideas prevalent when they were composed ; the 23.] HOMERIC SOCIETY. 45 relative importance of king, nobles, and commons ; the usages of peace and war ; the life of men in its social side ; the position of women and of slaves ; the religious notions of the day ; and such other questions as must be answered if we desire to obtain a living picture of the people. Every recent history of Greece has a chapter on the Homeric poems from this point of view none of them fuller or better than the chapters of Grote. What I had to say on this subject was set down Social Life in the opening chapters of my Social Life in m Greece, from which some stray critics have indeed expressed their dissent, without undertaking to probe and refute my arguments. Until that is done, the sketch there given of the aristocratic society described in the Iliad and the Odyssey claims to be just, and it is unnecessary to defend Alleged it here. Perhaps, however, recent inquiry may ofthe^ 1 ^ 7 have led some students to imagine that I have poems, attached too much credit to the Homeric pictures of life, seeing that they are now often asserted to be artificial, and constructed by the poets to represent an age and a society different from their own. We cannot verify what these poets describe by Examples anything which we know in historical Greece, with- * out making very large allowances. The games, for example, described in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, are totally distinct in character from the Olympic games, the oldest historical contests of the same kind known to us. The monarchy of Agamemnon and of Menelaus is totally different 46 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [24. from that of Sparta, which survived into the light of history ; and even the poets themselves con- stantly tell you that they speak of men not such as the men of their own day, but greater, stronger, and happier. On the other hand, when we seek for support from the very ancient remains found at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy in recent years, we find notcorro- no clear corroboration, and must admit that the ty'recent arms > tne dress ' and Probably the life of the great discoveries rnen whose splendour we have unearthed do not correspond to the descriptions of the same things in Homer. This has been the subject of a special book by W. Helbig 1 , and the general result at which he arrives is merely negative. The civili- zation found by Dr. Schliemann is apparently not that of Homer. Is the latter then purely imaginary, neither prehistoric nor historic? Is the life de- scribed as artificial as the language ? Pick's 24. For now we are assured, by the researches of C the nt of Fick > that the a PP arent jumble of dialects in the Homeric poems cannot possibly be any original language ect ' which embraced all the dialects, far less a judicious selection from each due to the genius of the poet, but rather the incongruous result of the adaptation of an older form (^olic) to the wants of a newer and different (Ionic) public. This rehandling of great poems to make them intelligible is an almost universal phenomenon, and now affords us the first reasonable theory for the extraordinary facts pre- sented by Homer's language. Of course there are 1 Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmdlern erlautert, 1884. 24.] TICK'S THEORY. 47 later poems, and possibly later passages in the old poems, where this artificial dialect was deliberately imitated by men who found it already achieved, and merely accepted it as the received epic lan- guage. But these passages are insignificant. The body of the poems seems to have been rehandled for the practical purpose of making them intelligible, just as Dryden rehandled Chaucer. In this theory of Fick, which he has defended Difficulties with extraordinary acuteness and learning, we have & the greatest advance made in our day as regards the language of Homer. Of course it has not yet been accepted by the world of scholars 1 . I myself think Pick's weak point is his close adherence to the dissection of the Iliad into three successive layers by A. Kirchhoff, and his attempt to show that the parts severed from the older as accretions by Kirchhoff are also exactly the parts which were composed in the later (Ionic) dialect, and which therefore do not show the traces of older forms elsewhere to be found. Fick may be right even here; but I am not persuaded by his arguments 2 . 1 Probably a generation will pass away before it is appreciated ; or it may soon pass into oblivion, to be rediscovered by some future thinker. All the newer histories agree in disapproving it, but chiefly on the authority of the philologers. Most of these are committed, both by tradition and by their own special researches, to the theory of a natural mixture of dialects at Smyrna, the border town of ^Eolic and Ionic settlements. 2 I understand that Mr. W. Leaf, one of the highest English authorities, agrees generally with Fick on this problem. On the other hand, the Provost of Oriel, as he informs me, does not see his way to accept it. 48 RECENT TREATMENT OF MYTHS. [25. Analogies But when the conservatives retorted that in pre- favour supposing a rehandling of the dialect, and an imperfect translation into newer forms, he was assuming a fact unique in literature, certainly in Greek literature, he smote them ' hip and thigh ' by showing parallel cases, not only in mediaeval poetry, but in the collateral Greek lyric poetry. He showed that old epigrams, for example, had been altered to make them intelligible, while an occa- sional form for which no metrical equivalent could be found was allowed to remain 1 . Itsapplica- & 2 5. I have delayed over this important and tion to the . - which was not composed till our second century. The metrical geography attributed to Scymnus of Chios 1 gives us some additional facts ; but on the whole we may say that our account of all this early history is derived from late and very theoretical antiquarians. They did not hesitate to put these events into the tenth or eleventh century before Christ, but on what kind of evidence we shall presently discuss. From the Asiatic settlements and from the rich cities in Eubcea (Chalcis and Eretria) went out more colonies to the coasts of Thrace and the Black Sea; but these are placed at such reasonable dates, in the seventh century, that we must be disposed to give them easier credence. The colo- 38. Intermediate between these two waves of nization of , . - . J . . . .. ... ., the West, colonization, both in date and in credibility of details, come the famous settlements in Sicily, of which a brief account is given by Thucydides at the opening of his sixth book ; and it is no doubt the apparent precision of this account, and the general accuracy of the author, which has made this colonization of Sicily and Southern Italy one of the early portions of Greek history most readily 1 Printed in C. Miiller's Geographi Graeci. 28.] THE OLD CHRONICLERS. 55 accepted by even the newest sceptics. It is quite extraordinary how the general seriousness and the literary skill of an author may make even practised critics believe anything he chooses to say l . Any one who reads with care the account of The Thucydides will see that he cannot possibly be authority, writing from his own knowledge or research, but from some older and far worse authority, doubt- less one of the chroniclers 2 or story-tellers who gathered, most uncritically, the early legends of various portions of the Greek world. It has long since been suggested, and with the strongest proba- bility, that Thucydides' authority was the Syracusan Antiochus, who compiled the early annals of Sicily with the evident intention of enhancing the glory of his native city. On what principles did these chroniclers pro- ceed? The great and only patent of respectability in Wh *t was . r r i nobility any Greek house or city of early times was founda- i n early tion by a hero or the direct descendant of a hero ; Greece ? for the heroes were sons or grandsons of the gods, from whom all Greek nobility was derived. The Homeric poems, in making or defining the Greek theology, also told of the great houses directly descended from Zeus or Heracles ; and so a royal house which was descended from these personages, 1 We shall soon come to a similar instance in Xenophon's Anabasis. 2 The Greek name is \oyoiroioi, seldom \oyoypdoi, which usually means a speech-writer. Cf. below, 31, a passage from Clinton which also applies here. 56 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [28. or a city founded by them, secured for itself a dig- Mace- nity recognized by all the race. To cite late his- kings. n torical instances : the Macedonian kings made good their claim to being Greeks and civilized men by showing their descent from the hero ^Eacus, whose descendants the ^Eacids figure so prominently in Romans, the legendary wars. The Romans, when first they came into contact with Greek culture, and felt at the same time their superior strength and their social inferiority, at once accepted and promoted the story invented for them at Pergamum or adapted for them in Sicily, that they were a colony of Tro- jans, led by -^Eneas, the child of Aphrodite by a mortal hero. Hellenistic If these things took place in the dry tree of sober history, what must have taken place in the green ? Every city was bound to have a heroic founder, and to have been established in almost mythical times. Even in late and reflecting days, as I have already mentioned ( 1 6), when the successors of Alexander founded new towns in Syria and Asia Minor, stones continued to be invented alleging old Hellenic settlements of mythical heroes in these places, whose shrines were accordingly set up, and their worship instituted, to produce an appearance of respectability in upstart polities. Glory of It is not usually felt by modern readers that in pedigrees, consequence of these sentiments the great thing was not to have a long pedigree for a family or city, but to have as short a pedigree as possible for its founder. To be the son or grandson of a god was 29.] QUITE UNTRUSTWORTHY. 57 splendid ; to be his remote descendant was only to cling on to real nobility like the younger and remoter branches of great English families. This will indicate how strong was the tendency to derive an early origin from a great and known descendant of the gods or their acknowledged sons. The sub- sequent history and fortunes of a city were com- paratively vulgar, provided it was founded by a Heracleid, the second or third in descent from Temenus or Hyllus. Hence the systematic habit of all early chronologers of counting downwards from Heracles or the Trojan war y and not upwards from their own days. 29. I have already declared that I put more The scep- faith than the modern sceptical historians in the |^^ dll ~ pictures of life and manners left us in Greek epic chrono- poetry, that I do not believe pure invention to be ogy * a natural or copious source for the materials of early poets. But the very sceptics to whom I here allude are in my mind quite too credulous on the matter of early chronology, and quite too ready to accept statements of accurate dates where no accu- rate dates can be ascertained 1 . This is the main topic on which I claim to have The shown strong reasons for rejecting what Grote, ^^ f Curtius, and even the recent sceptical historians early dates. 1 The solitary exception is Sir G. Cox, whose History of Greece has found little favour, in spite of its originality. He will not set down any date earlier than 660 B. c. as worthy of acceptance ; and I think he is right. But he also rides the solar theory of the myths to death, and so repels his reader at the very outset of his work. 58 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [29. have accepted. They have all agreed in giving up such dates as 1184 B.C. for the siege of Troy, or 1104 B.C. for the Return of the Heracleids 1 ; and yet they accept 776 for the first Olympiad, and 736 The so- for the first colony (Naxos) in Sicily, on nearly Olympic the same kind of evidence. And they do this in register. spite of the most express evidence that the list of Olympiads was edited or compiled late (after 400 B. C.), and starting from no convincing evidence, by Hippias of Elis. This passage from Plutarch's Life of Htmia, which I cited and expounded in an article upon the Olympiads in the Journal of Hellenic Studies which I have reprinted in the Appendix to this book, is so capital that it shows either ignorance or prejudice to overlook its importance. ' To be accu- Plutarch's rate,' says Plutarch, 'as to the chronology [of Numa], O f i tt is difficult, and especially what is inferred from the Olympic victors, whose register they say that Hippias the Eleian published late, starting from 1 The arguments of Busolt (G. G. i. 86) which I had intended to dis- cuss, will be antiquated by the appearance of his 2nd edition, which is now in the press, and which discusses the prehistoric conditions by the light of evidence which has accrued since the first publication of his important work. But for the printers' strike (November, 1891) I should probably have been able to quote his revised and amended views. Holm's appears to me a reasonable view. After stating that Apollodorus (ii. 7), Diodorus (4, 33), Plato (Legg. iii.6, 7), and Isocrates (Archidam. 119) are all at variance, he adds (i. 1 81) : ' One of these is just as historical as the other ; the current traditions are not better than the accounts of Plato and of Isocrates ; they are all mere tales (Sagen) which can neither be proved or refuted/ Here we have the attitude of Grote, pure and simple, but applied to a quasi-historical period. 30.] THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 59 nothing really trustworthy 1 / Nor is it possible to hold that this was some sudden and undue scepti- cism in the usually believing Plutarch ; for I showed at length that the antiquarian Pausanias, whose interest in very old things was of the strongest, could find at Olympia no dated monument older than the thirty-third Olympiad. If he had seen an old register upon stone, he would most certainly have mentioned it, nor can I find in any extant author any direct evidence that such a thing existed. I predicted confidently, when the recent excavations began, that no such list, or fragment of a list, would be found, and negatively at least, my prediction was verified 2 . 30. It is curious, moreover, that on one point The date this traditional chronology had been rejected, and an important date in early Greek history revised, by Ernst Curtius ; and yet he holds to the tradition 1 Will it be believed that E. Curtius paraphrases this remark (an-' ovSevos opfjuupevov dvaytcaiov irpos iriariv} by ' zuerst wissenschaftlich bearbeitet von Hippias ' ? 2 It is an axiom, to which I shall revert, that all sceptics have their credulous side ; and so we find that Mr. Evelyn Abbott, a learned and able man, who will not accept anything as real fact from the Homeric poems, takes with childish faith the list in Eusebius, and tells us that there we can read the names of the actual victors from 776 B.C. to 221 A.D. ! (History of Greece, i. 246.) And he adds, with charming naivete, that the alleged fact of one thousand years' record of foot-races * would be incredible if it were not true. But it is true/ etc. That a critical historian should tell us these things dogmatically, without touching upon any of the difficulties involved, can only be accounted for by the theory that he was following some authority he respected, such as Duncker, without thinking the matter out for himself. 60 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [30. in every other case. The date of Pheidon of Argos, the famous tyrant who first coined money in Greece, and who celebrated an Olympic contest in spite of Sparta and Elis, was placed by most of the old chronologers in 747 B. C., the eighth Olympiad, I believe, because Pheidon counted as the tenth from Temenus, the first Heracleid king of Argos. All the rational inferences, however, to be made from his life and work pointed to a much later date 1 ; so that by a simple emendation the twenty-eighth Olympiad also an irregular festival, according to Hippias' list revised by was substituted ; and thus Curtius has made a E. Curtius most instructive and interesting combination, by which this tyrant and his relation to Sparta become part of the rational development of Peloponnesian history. There seems to be an agreement in the more recent historians 2 to abandon even this gain, and go back to the old date, probably because such a Since step would imperil many other old dates, and cast abandoned. the historians into the turmoil of revising their traditional views. For when you once root up one of these early dates, many others are bound to follow. The uncertainty and hesitation of the critics seem now to arise from doubts about the authority of Ephorus, 1 I notice that older scholars, such as Newton, in his Chronology ', and Mitford, show quite a wholesome scepticism concerning Pheidon's date, which they are disposed to bring down even lower than Curtius proposes. 2 E.g. Duncker, Abbott, Duruy, Busolt (i. 140) with the recent literature cited, Holm (i. 256). 30.] EPHORUS. 6l from whom most of our knowledge is ultimately derived 1 . As I have elsewhere said, I regard this Quellenkritik as little more than a convenient way of airing acuteness and learning, and therefore highly useful for theses or exercises of philological can- didates for honours. But as regards what we can The really trace to Ephorus, concerning the date Pheidon, the reforms of Lycurgus, and other such questions, two separate inquiries must be satisfied before we accept his word : first, what documents or other evidence were accessible to Ephorus ; secondly, with what honesty and judgment did he use them? There are scholars who believe him implicitly, and even believe implicitly statements which they have fathered upon him by very doubt- ful inference. There are others who treat him with contempt. There is even a third class which accepts him sometimes, and rejects him at others, because he will not fit in with their preconceived opinions. The question now before us is this : If Ephorus did put Pheidon in the eighth Olympiad, or about 747 B.C., upon what authority did he do so? Had he any evidence to go upon different from that which we can still name and criticise? I will here add my opinion to the many which the reader of German can consult for himself. Ephorus 1 The reader may consult a long list of tracts on the credibility of Ephorus, and the accuracy with which our extant Greek authors cited him, with the general conclusions to be inferred, in Busolt (i. 97 and elsewhere) or Holm (i. 11-15). 62 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [30. not first- was a pupil of Isocrates, brought up to consider style and effect the main objects of the historian. To this he added the usual prejudices of the Greek for his native city, Kyme, which he glorifies upon every occasion. Thus it is to Ephorus that we owe the absurd date of the founding of the Italian Cumse (1050 B.C.) as an evidence of the early greatness of the JEolic city. It has been shown by A. Bauer and by Busolt that, in telling the story of the Persian Wars, Ephorus (as appears in the second-hand Diodorus) not only rearranged facts in such order as seemed to him effective, but often invented details. Whenever he adds to the narrative of Herodotus, this seems to be the case. The night attack of the Greeks on the Persians at Thermopylae (Diod. xi. 9) is a signal instance of this, not to speak of the rhetorical display, which is so widely different from the admirable and simple narrative of Herodotus. All such early history, therefore, as depends upon Ephorus, is to me highly suspicious. Archias, There is another ' tenth Temenid,' specially con- oflyracuse! necte d in the legends with Pheidon as a contem- porary and opponent, Archias of Corinth, who is said to have led the first colony to Sicily. I have no doubt that the same chronography which placed Pheidon in the eighth Olympiad (747 B.C.) placed Archias there, and, allowing for a few years of domestic struggles, sent him to Sicily in 735 B.C. 1 1 Though the Return of the Heracleids was placed by Erato- sthenes in 1 1 04 B.C., older authorites, just as competent, placed it 30.] ARCHIAS. 63 To my mind this legend is quite unhistorical, nay, it may possibly have falsified real history ; for though it may have suited the national vanity of Antiochus of Syracuse and other old historians to magnify their own city by putting it first, or prac- tically first, in the list, the whole situation points to a different course of events. Archias, when on his way, is said to have left a associated party to settle at Corcyra ; he is also said to have ^gends of helped the founder of Croton. It is surely im- Corcyra 1111^11 ' r andCroton. probable that Greek adventurers in search of good land and convenient harbours should fix on Sicily, passing by the sites of Tarentum, Sybaris, Croton, and Locri. That these sites were fully appreciated is shown by the flourishing cities which the legend asserts to have been founded in the generation succeeding the origin of Syracuse. Will any un- prejudiced man believe all this most improbable history ? The one fact which the old chronologers of Syracuse could not get over was this : from time immemorial Greek ships arriving in Sicily offered sacrifices at the temple of Apollo Archegetes at later. Thus Isocrates, in three of his orations, delivered 366-342 B. c., repeats that the Dorians had now been four hundred years in Pelo- ponnesus. Applying this round number, we obtain 1066-1042 for the Return of the Heracleids. The tenth generation, according to Greek counting, down from this date for Temenus, would give us 760-730 B.C. This may be the very computation by which the dates of Archias and Pheidon were fixed. Duncker (i. 139) thinks the Dorians cannot have come before 1000 B.C. If he reasoned like a Greek, and held Pheidon to be the tenth Temenid, he would straight- way put him below 700 B. c. 64 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [30. Naxos. Hence Naxos must have been the first Thucydi- settlement. In the following year, says Thucydides, downward Syracuse was founded ; and then all the dates from this wn ich he copies from his authority most likely imaginary ' date. Antiochus are, as usual, downward from the date of Syracuse, and almost all in numbers divisible by five. I will pause a moment, and give the reader a summary of the conclusions to which critical scho- lars in general have given their assent. It is con- ceded that Thucydides must have used Antiochus of Syracuse as his principal source in narrating the archaeology of Sicily. This opinion, first stated by Niebuhr, has been argued out fully by Wolfflin, and accepted with some reluctance by Holm, Clas- sen (the best editor of Thucydides), and Busolt 1 . Antiochus Even the language of Thucydides in these chap- se ters shows phrases which we recognize in the frag- ments of Antiochus cited by Strabo. The promi- nence of Syracuse, the city of Antiochus, and the mention of the constitutions of the new cities, are also features pointing to the work of Antiochus. In his special article Busolt has shown with great acuteness that all the later authorities, cited by some in support of Thucydides' data, really rest upon him or upon Antiochus 2 . What was the cha- racter of this author ? He was an early contem- 1 The last has given a summary of the arguments in his History, pp. 224, 241, and in the Rhein. Museum for 1885, pp. 461 seq. 2 That Hippys of Rhegium lived during the Persian Wars, and wrote 2i/c\iKa, is stated by Suidas only and without any evidence. 30.] ANTIOCHUS OF SYRACUSE. 65 porary of Herodotus, and is never cited by the ancients as a specimen of critical acumen, but rather as possessing special knowledge on an outlying part of the Greek world. We have, moreover, his opening words quoted by Dionysius of Halicar- nassus 1 , which are most important in the present connection : 'AVTLO^OS Sevcxpdveos ra8e orz/e'ypcn/fe 7tpl J IraA.t?]9 K T&V dpx.ata)z; Ao'ycoz; ra Trtororara /cat o-a(/>eorara. In other words he used oral tradition for his facts, and this he also did in his account of early Sicily 2 . He was, at best, one of the most serious, if you please, of the logopoioi, or chroniclers, who are always being contrasted with critical histo- rians such as Thucydides. Such being the state of nottrust- the facts, we are compelled to accept as our only worth y ' authority for the early traditions concerning Sicily this solitary chronicler, who seems to have had no difficulty in fixing dates centuries before the first immigration of the Greeks. In a loose thinker of this kind, patriotism may be fairly assigned as a strong moving cause in determining his facts and dates. Indeed, when Archias is said by this Antio- chus to have aided at the founding of Croton, Grote and Holm are quite ready to set it down to his de- sire to magnify Syracuse. When Ephorus of Kyme sets down the Italian colony of his city (Cumae) at 1050 B. c., all critical historians reject this date upon the same ground. If this criticism be indeed valid, 1 Arch. i. 12. 2 Diod. xii. 71. I now repeat these facts, which I had urged long ago, from the recent summary of Busolt (pp. cit. p. 224). F 66 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [31. are we only to use it when we choose, or to apply his dates ft generally ? Busolt shows (in his article) that the actual year of the founding of Syracuse (and hence of the other Sicilian colonies) cannot be re- garded as certain. Surely he and his brother critics stop short illogically, and refrain from pushing their doubts as far as they are bound to do. To me not only the exact year, but the exact genera- tion it is by generations and round numbers that Antiochus counted is quite uncertain ; and we are thrown back on arguments from general proba- bility such as those which I have indicated, though 31. It is the authority of Thucydides which has by P Thucy- imposed upon the learned an artificial chronology, dides, The scholar is often wanting in acuteness. There are, I suppose, plenty of philologers who believe Thucydides far more implicitly than their Bible, and because he appears careful and trustworthy in contemporary affairs, actually assume that he must be equally credible in matters wholly beyond his ken. I suppose they imagine, though they do not state it, that the historian consulted State archives in Sicily, and set down his conclusions from a care- ful analysis of their evidence. We have no trace or mention of any such systematic archives ; and if the historian indeed confined himself to these, what shall we say to his assertion that the Sikels who is not passed from Italy to Sicily just three hundred years omniscient. before the advent of the Greeks ? How could he know this? But the solemn manner of the man and his habitual reticence concerning his authori- 3i.] CREDULITY IN SCEPTICS. 67 ties have wonderfully imposed upon the credulity of the learned. Nobody rates Thucydides higher than I do, wherever he is really competent to give an un- biassed opinion. His accuracy is not, to my mind, impeached by the fact that he is found to have made a slovenly copy of a public document lately recovered on the Acropolis 1 . The variations, though many, are trifling, and do not affect the substance of the document. Yet this may do more to dis- credit him with the pedants than what seems to me dangerous credulity in larger questions. He is hardly to be blamed ; no man escapes entirely from the prejudices of his age. The most sceptical in Credulity some points, as I have already noticed 2 , let their credulity transpire in others. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose whole life was spent in framing scep- tical arguments against early history, is found to accept the unity of authorship and unity of design of the Homeric poems. Grote, so careful and pre- cise in accepting documents, subscribes to the genuineness of the Platonic Letters, which no other competent scholar admits; and so I suppose that in every sceptic, however advanced, some nook of belief will be found, often far less rational than the faith he has rejected. This truth, which applies to modern scholars so 1 It is the treaty which he professes to give verbatim in v. 47, with which the reader may compare the actual, though somewhat mutilated text in C. I. A. i. Suppl. 46 b . 2 Cf. above, 29. F 2 68 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [at Its prob- able oc- currence in ancient critics. Value of Hippias' work. signally, applies no less to the ancient critics of the Greek legends. When we find that Thucydides accepts a piece of ancient history like this account of the Greek settlement of Sicily, we must first of all be sure that he is not the victim of a fit of acquies- cence in an older chronicler. When we hear that Aristotle and Polybius, two great and sceptical men, accepted the Olympiads, we must first know exactly what they said about the earlier dates 1 , and then we must be assured that they did not simply acquiesce in the work of Hippias. For this Hippias was clearly a man writing with a deliberate policy. He must produce a complete catalogue ; he must make his documents conform to it. And so there is evidence in Pausanias that he not only succeeded in his purpose, but that he modified or re-wrote certain inscriptions which we may suppose did not suit his purpose. I refuse to put faith in such an authority, and I refuse to accept as the 1 The excerpt alluding to Polybius (printed in his text as vi. a, a) merely asserts that in the book of Aristodemus of Elis it was stated that no victors were recorded till the twenty-eighth Olympiad, when Coroebus the Elean won and was recorded as the first victor ; from which time the Olympiads were then reckoned. Aristotle is reported to have called Lycurgus the founder (fr. 490). Aristodemus was later than Hippias (cf. above, p. 58) ; and still it is to his book, and not to old registers, that the Greek writers refer. The recurrence of the 28th as an improper Olympiad shows that this number had some important place in the whole discussion. I think it likely that Coroebus really belonged to the twenty-eighth after 776, and not to that year. The oldest actual record of a victor which Pausanias could find was from Ol. 33, and this he describes as of extraordinary antiquity. Other details are given in the Appendix. 32.] ERATOSTHENES INVOKED. 69 first real date in Greek history an epoch fixed by all the Greek chronologers in a downward calcula- tion from the Trojan war, as may be seen even in the scientific and accurate Eratosthenes. His frag- Even ments, written at a time when there really existed Greek science, in a day rich with all the learning of counts ... . r , 1 i r i i downward. previous centuries, still manifest the old faith in the Trojan war, the Return of the Heracleids, the colonization of Ionia, and the guardianship of Lycurgus, as events to be fixed both absolutely and in relation to one another, and to serve as a basis for all the succeeding centuries down to the day of real and contemporary records. ( In these early dates and eras,' says Fynes Clinton in a Clinton's remarkable passage 1 , 'by a singular error in reason- Wl ing, the authority of Eratosthenes is made to be binding upon his predecessors ; while those who come after him are taken for original and indepen- dent witnesses in matters which they really derived from his chronology. The numbers given by Isocrates for the Return of the Heracleidae 2 are repeated three times, and are more trustworthy ; and yet the critics try to correct them by the authority of Eratosthenes/ 32. What, then, is the outcome of all this dis- cussion ? The first three stages of Greek history are, so to Summary speak, isolated, and separated by two blank periods, one of which has to this day remained a great gulf, 1 Fasti Hell., vol. ii. p. vii. 2 Cf. above, 30, note. THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [3* The stage of pre- 11 omeric Prototype of the Greek temple. over which no bridge has yet been constructed. Over the second, which immediately precedes proper history, the Greeks made a very elaborate bridge, which they adorned with sundry figures recovered from vague tradition and arranged according to their fancy. But it is only after this reconstructed epoch of transition that we can be sure of our facts. The first stage is that represented by the pre- historic remains, which, though they are plainly very various in development, and therefore probably in age, are yet by most of us classed together as ' without father, mother, or descent,' discovering to us the earliest civilization in Greek lands. But to assert this foundling character is perhaps too sceptical a position. For there can hardly be any likelihood that the Eastern parentage of this early luxury, suggested by the legends, will hereafter be disproved. And now even the most extreme ad- vocates of Greek originality must allow this early intercourse with, and influence of, the older civiliza- tions. As to their effects upon historic Greek art, there seemed to be a gap between the bee-hive tomb or fortress-wall and the pillared temple, which was a ' great gulf fixed,' till Dr. Schliemann found the doorways of the palace of Tiryns. They are all planned like a temple in antis, the earliest form, from which the peripteral easily follows. And early vases are adorned with rude figures which may be copies of old models such as those found at Mycenae. But the intermediate steps are still hopelessly ob- scure. 32.] SANTORIN AND ILION. 7 1 The earliest and rudest of these remains are not Degrees in Greece, but at the island of Santorin, under the stoge* 8 lava, and in the fort of Ilion (Troy) excavated by Dr. Schliemann 1 . The more developed, both in architectural skill and in ornamental designs, are in Argolis (Mycenae, Tiryns) and in Attica (Spata, Menidi). As I have already mentioned, this civili- zation does not appear to be the same as that of the epic poems, and the verdict of the learned declares that it dates from a long anterior epoch. What occurred in Greece between the epoch of this curious pre-Hellenic and, partially at least, im- ported culture, and the age of Homer, none of us can as yet do more than guess 2 . But the fact that the popular poetry chose for the scenes of its adventures the very sites of this pre-historic culture, seems to show that the importance of Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns either lasted down to the ' epic ' time, or was so recent as to hold the popular imagination. On the whole, therefore, I am disposed to con- 1 I incline, with Mr. Bent, to place the remains of Santorin before those of Hissarlik, even though they may be in some respects supe- rior in development. As is obvious, the culture of one place need not keep pace with that of another. But the total disappearance from the legends of any mention of the eruption which must have disturbed the whole ^Egean Sea, compared with the living memories of Troy, is to me a proof that the latter and its destruction must be far more recent than the former. Mr. E. Abbott, who refers to Bent's Cyclades, is disposed to the other view (History of Greece, i. 43) ; and so are Duruy (vol. i. chap. ii. i) and Holm. 2 Many writers put the Dorian immigration and the resulting changes of population, and emigration to Asia Minor, in the gap. 72 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [33. Probably sider these pre-historic splendours as not so extra- as is S ften vagantly old, surviving, perhaps, till 1000 B.C.; supposed, though of course the Trojan remains may be far older than the Mycenaean. Duncker, in his very careful discussion 1 , thinks the end of this period came about noo B.C. I look upon this, in an author who is always liberal with his figures, as a substantial agreement with me, but I can now add a remarkable corroboration. Mr. Flinders Petrie, Mr.Petrie's coming fresh from a prolonged and scientific study lce * of Egyptian art-remains, has examined with care the pre-historic collections in Greece, and has es- tablished 2 (i) a very early and widespread communi- cation between the peoples of the ^Egean and Egypt ; (2) a close similarity, both in materials and workmanship, between the Mycenaean ornaments and the Egyptian of about 1200-1000 B.C. The Egyptian pottery, &c., from dynasties earlier or later than this epoch show marked contrasts, and are easily to be distinguished. At the same time, I protest against making the rudeness of pottery in itself, without any corroboration, a proof of great antiquity. For there is such a thing as neo-bar- barism, especially in pottery; and moreover, simple people will go on for a thousand years making their plain household utensils in the same form and with the same decoration. The epic 33. As regards the second stage, or ' epic age,' I have already, in my Greek Literature, shown 1 i. 131. Busolt, as he informs me, now agrees with this view. 2 In two remarkable articles (Hellenic Journal for 1890 and 1891). 33-] DATE OF ARCHILOCHUS. 73 ample reasons for not dating it very early; and further researches since made rather confirm this view. The personages described seem to belong to the ninth century before Christ ; but it was gone before the poets brought together their work into the famous epics which were the opening of Greek literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey there- fore seem to me to describe the second, then already bygone, stage of Greek history, which was certainly separated by a gap from the third. This last begins The with the contemporary allusions of the earliest lyric ^storical poets, Archilochus, Callinus, Tyrtaeus, none of stage, whom were earlier than 700 B.C., and who more probably lived from 660 B. C. onward 1 . According to the theory of the Greeks, which is not yet extinct, three centuries separated this real history from the epic period, when the Trojan heroes and their singers lived ; .and even among recent critics there are some who wish to place the composition of the Iliad as far back as 900 B.C. I do not believe in so huge a gap in Greek The gap 1 The date of Archilochus, the earliest of the historical figures among Greek poets, used to be fixed about 709 B. c. The researches of Gelzer, Das Zeitalter des Gyges, make it certain that this date is wrong, and must be reduced to at least 670 B.C.; for Archilochus names Gyges in an extant fragment, and Gyges appears on a cunei- form inscription as the vassal of an Assyrian king whose time is de- terminable. Moreover, an eclipse which Archilochus mentions seems to be that in April, 647 B. c., which was total at Thasos, where the poet spent his later years. Even the conservative Duncker (vol. ii. p. 175, English ed.) adopts these arguments. Nevertheless, some recent histories still acquiesce in the exploded date ! 74 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [33. between literature. It seems to me impossible that the Archilo- stream of original epic should have dried up long elms. before Archilochus arose towards the middle of the seventh century B.C And here it is that the moderns have been deceived by the elaborate con- struction of four centuries of history made by the Greeks to fill the void between the events of the Iliad and the events of the earliest history. In the seventh century we have contemporary allusions to Gyges, king of Lydia, known to us from Assyrian inscriptions ; we have yearly archons at Athens, and a series of priestesses at Argos ; presently we have historical colonies and many other real evi- dences on which to rely. But before 700 B.C. it is not so. Some stray facts remained, as when Tyrtaeus tells us that he fought in the second Mes- senian war, and that the first had been waged by the grandfathers of his fellow-soldiers 1 . The double Old lists kingship of Sparta was there, though I am at a loss anToften^ tO ^ now ^ ow we can trust a ^ st f name S Coming fabricated, down from a time when writing was not known 2 . 1 The connected history was, however, not set down then, but by a late epic poet, Rhianus, and a late prose historian, Myron, both of whom Pausanias, who gives us what we now know of these wars, criticises severely, saying that the prose author is the worse of these bad or incomplete authorities (Pausanias, iv. 6), since he conflicts with Tyrtseus. How modern historians in the face of this passage can set down fixed dates for these wars, beginning with 785 B.C., passes my comprehension. 2 It is perhaps the most extraordinary fact in the results of the ex- cavations pointed out to me by Mr. Sayce, that in none of the early Greek tombs or treasures discovered have we a single specimen of early writing, though both Egyptians and Phoenicians, who supplied 33-] CHRONOLOGICAL INVENTIONS. 75 Nay, we have even distinct examples of fabricated lists. Hellanicus wrote concerning the list of the priestesses at Argos, in after days a recognized standard for fixing events. But this list reached back far beyond the Trojan war, as it started with lo, paramour of Zeus. The name of the priestess marking the date of the war was solemnly set down. The lists of the Spartan kings came straight down from Heracles. Again, at Halicarnassus has been found a list on stone of twenty-seven priests, starting from Telamon, son of Poseidon, and bringing back the founding of the city to 1174 B.C. 1 The tail of this list also was historical ; the beginning must have been deliberately manufactured ! From such data the early history of Greece was constructed 2 . Lycurgus is a half-mythical figure, and probably represents the wisdom of several lawgivers. ButNochron- however individual cases may be judged, in chron- eighdicen- ology all the early dates are to be mistrusted, and tury B.C. to to reconstruct the Greece of the eighth century B.C. requires as much combination and as much imagina- tion as to construct a real account of the Homeric age. I am convinced that two capital features in the usual Greek histories of the eighth century, the so much to them, must have been long familiar with that art. The author of the Sixth Book of the Iliad refers once to writing as a strange or mysterious thing, and yet on a folded tablet, which could not have been used at the origin of writing, or indeed till far later times. 1 C. I. G. 2655. 2 These inventions were produced at a comparatively late period, and therefore do not conflict with what I said of the rarity of inven- tion in a primitive age which had no theories to support. 76 THEORETICAL CHRONOLOGY. [33. reign of Pheidon and the colonization of Sicily, belong, not to that century, but to the next. Cases of Let not the reader imagine that he finds in me quity. one f those who delight in reducing the antiquity of history, and who advocate the more recent date in every controversy. There are nations whose culture seems to be undervalued in duration ; to me, for example, those arguments are most con- vincing 1 which place the great Sphinx at the Pyramids in an epoch before any written records, even in Egypt, so that it remains a monument of sculptured art many thousand years before the Christian era. But the Greeks were mere children in ancient history, and they knew it 2 . 1 I allude to the views of M. G. Maspero, in his admirable Archeo- logie egyptienne. ' 2 We have now positive evidence that the Athenians registered their public acts on stone as early as 570-560 B.C. On the Acropolis has been found (in 1884) the broken slab which contained the decree as to the legal status of the first cleruchs sent to Salamis upon its conquest by Athens. (See the article of Koehler in the Mittheilungen of the German Institute at Athens, vol. ix. p. 117 sq., and the Bull, de Corresp. hell. xii. I sq. where Foucart comments upon the inscription.) Three conditions are implied: (j) the cleruch is assimilated to Athenian citizens, as to taxes and military service, though he is bound to reside on Salamis and not leave his land. This was no doubt a novelty, and distinguishes the Athenian cleruch from the older colonist who had gone to Pontus or Magna Grsecia. (2) If he did not reside, or while he did not, he must pay a special absentee's tax to the State. (This is understood differently by Koehler and by Busolt, G. G. i. 548.) The original number of cleruchs was apparently 500 (Foucart op. cit. ibid.). (3) If he defaulted in his payment there was a fine of thirty drachmae a very small penalty, even regarding the modest means of the early Greek states. CHAPTER IV. THE DESPOTS ; THE DEMOCRACIES. 34. AT last we emerge into the open light of Brilliant day, and find ourselves in the seventh century ^eat lyric (more strictly 650-550 B.C.), in that brilliant, tur- poets. bulentj enterprising society which produced the splendid lyric poetry of Alcaeus and Sappho, of Alcman and Terpander, and carried Greek com- merce over most of the Mediterranean 1 . We have still but scanty facts to guide us ; yet they are enough to show us the general condition of the country, aristocratical governments which had displaced monarchies, and beside them the ancient twin-monarchy of Sparta, gradually passing into the oligarchy of the ephors. There is evidence in The the character of Alcman's poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all resembling the so-called time. Sparta of Lycurgus. The remains of early art found there point in the same direction, as do also the strange funeral customs described by Hero- 1 The reader who desires fuller details may consult the chapter on the ' Lyric Age ' in my Social Life in Greece, and the chapters on the lyric poets in my History of Greek Literature. 78 THE DESPOTS J THE DEMOCRACIES. [34. dotus on the death of the kings 1 . It would seem that there was luxury, that there was artistic taste, that there was considerable license in this older society. The staid sobriety and simplicity of what is known as Spartan life seems therefore rather a later growth, than the original condition of this Doric aristocracy. And so this type is far more explicable, in its exceptional severity, and its con- trast to all other Dorian states, if we take it to be the gradual growth of exceptional circumstances, than if we regard it as a primitive type, which would naturally appear in other branches of the race, its ex- At all events the Greeks had before them the const? example of an ancient, a respectable and a brilliant tion. monarchy. It is nevertheless most remarkable that in all the changes of constitution attempted through the various States, amid the universal respect in which the Spartans were held, no attempt was ever made in practical 2 Greek history to copy their institutions. The distinct resemblances to Spartan institutions in some of the Cretan communities were probably not imitations, nor can we say that they were Dorian ideas, for the many Dorian States we know well, such as Argos, Corinth, Syracuse, did not possess them. E. Curtius The Spartan State may therefore be regarded as ofthe eage standing outside the development of Greece, even despots, in the political sense 3 . In one respect only was its 1 Herodotus, vi. 58. 2 The theorists were always framing polities after Spartan ideas. 3 The two accounts of early Sparta which are cited with general 35-] THE TYRANTS AND THEIR POLICY. 79 policy an aggressive one, in interfering on the side of the aristocracies against the despots who took up the cause of the common people against their noble oppressors. It is one of those brilliant general views which make Curtius' history so attrac- tive, that he interprets this great conflict as partly one of race, so far as Ionic and Doric can severally be called such. The Doric aristocracies of the Peloponnesus were opposed by their Ionic subjects, or by Ionic States rising in importance with the growing commerce and wealth of the Asiatic cities. The tyrants generally carried out an anti-Dorian policy, even though they were often Dorian nobles themselves. There was no more successful aspirant to a tyranny than a renegade nobleman who adopted the cause of the people. 35. I have already alluded to the chapter in Crete's Grote's history 1 indeed there is such a chapter in Tiew> most histories entitled the c Age of the Despots.' The mistake which such a title is likely to engender must be carefully noticed. If we mean the age when this kind of monarch first arose, no objection need be urged ; but if it be implied that such an age ceased at any definite moment, nothing can be further from the truth. For this form of govern- ment was a permanent feature in the Greek world. When the tyrants were expelled from Athens and approval are those of Duncker in his history, and Busolt's mono- graph, Die Lakedaimonier( Leipzig, 1878). But there is a host of additional literature, cf. Busolt, G. G. i. 95. 1 Above, 8. 8o THE DESPOTS ; THE DEMOCRACIES. [35. from the Peloponnesus 3 they still flourished In Sicily, Italy, the Black Sea coasts, and Cyprus, till they reappeared again in Greece 1 . There was no moment in old Greek history when there were not scores of such despots. The closing period, after the death of Alexander, shows us most of the Greek States under their control. It was the great boast of Aratus that he freed his neighbours from them, and brought their cities under the more constitutional Achaean League. But at this period a despot, if he ruled over a large dominion, called himself a king ; and we may therefore add to the list most of the so-called kings, who close the history of independent Greece, as they commenced it in the legends. Greek The despot, or tyrant 2 as he is called, has a very k ac * reputation in Greek history. The Greeks of every age have not only loved individual liberty, but are a singularly jealous people, who cannot endure that one of themselves shall lord it over the rest. Even in the present day Greeks have often told me that they would not for a moment endure a Greek as king, because they all feel equal, and could not tolerate that any one among them should receive such honour and profit. This is why the ancient tyrant, however wisely and moder- ately he ruled, was always regarded with hatred by 1 It is likely enough that at no time were they really extinct in the Peloponnesus or in the lesser towns of northern Greece. 2 There is a good note upon this word in the Greek argument to the CEdipus Tyrannus. 36.] THE TYRANT IN LITERATURE. 8 1 the aristocrats he had deposed ; so that to them the killing of him was an act of virtue approved by all their society. I very much doubt whether how far in early days the common people generally had I any such feeling, as the tyrant usually saved them davs - from much severer oppression. Of course any individual might avenge a particular wrong or insult, and in later days, when a despot overthrew a democratic constitution, the lower classes might share in the old aristocratic hatred of the usurper. 36. But Greek literature was in the hands Literary of the aristocrats ; and so we have a long catalogue of accusations from Alcaeus, Herodotus, Xenophon, despot. Plato, Polybius, Plutarch, in fact all through Greek literature ; according to which the tyrant is a ruffian who usurps power in order that he may gratify his lusts at the expense of all justice and mercy. Feeling himself the enemy of mankind, he is perpetually in a panic of suspicion, and sur- rounds himself with mercenaries who carry out his behests. He plunders, confiscates, and violates the sanctity of the family and the virtue of the young. This terrible indictment, of which the climax was Lycophron's Casandreans^ has been indorsed by the great democratic historian of our century 1 , to whom the completeness of political liberty is the great goal of all civilization, and who therefore looks with horror upon those who retard its growth. But it seems to me that the problem has not been fairly handled, and that there is a great deal 1 Cf. above, 8. G 8s THE DESPOTS; THE DEMOCRACIES. [36. to be said for these tyrants, in the face of all this How far literary evidence 1 . Of course their irresponsible aSP^" powers were often abused. Coming without the shackles of tradition or the scruples of legitimacy to a usurped throne, the same Greek who was so jealous of his neighbour was sure to feel insolent elation at his own success, and deep suspicion of his unsuccessful rivals. And if a case can be found of a tyrant overthrowing a fairly working con- stitution, I surrender it to the verdict of the jury of historians from Herodotus to Grote. Reductioad But if the tyrannis was so unmixed an evil, how of "the * comes it to have been a constant and permanent popular phenomenon in Greek politics ? Man may indeed, as Polybius says, be the most gullible of all animals, though professing to be the most sagacious, and may ever be ready to fall into the same snares that he has seen successful in entrapping others 2 . But surely it exceeds all the bounds of human, not to say Greek, stupidity that men should perpetu- ally set a villain over them to plunder, violate, and exile men and women. The real The fact is that the tyrant was at one time a politics of necessity, and even a valuable moment, in the march temporary of Greek culture. The aristocratic governments despots. 1111. i 111 had only substituted a many-headed sovranty over the poor for the rule of a single king, who might 1 Mitford, who wrote in the days when tirades against tyrants were in high fashion, brought down a torrent of censure upon his head by saying his word for absolute government against democracy. 2 Cf. my Greek Life and Thought, p. 416. 36.] THE VIOLENCE OF FACTIONS. 83 be touched by compassion or reached by persuasion. But who could argue with the clubs of young patri- cians, who thought the poor no better than their slaves, and swore the solemn oath which Aristotle has preserved: e l will be at enmity with the Demos, and will do it all the harm I can.' To these gentle- men the political differences with the people had gone quite beyond argument ; whatever they urged was true, whatever was against them false : each side regarded its opponents as morally infamous. Whenever politics reach this condition, it is time to abandon discussion and appeal to an umpire who can enforce his decision with arms. When the commons had gained wealth and ac- Question- quired some cohesion, there were consequently ^ e n t S of te ~ violent revolutions and counter-revolutions, mas- Thucydi- sacres and confiscations, so that ' peace at any price' was often the cry of the State. Thucydides has drawn a famous picture of the political factions of his day, in which he declares their violence, fraud, and disregard of every obligation but that of party interests to be novel features of his times. That clever rhetorician knew well enough that these frauds and violences were no new thing in Greek politics. The poems of Alcseus, still more those of Theognis, and many more that were known to him, must have taught him that this war of factions was as old as real Greek history, and that the earliest solution of this terrible problem was the tyrant, who made peace by coercing both sides to his will and punish- ing with death or exile those that were refractory. G 2 84 THE DESPOTS; THE DEMOCRACIES. [37. The tyrant 37. In the shocking condition of cities like gather the Athens before Peisistratus, or the Megara of The- opposing ognis. we may even go so far as to say that, with- parties. . - , . 1-111- out an interval during which both parties were taught simply to obey, no reasonable political life was possible. The haughty noble must be taught that he too had a master ; he must be taught to treat his plebeian brother as another man, and not merely as a beast of burden. The poor must learn that they could be protected from every rich man's oppression, that they could follow their business in peace, and that they could appeal to a sovran who ruled by their sympathy and would listen to their voice. Cases of an There were even a few cases where the oppos- umpire . . voluntarily ing parties voluntarily elected a single man, such appointed. as pjttacus or Solon, as umpire, and where their trust was nobly requited. But even in less excep- tional cases, such as that of Peisistratus of Athens, I make bold to say that the constitution of Cleis- thenes would not have succeeded, had not the people received the training in peace and obedience given them by the Peisistratid family. The despots may have murdered or exiled the leading men ; they at all events welded the people into some unity, some homogeneity, if it were merely in the common bur- dens they inflicted, and the common antipathies they excited. And this is the most adverse view that can be urged. The picture we have of Peisis- tratus, especially in the Polity of the Athenians of recent fame, is that of a just and kindly man, wield- 37] THE TYRANTS AS ART-PATRONS. 85 ing his power of coercion for the general happiness of his subjects. This then was the political value of the early Services tyrants, and a feature in them which is generally ^f ts overlooked. Their services to the artistic progress to art. of Greece in art and literature are more manifest, and therefore less ignored. The day of great archi- tectural works, such as the castles and tombs of Argolis, the draining of Lake Copais, had passed away with the absolute rulers of pre-historic times. Even Agamemnon and his fellows, who probably represent a later stage in Greek society, would not have dared to set their subjects to such task- work. So long as there were many masters in each city and State, all such achievements were impossible. With the tyrants began again the building of large temples, the organizing of fleets, the sending out of colonies, the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts. It was the care of Pei- Examples, sistratus for the study of Homer, and no doubt for other old literature, which prepared the Athenian people to understand ^Eschylus. Nay, this tyrant is said to have specially favoured the nascent drama, and so to have led the way to the splendid results that come upon us, with apparent suddenness, in liberated Athens. The Orthagorids, the Cypse- lids, and single tyrants such as Polycrates of Samos and Pheidon of Argos, did similar services for Greek art : they organized fleets and promoted commerce ; they had personal intercourse of a more definite and intimate kind with one another than 86 THE DESPOTS ; THE DEMOCRACIES, [37. States as such can possibly have ; they increased the knowledge and wealth of the lower classes, as well as their relative position in the State ; and so out of apparent evil came real good 1 . Verdict of Even after all the full experience of Greek demo- theorists, cracies, of the complete liberty of the free citizen, of the value of public discussion, and of the respon- sibility of magistrates to the people, we find all the later theorists deliberately asserting that if you could secure the right man, a single-headed State was the most perfect. All the abuses of tyranny, therefore, so carefully pictured by literary men, had not seemed to them equal to the abuses of mob- rule, the violence and the vacillation of an in- competent or needy public. I cannot but repeat, that if we regard the world at large, and the general fitness of men for democratic liberties, we shall hesitate to pronounce the majority of races even now fit for government by discussion and by vote of the majority. Peisistratus It is very instructive to reflect that Peisistratus, n ' the most enlightened of tyrants, was contemporary .with Solon, the father of Greek democracy. The theory, therefore, of a constitution in which wealth as well as birth should have influence, and which should also regard the rights and the burdens of the poor, was not only alive, but represented by Solon, when Peisistratus made himself master 1 I shall return to this subject of tyrants in connection with their later and Hellenistic features. Cf. below, 7 1 - 38.] SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REVOLUTION. 87 of the State. Solon's theory, though supported by his law against neutrality^ , was unable to over- come the turbulence of faction ; and it required a generation of strong rule to prepare the whole people for the revival of Solon's theory, with many further developments, by Cleisthenes. Nevertheless, Solon remains a capital figure in early Greek history, known to us not by legends and legislation only, but also by the fragments of his poetry 2 . 38. This is the right place to consider the Contrast of nature of those Greek democracies that followed ^ O e d e e k m a ^ upon the expulsion of aristocrats and tyrants, and mocracy. 1 Three remarkable laws, all intended to save the Athenian demo- cracy, whose ministers had no standing-army at their control, from sudden overthrow, seem to me never to have been clearly correlated by the historians. Solon's law (i) ordained that where an actual a raa is had arisen, every citizen must take some side, calculating that all quiet and orderly people, if compelled to join in the conflict, would side with the established Government. Cleisthenes saw that this appeal to the body of the citizens came too late, and indeed had failed when the usurpation of Peisistratus took place. He (2) estab- lished Ostracism, which interfered before the ffraais, but when the rivalry of two leaders showed that the danger was at hand. So far Grote expounds the development; But this expedient also failed when the rivals combined, and turned the vote against Hyper- bolus. It is from that date only about 416 B.C. that I can find cases (3) of the ypatpT) irapavofjLcuv, or prosecution for making illegal proposals, thus interfering at a still earlier stage. This last form of the safeguard replaced Ostracism, and lasted to the end of Athenian history. It was a democratic engine often abused, but always safe to be applied in good time. 2 These have been increased for us by the text of the Aristotelian 'AOrjvaiow no\iTia, from which Plutarch cited, but not fully, his quotations in the Life of Solon* THE DESPOTS; THE DEMOCRACIES. [38. that have been so lauded in modern histories. The panegyric of Grote is well known ; and there is also a very fine chapter l in which Duruy, with- out being intimate, apparently, with Grote (for he only quotes Thirlwall in his support), has not only defended and praised this form of government at Athens, but even justified the coercion of all recal- citrant members of the Delian confederacy. The student has, therefore, the case of democracies in Greece ably and brilliantly stated. Slave- But in the first place let me repeat that they democfa- were one and al * slave-holding democracies, and cies. that for each freeman with a vote there were at \ least three or four slaves. Hence a Greek demo- cracy can in no wise be compared with the modern democracies of artisans and labourers who have to do all their own drudgery, and have hardly any servants. Even very poor Athenians kept a slave or two ; they were saved the worry of much trouble- some or degrading manual labour ; and so the Athenian or the Tarentine, even when poor and over-worked, was in a serious sense an aristocrat as well as a democrat : he belonged to a small minority ruling a far greater population. Still more eminently was this the case, when the demo- cracy was, like Athens or Rhodes, an Imperial one, ruling over subjects, or allied with smaller polities 1 Hist, of Greece, vol. ii. chap. xix. 2. He claims in his inter- esting preface to the last edition to have attained Grote's conclusions independently thirty years ago, when they were regarded in France as dangerous paradoxes. 38.] ATTIC LEISURE AND LIBERTY. 89 which were little better than subjects. Holm Supported argues that under Pericles the poorest citizen ^ t P^ bll( was paid by public money for doing public duties, and was thus above all care concerning his daily bread 1 . But when he adds that by this means 'Pericles succeeded in making the Athenians in one respect (materially) equal to the Spartans, in that they could be (if they performed public duties) noblemen and gentlemen like the latter, he surely overstates the case. The traditions of a landed aristocracy are wholly different from those of salaried paupers, however great may be the power wielded by these latter, or the privileges that they enjoy. Still it is quite possible that all the modern aids Athenian which our poor can use are not as efficient in helping them to attain culture as the leisure granted to the Greek democrat by slave-labour at home. Nor have we as yet any instance of a society becoming really refined without the aid of some inferior class, some Gibeonites, to hew wood and draw water. But if from this point of view the ancient artisan was far freer than his modern counterpart, in another he was not so. As against his brother-citizen, the laws secured him equality and justice ; but against The assem- the demands of the State he had no redress. The ^ e n al> Greek theory required that all citizens should be sovran. 1 G. G. ii. 391. There is a very curious summary of the various classes of public employments on which the Attic citizen lived in the Aristotelian 'AOyvaioov Ilo\iTfia, 24. The author estimates the total number of civil servants or pensioners at over 20,000. 90 THE DESPOTS ; THE DEMOCRACIES. [39. regarded simply as the property of the State ; and such a thing as an appeal to a High Court of Judicature against the decree of the Assembly would have been regarded as absurd 1 . The Demos was indeed ' the sovran people/ but sovran in the sense of a tyrant, or irresponsible ruler, as Aristophanes tells the Athenians. These are the general features of Greek demo- cracy, which are not always understood by foreign, and not urged with sufficient clearness by English, historians. 1 This has for the first time been clearly put by Duruy in his History of Rome. Our irresponsible and final Houses of Parliament, whose acts may annul any law, are a very dangerous modern analogy. CHAPTER V. THE GREAT HISTORIANS. 39. I NOW pass on to the Persian and Pelopon- nesian wars, and their treatment by ancient and modern critics. It is our peculiar good fortune to have these Herodotus two wars narrated respectively by the two greatest ^dides 11 historians that Greece produced, Herodotus and Thucydides. Unfortunately, perhaps, after the manner of most historians, they have made wars their chief subject ; but this criticism applies less to Herodotus, who in leading up to his great climax has given us so many delightful digressions on foreign lands and their earlier history, that his book is rather a general account of the civilized world in the sixth century, with passages from older history, than a mere chronicle of the great war. Nor does he disdain to tell us piquant anecdotes and unauthorized gossip, all giving us pictures of his own mind and time, if not an ac- curate record of older history. Making, therefore, 92 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [39. every allowance for the often uncritical, though always honest 1 , view he took of men and affairs, Herodotus there can be no doubt that the very greatness subject" in of his subject puts him far above Thucydides, whose mighty genius was unfortunately confined to / a tedious and generally uninteresting conflict, con- sisting of yearly raids, military promenades, very small battles, and only one large and tragic expedi- tion, throughout the whole course of its five-and- twenty years. Narrow Still sadder is it that this great man, having Thucy f undertaken to narrate a very small, though a very dides. long, war, so magnifies its importance as to make it out the greatest crisis that ever happened, and therefore excludes from his history almost every- thing which would be of real interest to the per- 1 Mr. Sayce will not admit even this, and indeed the habit of ap- propriating previous work, which Greek literary honesty seems to have allowed, must naturally offend an original inquirer like Mr. Sayce, whose ideas are so often pilfered without acknowledgment. But Greek historians seldom name their authority unless they are about to differ from it, and criticise or censure it. It is for this reason that I distrust the usual enumeration of Herodotus' travels (e.g. Busolt, G. G. ii. 90 sq.\ which assumes that whatever lands he describes he must him- self have seen. I feel sure that he borrowed a great deal, even a great many bare facts, from other books. But I call attention with pleasure to the suggestion of Holm (ii. 330), who shows that with the extended trade relations of Periclean Athens, information upon Pontus, Persia, and Egypt was of great practical value, and that the story of the ten talents reward given him by the Athenians may point to a real reward for his valuable reports, which were most important to their ' Foreign Office.' Hence the great and immediate popularity of his work. Holm feels as I clo, that Herodotus has been underrated, in com- parison with Thucydides (G. G. ii. 346). 39-] DIODORUS ON MYCENJE. 93 manent study of Greek life. He passes briefly over the deeply interesting but now quite obscure period of the rise of the Athenian power. A detailed history of the fifty years preceding his war would indeed have been an inestimable boon to posterity. He passes in contemptuous silence His de- over all the artistic development of Athens. The omission origin of the drama, ^Eschylus, Susarion, Cratinus ; the growth of sculpture, Pheidias, Ictinus, the building of the Parthenon, of the temple of Theseus, all this is a blank in his narrative. And yet he does not think it inconsistent with his plan to give us a sketch of the famous fifty years that elapsed between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. He proposes to correct the inaccuracies of Hellanicus, his only predecessor in this field, and there can be no doubt that what he has con- descended to give us is both accurate and valu- able. But so scanty are his details, so frequent his silence on really important public events, that we are fain to turn to any inferior author to fill the gap. Of these there are (apart from the poets) two ex- supplied tant, Diodorus and Plutarch. Both these men lived hi long after the events, and were beholden to literary sources for their information. The whole tone and the arrangement of Diodorus' eleventh book show that he used Ephorus as his chief authority. The citations from Ephorus by other authors make this conclusion unavoidable. The value of Diodorus' Diodorus. account, when it adds to what Thucydides has 94 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [39. said, is therefore to be estimated by the value of Ephorus as an independent historian. On this I have already declared my opinion ( 30), to which I need only add that I fully agree with Busolt when he says that for the early years of the period Ephorus had no other authority than Thucydides Date of the of any value. The only new fact that Diodorus ofMycense, preserves for us is the alleged destruction of My- cenae by the Argives (circ. 464 B. C.), at a moment, he infers, when Sparta was in the crisis of the Helot insurrection, and unable to interfere. I have long since explained (in Schliemann's Mycence) why I discredit the whole story. Holm is the only writer who seems to feel with me the diffi- culty of supposing such an event to have been passed over with indifference by the patriotic Greek States, whom the Mycenseans and Tirynthians had joined in the great Persian crisis. And when Holm urges political expediency to account for Sparta's non-in- terference, he surely forgets that the literary men of Athens were restrained by no such considerations. Thucydides (i. 102) mentions Argos at this moment: is it likely that even he would pass over this terri- torial aggrandisement of Argos without a syllable Silence of of notice ? But apart from this mass of reticences, Swkoclts what of ^Eschylus, the comrade of the Mycenaeans and Euripi- on the field of battle, what of Sophocles, what of Euripides, all of whom ought to have celebrated Mycenae, and who celebrate Argos instead ? They seem to have absolutely forgotten Mycenae ! What of the absolute reticence of the remains found by 39-] PLUTARCH AND THUCYDIDES. 95 Schliemann, not one of which belongs to the fifth or sixth century B. C., but all to a long anterior period ? The whole affair is, therefore, placed two centuries too late, and, for all we know, may not be derived from Ephorus at all, but from some inferior source, or from Diodorus' own combination. Even if Ephorus was the source, I refuse to accept his authority. When we turn to Plutarch, whose object was indeed rather artistic and moral than historical, we are in a far better plight. For although his Lives of Themistocles and Cimon do not give us much material of a trustworthy kind beyond what we know from Thucydides, this is not the case with the Life of Pericles, in which he has collected much Value of valuable information from sources now lost to us, which all the researches of the Germans have not even succeeded in specifying by name. Our whole picture of the splendour of Athens in her greatest moment is derived not so much from the vague phrases of the speeches in Thucydides as from the deeply interesting facts preserved by Plutarch. His brilliant sketch and the narrative of Thucydides have been illustrated, since the days of Curtius and of Grote, by the recovery of a large number of inscriptions, chiefly from the Acropolis at Athens, recording the quotas paid from the tribute of the several allied cities to Athena and to the other gods. These lists, together with several fragments of treaties with the various cities, and the lists of offerings recently found at Delos, have g6 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [39. afforded Holm the materials for his fascinating chapters upon Imperial Athens l . The newly- But even since the appearance of his book (1889) a OnikeCm- new anc ^ important review of the obscure moments of stitution of Athenian growth has been recovered in the work of Aristotle on The Polity of the Athenians*. He does not indeed concern himself either with the foreign policy or with the artistic grandeur of the city. But as regards her internal development he brings us several new and curious facts. He ascribes the crea- tion of the sovran Demos living at Athens on salaries for public duties, not to Pericles, but to Aristides. The whole democratic reform is in fact completed before the former arrives at power. The political activity of Themistocles is also prolonged for several years later than we had suspected, and it is even at his instigation that Ephialtes attacks the Areopagus. The political role of Pericles is in fact so reduced, that we almost suspect an animus against him in the author, who elsewhere shows his preference for the conservative side in politics. We should indeed rejoice could we confront this Aristotle with Thucydides, and see what truth there is in his departure from our received histories. Plutarch, who uses the work constantly in the Life 1 ii. u, 12, 16-20. 2 I call it the work of Aristotle, in spite of the many critical doubts expressed in England, for I cannot ignore the persistent cita- tions of Plutarch and of many good Greek grammarians and anti- quarians, who express no word of doubt, nor do the peculiarities of style seem to me to prove anything more than carelessness in revision, or perhaps the work of a pupil under the master's direction. Cf. 53 39-] NEW EVIDENCE. 97 of Solon, evidently disregards it when he comes to treat of Themistocles and Pericles. Had Thucy- dides been a little fuller, had he given himself the trouble to preserve a few more details, we should be in a better position to face this new historical problem, and estimate the really great period of the history of Athens. And yet such was his literary genius, such his Effects of rhetorical force, that, crabbed and sour as he may have been, he has so impressed his own and his subject's importance upon the learned world as to bring the Peloponnesian war into much The Pelo- greater prominence than the greater events of? * 1 Greek history. Thus in a well-known selection world-wide of fifteen decisive battles from the world's history, q ue n c ~e. the defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse figures as a world event ; whereas it only settled the question whether one kind of Greek or another should domi- nate in Sicily, and perhaps in Greece. The domes- tic quarrels within the limits of a single nationality are not of this transcendent import. If the Car- thaginians had crushed Rome, or the northern hordes of Asia destroyed the civilization of Persia when it was growing under Cyrus, there indeed a great battle might be called a decisive event. But even had the Athenians conquered Syracuse, it is quite certain that their domination of the Greek world would have broken down from within, from the inherent weaknesses in all Greek democracies, which Plato and Aristotle have long ago analyzed and explained. H 9 8 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [40- No repre- 40. This statement requires some further illus- Greekas- m trat i n to tne modern reader, who thinks, I suppose semblies. rightly, that the surest and most stable of govern- ments is that based upon the free resolve of the whole nation. But the Athenian imperial democracy was no such government. In the first place, there was no such thing as representation in their consti- tution. Those only had votes who could come and give them at the general Assembly, and they did so at once upon the conclusion of the debate 1 . There was no Second Chamber or Higher Council to revise or delay their decisions ; no Crown ; no High Court of Appeal to settle claims against the State. The body of Athenian citizens formed the Assembly. Sections of this body formed the jury to try cases of violation of the constitution either in act or in the proposal of new laws. The result was that all outlying provinces, even had they obtained votes, were without a voice in No outly- ing mem- bers save 1 Cicero specially mentions this as a grave defect in Greek demo- cracies, and compares it with the Roman precaution of making the voting by tribes or centuries a formal act at a distinct time. Here is this important and little-known passage (pro Flacco, cap. vii.): ' Nullam enim illi nostri sapientissimi et sanctissimi viri vim concio- nis esse voluerunt ; quae scisceret plebes, aut quae populus juberet, summota condone, distributis partibus, tributim et centuriatim de- scriptis ordinibus, classibus, aetatibus, auditis auctoribus, re multos dies promulgata et cognita, juberi vetarique voluerunt. Graecorum autem totae respublicae sedentis concionis temeritate administranttir ! The Roman safeguards were, however, quite insufficient, as the course of history proved. The Athenians also had some safeguards, especially in preparing resolutions for the assembly by a previous council ; but these too were almost useless. 40.] NO CONSTITUTIONAL CHECKS. 99 the government. But as a matter of fact they had Athenian no votes, for the States which became subject to sett i e< j S j n , Athens were merely tributarv ; and nothing was subject towns, further from the ideas of the Athenians than to make them members of their Imperial Republic in the sense that a new State is made a member of the present American Republic. This it was which ruined even the great Roman Similar de- Republic, without any military reverses, and when R oman R C . its domination of the world was unshaken. Owing public. to the absence of representation, the Empire of the Roman Republic was in the hands of the city population, who were perfectly incompetent, even had they been in real earnest, to manage the government of the vast kingdoms their troops had conquered. In both cases the outsiders were gov- erned wholly for the benefit of the city crowd. The mistakes and the injustices which resulted Hence an in the Roman executive were such that any able Athenian adventurer could take advantage of the world-wide em P ire . not mam- discontent, and could play off one city faction tamable. against the other. It is not conceivable that any other general course of events would have taken place at Athens, had she become the ruler of the Hellenic world. Her Demos regarded itself as a sovran, ruling subjects for its own glory and bene- fit ; there can, therefore, be no doubt that the ex- ternal pressure of that widespread discontent which was the primary cause of the Peloponnesian war, would have co-operated with politicians within, if there were no enemies without, and that ambitious H 2 ,cc THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [41. military chiefs, as at Rome, would have wrested the power from the sovran people either by force or by fraud. Hence I contend that the result of the Pelopon- nesian war even in its largest crisis had little im- port in the world's history. That the little raids and battles, the capture of a couple of hundred Spar- tans, or the defeat of twenty ships should still be studied with minuteness, and produce libraries of modern criticism, is due solely to the power of the historian and the just preeminence of the famous language in which he wrote his book. The 41. This is, I think, the most signal instance Thuc^ r on recor d of the falsification of the proper per spec- dides. tive of history by individual literary genius. It was a commonplace in old days that Achilles and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Diomede, all the famous heroes of the Trojan war, would have died in obscurity and passed out of sight but for the voice of the inspired poet. How much truer is it that Phormion and Brasidas, Gylippus and Lamachus would have virtually disappeared from history but for the eloquence of the Attic historian ! Pericles would have remained an historic figure, and so does Lysander(who is almost beyond the period), whether any single historian intended it or not. The rest were important in their day and to their city, not beyond these limits. The really great spirits from whom the Athens of that day derives her eternal supremacy, which no Lysander could take away, are, except Pericles, never mentioned in all his 42.] THUCYDIDES AND THE GRAMMARIANS. JOI work. No one could ever suspect, from this severe and business-like narrative, that the ^np&^slDletitJitJ : '; ; ; j architects, sculptors, and dramatic poets the' world ' has yet seen were then jostling each other in the streets of Athens. It seems thankless to complain of what Thucy- His calm- dides has not done, instead of acknowledging what sumed. he undertook to do and has performed with extra- ordinary ability. Never was the history of a long war written with more power, judgment, and, I was going to say, impartiality. But I honestly believe that his book would have been far inferior had it indeed been coldly impartial ; and I think Grote has shown, what I have supplemented in my Greek Literature, that strong personal feelings underlie the apparent calmness of his decisions 1 . 43. This estimate of Thucydides is, however, one which will make its way but slowly in the English classical world, by which I mean that large and important body who teach classics to schoolboys and college students, and the school- He is master interest so completely commands our ^escholas- literary journals that any opinion which runs coun- tic interest, ter to scholastic traditions is sure to be set down there also as the outcome of rashness or of ignor- ance. For Thucydides, in addition to his just in- fluence as a great writer, has enlisted in his favour all those to whom Greek grammar with its intrica- cies is the most divine of all pursuits. 1 Cf. my Hist. Gk. Lit. ii. i, chap. 5. 102 , , THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [42. ccount v if life Speakers, as one of them tells us, strove .rcl tc conceal what they had to say under new and difficulties, startling forms, in order to outrun in smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of intel- lectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable reputations depend. It is but natural that this school, or these schoolmen, should become so en- amoured of his intricacies as to love them with a love passing the love of women, and consequently to resent bitterly any word of depreciation which affects the importance of their idol. lie remains Enthusiastic study of any subject is always praise- of worthy ; the insistence upon minute accuracy, and critical contempt for slovenliness in writing, are always to scholars. . . t ,. be admired and encouraged, for it is to these quali- ties in the minute scholars that we owe much of our precision in thinking, and still more the sense of clearness and correctness in style. To this class, therefore, let Thucydides remain forever the foremost of books ; but let them not bully us into the belief that because they have studied his grammar more carefully than any other, they are therefore to decide that he is absolutely fault- less as a narrator, and absolutely trustworthy as a historian. 4 2.] HOLM'S ESTIMATE. 103 I have already dealt with this latter point 1 ; what I am here concerned with is the exaggerated place given in our modern histories to the petty feuds and border-raids of his often tedious chronicle, tedious only because the events he describes are completely trivial. Herodotus, on the other hand, Herodotus , , , . . , , ,-r^ underrated is apt to be underrated in these modern days, ihe i nc0 mpaii- field he covers is so wide, and the chances of error son - in observation so great, that it is impossible he should not often be found wrong. But what would our notions of earlier Greece or Asia Minor be without his marvellous prose epic ? The reader will pardon me for expressing my satisfaction, that this comparative estimate of the two great historians which I published some twenty years ago, and which is still regarded by many of my English critics as a mere paradox, has now become a widely and solidly defined belief among the best German critics. Of course they began by exaggerating the new view. Muller-Striibing espe- cially, as has been freely exposed by his opponents, has advanced from criticism to censure, from censure The critics to contempt of Thucydides. This is of course silly pedantry. Thucydides was a very great historian, and whoever cannot recognize it, shows that he has no proper appreciation for this kind of genius. But let the reader consult the passages in which the newest, and perhaps the best, of Greek histories, Holm's, gives a summary of the researches on the contrasted masters of historiography, and he will see 1 Above, 28. 104 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [43. that the result is much the same as that which I have long advocated. Holm argues (ii. pp. 346 sq.) that Herodotus has been underrated ; he argues (ibid. pp. 369 sq.) that Thucydides has been over- rated. Let me call particular attention to the details of the latter estimate, as one to which I thoroughly subscribe. But let no one charge me with despising the great Athenian ; I believe I appreciate his great- ness far better than do his random panegyrists. 43. Let us pass by anticipation to another re- markable case of distorted perspective, likewise due to transcendent literary ability. The Ana- The next great author who has fascinated the Xenophon. world by the grace and vividness of his style is the Athenian Xenophon. In his famous Anabasis, or Expedition of the Ten Thousand to assist the insurgent Cyrus, he has told us the story of what must have happened (on a smaller scale) many times before, of Greek mercenaries being induced by large pay to serve in the quarrels of remote Asiatic sovrans, and finding their patron assassin- ated or defeated. They had then their choice of taking service under his rival (with the chance of being massacred), or of cutting their way out of the country to some Hellenic colony. It seems to have been mainly due to the ability and eloquence of Xenophon that the present very large and formid- able body of mercenaries chose and carried out the latter course. His narrative of this Retreat, in which he claims to have played the leading part, is one of the most delightful chapters of Greek history. 43-] THE TEN THOUSAND DISPERSED. 105 But in all the modern accounts, without exception, The weak- both the events and the narrator have assumed p ers i a i ong - what seem to me gigantic proportions. It is not recognized, the least true that the Greeks were dependent upon this source for their knowledge of the weakness* of the Persian Empire. The campaigns of Agesilaus in Asia Minor, which were almost synchronous, and not by any means suggested (so far as we know) by the expedition, showed the same facts clearly enough. The military weakness of the Empire was already a commonplace. Its financial power, in the face of the poor and divided Greek States, was the real difficulty in the way of a Hellenic conquest. The manner in which the Ten Thousand were Reception received, upon their return to Greek lands, shows Thousand* all this plainly enough. Instead of bein^ hailed as n their re - u u j j turn - pioneers of a new conquest, as heroes who had done what nobody dreamed of doing before, they were merely regarded as a very large and therefore very dangerous body of turbulent marauders, who had acquired cohesion and discipline by the force of adversity, and who might make a dangerous attack on any civilized city, unless a little time were gained, during which their strength and harmony would give way to defections, and quarrels among themselves. Their ill-gotten wealth would soon be squandered, and they must then be induced to seek new service separately, and not in such a mass as to intimidate their employers. This is the rational account of what historians 106 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [44. The army often represent as the shabby, or even infamous, dissipated. /-IT i i 111. conduct of the Lacedaemonians, then the leading power in Greece. The policy they adopted was as prudent as it was successful, and the Ten Thou- sand melted away as quickly as they were gathered ; but we can hardly hope that many of them retired into so innocent and cultivated a leisure as Xeno- phon did in after years. Xeno- 44. So much for the expedition ; now a word phon s strategy, or two concerning this famous Xenophon. If his expedition had indeed made the figure in the con- temporary world that it does in his Anabasis and in modern histories, who can doubt that he would have been recognized as one of the chief mili- tary leaders of the age ; and, as his services were in the market, that he would have been at once employed, either as a general or as a minister of war, in the memorable campaigns which occupied the Greeks after his return? Why did he never command an army again 1 ? Why was 1 Some of the historians note naively enough, that the performance of Xenophon is very wonderful, seeing he had never learned the art of war, or commanded in any previous campaign. Wonderful in- deed, but was it a real fact? Holm, who seems to me really awake to the common-sense difficulties which seldom strike learned men, feels this, but accounts for it (iii. 182) in a very surprising way. I may premise that Xenophon is perhaps his favourite authority, whom he defends against all attacks with great spirit. His answer to the question why Xenophon never again commanded an army, is this : He could have, but he would not, because he was exiled from his native city, and despised the career of a mercenary chief ! In other words a very ambitious young man, who had deliber- ately chosen the profession of foreign adventure, when he had sue- 44.] CHARACTER OF THE ANABASIS. IC>7 he never tried as a strategist against Epamin- ondas, the rising military genius of the age? The simple fa'ct is that he has told us the whole story of his Retreat from his own point of view ; he has His real not failed to put himself into the most favourable ^s lite- light; and it is more than probable that the ac- rai 7- counts given by the other mercenaries did not place him" in so preeminent a position. The Anabasis is a most artistic and graceful self-panegyric of the author, disguised under an apparently candid and simple narrative of plain facts, perhaps even brought out under a false name, Themistogenes of Syra- cuse, to help the illusion ; nor was it composed at the spur of the moment, and when there were many with fresh memories ready to contradict him, but after the interest in the affair had long blown over, and his companions and rivals were scattered or dead. It is of course an excellent text for Grote to A special develop into his favourite historical sermon, that the broad literary and philosophical culture of the Athenian democracy fitted any man to take up ceeded and shown his transcendent powers, stops short because he despises that profession. Is not this most improbable? Had Xenophon brought home with him a really first-rate reputation, he would not have been required to fight the battles of his native city as a mercenary leader : he would very soon have recovered himself in popularity, and have become a leading Athenian. It was not there- fore because he could and would not, but because he would and could not, that he retired into obscurity. There is no reason to think he had excited any great or lasting odium at Athens. We hardly know for certain why- he was banished. 108 THE GREAT HISTORIANS. [45. suddenly any important duties, even so special as the management of a campaign. But however true or false this may be, it is certain that Xeno- phon's contemporaries did not accept him as a military genius, and that he spent his after years of soldiering in attendance upon a second-rate Spartan general as a volunteer and a literary pane- gyrist. Xenophon 45. For in me the suspicion that Xenophon kus and 1 " ma y have been guilty of strong self-partiality in Epami- the Anabasis was first awakened by the reflection that his later works show the strongest partiality for his patron, and the most niggardly estimate of the real master of them all, the Theban Epamin- ondas. If instead of spending his talents in glori- fying the Spartan king a respectable and no doubt able but ordinary personage, he had undertaken with his good special knowledge to give us a true account of the military performances of Epamin- ondas, then indeed he would have earned no ordi- nary share of gratitude from all students of the world's greatness. He was in the rare position of being a contemporary, a specialist, standing before injustice of the greatest man of the age, and capable of both lenica understanding his work and explaining it to us with literary perfection ; yet his Hellenica is gene- rally regarded as a work tending to diminish the achievements of the Theban hero 1 . 1 This is stoutly denied by Holm, G. G. iii. 15, and 181 sq., who cites Breitenbach's Edition and Stern's researches in support of his opinion. He regards Xenophon as perfectly impartial to others throughout his 45-] WIDE EDUCATION OF XENOPHON. 1 09 Happily we have here means to correct him, and to redress the balance which he has not held with justice. Shall we believe that when he had no one to contradict him, and his own merits to discuss, he is likely to have been more strictly impartial ? Xenophon will never cease to be a popular figure, and most deservedly ; for he added to the full edu- cation of an Athenian citizen in general intelligence, in politics, and in art, the special training given by the conversations of Socrates, and the tincture of occasional abstract thinking. But this was only Yet Xeno- a part of his education. He learned knowledge of eSvedly the world and of war by travel and exciting cam- popular. paigns, and completed his admirable and various training by a close intimacy with the best and most aristocratic Spartan life, together with that devotion to field-sports which is so far more gentlemanly and improving than training for athletics. In the whole range of Greek literature he appears the most cul- tivated of authors, in his external life he combines everything which we desire in the modern gentle- man, though his superficiality of judgment and lesser gifts place him far below Thucydides, or even Polybius. Hellenica. Whether he was so to himself in the Anabasis is of course another question, which Holm has not touched. It may be perfectly true, as Holm insists, that not a single false statement has ever been proved against the author of the Hellenica, but does this demonstrate that he was impartial ? It is in the selection, in the suppression, in the marshalling of his facts ; it is in his perspective that disguised partiality seems to have been shown. CHAPTER VI. POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BC. Literary 46. What may most properly make the modern the Greeks historian pause and revise his judgment of the Athe- against de- n j an democracy, is the evident dislike which the mocracy. most thoughtful classes, represented by these great historians, and by the professed pupils of Socrates, displayed to this form of society 1 . We are now so accustomed to histories written by modern Radicals, or by men who do not think out their politics, that we may perhaps be put off with the plea that the democracy which these authors and thinkers dis- liked and derided, and which some of them tried to overthrow, was a debased form of what had been established under Pericles, and that it was the acci- dental decay or the accidental abuses of democracy which disgusted them, whereas its genuine greatness 1 The tract de Repub. Athen. handed down to us among Xeno- phon's works, is now, by general agreement, assigned to some author who lived earlier, and wrote it before the close of the Peloponnesian war. It does not, therefore, express the individual opinion of Xeno- phon, though it is an attack upon the Athenian democracy by a determined and bitter aristocrat. Upon the details, cf. my Gk. Lit. ii. p. 47. 47-] THE POLICY OF PERICLES. Ill had been clearly manifested by the great century of progress which had now come sadly to a close. Ernst Curtius, a German savant of the highest Vacillation type, has so little thought out this subject that on critics. " one page we find him saying that the voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a proof of the high condition of their State ; whereas on another he says their voluntary submis- sion to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its degene- racy. But we can hardly expect any real apprecia- tion of the working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360 B. c. 1 But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly Crete's the conditions of the problem. He argues that p^f* f Cleon, on the whole, and without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered to it. 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great suc- cesses would soon have brought about its fall. But I join issue with Grote, and side with Plato, compared in thinking that the policy of Pericles, even within the conditions imposed upon him by the circum- 1 G. G. iii. pp. 221 sq. 112 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [47. stances just mentioned, was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure. Plato goes so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, frivolous, and sensual. Without actually indorsing this,, we are warranted by the course of history to say that the hope of holding a supremacy by merely keeping up with all energy and outlay a naval superiority already existing and acknow- The war ledged, was truly chimerical. Pericles thought Pericles^ *^ a t ^7 making the city impregnable which was then, against the existing means of attack, quite feasible and by keeping the sea open, he could amply support his city population and make them perfectly independent even of the territory of Attica. While they could derive money and food from their subjects and their commerce, they might gather in the rural population from the fields, and laugh at the enemy from their walls until his means were exhausted, or he was compelled to retreat for the purpose of protecting his own coasts against a hostile fleet. Hismiscal- Thucydides tells us in affecting language how )ns ' this experiment actually turned out, what was the misery of the country people crowded into the city without proper houses or furniture, sleeping in sheds and nooks of streets ; what was the rage of the farmers when they saw their homesteads go up in flames, and the labour of years devastated with ruthless completeness. Pericles had not even reckoned with the immediate effects of his singular 48.] NATIVE AGAINST MERCENARY SOLDIERS. 113 policy. Still less had he thought of the sanitary consequences of overcrowding his city, which must in any case have produced fatal sickness, and there- fore deep indignation among those who suffered from its visitation, even though no one could have anticipated the frightful intensity of the plague which ensued. But a far larger and more philosophical objection He de- may be based upon the consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a supply lation of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own afmy S of a permanently against an agricultural population yeomen, fighting, not for pay, but for the defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriot- ism. If you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan, you destroy the backbone of your fighting power ; and no outlay will secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides' day ; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather than native 1 ; and on this he bases his anticipation that the army of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military and naval power. 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in those 1 wvrjr^ jj.a\\ov ^ OIKCIOS. I 114 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [48. Advan- days, that mercenary forces could be kept at sea merce f more permanently than a body of farmers, who naries must go home frequently to look after their subsis- zfnTroops." tence and work their fields - This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbu- lent and unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating assembly 1 . The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal ; and his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so long as these were subjects, liable to oppression in any moment of panic or of passion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion, since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and the love The of separatism in their small States. I fancy that Spates ne- at no P el "id in the world's history could any small 1 Cf. on this point Polybius, xi. 13, whom I have quoted in my Greek Life and Thought, p. 416. 48.] ABORTIVE LEAGUES. 115 communities have easily been persuaded to submit cessarily to this kind of union, which was built on far too se narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost exclusive benefit of the leading city. It is necessary to insist upon these things, the want of representation in a common assembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they transgressed their State-treaties, especially for a practical writer, who holds that historical analogies are most serviceable, and help to explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that the analogies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent. Yet the necessity of combination was so great, Attempt and so keenly felt during the tyrannical ascendency ** t [ of Sparta at the opening of the next century, that several attempts were made to obtain the advan- tages, while avoiding the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made imme- diately after the battle of Cnidos (394 B.C.) and which seems to have been originated by Thebes, is passed over in silence by all our literary authori- ties, and was only discovered upon the evidence of coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban emblem Heracles throttling the snakes. The ex- istence of this confederation seems to justify the I 2 II 6 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [48. hopes of Epaminondas to make his city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of political vanity, often repeated 1 . The second The second was the well-known Athenian Con- Confede- ^ ederac 7 of " 377 B - c - of which, however, the details racy; are only preserved in an important inscription (No. 8 1 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most its details, interesting information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Eubcea, and also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions of cleruckies, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at Athens, in which Athens was not represented Decrees proposed either in the Athenian assembly or in this synod (synedrion) must be sanctioned by the other body before becoming law 2 . As might be expected, all these Leagues failed, its defects. The precautions against the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achaean League. 1 Cf. the excellent summary in Holm iii. 54-7. 2 Cf. Holm 1^.9 49-] POLITICAL THEORISTS. 117 49. The century at which we have now arrived Political in our survey the fourth before Christ was ^fourth* eminently the age of political theories devised by century, philosophers in their studies ; and they give us the conclusions to which able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at home, or power abroad. The Athenian suprem- acy had broken down ; the Spartan, a still more complete hegemony, as the Greeks called it, had gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power, as by its own inherent defects. Epaminondas has passed across the political sky, a splendid meteor, but leaving only a brief track of brilliancy which faded into night. And in every generation, if the military efficiency Greece and of Persia grew weaker, her financial supremacy Persia - became more and more apparent. In the face of all these brilliant essays and signal failures, in the face of the acknowledged intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, coupled with their continued exhibitions of political impotence in foreign policy, it was fully to be expected that Greek thinkers should discuss the causes of these contrasts, and endeavour to ascertain the laws of public happiness and the con- ditions of public strength. And so there were a series Theoreti- of essays, of which several remain, on the Greek ^ po State and its proper internal regulation, and a series of solutions for the practical difficulties of the day, especially the external dangers to which the Hel- Il8 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [49. lenic world was exposed. These documents form the main body of the splendid prose Literature of the Attic Restoration, as I have elsewhere called it 1 , and of the period which closed with the actual solution of the difficulties in foreign politics by the famous Philip of Macedon 2 . Inestimable The historian of Greece must evidently take into practical account these speculations, though they be not historian, strictly history; but the facts can hardly be under- stood and appreciated without the inestimable comments of the greatest thinkers and writers whom the country produced. Plato. Foremost among these in literary perfection is Plato, whose speculations on the proper conditions the internal conditions only of a Polity in the Hellenic sense will ever remain a monument of genius, though his ideal could hardly lead, or be in- tended to lead, to practical results. Then we have Xenophon. Xenophon, who in his political romance on the Education of Cyrus stands half-way between the mere philosopher and the practical man of the Aristotle, world. The most instructive of all is Aristotle, who, though he lived to see the old order pass away, and a new departure in the history of the race, nevertheless confined himself to the tradi- tional problems, and composed a special book his Politics on the virtues and vices of the ordinary Greek polity. The practical side, the necessary 1 That is, the Restoration of its legitimate democracy. Cf. my History of Greek Literature, part ii. cap. v. 2 Roughly speaking, 400-340 B. c. 50.] CONSTITUTION-MONGERING. 119 steps to reform and strengthen the leading States of Greece, especially in their external policy, and in the face of powerful and dangerous neighbours, we find discussed in the pamphlets of Isocrates and the public speeches of Demosthenes. It is on the proper place of these documents, and the weight assigned to them in modern histories, that I invite the reader's attention. 50. I have already mentioned the remarkable Sparta ever fact that though, at every period of this history, ^ never Spartan manners and Spartan laws commanded imitated. the respect and the admiration of all Greece, though the Spartan constitution had proved stable when all else was in constant flux and change, still no practical attempt was ever made in older Greek history to imitate this famous constitution. It shows, no doubt, in the old Greek legislators, a far keener sense of what was practical or possible that, instead of foisting upon every new or newly emancipated State the ordinances which had suc- ceeded elsewhere as a legitimate, slow, and his- toric growth, they rather sought to adapt their reforms to the conditions of each State as they found it. They fully appreciated the difference between the normal and the exceptional in legislation. The politicians of modern Europe, who are Practical repeating gaily, and without any sense of its ab- J^ a ^ 011 surdity, the experiment of handing over the Greece than British parliamentary system to half-civilized and Europe. hardly emancipated populations, and who cry in- 120 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [50. justice and shame upon those who decline to follow their advice these unhistorical and illogical states- men might well take lessons from the sobriety of Greek politicians, if their own common-sense fails to tell them that the forest-tree of centuries cannot be transplanted ; nay, even the sapling will not thrive in ungrateful soil. But although the real rulers of men in Greece saw all this clearly, it was not so with the theorists, nor indeed were they bound to observe practical limi- tations in framing the highest ideal to which man could attain. Hence we see in almost all the theorists a strong tendency to make Spartan institutions the proper type of a perfect State. Plato will not even consider the duties of an imperial or domi- nating State, he rather regards large territory and vast population as an insuperable obstacle to good government. But as a philosopher deeply interested in the real culture of the mind, perhaps as a theorist deeply impressed with the haphazard character of the traditional education, he felt that to intrust an uneducated mob with the control of public affairs was either to hand over the State to unscrupulous leaders, who would gain the favour of the crowd by false and unworthy means, or to run the chance of having the most important matters settled by the caprice of a many-headed and therefore wholly irresponsible tyrant. Every theorist that followed Plato seems to have felt the same difficulties, and therefore he and they adopted in the main the Spartan solution, 5 o.] THE QUESTION OF SUFFRAGE. 121 first, in limiting the number and condition of those to whom they would intrust power; secondly, in interfering 'from the beginning, more or less, in the education and training of the individual citizen. They differed as to the amount of control to be exercised, Plato and the Stoic Zeno were the most trenchant, and thought least of the value of individual character ; they differed as to the par- ticular form of the actual government ; whether a Theirgene- small council of philosophic elders, or some limited ^^ t sre assembly of responsible and experienced citizens, or, still better, one ideal man, the natural king among men, should direct the whole course of the State. But on the other two points they were firm, (i) es pe- First, universal suffrage had been in their opinion ^y n proved a downright failure. And let the reader remember that this universal suffrage only meant the voting of free citizens, slaves- never came within their political horizon, still more, that the free citizens of many Greek democracies, notably of the Athenian, were more highly educated than any Parliament in our own day l . We now have as an additional document on the same side, the newly discovered Polity of the Athe- 1 This Professor Freeman has admirably shown in his History of Federal Governments ; and it is generally admitted by all competent scholars. 2 It is perhaps worth calling attention to the fact that the tract on Athens in the Xenophontic collection has the same title as the newly-discovered treatise, so that some distinction is necessary in citing them. For the present the novelty of the Aristotelian book has cast the older document into oblivion. 122 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [51. which, whether it be really Aristotle's work or not, certainly was quoted as such freely by Plutarch, and represents the opinions of the early Peripatetic school. Nothing is stranger in the book than the depreciation of Pericles, as the founder of the extreme democracy of Athens, and the praise of Thucydides (son of Melesias), Nicias, and Thera- menes, as the worthiest and best of the later politi- cians, Theramenes especially, whose shiftiness is explained as the opposition of a wise and temperate man to all extremes, while he was content to live under any moderate government l . even I have already pointed out what important dif- thelrW- ferences in the notions of democracy the absence frage was o f all idea of representation, of all delay or control necessarily < _ restricted, by a second legislative body, of the veto of a constitutional sovran make this strong and con- sistent verdict not applicable by analogy to modern republics. Not that I reject Hellenic opinion as now of no value far from it ; but if we argue from analogy, we are bound to show where the analogy fits, and where it fails, above all to acknowledge the latter cases honestly. For we are not advocates pleading a cause, but inquirers seeking the truth from the successes and the sufferings of older men of like passions with ourselves. (2)Educa- 51. Secondly, the education of the citizens tion to be a 1 Cf. 'A0. rioA. c. 28. Holm (ii. p. 583) controverts my use of Plu- tarch's quotation from this chapter of Aristotle, and thinks that 1 had mistranslated the term plXriaTos. The full text now shows that Holm was mistaken and I was right. 5i.] STATE-EDUCATION. 123 should not be left to the sense of responsibility in parents, or to the private enterprise of professional teachers, but should be both organized and con- trolled by the State 1 . So firmly was this principle engrained into Greek political thinkers that Poly- bius, who came at the close of all their rich experi- ence, and whose opinion is in many respects more valuable than any previous one, expresses his Polybius' astonishment how the Romans, a thoroughly prac- ^tat the tical and sensible people, and moreover eminently Roman dis- successful, could venture to leave out of all public regarc account the question of education, and allow it to be solved by each parent as he thought fit. He pointed out this as the most profound existing con- trast to the notions of Greek thinkers 2 . We know very well how the Roman aristocracy The prac- in their best days solved the matter ; but we must ^^J deeply regret that there are no statistics, or even information, how the poorer classes at Rome fared in comparison with the Greeks. National education in Greece was certainly on a far higher level ; but here again we have an old civilization to compare with a new one, and must beware of rash inferences. 1 It is well to add, lest the reader might be misled by a false analogy, that this supervision applied to the appointment of teachers, and the regulation of teaching and of scho.ol discipline. The Greeks would have despised any system such as ours,, which limits the State control to examinations, and which tests efficiency by success in them. The modern notion of disregarding the moral and social conditions under which the young are brought up, provided they can answer at a high- class examination, would have struck them as wicked and barbarous. 2 Cf. the citation in Cicero de Repub. iv. 3. 3. 124 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [52. It is, for example, of great importance to note that the Greek State was essentially a city with its suburbs, where the children lived so near each other that day-schools could be attended by all. In a larger State, which implies a population scattered through the country, much more must be intrusted to parents, since day-schools are necessarily inade- quate 1 . This is but one of the differences to be weighed in making the comparison. To state them all would lead us beyond reasonable limits. Can a real Still, I take the verdict of the philosophers as democracy we }j wor th considering, and, indeed, there is no ever be sufficiently question which now agitates the minds of enlight- ened democrats more deeply than this : How can we expect uneducated masses of people to direct the course of public affairs with safety and with wisdom ? It is certain that even in the small, easily manage- able, and highly cultivated republics of the Greeks, men were not educated enough to regard the public weal as paramount, to set it above their narrow interests or to bridle their passions. Is it likely, then, that Education will ever do this for the State ? Are we following an ignis fatuus in setting it up as the panacea for the defects of our communities ? Christianity 52. To these grave doubts there is an ob- new S force. vious > but not > J think, a real rejoinder, when we urge that the position of the Christian religion 1 The makeshift of boarding-schools was unknown to the ancients, but at Sparta, young men were kept together even in their hours of leisure, and away from their homes, so that we must here admit a qualified exception. But what we know of this separate life is rather that of a barrack than of a school. 52.] THE EFFECTS OF RELIGION. 125 in modern education makes the latter a moral force for good far superior to any devices of legislators. While admitting unreservedly the vast progress Formal we have attained by having the Christian religion always* an integral part of all reasonable education, we demanded 11-11 by the must urge on the other side that to most people, Greeks. and at all times, religion is only a very occasional guide of action, and that what we have attained with all our preaching and teaching is rather an acquiescence in its excellence than a practical sub- mission to its directions. So far as this mere ac- quiescence in moral sanctions is to be considered, all Greek legislators took care to inculcate the teaching and the observance of a State religion, with moral sanctions, and with rewards and pun- ishments. They knew as well as we do that a public without a creed is a public without a con- science, and that scepticism, however consistent with individual sobriety and goodness, has never yet been found to serve as a general substitute for positive beliefs. But when we come to the case of superior indi- Real re- viduals, to whom religion is a living and acting ^opa-ty of force, then we have on the Greek side those exceptional splendid thinkers, whose lives were as pure a pe model as their speculations were a lesson, to the world. These men certainly did not require a higher faith to make them good citizens, and were a c law unto themselves, showing forth the work of law written in their hearts,' with a good conscience. The analogy, then, between the old Greek States and 126 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [52. ours as regards education may be closer than is usually assumed by those who have before them the contrast of religions. Greek I will mention a very different point on, which all the ancient educators were agreed, and which seems music quite strange to modern notions, I mean the capital importance of music, on account of its direct effect upon morals. They all knew that the Spartan pipes had much the same effect as the Highland pipes have now upon the soldiers who feel them to be their national expression. Hence all music might be regarded as either wholesome or unwholesome stimulant, wholesome or unwhole- some soothing, to the moral nature ; and not only does the sober Aristotle discuss with great serious- ness and in great detail the question of this influence, but he agrees with Plato in regarding the State as bound to interfere and prevent those strains, ' softly sweet in Lydian measure,' which delighted, indeed, and beguiled the sense, but disturbed and endangered the morals of men. discussed On this fascinating but difficult subject I have to ^and' already said my say in the last chapter of my studies in Social Life in Greece 1 , and I will only repeat that if the Greeks put too much stress on this side of education as affecting character, the moderns have certainly erred in the opposite directions, and are quite wrong in regarding music as an accomplish- ment purely sesthetic, as having nothing to say to the 1 Seventh Edition. It had been formerly the last chapter of my Rambles and Studies in Greece. 53.] THE PERFECT STATE. 127 practical side of our nature, our sensual passions and our moral principles. 53. It remains for us to note the chief varia- Xenophon's tions between the positions of the various theorists l on the ideal State. Xenophon tells us his views under the parable of the ideal education and government of a perfect king. But as he did hot conceive such a personage possible in the Hellenic world, he chooses the great Cyrus of Persia, a giant figure remote from the Greeks of his day, and looming through the mists of legend 1 . But he makes it quite plain that he considers the monarchy of the right man by far the most perfect form of government, and his tract on the Spartan State shows how he hated democracy, and favoured those States which reserved all power for the qualified few. Nor is Aristotle at variance with Xenophon, as Aristotle's. both his Ethics and Politics agree in conviction that there were single men superior to average society, and intended by Nature, like superior races, to rule over inferior men. It starts at once to our recollection that Aristotle had before his mind that wonderful pupil who transformed the 1 It was an artistic device, to make this paternal despot a foreign prince, living in a bygone age, of the same kind as the device of ^schylus to narrate the Persian war from the Oriental side, and make Darius a capital figure. No Greek or contemporary person could have sustained the figure of Cyrus in Xenophon's book. I need only remind the reader that the tract on the Athenian State now preserved among Xenophon's works is by an unknown author, and therefore an authority independent of Xenophon. 128 POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS. [53. Eastern world, and opened a new era in the world's Aristotle's politics. But no. The whole of Aristotle's Politics ignore 5 looks backward and . inward at the old Greek Alexander. State, small, and standing by the side of others of like dimensions, differing as despotisms, aristo- cracies, republics will differ, but not pretending to carry out a large foreign policy or to dominate the world. Evidence The recently discovered treatise on the History Foliteia f ^ e Athenian Constitution does not give us any further light as to the foreign policy which Aristotle thought best for a Greek State. Many critics are, moreover, inclined to deny the genuineness of the work, and a sharp controversy is now proceed- ing, in which, strange to say, the Germans are for the most part ready to accept the work as Aris- totle's, while the English are mostly for its rejec- tion. Against it has been urged (i) its general style, which in its easy straightforwardness does not remind the reader of the Aristotle we know ; (2) the particular occurrence of a number of words and phrases not elsewhere extant in the very large vocabulary of his works ; (3) certain inconsistencies not only with the Politics, but with Xenophon, and indeed, with the generally accepted facts of earlier Greek history. Thus while the political activity of Themistocles is prolonged, and that of Aristides is exalted beyond the other extant estimates of these men, that of Pericles is lessened into second-rate pro- portions. The praise of Theramenes as a moderate politician, as a conservative in a very radical mo- 53-] ALEXANDER INCOMMENSURABLE. 129 ment, affords no difficulty, for it is not foreign to what we know of Aristotle's views. These, how- ever, are the main objections urged by the English critics who have flooded the literary papers with their emendations. On the other hand, great Ger- man scholars, Gomperz, Wilamowitz von Mollen- dorf, Kaibel, and others, have stoutly maintained that there are no adequate reasons for doubting the unanimous testimony of later antiquity, proved as it is by many citations in Plutarch, many more in the Greek grammarians and lexicographers. They add, that we know little or nothing of Aristotle's popular style, and that his lost dialogues have been praised for their easy flow. I do not feel pre- pared, as yet, to offer an opinion for or against the treatise adhuc sub judice Us est. ~ But in any case the monarchy of Alexander is Alexander quite foreign to anything contemplated in the al ^ tlie theories or in the reflections of Aristotle.7 The theorists an _J incommen- Greek theorist, even such as he was, could not surabie adjust this new and mighty phenomenon to the tnat we cannot for a moment conceive a acquittal, pure and high-souled patriot, who had risked all for the national cause, to have been guilty of tak- ing bribes or embezzling money. Schafer indeed distinctly says 1 that his judgment is determined by his estimate of the moral character of its hero ; and so not only weak and illogical speeches, but immoral or dishonest acts, are simply to be set aside as inconceivable in so lofty and unsullied a nature. Whether this be a sensible way of writing history, I leave the reader to decide. What I am now going to urge is this, that in the morality of Attic politics, taking money privately was not thought disgraceful, but was, with certain restrictions, openly asserted to be quite justifiable. Morality of Hypereides puts it plainly in his speech in this expounded ver y case - Seeing that it was not the practice by Hyper- at Athens to pay salaries to politicians for their ser- vices, the public, he says, was quite prepared that they should make indirect profits and receive money privately for their work ; the one thing intolerable was that they should take it from the enemies of their country or to prejudice Athenian interests. Modern In England we have had the good fortune to afleast* 1 * ^ nc ^ r ^ cn men f hig n traditions to carry on the repudiates affairs of the nation, and even where we do not, 1 Demosthenes, iii. 239 et passim : cf. Curtius, G. G. iii. 774 (note 44). 6i.] MODERN SENTIMENT STRICTER 149 or used not, to give salaries, it has been long these thought disgraceful to make politics the source of pl private gain. How far it was done or not, in spite of this feeling, we need not inquire. There can be no doubt that now, at all events, there are large numbers of men supporting themselves by a parlia- mentary career ; and it is usually said of America also, that politics are there regarded as a lucrative profession, and that the men who spend their lives in politics from mere ambition or from pure patriotism are very rare indeed. Still I think modern sentiment, theoretically at least, brands these indirect profits as disgraceful ; nor do I think any modern advocate would describe such a practice as perfectly excusable in the way that Hypereides expresses it. We are dealing, therefore, with a condition of public morality in which taking bribes, to put it plainly, was not at all considered a heinous offence, provided always that they were not taken to injure the State. You might therefore be a patriot at Athens, and yet make that patriotism a source of profit. This combination of high and sordid principles AS regards seems so shocking to modern gentlemen that I ^jfave must remind them of two instances not irrelevant Walpole to the question in hand. In the first place men who were thoroughly honourable and served their country faithfully, as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole, have thought it quite legitimate to cor- rupt with money those under them and those 150 PRACTICAL POLITICS. [62. opposed to them. Though they would scorn to receive bribes, they did not scruple to offer them ; and they have left it on record that they found few men unwilling to accept such bribes in some indirect or disguised form. and the Again, if the reader will turn to the narratives patriots of f tne g reat War of Liberation in Greece, which our own lasted some ten years of this century (1821-1831), and will study the history of the national leaders who fought all the battles by sea and land, and con- tributed far more than foreign aid to the success of that remarkable Revolution, he will find that on the one hand they were actuated with the strongest and most passionate feelings of patriotism, while on the other they did not scruple to turn the war to their own profit 1 . They were klephts, bandits, assassins. They often took bribes to save the families of Turks, and then allowed them to be massacred. They made oaths and broke them, signed treaties and violated them. And yet there is not the smallest doubt that they were strictly patriots, in the sense of loving their country, and even shedding their blood for it. Analogous 63. Let us now come back to the case of of Demo- 6 Demosthenes. At the opening of his career he 1 Finlay even goes so far as to say that the islanders of Hydra, who were certainly the most prominent in the cause of patriotism, were actuated by no higher motives than despair at the loss of the lucrative monopoly they had enjoyed of visiting all the ports of Europe during the great Napoleonic wars under the protection of the neutral flag of Turkey ! The patriotism of these people did not include gratitude. 62.] A PATRIOT, BUT NOT HONEST. 151 would have gladly obtained money and men from Macedon to use against Persia ; for Persia then seemed a danger to Greece. Later on, his policy was to obtain money from Persia to attack Mace- don ; and we are told that in the crisis before Chaeronea he had control of large funds of foreign gold, which he administered as he chose. The one The end great end was to break the power of Macedon. And so I have not the smallest doubt that if he thought the gold of Harpalus would enable him to emancipate Athens, he was perfectly ready to accept it, even on the terms of screening Harpalus from any personal danger, provided this did not balk the one great object in view. Thus the telling of a deliberate lie, which to modern gentle- men is a crime of the same magnitude as taking a bribe, is in the minds of many of our politicians justified by urgent public necessity 1 . It is hardly worth while to give instances of this notorious laxity in European public life. Is it reasonable, is it fair, to try Demosthenes by a far higher standard ? This is why I contend that it is illogical and unhistorical to argue that because Demosthenes was an honourable man and a patriot, therefore he 1 But according to our evidence, Demosthenes did not deny that he had taken the money ; he pleaded as an excuse that he had advanced for the Theoric Fund, for the benefit of the Athenians, twenty talents, and that he had recouped himself for this money. This is the plea put into his mouth by Hypereides (in Demosth. 10). Such a defence, which merely amounted to making the Athenian public an unwitting accomplice, is so suicidal in Demosthenes' mouth, that I hesitate to accept it as it stands, though Holm (G. G. iii. 420) does so. 153 PRACTICAL POLITICS. Low aver- age of Greek national morality. Demo- sthenes above it. could not have done what he was convicted of doing by the Areopagus 3 . At no time was the average morality of the Greeks very high. From the days of Homer down, as I have shown amply in my Social Life in Greece, we find a low standard of truth and honesty in that brilliant society, which is gilded over to us by their splendid intellectual gifts. As Ulysses in legend, Themistocles in early, Aratus in later history are the types which speak home to Greek imagination and excite the national admiration, so in a later day Cicero, in a remarkable passage, where he discusses the merits and demerits of the race 2 , lays it down as an axiom that their honesty is below par, and will never rank in court with a Roman's word. Exceptions there were, such as Aristides, So- crates, Phocion ; but they never enlisted the sym- pathy, though they commanded the respect, of the Greek public. Nay, all these suffered for their honesty. I do not believe Demosthenes to have been below the average morality of his age, far from it ; he was in all respects, save in military skill, much above it : but I do not believe he was 1 All the evidence has been justly weighed by Holm, G. G. iii. 420-4, who comes to the same conclusion which I had put forward twenty years ago, long before the recent change of opinion concern- ing Demosthenes. That the Athenians condemned the orator justly, and to a moderate penalty, can be demonstrated from his own admis- sions. Political expediencies doubtless secured his conviction ; they do not prove it to have been unjust. 2 Pro Flacco, cap. iv. Gracca fides was a stock phrase. 62.] THE ART OF DEMOSTHENES. 153 at all of the type of his adversary, Phocion, who was honest and incorruptible in the strictest modern sense. The illusion has here again been produced by Deep effect the perfect art of Demosthenes, whose speeches rhetorical read as if he spoke the inmost sentiments of his earnest- mind and laid his whole soul open with all earnest- m ness and sincerity to the hearer. I suppose there was a day when people thought this splendid, direct, apparently unadorned eloquence burst from the fulness of his heart, and found its burning expression upon his lips merely from the power of truth and earnestness to speak to the hearts of other men. We know very well now that this is the most absurd of estimates. Every sentence, every clause, was turned and weighed ; the rythm of every phrase was balanced ; the very interjections and exclamations were nicely calculated. There never was any speaking or writing more strictly artificial since the world of literature began. But Theperfec- as the most perfect art upon the stage attains the ^^obe exact image of nature, so the perfection of Greek apparently oratory was to produce the effect of earnestness and simplicity by the most subtle means,^ adding concealed harmonies of sound, and figures of thought, by which the audience could be charmed and beguiled into a delighted acquiescence. This is the sort of rhetorician with whom we have to deal, and who regarded the simple and trenchant Phocion as the most dangerous ' primer of his periods.' To many persons such a school 154 PRACTICAL POLITICS. [62. of eloquence, however perfect, will not seem the strictest school for plain uprightness in action ; and they will rather be surprised at the eagerness of modern historians to defend him against all accu- sations, than at the decisive, though reluctant, condemnation which he suffered at the hands of his own citizens 1 . All the life of Demosthenes shows a strong theatrical tendency, even as he is said to have named VTTOKPKTLS (the art of delivery) as the essence of eloquence. It is in this connection that Holm justly finds fault with the modern critics, who reject indeed the ribaldry of ^schines as mendacious, but set down that of Demosthenes as a source of sober history. The scandalous accusa- tions made by all these orators against their oppo- nents have one distinct parallel in earlier history the sallies of the Old Comedy. This kind of political play died out with the rise of dramatic oratory, which was fully as libellous. Holm's remark is also worth repeating in this connection, that the dialectical discussions of the later tragedy were appropriated by the philosophers, whose dialogues satisfied the strong taste of the Athenians for this kind of intellectual exercise. ' 1 Cf. now the sensible remarks of Holm, G. G. 501 sq., who criti- cises this exceedingly studied oratory from the very same standpoint. CHAPTER VIIL ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 63. As I have said already, the death of The further Demosthenes is the favourite terminus for the poli- tical historians of Greece. But let us not grow history. weary, let us survey the fortunes of the race for some centuries more, touching upon those turning- points or knotty points where it seems that the evidence has not been duly stated or weighed. In approaching the work and the character ofDroysen's A1 , - ^ Geschichte Alexander, we come upon a new authority among j es ^/. modern historians, whom we have not yet en- lenismus. countered. Droysen, who unfortunately devoted the evening of his life to Prussian history, employed his brilliant abilities for years in researches upon the history of Alexander and of his immediate successors. His latest work on this period is no doubt the fullest and best to which we can refer, and it seems a very great omission that it has not been as yet translated into our language. This is more specially to be desired as we have This period no great English history of these times. It is but ne giected another instance of what has been so often urged b y En s lish historians. 1 56 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [63. in these pages. Greek history has been in the hands of people with literary and scholastic in- terests. So long as there are great authors to be translated, explained, panegyrized, all the most minute events are recorded and discussed with care ; but as soon as we come to an epoch certainly not less important in human affairs, perhaps more decisive than any that had gone before in shaping the future history of the world, we are deserted by our modern historians, because the Greeks had lost that literary excellence which makes their earlier records the proper training for the schoolboy and the collegian 1 . We are now reduced to Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, Strabo, for our materials, and there are those who think that the moral splen- dour and unfailing interest of the famous Parallel Nature Lives do not atone for the want of Attic grace and authorities strength which marks the decadence of Greek prose literature. Yet surely to the genuine historian, to whom all these records are merely sources of in- formation on the course of affairs and the charac- ters of men, literary perfection should only be an agreeable accident, an evidence, if you like, of that day's culture, not a gauge to test the pre-eminence of one century or one nation over another. 1 HenceFynes Clinton's third volume of Fasti, now fifty years old, is still by far the most complete collection of materials for studying later Hellenism. He not only gives all manner of out-of-the-way texts in full, but also a very excellent sketch of each of the Hellenistic monar- chies, with dates and other credentials. Considering the time of its appearance (1845), it may be regarded as one of the finest monuments of English scholarship. 64.] THE PREJUDICES OF GROTE. 157 64. Accordingly, the character of Alexander Alexander's and his work have not yet been sufficiently weighed MstorystiU and studied to afford us a perfectly clear picture, dis P^ed. which might carry conviction to the majority of readers, and finally fix his place in history. As I said above 1 , Grote's picture of him the only recent study of the period in England previous to my own Alexander s Empire and Greek Life and Thought is so manifestly unfair that no candid judge will be satisfied with it. If any other writer had used against Demosthenes or Pericles such evidence as Grote cites and believes against Alexander, the great historian would have cried shame upon him, and refuted his arguments with the high satisfac- tion of supporting an unanswerable case. Thus, for example, Grote finds in Q. Curtius, a Grote's un- late, rhetorical, and very untrustworthy Latin his- torian of Alexander, theatrical details of Alexander's evidence cruelties to the heroic defender of Gaza, or the mythi- n fm! nS cal descendants of the Milesian Branchidse who had settled in Inner Asia, details unknown to Arrian, unknown apparently to the Athenians of the day, and fairly to be classed with the king's adventures among the Amazons or in the land beyond the Sun. Yet these stories have their distinct effect upon Grote's estimate of Alexander, whom he esteems hardly a Hellene, but a semi-barbarian conqueror, of transcendent military abilities, only desirous of making for himself a great Oriental despot-monarchy, with a better and more efficient 1 Cf. 10. i 5 8 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [65- Droysen's estimate. military and civil organization, but without any preparations for higher civilization. The estimate of Droysen is nearer the truth, but still not strictly the truth itself 1 . To him the Ma- cedonian is a political as well as a military genius of the highest order, who is educated in all the views of Aristotle, who understands thoroughly that the older forms of political life are effete, that small separate States require to be united under a strong central control. He even divines that the wealth and resources of Asia require regeneration through Greek intelligence and enterprise, and therefore the ' marriage of Europe and Asia/ of which the manifest symbol was the wholesale matrimony of his officers with Persian ladies, was the real aim and goal of all his achievements. As such Alexander is more than the worthy pupil of Aristotle, and the legitimate originator of a new and striking form of civilization. Tendency 65. There is, I think, a great tendency, when- to attribute L . , , . , calculation ever we com e to estimate a great and exceptional to genius, genius, to regard him as manifesting merely a higher degree of that conscious ability called talent, 1 With the usual zeal of a specialist, who not only makes a hero his own, but defends him against every criticism, Droysen even justi- fies Alexander's introduction of the Oriental obeisances at his court. As Holm observes, such ceremonies, in themselves impolitic as regards free subjects, were quite inconsistent with the familiarities of the drinking-parties, which Alexander would not deny himself. A Persian King would have understood this, not so a Macedonian. The latest estimate, that of Holm (iii. 403 sq.}, appears to me also far the best. Yet he too, seems to attribute too much consciousness to the youthful Alexander. 65.] MILITARY INNOVATIONS. 1 59 or cleverness. It is much easier to understand this view of genius than to give any rational account of its spontaneity, its unconscious and unreflective in- Its sponta- spirations, which seem to anticipate, and solve with- ne out effort, questions laboriously answered by the patient research or experiment of ordinary minds 1 . We talk of ' flashes of genius/ When these flashes come often enough, and affect large political ques- tions, we have results which baffle ordinary mortals, and are easily mistaken either for random luck or acute calculation. If I am right, Alexander started with few definite Alexander's ideas beyond the desire of great military conquests, tece? On this point his views were probably quite clear, dents - and no doubt often reasoned out with his early companions. He had seen the later campaigns of Philip, and had discovered at Chaeronea what the shock of heavy cavalry would do against the best infantry the Greek world could produce. In his very first operations to put down revolt and secure his crown, he had made trial of his field artillery, and of the marching powers of his army through the difficult Thracian country. He therefore required no Aristotle to tell him that with the combined arms of Greece and Macedonia he could conquer the Persian Empire. His reckless exposure of his life at the Granicus and at Issus may indeed be interpreted as the divine confidence of a genius in his star, but 1 Thus Timoleon set up in his house a shrine to Auro/iarta, the spontaneous impulse which had led him to many brilliant successes. Cf. my Greek Life and Thought, p. no. 160 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [66. seems to me nothing more than a manifest defect in his generalship, counterbalanced to some extent by the enthusiasm it aroused in his household troops. He learns B u t it also taught him a very important lesson. Persian He had probably quite underrated the high qualities P ers * an n t>les. Their splendid bravery and unshaken loyalty to their king in all the battles of the campaign, their evident dignity and liberty under a legitimate sovran, must have shown him that these were indeed subjects worth having, and destined to be some day of great importance in checking Greek discontent or Macedonian insubor- dination. The fierce and stubborn resistance of the great Aryan barons of Sogdiana, which cost him more time and loss than all his previous conquests, must have confirmed this opinion, and led to that recognition of the Persians in his empire which was so deeply resented by his Western subjects. He dis- 66. His campaigns, on the other hand, must to V fuse thl have at the same time forced this upon his mind, nations in {hat the deep separation which had hitherto existed Alexandria. , TT T between East and West would make a homogeneous empire impossible, if pains were not taken to fuse the races by some large and peaceful process 1 . 1 We hear of the complaints of Macedonians and Greeks. The complaints of the Persians have not been transmitted to us ; but as they were certainly more just and well-founded, and as the king was living in their midst, where he could not but hear them, are we rash in asserting that they must have been fully as important in influenc- ing his decision ? Could the many Persian princesses, married to high Macedonian officers, and their native retinues, have been satis- fied or silenced without large concessions ? 66.] DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE. l6l This problem was the first great political difficulty he solved; and he solved it very early in his career by the successful experiment of founding a city on the confines of the Greek seas and the Asiatic continent, into which Jews and Egyptians crowded along with Greeks, and produced the first specimen of that composite Hellenistic life which soon spread over all his empire. This happy experiment, no doubt intended as an experiment, and perhaps the easiest and most obvious under the circumstances, must have set Alexander's mind into the right groove. Further advances into Asia showed him the immense field open to conquest by his arms, and also by the higher culture and enterprise of Greeks and Jews. He must have felt that in the foundation of chains of cities peopled by veterans and traders he would secure not only a military frontier and military communications, but entrepots for the rising trade His de- which brought new luxuries from the East, and new ofcom- 6 ^ inventions from the West. Two distinct causes merce. tended largely to promote this commerce, the vigor- ous maintenance of peace and security on roads and frontiers, and still more the dissemination of a Diffusion vast hoard of gold captured in the Persian treasuries. of golcL This hoard, amounting, to several millions of our money, not only stimulated trade by its mere circu- lation, but afforded the merchant a medium of exchange as superior in convenience to baser metals as bank-notes are to gold. The new merchant could pay out of his girdle in gold as much as M 1 62 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [66. his father had paid out of a camel's load in silver or copper. I have no doubt the Jews were the first people to profit by these altered circumstances, and thus to attain that importance from Rhodes to Rhagae which comes to light so suddenly and silently in the history of the Diadochi. Develop- These changes seem to me to have dawned Alexander's gradually, though quickly, upon the powerful mind views. O f t h e conqueror, and to have transformed him from a young knight-errant in search of fame into a statesman facing an enormous responsibility. His intense and indefatigable spirit knew no re- pose except the distraction of physical excitement ; and unfortunately, with the growth of larger views, his love of glory and of adventure was not stilled. His No cares of State or legislative labours were able romantic , , r 1 j ^.i imagina- to quench the romance of his imagination and the tion. longing to make new explorations and new con- quests. This is the feature which legends of the East and West have caught with poetic truth ; they have transformed the visions of his fancy into the chronicle of his life. But all that he did in the way of real government, of practical advancement in civilization, of respecting and adjusting con- flicting rights among his various subjects, seems to me the result of a rapid practical insight, a large comprehension of pressing wants and useful reforms, not the working out of any mature theory. Hence I regard it as nonsense to call the politician No pupil of and the king in any important sense the pupil of Aristotle. Aristotle. There is hardly a point in the Politics 67.] ALEXANDER AND NAPOLEON. 163 which can be regarded as having been adopted in the Macedonian settlement of the world. The whole conditions of this problem and its solution were non-Hellenic, non-speculative, new. 67. It is quite possible that some of Alexan- der's most successful ordinances were not fully understood by himself, if what I have said above of the spontaneous action of genius be true. But certainly many of them were clearly seen and really planned. What astonishes us most is the His supernatural quickness and vigour of the man. He died at an early age, but we may well question whether he died young. His body was hacked with wounds, worn with hard exercise and still harder drinking. His mind had undergone a per- petual strain. We feel that he lived at such a rate that to him thirty years were like a century of ordinary life. It is a favourite amusement to compare the great Compar men of different epochs, who are never very similar, JJa for a great genius is an individual belonging to no class, and can neither be copied nor replaced. Nevertheless it may be said that Napoleon shows more points of resemblance than most other con- querors to the Macedonian king. Had he died of fever on his way to Russia, while his Grand Army was unbroken, he would have left a military reputation hardly inferior to Alexander's. He won his campaigns by the same rapidity in movement, the same resource in sudden emergencies. But if Alexander's strategy was similar to that of Napo- M 2, 164 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [67. and Icon, his tactics on the battlefield bear the most >mwe 1. cur j ous resemblance to those which Cromwell de- vised for himself under analogous circumstances. Both generals saw that by organizing a heavy cavalry under perfect control, and not intended for mere pursuit, they could break up any infantry formation then possible. Both accordingly won all their battles by charges of this cavalry, while the enemy's cavalry, often equally victorious in attack, went in wild pursuit, and had no further effect in deciding the contest. It is even the case that both chose their right wing for their own attack, and used their infantry as the defensive arm of the action. This curious analogy, which seems never to have been noticed, only shows how great minds will find out the same solution of a difficulty, whenever like circumstances arise. It is in the Use of use of field artillery, which Alexander brought to artillery, j^^j. j n q u j te a nove i wav upon the northern bar- barians in his first campaign, that we should probably find, were our evidence more complete, a resemblance to the tactics which Napoleon em- ployed at Waterloo, attacking with cavalry and artillery together, in a manner which appeared strange even to Wellington. But the analogy to Napoleon holds good be- yond the battlefield. Although both conquerors commenced their career as soldiers, both showed themselves indefatigable in office-work of a peace- ful kind, and exceedingly able in the construction of laws. Napoleon imposed, if he did not originate, 68.] THE CLAIM TO DIVINITY. 165 the best code in modern Europe, and he is known to have worked diligently and with great power at its details. Both showed the same disagreeable insistence Vain but upon their own superiority to other men, whose vious? rivalry they could not brook. But Alexander sought to maintain it by exalting himself to a superhuman position, Napoleon by degrading his rivals with the poisoned weapons of calumny and lies. The falsehoods of Napoleon's official docu- ments have never been surpassed. Alexander did not sink so low ; but the assertion of divinity seems to most of us moderns a more monstrous violation of modesty, and a flaw which affects the whole character of the claimant. 68. So strongly is this felt that an acute writer, His as- Mr. D. C. Hogarth, has endeavoured to show l that Sd^toity this too was one of the later fables invented about questioned. Alexander, and that the king himself never per- sonally laid claim to a divine origin. The criticism of the evidence in this essay is excellent, and to most people will seem convincing. Nevertheless, after due examination of the matter, I am satisfied that the conclusion is wrong, and there is good rea- son to think that the visit to the temple of Ammon was connected with the policy of deriving Alexan- der's origin from that god. The very name Alexandria, given at that moment to his new foundation, was a formation only hitherto known in connection with a god's name. The taunt of his 1 In the Historical Review for 1887, PP- 3 J 7> sqq. 1 66 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. [68. soldiers at Babylon, that he should apply to his father Ammon, is perfectly well attested, and implies that his claim to divinity was well known in the army. An ordi- But to my mind a greater flaw in this able essay fcHfc^ tter is the assumption that for a Greek or Macedonian ^ays- to claim divine origin was as odious and ridiculous as for a modern man to do so. It is only yesterday that men held in Europe the theory that monarchy was of divine origin. In Egypt and the East it was quite the common creed that the monarchs themselves were such l . The new subjects of the Macedonian king would have thought it more extraordinary that he should not have claimed this descent than that he should ; and in Egypt especially the belief that the king was the son of a god and a god himself did not conflict with the assertion of his ordinary human parentage. This is a condition of thought which we cannot grasp, and cannot therefore realize ; but nevertheless the fact is as certain as any in ancient history. Perhaps The assertion, therefore, of divinity in the East am^nTthe was an ordinary piece of policy which Alexander Greeks. could hardly avoid ; the writer I have quoted has, however, shown strong reasons to doubt that he ever claimed it in Greece, though individual Greeks 1 It is to be noted that the Achsemenid kings, though asserting for themselves a Divine origin, did not claim to be gods. I think the first Greek who received in his lifetime supra-human honours was Lysander, who was flattered by altars, &c., in Asia Minor after his great victory. 68.] HIS DIVINITY A POLICY. 167 who visited his Eastern court at once perceived it in the ceremonial of his household, and though his soldiers taunted him with it during their revolt at Babylon. But this after all is a small matter. He probably knew better than any of his critics how to impress his authority upon his subjects ; and whether it was from vanity or from policy or from a contempt of other men that he insisted upon his own divinity, is now of little consequence. CHAPTER IX. POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. Tumults of 69. THE period which follows the death of the Dmdo- Alexander [ s one so complicated with wars and alliances, with combinations and defections, with re- shapings of the world's kingdoms 1 , with abortive efforts at a new settlement, that it deters most men from its study, and has certainly acted as a damper upon the student who is not satisfied with the ear- lier history, but strives to penetrate to the closing centuries of freedom in Greece. There is very little information upon it, or rather there are but few books upon it, to be found in English. Thirlwall has treated it with his usual care and justice ; and their intri- to those who will not follow minute and intri- cate details, I have recently given, in my Greek Life and Thought ', a full study of the social and 1 We may well apply to it the famous words of Tacitus at the opening of his Histories : ' Opus adgredior opimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum ; principes ferro interempti, bella civilia, plura externa ac plerumque permixta . . . pollutae caeremoniae ; magna adulteria ; plenum exiliis mare ; in- fecti caedibus scopuli . . . corrupt! in dominos servi, in patronos liberti ; et quibus deerat inimicus, per amicos oppressi.' 69.] WHAT WAS GREEK INDEPENDENCE? 169 artistic development which took place in this and the succeeding periods of Hellenism in Greece and the East. Hertzberg's and Droysen's histories, the one confined in space to Greece proper, the other in time to the fourth and third centuries B.C., are both thorough and excellent works. Holm's final volume, which will include the same period, is not yet accessible, so that I cannot notice it. A great part of this history was enacted, not in their wide Greece, or even in Greek Asia Minor, but in Egypt, ar in Syria, in Mesopotamia, and even in Upper Asia. The campaigns which determined the mastery over Greece were usually Asiatic campaigns, and each conqueror, when he arrived at Athens, endeavoured to enlist the support of Greece by public declara- tions of the freedom, or rather the emancipation, of the Greeks. This constant and yet unmeaning The libera- manifesto, something like the Home Rule mani- festoes of English politicians, is a very curious and interesting feature in the history of the Diadochi^ as they are called, and suggests to us to consider what was the independence so often proclaimed from the days of Demetrius (306 B.C.) to those of the Roman T. Flamininus (196 B.C.), and why so unreal and shadowy a promise never ceased to fascinate the imagination of an acute and practical people. For, on the other hand, it was quite admitted Spread of by all the speculative as well as the practical men of" the age that monarchy was not only the usual form of the Hellenistic State, but was the only 170 POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [69. means of holding together large provinces of var- ious "peoples, with diverse traditions and diverse ways of life. From this point of view the monarchy of the Seleucids in Hither Asia, and that of the Antigonids over the Greek peninsula, are far more interesting than the simpler and more homogeneous The three kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt 1 . For the kingdoms 1 . Greeks in Egypt were never a large factor in the population. They settled only two or three dis- tricts up the country ; they shared with Jews and natives the great mart of Alexandria, and even there their influence waned, and the Alexandria of Roman days is no longer a Hellenistic, but an Egyptian city. The persecutions by the seventh Ptolemy, who is generally credited with the whole- sale expulsion of the Greeks, would only have had a transitory effect, had not the tide of population been setting that way ; the persecutions of the Jews in the same city never produced the same lasting results. The Syrian monarchy stands out from this and even from the Macedonian as the proper type of a Hellenistic State. Unfortunately, the history of Antioch is almost totally lost, and 1 This judgment seems likely to be reversed by the wonderful ac- cession of new materials upon the Ptolemaic age, the first instalment of which I have published in a monograph upon the Petrie Papyri (with autotype plates, Williams & Norgate, 1891). We shall pre- sently know the conditions of life in one province at all events, the Fayoum, which was peopled with Greek veterans along with Jews and Egyptians. I have now under my hand their wills, their private letters, their accounts, their official correspondence in hundreds of shreds and fragments. 70.] POLITICS UNDER THE DIADOCHI. 171 the very vestiges of that great capital are shivered to pieces by earthquakes. Of its provinces, one only is tolerably well-known to us, but not till later days, through the Antiquities of Josephus, and the New Testament^. 70. How did the Greeks of Europe and of New Asia accommodate themselves to this altered state pro of things, which not only affected their political life, but led to a revolution in their social state? For it was the emigrant, the adventurer, the mer- cenary, who now got wealth and power into his hands, it was the capitalist who secured all the ad- vantages of trade ; and so there arose in every city a moneyed class, whose interests were directly at variance with the mass of impoverished citi- zens. Moreover the king's lieutenant or agent was a greater man in the city than the leading politi- cian. Public discussions and resolutions among the free men of Athens or Ephesus were often con- vincing, oftener exciting, but of no effect against superior forces which lay quietly in the hands of the controlling Macedonian. We may then classify the better men of that Politics day^as Follows. First there was a not inconsider- b able number of thoughtful and serious men who men > abandoned practical politics altogether, as being for small States and cities a thing of the past, and only leading to discontent and confusion. These men 1 The best special work on the conflict of the Greek settlements with the Jewish population, and with the Asmonaean sovrans all along the coast of Palestine, is B. Stark's Gaza und die Philistische Kiiste. 172 POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [70. adopted the general conclusion, in which all the philosophical schools coincided, that peace of mind and true liberty of life were to be obtained by retiring from the world and spending one's days in that practice of personal virtues which was the religion of a nation that had no creed adequate to its spiritual wants. except as a Nevertheless among other topics of speculation theoretical tnese men sometimes treated of politics; and when question, they did condescend to action, it was to carry out trenchant theories, and to act on principle, with- out regard to the terrible practical consequences of imposing a new order of things on a divided or uneducated public. The Stoic philosophers, in particular, who interfered in the public life of with some that day, were dangerous firebrands, not hesi- fatalexcep- , . ,. j r r tions. tatmg at the murder of an opponent; for were not all fools criminal, and was not he that offended in one point guilty of all ? Such men as the Sphaerus who advised the coup detat of the Spartan Cleomenes 1 , and the Blossius who stimu- lated the Gracchi into revolution, and the Brutus who mimicked this sort of thing with deplorable results to the world in the murder of Caesar, all these were examples of the philosophical politician produced by the Hellenistic age. Dignity But if there were mischievous exceptions, we courage of m ust not forget that the main body of the schools the philo- kept alive in the Greek mind a serious and exalted sophers 1 Cf. Plutarch's Life of Cleomenes, cap. xi. 7 1.] TRACTS ON MONARCHY. 173 view of human dignity and human responsibility, above all, they trained their hearers in that noble contempt for death which is perhaps the strongest feature in Hellenistic as compared with modern ^ society ; for there can be no doubt that Christian dogmas make cowards of all those who do not live up to their lofty ideal. The Greeks had no eternal punishment to scare them from facing death, and shown by so we find whole cities preferring suicide to the loss of what they claimed as their rightful liberty 1 . People who do this may be censured ; they cannot be despised. 71. Secondly, most philosophers had become Rise of so convinced of the necessity of monarchy, not of the rule of one superior spirit, as better than the vacillations and excitements of a crowd, that many of their pupils considered themselves fit to undertake the duty of improving the masses by absolute control ; and so we have a recrudes- cence, in a very different society, of those tyrants whose merits and defects we have already dis- cussed at an earlier stage in this essay 2 . The long series of passages from essays That Monarchy is best, which we may read in the commonplace book of Stobseus 3 , is indeed followed by a series of passages On the Censure of Tyranny \ but the former is chiefly taken from Hellenistic philoso- 1 Cf. the cases quoted in my Greek Life and Thought, pp. 394, 537. 541-543- 2 Above $$seqq. 8 Florilegium (ed. Teubner), ii. 247-284. 174 POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [72. phical tracts, whereas the latter is drawn wholly from older authors, such as Xenophon, who lived in the days of successful republics. Probably Even the literary men, who are always anti- unpopiUan despotic in theory, confess that many of these later tyrants were good and worthy men ; and the fact that Gonatas, the greatest and best of the Antigo- nids, constantly ' planted a tyrant ' in a free State which he found hard to manage, proves rather that this form of government was not unacceptable to the majority, than that he violated all the deepest convictions of his unmanageable subjects for the sake of an end certain to be balked if he adopted impolitic means. The force of imitation also helped the creation of tyrannies in the Greek cities ; for were not the Hellenistic monarchies the greatest success of the age? And we may assume that many sanguine people did not lay to heart the wide difference between the require- ments of the provinces of a large and scattered empire, and those of a town with a territory of ten miles square. These then were phenomena which manifested themselves all over the peninsula, aye, even at times at Athens and Sparta, though these cities were protected by a great history and by the sen- timental respect of all the world from the experi- ments which might be condoned in smaller and less august cities. Contempt- 73. But despite these clear lessons, the normal condition of the old leaders of the Greek world 73-] ATHENS AND SPARTA EFFETE. 175 was hardly so respectable as that of the modern Athens and tyrannies. It consisted of a constant policy of pro- test, a constant resuscitation of old memories, an obsolete and ridiculous claim to lead the Greeks and govern an empire of dependencies after the manner of Pericles or Lysander. The strategic importance of both cities, as well as their hold upon Greek sen- timent, made it worth while for the great Hellenistic monarchs to humour such fancies ; for in those days the means of defending a city with walls or natural defences were still far greater than the means of attack, even with Philip's developments of siege artillery, so that to coerce Athens or Sparta into absolute subjection by arms was both more unpopular and more expensive than to pay political partisans in each, who could at least defeat any active external policy. But if from this point except in of view these leading cities with all their dignity vousoppo- had little influence on the world, from another sitiontothe newfedera- they proved fatal to the only new development tions, of political life in Greece which had any promise for small and separate States. And this brings us to the feature of all others interesting to modern readers, I mean the experiment of a federation of small States, with separate legislatures for in- ternal affairs, but a central council to manage the external policy and the common interests of all the members. 73. This form of polity was not quite new in whose Greece or Asia Minor, but had remained obscure small 1 and and unnoticed in earlier and more brilliant times. bscure - 176 POST- ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [73. We may therefore fairly attribute to the opening years of the third century B.C. its discovery as an important and practical solution of the difficulty of maintaining small States in their autonomy or independence as regards both one another and the great Powers which threatened to absorb them. The old The old idea had been to put them under the sovran hegemony ', or leadership, of one of the great cities. State not But these had all abused the confidence reposed in them. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, had never for one moment understood the duty of ruling in the inte- rests, not only of the governing, but of the governed. The Athenian law, by which subject-cities could seek redress before the courts of Athens, had been in theory the fairest ; and so Grote and Duruy have made much of this apparent justice. But the actual hints we find of individual wrong and op- pression, and the hatred in which Athens was held by all her dependencies or allies, show plainly that the democratic theory, fair as it may seem in the exposition of Grote, did not work with justice. Accordingly, we find both in northern and in southern Greece the experiment of federations of cities attaining much success, and receiving much support in public opinion. The lead- It is most significant that these new and powerful stood aloof federations were formed outside and apart from the from this leading cities. Neither Athens nor Sparta, nay, ment. not even Thebes, and hardly even Argos, would condescend to a federation where they should have only a city vote in conjunction with other cities ; 74.] ATHENS AND THE LEAGUES. 1 77 and so the new trial was deprived both of their advice and of the prestige of their arms and arts. If, for example, both Athens and Thebes, but Athens and especially the former, had joined the yEtolian to " League of wild mountaineers, who had wealth and military power, but no practice in the peaceful discussion and settlement of political questions, they would probably have influenced the counsels of the League for good, and saved it from falling into the hands of unprincipled mercenary chiefs, who regarded border wars as a state of nature, and plunder as a legitimate source of income. But Athens stood sullenly aloof from this power- ful organization, remembering always her long-lost primacy, and probably regarding these mountain- eers as hardly Hellenes, and as unworthy to rank beside the ancient and educated States, which had once utilized them as mere semi-barbarous mercenaries. And yet the ^Etolians were the only Greeks who were able to make a serious and obstinate struggle for their liberties, even against the power of Rome. 74. But if to have rude ^Etolians as co-equal or the members of a common council would have been too bitter a degradation for Athens, why not ally herself to the civilized and orderly Achaeans ? For the Achaean cities, though insignificant hereto- fore, had old traditions, legendary glories ; and in later times Sicyon especially had been a leading centre, a chosen home for the fine arts. When Corinth and Argos were forced to join this League, N 178 POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [75. why should Athens stand aloof? Yet here was the inevitable limit, beyond which the Achaean League could never obtain a footing. It stopped with the Isthmus, because no arguments could ever induce Athens to give it her adhesion 1 . Sparta and Within the Peloponnesus the case was even : " worse ; for here Sparta was ever the active opponent of the Achaean League, and sought by arms or by intrigues to separate cities and to make any primacy but her own impossible. Thus the Leagues had to contend with the sullen refusal or the active oppo- sition of the principal Powers of Greece ; and if, in spite of all that, they attained to great and deserved eminence, it only shows how unworthy was the opposition of those States whose narrow patriotism could not rise beyond their own susceptibilities. This it was which made the success of the experi- ment from the first doubtful. A larger 75. But there was a constitutional question behind, which is one of the permanent problems of statecraft, and therefore demands our earnest atten- tion. The mode of attack upon the Leagues, especially upon the constitutional and orderly Achaean League, adopted by Macedon, Sparta, What right and Athens, was to invite some member to enter ation to er u P n separate negotiations with them, without coerce its consulting the common council of the federation. members ? 1 The momentary acquisition (in 190 B.C.) of two unimportant towns, Pleuron and Heraclea, in northern Greece, need hardly count as a correction of this general statement. The acquisition of the island Zacynthos was prevented by the Romans. 75.] THE RIGHT OF SECESSION. 179 And time after time this move succeeded, till at last the interference of the Romans in this direc- tion sapped the power and coherence of the League. The same kind of difficulty had occurred long Disputed before under the old dominations of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes ; but I did not refer to it before, be- Confeder- cause this is the proper place to bring the problem Athens and in all its bearings before the reader. Under the the 1 f jser & members. Athenian supremacy many members had volun- tarily entered into the Delian Confederacy ; others had done so either under protest, or for some special object, such as the clearing of the ^Egean from Persian occupation. Presently, when the par- ticular object was fulfilled, and when the Athenian tax-gatherers insisted upon the tribute which was spent on public, but Athenian, objects, the separate members declared their right to secede, and revolted whenever they had the power. The Athenians argued that the peace and prosperity of the -^Egean had been secured by the common effort of the Confederacy and by the zeal and self-sacri- fice of Athens. They denied that each member which had so long profited by the arrangement had a right to secede, and in any case they declared that they would coerce the seceder. In Duruy's chapter on the passage of the Delian Confederacy into the Athenian empire l he shows little sym- Duruy's pathy for the individual members and their hard- thisfques- 11 ships, and justifies Athens in her aggressive policy, tion. 1 Hist, des Grecs, chap. xix. N 2 l8o POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [76. In a mere passing note he compares the case of the North against the South in the late American Civil War. But as he has not argued out the problem, I may be of service to the reader in discussing it here. Greek sen- It was to this dispute that the real origin of the different. Peloponnesian war is to be traced. And though most people thought Athens quite justified in hold- ing what she had obtained, and not surrendering the empire which had cost such labour and returned in exchange such great glory, yet the general feel- ing of the Greek world was distinctly in favour of the seceder, in favour of the inalienable right of every city to reassert its autonomy as a separate State 1 , not only with communal independence, but with perfect liberty to treat as it chose with neigh- bouring States. Whenever, therefore, this conflict between Imperialism and Particularism arose, public sympathies sided with the assertion of local inde- pendence. Nature of 76. The debate in the present case was some- an e Lea h ue w ^ at different in its details. The Achaean League, a number of small cities situated upon a coast ex- posed to pirates, and able to foresee from lofty posts the coming raid, united voluntarily for attack and defence, and so formed a Confederacy, which 1 I need not pause to remind the reader that each Greek city, or iro\is, was in every constitutional sense a separate and independent State, just as much as the largest country is now. These cities severally made frequent treaties even with Rome, to which they stood in the same relations as a foreign king. 76.] THE RIGHT OF SECESSION. l8l lasted a long time before the wealth gained by its members as mercenaries and the decay of the greater Powers of Greece brought it into promin- ence 1 . These cities had a common executive and a sort of cabinet, preparing the business for the general Assembly, which met for three days twice a year, and then decisions were obtained from this Assembly and measures ratified by its votes. But as the more distant members could not attend in great numbers, the members of each city present, whether few or many, gave that city's vote, which counted as an unit in the Confederacy. The result was of course to put political power into the hands of the richer classes, who had leisure to leave their own affairs and go regularly to the Assembly at The difficulties which now arose were these : Had Statement any of the original twelve towns, that had volun- difficiiity W tarily formed this Union, the right to withdraw their adhesion ? In a lesser degree, had the towns that afterwards joined in consequence of the pres- sure of circumstances, but by a deliberate and public vote, a right to rescind that vote ? And in a still 1 These points were suggested for the first time in my Greek Life and Thought, pp. 7 seqq. 2 This voting by cities seems to me the nearest approach to repre- sentation that the Greeks ever made in politics, as distinct from religious councils, such as the Amphictyonies ; for of course a city far from the place of assembly could agree with a small number of its citizens that they should attend and vote in a particular way. Every citizen, however, might go if he chose, so that this would be a mere private understanding. 1 8s POST- ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [76. less degree, had any town which had subscribed to the Achaean constitution any right to violate its observance in one point, as by negotiating separ- ately with another State, or was it bound to observe in all respects the terms imposed by the Union from which it was not allowed to secede ? in its clear- The first of these cases is by far the most per- nevefyet pl exm g> an ^ I am not aware that it has ever been settled settled by any argument better than an appeal to force. force. To the Greeks, at all events, it seemed that the right of autonomy the power to manage one's own affairs was the inalienable right of every city ; just as the Irish Nationalists may be heard daily asserting it for every nation 1 . Case of the In our own youth we heard this right far more seriously urged by the seceding States of the American Union, some of which had been members of the first combination, and had voluntarily ceded certain portions of their political rights, at least their theoretical rights, in return for the protection and support of the Confederation as a whole. These States argued that if the Union began to 1 The Greek city-polity (rr6\is} was a perfectly clear and definite thing. A nation, on the contrary, may mean anything, for it may be determined by race, religion, language, locality, or tradition. Any one or all of these may be utilized to mark out the bounds of a nation according to the convenience of the case. I have often heard it asserted, and seen it printed, that in Ireland the Protestants of the North and East are quite a separate race. Such a statement, generally made to justify harsh measures against them from a Parliament of Roman Catholics, would also justify them in seceding from the rest of Ireland. 77-] PERMANENT CONTRACTS. 183 interfere in the domestic concerns of each, such, for example, as the practice of permitting house- hold slaves, it was a breach of contract, and justified the State in formally repudiating the remainder of the contract. But even had there been no encroachment by new legislation, the Greek city claimed the right of returning to its isolated independence. 77. On the other side, it has always been Arguments argued that though contracts for a definite period Jf the need not be renewed, there are many contracts several members. intended by their very nature to be permanent, and which are so far-reaching in their consequences that for any one party to abandon them is a profound injustice to the remainder, whose lives have been instituted and regulated upon these contracts 1 . Let us take an illustration from everyday life. From the contract of marriage there arise such important consequences that a dissolution does not permit the contracting parties to resume their 1 Duruy even quotes, in connection with the earlier Athenian Con- federacy (chap. xix. 2), the words of the actual treaties between several of the smaller towns (Erythrae, Chalcis), which have been found graven on stone ; and argues that because they assert per- manent union with Athens, and invoke curses on him that hereafter attempts to dissolve this union, Athens was legally as well as morally justified in coercing any seceders. It is strange so acute a thinker should not perceive that this assertion of eternal peace and union was an almost universal and perfectly unmeaning formula. If such formulae were really valid, we might find ourselves bound by our ancestors to very serious obligations. There is no case, except that of Adam, where the act of one generation bound all succeeding centuries. 184 POST- ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [77. original life; and therefore in all higher civiliza- tions legal divorce has been made very difficult, and secession by either party without legal sanc- tion a grave offence. In like manner it was argued that the several cities had grown rich and powerful under the League. The lives of its members had been sacri- ficed to defend every city attacked ; the funds of the League had been spent on each as they were needed. Was it just that after growing and thriving upon these conditions any one of them should, for its own convenience, repudiate the bond and regard all the accruing benefits as a private property, to be disposed of to any strange Power ? Cases of To answer this question and to adjudicate be- Or t ween the litigants is hard enough, and yet I have adherence, stated the simplest difficulty. For in the case of many of the additions to the Achaean League a revo- lution had first taken place, the existing government had been overthrown, and then the new majority had placed themselves under the protection of the Confederation. If the old rulers returned to power, were they bound by the Government which had coerced them, and which they regarded as revolutionary? Others, again, had been constrained by the presence of an armed force, and by threats of imminent danger if they did not accept the League's protection. When circumstances changed, could they not argue that they were coerced, and that an apparently free plebiscite was wrung from them against their better judgment? 78.] QUESTIONS OF DETAIL. 185 78. Such were the profoundly interesting and Various thoroughly modern problems which agitated the ^ minds of men in post- Alexandrian Greece. There were moreover various internal questions, whether new cities which joined should have equal rights with the original members ; whether large cities should have a city vote only equal to the vote of the smallest ; whether the general Assembly should be held in turn at each of the cities, or in the greatest and most convenient centre, or in a place specially chosen for its insignificance, so that the Assembly might be entirely free from local influ- ences? All these questions must have agitated the minds of the founders of the Swiss Union and the American Union, for the problems remain the same, however nations may wax and wane. The Achaean and ^Etolian Unions were very Looser popular indeed, especially the latter, which required no alterations in the administration of each State, League, but accepted any member merely on terms of paying a general tax, and obtaining in lieu thereof military aid, and restitution of property from other members if they had carried off plunder from its territory 1 . The Achaean League required more. A tyrant must abdicate before his city could become a member, and in more than one case this actually took place. The most dangerous, though passive, enemy of 1 We now have recovered several inscriptions, which give us in- formation on some of these points. Cf. Mitth. of the German Institute at Athens, xi. 262. i86 POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE. [78. Radical monarchy of Cleo- menes. this hopeful compromise between the Separatist and the truly National spirit was, as I have said, the sullen standing aloof of the greater cities. Of course the ever active foe was the power of Macedon, which could deal easily with local tyrants, or even single cities, but was balked by the strength of the combination. At last there arose a still more attractive alter- native, which was rapidly destroying the Achaean League, when its leader, Aratus, called in the common enemy from Macedon, and enslaved his country in order to checkmate his rival. This rival was the royalty of Sparta, who offered to the cities of the Peloponnesus an Union on the old lines of a Confederation under the headship of Sparta, but of Sparta as Cleomenes had transformed it ; for he had assassinated the ephors, abolished the second king, and proposed sweeping reforms in the direc- tion of socialistic equality, division of large proper- ties, and protection of the poor against the oppression of aristocrats or capitalists. This kind of revolution, with the military genius of Cleomenes to give it strength and brilliancy, attracted men's minds far more than the constitutional, but somewhat torpid and plutocratic, League. Of course the fatal struggle led practically to the destruction of both schemes by the superior force and organization of Macedon. CHAPTER X. THE ROMANS IN GREECE. 79. THE interference of the Romans in Greek Position of affairs reopened many of the constitutional questions war ds the upon which I have touched ; for in their conflicts Lea g ues - with Macedon they took care to win the Greeks to their side by open declarations in favour of inde- pendence, and by supporting the Leagues, which afforded the only organization that could supply them with useful auxiliaries. When the Romans had conquered came the famous declaration that all the cities which had been directly subject to Macedon should be independent, while the Achsean League could resume its political life freed from the domination of the Antigonids which Aratus had accepted for it. Now at last it might have seemed as if the peninsula would resume a peaceful and orderly development under the presidency and without the positive interference of Rome. But new and fatal difficulties arose. The 'liberty Roman in- of the Greeks ' was still, as ever, a sort of senti- ^P^a- tion of the mental aphorism which the Romans repeated, often 'liberty of from conviction, often again from policy. But the theGreeks - 1 88 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [79. Romans were a practical people, and did not the least understand why they should free the Greeks from Macedon in order that they might join some other Hellenistic sovran against Rome. And even if this danger did not arise, the Romans felt that the libera- tion of Greece would have worse than no meaning if the stronger States were allowed to prey upon the weaker, if every little city were allowed to go to war with its neighbours, if, in fact, the nominal liberty resulted in the tyranny of one section over another. Opposition Both these difficulties soon arose. The /Etollans. li ans j wno na cl not obtained from the Romans any extension of territory or other advantages adequate to their vigorous and useful co-operation against the king of Macedon, were bitterly dis- appointed, for they saw clearly that Rome would rather curtail than advance their power. The cities of northern Greece which had been liberated by the Romans from Philip V. could not be coerced into the ^Etolian League without an appeal on their part to Rome, which could hardly fail to be successful. So then the ^Etolians found that they had brought upon themselves a new and steady control, which would certainly prevent the maraud- ing chiefs from acquiring wealth by keeping up local disturbances, raids, and exactions as the normal condition of the country. They therefore openly incited king Antiochus of Syria to invade Greece, and so brought on their own destruction. Probably it was a great pity, for this League of moun- not fairly . t ., i i j tameers had shown real military vigour, and had it 8o.] THE TWO LEAGUES. 189 been educated into orderly and constitutional ways, stated by would have been a strong bulwark of Hellenic Pol y bl1 independence. Nor are we to forget that when we read of its turbulence and its reckless disregard of justice, we are taking the evidence of its most determined foe, the historian Polybius. He was one of the leaders of the rival League, and will hardly concede to the ^Etolians any qualities save their vices. On the other hand, he has stated as favourably as possible the more interesting case of his own confederation. 80. Here the second difficulty just stated was Rome and that which arose, not without the deliberate as- an g sistance of the Romans. On the one hand, the Achaeans thought themselves justified in extend- ing their Union so as if possible to comprise all Greece ; and though they usually succeeded by persuasion, there were not wanting cases where they aided with material force the minority in a wavering city, and coerced a new member which showed signs of falling away. More especi- ally the constant attempts to incorporate Sparta and Messene, which had never been friendly to the League, proved its ultimate destruction. The bloody successes of Philopcemen, the first Mistakes of Greek who ever really captured Sparta, and who ^nTave compelled it to join the League, led to complaints Rome ex- at Rome about violated liberties, and constant ter f erence " interferences of the Senate, not only to repress disorders, but to weaken any growing union in the country which Rome wished to see reduced to 190 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [ 8l - impotent peace ; and so there came about, after half a century of mutual recrimination, of protest, of encroachment, the final conquest and reduction of Greece into a Roman province 1 . 81. The diplomatic conflict between the Achaeans and the Romans is of the highest in- terest, and we have upon it the opposing judgments of great historians; for here Roman and Greek history run into the same channel, and the conflict may be treated from either point of view. Those who look at the debate from the Roman point of Mommscn view, like Mommsen, and who are, moreover, not Roman ^ persuaded of the immeasurable superiority of re- side, publican institutions over a strong central power, controlling without hesitation or debate, are con- vinced that all the talk about Greek independence was mere folly. They point out that these Greeks, whenever they had their full liberty, wore each other out in petty conflicts ; that liberty meant license, revolutions at home and encroachments upon neighbours ; and that it was the historical mission and duty of the Romans to put an end to all this sentimental sham. Hertzberg On the other hand Hertzberg, in the first volume ri^al^rfthe f kis excellent History of the Greeks under Roman Achsean Domination^ and Professor Freeman, in his Federal Government, show with great clearness that far lower motives often actuated the conquering race, 1 I am of course speaking generally, nor do I venture to decide without argument the difficult question of the exact status of Greece in the years after 146 B.C. 8 i.] DECAY OF GREECE. IQI that they were distinctly jealous of any power in the hands of their Greek neighbours, and that they constantly encouraged appeals and revolts on the part of individual cities in the League. So the Senate in fact produced those unhappy disturbances which resulted in the destruction of Corinth and the conquest of Greece by a Roman army in formal war. It is of course easy to see that there were faults Senility of on both sides, and that individual Romans, using their high position without authority of the Senate, often promoted quarrels in the interests of that truculent financial policy which succeeded in playing all the commerce of the world into the hands of Roman capitalists. On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the conviction that the days of independent Greece were over, that the nation had grown old and worn out, that most of its intellect and enterprise had wandered to the East, to Egypt, or to Rome, and that had the Romans maintained an absolute policy of non-intervention, the result would have been hardly less disastrous, and certainly more disgraceful to the Greeks. For a long and con- temptible decadence, like that of Spain in modern Europe, is surely more disgraceful than to be em- bodied by force in a neighbouring empire. Greece in this and the succeeding centuries had Decay of arrived at that curious condition that her people who emigrated obtained fortune and distinction all over the world, while those who remained at home seemed unable even to till the land, which was 192 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [82. everywhere relapsing into waste pasture, far less to prosecute successful trade, for want of both capital and sustained energy. One profession un- fortunately flourished, that of politics ; and the amount of time and ability spent on this profession may perhaps account for the decadence of both agriculture and commerce. The advo- 82. Greek politicians were divided into three Sica/with c l asses - There were first those who saw in Roman Rome. domination the only salvation from internal discord and insecurity. They either despaired of or de- spised the prospects of political independence, and saw in the iron Destiny which extended the Roman sway over the East, a definite solution of their difficulties, and possibly a means of increasing their material welfare. They therefore either ac- quiesced in or actively promoted every diplomatic encroachment on the part of Rome, and made haste to secure to themselves * friends of the mammon of unrighteousness/ as their adversaries thought, that by and by they might be the local governors, and recipients of Roman favour. The advo- Over against them were the uncompromising complete Nationalists,, I apologize for using the right word, indepen- who maintained absolutely the inalienable right of the Greeks to be independent and manage not only their internal affairs, but their external differ- ences as they pleased. They insisted that the Romans had gained their power over Greece by a system of unconstitutional encroachments, and that no material advantages of enforced peace or op- 83-] THE MODERATE PARTY. 193 pressive protection could compensate for the para- lysis which was creeping over Hellenic politi- cal life. The tyrannous and cruel act of the Romans, who deported one thousand leading Achaeans to Italy (on the charge of disloyalty to Rome in sentiments) and let most of them pine in their exile and die as mere suspects, without ever bringing them to trial, gave this party the strongest support by the misery which it inflicted and the wide-spread indig- nation it excited. The third party was the party of moderate coun- The party sels and of compromise. Sympathizing deeply with of ? aod * te the National party, they felt at the same time that any armed resistance to Rome was absurd and ruinous. They therefore desired to delay every encroachment by diplomatic protests, by appeals to the justice of the Romans, and thus protract, if they could not prevent, the absorption of all national liberties into the great dominion of Rome. This party, undoubtedly the most reasonable and the most honest, have left us their spokesman in the historian Polybius ; but we may be sure that, like every intermediate party, they commanded little sympathy or support. 83. Moreover, both the extreme parties had Money strong pecuniary interests to stimulate them. The J party which promoted complete submission to Rome were the people of property, to whom a settled state of things without constitutional agita- tions or sudden war-contributions afforded the only O 194 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [83. chance of retaining what they possessed. Rome had never favoured the needy mob in her subject cities, but had always ruled them through the responsible and moneyed classes. Roman do- minion therefore meant at least peace and safety for the rich. The grinding exactions of Roman praetor and Roman publican were as yet unknown acted upon to them. The Nationalist party, on the other tremes*' nan d, consisted of the needy and discontented, who expected, if allowed to exercise their political power, to break down the monopolies of the rich, and, in any case, to make reputation and money by the practice of politics ; for, as I have shown above, and as is not strange to our own day, politics had become distinctly a lucrative pro- fession. These people's hope of gain, as well as their local importance, would vanish with full subjection to Rome; and this was a strong mo- tive, even though in many it may have only been auxiliary to the real patriotism which burned at the thought of the extinction of national inde- pendence. Exagger- The debate soon went beyond the stage of mentfolr rational argument or the possibility of rational both sides, persuasion. To the Nationalist, the Romanizing aristocrat or moneyed man was a traitor, sacrificing his country's liberties for his mess of potage, grovel- ling and touting for Roman favour, copying Roman manners, and sending his sons to be educated in Roman ways. To the advocate of union with Rome, the so-called Nationalist was a needy and 84.] COERCION INEVITABLE. 195 dishonest adventurer, using the cry of patriotism and of nationality to cloak personal greed, social- istic schemes, and hatred of what was orderly and respectable. If he succeeded, his so-called liberty would be used in coercing and plunder- ing the dissentients ; and, after all, such stormy petrels in politics must be quite unfit to form any stable government. If any portion of the Pelo- The Sepa- ponnesus asserted its right to several liberty, ^ould not no politicians would have recourse to more vio- tolerate .... r separation lent coercion than these advocates of national from them- independence. They protested against enforced selves - union with Rome : they would be the first to promote enforced union with themselves, and carry- it through in bloody earnest. This was actually what happened during the last despairing strug- gle. The coercion practised by the last presidents Democratic of the Leagues, the violent Nationalists who forced t y rann > r - the nation into war, was tyrannous and cruel be- yond description. But of course the issue was certain ; and with the reeking smoke of the ruins of Corinth closes the history of Greece, as most historians, even of wider views, have understood it. 84. There is no period of the history which Modern deserves modern study more than that which I ^ " r alo |' ies have here expounded in its principles. The analo- upon us, gies which it presents to modern life, nay, to the very history of our times, are so striking that it is almost impossible to narrate it without falling into the phraseology of current politics. When I first O 2 196 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [84. published an account of these things 1 , 1 was at once attacked by several of my reviewers for daring to introduce modern analogies into ancient history. I had dragged the Muse of History into the heated atmosphere of party strife and the quarrels of our own day ; I had spoiled a good book by allusions to burning questions which disturbed the reader and made him think of the next election, instead of calmly contemplating the lessons of Polybius. It would have been far more to the point had they shown that the analogies suggested were invalid, and and not to the comparisons misleading. This not one of them be set aside. hag attemptec i to do ; nor do I hesitate to say that the objections they raised were rather because my analogies were too just and striking than because they were far-fetched and irrelevant. If these critics had found that the facts I adduced favoured their own political views, no doubt they would have lavished their praise upon the very feature which incurred their censure. Thehistory I think, with Thucydides and Polybius, that the essentklly 8 study f history is then most useful and serious modern; when it leads us to estimate what is likely to happen by the light of what has already happened in similar cases. Mere remoteness of date or place has nothing to say to the matter. The history of Greece, as I have often said already, is intensely modern, far more so than any mediaeval or than most recent histories. We 1 Greek Life and Thought, from Alexander to the Roman Con- quest. Macmillan, 1887. 85.] UNITY OF HISTORY. 197 have to deal with a people fully developed, in its mature life ; nay, even in its old age and decadence. To deny a historian the privilege and therefore the profit of illumining his subject by the light ^ ls of modern parallels, or the life of to-day by are surely n . f /^ i 1 , -i admissible, parallels from Greek history, is simply to con- if j us ti y demn him to remain an unpractical pedant, and drawn - to abandon the strongest claim to a hearing from practical men. Above all, let us seek the truth with open mind, and speak out our convictions ; and if we are wrong, instead of blaming us for appealing to the deeper interests and stirring the warmer emotions of men, let our errors be refuted. Let us save ancient history from its dreary fate in the hands of the dry antiquarian, the narrow scholar ; and while we utilize all his research and all his learning, let us make the acts and lives of older men speak across the chasm of centuries, and claim kindred with the men and the motives of to-day. For this, and this only, is to write history in the full and real sense, this is to show that the great chain of centuries is forged of homogeneous metal, and joined with links that all bear the great Workman's unmistake- able design. 85. We have come to the real close of political The spiri- Greek history, at a point upon which historians t closed have been unanimous. And yet the Greeks would with the hardly have been worth all this study if the sum of conquest, what they could teach us was a political lesson. They showed indeed in politics a variety and 198 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [85. an excellence not reached by any other ancient people. But their spiritual and intellectual wealth is not bounded by these limits ; and they have left us, after the close of their independence, more to think out and to understand than other nations have done in the heyday of their great- ness. On this spiritual history I shall not say more than a few words. The earlier part of it, ex- tending to the moment when, under Trajan, Christianity came forth from its concealment, and became a social and political power, I have recently treated in a volume entitled The Greek World under Roman Sway. The reader who cares to unfold this complicated and various picture of manners, of ideas, of social habits and moral principles, will find the Greek subjects of the Roman Empire full of interest, and will even find, in the authors of that age, merits which have long been unduly ignored. The crowded thoroughfares of Antioch and Alexandria; the great religious foundations of Comana, Stratoniceia, and Pessinus, each ruled by a priest no less important than the prince-bishops of Salzburg or Wiirtzburg in recent centuries; the old-world fashions of Borysthenes, of Naples, of Eubcea ; the gradual rise of Syrian and of Jewish Hellenism, the fascina- ting rivalries of Herod and of Cleopatra for Roman favour, the Hellenism of Cicero, of Caesar, of Claudius, and of Nero, the fluctuations of trade from Rhodes to Delos, from Delos to Puteoli and Corinth, the splendours and the dark spots 8 5 .] GREECE UNDER ROMAN SWAY. 199 in the society which Dion, Apuleius, and Plu- tarch saw and described these and many other kindred topics make up a subject most fascina- ting, though from its complexity difficult to set in order, and impossible to handle without the occurrence of error. I am sure it is below the mark to say that more The great than half the Greek books now extant date from jj the period of the Roman domination. And if it be period, true that in style there is nothing to equal the great poets and prose-writers from ^Eschylus to Demosthenes, it is equally true that in matter the later writers far exceed their predecessors. All the exacter science got from the Greeks comes from that large body of Alexandrian writings which none but the specialist can understand. The history of Diodorus, embracing an immense field and telling us a vast number of facts otherwise lost ; the great geographies of Strabo, of Ptolemy, and that curious collection which can be read in Carl Muller's laborious Corpus ; the moral essays of Dion Chry- sostom ; the social encyclopaedia of Plutarch ; the vast majority of the extant inscriptions, come to us from Roman times. But most of these are special. Is there nothing of general interest ? Assuredly there is. No Greek book can compare for one moment in general im- portance with that collection of history and letters called the New Testament, all written in Greek, and intended to reach the civilized world through the mediation of Greek. The An- thology, Lucian, Julian, 2CO THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [85. I will not here enter upon Christian Greek literature, but point to Plutarch, who has cer- tainly been more read and had more influence than any other Greek writer on the literature of modern Europe. Nay, in the lighter subjects, and where the writers must trust to style to commend them to the reader, not only is there a good deal of poetry once thought classical, such as the Anacreontics and the Anthology which is in great part the produce of later Greek genius, but the wit of Lucian and the serious- ness of Julian found in the Greek language their appropriate vehicle. The deeper philosophy of these centuries, that attempt to fuse the metaphysics of heathendom Plotinus. and Christendom which is called Neo-Platonism, this too was created and circulated by Greek writers and in Greek ; so that though Hellas was laid asleep, and her independence a mere tradition, her legacy to the world was still bearing interest one hundredfold. The writers who have dealt with this great and various development of later Hellenism are either the historians of the Roman Empire especially Duruy, who has kept up the thread of his Greek Theologi- History in his popular History of Rome or the st^dies 6 ^ theologians. The latter have a field so specially their own, and the literature of the subject is so enormous, that the mere historian of Greece and the Greeks must content himself with the pagan side. To touch even in a general way, as I have 86.] INFLUENCE ON RELIGION. SO I hitherto done, upon the many controversies that now arise concerning Greek life and thought would here be impossible. 86. But there is one important point at the very outset of the new departure into Christianity upon which I would gladly save the reader from a widely diffused error. It has been long the fashion since the writings Have the of Ernest Renan it has been almost a common- s h^ r einou place, to say: that while modern Europe owes religion? to the Greeks all manner of wisdom and of re- finement, in politics, literature, philosophy, architec- ture, sculpture, one thing there is which they could not impart to us, religion. This deeper side of man, his relation to one God, his duty and his responsibilities beyond this ordinary life, we owe not to the Greeks, but to the legacy of the Semitic race. To the Jews, we are told, are due all the highest, all the most serious, all the most elevating features in modern Christianity. Is this true ? Is it the case that the Greeks Or is it were, after all, only brilliant children, playing with life, and never awaking to the real seriousness of the world's problems ? There has seldom been a plausible statement circulated which is further from the truth. However capital the fact that the first great teacher and revealer of Christianity was a Jew, however carefully the dogmas of the Old Testament were worked up into the New, Christ- ianity, as we have it historically, would have been impossible without Hellenism. 202 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [87. The Ian- In the first place, the documents of the New fh^New Testament were one and all composed in Greek, Testament as the lingua franca of the East and West ; and Greek. V6y the very first author in the list, Saint Matthew, was a tax-gatherer, whose business required him to know it 1 . If, therefore, the vehicle of Christianity from the first was the Greek language, this is not an unimportant factor to start with ; and yet it is the smallest and most superficial contribution that Greek thought has given to Christianity. When my later studies on the history of Hellenism under the Roman Empire see the light, I trust that the evidence for the following grave facts, already admitted by most critical theologians, will be brought before the lay reader. Saint 87. When we pass by the first three, or Synopti- teaching ca ^ Gospels, there remains a series of books by early Christian teachers, of whom Saint Paul and Saint John are by far the most prominent. To Saint Paul is due a peculiar development of the faith which brings into prominence that side of Christianity now known as Protestantism, the doctrine of justification by faith ; of the greater importance of dogma than of practice ; of the predestination or election of those that will be saved. This whole way of thinking, this mode of looking at the world, 1 The old belief in an original Hebrew Gospel, from which Saint Matthew's was translated, now turns out to have no better foundation than the existence of an old version into Hebrew (Aramaic) for the benefit of the common people who were too ignorant to read Greek. Cf. Dr. Salmon's Introditction to the New Testament. 8;.] THE STOIC IDEAL. 203 so different from anything in the Jewish books, so developed beyond the teaching of the Synoptic Gospels, was quite familiar to the most serious Stoic ele- school of Hellenism, to the Stoic theory of life ^ t s " popular all over the Hellenistic world, and especially Paul - at Tarsus, where Saint Paul received his education. The Stoic wise man, who had adopted with faith The Stoic that doctrine, forthwith rose to a condition differing sase * in kind from the rest of the world, who were set down as moral fools, whose highest efforts at doing right were mere senseless blundering, mere filthy rags, without value or merit. The wise man, on the contrary, was justified in the sight of God, and could commit no sin ; the commission of one fault would be a violation of his election, and would make him guilty of all, and as subject to punish- ment as the vilest criminal. For all faults were equally violations of the moral law, and therefore equally proofs that the true light was not there. Whether one of the elect could fall away, was a matter of dispute, but in general was thought impossible *. Whether conversion was a gradual change of character, or a sudden inspiration, was an anxious topic of discussion. The wise man, and he alone, enjoyed absolute liberty, boundless wealth, supreme happiness ; nothing could take from him the inestimable privileges he had attained. Can any one fail to recognize these remarkable The Stoic doctrines, not only in the spirit, but in the very letter, Provldence - of Saint Paul's teaching? Does he not use even 1 Cf. further details in my Greek Life and Thought, pp. 140, 372. 204 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [88. the language of the Stoic paradoxes, ' as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; as poor, yet making many rich ; as having nothing, yet possessing all things'? Is not his so-called sermon at Athens a direct statement of Stoic views against the Epicureans, taking nothing away, but adding to their account of the moral world the revelation of Jesus Christ and of the Resurrection ? Will any one venture to assert in the face of these facts that the most serious and religious of Greek systems was the offspring of chil- dren in morals, or that it failed to exert a powerful influence through the greatest teacher of Christianity upon all his followers? It is of course idle to weigh these things in a minute balance, and declare who did most, or what was the greatest advance made in our faith beyond the life and teaching of its Founder. But the more we compare Greek Stoicism with Pauline Christianity, the more dis- tinctly their general connection will be felt and appreciated. Saiirt 88. Let us now come to the more obvious and Gospel. better acknowledged case of Saint John. It has been the stock argument of those who reject the early date and alleged authorship of the Fourth Gospel that the writer is imbued with Hellenistic philosophy ; that he is intimate with that fusion of Jewish and Platonic thought which distinguished the schools of Alexandria ; that in particular the doctrine of the Word, with which the book opens, is quite strange to Semite thought, doubly strange to Old Testament theology, not even hinted at in 8 9 -J THE CYNIC IDEAL. 205 the early apocryphal books. In other words, the Greek elements in the Fourth Gospel are so strong that many critics think them impossible of at- tainment for a man of Saint John's birth and education ! For my purpose this is more than enough. I Neo-Pla- need not turn, to refute these sceptics, to show t ^e ofThe how the author of the book of Revelation, if he Logos. be the same, made great strides in Greek letters before he wrote the Gospel, thus showing the importance he attached not only to Greek thought, but to Greek expression. The Alexandrian tone of Saint John's Gospel, derived from the same sources as those which gave birth to Neo-Platonism, is as evident as the Stoical tone in Saint Paul, derived from the schools of Tarsus and Cilicia. Here is a chapter of deeper Greek history yet to be written from the Greek side, not as an appendage to Roman history, or as an interlude in theological controversy. 89. So much for the influence of the highest The Cynic and most serious forms of Greek thinking upon the religion of the Roman Empire. But even men ; from the inferior developments of philosophy, its parodies of strength and its exaggerations of weakness, elements passed into this faith which is asserted to be wholly foreign to Hellenism. The Cynic ostentation of independence, of living apart from the world, free from all cares and responsi- bilities, found its echo in the Christian anchorite, who chose solitude and poverty from higher but 206 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [89. the Epicu- kindred motives. The sentimental display of denceup C on P ersona l affection, by which the Epicurean en- friends, deavoured to substitute the love of friends for the love of principle or devotion to the State, had its echo in those personal ties among early Christians which replaced their civic attachments and consoled them when outlawed by the State. Indeed, there is much in Epicureanism which has passed into Christianity, an unsuspected fact till it was brought out by very recent writers 1 . What shall we say too of the culture of this age ? Is not the eloquence of the early Christian Fathers, of John Chrysostom, of Basil, worthy of admira- tion ; and was not all their culture derived from the old Greek schools and universities, which had lasted with unbroken though changing traditions from the earliest Hellenistic days? One must read Libanius, a writer of the fourth century after Christ, to understand how thoroughly Athens was still old Greek in temper, in tone, in type, and how it had Theuniver- become the university of the civilized world 2 . The Athens traditions of this Hellenistic university life and system passed silently, but not less certainly, into the oldest mediaeval Italian universities, and thence to Paris and to England, just as the Greek tones 1 Cf. Mr. W. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, which is built on this idea ; also the excellent account in Mr. Bury's new History of the Later Roman Empire, vol. i. chap. i. 2 The reader who fears to attack Libanius directly, may find all the facts either in Sievers' (German) Life of Libanius, or in Mr. W. W. Capes's excellent book on University Life at Athens (London, 1877). 9i.] THE GREEK SPIRIT INDESTRUCTIBLE. 2O7 or scales passed into the chants of Saint Ambrose at Milan, and thence into the noble music of Pales- trina and of Tallis, which our own degenerate age has laid aside for weaker and more sentimental measures. 90. It is indeed difficult to overrate the amount Greece and the variety of the many hidden threads that t^ " unite our modern culture to that of ancient Greece, not to speak of the conscious return of our own century to the golden age of Hellenic life as the only human epoch in art, literature, and eloquence which ever approached perfection. As the Greek language has lasted in that wonderful country in spite of long domination by Romans, of huge inva- sion by Celts and Slavs, of feudal occupation by Prankish knights, of raid and rapine by Catalans and Venetians, ending with the cruel tyranny of the Turk, so the Greek spirit has lasted through all manner of metamorphose and modification, till the return wave has in our day made it the highest aspiration of our worldly perfection. 91. I said at the opening of this essay that I Greek po- should endeavour to indicate the principal problems toJ^Ju^ t to be solved by future historians of Greece, at least the private by those who have not the genius to recast the the EngHsh whole subject by the light of some great new idea ; wri ters, and in so doing, particular stress has been laid on the political side, not without deliberate intention. For, in the first place, this aspect of Greek affairs is the peculiar province of English historians. 208 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [92. They, with their own experiences and traditions of constitutional struggles, cannot but feel the strongest attraction towards similar passages in the life of the Greeks, so that even the professional scholar in his study feels the excitement of the contested election, the glow of the public debate, when he finds them distracting Athens or ^Egion. The practical insight of a Grote or a Freeman leads him to interpret facts which may be inexplicable or misleading to a foreign student. Even with Grote before him, Ernst Curtius or Duruy is sometimes unable to grasp the true political situa- tion. who have I say this in the higher and more delicate sense ; lived S in VeS f r f course many recent histories give an ade- practical quate account of the large political changes to the general student. Perhaps, indeed, the remoteness of foreign writers from political conflicts such as ours gives them a calmness and fairness which is of advantage, while the English writer can hardly avoid a certain amount of partisanship, however carefully he may strive to be scrupulously impar- tial. For in all these things we are compelled un- consciously to reflect not only our century, but our nation, and colour the acts and the motives of other days with the hues our imagination has taken from surrounding circumstances. Not so in 92. When we come to the literary and artistic HtemryhL S ^ C} t ^ ie f re ig n historians have a decided advan- tory, tage. The philosophical side of Greek literature has indeed been treated by Grote and other English 93-] VALUE OF GREEK ART. 209 writers with a fulness and clearness that leave little to be desired ; but on the poetry and the artistic prose of the Greeks, foreign scholars write with a freshness and a knowledge to which few of us attain. Of course a Frenchman, with the syste- where the matic and careful training which he gets in com- Germans position, must have an inestimable advantage over are su- i 1-1 ,. penor; a people, like us, who merely write as they list, and have no rules to guide their taste or form their style. And the German, if as regards style he is even less happily circumstanced than the English- man, whose language has at least been moulded by centuries of literature, has yet on the side of archaeology and art enjoyed a training which is only just now becoming possible in England or America. Hence it is that the earlier part of Curtius' especially history has such a charm, though we must not detract from the individual genius of the man, which is manifest enough if we compare him with the solid but prosaic Duncker. However complete and well articulated the bones of fact may lie before us, it requires a rare imagination to clothe them with flesh and with skin, nay, with bloom upon the skin, and expression in the features, if we are to have a living figure, and not a dry and repulsive skeleton. 93* What I think it right, in conclusion, to Importance insist upon is this : that a proper knowledge of Greek art, instead of being the mere amusement of the dilettante, is likely to have an important P 210 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [93. effect upon the general appearance of our public buildings and our homes, and to make them not only more beautiful, but also instructive to the rising generation. The day for new developments of architecture and of decorative art seems past, though the modern discovery of a new material for building iron ought to have brought with it something fresh and original. In earlier ages the quality of the material can always be shown to be a potent factor in style. Modern re- If, however, we are not to have a style of our ancient* own, we must necessarily go back to the great styles, builders and decorators of former ages, and make naissance. them the models of our artists. This has in fact been the history of the revivals since the universal reign of vulgarity in what we call the early Queen Victoria period in England. First there was a great Gothic revival, when we began to understand what the builders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant, and to reproduce their ideas with intelligence. This has since given way to the Renaissance style, in which most recent buildings have been erected, and which has beauties which the Gothic revivalists used to regard with horror. There is no probability that the last ideal will be more permanent than the last but one ; it will presently be replaced by some other model. This, however, will have been gained, that our ordinary lay public will have been trained to under- stand and appreciate not only the great Gothic works of the early, but the great Renaissance works 93-] ATTEMPTS AT GREEK BUILDING. 311 of the late Middle Ages. We can now even tolerate those curious vampings, so common in Holland and Germany, where one style has been laid upon the other or added to it I . It is more than likely that the next revival will Probability be a Hellenic revival. Renaissance architecture, as revival. 6 " is well known, is the imitation of Roman or late Hellenistic art, with certain peculiarities and modi- fications forced upon the builders by their edu- cation and surroundings. But many of them thought they were reproducing pure Greek style, concerning which they were really in total dark- ness. The few earlier attempts in this century to imitate Greek buildings show a similar ignorance. Thus the builders of the Madeleine in Paris thought, I suppose, they were copying the Parthenon, whereas they knew nothing whatever about the art of Ictinus. How far this inability to understand the art of a distant century may go, is curiously exemplified in the drawings taken (in 1676) from the yet un-ruined Parthenon by Jacques Carrey, by the order of the Marquis of Nointel. These drawings are positively ludicrous travesties of the sculpture of Phidias in seventeenth-century style 2 . Not until a long series of great students, begin- Greek art ning with Winckelmann, had studied with real care 1 Of this confusion the hall of the Middle Temple in London is a very interesting specimen, seeing that the Renaissance screen, a splen- did thing, is only two years later than the Gothic hall. 2 They are not, however, one whit worse than the ordinary attempts at Greek dress made by nineteenth-century ladies who go to Fancy Fairs. P 2 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [94. understood, the secrets of Greek art, till Mr. Penrose had dis- mann Pen- dosed the marvellous subtlety in the curves of the rose, Dorp- Parthenon, till Dr. Dorpfeld had analyzed the plan and materials and execution of the Olym- pian treasure-houses and temples, could we say that we were beginning to have a clear perception of the qualities which made Greek sculpture and architecture so superior to all imitations which have since been attempted. Its effect 94. It is high time that all this profound re- search, this recondite learning, these laborious ex- when pro- cavations, should be made known in their results, predated, and brought home to the larger public. Then when the day comes that we undertake to carry out a Hellenic Renascence, we shall know what we are about ; we shall abandon the superstition of white marble worship, and adopt colours ; we shall learn to combine chastity of design with richness of ornamentation ; we shall revert to that harmony of all the arts which has been lost since the days of Michael Angelo. and upon If it be true that there is in heaven a secret 1 treat 7 between the three sovran Ideas that en- noble human life, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True which enacts that none of them shall enrich us without the co-operation of the rest, then our study of this side of Greek perfection may even have its moral results. May not the ideas of mea- sure, of fitness, of reserve, which are shown in all the best Greek work, radiate their influence into our ordinary life, and, making it fairer, prepare it 95-] POETRY UNTRANSLATEABLE. for the abode of larger truth and more perfect goodness ? 95. Thus far I have sought to bring out the Greek Lite- political lessons which are the peculiar teaching hardly no- of history, and have only suggested what may yet ticed in this result from the artistic lessons left us by this won- derful people. The reader may wonder that I have said little or nothing concerning another very prominent side of Greek perfection, the wonders of the poetry which ranks with the best that has been produced by all the efforts of man before or since. My reason for this omission was, that here, if anywhere, the excellence of the extant Hellenic work is acknowledged, while the fact that all those ignorant of the language are excluded from enjoying it, makes any discussion of it unsuited to the general public. For whatever may be said of good translations of foreign prose, poetry is so essentially the artistic expression of the peculiar tongue in which it originates, that all transference into alien words must produce a fatal alteration. A great English poet may indeed transfer the ideas of a Greek to his page ; but he gives us an English poem on Greek subjects, not the very poem of his model, however faithful his report may be. If, therefore, we are to benefit by this side of Demands a Hellenic life, there is no short cut possible. We j must sit down and study the language till we can studyofthe n i i i 111 language. read it fluently ; and this requires so much labour, that the increasing demands of modern life upon our time tend to thrust aside the study of bygone 214 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [96. languages for the sake of easier and more obvious gains. 96. Nevertheless, it seems well-nigh impossible that a Hellenic Renascence, such as I have anti- cipated, can ever be thorough and lasting unless the English-speaking nations become really familiar with the literary side of Hellenic life. Revivals of the plays of ^Eschylus and Sophocles must not be confined to the learned stage and public of an English or American university, but must come to be heard and appreciated by a far larger public. Other Ian- This can hardly be done until we make up our :UaC minds that the subjects of education must not be musi content to increased in number, and that moreover they may give way to .< r thispursuit.be alternated with far more freedom than is now the case. There is, for example, a superstition that everybody must learn Latin before learning Greek, and that French is a sort of necessary accomplish- ment for a lady, whereas it is perfectly certain that the cultivation to be attained through Greek is ten times as great as that w r e can gain through Latin ; while in the second case it is no paradox to assert that any woman able to understand the Antigone of Sophocles or the Thahtsia of Theocritus would derive from them more spiritual food than from all the volumes of French poetry she is ever likely to read. If we cannot compass all, the lesser should give way to the greater ; and it is not till our own day that the supremacy of Greek has been acknow- ledged by all competent judges. 97. What has promoted the reign of Latin, and 97-] ROMAN DEPENDENCE ON GREEK. 2,1$ has told against Greek in our schools, is partly, I The nature i . tii c 111 1 an d quality believe, the bugbear of a strange alphabet ; partly O f Roman also and this among more advanced people the imi tations. want of a clear knowledge how closely most Roman poetry was copied from Greek models. Were the Greek models now extant, the contrast would pro- bably cause the Roman imitations to disappear, as indeed many such must have disappeared when the Roman readers themselves approached the great originals. Even now, if the lyrics of Sappho and Alcseus were recovered from some Egyptian tomb or from the charred rolls of Herculaneum, it might have a disastrous effect on the popularity of Horace. But in most cases the Romans copied from The case of , inferior poets of the Alexandrian age ; and before ngl ' the reader and I part company, it is of import- ance to insist upon this, that the best of Roman poetry was often a mere version of third-rate Greek. By far the greatest of the Roman poets is Virgil ; and if he alone remained, Latin would be worth learning for his sake. But even Virgil copies from second-rate Alexandrian poets, Apollonius and Aratus from the latter to an extent which would be thought shameful in any independent literature. It may be true that the translations are in this case not only equal, but far superior, to the originals. I will not dispute this, as my case does not require any doubtful supports. For even granting that he can exceed a second-rate Greek model, what shall we say when he attempts to imitate Theocritus in his Bucolics ? Here he is taking a really good Greek 2l6 THE ROMANS IN GREECE. [9 8< poet for his model, and how poor is the great Roman in comparison ! Even therefore in imitating an Alexandrian master, we can see that the first of Latin poets cannot bear the comparison. Theocritus 98. If I had not written fully on this subject flower in 6 m m y recent Greek Life and Thought, and my the Greek Greek World under Roman Sway. I should fain garden of ^ _ , _ poetry. conclude with some brief account of the after-glow of Hellenic genius, when the loss of freshness in the language and the life of the people had made pedantry and artificiality common features in the writing of the day. Yet these patent faults did not strike the Romans, whose poets, with only few exceptions, copied Callimachus and Parthenius as the finest models in the world. From my point of view, though I have cited these facts to show what a superstition the pre- ference of Latin to Greek is, I can urge them as but another evidence of the supremacy of Greece and its right to a spiritual empire over culti- vated men. Even debased and decaying Hel- lenism could produce poetry too good for the ablest disciples to rival, too subtle for any other tongue to express. Can we conclude with any greater tribute to the genius of the race, with any higher recommendation of their history than this, that it is the history of a people whose gifts have never ceased to illumine and to sustain the higher spirits in every society of civilized men ? APPENDIX. ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER 1 . THERE seems a sort of general agreement among modem historians of Greece to accept the ist Olympiad (776 B.C.) as the trustworthy starting-point of solid Greek chronology. Even Grote, so sceptical about legends, and so slow to gather inferences from them, accepts this date. There is only one exception, I think, to be found in Sir George Cox, who evidently rejects the Olympian register, who will not set down in his chrono- logy any figure higher than 670 B.C., and even that under the protest of a query. When we come to inquire on what authority so early a date can be securely established, we find a sort of assumption, not supported by argument, that from 776 onward the Eleians kept a regular record of their great festival, and as a matter of fact the alleged list is still ex- tant. It was generally acknowledged and cited by the late historians of Greece, who determined events according 1 I gladly acknowledge some valuable hints and corrections from Dr. Hirschfeld of Konigsberg, and Dr. Th. Kock of Weimar ; both of whom expressed agreement with my main results. 21 8 APPENDIX. to it. Above all, the critical doubts of philologists are soothed by the supposed authority of Aristotle, who is reported to have made researches on the question, and to refer to the list as if authentic 1 ; at all events he mentioned a discus at Olympia with Lycurgus' name inscribed upon it, but in what work, and for what purpose, is unknown. Aristotle is considered an infallible authority by modern philologists, so much so that even the most sceptical of them seem almost to attribute verbal inspiration to this philosopher. One other Greek authority shares with him this pre-eminence the historian Thucydides. And it so happens that in his Sicilian Archeology (book vi) Thucydides gives a number of dates, apparently with- out hesitation, which start from 735 B. c., and there- fore persuades his commentators that accurate dates were attainable concerning a period close to the ist Olympiad. These are apparently the reasons which have determined the general consent of modern historians. But neither Grote, nor E. Curtius, nor even Sir George Cox, has analysed the evidence for the authenticity of the older portion of this register. I cannot find in Clinton's Fasti, where it might well be expected, any such inquiry. In Mure's History of Greek Literature (iv. 77-90), a work far less esteemed than it deserves, and here only, do we find any statement of the evidence. The negative conclusions reached by Mure have made no impression on the learned world, and are now well-nigh forgotten. I will take up the question where he left it, and add some positive evidence to corroborate his argument that the list of victors at Olympiads handed down to us by Eusebius is, at least in its earlier part, an 1 Cf. below, p. 238, for the remaining fragment. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 2 19 artificially constructed list, resting on occasional and fragmentary monumental records, and therefore of no value as a scientific chronology. I will also endeavour to determine when the victors began to be regularly recorded, and when the extant list was manufactured. Such an inquiry must be of great importance in measuring the amount of credence to be given to the dates of events referred to the eighth and the first half of the seventh centuries B. c. for example, Thucydides' dates for the western colonies of the Hellenes. Let us first sketch the tradition about the Register as we find it implied in Diodorus, Strabo, the frag- ments of Timseus, and other late historians. We find especially in Pausanias a considerable amount of detail, and an outline of the general history of the feast as then accepted. All admitted, and indeed asserted, a mythical origin for the games. The declarations of Pindar and other old poets were express, that Herakles had founded them, that Pelops and other mythical heroes had won victories at them and victories of various kinds, including chariot races. Another account ascribed their foundation to Oxylus (Paus. v. 8, 5). But a long gap was admitted between these mythical glories and the revival of the games by his descendant Iphitus, king of Elis. 'This Iphitus,' says Pausanias (v. 4, 6), 'the epigram at Olympia declares to be the son of Hae- mon, but most of the Greeks to be the son of Praxonides, and not of Haemon ; the old documents (dpx a l ypa^ara) of the Eleians, however, referred 1 Iphitus to a father of the same name.' Iphitus, in connection with the Spartan Lycurgus, re-established the games, but (as was asserted) , as if they were no longer extant; but see below, p. 229. 220 APPENDIX. only as a contest in the short race (ord&oi/), and in this first historical Olympiad Corcebus won, as was stated in an epigram on his tomb, situated on the borders of Elis and. Arcadia (Paus. viii. 26, 4). A quoit on which Lycurgus' name was engraved, was at Elis, says Plu- tarch, in the days of Aristotle. The ' discus of Iphitus,' says Pausanias (v. 20, i), 'has the truce which the Eleians announce for the Olympiad, not inscribed in straight lines, but the letters run round the discus in a circular form 1 .' He alludes to the list again and again : e.g. (v. 8, 6) 'ever since there is a continuous record of the Olympiads (f ov TO a-wc^es rais fjLvi'jfjLais firl rals *OX. eVr/) ; prizes for running were first established, and the Eleian Corcebus won.' Pausanias proceeds in this passage to give an account of the successive additions of other competitions to the sprint race, ' according as they remembered them,' that is, according as they recollected or found out that they had been practised in mythical days. In the i4th Ol. the 8/avXoff, or double course, was instituted, and Hypenus the Pisaean won, and next after him Acanthus. In the 1 8th they remembered the pentathlon and the wrestling match, in which Lampis and Eurybatus re- spectively won, both Lacedaemonians. In the 23rd came boxing, and Onomastus of Smyrna, which then already counted as Ionian, won. In the 25th the first chariot race was won by the Theban Pagondas. In the 33rd came the pancration, and the monument of the first victor, Lygdamis, was at Syracuse The boys' contests were based on no old tradition, but the Eleians estab- 1 I can find no evidence that these discuses were identical, as is universally assumed. Pausanias would surely have mentioned Lycurgus' name, had he seen it. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 221 lished them of their own good pleasure. The boys' wrestling match was accordingly instituted in the 37th 01. I need not here pursue the account further, but will re- turn to this passage in connection with the other arrange- ments of the feast. We find that other authorities, such as Polemo, quoted by the Scholiast on Pindar (Ol. v.), agree with Pausanias as to some of these details. Strabo quotes from Ephorus the double foundation, by Oxylus and again by Iphitus. So does Phlegon, a freedman of Hadrian, who wrote a work on the Olympian festival, and gave a list of victors, probably from the same source as Eusebius' list. Phlegon notes indeed the difficulty of making Lycurgus and Iphitus contemporary with Corcebus in 776 B.C., and fixes the date of Iphitus twenty-eight Olympiads earlier (at 887 B.C.). But he introduces an Iphitus again in the 6th registered Ol., inquiring about the crown- ing of victors, and states that Daicles of Messene was first crowned with wild olive at the 7th contest. The only other point of interest in Phlegon's fragments is the full catalogue of the i77'th Ol. (frag. 12 in Muller's Frag. Hist. iv. 606), which gives the winners in seventeen events ; some of them thrice successful in the competitions. We may therefore take it for granted that the account of Pausanias, which now passes current in all the German and English works on Greek athletics, was, in the main, that established or adopted by Timseus or by Aristotle, the latter of whom is often alleged to have first given the Olympiads their prominent position as the basis of Greek chronology. But whether he adopted the list as genuine from the beginning or not, his isolated remark about the APPENDIX. quoit with Lycurgus' name is not sufficient to inform us 1 . Indeed we have only negative evidence concerning his opinion and no direct information. It is of far more importance to examine what positive evidence there was for this theory of the gradual rise and progress of the festival, its regularity, and the prominence of the stadion, or short race, in giving the name of its victor as the index of the date. We have two kinds of authority to consult the older literature ; and the monu- ments, either at first hand, or as described for us by former observers. As regards the literature, our review need be but very brief. (i) The twenty-third book of the Iliad seems composed without any reference to the earliest Olympian games as Pausanias describes them. The nature of this (perhaps special) 'competition is quite different. There are some events, such as the armed combat, which never made part of the historical games ; there are others, such as the chariot race, which are expressly asserted to have been later innovations at Olympia. The giving of valuable prizes, and several of them in each competition, is quite against the practice at Olympia. The Phseacian games in the Odyssey (6 120, sq.) contain five events, running, wrestling, leaping, discus, and boxing. Those who believe that the epics were composed before 776 B.C., or those who believe them to be the much later compilation of anti- quarian poets, will find no difficulty in this. The one will assert that the poet could not know, and the other that he would not know, what was established at Olympia. The latter will also hold that the accounts of the mythical 1 Cf. Plutarch, Lycurgus, i, to whom we owe the information. In the extant works of Aristotle there is no allusion whatever to the Register as a chronological standard. Cf. below, p. 238. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 2, 2, 3 celebrations by Herakles, Pelops, &c., were invented in imitation of the Homeric account. But still if Lycurgus indeed promoted the knowledge of the Homeric poems, why did he and Iphitus found a contest without the least resemblance to the heroic models ? And if, as I hold, the Homeric poems were growing into shape about the time of the alleged ist Olympiad, and after it, the contrast of the Iliad in its games to the Olympian fes- tival is so difficult to explain, that we must assume the old Eleian competition to have been no mere sprint race, but a contest similar in its events to that in the Iliad, or at least to that in the Odyssey. (2) This view is strongly supported by the statements of Pindar, who is the next important witness on the subject. In his Tenth Olympic Ode (w. 43 sq.) he tells of the foundation by Herakles, and gives the names of five heroes who won the various events of the first con- test. He gives us no hint that there was any break in the tradition, or that these five events had not remained in fashion ever since. In fact he does mention (Isth. i. 26 sq.) that the pentathlon and pancration were later inventions, thus making it clear that the rest were in his mind the original components of the meeting. Nor does he anywhere give priority or special dignity to the stadion ; only the last of his- Olympian Odes is for this kind of victory, his Thirteenth for the stadion and pentathlon together. He never mentions, as we should certainly have expected, that these stadion victors would have the special glory of handing down their names as eponymi of the whole feast. The other contests, the chariot race, the pancration, and the pentathlon, were evidently far grander and more highly esteemed, and we find this corroborated by the remark of Thucydides 224 APPENDIX. (v. 49), f This was the Olympiad when Androsthenes won for the first time the pancration.' Thucydides therefore seems to have marked the Olympiad, not by the stadion, but by the pancration. (3) This historian indeed (as well as his immediate pre- decessors, Herodotus and Hellanicus) gives us but little information about the nature of the games, except the remark that ' it was not many years ' since the habit of running naked had come into fashion at Olympia. Such a statement cannot be reconciled with Pausanias' account, who placed the innovation three centuries before Thucy- dides' time. But in one important negative feature all the fifth-century historians agree. None of them recognise any Olympian register, or date their events by reference to this festival. Thucydides, at the opening of his second book, fixes his main date by the year of the priestess of Hera at Argos, by the Spartan ephor, and by the Athenian archon. In his Sicilian Archaology, to which we will presently return, where it would have been very convenient to have given dates by Olympiads, he counts all his years from the foundation of Syracuse downward. Yet we know that Hellanicus, Antiochus and others had already made chronological researches at that time, and the former treated of the list of the Carneian victors. All these things taken together are conclusive against the existence, or at least the wide recognition, of the Olym- pian annals down to 400 B. c. In the next century Ephorus wrote in his earlier books concerning the mythical founding of the festival, but we have nothing quoted from him at all like the history set down by Pausanias. It is nevertheless about this time that the newer and more precise account came into vogue, for Timaeus, the younger contemporary of ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 225 Ephorus, evidently knew and valued the register. Its origin in literature would have remained a mystery but for the solitary remark of Plutarch. At the opening of his Life of Numa, in commenting on the difficulty of fixing early dates, he says : TOVS JAW ovv xpovovs J;aKpi(3)(Tai xaXcTrov fort, Kal /uaXicrra rovs K TWV 'O\vfjL7rioviKa>v dvayofjievovs, S)V TTjv dvaypa(f)r)V o^f (f)airiv 'iTrniav fK^ovvai, TQV 'HXeioi/, CLTT ovftevbs 6/)jua>fiej>oi/ avayKaiov irpos rrio-riv. What does this mean? Does it mean that Hippias first published or edited in a literary form the register, or does it mean that he both compiled and edited it ? The former is the implied opinion of the learned. 'Dieser Zeit,' says E. Curtius, Hist. i. 494 (viz. 'der Mitte des achten Jahrhunderts '), ' gehoren ja auch die Listen derer an, welche in den Nationalspielen gesiegt'; and in the note on this at the end of the volume, he indicates, together with the dvaypa^ai of the Argive priestesses, which Hellanicus published, two passages in Pausanias, and adds: 'wissenschaftlich bearbeitet zuerstvon Hippias dem Eleer, dann von Philochorus in seinen 'oAv/zTna^s.' Now of the latter work we know nothing more than the name ; of the former nothing but the passage just cited from Plutarch. Does it justify Ernst Curtius' wissen- schaftlich bearbeitet! Or does our other knowledge of Hippias justify it? The pictures of him drawn in the Platonic dialogues called after his name, and in Philo- stratus, though perhaps exaggerated, make him a vain but clever polymath, able to practise all trades, and exhibit in all kinds of knowledge. We should not expect anything ' wissenschaftlich ' from him. Indeed, in this case there was room for either a great deal of science, or for none. If there was really an authentic list at Q 226 APPENDIX. Olympia, Hippias need only have copied it. But is this consistent with Plutarch's statement ? Far from it. Plutarch implies a task of difficulty, requiring research and combination. And this, no doubt, was what the Sophist wanted to exhibit. Being an Eleian, and desirous to make himself popular in the city, he not only chose Olympia for special displays of various kinds, but brought together for the people a history of their famous games. And in doing this he seems to have shown all the vanity, the contempt of ancient traditions, and the rash theorizing which we might expect from a man of his class. We have, fortunately, a single case quoted by Pausanias which shows us both that this estimate of the man is not far from the truth, and what licence the Eleians gave him when he was reconstructing the history of the festival. Pausanias (v. 25, 2 sqq.) tells a pathetic story about the loss of a choir of boys and their teacher on the way from Messana in Sicily to Olympia, where they were commemorated by statues. TO ^v dy eV/ypa/z/^a avaBrniara clvai TU>V eV 7rop$/za> M(rorr]via>v' 'iTTTTLaS 6 \y6fJLVOS V7TO 'EXX^OOV yVo6ai, Cronos TO. cXeyela eV avrols 7roirja-v. Here, then, we have some kind of falsification, and apparently one in favour of the Messenians of the Peloponnesus, if we may judge from the form of Pausanias' remark. In more than one case a later epigram appears to have been inscribed on a votive offering, and I think we can show in Hippias a decided leaning to the Messenians, whose restoration to independence he probably witnessed. But were there really no registers, dvaypacfrai, from which Hippias could have copied? If there was cer- tainly no single complete list, of undoubted authority, may there not have been partial lists, affording him ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 227 suitable materials ? This we must endeavour to answer from the passages of Pausanias referred to by E. Curtius, as well as from others, which he has not thought it necessary to quote. The first is the opening passage of the sixth book, where the author says that as his work ' is not a catalogue of all the athletes who have gained victories at Olympia, but an account of votive offerings, and especially statues, he will omit many who have gained victories, either by some lucky chance, or without attaining the honour of a statue.' Though this passage may imply that there was such a catalogue of course there was in Pausanias' day it says not a word about an old and authentic register. It is indeed a capital fact in the present discussion, that neither does Pausanias, in this elaborate account of Olympia, nor, as far as I know, does any other Greek author, distinctly mention avaypa T&V 'OX. KaraX<'yo> ov ypdo/iara avaypn- tyas -V yvnvao-ito TO> eV 'OAv/>i7r/a. Here, at last, we have some definite evidence, and I will add at once another passage the only other passage I can find where any register is alluded to as it expounds the former. In vi. 8, i, we find : Euanorides the Eleian gained the vic- tory for wrestling both at Olympia and Nemea : ytvo^vos &e 'EAAciyoSi/o/s ypa\l/ KOI OVTOS TO. ovopara v 'OAv/iTria rcov veviKrjKOTwv. It appears then that if an Eleian had dis- tinguished himself at the games, he was likely to be afterwards chosen as one of the judges a reasonable custom, even now prevailing amongst us. It also appears that such \\avo8iKai obtained the right of celebrating their year of office by inscribing the names of the victors, and doubtless their own, in the gymnasium. But fortunately, the date of these inscriptions is deter- mined by two facts. In the first place both came after the establishing of boys' contests, which Pausanias expressly calls an invention of the Eleians, and fixes at the 37th Olympiad. Again the son of Paraballon, and Euanorides himself, won prizes at Nemea a contest not established, according to E. Curtius, till about 570 B.C., but proba- bly a little earlier, and nearer to 600 B.C. I do not for a moment deny the existence of some kind of register from this time onward ; in fact there are some probable reasons to be presently adduced in favour of it. Indeed the very form of the note about Paraballon seems to imply some novelty, an exceptional distinction in his inscription ; and what we are here seeking is evidence for an early register, in fact a register of the contests previous to 600 B. c. What evidence does Pausanias afford of this? As I have said, there is not a word about a register or cata- ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 229 logue, but there are several notes of old offerings and inscriptions, which show us what sort of materials existed, at least in Pausanias' day. And there is no reason whatever to believe that many ancient monuments or inscriptions had been injured, unless Hippias carried out his work of falsifying them on a large scale. There were indeed several monuments antedated by mere vulgar mistakes. Such was the stele of Chionis (vi. 13, 2), who was reported to have won in four successive contests (Ols. 28-31), but the reference in the inscription to armed races as not yet introduced, proved even to Pausanias that the writer of it must have lived long after Chionis' alleged period. There was again the monument of Pheidolas' children, whose epigram Pausanias notes as conflicting (vi. 13, lo) with ra 'HXfio>i> es TOVS 'QXvfjLTTioviKas ypdfjLfiaTa. o-ySd/7 yap 'OX. Km cfipcoffTJj KOL ov npb Tavrrjs &T\V v rois 'HX. ypdp.fJLa. Traidcov. These ypd^ara a WOrd apparently distinct from dvaypafyai are probably nothing but the treatise of Hippias, preserved and copied at Elis. Had these ypd^ara indeed been an authentic register, in- scribed at the time of each victory, is it possible that any epigrams of later date would have been allowed to con- flict with it ? Surely not. But if the register came to be concocted at a late period, such discrepancies might be hard to avoid. But as regards genuine early monuments, Pausanias tells us that Corcebus had no statue at Olympia, and im- plies that there was no record of his victory save the epi- gram on his tomb at the border of Elis and Arcadia. Then comes the case of the Spartan Eutelidas (vi. 15, 8), who conquered as a boy in the 38th OL, the only contest ever held for a pentathlon of boys. eWi 8e i\ T eiVobi/ dp%aia TOV Evr., KOL TO. eVi ro> jSdQpto ypafip-ara dfj,vdpd VTTO roO 230 APPENDIX. Xpovov. But this statue cannot have been so old even as the 38th Ol. For in vi. 18, 7, Pausanias tells us that the first athlete's statues set up at Olympia were those of Praxi- damas the ^Eginetan, who won in boxing at the 59th Ol., and that of the Opuntian Rexibios the pancratiast, at the 6 1 st. ' These portrait statues are not far from the pillar of CEnomaos, and are made of wood, Rexibios' of fig-tree, but the ^Eginetan's of cypress, and less decayed than the other.' Just below this we have a mention of a treasure-house, dedicated by the Sicyonian tyrant Myron in the 33rd Ol. In this treasure-house was an inscribed shield, ' an offering to Zeus from the Myones.' TO. de eVi rfi odTriSi ypappara TraprjKTm fj.ev eVi 3/ao^u, TrcVoi/tfe $ avro Sta ToG dva6r)fj.(iTOs TO ap^aiov (\l. 19, tj) These exhaust the oldest dated monuments found by Pausanias. He mentions indeed an ancient treasury of the Megarians, built in a time before either yearly archons at Athens or Olympiads (vi. 19, I3) 1 . Thus the antiquarian traveller, who revelled in the venerable in history and the archaic in Greek art, could find no dated votive offerings older than the 33rd Ol., and these he specially notes as of extraordinary antiquity, decayed and illegible with age. We may feel quite certain that he omitted no really important extant relic of old times in his survey. Such then were the materials from which Hippias proceeded, not before the year 400 B.C., and prob- ably a generation later, to compile the full register of the Olympiads. There may have been some old inscrip- tions which Pausanias failed to see, or which had become 1 The recent excavations have refuted this very early date for the treasure-house. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 231 illegible, or had disappeared under the soil with time. Doubtless there were many old traditions at Elis, which the Eleian sophist would gather and utilise. There were also throughout Greece, in the various cities he visited, traditions and inscriptions relating to victors who had been natives of these cities. But that these formed an unbroken chain from Corcebus down to Hippias' day is quite incredible* His work is so completely lost that we can only con- jecture his method of proceeding from the general char- acter of his age,, and from the critical spirit we can fairly attribute to it. He had before him the history of the Pythian festival, which began in historical times (Ol. 48), if we omit the old contest in composing a hymn to the gods. The various innovations and additions were well known, and it is certain that at Olympia too the range of contests had been enlarged by the pentathlon, the pancration, the hoplite race, &c. But it is likely that Hippias carried out this analogy too far. He found no traditions for the other events as old as Corcebus, and he assumed that the games had begun with a simple short race. Accord- ing to the order of the first record of each competition , he set down its first origin. He was thus led to make the o-raSioi/ the c eponymous competition,' if I may coin the expression, though it is more than probable that the early festivals were noted by the victor in the greatest feats and if there was a real register by the Hel- lanodicse who had presided. For it is certain from Pausanias that the umpire did inscribe his own name with those of the victors. Hippias' work, the ypa^/unra of the Eleians in after days, was thus a work based upon a problematical re- construction of history. It rested for its earlier portions 232 APPENDIX. on scanty and broken evidence ; as it proceeded, and monuments became more numerous, its authenticity increased. After Ol. 60, when the fashion came in of setting up athlete statues, we may assume it in the main to have been correct ; though even here there were not wanting discrepancies with other evidence, and possibly some mala fides on the part of the compiler 1 . There remain, therefore, three point* of interest con- nected with the theory thus proposed. Have we any evidence of the date at which the Hellanodicae first made it a matter of ambition to inscribe their own names, and those of victors in the gymnasium, at Olympia ? Are there traces of deliberate theorizing in the extant list of victors previous to this date ? Why and for what reasons did Hippias fix on the year 776 B.C. as the commencement of his list ? (i) There are several probable reasons for fixing the origin of registering the victories at about the 5oth Ol. It was about this time that the Eleians finally conquered the Pisatans, and secured the complete management of the games. From the spoils of Pisa they built the magnificent Doric temple lately excavated, and no doubt increased the splendour of Olympia in other ways. For in addi- tion to their increase of power they were stimulated by a new and dangerous competition that of the Pythian games, established in the third year of the 48th OL, and this may have been one of the reasons why they deter- mined finally to crush and spoil the Pisatans. It is likely that the Nemean and Isthmian games were insti- 1 Cf. the case of QEbotas, supposed to have won the 6th Ol., but also asserted to have fought in Platsea in Ol. 75. His statue and epigram, be it observed, dated from about OL 80. Paus. vi. 3, 8 ; vii. 17, 13. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 233 tuted about the same time, and these rival games were perhaps connected with some complaints as to the management of the Olympian festival, for no Eleian seems to have competed at the Isthmian games (Paus. v. 2, 2). The Eleians were accordingly put upon their mettle, both to keep their contest unequalled in splendour, and beyond suspicion in fairness. To obtain the first, they lavished the spoils of Pisa, as already mentioned. As to the second, we have a remarkable story told us by Herodotus (ii. 160), and again by Diodorus (i. 95), that they sent an embassy as far as Egypt to consult the Pharaoh as to the best possible conduct of the games. This king told them that no Eleian should be allowed to compete. Herodotus calls him Psammis (Psammetichus II), who reigned 594-587 B.C.; and he is a higher authority than Diodorus, who calls him Amasis, and so brings down the date by twenty-five years. Herodotus' story has never been much noticed, or brought into relation with the other facts here adduced, but it surely helps to throw light on the question. And there is yet one more important datum. Pausanias tells us that in Ol. 50 a second umpire was appointed. If the practice of official registering now commenced at Olympia, as it certainly did at Delphi in the Pythian games, we can understand Pausanias' remarks about Paraballon and others having esteemed it a special glory to leave their names associated with the victors'. For it was a new honour. From this time onward, therefore, I have nothing to say against the register which we find in Eusebius. (2) But as regards the first fifty Olympiads, is there any appearance of deliberate invention or arrangement about the list of names? Can we show that Hippias 234 APPENDIX. worked on theory, and not from distinct evidence? It is very hard to do this, especially when we admit that he had a good many isolated victories recorded or remembered, and that he was an antiquarian, who no doubt worked out a probable list. Thus the list begins with victors from the neighbourhood, and gradu- ally admits a wider range of competitors. This is natural enough, but I confess my suspicion at the occurrence of eight Messenians out of the first twelve victors, followed by their total disappearance till after the restoration by Epaminondas. For the sacred truce gave ample occasion for exiled Messenians to compete at the games 1 . I also feel grave suspicions at the curious absence of Eleian victors. Excepting the first two, there is not a single Eleian in the list. How is this consistent with Psammis' remark to the Eleians ? For how could they have avoided answering him that their fairness was proved by the occurrence of no Eleian as victor epony- mous for 170 years? Many Eleian victors are indeed noticed by Pausanias in the other events. It is hardly possible that they could not have conquered in the stadion, so that I suspect in Hippias a deliberate intention to put forward non-Eleians as victors. I have suspicions about CEbotas, placed in the 6th Ol. by Hippias, but about the 75th by the common tradition of the Greeks. It is curious, too, that Athenian victors should always occur in juxtaposition with Laconian. But all these are only suspicions. (3) I come to the last and most important point ; indeed it was this which suggested the whole inquiry. 1 Hippias' false epigram on the Sicilian Messenians (above men- tioned) implies that the Messenians exiled from Messene were eligible. ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 235 On what principles, or by what evidence, did Hippias fix on the year 776 B.C. as his starting-point? We need not plunge into the arid and abstruse computations of years and cycles which make early chronology so difficult to follow and to appreciate. For one general con- sideration is here sufficient. Even had we not shown from Plutarch's words, and from the silence of all our authorities, that Hippias could not have determined it by counting upwards the exact number of duly recorded victories, it is perfectly certain that he would not have followed this now accepted method. All the Greek chro- nologists down to Hippias' day (and long after) made it their chief object to derive historical families and states from mythical ancestors, and they did this by reasoning downwards by generations. They assumed a fixed start- ing-point, either the siege of Troy, or the return of the Herakleids. From this the number of generations gave the number of years. Thus we may assume that Hippias sought to determine the date of the ist Olympiad by King Iphitus, who had been assigned to the generation TOO Olympiads a neat round-number before himself. Hippias thus fixed the date of both Iphitus and Lycurgus. The Spartan chronologers would not accept such a date for Lycurgus. His place in the generations of Herakleids put him fully three generations earlier. Other chronolo- gers therefore sought means to accommodate the matter, and counted twenty-eight nameless Olympiads from Ly- curgus to Corcebus (and Iphitus). Others imagined two Iphiti, one of Lycurgus' and one of Corcebus' date. But all such schemes are to us idle ; for we may feel certain that the number of Olympiads was accommodated to the date of Iphitus, and not the date of Iphitus to the number of Olympiads. 236 APPENDIX. Unfortunately the genealogy of Iphitus is not extant ; in Pausanias' day he already had three different fathers assigned to him (v. 4, 6.); and we cannot, therefore, follow out the a priori scheme of Hippias in this instance ; but I will illustrate it by another, which still plays a prominent figure in our histories of Greece I mean the chronology of the Sicilian and Italian colonies, as given by Thucydides in his sixth book. He speaks with considerable precision of events in the latter half of the eighth century B. c. ; he even speaks of an event which happened 300 years before the arrival of the Greeks in Sicily. As Thucydides was not inspired, he must have drawn these things from some authority; as he mentions no state documents it has been conjectured that his source was here the work of Antiochus of Syracuse. This man was evidently an antiquarian no wiser or more scientific than his fellows ; Thucydides betrays their method by dating all the foun- dations downwards from that of Syracuse. Antiochus was obliged to admit the priority of Naxos, but grants it only one year ; then he starts from his fixed era. But how was the date of the foundation of Syracuse de- termined? Not, so far as we know, from city registers and careful computations of years backward from the fifth century. Such an assumption is to my mind chimerical, and the source of many illusions. The foundation of Syracuse was determined as to date by its founder, Archias, being the tenth from Temenos. The return of the Herakleidae was placed before the middle of the eleventh century B. c. ; hence Archias would fall below the middle of the eighth century. The usual date of Pheidon of Argos, 747 B.C., was fixed in the same way by his being the tenth Temenid, and hence the 8th Ol. was set down as the an- Olympiad celebrated by ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 237 him. He should probably, as I have before argued, be brought down nearly a century (to 670 B.C.) in date. I will now sum up the results of this long discus- sion. When we emerge into the light of Greek history, we find the venerable Olympian games long estab- lished, and most of their details referred to mythical antiquity. We find no list of victors recognised by the early historians, and we have the strongest negative evidence that no such list existed in the days of Thucydides. Nevertheless about 580 B.C. the feast was more strictly regulated, and the victors' names re- corded, perhaps regularly, in inscriptions ; from 540 B. c. onward the practice of dedicating athlete statues with inscriptions was introduced, though not for every victor. About 500 B. c. there were many inscriptions (that of Hiero is still extant), and there was evidence from which to write the history of the festival; but this was never done till the time of the archaeologist and rhetorician Hippias, who was a native of Elis, with influence and popularity there, and who even placed new inscriptions on old votive offerings. This man (probably in 376 B.C.) constructed the whole history of the feast, partly from the evidence before him, partly from the analogy of other feasts. He fixed the commencement of his list, after the manner of the chronologers of his day, by the date of the mythical founder. Hence neither the names nor the dates found in Eusebius' copy of the register for the first fifty Olympiads are to be accepted as genuine, unless they are corroborated by other evidence. We have not even, as yet, the corroborative evidence of any other Greek inscriptions of the seventh or eighth centuries B. c. Till some such records, or fragments of such records, are found, we are not entitled to assume 238 APPENDIX. that the Greeks began to use writing upon stone for any records at such a date as 776 B.C. That great storehouse of old civilization, the Acropolis of Athens, has yielded us nothing of the kind ; and even if we admit that the annual archons were noted down since 683 B. c. (which is far from certain), is not the further step to nearly a century earlier completely unwarrantable ? I have reserved till now a passage in Aristotle's frag- ments (594) on the Olympian festival, which may help the still unconvinced reader to estimate the value of his opinion, on the authenticity of the Register. Aristotle is commonly spoken of as having made critical researches upon this question : here is the only specimen left to us : ' The order of the festivals, as Aristotle makes out the list, is : first, the Eleusinia in honour of the fruit of Demeter second, the Panathencea to commemorate the slaying of the giant Aster by Athene ; third, that which Danaos established at Argos at the marriage of his daughters ; fourth, that of Lykaon in Arcadia, and called Lykcea ; fifth, that in lolkos ordained by Akastos for his father Pelias ; sixth, that ordained by Sisyphos (Isthmian?} in honour of Melikertes : seventh, the Olympian, ordained by Herakles in honour of Pelops ; eighth, that at Nemea, which the Seven against Thebes established in honour of Archemorus ; ninth, that at Troy, which Achilles cele- brated for Patroklos; tenth, the Pythian, which the Amphiktyons established to commemorate the death of the Python. This is the order which Aristotle, who composed the treatise called mVXot, set out of the ancient festivals and games.' This quotation is from a scholiast to Aristides, who is not the only grammarian who refers to the ruVAot : there seems no reason to question the authenticity of ON THE OLYMPIAN REGISTER. 239 the reference to this book as the work of Aristotle. It seems to be on the strength of these Peploi, with its only, extract now cited, that modern historians have claimed the authority of the great critic for the Olympian Register ! Was there ever so strange an inference ? Is this indeed the wisscnschaftlickt Bearbeitung which was begun by Hippias of Elis ? Any calm critic free of prejudice will rather conclude from it that on questions of early chronology and mythical history Aristotle was a firm believer in legend, and that he understood his duty to be that of a classifier and arranger of these stories rather than that of a destructive critic. It is but another case of acquiescence in a sceptic, such as I have described in the text above. This being Aristotle's attitude as regards the foundation of the feast, his authority as to the beginning of the Register would be probably worthless. But as a matter of fact we know nothing about it. These considerations are, however, of great importance in dealing with an objection or reservation made to my argument by Mr. Bury, who, while he accepts my conclusions as regards the Olympiads, thinks that the early dates for the Sicilian settlements rest on better evidence, seeing that they are sanctioned by the much older and greater authority of Thucydides, who was certainly critical about many of his dates, and cautious in expressing a positive opinion. I think the case of Thucydides to be closely analogous to that of Aristotle. On all historical matters within the reach of proper inquiry, I hold him to have been thoroughly critical. But when we go back to the legends such as the Siege of Troy, or the story of Tereus and Procne, I think he laid aside all this caution, and 240 APPENDIX. contented himself with a very modest rationalism in interpreting the myths. He is most particular about the Pentekontaetia, and Hellanicus' mistakes, but tells us calmly of events sixty years after the Trojan War, or 300 years before the Greeks went to Sicily. These matters stood with him on a different footing from that of his researches, just as our Bible history is honestly accepted by many scientific men of very sceptical turn in their special studies. They acquiesce in Scriptural evidence as a matter of general consent. Neither critic ever seems to suspect fabrication of legends and lists ; and yet fabrication there certainly was. In discussing the lists of the Argive priestesses, the kings of Sparta, and others, Max Duncker comes to the deliberate conclusion (vol. i. pp. 130-1 Eng. ed.) that the early part of these lists is fabricated. He classes all the names before 800 B. c. as imaginary; applying critical principles more consistently, and accepting nothing upon the evidence of one unconfirmed witness, I have now shown reasons why we may suspect many of them down to 650 B.C. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. APR 14 id6U JLCX DEC 12 1958 4fi P'59W J -At**- '" '" JAN. JAAIC 1S60 14w'60YD LD 21A-50m-9,'58 (6889slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley I / ^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY