mmmmmm' J It • > O : : ■■ ^ ; * H^iiU l*.r J ' 1 - ', j K ; Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrdsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/ancientgreeceskeOOcottrich GREAT NATIONS ANCIENT GREECE GREAT NATIONS In active prej>aration ROME By H. L. HaveU, B.A. FRANCE By Professor W. H. Hudson GERMANY By T. W. RoUeston IRELAND By Eleanor HuU and Professor Stanley Lane- Poole SCOTLAND By R. L. Mackie, M.A, MEDIEVAL ITALY By H. B. Cotterill, M.A. \ I White Attic Lekythus 2. Red-figured Lekythus ANCIENT GREECE A SKETCH OF ITS ART LITERATURE & PHILO SOPHY VIEWED IN CONNEXION WITH ITS EXTERNAL HISTORY FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO THE AGE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT BY H. B. COTTERILL M.A. Translator of the " Odyssey " Editor of " Selections from the Inferno" Goethe's "Iphigenie" Milton's "Areopagitica" Virgil's " Aeneid " I and VI etc. NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS "^W «>' -«? D^ ni c*" PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON ENGLAND PREFACE WHEN the attempt is made in a book ot this size to give a continuous account of the external history of Greece, and into this framework to fit a number of sketches descriptive of its art, Hterature, and philosophy, as well as other matters, it is of course necessary to omit many details and to rely on whatever skill one may happen to possess in selection and combination. In regard to antiquities and literature, I have drawn attention chiefly to what is extant and of general interest, and have trusted to description, illustration, and quotation rather than to dis- quisition and criticism. The Sections appended to each chapter treat subjects that are closely connected with the period covered by the chapter. Any of these Sections can be omitted without seriously interrupting continuity. Temples, Dress, Coins, and Vases have been relegated to Notes at the end of the volume, seeing that they are not specially connected with any one period. The letters B.C. (but not a.d.) have been generally omitted, as unnecessary in a book on Ancient Greece. To name in full all the books that one has to use in such work is unnecessary, but, since space did not always allow of exact reference on occasions when I annexed a fact or a sentiment, it is right that I should here acknowledge my obligations to the following modern writers : Baikie, Berard, Bergk, Ber- noulli, Buchholz, Burrows, Bury, Busolt, Butcher, Archer Butler, Chamberlain (Grundlagen) , Christ, Dawkins, Deussen, Diehl, Donaldson, Dorpfeld, Dussaud, Sir A. J. Evans, Frazer (Pausanias), Furtwangler, E. Gardner, P. Gardner, Gomperz, Grote, Hall, Miss Harrison, Head, Hill, Hogarth, Holm, V PREFACE Hommel {Chronology), A. I/ang, W. I^eaf, I/)wy, Mahaffy, Meltzer, Mover, Mosso, A. S. Murray, G. Murray, F. A. Paley, Petrie, Sir H. Rawlinson, Canon Rawlinson, Ridge- way, Ritter and Preller, Schlegel, Schliemann, Schuchliardt, A. H. Smith, G. Smith, W. Smith, Tsountas, H. B. Walters, Wilamowitz, Wood (Ephesus), Zeller, Zimmermann. Also, in regard to the illustrations, my thanks are due to Mr. Hasluck, of the British School in Athens, and (especially in regard to vases) to Professor H. Thiersch, of Freiburg, as well as to many others whose names are mentioned in the I^ist. Some of the illustrations supplied by F. Bruckmann and Co. are from their fine series of Greek and Roman Portraits ; others are from Bernoulli's Griechische Ikonographie. The autotypes of coins in Plates I- VI are reproductions which I was permitted by the courtesy of the Director of the British Museum to make from Mr. Head's official Guide to the Coins of the Ancients. In quoting Herodotus I have, with the permission of Mr. John Murray, frequently made use of Canon Rawlinson's version, and in translating Thucydides I sometimes accepted the guidance of Dale. For the compilation of the index I am indebted to Mr. C. C. Wood. H. B. C, Freiburg im Breisgau, March 191 3 VI CONTENTS iAPTl R PAGE I. The Aegaean Civii^ization : The Achaean Supremacy i Sections : A. Language and Writing. B. The Old Religion. C. The ' Homeric Age ' and Homer. D. Chrono- logy of Aegaean and other Contemporary Civilizations. II. The Dark Age ' 74 Sections ; A. ' Dipylon ' Antiquities. B. Hesiod C. The Phoenicians and some other^Nations during the Dark Age. III. From the First OIvYmpiad to Peisistratus 113 Sections : A. Egypt and Cyrene. B. I,ydia : Ivist of Eastern Kings. C. The Games. D. The Poets. IV. The Age of Peisistratus and the Rise of Persia 172 Sections : A. Poets and Philosophers. B. Early Greek Sculpture and Architecture. V. The Persian Invasions 234 I Sections : A. The Greeks and Carthaginians in Sicily. B. Pindar. VI. The Rise of the Athenian Empire 283 Sections: A. Architecture and Sculpture. B. Aeschylus: Herodotus : Philosophers of the Period. V VII. The PE1.OPONNESIAN War 326 W Sections : A. Thucydides. B. Sophocles : Euripides : Aristophanes. C. Democritus : The Sophists : Socrates. D. Sculpture. vii CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII. The Spartan and the Theban Supremacy 387 Sections : A. Xenophon. B. Sicily and the Cartha- ginians. C. Plato. D. Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting till the Accession of Alexander. IX. The Rise of Macedonia : Phiup and Alexander 422 Sections : A, Isocrates : Aeschines : Demosthenes : I^ater Philosophers. B. Lysippus : Hellenistic Sculpture. Note A. Greek Tempi^es 449 Note B. Dress 458 Note C. Coins 462 Note D. Pottery and Vase-Painting 471 I^isT OF Important Dates 477 Dates of Foundation of the Kari,y Greek Coi^onies 479 IvisT OF THE Persian Kings 480 lyisT OF THE Chief Greek Writers, Phii^osophers. and scui^ptors 48 1 Index 483 viu LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS In the following list the names of those to whom the author is indebted for permission to use copyright photographs, &c., are given in italic below the title of the subject. MAPS PAGB Greece and the Aegaean Sea i Sicily and Magna Graecia 119 Athens and the Peiraeus 299 The Route of the Ten Thousand 390 COLOURED PLATES PLATE I. Two lyEKYTHi Frontispiece Photo Mansell & Co. The larger, a white Attic lekythus (funeral oil-vase) with polychrome painting of early, severe style {c. 460). The smaller, a red-figured lekythus of the earHer and still somewhat restrained ' beautiful style,' which afterwards became fanciful and fantastic ; date c. 450. In British Museum. II. lyATE-MYCENAEAN VASES (c. I200) 8 Photo Mansell &• Co. One has the polypus decoration ; the other is an example of the characteristic Mycenaean false-necked amphora (' Biigel-kanne '). In the latter vessel the neck, to which the handles are attached, has no aperture. The spout is set in the shoulder of the vessel, and in the picture it stands in front of the ' false neck ' and hides it. In British Museum. III. An Attic Hydria of the Middi^e Bi,ack-figured Period (c. 550) 218 Photo Mansell & Co. Found at Vulci. Maidens fetching water from a fountain. Similar vases are inscribed with the names of the fountains Kallikrene or KaUirrhoe. This vase has the names of some of the maidens with the adjective /caX?) (' beautiful ') appended, as frequently occurs in vase-paintings. On the lower part of the vase is depicted Heracles strangling the Nemean lion. In British Museum. iz LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE PACK IV. A lyATK B1.ACK-FIGURED HyDRIA (c. 510) FROM Vui,ci 250 Photo Mans ell 6- Co. Harnessing chariot-horses. The driver in long white robe (c/. Fig. 74). Below, a boar- hunt. In British Museum. V. An APUI.IAN FuNERAi, Amphora with Voi^ute Handi.es 470 Photo Mansell 6- Co. Date c. 300. Scenes from the ' Sack of Troy ' {Iliou Persis) . Above, the death of Priam and of Hecuba; below, Ajax and Cassandra. In British Museum. COINS 462 463 464 465 466 467 VII. Portrait Coins 468 Plates I- VI consist of reproductions from the British Museum ' Guide to the Coins of the Ancients.' Plate VII is from photographs by F. Bruckmann. GENERAL ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. 1. Wai.1, of the Sixth City of Troy 6 From the Rev. James Baikie's ' Sea Kings of Crete ' {Messrs. A. &^ C. Black). Since this photo was taken the site has been further excavated. See, for instance. Dr. W. Leaf's new book on Troy. There can be very little doubt that these are the actual walls from a tower of which Andromache (if Homer's story is true) saw Hector being dragged round the city behind the chariot of Achilles (//. xxii. 460 sq.). 2. The lyiON Gate, Mycenae io Photo English Photographic Co. 3. Amenhotep III 10 Photo Mansell &> Co. British Museum. X I. Coins OF C. 700-500 11. c. 600-500 III. c. 480-400 IV. c. 480-430 V. c. 400-350 VI. c. 380-300 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PAGE 4. Men worshipping a Snake 10 From Miss J. E. Harrison's ' Prolegomena ' [Cambridge University Press). 5. Siege Scene 12 Photo Mansell & Co. On fragment of silver vase. From the copy in the British Museum. 6. Cretan Statue 12 Photo Maraghiannis. From Eleutherma. 7. From a Mycenaean G01.D Ring : Women and Sacred Tree 14 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prihelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Found south of Mycenaean acropolis. Sun and moon and Milky Way (or ocean stream ?) ; sky-deity with figure-of-eight shield and lance ; double axe ; child picking the date-like (or grape-like ?) fruit of the sacred tree ; row of animals' heads (?). 8. The ' Warrior Vase ' 14 Photo English Photographic Co. The painted fragment was found outside acropolis at Mycenae. Note corslet, short fringed chiton, leggings and footgear, metal (?) rings at knee and wrist, gourd or bag for water or food (?) hanging on spear, and the woman saying farewell. 9. G01.DEN Mask 14 Photo Rhomaides. The mask covered the face of one of the Mycenaean princes buried on the acropolis. 10 y II. Mycenaean Daggers 15, 16 From Professor Bury 's ' History of Greece ' {Macmillan & Co. Ltd.). 12. Goi^DEN Discs and Shrine 16 Photo Rhomaides. From the third tomb on the Mycenae acropolis. Of thin gold. Rather less than natural size. The discs probably dress ornaments. 13. GoivDEN Cups from Vaphio 16 Photo Rhomaides. 14. AcROPOus, Mycenae 18 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. 15. Excavations of Pai^ace, Cnossus 18 Photo Maraghiannis. xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIC. PAGE i6. The Cup-bkarbr, Cnossus 20 Copyright. By permission of Mr. John Murray. 17. Acrobats and Bi^ands 21 Front Dussaud's ' Civilisations prShelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Cretan gems. Instead of the usual bull we find here large antelopes like African elands. 18. ' Throne of Minos ' 22 Photo Maraghiannis. In the ' Council Chamber ' of the Cnossus Palace. Fresco of " griffin with peacock-plumes in a flowery landscape." 19. MiNOAN Game-board 22 Photo Maraghiannis. Found in Cnossus Palace. 20. Cretan Jars for Oii. or Corn 38 Photo Maraghiannis. Found in store-houses of Cnossus Palace. Five feet high. 21. CivAY Disc of Phaestus 38 Photo Maraghiannis. 22. Tabi^ets with Cretan I^inear Script 39 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prehelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Early linear writing {c. 1600 ?). 23. Inscription on Tataia's Fi.ask 42 Copied by the author from Mr. H. B. Walters' book on Vases. 24. ' Harvester Vase ' 48 Photo Maraghiannis. A small vessel of black soapstone, probably once covered with gold-leaf. Early Minoan work. Foimd at Hagia Triada, Crete. 25. Cretan Sarcophagus 48 Photo Maraghiannis. Later Minoan. Plastered limestone, painted. Funeral ceremony. Double axes. Musicians, one with seven-stringed lute. 26. Griffins and PiU/Ar 50 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prihelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Cretan gem. 27. Earth-Goddess and I^ions 50 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prihelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Imprint of seal found in Cnossus Palace. The Earth-Mother on mountain (Ida ?) with lions ; shrine and worshipper (or her son, Zeus Cretagenes ?). xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 28. RiTUAi. Danck and Uprooting of Sacred Tree 51 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations pr&helUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Gold ring. The uprooting of the sacred tree was perhaps a funeral ceremony. 29. Genii watering Sacred Tree 51 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prShelUniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Gem found at Vaphio. 30. The ' lyADY OF Wii,D Creatures ' 52 From Miss J. E. Harrison's ' Prolegomena' {Cambridge Uni- versity Press). Painting on a Boeotian amphora at Athens. 31. Cretan Seai,s 53 From Dussaud's ' Civilisations prShellSniques ' {Geuthner, Paris). Perhaps represent transformations in masked ritual dance, or perhaps worn as charms against evil spirits. 32. The Return of the Barth-Maiden 56 From Miss J. E. Harrison's ' Prolegomena ' {Cambridge Uni- versity Press). Vase at Oxford. I^ike the Anodos of Kore, but here the maiden is Pandora (generally the Greek Eve, but here probably the ' All-giver,' Earth-goddess). Zeus, Hermes, and Epimetheus welcome her return. Compare the northern myth of Holda, the goddess of spring. 33. MiNOAN, Mycenaean, and Trojan Ware 58 Photo Maraghiannis. Top left jug and two small cups are of the exceedingly fine Kamares ware ; found in Kamares cave. Mount Ida, Crete. Date c. 2000. Two other jugs on left, one with sunflower and papyrus (?), the other with octopus, are later Minoan, c. 1500- 1400. The former is in what is called ' Cnossus Palace style.' Top right-hand jug, probably from an island tomb ; date c. 2500. Black with incised lines filled with white substance. Two-necked jug of ' Hissarlik ' (Trojan) type. Date c. 1800, I^owest to right : Mycenaean ware, but found in Cyprus. Date c. 1300. 34. D1PY1.0N Vase 98 Photo Mansell &> Co. Two sides of same vase. Date about 850 or earlier. British Museum. xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 35. DIPYI.ON, PHAI.ERON, SamIAN, AND CORINTHIAN Ware, c. 800-600 100 Photo Mansell & Co. Upper row, three Dipylon vessels ; ancient animal decoration (bird, two horses at manger) combined with the revived geometric and maeander style. See Note D. Date c. 800. Lowest to left : ' Phaleron ware.' About fifty of such one- handled jugs discovered. Named after first, found on the road to Phaleron. Very different from preceding, and far more artistic. Oriental influence ? Date c. 700. Samian two-handled jug, found in the cemetery Fikellura, Rhodes. Date c. 600. Old Corinthian ; easily recognized by rather heavy but finely balanced shape, colours (rich browns and yellows) and style of animals, with spaces filled with flowers, &c. Corinth was anciently a great emporium, especially for trade with the far West. Date, about Periander's age, c. 600. 36. Foundations op Apoi,i.o's Tkmpi^e, West Dei^phi 104 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. See under Fig. 49 in this list. 37. Archaic Statue io6 From Gardner's ' Handbook of Greek Sculpture ' {Macmillan & Co. Ltd.). One of the so-called ' Tanten ' (' Aunts') excavated on the Athenian Acropolis. 38. ASSARHADDON WITH CaPTIVE EGYPTIAN AND AETHIOPIAN 112 Photo Graphische Gesellschaft. 39. The ' Francois Vase ' ii6 Photo Alinari. In the Etruscan Museimi, Florence. Perhaps the oldest inscribed Greek vase. Found by M. Fran9ois at Chiusi (Clusium, the city of Lars Porsena, where great numbers of tombs, &c., have been discovered). It was in about fifty fragments, but was nearly complete. In 1900, however, an insane employ & of the museum overthrew it, and while it lay shattered on the floor numerous shards were stolen, so that many important portions (as seen in the picture) are wanting. For questions of ancient Greek dress, weapons, chariots, vases, &c., it is invaluable. See Index and Note B. Many of the figures in the numerous scenes are named, and we learn the names of the painter and maker by the words KXir/as /z* eypayjfcv 'Epyori/xos- /x' iirolrjaev. Date perhaps about 650. Greek work imported into Etruria. 40. lyACiNiAN Cape and Column 120 From ' Aus dem klass. Siiden,' by permission of Herr Ch. Coleman, Liibeck. xiy LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PACm 41. Poseidon's TempIvE, Paestum 120 Photo Brogi. To left a part of the ' Basilica.' Note the greater bulge {entasis) of the columns. See Note A. 42. Apoi.i.o's Tempi^e, Corinth 130 Photo Simirioitis, Athens. See Note A. 43. Site of Corinth and the Acrocorinthus 130 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. Looking south. The rock of the ancient citadel Acrocorinth is some igoo feet high. A village existed on the old site till 1858, when it was destroyed by an earthquake, and New Corinth was then founded on the sea-shore. 44. C01.0SS1 OF Abu Simbeiv 148 Photo Frith. They all represent Ramses II {c. 1300, the Pharaoh of Moses' youth). The Greek inscription is on the legs of the headless colossus. It is signed by ' Archon and Pelekos/ who had " travelled with King Psamtik to Elephantine, and as far as the river permits." Date 594- 45. Cimmerians 148 Photo Mansell S'Co. A terra-cotta sarcophagus found at Clazo- menae, now in the British Museum. The head-dress, weapons, and war-dogs make it likely that these are the mysterious Cimmerians. Others take it for a chariot-race or a ' Doloneia.' 46. Site of Oi^ympia and Vai,e of the Ai^pheios 152 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. 47. Heraion, Oi^ympia 152 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. 48. Vai,e of Tempe and Mouth of River Peneios 156 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. 49. Site of Dei^phi 156 Before the old village of Zastri had been cleared away. Photo by Dr. Walter Leaf, Hellenic Society. In background lower precipices of Parnassus and ravine, from the left side of which springs the Castalian Fount. The great Temple lies further west. 50. ' Artemis of Dei,os ' 172 From Gardner's ' Handbook of Greek Sculpture ' {Macmillan &> Co. Ltd.). Primitive image with hair (as in Cretan statue, Fig. 6) in Egyptian style. Dedicated by Nicandra of Naxos to the Dehan Artemis. Found in ■ Delos. XV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS riG. PAGE 51. STEI.E OF ArISTION 172 Photo Alinari. Athens National Museum. 52. The Croesus Coi^umn 182 From Gardner's ' Handbook of Greek Sculpture ' {Macmillan &> Co. Ltd.). The inscription is on the moulding beneath the figure. It is unfortunately almost invisible. 53. Tomb of Cyrus 192 From Dr. Sarre's ' Iranische Felsreliefs ' {Ernst Wasmuth, A. -G., Berlin). See p. 193. 54. The OIvYmpieion, Athens 192 Photo Simiriottis, Athens. See p. 456. 55. Bl,ACK-FIGURED VASES, C. 70O-50O 204 Photo Mans ell S' Co. Greek vase found at Vulci, Etruria. Achilles slaying Penthe- silea. Date c. 550. Panathenaic prize vase. Victor being crowned. Date perhaps only c. 420, but in these prize vases the old black-figured style of the sixth century was kept. In middle : Attic amphora. Birth of Athene (springing from the head of Zeus). Left lower : Ancient Corinthian crater (mixing bowl). Return of Hephaestus to Olympus, mounted on mule and accompanied by Dionysus and satyrs. A not infrequent comic subject. From Daphnae, Egypt. Such water-jars (about thirty) only found at Daphnae (and perhaps Clazomenae). Decoration all of same type : above. Sphinxes ; below, geese ; in middle, procession of women. Black-figured style with white women's faces. Date c. 560 (age of Solon, Croesus, and Amasis). 56. Ancient Bi,ack-figured Amphora 210 Photo Mansell cS* Co. From Vulci, in Etruria, but Attic work. Athene, Zeus, and Hermes. Archaic style. Date c. 560. 57. TEMPI.E NEAR SEGESTA 214 Photo Brogi. See Note A. 58. Statue from the Branchidae Tempi^e 222 From Gardner's ' Handbook of Greek Sculpture ' [Macmillan &> Co. Ltd.) . Inscribed with name of Chares of Teichiussa. British Museum. 59. The ' Harpy Tomb ' 222 Photo Mansell 6- Co. British Museum. xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS riG. PAOB 60. EuROPA ON Tim BuLi, 226 From Gardner's ' Handbook of Greek Sculpture * {Macmillan 6* Co. Ltd.). Metope from temple at Selinus. At Palermo. Somewhat later than the Selinus reliefs of Perseus and the Gorgon, and the extraordinary fore- shortened chariot, models of which are in the British Museum. 61. The Tyrannicides 230 Photo Alinari, Naples. 62. Tkmpi "^^^ Tpcrxt^j cfu hguBos ■ hos dkv fu h^6J/ih tiiJ^s &n^ ^ J Atn Taputu J^asA ,<^ uhoei/i^JiaJjnc s{ ca ra 2 «§ ^ d rt > S -si- a .aSa-ai t-1 P CIS G 1-1 "Q Jb rt o S « ::^'0 -a ■ 0Sgw2 rt 11:^ o ?> -po ftg «2 X 2 i I 2 2 a^l •^gao i2 ^ « S > c8 o f*' o dC-W ia-5 J CD cijs A< ^(d a 72 S' 3 o a ^ ^_^ 9, in >~- S g^ ^ Oifl o*: >> d'C a •2g o d •t38 c/^2 J ID PO >. 'S H (o Th Ml isJi rt -< '-' u_, »Q •"^ O C! o o 5 V o i) qP «l 11 ?o §e O ci +j ;-! 05 oj A 4iJ CO « o N 2 9 2 " ^a rt a ^ 5c O 1 I 2 J 3 Q, d « +j o HpLi 5t If •a a s" . 8 c •% d 8-^ ^« i2^-d ;2;g^ J5cH > 3 >> sQ i o "m d CU > .a « O 9 ^ t-H •^ S f/1 aa O -M a S^ 83 o 8 «o .H 2 g-S B'-S X .a till OS'S 2- « S,l U) « rt o rt ^c^^^'S-g o O M « S « S3 <«, i;l a o SI rt O ^5i •3^ « a'-S w m rt rt M-, « '3 O-m-mTJotOo!- w rt ja c9 g •^ d 3 «) P « P2 CHAPTER II THE DARK AGE (c. IIOO TO 776) The Dorians : The Coi^onization of Aeoi> < 03 < tn O D o O . M lO V.O ON A ? vn VO vn VO VJ . M t>^ to _^ • r-SJ o a ^ d «i IH (1) rt ^voo^z; o CiVO M O t^ to VO^ ^ M o r^ ^ ffi >o «5 o fl to ca^ q THE AGE OF COLONIZATION SECTION C : THE GAMES It is a trite remark that Greece was never a nation ; and it is true that Hellas, and even the Hellenic homeland, had no political coherence. Very rarely, as Thucydides says, did the Greek states take any combined action, and even against the Persians the combination was by no means complete. Greek patriotism was not based on the idea of political union, far less on that of any central imperial power. All imperialism, all hegemony of Greek over Greek, was as odious as tyranny to the deeper instincts of the race, and although such temporary structures as the Athenian Empire and the Spartan and Theban supremacies arose from time to time, they were maintained by forces foreign to true Hellenic genius. But though not united politically, often torn asunder by intestine feuds, the Hellenic world was united in heart by sentiments perhaps nobler than those of ordinary patriotism — by the proud consciousness of kinship not only in blood but in the deepest sympathies of human nature, such as find expression in religion and art and literature. This fact is finely stated in the message sent by the Athenians to Sparta before the capture of Athens by Mardonius the Persian : " Not all the gold that the earth contains would bribe us to take part with the Medes and help them to enslave our countrymen. . . . There is our common brotherhood, our common language, the altars and the sacrifices of which we all partake, and the common character which we bear. Did the Athenians betray all this, of a truth it would not be well,^' This consciousness, which more and more counteracted the old antipathies between Doric, Ionian, and other sections of the race, and inspired all Hellas with a feeling of boundless superiority over the nations that surrounded it on all sides — though some of these ' barbarians ' could boast of a civilization far more ancient and a sense of truth and honour ^ far keener 1 See later remarks on the Persian character. The traitor was never far to seek among the Greeks, but was scarcely known among the Persians. 151 ANCIENT GREECE than that of the Greeks — ^was fostered by the great religious festivals held by the mother-cities, to which the colonies of the Hellenic world sent solemn embassies (Oewplai) vying with each other in the magnificence of their offerings. Also for the Greeks of the colonies there were meeting- places where great festivals were held, such as the Ivicinian promontory in South Italy, and the island of Delos. This island, lying in the midst of the Cyclades, which offer easy transit between Greece and Ionia, was in early times an impor- tant entrepot. It was also the religious centre of the Ionian world, famed as the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo and for the most ancient oracle of the god.^ Every fifth year the birth of the twin deities was celebrated with magnificence, amidst a great concourse, vividly described in the ancient Hymn to Apollo : " Hither gather the long-robed lonians with their children and chaste wives. They wrestle, they dance, they sing in memory of the god. He who saw them would say they were immortal and ageless, so much grace and charm would he find in viewing the men, the fair-girdled women, the swift ships, and riches of every kind." (See also Thuc. iii. 104.) These festivals seem to have been accompanied by contests in music and poetry. The temple, with its priceless treasure of offerings, was not touched by the Persians, who plundered most of the other islands, but the Delian festivals seem to have ceased during the Persian supremacy. They were revived with great ostentation by the Athenians of the Empire, who used to send splendid theorias in the sacred Delian galley [Salaminia) ; but this revival was of short duration, for Delos had lost its special sanctity in rivalry with Delphi, and the centre of religious life for the lonians had been long since transferred to the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, as that of their political life was transferred to the pan-Ionian assembly on Mount Mycale. ^ Homer speaks only of Apollo's altar in Delos. Excavation has revealed a sanctuary with small temples of Artemis, Apollo, I,eto, and Aphrodite — perhaps built on the site of the great ancient temple. Statues, possibly of Artemis, have been discovered (see Fig. 50). The original Delian statue of Apollo was said to have been brought thither by Theseus from Crete. 152 46. Site of Oi^ympia and Vai,k of the Ai^pheios 47. Heraion, Oi^ympia 152 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION By far the most famous, if not the most ancient, pan-Hellenic assembly was that held at Olympia, where Heracles is said to have consecrated (c. 1200) a sanctuary to Zeus, and to have founded games after his victory over Augeas, king of Blis. Others even attribute the foundation to Pelops (c. 1280) . Tradi- tion asserts that the games, which had fallen into disuse, were reinstituted by I^ycurgus of Sparta and Iphitus, king of Blis ; ^ to prove which was shown at Olympia the discus of Iphitus inscribed with the name of I^ycurgus. Perhaps it was on this occasion that the Eleans, supported by Sparta, usurped the presidency at the games, held till then by the people of Pisa, in whose territory Olympia lay, and to whom, as we have already seen. King Pheidon of Argos {c. 680) for a time restored their rights. During the seventh century all the victors were Spartans, Messenians, and Bleans, so that it seems as if the games were confined to these peoples. After the Messenian wars (c. 600) we find competitors from other Greek states, and later many of the most celebrated victors came from South Italy, Sicily, and other parts of Hellas. None but pure Hellenes were allowed to compete. Foreigners might be spectators, but no slave nor any woman was allowed to be present. 2 From 776 to 724 the games consisted merely of a foot-race of about three hundred yards. I^onger races were then introduced, and the pentathlon (a fivefold contest in running, leaping, wrestling, discus- and spear-throwing) and chariot-races, and lastly the pancratium (combined boxing and wrestling). The competitors had to undergo a training of ten months and special practice for a month at Olympia under supervision, and to make sacrifices and to vow that they would compete fairly. There were official trainers besides the judges (hellanodicae) , who awarded the prizes — wreaths cut with a golden knife from the sacred oHve-tree, which, it was said, Heracles had planted. ^ Traditional date 884. Others give 776, i.e. the year of the victory of Coroebus, from which the Olympiads are dated. * Perhaps no married women ; and possibly exceptions were made with Spartan women. A story is told of a woman being detected in male attire, but as her son was victor she was forgiven. IS3 ANCIENT GREECE Marvellous stories were told of the feats of some of the victors. The distances (fifty feet or so) covered by them in leaping seem incredible, but how they used the halteres — i.e. ' leaping weights ' held in the hands while jumping — is unknown. Of activity and endurance we have a striking example in the victor of the nine-mile race, who is said to have continued running after passing the goal, and to have reached Argos, some fifty miles distant, on the same evening. The festival took place every fourth year. At first it was limited to a single day (probably that of the first full moon after the summer solstice). After the Persian wars it was extended to five days. The vast multitudes who camped on the slopes of the Mount of Cronos and the sandy hillocks between the beds of the Alpheus and the Cladeus, and who for five days stood in dense throngs around the racecourse and palaestra, must have suffered greatly from heat and drought — for the river-water was scanty and bad, and it was not till a late age that a reservoir of pure water was made by the wealthy Roman, Herodes Atticus. No wonder that special sacrifices were offered to Zeus the Averter of Flies ! A ' holy truce * was proclaimed for the whole month, during which all warfare was forbidden and the land of Elis was considered sacred. The temenos, or sacred precinct, at Olympia was called the Altis.^ Within it stood in early days the ancient temple of Zeus, on the site of which was probably afterwards built the wonderful structure for which Pheidias made his famous statue, and where the equally famous chest of Cypselus was kept. Another temple contained the tomb of Pelops, and very ancient stone foundations have been excavated which are believed to have belonged to the temple of Hera and Zeus — an edifice of sun-baked brick with wooden Doric columns dating from perhaps looo (see Fig. 47). In an open space of the Altis stood the great altar of Zeus, and outside the walls was the Stadion, a racecourse about two hundred yards in * Probably the Elean form of aXaos, a sacred grove. The Altis was a square of about two hundred yards each way, enclosed by great walls. 154 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION length. Such was Olympia in the age of lyycurgus, and also of Pheidon ; but in time the old buildings were replaced by marble temples, and many other magnificent structures arose within and without the Altis — halls and porticoes and treasure- houses. More than eighty altars erected to the various deities testified to the vast numbers of the worshippers, who came from all parts of Hellas ; ^ the avenues were lined with the statues of victorious athletes, and both within and without the temples were erected the masterpieces of renowned sculptors, such as the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, the Victory of Paeonius, and the Hermes of Praxiteles. 2 Even in the sixth century, as we shall see, men like Xenophanes the philosopher spoke disdainfully of the glori- fication of the athlete. Euripides, too, in the fragment that survives of his Autolycus, calls athletes the worst of all the ills of Hellas, and Socrates, one of the hardiest and bravest of soldiers, spoke of such men with contempt, as did also Epameinondas. In a still later age — when chryselephantine statues of royal Macedonians stood in the Philippeion at Olympia — the games degenerated into mere professional contests, and Alexander the Great himself is said to have despised ' athleti- cism.' Under the earher Roman emperors the Olympic Games were celebrated with great magnificence, but were abolished in A.D. 394 by Theodosius I. His grandson, Theodosius II, had all the temples burnt. But many a splendid ruin still remained, and afforded material to Christian church-builders, as well as to Goths, Slavs, and Turks. At last the great columns and pediments of the temple of Zeus were overthrown by an earthquake. Excavations made by the Germans about 1876 brought to light not only old foundations and many fragments of architectural sculpture, but also the two ^ As one might infer from its site on the western shores of Greece, Olympia was frequented far more by the Greeks of Western Hellas than by those of Ionia. Out of the twelve treasure-houses five were erected by Greeks of Sicily and South Italy, one by Epidamnus, one by Cyrene, and one by Byzantium. * See Figs. 93, 112, and cow 10, Plate III. ANCIENT GREECE statues already mentioned, the Hermes and the Victory — both of them original masterpieces by great Greek artists. Of these and of the sculptures of the Zeus temple I shall speak again later. Pan-Hellenic festivals with athletic and sometimes musical and poetical contests were held also at Delphi, at Nemea, and on the Isthmus. For all of them great antiquity was claimed. The Isthmian Games were said to date from the age of Theseus and Sisyphus, the Nemean from that of the Seven against Thebes, while Apollo himself was said to have founded the Pythian Games at Delphi. But very little is known of them until they were refounded — the Isthmian festival, in honour of Poseidon, possibly by Periander of Corinth, and the Nemean, in honour of Zeus, by the Argives. These festivals were biennial. At the same time as they were reinstituted (c. 580) the Pythian Games were revived. At the original Pythian festival there were probably only contests in music and poetry. The great temple stood, as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo says, "in a hollow, rugged glen beneath the overhanging crags of snowy Parnassus " — a site very unsuitable for athletic gatherings and horse-races. Nor did the god himself seem to favour such things, for in the same Hymn the poet protests in the deity's name against the clatter of chariots and horses around his temple, and the " drinking of mules at the sacred fountains." But when an arena was found at sufficient distance, so that the tumult of games should not disturb the sanctity of his oracle, Apollo was content and vouchsafed his favour. This arena was the plain of Cirrha, or Crissa, lying between Delphi and the sea. The people of Crissa, to whom belonged the port at which pilgrims landed, levied heavy dues and otherwise annoyed the people of Delphi, who had control of the Delphic shrine. These appealed to the Amphictiony ^ — a religious league of North Grecian states — which espoused their cause, and with the help of Cleisthenes of Sicyon, after * Amphictiones means 'dwellers around.' The league was probably begun by the neighbours of a shrine of Demeter near Thermopylae, and gradually grew until the Amphictionic Council had great influence. See Diet. Ant. is6 !. Vai,e of Tkmpe and Mouth of River Penfios 49. Site of Dei^piii 156 M THE AGE OF COLONIZATION a struggle of about ten years (the first Sacred War) , succeeded in capturing Crissa (590). They razed it to the ground and dedicated the Crissaean plain to the service of the Delphian god ; and on this plain was held the Pythian festival, which for its musical, poetical, and artistic contests, as well as for its chariot-races, became scarcely less famed than that of Olympia itself. French excavators have brought to light the remains of the great temple and of about six others, as well as a theatre, stadium, and gymnasium, not far from the Castalian Fount, and the paved Sacred Way which winds up the huge stone terraces on which Apollo's temple stood. This Sacred Way was lined by treasure-houses erected by many of the chief cities of Greece, and was once filled with priceless works of art, almost all of which have naturally disappeared, for Delphi was the prey of plunderers during many ages. Fine architectural sculptures have, however, been recovered, especially some that belonged to the Athenian, Sicyonian, and Cnidian treasuries, and also numerous statues, offerings to the Delphic god. Of these the most remarkable are a colossal Sphinx dedicated by the people of Naxos, and the bronze charioteer (Fig. 74) which was probably erected as a thank-offering for victory in a chariot -race by Polyzalus, the brother of Hiero. SECTION D : THE POETS (776-560) We have seen how by the time of Hesiod the old monarchical and feudal feeling had largely given way to the natural yearn- ings for personal liberty and independent thought, and how such yearnings, thwarted by the rich and high-born oppressor, found vent in bitter lament and the cry for justice and equality. The true poet — who ever interprets his age — no longer deigned to sing the praises of heaven-descended princes. The epic bard, or rhapsode, indeed, still existed, and the Cyclic writers (so called because they attempted to finish the whole cycle of the legend of Troy) supplied him with material such as the Sack of Ilion, the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Telegoneia, and sometimes, for a change, with mock-heroic 157 ANCIENT GREECE parodies of the Homeric epic such as the Margites, the story of a booby-hero who " knew many professions but knew all badly/' or the Batrachomyomachia, the ' Battle of the Frogs and Mice/ And there were (as there are in most ages) poets who wrote religious verse — hymns for festivals of the gods, some of them, such as the * Homeric ' hymns to Apollo and Demeter, of great dignity and beauty. But all this was a survival. The spirit of the age was another, and poetry demanded new forms in which to sing of freedom and fatherland, love and friendship, wisdom and virtue, life and death. The first of these new forms was elegiac verse, which in its original home, Caria and I^ydia, was of a dirge-like character and was accompanied by mournful flute-music. But the metre, a couplet consisting of the epic hexameter and a similar but shorter and more energetic verse with two emphatic monosyllables, was adopted by the Greeks for their war-songs, and also for exhortatory poetry [viroOmai) and sententious maxims {yvwimai), and for the expression of personal feelings and opinions on all subjects affecting human life. Among the elegiac poets of this age the chief were Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, and Solon. The second form was iambic verse, generally of a satiric character, the chief writers of which were Semonides of Amorgos and Archilochus. The third form was lyrical verse. These early lyrical poets stand on a level immeasurably higher than that of the elegiac and iambic writers. The best known, though, alas ! by repute rather than from what has survived of their poetry, are Sappho and Alcaeus, with whom one may perhaps venture to associate Alcman, Arion, and Stesichorus. The following brief accounts of these poets and of some of their surviving works may prove interesting. Further bio- graphical details will be found in classical dictionaries. (i) Callinus of Ephesus was perhaps the inventor of the elegiac couplet. His seems to have been mostly war-poetry. Among the few verses of his that are extant he calls upon his countrymen to rouse themselves : *' How long will ye lie idle, 158 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION while war fills all the world ? . . . 'Tis honourable and glorious for a man to fight for his fatherland, his children, and the wife of his youth. ... It is not possible to escape one's destined death. . . . Many a man has fled battle and the clash of arms only to return to his home and find there the doom of death." In a verse preserved by Strabo Callinus exclaims : ** Now is coming the host of the Cimmerians, those doers of terrible deeds ! " It is therefore probable that by his war-songs he roused the Bphesians against these savages, who (c. 678) had captured Sardis and killed the I^ydian king Gyges, and soon afterwards burnt the temple of Artemis, just outside the walls of Kphesus. (2) Of Tyrtaeus {c. 660) we have already heard. Whether ^ he was really an Athenian, or whether his birthplace, Aphidna in I^aconia, was confused with Aphidna in Attica, is unknown. Fragments survive of * Tyrtaean ' marching songs in anapaestic measure — e.g. "Ayer'j w ^rrdpras evdvSpov Kovpoi iraTepoiv TroXiarav . . . — and about eighty elegiac couplets, some of which have a splendid swing, such as : TeBvdfievai yap koKov inl 7rpop.dxoi(n Trea-ovra avBp* dyaObv Trepl jj irarplSi fiapvdpevov . . . Km TToda Trap ttoSi Bus /cat eV d(nri8os damld* epfiaas . . . The language is almost pure Ionic, not Doric ; which is trange if he was really vSpartan. Moreover, his poetry (if t is his) contains numerous lines almost identical with lines |;)f Callinus, so that some hold that it was written in Ionia )y some Milesian poet and attributed to Tyrtaeus. Among : Tyrtaean elegiac exhortations (vTroOtiKai) sue some fine verses pncouraging young warriors not to desert their elders in battle. r What a foul sight," the poet exclaims, " is a white-headed /arrior lying dead in the front ranks ! But in the youth i verything is seemly ; he is handsome alive and handsome also /hen fallen in the van of the battle." Besides, he adds, ravery is the best policy ; the bold survive, while all the herd IS9 ANCIENT GREECE of cowards perishes. Of his elegy Eunomia (' Good Order ') about thirty Hnes are extant. In it the poet calls on the citizens i to avoid dissension and to respect the Pythian oracle as the source of law and order. He mentions the " god-honoured kings" of Sparta, especially Theopompus, under whose command, after nineteen years, " we conquered Messenia, good to plough and good to plant." Another fragment (possibly genuine) depicts vividly a well-known characteristic of i the Spartans : " The love of money and naught else shalli ruin Sparta. . . . Thus hath golden-haired Apollo prophesied! from his rich shrine." (3) The poetry of Mimnermus [c, 630) is of a more personal character. Some of it is addressed to Nanno, a flute-girl .! ** What is life," he exclaims, " without golden Aphrodite ? " Old age is a terrible thing ; its doom {kyip) is worse than that of death, destroying both eyes and mind.^ lyike Horace he sings ol the joys of youth, and bids one gather them donee virenti canities abest. Perhaps more interesting than his views on this subjed are the verses in which he tells how an ancestor of his drov( in rout the phalanxes of I^ydian horsemen on the plain of the Hermus. This was evidently in a fight between the people o: Smyrna, the poet's birthplace, and King Gyges, who failed t( take the city. Three generations later (c. 590) Alyattes o lyydia captured and razed Smyrna (see p. 149). But Mimnermu; probably did not live to see this evil day, though he seem to have survived to the manhood of Solon (c. 600), wh( answered his assertion that life was over at seventy ^ b bidding him substitute ' eighty.' (4) When Solon was in Egypt, says the grandfather Critias in Plato's Timaeus, he heard from the priests (the sam priests who told him that the Greeks were always childrer the wonderful story of the isle Atlantis. '' Ay," adds the ol Critias, "if he had not taken up poetry as a mere by-worl but had worked at it earnestly like others and had compose ^ Perhaps these Kr^pes of Mimnermus are the evil spirits, or, as Miss Harrisc has argued, the bacilli, of old age and death. See p. 46. ^ Strangely enough, Solon in his Ten Ages gives seventy as the limit, ar Herodotus makes him give the same in his conversation with Croesus. 160 l THE AGE OF COLONIZATION a poem on this story that he brought from Egypt, instead of having been obHged to neglect it on account of all the political troubles that he found here at Athens, I believe that neither Hesiod nor Homer nor any other poet would have been more famous." In spite of Critias, or even of Plato himself, it is not easy to believe that Solon could ever have been a great poet. But his verses are often exceedingly eloquent and forcible, and on account of his great reputation as statesman and sage they are of supreme interest. In an age when writing was still a rare accomplishment and one had to trust mainly to the living voice those who had anything to say and who wished to impress it on the memory of their hearers chose a rhythmical form — which, after all, is the natural mode of expression for the emotions, and far less artificial than literary prose. ^ Even laws, it is said, were anciently published in rhythmical language, and not only sages such as Solon and Bias (who wrote a poem of two thousand lines), but also many of the earlier philosophers, as Parmenides, Heracleitus, Xenophanes, Empedocles, and perhaps even Thales himself, expressed their doctrines in verse — a method which, as the magnificent De Rerum Natura of I^ucretius in a later age proved, allows the imagination its sublimest flights, but which might have its disadvantages for writers on what is nowadays called philosophy. The extant verses of Solon are (a) eight lines of his celebrated verses, originally a hundred, about Salamis ; (b) Exhortations to the Athenians ; (c) Exhortations to himself ; (d) some trochaic and iambic verses. The sense of his lines about Salamis is as follows : "I came myself as a herald from lovely Salamis, having composed an order [series] of verses instead of a set-speech. . . . Would that I had been then [when we gave up Salamis] a man of Pholegandros or Sicine [little Aegaean islands] rather than an * Aesop (c. 570) should here be mentioned. If he wrote his Fables in verse, as is probable, they were known later only in a prose version ; for Socrates, when in prison, bidden by the god to " make his life more musical," versified some of them. L 161 ANCIENT GREECE Athenian, for swiftly this report might be spread abroad : This is an Attic man — one of the Salamis-abandoners." In his Exhortations to the Athenians he eloquently describes the ruin brought on a city which loves injustice — how its poor are sold into slavery and not even the courtyard doors keep out disaster from a man's home. He sings of Order and Disorder, and of feuds between rich and poor. *' I stood holding before both a mighty buckler, nor did I let either win unjustly." " It is hard," he says, " to please all in great undertakings." He speaks of the Demos, and how it best obeys its leaders when not given too loose a rein nor held in too tight ; and he addresses a remark to this same Demos which shows how thoroughly he understood its nature : " Each one of you singly treadeth in the tracks of the fox [is foxish in cunning], but when ye are all together the mind within you is a gaping gooselike thing ; for ye pay regard to the tongue and the word of any wheedling flatterer and look not at all to what is being done." The Exhortations to himself contain many wise saws and maxims — e.g. " Wealth is good, but not when ill-acquired " ; " God is a righteous judge, not quick to anger as a man." A very interesting fragment is his Ten Ages, in which he depicts with almost Shakespearean art the state of man at every seventh year of his life — from the child of seven shedding his first teeth to the septuagenarian ''ripe to receive his destined doom of death," an expression inconsistent with his answer to Mimnermus. He probably lived eighty years himself, and one of his finest sayings was, " I grow old ever learning many things." Of historical interest (if genuine) are the lines that he addressed to Philocyprus, the Gyprian prince, bidding him farewell, and wishing him long life at his new city, Soli (see p. 141). Among the fragments of his trochaic tetrameters there is a rather amusing passage in which he pretends to quote public criticism of the fact that he followed the example of Pittacus rather than that of Periander " Solon," he says, " was a 162 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION man of no deep wisdom or judgment, for when God gave him good things he would not accept them, and, having enclosed his catch, became nervous and did not haul his big net to land. If / had got hold of such power and boundless wealth, even if I had been tyrant of Athens for a single day, I should have been willing to be flayed to make a wine-skin and have all my family exterminated." In his iambics he gives a most interesting account of how he released debtors and recalled those who had been sold into foreign slavery. (5) Horace says that '* fury armed Archilochus with his own iambus." Doubtless iambic rhythm (which in some languages, such as English, is the natural rhythm of emotional language) existed before.^ It is found, for instance, in the Margites, sometimes attributed to Homer, and it was probably used in chants at Demeter mysteries and other reli- gious ceremonies ; whence perhaps Archilochus borrowed it, for his father was a priest of Demeter, and he himself won the prize for a hymn to the goddess. But possibly the iambic trimeter (the metre used by the great Greek dramatists) was invented by this poet of Paros, who used it with dire effect, it is said, in his scathing satires against lyycambes and his daughters. From fragments of his poems (which comprised elegiacs, iambics, trochaic tetrameters, and also combinations of various rhythms, imitated by Horace in his Epodes) it seems that he visited Southern Italy, for he speaks of the '* streams of the Siris, more lovely than Thasos," Also he mentions Euboea, and describes the Kuboean mode of fighting : " not much bending of bows nor many slings, but the terrible work of the sword " ; so, perhaps, he took part in the lyelantine war of Chalcis and Bretria (p. 128). He joined an expedition to Thasos made by the Parians, attracted by the gold-mines of that island and of the opposite Thracian mainland ; but it seems to have been unsuccessful. He speaks of Thasos with * The essential difference between the hexametric and iambic rhythms con- sists in the fact that the spondee (or dactyl) is in equipoise, its two parts balancing each other and producing a smooth onward motion, whereas the trochee or iambus ("^ or ^~) causes an agitated, up-and-down movement. 163 ANCIENT GREECE dislike as a bare, rocky ridge " like a donkey's back." In a fight with Thracians he lost his shield (a fact that probably accounts for a similar story about Alcaeus, and certainly accounts for the imaginative loss of Horace's shield at PhiHppi). His lines on the subject may be thus rendered : Some Thracian's doubtless chuckling o'er an unexpected find — A brand-new shield, which much against my will I left behind. Well, anyhow, I saved my life. The shield may go to pot I Another and a better one can easily be got. More important for the chronologist is the fact that, perhaps while he was in Thasos, he witnessed a solar eclipse, for this gives us the first quite certain date in Greek history, viz. April 8, 648. " Nothing," he says, " is incredible and impossible any longer, since Zeus created night at noonday, hiding the light of the blazing sun ; and pale dread fell upon mortals. Henceforth all things can be believed and expected. I^et none wonder even if the beasts of the forest exchange with dolphins and dwell in the briny realms, and the resounding billows become dearer to them than the dry land, while the mountains delight those others." Possibly there is reference here to his former love for the fair Neobule, I/ycambes' daughter, now changed into the bitterest disdain. But of all that has survived of Archilochus the lines are the finest in which he addresses his own soul, as Odysseus does in the Odyssey. " Soul, soul, storm-tossed by desperate cares, come forth and defend thyself breast-foremost 'gainst thy foes, and station thyself in safety anigh the ambush of the enemy. And if victorious, triumph not openly, nor, if conquered, fall on thy face in thy house and lament, but rejoice in all that is joyous and vex not thyself too much because of evil men, remembering that such is the way of mortals." Words like these and a line such as Gyges with all his golden wealth is naught to me, come like a breath of fresh air across all the long ages of dusty, dreary warfare and politics that so often form the main subject of history. 164 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION (6) Semonides, called also Simonides, probably from being confused with the later poet of that name, was a Samian by birth, but migrated, perhaps as oekist of a Samian colony, to the little island of Amorgos. I^ike Archilochus, he used the iambic trimeter for satire ; but his satire was not directed against individuals, and his only extant complete poem, in spite of some very caustic passages, is quite Horatian in its playful humour. This poem, which is of about a hundred lines, describes the creation of ten different kinds of women — the dirty from the pig, the sly from the fox, the shameless and inquisitive from the dog, the stupid from earth, the unstable from water, the obsti- nate from the donkey, the thievish from the cat, the coquettish from the horse, the mischievous from the monkey, and, lastly, the good and industrious from the bee. The last he describes with as much enthusiasm as Solomon himself, and a couplet of his preserved by Clement of Alexandria repeats almost word for word Hesiod's assertion that "nothing can a man win better than a good woman, or worse than a bad one/' Some of the pictures in this poem of Semonides are exceedingly vivid — such as that of the coquette, who will take no share in household duties, but sits afar from the hearth, fearing the soot, and performs her ablutions and anointings twice or even three times daily, and " carries on her head a deep mane of hair all combed out and overshadowed with flowers — a pretty sight indeed for others, but to her lord and master a misfortune, unless he be some tyrant or sceptre-bearing king who delights in such things." (7) Alcman was born at Sardis, in I^ydia, but his father was probably Greek. How he came to Sparta is unknown. Either, like Terpander, he was invited thither, or he came originally as a slave and gained his freedom and civic honours by his poetry. He is, according to the canon of the Alexandrine grammarians, the first Greek lyric poet. His language is the old lyaconian dialect. He wrote hymns, love- and war-songs, and Parthenia (songs for Spartan maidens), all of which seem to have been true songs and of a far higher poetic value than the verses of Tyrtaeus. The form, too, of his poems 165 ANCIENT GREECE is very different from that of the elegiac and iambic poets. They consist of short hnes, mostly trochaic and dactylic, arranged in strophes and antistrophes — a system invented by him, amplified by Stesichorus and Pindar, and adopted by the Attic dramatists for their choral odes — in which also the Doric dialect is often used. He lived about 670-600, and was thus probably a contemporary of Tyrtaeus. Of his poetry numerous fragments remain. Of these the most important was discovered (written on papyrus) in Egypt about sixty years ago. It is a Parthenion, meant to be sung by virgins at the festival of Artemis Orthia (see p. loi). There are also four hexameters of great beauty, addressed in old age to the Spartan maidens. He laments that he can no longer take part in their songs and dances and wishes he were some bright-coloured sacred sea-bird *' that over the foam of the sea with dauntless heart amid the halcyons flies.'' His lines descriptive of the stillness of night have all the vividness, if not the pathos, of Goethe's Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh'. (8) Arion {c. 625) was a native of lyesbos, which he left probably early, before the days of Alcaeus and Sappho. He spent most of his life at the court of Periander of Corinth, where he became famous as a minstrel and song- writer. According to Herodotus, as well as Aristotle, he was *' the first to invent the dithyramb measure." More probably he adapted the rough measures and boisterous ribaldry of the old Cyclic, or dithyramb, chorus, sung at vintage dances in honour of Dionysus. There is nothing of Aiion's poetry extant, although the historian Aelian (third century a.d.) quotes verses in which Arion himself is supposed to give an account of his rescue by the dolphin. Aelian also appeals to the inscription on the bronze statue of Arion and his dolphin erected on Cape Taenarus to prove the truth of that account ; and perhaps there is more truth in the story than we believe. Pliny tells of a dolphin (porpoise) who used to carry a boy to and from school every day across the bay of Baiae. (9) Stesichorus {c. 632-556) was born at Himera, in Sicily. One tradition asserts that he was a son of Hesiod. He incurred 166 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION the hostility of the notorious tyrant Phalaris and fled to Catane, where he died. His tomb gave the name to one of the city gates. This name, Stesichorus, he is said to have received in addition to his original name Tisias because he was famed as an ' arranger of choruses.' He is said to have brought the lyric art to perfection in language and rhythm, but the bulk of his writings seems to have been on epic subjects — the old Trojan and Orestean legends and the myths about Heracles. Of these poems numerous fragments survive, but they are of little interest except the first three lines (preserved for us by Plato) of the celebrated Palinode with which Stesi- chorus atoned for having slandered Helen of Troy and thus, it is said, recovered his eyesight : " It is not true — that story. Thou didst never embark on well-benched ships nor reach the battlements of Troy." It was not Helen herself that Paris carried off, but only a phantom — that ' double ' of Helen which plays a part in Greek legend and literature and is intimated in the beautiful episode of the Helena in Goethe's Faust. (id) Alcaeus {c. 645-580) belonged to a noble family of Mytilene in I^esbos. He took part against the tyrant Myrsilus, and after the defeat of the lycsbians by the Athenians at Sigeum (in defence of which stronghold he distinguished himself — and perhaps lost his shield) he, as well as his brother and many others of the aristocratic party, went into exile {c. 596). He seems to have been for some time in Egypt, where Apries (Hophra) was reigning and Naucratis, the Greek settlement, was already a flourishing town. Hither, too, perhaps with Alcaeus, came Charaxus, the brother of Sappho — and possibly even Sappho herself. The brother of Alcaeus took service under Nebucadnezar, and may have been at the sack of Daphnae (see p. 144), but probably he returned with the poet to Mytilene. Here Alcaeus violently opposed the democratic party, and when Pittacus (c. 590) was made dictator (p. 128) he was imprisoned ; but the wise Pittacus seems to have forgiven him, and probably the two became friends. A true and tender friendship existed also between 167 ANCIENT GREECE Alcaeus and Sappho, who was the younger by a few years. His poetry breathes passionate emotion. He sings of gods and of men, of war and arms, of love and wine. In verses still extant he describes the ship of the state (a picture copied by Horace) tossed on the waves, rolling to and fro with sails rent and the water rising ever higher in the hull. Two lines survive addressed to Sappho : " O violet- weaving, holy, sweetly smihng Sappho, I wish to say something to thee, but shame prevents me." Of all his poems (ten books of which once existed) we have but these lines and a few other fragments. Many of his odes were written in the measure (a stanza of four lines) invented by him, and named after him — a measure well known from Horace's translations and imitations of the Aeolian bard ; known also to English readers from Tennyson's fine stanzas addressed to Milton. (ii) Sappho, like Alcaeus, was a I^esbian, and had her home at Mytilene ; but for some years (c. 596-590) she too lived in exile, perhaps in Sicily — possibly also at Naucratis. At Mytilene her house, which she named ' The Home of the Muses,' was the gathering-place of many literary and fashionable women, and as I^esbos was at this time, it is said, rich in female writers, some of whom tried to found schools in rivalry of Sappho and her ill-fated friend, the poetess Krinna, jealousy and calumny were inevitable. Hence doubtless arose the tales that sullied her good name — tales which were more readily believed by the Athenians because of the very different ideas that prevailed at Athens and among the lycsbians in regard to the amount of social freedom allowable to women, lycss intelligible is the tale that relates her hapless infatuation for the mythical Phaon, the ugly ferryman who was rejuvenated and beautified by Aphrodite, and her fatal leap from the lycucadian precipice. Sappho's poetry has the exquisite natural grace and the delicate but distinct outlines of the finest Greek sculpture — such sculpture as we see on the frieze of the Parthenon or on some beautiful Athenian stele. Both in thought and in lan- guage it offers the very greatest contrast imaginable to what 168 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION is often regarded as the true poetical method of expressing deep emotion. It affects one not by the display of vehement passion, but by impressing on one's mind a picture which haunts the memory and ever afterwards has the power of stirring one's feelings as if it were a real experience. Even the fragments that remain of her nine books of poems allow us to accept without hesitation the judgment of ancient critics, who were unanimous in their almost reverential admira- tion. Among these surviving fragments are three probably complete odes in her favourite measure, invented by her (or some say by Alcaeus) and known as the Sapphic.^ No translation can give any hint of the beauty and power of her language, but even a rough prose version of some of these relics of her poetry may be more useful and interesting than biographical details and critical comments. First let us take the ode to Aphrodite : *' Immortal Aphrodite on thy throne of many colours, daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I implore thee, break not my heart, O I^ady, with excess of love and of anguish, but come hither, if ever before thou heardest from afar my cries and, leaving the golden mansion of thy father, didst yoke thy :ar and come ; and swiftly thy winsome sparrows brought thee Dver the dark earth, eddying their rapid wings, from heaven ;hrough the midmost aether ; and quickly they arrived, and ;hou, O blessed one, smiling with thy divine countenance, iidst ask what ailed me now again, and why again I called on :hee, and what in my maddened heart I wished. Whom dost hou desire that Persuasion should bring to thy friendship P Vho doeth thee wrong, Sappho ? E'en if she fleeth, she shall von pursue thee ; and if she accepteth not gifts, yet shall she give hem ; and if she loveth not, soon shall she love — yea, even against ■er will. Come to me also now, and set me free from grievous ares, and all that my heart longs to be fulfilled do thou fulfil, nd be once more my helper ! " ^ Horace used the Sapphic metre twenty-six times and the Alcaic thirty- . ^ven times. Probably the best example of the metre in English is Canning's Needy Knife-grinder.' 169 ANCIENT GREECE The second is an ode that was discovered not many years ago among the papyrus manuscripts found at Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt. It was addressed by Sappho to her brother Charaxus, at Naucratis, where he is said to have disgraced himself with his relations by falling in love with the notorious Rhodopis, who was a slave-girl (a fellow-slave, says Herodotus, of Aesop the fable- writer), and was redeemed by Charaxus at a great expense — for which he was " often lashed by Sappho in her poetry " : '' I implore you, Sea-nymphs, grant that my brother return hither in safety, and that all things which in his heart he may desire be fulfilled, and that he may atone for all the errors of the past and become a joy to his friends and a sorrow to his enemies ; and to us may he never prove of no account. And may he wish to make his sister share in his good name, and may he forget the grievous pain of what in days past made him mourn and break his heart, as he heard at some festival of the citizens a wounding word that cut right deep into the quick and, though ceasing for a time, ere long returned again." The third ode, also in Sapphic measure, gives us, without any attempt at direct description, a picture of a beautiful maiden beloved by Sappho : " lyike unto the gods seemeth to me that man who sits in thy presence and nigh unto thee listens to thy sweet voice andn laughter, which ever sets a-throbbing the heart within my bosom. For when I look e'en for a moment on thee, no voice comes any more, but my tongue fails utterly and a soft glow at once spreads o'er my face, and I see no more with my eyes, and my ears are filled with sounds, and the sweat pours dowr and trembling seizeth all my body, and I am more pallid than grass and am so distraught that I seem nigh unto deatl itself." Another short poem, in a different metre, intimates by i different poetical process, and again without any direc 170 THE AGE OF COLONIZATION i description, the loveliness of Sappho's friend Atthis, who had married a I^ydian and had gone with him to Sardis : " Now amidst I^ydian women she shineth in her beauty as, whene'er the sun is set, the rosy moon, having round her all the stars, spreads abroad her light o'er the briny sea alike and o'er the flowery fields ; and the dew lies there, beautiful, and roses revive and bloom, and fragile chervil and rich- blossoming melilot." A very different woman is pictured in another fragment : " When thou art dead thou shalt lie there, and never shall there be any remembrance of thee nor any longing for thee in days to come, for thou hast no share in the roses of Pieria [poetry and music], but when thy soul has flown forth, also in the mansion of Hades unnoticed thou shalt flit about with the dim inglorious dead." Many other beautiful fragments of Sappho's poetry survive. Well-known lines of Byron were evidently inspired by her address to the evening star : " O Hesperus that bringest back all things which the gleaming dawn dispersed, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the boy back to his mother." A graphic picture of autumn is given in a few words : " All round it pipeth chill amidst the orchard boughs ; the leaves are quivering and the foliage falls." Another touch of autumn, recalHng Coleridge's " one red leaf on the topmost twig," is given in what may be the fragment of some marriage-song : " As a sweet apple blusheth on the tip of the branch, on the topmost tip, and the apple-pickers have forgotten it — nay, have not forgotten it, but have been unable to reach it." Among the many papyrus manuscripts yet undeciphered or undiscovered we may have the fortune to come upon more of Sappho's poetry. Indeed, it was lately reported that some- thing more had been found. Were enough to come to light to influence modern literature, the gain would be inestimable, for the great qualities of Sappho's poetry are just what modern literature lacks most. 171 CHAPTER IV THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS AND THE RISE OF PERSIA (560-500) SECTIONS : POETS AND PHIIvOSOPHERS : THE ORDERS OP GREEK ARCHITECTURE : SCUIvPTURE, DOWN TO THE PERSIAN WARS TO the student of comparative politics the history of Athens from 560 to 500 is especially attractive, for during this period, while the democratic constitution framed by Solon still continued to exist, as Thucydides says, in its essential features, the state was for many years under the absolute control of a single man and his heirs, who, although the power was seized by the usual methods, may be regarded rather as constitutional rulers than as despots. That Athens for a time lost her liberty and emerged from the trial stronger and better prepared to face the foe of Hellas cannot but be of deep interest, but the phenomena of political evolution form by no means the main subject of Greek history. Such pheno- mena are due to ever-recurring influences working on average human nature, and they may be traced under various conditions in the stories of many another nation ; ^ but genius has ever something new to tell us, and from Greek genius we may learn what we cannot learn from any other source. I shall therefore content myself with giving a brief account of the reign, or tyranny, of Peisi stratus and his sons and of the reforms of Cleisthenes, and shall reserve more of the space at my disposal for matters of greater importance. When Solon returned to Athens (c. 562) dissension was at * By a strange coincidence the same year (510) saw the banishment of the Tarquins from Rome and of the Peisistratidae from Athens. 172 50. ' Artemis of Dei.os * 51. Stei^k of Aristion 172 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS its height, and it is quite possible that, finding his influence of no avail, he again left for the East and visited Croesus, who ascended the throne of I^ydia in 560. In this same year Peisistratus, the cousin of Solon, and the leader, as we have seen, of the so-called party of the Hills, consisting mainly of peasants and ultra-democrats, persuaded the people by means of a stratagem ^ to allow him a bodyguard, and seized the Acro- polis. Hereupon his political opponents left Athens, and he seems to have quietly assumed the reins of government and to have remained in power for about five years. Solon, when again in Athens, is said to have appealed to the people to " pluck the tyrant up by the roots,'* but in vain. Some relate that he returned to his friend the king of Soli, in Cyprus, but from his verses to Mimnermus (if they are his) it seems likely that he remained at Athens and lived till c. 558, and found life at eighty not unenjoyable, even under a despot. Two or three years later Peisistratus was driven out by the united parties of the Coast and the Plain, but they quarrelled, and by the aid of Megacles he returned (c. 550) . The stratagem by which this was effected would be incredible if we did not know how ineradicable proved the old deisidaimonia — that eerie dread of the supernatural which was so universal in an earlier age, and to which the Athenians seem to have been especially susceptible. The story is that Peisistratus entered Athens in a chariot on which there stood by his side a stalwart peasant woman arrayed as Athene, and that the mob accepted the apparition as genuine and reinstated him in power. Peisis- tratus had promised to marry the daughter of Megacles (who was the head of the Alcmaeonid nobles), and he did so, but he refused to treat her as his wife, for he had a family by a former wife and was unwilling to connect himself with descendants of Cylon, who were regarded as accursed. This led to his second banishment, which lasted for ten years, * By displaying self-inflicted wounds. We have a similar story connected with Sextus Tarquin, and with Odysseus {Od. iv. 244). The grant of a body- guard was proposed to the Kcclesia by Aristion, whose portrait we probably have in Fig. 51. 173 ANCIENT GREECE until about 540, when, with mercenaries from Argos and Naxos, he crossed from Euboea to Marathon, surprised or won over the Athenian troops and entered the city, where he re-estabHshed himself as absolute ruler, sending the children of his adversaries as hostages to his friend Lygdamis, tyrant of Naxos, and expelling the Alcmaeonidae. The rule of Peisistratus during the next thirteen years is said to have been wise and beneficial. He feued much of the land to peasants, encouraged agriculture, extended Athenian power and commerce abroad, recapturing Sigeuni from the lycsbians and promoting Greek influence on the shores of the Hellespont, where the Thracian Chersonese was now governed by an Athenian — the half-uncle of the famous Miltiades. About this elder Miltiades a picturesque story is told. He was, says Herodotus, a victor in the Olympian chariot-race and a man of high distinction, but an adversary of Peisistratus. One day (c. 558) as he sat in the porch of his house, probably brooding over the success of his rival, some wayfarers "in outlandish garments and armed with lances" approached. He offered them entertainment, and after the banquet was over they told him that the Delphic oracle had bidden them take back with them to their country, the Thracian Chersonese, the first man who offered them hospitality, for he would help them against their enemies. Miltiades, perhaps glad to leave Athens, acceded to their entreaties and became ' king ' of the Chersonese and a friend of Croesus. He was succeeded in his office as Thracian prince and Athenian governor of the Greek settlements on the Hellespont by a nephew, who was (c. 520) succeeded by the younger and more celebrated Miltiades. Under Peisistratus Athens seems to have begun to assert that hegemony in the Ionic world which she afterwards attained. The lord of the Ionian mother-city took upon himself, as Thucydides says, to ' purify ' Delos by removing | all the tombs within sight of the temple. He also ordered that the Homeric poems, recited at the Delian and other festivals, 174 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS should be collected and arranged and written out in the Attic script and divided into books. Possibly on this occasion lines may have been inserted in order to connect Athens with the great Ionian epic — for, whatever the reason may be. Homer had said but little about the Athenians and their legends. This revision of Homer was undertaken by Peisistratus and his son Hipparchus in order to regulate the hitherto arbitrary and disconnected recitations of the poem at the great festival of Athene, which had been lately founded. At this festival took place the musical and athletic contests and the stately procession of which we have such precious records in the so- called Panathenaic prize- vases and in the frieze of the Parthenon (see Figs. 55 and 85). Besides the Panathenaic festival Peisistratus revived or amplified the vintage festival, which had been held from early ages in honour of Dionysus (the lycnaia, or ' Festival of the Wine- vat '), such as we have already heard of in connexion with Arion at Corinth. At this new festival, which was called the Great Dionysia, the old dances and songs performed originally by peasants dressed up as satyrs were in course of time combined with dialogue and with representations of Did legends, and this ' goat-song ' performance (rpayfjiS/a) ieveloped little by little into the Attic drama. The chief bomposer and director of these Dionysiac performances in :he age of Peisistratus was Thespis, who is often spoken of as :he father of Attic tragedy. He is said to have first introduced , iialogue and to have himself taken the part of the actor who, I n various disguises and with a stained or masked face, con- versed with the chorus of dancers. The first representation i)f this kind at the New Dionysia is said to have taken place n535. During the rule of Peisistratus and his sons the huge f emple of Olympian Zeus was begun and many fine buildings i^ere erected. Some of these will be described later. One 'f his most useful works was a system of pipes by which dhens was supplied with water, possibly from the Upper lissus, or more probably from Kallirrhoe (' Fair-stream '), a ANCIENT GREECE natural source near the Ilissus and the Olympieion, to the south-east of the Acropolis.^ Peisistratus died in 527 and left the government to his eldest son, Hippias, while the second, Hipparchus (Hke a King Archon), had, perhaps together with a younger brother Thessalus, the control of religious festivals, literary and musical contests, and the like.^ For thirteen years Athens seems to have enjoyed an unevent- ful prosperity under the Peisistratidae. We know really next to nothing of this period, except that Hippias and his brother were, like the Medici of Florence, patrons of art, and thati Anacreon and Simonides of Ceos visited their court. Herodotus! speaks of them as oppressive tyrants, while Thucydides, whol was related to the Peisistratidae, but whose judgment was not| likely to have been warped by prejudice, asserts that they " cultivated virtue and intellect." He allows, however, thati '* their tyranny proved galling at last," and that Hippias! ultimately proved not only a tyrant but a traitor to his country.i In 514 Hipparchus was assassinated by Harmodius andi Aristogeiton. He had conceived an infatuation for the! young Harmodius, and having been repelled he insulted the! vSister of the youth, refusing her as a * basket-carrier ' in the Panathenaic procession.^ So the two friends planned to kill Hipparchus and his brother ; " but, having suspected," saysi 1 Remains of the water-pipes of Peisistratus have perhaps been discovered,' between the Pnyx and the Areopagus. KaUirrhoe, sometimes depicted onj Athenian vases, changed its ancient name, as Thucydides tells us (ii. 15),! to Enneakrounos ('Nine Fountains'), after the natural spring had been built over and the waters were collected into a reservoir furnished with nine distributing pipes, (Herodotus, however, speaks of it as Enneakrounos in connexion with the old Pelasgic inhabitants.) The spring still exists and retains its ancient name (KalUrroi), but almost every trace of the reservoii has disappeared. The pools formed by the spring are now used by Atheniani washerwomen. ' See Thuc. i. 20 and vi. 54 sq., and Hdt. v. 55. Also the pseudo-Plato in his Hipparchus says that this prince" first introduced Homer into Greece." The writer, whether Plato or not, evidently regarded Hipparchus as the chief ruler — a belief stigmatized by Thucydides. ^ According to Herodotus the Gephyraean family to which Harmodius belonged was originally Phoenician, and was " excluded at Athens from a number of privileges." Perhaps this was a legal ground for the rejection of the girl. 176 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS Thucydides, '' that information had been given to Hippias by their accompHces, they abstained from attacking him, as being forewarned, and as they wished to do something at all hazards, having fallen in with Hipparchus, who was arranging the Panathenaic procession, they slew him." Possibly at first no great enthusiasm was excited by the act — or else it was suppressed by dread — but not many years later, after the expulsion of Hippias, statues were erected to the Tyrannicides, and popular songs, such as the well-known drinking-song (skolion) composed by the otherwise unknown Callistratus, ' 111 wreathe my sword in myrtle bough,' prove how the Athenians had learnt to detest the name of the Peisistratidae. This hatred was much intensified by the tyrannical conduct of Hippias after the murder of his brother. " Being now in greater apprehension," says Thucydides, '' he put to death many citizens, and also kept his eye on foreign states in whatever quarter he had a prospect of safe retreat in case of revolution." Doubtless among these foreign states was Persia. After four years the revolution came. The exiled Alc- maeonidae, who longed to return to Athens, had at length succeeded in obtaining the aid of Sparta in the following way. The great temple at Delphi had been burnt down, and a public subscription through the whole of Greece had enabled the Delphic treasury to contract for its reconstruction. The Alc- maeonidae undertook the contract, and, using marble instead of the specified poros, rebuilt the temple with such magnificence and so won the favour of the Pythian priests that whenever the Spartans came to consult the oracle the invariable answer was, " First liberate Athens ! " Sparta, by the conquest of Tegea and the defeat of Argos, had made herself the head of a ' Peloponnesian league, and was strong enough to interfere in 1 Northern Greece. The first raid into Attica was defeated by cavalry sent from Thessaly to aid Hippias, but the Spartan I king Cleomenes then led a strong force against Athens, and Hippias, blockaded in the ' Pelasgic fortress ' (i.e. the Acropolis), and hearing of the capture of his children, capitulated (510). M 177 ANCIENT GREECE He was allowed to leave Attica ' under treaty/ together with his children, and went, says Thucydides, " first to Sigeum, then to lyampsacus, and thence to the court of King Darius." Now the head of the Alcmaeonidae who had been thus restored to Athens was Cleisthenes. He was the grandson of Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon, whose daughter married the Athenian Megacles. Of this Megacles we have already heard much. It was his daughter (and therefore the sister of Cleisthenes) whom Peisistratus married and rejected. On the expulsion of Hippias, whose absolute rule had kept open feuds in abeyance, political discussion once more began. Cleisthenes, the personal foe of the Peisistratidae, was naturally opposed to the old regime, and, as Herodotus expresses it, " called to his aid the common people." He was opposed by Isagoras and the aristocratical party. Isagoras, being worsted, appealed to Sparta, and the Spartans sent a peremptory order (as they did again seventy-seven years later, in refer- ence to Pericles) that the Athenians should " cast out the accursed thing " — the *' pollution of the goddess " — namely, the Alcmaeonidae.^ Cleisthenes was forced to leave Athens. This, however, did not content Isagoras and his party. They invited the Spartans ; whereupon King Cleomenes came and expelled 700 Athenian families. But on his trying to dissolve the Kcclesia and establish an oligarchy the Athenians rose. The Spartans were blockaded for two days in the Acropolis, and then accepted terms, pur- chasing their lives by handing over their mercenaries to the tender mercies of the Athenians, who put them all to death, among them a Delphian who, as pancratiast, had won three victories at the Pythian and two at the Olympic Games, and whose statue by the celebrated Argive sculptor Ageladas I (the master of Pheidias, Myron, and Polycleitus) was seen ' nearly 700 years later at Olympia by the traveller Pausanias. Cleisthenes and the 700 families were then recalled. Cleomenes 1 endeavoured to invade Attica again, and although the attempt j failed (the Spartan kings having quarrelled) , the Athenians were | ^ See about Cylon p. 136; also Thuc. i. 126, and Hdt. v. 70. 178 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS so alarmed, if we are to believe Herodotus, that they actually sent ambassadors to Sardis to sue for the alliance of Darius ; but they were told that the friendship of the Great King was only to be bought by earth and water, tokens of vassalage. Possibly it was not in alarm that they did this, but in arrogance, ! for we find them soon afterwards inflicting crushing defeats I on the Boeotians and the Chalcidians (of Euboea), who had j joined the Spartans in their last invasion of Attica. The rich lyelantine plain (p. 129) was allotted to Athenian settlers, ! and many Chalcidian prisoners were kept fettered at Athens 1 until they were ransomed at two minae apiece (say £8 nominal, [but perhaps ^^40 in present value). "The chains wherewith I they were fettered,'' says Herodotus, " were hung up by the Athenians in their Acropolis, where they were still to be seen in my day, hanging against a wall scorched by the Median flames." From a tenth of the ransom-money a magnificent bronze quadriga was set up to the left of the old gate of the Acropolis.^ Moreover, in a stoa (portico) at Delphi the Athenians I dedicated (as we learn from an inscription lately discovered 1 there) arms and beaks of ships captured in this war. 1 The people of Aegina had made common cause with the Boeotians against their old enemy, Athens. In Solon's time, ' as we have seen, the Athenians had attacked Aegina, not long I after their conquest of Salamis, but had been driven out of the I jj island by the Argives.^ Since that time hostility had smouldered, • I ; but it now broke out openly, and the Aeginetans carried on a e I- chronic 'unheralded' war with Athens right down to the 1, ( ; time of the Persian war, making constant descents on the coast :e i 3f Attica and on the Athenian port Phaleron. Such was their s,;:imbitterment that shortly before the battle of Salamis the asjJ5partans had to interfere and send Aeginetans as hostages to Vthens in order to prevent Aegina aiding the Persians ; nor lid Aegina cease to be a thorn in the side of Athens till (in 431) ^ P|' * Pericles perhaps set up another on the right hand (c. 446), and when the ew Propylaea were built {c. 437) they were probably put on new bases. 'ne of these bases with traces of the inscription quoted by Herodotus (v. 77) as been found. * See Hdt. v. 82 sq., and Note B, Dress. 179 ANCIENT GREECE the inhabitants were expelled and the island was incorporated in the Attic state. Thus Athens began to unfold her powers — a fact that Herodotus justly attributes to her regained political freedom. " These things show/' he says, " that while undergoing oppression they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master ; but as soon as they got their liberty each man was eager to do the best he could." Had this rewon liberty retained the basis of the old vSolonian constitution the old political feuds would have assuredly reappeared and led even again to some form of enslavement, but fortune willed it that Cleisthenes should discover a method by which all the local and clan influences which had made party feeling so rancorous and dangerous should be eliminated, and the weal of the state should become the one object of political activity. Having abolished the four old Ionic tribes, which were founded on locality, profession, and wealth, he formed ten tribes solely for political purposes. Each of these new political tribes consisted of three trittyes (thirds) taken from three different regions of Attica, so that the tribal vote was not prejudiced by local influences. Each tribe had to supply a contingent of hoplites, some cavalry,^ and one of the ten generals of the Athenian army. Fifty men from every tribe, chosen by lot from a selected number, formed the new council (Boule) of 500. This council, in conjunction with theF archons and other magistrates, managed all internal affairs' and initiated laws to be sanctioned by the great Assembly (Ecclesia). But for the dispatch of business the Boule had a permanent, committee. Each of its ten groups of councillors: took it in turn to act as this committee for thirty-six days (the tenth of the year of 360 days, which was rectified by intercalating a month every five years). While they sat on committee these deputies were called prytaneis (presidents),! and their tribe was the ' presiding tribe ' during this space of 1 The tribal regiment was called a ' tribe ' {phyle). The subdivisions werci tA^cls and Xo^ot. See Hdt. vi. iii. In Solon's time Athens could mustei barely a hundred horsemen, and even at the beginning of the Peloponnesiai War only about a thousand. 180 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS thirty-six days (which was called a prytaneia). The people's Assembly (Ecclesia) probably met, as it did in later times, every nine days — or it may have been summoned only on special occasions to sanction a law by plebiscite or to dispose of some referendum. Of the Areopagus we hear little at this period. It probably existed with only an empty show of authority. Ostracism may have been an invention of Cleisthenes, though it seems to have been used first in 488. It was an useful method of getting rid for a time of a dangerous citizen. The council and Assembly first decided (and could only do it during the sixth prytaneia) that an ostrakismos was advisable. On a fixed day barricades were erected in the Agora and every voter of the ten tribes gave his vote by casting into an urn an ostrakon (potsherd) on which he had inscribed the name of any citizen whom he held to be especially dangerous. The man against whom most votes were given, should his ostraka number at least 6000 — i.e. about a fifth of the number of the voters — was exiled for ten (later for five) years, but lost neither his citizenship nor his property. The Rise of Persia We must now turn from the affairs of the refounded demo- cracy of the little Attic state to note the rise of a mighty empire which ere long will threaten to annihilate the whole of the eastern while Carthage is endeavouring to annihilate the western world of Hellas. It would take us too far afield to follow Herodotus in his mvestigations of the origins of the feud between Greece and :he Asiatic ' barbarian,' nor will it be possible to repeat nany of the countless stories that he tells in connexion with lie lyydian, Median, and Persian kings, stories with which he Hures the reader to Egypt and Scythia and many another trange land and people before he launches out into the subject I the Graeco-Persian war. I have already traced the history of Assyria and Babylon own to the death of King Nebucadnezar in 562, that of 181 ANCIENT GREECE I^ydia to the accession of Croesus in 560, and that of Media to the death of Astyages in 559, and we have seen that the great kings of Nineveh and Babylon had never (except in the case of Cyprus) come into colhsion with the Greeks. But the early lyydian kings had attacked and subjugated several of the Ionian and Aeolian cities, and Croesus, as soon as he was firmly seated on the I^ydian throne, made himself master of all the Greek cities on the mainland of Asia Minor except Miletus, and even made preparations to invade the islands, but was, says Herodotus, deterred by a witty remark of the sage Bias.^ Kphesus was the first city he attacked — " The Ephesians, when he laid siege to the place, made an offering of their city to Artemis by stretching a rope ^ from the town wall to the temple of the goddess, which was distant from the ancient city by a space of seven furlongs." This was evidently the new temple of the Kphesian Artemis, which was still being built to replace the old temple burnt by the Cimmerians in 677. After capturing Kphesus, Croesus presented to this temple, says Herodotus, " golden heifers and most of the columns." The sculptured drum of one of these columns is now in the British Museum (Fig. 119). On it were found the Greek letters BA KP AN .... EN, which have been (doubtless rightly) restored to BA2IAEY2 KPOISOZ ANAGHKEN, i.e, " King Croesus dedicated." The wealth ^ of Croesus, as that of his ancestor Gyges and 1^ the Phrygian Midas, was proverbial. Although the conqueror of the Greek cities of Aeolis and Ionia, he was a great admirer !| of Hellenic civilization, and his court at Sardis was frequented 1 1 by many Greeks of distinction. He made, moreover, many splendid offerings to Greek temples, of which Herodotus gives a description that may well excite wonder, if not incredulity. Shortly after the accession of Croesus, perhaps in 560-5591 Solon not improbably, as we have seen, visited Sardis. Croesus, * Herodotus says: " Within my own knowledge Croesus was the first to inflict injury on the Greeks " ; but Alyattes, Sadyattes, and perhaps Ardys attacked the Greek cities. * See p. 136, foot-note. 3 See Hdt. i. 50 and 92. For the lyydian coinage see Note C, Coins. 182 52. The Croesus Coi^umn From the earlier Ephesian temple 182 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS a young man of thirty-five in the first flush of kingly pride, bade the sage tell him whom of all men he had ever met he deemed the most happy. Solon cited an Athenian, Tellos by name, who had been blessed with domestic happiness and had died a soldier's death in defence of his country, and as second happiest he cited the Spartan youths Cleobis and Bito, who, when the oxen failed to come, yoked themselves to a car and drew their aged mother five-and-forty furlongs to the festival of Hera at Argos, and died in the temple ; and when Croesus asked him in astonishment how he ventured to put the happiness of such people on a level with his, Solon replied that no wealth could give good fortune, and that even a fortu- nate man cannot for certain be called ' happy ' imtil he is dead, for '' in every matter it behoveth us to mark well the end." Soon afterwards Croesus learnt that all his gold could not save him from the grief of losing his favourite son, and some ten years later he was taught the wisdom of marking well the end. His kingdom had extended itself eastward over all Phrygia, Mysia, and Paphlygonia, as far as the river Halys, and hearing of the presumptuous doings of Cyrus and his Persians and Medes, he got together a great army of I^ydians and Greeks and crossed over into Cappadocia to challenge the new foe — not before having consulted the oracle at Delphi. The Delphic god, though he received gifts of almost indescrib- able magnificence from Croesus, played him a rather disingenu- ous trick, bidding him (as Ahab was bidden) go up, for he would destroy a mighty empire. So vast had the power of Croesus become that doubtless he had visions of making himself the king of Media in the place of this usurper who had dethroned the old Astyages. But the empire that he should destroy was his own, as the oracle afterwards ex- plained. After an indecisive battle near the ancient capital of Cappadocia, Pteria, he retreated to Sardis, which ere long was stormed by Cyrus. Croesus was condemned to die. He was placed, with twice seven noble I^ydian youths, on a great funeral pyre. The pyre was lighted, and as the flames shot 183 ANCIENT GREECE upward he was heard to call aloud three times on the name of Solon. Cyrus demanded the reason, and when he learnt it he bade the fire be quenched. But it was too late ; the flames were not to be mastered. Then Croesus called on Apollo, and a sudden deluge of rain extinguished the fire. Cyrus, deeply moved by the miracle, made Croesus his coun- sellor and constant companion. Cyrus captured Sardis probably in 546. Thirteen years earlier he had (according to Herodotus) dethroned the Median king Astyages. His father, Cambyses, a descendant of a noble chieftain named Achaemenes, was prince of the Persians, a race of bold and hardy mountaineers, closely akin to the Medes, living in the highlands between Media and the Persian Gulf. This Cambyses married a daughter of the Median king, and their son, the young Cyrus, putting himself at the head of a body of Persians, succeeded (in 559) in conquering his grandfather and establishing the Medo- Persian Empire. This Medo-Persian Empire, when first Cyrus mounted the throne,^ occupied, roughly speaking, the lands between the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, the Indus, and the valley of the Tigris. Its chief cities were Pasargadae, Persepolis, Ecbatana, and Susa. The general name given to this vast country by its inhabitants was Iran, and these inhabitants are therefore generally said to have belonged to the Iranian branch of the Aryan race. In religion they were followers of Zoroaster and worshipped Mithras, the sun-god. According to Herodotus they had neither images of gods nor temples nor * Herodotus gives a story about the infancy of Cyrus and his childhood at the court of Astyages which has great similarity to the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus and King Numitor (Hdt. i. 107 sq.). It should be mentioned that Xenophon, who wrote later but knew personally the younger Cyrus, and Ctesias, who was surgeon to that prince's brother (Artaxerxes II), give versions very different from that of Herodotus. Xenophon states in his Cyropaedeia, where he describes the bringing up of Cyrus the Great, that Cyrus never rebelled against his grandfather, but acted as his general and the general of his son, Cyaxares II (unknown to Herodotus), and that he even took Babylon (538) as the general of this Cyaxares II (perhaps the ' Darius the Median ' of Daniel v. 31), whom he later dethroned. Ctesias asserts that Cyrus and Astyages were in no way related. According to Herodotus, Cyrus was a great-nephew of Croesus, who married a sister of Astyages. 184 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS altars, " accounting the use of such things a folly." As fire- worshippers they probably had no idols, and there seems to be no trace of ancient Persian (though of course of Chaldaean) temples, but huge stone altars on open-air terraces have been discovered which were apparently used for sacrifice to the sun-god. Probably the Persians had a purer form of Zoroas- trian fire-worship than the other Iranian peoples, such as the Chaldaeans and Medes, regarding I^ight and Darkness as symbols of the powers of good and evil, also symbolized by the deities Ormuzd and Ahriman. The priests and religious teachers, called Magi, formed a very select and influential caste. Of the character and the customs of the Persians graphic and full descriptions are given by Herodotus (i. 131 sq, and elsewhere) and by Xenophon and other writers. It is here impossible to treat this intensely interesting subject as it deserves, but it is well to note in passing that, although we are indubitably right in regarding the result of the Graeco- Persian conflict with the deepest gratitude, nevertheless we must allow — as, indeed, did many of the Greeks themselves — that in some important points the Persian character (which was evidently very different from that of the Medes and the Babylonians) was originally greatly superior to that of the average Hellene. It was no strong character and soon con- tracted many Oriental and Hellenic vices ; but noble traits remained. Many acts of magnanimity are related of the Persian kings, ^ and their contempt for the huckstering and rhetorical arts and deceits of the Greek Agora, as well as for the venality and treachery not only of the ordinary Greek but even of Greek leaders, was frequently and openly expressed. " The most disgraceful thing in the world, in their opinion," says Herodotus, ''is to tell a lie " ; and when he ^ See Hdt. vi. 41 and 119, vii. 136, &c. Kven the mad Cambyses was ^capable of generous impulses. Doubtless such qualities coexisted with terrible callousness towards human suffering. As for the painful subject of the ever-present Greek traitor, one need only think of Bretria and Thermopylae and Marathon and Aegina and Thebes and Pausanias and Themistocles and Miltiades and many other names. For an arraignment of Greek character see Mahaffy's Social Life in Greece. 185 ANCIENT GREECE remarks that " the Persians look upon themselves as very greatly superior in all respects to the rest of mankind," we cannot but concede that in some respects at least they do offer a very striking contrast to the less admirable sides of the Greek cha- racter. Thus one cannot help contrasting such facts as the treatment by Darius of the Eretrian captives and the terrible decree passed by the Athenians against Mytilene. It is true that in this case intense excitement may be pleaded and the decree was ultimately reversed — so that the process somewhat reminds one of what Herodotus says about the Persians : ''It is their practice to deliberate upon affairs of importance when they are drunk, and then on the morrow, when they are sober, to reconsider it." ^ After his conquest of Lydia Cyrus returned to the far East, leaving his general Harpagus to reduce the Greek Asiatic cities, all of which, with the exception of powerful Miletus, had aided their liege-lord Croesus. Harpagus had no very difficult task, for these cities, in constant feud, were ever a prey to the invader. Had they but formed a confederation, as the sage Thales, it is said, advised, ^ Ionia and Aeolis might perhaps have offered a successful resistance to the advance of Persia ; but the consciousness of disunion in the face of such over- whelming odds paralysed them, and we are scarcely surprised when we hear that another sage. Bias of Priene, advised the lonians to migrate en masse to Sardinia, and that the people of Phocaea, when besieged, embarked on their ships and sailed away (most of them) to Corsica,^ while the people of Teos made for Thrace, where they founded Abdera. Cyrus meantime had attacked Babylonia. The great Nebucadnezar had died in 562, and had been succeeded by several Babylonian kings, the fourth of whom, Nabonid (whose regal title seems to have been I^abynetus), ruled in great state at Babylon, where the Jews with Daniel were still in captivity. ^ Sometimes, he adds, they reversed the process. See Tacitus, Germ. xxii. * Thales is said to have persuaded the Milesians not to aid Croesus. But Miletus was in alliance with I^ydia, and we hear of Thales himself aiding Croesus by damming up the river Halys in order to allow him to pass over. ' See p. 123 as to the Phocaeans at Alalia and Klea. 186 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS He had made alliance with Amasis of Egypt, Croesus of I^ydia, and Polycrates of Samos against the usurper Cyrus. The conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus seems to have lasted about ten years. In 538 he succeeded in capturing Babylon by diverting the Euphrates.^ Not content with the mighty empire that he had now under his rule, he made an expedition into what is now Russian Turkestan against a Scythian tribe, the Massagetae. In this remote land, near the Aral lake, he fell in battle (529).^ The queen of the Massagetae is said to have placed his head in a bowl of blood and bade it drink its fill. 2 Cambyses, his son, increased the Persian Empire by the conquest of Egypt. During the first thirty-four years of the period we are consider- ing in this chapter (560-500) Egypt had enjoyed independence and prosperity under King Aahmes (Amasis), whose friendship with the Greeks has already been mentioned. He had con- quered Cyprus and had formed an alliance with Polycrates, the powerful despot of Samos, who, with a strong fleet of fifty-oared ships of war, had defied Cyrus and Harpagus. All that Polycrates undertook seemed to prosper. His court, at which the poets Ibycus and Anacreon lived, and which Amasis possibly honoured with his presence, rivalled the fame of that of Periander or Peisistratus, and under his rule the city of Samos was furnished with its splendid harbour and the great temple of Hera and many other magnificent buildings, as well as with the celebrated Samian aqueduct, with its tunnel of seven furlongs. But the envy of the gods was aroused, and Amasis, foreseeing the ruin of the Samian tyrant (as all readers of Schiller's fine ballad know), renounced his friendship. Perhaps the fact lying beneath the story of the Ring is that the kings quarrelled ; for we hear that Polycrates sent forty of his penteconters (which mutinied and never arrived) to aid Cambyses in his attack on Egypt. Not long afterwards (523), having apparently broken again with Cambyses, he fell into an 1 Hdt. i. 191. The Belshazzar of Daniel is either Nabonid himself or (as inscriptions seem to prove) his son, who was acting as governor of Babylon. * See note at end of this chapter. 187 ANCIENT GREECE ambuscade laid by the satrap of Sardis, who crucified him. Bre Cambyses reached Egypt King Amasis had died (525). His son, Psamtik III, was defeated near Pelusium, and Memphis was then captured and the whole of Egypt and Cyrene sub- mitted to the Persians. But, incensed at his failure to conquer Aethiopia, Gambyses vented his fury in acts of sacrilege (such as mutilating the corpse of Amasis and stabbing the sacred bull Apis) and in other deeds so indescribably cruel and foolish that one is forced to believe that he was insane. One assassination, that of his brother Bardyia, or Smerdis, who was regent of some of the eastern provinces of the empire, caused the fall of the tyrant ; for a false Smerdis, one of the Magi, named Gaumata, pretending to be the murdered prince, proclaimed himself king, and Cambyses hastened homeward, and somewhere in Syria either met his death by an accident, as related by Herodotus, or committed suicide, as is stated by the Darius inscription at Behistun. The false Smerdis, keeping himself out of sight in his palace to avoid detection, held power for eight months so firmly that, according to the Darius inscription, " no Persian or Mede had the courage to oppose him." But seven nobles, who, by means of one of the women of the royal harem, Herodotus says, discovered that he possessed no ears and was a Mede and a Magian whom Cambyses had thus punished for some offence, slew the pretender and a great number of the Magi. One of these nobles, Darius, the son of the satrap Hystaspes, was elected king. Herodotus gives a graphic description of how it was arranged that the man should be king whose horse neighed first, and how the groom of Darius won the royal crown for his master. Some modern critics, however, reject the story as childish, and assert that Hystaspes ^ was the legitimate heir of Cyrus. The probability is that the false Smerdis was a pretender put forward by the party of the Medes and Magi (who, although Persian priests, were of Median * Hystaspes was, according to Herodotus, " governor of Persia" (iii. 70). In the Behistun inscription he is called a general of his son Darius (!) and a satrap of Parthia. 188 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS extraction), and that his overthrow meant the triumph of the Persian royal house of the Achaemenidae, to which Darius (as Xerxes asserts in Hdt. vii. ii) unquestionably belonged ; and Darius strengthened the tie by marrying Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus, who had been Cambyses' queen. Darius began to reign in 521, and reigned for thirty-six years. After suppressing revolts that broke out more than once in Media and Babylonia and forced him to capture Babylon twice, he confirmed the Persian sovereignty in his western empire by placing Phrygia, I^ydia, and Ionia under satraps, to whom the tyrants of the Greek cities of the main- land paid tribute and furnished troops and ships as vassals of the Great King. Samos, too, which under Polycrates had defied Darius, was conquered and ' netted ' and given over to the brother of Polycrates, who had won the friendship of the young Darius when he was in Egypt with Cambyses. ^ But it was not only in war that the empire of Darius was great. It attained a wealth and a magnificence of Oriental civilization which in ancient times were probably never equalled. 2 The gold staters of King Darius, known as ' Darics ' (probably the 'dram' of Ezra and Nehemiah), circulated throughout Hellas. The chief cities were connected by care- fully kept roads, and there was a system of royal mails carried by relays of horses and couriers {ayyapela). The ' royal road ' between Sardis and Susa, some 1500 miles in length and with about a hundred stations, was traversed by pedes- trians in about ninety days, and by a post or courier, of course, in far less time. (Herodotus, who describes it fully, probably travelled by this route.) After he had reigned about eight years Darius, it is said, con- ceived a desire to punish the Scythians for their invasion of Media, which had taken place about a century before (p. 148). Whether this was his real object or whether his purpose was the conquest of Thrace and the acquisition of the gold-mines ^ For this story see Hdt. iii. 139; and for the process of 'driving' or ' netting ' a hostile country see Hdt. iii. 149, vi. 31. - See Hdt. iii. 89 sq. for an account of the revenues of Darius from his immense empire of twenty satrapies. ^ 189 ANCIENT GREECE of this country and of Dacia is questioned. Herodotus had far better opportunities than we have of learning the truth, and there can be httle doubt that the professed object was what he asserts it to have been, but there is no less doubt that what he describes as a disastrous failure resulted in the establishment of Persian supremacy in Thrace, and even in Macedonia, for the next fifteen years or so. As for the story that Herodotus gives us of this Scythian expedition, it certainly contains a good deal that sounds impossible, especially in regard to the distances traversed in a comparatively short time ; but the chronicler himself had visited Scythia (he had been, for instance, four days' journey up the river Bug, and evidently knew the Dnieper and its sturgeon), and had collected an immense amount of informa- tion about the country, as well as reports, more or less founded on facts, about the nations further north, and what he relates has a deep interest for every one except the purely scientific historian. He tells us that Darius collected an army of 700,000 men and a fleet of 600 Greek ships. The ships, or some of them, he sent up the Danube, and ordered a bridge to be thrown across the river above the delta. His army crossed the Bosporus by another bridge, constructed by the Samian Mandrocles (who afterwards gave to the Heraion at Samos a picture of the passage of the troops, with Darius seated on his throne in the foreground), and two marble pillars with inscriptions in Greek and Assyrian were erected. One of these Herodotus seems to have seen later at Byzantium. Having reached the Danube, Darius left the Ionian Greeks in charge of the bridge, and, giving them a leathern thong in which sixty knots had been tied, he bade them untie one every day, and if he had not returned when the last had been untied they were to sail home. He then set out " with all speed," and, following the retreating Scythians, marched as far as the Maeotic lake (Sea of Azof) and the Don, and even perhaps the Volga ! But the Scythians doubled and re-entered their own country, and baffled and harassed the returning Persians ; and some of them, stealing ahead, reached the 190 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS Danube and urged the Greeks to destroy the bridge. This proposal was strongly seconded by Miltiades, who was now, as we have seen, the Greek ' tyrant ' of the Chersonese, and had been obliged to join the expedition. But when Histiaeus of Miletus opposed it, saying that their existence as tyrants depended wholly on Persia, the Greek leaders decided (to the great disdain of the Scythians, who called them the " faith- fullest of slaves ") only to break the bridge for a distance of a bow-shot from the Scythian side, and to await the return of Darius, though the sixtieth knot had long ago been untied. At length the Persians arrived. " It was night, and their terror when they found the bridge broken was great. . . . But there was in the army of Darius an Egyptian, who had a louder voice than any other man in the world. He was bid by Darius to stand at the water's edge and call Histiaeus the Milesian, who, hearing him at the very first summons, brought across the fleet. . . . Thus the Persians escaped from Scythia.'' And Darius, having reached Sestos, took the bulk of his army across the Hellespont and returned to Sardis. But, although Herodotus seems to regard the return of the king as a flight rather than a dignified withdrawal after a successful campaign, 80,000 men were left behind in Europe under the command of Megabazus, who '* subdued to the dominion of the king all the towns and all the nations of these parts." For some time the whole of Thrace and the islands of the North Aegaean remained in the possession of Persia, and tribute was probably exacted from the Macedonian king.^ After the revolt of Ionia in 499 the Thracians (whom Herodotus calls " the most powerful people in the world, except, of course, the Indians '') threw off the Persian yoke, and were forthwith invaded by the Scythians, who succeeded even in driving Miltiades out of the Chersonese. The fourth book of Herodotus consists mainly of his account of Scythia and the Scythians. Whatever may be its value from the standpoint of the historical critic, it is very fascinat- ing. Much that he recounts is founded on his own experiences ^ For the fate of one Persian embassy demanding tribute see Hdt. v. 17. 191 ANCIENT GREECE and may be accepted as trustworthy, and as for the stories that he retails about the fabled lands beyond the Tanais (Don) — about the one-eyed Arimaspi and the treasure of sacred gold guarded by griffins (recalling the Rheingold and the dragons of the Siegfried legend), and about the Hyper- boreans and the ' Perpherees,' those maiden-messengers who brought (possibly from Britain) gifts packed in wheat-straw to the shrine of Artemis in Delos, and died there, and were honoured as deities with the hair-offerings of Delian youths and maidens ^ — all such things he merely repeats on hearsay for whatever human interest they may possess, and he especially warns us that much of it was derived from a very weird person, namely, a poet and traveller named Aristeas, a kind of ' spectre-man,' as Herodotus calls him, who was said to have vanished on several occasions and to have reappeared after the lapse of years — once, indeed, after the lapse of over three centuries ; having recounted which fact, Herodotus uses his favourite formula and allows that " enough has been said concerning Aristeas." The geography of Herodotus is a subject too large to discuss fully here. I must content myself with one or two of his remarks. " I cannot but laugh,'' he says, " when I see numbers of persons drawing maps of the world . . . and making the ocean-stream running all round the earth, and the earth itself an exact circle, as if described with a pair of compasses, with Europe and Asia of just the same size." Doubtless here he is making a thrust at Hecataeus, his predecessor in history- writing, who composed a text to the map that Anaximander made of the world (p. 205). He then proceeds to give his own ideas as to the shape and relative size of the three continents, and asserts that Europe is by far the largest — so much larger that he " cannot conceive why three different names, and women's names especially, should have been given to what is really only one continent." In one point at least he was right. " As for lyibya," he says, " we know it to be washed on * Hdt, iv. 33. It reads like the legend of some St. Walpurga. Herodotus himself saw their graves " on the left as one enters the precinct of Artemis." 192 '"*' iir:^' '-^ "■^^lito -'• 53. Tomb of Cyrus From Dr. Sarre's ' Iranische Felsreliefs ' {Ernst Wasmuth, A.-G., Berlin) 54. The OlyYMPIEION, ATHENS 192 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia." He gives as proof the circumnavigation of Africa by Pharaoh Necho's Phoenician sailors/ but he rejects just the one bit of evidence that for us is conclusive. " On their return," he says, " they declared (and I for my part do not believe this, though perhaps others may) that in sailing round I^ibya they had the sun upon their right hand " — i.e. on looking towards the noonday sun the east was to their right. Another attempt to circumnavigate Africa was made, says Herodotus, by a nephew of Darius, who was condemned to death for some crime, but respited on condition that he should " sail round lyibya." He seems to have got as far as the Guinea coast, where he discovered a " dwarfish race," but his ships " refused to go any further " (perhaps on account of the south trade- winds), and he returned and (like Walter Raleigh) was put to death in execution of the former sentence. NOTE ON THE TOMBS OF CYRUS AND DARIUS (See Figs. 53 and 73) The story related by Herodotus about the death of Cyrus seems inconsistent with the fact that his tomb (a cenotaph ?) was to be seen at Pasargadae, where Alexander the Great visited it — and punished severely those who had pillaged it. There still exists at Pasargadae (if the ruins in the valley of the Murghab are really the remains of the ancient capital of the Achaemenid princes) a square building on an eminence amidst desolate scenery which may be this celebrated tomb of Cyrus, once surrounded by luxuriant parks. It is now called the ' Tomb of Solomon's Mother.' Here there have been discovered imany stones inscribed with the name of Cyrus, and also a relief of a four- winged figure surmounted by a curious structure I like an Egyptian headdress — possibly a portrait of Cyrus set up by Cambyses. Darius abandoned Pasargadae and built, sixty miles further down the valley, the magnificent city of Persepolis, called by the Greeks " the richest city under the 1 See p. 144. N 193 ANCIENT GREECE sun " — until Alexander plundered its treasury, where he found 120,000 talents of gold. On the site of Persepolis enormous ruins still exist of the architectural works and sculptures of Darius and Xerxes. There is a huge pylon or portal with winged bulls, and some of the hundred columns of the immense Hall of Xerxes, and the great flight of steps that led up to his palace, which, it is said, Alexander set on fire, incited by the notorious Athenian courtesan Thais. On the side of the Royal Mount near Persepolis are the tombs of Darius and of some of the later Persian kings, as well as many monuments of the Sassanidae, who ruled Persia during the Roman Empire and until Persia fell into the hands of the ^ Mahometans. The tomb of Darius is cut out of the solid rock in the middle of a perpendicular precipice (Fig. 73) . At Behistun in Media, between Babylon and Bcbatana, on the face of the rock in a precipitous gully there may still be seen the sculptured relief that records, with inscriptions in three Oriental languages, the victories over revolted provinces which Darius gained in the first three years of his reign. SECTION A : POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS (560-500) How far the political state of a country influences art is a question difficult to answer. Perhaps it might be possible to discover some apparent connexion between the events related in the last chapter and the fact that in the Hellenic world during this period, although many magnificent temples were erected and sculpture was beginning to show signs of the coming glory, as far as we can judge from surviving fragments no really great poetry was written — nothing at all comparable with that of Sappho or Alcaeus — while during the next century or so more great poetry, as well as great sculpture and architecture and oratory and philosophy, was produced by one single city of Greece than we can perhaps find in any other century of the world's history. At Athens, as we have seen, the first beginnings of the Attic drama were made, during the rule of the Peisistratidae, 194 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS by Thespis, who introduced dialogue into the rude choruses of vintage festivals. He was followed by Choerilus and Phrynichus and Pratinas and others, by whom these Dionysiac performances were developed into drama. All these three must have written plays of no mean value, for they contended not unsuccessfully with Aeschylus himself in his younger days. Of their works we know scarcely anything. Choerilus wrote something like 150 pieces. Phrynichus gained a tragic victory in 511, and some eighteen years later had the mis- fortune to write a drama representing the capture of Miletus by the Persians (494), which so painfully affected the Athe- nians that he was fined 1000 drachmae. Sixteen years later (478) he gained the prize with the Phoenissae. In this play he gave a description of the battle of Salamis which Aeschylus is said to have imitated in his Persae.^ But we are here encroaching on what belongs to the next century. Of other Greek poets, or verse-writers, of the period 560-500 the most notable are Theognis, Xenophanes, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides of Geos. It may be remembered that one of the cities which fell under the rule of a tyrant was Megara. About the year 640 Theagenes overthrew the aristocratic party and held power for some time ; but he was ejected, and for the next century the state suffered from endless conflicts between the nobles and the people, in the midst of which troubles the Athenians, at Solon's instigation, wrested Salamis from Megara, and even for a time occupied her port, Nisaea. Among the nobles banished during a temporary supremacy of the democratic party was Theognis. He seems to have spent many years in exile in Sicily and Kuboea {c. 550), but to have returned and lived at Megara until the Persian peril was imminent ; for in his poem he prays Apollo to " keep far from this city the savage host of the Medes." Of the 1368 lines in elegiac metre which are attributed to Theognis (collected about 400 B.C.), about half — those addressed to a young nobleman, Gyrnus — are perhaps authentic. They pour the bitterest 1 See p. 315. In Aristophanes' Frogs (1296) this charge seems rebutted. 195 ANCIENT GREECE contempt on the ' bad ' and ' cowardly ' (KaKoi, SeiXoi) — cant terms among the aristocrats for the working classes — and call upon the ' good ' and * brave ' (ay aOoi, ea-OXol) to trample on the neck of their hated inferiors and to keep themselves from the contamination of the common herd. Theognis laments that Megara is still the same but her people are all changed, that for the sake of gold the noble deigns to wed the daughter of the vile plebeian, and that those who once were the good are now base and vile. Historically all this is of interest. It seems also to have been thought valuable educationally, for it was much used by schoolmasters and by lecturing Sophists ; but regarded as poetry it is very poor stuff, about on a level with Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, or even below it, being tainted with virulence and a maudlin pessimism. 1 Of a very different character are the verses of Xenophanes. He is, as we shall see, more important as a thinker than as a poet, but the vigorous lines in which he expressed some of his convictions are very notable not only for their thoughts but also for their form. In his chief poem {Hepl ^vcrecog, 'On Nature '), of which fragments survive, he inveighs against the popular anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and especially against Homer, and Hesiod for attributing human weaknesses and follies to the gods. " God," he says, " is wholly Sight and wholly Thought and wholly Hearing, and with no effort He rules all things by the working of His mind. . . . There is one God, supreme among divinities and men, hke unto mortals neither in body nor in thought." The Aethiop, he says, makes his gods black, the Thracian makes his blue-eyed and blond, and if horses and oxen and lions had hands and could write and do handiwork as men, they would have formed con- ceptions and made images of gods in their own likeness. We possess also fragments of his elegiacs, in which are found many wise and manly sayings about self-restraint and the ^ He steals, and spoils in stealing, the well-known saying, which King Midas learnt from the god Silenus, and which Sophocles used with such pathetic effect, that " The happiest lot is never to have been born — or to return as soon as possible thither whence we came." 196 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS true enjoyment of life, and a fine passage in which he contrasts the glory won by Olympic victors with that which wisdom confers on a man. " If any one should win by swiftness of foot, or in the pentathlon, there where is the precinct of Zeus by the streams of the Pisa, or else by wrestling, or by being skilled in painful boxing, or that formidable contest that they call the pancratium, he would be granted a conspicuous front seat at the games, and food would be given him by the city from public funds and a gift such as to be an heirloom for ever ; or e'en if he won the victory by means of his horses, and not by his own strength, he would gain all these things . . . but he would not deserve them as I do ; for better than the strength of man or of horses is our [human] wisdom.'* Xenophanes was born at the Ionian city Colophon, but left it (some say, banished on account of his heretical poem) at the age of twenty-five. In the fragment which tells us this he says that he is already ninety- two years old, having "tossed about through Hellenic lands" for sixty-seven years. In another fragment he asks himself : " How old wast thou when the Mede arrived ? " It seems probable, therefore, that he left Colophon on account of the Persian invasion under Harpagus [c. 545), when the Phocaeans abandoned their city and sailed to Corsica. We have already seen (p. 123) that he possibly joined these Phocaeans in founding Elea, where he is said to have lived in very modest circumstances to about his hundredth year. We shall hear more of him as a philosopher. At the semi-Oriental court of Samos we find the poets Ibycus and Anacreon (c. 550-522). Ibycus, a native of Rhegium, is said to have been tutor to Poly crates. From the few lines that we possess of his voluptuously imaginative poetry, and from the fact that he is called by Suidas the " maddest of all love-poets," one may infer what was his influence on the youth- ful prince. But it should be remarked that, as far as one can judge from a few lines, there was in Ibycus (as also in the genuine Anacreon) intense passion without any of that effemi- nate sentimentality which is found in later Greek love-poetry. His conception of Eros is that of a strong and terrible deity, 197 ANCIENT GREECE " like the Thracian Boreas blazing with lightning," or of an insidious and mighty wizard : " From under dark eyebrows shooting forth ravishing glances with enchantments of every kind, he casteth me into the immeasurable toils of the Cyprian goddess." He is said also to have composed epic poems similar to those of the Cyclic writers. The story of his death at the hands of robbers and of the detection of the crime has become well known through Schiller's fine ballad, The Cranes oflbycus^ Anacreon was a native of Teos, in Ionia. When the city was taken by Harpagus (544) he migrated to Abdera, in Thrace. Thence he came to Samos, and lived there until the crucifixion of Polycrates in 523, when Hipparchus is said to have sent a trireme to bring him to Athens. Here he spent some years, but probably returned to Abdera or Teos. He died two years after the battle of Salamis, at the age of eighty-five, choked by a grape-stone. The Athenians erected a statue of him (seen by Pausanias) in the characteristic guise of a drunken old man. Much that passed under the name of Anacreon is evidently the product of ' Anacreontic ' poets of later times. Some of these Anacreontic odes are exceedingly clever and pretty, such, for instance, as the Address to a Painter, which was adduced by lycssing, in his Laocoon, as an example of the kind of pictorial description that poetry should not attempt. It is nevertheless very charming, and ends in a most ingenious conceit. " Come, good painter," exclaims the poet, " paint my absent mistress as I bid thee." He then gives exact details — the soft black locks, the ivory brow, the milk and roses of the cheeks, the marble neck and bust; but, as if feeling the uselessness of all such word-painting, he bids the painter stop, and, turning to the picture created by his own imagination, he calls upon it to speak and answer him. It is exceedingly clever and pretty. But this is not how Homer and Shakespeare make us realize the beauty of Helen and Juliet. Probably, however, we form quite a wrong idea of Anacreon's poetry when we associate him with such delicately worded trifles, 1 Schiller imagines him journeying from Rhegium to Corinth to take part in the Isthmian Games. 198 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS for in fragments of what is undoubtedly his work we find a very different style and some quite different conceptions. Thus, like Ibycus, he gives us a picture of lyove (Eros) which offers a very striking contrast to the winged, roguish, rose- fettered urchin of the Anacreontics. " lyike a smith, with mighty hammer," he says, " Eros smote me and plunged me in a wintry torrent." This is the Eros of the older poets and sculptors, the first-born of the gods of whom Hesiod sings, the strong-Hmbed, manly Eros of Praxiteles, not the chubby little Cupid with his toy bow and quiver whom we meet so often in Hellenistic and Roman art. One generally associates Simonides of Ceos (556-467) with Marathon and Thermopylae. But while he was a boy Croesus was still reigning, and he was already nearly thirty years of age when Peisistratus died. About 525 he was invited by Hipparchus to leave his home on the island of Ceos and to come to Athens, where Anacreon was then living. When Hipparchus was murdered by Harmodius and Aristogeiton he went to Thessaly, probably to the court of the Aleuadae, the princes of lyarissa, whose submission to the Persians prob- ably occasioned his return to Athens. Here he became intimate with Themistocles and was held in great honour for his learning and poetical genius. Four years after the battle of Salamis, when he was eighty years old, he gained the prize at the Great Dionysia — the fifty-sixth public prize for poetry, as he tells us, that he had won. Soon afterwards, together with his nephew, the poet Bacchylides, he went to Syracuse, where, at the court of Hiero, he met Aeschylus and Pindar. He died at Syracuse, aged eighty-nine, in 467. Thus his life extended almost from the age of Solon to that of Pericles, and he was a contemporary for a few years of both Thales and Socrates. In considering him one is therefore obliged either to anticipate or to defer considerably. He seems to have produced a great amount of poetry in his long life — hymns to the gods, funeral eulogies and elegies, triumphal odes, dithyrambs, and odes in honour of victors at the games. In such odes he, as also his nephew Bacchylides, had a powerful 199 ANCIENT GREECE rival in Pindar, by whose sublimity of imagination and majesty of language, it is said, they were both eclipsed. Nevertheless some of the fragments of his poetry that survive are as fine as almost anything in Pindar, and the subject is certainly some- times on a far higher level than that of the ordinary Pindaric ode. In an encomium on those who fell with L^eonidas he says : " Splendid was the fortune of those who died at Thermo- pylae and glorious their fate. Their tomb is an altar ; instead of wails there is remembrance, and lamentation is changed into praise ; such a shroud neither decay shall e'er destroy, nor time, that conquereth all. This resting-place of brave men hath received to dwell within it the glory of Hellas." The metres of these odes are probably such as had been used from an early age in musical compositions. They seem to be conditioned by various musical rhythms (Doric, Aeolic, I^ydian, &c.), and to be, as Horace says with reference to Pindar, free from all law,^ except that the poem has certain divisions (strophes, antistrophes, epodes, &c.). Simonides is remem- bered chiefly on account of the famous lines, quoted by Hero- dotus, that were engraved on the monuments at Thermopylae. ^ Herodotus does not mention Simonides as their author, but Cicero and other writers do. Another couplet, on the Athenians who fought at Marathon, is attributed to Simonides by the rhetorician Aristides, and some lines of his beginning " I am the bravest of beasts " may have been composed as the inscription for the stone lion which, as Herodotus tells us, was set up at Thermopylae in memory of I^eonidas. Earlier in life (c. 506) he wrote, it is said, an epitaph for the Athenians who fell in the Chalcidian war. Simonides is said to have invented, or introduced, the letters v, Wj ^, \p. ^ Of the forty -four extant odes of Pindar only two have any decided metrical similarity, and these two are addressed to the same person and probably form one consecutive piece. * Thus translated by Rawlinson : Here did four thousand men from Pelops' land Against three hundred myriads bravely stand ; and Go, stranger, and to I^acedaemon tell That here, obeying her behests, we fell. 200 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS The Philosophers Some of the older Greek philosophers, such as Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Bmpedocles, may be classed also among the poets, and others, such as Thales and Pythagoras, would perhaps be conceded a like honour if their writings had sur- vived. The incomparable insight into the life of things which distinguishes Greek thought from what often usurps the name of philosophy was due mainly to the poetical spirit that animated it. As Plato tells us, the truths which are the object of the ' lover of wisdom ' cannot be learnt in the same way as scientific facts, but only by the help of our imaginative faculties and by contemplation ; and his statement is con- firmed by Aristotle himself, who says that " poetry is more philosophical and more worthy of serious regard than history.*' In the Greek thinkers of the period that we are examining there are noticeable three distinct methods of regarding the universe. The Ionic philosophers, fixing their gaze on the visible order of things, endeavoured to discover the prime element or self-created and self-moving elementary substance to which the material universe owes its origin and existence. The Eleatic school, of which Xenophanes was the founder, sought the one true existence behind appearances, denying the reality, or even the very existence, of the material world. Pythagoras taught that the life of things — that which alone gives them any true existence — is the relation that they bear to the one life of all (as numbers to unity), and that their nature and their reality as objects of the sensible universe depend on the relation that they bear (Hke numbers) to one another. Thus, all things being bound together into a cosmos by proportion, the universe is of the nature of harmony. To give any full and systematic account of the theories of these early Greek thinkers is here impossible, but if the essential characteristics of the three schools are kept in mind the follow- ing facts will perhaps fall into place and offer a fairly intelligible picture. Thales of Miletus (c. 636-546) was the first of the Ionic 201 ANCIENT GREECE ' Physicists,' and is regarded as the father of Greek philosophy, as well as the chief of the Seven Sages. Herodotus asserts that he was of Phoenician origin, and possibly the Semitic strain may account for genius in his case, as it has done in others. When Thales was still a young man, Miletus, then " a rich and powerful city " and the mother of many colonies, fell under the rule of the tyrant Thrasybulus (p. 130), the friend and Machiavellian adviser of Periander; and it remained under his rule for more than forty years. Thales is said to have visited Egypt and to have acquired there the knowledge of geometry and astronomical calculation which enabled him to foretell the eclipse^ that put an end to the battle between Astyages of Media and the I^ydian king Alyattes (585) . Possibly he also learnt in Egypt a certain amount of geology — enough to make him a ' sedimentarist ' and a believer in water as the prime element — for Herodotus, who also was in Egypt, gives us a long description of the formation of the country by alluvial deposit, which he held to have been going on for some 12,000 years. Miletus was harassed a good deal by Alyattes, but under Croesus the Milesians (almost alone of the Ionian Greeks) retained their independence, and Thales is said to have advised his fellow-citizens not to aid the I^ydian king against Cyrus — advice which probably saved the city from being taken by Harpagus. But the anxiety caused by the advance of Persia is shown by the fact that Thales tried to persuade th^Ionians to form a ' confederation,' with Teos as capital. It must have been soon after this that he died. Whether Thales wrote anything is not known. What we know of his doctrines we learn from Plato, Aristotle, and other writers. The fact that he chose water as the prime substance should be connected closely with the fact that he conceived such prime substance to be in perpetual motion, and mind, 1 The Chaldaeans, from whom possibly (but not probably) the Egyptians learnt their astronomy, are said to have registered, or calculated, eclipses from about 720. They are said to have believed the world to have existed for 172,000 years. But the Indian sages claim an antiquity of two million years for their astronomical tables, and doubtless the most ancient names of the constellations are of Indian origin. 202 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS or intelligence, to be present wherever there was motion ; ^ and, as motion exists everywhere in the universe, he asserted that " all is full of gods," and that even the kinetic power of the magnet and of amber proved their possession of what he called a ' soulless soul ' (or ' lifeless vitality '). Cicero, indeed, says that Thales spoke of the ' Mind of the Universe ' as being equivalent to ' God,' but it is probable that his theories were unconnected with religious ideas — that is, that they were entirely materialistic and without any assumption of a spiritual or intellectual ' first cause,* such as was proclaimed later by Anaxagoras. Consequently, in order to account for move- ment he was obliged to conceive his prime substance as self- moving, and, indeed, self -created, and was thus driven to face the same difficulties that all materialists are forced to encounter. Some writer has remarked that " a lake formed by the Maeander i now covers the native city of the man who taught that every- thing comes from and returns to water.'* The story of his falling down a well into his favourite element while star- gazing is perhaps a playful invention. In connexion with Thales it may be interesting to raise the question how far, if at all, Greek philosophy was indebted to the philosophy of the Bast. It is indubitable that Thales and Pythagoras, and perhaps other early Greek philosophers, visited Egypt, and perhaps other Eastern lands, and it seems possible that, as far as their external form is concerned, some of the doctrines of Greek thinkers, such as that of ' trans- migration,' had an Oriental or Egyptian origin,* and that the belief in the immortality of the soul, which we find so strongly ^ asserted by Socrates, was not evolved by Greek thought, but introduced from Eastern sources ; moreover, in Vedanta j philosophy there are doctrines of ' abstraction ' and of the kriune nature of the Deity (as Intelligence, Matter, and Multi- tude) which have a singular resemblance to the Socratic doctrine of the '' release and purification of the body " and to ^ Cf. "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The theory of Thales is like that of the modern Monist. ^ Herodotus asserts this (ii. 123), but no proof has been found of it in EJgyptian monuments. 203 ANCIENT GREECE the Monad and Triad doctrine of Pythagoras, and others that closely resemble the Bleatic denial of the reality of the sensible world ; but it is surely not impossible that the human mind is so constructed that it may (perhaps must) arrive at similar formulae ; or, if it be true that Greece accepted certain forms of Eastern thought, it is no less true that Hellenic genius reinspired these forms with a new life so that they are as truly original creations as Hamlet or Faust. The human mind seems generally to find no insuperable difficulty in forming a vague conception of an inert prime element (more or less immaterial) existing from all eternity ; but for the conception of a cosmos, an ordered, differentiated universe, or even of ' matter ' itself, it is necessary to account for the ordering force, and one instinctively rejects the ' self- moved ' material prime element of Thales and the ' self-moved ' atoms of Democritus, of which we shall hear later. This difficulty accounts for the creative lyove (Eros) of Hesiod, the "love and hate of the atoms" of Empedocles, the Nous (Mind) of Anaxagoras, and all other such attempts to visualize and personify the mysterious power which manifests itself in motion and life, and it is not surprising that Anaximander (c. 610-545), 9- contemporary and fellow-citizen, perhaps disciple, of Thales, should have attempted to go a little further toward the realm of the Immaterial in his search for a first cause of motion. He is said to have been the first Greek philosopher who wrote a prose work. Of this work (entitled, as usual, About Nature) nothing but a few quotations survive, but they prove that the author proclaimed as the prime element, or rather the first ' principle ' (for he was the first to use the word apx'/) , what he called ' the infinite ' or ' unconditioned ' {to aireipov), by which he probably meant matter not exactly in a chaotic state, but with its elements {a-TOixeia) not yet differentiated.^ But his apxh is really quite as materialistic as that of Thales, and is less conceivable. Instead of ' self-' ^ See Cicero, De Nat. Deor. i. Plato uses to aneipov for primal ' matter ' regarded merely as a passive, potential, formless existence — and this seems practically what Anaximander meant. 204 55- Bl,ACK-FIGURED VASES c. 700-500 See List of Illustrations and Note D 204 ,.^, '"_ J** i. if' I THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS movement ' he has to imagine ' counteracting forces,' such as heat and cold, dryness and moisture, in order to produce a cosmos. His theory that Hving things were evolved out of damp matter and that men as well as all other animals were at first fish-like has affinity to modern morphological doctrines. He is said to have invented the sun-dial (though Herodotus credits the Babylonians with the invention) and to have made a map of the world and an astronomical globe. The map is said to have been engraved on a brass tablet, and was perhaps the very one which (c. 499) Aristagoras of Miletus took over to show the vSpartans the extent of the Persian Empire, and for which Hecataeus wrote a text. A third Milesian, Anaxi- menes, proclaimed as the apxn an illimitable element of the nature of air — the life-breath, as it were, of the universe. This seems a relapse ; but we know too little of his doctrines to be certain. The earth he believed to float sustained in the midst of air, and he is said to have been the first (Greek ?) to teach that the moon's light came from the sun. If, as it is said, he taught Anaxagoras (born in 500) and was himself a disciple of Anaximander, he must have lived to a great age. In connexion with these Physicists may be mentioned Heracleitus of Kphesus, for, although he lived somewhat later (c. 540-470), and although his genius was of a strikingly original, imaginative, and independent character (justifying his proud remark, " 1 have gone to no teacher but myself," and perhaps even justifying the gift of his own book to the temple of Artemis as the most precious offering he could make), nevertheless the fact that he accepted a ' prime element ' makes it convenient to class him with the other Ionian philosophers. During most of the life of Heracleitus Ephesus was under the sovereignty of Persia and the rule of Greek tyrants. But he evidently lived to see the day of liberation, for in his work On Nature he pours bitter disdain on the Ephesian democracy for having banished his friend Hermodorus (who, by the way some twenty-six years later helped the Roman decemviri to draw up their Twelve Tables). This would seem to prove that he wrote the book after the recovery of Sestos by the 205 ANCIENT GREECE Athenians and the liberation of Ionia from the Persian yoke (478). To judge from the 136 short fragments of his writings that survive Heracleitus expressed himself in very trenchant aphorisms. The following are some of them : " War is the father of all things " (i.e. all things are evolved by antagonistic forces) ; ''No man can wade twice in the same stream " [i.e. material objects are always changing) ; " The wisest of men is an ape to the gods " \ " I^ife is the death of gods, death their life " ; " Men are mortal gods, gods immortal men " \ ''A man's character is his destiny " ; " lycaming teaches not wisdom/' In connexion with this last aphorism he added : '' Otherwise learning would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and Xenophanes and Hecataeus." Still more strongly he expressed himself about Homer and Archilochus, saying that they " ought to be whipped." Such language is intelHgible enough, so that probably it was the abstruseness of his doctrines rather than his words that won him the title ' the Obscure.' Even Socrates confessed that there were many things in the book of Heracleitus that needed a * Delian diver ' to bring them up from their obscure depths. Heracleitus held fire to be the prime element. Possibly he was led to the choice by Oriental (Zoroastrian) influence. But by ' fire ' he meant a subtle, fiery, aetherial substance rather than flame. Of this self-kindled, ever-vibrating fiery aether he conceived the human soul and the soul of the universe, and even Deity itself, to consist.^ Doubtless fire, or heat, was believed by him (as it is, or was until lately, believed i by modern science) to be caused by, or to he, vibration ori undulation, and it was evidently as a most striking form, or symbol, of perpetual and inconceivably rapid motion that he I chose it, for all his philosophy was founded on the axiom thatj there is no true existence except in motion, in mutation, development, action, transition. " All is in flux " {iravra pel) * Anticipating by some 2400 years the assertion of the modern Monist, who tells us that the only possible God is "the sum total of the vibrations of the Kther." Socrates was accused by Aristophanes (of course falsely) of having enthroned ' Aetherial Vortex ' in the place of Zeus, 206 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS was his fundamental dogma. There is no such thing as a permanent state of being. Being (existence) consists in change. Nothing exists except in merging its identity in something else. Thus, " Death is life, life is death,'' and " Sleep and waking are the same,'' or (if I may slightly change his form of expres- sion and put some of his aphorisms into the words of three great modern poets), ''There is no Death ! What seems so is transition," ^ '* To sleep is to wake," and " lyiving are the dead, and I am the apparition, I the spectre." Such doctrines, so unintelligible to the many, probably credited him with the obscurity and melancholy which have attached themselves to his memory. Of the life and poems of Xenophanes I have already spoken. His philosophy offers a very striking contrast to that of Hera- \ \ cleitus, and forms a part of the first rude foundation on which \ \ was reared the Ideal Theory of Plato. Heracleitus asserted that nothing truly exists except in so far as it is in motion, mutation, transition — that is, as a link in the endless chain of cause and effect. Xenophanes, on the contrary, asserted that all motion and mutation and transition, ( as well as the things that they affect, are merely appear- I ances, the multitudinous phenomena of the senses [ra iroWa), I which are not existent except so far as they stand in relation to the one eternal and immutable Reality, the " unmoved source of motion" and the only source of all being. In his • poetry, as we have seen, he gives this immutable and eternal i Reality the name of God. As a philosopher he calls it the One — an expression used also by Pythagoras and by Plato. iBut though he held that things of the senses (the Many) are non-existent in their variety and their mutations and their relation to one another, he asserted that they exist truly by virtue of their relation to the One. Thus the keystone of the Bleatic school is ra iravra ev (' All things One ') rather than TO eV Km TOL iravra ('The One and the Many'), which vvas the formula of Platonic philosophy ; and we should regard ^ In the Phaedo Socrates (or Plato) speaks of transition from life to death and from death to life in reference to the immortality of the soul. 207 ANCIENT GREECE the creed of Xenophanes as pantheistic rather than duaHstic — that is, as identifying spirit and matter rather than separating them by an impassable gulf, as Plato seems to do. But how- ever that may be, it is clear that Xenophanes himself allowed the practical existence of sensible objects and of change and motion — allowed, as Socrates did, that such phenomena, although not the objects of true knowledge, could be used as ' rafts ' to carry us across the sea of human life — whereas some of his successors, such as Parmenides and Zeno, insisted on the absolute non-existence of the natural world, and were thus landed in absurdities. Under Zeno the sublime philosophy of the founder degenerated into metaphysical quibbles and paradoxes and puzzles about the infinitely small and great, such as the puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise. He denied not only the absolute reahty but also the practical existence of the sensible world and the possibility of motion — a doctrine refuted, it is said, by an unbehever who rose from his seat and walked across the lecture-room, or lecture-portico, of the philosopher. Hence the expression Solvitur amhulando. The one doctrine of real importance in the philosophy of Xenophanes, and that which places it on a level quite different from that of the Ionic Physicists, is that which asserts the reality of things to depend on their relation to the one true existence — a doctrine substantially the same as that of Socrates, who taught that everything exists by virtue of its true, not its apparent, cause, and that the only true knowledge is the knowledge of the true cause of things. Pythagoras {c. 570-490) was a contemporary of Xenophanes and a generation earher than Heracleitus. He and Xeno- phanes, living only some 120 miles distant from each other in Southern Italy, may be supposed to have met ; but there was evidently not much mutual admiration, if we may judge from some very contemptuous verses of Xenophanes. " They relate," he says, " that once when he [Pythagoras] was going past while a puppy was being whipped, he was touched with pity and exclaimed : ' I^eave off ! Beat him not ! for he is the soul of a friend of mine. I recognized it at once by his voice.' " 208 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS Pythagoras was a Samian, but about 540, after having visited the East and Egypt/ he left Samos, perhaps in order to escape from the frivolous court of Poly crates, and settled in Croton. Here he seems to have gained great influence with the wealthy aristocratical party. Three hundred Crotoniats he formed into an Order, bound together by vows of allegiance and secrecy, after the fashion of Freemasons, whom they also resembled in possessing secret signs. On new members a period of proba- tion, some say of seven years, was imposed, during which they were tested in their powers of keeping silence (like the Trap- pists) and in keeping their temper and in mental capacities. Only a few were initiated into the secret (esoteric) doctrines and rites, which were perhaps of an Orphic character, and seem to have been specially connected with the worship of Apollo ; and it is possible that Pythagoras was identified by his followers with Apollo and that he laid claim (as Empedocles did later) to supernatural powers. The rule of the Order seems to have included strict abstinence from animal food — a practice necessarily involved in the creed of transmigration of souls. 2 Music and athletics formed an indispensable part in the system. When a member wished to leave the Order he was presented with double his original subscription and allowed to depart, but over his seat in the refectory was erected a monument, and funeral rites were celebrated to intimate his philosophic decease. To the chief lodge (so to speak) at Croton were affiliated others in Taras, Sybaris, Metapontion, and other towns. Perhaps it was owing to the political influence of these aristocratical Pythagorean societies that in 510 (the year when Tarquin and Hippias were expelled) Croton utterly destroyed ^ Herodotus evid-ently alludes (iL 123) to him, though he declines to mention his name, when he speaks of certain Greek writers having appropriated and published as their own the Egyptian (?) doctrine of Transmigration. In iv. 95 he calls him " not the meanest of Greek philosophers." * Beans were also taboo, if we are to take Horace's joke seriously {Sat. II, vi. 63), who intimates that some relative of Pythagoras had been a bean. Grote rejects Pythagorean vegetarianism as a fable because Milo must have had a meat diet 1 o 209 ANCIENT GREECE Sybaris,^ which had led into the field, we are told, an army of 300,000 men, against whom Milo, the celebrated Pythagorean wrestler (six times Olympic victor), did deeds like those of Samson. Soon after this the popular party, under the leader- ship of Cylon, gained the upper hand in Croton, and the Pythagorean societies fell under ban. Milo's house, where forty disciples were assembled, was set on fire by the mob, and all but two perished — possibly Pythagoras among them ; but some say that he had fled to Taras some years, pre- viously, and thence to Metapontion, where 40a years later, Cicero tells us, his tomb was to be seen.^ Probably Pytha- goras, like Socrates and many other wise men, wrote nothing, although there is a story of his having left all his writings to his daughter Damo, with orders not to publish them — a com- mand that she kept, although in great poverty. There are extant so-called ' Golden Verses * (seventy-one hexameters) which are attributed to him, but they are evidently a late fabri- cation. One of his disciples, Philolaus, who is said to have escaped from the conflagration and taken refuge in Greece, incorporated the doctrines of the school in a book (of course called On Nature), but only a few questionable relics of this book, as also of about ninety other works by the older Pythagoreans, survive (including some fragments ascribed to Archytas, the famous Tarentine mathematician, well known to readers of Horace). The disappearance of these old records is doubtless due to the fierce persecutions to which the sect was exposed. For the life and doctrines of Pythagoras we are almost entirely dependent on a few comments of Aristotle and on the writings of Porphyry and lamblichus, neo-Platonists of the third century A.D., at which epoch, at Alexandria, there was a great revival of the mystical doctrines of the school and an attempt to proclaim Pythagoras as the anti-Christian Messiah. 1 Sixty-seven years later, after a vain attempt to revive Croton, Thurii was founded (443) in the vicinity. Herodotus probably took part in the founding of Thurii and saw the ruins of Sybaris. * In Cicero's time the revival of Pythagoreanism was beginning. In early days the Romans, when bidden by an oracle to erect a statue to the wisest of the Greeks, erected one to Pythagoras. 210 56. Ancient Bi^ack-figured Amphora See List of Illustrations and Note D THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS Plato himself borrowed largely from Pythagoras. Timaeus of lyocri, a Pythagorean, is said to have been Plato's teacher, and in the dialogue Timaeus Plato propounds views on the physical universe which are perhaps mainly Pythagorean ; but it is as impossible to say how far they are Platonized as to say how far the doctrines of Socrates were Pythagorized by Plato. In the Phaedrus Plato uses, doubtless merely as a parable, the doctrine of Transmigration and of the ten periods of the soul as it was taught by Pythagoras, and the Platonic theory of Ideas is founded on Pythagorean and Eleatic doctrines of the One and the Many. The main thesis of the Pythagorean system of philosophy is that the human mind recognizes within itself certain laws without which thought is impossible, and in these laws it possesses a revelation of the natural laws to which the structure of the universe is due. Now of these intellectual laws those of number are the most immutable and categorical, and the universe (both the sensible and the intellectual) is an ' imita- tion ' or ' realization ' of the laws of number, where Deity is the omnipresent Unit or Monad — of which all numbers consist, though it is itself no number — and prime (brute, chaotic) matter is the Duad, and the ordered Cosmos (formed by the addition of the creative Monad to the chaotic Duad) is the Triad. ^ Now, strictly speaking, the sensible universe, according to this theory, is number realized in space, and when number is realized in space it is geometry. Therefore we find that with Pythagoras, as with Plato, geometry was the foundation of all true science. He himself is said to have discovered the most important fact of the equality of the square on the long side of 1 a right-angled triangle to the sum of the squares on the shorter sides — and to have sacrificed a hundred oxen as thank-offering. ^ But in his philosophy he seems to have adopted numbers, as j being more readily expressive of ratio and proportion than are ^ Natural objects (under three dimensions) are triads, and human nature is a triad, and the mind's conception of Deity is also a triad. I^ater Pytha- goreans made the Four represent solidity, the Five quality (colour, &c.), the Six vitality, the Seven mind, and so on. ^ Hardly consistent with his transmigration and vegetarian principles ! 211 ANCIENT GREECE lines and areas. As numbers are dependent for their individual existence on the unit, so sensible objects are dependent for their specific existence on their true cause — the One, or Deity. But the existence of natural objects as phenomena depends on their relation to all other such objects (nothing being of any meaning or value, or conceivable, by itself), in the same way as every intelligible number stands related, in a certain ratio or proportion, to every other number. Thus all things of the senses are knit together into one harmonious whole, and the natural universe is a Harmony ^ — such as also modern science proclaims it to be " Throughout the processes of Nature,'' says Tyndall, " we have interdependence and harmony, and the main value of physics as a mental training consists in the tracing out of this interdependence and the demonstration of this harmony." In passing it may be observed that many phenomena seem (though this may be merely due to the constitution of the human mind) to be the results of the vibration of some one prime element (' ether ' ?) at different rates, so that we have light and electricity and the octaves of sound and colour, and possibly of taste and smell, all related and standing in certain numerical ratios each to the other. But their specific exist- ence, as light and sound and so on, is due, as Pythagoras expresses it, to their relation, not to each other, but to the Unit. Thus, when Professor Romanes asserted that with one persistent force and one prime matter he could account for the universe, Darwin answered : " 1 could not disprove it if some one should assert that God had given certain attributes to force so that it develops into light, heat, electricity, and magnetism — and perhaps even into life." This doctrine of the harmonious system of the universe is one of the most suggestive and illuminating of all parables. But scientifically Pythagoras was, of course, on the wrong lines. He attempted to force Nature into accordance with| his theories ; and of this we have a striking instance in the I ^ Hence the Pythagorean ' music of the spheres,' which our ears are too i dull, or from long familiarity too callous, to perceive. 212 I THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS fact that, in order to complete the mystic ' Decad/ he added a tenth to the then-known nine celestial bodies which circled round the central Fire or Watch-tower of Zeus. This tenth body he called the Antichthon (' Counter-earth '). How such a method differs from that by which Neptune was discovered need scarcely be explained. The gulf between Physics and Ethics Pythagoras conceived to be bridged by music, which is at once a subject of intellectual research and a means of affecting the emotions. The explana- tion of the musical intervals and of harmony as due to propor- tion is attributed to him, although some accounts of his experi- ments are apocryphal, seeing that hammers of different weight do not produce different notes from the same anvil or bell. But he seems to have discovered the fact that a chord at the same tension vibrates in proportion to its length : that half the length produces the octave above the original note, two- thirds produces a musical fifth, three-fourths a fourth, and eight-ninths a major tone. Thus from Physics to Ethics, from the sensible world to the world of mind and morals, we pass by the bridge of Music — climb the Beanstalk, as it were, and find ourselves in a fairy- land where our dull, boorish materialism not seldom wakes to find itself ' translated ' and invested with an ass's nowl. Even in this realm Pythagoras, or later Pythagorean philosophy, ventures to use the scale of Number and reads off vice as imperfect and virtue as perfect proportion — a virtuous life (i.e. virtue realized in action) as the straight line, abstract justice as the square number, and a just life as the geometric square. The soul he defines as a ' self-moving number,' or triune Monad, and thus asserts it to be of the same nature as Deity — a connexion that doubtless encouraged his claim to supernatural powers. These formulae are, of course, merely little curiosities preserved for us by later writers, and are of no value except as curiosities ; nor can we regard otherwise such stories as that of the recognition by Pythagoras in the temple of Hera at Argos of the shield whicn he had used (as Euphorbus, the Trojan) in a former life. But, however 213 ANCIENT GREECE unworthy of serious regard they may appear to some minds, such a parable as that of Metempsychosis, with its gradual redemp- tion of the human soul by purification, initiation, and intuition, until it is fit to dwell with the gods, and such an imaginative conception as the harmony of the universe and the music of the spheres, are (as Aristotle himself allows) of more value to the true thinker than much that goes by the name of scientific metaphysics. The main structure of the Pythagorean philo- sophy, however dimly it looms through the ages, is of impres- sive grandeur — a watch-tower of Zeus overlooking the infinities of space and time. SECTION B : THE ORDERS OF GREEK ARCHITECTURE : SCULPTURE, DOWN TO THE PERSIAN WARS Something has already been said about the primitive shrines of the Mycenaean age and the temples of Homeric times, and some of the temples of the earlier historic period have been mentioned. Others will be mentioned later in connexion with historical events and with sculpture, and further information will be found in Note A at the end of this book, and can be supplemented by reference to the Index and the I^ist of Illustrations. But without attempting to trace minutely the evolution of the Greek temple or to describe the technical details of Greek architecture (on which points full information can be found in dictionaries and text-books) it may be well to state here the main characteristics of the different orders and to add a few facts in connexion with some of the chief temples. The original shrine, generally of wood or sunburnt brick, was an oblong, or rarely a round, building, like the ancient Greek house, with a porch. Sometimes this porch had side walls and perhaps a couple of wooden pillars in front, so that the whole building consisted of a hall (the shrine proper, or mo?) and a closed forecourt (Tr/ooVao?).^ Then the row of pillars or columns was extended across the whole front of ^ Ex. the Treasure-house of Megara at Delphi. 214 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS the building and the side walls of the porch were omitted, so that an open portico was formed.^ Then a porch or portico was placed at both ends of the building. ^ Next, a row of columns was extended all round the building, which was said to be peripteros — i.e. winged, or aisled — and sometimes the portico had two rows of columns.^ Ivastly, two rows of columns were placed all round, and there were also columned porches at both ends of the building itself.* Such a temple was called dipteros, ' two- winged.' The interior sanctuary (the paog or a-rtKog, in which was the statue of the divinity facing east, so that the light of the rising sun should illuminate it) had side walls, but frequently had also inside them two rows of columns (as in the great Paestum temple) , forming aisles and perhaps supporting the roof. These interior aisles were sometimes formed by two tiers of small columns, one on the top of the other. Whether the interior building was generally, or ever, hypaethral — i.e. open to the sky — is not quite certain. Certain it is that the statue was not often unprotected by a roof ; and it is probable that the open space was only just enough to allow of sufficient light, as in the Pantheon at Rome. The number of columns in the front of a temple was two, four, six, eight, or ten. The side (counting the corner columns) had generally one more than double the number of the front columns. Thus the Parthenon is 8 x 17, the Theseion is 6 X 13, as also is the temple of Zeus at Olympia ; but Paestum is 6 X 14, and so is the splendid temple at Segesta (Fig. 57). The three orders of Greek architecture are the Doric (espe- cially used in Western Hellas), the Ionic (at first peculiar to Ionia), and the Corinthian. In the motherland we find all three styles, but the Doric is the most ancient. The Corinthian, with its slender shaft and its capital orna- mented with rows of acanthus leaves, need not occupy our attention now, for it was first invented about the time of the Peloponnesian War. The earliest specimen known (c. 430) 1 Ex. the Erechtheion. 2 Ex. the Nike temple at Athens. ' Ex. the Zeus temple at Olympia and the Parthenon. * Ex. the Artemis temple at Ephesus. 215 ANCIENT GREECE is said to have been a single column (now lost) inserted in the Ionic court of the Doric temple at Phigaleia (Fig. 84) . Other fine examples are the monument of Lysicrates (Fig. 136), the ' Temple of the Winds/ and the splendid columns of the Olympieion at Athens (Figs. 54/134), erected by the Emperor Hadrian. The Doric order has a baseless, somewhat tapering column, surmounted by a capital composed of a thick slab (abax, or abacus) lying on a very flat oval moulding (the echinus). The columns bear a plain architrave (' main beam '), which supports the frieze and the projecting cornice. The Ionic order has a slenderer column,^ standing on a base, and bearing a capital whose main characteristic is two large spiral volutes (evidently an artistic modification of the ox-heads which occur in Oriental architecture, e.g. in the Persepolis columns). The columns carry an entablature composed, as in the Doric order, of architrave, frieze, and cornice, but the face of the architrave is cut into three planes, each pro- jecting a Httle above the one below it, and the friezes of the two orders differ essentially. This difference of the friezes will be noted at once in pictures of Doric and Ionic temples. It will be seen that the Ionic frieze is one undivided space, either plain or filled with a line of figures in procession or otherwise forming a continuous series, whereas in the Doric temples the frieze consists of numerous spaces (metopes), either left plain or else filled each by a single group of figures, 2 and every metope is divided from the next by a kind of tablet of three bands sundered by flutings (triglyphs). These triglyphs are said to represent the ends of the rafters, which were visible in the old wooden temples, and the small 1 The Ionic column scarcely tapers at all. Its height is 16 to 18 semi- diameters (modules). That of the Parthenon columns is 12. In the great Paestum temple it is only 8, and in the Apollo temple at Corinth {the most ancient perhaps in Greece) it is only yf . The columns of Atreus' Treasury and the lyion Gate (Mycenae) taper downwards. ^ In the Parthenon the external frieze consisted of metopes and triglyphs, but the frieze of the inner building was Ionic in character, although the columns were Doric. This is the frieze, representing the Pan?ithetiaic procession, which is in the British Museum. 2l6 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS spherical ornaments (mutules) below and above the frieze are supposed to represent rain-drops, or perhaps nail-heads. Another characteristic, especially in the Doric style, is that the column not only tapers considerably but it has a slight outward curve (called the entasis) in the middle, the object of which may have been to correct some optical error in perspective. In the Parthenon this bulge is scarcely per- ceptible. In the temple of Demeter at Paestum, or still more in the ' Basilica,* it is disagreeably noticeable (Fig. 41). At Phigaleia it seems entirely absent. The columns of all three orders have almost always parallel flutings. The Doric are sharp-edged, shallower, and fewer (twenty in the Parthenon), the Ionic and Corinthian gene- rally separated by fillets, semicircular, and numbering from twenty-four up to thirty- two. Sometimes the lower part of the Ionic column was left plain, or (as at Ephesus) was used for sculptured reliefs. In later times spiral flutings were sometimes used. In point of size, especially in regard to height, Greek temples are, of course, not comparable with our cathedrals, nor with the great temples of the East, and, as Herodotus himself remarks, " although the temple of Ephesus is worthy of note, and also the temple of Samos, if all the great works of the Greeks could be put together in one they would not equal " things that are to be seen in Egypt. The length of the Olympieion at I Acragas (Girgenti), the largest temple in the Hellenic world, but (like its Athenian namesake) never completed, was 363 feet ; that of the Samian Heraion was 346, that of the (earlier) Ephesian temple was 342, and that of the Parthenon is 227 i feet. St. Paul's Cathedral is 513 feet long and St. Peter's at I [ Rome is 613 feet. I Sculpture, down to the Persian Wars In a former section we considered some of the main charac- teristics of the religion that preceded the introduction of the Olympian hierarchy, and noticed how the feelings of awe and dread for the supernatural revealed themselves in grotesque 217 ANCIENT GREECE and horrible effigies, which were regarded with superstitious reverence. This fetish- worship was by no means eradicated by the new Olympian religion. Although we find little or no trace of ' spook * or superstitious awe in Homer, who seems to shrink instinctively from all that is grotesque, monstrous, and uncanny, the old deisidaimonia survived (as we saw in Hesiod's case) side by side with the brighter and more openly professed Olympian orthodoxy, and during the sixth century there seems to have been a great recrudescence of ' chthonian ' cult, aggravated by the introduction and spread of the Orphic creed and rites and the institution, or revival, of Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries. This subject we shall meet again when we come to the philosophers of the fifth century. At present it will suffice to note the fact that Greek sculpture was apparently a direct evolution from the fabrication of grotesque fetish-idols, although it is impossible by any analysis to discover the vital force which effected this wondrous develop- ment — a development which in many cases, such as that of Egypt and of Assyria and of other Oriental nations, has scarcely taken place at all, and in no other case has been so rapid and so perfect as in Greek art. Certainly we cannot account for it by what we call civilization. In our sense of the word the Persian Empire was in the age of Aeschylus and Pheidias at a higher stage of civilization than Greece, and in the Hellenic world the advent of a more scientific learning and research and criticism was contemporary with the degeneracy, and was soon followed by the disappearance, of all true art, until its renascence in other forms. But however inexplicable it may be, it is an incontestable fact that within less than two centuries the superstitious awe attaching to some ghoulish monstrosity or some formless stock or meteorite gave place to reverence for the images of a Pheidian Zeus or Athene — reverence paid not so much to the present deity as to the manifestation of the grand, the serene, and the beautiful.^ 1 The testimony of many writers to the effect produced by the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia is very striking. " Let a man sick and weary in soul," says one of these, " who has passed through many distresses and sorrows, whose 2l8 An Attic Hydria of the Middle Black-figured Period 218 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS The vital power which effected this development revealed its workings not only in sculpture but also in other creations of Hellenic genius — in Greek literature, Greek thought, Greek mythology, and Greek theology, all of which bear testimony to a genius essentially formative and artistic — perhaps we may say essentially sculpturesque — a genius well described as the converse of that of the Jewish nation, and one for which the dangers of idolatry were to a great extent neutralized by poetic imagination and reverence for the ideally beautiful. Doubtless the imaginative and allegorical pictures of the Olympian gods and the Olympian creed which we find in the art of Homer and Pheidias and the dramatists do not reveal to us the gross anthropomorphic superstitions of the populace, which were, as we have seen, as bitterly denounced by Xeno- phanes as was Jewish idolatry by Isaiah. Doubtless, as in every age, the religion of the thinker and the true artist was not that of the people, but in spite of all the superstitions in which it was involved (and we need only think of Socrates to realize them) this anthropomorphism of the popular theology was a result of the same formative spirit to which was due the evolution of Greek sculpture from the formless or grotesque effigies of the early age of Greece. Whether we should regard Greek plastic art as lineally descended from Aegaean it is not easy to say. Aegaean plastic art (as we see by the Vaphio cups) attained an astonishing proficiency, but was apparently swept out of existence by the Dorians. It may have survived and been the germ from which sprang the glories of the Periclean age, but it is foolish to refuse to recognize in Hellenic art, as in Hellenic thought, the presence of many elements derived from other sources — from Crete, I^ydia, Phrygia, the East, and Hgypt — and to insist on an ' autochthonous ' originality in the case of Greek sculpture or Greek thought which cannot be claimed for Giotto, Dante, or Shakespeare. But whether pillow is un visited by kindly sleep, stand in front of this image ; he will, I deem, forget all the terrors and troubles of human life." (Quoted by Professor Bury.) 219 i ANCIENT GREECE of Aegaean or other origin in regard to some of its elements, the art of classical Hellas is, of course, original in the true sense of the word, being a re-creation — and that, too, into a far higher existence. Genuine statuary is said to have begun in Greece about 600, and the so-called ' archaic * period extends to the end of the Persian wars, say 480. Of this period I shall give a brief review, prefaced by a few remarks on the fetish-worship which preceded the attempt to represent deity, and later also the human form divine, as a thing of perfect beauty. The ancient Greek idol was often merely a symbol of divine presence — sometimes a rude figure (such as one finds in thousands on sites of temples) of clay or wood or lead, fre- quently grotesque or monstrous, sometimes a formless stock, ^ or a ' heaven-fallen ' stone, or a pillar, such as we hear of in the Bible and see in the Lion Gate at Mycenae and in pictures of the Earth-goddess. Real statuary assuredly existed in Greece (as, of course, in Egypt and the East) before the sixth century,^ and rich and elaborate relief-work was produced, as we see from the descriptions of the famous Cypselus chest and the carved throne of the Apollo image at Amyclae. The former, which Pausanias saw some 800 years later in the Heraion at Olympia, was presented probably by Periander, and was asserted to have been the actual chest in which Cypselus was hidden by his mother {c. 655). In any case it is probably the most ancient specimen of artistic Greek carved work (if it was by a Greek artist) of which we have historical record. The reliefs, in cedar wood, ivory, and gold, represented mythological subjects (Pelops, Heracles, Perseus, &c.) in thirty- three panels arranged in five parallel rows. The Amyclaean 1 These old wooden idols were called ^oava (' carved things ') , See Hdt. v. 82. ' E.g. the gold and silver dogs and the golden torch-bearers of Od. vii. and the Apollo statue intimated by //. i. 28, and the statue of Athene in//, vi. 92 and 303, evidently imagined in a sitting position. A colossal gold-plated statue of Zeus was given by Cypselus or Periander [c. 600) to Olympia. Also we hear of an artist of Rhegium, Clearchus, who at a very early period made a bronze statue (not cast, but plated) of Zeus at Sparta. Moreover, there is a stone sculpture still existing in Greece that is far older than Homer — the Lions of Mycenae. 220 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS throne was also decorated by about twenty-seven reliefs (probably in bronze), and was supported by figures of the Seasons, the Graces, Tritons, &c. It was the work of a I^ydian (Magnesian) artist, Bathycles, who may have come to Sparta in the time of Croesus (say 550), but whose date is possibly considerably earlier. This was a work produced by a foreign artist ^ as a throne, or screen, for a Greek god. But in what form was that god represented ? He was, as Pausanias tells us, a bronzen pillar, some 45 feet high, " with head and hands and feet attached." Such old fetishes, pillars and logs and meteorites, sometimes quite formless or else shaped into some rude resemblance to humanity or to some monstrous thing, and decked out with ornaments, were not seldom pre- served reverentially in temples^ — hidden away like Bambini and relics and displayed only on solemn occasions — long after a splendid statue of the deity had been erected in the sanc- tuary. At Troy we hear of the Palladium, and at Ephesus and on the Tauric Chersonese of the heaven-fallen image of Artemis, and in the Brechtheion there was kept an old ^oavov of Athene long after the Pheidian goddess had been erected in the Parthenon, and at Phigaleia existed (and was renewed in bronze by Onatas of Aegina) a monstrous horse-headed Demeter. Doubtless of the nature of the ancient wooden or clay idol were the ' Aeacidae ' — the images of the old Aeginetan heroes Aeacus, Telamon, and Peleus of which Herodotus tells us. The Aeginetans, he says, when appealed to by the Thebans for help, " sent them the Aeacidae," and the Thebans, " relying on the assistance of the Aeacidae," ventured on war, but were beaten ; whereupon they returned the Aeacidae and " besought the Aeginetans to send them men instead." Moreover, in spite of this experience, just before the battle of Salamis, * Ivydia, Phrygia, and I^ycia all seem to have reached an advanced stage in plastic art before Greece, and doubtless, as well as Egypt, Crete, and the East, contributed many important elements for the development of Greek sculpture. The great rock-relief of ' Niobe ' (probably the Earth-Mother Cybele) on Mount Sipylus in Lydia is very ancient, and so are recently dis- covered tombs in Phrygia with lions like those of Mycenae. Sculptured monuments of high antiquity, probably of Hittite provenance, have lately been discovered at Pteria, the ancient capital of Cappadocia. 221 ANCIENT GREECE says Herodotus, " sl ship was sent by the Athenians toAegina to fetch Aeacus and the other Aeacidae/' According to tradition, the first sculptors and workers in metals were superhuman beings, such as Hephaestus and the fabled tribes of Phrygian Dactyli and Cretan and Rhodian Telchines and I^emnian Cabiri and the Cyclopes. Then we hear of Daedalus. The name may be an epithet (' the artificer '), but there is no good reason to doubt that it was given to some great worker in metals and sculptor and inventor (possibly even of wings!), whom legend and Homer ^ connect with Minos, and thus also with Theseus and Athens, intimating doubt- less the artistic connexion between Crete and Greece in the Minoan age. Daedalus is said to have made statues that could see and walk, and even run away if they were not chained to their pedestals ! This we may accept as an imaginative way of saying that he first gave usable-looking legs to statues and opened their eyes and freed their arms.^ But it will be seen that he and his followers, the Daedalidae, did not succeed at once in banishing the type of the old image with cone-shaped or columnar nether extremities and arms glued to its side, or with its figure swathed in massive drapery and forming a solid piece with the marble on which it is seated — as if doomed to sit there for all eternity. After about 600 the sculptors and masterpieces mentioned by old writers become very numerous, but of many nothing survives but the name. For our object it will be enough to limit ourselves to what can be illustrated by extant monuments. Of these relics there are several well-defined types, in which we trace the evolution from the primitive idol to a statue of high artistic value. (i) The first of these types is a figure whose lower half, though no longer a mere column or block, is columnar, with the * Homer frequently uses cognate words (daidaXeos, SaidaXXeiv, &c.) in connexion with artistic decoration, but only mentions Daedalus as the maker of a dancing-ground for Ariadne. With ' Daedalus ' cf. the half-mythical sculptor ' Smilis ' ((t/xiXt; = sculptor's chisel). ' Something analogous can be said of Giotto. 222 58, Statue from the Branchidae Tempi^e 59. The ' Harpy Tomb 222 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS legs undefined and entirely hidden by a stiff, shapeless skirt, below which the feet protrude side by side. The arms are attached to the sides, the drapery has no real folds or texture, but is a solid mass marked with conventional lines. The head- dress is of an Egyptian or Oriental character, generally with broad flat masses of hair hanging down in front of each shoulder. This type is well illustrated by the ' Naxian Artemis ' (Fig. 50) discovered in Delos, where Nicandra of Naxos dedicated the image to the goddess, and by a similar, but headless, statue found near the site of the great Hera temple in Samos. (ii) Secondly, there are heavily draped seated figures which, in early examples, seem, as has been said, to form one solid piece with the block or throne on which they sit. Of this type the Branchidae statues (which are in the British Museum) offer fine examples. The specimen given in Fig. 58 is inscribed with the name ' Chares of Techiussa,' probably some great Milesian, possibly a tyrant of Miletus long before its destruction by Darius in 494. (See Note A at the end of this book for the Branchidae temple.) The Cretan statue given in Fig. 6 was perhaps of the same character. The lower half is wanting, but not only the flat masses of pendent (probably false) hair but also the general pose remind one forcibly of seated Egyptian statues. It is the only specimen extant of Cretan sculpture of this period, and shows perhaps the style of the followers of Daedalus, such as Dipoenus and Scyllis, who are said to have introduced statuary (c. 580) from Crete into the Peloponnese. This statue is perhaps considerably older than any of those from the temple of the Branchidae. (iii) Thirdly, we have winged figures, possibly an imitation ' from Oriental art. In classical Greek art wings are rare, as being unnatural. In Oriental art we often have four or six wings, and it seems just possible that the oldest Greek Victory (Nike) extant may have had six. It is a very uncouth thing, 1 For wings in Greek sculpture I may perhaps refer to an appendix in my edition of Virgil's A eneid, i. (Blackie & Son) . In later sculpture Victory, Cupid, and Death are winged. See Fig. 119 and p. 419. 223 ANCIENT GREECE but is highly interesting as one of the first Greek statues with unmistakable legs — legs, too, that are bent. Perhaps the goddess was represented flying. From small bronzes that repeat the type it seems probable that the figure floated, suspended by the drapery. Its wings were probably coloured. It has a rather sour archaic smile and an elaborate system of forehead curls and pendent tresses. It is also interesting because it may be the actual statue referred to by Aristophanes, who says that Achermus of Chios was the first to make a winged Nike. It was discovered in Delos, whither many statues were sent as offerings from other Aegaean islands, and a pedestal was discovered near it on which were the names of Micciades and Achermus, the Chian sculptors, whose date is about 570. Winged figures occur also on vases and in other paintings of this period. They are sometimes purely decora- tive (as perhaps on the Clazomenae sarcophagus. Fig. 45), sometimes they represent a winged Artemis, sometimes Harpies, Fates (/cr/pe?), genii, or evil spirits. The finest example of this (of about 550) is the famous ' Harpy tomb/ a monument evidently of Greek (Ionic) work, but discovered in lyycia and now in the British Museum (Fig. 59). The winged bird-like figures are doubtless death-goddesses who are carrying away the souls of the dead. The central portion represents probably Hades, the king of the lower world, or else a deceased hero, receiving gifts — a motive found on many Greek tombs, the earliest examples being very ancient Spartan gravestones. ^ These sculptures formed a part of the frieze of a massive square monument, some 30 feet high. The relief was elaborately painted, but the colours have quite disap- peared. From frescoes on the internal walls of the sepulchral chamber it seems as if the monument was used in early Christian times by a ' Stylite ' (a hermit who lived on the top of a column). (iv) Fourthly, we have draped figures, mostly female, in which the arms are, in later examples, no longer attached to the sides, but bent and projecting forward (made of a separate ^ Cf. the (later) stele of Hegeso, Fig. 106. 224 THE AGE OF PEISISTRATUS piece and inserted) or crossed over the body ; and^the left foot is almost always advanced. In these statues the drapery is no longer massive and conventional, but treated with a skill that shows a very great advance. Of this type we have striking examples in the fourteen female statues excavated some twenty-seven years ago on the Acropolis (p. 228). Their date is probably about 520 to 500. (v) I^astly, a large number of later archaic Greek statues belong to what is called the * nude male' type.^ They are full length, and fully developed in limb, and show great ana- tomical knowledge and artistic skill. They seem not seldom to represent the god Apollo ^ (thence are commonly known as ' Apollos '), but are evidently sometimes statues of athletes. Nude ' Apollos ' of this type have been found in Naxos, Thera, Melos, and other places. A very striking early example, now at Munich, was found at Tenea (between Corinth and Mycenae). It has the antique Egyptian 'wig' and the archaic grimace, but the anatomy is finely treated. The finest examples, however, come from Boeotia, especially from the sanctuary of Apollo on Mount Ptoon. They are archaic in style, but give evidence of a careful study of the human body, and are the first distinct intimations of that mastery of the Greeks in statuary which has never been approached. In connexion with these ' Apollos ' should be mentioned the statues of athletes. We hear of wooden statues of athletes erected at Olympia about 540, and one at Phigaleia perhaps as early as 560. The chief makers of athlete statues were the sculptors of Argos and Sicyon. Ancient writers speak of the great pre-eminence of these schools, and doubtless their statuary, which consisted at this epoch mainly of avSpLavTe the victor of Marathon — as the Athenians, too, thought, for besides the ten pillars on the field of battle in memory of the fallen a monument was, it is said, erected in honour of him. It will be remembered that he had succeeded his uncle as tyrant of the Chersonese. He had incurred the resentment of Darius by voting for the destruction of the bridge over the Danube (p. 191) and by conquering and handing over to the Athenians the islands of lycmnos and Imbros, and on the failure of the Ionic revolt he had fled to Athens. His son, Metiochus, had been captured by the Persians. ('* Darius, however, when the Phoenicians brought him into his presence, was so far from doing him any hurt that he loaded him with favours, ^ He doubtless also fought at Salamis — so vividly described in his Persae — and at Plataea, and an Ameinias, possibly this brother of his, greatly dis- tinguished himself at Salamis. 242 65. Pythagoras 66. Aeschyi^us 67. MII^TIADES 68. ThemistocIvES 242 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS giving him a house and estates and also a Persian wife/') His popularity at Athens was partly due to the acquisition of lycmnos and Imbros and partly to his hostility to the Peisis- tratidae, who had assassinated his father Cimon (celebrated for having thrice won with the same mares the four-horse chariot-race at Olympia) ; moreover, his experience in war and his knowledge of the Persians doubtless led to his election as general. Besides Aeschylus and Callimachus and Miltiades two famous men, afterwards great rivals, Aristides and Themistocles, took part in the battle — the former as general, the latter a young man of perhaps twenty-six. Some thirty years later, in the great public portico near the Athenian Agora known as the Poikile Stoa (the ' Painted Portico '), the Michelangelo of antiquity, Polygnotus, depicted the battle of Marathon. He seems to have chosen three scenes : the first was the charge of the Athenians and Plataeans, the second was the slaughter of the Persians in the swamp, the third showed the attack of the Greeks on the ships. The Persian leaders, Datis and Artaphernes, and the Greek generals Callimachus and Miltiades and others were portrayed — Cynaegeirus, too, seizing the stem of the vessel. Something should perhaps be said here about the Spartan leaders — though they were conspicuous for their absence. We have several times already heard of the Spartan king Cleomenes. He had reigned since about 520, and had helped to eject Hippias, but had failed in a second expedition to Athens. He had resisted the appeal of the Milesians and the bribes of their envoy, Aristagoras.^ As was often the case (an inevitable and perhaps intentional result of the curious dual system), the two Spartan kings had quarrelled. Cleomenes, who was wild and impulsive (touched, indeed, with insanity, ^ See Hdt. v. 49 sq. for the story of the bronzen map and the dismissal of I Aristagoras for having suggested to the Spartans a three months* march up I to Babylon ; and how the little Gorgo, daughter of Cleomenes, and after- wards wife of her half-uncle Leonidas, saved her father from accepting the bribe. ANCIENT GREECE if we are to believe Herodotus), succeeded finally, a year before Marathon, in persuading the Delphic oracle to declare his rival, King Demaratus, to be illegitimate. Demaratus fled to the court of Darius,^ and we shall find him later as the trusted adviser of Xerxes. A year after Marathon Cleomenes was proved to have tampered with the Delphic oracle in order to dethrone his rival, and took to flight. He was allowed to return, but showed signs of insanity and was fettered and placed under the guard of a Helot, and committed suicide. I^eonidas, his half-brother, succeeded, and when he died at Thermopylae" Cleombrotus and then Pausanias held the regency for his son Pleistarchus. Demaratus was succeeded by I^eotychidas, who reigned till 469. The counsel given by Solon to Croesus to " mark well the end " has a striking application in regard to many — indeed, to most — ^of the famous leaders and statesmen of Greek history. The end of Miltiades is especially painful. He used his popularity to persuade the Athenians to put a fleet of seventy" fully manned ships at his disposal, *' without saying what country he was going to attack, but only that it was a very wealthy land, where they might easily get as much gold as they could carry away." In order to avenge some private- wrong he attacked the island of Paros ; but after besieging the town in vain, he was persuaded by a Parian prisoner, a priestess, to steal some sacred object — for this was apparently his purpose in going by night to a Parian temple. On his return he injured himself when jumping from the wall of the precinct, and he returned invalided to Athens. Here he was impeached for having deceived the Athenians. His life was spared, but he was fined fifty talents. " Soon afterwards his leg gangrened and mortified ; and so Miltiades died ; and the fine was paid by his son Cimon." What was the end of Hippias is uncertain. Herodotus gives a graphic picture of the old man landing at Marathon, and *' marshalling the companies of the barbarians as they ^ Many famous Greeks went over to the Persians. I need only mention the two ' saviours of Greece,' Themistocles and the victor of Plataea, Pausanias. 244 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS disembarked " ; but we hear no more. Had he been killed in the battle we should have surely heard of it. Some assert that he retired to I^emnos, which was now for a time reoccupied by the Persians, but was reannexed by Athens after Salamis. We hear of Peisistratidae — perhaps sons of Hippias — at the court of Xerxes. The occurrences in Greece during the interval between the battle of Marathon and that of Salamis proved of very great moment in deciding the fate of the Hellenic race. I^et us first consider these, and then turn to Persia and the vast preparations of Darius and Xerxes for wreaking vengeance on Athens. The perpetual hostility between Athens and Aegina has been frequently mentioned, and it will be remembered that the Athenians had denounced Aegina to Sparta for having sent earth and water to the Persian king. Sparta, the head of a great confederation to which even Athens belonged, had lately^ by means of a rather mean ruse,^ defeated its great rival Argos, and had almost exterminated the Argive warriors — so that the city " was left so bare of men that the slaves managed the state and administered everything until the sons of those who were slain by Cleomenes grew up.'' Sparta, therefore, felt justified in acting in a high-handed manner, and, having taken hostages from the Aeginetans, handed them over to the Athenians. After Marathon these hostages were demanded back by the Aeginetans, but the demand was refused by Athens, and continual fighting went on between the two states from about 487 until 483, when, in prospect of I renewed invasion by the Persians, the Greek states assembled on the Corinthian isthmus and decided to patch up all quarrels. Probably, as Herodotus says, " the breaking out of this Aeginetan war was the saving of Greece ; for hereby the i Athenians were forced to become a maritime power.'' Even in the Dark Age, as we have seen, Athens possessed a considerable navy ; but as a maritime power she was then 1 Hdt. vi. 78. 24s ANCIENT GREECE out-rivalled by Corinth, and in later days by Corcyra and Syracuse, and had held her own with much difficulty against Aegina. The quarrel with this neighbouring island-state induced the Athenians now to build ships, and the man who suggested this (doubtless foreseeing Salamis) was the great statesman Themistocles. Bven before the battle of Marathon he had been archon,^ and had carried a measure for the fortification of the Peiraeus and the preparation of docks in the three natural harbours ; and the work was begun ; but it was not completed until after the Persian wars. Themistocles, as we are told by Thucydides in a masterly analysis of his character (i. 138), was " the best judge of things present with the least delibera- tion, and the best conjecturer of the future/' This insight and foresight made him beHeve that the safety of Greece and the future greatness of Athens depended on her sea-power. Marathon had been a victory for Athenian hoplites — the high- class citizens of Athens, whose political leaders were Aristides and Xanthippus. Themistocles, though no professional party- leader or demagogue, gained the allegiance of the mercantile and naval part of the population, of that ' nautical rabble ' on which Aristophanes — the praiser of good old Marathonian times — pours such contempt. The claims of the Peiraeus were begin- ning to make themselves heard. It was felt by some that Athens, if she was to be a great maritime power, should not be at the distance of four miles from the sea, and doubtless the transference of the city to the Peiraean peninsula would have saved her from enormous difficulties and expenses (such as those connected with her Long Walls) ; but the feeling against abandoning the ancestral site and the Acropolis was exceedingly strong and prevailed. The policy urged by Themistocles was that of fortifying the harbours of Athens and increasing her navy. About the year 483 fortune offered him the following opportunity. *' The Athenians, having a large sum of money * If this was, as stated, in 493-2, and if he was born, as stated, about 514, he would have been only about twenty-one years of age. Hitherto the open beach of Phaleron had sufficed for the warships. 246 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS in their treasury, the produce of the mines at lyaurion [near Sunion], were meaning to distribute it among the full-grown citizens, who would have received ten drachmae apiece, when Themistocles persuaded them to build with the money two hundred ships " — more probably to raise their navy to this number — " to help them in their war against the Aeginetans. . . . The new ships were not used for this purpose, but became a help to Greece in her hour of need." About the personality of Themistocles and his two chief rivals, Xanthippus and Aristides, a few words should be said. He was the son of a middle-class Athenian, Neocles. His mother was a foreigner, a Thracian or Halicarnassian. He owed, therefore, his citizenship to the late reforms of Cleisthenes, and his early political pre-eminence under such unfavourable conditions to very unusual abilities. His meteor-like career and fall will be related in connexion with historical events. Probably no one ever earned more justly the name of a saviour of his country, nor that of a traitor — although many illustrious Greeks contest with him the latter title to fame. Xanthippus was connected through his wife, Agarista (a niece of the reformer Cleisthenes), with the celebrated ^^l Alcmaeonidae. He was a leader of the old democratic party, which held to the reforms of Cleisthenes against the more advanced radical and nautical doctrines of Themistocles. In 483, things having come to a crisis between the two parties, an appeal was made to ostracism and Xanthippus was banished (see Fig. 75). At the battle of Salamis he returned, was made admiral in place of Themistocles in 479, and fought at My cale. He was the father of Pericles, who began to take part in public affairs about 469. Aristides was of noble Athenian family. He was, as we have seen, one of the generals at Marathon. In the following year he was archon. He had been an intimate friend of Cleisthenes (who had evidently died about 500) . His character gained him the surname ' the Just.' He took part with Xanthippus in opposing the policy of Themistocles, and like him was ostracized (483 or 482). In this connexion a rather trite 247 ANCIENT GREECE story should perhaps be retold. An ilHterate voter appealed to a bystander to scratch on his ostrakon (potsherd) the name Aristides. The bystander, who happened to be Aristides himself, complied with the request, but asked the man why he wished to ostracize Aristides. " Because," was the answer, " I'm so tired of hearing him called the Just." Aristides, permitted to return, took part in the battle of Salamis, as we shall see, and became a great power in the state. To him and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, was chiefly due the building up of the Athenian Empire. He lived to see the ostracism of Themistocles, and died, almost in poverty, in the year 468. Ivct us now turn to Persia. After the return of Datis and Artaphernes the determination of Darius to chastise Greece seems to have urged him to collect a still vaster armament. But in the midst of these preparations he died (485). His latter years had been troubled by the quarrels of his sons in regard to the succession. Artabazanes was the eldest, but was born before, whereas Xerxes was born soon after, the accession of Darius. Moreover, the mother of Xerxes was Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus and widow of Cambyses, and she was regarded as the chief wife of Darius. He therefore (influenced also, it is said, by the arguments of the exiled Spartan Demaratus, who had himself lost his kingship through a question of legitimacy) appointed Xerxes as his heir. Xerxes was a mere youth. He was at first " coldly disposed towards a Grecian war," and gave his attention to subduing Egypt, which had revolted, and over which he set his brother Achae- menes as satrap. (Achaemenes led the Egyptian naval contingent in the invasion of Greece, and was afterwards killed in Egypt.) After his return from Egypt Xerxes called a council and pledged himself " not to rest till he had taken and burnt Athens." The plan was warmly supported by Mardonius, who had' con- stantly incited Xerxes to avenge the Persians, and had been seconded by messengers from the Aleuadae (the Thessalian princes who had espoused the cause of the Persians), and by certain Peisistratidae (perhaps sons of Hippias), as well as by an ' oracle-monger,' Onomacritus by name, who had long ago been 24-8 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS banished by Hipparchus from Athens for having forged prophecies under the venerable name of Musaeus. This Orphic seer " had plied Xerxes with his oracles, and the Peisistratidae and Aleuadae had not ceased to press him with their advice, till at last Xerxes had yielded." But his uncle Artabanus was strongly opposed to the attempt, extolling the invincible bravery of the Greeks, while Mardonius sneered at them as cowards, saying, " Though I went as far as Mace- donia and came little short of reaching Athens itself, yet not a soul ventured to come out against me to battle." Xerxes was disquieted by the advice of his uncle ; but he had a vision which bade him keep to his former decision, and after the vision had twice appeared he bade Artabanus don the royal robes and lay himself on the royal bed. The vision then appeared also to him, and " threatened him and endeavoured to burn out his eyes with red-hot irons." So he was convinced ; and, encouraged by still another vision, Xerxes sent forth orders to all the nations in the Persian Empire to collect men and horses and chariots and transports and ships of war. Herodotus uses all the resources of his inimitable art in order to impress one with the incomparable vastness of the armament of Xerxes. Some of his statistics may perhaps be questionable, but in spite of all that it has suffered at the hands of scepticism and criticism his account of the invasion still remains by far the most worthy of perusal, for it is a work of art and not merely a bare enumeration of well-authenticated facts. As my space allows me only the choice between con- structing a narrative from provable statistics and offering some of the innumerable pictures delineated by Herodotus, I shall adopt the latter course, leaving it to the reader to fill up, if necessary, the numerous gaps by reference to some shortly told history of Greece. " In the first place, because the former fleet had met with so great a disaster at Athos, preparations were made there during three years. Detachments were sent by the various nations whereof the army was composed. These relieved each other in turn and worked at a moat beneath the lash. The people H9 ANCIENT GREECE dwelling about Athos also bore a part in the labour. Athos is a great mountain stretching out far into the sea, and where it ends towards the mainland there is a neck of land some twelve furlongs wide, the whole extent of which is a level plain, broken only by a few low hills " ; and the modern name of the locality (Provlaka) means 'the canal in front [of the mountain].' Distinct traces of Xerxes' canal are still visible. The isthmus is formed of deposits of sand and marl, and its highest part is only 50 feet above sea-level, so that the cutting of a canal was a comparatively easy task. " It seems to me," says, never- theless, our historian, " that Xerxes was actuated by pride, wishing to display his power and to leave a memorial to posterity, for, although it was possible with no trouble at all to have the ships drawn across the isthmus, he ordered that a canal should be made of such width as to allow two triremes to pass abreast with oars in action." Xerxes met the main body of his Eastern troops in Cappa- docia, and spent the winter of 481 at Sardis. Meantime all the contingents of nearly fifty different nations, land and sea forces, were assembling near the Hellespont, and preparations were being made to throw a double bridge across the strait. " Near Sestos and just opposite Abydos there is a rocky tongue of land which runs out for some distance into the sea. Towards this tongue they constructed a double bridge from Abydos, the Phoenicians making one line of it with cables of white flax, the Egyptians for the other using ropes of papyrus. But after the channel (which is seven furlongs wide) had been bridged it happened that a great storm arose and broke the whole work to pieces. Now when Xerxes heard thereof he was filled with wrath and straightway sent orders that the Hellespont should receive three hundred lashes, and that fetters should be cast into it. Nay, I have even heard it said that he bade branders take their irons and brand the Helles- pont. And while the sea was thus punished by his orders, he also commanded that the overseers of the work should lose their heads." So a new bridge was built. Six hundred and seventy-four ships 250 A Late Black-figured Hydria 250 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS of war (triremes and penteconters) were arranged in two lines, and over each of these were stretched by means of capstans six huge cables, some of flax and some of papyrus (the former weigh- ing not less than fifty-seven pounds the cubit) . Transversely were laid immense planks, and a road was formed with brush- wood and earth, and fenced with a high boarding, so that the animals should not see the water. Then Xerxes set forth from Sardis. " At the moment of departure the sun suddenly quitted his seat in the heavens, though there were no clouds in sight. "^ The omen was favourably interpreted by the Magi, and Xerxes " proceeded on his way with great gladness of heart. . . . First of all went the baggage-carriers and the beasts of burden, and then a vast crowd of many nations . . . then in front of the king a thousand picked horsemen of the Persian race and a thousand spearmen ; then ten sacred horses richly caparisoned and the holy car of Zeus [Ormuzd] drawn by eight milk-white steeds with their charioteer on foot ; for no mortal may mount upon the car. Next came Xerxes himself, in a chariot drawn by Nisaean horses — but when the fancy took him he would alight and travel in a litter. Then immediately behind the king a thousand spearmen, the noblest of the Persians, and a thousand Persian horsemen ; then ten thousand on foot, all picked men. And of these last one thousand carried spears with golden pomegranates at their lower ends instead of spikes, 2 and these encircled the other nine thousand, who bore on their spears pomegranates of silver ; and the thousand Persians who followed after Xerxes had golden apples." On reaching Ilium (Troy), where the water of the Scamander,^ naturally enough, ' ' failed to satisfy the thirst of men and cattle,' * 1 Here our chronicler seems to have made a slip, and to have transferred to this occasion an eclipse which occurred in the preceding spring — probably before the departure of Xerxes from Susa. 2 In the monuments of Persepolis such pomegranates or apples may be recognized. • The Scamander has, like many rivers in hot countries, a wide bed, but is reduced to a small brook in summer. It was now fairly early in the year ; but, as in other cases where the veracity of Herodotus has been questioned, it is very easy to believe that a host of perhaps a milUon with innumerable beasts of burden would soon exhaust the drinkable water of such a stream. 251 ANCIENT GREECE Xerxes (as afterwards Alexander) ascended the citadel, and " made an offering of a thousand oxen to the Trojan Athene, while the Magi poured libations to the heroes who were slain at Troy." Thence he arrived at Abydos, and from a white marble throne (or platform) viewed all his land forces and all his ships ; and when the appointed day had come " they burnt all kinds of spices on the bridge and strewed the way with myrtle boughs, while they anxiously waited for the sun, hoping to see him as he rose. And now the sun appeared ; and Xerxes took a golden goblet and poured a libation into the sea, praying the while with his face turned to the sun ; and after he had prayed he cast the golden cup into the Hellespont, and with it a golden bowl and a Persian sword of the kind that they call acinaces. I cannot say for certain whether it was as an offering to the sun-god that he threw these things into the deep, or whether he repented of having scourged the Hellespont. . . . And as soon as Xerxes had reached the European side, he stood to contemplate his army as they crossed under the lash. And the crossing continued during seven days and seven nights, without cessation or pause." From Sestos the land forces marched westwards and met the fleet at Doriscus on the Thracian sea-coast, near to the river Hebrus. Here Xerxes numbered his forces. ** A body of ten thousand men was brought to a certain place and made to stand together as close as possible ; then a circle was drawn round them and the men were let go ; then, where the circle had been, a fence was built about the height of a man's middle, and the enclosure was filled continually with fresh troops, till the whole of the army had thus been numbered." The sum total was 1,700,000. Herodotus takes this as the number of Asiatic foot-soldiers, and adds 80,000 horsemen, and also camel- riders and charioteers, and half a million seamen — the crews and soldiers of 1207 triremes and 3000 smaller vessels. Thus, together with some 300,000 men pressed into service in Europe, ^ he makes 2,641,610 combatants, and to these he adds the same * Also quite half the naval force was supplied by Greeks, or nations of Greek lineage. 252 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS number of non-combatants, arriving at a grand total of over five millions. Doubtless the nobles were attended by their harems and large retinues, but the Persian and Median picked troops only amounted, including the famous 10,000 * Immortals,' to about 24,000 (Hdt. vii. 40, 41) — about one- hundredth of the whole army, which was mainly a motley host of picturesquely dressed savages, many of them only armed with light javelins or flint-headed arrows (or " staves with one end hardened in the fire "), and certainly well able to look after themselves without such slaves and attendants as, for instance, the Spartan hoplites took into battle.^ As for the number of combatants given by Herodotus, we need not whittle it down to about a seventh, as is done by some sceptics. Six millions, it is said, took the Red Cross, and a million combatants, with a ' vast multitude ' of followers, composed the host of invaders in the First Crusade under far less favourable com- missariat conditions. Doubtless the provisioning of such a vast multitude as this army of Xerxes was difiicult, but those who have had experience of Africans and Orientals know how re- sourceful they are, and it should not be forgotten that immense stores had been laid up beforehand in Thrace, and that the whole country, according to Herodotus, was drained of its riches by the enormous strain put upon it (Hdt. vii. 25 ; see also vii. 1 18-120, where the cost of one meal is reckoned at about £100,000, and the joke is made that " if the order had been to provide breakfast as well as dinner, the people of Abdera must have fled, or have been entirely ruined "). The descriptions given by Herodotus of the warriors of the forty-six different nations, with their various weapons and costumes, are most graphic and interesting, but are too long to repeat. Doubtless he draws largely on his own reminiscences, for he travelled much in the East and in Africa. Some of his word-pictures are corroborated by Persian and Egyptian monuments. In one case — that of the Aethiopians — it seems that the fashions in battle costume have remained unchanged for some 2400 years, for, substituting zebras for horses, ^ At Plataea each Spartan hoplite was accompanied by seven Helots. 2S3 ANCIENT GREECE I have seen exactly the same in equatorial Africa. " When they went into battle," says Herodotus, '* they painted their bodies half with chalk and half with vermilion. . . . They wore on their heads the foreheads of horses with ears and mane attached to the scalp, the mane serving as a crest and the ears standing stiffly upright." ^ Among the many commanders may be noted Mardonius, the brother-in-law of Xerxes, and Achaemenes, his brother, and that other unfortunate brother of his, Masistes, whose tragic story is told by our historian (ix. io8 sq.), and that queen of Halicarnassus, Artemisia, who distinguished herself so highly at Salamis, and whose " brave and manly spirit moved the special wonder " of her fellow-countryman Herodotus. At Doriscus the king, having reviewed his land army, " exchanged his chariot for a Sidonian vessel, and, sitting beneath a golden awning, sailed along before the prows of all his vessels," drawn up at some distance from the shore, " with fighting men upon the decks accoutred as for war." Klate with pride, he turned to the exiled Spartan king Demaratus, asking whether the Greeks would dare to oppose such an armament. The answer was memorable : " Poverty hath at all times been a fellow-dweller with us in the land, but Valour has come to us as an ally whom we have gained by wisdom and strict laws. . . . Brave are all the Greeks, but as for the lyacedaemonians they will never accept slavery. As for their numbers do not ask ; for if only a thousand take the field they will meet thee in battle, so will any number, less or more." Thereat Xerxes laughed and rejoined : '' lyct them be five thousand and we shall have more than a thousand to each one of theirs " ; " and much more he said in contemptuous ridicule ; and Demaratus answered all, and added : ' Though they be free men they are not free in all respects, for law is their master. This master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee, and his commandment is always the same, for- bidding them to flee whatever be the number of their foes, * Heracles sometimes thus wears his lion-skin. Cf. also Virg. A en. xi. 680. 254 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS and requiring them to stand firm and to conquer — or else to die.' " From Doriscus the vast armament marched westward, crossed the Strymon, and arrived at Acanthus, near the Athos canal. Then, passing through Chalcidice, it reached Therma (later named Thessalonice after the sister of Alexander the Great). The fleet meanwhile sailed through the canal and rounded the promontories of Sithonia and Pallene, gathering fresh supplies of men and ships and provisions from the numerous Greek cities on the coast. During the land march — which followed the same route as that later traversed by St. Paul — " the camels were set upon by lions which came down by night " ; and Herodotus adds : " The whole of that region is full of lions ^ and wild bulls with huge horns, which are imported into Greece." From Therma King Xerxes beheld in the far distance the mountains Ossa and Olympus, and embarking on a Sidonian vessel he visited the mouth of the Peneios (Peneus), which dis- charges its waters through the narrow vale, or ravine, of Tempe (Fig. 48). "Wise men, truly,'' he remarked, "are they of Thessaly, and good reason they had to change their minds, for nothing more is needed but to fill up the gorge with an embankment, and lo ! all Thessaly would be laid under water." And possibly he was right, for Thessaly was once a great lake,* until, as Herodotus believed, the gorge of Tempe was formed by volcanic disturbance, or by erosion. The remark of Xerxes alluded to the fact that the Thessalians had begged the southern Greeks to make a stand at the pass of Tempe. Ten thousand hoplites were dispatched — the Athenian contingent under Themistocles — but the Macedonian king, Alexander I, sent to warn them of the vastness of the Persian army, and when it was discovered that there were several other practicable ^ Aristotle confirms this. Tradition from the age of Heracles to that of the Nibelungenlied asserts the presence of lions in E)urope. The ' wild bull ' is probably the auerochs (urus). Classical writers also tell of bonasi (wild oxen), alces (elk), bubali (buffalo ?). 2 The Greek tradition of the Deluge is connected with Thessaly, the Greek Noah, Deucalion, having been king of Thessalian Phthia. 25s ANCIENT GREECE passes from the north (by one of which Xerxes led his army) the troops were recalled ; whereupon the Thessalians, doubtless to the great satisfaction of their Aleuad princes, who had long before held treasonable correspondence with Xerxes (Hdt. vii. 6), " warmly espoused the side of the Medes, and were of the greatest service to Xerxes during the war." This expedition had set out while Xerxes was at Abydos ; for when the Greeks had learned for certain that the invasion would take place, they had convened an assembly, under the presidency of Sparta, at the Corinthian isthmus. It was the first time in Greek history that a congress of all the states of Greece had been summoned — the first time (with the exception perhaps of the Trojan War) that all Greece, indeed all the Hellenic world, was called upon to co-operate against a common enemy. Besides deciding to defend Thessaly, they agreed to put an end to all feuds among themselves, such as that between^ Athens and Aegina, and between Sparta and Argos. In spite of the jealousy of Athens, Sparta was given the leadership on land and on the sea. They determined also to send an appeal to Gelo, the powerful lord of Syracuse, and to Corcyra and Crete. Also they at once dispatched spies to Sardis, while Xerxes was still there. The spies were detected, but sent back unharmed by Xerxes, " after having been taken round the Persian camp and having viewed everything to their hearts' content " ; for he expected that the Greeks, when they heard of the vastness of his army, would submit and " save him the trouble of the expedition." The embassy to Gelo, " whose power was said to be far greater than that of any single state in Greece," failed because he demanded the chief command — or, anyhow, the command of the naval forces — and when this was indignantly refused he dismissed the envoys with the contemptuous remark : "Ye have, it seems, no lack of commanders ; but ye are likely to lack men to receive their orders." The Corey raeans made lavish promises, but failed to keep them — " watching to see what turn the war would take." The Cretans, warned by an oracle, refused point- blank. The Argives, when asked to lay aside their feud 256 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS and aid in repelling the Persians, applied to the Delphic oracle, which, in cowardly fashion, bade them " warily guard their own head." They then made, like Gelo, extravagant demands, and ultimately stood aside — probably in collusion with the Persians. " Some," says Herodotus, " go even so far as to say that the Argives first invited the Persians to invade Greece, because of their ill-success against I^acedaemon " — nor is this impossible, for at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War both the Athenians and the I^acedaemonians, according to Thucydides (ii. 7), '* intended to send embassies to the Persian king and to the barbarians in other parts, whencesoever either hoped to gain assistance." On their return from Thessaly the Greeks once more took counsel together on the Corinthian isthmus. " The opinion prevailed that they should guard the pass of Thermopylae^ since it was narrower than the Thessalian defile, and at th^ same time nearer to them. Of the pathway by which th( Greeks who fell at Thermopylae were circumvented they hac no knowledge as yet. At the same time it was resolved thai the fleet should proceed to Artemisium, in the region oi Histiaeotis [in Northern Kuboea]." The Greek fleet of rather more than 300 warships, of whic] 200 were supplied by Athens, took up its station near Art( misium, and the Persian fleet arrived at the precipitous promontory of Magnesia, which is formed by the long ridg( of Mount Pelion. They had sent forward ten swift ships) which succeeded in capturing three Greek vessels on the look- out, and when fire-signals ^ from the island Sciathos informed the Greeks of this disaster they " quitted their anchorage at Artemisium, and, leaving scouts on the Euboean heights to watch the enemy, withdrew to Chalcis, intending to guard the Euripus " — the narrow strait between Buboea and the mainland. But the movements and sequence of events as 1 Evidently some code was used by the Greeks, for such news could not ihave been foreseen. For fire-signals see Aesch. Agam. 29 and 272 sq. ; Thuc. 'ii. 94, iii. 22, 80 ; Hdt. vii. 182, ix. 2 (where a system of signals between 1 Attica and Sardis is mentioned) . The news of Plataea is said to have reached 1M7cale on ^he same day (see p. 273). R 257 ANCIENT GREECE described by Herodotus are difficult to follow. One great fact emerges — the wreck of 400 vessels of the Persian fleet, which had taken up a dangerous position off the harbourless Magnesian coast-line. " The ships of the first row were moored to the land, while the rest swung at anchor further off. The beach extended but a very little way, so they had to anchor off the shore, row upon row, eight deep. In this manner they passed the night ; but at dawn calm and stillness gave place to a raging sea and a violent storm. . . . Such as put the loss of the Persian fleet at lowest say that 400 ships were destroyed and that a countless multitude of men perished ^ and a vast amount of treasure was engulfed." To some the fact may appear not worthy of mention, but it may help one to realize better the Greek character when we learn that the people of Delphi " earned the everlasting gratitude of the Greeks " for cheering them with the oracle that " the winds would do Greece good service," and that the Athenians attributed this storm to the sacrifices and prayers that they offered to Boreas (to whom later they erected a temple on the banks of the Ilissus) . It is also psychologically if not historically interesting to note that the winds were influenced also by the entreaties of the foe, for " after the storm had lasted three days, at length the Persian Magi, by offering sacrifices to the winds and charm- ing them with the help of conjurers, succeeded in laying the tempest ; or perhaps," adds Herodotus, " it ceased of itself." The loss of 400 vessels out of their immense fleet was a matter of no vital importance to the Persians. They moved round Cape Sepias to the shelter of the great Pagasaean Gulf and took up station near the port whence Jason in the Argo put forth on to the high sea, called from that fact * Aphetae.' Meantime the Greeks had returned to Artemisium and managed to capture fifteen stray Persian vessels. Although terribly alarmed at the huge fleet of Xerxes, they held their post (Themistocles, it is said, having received a bribe of thirty talents from the Buboeans, and having given five to the Spartan admiral Eurybiadas), and in several engagements ^ As also at Salamis, for the Persians could not swim (Hdt. viii. 89). 258 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS did considerable damage to the enemy and captured thirty more of their ships. But the Persians, determined on their part to capture the whole Greek fleet, and " not let even a torch-bearer slip through their hands,'' sent a squadron of 200 warships to circumnavigate Buboea and seize the strait of the Buripus. News of this was brought to the Greeks, it was said, by a diver — a Greek of Scione, ScylHas by name. *' I marvel much," says Herodotus, " if the tale commonly told be true. 'Tis said he dived into the sea at Aphetae and did not once come to the surface till he reached Artemisium, a distance of nearly eighty " — really sixty — '' furlongs. Many things are related of this man that are plainly false, but some seem to be true. For my part I think he made the passage to Artemisium in a boat." The 200 Persian ships never arrived at their destination. *' Heaven so contrived it that the Persian fleet might not greatly exceed the Greek, but be brought nearly to its level. The squadron was therefore entirely lost about the Hollows of Buboea." The Greeks had scouts on watch near Thermopylae and near Artemisium, ready to sail at any moment with news. The watches in the Maliac Gulf " now arrived at Artemisium with the news of what had befallen lyconidas and those who were with him." Forthwith the Greek fleet sailed ofl southward, through the Buripus, and the Persians captured Histiaea and overran the north of Buboea. Themistocles had cut inscriptions on the rocks at various places on the coast, entreating the lonians and Carians not to fight against their ancestors, and pointing out that it was through them that Greece had incurred the enmity of the Persians. Whether this had any result we are not told, and whether any of these inscriptions are extant I cannot say. Meanwhile the battle of Thermopylae had been fought. It was the wish of the lyacedaemonians and their Pelopon- nesian allies that Northern Greece should be abandoned to its fate, and that a stand should be made at the Isthmus. But they were conscious that it would be vain to hold the Isthmus 259 ANCIENT GREECE if the Persians had the supremacy on the sea/ and that their safety depended on the fleet, two-thirds of which belonged to Athens. To please the Athenians, therefore, they sent a small body of men northwards. " They intended presumably, when they had celebrated the Carnean festival, to hasten in full force to join the army ; and the rest of their allies intended to act similarly, for it happened that the Olympic Games fell exactly at this period. ^ None of them expected that the contest at Thermopylae would be decided so speedily ; there- fore they were content to send forward merely an advance- guard." lyconidas took with him 300 Spartan veterans^ and some 3000 other Peloponnesians, and was joined by about 3000 from Northern Greece, including 400 Thebans, whom he " made a point of demanding from Thebes, because the Thebans were strongly suspected of being well inclined to the Medes " — a suspicion which, if we can believe Herodotus, was fully confirmed by their shameful surrender in the midst of the fight at Thermopylae, where they suffered the indignity of being branded as fugitive slaves by the Persian victor (Hdt. vii. 233. But later writers know nothing of this, and perhaps Herodotus was influenced by the bitter anti-Theban feeling prevalent after the Persian wars) . The pass of Thermopylae has been much broadened by alluvial deposits. A swampy plain of about two miles now separates the waters of the Maliac Gulf from the precipices of Mount Kallidromos. Formerly the pass itself (by the hot sulphur springs) was about fifty feet wide, and there were two other places where it was still narrower, that to the east 1 In a fine passage (vii. 139) Herodotus expresses his convictions on this point and, Doric as he was by origin, shows his impartiality. " I cannot see," he says, " what possible use walls across the Isthmus could have been if the king had had the mastery on the sea. If, then, a man should say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece, he would not exceed the truth." With this compare the advice given to Xerxes by Demaratus (vii. 235) — viz. to send ships to attack the coasts of Laconia, and " the Isthmus and the cities of the Peloponnese will surrender without a battle." 2 Cf. p. 240. » All fathers with sons living. Sparta only possessed 8000 full-grown Sp artiats, if we are to believe Demaratus. The numbers given by Herodotus (vii. 202) do not seem to agree with the inscription that he quotes (vii. 228). 260 I 69. THERMOPYIyAE 70. Tomb of IvEonidas (?) 260 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS allowing only the passage of a single wagon (Herodotus how- ever speaks of marshes between the road and the sea). At Thermopylae itself there were the remains of an ancient wal\^ built by the Phocians as a defence against the Thessalians. This the Greeks now repaired, and here they determined to make their stand. Xerxes took up his headquarters at Trachis, just to the west of the pass, and " after waiting four days, expecting that the Greeks would run away, he grew wroth with their impudence," and sent Median troops, who were beaten back with great loss, and then commanded his Immortals to attack. " They, it was thought, would soon finish the business." But they too were repelled, and " during these assaults, it is said, Xerxes, who was watching the battle, thrice leaped from the throne on which he was sitting, in terror for his army." On the third day the traitor appeared. Bphialtes,^ a man of Malis, offered to guide the Persians by a steep pathway across the mountains so as to cut off the Greeks in the rear. Xerxes sent Hydarnes with the Immortals — probably not all the Ten Thousand. They ascended the ravine of the stream Asopus, between the Trachinian cliffs and Mount Oeta (famous in connexion with the legends of Heracles), and surprised at break of day and put to rout the thousand Phocians who were guarding this mountain path. I^eonidas, having learnt the fact from a seer and from deserters, ^ dismissed all the Greeks except his 300 Spartans, the Thebans (whose fidelity he suspected), and 700 Thespians. It is just possible that he detached other troops — numbering perhaps about 2500 — in order to oppose the Immortals ; but we hear of no collision. According to Herodotus, the devoted band of Spartans and Thespians, having retreated to a hillock, were assaulted on both sides 1 It is but fair to say that Herodotus names others ; but he feels so certain that he " leaves this name on record " as that of the real perpetrator. Bphialtes, anyhow, had a price set on his head by the deputies of the Amphictionic Council, which, by the way, had its ancient meeting-place at Anthela, in the pass of Thermopylae. 2 Both rather strange sources. The seer was Megistias, who refused to desert Leonidas and was killed and had the honour of an epitaph by Simonides (Hdt. vii. 221, 228). Who the deserters could have been is not easy to say. 261 ANCIENT GREECE and massacred, while the Thebans surrendered. I^ater and more rhetorical writers describe the battle with ridiculous exaggeration. One asserts that the Spartans not only drove back the Persians to their camp, but that I^eonidas snatched the diadem from the head of Xerxes. The account given by Herodotus bears the impress of truthfulness and impartiality — except possibly in regard to the Thebans. The loss of the Persians he gives at 20,000 (probably too many) and that of the Greeks at 4000, including many Helots {seven of whom generally attended each Spartan). He asserts that Xerxes gave permission to the seamen of the fleet to come and view the battlefield, and buried or concealed all the Persian dead except a thousand. " It was indeed most truly a laughable device— on the one side 1000 men lying strewn all about the field, on the other 4000 crowded together on one spot." Two brothers of Xerxes were among the slain. The body of lyconidas was maltreated by Xerxes, who cut off the head and crucified the trunk. This act excited the wonder of Herodotus : "for the Persians are wont to honour those who show themselves valiant in fight more than any nation I know " — a statement that is confirmed by many of his anecdotes. The sulphur springs still exist, and their water is bluish green, just as it is described by Pausanias. About a mile to the west of these springs is a round hillock which is probably the mound (KoXumg) on which the Spartans and Thespians made their last stand. " The hillock," says Herodotus, "is at the entrance of the pass " — i.e. as one comes from the west — " where the stone lion stands ^ which was set up in honour of I^eonidas. . . . The slain were buried where they fell, and in their honour and for those no less who were slain before lyconidas sent away the allies an inscrip- tion was set up . . . and another for the Spartans alone." For these inscriptions (rejected as later bombast by some modern critics) see p. 200. It will be noticed that 4000 " from Pelops' land " are mentioned. On a column at Sparta, which was seen six hundred years later by Pausanias, were ^ This lion existed till the time of Tiberius. 262 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS engraved the names of I^eonidas and his 300 Spartans — or 299, for one, being ill, or not returning when sent on a message, escaped. He was treated with great contumely, but " wiped away all his disgrace at Plataea," where he was slain. The Persian army now poured into Phocis, Boeotia, and Attica. The Phocians took refuge on Mount Parnassus, and the temple of Delphi was only saved by the aid of the god, who repulsed the barbarian plunderers by lightning and by hurHng down from the heights great masses of rock — seen afterwards by Herodotus. The Thespians and Plataeans, who alone of the Boeotians had not surrendered, fled to the Peloponnese, and their towns were burnt and plundered. Attica was ravaged. When Athens was reached it was found to be deserted, except for a small garrison in the Acropolis, who had " barricaded the citadel with planks and boards/' in accordance with what they held to be the meaning of a Delphic oracle. For the Pythian god, though he defended his own treasure, gave what seems craven counsel in this hour of need. He had bidden the Argives " warily guard their own head," and when the Athenians sent messengers to Delphi they were consternated by the answer that all was lost — head and body, hands and feet — and that they were to depart from the sanctuary and " o'erspread their hearts with woes" ; and when they as suppliants implored a more comfort- able response, the priestess answered that Athene could gain no more from Olympian Zeus except the promise that their * wooden wall ' should remain undestroyed. Some interpreted this literally, and demanded that the Acropolis should be fortified with wood and be strongly garrisoned, and this seems to have been done. But Themistocles (whom some accuse of having prompted the oracle) persuaded the great majority that by the ' wooden wall ' was meant the fleet, and the ques- tion now to be decided was whether to " quit Attica without lifting a hand and make a settlement in some other country " — as the Phocaeans and Samians had done — or to venture a sea-fight. In any case Athens would have to be abandoned for a time. Themistocles and his fellow-generals " issued a 263 ANCIENT GREECE proclamation that every Athenian should save his children and household as best he could. Whereupon some sent their families to Aegina, some to Salamis, but the greater number to Troezen. This removal was made with all possible haste, partly from the desire to obey the oracle, but still more for another reason." This reason was that the huge serpent which lived in the temple of Athene Polias (or was supposed to live there, for Herodotus throws doubt on its existence) no longer consumed its honey-cake ; "so they believed that the goddess had already abandoned the Acropohs." Xerxes therefore found and sacked a deserted city. The Persians set fire to the wooden wall of the Acropolis, and after two weeks' siege scaled the north side by a secret path, massacred the garrison, and destroyed the temples and statues. {The destruction was completed on the later occupation by Mardonius.) Meantime the Spartans under Cleombrotus (the regent for the child-king, Pleistarchus, son of I^eonidas), together with their allies — ^Arcadians, Corinthians, Eleans, and others — ^were busily fortifying the Isthmus. They blocked the Scironian Way, which led past precipitous rocks on the eastern shore, and then " decided to build a wall right across the Isthmus. Stones, bricks, timber, baskets filled with sand, were used . . . and they laboured ceaselessly night and day." Their policy was not only selfish but foolish, for had Themistocles carried out his threat made to the Spartan admiral Burybiadas, to sail away with all the Athenians and refound the city of Siris in Italy, little would have availed them their Isthmian wall. Councils were held now on both sides. The fleet of Xerxes had arrived off Phaleron, and he came aboard a ship (probably his favourite Sidonian vessel) and " sat in a seat of honour ; and the sovereigns of nations and the captains of ships were sent for, and took their seats according to the rank assigned them of the king. In the first seat sat the king of Sidon, and after him the king of Tyre, and then the rest in their order. And Xerxes sent Mardonius and questioned each whether a sea-fight should be risked or no. And all gave the same 264 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS answer, advising to engage the Greeks, except only Artemisia/' The speech of Artemisia, as given by Herodotus, was audacious in its contempt for the seamanship of the king's allies and for its advice to risk no naval engagement. It was fully expected that " her life would be forfeit." But Xerxes took it good-naturedly and " gave orders that the advice of the greater number should be followed, and resolved that he himself would be an eye-witness of the combat." The council of the Greeks was of a stormier character. The Spartan admiral Eurybiadas, seconded by the Corinthian captain Adeimantus, insisted that the fleet should retire to the Isthmus, and thus abandon Salamis, Aegina, and Megara ; and fierce altercations took place between them and Themis- tocles, who when bidden to be silent, " since he was a man without a city," replied with justice that his 200 ships of war were as good as any city in Greece. Eurybiadas, conscious that the only safety for the Peloponnese lay in these ships (for of 378 warships the Athenians supplied 200), at length yielded ; but Themistocles still feared the influence of the Peloponnesians, and sent a secret message to the commanders of the Persian fleet, saying that " fear had seized the Greeks and they were meditating a hasty flight." Forthwith the Persians " landed troops on the islet Psyttaleia, between Salamis and the mainland, and advanced their western wing towards Salamis ^ so as to enclose the Greeks, moving forward at the same time their centre so ats to fill the whole strait as far as Munychia." >^ At this critical moment Herodotus brings on to the stage Aristides. He and Xanthippus and other political exiles had been recalled while Xerxes was still in Thessaly, but he seems to have delayed his return, and is now just in time to co-operate with Themistocles (to whom he offers reconciliation) and to announce to the council of sea-captains that " he has come from Aegina and has barely escaped, for the Greek fleet is now entirely enclosed by the ships of Xerxes." 1 Diodorus, but not Herodotus, says that 200 Kgyptian vCvSsels were sent round Salamis to the south to cut off the retreat of the Greeks. 265 ANCIENT GREECE While they still doubted a Tenian trireme, which had deserted from the Persians (" and for this reason the Tenians were described on the tripod at Delphi among those who overthrew the barbarian"), arrived and confirmed the news. The battle of Salamis (September 20, 480) is described graphically by Herodotus (vii. 84 sq.), and also by Aeschylus (Persae, 359 sq.), who was an eye-witness but as a poet perhaps may have drawn somewhat on his imagination. The main features in both descriptions are similar. Numerous modern reconstruc- tions have been made, and almost every detail given by older writers has been questioned or modified. Some theorists (e.g. Gobineau and Chamberlain) have even doubted whether any real sea-battle took place. The main body of the Greek fleet engaged the Phoenicians and the rest of the Persian centre in the strait between Salamis and Mount Aegaleos (at the base of which Xerxes sat on his throne viewing the conflict), " fighting in order and keeping their line, while the barbarians were in confusion and had no plan in any of their movements, so that the result of the battle could scarce be other than it was." The immense number of the Persian ships proved disastrous to them. While attempting to overwhelm the Greeks they crowded tumultuously into the narrow strait, and the repulse of the foremost lines threw all the vast throng of vessels into inextricable confusion (vii. 89). Then the Aeginetan ships, which formed the right wing of the Greek fleet, ^ managed to turn the left wing of the Persians (held by the lonians) and charged the disordered centre of the enemy's fleet, while Aristides, " taking a number of Athenian hoplites which were drawn up on the shore of Salamis, landed them on the islet of Psyttaleia and slew all the Persians by whom it was occupied." The attack of the Aeginetans decided the battle. ^ 1 Either inside the strait or on the south-east coast of Salamis. 2 They were accorded the first prize for valour {to. dpLo-Tela). The Corin- thians were, perhaps unfairly, accused by the Athenians of having tried to desert in the midst of the battle. Aeschylus represents Xerxes as tearing his raiment and uttering shrieks when he saw the slaughter on Psyttaleia. I have omitted the well-known story of Artemisia sinking a friendly ship to save herself (Hdt. vii. 87). 266 71. Bay of Sai^amis 72. Wai,i,s of Themistoci,e;s 266 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS The Persians collected their vessels at Phaleron, and the Greeks, " expecting another attack, made preparations." But Herodotus represents Xerxes as in a great state of panic. " He riiade up his mind to fly ; but, as he wished to hide his project alike from the Greeks and his own people, he set to work to carry a mound across the strait to Salamis, and at the same time began fastening a number of Phoenician merchant- ships togethefl to serve at once for a bridge and a rampart." But his brothqr-in-law Mardonius was not deceived, for " long acquaintance toabled him to read all the king's thoughts," and with the approval also of Artemisia, who reminded Xerxes that he had burnt Athens and thus had gained the purpose of his expedition, the plan was formed that the king should return to the Bast^ yerland^hat the fleet should at once sail to the Hellespont to guard the bridge, and that Mardonius, after escorting the king throughTThessaly, should retain 300,000 men, including the 10,000 Immortals, for the purpose of com- pleting the conquest of Greece. If all the tales told of the return of Xerxes are true it was as disastrous as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Herodotus himself refuses to believe that the king " never once loosed his girdle till he came to the city of Abdera, not feeling himself till then in safety " ; but he tells us that famine and disease so thinned the ranks of his troops that he reached the Helles- pont with a mere fraction of his former army. Aeschylus draws on his imagination and gives us a fine picture, scarcely less impressive than that of the disaster of Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea. He tells us how the Strymon, frozen over in a single night and unfrozen by the heat of the next day's sun, swallowed up great numbers of panic-stricken fugitives. By some Xerxes is said to have taken ship from Eion (on the Strymon) and to have been nearly lost in a storm — during which, in order to lighten the vessel, a great number of Persian nobles, " having made obeisance, leaped overboard." Others say that he reached the Hellespont, but found the bridge destroyed by storms — not that this was of much consequence, for his fleet had arrived. 267 ANCIENT GREECE The Greeks had pursued the ships of the enemy only as far as Andros. Themistocles had tried to induce them to con- tinue the pursuit and annihilate the Persian fleet, but the Peloponnesians were still afraid that the land forces of Xerxes might march against the Isthmus, and refused to set sail.^ Then, it is said, Themistocles once more sent a messenger (the same faithful slave, Sicinnus, the tutor to his sons) and informed Xerxes that it was by his own influence that the pursuit had been abandoned. Possibly this was a fabrication of later days, after Themistocles had proved a traitor ; possibly it was a result of that preternatural insight into the future with which he is credited by Thucydides. However that may be, he is said to have urged this act as a reason for expecting favour when he reached the court of Xerxes as an exile. That the journey of Xerxes was not a flight is apparent from the fact that the troops which had accompanied him to the Hellespont not only returned to Thessaly, where they rejoined Mardonius, but also during their return march undertook, under the command of Artabazus, the reduction of the cities of Olynthus and Potidaea. Olynthus was captured and all the inhabitants were " led out to a marsh and put to death." Potidaea stood a siege, and treason, for three months, and ultimately many of the besieging Persians were caught by a spring- tide or bore and, " not being able to swim, perished immediately." " The Potidaeans say," remarks Herodotus, " that what caused this spring- tide was the profanation by these very men of a temple and image of Poseidon. And in this they seem to me to say well." Mardonius now sent as envoy to Athens the king of Mace-^ donia, Alexander I, who had ties both with the Athenians and with Persia. In the name of the Great King forgiveness and friendship were offered. But the Athenians answered : " So long as the sun keeps his present course we will never join alliance 1 Cleombrotus, in command at the Isthmus, had intended to follow up the retreating Persian land forces, but had been stopped by — an eclipse ! This happened, they say, at 2 p.m. on October 2, 480. 268 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS with Xerxes" ; and to the I^acedaemonians, who had hastily sent an embassy to oppose Alexander, they declared : " Not all the gold that the whole earth contains would bribe us to take part with the Medes. . . . First, there is the burning and destruction of our temples and the images of our gods. . . . Then there is our common brotherhood with the Greeks, our common language, the altars and sacrifices at which we all par- take, the common character that we bear. Did the Athenians betray all these, of a truth it would not be well. While one Athenian remains alive we will never join alliance with Xerxes.'* Mardonius therefore, though the Thebans advised him to stay in Thessaly and send gold to the leaders of the Greeks, marched down upon Athens. '' But on his arrival he did not find the Athenians. They had again withdrawn, some to their ships, the greater number to Salamis. So he only gained possession of an empty city." This was in July 479. The reason why the Athenians had again withdrawn was because the Spartans had refused to leave their Isthmian wall and march north to help in opposing Mardonius, alleging in excuse (as so often they had done) a religious festival — this time the ' Hyacinthia.' Mean and selfish as such conduct appears, especially in contrast to that of the Athenians, it was soon to be proved once more that when face to face with the foe they possessed a splendid courage. To them was mainly due the great victory of Plat^fi^ which for ever liberated Greece from the Persian invader. The Athenians, dispossessed of their city, though they had for a second time rejected with disdain the proposals of Mar- donius, sent word to the Spartan regent Pausanias (Cleom- brotus having died soon after the eclipse) that they, and also Megara and Plataea, would be forced to surrender to the Mede unless the I^acedaemonians would help them. Hereupon 5000 Spartiats were ordered to start northwards under tli£_ command of Pausanias. They were accompanied by many Helots and Perioeci and other Peloponnesians, and joined iby the Athenians under the command of Aristides, so that the iwhole army may have numbered 70,000 men, among whom, ccording to Herodotus, there were 38,700 hoplites. I ^^9 ANCIENT GREECE Mardonius, when he heard of this army, resolved to with- draw to Thebes, as Attica was too hilly for his cavalry and there was *' no way of escape from the country except through defiles/' Before leaving Athens he completed as far as possible the destruction of the city and its temples, leaving the Acropolis a waste of ruins. His army, says Herodotus, num- bered about 300,000 and perhaps 50,000 Greek auxiliaries. About six miles to the south of Thebes he built a huge fort, " a square of about ten furlongs each way," with ramparts and towers formed of trees that he cut down in all directions. His army he encamped along the Asopus, which flows through the plain between Thebes and the great range of Cithaeron, the boundary between Boeotia and Attica. Here, with his rear covered by the Thebans, he awaited Pausanias, who crossed into Boeotia, and, finding the enemy blocking the way, disposed his forces on the north slopes of Cithaeron. For ten days th^ armies faced one another. The Greeks were much harassed by the cavalry, having themselves no horse ; but in the skir- mishes the leader of the Persian horsemen, Masistius, a splendid warrior with golden breastplate, was slain ; whereupon the Persians " made great lamentation, shaving all the hair from their heads and cutting the manes from their war-horses and sumpter-beasts, while they vented their grief in cries so loud that all Boeotia resounded with the clamour." Day by day the numbers of the Greeks increased, but so great was the self-confidence of the barbarians that Artabazus advised Mardonius merely to wait, as the Greeks would never venture down into the plain, and to harass them and cut off their supplies and ply the leaders with bribes. The Persian horse did indeed cut off their communications by occupying the passes in their rear, and succeeded in reaching and choking up the fountain Gargaphia on which they relied for water. But Mardonius was impatient for a battle, and decided to attack, and, according to Herodotus, the news of this decision was brought to the Greek outposts by the Macedonian king Alexander. The battle is exceedingly difficult to * reconstruct.' I shall 270 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS not attempt to describe, far less to explain, all the false moves, the blunders, and the unobeyed orders that have complicated the question. The chief facts seem to have been that the Athenians, after accepting the proposal of Pausanias that they should oppose the Immortals and Persian picked troops, were ordered to fight the Thebans and other renegade Greeks, and that when the decisive moment came they were held in check by their opponents and were unable to take any great part in the actual rout of the barbarians. This rout was effected mainly by the I^acedaemonians and Tegeans. After faUing back and being followed up byjthe._main body of the Persians, 4:hey halted for some time—losing many men by the arrows of the foe, shot from behind the line of wicker shields, while they sacrificed and calmly waited for favourable omens — and then, the omens allowing it, they swept forward, broke through the array of wicker shields, and put the whole host of the enemy to flight. " The barbarians many times seized hold of the Greek spears and broke them ; for in boldness and warlike spirit they were nowise inferior to the Greeks, but they were without real shields, and far below their opponents in skill with weapons. . . . The fight was hardest where Mardonius, mounted on a white horse and surrounded by the bravest of the Persians, the Ten Thousand, fought. So long as he was alive these troops resisted, but when he fell,^ and those with him, all the others took to flight.'' Artabazus, seeing how the day was going, wheeled off with 40,000 men and made his ' way northwards. The Thebans, after fighting with desperate B fury and losing 300 men, retreated to their city. Most of the '■routed Persian army fled for refuge to their wooden rampart, closely followed by the Spartans, who, however, being unskilled in siege operations, had to await the arrival of the Athenians before they were able to take the fortification. ^ A terrible f massacre ensued. Only 3000 are said to have survived out I of the immense host ; but possibly many escaped and joined 1 His body was treated with respect by Pausanias, but was stolen. 2 Cf. Thuc. i. 102. The Spartan city itself was without walls. The Spartans 'despised and hated such defences, as is seen from their bitter opposition to the building of the Athenian lyong Walls. 271 ANCIENT GREECE Artabazus, who with great difficulty reached Byzantium and crossed to Asia. The spoil was enormous/ and during many years afterwards the Plataeans used to find treasures of gold and silver on the battlefield. The loss of the Spartans is given by Herodotus at 91, of the Tegeans at 16, and of the Athenians at 52 (though Plutarch states the whole loss, probably including Helots, at 1360) . It would therefore seem that, in spite of the fierce depreciation to which their conduct in the battle has been subjected by some writers, the Athenians had a certain amount of fighting. Of the Corinthians and Megarians Herodotus says that they were drawn up at some distance and did not know that a battle was being fought ! At last they learnt the fact and rushed forward, but were cut to pieces by the Theban cavalry. The Spartans were given the chief credit for the victory. " The Athenians," says Herodotus, " and the Tegeans fought well, but the prowess shown by the I^acedae- monians was beyond either." Pindar gives Sparta the chief praise. Aeschylus, too, attributes the victory to the ' Doric spear.' A tenth of the booty was set aside for the Delphic treasury, and colossal bronze images of Zeus and Poseidon were erected at Olympia and the Isthmus respectivel)^ At Delphi was dedicated, says Herodotus, " the golden tripod which stands on the bronze serpent with three heads close to the altar." On the base of the supporting pillar, formed of three serpents, were inscribed the names of the Greek states which had joined to repel the Persian invader. This base is still to be seen in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, whither it was removed by Constantine the Great. ^ The battle of Plataea was fought probably on August 12, 479. " On the same day," says Herodotus, " another defeat befell the Persians at Mycale, in Ionia." The Greek fleet had started in the spring to aid the lonians, who had entreated their help ^ The throne and scimitar of Mardonius and the golden breastplate of Masistius were still to be seen in the Athenian Acropolis in the time of Pausanias, 600 years later. ^ Discovered in 1880, when Constantinople was occupied by the Western Powers. Mahommed II, on the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, smashed the jaw of one of the serpents with his battle-axe (Gibbon, ch. 68). See p. 284. 272 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS against the Persians. But it had got no further than Delos, for " all beyond that seemed to the Greeks full of danger and>^ swarming with Persian troops.'* For some months it lay idle at Delos. But on the urgent appeal of the Samians the Spartan king lycotychidas, induced by favourable omens (especially by the lucky-sounding name of the Samian envoy), decided to attack the Persian fleet, which lay in the lee of Samos. When the Greeks reached the Samian coast near the^reat temple of Hera, the Persians, who shrank from a naval battle, dismissed all their Phoenician vessels and stranded the rest on Cape Mycale, where they had a land force of 60,000 men under the command of Tigranes. The Greeks disembarked and after a desperate fight carried the ramparts of the naval camp and burned the ships, the Athenians especially distin- guishing themselves, and the victory being rendered more easy by the wholesale desertion of the Ionian auxiliaries of the enemy. According to Herodotus, the news of the victory at Plataea, which had been gained on the very same forenoon, arrived in time to cheer the Greeks while advancing to the fight. This is, of course, rejected as a fable by many writers. Possibly fire-signals (if visible by day) may be the explanation. If not, perhaps it may have been one of those cases in which the knowledge of an event seems to have been transmitted over great distances by some unexplained agency — such as the Greeks named ' divine rumour ' ((pmv, ocrcra). The Greek fleet then sailed to the Hellespont, but when they ; found Xerxes' bridge destroyed the- Spartans went home. 'The Athenians, however, laid siege to Sestos, still in the possession of the Persians, and late in the autumn of 478 they succeeded in capturing it. " This done, they sailed back to Greece, carrying with them, besides other treasures, the shore fcables from the bridge of Xerxes, which they wished to dedicate |in their temples." ^ These are, all but a few lines, the last words ipf the history of Herodotus. ^ One is forcibly reminded of the chain cables still to be seen hanging in !the Campo Santo at Pisa. 8 273 ANCIENT GREECE SECTION A : THE GREEKS AND CARTHAGINIANS IN SICILY (500-478) While Greece was fighting for her existence against the Persian invader the Greeks in Western Hellas were also struggling against an Asiatic race — the Phoenicians and the Phoenician colony of Carthage. It seems, indeed, probable that Carthage and Persia were acting in concert. We have already noted the rise of the Greek colonies in Sicily and Southern Italy. During the first period of their exist- ence the Phoenician settlements in Sicily gave them little or no trouble, but these offered a valuable base to the navies of the rapidly growing Carthaginian state, which, in alliance with the powerful and piratical princes of Etruria, began to gain supremacy in the Western Mediterranean, and almost annihi- lated, as we have seen, the Phocaean fleet at the battle of Alalia, off the coast of Corsica {c. 535) . Carthage now domi- nated Sardinia and Corsica, and intended to dominate Sicily. Indeed, as early as about 565 a Carthaginian army, commanded by Malchus, had landed in Sicily, and seems to have won a battle against the tyrant Phalaris of Acragas. But it was not till the era of Xerxes that the Carthaginians made a serious effort to wrest the island from the Greeks. Meanwhile Hellenic civilization and power in Greater Greece, in spite of devastating intestine wars and such disasters as the annihilation of Sybaris by Croton, had reached a very high stage of development. The chief cities of Sicily had fallen into the power of despots. In the north Himera was ruled by Terillus. In the south and east Acragas (Agrigentum) and Syracuse ^ were ruled by Thero 1 For reference the following may be useful : Syracuse founded by Dorians 734 ; under aristocracies and democracies till the despots Gelo (485), Hiero (478), Thrasybulus""(467) ; then democracy ; besieged by Athenians 413 ; democracy overthrown by Dionysius (406-367), whose son, Dionysius the Younger, was finally dethroned by Timoleon in 343. In passing it is interesting to note that Sicily for some 3000 years (perhaps for much longer) has been the arena of racial strife. One need only mention the following names to recall such conflicts : Sicals, Sicanians, Elymi, Phoenicians, Greeks, Cartha- ginians, Romans, Franks, Odoacer, Bast Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, Aragon princes. Bourbons. 274 73- Tomb of Darius 74. ChARIOTIvIvR found at DEIvPHI Themistokles,ofthe Deme' Phrearroi. m Xaav 6 L 7T n o <^ 'A£(^ L(|) (> o V o ^ XanTHIPPOS SONOF Arriphron. 75. OSTRAKA OF ThEMISTOCI,ES AND XANTIIIPPUS 274 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS and his son-in-law Gelo, and attained very great prosperity and power under these despots. Gelo, originally a general of Hippocrates, tyrant of Gela, had succeeded to the lordship of that city, and when appealed to by the exiled Syracusan Gamori (landed nobility) had reinstated them and at the same time seized the power also in Syracuse. He gave over the tyranny of Gela to his brother Hiero, and as ruler of Syracuse adorned the city with many fine buildings and with magnificent docks and raised her to the rank of a great naval power, while he increased her wealth and her population greatly by transferring thither many of the richer inhabitants of captured Camarina and Hyblaean Megara — the poorer being sold into foreign slavery ; for he " regarded the demos,** says Herodotus, " as a most unpleasant neighbour." While Gelo and his brothers, Hiero, Polyzalus, and Thrasybulus, kept their magnificent court at Syracuse, the city of Acragas, though not yet adorned with its splendid temples, ^ became wealthy and powerful under the rule of Thero, whose daughter Demarete became Gelo's wife ; and when Thero quarrelled with Terillus and drove him out of Himera, and Terillus appealed to the Carthaginians for aid (as Hippias appealed to the Persians), the lords of Syracuse and Acragas combined to oppose the foreign invader. It was at this moment that the envoys from Greece came to beg Gelo for assistance against Persia ; ^ and it can cause no wonder that he was unable to promise it, though he possessed a "far larger eet and army " than any other Greek state. The Cartha- inians, about 300,000 men under Hamilcar, landed at Panor- us (Palermo) and besieged Thero in Himera. Gelo hastened his relief, and by a ruse gained entrance to Hamilcar' s naval mp. Then, profiting by the confusion, he assailed the land mp also. The struggle was fierce and long, but the victory mplete. Half the Punic army was massacred ; the rest ere enslaved. Only one single vessel, we are told by Diodorus, ^ Built by slave labour after the battle of Himera. See Note A (5). 2 See p. 256. Gelo is accused by Herodotus of having sent three ships to iielphi under the command of a certain Cadmus, who took with him " a rge sum of money and a stock of friendly words, and was to watch and see ^hat turn the Persian war might take." 27s ANCIENT GREECE reached Carthage. A fine picture is given by Herodotus, which is well worth a moment's pause, although it may not represent an historical fact ; indeed, Herodotus, as often, gives the thing for what it is worth — and it is worth much from a standpoint other than that of the scientific historian. " After the battle Hamilcar disappeared. Gelo made the strictest search, but he could not be found, dead or alive. The Carthaginians, who take probability for their guide, give the following account. Hamilcar, they say, during all the time that the battle raged, which was from dawn till evening, remained in the camp [near the shore] sacrificing and seeking favourable omens, while he burned on a huge pyre the entire bodies of victims. Here, as he poured libations on the sacri- fices, he saw the rout of his army ; whereupon he cast himself headlong into the flames, and so was consumed and disappeared. Whether it happened in this way or not, certain it is that the Carthaginians offer him sacrifice." The oft-repeated assertion of old writers that the leaders of armies, both Greek and Roman, would refuse to give battle without obtaining favourable omens ^ often gives one pause. Here is the case of the commander of a Carthaginian ^ arm}'- absenting himself all day from an important battle for such purposes. The battles of Himera and Salamis (as those of Mycale and Plataea) were believed to have been fought on the same day (September 20, 480). It is, of course, possible that this was not so ; but there is little to be gained by doubt- ing it. From, the spoil a large present was made by the Syra- cusans to Demarete, the wife of Gelo. The silver coins, called Demareteia, struck on this occasion, some of which still exist, are exceedingly beautiful (see coin 6, Plate IV). At Himera exist the remains of a temple near the mouth of the river. It may have been the very temple before which Hamilcar offered sacrifice to Poseidon. Gelo died in 478, the year of the capture of Sestos by the * The well-known exception of P. Claudius and the refractory chickens was followed by a crushing defeat ! 2 Hamilcar is said to have been Greek from his mother's side, and at Himera to have sacrificed, not to Phoenician deities, but to Poseidon. 276 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS Athenians, the last event recorded by Herodotus. The reign of his brother Hiero therefore really belongs to our next period ; but it may be better to anticipate a little for the sake of con- tinuity. During the twelve years of his reign Syracuse was probably the most notable city of the Hellenic world, both for its power and for its patronage of the fine arts. At the court of Hiero and at that of Thero of Acragas we find Simo- nides, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The victories of Hiero and others of the Sicilian princes at the Olympic and Pythian chariot-races were celebrated by the first poets of the day. The exact dates of some of these victories (extending from 482 to 472) have been lately ascertained by means of papyrus manuscripts discovered in Egypt ; and at Delphi not many years ago was excavated the famous bronze statue of the charioteer (Fig. 74) dedicated by Hiero's brother Polyzalus, evidently as a thanksgiving for victory. Beneath all this iisplay there was doubtless much to disgust — much tyranny md inhumanity, 1 much insolent, if magnificent, patronage )f genius. Of all this there are evidences not only in recorded ,cts of barbarity, but even in hints dropped by Pindar himself, spite of his evident admiration of the feudal pomp of the yracusan court. One feat performed by Hiero justly earned gratitude of Hellas. The people of the Greek city of ae, or Cyme, in Italy (see p. 117), were hard pressed by the scans — the same Btruscans, or Tyrseni, whose pirate- t had rendered so much aid to the Carthaginians, the same pie who had espoused the cause of the Tarquins and had, der their king, I^ars Porsena, besieged Rome some thirty ars before. Hiero sent his fleet and inflicted a crushing efeat on the Etruscans. Of this victory we possess a most ^iteresting memorial (Fig. "jf) — a bronze Etruscan helmet, i*und (1817) at Olympia. Its inscription says : *' Hiero and 'le Syracusans [dedicate] to Zeus Tyrrhenian spoil from yme." In the splendid ode that Pindar wrote to celebrate, [imarily, the victory which Hiero's horses gained at the I Sinister stories are told of Hiero's conduct towards Polyzalus, who had irried Demarete. 277 ANCIENT GREECE Pythian Games in the same year (474) he also alludes to the victory of Cyme, and prays Zeus that " the Phoenician and the war-cry of the Tyrseni may remain in peace at home, having seen the grievous ruin of their ships before Cyme." In 472 Thero of Acragas died. His son quarrelled with Hiero and was overthrown, and Acragas became a free republic. Not long after Hiero' s death in 467 his brother Thrasybulus, who succeeded him, was expelled on account of his cruelty and avarice, and Syracuse also became free. Its further connexion with Greece will occupy our attention when we come to the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of the Athenians and to the visits of Plato to the court of Dionysius. SECTION B : PINDAR (522-442) Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, but the plays of Aeschylus are perhaps better considered in connexion with those of the other Attic dramatists, whereas Pindar, both in feeling and in form, belongs to a different school. Although it is full of wise saws and pious sentiments, and parades with great pomp and solemnity the dogmas and legends of the popular religion, the poetry of Pindar — such at least as we possess — is for the most part a majestically magnilo- quent glorification of wealth and high birth and success ; while Aeschylus, though for a time he enjoyed, as did Pindar, the regal patronage of the Syracusan court, moved in quite another, and a far higher, world of thought and feeling, and in his dramas pictured, in language of still more superb audacity and with a far sublimer imagination, the wrestlings of the human soul against the mysterious decrees of Fate. Pindar was born at or near Thebes about 522. He studied at Athens, and when still a youth of sixteen composed dithyrambs for public festivals. On his return he came under the influence of the Theban poetess Corinna, some fragments of whose lyrics have been discovered in a papyrus manuscript. She advised him to introduce mythology into his poetry. The result was i a hymn written for the Thebans, twelve lines of which are | 278 76. Tempi;e of ' Concordia : 77. ' HiERO'S HEI.MET 278 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS extant. In these twelve short lines there are twelve different proper names and sixteen epithets, mostly long made-up words. This hymn is said to have introduced every mytho- logical character connected with Thebes. No wonder that Corinna's criticism was, '' One should sow with the hand and not with the whole sack." He seems soon to have become noted as a poet. The earliest of his epinikia (' songs of victory ') , all of which we probably possess, was written in 502. It was in honour of a Thessalian youth who had won the foot-race at the Pythian Games, and it extols the Aleuadae (Pyth. x.) . But Pindar did not share the Medizing propensities of these princes. He belonged to the small minority at Thebes which sympathized strongly with the victors at Marathon and Salamis and Plataea. Indeed, it is said that (perhaps later in life) in consequence of his praises of Athens (XiTrapai . . . KXeival 'AOavai) he was severely fined by his fellow-citizens, and that the Athenians made him their pubHc guest (Tr/ooSej/o?) and paid him twice the sum and erected a bronze statue to him. His poetry was greatly admired by Alexander I of Macedonia ^ — who, as we have seen, submitted to Persia, but was Greek at heart — and also by Thero of Acragas and Hiero of Syracuse, for both of whom he wrote numerous enkomia (panegyrics) and epinikia. In 473, a year after the great victory of Hiero at Cyme, Pindar went to Sicily, where he lived for about four years. Here he may have met Aeschylus (who, however, probably went there first in 468), and certainly met Simonides (who died c. 468) and the nephew of Simonides, the lyric poet Bacchylides, who was also employed by Hiero to celebrate his victories at the games. 2 In 468 Pindar was again in Thebes, whence he sent a fine ode [01. vi.) to Syracuse. Hiero was at this time suffering from a serious disease, and in 467 he died. In the next year Pindar wrote two of his finest odes (Pyth. iv. and v.) 1 As lovers of Milton's sonnets know, Pindar's house was consequently spared by Alexander the Great (as it had been already by the Spartans). 2 Bacchylides was regarded by some ancient writers as a formidable rival of Pindar, but fifteen of his poems discovered lately among Egyptian papyrus manuscripts seem to prove that, though he possessed elegance and taste, he was a poet of no high order. 279 ANCIENT GREECE for Arcesilaus IV, king of Cyrene — a descendant of Battus (see p. 145) — and it is just possible that the poet visited Cyrene and also Rhodes. In 460 he wrote one of his epinikia, and another in 452, at Olympia. His last poem was a hymn to Persephone, of which three words are extant. He is said to have died at Argos, in the theatre. There were seventeen volumes of Pindar's poems — hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, dirges, enkomia, epinikia, and others. Besides about 150 fragments of other poems, we possess, prob- ably complete, the forty-four epinikia, or odes of triumph, which were written in honour of victors at the gamCvS — Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian — and were recited at banquets or festive processions {kcojuloi). The earliest (P. X.) has been mentioned. Another early one {P. vii.) is in honour of an Athenian, Megacles, perhaps a son of the reformer Cleisthenes, and it is interesting to note that this ode, as also the only other written for an Athenian {NAi.), is remarkably short, and that there is a good deal said about avoiding envy. The date is that of the battle of Marathon, and Megacles had already been twice ostracized — so, what with the Medizing tendency of the Thebans and the democratic dislike of hero- worship at Athens, we cannot wonder at Pindar's brevity and sage advice. Exceedingly Gne and historically the most interest- ing are the numerous epinikia composed for Thero and Hiero — ' King of Syracuse,' as the poet calls him, using a title that Hiero assumed about 478. In one of these (P. i.) Pindar cele- brates the victory gained by Hiero' s chariot horses (or perhaps by his celebrated racer Pherenikus) at the Pythian Games in 474, and alludes (as we have already seen) to the still more important victory won at Cyme in the same year, and also to the battles of Salamis and Plataea and Himera. " I will claim a reward," he says, " from Salamis for the sake of the Athenians, and at Sparta I will tell of the fight before Cithaeron where the Medes with their crooked bows were smitten, and by the well-watered banks of the Himera I will pay the sons of Deinomenes [Hiero and his brothers] the hymn that is their due for deeds of valour." Fourteen of the odes are 280 THE PERSIAN INVASIONS for Sicilian victors, and not a few are in honour of Aeginetans, for whom Pindar seems to have had a special partiality. In a series of six of his ' Nemeans ' he extols the Aeacidae, and contrasts the noble character of Ajax with that of Odysseus, of whom he says : " I deem that his fame became greater than his deeds and sufferings through the sweet singer Homer." The metre of the Pindaric odes seems at first sight — as it seemed to Horace — to be quite arbitrary. But, although there is scarcely any resemblance between the metres of the various odes, each of them consists of parts (strophes, epodes, &c.) in which the same or a similar metre recurs. The rhythms were doubtless based on the kind of music (Doric, Aeolic, lyydian, &c.) to which the poems were set. Grandeur of expression, often rising to sublimity but sometimes sinking to magniloquence, is the striking characteristic of Pindar's poetry. Although he possesses no such sublimity of imagination ^ as Aeschylus, or Dante, or Milton, the onward rush of thought, clothed in superb language, is magnificent. He compares himself to an eagle. " I send thee," he says, " this mingled draught of honey and white milk — late indeed ! but amidst the birds of the air the eagle is swift : he marketh from afar, and, swooping suddenly, seizeth with his talons the tawny prey ; but cackHng jackdaws haunt the lower ground." Gray, too, has pictured for us the Theban eagle as Sailing with supreme dominion Thro' the azure deep of air ; and Horace in one of his finest odes has likened Pindar to a mighty torrent, and to a wild swan winging its way through the realms of cloudland. Although he accepted many strange myths for artistic purposes, Pindar protested strongly, as Xenophanes had done, against all that was derogatory of the dignity of the gods. "It is seemly," he says, "for a man to speak nobly of the deities." And although for artistic purposes he makes use ^ The finest imaginative picture in Pindar is perhaps that of the eagle of Zeus lulled to sleep by the tones of Apollo's golden lyre (P. i.)- The paraphrase ; by Gray in his Progress of Poetry does it very poor justice. 28l ANCIENT GREECE of the Olympian gods, in most cases when he is expressing his own beHefs he speaks of ' God ' as Xenophanes and other sages, and indeed Homer himself, had done. " One must not strive with God," he says, " who now exalte th the one and now giveth great glory to others/' God, he tells us, " o'ertakes the eagle in its flight and passeth the dolphin in the sea." If God does not " swiftly put forth his hand to the helm of the state, it is oft no easy task for the rulers to guide it aright." He is full of wise, if rather trite, saws and maxims. The best of them is perhaps preserved by Herodotus and Plato : " I^aw is king of all." Others are : " Future days are wisest witnesses " (which reminds one of Solon) ; " Silence is oft wisest for a man " ; *' We all die but once." His wisdom does not bear the impress of deep conviction ; it is purely decorative — like exquisite embroidery. Not a few dark threads of melancholy and embitterment sometimes traverse the web — due perhaps to the rivalry of other poets, and to that ' envy ' of which he sometimes sings — possibly also to a too close contact with regal wealth and luxury. Pythagorean and Orphic influences can perhaps be traced in some passages where he speaks of purification and initiation, and of the rewards and punishments in a future life. A fine picture of the life of spirits in Elysium is given in a fragment of one of his dirges, reminding one of similar pictures by Virgil and Dante and of passages in Plato's Phaedo. In another fragmentary dirge he speaks thus of death : " By a happy destiny all travel towards a bourne where they are loosed from toil. The body, indeed, followeth almighty Death, but still alive remaineth a shadowy image of vitality, and this alone is of origin divine." The Orphic teachings doubtless were associated with much superstition and priestcraft, but, together with Pythagorean mysticism, they helped by their imaginative parables to keep alive in the hearts of many the beliefs that lie at the root of all true religion. zSz CHAPTER VI THE RISE OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE (478-439) SECTIONS : ARCHITBCTURK AND SCULPTURE : ABSCHYIvUS, HERODOTUS, PHILOSOPHERS OF THE PERIOD THE capture of Sestos is, as we have seen, the last event recorded by Herodotus in his history of the Persian invasions ; but Persia continued to hold important posts in Thrace,^ and, although after Mycale the Ionian and Aeolian cities regained autonomy, the barbarian was still at their gates ; nor was it unlikely that Xerxes would attempt to revenge himself on Greece itself. The need for combined action was therefore strongly felt. Hitherto Sparta had been regarded as leader. Although the victories of Marathon and Salamis had been due mainly to Athens, and although her ships formed the bulk of the Greek fleet, the allies had hitherto refused to submit to Athenian leadership, and the supreme command both on land and on the sea had been held by Spartans — by Kurybiadas at Salamis, by Pausanias at Plataea, and by I^eotychidas at Mycale. How the command of the allied fleet was acquired by Athens, and how she made herself the head of a great anti-Persian confederacy, and how out of this leadership (riyijULovia) in less than twenty years she developed an empire (apxn) which extended its victories even to Cyprus and Egyptian Memphis, has been recounted by many writers ; and although this period lies between those described in detail by Herodotus and by Thucydides, enough is told by both, especially by Thucydides,^ to render possible a fairly satis- factory reconstruction. 1 Doriscus was evidently still Persian when Herodotus wrote vii. 106-107. 2 Thuc. i. 89 sq. and the speech of the Athenians in i, 74. Other sources are inscriptions, Plutarch, and Nepos. 283 ANCIENT GREECE But it is not my purpose to follow closely the evolution of the Athenian Empire, nor the varying fortune of those long- protracted struggles for supremacy which often fill so many pages of Greek history with their wearisome and ever-recur- ring details of battles and sieges and seditions and revolts and butcheries. Such things, it is true, form the main staple of one of the greatest of histories — that of Thucydides — but they are so skilfully interwoven, now with the brilliant rhetoric and the intricate arguments of fictitious speeches, now with some subtle analysis of character or motive, now with some trenchant criticism or the vivid description of a beleaguered town or plague-stricken city or sickening butchery, that we are at times almost persuaded that these miserable squabbles and atrocities are, as he believed them to be, not only more worthy of record than what Herodotus calls " the great and wonderful deeds of the Greeks and barbarians " in the Persian wars, but even of more consequence to posterity than all the legacies of Greek art, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy. A " possession for ever " doubtless his book will remain, but not by reason of its minute record of events, many of which have no longer any value except in so far as they may at times give us a fuller view of the dark side of Greek character. The transfer of the naval command from Sparta to Athens happened thus. In the year following the capture of Sestos (in which lycotychidas and the Spartan ships had taken no part) a fleet composed mainly of Athenian and Ionian vessels was put under the command of the Spartan Pausanias, who as the victor at Plataea enjoyed great popularity in spite of his overweening arrogance.^ He made for Cyprus and cleared the island of the Persians ; then he sailed to Byzantium. Here he laid himself open to the charge of Medism. He was accused of releasing Persian prisoners, assuming Median ^ On the dedicated tripod (p. 272) he had caused onlj'- his own name to be inscribed as the conqueror of the Mede. The Spartans erased the distich and engraved the names of the cities (Thuc. i. 132). This doubtless rankled in his mind, and (as seen in Cleomenes) the peculiar temperament and training of the Spartans seem to have induced a tendency towards unbridled passion and insanity. 284 78. Group of Gods, Parthenon Frieze 79. The * SXRANGFORD ' ShIEI^D 284 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE habits and dress, and even of treasonable correspondence with the Great King/ and was recalled to Sparta. The Ionian allies hereupon, weary of arrogant despotism, begged the Athenians to assume the command of the fleet, and although another admiral (Dorkis) was sent out from Sparta, he was not recognized. The acquiescence of Sparta seems remarkable, but was probably due to the influence of the military caste of the old school, which regarded sea-power as an illusion. To this influence was also probably due a raid on Thessaly made about this time (c. 476) by the Spartans under their king I^eotychidas, who landed in the Gulf of Pagasae, and might perhaps have annexed the whole of Thessaly unless he had proved as venal as many of his compatriots. He was convicted of receiving bribes from the Persian-loving Aleuadae, and only saved his life by seeking sanctuary at Tegea. Here we may perhaps glance at the question of what Thucydides calls the entirely different character of the Spartans and the Athenians. Many of these differences have been noted by the Attic historian, who during his exile of twenty years had special opportunities for studying them, and it would be a most interesting, if exceedingly difficult, task to collect all that he has said on the subject, to compare it with what has been said by Herodotus and other ancient writers, and to see how far it is borne out by historical facts. 1 His letter to Xerxes, proposing to marry his daughter, and the reply of Xerxes, are given by Thucydides. The fate of Pausanias may be best related here, so as to avoid discontinuity. He hired a private trireme and returned to Byzantium, where he conducted himself like a Persian magnate and was guilty of many excesses. He even got possession of Sestos, but the Athenians sent Cimon with a squadron and expelled him. Having retired to Cleonae in the Troad, he renewed his intrigues with the Persians and was again summoned to Sparta, where, suspected of inciting a rising among the Helots, and being also convicted by a ruse (see Thuc. i. 133) of his correspondence with Persia, he fled for sanctuary into a small building in the precinct of Athene and was walled up there by the ephors and died of starvation (471). Although he was carried out of the sanctuary while still breathing, the Delphic oracle ordered atonement for the pollution ; and this ' pollution ' was urged as a charge by the Athenians when, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, they themselves were ordered by the Spartans to cast out the Alcmaeonid ' pollution ' in the person of Pericles. 285 ANCIENT GREECE From various passages — such as the speech of the Corinthians in i. 70, where the contrast is strongly brought out, and in i. 141, where Pericles points out the practical advantages possessed by Athens, and his great speech (iii. 39-40), where he delineates the main features of Spartan and Athenian character — one may gain a fairly clear impression of his finely drawn distinctions, but to restate that impression in any other form, especially in a still more concise form, is almost im- possible. These passages should be studied. In passing I can but oifer a few epithets such as may perhaps occur to the reader of Thucydides as roughly intimating his judgments. The Spartans he seems to regard as eminently dilatory, enslaved to tradition and system, unimaginative, illiterate, boorish, short-sighted and narrow in policy, unenterprising, unideal, incapable of foreseeing difficulties, cold-blooded, tena- cious, heroically but stupidly regardless of danger and death, and incredibly superstitious and venal. The character of the ' Athenians he seems to consider a rare composite of the prac- tical and the ideal : they are at once " most enterprising and most prudent,'' " lovers of the beautiful but also of economy, lovers of learning but also of manliness," magnanimous but severe (alas! we might add, often inhumanly cruel), generous but exacting, sanguine, impulsive, imaginative, brilliant, versa- tile, restless but capable of strenuous and protracted effort, fascinating but false. The last two epithets may be exemplified by the intense affection and the intense hatred that, far more than Sparta, Athens seems to have excited under various conditions. The enthusiasmtfor Athens among the Ionian Greeks at the formation of^the Confederacy was evidently very strong, but it was soon^to be followed by a detestation as universal and still more intense, so that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War " the good wishes of all men made greatly for the I^acedaemonians ... so angry were most with the Athenians, some of them from a wish to be liberated from their rule and others from a fear of being brought under it/' ^ ^ Thuc. ii, 8. All quotations in this chapter are from Thucydides, if not otherwise specified. Dale's translation has been used to some extent. 286 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE During the next few years we hear but little of Sparta. We have chiefly to note the foundation and rapid development of the so-called Confederacy of Delos — the work especially of Aristides and Cimon ; and, secondly, the important changes effected at Athens by the influence of Themistocles. The Confederacy of Delos The allies, especially the lonians, had begged Athens to assume the naval command. This led to the formation of a league, nominally anti-Persian, under the hegemony of Athens. The isle of Delos, the sacred ancient gathering-place of the Ionic race, was chosen as headquarters and as treasure-house. In course of time the Confederacy included about 260 towns (Aristophanes says a thousand!), situate mostly in Ionia and Aeolis and the adjacent islands and Kuboea. According to its wealth each state had to contribute its share in fully equipped vessels, or the equivalent in tribute ((popog). Most of the smaller and some of the greater states preferred the latter method, and thus practically subscribed to the enlargement of the Athenian fleet, and what was at first the voluntary subscription of a confederate was soon regarded by Athens as the tribute of a subject. The work of valuation was entrusted to Aristides, and his estimates gave such general satisfaction that they remained in force for half a century. To Cimon, 1" the son of Miltiades, was given the command of the confederate fleet. His first feat, after expelling Pausanias from Byzantium, was the capture of Bion — stubbornly defended by the Persian Boges, who finally lit a pyre and flung his wife and children and slaves and himself into the flames. A year or two later (473) Cimon distinguished himself by capturing from pirates the illustrious isle of Scyros, and still more by discovering, as was believed, the bones of Theseus, who, tradition asserts, when expelled from Athens was murdered on this island by tl^ycomedes (the king at whose court Achilles lived for some time disguised as a girl). The bones were brought to Athens, and possibly the Theseion was built to receive them ; but this is doubted (see Note A). Some five years later (468) the 287 ANCIENT GREECE confederate fleet, after having driven the Persians from several lyycian and Carian cities, gained a brilHant victory over the Persian fleet at the mouth of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia. About 200 of the enemy's vessels were destroyed, as well as a reinforcement of 80 Phoenician ships that arrived after the battle, and the Greeks are said to have disembarked and routed the Persian land troops on the same day. Shortly before this battle, doubtless with the full approval of Athens, though also doubtless not with the full approval of the confederate council (for Thucydides speaks of it as the " subjugation of an allied city contrary to agreement ''), Cimon had reduced by force the island of Naxos, which had signified its intention of withdrawing from the Confederacy. The Naxians were henceforth treated as ' subject allies ' of Athens, and this precedent was soon followed by similar cases. Thasos quarrelled with Athens about a gold-mine and ' revolted ' (for thus the Athenians now described withdrawal from the league). After two years it was reduced (463), having hoped in vain for the aid of the lyacedaemonians, who were prevented from keeping their promise by an earthquake — and this time a really serious one, as we shall see later. One after another the states of the Confederacy, discontented with Athens for using the funds and the fleet against Greeks instead of against Persians, were either reduced by force or acquiesced in being treated as tributaries of the Athenian Empire, until only Chios, I^esbos, and Samos were still autono- mous and not liable to military service under Athenian com-: manders, although obliged to contribute contingents to the confederate fleet ; and, if we allow ourselves to look forward a few years, we may note here that in 454 the treasury was removed from Delos to Athens and the Confederacy came prac- tically to an end, although this name still continued to be used ofiicially instead of the word ' Empire ' {apx^) — a word odious to the democratic Hellene, except in the case of such lovers of freedom as the Athenians, who, as Goethe said, loved no freedom but their own. From its full development in 454 until its total collapse at the end of the Peloponnesian War this 288 8o. Tkmpi;e on Sunion 8i. Theseion 288 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE Athenian Empire existed just half a century. But this is anticipation, and we must now return and note what has been occurring at Athens itself. Themistocles and Events at Athens In a former chapter I touched upon the personality and political tenets of the four leading Athenians during the Persian invasion, namely, Themistocles, Xanthippus, Aristides, and Cimon. To Themistocles it was mainly due that Athens had become a maritime power and had conquered at Salamis. Xanthippus had succeeded him in the command of the fleet, and had won the battle of Mycale. Aristides had distinguished him- self at Marathon and at Salamis, and had commanded at Plataea, and was the chief organizer of the Confederacy. Cimon, the youngest of the four, the son of Miltiades, was actively occupied in extending the oversea empire of Athens. He and Aristides belonged to the older school of Cleisthenic republicanism, opposed to the more advanced democratic and ' Peiraean ' influences of Themistocles, and were politically in sympathy with Xanthippus ; but between Cimon and Xanthippus was a very strong hereditary hostility, for Xanthippus had been the chief accuser of Miltiades. Themistocles was not a pro- fessional party politician, nor was he, as the other three, of noble family. He stood, therefore, somewhat apart, but exer- cised great influence on the decisions of the Kcclesia. Even before the battle of Marathon, in 493, he had as archon per- suaded the Athenians to begin the fortification of the Peiraeus and the formation of new docks. These operations had been stopped by the Persian invasions. On his suggestion they were now renewed, and walls round Athens itself were begun, enclosing a greater space than those demolished by Peisistratus and by the Persians. Hereupon Sparta sent envoys to propose the stoppage of the work and the demolition of all fortifications in Greece ; but Themistocles, says Thucydides, went to Sparta and deluded the authorities with various excuses, while at home ' the whole population, men, women, and children, worked at the building, sparing neither private nor public edifice. . . , T 289 ANCIENT GREECE And the building still shows even now " — as its relics do even in our day — '' that it was executed in haste, for the foundations are laid with stones of all kinds, and many columns from tombs and sculptured blocks were inserted." Thus ere long Themistocles was able to inform the I^acedaemonians that " Athens was already walled and capable of defending itself," and that " as the Athenians had abandoned their city without the leave of Sparta, so without her leave they intended to have their city walled." Besides the erection of city ramparts there was an immense amount of clearance and rebuilding to be done in Athens itself and on the Acropolis, where, as we have already seen, the debris of the old temples and sculptures was cast into the spaces between the new walls and the newly levelled plateau. On this plateau arose the new temples, which will be described later. The new walls of the Acropolis were probably erected, not by the advice of Themistocles, but by that of Cimon, since we hear of the southern wall being built out of the spoils of the battle of the Eurymedon (468), when Themistocles was an exile at Argos, or perhaps already a fugitive in Asia. Whether he was suspected of Medism or of receiving bribes, or whether arrogance made him unpopular, or whether his political opponents persuaded the Bcclesia that he was a danger to the state, is not known, but that he was ostracized is certain — and the fact is illustrated, if not proved, by the potsherd bearing his name that may be seen in the British Museum (Fig. 75). This was probably in 471, the same year in which Pausanias met his fate. For some years he '' had a house at Argos and used to travel about the Peloponnese." Then, apparently about 467, the lyacedaemonians accused him to the Athenians of having taken part in the intrigues of Pausanias. He fled, first to Corcyra, then through Thessaly (aided by the king, Admetus) to Asia, and ultimately reached Susa. Here he wrote a letter to Artaxerxes, who was now king (his father, Xerxes, having been murdered by Artabanus in 465) , claiming recognition as a " benefactor of the king " for his messages sent 290 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE to Xerxes (p. 268) and asking for a year's grace in order that he might learn the Persian language. At the end of this time he presented himself and gained such favour with the Persian king — to whom he proposed plans, never to be carried out, for the conquest of Greece — that he was made governor of Asiatic Magnesia and was supplied with bread and wine by the cities of I^ampsacus and My us. Thus he lived, as a Persian magnate, till about 450. The story that he poisoned himself with bull's blood probably arose from a statue that was erected to him in Magnesia, which represented him pouring a libation while standing near a slain bull. " His relations say that his bones were carried over to Attica and buried there without the knowledge of the Athenians." A tomb in the rock near the Peiraeus lighthouse is still shown as the tomb of Themis- tocles. Aristides had died ^ in the year of the battle of the Eury- medon (468), and Cimon was thus for a time without any powerful political opponent. But Xanthippus, his hereditary enemy, now dead or retired, had left behind him a son who was to attain by his splendid gifts of intellect and character an almost absolute control of the state. Nor was it long before the popularity of the victor of the Eurymedon — the generous and jovial old sailor whose plentiful lack of wit had been proverbial in his earlier days and whose preferences were still for wine- bouts and aristocratic boon companions rather than for states- manship and philosophy — suffered total eclipse. Ostracism — the almost inevitable fate of the eminent Athenian statesman — came upon him under rather dramatic circumstances. He had always obstinately maintained that the one object of Athens should be to extend her oversea empire and harass Persia, and that she should recognize the supremacy of Sparta on land and live at peace with her — a doctrine that won him the contemptuous sobriquet of the I^aconizer or Philo- I/aconian. Now in 464 a very severe earthquake laid Sparta 1 He is said to have died so poor that he was buried at public expense. Some of his descendants, fortune-tellers and beggars, were granted rations by the state. The descendants of Themistocles were wealthy and respected. One was a friend of Pausanias the traveller. 291 ANCIENT GREECE in ruins. Many Spartans perislied, and the opportunity was seized by the Messenian Helots, who, after defeating the Spartans with the loss of 300 men on the plain of Stenyclarus, fortified themselves (as their forefathers had done) on Mount Ithome. For more than two years they defied the Spartans, who at last appealed for assistance to Athens — the Athenians being skilled in siege operations. Cimon, in spite of the oppo- sition of Pericles and another newly risen anti-oligarchical politician, Bphialtes, carried the Assembly with him by his sailor eloquence. " Consent not,'' he exclaimed, " to see Hellas lamed and our city without her yoke-fellow ! " Four thousand Athenian hoplites were sent under his command to help in the siege of Ithome ; but Ithome was not easily to be taken, and the Spartans, perhaps suspecting treason, suddenly and insultingly dismissed the Athenian troops. The indignation at Athens was intense, and Cimon was ostracized. For about two years longer Ithome defied capture. At last the Messe- nians capitulated on the condition that they should leave the Peloponnese ; and Athens offered them a site for a new home at Naupactus, the haven on the Corinthian Gulf which, it will be remembered, was so called because it served as a ship-yard for the Dorians on their invasion of the Peloponnese. It had been lately occupied by the Athenians as a naval station, a kind of Gibraltar commanding the entrance of the gulf and the trade with Western Hellas. In a later age we shall hear again of these Messenians of Naupactus (see Figs. 93, 122, and pp. 336, 396) • Soon after the ostracism of Cimon the friend of Pericles, Bphialtes, was assassinated — probably in revenge for his attacks on the ancient and aristocratic council of the Areo- pagus, which he accused of corrupt practices and caused to be deprived of the relics of its political power, leaving it nothing but jurisdiction in cases of homicide and a few religious func- tions.^ Pericles now and for the next thirty years stood alone at the helm of the state, often, it is true, fiercely assailed, but only for one short period opposed by a rival of any importance. ^ 1 See remarks on the Eumenides, p, 319. 292 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE The * age of Pericles/ if we limit the name to these thirty years and except the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, offers comparatively little of moment in its military and political occurrences, but much that is of supreme literary and artistic interest. It is true that the fame of Pericles himself rests mainly on his statecraft, and it was to his genius and his good fortune that Athens owed a measure of peace during the time of her greatest artistic and intellectual activity, but, putting aside the question whether a policy which resulted in the universal hatred of Athens and the acclamation of Sparta as the liberator of Greece was really a great policy, what the Periclean age has of value for us is very slightly connected with the facts of its political history. These facts I shall therefore state as concisely as possible. 461-459. After Cimon's banishment Athens breaks with Sparta and forms an entente with Argos (the Oresteia of Aeschy- lus reflects this feeling). Megara puts itself under the pro- tectorate of Athens. lyong Walls are built between Megara and its port Nisaea and garrisoned by Athenians, who thus com- mand the passes of Geraneia leading to the Isthmus. A fleet of 200 Athenian and confederate ships cross from Cyprus to Kgypt to assist the I^ibyan king Inaros to free Egypt from the Persians. They sail up the Nile as far as the Pyramids and capture Memphis, except the ' White Citadel,' which holds out for years. (Finally, in 454, Artaxerxes sends a great army and besieges the Greeks on a Nile island, which he takes by diverting the stream. The Greeks burn their ships and capitulate and are allowed to retreat to Cyrene. A reinforce- ment of fifty triremes sent from Athens is annihilated by the Phoenician fleet in the Nile.) 458-450. The occupation of Megara by Athens causes war with Corinth and with Aegina. The Athenians, though many of their warships are in Egypt, capture seventy Aeginetan vessels and force Aegina to surrender the rest and to be enrolled as subject state in the Confederacy. The I^acedaemonians send troops to Northern Greece to defend their mother-country, 293 ANCIENT GREiECE Doris, against the Phocians, and use the opportunity to re- estabhsh a Boeotian league, with Thebes at its head, to counter- act Athens. On their return they threaten Athens and rout the Athenians at Tanagra, but soon afterwards Athens re- occupies Boeotia. At the battle of Tanagra the exiled Cimon had appeared and offered to fight as hoplite. His request was refused, but he was allowed to return to Athens. Some years later he negotiates a five-year truce between Athens and Sparta. He is reinstated as admiral of the confederate fleet, and once more renews naval operations against Persia. During the blockade of Cition in Cyprus he dies. From 458 to 455 the two lyong Walls from Athens to the Peiraeus are built (p. 297). 448. After the death of Cimon the Greeks and Persians seem to have agreed to abstain from hostilities. It is doubtful whether a formal treaty was made. Thucydides does not mention it. Some later writers assert that Callias, brother-in- law of Cimon, went to Susa to ratify it and that the Persian king promised to send no ships into the Aegaean or the Pro- pontis, nor to cross the river Halys, nor to claim the Greek Asiatic cities, except those in Cyprus, which were surrendered to the Phoenicians. A copy of this treaty, it is said, was engraved on a column at Athens. As we hear soon after (Thuc. i. 115) of a satrap of Sardis, some of these details are evidently incorrect. 447. Boeotia revolts and the Athenians suffer a severe defeat and lose many prisoners at Coroneia. Buboea revolts, but is reduced by Pericles. Even Megara, which had volun- tarily put itself under Athenian protection, finds Athenian imperialism too hard a taskmaster, or possibly is induced to revolt by the oligarchical faction, and massacres the Athenian garrison. Then a Peloponnesian army invades Attica. 446. Thirty Years' Peace is concluded. Athens agrees to surrender Megara and Achaea, and it is stipulated that neither side shall tamper with the other's allies. The terms are humiliating for Athens and for the policy of Pericles. The loss of Megara and the lyong Walls of Nisaea deprives Athens 294 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE of the command of the Isthmus of Corinth, and exposes her to attack from the Peloponnese. 445-431. During these fourteen years Pericles has absolute control of the state, not by virtue of any special official position (he is officially only one of the ten strategoi, or generals, re- elected yearly), but merely through strength of character and intellect. About 443 a politician named Thucydides (not the historian, but the son of Melesias), a relative of Cimon, heads a party that violently opposes the imperial policy of Pericles, asserting that even the weal of the empire should not override justice and honour. These * little Athenians ' (so to speak) sit apart in the public Assembly to show their contempt of the malodorous demos and its hero, whom they accuse (doubtless with some justice) of misappropriating the funds of the Con- federacy for the purpose of adorning Athens and carrying on her wars against fellow-Greeks. Pericles argues that as long as the allies are protected satisfactorily by Athens they have no right to interfere with the finances — an argument well suited to win the approval of an imperialistic mob. Thucy- dides, who seems to have been an orator scarcely inferior to Pericles himself, and who evidently stood on a higher level of political morality, is said to have complained, and doubtless with much reason, that " even when he had thrown Pericles he denied that he had fallen and talked over those who had seen him fall." It is therefore not surprising that when Thucydides proposed a trial by ostracism he himself was banished (443). It was perhaps in the same year that after an unsuccessful attempt had been made by the Sybarites to refound their city (destroyed by Croton in 510), Pericles settled the pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii near the site of Sybaris — a fact the more interesting because both Herodotus and the orator I^ysias were probably among the first colonists, and because Hippodamus (p. 298) laid out the plan of the new city on the new method, with streets at right angles, as he did at the Peiraeus. 439. Samos, one of the three autonomous allies and the richest of them, now shared the fate of Naxos and of many 29s ANCIENT GREECE others of the confederates. The Samian oligarchy quarrelled with Miletus, and refused to accept the arbitration of Athens, which was in favour of the Milesians, some say because Aspasia, who was Milesian, influenced Pericles ! Pericles himself probably went out in command of the fleet and established a democracy ; but the exiles returned, and again Pericles went out, this time having as a fellow-s^m^^^os the poet Sophocles, who had lately gained great fame by his Antigone. After a blockade of nine months Samos surrendered her fleet and paid looo talents indemnity. Also Byzantium revolted, but was forced to return to allegiance. Perhaps it was at this time that Pericles visited the Euxine with a large fleet, and sailed as far as the Crimea. In his funeral speech in honour of those who fell in the Samian war his eloquence is said to have produced an extraordinary effect. He was crowned as an Olympic victor. But Cimon's sister Elpinice (who seems not to have accepted Pericles' definition of the ideal woman as one about whom least is said) reproached him publicly with having triumphed over fellow-Greeks, while her brother had triumphed only over the barbarian. We have now arrived at events (the sedition at Kpidamnus and the sea-fight of the Corcyraeans against the Corintliians) which were among the immediate causes of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, and it will be better to reserve them for consideration in closer connexion with the war. Also whatever more there is to be said, or quoted, on the subject of the policy and character of Pericles will be more intelligible if deferred to the end of his career. In the following sections a brief account is given of some of the important artistic and literary works produced during the period that we have been considering. SECTION A : ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE {c. 478-431) When the Athenians returned to their city after its second occupation by the Persians and the withdrawal of Mardonius in 479 they at once set to work, as we have seen, to clear away 296 8 3. Parthenon, from West :^5s:;: THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE the ruins and to rebuild. They were also persuaded by Themistocles to surround Athens with new ramparts and to fortify also the Peiraeus, and, probably by Cimon's advice, they set aside some of the spoil taken from the Persians at the Kurymedon for the building of the great south wall of the Acro- polis, and perhaps also for clearing and enlarging the plateau and either attempting to restore the old temple of Athene Polias (see Note A, 14) or laying foundations for new temples. More, however, was not accomplished until about twenty years later, when Pericles, at the zenith of his power, induced the Athenians to vote a large sum (partly their own and partly taken from the treasury of the confederates) for the erection of the Parthenon, which was built on old foundations, but after a new plan, devised by the architect Ictinus. But before we come to the Parthenon and its sculptures a few words should be said about some works of great political, if not artistic, importance, namely, the port of the Peiraeus and the I^ong Walls which connected it with Athens. The fortifications of the Peiraeus, as also the first formation of docks in its three natural inlets, Munychia, Zea, and ' The Harbour,' of which Cantharus (' The Cup ') was the part used by warships, were due to the influence of Themistocles, and probably the I^ong Walls were begun or planned before his exile ; but they seem to have been finished between 458 and 455. These walls diverged considerably in order to include both the Peiraeus and the open bay of Phaleron, the beach of which, some two miles in extent, offered an easy landing-place for an invader. About 443 Pericles induced the Athenians to remedy this defect by building another long wall parallel to the northern wall, and at a distance from it of about 400 yards, thus forming a far narrower and more defensible fortified passage of about four miles between the port and the upper city. After the completion of this third wall the old Phaleron wall was no longer kept in repair, and the open beach of the Phaleron bay was deserted for the quays and marts of the new harbours. The town of Peiraeus, spreading round the great harbour and Zea, and up the slopes of Acte and Munychia, 297 ANCIENT GREECE was laid out on a new plan, in rectangular blocks, by the Milesian architect Hippodamus, who also laid out the new cities of Thurii and Rhodes, and whose name was given to the chief market-place in the Peiraeus. A fine Kmporion, or * Place of Commerce,' and a spacious colonnaded ' Show-place ' (Deigma) for imported merchandise were constructed, and a thousand talents spent on new docks and an arsenal. The Peiraeus has of late years recovered its ancient name as well as its ancient prosperity. As late as 1835 it was known as Porto lycone. This name its little fishing hamlet received on account of the ancient stone lion which once stood at the entrance of the harbour, and which was carried off by the Venetians in 1687 and now stands in front of the arsenal at Venice. Having secured their city and their port by ramparts and long walls, the Athenians were easily won over by Pericles to beheve that it was their duty to show their gratitude for deliverance from the barbarian by erecting worthier shrines " to the gods. They had still stored up in their treasury a great amount of Persian spoil, aiidjt he yearly tribute of thejr. subject aUies was abmit 600 lakats — some at least of which they thought it justifiable to use in adorning the imperial city. On the Acropolis, in the place of the ancient temples burnt by Mardonius, had arisen — or perhaps had only been begun — a new shrine to receive the old wooden idol of Athene, which had doubtless been hidden away during the barbarian invasion. And Cimon, who did not believe in fortifying the city, had built a strong portal and a south wall for the citadel. Moreover, on the plateau inside Cimon' s Gate statues were again erected, among them {c. 460) a colossal bronze Athene by Pheidias, then about thirty-five years of age, and some ten years later perhaps his scarcely less famous I^emnian Athene (see Fig. 87 and lyist of Illustrations). The greater statue — which was dedicated from Persian spoils and was sometimes called the ' Promachos,' or Champion Goddess — is said to have been, together with its pedestal, 66 feet high. In representations of the Acropolis on coins 298 ANCIENT GREECE it overtops considerably the Parthenon and the Propylaea. The crest on the helmet and the gilded tip of the spear served, says Pausanias, as a landmark for sailors, like the gilt angel on the Venetian Campanile. The statue stood on the Acropolis for eight centuries, and was then probably taken to Constanti- nople, and was there destroyed by a mob in a.d. 1203. The lycmnian Athene was a smaller bronze statue dedicated by the Athenian colonists of I^emnos. This island, as we have seen, was gained for Athens by Miltiades shortly before the battle of Marathon, and the colonists probably commissioned Pheidias to make the statue about 450. But Athens possessed no longer — indeed, she never had possessed — any shrine worthy of her goddess, any temple so majestic as that of Delphi or of Olympia or Bphesus or Samos or Sicilian Acragas or Selinus, or even far-away Italian Paestum. So keenly did Pericles feel this that in 448, having perhaps failed in getting money voted by the Athenians, he induced or allowed them to send an embassy to the other Grecian states proposing a pan-Hellenic congress in order to discuss various matters, especially the restoration of the temples burnt by , the barbarians. Naturally the " twenty elderly Athenians I were rebuffed," as Grote tells us. Sparta cared httle for grand 1 temples and such things, and doubtless regarded the proposal as a sly stroke of policy for increasing the imperial power of Athens. Perhaps this rebuff effected what the eloquence of Pericles had failed to effect. The chief buildings erected by the Athenians in this period were the Parthenon (c. 445-438), the Theseion, the temple on Sunion, the Odeion, the new Propylaea (437-432), and the Hall of Mysteries at Bleusis. Besides these we may note the splendid temple of Apollo at Phigaleia, in Messenia, designed by the Athenian Ictinus, the chief architect of the Parthenon. Three of these, and also the Krechtheion, which was somewhat later, are described in Note A at the end of this volume. Of the others the following brief account may be useful. The Propylaea (i.e. the Gate-porticoes) took the place of the 300 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE fortress-portal built by Cimon, and were for show rather than for defence. The edifice was designed by Mnesicles and built between 437 and 432. It consisted of a massive wall in which were pierced five gateways, and on each side of the wall was a portico of six Doric columns. Through the central gateway ran the main road. The other gateways, two on each side, were on a higher basement, reached by several steps of marble and one of black Eleusinian stone. The gateways had massive doors, whose ' harsh thunder ' is mentioned by Aristophanes. The inner roof of the fore-portico was supported by six Ionic columns. This central building was to be flanked by projecting wings with colonnades backed by spacious halls. The north wing, much of which, together with considerable portions of the central building, still exists, was fairly well completed, and contained a portico and a hall (Pinakotheke) in which votive paintings were hung, some of them probably by the famous painter Polygnotus. (He had probably already painted his fresco (?) of the battle of Marathon in the Stoa Poikile, near the market-place, and a picture of the Descent of OdyvSseus into Hades for the I^esche of the Cnidians at Delphi.) The south wing, however, was never completed, either because of the Peloponnesian War or else because the ground had already been consecrated as the site of the temples of Brauronian Artemis and Athene Nike, and the priests refused to give it up. Whatever may have been the reason, the little temple of Athene Nike was built on this projecting cliff, as is explained in Note A. The Odeion, or Music Hall, was built soon after Pericles had got rid of his opponent Thucydides (442) and was able to indulge more freely his wish to spend public money on splendid structures. Its site was on the south-west slope of the Acropolis, not far from the theatre of Dionysus. (A far greater Odeion was built three centuries later near the Propylaea by Herodes Atticus. In passing note that the theatre of Dionysus, in which all the masterpieces of the Attic drama were first performed, was at this time only a somewhat primitive stage facing the Acropolis, on the natural slope of which the audience was 301 ANCIENT GREECE accommodated with wooden benches or dug-out seats. The huge auditorium, capable of holding 30,000 spectators, was excavated and furnished with stone seats in the fourth century.) The Hall of Mysteries at Eleusis was constructed about the same time to replace the old building destroyed by the Persians. The design was by Ictinus, and the superintending architect was Coroebus. The inner temple (Telesterion, or ' Place of Initiation ') was partly built into the rock of the Kleusinian acropolis. It was afterwards {c 310) furnished with a fine Doric colonnade. The Mysteries were celebrated here down to A.D. 396, when the building was burnt by Alaric. p The Parthenon was begun about 445, some three years before /the ostracism of Thucydides. It is therefore probable that his indictment of Pericles was based mainly on the great expenses / demanded for this magnificent temple. ^ The designer was I Ictinus, the builder Callicrates, and to Pheidias was entrusted the decorative work. It is regarded as the purest type of Doric architecture, the characteristics of which I have explained elsewhere. Its dimensions are 228 by loi feet ; its peristyle consists of 8 X 17 columns of about 35 feet. At both ends there is a double portico, the inner row of columns standing on a level with the inner temple and two steps above the stylobat (base- ment of the outer columns) . The sanctuary containing the gold and ivory statue of Athene by Pheidias, which was 38 feet high, formed the larger (eastern) part of the inner temple, and was enclosed by walls and divided lengthwise, like a church with its nave and two aisles, by two rows of small columns arranged in two tiers, one above the other. The statue stood facing the eastern portal, so as to receive the light of the rising sun, or perhaps the sunlight from the open space in the roof — if the Parthenon was a hypaethral temple. Behind this sanctuary (called the Hecatompedos, or ' Hundred-foot Shrine,' being 100 Attic feet in length) was a smaller compartment with its 1 Grote gives 3000 talents as perhaps spent at this time on public buildings (say ;^70o,ooo, representing three times as much in modern money). The gold on the Athene statue weighed 40 talents. In the treasury at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War were 6000 talents (Thuc. ii. 13). 302 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE ^ entrance at the west end of the temple. This was the ' Par- thenon ' proper. It was perhaps so named because it was (besides being the treasure-house) the dwelHng of the maiden priestesses of the goddess, and it may have given its name to the whole temple. But possibly the word ' Parthenon ' (' Room of the Maiden/ or ' the Maidens ') was originally applied to the temple itself, although it seems that at first it retained the name of the old temple of Athene Polias. Apart from its sculptures and regarded only as a building, the Parthenon possesses, even in its present state, a beauty and dignity such as we seek in vain in other ancient ruins, however impressive. It is as impossible to analyse and define such qualities as to discover by dissection the causes of what is great and beau- tiful in the art of Pheidias or of Sophocles ; but it is possible to note the wonderful care that in the best Greek architecture, as in the best Greek sculpture and poetry, was given to details of symmetry and proportion. Doubtless in order to render the perspective effect more perfectly harmonious and to lend a certain undefinable grace and beauty to the whole building, I the use of the absolutely straight line was avoided to a great extent. The columns not only taper gently, and gently diminish the width of their flutings, but have the slight convexity in their middle parts which is known as entasis. They also all lean very slightly inwards, and the corner columns are slightly thicker than the others. Even the steps of the marble basement are not exactly horizontal, but have a slight convexity. By what rules, if by any, the Greeks thus attempted to eliminate the imperfections of natural perspective as presented to us by our dull senses it is impossible to say. I The Parthenon was built of Pentelic (Attic) marble, which! was first used about this time, all finer architectural and statuary work having been until now done in the imported Parian marble. The Pentelic stone contains a certain amount of iron, to which is due the rich golden tint that it acquires. As has been stated elsewhere, colour was used for the decora- : tion of Greek temples and statuary very much more freely i than we are willing to believe, accustomed as we are to Greek 303 ^ ANCIENT GREECE j architecture and sculptures deprived of their original colours \ and to the dazzling white of Carrara marble in modern statues. j How far the Parthenon was decorated externally with colour I is not easy to discover, but probably the columns and architraves I were left uncoloured (though ornamented with wreaths, shields, &c.) or were only slightly tinted, while the mouldings and other decorations were brightly coloured, as well as the dress and other details of the pediment sculptures and the reliefs of the metopes and frieze, all of which had doubtless a background of dark red or blue. Above the architraves of the outer colonnade (as in all Doric temples) the frieze was divided by triglyphs into metopes. These metopes, ninety-two in number, were all sculptured in very high relief. As each forms a distinct picture it is easy to understand why metopes generally represent concentrated and vigorous action, every group being self-balanced and in- dependent. In the Parthenon the metopes depict contests between Centaurs and I^apithae and between Greeks and Amazons (Fig. 82), and possibly (on the north side, where the reliefs are very weather-worn) scenes from the Trojan War. Fifteen of the best are in the British Museum. Some are exceedingly vigorous and wonderfully balanced, and were possibly the work of Pheidias or of Myron, who excelled in poise amidst violent action (as in his Discobolos and his Marsyas) ; these have a decided likeness to the high-reliefs of the Theseion. Others again are of very inferior design and workmanship, jand were probably Ti>y disciples of the ' athletic^ scEooF^ iArgos. 5 ""The frieze of the Parthenon (much of which is in the British ; Museum) was a continuous frieze, as in an Ionic temple, and iran above the inner columns of the porticoes, all round I the outside of the walls of the sanctuary. It could thus be j seen by those who walked, or a procession which marched, round the Parthenon, and " the figures would seem to advance I as the spectator moved " (Gardner). Being under the colonnade and only lighted from below, the sculptures (especially the lower portions) were in very low relief, 304 ■" ' ' 'i ■■ "'UJHAJM '-r v 85. Portions of Parthi^non Frikze 304 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE .., so as to avoid too deep shadows. The continuous (Ionic) frieze- is, of course, well adapted for the representation of processions. The subject of the Parthenon frieze is the Panathenaic pro- cession, the great solemnity that took place every fourth year in connexion with the Panathenaic games, and in which all the richest and noblest born, all the magistrates and colonial and ; foreign representatives, all the youth and beauty of Athens, ■ took an eager part. The procession consists of knights on horseback, charioteers, victims for sacrifice, musicians, maidens carrying the sacred vessels and baskets, the archons and other dignitaries ; and over the main portal of the temple is seated in dignified expectation, awaiting the procession of worshippers, Athene herself with all the other Olympian divinities — a magnificent group. Nigh at hand is a priest with the sacred robe (peplos) which was offered to Athene on these occasions. There is an unity of design as well as a similarity of workmanship in the whole frieze from which it is fairly safe to conclude that it was mainly the jvotk of Phexdias himself, or carried out under his direct supervision. Perhaps there is a concentration of power in a single statue which may make it a more wonderful product of creative art than any sculptured group or continuous frieze can be (the difference being somewhat analogous to that between a drama and an epic), but by reason of its incom- parable grace and beauty the Parthenon frieze, even in its present state, holds something of the same place among works of sculpture that the Odyssey holds among works of poetic literature, while the groups of the two pediments may perhaps be likened to the Iliad. The sculptures of the pediments, doubtless also designed by Pheidias and executed under his direct supervision, were; still more wonderful for their masculine beauty and poweri than the frieze was for its beauty of delicate grace. So much we can tell from their scanty and mutilated remains — most of which may be seen in the British Museum. It is impossible for me to attempt any full description here, or to discuss the very numerous and diverse theories as to the meaning of the various figures and the way in which they were grouped. A fairly i u 305 I ANCIENT GREECE isatisfactory reconstruction, or rather restoration, made by jthe Austrian sculptor Schwerzek, is given in Fig. 86. All such reconstructions are considerably indebted to drawings ,; of the Parthenon that were made by a French artist, Carrey, ; in 1674, a few years before a German gunner of the Venetian forces besieging the Turks in the Acropolis succeeded in dropping a shell into the Turkish powder magazine, which was located in the Parthenon, with the result that a great part of the temple, until then in fair preservation, was demolished and many of the sculptures were shattered. The Venetian commander endeavoured to carry off the figure of Poseidon and the horses of Athene's chariot, but the whole group fell and was broken to pieces. In 1801 the English ambassador, lyord Elgin, procured a firman allowing him to " remove a few blocks of stone and figures," and removed the greater part of the metopes, frieze, and pediment sculptures — perhaps fortunately, as they were thus saved from further destruction by weather and vandalism. The subject of the east pediment was the birth of Athene. The central figures are lost. They perhaps represented the birth as it is frequently depicted on old vases, where the goddess in the form of a small fully armed figure springs forth from the head of Zeus, which has been smitten by Hephaestus with his hammer ; or more probably Pheidias chose a moment of more dignity, and represented the goddess already in full stature by the side of her father. An extant but mutilated figure is believed to represent Iris starting to take the news to mortals. In the left corner Helios (the sun) is rising from the sea in his chariot, and in the right the moon (Selene) is descending with her chariot into the waves. The other figures, sometimes called ' Theseus ' (or ' Olympus '), ' The Three Fates ' (or ' The Seasons '), and so on, are all of uncertain meaning. The subject of the west pediment was the contest of Poseidon and Athene for the land of Attica (see p. 32). Poseidon produced, to support his claim, a spring of salt water, and Athene made an olive- tree spring forth. (Both were preserved as objects of reverence in the ancient ' house of Erechtheus,' which was replaced by 306 m .:^«r, 'Ci vO O ro THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE , the Brechtheion.) The central group of Poseidon, Athene, ' and the horses of Athene's chariot were destroyed as has been explained. Carrey's sketch depicts Poseidon as a huge nude figure starting backwards in amazement before Athene, much as Marsyas does in Myron's group (see Fig. 88 and explanation, ; p. 309). The chariot of Poseidon, on the right, was probably | drawn by sea-horses. Reclining figures that once filled the ' corners may perhaps have represented the streams Ilissus and Cephisus, between which Athens lay. But the relics are too few and too mutilated to serve for any certain reconstruction, and it may be safer to confine one's admiration to them as single figures and as examples of unrivalled skill in the technique of sculpture — " marvellous translations into marble," as they have j been called, " of flesh and of drapery." Pheidias was born about 500, so he must have had distinct memories of Marathon, and perhaps fought at Salamis and Plataea. Among his earliest works was a group (Miltiades amidst gods and heroes) erected at Delphi, probably by Cimon to commemorate Marathon and his father. His colossal bronze Athene has already been mentioned, and his Athene lycmnia. Of his chryselephantine Athene Parthenos we are forced to form our only conception from two most unattractive statuettes and a few gems, busts, and coins (Figs. 89, 90, 91). After the dedication of the Parthenon in 438 (though the chronology is uncertain) Pheidias seems to have spent five years at Olympia working at his great statue of Olympian Zeus, which ancient writers describe as the most majestic and impressive of all images of the gods. The throne on which Zeus was seated was probably, with its supporting pedestal (22 feet broad), the most magnificent work of decora- tive sculpture ever produced. Every available surface was I used for reliefs or paintings. The statue itself was about 40 feet high, and the whole monument perhaps over 60 feet, so that, it was said, Zeus could not stand up without putting his head through the roof. On the extended right hand of the god stood a Victory, on his sceptre perched his eagle. Rough imitations of the monument and of the head of this Pheidian 307 ANCIENT GREECE Zeus may be seen on coins (Plate VI, 8, and Plate III, lo), and some of these heads are incomparably more satisfactory than any relic we possess of the Athene ; but this is all that is extant to help us to form any conception of the greatest masterpiece of Greek sculpture. Caligula tried to remove the statue, but portents, it is said, deterred him. It was probably after his return to Athens, about 432, that Pheidias was accused (by the enemies of Pericles) of peculation and sacrilege. He was able to refute the first charge because, by the advice of Pericles, he had made all the gold ornaments of the Athene detachable, and could thus prove that he had used the whole of the forty talents entrusted to him. The other accusation was based on the fact that he had introduced his own portrait and that of Pericles in the decorations of Athene's shield (see Fig. 79 and lyist of Illustrations) . It is said that he — the great artist who had been lately the pride of Athens and of all Greece — was condemned on this trivial charge and thrown into prison and died there — a fact almost incredible if we had not the cases of Anaxagoras and Socrates and others to prove how fatal were the results of giving judicial powers to a bigoted and litigious populace, whose vaunted reverence for law was merely a reverence for their own verdicts, not for any principles of justice and humanity. The creation of the dicasteries, that much-lauded gift (confirmed by the wise Pericles himself) to the Athenian mob, led to the pernicious influence of sophists and rhetoricians and inflammatory talk of all kinds, and the consequences were inevitable. Contemporary with Pheidias were the sculptor Calamis, renowned for his Attic grace uninfluenced by Argive ' athleti- cism ' and renowned for his horses (see the Delphic charioteer. Fig. 74 and p. 231), and Alcamenes, a I^esbian, and Paeonius, of Mende in Thrace. These two are said by Pausanias to have made the fine pediment sculptures for the magnificent temple of Zeus at Olympia [c. 450, some years before Pheidias was summoned to make the great statue) . Many of these sculptures have been recovered — enough to allow of a fairly complete reconstruction of the two pediments, which represented the 308 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE race of Pelops and Oenomaus and the fight of the Centaurs and lyapithae. Except one majestic statue with outstretched arm — perhaps an Apollo — the excavated figures have not, however, raised our esteem for these sculptors. Nor can one easily beheve that such a heavy, stiff, and somewhat antiquated style could ever have been practised by a sculptor who (perhaps when an old man and influenced by the Attic grace of Pheidias) was able to produce such a miracle of delicate beauty and lightness as the ' Nike of Paeonius,' one of the two great art treasures discovered by the excavators at Olympia (Fig. 93). Another and perhaps greater contemporary of Pheidias was Myron (c. 500-410), an Attic sculptor, who seems to have studied under Ageladas at Argos, probably together with Pheidias, and to have adopted the Argive ' athletic ' style. We have fine copies of two at least of his works — the well-known Discobolos (' Quoit- thrower ') and the equally well-known figure of the satyr Marsyas starting back when confronted by Athene. This group is described by Pliny and others, but the second figure was supposed to have been irrecoverably lost. Not many years ago was discovered at Rome what almost certainly is a copy of the Athene. It is in Frankfurt, and I am fortunate to be able to give a photograph of it (Fig. 88) . The original was in bronze, a material preferred by the Argive school and well adapted for statues representing violent motion — or, rather, that momentary poise in the midst of motion which is so conspicuous a characteristic of Myron's works and is selected by I^essing (in his Laocoon) as an essential characteristic of all great sculpture. SECTION B : AESCHYLUS : HERODOTUS : PHILOSOPHERS OF THE PERIOD How the Attic drama originated in Doric dithyrambs and in ' goat-dances ' performed at vintage festivals in honour of Dionysus, the wine-god, has been told, and we have seen how dialogue was introduced (perhaps by Thespis) between the L ANCIENT GREEiCE chorus and its leader, and also how the performances were transferred from the vintage gatherings * in the marshes ' outside Athens to a primitive theatre on the south-eastern slope of the Acropolis, where later the great theatre of Dionysus was constructed. In the time of Aeschylus (525-456) various innovations were made, some of them doubtless by him. A second ' hypocrite ' (i.e. ' answerer,' or speaker) was added, so that the narrative and the ' drama ' (action) became much developed and more independent of the chorus, which now fell more into the back- ground. Masks and costumes were improved and the high buskin [cothurnus, like the Elizabethan chopin) introduced. Statues, houses and temples, curtains, painted rocks and groves and other scenery, doors for exits and entrances, and other such stage apparatus, began to take the place of the central thymele (altar) round which the old dances had been performed, and, by about 430, movable platforms, wheeled or revolving on pivots, cranes, and other machinery for the descent and ascent of deities, became common. But to the end the classical Attic drama retained much of its original scenic simplicity. It was always more sculpturesque than pictorial. Sophocles introduced a third, perhaps a fourth, actor ; but this number was seldom, if ever, exceeded. Spectacular effects seem to have been almost entirely disregarded, and nuances of by-play and facial expression were made impossible by the great size of the open-air theatres and by the masks of the actors. The one thing of importance — and it must have been exceedingly difficult, needing mechanical aids — was audible and effective recitation both of dialogue and of chorus, for text-books were unknown, and the vast audiences would doubtless be eager to hear and criticize the new versions of the familiar legends that generally formed the subjects of these dramas.^ It has already been mentioned that Aeschylus fought at 1 The Persians of Aeschylus was a striking exception. So was the Capture of Miletus, by Phrynichus (p. 195). The knowledge of the audience and the supposed ignorance of the characters in the play as to the approaching cata- strophe allowed place to that ' dramatic irony ' which is especially associated with Sophocles. 310 w. I7. Probabi,e Copy of tiif. Phridian Athene: ItICmnia Probabi^E Copy of Myron's Athene 310 Marsyas group See List of Illustrations. THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE Marathon, where his brother Cynaegeirus was killed. Probably he was present also at Salamis and at Plataea, and some believe that the ' Ameinias of Pallene ' who at Salamis first attacked the Persians was the youngest of his brothers.^ He first competed for the tragic prize about 499, and first won it in 484. He is believed to have invented the ' trilogy ' — a group of three connected, or unconnected, tragedies, followed usually by a semi-comic ' satyric ' play. In 468 he was defeated by the young Sophocles, amidst great public excitement. Cimon in this year brought the bones of Theseus from Scyros, and he with his nine fellow-generals were asked to act as judges, and decided in favour of Sophocles. It has been said that either on this account or because he was beaten by Simonides in the composition of the Marathon epitaph (which, however, was in 489 !), or else because he was accused of revealing the Kleusinian Mysteries or of impious language (perhaps in his Prometheus, where Zeus is blasphemed), Aeschylus withdrew to the court of Hiero at Syracuse. It seems, however, that he had already been in Syracuse (about 475-470), where he must have known Simonides and Pindar. Hiero died in 467, and the poet, who was again in Athens in 465, returned to Sicily after the production of his Oresteia at Athens, and died (456) at Gela — killed, it is said, by being struck on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle, in fulfilment of a prophecy that he should perish by a ' stroke from heaven.' Of the seventy or more tragedies attributed to Aeschylus we possess only seven complete, ^ but these seven are more than enough to prove that in dramatic power and sublimity he is, with perhaps the one exception of Shakespeare, the greatest of poets, and in majesty and might of language unrivalled. His plots are simple, and in the earlier dramas there is a want ^ Hdt. viii. 84, 91 ; Aesch. Pars. 409 ; also scholia of the Medici MS. ^ The preservation of classical works is due mainly to the critics and writers of Alexandria, where there was a vast library (destroyed by Omar in a.d. 641) , founded by the Ptolemies (c. 300 B.C.) . They chose what was most popular and what best illustrated their theories of art. Sophocles wrote, it is said, 13O plays, of which only seven are extant. Of Euripides we have about twenty, and half the Hypsipyle, lately discovered. 3" ANCIENT GREECE of movement, the chorus sometimes being unduly prominent and using exceedingly obscure language ; but the dramatic effect is often overpowering. " Terror," says Schlegel, " is his element, and not the softer affections.^ He holds up a Medusa's head before the petrified spectators." His mind seems to have been deeply imbued by awe of mysterious powers — such powers as we hear of in the old religion of Greece and the Orphic and Kleusinian Mysteries. ^ There is constant reference to expiation and purification and the averting of evil, to dreams and oracles and portents and spectral appari- tions and to the ancient chthonian (infernal) deities, especially to the primal Earth-Mother. In some passages, says Paley, there is scarcely a word that does not involve some mystic doctrine. In splendid contrast to this background of gloom, with its sinister Fates and terrific Furies, stand the figures of the gods of Olympus, the benign sunHght deities — Zeus and Apollo and Athene. To these also Aeschylus pays reverence, but rather perhaps as personifications of Nature and agents of those supreme spiritual powers of good and evil the mani- festations of whose irresistible will are intimated under such names as Fate and Destiny and Justice and Retribution, and that Infatuation that maddens a man and goads him on to insolence and impiety and tempts him to " kick against the altar of Righteousness." Aeschylus is said to have belonged to the aristocratic anti-popular party of Aristides and Cimon, and to have opposed the innovations of Themistocles. But his glorifica- tion of the battle of Salamis seems scarcely consistent with a bigoted anti-naval poHcy, and his Eumenides is not, as is 1 In the Frogs of Aristophanes is an amusing scene (in Hades) between Aeschylus and Euripides, where the claims of the two poets are tested by Dionysus — partly by means of a balance to weigh their verses. Aeschylus boasts that " nobody ever accused him of describing a woman in love." " No," says Euripides, " there's nothing of Aphrodite in you ! " " And may there never be ! " answers Aeschylus. 2 It is notable that Aeschylus was born at Eleusis, and as a child may have received many such impressions ; and this may account for the charge of " revealing the mysteries " in his poetry. Cicero says that he was " almost a Pythagorean," and certainly there is much in his poetry that recalls Pytha- gorean doctrines. 312 THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE sometimes imagined, directed against the action of the party of Kphialtes (p. 292) , but is rather a recognition of the Areopagus as the supreme court for cases of homicide. His reverence for the divine rights of kingship is very perceptible, and he seems to have been much impressed by the magnificence of the Persian court. Indeed, one may perhaps trace an Oriental influence in some of his imaginings, which at times are scarcely Greek in their audacity and grotesqueness — a quality noticed by Aristophanes, who makes Euripides ridicule the ' horse- cocks ' (griffins) and ' goat-stags ' of Aeschylean drama. No translation can reproduce the splendours and sublimities of the verse of Aeschylus, but some idea of the greatness of his dramatic power may be gained by reading even an unpre- tentious prose version, not of selected passages, but of an entire play, or, still better, of the great Trilogy — perhaps the mightiest drama in all literature. The pages of a volume on Ancient Greece could scarcely be better filled than with such a version ; but I shall have to content myself with giving a brief account of the seven extant plays. (i) The Suppliants is probably the earliest extant Greek tragedy. Some connect it with the alliance of Athens and Argos and the Egyptian expedition of 460-459. But from the style and the antique form of the drama, which consists mainly of chorus, it seems certain that the true date is about 488. The suppliants, who form the chorus, are the fifty Danaides who with their father. King Danaus, have fled from Egypt to Argos in order to escape hated nuptials with their cousins, the fifty sons of King Aegyptus. They plead for protection as descendants of Argive lo, whose wanderings (in the form of a heifer) had brought her to Egypt. Pelasgus, the Argive king, grants their prayer and repels the insolent black herald who demands their surrender. There were only two actors, as Danaus and the herald were played by the same person. The trilogy consisted of the Egyptians, the Suppliants, and the Danaides. In the last the Danaides were, it is believed, tried for the murder of their cousins (whom after all they had been compelled to marry), and were seemingly acquitted, although 313 ANCIENT GREECE according to the well-known legend they suffered punishment in Hades. It is unlikely that Aeschylus introduced the senti- mental exception of Hypermnestra, who alone — splendide mendax — out of pity or love, is said to have disobeyed her father and spared her husband (Hor. C. Ill, xi.). (2) The Seven against Thebes (467) was preceded in a trilogy by Laws and Oedipus, and followed by a satyric play, the Sphinx. For the story of the expedition of the seven heroes see p. 33. In the Frogs of Aristophanes Aeschylus describes it as a play "cram-full of Ares." The moment chosen is that of the assault on the city. After a long and vivid report by a messenger who describes the assailing host to the chorus of Theban women and the king, Eteocles stations a Theban hero at each of the seven gates, and, goaded by the Krinys of a father's curse, in spite of the entreaties of the chorus and his own foreknowledge of inevitable death, determines to meet his brother Polyneices in mortal combat, in which both are slain. Antigone and Ismene then appear, mourning their brothers in a very beautiful and pathetic lamentation, in which the younger echoes in somewhat different form the broken utterances of the elder sister. In defiance of the proclamation of the new ''ruler of the Cadmean city'' (Creon), Antigone now states her determination to bury Polyneices, her brother. Thus we are brought to the moment with which the Antigone of Sophocles opens ; and modern criticism gravely (and perhaps not unreasonably) suspects that this last scene may have been added by some later writer in order to link the Seven up with the Sophoclean play. (3) The Persae is the only extant Greek tragedy dealing with contemporary history. It was performed at Athens (with other plays on legendary subjects) about eight years after the battle of Salamis. Possibly it was written in Sicily for King Hiero and first performed at Syracuse. The scene is laid in Persia, in front of the tomb of Darius (Fig. 73 and p. 194), near Persepolis,^ where, awaiting Queen Atossa, is collected a 1 The " city of the Persians " (1. 15) may, I think, be Persepolis ; but Susa and EJcbatana are alone mentioned by name. 314 89-91. Three possible Copies of the Pheidian Athene 314 See List of Illustrations THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE band of twelve elders — * Faithfuls.' They chant of the crossing of the Hellespont and of the innumerable host that has accom- panied Xerxes to Greece, but express their anxiety at hearing no news. The mother- queen Atossa approaches. She too is full of anxiety about her son Xerxes, and has been disturbed by strange dreams, and will offer libations at the tomb of her deified husband. A messenger now arrives and relates the disasters of the Persians. The descriptions of the battle of Salamis and the terrified flight of Xerxes and the catastrophe at the river Strymon (see p. 267) are exceedingly fine, and most interesting as the earliest picture that we possess of any great historical event in Greek history — if we exclude the Homeric poems ! The ghost of Darius now rises from the tomb, and to him Atossa recounts the disastrous story of the invasion, whereat the spirit of the Great King, full of mourning and of wrath at the folly of his son, prophesies the utter defeat of the Persians at Plataea — being able, as are the spirits in Dante's Inferno, to foresee the future, though ignorant of the present. After the disappearance of the ghost of Darius, Xerxes and his retinue arrive in a pitiable state of despair and terror, and the play ends amidst their heart- rending lamentations — a scene that, however unhistorical, must have highly delighted an Athenian audience. ^ (4) Prometheus Bound was written perhaps a few years after the great eruption of Aetna (c. 478; see Thuc. iii. 116), which is mentioned prophetically (1. 375). But the highly developed form of the play, with its finely finished metrical and rhetorical language and the predominance of the dramatic over the lyrical element, and the possibility of a third actor (though Prometheus may have been an effigy), as well as the probable use of stage machinery {e.g. in the case of the ocean nymphs, whose advent is heralded by the flutter of wings), has induced some to give it a much later date and even needlessly to question its authenticity. ^ In the Frogs Dionysus exclaims (