# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Greece/II/Section I.—Greek History to the Death of Alexander the Great

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Section I.—Greek History to the Death of Alexander the Great.
The early history of Greece is the first chapter in the political and intellectual life of Europe. In contrast with nations still in the tribal stage the Greeks have already the life of cities ; in contrast with the despotic monarchies of tli3 East they recognize the principle that no personal rule should be unlimited. From the first they appear as a people obedient to reason and to a native instinct of measure. In the political sphere this leads them to aim at a due balance of powers and tendencies in the state, at the definition of duties and the protection of rights. In the intellectual sphere it leads them to explore causes, to interpret thought in clear forms, to find graceful expression ​for the social feelings and sympathies. The historical interest of Greece does not begin therefore only at the point where details and dates become approximately certain, but with the first glimpses of that ordered life out of which the civilization of Europe arose. At a later stage the Greek commonwealths offer the most instructive study which the ancient world affords in the working of oligarchic and democratic institutions. Then, as the Roman power rises, culminates, and declines, Greek history assumes a new character and a new interest. From Alexander the Great dates the beginning of a modern Greek nation, one, not in blood, but in speech and manners. Two main threads link together the earlier and later history of civilized man. One passes through Rome, and is Latin ; the other passes through the new Rome in the east, and is Greek. In a sketch like the present it would be impossible to attempt a detailed narrative of facts, which, besides, fall to be considered under particular headings. The aim here will be rather to trace in outline the general course of the development, and to indicate, so far as a rapid survey permits, the leading causes and tendencies which were at work in its successive stages.
Six periods may be distinguished. I. The prehistoric period, down to the close of the great migrations. II. The early history of the leading states down to about 500 B.C. III. The Ionic revolt and the Persian wars, 502-479. IV. The period of Athenian supremacy, 478-431. V. The Peloponnesian War, 431-404, followed by the period of Spartan and then of Theban ascendency, 404-362. VI. The reigns of Philip and Alexander, 359-323 B.C..
I. The Prehistoric Period, down to the close of the great Migrations.
" Ancient Hellas," says Aristotle, " is the country about Dodona and the Achelous, .... for the Selloi lived there, and the people then called the Graikoi, but now the Hellenes" (Meteor., . 14). The name Graikoi probably meant the "old" or "honourable" folk (Curtius, Etym., 130). The Italians may have enlarged the application of this name, which they found on the eastern side of the Ionian Gulf. The moderns have followed the Romans in giving it to the whole people who, from very early times, have always called themselves Hellenes.
The evidence of language tells something as to the point of civilization which had been reached by the ancestors of Indo-European nations before the Hellenes parted from the common stock in Central Asia. They had words for "father," "mother," "brother," "sister," "son," "daugh ter," and also for certain affinities by marriage, as " father- in-law," " brother-in-law," " daughter-in-law." They lived in houses ; they wore clothes made of wool or skins ; as arms they had the sword and the bow; they had flocks and herds, goats and dogs ; they drove, if they did not ride, horses. They were a pastoral rather than an agri cultural people. They knew how to work gold, silver, and copper ; they could count up to a hundred ; they reckoned time by the lunar month ; they spoke of the sky as the Heaven-father. The first great migration from the common home was that which carried the ancestors of the Teutonic, Slavonic, and Lithuanian tribes into north -western Europe. The next was that which carried the ancestors of Greeks, Italian-, and Celts into southern and south-western Europe.
Language indicates that there must have been a period during which the forefathers of Greeks and Italians, after the Celts had parted from them, lived together as one people. Again, the Greek language, unique -in its character istic development, tells that the Hellenes, after the Italians had left them, must have long remained an undivided people. But to us this primitive Hellenic unity is prehis- toric. We first know the Hellenes as a race divided into Hellene two great branches, each with well-marked characteristics of its own, Dorians and lonians ; while those who have been less affected by the special causes which produced these divergences from an earlier common type are regarded as forming a third branch, and are called collectively JEolians. Further, we hear of a people distinguished indeed from the Hellenes, yet apparently felt (as by Thucydides) to be not wholly alien from them, a people represented as having been before them in Greece proper, on the coasts, and in the islands of the ^Egean, the Pdasgians. In Pelas- some Homeric passages, and those among the oldest, the ians - name Pelasgoi denotes a tribe of Achaean or /Eolian Greeks living in Thessaly (Iliad, ii. 081 ; xvi. 233). In other poetical texts of later date, and repeatedly in Hero dotus, Pelasgoi is a general designation for people of whom the Greeks knew little definitely, except that they had preceded the Hellenic dwellers in the land. In this second and vague use, " Pelasgian " is virtually equivalent to " prehistoric."
The highlands of Phrygia have the best claim to be Earlics regarded as the point of departure for the distinctively Hellenic migrations. In these fertile regions of north- western Asia Minor, the Hellenes, after the Italians had left them, may have lived, first as a part of the Phrygian nation, and afterwards as a separate people. From these First seats a great wave of migration seems to have carried over epoch, the Hellespont into Europe a population which diffused itself through Greece arid the Peloponnesus, as well as over the coasts and islands of the archipelago. In after ages, when the kinship, though perhaps dimly suspected, was no longer recognized, the Hellenes called these earlier occu pants of the land Pelasgians. It has been conjectured that in Pelasgos we have combined the roots of Trepav and e?/xi (770.). The name would then mean " the further-goer," " the emigrant." It would thus be appropriate as the name given by the Hellenes, who had remained behind in Phry gia, to the kinsmen who had passed over into Europe before them.
The second epoch of migration from the Phrygian high- Second lands appears to have been one by which single Hellenic e F cu - tribes, with special gifts and qualities, were carried forth to become the quickeners of historic life among inert masses of population, among those " Pelasgians " who had long been content to follow the calm routine of husbandmen or herdsmen. The ancestors of the lonians went down to the coasts of Asia Minor, and became the founders of a race whose distinctive powers found scope in maritime enter prise and in commerce. The ancestors of the Dorians passed into the highlands of Northern Greece, and there developed the type of hardy mountaineer which united the robust vigour of hunter and warrior with a firm loyalty to ancestral traditions in religion and in civil government.
Of these two branches, the Ionian and the Dorian, the Ionian was that which most actively influenced the early development of Greece. But the lonians themselves derived the first impulses of their progress from a foreign source. Those Canaanites or "lowlanders" of Syria, whom we call by the Greek name of Phoenicians, inhabited the long narrow strip of territory between Lebanon and the sea. Phoenicia, called " Keft " by the Egyptians, had at a remote period contributed Semitic settlers to the Delta or " Isle of Cap itor ; " and it would appear from the evidence of the Egyptian monuments that the Kefa, or Phoenicians, were a great commercial people as early as the 16th century B.C. Cyprus, visible from the heights of Lebanon, was the first stage of the Phoenician advance into the- Western waters ; and to the last there was in Cyprus a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-European. From Cyprus the Phoenician navigators proceeded to the southern ​coasts of Asia Minor, where Phoenician colonists gradually blended with the natives, until the entire seaboard had become in a great measure subject to Phoenician influences. Thus the Solymi, settled in Lycia, were akin to the Canaan- ites ; and the Carians, originally kinsmen of the Greeks, were strongly affected by Phoenician contact. It was at Miletus especially that the Ionian Greeks came into com mercial intercourse with the Phoenicians. Unlike the dwellers on the southern seaboard of Asia Minor, they showed no tendency to merge their nationality in that of the Syrian strangers. But they learned from them much that concerned the art of navigation, as, for instance, the use of the round-built merchant vessels called yavXoi, and probably also a system of weights and measures, as well as the rudiments of some useful arts. The Phoenicians had been first drawn to the coasts of Greece in quest of the purple-fish which was found in abundance off the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia ; other attractions were furnished by the plentiful timber for shipbuilding which the Greek forests supplied, and by veins of silver, iron, and copper ore.
Two periods of Phoenician influence on early Greece may be distinguished : first, a period during which they were brought into intercourse with the Greeks merely by traffic in occasional voyages ; secondty, a period of Phoenician trading settlements in the islands or on the coasts of the Greek seas, when their influence became more penetrating and thorough. It was probably early in this second period, perhaps about the end of the 9th century B.C., that the Phoenician alphabet became diffused through Greece. This alphabet was itself derived from the alpha bet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was brought into Phoenicia by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta. It was imported into Greece, probably, by the Aramseo-Phcenicians of the Gulf of Antioch, not by the Phosnicians of Tyre and Sidon, and seems to have superseded, in Asia Minor and the islands, a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be used in Cyprus down to a late time. The direct Phoenician influence on Greece lasted to about 600 B.C. Commerce and navigation were the provinces in which the Phoenician influence, strictly so called, was most felt by the Greeks. In art and science, in everything that concerned the higher culture, the Phoenicians seem to have been little more than carriers from East to West of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian ideas.
The legends of European Greece speak clearly of foreign elements in civilization and in religious worship which came in from the East. But they do not constrain us to suppose that those who brought in these new elements were always, or as a rule, strangers to the people among whom they brought them. On the contrary the myths constantly say, or imply, that the new comers were akin to the people among whom they came ; as the sons of ^Egyptus are first cousins to the daughters of Danaus ; as Cadmus and Pelops, though nominally of foreign origin, are thoroughly national heroes and founders. Hence it appears reasonable to con clude that the East by which European Hellas was most directly and vitally influenced was net the Semitic but the Hellenic East ; that the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, after having themselves been in intercourse with Phoenicia and Egypt, were the chief agents in diffusing the new ideas among their kinsmen on the western side of the /Egean. Asiatic Greeks, who had settled among Egyptians in the Delta, or who had lived amid Phoenician colonies in Asia Minor, would easily be confounded, in popular rumour, with Egyptians or Phoenicians. The Asiatic Greeks, as pioneers of civilization in European Greece, appear some times under the name of Carians, when they are little more than teachers of certain improvements in the art of war, and have a decidedly foreign character, sometimes as Leleges, who are associated especially with Lycia, Miletus, and the Troad, and who, as compared with the " Carians," are the representatives of a more advanced civilization. In the east the seafaring lonians gave their name to the whole Greek people, as in the Hebrew Scriptures the Greeks are " the sons of Javan," the Uinim of the Egyptians, the launa of the Persians. It does not appear that the European Greeks of early days used "Ionian" in this way as a collective name for the Asiatic Greeks. But such names as lasion, lason, lasian Argos point to a sense that the civilization which came from Asia Minor was connected with Ionia. At a later time the Greeks forgot the lonians and Phoenicians who had brought an Eastern civilization to the western side of the ^Egean. Vividly impressed by the great antiquity of this civilization itself, especially in Egypt, they preferred to suppose that they had derived it directly from the source.
The appearance of new elements in religious worship is one great mark of the period during which Greece in Europe was still being changed by influences, Greek or foreign, from the East. The worship which the fathers of the Hellenes had brought with them from the common home in Asia was the worship of the " Heaven-father," the unseen father who dwells in aether, whose temple is the sky, and whose altar is most fitly raised on the mountain top, as the ancient shrine of the Arcadian Zeus was the grove on the summit of Mount Lycaeus. This is the " Pelasgian Zeus, dwelling afar," to whom the Homeric Achilles prays. But as the united Hellenic race parted into tribes, so to the first simple worship of the Heaven-father was added a variety of local cults. And as mariners from other lands began to visit the coasts, they brought in their own gods with them. Thus Melcarth, the city-god of Tyre, is re cognized in Melicertes as worshipped at the isthmus of Corinth. In one Greek form of the worship of Heracles, Astarte the goddess of the Phoenician sailors becomes Aphrodite, who springs from the sea. The myth of Adonis, the worship of the Achaean Demeter, are other examples. There are, again, other divinities who came to European Greece, not directly from the non-Hellenic East, but as deities already at home among the lonians. Such was Poseidon, and, above all, Apollo, whose coming is every where a promise of light and joy.
Little precise knowledge of the earliest kingdoms and states can be extracted from the legends as they have come down to us, but some general inferences are warranted. The tradition that Minos cleared the archipelago of pirates and established a wide maritime dominion, that he was the first to sacrifice to the Charites, and that Daedalus wrought for him, may be taken at least as indicating that Crete played a prominent part in the early history of Greek culture, and that there was a time when Cretan kings were strong enough to protect commerce in the /Egean waters. Again, though Gordius and Midas have passed into the region of fable, there are reasonable grounds for the belief that the ancient kings of Phrygia once exercised dominion over Asia Minor. The Lydians, in Lydia. whose origin Semitic and Aryan elements appear to have been mingled, have a twofold interest in this dawn of Hellenic history. First, they represent the earliest kingdom in Asia Minor of which anything is certainly known. Secondly, they are on land what the Phoenicians are on the sea, carriers or mediators between the Greeks and the East. In the north-west corner of Asia Minor, a branch of Troy, the Dardani whose ancestor is described as worshipping the Pelasgian Zeus founded the kingdom of the Troas, the land of Troy. It has been remarked that the double names of the Trojan heroes, Alexander, Paris, Hector, Darius, point to the twofold relationship of the Trojans, on the one side to Hellas, on the other to Asia. In ​European Greece we find the race known as the Minyæ, whose early glories are linked with the story of "Jason and the Argonauts " moving southward from the shores of the G.ilf of Pagasae into the valley of Like Copais, and found ing the Bteotian Orchomenus. The early greatness of Thebes is associated with the name of Cadmus, the king- priest who introduces the art of writing, who builds the citadel, who founds a system of artificial irrigation. The Achaean princes, whose chivalrous spirit id expressed in the Homeric Achilles, rule in the fertile valley of the Thessalian Phthiotis. In the Peloponnesus the Pelopidaa at Mycenae reign over Achaeans ; and Agimemnon is said to rule, not only "all Argos," but "many islands." The principle on which such legends as that of Agamemnon s sovereignty may best bs estimated has been well stated by Mi- Freeman : l "The legend of Charlemagne, amidst infinite perversions, pre serves a certain groundwork of real history ; I should expect to lind in the legend of Agamemnon a similar groundwork of real history. There is, of course, the all-important difference that we can test the one story, and that we cannot test the other, by the certain evidence of contemporary documents. This gives us certainty in one case, while we cannot get beyond high probability in the other. . . . Later Grecian history would never lead us to believe that there had been once a single dynasty reigning, if not as sovereigns, at least as suzerains, over a large portion of insular and peninsular Greece. So lat.T mediaeval history would never L-ad us to believe thai there had once been a Latin or Teutonic emperor, whosedomiuionsatretched from the Eider to the Ebro. But we know that the Carolingian legend is thus far confirmed by history ; there is, therefore, no a priori objection to the analogous features of the Pelopid legend. The truth is that the idea of such an extensive dominion would not have occurred to a later romancer, unless some real history or tradi tion had suggested it to him. So, again, without some such ground work of history or tradition, no one would have fixed upon Mykene, a place utterly insignificant in later history, as the capital of this extensive empire. The romances have transferred the capital of Karl from Aachen to Paris ; had it really been Paris, no one would have transferred it to Aachen. . . . Whether Agamemnon be a real man or not, the combination of internal and external evidence leads us to set down the Pelopid dynasty at Mykene as an established fact."
We now come to a phase in the development of early Greece which tradition represents as following, but at no great interval, the age in which a Pelopid dynasty ruled at Mycenae and fought against Troy. This is the period of great displacements of population within the mainland of European Greece. The first of these migrations is that of the people afterwards known as Thessalians. A fierce tribe of mounted warriors, they passed from Thesprotia in Epirusover the range of Pindus, and subdued or drove out an /Eolic population who dwelt about Arm , in the fertile lowlands of southern Thessaly. Those of the /Eolians who had not submitted to the conquerors passed southward into the land thenceforth called Boaotia, where, between Orchomenus and Thebes, they founded a new home. Their conquest of Bueotia appears to have been difficult and gradual ; and even after the fall of Orchomenus and Thebes, Platsea is said to have maintained its independ ence. The legend placed these events about 1124 B.C., or sixty yeirs after the fall of Troy. About twenty years later in the mythical chronology occurs the third and more famous migration, known as the return of the Heraclidse. We need not enter here into the details of the myth. It will be enough to indicate the results to which an examina tion of the legend leads. The Dorians, migrating south ward from the highlands of Macedonia, had established themselves at the northern foot of Parnassus, in the fertile district between that range and (Eta, which was thenceforth called Doris. In setting out from these seats to conquer the Peloponnesus the Dorians were associated with other tribes. Among these were the Hylleans, who were believed to be of Achaean origin, and who traced their descent from
1 "The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History," Essays, 1st series, p. 29.
the hero Hyllus, son of the Tirynthian Heracles. The Hyllean chiefs of the expedition represented themselves, accordingly, as seeking to reconquer that royal dominion of Heracbs in the Peloponnesus of which his descendants had been wrongfully deprived by Eurystheus. Hence the Dorian migration itself came to be called the " Jleturn of the Heraclidai." The migration had two main results : (1) the Dorians, under leaders claiming Heraclid descent, overthrew the Achaean dynasties in the Peloponnesus, and either expelled or subjugated the Achaean folk ; (2) a por tion of the Achaaans, retiring northward before the Dorian invaders in the south, drove the lonians on the coast of the Corinthian Gulf out of the strip of territory which was thenceforth called Achaia; and these lonians sought refuge with their kinsfolk in Attica. It is in the nature of the heroic myths to represent changes of this kind, which may have been the gradual work of generations, as effected by sudden blows. Some comparative mythologers have main tained with much ingenuity that the " Return of the Heraclidae" is merely one of those alternations which balance each other in the hundred forms of the solar myth. It appears more consistent with reason to believe that there was really a great southward movement of population, which resulted in the substitution of Dorian foe Achaean ascend ency in the Peloponnesus. We cannot pretend to fix either the exact time at which it commenced or the period which was required for its completion. One thing may, however, be affirmed with probability. It cannot have been done all at once, as the myth says that it was. The displacement of the Achaeans was accomplished only by degrees, and perhaps after the lapse of centuries.
The same remark applies to those three streams of migration from European Greece to the coasts of Asia Minor, which are represented as having ensued on the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus, and which may naturally be connected with the disturbance of populations which the southward advance of the Dorians caused. The Aclueans, driven from their old seats in the south,
moved northwards ; and, reinforced by yEolic kinsmen
from Bceotia and Thessaly, established themselves on the
north-west coast of Asia Minor, where Lesbos and Cyme became their strongholds. By degrees their dominion spread inland, until they had become masters of Mysia and the Troad. The /Eolic migration which thus created an Asiatic yEolis was unquestionably the slow work of genera tions. The immediate cause of the Ionic migration, which began later than the yEolie, appears to have been the overcrowding of Attica by the lonians driven out of Achaia. The /Eolic settlements had been the work of a people migrating in large masses. The Ionic colonization seems to have been effected rather by smaller numbers of warlike adventurers, sprung from the noble Ionian families of Attica and the Peloponnesus, who claimed to rule over the Ionic communities already established on the Asiatic coast. The Dorian colonists, following the southward direction of their previous conquests, settled on the south- west coast of Asia Minor. The islands of Cos and Rhodes received Dorian settlers ; and, after what was probably a long struggle, the Dorians subdued Crete.
While the populations had thus been settling down into the places which they were to occupy during the historical age of Greece, a movement had been in progress on the European mainland which tended to quicken among the various tribes a sanse of the unity of the race. This was the establishment of local associations among neighbouring tribes for the common worship of the same god. These associations were of a feleral character: that is, while the members of the association were independent in other matters, they were subject to a common central authority in all that concerned religious worship. Such a federal ​association was called an amphictyony, that is, a league of neighbours. The most important of such leagues was the Delphic amphictyony, of which the object was to conserve the worship of Apollo at Delphi. This league arose in Thessaly, where the conquerors who had come in from Epirus sought to establish themselves more iirmly by embracing the cult of Apollo. It was afterwards extended through the southern districts until it included most of the tribes dwelling about (Eta and Parnassus. The members of the Delphic amphictyony gave a new meaning and value to the federal compact by applying it to enforce certain obligations of humanity in war. They took an oath that they would not raze each other s towns, nor, during a siege, cut off the supply of water. It was in con nexion with the Delphic amphictyony that the name Hellene appears to have been first distinctly recognized as the national name. The earliest collective name of the race, in Greek tradition, had been Graikoi. The members of the Delphic amphictyony chose as their federal name that of Hellenes, a name of sacred associations, if we may connect it with that of the Selloi or Ilelloi, the priests of the Pelasgian Zeus at Doclona, in the region which, according to Aristotle, was the most ancient Hellas. The circumstances which gave currency to Hellene as a common appellative have left a reminiscence in the myth that Hellen was nearly related to Amphictyon.
The Homeric poems may be regarded by the student of history as great pictures of political and social life, illustrating the whole variety of Greek experience down to the close of that age which saw the tides of /Eolic, Ionic, and Doric migration flow from the west to the east of the ./Egean. It is a distinct question how far recoverable his torical fact is embedded in their text, or how far trustworthy inferences may be drawn from them in regard to a supposed series of events. But at least the legends of the Achaean princes and warriors are there, as they came through ^Eolic minstrels to the poets of lonh ; and, various as may be the ages and sources of the interwoven materials, the total result may be taken as a portraiture, true in its main lines, of the age from which these legends had come down. In the political life described by the Homeric poems the king rules by divine and hereditary right. But he is not, like an Eastern monarch, even practically despotic ; he is bound, first, by tJiemistes, the traditional customs of his people ; next, he must consult the bottle, the council of nobles and elders ; and, lastly, his proposals require to be ratified by the agora, or popular assembly. The social life is the counterpart of this. It is a patriarchal life, in which the head of the family stands to his dependants in a relation like that of the king to his subjects. It is, within the family pale, eminently humane ; and the absence of a charity which should include all mankind is in some measure compensated by the principle and practice of hos pitality. The position of free-born women is high, higher than in the historical ages and polygamy is unknown among Greeks. Many of the pictures of manners, especially in the Odyssey, have the refinement of a noble simplicity in thought and feeling, and of a genuine courtesy which is peculiarly Hellenic. The useful arts are still in an early stage. The use of the principal metals is known, but not, apparently, the art of smelting or soldering them. Money is not mentioned, oxen being the usual measure of value ; anil there is no certain allusion to the art of writing.
II. The Early History of the leading States down to about 500 B.C.
iie Pelo- In the history of the Peloponnesus after the Dorian im- mnesus. migration we begin to be on firmer ground. There may still b-j hrge room f &gt;r doubt as to particular dates or , but trio a 53 left permanent iv-cords in the institu tions which survived it. The first thing which should be borne in mind with regard to the Dorian immigration is that its dirtct influence was confined to three districts of ResuH the Peloponnesus. Argolis, Lajonia, and Messenia were fthe thoroughly Dorianized. Of the other three districts, Arcadia remained almost wholly unaffected, Elis and Achaia were affected only indirectly, through the influx of the populations which the Dorians had displaced. The first rank in the Peloponnesus was long retained by Argos. Argos The ancient primacy of its Achaean princes was inherited by its Dorian rulers ; and now, under the dynasty of the Temenidiv, Argos acquired a new prestige as the head of a federative Dorian hexapolis, of which the other members were Phlius, Sicyon, Troezene, Epidaurus, and Corinth. It was only by slow degrees that the power arose which was destined to eclipse Argos. "When the Dorians entered the Sparti valley of Eurotas, they found " hollow Lacedaemon " already shared among people of other tribes. Leleges, Minyans, and Achaeans had been there before them. Both yEolian and Achaean elements remained in the land. The settle ment of the Dorians was made in a strong position under Mount Taygetus, on the right or western bank of the Eurotas ; and the fact that, unlike most Greek cities, it was not founded on a rocky base, but on arable soil, was expressed by the name tiparte (sown land). It was indeed less a city than a group of rude hamlets, the camp of a military occupation. And, as a natural stronghold, defended by an alert garrison, it dispensed with walls. Sparta was at first only one member of a Laconian hexa polis. It was at a later stage that Sparta became the head-town of the country, and the seat of a central govern ment. The origin of the dual kingship may probably be traced to this period. Such a dualism has no parallel else where among Dorians : and, as regards one at least of the two royal lines, we know that the Agiade Cleotnenes proclaimed himself an Achaean. The two royal lines of the Agiadae and Eurypontid&lt;e may have taken their beginning from a coalition or compromise between Doriun and Achaean houses. Afterwards, when it was desired to ex plain the dualism and to refer both lines to a common source, Agis and Eurypon were represented aa descended from the twin sons of Aristodsmus, Eurystheus and Procles.
The spread of Spartan power in the Peloponnesus was preceded by the building up of that political and social system which made the Spartan citizens a compact aristocracy, exclusively devoted to the exercises of war. The personality of Lycurgus is shadowy. He has even been classed with those beings who, like Prometheus, Hermes, and Phoroneus, bestow on men that gift of fire without which they could not have attained to a high civilization. But the charge of excessive credulity can scarcely be brought against those who hold, with E. Curtius, that " there really lived and worked in the first half of the 9th century B.C. a legislator of the name of Lyc urgus, a man win, as a born Heraclide, was called to take part in public affairs." It is another question whether he was the author of all the institutions which were afterwards ascribed to him. The example of another legislator who stands in a far clearer light of history, the Athenian Solon, whom the orators sometimes credit with the work of Clisthenes in addition to his own, may serve to show how loose such ascriptions often were. But at least the work of Lycurgus may be assumed to have marked an epoch in the history of the Spartan system. This system rested, first, on a distinction of three orders. Dorians alone were Spartiatai, citizens of Sparta, ns opposed to mere Lacedajmonii, and to them belonged all political power. Lycurgus, said the tradition, assigned nine thousand lots of land to as many Spartiatae ; the land descended from father to eldest son, and, failing isviie, reverted to the state. The older or non- ​Dorian population, settled chiefly on the mountain slopes around the Spartan lands, were called Perioikoi. They were free farmers, who had no share in the government, and were not required to perform military service. Lastly, the Helots cultivated the lauds of the Spartans, not as slaves belonging to private masters, but as serfs of the commonwealth ; heuce no Spartan citizen could sell a Helot or remove him from the land. From each farm the Helots had to produce annually a certain quantity of barley, oil, and wine ; if there was a surplus, they could keep it for themselves. The condition of the Helots was thus in some respects better than that of ordinary Greek slaves. But it was such as constantly to remind them that they had once been a free peasantry. It was this, as much per haps as positive ill-usage, which made it so peculiarly galling. The hatred of the Helots was a standing menace Character to the Spartan commonwealth. As Aristotle says, the Spartan kingship meant practically a life-tenure of the chief military command. The government was essentially | an official oligarchy, in which the power of the irresponsible ephors was not importantly modified by the gerousia, while the popular assembly played a part hardly more active than that of the Homeric agora, with its formal privilege of he social simple affirmation or veto. The military training, from lte a childhood upwards, to which the whole social life of Sparta ra^ was ma( ^ e subservient, was at Qrst a necessity; but it soon became thoroughly identified with the ambition and with the pride of an exclusive warrior-caste. Sparta was sharply marked off from the other Greek communities by this systematic treatment of war as the business of life. When the military prestige of Sparta began to decline in the course of the 4th century B.C., it was remarked that this was due to the increased attention which other states had begun to pay to the art of war, whereas in old days the Spartans had been like professional soldiers matched against civilians.
The mountain wall of Taygetus had set a barrier between Laconia and Messenia, which might have seemed to forbid the extension of Spartan power towards the west. If the Dorians in Messenia had fully preserved the warlike character of the race, they would probably have had little to fear. But they seem to have been in some measure enervated by the natural wealth of a country which, at the same time, excited the envy of their neighbours. Myths have grown thickly around the story of the two Messenian wars. This, at least, appears certain : the gradual con quest of Messenia by Sparta occupied not less than a hundred years (about 750-650 B.C.). The legend that, at j a critical time, the stirring war-songs of the Attic Tyrtaeus j raised the sinking spirit of Sparta, agrees with the j tradition of a long and doubtful struggle. Nor was the strife confined to the two chief combatants. Messenia was aided by other Peloponnesian states which dreaded a like fate for themselves, Argos, Sicyon, Arcadia. Sparta was helped by Elis and Corinth. When Messenia had been con quered and the Dorian inhabitants reduced to the state of Helots, Sparta had overcome the most difficult obstacle to her ambition. By conquests, of which the details are obscure, she won from Argolis a strip of territory on the eastern coast of the Peloponnesus, and finally carried her north-eastern border to Thyrea. In southern Arcadia alone the Spartan arms were decisively repulsed by Tegea ; and the Tegeans, accepting the supremacy of Sparta, were enrolled, about 560 B.C., as honoured allies of the power which they had checked.
The repulse warned Sparta that it was better to aim at leading the Peloponnesus than at conquering it ; and an opportunity was found of asserting this leadership in a manner far more effective than any military demonstration. At Olympia, in the valley through which the Alpheus passes to the western coast, there was an ancient sanctuary of the Pelasgian Zeus. An amphictyony, or league of neighbouring towns, held sacrifice and games there once in four years, the management of the festival being shared between Pisa and Elis. A dispute arose between these two states. Sparta confirmed Elis in the religious super intendence of the festival, and at the same time arrogated to herself the political headship of the sacred league. Every effort was now made by the Spartans to extend the popularity and enhance the brilliancy of the Olympic games. Sparta already supreme in Laconia and Mes senia, already the victorious rival of Argos in the east of the land now appears at the Olympian shrine of Zeus in a character peculiarly well adapted to attract the loyalty of the western Achseans. The general recognition of Sparta as the first state in the Peloponnesus may be said to date from the time when, under Spartan auspices, the Olympic festival acquired a new celebrity.
For political reasons Dorian Sparta had always cherished the traditions of the Achaean princes ; but the monarchy of the Achaean age, if it still existed anywhere, was a rare survival. The form of government which had generally succeeded to it was oligarchy, that is, the rule of a group of noble families claiming descent from the heroes, possessing certain religious rites in which no aliens parti cipated, and claiming to be, by a divine authority, the interpreters of the unwritten law. These noble families made up the state. The commons, who lived in or around the city as artisans, labourers, or farmers, were free men, but had no political rights. The Dorian ascendency in the Peloponnesus was peculiarly favourable to oligarchies. Sparta was, in fact, such an oligarchy, though not of the closest kind, the Dorian citizens being the privileged class, while the Periceci answered to the commons else where. It was a fortunate circumstance for the political development of Greece that oligarchy did not, as a rule, pass directly into democracy. A period of transition was needed, during which the people, hitherto debarred from all chance of political education, should learn the meaning of membership in the state.
This was afforded, at least in some measure, by that peculiar phase in the life of the Greek commonwealths which intervenes between oligarchy and democracy, the age of the tyrannies. A turannos meant one whose power is both superior and contrary to the laws. An absolute ruler is not a turannos if the constitution of the state gives him absolute power ; nor is a ruler unauthorized by the laws less a turannos because he rules mildly. The genesis of the tyrant was different in different cases. Most often he is a member of the privileged class, who comes forward as the champion of the people against his peers, overthrows the oligarchy with the help of the people, and establishes his own rule in its stead. Such was Pisistratus at Athens. Sometimes he is himself one of the people ; this was the case with Orthagoras, who (about 676 B.C.) overthrew the Dorian oligarchy at Sicyon. The case of Cypselus at Corinth is intermediate between these two ; for he belonged to a noble Dorian house, though not to the inner circle of those Bacchiadse whose rule he overthrew. Or the tyrant is one who raises himself to absolute power from the stepping-stone of some office with which the oligarchy itself had entrusted him. An example is supplied by Phalaris of Agrigentum, and by the tyrants of some Ionic cities in Asia Minor. Lastly, the tyrant might be a king who had overstepped his constitutional prerogative. Pheidon, king of Argos, is adduced by Aristotle as an instance of this rarer case. In all cases the tyrant properly so-called must be distinguished from a ruler whom a community has voluntarily placed above the law, either temporarily or for his life. Such was properly called an ​aisurnnetes or dictator, as Pittacus of Mitylene. The benefits conferred on the Greek commonwealths by the tyrannies were chiefly of two kinds. (1) The tyrant often instituted new religious festivals, in which the whole body of the citizens might take part. A feeling of civic unity Was thus created, which could not exist while the nobles formed a separate caste, as exclusive in their worship as in their other privileges. (2) The court of the tyrant became a centre to which poets and artists were attracted. Such a man as Periander of Corinth (625-585) might aim at resembling an Eastern despot, but his encourage ment of liberal arts must still have given an impulse to the higher civilization of Corinth. Polycrates of Samos, the friend of Anacreon, welcomed all men of fine gifts to his court ; Pisistratus showed a like care for poetry, and for the artistic embellishment of Athens. The root of evil in the tyranny was its unlawful origin, and its consequent reliance upon force, frequently leading the tyrant to aim at keeping the citizens in a state of helplessness and mutual mistrust. But the founder of a tyranny was usually a man with some inborn qualities for command, and the baser forms of oppression were not required until he had given place to a weaker successor.
The age of the oligarchies and tyrannies coincides with the most active period of Greek colonization, which re ceived an impulse both from redundant population and from political troubles at home. The two centuries from 750 to 550 B.C. saw most of the Greek colonies founded. Sicily received settlements from both the two great branches of the Greek race. Naxos, founded by the Chalcidians of Euboea (73-5 B.C.), with Leontini and Catana, founded soon afterwards by Naxos, formed a group of Ionic communities on the eastern side of the island. Syracuse, founded by Corinth (734 B.C.), Gela, colonized by Rhodians and Cretans (690 B.C.), and Agrigentum, of which Gela was the parent city (582 B.C.), were among the chief of the Dorian commonwealths on the south-eastern and south western coasts. These Siceliot cities formed a fringe round the Siceli and Sicani of the interior; but, though in the presence of non-Hellenic populations, they never lost among themselves the sharp distinction between Dorian and Ionian (or " Chalcidic "), a distinction which was long the key note to the inner history of the Siceliots. The earliest of the Greek settlements in Italy was the Ionic Cumae, on the coast near Cape Misenum, a little to the north-west of Naples, It was founded by Chalcidians of Eubcea, as early, according to the tradition, as 1050 B.C. The Dorian Tarentum, a colony of Sparta, and the Achaean (^Eolic) settlements of Sybaris and Croton, dated from the latter part of the 8th century B.C. Poseidouia (Paestum) was founded by Sybaris. Locri, an /Eolic settlement near Cape Zephyrium (whence its epithet " Epizephyrian "), and the Ionic Rhegium, founded from Chalcis, complete the series of flourishing cities which made south-western Italy appear as a new and richer land of the Hellenes, as Megale Hellas, Magna Grcecia. The turning-point in its prosperity was the war between the two foremost of the Achaean cities, ending in the destruction of Sybaris by Croton (510 B.C.). By this event, just at the time when the lonians of Asia Minor were passing under the sway of Persia, the Greeks of Italy were rendered less able to make head against the native tribes of the peninsula. The name Megale Hellas remained, but its old significance was gone; the spirit of confident progress had been quenched.
The distinctive character of Greek colonization is seen less vividly where, as in Sicily and Italy, Greek com munities clustered together, than at those lonely outposts of Hellenic life where a single city stood in barbarian lands. Massalia (Marseilles) was founded by the lonians of Phocaja about 600 B.C., and became the parent of colonies on the east coast of Spain. If Carthage had not fulfilled the purpose for which it was founded, by serving as the jealous guardian of Phoenician commerce in the western Mediter ranean, Greek settlements would probably have multiplied on those shores as rapidly as elsewhere. Cyrene, on the African coast, was a Dorian colony (630 B.C.) from Thera, itself colonized by Sparta, and became the founder of Barca. Corcyra was colonized by Corinth about 700 B.C., and joined with the mother-city in founding settlements (among others, Epklamnus) on the coast of Epirus. The northern shores of the yEgean and the Propontis were dotted with colonies, from the group of towns planted by Chalcis in the peninsula thence called Chalcidiee, to Byzan tium, which, like Selymbria, was founded by Megara (657 B.C.). Among the colonies on the western coast of Asia Minor, Miletus was especially active in creating other settlements, particularly for purposes of commerce. Nau- cratis, in the delta of the Nile, was a trading colony from Miletus, and flourished from 550 B.C. On the southern shores of the Propontis and the Euxine, Cyzicus and Sinope (itself the parent city of Trapezus) were daughters of Miletus. Here too were the remotest of Greek settle ments, Panticapseum (Kertch in the Crimea), afterwards the capital of the Greek kings of the Bosporus : Olbia (or Borysthenes) on the adjacent mainland ; and Istria, at the mouth of the Danube. The above enumeration, though not exhaustive, will serve to mark the wide extent of the area included by Greek colonization. As the city was the Nalur highest unit in the political conception of the Greeks, so ^ ie G each colony contained within itself the essentials of a com- colon J plete political life. Its relation to the parent-city was one of filial piety, not of constitutional dependence. In so far as the cult of the gods and heroes whom it worshipped was localized in the mother-country, it was needful that a link should exist between the religious rites of the colony and those of its parent ; and this religious continuity was symbolized by the sacred fire which the founder (OIKIO-TTJS) carried with him from the public hearth to the new settle ment. For the rest, Massalia and Olbia were cities of Hellas in as full sense as Athens or Sparta. It was due to the self-sufficing character (cu/rapKeia.) of the Hellenic city as such that Hellas was not a geographical expression.
When Attica first comes into the view of history, it already forms a single state of which Athens is the capital : the kingly period is over, and, though a close oligarchy still exists, there are signs of coming change. But the hints of poetical legend, and sometimes the surer evidence of the ground itself, enable us to go further back, and to form at least a general conception of earlier chapters in the story of the land. Of the three plains on the northern shore of the Saronic gulf, those of Megara, Eleusis, and Athens, the Attic plain is that which offered the greatest advantage to settlers. It is the most spacious; it is the best watered; it holds the most central position in the district which stretches south-east from the chains of Cithaeron and Parnes to the yEgean ; it has the best seaboard for navigation and commerce ; and it contains the best site for a city. Traces of early immigrants of various stocks survived in the names of places, in worships, and in legends. Eleusis, Pineus, Phaleron, are Minyan names ; the myths and cults tell also of Carians, Leleges, Cretans, Tyrrhenians. But the chief influence which came to Attica from beyond sea must have been that of the Phoenician settlement at Salamis (Salama, the place of peace), a name which, as in the Cyprian worship of Zeus Salaminios (Baal-Salam), points to the Phoenician effort to establish friendly intercourse between alien races. Herodotus (viii. 44) distinguishes four periods in the early history of Attica, with each of which he connects an appellative. Iii the first the inhabitants were " Pelasgoi called Kranaoi," in the ​second "Kekropidse," in ths third "Athenians," in the fourth "lonians." The extensive series of rock-dwellings found on the south and south-west of the Acropolis are, by the ingenious and probable conjecture of E. Curtius, connected with the first of these periods. This primitive Pelasgic settlement was the Rock-town (Kpavaai) its inhabitants were Kranaoi, the dwellers in the rocks. The second period was one in which the Acropolis became the seat of a small number of nobles, and of a princely family claiming descent from ths earth-born Cecrops. The cita del becomes the centre of religious and political life ; beneath it dwell Pelasgic bondmen, who work for the Cacropidie as the Cyclopes worked for the Perseiclaa at Argos. The city of the Cecropidse no longer of the Kranaoi becomes the head of the twelve cities among which the Attic land was divided. As the leading families are drawn towards the Cecropid city, rivalries ensue, which are mythically represented by the strife of rival gods on the Acropolis. Ze 1 ^, the Pelasgic god, has priority of possession. But his honours are disputed by Poseidon, the deity of the Thracians settled on the gulf of Salamis, and of their priestly clan, the Eumolpidct?. The third claimant is Athena, the divinity of a race possessing a higher culture, the giver of the olive to the land. The final victory falls to Atheua. But Zeus keeps the place of honour as protector of the whole community, Polieus ; and Athena shares her sanctuary with Poseidon. The mythical Erechtheus, representing at once the ancient Poseidon and the nursling of Athena, is the symbol of the victory and the conciliation. This is the third period of Herodotus ; "Erechtheus having succeeded to power," the Cecropid^e become Athenians. The fourth and last period is that in which Ionian settlers press forward from their earlier seat on the bay of Marathon, and establish themselves not without opposition on the banks of the Ilissus. The wor ship of the Ionian Apollo takes its place beside that of Zeus and Athena. The Ionic settlement on the Ilissus was in cluded in an enlarged Athens, and the close of the epoch was marked by that union (a-vvouaa) of Attica into a single state which Attic tradition ascribed to the hero king Theseus.
The light soil of Attica had protected it from such wholesale changes of population as had passed over Thessaly, Bœotia, and ths Peloponnesus. In contrast with the occupiers of those lands the Attic population claimed to be indigenous ; and the claim was true in this sense that the basis of tha population was an element which had been there from prehistoric times. On ths other hand the maritime advantages of Attica had been sufficient to attract foreign immigrants. Thus in Attica no one type of life and character prevailed to the sam3 extent as^the Dorian in the Peloponnesus or the ^Eolian in Boeotirt. The Ionian element was tempered by others older than itself. This fact is the key to that equable and harmonious development which so remarkably distinguished the Attic people alike in culture and in politics. The institutions which are found existing in Attica in the 7th century B.C. may be regarded as dating from the age which tradition called that of Theseus, the age, namely, in which the loose canton- system of Attica was knit together into a single state. The Jlasses. inhabitants of Attica form three classes, the Eupatridic or nobles ; the Geomori, free husbandmen ; and the Demiurgi, or handicraftsmen. The government was wholly in the hands of the Eupatridae, who alone were citizens in the proper sense. The Eupatrid order was divided into four tribes, called after the sons of Ion, Geleon, Hoples, jEgicoreus, Argadeus. Each tribe contained three plira- triai or clans, and each clan thirty gene or houses. The members of each clan were united by the worship of an heroic ancestor, and all the clans were bound together by the common worship of Zeus Herkeios and Apollo Patrous.
The transition from monarchy to oligarchy was more gradual at Athens than it seems to have been elsewhere. First, the priestly office of the king was taken away ; and, as the old name basil ens implied religious as well as civil authority, he was henceforth called simply the ruler, archon. But tlv3 office of archon was still held for life, and was hereditary. The second step was to appoint the archon for ten years only. The third and last step was to divide the old regal power among nine archons appointed annually (633 B.C.). The first archon, called Eponymos, because his name marked the date of official documents, had a general supervision of affairs, and in particular re presented the state as the guardian of orphans and minors; the second archon was high priest (basileus); the third was commander-in-chief (polemarch) ; the remaining six were the custodians of the laws (" thesmothetse "). After this reform, two events are the chief landmarks of Attic history before Solon. The first is the legislation of Draco, the second is the revolution of Cylon. Hitherto the Eupatridae had been the depositaries and sole interpreters of an un written law. Draco, himself a Eupatrid, was now com missioned, not to frame a new code, but to write down the laws as they existed in oral tradition. To a later age the laws of Draco became a proverb of severity ; but their severity was that of the rude age from which they had come down, not of the man who was employed to tabulate them. By this code (020 B.C.), and by the establishment of a court of fifty-one judges (e&lt;eVai) in capital cases, the people were so far secured against abuse of the judicial office. But the existence of serious popular discontent a few years later is shown by the attempt of Cylon (G12 B.C.). Stimulated by the example of his father-in-law, Theagenes, the tyrant of Megara, he resolved to seize the supreme power at Athens. Promises of relief and of a new agrarian law gained him adherents among the distressed classes; but when he had succeeded in seizing the Acropolis, he found himself disappointed of popular support and surrounded by the troops of the archons. He escaped. His partisans surrendered, on the promise of the archon Megacles that their lives should be spared; but, when they had left the altars, they were cut down. The " Cylonian crime " was denounced by the people as having brought a pollution upon the city, and the punishment of the whole clan of the Alcmreonida) to which Megacles belonged was de manded as an expiation. The Eupatridae refused to yield, until Solon, one of their order, prevailed on the Alcmaionidrc to stand a trial before three hundred of their peers. They were found guilty of sacrilege, and were banished.
Solon was now to come forward as the umpire of still graver issues. The influence of his ardent and lofty nature on the people is expressed in the legend that his recitation of his elegy, " Salamis," fired them to strike the blow by which "the fair island" was won back from the Megarians. The part which he had taken in the Alcmoeonid affair was well fitted to make him trusted both by the nobles and by the people. His legislation had a twofold scope. In the first place he aimed at giving immediate relief to a class whose plight was desperate. As there was little money in the land, those in whose hands it was had been able to force up the rate of interest as they pleased. The small farmers (geomori) were being crushed out of existence by a load of debt, mortgaging their farms to their creditors, who, in default of land, could even sell the debtor as a slave. Solon depreciated the value of the silver drachma by 27 per cent., so that a debt of 100 old drachmas could be paid with 73 ; debts to the state were cancelled altogether. In a fine iambic fragment, Solon calls as witness of his work " the greatest of Olympian deities, the black earth, wherefrom I took up of yore the pillars that had been set in many a place," these (opoi) being the stones ​that marked a mortgaged homestead. Secondly, Solon aimed at establishing a permanent equilibrium between classes. He classed the citizens by their rated property as (1) Pentakosio-medimnoi, (2) Hippeis, (3) Zeugitai, (4) Thetes. The first class alone could hold the archonship ; the fourth had no political privilege except that of voting in the assembly. But Solon made the assembly (eK/cA??&lt;na) what it had never before been, a real power. He gave to it (1) the right of passing laws, (2) the right of calling magistrates to account, (3) the right of electing archons. At the same time he created a council of fouv hundred, to be elected annually by the people, through which all business should be introduced to the assembly. He strengthened the old Eupatrid Areopagus, by adding to its jurisdiction in homicide a general power of moral censor ship, and provided that the archons of each year should, if found worthy, pass at the end of it into this senate. Athenians of a later age often described Solon as the founder of the democracy. This was not his own concep tion of his work. We have his own description of it : " I gave the people as much strength as is enough, without taking away from their due share (rt/x^s), or adding thereto. But as for those who had power and the splendour of riches, to them also I gave counsel, even that they should not uphold violence. And I stood with my strong shield spread over both, and suffered neither to prevail by wrong." Solon was not a champion of popular rights, but a philo sophic mediator between classes.
The removal of the urgent pressure of usury, the sub stitution of wealth for birth as the canon of privilege, and the bestowal of strictly limited political power on the people were Solon s achievements. It is no proof of their inadequacy that they were soon followed by the appearance of a successful demagogue. The Attic population was locally divided into three classes, the Diacrii or the " highlanders " of the north-east district (the poorest) ; the Parali, the boatmen and fishermen of the coast ; and the " Pedieis," the richer farmers of the Attic plain. Each of these classes formed a political faction, with an ambitious noble at its head. The Diacrii were led by Pisistratus, the Parali by Megacles, the Pedieis by Lycurgus. On the pretence that he had been murderously assaulted by the enemies of the people, Pisistratus obtained a guard of 50 men. It was presently increased to 400. He then seized tha Acropolis (560 B.C). After having been twice driven out by the combined factions of the Plain and the Shore, he finally established himself as tyrant in 545 B.C., and reigned till his death in 527 B.C. He did not abolish Solon s con stitution, though he reserved some of the higher offices for members of his own house. His government appears to have been mild and wise. He set the example of submis sion to the laws. By many new enactments he promoted good order and morality. The convenience of the citizens and the beauty of Athens were consulted by the construc tion of new buildings, roads, and aqueducts. There were but two things to remind Athenians that this paternal rule had been founded in force, the presence of hired troops, and the levy of tithes on private lands. Pisistratus was suc ceeded by his eldest son Hippias. In 514 B.C. Hipparchus, the brother of Hippias, was murdered by Harmodius and Aristogiton, in revenge for an affront offered to the sister of Harmodius. The rule of Hippias, which had hitherto resembled that of his father, now became cruel. The Alcmceonidre who had been in banishment since the final return of Pisistratus in 545 had won the favour of the Delphic priesthood by an act of liberality. The temple at Delphi having been burned down, they had undertaken to rebuild it, and, instead of common limestone, which would have satisfied the contract, used Parian marble for the east eide of the temple. They now exerted their influence. Whenever Sparta or a Spartan consulted the oracle, the response always included a command to set Athens free. At last Cleomenes, king of Sparta, took the field. The children of Hippias fell into his hands, and, to save them, Hippias voluntarily withdrew from Athens (510 B.C.). The End c rule of the Pisistratid house was now at an end. In the Pisist phrase of the song which gave ill-merited glory to Harmo- titl ru dius and Aristogiton, Athens was once more under equal laws.
But there was a vehement strife of factions. The Eupatrid party, under Isagoras, wished to restore the aris tocracy of pre-Solonian days. The party of popular rights was supported by the Alcmseonidae, and led by Clisthenes, whose father, Megacles, had married the daughter of Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon. Clisthenes, in the words Refor of Herodotus, took the people into partnership, and by ot Cli his reforms became the real founder of the democracy. thenei Abolishing the four Ionic tribes, which had included the Eupatridse, he instituted ten new tribes, which included all The t the free inhabitants of Attica. Each tribe was composed tribes of several denies (townships) not adjacent to each other, thus securing that the old clans should be thoroughly broken up among the new tribes. The number of the Council (Boole) was raised from 400 to 500, 50 members The being elected from each of the ten new tribes. Further, it Coutu was arranged that each tribal contingent of 50 should take it in turn to act as a committee (Trpuravets) of the council, a board of presidents (irpoeSpot), and the chairman of the day, being again chosen in rotation from the committee. A new office was also instituted. The command of the army was given to a board of ten Generals (strategi), one being Genei elected by each of the tribes. In later times the strategi became ministers of foreign affairs. Jury courts of citizens were organized out of the assembly, to share the adminis- Jury- tration of justice, which had hitherto belonged to the court! archons and the Areopagus. As a safeguard for the state against party struggles, it was provided that, if the Council Ostra and the Ecclesia should declare the commonwealth to be in cism. danger, each citizen might be summoned to indicate by ballot the name of any man whom he thought dangerous, and that, if the same name was written on 6000 tickets (oo-T/aaKct), the man so indicated should go into exile for ten years, without, however, losing his civic rights or his pro perty. This was the institution of ostracism. Finally, choice by lot was substituted for voting in the election to the archonship, thus diminishing the danger of factious partisanship.
Isagoras, the leader of the party opposed to these reforms, had a zealous ally in Cleomenes, king of Sparta, Clisthenes, they alleged, was aiming at a tyranny such as that of his grandfather and namesake at Sicyon. Sparta, the leading Dorian state, was in a manner the recognized champion of aristocracy against revolution. The Spartan herald summoned the Athenians to banish the accursed Alcmseonidse, and Clisthenes voluntarily left Attica. Cleomenes arrived at Athens with his army. Isagoras was made archon ; seven hundred " democratic " families were banished ; the newly constituted Council of five hundred was dissolved. But now the people rose in arms. Cleomenes and Isagoras were besieged on the Acropolis. On the third day of the siege they surrendered. Cleomenes and his troops were allowed to withdraw. Isagoras escaped, but his Athenian adherents were put to death. Clisthenes now returned to Athens. He seems, however, to have excited popular indignation by promoting a treaty with Persia, by which the supremacy of the Persian king was acknowledged. He thus lent colour to the accusation of his enemies that he was aiming at a tyranny ; and he was banished. Cleomenes presently invaded Attica a second time, with the Peloponnesian allies. But the other Spartan ​king, Demaratus, was opposed to his designs. The Corin thians refused to follow him, and his army broke up when it had advanced no further than Eleusis. Meanwhile the Thebans and the Chalcidians of Euboea had been induced to take up arms against Athens. Freed from the danger of the Peloponnesian invasion, the Athenians marched against the Thebans. They found them on the shore of ths Euripus, and routed them. Crossing the strait into Euboea, they defeated the Chalcidians on the same day. The lands of the Chalcidian knights (Hippobotae) were divided in equal lots among four thousand Athenians, who occupied them, not as colonists forming a new city, but as non-resident citizens of Athens. This was the first kleru- chia. The Spartans, incited by Cleomenes, now made a final effort to repress the democratic strength of Athens. Hippias was invited from his retreat on the Hellespont to Lacedaemon, and a Peloponnesian congress was convened at Sparta to discuss a project for restoring him to Athens as tyrant. The representative of Corinth urged that it would be shameful if Sparta, the enemy of tyrannies, should help to set up a new one. The congress was of his mind. The scheme failed, and Hippias went back to Sigeum.
Jn these five years (510-505) which followed the fall of the Pisistratidte the future of Athens was decided. Athens had become a free commonwealth, in which class grievances no longer hindered the citizens from acting together with vigorous spirit. The results were soon to appear in work done by the "Athenians, not for Athens only, but for all Greece.
The time was now drawing near when Greece was to sustain its first historical conflict with the barbarian world. There was not, in the modern sense, an Hellenic nation. But there were common elements of religion, manners, and culture, which together constituted an Hellenic civilization, and were the basis of a common Hellenic character. The Graikoi of Epirus, united in the worship of the Pelasgian Zeus, had become the Hellenes of Thessaly, united in the worship of Apollo. The shrine of Delphi, at first the centre of the most important amphictyony, had now become the religious centre of all Hellas. It was acknowledged as such by foreigners, by the kings of Phrygia and Lydia in the east, by the Etruscan Tarquinii in the west, as after wards by the Roman republic. In political matters also Delphi was a common centre for the Greek states, mediat ing or advising in feuds between factions or cities, and giving the final sanction to constitutional changes. A sense of Hellenic unity was further promoted by the great festivals. It has already been seen how Sparta lent new brilliancy to the gatherings at Olympia. The Pythian fes tival was revived with a fresh lustre after the first Sacred War (595-585), in which Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, and his allies destroyed Crisa, the foe of Delphi. A little later two other festivals were established, the Isthmian and the Nemean, at about the time when the tyranny of the Cypselid;e was overthrown at Corinth, and that of the Orthagoridae at Sicyon. The games of Nemea and of the Isthmus were new assertions of the Dorian sentiment which was so strongly opposed to tyrannies, and they exemplify the manner in which such festivals were fitted to express and strengthen national sympathy. In the gradual growth, too, of Hellenic art, with a stamp of its own distinct from that of Assyria, Babylon, Phoenicia, or Egypt, the Greeks found a bond of union, and the temples were centres at which the growth of such an art was encouraged and recorded. Above all, the Homeric poetry, in which the legends of the heroic age took a form that appealed to every branch of the Greek race, was a witness to the contrast between Greek and barbarian. It was the interpretation of this contrast which made Homer so peculiarly the national poet. Still the unity of Greece had hitherto been little more than an ideal. The only great enterprise in which Greeks had made common cause against barbarians belonged to legend. The first historical event in which the unity of Greece found active expression was the struggle with Persia.
III. The Ionic Revolt and the Persian Wars, 502-479 B.C.
The twelve Ionian cities on the western coast of Asia Minor formed a community which kept itself thoroughly distinct from the vEolian colonists to the north and the Dorians to the south. The Pan-Ionic festivals preserved the memory of the common descent. The Ionian life and culture had a character of its own. But the Ionian cities The had no political cohesion, nor had they any recognized Ionian leader. One after another they became tributary to the Clties kings of Lydia. The process of subjugation commenced at the time when the Lydian dynasty of the Mermnadae (about 716 B.C.) began to make themselves independent of Assyria. It was completed by Crcesus, to whom, about 550 B.C., all the Ionian cities had became subject. Crcesus under was friendly to the Greeks : he respected their religion, Lydia and enriched its shrines ; he welcomed distinguished Greeks to Sardis. All that was exacted from the lonians by Crcesus was that they should acknowledge him as their suzerain, and pay a fixed tribute. The Persians, under Cyrus, defeated Croesus and conquered Lydia about 547 B.C. The whole coast-line of Asia Minor was afterwards reduced by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus. The Persians, muler zealous monotheists, destroyed the Greek temples. But it Persia was not till the reign of Darius, who succeeded Cambyses in 521 B.C : , that the lonians felt the whole weight of the Persian yoke. Darius, the able organizer of the Persian empire, preferred that each Ionian city should be ruled by one man whom he could trust. He therefore gave system atic support to tyrannies.
It is characteristic of the political condition of Ionia that ^he i, the revolt was not a popular movement, but was the work revolt. of two men, each of whom had private ends to serve. Ilistiaeus, tyrant of Miletus, had rendered a vital service to Darius during his Scythian expedition (510 B.C.) by dissuading the other Greek leaders from breaking down the bridge over the Danube, which secured the retreat of the Persian army. Having been rewarded with a principality in Thrace, he presently became suspected of ambitious designs. Darius sent for him to Susa, and detained him there on the pretext that he could not live without his friend. Meanwhile Aristagoras, the son-in-law of Histianis, ruled at Miletus. In 502 Aristagoras undertook to restore the exiled oligarchs of Naxos, and for this purpose obtained 200 Persian ships from Artaphernes, the satrap of western Asia Minor. The enterprise miscarried. Aristagoras, dreading the anger of Artaphernes, now began to meditate revolt. He was encouraged by secret messages from Histiseus, who hoped to escape from Susa by being sent to suppress the rising. Aristagoras laid down his tyranny, and called on the people of Miletus to throw off the Persian yoke. The other Ionian cities followed the example. They deposed their tyrants and declared themselves free. The ^Eolian and Dorian settlements made common cause with them. Cyprus also joined in the revolt (500 B.C.). Aristagoras next sought aid beyond the ^Egean. Sparta held aloof, but five ships were sent by the Eretrians, and twenty by the Athenians. The united Greek force surprised Sardis, and set fire to it, but was presently driven back to the coast. The Athenians then went home. Darius was deeply incensed by this outrage. The whole Persian force was brought to bear on Ionia, and Miletus was invested by land and sea. In a sea fight off Lade, an island near Miletus, the lonians were decisively defeated by a Persian fleet of nearly twice their number, ​partly through the shameful desertion of the Samians and Lesbians during the battle (496 B.C.). The Persians soon afterwards took Miletus by storm (495 B.C.). The Greek cities of the Asiatic sea board and of the Thracian Cher sonese successively fell before them.
But the vengeance of Darius was not yet complete. He could not forget that Greeks from beyond the sea had helped to barn Sardis, and he resolved that the punishment of Athens and Eretria should be as signal as that of his own vassals in Ionia. A Persian army, under Mardonius, crossed the Hellespont and advanced through Thrace. But the Persian fleet which accompanied it was shattered by a storm in rounding Mount Athos. The progress of Mar donius was also checked by the Thracians, and he retreated to Asia.
The ambition of Mardonius had been to bring all European Hellas under the rule of the Achsemenidaa. The second Persian expedition, guided by more cautious counsel, had a narrower scope. It was directed strictly against those states which the great king had vowed to punish. The intrigues of the Pisistratidse were busy in promoting it, and Hippias was to lend his personal guidance to its leaders. But before the new force set out Persian agents were sent through Greece to demand the symbols of sub mission from the cities. Most of the islands feared to re fuse, ^Egina, now a prosperous maritime power, complied from another motive than fear. Even Persia was welcome to her as an ally against Athens. The Athenians called upon Sparta, whom they thus recognised as the head of Greece, to punish this treason to the Hellenic cause ; and Cleo- menes, after overcoming the opposition of his royal col league, Demaratus, took an arbitrary revenge on the vEginetans by depositing ten men of their chief families in the hands of the Athenians.
In 490 B.C. the second Persian expedition crossed the ./Egean under the command of Datis and Artaphernes. Naxos was sacked, Eretria was betrayed. It seemed hardly doubtful that Athens too must fall. The Persians landed in the bay of Marathon, enclosed by the spurs of Brilessus (Pentelicuss) and the hills of the Diacria. They thus avoided the dangers of a voyage round a rocky coast ; and no part of Attica, Hippias told them, was so favourable to cavalry, The Athenians had sent for help to Sparta; but a religious scruple forbade the Spartans to march before the time of the full moon. Nine thousand Athenian citizens, with the slaves who carried their shields, went forth to meet the Persians at Marathon, On the way they were joined by a thousand Plataeans, the whole force of that city, who came to stand by their old protectors. Miltiades, formerly the ruler of the Chersonese, was one of the ten Athenian generals. Five of these voted for awaiting Spartan help. The other five, led by Miltiades, were for giving battle at once ; and the vote of the polemarch, Callimachus, turned the scale in their favour. The Greeks charged down from the hillside upon the Persians. The Greek centre was driven in, but the Greek wings prevailed, and then closed upon the Persian centre. The Persians fled to their ships. Six thousand Persians fell. The Greek loss was about 192. Believing that traitors at Athens had signalled to the Persians to surprise the city while undefended, the army hastened back, The Persian fleet soon approached, but seeing troops on the shore, sailed away for Asia.
After the victory of Marathon Miltiades was all-power ful at Athens. He asked the people to give him a fleet, in order that he might strike another blow at Persia while the effects of Marathon were fresh. His demand was granted. But he employed the fleet in an attempt to wreak a private grudge on the island of Paros. At the end of twenty-six days he returned to Athens baffled, and suffering from a wound.,in the thigh. He was indicted for having deceived the people, and was sentenced to a fine of about 12,000. Being unable to pay it, he was disfran chised as a public debtor. His wound mortified, and he died, leaving debt and dishonour to his son Cimon. Aristides was now the most influential man at Athens, as Themistoclea was the ablest. Themistocles foresaw that the Persians would return, and that Athens could resist them only on the sea. He aimed therefore at creating an Athenian navy. Already (491 B.C.) he had persuaded the Athenians to set about fortifying the peninsula of the Piraeus, which, with its three harbours commanded by the height of Munychia, offered greater advantages thai) the open roadstead of Phalerum. He now urged that the revenues from the silver mines of Laurium should be applied to building a fleet. The frequent hostilities between Athens and ^Egina enforced the advice. Before 480 B.C. Athens had acquired 200 triremes. Aristides was at the head of a party who viewed this movement with alarm. Had not the naval empire of Miletus, Chios, and Samos been transient? The land-holding citizens who had fought at Marathon would give place to a mob of sailors and traders. An unstable democracy would carry the state out of the ancient ways. The strife of parties came to an issue. An ostracism was held, and Aristides was banished, probably in 484 or 483 B.C. Themistocles remained the leader of Athens in the new path which he himself had opened. Athens was now the first maritime power of Greece.
The repulse at Marathon had probably not prevented the Persian commanders from representing their expedition as in a great measure successful. Darius resolved on the complete subjugation of Greece. But, when vast prepara tions had been in progress for three years, he died, leaving the throne to Xerxes, the eldest of his four sons by Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus (485 B.C.). Xerxes was not, like his father, a born ruler or a trained warrior. But he was profoundly convinced that all human beings were the natural slaves of the Persian king ; and he was influenced by a strong war-party in the palace, with Atossa and Mardonius at its head. The house of Pisistratus, the ambitious Aleuadas of Thessaly, and Demaratus, the exiled king of Sparta, united in urging an invasion of Greece. It was in vain that Artabanus, the uncle of the king, argued on behalf of the moderate party at the court. Orders were given to raise such an armament as the world had never seen, a host which should display the whole resources of the empire from the Indus to the .^Egean, from the Danube to the Nile. Forty-six nations were represented by the forces which wintered at Sardis in 481 B.C. A fleet of 1200 triremes, and about 3000 transports and smaller craft, assembled near Cyme and Phocsea on the Ionian coast. In the spring of 480 B.C. Xerxes led about a million of men to the Hellespont, whither the fleet went before to meet them.
Greece was probably never stronger than it was at this time. The population of the Peloponnesus may have been about two millions. Athens, according to Herodotus, had 30,000 citizens. The Boeotian towns and the islands were prosperous. The proportion of slaves to freemen varied from perhaps four to one at Athens to as much as ten to one at Corinth or yEgina. Life was still simple and vigorous. Society was not divided into rich classes enervated by luxury and poor classes enfeebled by want. The public pahestras were schools of physical training for war. But that which Greece lacked was political unity. Aristocracy and democracy were already rival forces. Everywhere the aristocrats felt that a victory over Persia must have a national character, and must so far be a victory for the people. They inclined therefore to the Persian cause ; and the stand in defence of Greece was ​eventually made by a few states only. Sparta, as the lead ing city of Greece, took the first step towards the forma tion of a national party, by convening a congress at the isthmus of Corinth in the autumn of 481. Here Them- istocles showed his statesmanship by prevailing on the Athenians to abstain from disputing the hegemony of Sparta. Most of the Peloponnesian cities were represented at the congress. But Argos and Achaia, jealous of Sparta, held aloof. In Boeotia, Thebes, the enemy of Athens, favoured Persia. In Thessaly the dynasty of the Aleuadse were the active allies of the invader. Gelon of Syracuse refused to aid unless he were to lead. The Corcyreans promised sixty ships, but did not send them. Crete also failed to help. The states which fought against Persia were then these only, Sparta with her Pelopon nesian allies, Athens, ^Egiua, Megara, Plataea, Thespian. This national league expressed indeed the principle of Greek unity, but Greece was far from being united. The "medizing" party was strong, and it counted some adher ents in many even of the patriotic cities. Wherever democracy had enemies Persia had friends.
The first idea of the national defence was to arrest the torrent of invasion at some northerly point which could be held against great numerical odds. Tempe proving unten able, it was resolved to makfi a stand at Thermopylae. When Leonidas had fallen with his 300 Spartans and the 700 Thespians who shared their heroic death, the next ob ject of the Peloponnesian allies was to guard the isthmus hens, of Corinth. The peculiar misfortune of Athens in the war was her position between two gates, the first of which had been forced by the enemy. The Greek leaders seem to have assumed at first that it was vain to oppose the Persian land forces in an open field. Xerxes occupied Athens, and the flames which destroyed its houses and temples at last avenged the burning of Sardis. The Greek ships, which had gained some advantage over the Persian fleet at Artemisium in the northern waters of the Euboean strait, had moved to Salamis as soon as it was known that the Persians had passed Thermopylae. The homeless popula tion of Athens had been conveyed to Salamis, ^gina, and Trcezen before the arrival of Xerxes. And now the fore cast of Themistocles was verified. Athens, and Greece itself, were saved chiefly by the Athenian ships, 200 in number out of a total of 366. The Peloponnesian leaders wished to withdraw the fleet to the isthmus. Themistocles saw that if it left Salamis it would disperse. He sent word to Xerxes that the Greeks meditated escape. The Persian fleet surrounded them in the night. Next day the tie of battle of Salamis was fought. Of 1000 Persian ships, 200 imis. were destroyed ; the rest fled. It was on the same day that Gelon of Syracuse defeated the Carthaginians at Himera in Sicily (480 B.C.). Xerxes lost heart and re treated to Asia, leaving Mardonius with 300,000 men to finish the war. In the summer of 479 Athens was again occupied and destroyed by the Persians. Now at length Sparta came to the rescue. Pausanias, the guardian of the young son of Leonidas, led 110,000 of the allies into Boeotia, and utterly defeated the army of Mardonius near Plataea (479 B.C.). On the same day the troops of the Greek fleet defeated those of the Persian fleet in a battle on the shore at Mycale near Miletus. This victory set Ionia free from Persia.
The Persian wars had revealed both the weakness and the strength of Greece. The hereditary aristocracy of Thessaly had shown that they were eager to establish the supremacy of their house with the help of Asiatic despotism. Such states as Argos and Thebes had not been ashamed to indulge jealousy and party spirit by betrayal of the com mon cause. Even Sparta and the Peloponnesian allies had been disposed to confine their endeavours to the defence of their own peninsula, leaving Athens and the northern cities to their fate. On the other hand the struggle had brought into strong relief the contrast between absolute monarchy and constitutional freedom. This appeared in two things : the Greek strategy was superior ; and the Greek troops fought better. Athens, in particular, had shown how both the intelligence and the spirit of citizens are raised by equal laws. The mistakes of the invaders, which, to a Greek mind, might well have seemed the work of Ate, were such as are natural when a vast force is directed by the intemperance of a single will. Artemisia, and Demaratus advised Xerxes to occupy Cythera. The Thebans advised Mardonius to sow dissension among the Greeks by means of bribes. Both counsels were judicious, and both were neglected. Time is, in war, the surest ally of superior numbers and resources ; but the impatience of the Persian commanders staked everything on a few pitched battles. Again, the Persians, unlike the Lydians of old, destroyed the Greek temples. They thus conferred an immense moral advantage on their antagonist. He could no longer doubt that he was helped by his gods.
IV. The Period of Athenian Supremacy, 478-404 B.C.
In the space from the Persian to the Peloponnesian War the central interest belongs to Athens. The growth of Athenian empire, the successive phases through which it passed, and its influence on the rest of Greece, the inner development of Athenian life, political, intellectual, social, these are the salient features in a period of about fifty years. The first care of Themistocles after the repulse of the Persian invasion was to restore the fortifications of Athens. The jealous interference of Sparta, instigated by ^Egina and Corinth, was defeated by his ingenuity. A wall of larger circuit than the old one was built round Athens, and a strong wall was also carried round the Piraeus. The Persians had been driven out of Ionia, but they still held many places on the Thracian and Asiatic coasts. The Spartan Pausanias, commanding the Greek fleet, took Byzantium from the Persians in 478. He now formed the design of making himself a despot, and his adoption of the manners of a Persian grandee became so offensive to the Greek captains that they requested the Athenian commanders to assume the leadership of the fleet. Pausanias was recalled to Sparta, and his successor found that the hegemony had already changed hands. The league, of which Athens now became the head (477 B.C.), was intended to continue the national defence against Persia. Its special purpose was to guard the vEgean. Aristides was chosen to assess the rate of contribution for the members. The representatives of the several cities met at the temple of Apollo in Delos, where the common fund was also deposited. Hence the league was called the Confederacy of Delos. It was only gradually that this free confederacy, with Athens for a president, passed into an Athenian empire over tributary cities. At first each city contributed ships to the common fleet. But the practice arose of allowing some cities to contribute money instead of ships. A city which did this had no control over Athens, and no protection against attack. One after another of the discontented allies revolted from Athens, and was forcibly reduced to the condition of a subject. Naxoe was the earliest example (466 B.C.) ; Thasos was the next (465 B.C.); and as early as 449 B.C. only three insular allies remained free, Samos, Lesbos, and Chios. The transfer of the common fund from Delos to Athens (about 459 B.C.) was merely the outward sign of a change in which most members of the original league had already been compelled to acquiesce. In the earlier years of the Confederacy the work for which it had been formed was not neglected. Of the successes gained against Persia the ​most notable was the victory of Cimon over the Persians, both by land and by sea, at the mouth of Eurymedon (466 B.C.). But, as Athens assumed more and more distinctly an imperial character, the common fund came to be regarded as a tribute which could be applied to exclusively Athenian objects. This was the grievance which made the very name of the " tribute " (&lt;/&gt;opos) so hateful.
The years 457-455 B.C. may be taken as marking the greatest extension of the Athenian empire. It was in 457 victory at (Enophyta in Boaotia, following on their defeat at Tanagra, enabled the Athenians to break up for a time the oligarchical league over which Thebes presided. Democracies were established in the Bceotian towns, and Athens was virtually supreme, not only in Bceotia, but also in Phocis and Locris. In 455, after a struggle of some years, Athens conquered ^Egina. But now the tide began to turn. In 453 the defeat of the Athenians at Coronea destroyed the power of Athens in Boeotia, Phocis, and Locris. Oligarchies were restored. First Euboea and then Megara revolted from Athens. The Spartans, released from a truce of tive years (452-447), invaded Attica. They advanced, however, no farther than the Thriasian plain ; and it was believed that their leader, the king Pleistoanax, had taken Athenian bribes. Freed from this danger, Pericles was enabled to reduce Eubcea. rhirty But the dream of an Athenian land-empire was over. In Fears 445 a truca for thirty years was concluded between Athens ["nice. an( j Sp ar ta. Athens gave up all dependencies on the mainland of Greece. Henceforth the Athenian empire was to be maritime only. Between the conclusion of the Thirty Years Truce and the events which led to the Peloponnesian War the most important incidents were first, the revolt of Samos and its reduction by Athens (440 B.C.) ; next, the foundation by Athens of two settlements, Thurii, on the site of Sybaris in southern Italy, and Amphipolis, on the Strymon, in Thrace.
Meanwhile the inner political life of Athens had passed through great changes. Soon after the Persian wars, the fourth or poorest class of the Solonian timocracy had been made eligible to the archonship. This was done on the proposal of Aristides himself. The maritime population of the Piraeus was now large, and it had become impossible to exclude the main body of the citizens from the chief offices of the state. The development of Athenian demo cracy had been secured by that loyal unity of civic action and feeling which the Persian wars had produced. Them- istocles, whose policy had been the source of those new im pulses, did not remain to direct them ; lie was accused of complicity in the Persian intrigues of Pausanias, and ostra cized (about 471 B.C.). Aristides died in 468. Cimon, the son of Miltiades, was now at the head of a conservative party. The other party, which was rather progressive than properly democratic, was led by Pericles, an Alcmaeonid, and Ephialtes. A blow was dealt to the influence of Cimon and his party when the Spartans insultingly dis missed an Athenian force which had marched, under Cimon, to help them in reducing the insurgent Helots on Mount Ithome (464 B.C.). Soon afterwards some important re forms were proposed and carried by Ephialtes. The powers of the Areopagus were diminished. Probably it lost its general censorial power and its veto upon legislation, re taining its jurisdiction in homicide. The archons and generals were deprived of their discretionary judicial powers. Henceforth the people was to be the final judge both in criminal and in civil causes. The juries chosen from the Heliaea were now organized as a permanent system of courts, every juror receiving a fee from the state for each day of his attendance. Cimon was ostracized ; and the exasperation of the conservative party was shown by the assassination of Ephialtes (457 B.C.). Cinion was succeeded in the leadership by his kinsman Thucydides, son of Melesias ; and when, in 443 B.C., Thucydides also was ostracized, there was no longer any disciplined resistance to the policy of Pericles. Athens was now strengthened and embellished by a series of public works. Already in PuW 457-456 two long walls had been built, one from Athens wor k to Phalerum, the other from Athens to the Piraeus ; and about 445 a third or intermediate wall, parallel to the latter, was built on the proposal of Pericles. The Odeion, a theatre for musical performances, arose on the east side of the theatre of Dionysus, under the Acropolis. On the Acropolis itself the Erectheion, the shrine of Athene Polias, which had been burned by the Persians, was rebuilt on a greater scale ; and the Parthenon, the magnificent temple of the Virgin Athene, containing the chryselephantine statue of the goddess by Phidias, was constructed under his superintendence from the plans of Ictinus and Calli- crates (438 B.C.). The Propylaea or portals, forming a colon naded entrance to the Acropolis on the western side, were completed a few years later.
The period known as "the age of Pericles" may be roughly defined as the years from 460 to 430 B.C. The idea which pervades the whole work of Pericles is that the Athenian people, having been called upon by circumstances to rule over a wide alliance, must be trained to rule worthily. Pericles was opposed to extending the empire of Athens ; but he was resolved to hold it, because he saw the danger of giving it up. And, in order that it should be held securely, he saw that the people must be educated, first, politically, by constitutional freedom, and next, intellectually and socially, by general cultiva tion. The theoricon, or money given to the citizen to- pay for his seat at the theatre, was doubtless a party expedient, like the pay provided for the juror and for the citizen-soldier ; it belonged to a plan for breaking the ex clusive power of wealth. But it also fitted into the system by which Pericles sought to bring the citizens collectively under the influence of art in all its noblest forms. Painting, music, sculpture, architecture, had each its place in this scheme ; but for the statesman s object no single instru ment was perhaps so potent as the drama. It was a time of contending forces, in which one chief peril was lest the- generation to which a larger future was opening should lose its hold on what was best in the past. The religious tradition and the new ethical subtlety were nowhere re conciled in so lofty an ideal as by Sophocles ; nor could any presentment of art rival the theatre in its power of quickening a sympathetic enthusiasm. The " age of Pericles " would have produced better results for the political future of Athens if Pericles hrmselt" had btei less great. As Thucydides says, the nominal democracy was virtually the rule of one man. The informal sovereignty of Pericles hindered the rise of those who might otherwise have been trained to succeed him. Dur ing his lifetime the need of a restraining force was not felt in the reformed institutions, for that force was supplied by a single mind. But when he was gone it was seen that the new equilibrium of the state depended on a Pericles being at its heid. Probably Pericles himself believed that there were men who could continue what he had begun ; and if he was wrong, that cannot detract from the glory of what he did for his own time.
V. The Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C.The Period of Spartan and then of Theban Ascendency, 404-362 B.C.
In examining the causes which led to the breach of the Thirty Years Truce, and to the Peloponnesian War which followed it, Thucydides distinguishes two alleged or immediate causes from a third cause which was not alleged, ​"but which lay deeper than either of the others. The two alleged causes were (1) the active help given by Athens to the Corcyraians in their quarrel with Corinth concerning Epidamnus, a colony of Corcyra; (2) the Athenian blockade of Potidrei, a Corinthian colony which had revolted from Athens. The more essential cause was the growth of Athenian power, and the alarm which this caused to the Lacedaemonians. In truth the affair of Epidamnus and the affair of Potidsea were merely the sparks which hap pened to kindle the flame. That long conflict which we call the Peloponnesian War had been prepared from the time when the Athenian democracy, founded by Clis- thenes, had become a power in Greece through the suc cessful struggle against Persia. From- that time there were two antagonistic principles, represented by two rival eities, oligarchy by Sparta, democracy by Athens. The other cities grouped themselves naturally around these. All Greece was divided between these two ideas. The Peloponnesian War is the collision between them. It would be inconsistent with the limits and the scope of this sketch to enumerate the details of the war in each of its twenty- seven years. Yet we must aim at indicating the periods into which it falls, the leading characteristics and tenden cies which it presents.
1. The first period of the Peloponnesian War comprises the years from its commencement in 431 B.C. to the peace of Nicias in 421, hence sometimes called the Ten Years War. As one of its main features was the frequent invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesians, the latter called it the Attic War. The result of it was that Sparta had gained nothing, and that Athens had lost nothing except Amphipolis. By the peace of Nicias Athens kept all places which had surrendered voluntarily. Those allies of Sparta from which these places had been taken were naturally discontented. Corinth and Thebes especially were aggrieved. In spite of all the mistakes of Athens, in spite of the desolating plague, in spite of such reverses as the defeats at Delium and Amphipolis, and the loss of the Chalcidic towns, Athens remained on the whole triumphant; and against what Brasidas had done for Sparta might be set the victories of Phormio and the capture of Sphacteria. On the other hand the peace of Nicias had brought disaffection into the Spartan confed eracy.
2. The second period of the war extends from the peace of Nicias in 421 to the catastrophe of the Sicilian expedi tion in 413. The four years immediately following the peace of Nicias are the only years during which the great fundamental antithesis on which the whole war rested was temporarily obscured. Many of the allies of Sparta were discontented, and the intrigues of Alcibiades were active among them. But it was in vain that oligarchical allies were gained for the moment to the democratic cause. The normal relations were soon restored. Then came the Athenian expedition to Sicily, ending in a crushing disaster. Thucydides thinks that the mistake lay, not so much in an original miscalculation of strength, as in the failurs at Athens to support the expedition after it had gone. It is indeed possible that with other guidance Athens might have conquered Syracuse. But at least it was essential that Athens should put forth its whole strength, if only for the reason that no people resembled the Athenians so closely as the Syracusans. Yet never had the Athenians fought under greater disadvantages. The Athenian forte was in attack ; at Syracuse they had to act on the defensive. The bold and versatile Alcibiades was made a public enemy. Nicias, timid and in weak health, is opposed to Gylippus, who unites a Dorian energy of hatred to Athens with something like Ionian command of resource. And, when everything had been lost except a chance of saving the army, the perversity of Nicias defeated the prudence of Demosthenes. The Sicilian disaster was the turning-point of the war. Pericles had warned the Athenians against needless ventures and a policy of aggrandizement. They had incurred a needless risk of tremendous magnitude, and had lost. If they had won, Alcibiades would probably have raised a tyranny on the ruins of their democracy.
3. The third and last period of the war is from the Sicilian defeat in 413 to the taking of Athens by Lysander in 404, a few months after the battle of /Egospotami, This is the period called the Decelean War, because Decelea in Attica was occupied by the Spartans in 413, and continued to be a permanent base of their operations against Athens. As the sea board of Asia Minor was the scene of much of the fighting, it is sometimes also called the Ionian War. In this last chapter the war takes a new char acter. After the Sicilian overthrow Athens was really doomed. The Decelean War is a prolonged agony of Athenian despair. Athens had now no hope but in her ships ; and the leaders had to find their own supplies. The Spartan treasury was also empty. This want of money on both sides gave the mastery of the situation to Persia. And it was due to the factious treason of Alcibiades that the aid of Persia was given to Sparta. Athens was ulti mately conquered, not by the Spartan confederacy, but by the disloyalty of Athenians bent on ruining political oppo nents. The " Revolution of the Four Hundred," with its brief success, greatly contributed to the exhaustion of the city. Even at /Egospotami, even when Lysander was before Athens, it was the baneful influence of Athenian faction that turned the scale. When Athens had been taken and the walls destroyed, Sparta was once more the first power in Greece. When Thrasybulus and the patriotic exiles had overthrown the rule of the Tliivty Tyrants, they restored the Athenian democracy, but they could not re store the old Athenian power.
Sparta itself was changed. The old Spartan institutions had taught a simple reliance on disciplined strength. In the Peloponnesian War Sparta had won the victory with Persian gold. Already the love of money had found its way into the state which had once been so carefully protected from it. Differences of degree had arisen between the citizens, whose equality had been the very basis of the old Spartan life. Citizens who had been impoverished by the rise of prices, and who could no longer pay their share of the public tables, were now distinguished as "inferiors" (vTTo^eiove?) from those who retained their full civic rights (ofj.oioi). Spartan commanders abroad were not always inaccessible to bribes. The habit of military discipline indeed remained. Spartans were still distinguished, as a rule, by gallantry in the field, by care for the dead, and by attention to the ritual of the gods. Nor had the valley of the Eurotas remained closed to the higher culture of Greece. The old type of Spartan leader the rough soldier incap able of eloquence or of finesse had ceased to be the only type. An Athenian might have envied the powers of persuasion and the diplomatic tact of such Spartans as Brasidas, Lysander, or Gylippus. But the qualities of the old Sparta were seldom fused into a perfect harmony with the new accomplishments. Such men as Lichas and Cal- licratidas were rare. The balance of political power, as it existed in the old constitution, had also been unsettled. The kings were still, as of old, the commanders-in -chief on land. But the new office of the admiral (vavap^o-;) was invested with the chief command at sea. The supreme control of the state had passed more and more into the hands of the ephors, and the ephors, chosen annually, were not always incorruptible.
Sparta had waged the Peloponnesian War in the name ​partan of freedom. The Greek cities were to be liberated from ile in the all-absorbing tyranny of Athens. Now, however, Sparta altogether failed to redeem these pledges. On the contrary she aimed at setting up a tyranny of her own. Oligarchical governments were established, controlled in each city by a Spartan garrison under a Spartan harmost or military governor. The earliest and one of the worst cases was the tyranny of the thirty tyrants at Athens, set up by Lysander, and supported by Spartan arms until, after eight . months, the Athenian exiles under Thrasybulus marched from Phyle upon Athens. The Athenian democracy was formally restored in September 403 B.C. ; and the liberators used their victory with a wise moderation. Four years later Socrates was put to death, because a party blindly zealous for the old beliefs of Athens could not see that such thought as his led to the only firm basis for a new social order.
The retreat of the 10,000 Greeks under Xenophon, in 401 B.C., marks a turning-point in the relations of Greece to Persia. It was to the Greeks a striking revelation of Persian weakness, an encouragement to schemes of invasion which would before have seemed wild. Sparta now began a war against the Persians in Asia Minor partly to escape from the reproach of having abandoned Asiatic Hellas to the barbarian. Agesilaus, on whom the lesson of the famous retreat had not been lost, was encouraged by success to plan a bolder campaign. But in 394 B.C. the Athenian Conon, commanding the fleet raised by the satrap Pharnabazus, utterly defeated the Spartan fleet at Cnidus. Soon afterwards, under his protection, the Long Walls of Athens were restored. The Spartan power in Asia Minor was at an end. The oligarchies were overthrown, and the Spartan governors expelled.
The reverses of Sparta did not end here. At the instigation of Persia an alliance was formed between Athens, Thebes, Argos, and Corinth. In the territory of the latter state the allies waged war on Sparta, to whose aid Agesilaus was recalled from Asia. When the Corinthian War had eace of lasted six years, the peace of Antalcidas was negotiated ntal- between Sparta and Persia (387 B.C.). By it the Greek cities Jas&gt; in Asia, with Cyprus, were given up to Persia. Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were assigned to Athens. All other Greek cities were declared independent. The meaning of this was that they were to be independent of each other isolated for purposes of defence and all alike dependent on the Great King. The Corinthian War had begun from Persian intrigue ; it ended with a peace dictated by Persia. But the Spartan policy had gained its own ends. The so- called " autonomy " of the Greek cities disarmed the rivals of Sparta. Now, as at the end of the Peloponnesian War, a prospect of dominion was opened to her. The Persian king, whom this disgraceful peace practically recognized as suzerain of Greece, was to be merely the guarantor of terms under which Spartan ambition might be securely pursued.
A few years later these designs met with their first serious check. In 382 B.C. the Spartans treacherously seized the Cadmea or citadel of Thebes. They held Thebes for evolu-" three years. But in 379 a party of Theban exiles, under on at Pelopidas, surprised the Spartan garrison and recovered the jes&gt; city. A still greater discouragement to Sparta was the ew _ establishment of a new Athenian Confederacy precautions theman being taken against the members passing, as under the on/ ~~ Delian Confederacy, into the condition of mere tributaries. Thebes joined the new confederacy, and presently suc ceeded in restoring the old Boeotian league, of whLh Thebes was the head. But the rise of Thebes had excited Athenian jealousy. Peace was made in 371 between Athens and Sparta. Thebes, thus isolated, was at once attacked by the Lacedaemonians. They invaded Bceotia, but were de- feated by the Thebans under Epaminondas at Leuctra, Thebs 371 B.C. This destroyed Spartan power outside of the vic t r Peloponnesus. Epaminondas next invaded the Pelopon- * Lei nesus itself. He resolved to set up rivals to Sparta on her owu borders. He therefore united the cities of Arcadia Epam into a league, with a new 7 city, Megalopolis, for its capital ; nontk and he gave independence to Messenia, which for three centuries had been subject to Sparta laying the found ations of a new capital, Messene, around the great natural citadel of Ithome. The Arcadian league did not long hold together. Mantinea led a group of Arcadian towns favour able to Sparta. In 362 B.C. a battle was fought near Mantinea between the Spartans and the Thebans. The Thebans were victorious, but Epaminondas fell. With his death the temporary supremacy of Thebes came to an end. Sparta had, however, been reduced from the rank of a leading state. Xenophon closes his Hellenica with these words : " There was more confusion (d/cptcna) and tumult in Greece after the battle than before."
Political confusion is indeed the general characteristic of the period between the end of the Peloponnesian War and the Macedonian conquest of Greece. In the preceding century Athens and Sparta had been the vigorous representatives of two distinct principles. The oligarchic cities B.C. rallied round Sparta, the democratic round Athens. But at the end of the Peloponnesian War Athens was exhausted. Sparta, now predominant, but suffering from inner decay, exercised her power in such a manner as to estrange her natural allies. Thus both the normal groups of states were broken up. New and arbitrary combinations succeeded, seldom lasting long, since they were prompted merely by the interest or impulse of the hour. In this period of un stable politics the moment most promising, perhaps, for the future of Greece was when Athens had formed a new naval confederacy, and was also allied with the Boeotian league. But the alliance was broken by Athenian jealousy of Thebes, not to be renewed until Greek independence was on the eve of receiving its death-blow. The work of Epaminondas in one sense died with him ; the brief hegemony of Thebes passed away. But in another sense the results which he achieved were enduring. He had been for Thebes such a man as Pericles was for Athens a ruling personal influence in a democratic commonwealth ; and he had raised Theban policy to the old Athenian level. The aims of Thebans were no longer confined to the circle of Theban interests; Thebes now aspired to be what Athens hid been the champion of national freedom and greatness. The power founded by Epaminondas was transient ; but this large Hellenic patriotism made itself felt in some degree as a permanent inspiration, preparing the Thebans to stand by the Athenians in the last struggle for Greek freedom.
VI. The reigns of Philip and Alexander, 359-323 B.C.
Three years after the death of Epaminondas Philip came to the throne of Macedon. His power rapidly grew. A warlike people, ruled by an able and ambitious king, was now the northern neighbour of Greece. The most obvious vice of Greek politics at this period was disunion ; but the disunion itself was only the symptom of a deeper decay. No one city of Greece any longer retained the vigour required in a leader. Had either Athens or Sparta now possessed such vital force as they showed in the Persian wars, no local or temporary feuds would have prevented the organization of national defence. Nothing marks the decay of the Greek commonwealths more significantly than the fact that they did not even recognize the urgency of the danger. Demosthenes had the old Greek spirit ; but he stood almost alone. The principles on which he constantly insisted, and which give unity to his entire career, are mainly ​two : first, the duty of the Athenian citizen to sacrifice personal ease and gain to the service of Athens ; secondly, the duty of Athens, as the natural head of free Greece, to consult the interests of all the Greek cities. The energy of Demosthenes was not Grst roused by the progress of Philip. Before there was danger from the quarter of Macedon, Demosthenes had seen clearly that the decay of public spirit threatened the destruction of Hellenic life. As he said to the Athenians afterwards, if Philip had not existed they would have made another Philip for themselves. And the condition of Athens was at least not worse than that of any other city which could have aspired to lead.
A strategist so keen-sighted as Philip must early have perceived that he had little to fear from combined resistance, so long as he was careful not to attack too many separate interests at the same time. Greeks, he saw, were past fighting for each other as Greeks. This was the key-note of his policy to the last. While making aggressions on one Greek city or group of cities, he always contrived to have others on his side.
Philip s career in relation to Greece has two periods. The end of the first period is marked by his admission to the Amphictyonic Council ; the end of the second, by the battle of Clueronea. During the first period Philip is still a foreign power threatening Greece from outside. He takes Amphipolis from the Athenians ; he destroys Potidtea ; he acquires towns on the Thracian and Messalian coasts; he defeats the Phocians under Onomarchus, and even advances to Thermopylae, to find the pass guarded by the Athenians; finally, he destroys Olynthus and the thirty-two towns of its confederacy. In the second period he is no longer a foreign power. Having intervened in the Sacred War and crushed the Phocians, he has taken the place of Phocis in the Ampluctyonic Council, and has thereby been admitted within the circle of the Greek states. The First Philippic and the three Olynthiac speeches of Demosthenes belong to the first of these periods. The speeches On the Peace, On the Embassy, On the Chersonese, and the two later Philippics, belong to the second. In the Third Philippic, the climax of his efforts before Chaeronea, Demosthenes reviews the progress of Philip from the Hellenic, not merely from the Athenian, point of view. Philip has destroyed Olynthus, he has ruined Phocis, he has sown dissensions in Thessaly; Thebes is afraid of him ; he lias gained Eubcea and the Peloponnesus ; he is supreme from the Adriatic to the Hellespont; and the last hope of Greece is in Athens. Demosthenes succeeded in winning back Byzantium to the Athenian alliance, and in persuading Thebans to fight by the side of Athenians ; but he could not avert the cata strophe of Chajronea.
After the victory which made him master of Greece, Philip deprived Sparta of her conquests in the Pelopon nesus. The Messenians, Arcadians, Argives, recovered their old possessions. A congress was then summoned at the isthmus of Corinth. Macedonia and the Greek states were united in a federal league. A federal council was constituted to guard the federal laws ; and the Delphic Amphictyony was recognized as a tribunal to which this council should refer any breach of those laws. Philip, representing Macedonia, the most important member of the league, was acknowledged as its head or president. His position in regard to the Greek cities was thus in form much the same as that of Athens or Sparta in former days. It was nominally an hegemony, with somewhat more stringent powers, corresponding to the more systematic organization of the league ; in practice it was military kingship over Greece. Yet Demosthenes had not failed. The condition of the Greek states under Philip was favour able in proportion as they had given him trouble. Thessaly had actively helped him, and had been completely subju gated. The Peloponnesian rivals of Sparta had not been active either in helping or resisting him, and they were now more dependent on Philip than they had formerly been on Sparta. Athens alone had effectively resisted him, and Athens was treated by him with the prudent respect due to a serious antagonist.
If Greek liberty had received a fatal blow in Greece proper, there was another part of Hellas in which, almost simultaneously, it had been vindicated with splendid suc cess. While Demosthenes was making his heroic resistance . to the designs of Macedon, the enemies of Hellenic free dom in Sicily had been encountered with equal vigour and happier fortune by Timoleon. A few years after the defeat of the Athenian armament in 413, Sicily had suffered two invasions of the Carthaginians. Selinus and Himera, Agrigentum, Gela, and Camarina, had successively fallen. The first Dionysius, in consolidating his own tyranny at 405-36 Syracuse, had been content to leave half the island in the B.C. hands of the foreign foe. The feeble misrule of his son, Dionysius II., produced a series of revolutions. A party at Syracuse invoked the aid of Corinth. Timoleon was sent with only 1200 men (343 B.C.). His first work was to deliver Syracuse from the contending forces of Dionysius and a rival named Hicetas, and to restore the Syracusan democracy. His next work was to drive the Carthaginians out of Sicily. He defeated them with crushing effect at the river Crimesus (340 B.C.). The Sicilian Greeks were now free. Sicily entered on a new period of prosperity, which lasted until Agathocles became tyrant of Syracuse (317 B.C.). Thus the brightest days, perhaps, of Hellenic Sicily coincided with those in which the cities of the Hellenic mainland were learning to bear the Macedonian yoke.
The time seemed now to have come for an enterprise which, since the retreat of the Ten Thousand, had been the dream of many Greek captains, but which none had yet been in a position to attempt. Philip, in the forty-seventh year of his age, had declared war against Persia, and was preparing to invade Asia at the head of an army gathered from all Greece, when he was assassinated by a young Macedonian noble in revenge for a private affront (336 B.C.). Death Alexander, Philip s son and successor, was only twenty. Philip. Marching into Greece, he promptly repressed an insurrec- Alex- tionary movement, and was recognized by a new assembly auder. at Corinth as commander-in-chief of the Greek armies. He next marched against the tribes on the northern borders of Macedonia. While he was absent on this expedition, the Thebans rose against the Macedonian garrison. Alexander returned, took Thebes, and razed it to the ground (335 B.C.). At Corinth he received the homage of the Greek states, and then returned to Macedonia.
Alexander was now free to execute the design of Philip. As captain-general of Hellas, he sets forth to invade the Persian empire, and to avenge the wrongs suffered by Greece at the hands of the first Darius and of Xerxes. The army with which he crossed the Hellespont in 334 B.C. Alex- numbered perhaps about 30,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. aiKlfcr It was composed of Macedonians, Greeks, and auxiliaries " lva ( from the barbarian tribes on the Macedonian borders. The devotion of native Macedonians to their hereditary king was combined with the enthusiasm of soldiers for a great gene ral. Even if the military genius of Alexander had not been of the first order, his personal authority over his Macedonian troops, and through them over the rest, would still have been greater than was ever possessed by a Greek citizen commanding fellow-citizens.
Alexander s career of conquest has three stages, marked by his three great battles. The victory at the Granicus (334 B.C.) gave him Asia Minor. The victory at Issus (333 B.C.) opened his path into Syria and Egypt. The victory ​at Arbela (331 B.C.) made him temporary master of the whole East. In accomplishing the first two of these stages Alexander was not compelled to assume any new character. The king of Macedon, the elective captain-general of Greece, needed no other titles by which to hold the lands to which he came as a deliverer from Persia. The later history of these lands is the proof. Asia Minor was by degrees thoroughly Hellenized, and remained Greek till the Turks came in the llth century. Syria and Egypt were not indeed Hellenized as whole countries, but their capital cities, Antioch and Alexandria, were Hellenic ; and the control established by Alexander was retained by Macedonia or by Rome for centuries. At the third stage, however, Alexander s conquests entered upon an entirely new phase, and compelled him to take up an altogether new position. Neither in his Hellenic nor in his Macedonian capacity could he put forward any effective claim to hold the Persian empire proper, the empire stripped of its Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hellenic dependencies. He could hold Persia only as a Persian king, as the successor of those Achaemenid kings whose dynasty he had overthrown. The constitutional king of Macedonia, with limited prerogatives, the elective captain of Greece, must now assume a third and distinct character. He must be also a Persian king, a constitutional despot. The merely European influences re presented by Alexander might leaven the East, but they could not lastingly possess or transform it. Hellenic culti vation, like Roman power, was not permanently introduced over any wide area east of the Euphrates. This fact is enough to illustrate the enormous difficulty of the task which Alexander had undertaken. It seems not impossible that policy may have been mingled with vanity in his ex action of divine honours. Greeks or Macedonians could never pay him the slavish homage which Persian subjects rendered to their king. But the contrast between European and Asiatic royalty would at least be less glaring if the master of Persia were also acknowledged as the son of Zeus Ammon.
The colonies planted by Alexander in his progress through Asia make the beginning of a new period in Hellenic history. Hitherto we have had to do with a people whose Hellenic unity rests, not merely on community of language and civilization, but also upon community of blood. Now, by the side of this natural Hellenic nation, there arises an artificial Hellenic nation, with a common language and civilization, but not exclusively of Hellenic blood. The Macedonians may be regarded as the founders of this artificial nationality. They were doubtless of a stock kindred to the Hellenic ; in what degree, it is less easy to say but (with the exception of their kings) they were generally regarded by the Greeks as standing half-way between Greeks and barbarians. Philip did much to Hellenize Macedonia; and the Macedonian colonies of Alexander became in their turn centres from which the influence of Hellenic civilization was diffused through Asia. Henceforth there are two Hellenic types : the Greek of Greece proper, who preserves in some degree the marked individuality of the old Greek character ; and the Asiatic Greek, more readily affected by foreign surroundings, more pliant and less independent. The history of the modern Greek nationality dates from the days of Alexander.
The results of Alexander s conquests were beneficent chiefly in two ways : first, by liberating the hoarded treasures of the Eastern kings, and so stimulating industry and commerce ; secondly, by opening Asia to a new civiliza tion, which helped to promote intellectual and moral pro gress, even in those places where its influence was limited or transient. In the process of doing this much that was valuable may have been destroyed. But it can hardly be questioned that on the whole the gain far outweighed the loss. If Alexander had not died at the age of thirty-two, leaving his work unfinished, it would perhaps have been easier to judge how far he deserves the credit of having con templated these benefits to mankind. There is nothing to show that he intended to govern otherwise than as an absolute ruler, with a better machinery for controlling his subordinates than had been possessed by the Persian kings. Such a view is not inconsistent with the fact that his colonies enjoyed municipal freedom. Nor can it be proved that he meant his colonies to be anything more than military strong holds or commercial centres. But it may at least be said that, if his object had been to diffuse Hellenic cultivation over Asia, he could have adopted no more effectual means. It is conceivable that, in his vision of that complex empire which imposed such almost irreconcilable tasks upon its ruler, the idea of engrafting Eastern absolutism on Greek politics may have co-existed with the idea of Hellenizing Asiatic society. In that period of Hellenic history which closes with Alexander we are tracing the gradual development of a race with special gifts of mind and body, which strongly distinguish it from all other races. The Hellenes set the Hellenic stamp on everything which they create, first, on their language itself, then on their politics, their literature, and their manners. Every element of their life receives its mature shape from themselves, even when the germ has been borrowed ; the Hellenes are an original people in tho sense that they either invent or transform. At a very early time they have the political life of cities, and they never rise from the conception of the city to the higher unity of the nation. Their love of clear outline and their sense of measure shrink from every vague abstraction ; the principle of order itself is by them identified with " the limit " ; the indefinite is a synonym for disorder and evil. The city, an easily comprehended whole, satisfies this instinct ; but there is room within its framework for the gradations of monarchy, oligarchy, democracy ; for the various modes of acting and thinking which characterize Achaeans, Dorians, lonians. As the leading commonwealths j grow to maturity, two principles of government stand out | in contrast, oligarchy and democracy. Each is represented i by a great city round which the lesser states are grouped. i The inevitable collision comes, and the representative of | democracy is at last vanquished But in the hour of victory j oligarchy is discredited by the selfish ambition of its cham pion. A time of political confusion follows, in which no one city can keep a leading place. Separate interests prevail over principles ; public spirit declines. The disunion of , the cities incurable, because arising from a deep inner decay enables the crafty king of a half-barbarian country to make himself the military dictator of Greece. But just when the better days of Hellenic civilization seem to be over, a new career is opened to it. Men who are not of Hellenic blood help to diffuse the Hellenic language, thought, and manners over a wider field ; and the life of
(r. c. j.)