Greece and Rome : their life and art

Front matter

GREECE anp ROME

Lala we ha a

“ai

Book I. History And Political Condition

THE AGE OF LEGEND,

HEN we study the past of Greece and of Italy, and endeavor to understand the causes, as well as the phenomena of their respective histories—histories more distinctly their own than those of any other race or people—we can-not fail to be struck by the thought that nature, in assigning to those xT countries their peculiar geographical positions, had especially marked them out for peculiar destinies. The highest mountain system of Europe, running down almost to the coast-line, divides them sharply from the great mass of the continent, and, as it were, drives them into the sea in the form of peninsulas. Thus isolated and apart, they both, Greece as well as Italy, have been singled out for independent ic national development, each in its own way.

and characte While one was destined to rule the world, and in so ruling to spread far and wide the ancient culture, the other, by the happy variety of its geographical and physical conditions, and by its position as mediator and regenerator of

GREECE.

the superannuated and perishing culture of the East, was peculiarly fitted to originate a new

and complete intellectual life, which, for all time to come, should be the light of the world. Greece—from Makedonia to the southern cape of Lakonia, but a little tract at best—

unites, in this narrow area of a few square leagues, all the diversities of climate and vegetation,

which, in less favoured climes, are spread over wide regions. In the north flourish the oak and the birch, and in the south the date-palm; while in the intermediate region the vine

OAKS OF MT, PARNASSOS.

and the olive grow in luxuriant abundance. The mountain wall of the Haimos (now the

Balkan) shelters it from the rough and blighting winds of the north, while the sea and ifyi Mountain-ranges, inclosing rich and lovely vales and plains, traverse the land with regularity,

I highlands temper the southern heats with vi ng moisture and refreshing coolness, and lay it off like a chess-board, so that it seems equally adapted for subdivision into smal states and populations, and for the development of the most diversified life; a life giving ful scope to the character of a highly-gifted people. Yet, at the same time, it is prevented from isolation by the sea, which everywhere deeply indents the land with bays, divides the north from the south, Hellas from the Peloponnesos, except only a narrow isthmus, anc by its harbours invites the inhabitants to come and go, to travel and traffic with the great } world without.

While all Greece enjoys this wealth of ports and harbours, the tern coast is, in this respect, especially favoured. Toward it flow the larger streams, in this direction stretch the wider plains, and open themselves to receive and extend culture. In the east, | therefore, it was that the larger cities first grew, and the spiritual life of antiquity bloomed 4

1 iH i

HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONDITION.

in all its luxuriance and beauty, while the races in the interior, or amid the rocky hills and gorges of the west and the higher north, were reserving their physical strength for the future, to enter on the stage of history, fresh and young, when the highly-civilized states of the East had already begun to decline.

The eastern side, we say, gives and receives. On this side, that which faces the Orient, Greece does not end with her natural boundary. In fact, this boundary was rather a division than a limit; for in the earliest times, the times of the heroic legends, almost as much as in later days, the islands of the Aegaean Sea and the coast of Asia Minor were a part of Greece. Wherever Greek was spoken, there was Greece ; and_ here, everywhere, on the islands as on the coast, as far as our vision can pierce into the mists of antiquity, the Greek tongue was spoken and kindred races dwelt. Every impulse that started from the side of Asia Minor was felt in the mother-land—if we may properly call Greece the mother-land—and every trivial movement in the heart of Hellas was propagated to the coast of Ionia. For Greek history, if not for Greece itself, the Aegaean is an inland sea; and for the mariners who cruise from island to island without once losing sight of land, it is a connecting highway, rather than a hindrance.

Thus, then, in even the earliest times, the movements of the Greek tribes went from the Hellespont and the coast of Asia Minor across to the Adriatic. And in these expanses of land and water there was, in that prehistoric time known as the heroic age, an incessant crowding and shifting of the peoples. The current flows from east to west, followed by a reflux from west to east; other tribes press down from the north, push their neighbours from their lands, traverse these, encounter and thrust aside other races and again others, until the movement reaches the southern coast, when it either is continued over the sea, or ebbs back toward the north again. One name after another arises out of the haos, and vanishes again, either to emerge elsewhere, or to reappear where it had been 1ought utterly extinct. Immigrants, afterwards reverenced as heroes, such as Danaos,

‘ekrops, Kadmos, come from Egypt or Phoinikia, bringing into Greece the inventions of he Orient—writing, measures, and weights; and whatever they bring seems to be only xreek, and the bringers themselves are shortly reckoned as autochthons, native-born Greeks,

HoOtmee

-elops, of the race of Tantalos, comes with a treasure of gold into A and his escendants, the Atreidai, with Agamemnon, “shepherd of the people,” at their head, appear as princes and kings, leaders of a united Greece. These princes and heroes gather their forces, swelled by adventurers from all the tribes, and make expeditions across the sea, whether lured, like the Argonauts, by a golden prize, or bound to revenge an outrage such as the abduction of Helen, and punish it with the destruction of Troy.

All this has been thickly overgrown with legend, if not thus actually created, and has been, at a later date, painted in perfect faith, and with the minutest details, in poetry. Then, still later, came the scholars, the literati of Alexandreia, who took the poetry for sober fact, and arranged all that the legend had invented or narrated into a chronological system, in which the Argonauts and the Trojan War, Kekrops and Kadmos, Danaos and Pelops, the wanderings of Dorians and Ionians, are entered and dated with grave precision.

Yet, arbitrary as this system was, and little as it serves to reconcile contradictions, explain enigmas, and bring light into this chaos of confusions, still, at the bottom of all this flux and reflux of peoples, these expeditions by sea and by land, this emergence and disappearance of names, there lies some substratum of fact which may perhaps be cleared i

GREECE.

from the overgrowths of fable, if we frankly renounce all attempts at chronology. And thus the following sketch may be accepted as at least probable.

Leaving out of view those primeval inhabitants, of whom even the hoariest legend preserves no trace, we must look upon Phrygia, that table-land of Asia Minor east of the Greek coast-tract, as the original home from which the Greek nation emigrated, and from which Greece, and even Italy, were peopled. Though left behind in culture, and mocked and despised as barbarians, the Phrygians were indisputably of one race and one speech with the Hellenes. From this region started one wave of emigration after another, at greater or less intervals, whether broken loose by some shock from Asia, or crowded out by overpopulation. The first wave, cr ing the Hellespont or the Bosporus, and wandering on, apparently gave to Italy its peoples, so nearly akin to the Greeks. The second wave southward after entering Europe, occupied of emigrants followed the same course, but movin

Makedonia, Hellas, and the Peloponnesos, and here they settled and tilled the soil. These ians, who are everywhere the primitive people, and in all later movements were the Pelasg are sometimes conspicuous, sometimes dimly apparent as the fundamental element, though under various names. A third wave was composed of the Dorians, a race less numerous, but of very warlike spirit, who took the same way as the Pelasgians, but made a temporary settlement in the north of Hellas, in the mountains and about Olympos. A fourth and last wave, which may have split off from the Dorians, were the Ionians. These did not pass the Hellespont, but turning southward, occupied the whole west coast of Asia Minor, and thence spreading from island to island, reached, at last, the east coast of Greece, where they Jondzed Attika especially, and made it the mother-land of Ionia.

Here, however, as indeed nearly everywhere, they encountered a foreign people who had already established themselves—the Phoinikians. Starting originally from the from Asia, the Phoinikians found

Euphrates, and forced forward by reiterated impuls themselves at last crowded into a narrow strip of land and a few towns on the Syrian coast, and were thus in a manner thrust out into the sea. They became seafarers, manufacturers and traffickers, merchants—pirates when occasion offered. Thus, in quest of the purple murex, metals, and other commodities of trade, they went to the islands, the Asian coast, to Attika and Argolis, established factories, trading-posts, marts, one of which existed in the earliest times on the Argive coast, and wherever they went introduced their traffic and their arts. Their gods, too, they brought with them. The Sidonians carried with them, in all their voyages, the statue of Astarte, and wherever they settled arose places of her worship. In this way she came to Greece, “the foreign Aphrodite,” the foam-born lovegoddess, because she had come over the waves and risen from their foam. In Corinth, on the isthmus, the favourite depot of Phoinikian trade, was her chief seat, and her priestesses and female attendants had all the skill in dyeing and weaving which the Phoinikians had taught them. The Tyrians, again, never embarked without taking with them the statue of Herakles Melkart. In him, as Herakles Melikertes, the Greeks embodied the voyaging and trafficking of the Phoinikians, and their maraudings and piracies as well. His deeds and adventures are theirs. Herakles, the lion-subduer, is an Asiatic, a Phoinikian figure ;

the Pillars of Hercules, at the outlet of the Mediterranean, mark the limits of their voyages at that period; they it was who brought the golden apples of the Hesperides from Africa, and the herds of Geryon from Spain; their works, such as dykes and excavations, canals and river-clearings, are typified in his labours.

The Ionians learned from the Phoinikians, grew up beside them, and became seafarers 6

HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONDITION.

and their rivals. United with them for a time—as Iolaos becomes the companion of Herakles

—their competition soon grew to antagonism, the Phoinikians were driven from the Aegaean Se a and the Greek coast. Following in their tracks, the Ionians appear in Syria and Egypt, always under the same name, though in various forms, In the time of the Hyksos dynasty—about 1500 B. C.—they even attempted conquests and settlements at the mouths of the Nile, but without success. But they learned from the Phoinikians and Egyptians, and all that they thus gained they brought back to Greece, It is these Ionians who had acquired knowledge in the East whom we must recognize in the strangers who bring new arts and more advancec civilization. Jo, daughter of the King of Argos, driven over sea and land, finds repose in Egypt, and from Egypt Danaos returns to Argos. Kadmos, the Phoinikian, follows the track of Europa, and founds the Kadmeia in Boiotia. These are Greeks, of the same race, 0 the same language; but they come from a foreign land, and bring foreign manners and foreign lore.

It was, at best, a wild and disordered condition of things that prevailed during this perioc of rivalry between the Phoinikians and Ionians. The process of clearing up, which displays itself in the founding of single states, such as now begin to emerge, shrouded in myths, from the twilight of legend, went on but slowly. The first kingdom is that of the fabulous Minos,

King of Crete, who brought the Aegaean Sea under the rule of law, and made a number o islands, and even Attika, his subjects or tributaries. In Boiotia, by the lake Kopais, the Minyai created at Orchomenos, the first walled city of Greece, an ordered state, whose remains may now be seen in the Katabothra, massive constructions of stone, partly subterranean, which carried off the overflow of the lake, and thus changed the wide, marshy vale into rich, arable arose the kingdom of the Kadmeones; while in soil. In another part of Boiotia, at Thebes their name or that of their founder, the rule of the Pelopidai at the Peloponnesos, which be

Mykenai extended far and wide. elops, the son of Tantalos, came from Lydia, where he left his sister Niobe, whose blooming children perished by the shafts of Apollo and Artemis; this is the river, that pines and flows as it were in tears, when the fierce sun of summer has dried up its children, the brooks. From the land of gold, from Sipylos and Tmolos, from Paktolos bearing golden sands, Pelops came, bringing fabulous treasures, and with these won the lordship over the lands and strongholds of the Achaians in Argolis.

With rule came the lust for rule, and this brought jealousy, rivalry, family discord, war, and murder for the throne. The princely houses were deeply stained with blood-guiltiness ;

atrocity followed atrocity in the houses of the Labdakidai at Thebes, and the Pelopidai or

Atreidai at Mykenai; and while the former line perished with the children of Oidipus, in the latter entered at last Apollo, the god of light, the reconciler and bestower of blessings, who atoned the guilt, took off the curse, and drove away the Erinnyes, the dread impersonators of this wild, evil, and terrible time.

Here, properly speaking, ended the heroic age; but not from these states, which, as legend and poetry tell, united at last in a common war against Troy, sprang the political form of the Greece of history. Once more, still shrouded in legend, yet nearer to true and accredited history, there came a movement among the various races, which traversed Greece from the farthest north to extreme south, and, rolling back like a surf, dashed its waves against the Asian coast. This was the wandering of the Dorians and Herakleidai. From this first came the permanent settlement of the tribes, and that organization of cities which forms the foundation of Greek history and of the development of Hellenic civilization.

It is worthy of note that the movement had its origin in a region which, in a later

GREECE.

as half-barbarian at the best. Even the twofold name time, was hardly reckoned as Greek of the Greeks—Gratkot, Gracc’, as the Romans called them, and /Yedlenes, as they called themselves—may be traced back here. In Epeiros Pelasgian tribes had long dwelt in peace, united around the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, which was revered wherever the

Pelasgians were found. Even Achilleus prayed to the Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona. But a warlike tribe of Epeirots, called Thessalians, poured over Pindos into the fruitful valley of the Peneios, there established themselves, and gave the land their name. The earlier inhabitants were driven out; the Boiotians, of Pelasgic race, moved southward, and seized, or at least

SITE OF DODONA, mastered, the land of the Minyai and Kadmeones, to which they gave their name. The Dorians, who had their settlements about Olympos, and the famous vale of Tempe, through which the Peneios, flowing from Thessaly, makes its way to the sea, were driven northward. 3ut they drew together again, united with the Herakleidai, or Hylleans, descendants of h The established themselves on the southern confines of Doris. Here they joined a confederacy of

Herakles or his son Hyllos, under whose leadership they forced their way throu ey aly, and small tribes, which, under the name of Amphiktyonia, had its centre at the sanctuary of the Pythian Apollo at Delphi; a confederacy, which, in addition to the community of worship at the federal holy-place, fulfilled the earl est requirements of culture, and tended to produce a higher civilization. It was not formed for mutual defence ; but it was a part of the compact that no member of the league should have its towns utterly destroyed, nor, in the event of war or siege, should any be cut off from water. The accession of the Dorians gave this league importance; and in all probability it was they who gave its members the collective name of Hellenes, by which they were first called. The legend represents Hellen and Amphiktyon as brothers,

HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONDITION.

VALE OF TEMPE, WITH OLYMPOS AND THE PENEIOS,

But the Dorians, fighters by vocation, could not rest cooped up among the mountain-ranges of Hellas; so, without abandoning Doris, they pushed out with the Herakleidai and a >

+k habitations more to their mind. The Herakleidai many adventurers of other tribes, to se brought forward their hereditary claim to the Peloponnesos, from which their ancestor had been driven by Eurystheus. Beaten back at the Isthmus, Oxylos, the Aitolian, led them across the gulf; and while he took for his own the land of Elis, the Dorians and Herakleidai acquired, not by a sudden invasion, but after much toil and fighting, and partly indeed by negotiation, the three states, Argolis, Lakonia and Messenia.

The movement did not end here. A part of the Dorians went to Crete, and there founded a Dorian state, which became a pattern to the mother-country. Another part, leaving Argolis, turned back northwards over the Isthmus, and conquered and Dorzzed Megaris but at Attika

A third part joined itself to a movement which had been brought about by the Dorians legend says through the self-sacrifice of Kodros—they were brought to a stand.

indirectly. The peoples whom they had alarmed or pressed upon were again looking for new abodes, and among these were Achaians who had been forced to abandon their strong cities in Argolis, and now gave their name to the region of Achaia, on the south of the

Gulf of Krissa or Corinth. In Attika, especially, and in the coast-towns of Boiotia, wanderers

=f of all races took refuge; Aiolians, Ionians, Achaians; among them noble and wealthy families, such as the descendants of Nestor, from Pylos. Here they assembled, and from these ports, but especially from Aulis, they took ship, and passing from island to island, as so many stations on the way, reached, at last, the coast of Asia Minor, And here they

, who had succeeded the old JIonians, such as_ the found everywhere kindred races Dardanians in the Troad, Not until after much hard fighting did the new-comers get

GREECE.

PRESENT ASPECT OF THE PLAIN OF TROY, possession of the old towns, which they partly destroyed and partly reconstructed, In this way arose the Aiolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies, which were destined soon to surpass in culture the mother-land.

Y Out of these struggles for settlements—at least such is the view taken by many writers— arose the legend of the Trojan war. All that is certain is that the Homeric songs had _ their origin and development there on the coast of Asia Minor. But whether the Atreidai and their companions among the princes of Greece really took any part in the war, and whether their and after the return, are not pure inventions, is more than questionable.

adventures, durin; One contribution to the solution of these questions has been made by the discoveries of Schliemann in Mykenai and the Troad, but it is at best only a contribution. They have not answered with certainty, either the questions as to~ the existence and site of Troy, or those relating to the fates of the Atreidai. Where most of the scholars of to-day place the site

GOLD DIADEM FOUND AT HISSARLIK.

Composed of fine chains and leaves.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONDITION.

of Troy, absolutely nothing has been found proving the existence of such a city ; but there, where the ancients themselves fixed the position of Ilium, upon the present hill of Hissarlik, Schliemann has discovered, in countless abundance, relics proving the existence, not only of a town, but of one which had more than once been destroyed by fire and sword, exactly as is told of Troy. These general facts are not to be denied or ars sued away, and they will forever perpetuate the fame of their discoverer.

But another contradiction presents itself, which, so far, has not been reconciled. The state of culture which meets us everywhere in the Homeric poems is one far more advanced than that revealed by the remains found at Hissarlik. Centuries must lie between them,

GATE OF THE LIONS AT MYKENAI (RESTORED).

but how many, who can say? for the relics found at Hissarlik are of the most primitive kind, while the culture in the Iliad and Odyssey is in no wise such.

At all events, one characteristic which agrees with the legend of Troy, that is, high antiquity, is conceded by apparently a majority of scholars to that wonderful, fabulous treasure-trove so lately discovered in the stronghold of Mykenai, the ancient seat of Agamemnon. Schliemann, relying upon a tradition—which, it is true, we only have from the comparatively late report of Pausanias—believes that he has here found the graves of Agamemnon and his family; and his view has been accepted by scholars of good repute. From these graves he has brought to light whole treasures of gold ; utensils, pieces of armour, weapons, masks, ornaments of all kinds, The immense importance of these discoveries, as

I by similar discoveries of antiquities belonging to nearly the same time, which Cesnola, within illustrating the development of Greek civilization, is denied by none. It is even enhanced