IV. THE TRANSITION TO SECURE HISTORY
BELOCH’S VIEW OF THE CONVENTIONAL PRIMITIVE HISTORY[7]
[Sidenote: [ca. 1200-800 B.C.]]
The singers of the epic poems as well as their hearers were as yet wholly unconscious of the gap separating mythology from history. To them the Trojan War, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the wanderings of Ulysses and Menelaus, were historical realities and they believed just as firmly that Achilles, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and all the other heroes once really lived, as the Swiss until recently believed in the reality of their Tell and Winkelried. Indeed until the fourth century hardly any one in Greece dared to question the truth of these things. Even so critical a person as Thucydides is still wholly under the influence of epic tradition, so much so that he gives a statistical report of the strength of Agamemnon’s army and tries to answer the question as to how such masses of people could have been supported during the ten years’ siege of Troy.
But the world which the epic described belonged to an immeasurably distant past. The people of that time were much stronger than those “who live to-day”; the gods still used to descend upon the earth and did not consider it beneath them to generate sons with mortal women. In comparison with that great by-gone age, the present and that which oral tradition told of the immediate past seemed wholly without interest; and if the epic did occasionally seize upon historical recollections, the events were put back into the heroic age and became inseparably mingled with mythical occurrences. As to how the present had grown out of this heroic past, the poets and their contemporaries had not yet begun to ask.
The time came, however, when this question was put. People wanted to know why the Greece of historical times looked so different from Homer’s Greece; why for example Homer knows of no Thessaly; why he has Achæans instead of Dorians living in Argolis; why, according to him, descendants of Pelops instead of those of Hercules sit upon the thrones of Argos and Sparta. It is the first awakening of the historical sense which finds expression in such questions. The answer, however, was already given with the question. It was clear that the Grecian tribes must have changed their abodes to a great extent after the Trojan War; Hellas must have been shaken by a real migration of peoples. But this single fact was not sufficient. People wanted to know the impelling cause of the migrations, and the particular circumstances under which they took place. The answer was not difficult for a people endowed with such a facility for speculation.
The very lack of colour in such accounts would be a sufficient proof for the fact that we are not dealing here with pure speculation, not with real tradition. Thus hardly anything more is told of the immigration of the Thessalians into the river basin of the Peneus beyond the bald fact, and that was sufficient to explain why Homer’s “Pelasgian Argos” was called Thessaly in historic times. Of course the incomers must have had a leader, consequently Thessalus, the eponymic hero of the people, was placed at their head, a point in the story which of itself is sufficient to stamp the whole narrative as a late invention. The Thessalians also must have come from somewhere; but since Homer already places the races south of Thermopylæ in the homes they actually occupied in history, and since they could not make a Grecian tribe immigrate from Thrace or Illyria, there was nothing else to do but to place the original home of the conquerors in Epirus. This was all the more plausible as the name Thessaly is really closely connected with Thessaliotis, the region about Pharsalia and Cierium on the borders of Epirus, and first spread from here to other parts of the country.
Even more characteristic perhaps is the account of the migration of the Bœotians. According to Homer, Cadmeans lived in Thebes, Minyæ in Orchomenos. Hence it followed that the Bœotians must have immigrated after the Trojan War, like the Thessalians. But a great many Thessalian names of places and religious practices occur in Bœotia. Hence nothing was more simple than to make the Bœotians immigrate from Thessaly, thus at the same time explaining what had become of the original inhabitants of Thessaly after the influx of Thessalians. To be sure this original population, as represented by the serfs (penestai) of the Thessalian nobles, presented a very different appearance; still these two views could very well be combined: one needed only to suppose that one part of the former population of the region had fallen into bondage, and that the other had emigrated. Moreover, Homer already mentions Bœotians in the region which they occupied in historic times. That made the further supposition necessary that a part of the people had already settled in Bœotia before the Trojan War; or else the opposite hypothesis was made, that the Bœotians had been driven out of Bœotia after the Trojan War by the Pelasgians and Thracians, and had returned thither after several generations. We see plainly from this example how all such suppositions were dependent on the epic poems.
The migration of the Eleans is a similar case. Elis is an old district name, consequently no Eleans can ever have existed outside of Elis. But Homer mentions the Epeans as being inhabitants of the country; consequently it was stated that the Eleans did not enter the Peloponnesus until after the Trojan War, and that they came from Ætolia, where Oxylus, the mythical ancestor of the Elean royal house, was also worshipped as a hero. According to an opposite version Ætolia was settled by emigrants from Elis; and these two views were then combined, and the Eleans were made first to move to Ætolia and then, after ten generations, to move back again. As a matter of fact the Homeric Epeans are nothing else than the inhabitants of Epea in Triphylia, whose name was extended to include the inhabitants of the surrounding districts, like the name of the neighbouring Pylians, since the knowledge of the Ionic rhapsodists concerning the western part of the Peloponnesus is very scanty.
Further, since Homer knows of no Dorians in the Peloponnesus, it was clear that the peoples inhabiting Argolis and Laconia in historic times could have come in only after the Trojan War; it remained only to discover from whence. This was not difficult; there was in the middle part of Greece, between Œta and Parnassus, a small mountainous district whose inhabitants were called Dorians, quite like the Grecian colonists on the Carian coast. This is not at all remarkable, since in a widely extended linguistic territory the same local names must necessarily recur in different places, as may be seen from any topographical dictionary. Such homonyms by no means prove an especially close relationship between the inhabitants of such localities; in the formation of Greek racial tradition, however, they have played an important part.
The home of the Dorians was in this way established. People now wanted to know the reason which had led them to seek new abodes so far away. In close connection with this was the question as to how the descendants of Hercules had come to reign over Argos, Sparta, and Messene. The answer was given by the tradition of the return of the Heraclidæ. Hercules, it was related, had belonged to the royal family of Argos, but had been robbed of his rights to the throne and had died in exile; his sons, or grandsons as was stated later for chronological reasons, had made good their rights with the aid of the Dorians and had also established the claims which Hercules had to dominion over Laconia and Messenia. The regained lands were divided under the three brothers Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, or between the twin sons of the latter, Procles and Eurysthenes. This was a tradition which could be put to admirable political use. Supported by this title, Argos could claim the hegemony over the whole of Argolis; Sparta could justify the subjection of the small cities of Laconia and Messenia. That was why this tradition, once come into existence, was quickly circulated and officially recognised.
But the mention of Messenia shows that we are here dealing with a comparatively recent stage in the growth of tradition, since this region could not be claimed as a heritage by the Heraclidæ until after the Spartan conquest between the eighth and seventh centuries.
Also the eponymi of the Spartan royal dynasties of Agis and Eurypon have no place in the tradition of the Doric migrations; a sure sign that they were first connected with Hercules artificially. And Temenus, from whom the Argive kings traced their descent, was, according to the Arcadian myth,--no doubt taken from Argos,--the son of Pelasgus, of Phegeus, or of the Argolian hero Phoroneus. It was also related that Temenus had been brought up by Hera--the goddess of the Argolian land. He was thus an old Argive hero who originally had nothing whatever to do with Hercules. Just as little was known about the Doric migration on the island of Cos at the time when the genealogy of its ruling dynasty was written, since the latter is not traced back to Temenus, but directly to Hercules through his son Thessalus. And anyway Hercules, as we have seen, is not a “Doric” divinity at all, but a Bœotian, whose cult was extended to the neighbouring countries of Bœotia, only after the colonisation of Asia Minor. The tradition concerning the return of the Heraclidæ is thus seen to have come into existence long after the immigration of the Dorians into the Peloponnesus, with which it is inseparably connected. This tradition is first mentioned by Tyrtæus towards the end of the seventh century and in the epic poem Ægimios, ascribed to Hesiod, which may have been written at the same time, or a little later. That was the period when the Homeric poems became popular in European Greece; both Tyrtæus and Hesiod are wholly under their influence. Moreover it is clear that an immigration of Dorians from middle Greece into the Peloponnesus could be talked of only after the Doric name had been carried from the colonies of Asia Minor to the west coast of the Ægean Sea, which did not happen until post-Homeric times. In the same way the legend of the Thessalian migration could have grown up only after the inhabitants of the Peneus river basin had become conscious of their racial unity and had begun to designate themselves by the common name of Thessalians. This must have taken place early in the eighth or seventh centuries, since, as has already been stated, Homer is not as yet acquainted with this name, whereas the latest part of the Iliad, the catalogue of ships, mentions the eponymic hero of the people. Finally, the dependence of all these legendary migrations upon the epic poems is shown by the fact that they are connected only with regions which in Homer had a different population than in historic times. The Arcadians and Athenians, on the other hand, who already in Homer are found in the same districts they occupied in later times, considered themselves autochthonous. Thus we see that Homer had not only given the Greeks their gods, as Herodotus says, but their ancient history also. We, however, do not need to be told that traditions which did not grow up until the eighth or seventh century are entirely worthless as helping to an understanding of conditions in Greece at a time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor.
After all this the question as to the internal evidence of the truth of these traditions is really superfluous. Even a well-invented myth is yet by no means history. Here, however, we are asked to believe the most improbable things. The Doris on the Œta is a wild mountain valley, measuring scarcely two hundred square kilometers in area, which could not have contained more than a few thousand inhabitants, since farming and grazing formed their sole means of support. In Homer’s time the eastern Locrians were still so lightly armed that they were wholly unfitted for fighting with the hoplites at close range; the Dorians who lived farther inland than these Locrians cannot have been much further advanced several centuries earlier. And a few hundreds or even thousands of such poorly armed soldiers are to have conquered the old highly civilised districts of the Peloponnesus with their numerous strongholds, and the superior armour of their inhabitants? The very idea is an absurdity. No more can we understand why the Dorians should have migrated precisely to Argolis, and Laconia, and even to Messenia--places situated so far from their home. The legend does indeed give a satisfactory answer to this question, but anyone who cannot recognise Hercules, with his sons and grandsons, as historical characters, is obliged to find some other motive for the migration of the Dorians.
In other respects, also, there is absolutely no proof to support the supposition of a migration of peoples upon the Grecian peninsula. The “Mycenæan” civilisation was not, as has been supposed, suddenly destroyed by an incursion of uncivilised tribes, but was gradually merged into the civilisation of the classic period. Even Attica, in connection with which there is no tradition of a migration, had its period of Mycenæan culture. The so-called “Doric” institutions are limited to Crete and Laconia, and in the latter country they are not older than the Spartan conquest in the eighth century; hence they have nothing whatever to do with the Doric migration. In the same way the serfdom of the Thessalian peasants may very well have been the result of an economic development, like the colonia during the Roman empire or serfdom in Germany after the end of the Middle Ages. Also the differentiation of the Grecian dialects came about, as we saw, after the colonisation of Asia Minor, and hence should not be traced back to the migrations which took place within the Grecian peninsula at some time preceding this period. And, in any case, after the Dorians settled in the Peloponnesus they must have adopted the dialect of the original inhabitants of the country, who were so far superior to them in numbers and civilisation; just as no one doubts that the Thessalians did the same after their immigration into the Peneus river basin. A “religion of the Doric race,” however, exists only in the imagination of modern scholars; Hercules himself, the ancestral god of the Dorians, is of Bœotian origin. Finally, it is extremely doubtful if the Argives and Laconians were any more closely related to each other than to the other Grecian tribes--the so-called Doric Phyleans, at least, have until now been traced only in Argolis and in the Argolian colonies. But even if a closer relationship did exist between the two neighbouring tribes, it would by no means necessarily follow that the Argo-Laconian people first immigrated into the Peloponnesus at a time when the eastern part of the peninsula had already reached a comparatively high grade of civilisation. There is indeed no question but that the Peloponnesus got its Hellenic population from the north, that is directly from middle Greece; and it is very probable that, even after the Peloponnesus was already in the possession of the Greeks, tribal displacements still took place in Greece. But they occurred in so remote a period that they have left no distinguishable trace, even in tradition. If the Greeks of Asia Minor remembered only the bare fact of their immigration, how could a tradition have been maintained of tribal wanderings which took place long before this colonisation? It is an idle task to try to discover the direction of these migrations or the more particular circumstances under which they took place.
Hence it is a picture of the imagination which, since Herodotus,[e] has been accepted as primitive Grecian history. But the problem which gave rise to the traditions of mythical migrations still remains for us to solve--the question as to why the epics present us with a different picture of the distribution of Grecian tribes, from that found in historic times. The answer to-day will naturally be different from the one given two thousand years ago.
The epic poem designates Agamemnon’s followers, and indeed all the Greeks before Troy, as Argives, Achæans, or Danaans--terms which are used wholly synonymously even in the oldest parts of the Iliad. Now we know that not only in Homeric times, but already centuries earlier, before the colonisation of Crete and Asia Minor, Argolis was inhabited by the same people that we find there in historic times. It would not of itself be impossible to suppose that this people, who afterwards had no common tribal name, should have called themselves Achæans or Danaans, in prehistoric times, although it would be difficult to understand how this tribal name could have been lost. But as a matter of fact a tribe called Danaan never did exist. Danaus is an old Argive hero who is said to have transformed the waterless Argos into a well-watered country; his daughters, the Danaides, are water nymphs; Danæ also, the mother of the solar hero Perseus, and herself a goddess, cannot be separated from Danaus. The Danaans, accordingly, are the “people of Danaus”; they belong like him to tradition, and have been transposed from heaven to earth like the Cadmeans and Minyæ to whom we shall return later on. The name Achæan, however, was applied in historic times to the inhabitants of the northern coast of the Peloponnesus and of the south of Thessaly, and it is hardly probable that it should have been more widely spread in historic times. Agamemnon seems rather, according to the oldest tradition, to have been a Thessalian prince, like Achilles, who continued to be regarded as such. At the time, however, when the epic was being formed in Ionia, the Peloponnesian Argos outshone all other parts of the Grecian peninsula, and the poets in consequence were obliged to transpose the governmental seat of the powerful ruler from Thessaly to the Peloponnesus. His Achæans of course migrated with him.
Since, now, in Homer the name Achæan includes all the Grecian tribes under Agamemnon’s command, it could no longer be used to designate the inhabitants of one single region. Consequently in the epic the name Achaia is not used for the northern coast of the Peloponnesus, but this region is simply called “coast-land,” or Ægialea. This then gave rise to the tradition--if we still call such combinations tradition--that the Achæans who were driven out of Laconia by the Dorians had settled in Ægialea and given their name to the country. Ionians were said to have lived there previously, a theory which was supported by the existence of a sanctuary of the Heliconian Poseidon on the promontory of Mycale.
Furthermore Homer mentions various peoples upon the Grecian peninsula and the surrounding islands, which in historic times no longer existed there; for example, the Abantes, who appear in the catalogue of ships as inhabitants of Eubœa, whereas in the rest of the Iliad they are not localised. It is possible that there has here been a preservation of the old tribal name of the Eubœans, which later must have been lost; but it is also just as possible, and more probable, that the Abantes had originally nothing whatever to do with Eubœa, but that they were the inhabitants of Abæ in Phocis, whose name then, for the sake of some theory, was transferred to the neighbouring island. The Caucones according to the Telemachus must have dwelt in the western part of the Peloponnesus, not far from Pylus, whereas the Iliad calls them allies of the Trojans; and in reality even in historic times Caucones are said to have been found on the Paphlagonian coast. The name was thus evidently transferred from Asia Minor to the Peloponnesus, for which the river Caucon near Dyme in Achaia may have given a reason. A comparatively late part of the Iliad tells of a war between the Curetes and the inhabitants of Calydon in Ætolia. In Hesiod, on the other hand, the Curetes are divine beings, related to the nymphs and satyrs. They appear also as beneficent dæmons in the Cretan folk-lore; they are said to have taught mankind all sorts of useful arts and also to have brought up the infant Zeus. They belong thus to mythology, not to history. They were probably located in Ætolia only because there was a mountain there called Curion; and as a matter of course it was said that they had immigrated from Crete. Since on the Ætolian coast at the foot of the Curion there was a city called Chalcis, they were further transferred to the Eubœan Chalcis.
There are also other cases in pre-Homeric times of mythical people having been transposed from heaven to earth--thus the Danaans of whom we have already spoken; furthermore, the Lapithæ, who are said to have lived in the northern part of Thessaly at the foot of Olympus and Ossa. Their close association with the centaurs leaves no doubt that they, like the latter, belong to the realm of mythology. Closely related to them are the Phlegyæ. The Iliad gives us a picture of Ares, as he advances to battle in their ranks, but leaves their dwelling-place indefinite; later authorities placed it in Thessaly or in the valley of the Bœotian Cephisus. Coronis, the mother of Æsculapius, belonged to this tribe; also Ixion, who laid violent hands on Hera. Finally, the Phlegyæ are said to have burned the Delphic temple and in punishment therefor were destroyed by Apollo by lightning and an earthquake. The Minyæ also belong to this circle. They compose the crew of the ship Argo, which goes into the distant sun-land of the east to bring back from thence the Golden Fleece; the daughter of their tribal hero, Minyas, is Persephone, and no further proof is necessary to show that he himself is a god and his people mythical. Afterwards when the starting-point of the Argonauts was localised in the Pagasæan Gulf, the Minyæ also became a Thessalian race; from there, like their relatives the Phlegyæ, they were brought over to Bœotia, where Orchomenos in Homer is called “Minyean.” And since the Iliad furthermore mentions a river Minyos in the later Triphylia, the Minyæ were placed there also.
The Pelasgians play a much more important part in the conventional primitive history of Greece than the last-mentioned peoples. Throughout antiquity their name is connected with the western part of the great Thessalian plain, the “Pelasgic Argos” of Homer, the Pelasgiotis of historic times. The Iliad speaks of the Pelasgians, famed for their spears, who lived far from Troy in broad-furrowed Larissa, and probably intends thereby the Thessalian capital. Thessalian Achilles prays to the Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona before the departure of his friend Patroclus. But the Iliad as yet knows nothing of Pelasgian inhabitants of Dodona; on the contrary the catalogue of ships reckons this sacred city as belonging to the territory of the Ænianes and Perrhæbi, and it is Hesiod who first makes the temple to have been founded by Pelasgians. Elsewhere Pelasgians are mentioned by Homer only in Crete.
Otherwise the later accounts. Wherever within the circle of the Ægean Sea the name of Larissa occurs, there Pelasgians are said to have lived--in the Peloponnesian Argos, in Æolis of Asia Minor, on the island of Lesbos, on the Cayster near Ephesus. It is possibly for this reason that the Odyssey places Pelasgians in Crete, since there, also, there was a Larissæan field near Hierapytna, and Gortyn is said to have been called Larissa in ancient times. From Argos the Pelasgians also became woven into the myths of the neighbouring Arcadia, the ancestral hero of which, Lycaon, is called by Hesiod a son of Pelasgus.
Pelasgians were said to have lived once in Attica also. The wall which defended the approach to the citadel of Athens bore the name Pelargicon, and as no one knew what that meant, it was said that it had been corrupted out of Pelasgicon and that the citadel had been built by Pelasgians. These Pelasgians were then said to have been driven out by the Athenians and to have migrated to Lemnos. Why they went precisely to this place we do not know, nor why these Lemnian Pelasgians were called Tyrrhenians. Homer places the Sinties, that is a Thracian tribe, in Lemnos. Remnants of the original inhabitants of the island, who were driven out by the Athenians in about the year 500 B.C., were, a hundred years later, still living on the peninsula of Athos and on the Propontis near Placia and Scylace; they had preserved their old language, which was different from the Greek.
In consequence of this and similar traditions, the theory was brought forward in the sixth century that the Hellenes had been preceded in Greece by a Pelasgic race. Since, however, some of the Grecian tribes, as the Arcadians and Athenians, considered themselves to be autochthonous, there was nothing for it but to call the Pelasgians the ancestors of the later Hellenes, and so the whole change was reduced to one of name only. This to be sure was in contradiction of the statements of Homer, who names the Pelasgians among the allies of Troy, and hence evidently considered them to be racially antagonistic to the Greeks. The genealogists and historians of antiquity never got around this contradiction, which was indeed inexplicable with the means at their command.
Moreover, even if a Pelasgian people ever had existed in the wide extent attributed to them by tradition, the Greeks of antiquity would no more have conceived of them as being a single nation, than they themselves became conscious of their national unity before the eighth century; they would have designated the several Pelasgian tribes by different names. This alone shows that we are not dealing here with real historical tradition, quite apart from the fact that there is no historical tradition from the time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor. Here also it is a question of mere theorising, and the theories already presuppose the existence of the Iliad and Odyssey, even to their later songs, so that they cannot be older than the seventh or sixth century. Historically the Pelasgians can be traced only in Thessaly. Pelasgiotis is thus equivalent to Pelasgia, just as Thessaliotis is equivalent to Thessalia and Elimiotis to Elimea. The Pelasgiots, however, of historic times were of Grecian origin and we have not the slightest reason to suppose that the same was not true of prehistoric times. Indeed the Thessalian plain in all probability is the place in which the Hellenes first made permanent settlements.
A similar position to that of the Pelasgians is occupied by the Leleges in tradition. Homer speaks of them as inhabiting Pedasus in southern Troy and even Alcæus calls Antandrus, situated in this region, a Lelegean town. Later comers regarded the Leleges as the original inhabitants of Caria, where there was also a Pedasus; even in the Hellenistic period they were said to have formed a clan of serfs in this region, like the Heliots in Sparta. Old fortresses and tombstones, concerning the origin of which nothing was known, were ascribed to the Leleges, just as we speak of “Pelasgian” walls. It was also supposed that the whole Ionian coast and the islands near it were once inhabited by these people. It was natural to suppose a similar relationship for European Greece and here also to let a Lelegean population precede the Hellenic. Supports for this theory were found in a number of local names, such as Physcus and Larymna in Locris, Abæ in Phocis, Pedasus in Messenia, which occur in an identical or similar form in Caria. One of the two citadels of Megara was called Caria; and Zeus Carios was worshipped in various parts of Greece. Accordingly, Leleges or Carians were said to have lived in all these places. The supposition that the southern part of the Hellenic peninsula was occupied by a Carian population in a pre-Grecian period has, as we have seen, a great deal in its favour; only we should avoid trying to discover historical tradition in late suppositions, since Homer still knows nothing of all these myths and Hesiod is the first to make Locrus rule over the Leleges.
Nor does Homer know anything of Thracians outside of their historic abodes to the north of the Ægean Sea. Later tradition places them in Phocian Daulis and in Bœotia on the Helicon. The most direct cause for this was probably furnished by the race of Thracidæ, which attained a prominent position in Delphi and which had probably spread into other Phocian cities as well; another reason was the name of the Daulian king, Tereus, which had a Thracian sound, and lastly, the cult of the Muses which had a home on the Helicon, as also on Olympus in Thracian Pieria. Mysteries were connected with this cult even at a comparatively early period, as is shown by the legends of Orpheus and Musæus. Hence Eumolpus, the mythical founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, was held to be a Thracian; his very name shows that he is connected with the worship of the Muses, even if he were not expressly said to be the son of Musæus. The historic value of this tradition is thus sufficiently demonstrated.
There were also traditions of immigrations from the Orient into Greece. These were based in part upon solar myths, which have given rise to similar legends among the most widely separated peoples; they also reflect the consciousness that the rudiments of a higher civilisation were brought to the Greeks from the East. In the form in which we have them, these myths are without exception late formations, which presuppose close relations between Greece and the old civilisations of Asia and Egypt. In Homer, accordingly, there is no trace of them.
Thus Pelops is said to have come from Lydia or Phrygia to the peninsula which has since borne his name. One might be tempted to regard him as the eponymic hero of the Peloponnesus; but Pelopia was also the name of a daughter of Pelias or of Niobe, and of the mother of Cycnus, a son of Ares. Pelops’ mother also is Euryanassa, a daughter of Dione; his paternal grandfather is Xanthus (the “shining one”); two of his sons are called Chrysippus and Alcathous. These names leave no doubt as to the fact that Pelops was originally a solar hero; hence also the story of his contest with Œnomaus for the possession of Hippodamia. The name Peloponnesus, which is also unknown to Homer, means accordingly “Island of the sun-god”; Helios, as is well known, had a celebrated temple at the most extreme southern point of the peninsula, on the promontory of Tænarum. Thus Pelops, originally, was not materially different from Hercules, who for the most part has crowded him out of cult and tradition; just as the genealogy of the Peloponnesian dynasties was traced back to Pelops in ancient times and to Hercules at a later period. Nevertheless Pelops has at least kept the first place in Olympia.
The tradition of the immigration of Danaus from Egypt is closely connected with the legend of the wanderings of Io, which could not have taken on its present form until after Egypt was opened up to the Hellenes, that is not before the end of the seventh century. The legend concerning the Egyptian origin of the old Attic national hero Cecrops grew up much later in the fourth or third century, and never attained general recognition.
We have already seen how Phœnix and his brother Cadmus became Phœnicians. Accordingly Phœnix’s daughter, or according to a later myth his sister, Europa, was carried off by Zeus from Phœnicia to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos. This alone makes it clear that Minos had nothing whatever to do with the Phœnicians, but is a good Grecian god, as are also Phœnix, Cadmus, Europa, his wife Pasiphaë (the “all enlightening”), his daughter Phædra (the “beaming”), and Ariadne the wife of Dionysus. Minos, also, afterwards fell to the rank of a hero; already in Homer he appears as the king of Knossos, and later the Cretans trace their laws back to him. The name Minoa occurs frequently in the islands and on the coast of the Ægean Sea; also in Crete itself, and in Amorgos, Siphnos, and on the coast of Megaris. Hence the conclusion was drawn that Minos had ruled in all these places and must therefore have been a great sea-king, whose dominion extended over the whole of the Cyclades and in fact over the whole Ægean Sea. But in Sicily there was also a Minoa, a daughter city of the Megarian colony of Selinus, and doubtless named after the small island of Minoa near the Nisæan Megara. Thus the tradition arose that Minos had proceeded to Sicily and there found his death. Since Selinus was founded in the year 650 B.C., this myth cannot have come into existence before the sixth century.
At the beginning of the fifth century all these traditions were combined, and connected; on the one hand, with the myths which formed the substance of the epic poems; on the other, with the oldest historic recollections. The genealogies of the heroes as given in part by Homer and more completely by Hesiod served as a chronological basis. At the beginning were placed the Pelasgians, then the immigrations from the east, of Danaus, Pelops, Cadmus, and others. Then followed the expedition of the Argonauts, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the Trojan War, and whatever else of similar nature was related in the epics. Next came the age of the great migrations; first the incursion of the Thessalians into the plains of the Peneus, and the Bœotian migration caused thereby, then the march of the Dorians and their allies, the Eleans, into the Peloponnesus, which was followed by the colonisation of the islands and of the western coast of Asia Minor.
Thus was gained the misleading appearance of a pragmatic history of Grecian antiquity; and although even in ancient times occasional critical doubts were not wanting, this system as a whole was accepted by the Greeks as historical truth.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Reproduced by permission from his Griechische Geschichte. The subject here treated is one on which the authorities are by no means agreed. Other views are presented in a subsequent chapter.]
V. THE DORIANS
Land of the lordly mien and iron frame! Where wealth was held dishonour, Luxury’s smile Worse than a demon’s soul-destroying wile! Where every youth that hailed the Day-God’s beam, Wielded the sword, and dreamt the patriot’s dream; Where childhood lisped of war with eager soul, And woman’s hand waved on to glory’s goal.
--NICHOLAS MICHELL.
From the earliest period there were two peoples of Greece who seem, at least in the eye of later generations, to have been pre-eminent--the Dorians and the Ionians. Of the former the leaders are the Spartans; of the latter, the Athenians. In the main, so preponderant are these two cities that, viewed retrospectively, Greek history comes to seem the history of Athens and Sparta. This appears a curious anomaly when one considers that these cities were not great world emporiums like Babylon and Nineveh and Rome, but at best only moderate-sized towns. Yet they influenced humanity for all time to come; and our study of Greek history perforce resolves itself largely into the doings of the citizens of these two little communities. We shall first consider the history of the Dorians, who, though in the long run the less important of the two, were the earlier to appear prominently on the stage of history.[a]
The Dorians derived their origin from those districts in which the Grecian nation bordered towards the north upon numerous and dissimilar races of barbarians. As to the tribes which dwelt beyond these boundaries we are indeed wholly destitute of information; nor is there the slightest trace of any memorial or tradition that the Greeks originally came from those quarters. On these frontiers, however, the events took place which effected an entire alteration in the internal condition of the whole Grecian nation, and here were given many of those impulses, of which the effects were so long and generally experienced. The prevailing character of the events alluded to, was a perpetual pressing forward of the barbarous races, particularly of the Illyrians, into more southern districts.
To begin then by laying down a boundary line, which may be afterwards modified for the sake of greater accuracy, we shall suppose this to be the mountain ridge, which stretches from Mount Olympus to the west as far as the Acroceraunian Mountains (comprehending the Cambunian ridge and Mount Lacmon), and in the middle comes in contact with the Pindus chain, which stretches in a direction from north to south. The western part of this chain separates the farthest Grecian tribes from the great Illyrian nation, which extended back as far as the Celts in the south of Germany.
In the fashion of wearing the mantle and dressing the hair, and also in their dialect, the Macedonians bore a great resemblance to the Illyrians, whence it is evident that the Macedonians belonged to the Illyrian nation. Notwithstanding which, there can be no doubt that the Greeks were aboriginal inhabitants of this district. The plains of Emathia, the most beautiful district of the country, were occupied by the Pelasgi, who, according to Herodotus, also possessed Creston above Chalcidice, to which place they had come from Thessaliotis. Hence the Macedonian dialect was full of primitive Greek words. And that these had not been introduced by the royal family (which was Hellenic by descent or adoption of manners) is evident from the fact, that many signs of the most simple ideas (which no language ever borrows from another) were the same in both, as well as from the circumstance that these words do not appear in their Greek form, but have been modified according to a native dialect. In the Macedonian dialect there occur grammatical forms which are commonly called Æolic, together with many Arcadian and Thessalian words: and what perhaps is still more decisive, several words, which, though not to be found in the Greek, have been preserved in the Latin language. There does not appear to be any peculiar connection with the Doric dialect: hence we do not give much credit to the otherwise unsupported assertion of Herodotus, of an original identity of the Dorian and Macednian (Macedonian) nations. In other authors Macednus is called the son of Lycaon, from whom the Arcadians were descended, or Macedon is the brother of Magnes, or a son of Æolus, according to Hesiod and Hellanicus, which are merely various attempts to form a genealogical connection between this semi-barbarian race and the rest of the Greek nation.
The Thessalians as well as the Macedonians were, as it appears, an Illyrian race, who subdued a native Greek population; but in this case the body of the interlopers was smaller, while the numbers and civilisation of the aboriginal inhabitants were considerable. Hence the Thessalians resembled the Greeks more than any of the northern races with which they were connected: hence their language in particular was almost purely Grecian, and indeed bore perhaps a greater affinity to the language of the ancient epic poets than any other dialect. But the chief peculiarities of this nation with which we are acquainted were not of a Grecian character. Of this their national dress, which consisted in part of the flat and broad-brimmed hat καυσία and the mantle (which last was common to both nations, but was unknown to the Greeks of Homer’s time, and indeed long afterwards, until adopted as the costume of the equestrian order at Athens), is a sufficient example. The Thessalians moreover were beyond a doubt the first to introduce into Greece the use of cavalry. More important distinctions however than that first alleged are perhaps to be found in their impetuous and passionate character, and the low and degraded state of their mental faculties. The taste for the arts shown by the rich family of the Scopadæ proves no more that such was the disposition of the whole people, than the existence of the same qualities in Archelaus argues their prevalence in Macedonia. This is sufficient to distinguish them from the race of the Greeks, so highly endowed by nature. We are therefore induced to conjecture that this nation, which a short time before the expedition of the Heraclidæ, migrated from Thesprotia, and indeed from the territory of Ephyra (Cichyrus) into the plain of the Peneus, had originally come from Illyria. On the other hand indeed, many points of similarity in the customs of the Thessalians and Dorians might be brought forward. Thus, for example, the love for the male sex (that usage peculiar to the Dorians) was also common among the Illyrians, and the objects of affection were, as at Sparta, called ἀΐται; the women also, as amongst the Dorians, were addressed by the title of ladies (δέσποιναι), a title uncommon in Greece, and expressive of the estimation in which they were held. A great freedom in the manners of the female sex was nevertheless customary among the Illyrians, who in this respect bore a nearer resemblance to the northern nations. Upon the whole, however, these migrations from the north had the effect of disseminating among the Greeks manners and institutions which were entirely unknown to their ancestors, as represented by Homer.
We will now proceed to inquire what was the extent of territory gained by the Illyrians in the west of Greece. A great part of Epirus had in early times been inhabited by Pelasgi, to which race the inhabitants of Dodona are likewise affirmed by the best authorities to have belonged, as well as the whole nation of Thesprotians; also the Chaonians at the foot of the Acroceraunian Mountains, and the Chones, Œnotri, and Peucetii on the opposite coast of Italy, are said to have been of this race. The ancient buildings, institutions, and religious worship of the Epirotes are also manifestly of Pelasgic origin. We suppose always that the Pelasgi were Greeks, and spoke the Grecian language, an opinion however in support of which we will on this occasion only adduce a few arguments. It must then be borne in mind, that all the races whose migrations took place at a late period, such as the Achæans, Ionians, Dorians, were not (the last in particular) sufficiently powerful or numerous to effect a complete change in the customs of a barbarous population; that many districts, Arcadia and Perrhæbia for instance, remained entirely Pelasgic, without being inhabited by any nation not of Grecian origin; that the most ancient names, either of Grecian places or mentioned in their traditions, belonged indeed to a different era of the dialect, but not to another language; that finally, the great similarity between the Latin and Greek can only be explained by supposing the Pelasgic language to have formed the connecting link. Now the nations of Epirus were almost reduced to a complete state of barbarism by the operation of causes, which could only have had their origin in Illyria; and in the historic age, the Ambracian Bay was the boundary of Greece. In later times more than half of Ætolia ceased to be Grecian, and without doubt adopted the manners and language of the Illyrians, from which point the Athamanes, an Epirote and Illyrian nation, pressed into the south of Thessaly. Migrations and predatory expeditions, such as the Encheleans had undertaken in the fabulous times, continued without intermission to repress and keep down the genuine population of Greece.
The Illyrians were in these ancient times also bounded on the east by the Phrygians and Thracians, as well as by the Pelasgi. The Phrygians were at this time the immediate neighbours of the Macedonians in Lebæa, by whom they were called Brygians (Βρύγες, Βρύγοι, Βρίγες); they dwelt at the foot of the snowy Bermius, where the fabulous rose-gardens of King Midas were situated, while walking in which the wise Silenus was fabled to have been taken prisoner. They also fought from this place (as the Telegonia of Eugamon related) with the Thesprotians of Epirus. At no great distance from hence were the Mygdonians, the people nearest related to the Phrygians. According to Xanthus, this nation did not migrate to Asia until after the Trojan War. But, in the first place, the Cretan traditions begin with religious ceremonies and fables, which appear from the most ancient testimonies to have been derived from Phrygians of Asia; and secondly the Armenians, who were beyond a doubt of a kindred race to the Phrygians, were considered as an aboriginal nation in their own territory. It will therefore be sufficient to recognise the same race of men in Armenia, Asia Minor, and at the foot of Mount Bermius, without supposing that all the Armenians and Phrygians emigrated from the latter settlement on the Macedonian coast. The intermediate space between Illyria and Asia, a district across which numerous nations migrated in ancient times, was peopled irregularly from so many sides, that the national uniformity which seems to have once existed in those parts was speedily deranged. The most important documents respecting the connection between the Phrygian and other nations are the traces that remain of its dialect. It was well known in Plato’s time that many primitive words of the Grecian language were to be recognised with a slight alteration in the Phrygian, such as πῦρ, ὕδωρ, κύων; and the great similarity of grammatical structure which the Armenian now displays with the Greek, must be referred to this original connection. The Phrygians in Asia have, however, been without doubt intermixed with Syrians, who not only established themselves on the right bank of the Halys, but on the left also in Lycaonia, and as far as Lycia, and accordingly adopted much of the Syrian language and religion. Their enthusiastic and frantic ceremonies, however, had doubtless always formed part of their religion; these they had in common with their immediate neighbours, the Thracians: but the ancient Greeks appear to have been almost entirely unacquainted with such rites.
The Thracians, who settled in Pieria at the foot of Mount Olympus, and from thence came down to Mount Helicon, as being the originators of the worship of Bacchus and the Muses, and the fathers of Grecian poetry, are a nation of the highest importance in the history of civilisation. We cannot but suppose that they spoke a dialect very similar to the Greek, since otherwise they could not have had any considerable influence upon the latter people. They were in all probability derived originally from the country called Thrace in later times, where the Bessi, a tribe of the nation of the Satræ, at the foot of Mount Pangæum, presided over the oracle of Bacchus. Whether the whole of the populous races of Edones, Odomantes, Odrysi, Treres, etc., are to be considered as identical with the Thracians in Pieria, or whether it is not more probable that these barbarous nations received from the Greeks their general name of Thracians, with which they had been familiar from early times, are questions which we shall not attempt to determine. Into these nations, however, a large number of Pæonians subsequently penetrated, who had passed over at the time of a very ancient migration of the Teucrians together with the Mysians. To this Pæonian race the Pelagonians, on the banks of the Axius, belonged; who also advanced into Thessaly, as will be shown hereafter. Of the Teucrians, however, we know nothing excepting that, in concert with (Pelasgic) Dardanians, they founded the city of Troy--where the language in use was probably allied to the Grecian, and distinct from the Phrygian.
Now it is within the mountainous barriers above described that we must look for the origin of the nations which in the heroic mythology are always represented as possessing dominion and power, and are always contrasted with an aboriginal population. These, in our opinion, were northern branches of the Grecian nation, which had overrun and subdued the Greeks who dwelt farther south. The most ancient abode of the Hellenes proper (who in mythology are merely a small nation in Phthia) was situated, according to Aristotle, in Epirus, near Dodona, to whose god Achilles prays, as being the ancient protector of his family. In all probability the Achæans, the ruling nation both of Thessaly and of the Peloponnesus in fabulous times, were of the same race and origin as the Hellenes. The Minyans, Phlegyans, Lapithæ, and Æolians of Corinth and Salmone, came originally from the districts above Pieria, on the frontiers of Macedonia, where the very ancient Orchomenus, Minya, and Salmonia or Halmopia were situated. Nor is there less obscurity with regard to the northern settlements of the Ionians; they appear, as it were, to have fallen from heaven into Attica and Ægialea; they were not, however, by any means identical with the aboriginal inhabitants of these districts, and had perhaps detached themselves from some northern, probably Achæan, race. Lastly, the Dorians are mentioned in ancient legends and poems as established in one extremity of the great mountain chain of Upper Greece, viz. at the foot of Mount Olympus: there are, however, reasons for supposing that at an earlier period they had dwelt at its other northern extremity, at the farthest limit of the Grecian nation.
We now turn our attention to the singular nation of the Hylleans (Ὑλλεῖς, Ὕλλοι), which is supposed to have dwelt in Illyria, but is in many respects connected in a remarkable manner with the Dorians. The real place of its abode can hardly be laid down; as the Hylleans are never mentioned in any historical narrative, but always in mythological legends; and they appear to have been known to the geographers only from mythological writers. Yet they are generally placed in the islands of Melita and Black-Corcyra, to the south of Liburnia. Now the name of the Hylleans agrees strikingly with that of the first and most noble tribe of the Dorians. Besides which, it is stated, that though dwelling among Illyrian races, these Hylleans were nevertheless genuine Greeks. Moreover they, as well as the Doric Hylleans, were supposed to have sprung from Hyllus, a son of Hercules, whom that hero begot upon Melite, the daughter of Ægæus: here the name Ægæus refers to a river in Corcyra, Melite to the island just mentioned. Apollo was the chief god of the Dorians; and so likewise these Hylleans were said to have concealed under the earth, as the sign of inviolable sanctity, that instrument of such importance in the religion of Apollo, a tripod. The country of the Hylleans is described as a large peninsula, and compared to the Peloponnesus: it is said to have contained fifteen cities; which however had not a more real existence, than the peninsula as large as the Peloponnesus on the Illyrian coast. How all these statements are to be understood is hard to say. It appears however that they can only be reconciled as follows: the Doric Hylleans had a tradition, that they came originally from these northern districts, which then bordered on the Illyrians, and were afterwards occupied by that people; and there still remained in those parts some members of their tribe, some other Hylleans. This notion of Greek Hylleans in the very north of Greece, who also were descended from Hercules, and also worshipped Apollo, was taken up and embellished by the poets: although it is not likely that any one had really ever seen these Hylleans and visited their country. Like the Hyperboreans, they existed merely in tradition and imagination. It is possible also that the Corcyræans, in whose island there was an “Hyllæan” harbour, may have contributed to the formation of these legends, as is shown by some circumstances pointed out above; but it cannot be supposed that the whole tradition arose from Corcyræan colonies.
Here we might conclude our remarks on this subject, did not the following question (one indeed of great importance) deserve some consideration. What relation can we suppose to have existed between the races which migrated into those northern districts, and the native tribes, and what between the different races of Greece itself? All inquiries on this subject lead us back to the Pelasgi, who although not found in every part of ancient Greece (for tradition makes so wide a distinction between them and many other nations, that no confusion ever takes place), yet occur almost universally wherever early civilisation, ancient settlements, and worships of peculiar sanctity and importance existed. And in fact there is no doubt that most of the ancient religions of Greece owed their origin to this race. The Jupiter and Dione of Dodona; Jupiter and Juno of Argos; Vulcan and Minerva of Athens; Ceres and Proserpine of Eleusis; Mercury and Diana of Arcadia, together with Cadmus and the Cabiri of Thebes, cannot, if properly examined, be referred to any other origin. We must therefore attribute to that nation an excessive readiness in creating and metamorphosing objects of religious worship, so that the same fundamental conceptions were variously developed in different places, a variety which was chiefly caused by the arbitrary neglect of, or adherence to, particular parts of the same legend. In many places also we may recognise the sameness of character which pervaded the different worships of the above gods; everywhere we see manifested in symbols, names, rites, and legends, an uniform character of ideas and feelings. The religions introduced from Phrygia and Thrace, such as that of the Cretan Jupiter and Dionysus or Bacchus, may be easily distinguished by their more enthusiastic character from the native Pelasgic worship. The Phœnician and Egyptian religions lay at a great distance from the early Greeks, were almost unknown even where they existed in the immediate neighbourhood, were almost unintelligible when the Greeks attempted to learn them, and repugnant to their nature when understood. On the whole, the Pelasgic worship appears to form part of a simple elementary religion, which easily represented the various forms produced by the changes of nature in different climates and seasons, and which abounded in expressive signs for all the shades of feeling which these phenomena awakened.
On the other hand, the religion of the northern races (who as being of Hellenic descent are put in contrast with the Pelasgi) had in early times taken a more moral turn, to which their political relations had doubtless contributed. The heroic life (which is no fable of the poets), the fondness for vigorous and active exertion, the disinclination to the harmless occupations of husbandry, which is so remarkably seen in the conquering race of the Hellenes, necessarily awakened and cherished an entirely different train of religious feeling. Hence the Jupiter Hellanius of Æacus, the Jupiter Laphystius of Athamas, and, finally, the Doric Jupiter, whose son is Apollo, the prophet and warrior, are rather representations of the moral order and harmony of the universe, after the ancient method, than of the creative powers of nature. We do not however deny, that there was a time when these different views had not as yet taken a separate direction. Thus it may be shown, that the Apollo Lyceus of the Dorians conveyed nearly the same notions as the Jupiter Lycæus of the Arcadians, although the worship of either deity was developed independently of that of the other. Thus also certain ancient Arcadian and Doric usages had, in their main features, a considerable affinity. The points of resemblance in these different worships can be only perceived by comparison: tradition presents, at the very first outset, an innumerable collection of discordant forms of worship belonging to the several races, but without explaining to us how they came to be thus separated. For these different rites were not united into a whole until they had been first divided; and both by the connection of worships and by the influence of poetry new combinations were introduced, which differed essentially from those of an earlier date.
The language of the ancient Grecian race (which, together with its religion, forms the most ancient record of its history) must, if we may judge from the varieties of dialect and from a comparison with the Latin language, have been very perfect in its structure, and rich and expressive in its flexions and formations; though much of this was polished off by the Greeks of later ages: in early times, distinctness and precision in marking the primitive words and the inflections being more attended to than facility of utterance. Wherever the ancient forms had been preserved, they sounded foreign and uncouth to more modern ears; and the language of later times was greatly softened, in comparison with the Latin. But the peculiarities of the pure Doric dialect are (wherever they were not owing to a faithful preservation of archaic forms) actual deviations from the original dialect, and consequently they do not occur in Latin; they bear a northern character. The use of the article, which did not exist in the Latin language or in that of epic poetry, can be ascribed to no other cause than to immigrations of new tribes, and especially to that of the Dorians. Its introduction must, nearly as in the Roman languages, be considered as the sign of a great revolution. The peculiarities of the Doric dialect must have existed before the period of the migrations; since thus only can it be explained how peculiar forms of the Doric dialect were common to Crete, Argos, and Sparta: the same is also true of the dialects which are generally considered as subdivisions of the Æolic; the only reason for the resemblance of the language of Lesbos to that of Bœotia being, that Bœotians migrated at that period to Lesbos. The peculiarities of the Ionic dialect may, on the other hand, be viewed in great part as deviations caused by the genial climate of Asia; for the language of the Attic race, to which the latter were most nearly related, could hardly have differed so widely from that of the colonies of Athens, if the latter had not been greatly changed.[b]
THE MIGRATION--THE VIEW OF CURTIUS
[Sidenote: [ca. 1100 B.C.]]
It is with the advance of the Dorians that the power of the mountain peoples makes its appearance from the north to take its share in the history of nations. For centuries they had lagged behind the coast and maritime races, but now they stepped in with all the greater impress of sheer natural force, and all that was transformed and reformed as a consequence of their conquering march, had a durability which lasted throughout the whole period of Greek history. This is the reason that in contradistinction to the “Heroic Age” ancient historians begin the historical period with the first deeds of the Dorians.
But, for all that, the information concerning these deeds is none the less scanty. On the contrary: as this epoch approaches, the old sources dry up, and new ones are not opened. Homer knows nothing of the march of the Heraclidæ [i.e., descendants of Heracles or Hercules]. The Achæan emigrants lived entirely in the memory of past days, and cherished it beyond the sea in the faithful memorials of song. For those who remained behind, who had to submit themselves to a strange and powerful rule, it was no time for poetry. The Dorians themselves have always been sparing in the matter of tradition; it was not their way to use many words about what they had done; they had not the soaring enthusiasm of the Achæan race, and still less were they capable of spinning out their experiences at a pleasing length, in the fashion of the Ionians. Their inclination and ability were directed to practical existence, to the fulfilment of definite tasks, to earnest occupations.
Thus, then, the great incidents of the Dorian emigration were left to chance tradition, of which all but a few faint traces have been lost, and this is why our whole information on the conquest of the peninsula is as poor in names as in facts. For it was only at a later date, when the national epos itself had long died out, that an attempt was made to recover the beginnings of Peloponnesian history.
But these later poets could no longer find any fresh and living fountain of tradition; nor is theirs that pure and unrestrained delight in the images of the olden time, which constitutes the very breath of life in the Homeric poem; but there is a conscious effort to fill out the gaps in tradition, and to join the torn threads connecting the Achæan and the Dorian period. They sought to unify the legends of various places, to restore the missing links, to reconcile contradictions; and thus arose a history of the march of the Heraclidæ, in which things that had come about gradually and in the course of centuries, were related together with dogmatic brevity.
The Dorians crossed over from the mainland in successive troops, accompanied by their wives and children; they spread slowly over the country; but wherever they gained a footing the result was a complete transformation of the conditions of life by their agency. They brought with them their household and tribal institutions; they clung with tenacious obstinacy to their peculiarities of speech and custom; proud and shy, they held aloof from the other Greeks, and instead of becoming absorbed, as the Ionians did, into the older population, they impressed on the new home the character of their own race. The peninsula became Dorian.
But this transmutation came about in a very varied fashion; it did not start from one point, but had three chief centres. The legend of the Peloponnesus has expressed it in this wise: three brothers, Temenus, Aristodemus, and Cresphontes, who were of the race of Heracles [Hercules], the old rightful heir to the dominion of Argos, asserted the claims of their ancestor. They offered common sacrifices on the three altars of Zeus Patrous and cast lots among themselves for the various lordships in the country. Argos was the principal lot, and it fell to Temenus; Lacedæmon, the second, came to the children of Aristodemus, who were minors, whilst the beautiful Messenia passed, by craft, into the third brother’s possession.
This tale of the drawing of lots by the Heraclidæ, arose in the Peloponnesus after the states had assumed their peculiar constitution. It contains the reasons, derived from the old heroic past, for the erection of the three metropolitan towns; the mythical authority for the Peloponnesian claims of the Heraclidæ, and for the new state organisation. The historical kernel of the legend is that, from the very beginning, the Dorians represented, not the interests of their own race, but the interests of their leaders, who were not Dorians, but Achæans; this is why the god, under whose authority the division of the land was made, was none other than the ancient god of the race of Æacidæ. Further, the foundation of the legend lies in the fact that the Dorians, in order to gain possession of the three chief plains of the peninsula, divided, soon after their arrival into three hosts.
Each had its Heraclid as leader of the people. Each was composed of three races, the Hylleans, Dymanes, and Pamphylians. Each host was an image of the entire race. Thus the whole subsequent development of Peloponnesian history depended on the manner in which the different hosts now established themselves in the new regions; on the extent to which, in the midst of the ancient people of the country and in spite of the subservience of their forces to foreign leadership, they remained faithful to themselves and their native customs; and on the method by which mutual relations were established.
MESSENIA
[Sidenote: [ca. 1100-1000 B.C.]]
The new states were in part, also new territories, as was, for instance, Messenia. For in the Homeric Peloponnesus there is no country of this name: its eastern portion where the waters of the Pamisus connect a higher and lower plain with one another, belongs to the lordship of Menelaus, and the western half to the kingdom of the Neleïdes which has its centre on the coast. The Dorians came from the north into the upper plain, and there obtained a footing in Stenyclarus. Thence they spread farther and drove the Thessalian Neleïdes towards the sea. The high, island-like ocean citadel of old Navarino, seems to have been the last spot on the coast where the latter maintained themselves, till finally, being more and more closely pressed, they forsook the land for the sea. The island-plain of Stenyclarus now became the kernel of the newly-formed district, and could thence be called Messene--that is, the middle or inner country.
With the exception of this great supplanting of one nation by another the change was effected more peacefully than in most other quarters. At least the native legend knows nothing of forcible conquest. A certain portion of arable land and pasture was to be given up to the Dorians; the remainder was to be left to the inhabitants in undisturbed possession. The victorious visitors laid claim to no special and favoured position; the new princes were by no means regarded as foreign conquerors, but were received with friendliness by the nation as relatives of the ancient Æolian kings, and on account of the dislike to the house of the Pelopidæ. With full confidence they and their following settled among the Messenians, and evidently with the idea that under their protection the old and new inhabitants might peacefully amalgamate into one community.
But after this their relations did not develop in the same harmless manner. The Dorians believed themselves betrayed by their leaders, and in consequence of a Dorian reaction Cresphontes found himself compelled to overthrow the old order of things; to abolish equality before the law; to unite the Dorians in one close society in Stenyclarus, and to make this place the capital of the country, while the rest of Messenia was reduced to the position of a conquered district. The disturbances went on. Cresphontes himself became the victim of a bloody insurrection; his family were overthrown and no Cresphontidæ followed. Æpytus succeeded. He is by name and race an Arcadian, brought up in Arcadia whence he penetrated into Messenia, then on the verge of dissolution. He gave order and direction to the development of the country, and hence its subsequent kings are called Æpytidæ. But the whole direction henceforth taken by the history of the country is different, non-Dorian, unwarlike. The Æpytidæ are no soldier-princes, but creators of order, and founders of forms of religious worship. And these forms are not those of the Dorians, but decidedly non-Dorian, old Peloponnesian, like those of Demeter, Æsculapius, the Æsculapidæ. The high festival of the country was a mystery-service of the so-called “great deities” and unknown to the Dorian race, while at Ithome, the lofty citadel of the country, which raises its commanding height between the two plains of the district, ruled the Pelasgic Zeus, whose worship was considered the distinctive mark of the Messenian people.
Scanty as are the relics preserved of the history of the Messenian country, some very important facts undoubtedly underlie them. From the first a remarkable insecurity reigned in this Dorian foundation; a deep gulf between the commander of the army and the people, which had its origin in the king’s connection with the ancient pre-Achæan population. He did not succeed in founding a dynasty, for it is only in subsequent legend, which here, as in the case of all Greek pedigrees, seeks to disguise a violent break, that Æpytus is made to be the son of Cresphontes. But the warlike Dorian nation must have become so weakened by internal conflicts, that it was not in a position to assert itself; the transformation of Messenia into a Dorian country was not carried into effect, and thus the main lines of its history were determined. For rich though the district was in natural resources, uniting as it did two of the finest watersheds with a coast stretching between two seas and well provided with harbours; yet the development of the State was from the first unfortunate. There was here no complete renewal, no powerful Hellenic revival in the district.
It was with far different success that a second host of Dorian warriors pressed down the long valley of the Eurotas, which from a narrow gorge gradually widens to the smiling plain of cornfields at the foot of Taygetus, the “Hollow Lacedæmon.” There is no Greek territory in which one plain is so decidedly the very kernel of the whole as it is here. Sunk deep between rugged mountains and severed from the surrounding country by high passes, it holds in its lap all the means of comfort and well-being. Here on the hillocks on the Eurotas above Amyclæ the Dorians pitched their camp, from which grew up the town of Sparta, the youngest city of the plain.
If the Dorian Sparta and the Achæan Amyclæ existed for centuries side by side, it is manifest that no uninterrupted state of war continued during this period. Here, no more than in Messenia, can a thorough occupation of the whole district have taken place, but the relations between the old and new inhabitants must have been arranged by agreement. Here, too, the Dorians dispersed through different places and mingled with the foreign nation.
ARGOS
The third state has its kernel in the plain of the Inachus, which was regarded as the portion of the first-born of the Heraclidæ. For the fame of Atrides’ might, though it was chiefly fixed at Mycenæ, also extended over the state which was founded on the ruins of the Mycenæan kingdom. The nucleus of the Dorian Argos was on the coast, where between the sandy estuary of the Inachus, and that of the copious stream of the Erasinus, a tract of firm land rises in the swampy soil. Here the Dorians had their camp and their sanctuaries; here their commander Temenus had died and had been buried before he had seen his people in secure possession of the upper plain; and after him this coast town preserved the name of Temenium. Its situation shows that the citadels and passes farther inland were maintained by the Achæans with a more steadfast resistance, so that the Dorians were for a long time compelled to content themselves with a thoroughly disadvantageous situation. For it was only by degrees that the whole strip of shore was rendered habitable, and the swampy character of the soil was, according to Aristotle, the main reason why the sovereign town of the Pelopidæ was placed so far back in the upper plain. Now by the advance of the Dorian might, the high rock citadel of Larissa also became the political centre of the district, and the Pelasgian Argos at its foot, which had been the oldest place of assembly for the population, was once more the capital. It came to be the seat of the reigning family of the line of Temenus, and the starting-point for the further extension of their power.
This extension did not result from the uniform conquest of the district and the annihilation of the earlier settlements, but from the despatch of Dorian bands which established themselves at the chief points between the Ionian and Achæan populations. This was also effected in different ways, more or less violent, and radiating in two directions, on the one side towards the Corinthian, on the other towards the Saronic Sea.
Low passes lead from Argos into the Asopus Valley. Rhegnidas the Temenid led Dorian armies into the upper valley, where, under the blessing of Dionysus, flourished the old Ionian Phlius, while Phalces chose the lower vale at whose entrance, Sicyon, the ancient capital of the coast district of Ægialea, spread itself over a stately plateau. At both places a peaceful division of the soil appears to have taken place; and the same was the case in the neighbourhood of the Phliasians, at Cleonæ.
It must be confessed that it is incredible that, in this narrow and thickly populated territory, lordless acres were to be found with which to satisfy the strangers’ desire for territory, and even more so that the former land-owners willingly vacated their hereditary possessions; but the sense of the tradition is that only certain wealthy families were compelled to give place in consequence of the Dorian immigration, whilst the rest of the population continued in their former situation and were exempted from political change. The passion for emigration which had taken possession of the Ionian families throughout the north of the peninsula softened the effects of the transfer. The hope of finding fairer homes and a wider future beyond the sea, drove them to a distance. Thus Hippasus the ancestor of Pythagoras, left the narrow valley of Phlius to find in Samos a new home for him and his.
In this way it came about that good arable lands were left unoccupied in all the coast districts, so that the governments of the small states, which either retained their power or entered upon it in the place of the emigrants, were able to portion out fields and hand them over to the members of the warrior race of Dorians. For the latter were not anxious to overthrow the ancient order and to assert new principles of government, but only required a sufficiency of landed property for themselves and their belongings, together with the civil rights that belonged to it. Therefore the similarities between their worship of gods and heroes were utilised as a means of forming peaceful bonds of union. Thus it is expressly declared of Sicyon that from ancient times the Heraclidæ had ruled in this very place: therefore Phalces, when he penetrated thither with his Dorians, had allowed the ruling family to retain its offices and titles and had come to an understanding with it by peaceful agreement.
Towards the coast of the Saronic Gulf marched two hosts from Argos, under Deïphontes and Agaios, who transformed the old Ionian Epidaurus and Trœzen into Dorian towns; but from Epidaurus the march was continued to the isthmus, where, in the strong and important city of Corinth, whose citadel was the key of the whole peninsula, the series of Temenid settlements found its limit.
These settlements unquestionably form the most brilliant part of the warlike march of the Dorians through the Peloponnesus. By the energy of these Dorians and their leaders of the race of Hercules, who must have joined in these undertakings in specially large numbers, all parts of the many sections into which the country was split up were successfully occupied, and the new Argos, stretching from the island of Cythera as far as the Attic frontiers, far exceeded the bounds of the modest settlements on the Pamisus and Eurotas. For even if the leaders of the armies had not everywhere founded new states, still those existing had all become homogeneous by the acceptance of a Dorian element, which formed the military and preponderating section of the population.
This transformation had started from Argos, and consequently all these settlements stood in a filial relation to the mother city, so that we may regard Argos, Phlius, Sicyon, Trœzen, Epidaurus, and Corinth as a Dorian hexapolis forming a confederation like that in Caria.
Moreover this organisation was not an entirely new one. In Achæan times Mycenæ had formed with Heræum the centre of the country; in the Heræum Agamemnon had received the oath of fealty from his vassals. This was why the goddess Hera [Juno] is said to have preceded the Temenidæ to Sicyon, when they sought to revive the union between the towns which had become estranged from one another. Thus here also the remodelling was connected with the ancient tradition.
But now a central point for the confederacy was found in the worship of Apollo, which the Dorians had found established in Argos and had merely reconstituted, in the guise of the Delphic or Pythian god, through whose influence they had become an active people and under whose auspices they had hitherto been led. The towns sent their yearly offerings to the temple of Apollo Pythæus, which stood in Argos at the foot of the Larissa, but the mother city possessed the rights of a chief town as well as the government of the sanctuary.
In the meantime the size of Argos and the splendour of her new foundations, constituted a dangerous superiority. For the extension of power implied its division, and this was in the highest degree increased by the natural peculiarities of the Argive territory, which is more broken than any other Peloponnesian country.
In regard to the internal relations of the different states, great complications prevailed from the time that the older and younger population had mutually arranged themselves. For where the victory of the Dorians had been decided by force of arms, the old occupants had been driven from rights and possessions; an Achæo-Dorian town was formed and none were citizens save those belonging to the three tribes.
But in most cases it was otherwise. For example where, as in Phlius and Sicyon, a prosperity founded on agriculture, industrial activity, and commerce already existed; there the population did not, at least for any length of time, submit to be oppressed and thrust on one side. They remained no nameless and insignificant mass, but were recognised as forming one or several tribes, side by side with the three Dorian divisions, though not with the same rights. Where, therefore, more than three phylæ or tribes are met with; where, besides the Hylleans, Dymanes and Pamphylians, there are also mentioned “Hyrnethians” as in Argos, or “Ægialæans” (shore people) as in Sicyon, or a “Chthonophyle” (which was perhaps the tribal name of the natives in Phlius), it may be concluded that the immigrants had not left the older people entirely outside the newly-founded commonwealth, but had sooner or later given them a certain recognised standing. However insignificant the latter might be, it was still the germ of important developments, and the existence of such co-tribes suffices to indicate a peculiar history for those states in which they occur.
Originally the various tribes also occupied different localities. As the diverse sections of the army had been separated in the camp, so the Pamphylians, the Dymanes and the Hylleans had their special quarters in Argos, and these long subsisted as such; when the Hyrnethians were admitted into the municipal commonwealth, they formed a fourth quarter. How long a period generally elapsed before the various elements of the population became amalgamated, is most clearly shown by the fact that places like Mycenæ continued their quiet existence as Achæan communities. Here the ancient traditions of the age of the Pelopidæ lived on undisturbed on the very spot where they had been enacted; here the anniversary of Agamemnon’s death was celebrated year after year at the place of his burial, and even during the Persian War, we see the men of Mycenæ and Tiryns, mindful of their old hero kings, as they take their part in the national quarrel against Asia.
Thus under the Dorian influence three new states were founded in the south and east of the peninsula, namely Messenia, Laconia, and Argos, which differed greatly even at the outset, and early diverged upon separate lines.
ARCADIA
At the same time great changes were taking place on the remote west coast. The states north and south of the Alpheus with which Homer is acquainted, were overthrown and Ætolian families, who honoured Oxylus as their ancestor, founded new lordships on the territory of the Epeans and Pylæans. These foundations had no apparent connection with the marches of the Dorian armies, and it is only a legendary poem of later date which speaks of Oxylus as having stipulated for the western land as his share in reward for services rendered to the Dorians. This betrays that it was a subsequent invention, by the fact that the new settlements on the peninsula are represented in this and similar fables as a result of a great and carefully planned undertaking; a representation which stands in complete contradiction to the facts of history. And when it is further related that the Dorians were conducted by their crafty leader, not along the flat coast road but across country through Arcadia, so that they might not be roused to envy or tempted to break their compact altogether, by the sight of the tracts of land conceded to Oxylus; this is but a tale invented with the object of explaining the erection of a state in Elis independently of the Dorian immigration, and the grounds for it are to be sought in the circumstance that the whole west coast, from the straits by Rhium down to Navarino, is distinguished by easy tracts of level country, such as are scarcely found elsewhere in Greek territory.
The best cornland lies at the foot of the Erymanthus Mountains, a broad plain through which the Peneus flows and which is surrounded by vine-clad hills stretching towards the neighbouring groups of islands. At the spot where the Peneus issues from the Arcadian mountains and flows into the coast-plain there rises on the left bank a stately height which looks clear over land and island sea and on this account was called in the Middle Ages, Calascope, or Belvidere. This height was selected by the Ætolian immigrants as their chief citadel; it became the royal fortress of the Oxylidæ and their following, into whose hands fell the best estates.
From here the Ætolian state, under the territorial name of Elis spread southward over the whole low country, where on the banks of the Alpheus the Epeans and Pylæans had once fought out those petty feuds of which Nestor was so fond of telling. On the decay of that maritime kingdom of the Neleidæ which was attacked on the south by the Messenian Dorians and on the north by the Epeans, Ætolian tribes pressed forward from the interior of the island; these were the Minyans who being expelled from Taygetus took possession of the mountains which run farthest in the direction of the Sicilian Sea from Arcadia. Here they settled themselves in six fortified towns, united by a common worship of Poseidon; Macistus and Lapreus, were the most distinguished. Thus between the Alpheus and the Neda, in what was afterwards the so-called Triphylia, or “country of three tribes,” a new Minyan state was formed.
Finally the nucleus of a new state was also planted in the valley of the Alpheus, where scattered families of Achæans under Agorius of Helice allied themselves with Ætolian houses, and founded the state of Pisa.
[Sidenote: [ca. 1000 B.C.]]
Thus on the western coast, partly through conquest by the northern tribes and partly by arrivals from other parts of the peninsula, three new states arose, namely Elis, Pisa, and Triphylia; and in this way the whole coast district of the Peloponnesus was gradually newly populated and partitioned out afresh. Only in the district in the heart of the peninsula, did the country remain undisturbed in its existing state.
Arcadia was regarded by the ancients as a pre-eminently Pelasgian country, and here it was thought the autochthonic condition of the aboriginal inhabitants had been longest preserved and had suffered the least disturbance. Nevertheless the native legends themselves distinctly indicate that here also immigrations took place, interrupting the uniform condition of Pelasgian life, and occasioning a fusion of races, of different character and origin. Here too there is no mistaking the epoch at which, as in all other Greek states, the historical movement began.
After Pelasgus and his sons, Arcas, as ancestor of the Arcadians, stands at the beginning of a new era in the prehistoric life of the country. But Arcadians were to be found in Phrygia and Bithynia as well as in Crete and Cyprus, and the fact that colonists from the islands and shores of the eastern sea ascended into the highlands of the Peloponnesus that they might settle there in the beautiful valleys, is manifested by many tokens. The Cretan myths about Zeus are repeated in the closest manner of the Arcadian Lycæum; Tegea and Gortys are Cretan as well as Arcadian towns, with identical forms of worship, ancient legends connect Tegea and Paphos and the Cyprian dialect, which has only very recently been learnt from the native monuments, shows a great likeness to the Arcadian. Arcadians were known as navigators both in the western and in the eastern sea, and Nauplius, the hero of the oldest Peloponnesian seaport town appears as the servant of the Tegeatic kings, to whose house Argonauts like Ancæus also belong.
There are remains of old traditions, which show that even the interior of the Peloponnesus was not so remote or isolated as is commonly supposed; that here too there were immigrations and that in consequence in the rural districts, and particularly in the fruitful ravines of the eastern side, a series of towns grew up, which, on account of the natural barriers of their frontiers, early formed isolated city domains; such as those of Pheneus, Stynphalus, Orchomenus, Cleitor and afterwards the towns of Mantinea, Alea, Caphyæ, and Gortys. In the southwest portion of Arcadia, in the forest range of Lycæum, and in the valley of the Alpheus were also to be found ancient fortress towns, such as Lycosura; but these fortresses never became political centres of the districts. The mass of the people remained scattered and were only connected with the community by very slight bonds.
Thus the whole of Arcadia consisted of a numerous group of municipal and rural cantons. It was only the former which could attain historical importance, and among them especially Tegea, which lying as it did in the most fertile part of the great Arcadian plateau, must from the earliest times have assumed something of the position of a capital city. Thus it was a Tegeatic king, Echemus, the “steadfast,” who is said to have prevented the Dorians from entering the peninsula. Yet the Tegeatæ never succeeded in giving a unity to the whole island. Its natural conformation was too multi-form, too diversified, and too much cut up by high mountain ridges into numerous and sharply defined portions for it to be able to attain to a common territorial history. It was only certain forms of worship, with which customs and institutions were bound up, that were universal among the whole Arcadian people. These were, in the north country the worship of Artemis Hymnia, and in the south that of Zeus Lycæus, on the Lycæum, whose summit had been honoured as the holy mountain of Arcadia from primeval Pelasgian times.
The country was in this condition when the Pelopidæ founded their states; and so it still remained when the Dorians invaded the peninsula. A wild, impracticable mountain country, thickly populated by a sturdy people, Arcadia offered little prospect of easy success to races in search of territory, and could not detain them from their attempts on the river plains of the southern and western districts. According to the legend they were granted a free passage through the Arcadian fields. Nothing was changed except that the Arcadians were pushed farther and farther back from the sea, and therefore driven farther and farther from the advance Hellenic civilisation.
If we take a glance at the peninsula as a whole, and the political government which, in consequence of the immigration, it acquired for all time, we shall find, first, the interior persisting in its former condition unshaken, secondly, three districts, Lacedæmon, Messenia, and Argos, which had undergone a thorough metamorphosis directly due to the immigrating races; and finally the two strips of land along the north and west coasts, which had been left untouched by the Dorians, but in part were resettled by the ancient tribes whom the Dorians displaced, as was the case with Triphylia and Achæa, and in part transformed by arrivals of another kind, as happened at Elis.
Thus complicated were the results which followed the Dorian migration. They show sufficiently how little we have here to do with a transformation effected at one blow, like the result of a fortunate campaign. After the races had long wandered up and down in a varying series of territorial disputes and mutual agreements, the fate of the peninsula was gradually decided. Only when men had forgotten the tedious period of unrest and ferment, which memory can adorn with no incidents, could the reconstitution of the peninsula be regarded as a sudden turn of events by which the Peloponnesus had become Dorian.
Even in those districts which the invaders especially contended for and occupied, the transformation of the people into a Dorian population was only effected very gradually and in a very imperfect fashion. How could it have been otherwise? Even the conquering hosts themselves were not of purely Dorian blood, but intermixed with people of all sorts of races. Nor was it as Dorians but as relatives of the Achæan princes that the leaders of their armies laid claim to power and rule. Thus Plato saw in the march of the Heraclids a union between Dorians and Achæans, dating from the times of the movement of the Greek peoples, and how little unity originally existed between the commander and his men is shown by a series of undoubted facts. For no sooner had the force of the warriors won a firm footing in the districts, than the interests of Heraclids and Dorians diverged and such dissensions broke out as either endangered or nullified the whole success of the colony.
The leaders sought to effect amalgamation of the old and new populations, that they might thus attain a broader foundation for their power and place themselves in a position independent of the influence of the Dorian warriors. Everywhere do we find the same phenomena, and most distinctly in Messenia. But in Laconia also, the Heraclids made themselves detested by their warriors, by trying to assimilate the non-Dorian to the Dorian people, and in Argolis we see the Heraclid Deïphontes, whose name is thoroughly Ionic, allied with Hyrnetho, who is the representative of the original population of the coast district. It is this same Deïphontes who helps to establish the throne of the Temenids in Argos, to the indignation of the other Heraclids and of the Dorians: here, therefore, their new kingdom undoubtedly rests on the support of the pre-Dorian population.
Thus the bonds between the Heraclids and the Dorians were loosened in all three countries, soon after their occupation. The political institutions were established in spite of the Dorians, and if the newly imported popular force was to have a fruitful and beneficial effect on the soil of the country, it required the art of a wise legislation to conciliate opposition and regulate the forces which threatened to destroy it. The first example of such legislation was given, as far as we know, on the island of Crete.
DORIANS IN CRETE
Dorians in considerable numbers had passed over into Crete from Argos and Laconia, and if in other cases islands and seacoast were not a soil on which the Dorian races felt at home, here it was otherwise.
Crete is rather a continent than an island. With the wealth of resources of every kind which distinguishes the country, the Cretan towns were able to preserve themselves from the restlessness belonging to the life of a seaport, and quietly to unfold the new germs of life which the Dorians brought to the island. Here, too, they came as invaders: massed in great hosts they overpowered the island people, whom no bonds of union held together. We find Dorian tribes in Cydonia, the first place in which the new arrivals from Cythera established themselves. Then Knossos, and especially Lyctus, whose Dorian people hailed from Laconia, became the chief towns of the new settlement.
The Dorians had here reached the land of an ancient civilisation, whose fertility was not yet exhausted. They found towns with definite constitutions and families well versed in the art of rule. State government and religious worship had here, under quieter conditions, retained their original connection and in especial the religion of Apollo, administered by the old priestly families, displayed its organising, civilising, and intellectual influence in entirety. The Dorians brought nothing but their tempestuous courage and the strength of their spears; compared with the Cretan nobility they were the merest children in all that concerns the art of government and legislation. They demanded land and left it to others to find out the ways and means of satisfying their requirements, for the overthrow of the ancient government signified nothing to them. But that the Dorians nevertheless did not behave as reckless conquerors; that they did not overturn the ancient state and found new ones, is manifest from the mere fact that the organisation of Dorian Crete is nowhere referred to a Dorian originator.
On the contrary, Aristotle testifies that the inhabitants of the Cretan town of Lyctus, where the Dorian institutions were most completely developed, preserved the existing institutions of the country; according to unanimous tradition, there was no break, no gap between the Dorian and the pre-Dorian period; so that the name of Minos, the representative of Cretan civilisation, could be associated both with the old and the new.
Patrician houses whose rights had come down to them from the royal period, remained in possession of the government. Now as formerly it was from them that the ten chief rulers of the state, “the Kosmoi,” were taken in the different towns; from them that the senate was chosen, whose members retained their dignity for life and were answerable to none. These families held rule in the towns when the Dorians invaded them. They concluded treaties with them, which took account of the interests of both sides, they made themselves subservient to the foreign power, by assigning the immigrants a sufficient share of the land which the state had to dispose of, not without the accompanying obligation of military service and the right, as the fighting portion of the community, to a voice in all important decisions but especially when it was a question of war and peace.
The Dorians took their place as the fighting element in the state. For this reason, the boys as they grew up, were placed under state discipline; united in troops; trained according to regulation, in the public gymnasia, and schooled in the use of weapons; they were inured to hard living and prepared by warlike games for real combats. Thus, remote from all effeminate influences, the military qualities peculiar to the Dorian race were to be imparted; there was also, however, some intermixture of Cretan customs, as for instance, the use of the bow, which was previously unknown to the Dorian. The grown youths and men, even if they possessed households of their own, were expected to be sensible first of all of the fact that they were comrades in arms, and prepared to march at any moment as though in a camp. Accordingly at the men’s daily meal they sat together by troops, as they served in the army, and in the same way they slept in common dormitories. The costs were met through the state from a common chest, but this chest was supplied by each delivering the tenth part of the fruit of his possession to the fraternity to which he belonged, and this tithe was then handed over to the state chest. In return, the state undertook to support the warriors, as well as the women who had charge of the house with the children and servants, in times both of peace and war. I believe it is plain that we have here an arrangement agreed on by treaty between the older and newer members of the state.
In order, however, that the Dorian fighting element might be able to devote itself wholly to its calling, its members had to be entirely exempt from the necessity of personally cultivating their share of the soil; otherwise they would not only have been impoverished by its neglect in war-time, but in peace they would have been detained from military exercises, and the equally valuable hunting excursions after the plentiful game of the Ida Mountains. Consequently the work of agriculture was imposed on a special class of men, who, by the chance of war, had fallen into the condition of servitude and were deprived of civil rights. When and how this element of serfdom was formed, is not indicated; but there were two classes of them. The one tilled those fields which had been preserved by the state as public property; these were the so-called Mnoetæ; the others, the Clarotæ dwelt on the lands which had passed by donation into the hereditary possession of the immigrants. The Dorian landowners were their masters and had the right to demand of them the fruit of the field at a fixed date, while it was their duty to see that the soil was properly improved, so that nothing might be lost to the state. Otherwise the military class lived without care, unconcerned for the maintenance of existence, and could say, as the proverbial lines of the Cretan Hybrias have it, “Here are my sword, spear and shield; my whole treasure; herewith I plough and gather the harvest.”
What they learned was the use of weapons and self-command; their art, discipline, and obedience, obedience of the younger to the older, of the soldier to his superior, of all to the state. Higher and more liberal culture appeared unnecessary and even dangerous, and we may suppose that the ruling families of Crete had intentionally laid down a one-sided and narrow education for the Dorian community, in order that they might not feel tempted to outstep their soldierly calling, and contest the guidance of the state with the native races.
Beside these however there remained on the peninsula a considerable part of the older population, whose position was entirely unaffected by the Dorian immigration; the people on the mountains and in the rural towns, who were dependent on the larger cities of the island and paid according to an ancient usage a yearly tax to their governments; and rural peasants and cattle-breeders, tradesmen, fishers, and sailors who had nothing to do with the State except willingly to submit to its ordinances, and to pursue their occupations in a peaceful fashion.
It is on the whole, an unmistakable fact that a Greek state organisation of a very remarkable character was here called into being, and formed a combination in which old and new, foreign and native, were amalgamated; an organization which Plato judged worthy to form the groundwork for the plan of his ideal state. For here we actually have the latter’s three classes: the class equipped with the wise foresight becoming the rulers of the state; the class of “guards,” in which the virtue of courage, with exclusion from a more liberal development by means of art and science, was the object to be attained; and, finally, the industrial class, the element which provided the necessaries of life, and to which a disproportionately larger amount of arbitrary freedom was permitted; it had but to provide for the physical support of itself and the community generally. The first and third classes might have formed the state by themselves, inasmuch as they sufficiently represented the mutual relations of governing and governed. Between the two the guards, or armed element, had thrust itself in, to the increase of stability and durability. On this wise it came to pass that Crete was the first country to succeed in assigning to the Dorian race a share in the ancient community, and thus for the second time the island of Minos became a typical starting-point for the Hellenic state organisation.
The later Crete is also better known to us by the effects which proceeded from it, than in its internal condition like a heavenly body the abundance of whose light is measured by its reflection on other objects. Crete became for the Hellenes the cradle of a complicated civilisation. Thence sprang a series of men who founded the art of sculpture in the peculiar Hellenic form, and strewed its seeds in all Greek countries--for Dipœnus and Scyllis, the earliest masters in marble sculptures, derived their origin from Crete, the home of Dædalus. Other Cretans distinguished themselves as masters in the art of divination, and as singers and musicians who, educated in the service of Apollo, obtained such power over the human soul, that they were summoned by foreign states to interpose their aid in a disordered condition of the community and lay the foundations of a sound system of government. These Cretan masters, such as Thaletas and Epimenides, are not, however, sprung from the Dorian race any more than are the sculptors; the new shoots had sprouted from the old root of native culture, even if the admixture of various Greek races had essentially contributed to the impulse of new vital activity.
In spite of the fact that the population of Crete received such a reinforcement and that she had so well understood how to employ it to strengthen her states, none the less, after the time of Minos, she never again attained to a political influence extending over all her shores. The chief cause lies in the condition of the island which made the formation of a great state an impossibility. The territories of the various towns among which the Dorians were divided, Cydonia in the west, Knossos and Lyctus in the north and Gortys in the south of the island, held suspiciously aloof from one another, or were at open feud; thus the Dorian strength was squandered in the interests of petty towns. Added to this that the Dorians, when they immigrated across the sea, of course came only in small bands, and for the most part, unaccompanied by women, so that for this reason alone they could not retain their racial characteristics to the same extent as on the mainland. Finally, even in the seats of Dorian habitation across the sea, we sometimes find, that not all three races, but only one of them had settled in the same town; thus in Halicarnassus there were only Dymanes; in Cydonia, as it seems, only Hylleans. Thus a fresh dispersal and weakening of the Dorian strength must have supervened, and it is easy to understand why the continental settlements of the Dorians, especially those of the Peloponnesus, still remained the most important and the ones fraught with most consequence for history.
In the Peloponnesus, however, it was, once again, at a single point that a Dorian history of independent and far-reaching importance developed itself. And that point was Sparta.[c]
VI. SPARTA AND LYCURGUS
What! are these stones, yon column’s broken shaft, Where moss-crowned Ruin long hath sat and laughed, These shattered steps, these walls that earthward bow, All Sparta’s Royal Square can boast of now?
--NICHOLAS MICHELL.
[Sidenote: [ca. 885 B.C.]]
The characteristic development of Sparta depends partly on the nature of the land and partly on the relations formed there by strange conquerors.
Sparta is a peninsular land, enclosed by an almost uninterrupted line of mountains, a hundred miles square in area, which opens itself out southwards towards the sea between two necks of land. On the west side are the steep walls of Taygetus, which before entering into the Tænarian promontory are penetrated by a pass which leads into Messenia; to the east on the coast is the chain of Parnon. Between these mountains, which enclose many cultivable valleys, the valley of the Eurotas runs from north to south and is narrow in its upper part to below the defile in which Sparta lies; south of this it extends itself in the shape of a trough into a fertile plain which again narrows itself towards the sea; there are no good ports. Therefore on all sides Sparta was not easily accessible to the enemy, or even to friends; and had produce enough for its inhabitants.
Sparta had three classes of inhabitants. They were:
(1) the Helots, those old inhabitants of the land who in consequence of their obstinate resistance were made slaves; and were not so much oppressed as hated and despised; they had to pay a “fixed and moderate rent” for the land on which they (bound to the soil) dwelt, nevertheless they were partly public and partly private slaves and could only go about in a special slave costume; the so-called crypteia[8] was a yearly campaign against them when they showed themselves refractory; it served as military exercise or manœuvres to the youthful conquerors.
(2) The Laconians stood under far more favourable relations; they were the populations of the hundred towns of the province; a portion of them were strangers who had joined the Dorians at the conquest, but, for the greater part, they were old inhabitants who early enough subjected themselves to the conquerors. They stood in the relation of subjects, and had no political rights, but were in no way oppressed; they had landed property for which they paid rent to the state; and they carried on trade and art.
(3) The Dorian conquerors, the real Spartans, dwelt in the capital, which remained an “open camp,” all the more so as they formed only a small part of the whole population and could keep the land in subjection only by arms. They were the ruling citizens, possessed the best lands which were in the vicinity of the capital, and had these cultivated by slaves (helots) whilst they dedicated themselves to war and the affairs of state.
These relations certainly existed in the beginnings of the Dorian conquest, but they were only brought about by circumstances, without being regulated by law. Many errors must have arisen through this, and they seem to have given rise to the “Legislation of Lycurgus.”[b]
While modern criticism makes few inroads upon the accepted stories of the Spartan régime it assails the very existence of Lycurgus, the so-called creator of it. The earliest accounts of his legislation are three centuries later than the time of his alleged career. The old Spartan poet Tyrtæus does not seem to have mentioned him. Pindar credits his edicts to Ægimius the mythical ancestor of the Dorians. Hellanicus and Thucydides do not credit them to Lycurgus, and the “argument from silence” is strong against him. His name means “wolf-repeller,” and it is thought that from being originally a god of protection worshipped by the predecessors of the Dorians, he came to be accepted finally as a man and a lawgiver. But historical cities have denied the existence of other heroes of tradition only to restore them later to their old glory, and it is necessary to present here the Lycurgus of venerable story, as all the traditions of early Spartan communal life centre about his name; and their alleged ancient lawgiver becomes, therefore, one of the most important personages in Grecian history. As to his personality--accepting him for the nonce as a reality--opinions differ according to the bias of the individual historian. We shall perhaps be in best position to gain a judicious idea of the subject by first following the biography of Lycurgus by Plutarch, and afterward turning to modern investigators for an estimate of the man and his laws. Whatever our individual opinion as to the personality of the hero himself, we shall at least gain an insight into the actual customs of the Spartans; and it perhaps does not greatly matter if we are left in doubt as to the share which any single man--be his name Lycurgus or what not--had in shaping them.[a]
PLUTARCH’S ACCOUNT OF LYCURGUS
Of Lycurgus, the lawgiver, says Plutarch, we have nothing to relate that is certain and uncontroverted. For there are different accounts of his birth, his travels, his death, and especially of the laws and form of government which he established. But least of all are the times agreed upon in which this great man lived. For some say he flourished at the same time with Iphitus, and joined with him in settling the cessation of arms during the Olympic Games. Among these is Aristotle the philosopher, who alleges for proof an Olympic quoit, on which was preserved the inscription of Lycurgus’ name. But others who, with Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, compute the time by the succession of the Spartan kings, place him much earlier than the first Olympiad. Timæus, however, supposes, that, as there were two Lycurguses in Sparta at different times, the actions of both are ascribed to one, on account of his particular renown; and that the more ancient of them lived not long after Homer: Nay, some say he had seen him. Xenophon, too, confirms the opinion of his antiquity, when he makes him contemporary with the Heraclidæ. It is true, the latest of the Lacedæmonian kings were of the lineage of the Heraclidæ; but Xenophon there seems to speak of the first and more immediate descendants of Hercules. As the history of those times is thus involved, in relating the circumstances of Lycurgus’ life, we shall endeavour to select such as are least controverted, and follow authors of the greatest credit.
For a long time anarchy and confusion prevailed in Sparta, by which one of its kings, the father of Lycurgus, lost his life. For while he was endeavouring to part some persons who were concerned in a fray, he received a wound by a kitchen knife, of which he died, leaving the kingdom to his eldest son Polydectes.
But he, too, dying soon after, the general voice gave it for Lycurgus to ascend the throne; and he actually did so, till it appeared that his brother’s widow was pregnant. As soon as he perceived this, he declared that the kingdom belonged to her issue, provided it were male, and he kept the administration in his hands only as his guardian. This he did with the title of Prodicos, which the Lacedæmonians give to the guardians of infant kings. Soon after, the queen made him a private overture, that she would destroy her child, upon condition that he would marry her when king of Sparta. Though he detested her wickedness, he said nothing against the proposal, but pretending to approve it, charged her not to take any drugs to procure an abortion, lest she should endanger her own health or life; for he would take care that the child, as soon as born, should be destroyed. Thus he artfully drew on the woman to her full time, and, when he heard she was in labour, he sent persons to attend and watch her delivery, with orders, if it were a girl, to give it to the women, but if a boy, to bring it to him, in whatever business he might be engaged. It happened that he was at supper with the magistrates when she was delivered of a boy, and his servants, who were present, carried the child to him. When he received it, he is reported to have said to the company, “Spartans, see here your new-born king.” He then laid him down upon the chair of state, and named him Charilaus, because of the joy and admiration of his magnanimity and justice testified by all present. Thus the reign of Lycurgus lasted only eight months. But the citizens had a great veneration for him on other accounts, and there were more that paid him their attentions, and were ready to execute his commands, out of regard to his virtues, than those that obeyed him as a guardian to the King, and director of the administration. There were not, however, wanting those that envied him, and opposed his advancement, as too high for so young a man; particularly the relations and friends of the queen-mother, who seemed to have been treated with contempt. Her brother Leonidas one day boldly attacked him with virulent language, and scrupled not to tell him, that he was well assured he would soon be king. Insinuations of the same kind were likewise spread by the queen-mother. Moved with this ill treatment, and fearing some dark design, he determined to get clear of all suspicion, by travelling into other countries, till his nephew should be grown up, and have a son to succeed him in the kingdom.
He set sail, therefore, and landed in Crete. There having observed the forms of government, and conversed with the most illustrious personages, he was struck with admiration of some of their laws, and resolved at his return to make use of them in Sparta. Some others he rejected. From Crete Lycurgus passed to Asia, desirous, as is said, to compare the Ionian expense and luxury with the Cretan frugality and hard diet, so as to judge what effect each had on their several manners and governments. The Egyptians likewise suppose that he visited them; and as of all their institutions he was most pleased with their distinguishing the military men from the rest of the people, he took the same method at Sparta, and, by separating from these the mechanics and artificers, he rendered the constitution more noble and more of a piece.
Returning, he immediately applied himself to alter the whole frame of the constitution; sensible that a partial change, and the introducing of some new laws, would be of no sort of advantage, he applied to the nobility, and desired them to put their hands to the work; addressing himself privately at first to his friends, and afterwards, by degrees, trying the disposition of others, and preparing them to concur in the business. When matters were ripe, he ordered thirty of the principal citizens to appear armed in the market-place by break of day, to strike terror into such as might desire to oppose him. Upon the first alarm, King Charilaus, apprehending it to be a design against his person, took refuge in the Chalcioicos [brazen temple]. But he was soon satisfied, and accepted their oath, and joined in the undertaking.
The Institutions of Lycurgus
Among the many new institutions of Lycurgus, the first and most important was that of a senate; which sharing, as Plato says, in the power of the kings, too imperious and unrestrained before, and having equal authority with them, was the means of keeping them within the bounds of moderation, and highly contributed to the preservation of the state. For before, it had been veering and unsettled, sometimes inclining to arbitrary power, and sometimes towards a pure democracy; but this establishment of a senate, an intermediate body, like ballast, kept in it a just equilibrium, and put it in a safe posture: the twenty-eight senators adhering to the kings, whenever they saw the people too encroaching, and, on the other hand, supporting the people, when the kings attempted to make themselves absolute. This, according to Aristotle, was the number of senators fixed upon, because two of the thirty associates of Lycurgus deserted the business through fear.
He had this institution so much at heart, that he obtained from Delphi an oracle in its behalf called rhetra, or the decree.
Though the government was thus tempered by Lycurgus, yet soon after it degenerated into an oligarchy, whose power was exercised with such wantonness and violence, that it wanted indeed a bridle, as Plato expresses it. This curb they found in the authority of the ephori, about one hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus.
A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus, was a new division of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality, the city over-charged with many indigent persons, who had no land, and the wealth centred in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state still more inveterate and fatal, I mean poverty and riches, he persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land, and to make new ones, in such a manner that they might be perfectly equal in their possessions and way of living. Hence, if they were ambitious of distinction they might seek it in virtue, as no other difference was left between them, but that which arises from the dishonour of base actions and the praise of good ones. His proposal was put in practice.
After this, he attempted to divide also the movables, in order to take away all appearance of inequality; but he soon perceived that they could not bear to have their goods directly taken from them, and therefore took another method, counterworking their avarice by a stratagem. First he stopped the currency of the gold and silver coin, and ordered that they should make use of iron money only: then to a great quantity and weight of this he assigned but a small value; so that to lay up ten minæ [£30 or $150] a whole room was required, and to remove it nothing less than a yoke of oxen. When this became current, many kinds of injustice ceased in Lacedæmon. Who would steal or take a bribe, who would defraud or rob, when he could not conceal the booty? Their iron coin would not pass in the rest of Greece, but was ridiculed and despised; so that the Spartans had no means of purchasing any foreign or curious wares; nor did any merchant-ship unlade in their harbours. There were not even to be found in all their country either sophists, wandering fortune-tellers, keepers of infamous houses, or dealers in gold and silver trinkets, because there was no money. Thus luxury, losing by degrees the means that cherished and supported it, died away of itself: even they who had great possessions, had no advantage from them, since they could not be displayed in public, but must lie useless, in unregarded repositories.
Desirous to complete the conquest of luxury, and exterminate the love of riches, he introduced a third institution, which was wisely enough and ingeniously contrived. This was the use of public tables, where all were to eat in common of the same meat, and such kinds of it as were appointed by law. At the same time, they were forbidden to eat at home, upon expensive couches and tables, to call in the assistance of butchers and cooks, or to fatten like voracious animals in private. For so not only their manners would be corrupted, but their bodies disordered; abandoned to all manner of sensuality and dissoluteness, they would require long sleep, warm baths, and the same indulgence as in perpetual sickness. To effect this was certainly very great; but it was greater still, to secure riches from rapine and from envy, as Theophrastus expresses it, or rather by their eating in common, and by the frugality of their table, to take from riches their very being. For what use or enjoyment of them, what peculiar display of magnificence could there be, where the poor man went to the same refreshment with the rich?
The rich, therefore (we are told), were more offended with this regulation than with any other, and, rising in a body, they loudly expressed their indignation: nay, they proceeded so far as to assault Lycurgus with stones, so that he was forced to fly from the assembly and take refuge in a temple.
The public repasts were called by the Cretans andria; but the Lacedæmonians styled them phiditia, either from their tendency to friendship and mutual benevolence, phiditia being used instead of philitia; or else from their teaching frugality and parsimony, which the word pheido signifies. But it is not at all impossible, that the first letter might by some means or other be added, and so phiditia take place of editia, which barely signifies eating. There were fifteen persons to a table, or a few more or less. Each of them was obliged to bring in monthly a bushel of meal, eight gallons of wine, five pounds of cheese, two pounds and a half of figs, and a little money to buy flesh and fish. If any of them happened to offer a sacrifice of first fruits, or to kill venison, he sent a part of it to the public table: for after a sacrifice or hunting, he was at liberty to sup at home: but the rest were to appear at the usual place. For a long time this eating in common was observed with great exactness: so that when King Agis returned from a successful expedition against the Athenians, and from a desire to sup with his wife, requested to have his portion at home, the polemarchs refused to send it: nay, when, through resentment, he neglected the day following to offer the sacrifice usual on occasion of victory, they set a fine upon him. Children were also introduced at these public tables, as so many schools of sobriety. There they heard discourses concerning government, and were instructed in the most liberal breeding. There they were allowed to jest without scurrility, and were not to take it ill when the raillery was returned. For it was reckoned worthy of a Lacedæmonian to bear a jest: but if any one’s patience failed, he had only to desire them to be quiet, and they left off immediately. After they had drunk moderately, they went home without lights. Indeed, they were forbidden to walk with a light either on this or any other occasion, that they might accustom themselves to march in the darkest night boldly and resolutely. Such was the order of their public repasts.
Lycurgus left none of his laws in writing; it was ordered in one of the rhetræ that none should be written. For what he thought most conducive to the virtue and happiness of a city, was principles interwoven with the manners and breeding of the people. As for smaller matters, it was better not to reduce these to a written form and unalterable method, but to suffer them to change with the times, and to admit of additions or retrenchments at the pleasure of persons so well educated. For he resolved the whole business of legislation into the bringing up of youth. And this, as we have observed, was the reason why one of his ordinances forbade them to have any written laws.
Another ordinance levelled against magnificence and expense, directed that the ceilings of houses should be wrought with no tool but the axe, and the doors with nothing but the saw.
Regulations Regarding Marriage and the Conduct of Women
As for the education of youth, which he looked upon as the greatest and most glorious work of a lawgiver, he began with it at the very source, taking into consideration their conception and birth, by regulating the marriages. For he did not (as Aristotle says) desist from his attempt to bring the women under sober rules. They had, indeed, assumed great liberty and power on account of the frequent expeditions of their husbands, during which they were left sole mistresses at home, and so gained an undue deference and improper titles; but notwithstanding this he took all possible care of them. He ordered the virgins to exercise themselves in running, wrestling, and throwing quoits and darts; that their bodies being strong and vigorous, the children afterwards produced from them might be the same; and that, thus fortified by exercise, they might the better support the pangs of childbirth, and be delivered with safety. In order to take away the excessive tenderness and delicacy of the sex, the consequence of a recluse life, he accustomed the virgins occasionally to be seen naked as well as the young men, and to dance and sing in their presence on certain festivals. There they sometimes indulged in a little raillery upon those that had misbehaved themselves, and sometimes they sung encomiums on such as deserved them, thus exciting in the young men a useful emulation and love of glory. For he who was praised for his bravery and celebrated among the virgins, went away perfectly happy: while their satirical glances thrown out in sport, were no less cutting than serious admonitions; especially as the kings and senate went with the other citizens to see all that passed. As for the virgins appearing naked, there was nothing disgraceful in it, because everything was conducted with modesty, and without one indecent word or action. Nay, it caused a simplicity of manners and an emulation for the best habit of body; their ideas, too, were naturally enlarged, while they were not excluded from their share of bravery and honour. Hence they were furnished with sentiments and language, such as Gorgo the wife of Leonidas is said to have made use of. When a woman of another country said to her, “You of Lacedæmon are the only women in the world that rule the men:” she answered, “We are the only women that bring forth men.”
These public dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in sight of the young men, were, moreover, incentives to marriage; and, to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attractions of love, as a geometrical conclusion follows from the premises. To encourage it still more, some marks of infamy were set upon those that continued bachelors. For they were not permitted to see these exercises of the naked virgins; and the magistrates commanded them to march naked round the market-place in the winter, and to sing a song composed against themselves, which expressed how justly they were punished for their disobedience to the laws. They were also deprived of that honour and respect which the younger people paid to the old; so that nobody found fault with what was said to Dercyllidas, though an eminent commander. It seems, when he came one day into company, a young man, instead of rising up and giving place, told him, “You have no child to give place to me, when I am old.”
In their marriages the bridegroom carried off the bride by violence; and she was never chosen in a tender age, but when she had arrived at full maturity. Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding, cut the bride’s hair close to the skin, dressed her in man’s clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed. Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment, to sleep with the other young men: and observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions, and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride at the same time exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings. And this they did not for a short time only, but some of them even had children before they had an interview with their wives in the day-time. This kind of commerce not only exercised their temperance and chastity, but kept their bodies fruitful, and the first ardour of their love fresh and unabated; for as they were not satiated like those that are always with their wives, there still was place for unextinguished desire.
When he had thus established a proper regard to modesty and decorum with respect to marriage, he was equally studious to drive from that state the vain and womanish passion of jealousy; by making it quite as reputable to have children in common with persons of merit, as to avoid all offensive freedom in their own behaviour to their wives. He laughed at those who revenge with wars and bloodshed the communication of a married woman’s favours; and allowed, that if a man in years should have a young wife, he might introduce to her some handsome and honest young man, whom he most approved of, and when she had a child of this generous race, bring it up as his own. On the other hand, he allowed, if a man of character should entertain a passion for a married woman on account of her modesty and the beauty of her children, he might treat with her husband for admission to her company, that so planting in a beauty-bearing soil, he might produce excellent children, the congenial offspring of excellent parents.
For in the first place, Lycurgus considered children, not so much the property of their parents, as of the state; and therefore he would not have them begot by ordinary persons, but by the best men in it. In the next place, he observed the vanity and absurdity of other nations, where people study to have their horses and dogs of the finest breed they can procure, either by interest or money; and yet keep their wives shut up, that they may have children by none but themselves, though they may happen to be doting, decrepit, or infirm. As if children, when sprung from a bad stock, and consequently good for nothing, were no detriment to those whom they belong to, and who have the trouble of bringing them up, nor any advantage, when well descended and of a generous disposition. These regulations tending to secure a healthy offspring, and consequently beneficial to the state, were so far from encouraging that licentiousness of the women which prevailed afterwards, that adultery was not known amongst them.
The Rearing of Children
It was not left to the father to rear what children he pleased, but he was obliged to carry the child to a place called Lesche, to be examined by the most ancient men of the tribe, who were assembled there. If it was strong and well proportioned, they gave orders for its education, and assigned it one of the nine thousand shares of land; but if it was weakly and deformed, they ordered it to be thrown into the place called Apothetæ, which is a deep cavern near the mountain Taygetus: concluding that its life could be no advantage either to itself or to the public, since nature had not given it at first any strength or goodness of constitution. For the same reason the women did not wash their new-born infants with water, but with wine, thus making some trial of their habit of body; imagining that sickly and epileptic children sink and die under the experiment, while healthy became more vigorous and hardy. Great care and art was also exerted by the nurses; for, as they never swathed the infants, their limbs had a freer turn, and their countenances a more liberal air; besides, they used them to any sort of meat, to have no terrors in the dark, nor to be afraid of being alone, and to leave all ill humour and unmanly crying. Hence people of other countries purchased Lacedæmonian nurses for their children.
The Spartan children were not in that manner, under tutors purchased or hired with money, nor were the parents at liberty to educate them as they pleased: but as soon as they were seven years old, Lycurgus ordered them to be enrolled in companies, where they were all kept under the same order and discipline, and had their exercises and recreations in common. He who showed the most conduct and courage amongst them, was made captain of the company. The rest kept their eyes upon him, obeyed his orders, and bore with patience the punishment he inflicted: so that their whole education was an exercise of obedience. The old men were present at their diversions, and often suggested some occasion of dispute or quarrel, that they might observe with exactness the spirit of each, and their firmness in battle.
As for learning, they had just what was absolutely necessary. All the rest of their education was calculated to make them subject to command, to endure labour, to fight and conquer. They added, therefore, to their discipline, as they advanced in age; cutting their hair very close, making them go barefoot, and play, for the most part, quite naked. At twelve years of age, their under garment was taken away, and but one upper one a year allowed them. Hence they were necessarily dirty in their persons, and not indulged the great favour of baths and oils, except on some particular days of the year. They slept in companies, on beds made of the tops of reeds, which they gathered with their own hands, without knives, and brought from the banks of the Eurotas. In winter they were permitted to add a little thistle-down, as that seemed to have some warmth in it.
They steal, too, whatever victuals they possibly can, ingeniously contriving to do it when persons are asleep, or keep but indifferent watch. If they are discovered, they are punished not only with whipping, but with hunger. Indeed, their supper is but slender at all times, that, to fence against want, they may be forced to exercise their courage and address. This is the first intention of their spare diet: a subordinate one is, to make them grow tall. For when the animal spirits are not too much oppressed by a great quantity of food, which stretches itself out in breadth and thickness, they mount upwards by their natural lightness, and the body easily and freely shoots up in height. This also contributes to make them handsome: for thin and slender habits yield more freely to nature, which then gives a fine proportion to the limbs; whilst the heavy and gross resist her by their weight.
The boys steal with so much caution, that one of them, having conveyed a young fox under his garment, suffered the creature to tear out his bowels with his teeth and claws, choosing rather to die than to be detected. Nor does this appear incredible, if we consider what their young men can endure to this day; for we have seen many of them expire under the lash at the altar of Diana Orthia.
The Famed Laconic Discourse; Spartan Discipline
The boys were also taught to use sharp repartee, seasoned with humour, and whatever they said was to be concise and pithy. For Lycurgus, as we have observed, fixed but a small value on a considerable quantity of his iron money; but on the contrary, the worth of speech was to consist in its being comprised in a few plain words, pregnant with a great deal of sense: and he contrived that by long silence they might learn to be sententious and acute in their replies. As debauchery often causes weakness and sterility in the body, so the intemperance of the tongue makes conversation empty and insipid. King Agis, therefore, when a certain Athenian laughed at the Lacedæmonian short swords and said, “The jugglers would swallow them with ease upon the stage,” answered in his laconic way, “And yet we can reach our enemies’ hearts with them.” Indeed, to me there seems to be something in this concise manner of speaking which immediately reaches the object aimed at, and forcibly strikes the mind of the hearer.
Lycurgus himself was short and sententious in his discourse, if we may judge by some of his answers which are recorded: that, for instance, concerning the constitution. When one advised him to establish a popular government in Lacedæmon, “Go,” said he, “and first make a trial of it in thy own family.” That again, concerning sacrifices to the deity, when he was asked why he appointed them so trifling and of so little value, “That we may never be in want,” said he, “of something to offer him.” Once more, when they inquired of him, what sort of martial exercises he allowed of, he answered, “All, except those in which you stretch out your palms.” Several such like replies of his are said to be taken from the letters which he wrote to his countrymen: as to their question, “How shall we best guard against the invasion of an enemy?” “By continuing poor, and not desiring in your possessions to be one above another.” And to the question, whether they should enclose Sparta with walls, “That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick.” Whether these and some other letters ascribed to him are genuine or not, is no easy matter to determine.
Even when they indulged a vein of pleasantry, one might perceive, that they would not use one unnecessary word, nor let an expression escape them that had not some sense worth attending to. For one being asked to go and hear a person who imitated the nightingale to perfection, answered, “I have heard the nightingale herself.”
Nor were poetry and music less cultivated among them, than a concise dignity of expression. Their songs had a spirit, which could rouse the soul, and impel it in an enthusiastic manner to action. The language was plain and manly, the subject serious and moral. For they consisted chiefly of the praises of heroes that had died for Sparta, or else of expressions of detestation for such wretches as had declined the glorious opportunity, and rather chose to drag on life in misery and contempt. Nor did they forget to express an ambition for glory suitable to their respective ages.
Hippias the sophist tells us, that Lycurgus himself was a man of great personal valour, and an experienced commander. Philostephanus also ascribes to him the first division of cavalry into troops of fifty, who were drawn up in a square body. But Demetrius the Phalerean says, that he never had any military employment, and that there was the profoundest peace imaginable when he established the Constitution of Sparta. His providing for a cessation of arms during the Olympic Games is likewise a mark of the humane and peaceable man.
The discipline of the Lacedæmonians continued after they were arrived at years of maturity. For no man was at liberty to live as he pleased; the city being like one great camp, where all had their stated allowance, and knew their public charge, each man concluding that he was born, not for himself, but for his country. Hence, if they had no particular orders, they employed themselves in inspecting the boys, and teaching them something useful, or in learning of those that were older than themselves. One of the greatest privileges that Lycurgus procured his countrymen, was the enjoyment of leisure, the consequence of his forbidding them to exercise any mechanic trade. It was not worth their while to take great pains to raise a fortune, since riches there were of no account: and the helots, who tilled the ground, were answerable for the produce above-mentioned.
Lawsuits were banished from Lacedæmon with money. The Spartans knew neither riches nor poverty, but possessed an equal competency, and had a cheap and easy way of supplying their few wants. Hence, when they were not engaged in war, their time was taken up with dancing, feasting, hunting, or meeting to exercise or converse. They went not to market under thirty years of age, all their necessary concerns being managed by their relations and adopters. Nor was it reckoned a credit to the old to be seen sauntering in the market-place; it was deemed more suitable for them to pass great part of the day in the schools of exercise, or places of conversation. Their discourse seldom turned upon money, or business, or trade, but upon the praise of the excellent, or the contempt of the worthless; and the last was expressed with that pleasantry and humour, which conveyed instruction and correction without seeming to intend it. Nor was Lycurgus himself immoderately severe in his manner; but, as Sosibius tells us, he dedicated a little statue to the god of laughter in each hall. He considered facetiousness as a seasoning of their hard exercise and diet, and therefore ordered it to take place on all proper occasions, in their common entertainments and parties of pleasures. Upon the whole, he taught his citizens to think nothing more disagreeable than to live by (or for) themselves.
The Senate; Burial Customs; Home-Staying; The Ambuscade
The Senate, as said before, consisted at first of those that were assistants to Lycurgus in his great enterprise. Afterwards, to fill up any vacancy that might happen, he ordered the most worthy men to be selected, of those that were full threescore years old. This was the most respectable dispute in the world, and the contest was truly glorious: for it was not who should be swiftest among the swift, or strongest of the strong, but who was the wisest and best among the good and wise. He who had the preference was to bear this mark of superior excellence through life, this great authority, which put into his hands the lives and honour of the citizens, and every other important affair. The manner of the election was this: When the people were assembled, some persons appointed for the purpose were shut up in a room near the place; where they could neither see nor be seen, and only hear the shouts of the constituents: for by them they decided this and most other affairs. Each candidate walked silently through the assembly, one after another according to lot. Those that were shut up had writing tables, in which they set down in different columns the number and loudness of the shouts, without knowing whom they were for; only they marked them as first, second, third, and so on, according to the number of the competitors. He that had the most and loudest acclamations, was declared duly elected. Then he was crowned with a garland, and went round to give thanks to the gods: a number of young men followed, striving which should extol him most, and the women celebrated his virtues in their songs, and blessed his worthy life and conduct. Each of his relations offered him a repast, and their address on the occasion was, “Sparta honours you with this collation.” When he had finished the procession, he went to the common table, and lived as before. Only two portions were set before him, one of which he carried away: and as all the women related to him attended at the gates of the public hall, he called her for whom he had the greatest esteem, and presented her with the portion, saying at the same time, “That which I received as a mark of honour, I give to you.” Then she was conducted home with great applause by the rest of the women.
Lycurgus likewise made good regulations with respect to burials. In the first place, to take away all superstition, he ordered the dead to be buried in the city, and even permitted their monuments to be erected near the temples; accustoming the youth to such sights from their infancy, that they might have no uneasiness from them nor any horror for death, as if people were polluted with the touch of a dead body, or with treading upon a grave. In the next place, he suffered nothing to be buried with the corpse, except the red cloth and the olive leaves in which it was wrapped. Nor would he suffer the relations to inscribe any names upon the tombs, except of those men that fell in battle, or those women who died in some sacred office. He fixed eleven days for the time of mourning: on the twelfth they were to put an end to it, after offering sacrifice to Ceres. No part of life was left vacant and unimproved, but even with their necessary actions he interwove the praise of virtue and the contempt of vice: and he so filled the city with living examples, that it was next to impossible for persons who had these from their infancy before their eyes, not to be drawn and formed to honour.
For the same reason he would not permit all that desired to go abroad and see other countries, lest they should contract foreign manners, gain traces of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of government. He forbade strangers, too, to resort to Sparta, who could not assign a good reason for their coming; not, as Thucydides says, out of fear they should imitate the constitution of that city, and make improvements in virtue, but lest they should teach his own people some evil. For along with foreigners come new subjects of discourse; new discourse produces new opinions; and from these there necessarily spring new passions and desires, which, like discords in music, would disturb the established government. He, therefore, thought it more expedient for the city, to keep out of it corrupt customs and manners, than even to prevent the introduction of a pestilence.
Thus far, then, we can perceive no vestiges of a disregard to right and wrong, which is the fault some people find with the laws of Lycurgus, allowing them well enough calculated to produce valour, but not to promote justice. Perhaps it was the crypteia, as they called it, or ambuscade, if that was really one of this lawgiver’s institutions, as Aristotle says it was, which gave Plato so bad an impression both of Lycurgus and his laws. The governors of the youth ordered the shrewdest of them from time to time to disperse themselves in the country, provided only with daggers and some necessary provisions. In the day-time they hid themselves, and rested in the most private places they could find, but at night they sallied out into the roads, and killed all the helots they could meet with. Nay, sometimes by day, they fell upon them in the fields, and murdered the ablest and strongest of them. Thucydides relates, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, that the Spartans selected such of them as were distinguished for their courage, to the number of two thousand or more, declared them free, crowned them with garlands, and conducted them to the temples of the gods; but soon after they all disappeared; and no one could, either then or since, give account in what manner they were destroyed. Aristotle particularly says, that the ephori, as soon as they were invested in their office, declared war against the helots, that they might be massacred under pretence of law. In other respects they treated them with great inhumanity: sometimes they made them drink till they were intoxicated, and in that condition led them into the public halls, to show the young men what drunkenness was. They ordered them, too, to sing mean songs, and to dance ridiculous dances, but not to meddle with any that were genteel and graceful. Thus they tell us, that when the Thebans afterwards invaded Laconia, and took a great number of the helots prisoners, they ordered them to sing the odes of Terpander, Alcman, or Spendon the Lacedæmonian, but they excused themselves, alleging that it was forbidden by their masters. Those who say, that a freeman in Sparta was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave, seem well to have considered the difference of states. But in my opinion, it was in aftertimes that these cruelties took place among the Lacedæmonians; chiefly after the great earthquake, when, as history informs us, the helots, joining the Messenians, attacked them, did infinite damage to the country, and brought the city to the greatest extremity. I can never ascribe to Lycurgus so abominable an act as that of the ambuscade. I would judge in this case by the mildness and justice which appeared in the rest of his conduct.
Lycurgus’ Subterfuge to Perpetuate His Laws
When his principal institutions had taken root in the manners of the people, and the government was come to such maturity as to be able to support and preserve itself, then, as Plato says of the Deity, that he rejoiced when he had created the world, and given it its first motion; so Lycurgus was charmed with the beauty and greatness of his political establishment, when he saw it exemplified in fact, and move on in due order. He was next desirous to make it immortal, so far as human wisdom could effect it, and to deliver it down unchanged to the latest times. For this purpose he assembled all the people, and told them, the provisions he had already made for the state were indeed sufficient for virtue and happiness, but the greatest and most important matter was still behind, which he could not disclose to them till he had consulted the oracle; that they must therefore inviolably observe his laws, without altering anything in them, till he returned from Delphi; and then he would acquaint them with the pleasure of Apollo. When they had promised to do so, he took an oath of the kings and senators, and afterwards of all the citizens, that they would abide by the present establishment till Lycurgus came back. He then took his journey to Delphi.
When he arrived there, he offered sacrifice to the gods, and consulted the oracle, whether his laws were sufficient to promote virtue, and secure the happiness of the state. Apollo answered, that the laws were excellent, and that the city which kept to the constitution he had established, would be the most glorious in the world. This oracle Lycurgus took down in writing, and sent it to Sparta. He then offered another sacrifice, and embraced his friends and his son, determined never to release his citizens from their oath, but voluntarily there to put a period to his life; while he was yet of an age when life was not a burden, when death was not desirable, and while he was not unhappy in any one circumstance. He, therefore, destroyed himself by abstaining from food, persuaded that the very death of lawgivers, should have its use, and their exit, so far from being insignificant, have its share of virtue, and be considered as a great action. To him, indeed, whose performances were so illustrious, the conclusion of life was the crown of happiness, and his death was left guardian of those invaluable blessings he had procured his countrymen through life, as they had taken an oath not to depart from his establishment till his return. Nor was he deceived in his expectations. Sparta continued superior to the rest of Greece, both in its government at home and reputation abroad, so long as it retained the institution of Lycurgus; and this it did during the space of five hundred years, and the reign of fourteen successive kings, down to Agis the son of Archidamus. As for the appointment of the ephors, it was so far from weakening the constitution, that it gave it additional vigour, and though it seemed to be established in favour of the people, it strengthened the aristocracy.[c]
EFFECTS OF LYCURGUS’ SYSTEM
Thus far we have followed Plutarch; now let us see what modern authority will say of the influence of Lycurgus.
The best commentary on the laws of Lycurgus is the history of Sparta; let us read it and judge the tree by its fruits.
Lycurgus, if we unite under his name all the laws mentioned, without pausing to make sure that they are rightfully attributed, had operated with rare sagacity to render Sparta immutable and its constitution immortal. But there exists an arch-enemy to the things of this world that call themselves eternal--the old man with the white beard and denuded scalp that antiquity armed with a scythe. Legislators like, no better than poets, to take him into account; they are ready enough to declare that they have erected an edifice more solid than brass. Time advances and the whole structure crumbles to the earth. Sparta braved him through several centuries, by sacrificing the liberty of her citizens whom she kept bowed under the severest discipline. She lasted long, but never truly lived. As soon as her inflexible, and in some respects immoral, constitution, established outside the usual conditions under which society exists, was shaken, her decadence was rapid and irrevocable.
Lycurgus had desired to make fixed, population, lands, and the number and fortune of citizens; as it turned out never was there a city where property changed hands more frequently, where the condition of citizens was more unstable, or their number subject to more steady diminution. He had singularly restricted individual property rights to strengthen the power of the state; and Aristotle says: “In Sparta the state is poor, the individual rich and avaricious.” He had failed to recognise the laws of nature in the education and destiny of women; and Aristotle, charging the Spartan women with immorality, with greed, and even calling into question their courage, sees in the license they allowed themselves one of the causes of Lacedæmon’s downfall.
He made the helots tremble under his rule, and finally sent them back to their masters. He prohibited long wars; but he had made war attractive by freeing the soldiers from the heavy rules laid upon the citizen, and it was by war and victory that his republic perished. He withdrew from his fellow-citizens all power of initiative, assigning to each moment of their lives its particular duty; in a word, to speak with Rousseau, who was also a master of political paradox, “His laws completely changed the nature of man to make of him a citizen.” Yet Sparta, become a revolutionary city, perished for want of men. He proscribed gold and silver that there might be no corruption, and nowhere since the Median wars, was venality so pronounced and shameless.
He banished the arts, except for the adornment of his temple of Apollo at Amyclæ; and in this he succeeded. Pausanias makes note of some fifty temples in Lacedæmonia, but not a stone of them remains. Rustic piety and not art erected them. Save for a certain taste in music, the dance, and a severe style of poetry, Sparta stands alone as a barbarian city in the middle of Greece, a spot of darkness where all else is light; she did not even know thoroughly the only art she practised, that of war; at least she always remained ignorant of certain features of it.
As Aristotle says: “Trained for war, Lacedæmonia, like a sword in its scabbard, rests in peace.” All her institutions taught her to fight, not one to live the life of the spirit. Savage and egotistical, she satisfied the pride of her children, and won the praise of those who admire power and success, but what did she do for the world? A war machine perfectly fitted to destroy but incapable of production, what has she left behind her? Not an artist nor a man of genius, not even a ruin that bears her name; she is dead in every part as Thucydides predicted, while Athens, calumniated by rhetoricians of all ages, still has to show the majestic ruins of her temples, source of inspiration to modern art in two worlds, as her poets and philosophers are the source of eternal beauty.
To sum up, and this is the lesson taught by this history: rigidly as Lycurgus might decree for Sparta equality of possessions, an end contrary to natural as to social conditions, nowhere in Greece was social inequality so marked. Something of her discipline subsisted longer, and it was this strange social ordonnance that won for Lacedæmon her power and renown, striking as it did all other populations with astonishment.
The Spartans have further set a noble example of sobriety, and of contempt for passion, pain, and death. They could obey and they could die. Law was for them, according to the felicitous expression of Pindarus and of Montaigne: “Queen and Empress of the World.” Let us accord to them one more virtue which does them honour, respect for those upon whose head Time has placed the crown of whitened locks.
The aristocratic poet of Bœotia who like another Dorian, Theognis of Megara hated the masses, admired the city where reigned under a line of hereditary kings, “The wisdom of old men, and the lances of young, the choirs of the Muse and sweet harmony.” Simonides more clearly recognises the true reason of Sparta’s greatness; he called Lacedæmon “the city which tames men.” Empire over oneself usually gives empire over others, and for a long time the Spartan possessed both.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[8] [J. B. Bury translates it as “a secret police.”]
VII. THE MESSENIAN WARS OF SPARTA
[Sidenote: [ca. 764 B.C.]]
That there were two long contests between the Lacedæmonians and Messenians, and that in both the former were completely victorious, is a fact sufficiently attested. And if we could trust the statements in Pausanias,--our chief and almost only authority on the subject,--we should be in a situation to recount the history of both these wars in considerable detail. But unfortunately, the incidents narrated in that writer have been gathered from sources which are, even by his own admission, undeserving of credit, from Rhianus, the poet of Bene in Crete, who had composed an epic poem on Aristomenes and the Second Messenian War, about B.C. 220, and from Myron of Priene, a prose author whose date is not exactly known, but belonging to the Alexandrine age, and not earlier than the third century before the Christian era.
The poet Tyrtæus was himself engaged on the side of the Spartans in the second war, and it is from him that we learn the few indisputable facts respecting both the first and the second. If the Messenians had never been re-established in Peloponnesus, we should probably never have heard any further details respecting these early contests. That re-establishment, and the first foundation of the city called Messene on Mount Ithome, was among the capital wounds inflicted on Sparta by Epaminondas, in the year B.C. 369,--between three hundred and two hundred and fifty years after the conclusion of the Second Messenian War. The descendants of the old Messenians, who had remained for so long a period without any fixed position in Greece, were incorporated in the new city, together with various helots and miscellaneous settlers who had no claim to a similar genealogy. The gods and heroes of the Messenian race were reverentially invoked at this great ceremony, especially the great hero Aristomenes; and the site of Mount Ithome, the ardour of the newly established citizens, the hatred and apprehension of Sparta, operating as a powerful stimulus to the creation and multiplication of what are called traditions, sufficed to expand the few facts known respecting the struggles of the old Messenians into a variety of details. In almost all these stories we discover a colouring unfavourable to Sparta, contrasting forcibly with the account given by Isocrates in his discourse called Archidamus, wherein we read the view which a Spartan might take of the ancient conquests of his forefathers. But a clear proof that these Messenian stories had no real basis of tradition, is shown in the contradictory statements respecting the prime hero Aristomenes. Wesseling thinks that there were two persons named Aristomenes, one in the first and one in the second war. This inextricable confusion respecting the greatest name in Messenian antiquity, shows how little any genuine stream of tradition can here be recognised.
Pausanias states the First Messenian War as beginning in B.C. 743 and lasting till B.C. 724,--the Second, as beginning in B.C. 685 and lasting till B.C. 668. Neither of these dates rest upon any assignable positive authority; but the time assigned to the first war seems probable, that of the second is apparently too early. Tyrtæus authenticates both the duration of the first war, twenty years, and the eminent services rendered in it by the Spartan king Theopompus. He says, moreover, speaking during the second war, “the fathers of our fathers conquered Messene;” thus loosely indicating the relative dates of the two.
The Spartans (as we learn from Isocrates, whose words date from a time when the city of Messene was only a recent foundation) professed to have seized the territory, partly in revenge for the impiety of the Messenians in killing their king, the Heraclid Cresphontes, whose relative had appealed to them for aid,--partly by sentence of the Delphian oracle. Such were the causes which had induced them first to invade the country, and they had conquered it after a struggle of twenty years. The Lacedæmonian explanations, as given in Pausanias, seem for the most part to be counter-statements arranged after the time when the Messenian version, evidently the interesting and popular account, had become circulated.[b]
Within the limits of Messenia there was a temple of Diana Limnatis, which was alone common to the Messenians among the Dorians, and to the Lacedæmonians. The Lacedæmonians asserted, that the virgins whom they sent to the festival were violated by the Messenians; that their king, Teleclus, was slain through endeavouring to prevent the injury, and that the violated virgins slew themselves through shame.
The Messenians, however, relate this affair differently; that stratagems were raised by Teleclus against those persons of quality that came to the temple in Messene. For when the Lacedæmonians, on account of the goodness of the land desired to possess Messenia, Teleclus adorned the beardless youths after the manner of virgins, and so disposed them, that they might suddenly attack the Lacedæmonians with their daggers as they were sitting. The Messenians, however, running to their assistance, slew both Teleclus and all the beardless youths. But the Lacedæmonians, as they were conscious that this action was perpetrated by public consent, never attempted to revenge the death of their king. And such are the reports of each party, which every one believes, just as he is influenced by his attachment to each. After this event had taken place, and when one generation had passed away, a hatred commenced between the Lacedæmonians and Messenians.[c]
FIRST MESSENIAN WAR
In spite of the death of Teleclus, however, the war did not actually break out until some little time after, when Alcamenes and Theopompus were kings at Sparta, and Antiochus and Androcles, sons of Pintas, kings of Messenia. The immediate cause of it was a private altercation between the Messenian Polychares (victor at the fourth Olympiad, B.C. 764) and the Spartan Euæphnus. Polychares having been grossly injured by Euæphnus, and his claim for redress having been rejected at Sparta, took revenge by aggressions upon other Lacedæmonians; the Messenians refused to give him up, though one of the two kings, Androcles, strongly insisted upon doing so, and maintained his opinion so earnestly against the opposite sense of the majority and of his brother, Antiochus, that a tumult arose, and he was slain.
[Sidenote: [ca. 750 B.C.]]
The Lacedæmonians, now resolving upon war, struck the first blow without any formal declaration, by surprising the border town of Amphea, and putting its defenders to the sword. They further overran the Messenian territory, and attacked some other towns, but without success. Euphaes, who had now succeeded his father Antiochus as king of Messenia, summoned the forces of the country and carried on the war against them with energy and boldness. For the first four years of the war, the Lacedæmonians made no progress, and even incurred the ridicule of the old men of their nation as faint-hearted warriors: in the fifth year, they made a more vigorous invasion, under their two kings, Theopompus and Polydorus, who were met by Euphaes with the full force of the Messenians. A desperate battle ensued, in which it does not seem that either side gained much advantage: nevertheless the Messenians found themselves so much enfeebled by it, that they were forced to take refuge on the fortified mountain of Ithome, and to abandon the rest of the country.[b]
After this battle the affairs of the Messenians were in a calamitous situation. For, in the first place, through the great sums of money which they had expended in fortifying their cities, they had no longer the means of supplying their army. In the next place, their slaves had fled to the Lacedæmonians. And lastly, a disease resembling a pestilence, though it did not infest all their country, greatly embarrassed their affairs. In consequence, therefore, of consulting about their present situation, they thought proper to abandon all those cities which had the most inland situation, and to betake themselves to the mountain Ithome. In this mountain there was a city of no great magnitude, which, they say, is mentioned by Homer in his catalogue:
“And those that in the steep Ithome dwell.”
In this city, therefore, fixing their residence, they enlarged the ancient enclosure, so that it might be sufficient to defend the whole of its inhabitants. This place was in other respects well fortified: for Ithome is not inferior to any of the mountains within the isthmus in magnitude; and besides this, is most difficult of access.
When they were settled in this mountain, they determined to send to Delphos, and consult the oracle concerning the event of the war. Tisis, therefore, the son of Alcis, was employed on this errand; a man who, in nobility of birth, was not inferior to any one, and who was particularly given to divination. This Tisis, on his return from Delphos, was attacked by a band of Lacedæmonians belonging to the guard of Amphea, but defended himself so valiantly that they were not able to take him. It is certain, however, that they did not desist from wounding him, till a voice was heard, from an invisible cause, “Dismiss the bearer of the oracle.” And Tisis, indeed, as soon as he returned to his own people, repeated the oracle to the king, and not long after died of his wounds. But Euphaes, collecting the Messenians together, recited the oracle, which was as follows: “Sacrifice a pure virgin, who is allotted a descent from the blood of the Æpytidæ, to the infernal demons, by cutting her throat in the night: but if the virgin who is led to the altar descends from any other family, let her voluntarily offer herself to be sacrificed.” Such then being the declaration of the god, immediately all the virgins descended from the Æpytidæ awaited the decision of lots: when the lot fell upon the daughter of Lyciscus, the prophet Epebolus told them that it was not proper that she should be sacrificed, because she was not the genuine daughter of Lyciscus: but that the wife of Lyciscus, in consequence of her barrenness, had falsely pretended that this was her daughter.
The Futile Sacrifice of the Daughter of Aristodemus
[Sidenote: [ca. 750-725 B.C.]]
In the meantime, while the prophet was thus dissuading the people, Lyciscus privately took away the virgin and fled to Sparta. But the Messenians being greatly dejected as soon as they perceived that Lyciscus had fled, Aristodemus, a man descended from the Æpytidæ, and who was most illustrious in warlike concerns and other respects, offered his own daughter as a voluntary sacrifice. Destiny, however, no less absorbs the alacrity of mankind, than the mud of a river the pebbles which it contains. For the following circumstance became a hindrance to Aristodemus, who was then desirous of saving Messene by sacrificing his daughter: A Messenian citizen whose name is not transmitted to us happened to be in love with the daughter of Aristodemus, and was just on the point of making her his wife. This man from the first entered into a dispute with Aristodemus, asserting that the virgin was no longer in the power of her father, as she had been promised to him in marriage, but that all authority over her belonged to him as her intended husband. However, finding that this plea was ineffectual, he made use of a shameful lie in order to accomplish his purpose, and affirmed that he had lain with the girl, and that she was now with child by him. But in the end, Aristodemus was so exasperated by this lie, that he slew his daughter, and having cut open her womb, plainly evinced that she was not with child.
Upon this, Epebolus, who was present, exhorted them to sacrifice the daughter of some other person, because the daughter of Aristodemus, in consequence of having been slain by her father in a rage, could not be the sacrifice to those dæmons which the oracle commanded. In consequence of the prophet thus addressing the people, they immediately rushed forth in order to slay the suitor of the dead virgin, as he had been the means of Aristodemus becoming defiled with the blood of his offspring, and had rendered the hope of their preservation dubious. But this man was a particular friend of Euphaes; and in consequence of this, Euphaes persuaded the Messenians that the oracle was accomplished in the death of the virgin, and that they ought to be satisfied with what Aristodemus had accomplished. All the Æpytidæ, therefore, were of the opinion of Euphaes, because each was anxious to be liberated from the fear of sacrificing his daughter. In consequence of this, the advice of the king was generally received, and the assembly dissolved. And after this they turned their attentions to the sacrifices and festival of the gods.[c]
The war still continued, and in the thirteenth year of it another hard-fought battle took place, in which the brave Euphaes was slain, but the result was again indecisive. Aristodemus, being elected king in his place, prosecuted the war strenuously: the fifth year of his reign is signalised by a third general battle, wherein the Corinthians assist the Spartans, and the Arcadians and Sicyonians are on the side of Messenia; the victory is here decisive on the side of Aristodemus, and the Lacedæmonians are driven back into their own territory. It was now their turn to send envoys and ask advice from the Delphian oracle; and the remaining events of the war exhibit a series, partly of stratagems to fulfil the injunctions of the priestess, partly of prodigies in which the divine wrath is manifested against the Messenians. The king Aristodemus, agonised with the thought that he has slain his own daughter without saving his country, puts an end to his own life. In the twentieth year of the war, the Messenians abandoned Ithome, which the Lacedæmonians razed to the ground: the rest of the country was speedily conquered, and such of the inhabitants as did not flee either to Arcadia or to Eleusis, were reduced to complete submission.
Such is the abridgement of what Pausanias gives as the narrative of the First Messenian War. Most of his details bear the evident stamp of mere late romance: and it will easily be seen that the sequence of events presents no plausible explanation of that which is really indubitable--the result. The twenty years’ war, and the final abandonment of Ithome, are attested by Tyrtæus, and beyond all doubt, as well as the harsh treatment of the conquered. “Like asses worn down by heavy burthens” (says the Spartan poet) “they were compelled to make over to their masters an entire half of the produce of their fields, and to come in the garb of woe to Sparta, themselves and their wives, as mourners at the decease of the kings and principal persons.” The revolt of their descendants, against a yoke so oppressive, goes by the name of the Second Messenian War.
The Hero Aristomenes and the Second Messenian War
[Sidenote: [ca. 750-668 B.C.]]
Had we possessed the account of the First Messenian War as given by Myron and Diodorus, it would evidently have been very different from the above, because they included Aristomenes in it, and to him the leading parts would be assigned. As the narrative now stands in Pausanias, we are not introduced to that great Messenian hero,--the Achilles of the epic of Rhianus,--until the second war, in which his gigantic proportions stand prominently forward. He is the great champion of his country in the three battles which are represented as taking place during this war: the first, with indecisive result, at Deræ; the second, a signal victory on the part of the Messenians, at the Boar’s Grave; the third, an equally signal defeat, in consequence of the traitorous flight of Aristocrates, king of the Arcadian Orchomenus, who, ostensibly embracing the alliance of the Messenians, had received bribes from Sparta. Thrice did Aristomenes sacrifice to Zeus Ithomates the sacrifice called Hecatomphonia, reserved for those who had slain with their own hands a hundred enemies in battle. At the head of a chosen band he carried his incursions more than once into the heart of the Lacedæmonian territory, surprised Amyclæ and Pharis, and even penetrated by night into the unfortified precinct of Sparta itself, where he suspended his shield, as a token of defiance, in the temple of Athene Chalciœcus. Thrice was he taken prisoner, but on two occasions marvellously escaped before he could be conveyed to Sparta.[b] Pausanias thus describes one of his escapes:
“Aristomenes continued to plunder the Spartan land, nor did he cease his hostilities till, happening to meet with more than half of the Lacedæmonian forces, together with both the kings, among other wounds which he received in defending himself, he was struck so violently on the head with a stone, that his eyes were covered with darkness, and he fell to the ground. The Lacedæmonians, on seeing this, rushed in a collected body upon him, and took him alive, together with fifty of his men. They likewise determined to throw all of them into the Ceadas, or a deep chasm, into which the most criminal offenders were hurled. Indeed, the other Messenians perished after this manner; but some god who had so often preserved Aristomenes, delivered him at that time from the fury of the Spartans. And some who entertain the most magnificent idea of his character, say, that an eagle flying to him bore him on its wings to the bottom of the chasm, so that he sustained no injury by the fall.
“Indeed, he had not long reached the bottom before a dæmon shewed him a passage, by which he might make his escape; for as he lay in this profound chasm wrapped in a robe, expecting nothing but death, he heard a noise on the third day, and uncovering his face (for he was now able to look through the darkness) he saw a fox touching one of the dead bodies. Considering, therefore, where the passage could be through which the beast had entered, he waited till the fox came nearer to him, and when this happened seized it with one of his hands, and with the other, as often as it turned to him, exposed his robe for the animal to seize. At length, the fox beginning to run away, he suffered himself to be drawn along by her, through places almost impervious, till he saw an opening just sufficient for the fox to pass through, and a light streaming through the hole. And the animal, indeed, as soon as she was freed from Aristomenes, betook herself to her usual place of retreat. But Aristomenes, as the opening was not large enough for him to pass through, enlarged it with his hands, and escaped safe to Ira. The fortune, indeed by which Aristomenes was taken, was wonderful, for his spirit and courage were so great, that no one could hope to take him; but his preservation at Ceadas is far more wonderful, and at the same time it is evident to all men that it did not take place without the interference of a divine power.”[c]
[Sidenote: [ca. 668 B.C.]]
The fortified mountain of Ira on the banks of the river Nedon, and near the Ionian Sea, had been occupied by the Messenians, after the battle in which they had been betrayed by Aristocrates the Arcadian; it was there that they had concentrated their whole force, as in the former war at Ithome, abandoning the rest of the country. Under the conduct of Aristomenes, assisted by the prophet Theoclus, they maintained this strong position for eleven years. At length, they were compelled to abandon it; but, as in the case of Ithome, the final determining circumstances are represented to have been, not any superiority of bravery or organisation on the part of the Lacedæmonians, but treacherous betrayal and stratagem, seconding the fatal decree of the gods. Unable to maintain Ira longer, Aristomenes, with his sons, and a body of his countrymen, forced his way through the assailants, and quitted the country--some of them retiring to Arcadia and Elis, and finally migrating to Rhegium. He himself passed the remainder of his days in Rhodes, where he dwelt along with his son-in-law, Damagetus, the ancestor of the noble Rhodian family, called the Diagorids, celebrated for its numerous Olympic victories.
Such are the main features of what Pausanias calls the Second Messenian War, or of what ought rather to be called the Aristomeneïs of the poet Rhianus. That after the foundation of Messene, and the recall of the exiles by Epaminondas, favour and credence was found for many tales respecting the prowess of the ancient hero whom they invoked in their libations,--tales well-calculated to interest the fancy, to vivify the patriotism, and to inflame the anti-Spartan antipathies, of the new inhabitants,--there can be little doubt. And the Messenian maidens of that day may well have sung, in their public processional sacrifices, how “Aristomenes pursued the flying Lacedæmonians down to the mid-plain of Stenyclarus, and up to the very summit of the mountain.” From such stories, traditions they ought not to be denominated, Rhianus may doubtless have borrowed; but if proof were wanting to show how completely he looked at his materials from the point of view of the poet, and not from that of the historian, we should find it in the remarkable fact noticed by Pausanias: Rhianus represented Leotychides as having been king of Sparta during the Second Messenian War; now Leotychides, as Pausanias observes, did not reign until near a century and a half afterwards, during the Persian invasion.
THE POET TYRTÆUS
[Sidenote: [ca. 668-648 B.C.]]
To the great champion of Messenia, during this war, we may oppose, on the side of Sparta, another remarkable person, less striking as a character of romance, but more interesting, in many ways, to the historian--the poet Tyrtæus, a native of Aphidnæ in Attica, an inestimable ally of the Lacedæmonians during most part of this second struggle. According to a story--which however has the air partly of a boast of the later Attic orators--the Spartans, disheartened at the first successes of the Messenians, consulted the Delphian oracle, and were directed to ask for a leader from Athens.[b] “At the same time,” Pausanias writes, “the Lacedæmonians received an oracle from Delphos, which commanded them to make use of an Athenian for their counsellor. Hence, when by ambassadors they had informed the Athenians of the oracle, and at the same time required an Athenian as their adviser, the Athenians were by no means willing to comply: for they considered, that the Lacedæmonians could not without great danger to the Athenians take possession of the best part of Peloponnesus; and at the same time, they were unwilling to disobey the commands of the god.
“At last they adopted the following expedient: There was at Athens a certain teacher of grammar, whose name was Tyrtæus, who appeared to possess the smallest degree of intellect, and who was lame in one of his feet. This man they sent to Sparta, who at one time instructed the principal persons in what was necessary for them to do, and at another time instructed the common people by singing elegies to them, in which the praise of valour was contained, and verses called anapæsti.”[c]
[Sidenote: [ca. 660-610 B.C.]]
This seems to be a colouring put upon the story by later writers, and the intervention of the Athenians in the matter in any way deserves little credit. It seems more probable that the legendary connection of the Dioscuri with Aphidnæ, celebrated at or near that time by the poet Alcman, brought about, through the Delphian oracle, the presence of the Aphidnæan poet at Sparta. Respecting the lameness of Tyrtæus, we can say nothing: but that he was a schoolmaster (if we are constrained to employ an unsuitable term) is highly probable, for in that day, minstrels, who composed and sung poems, were the only persons from whom the youth received any mental training. Moreover, his sway over the youthful mind is particularly noted in the compliment paid to him, in after-days, by king Leonidas: “Tyrtæus was an adept in tickling the souls of youth.” We see enough to satisfy us that he was by birth a stranger, though he became a Spartan by the subsequent recompense of citizenship conferred upon him; that he was sent through the Delphian oracle; that he was an impressive and efficacious minstrel, and that he had, moreover, sagacity enough to employ his talents for present purposes and diverse needs; being able, not merely to reanimate the languishing courage of the baffled warrior, but also to soothe the discontents of the mutinous. That his strains, which long maintained undiminished popularity among the Spartans, contributed much to determine the ultimate issue of this war, there is no reason to doubt; nor is his name the only one to attest the susceptibility of the Spartan mind in that day towards music and poetry. The first establishment of the Carneian festival, with its musical competition, at Sparta, falls during the period assigned by Pausanias to the Second Messenian War: the Lesbian harper, Terpander, who gained the first recorded prize at this solemnity, is affirmed to have been sent for by the Spartans pursuant to a mandate from the Delphian oracle, and to have been the means of appeasing a sedition. In like manner, the Cretan Thaletas was invited thither during a pestilence, which his art, as it is pretended, contributed to heal (about 620 B.C.); and Aleman, Xenocritus, Polymnastus, and Sacadas, all foreigners by birth, found favourable reception, and acquired popularity, by their music and poetry. With the exception of Sacadas, who is a little later, all these names fall in the same century as Tyrtæus, between 660 B.C.-610 B.C. The fashion which the Spartan music continued for a long time to maintain, is ascribed chiefly to the genius of Terpander.
That the impression produced by Tyrtæus at Sparta, therefore, with his martial music, and emphatic exhortations to bravery in the field, as well as union at home, should have been very considerable, is perfectly consistent with the character both of the age and of the people; especially as he is represented to have appeared pursuant to the injunction of the Delphian oracle. From the scanty fragments remaining to us of his elegies and anapæsts, however, we can satisfy ourselves only of two facts: first, that the war was long, obstinately contested, and dangerous to Sparta as well as to the Messenians; next, that other parties in Peloponnesus took part on both sides, especially on the side of the Messenians. So frequent and harassing were the aggressions of the latter upon the Spartan territory, that a large portion of the border-land was left uncultivated: scarcity ensued, and the proprietors of the deserted farms, driven to despair, pressed for a redivision of the landed property in the state. It was in appeasing these discontents that the poem of Tyrtæus, called Eunomia, “Legal Order,” was found signally beneficial. It seems certain that a considerable portion of the Arcadians, together with the Pisatæ and the Triphylians, took part with the Messenians; there are also some statements numbering the Eleans among their allies, but this appears not probable. The state of the case rather seems to have been, that the old quarrel between the Eleans and the Pisatæ, respecting the right to preside at the Olympic games, which had already burst forth during the preceding century, in the reign of the Argeian Pheidon, still continued. The Second Messenian War will thus stand as beginning somewhere about the 33rd Olympiad, or 648 B.C., between seventy and eighty years after the close of the first, and lasting, according to Pausanias, seventeen years; according to Plutarch, more than twenty years.
[Sidenote: [ca. 660-580 B.C.]]
Many of the Messenians who abandoned their country after this second conquest are said to have found shelter and sympathy among the Arcadians, who admitted them to a new home and gave them their daughters in marriage; and who, moreover, punished severely the treason of Aristocrates, king of Orchomenos, in abandoning the Messenians at the battle of the Trench.
The Second Messenian War was thus terminated by the complete subjugation of the Messenians. Such of them as remained in the country were reduced to a servitude probably not less hard than that which Tyrtæus described them as having endured between the first war and the second. In after-times, the whole territory which figures on the map as Messenia,--south of the river Nedon, and westward of the summit of Taygetus,--appears as subject to Sparta, and as forming the western portion of Laconia. Nor do we hear of any serious revolt from Sparta in this territory until a hundred and fifty years afterwards, subsequent to the Persian invasion--a revolt which Sparta, after serious efforts, succeeded in crushing. So that the territory remained in her power until her defeat at Leuctra, which led to the foundation of Messene by Epaminondas.
Imperfectly as these two Messenian wars are known to us, we may see enough to warrant us in saying that both were tedious, protracted, and painful, showing how slowly the results of war were then gathered, and adding one additional illustration to prove how much the rapid and instantaneous conquest of Laconia and Messenia by the Dorians, which the Heraclid legend sets forth, is contradicted by historical analogy.
The relations of Pisa and Elis form a suitable counterpart and sequel to those of Messenia and Sparta. Unwilling subjects themselves, the Pisatæ had lent their aid to the Messenians, and their king Pantaleon, one of the leaders of this combined force, had gained so great a temporary success, as to dispossess the Eleans of the agonothesia or administration of the games for one Olympic ceremony, in the 34th Olympiad. Though again reduced to their condition of subjects, they manifested dispositions to renew their revolt. These incidents seem to have occurred about the 50th Olympiad, or B.C. 580; and the dominion of Elis over her Periœcid territory was thus as well assured as that of Sparta. The Lacedæmonians, after the close of the Peloponnesian War had left them undisputed heads of Greece, formally upheld the independence of the Triphylian towns against Elis, and seem to have countenanced their endeavours to attach themselves to the Arcadian aggregate, which, however, was never fully accomplished. Their dependence on Elis became loose and uncertain, but was never wholly shaken off.[b]