Tyranny and Culture
All this time art has been slowly reviving. Lyric poetry and music had found a patroness in the advancing city of Sparta. The Heroic and Olympian cults which were fostered by the epic poets and by the influence of the Delphic oracle undoubtedly gave an impetus to art, partly by requiring temples and temple statues, and partly by fixing certain artistic types for the principal deities. Even the potter, though he is still where we left him in the Dipylon and Geometric styles of ornament, begins to depict the heroic mythology, and to evolve types which can be imitated and improved. This fixing of types or motives was essential to the progress of ancient art. The Greek sculptor does not carve a statue, as novel and original as possible, to send to an exhibition of art. He is commissioned to make, we will say, an Athena; in that case he has to express the armour, the ægis, the owl, perhaps the snake. He tries, indeed, to make the goddess as lovely and strong and benignant as he can. Perhaps he is allowed to choose between the Polias type or the seated statue, but in any case the type is fixed for him. Or he may be asked to make an athlete statue; in that case he will have to carve a nude male figure as physically perfect as possible, in an athletic attitude. He will not be asked, yet, to portray accidental facts, such as the lineaments of the particular man the statue is to honour. That is how, by concentrating on a limited number of motives, Greek art succeeded in a few generations in approaching so near to perfection.
Show me the patron, and I will show you the style of art which will prevail. The horse-riding aristocracies of Northern ancestry, who prevailed everywhere in Greece in the eighth century, cared little for art. Poetry they could enjoy, if it sang the praises of their ancestors, or if it cheered them at their cups. Hence the popularity of Homer and the Homeridæ and Hesiod on the one hand, of Archilochus, Simonides, and Alcman on the other. But these little “Basileis” were not kings enough to keep courts where art could flourish without starving, and as yet there were few cities great enough to supply the want of a patron. Once more we must look to politics if we wish to understand the revival of art.
The little states of old, with their natural citadels, provided a splendid opportunity for any ambitious and unscrupulous person who wished to make himself tyrant. All you had to do was to stand forth as champion of the oppressed “demos” against the oppressive aristocracy, declare that your life was in danger, acquire a bodyguard of a few score stout knaves armed with spears, or even cudgels, then seize the citadel, and, if you had not forgotten provisions, there you were. It was a simple trick that was tried again and again in Greek history, and it nearly always succeeded. For example, at Corinth there was a singularly offensive aristocracy called Bacchiads. One of them had a deformed daughter who was permitted to marry beneath her. Her son, Cypselus, was not received in Bacchiad circles; he felt aggrieved, and he adopted the programme I have indicated. He founded a little dynasty which lasted more than seventy years, until it was put down by the Spartans in 581 B.C. The same thing had happened a little earlier at Sicyon; it was repeated at Megara a little later, and at Epidaurus. At Athens the first attempt by Cylon, about 621, failed; at Miletus a similar attempt succeeded. In the sixth century tyranny broke out everywhere in Sicily. In 560 Athens followed suit with the tyranny of Peisistratus. Polycrates of Samos comes about thirty years later. Thus many states in Greece went through the tyrannical phase about this time.
Although the Greeks, to their eternal honour, ever afterwards detested the name of tyrant, and although they tried to expunge the benefits they owed to them from the tablets of their history, yet we can see that tyranny was a valuable, almost a necessary, stage in the progress of the Greek state. Anything is better than aristocracy of the Bacchiad type: even
Plate 27.—Corinthian Vases.
a tyrant has the merit of possessing a single throat. As a matter of fact, most of the Greek tyrants, with the exception of Phalaris of Acragas, who had a habit of roasting his subjects in a brazen bull, were intelligent and not oppressive rulers. They were able to form a consistent foreign policy, which is always the strong point of autocracies, to found colonies, acquire empires, form alliances, and marry their neighbours’ daughters. We hear of tyrants having relations with Egypt and Lydia, and importing copper from Spain. At home they policed their cities and made them appreciate the benefits of order. Above all, no doubt from sordid motives, they encouraged commerce. The flourishing commerce of Minoan days had ceased with the end of the thalassocracy. Piracy had become rife on the Ægean, as we see in Homer, where no visitor thinks it impolite to be asked whether he is or is not a pirate. For art and literature, here at last were the patrons. It is under the tyrants of the late seventh and sixth centuries that the art revival begins.
Coin of Corinth. Sixth century
Corinth, with her mighty natural fortress, more than a mile in circuit and 1800 feet high, her two seas and her command over a narrow isthmus, was admirably situated for commerce. She was one of the earliest states to develop a tyranny, to found an empire, and to revive the arts. Her colonies were mostly towards the west, and in Corcyra she had a valuable stepping-stone for Sicily and Italy. It is at Corinth that a new type of vase-painting appears early in the sixth century. It is very obvious that the motive was still derived from textile art, probably from Assyrian embroidery. The result, with its rich purples, is very pleasing from a decorative point of view, though the actual scenes and ornaments are unmeaning, and therefore un-Greek.[32] The coin types of Corinth in the sixth century are already beautiful designs. It was Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, who dedicated at Olympia that famous chest of which we have spoken, with its parallel bands of mythological scenes. Periander, his son, was originally one of the Seven Sages, though Plato wanted to cast him out for a tyrant. The name of the third, Psammetichus, proves the close intercourse of Corinth with Egypt. It was Corinth under her tyrants that evolved a new poetical form, the dithyramb, and that first erected a Doric temple in Greece proper. This grave and splendid style of architecture was very probably based upon Egyptian models, but with characteristically Greek modifications. The earliest Greek temples seem to have been of wood and sun-baked brick. Such originally was the temple of Hera at Olympia, but as the wooden columns fell down one by one they were replaced with stone. In many features of Doric architecture it is possible to trace development from wooden technique. The whole roofing system is one of joists and beams, even when the roof is of stone. The triglyphs are the ends of the beams, translated into stone. The metopes were originally left open, then filled with terra-cotta reliefs, and finally with slabs of stone carved in high relief. In the earliest Doric temples the columns are very thick and heavy and the intercolumnar spaces very narrow. These things indicate that the architect had not yet fully realised the superior strength of stone. An ignorant or hasty glance might suggest that there was no progress in Greek architecture, but the close observer sees how the succeeding generations of architects continued to make subtle improvements, rendering the shafts more graceful, the mouldings more refined in their curves, correcting most cunningly the optical illusions of a straight row of tall columns, improving the lighting arrangements, improving the masonry, substituting stone for wood and precious marble for stone, adding ornament where it was appropriate, as on the frieze inside the peristyle, rejecting it where it was unsuitable, as on the architrave, which, being a main beam, ought to look heavy and strong, reaching forward, in fact, to the telos, the ultimate end of the type which his predecessors had set him. That is the Greek way. The Parthenon is the goal at which this old temple of Corinth had been aiming.
| DORIC STYLE | IONIC STYLE |
Seven columns of the Corinthian temple[33] have stood through the Roman destruction of Corinth and all the subsequent batterings of history. Their antiquity is shown by their clumsy strength. The height of the columns is only about four times the diameter of the base. Each column is a monolith of rough limestone covered with stucco and painted, in height 23½ feet, in diameter tapering rather sharply from the base (5 feet 8 inches) to the top (4 feet 3 inches). The temple was peripteral—i.e. it had a colonnade all round the nave, six columns at each end, fifteen on each side. Already there is an attempt to correct the optical illusion which makes horizontal lines seem to sink in the middle and vertical lines seem to bulge outwards, the stylobate, or floor from which the columns rise, being slightly curved, so that the centre columns stand about 2 centimetres higher than those on the wing. The interior building consists of two oblong chambers back to back, without communication between them. The side walls are prolonged at each end so as to form wings, and between each pair of wings stood two columns “in antis.” Thus there is a porch at each end under the colonnade. From the existence of the two separate chambers we conclude either that the temple united two distinct cults, or that one of the chambers was a treasury, for temples in Greece were always used as banks. I have gone into some detail in describing this building, because it is probably the oldest Doric temple in Greece, except the old wooden Heræum at Olympia. Roof-tiles, which made a sloping roof possible, were said to be an actual Corinthian invention. The Corinthian colony of Corcyra (Corfu) can boast a similar temple about fifty years later (? 600 B.C.).
It was under these Cypselid tyrants that Corinth began to acquire her historical character of a luxurious, sensual, and cosmopolitan city. Aphrodite, as she was worshipped at Corinth, was none other than “Ashtaroth, the abomination of the Sidonians,” and was imported along with the Tyrian purple from Phœnicia. She had a famous temple on the citadel of Corinth, which was thronged by her sacred slaves, the courtesans. Their numbers grew to more than a thousand, and they were a notorious snare to the commercial travellers of antiquity. You had to be a rich man to visit Corinth, as the proverb said:
οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθον ἔσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς
“non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.”
That this immoral state of affairs began under the tyrants we can be sure, though Periander is said to have collected all the procuresses he could find and drowned them in the sea. Pindar delicately sings of “the hospitable damsels, ministers
Plate XXVIII. OLD TEMPLE AT CORINTH
English Photo Co., Athens
of Persuasion in wealthy Corinth.” And we are told that when the Persians invaded Greece the courtesans flocked to the temple of Aphrodite to pray for the deliverance of the land. In gratitude for their patriotism bronze statues of them were erected, with an epigram by Simonides. Lais, the most celebrated of all these erring females, belongs to the time of the Peloponnesian war, though there would appear to have been others who adopted her famous name. The other Greeks were apt to speak of Corinth in much the same tone as a modern Englishman or German speaks of Paris. The wealth of Cypselus is proved by his dedication of a colossal gold (or gilt) statue of Zeus at Olympia. Periander cut a canal through the promontory of Leucas, and projected another through the isthmus of Corinth.
One of the tyrants of Sicyon won the chariot race at Olympia, and dedicated two large model shrines of Spanish bronze. But Cleisthenes was the most celebrated for his luxurious court, for his hostility to Argos, which made him forbid the recital of Homer at Sicyon because it honoured the Argives, and for the wooing of his daughter Agariste. Cleisthenes had issued a general invitation to any one who wished to marry her to come to his court, offering them hospitality for a year. All the rich young gentlemen of Greece assembled. For a whole year Cleisthenes tested their accomplishments. By that time two Athenians were the favourites, Megacles, of the famous Alcmæonid family, and Hippocleides, who had the most charming social graces in the world. At last came the final day of decision. Hippocleides braced himself for a great effort. There had been a banquet, and perhaps Hippocleides had poured too many libations to Dionysus. After dinner the flute-players struck up, and Hippocleides began to dance. Let Herodotus continue the story: “And he danced, probably, for the pleasure of dancing; but Cleisthenes, looking on, began to have suspicion about it all. Then Hippocleides, after a short rest, ordered a slave to bring in a table: when it came, he began to dance on it, first Laconian figures and then Attic ones; finally he stood on his head on the table” (this was perhaps an old ritual dance) “and gesticulated with his legs. But Cleisthenes, when he danced the first and second time, revolted from the idea of Hippocleides as a son-in-law on account of his indecorous dancing, yet he restrained himself, not wishing to make a scene. But when he saw him gesticulating with his legs he could not restrain himself any longer. ‘O son of Tisander,’ he cried, ‘you have danced away your marriage.’ But Hippocleides answered: ‘Hippocleides doesn’t, care!’ Hence this answer became a proverb.” So Megacles married the lady, and lived happily ever afterwards, becoming the ancestor of Pericles, while Hippocleides probably took to drink and went to the bad altogether. But of this Herodotus does not inform us.
The tyranny at Megara was a brief one, but we know that Theagenes built an aqueduct for his city and made it a serious commercial rival to Athens.
At Athens Peisistratus stood forth as champion of the poor shepherds of the Hill against the wealthier parties of the Coast and the Plain. He succeeded where Cylon had failed in gaining command of the Acropolis with his bodyguard. Twice the Athenians managed to expel him, but each time he got back, the first time by dressing up a tall and handsome woman as the goddess Athena and driving into the city with her, and the second time by hiring a contingent of horsemen from Eretria, with money which he had obtained by prudent operations in the goldfields of Thrace. From first to last he and his sons were in power from 560 to 510. It is difficult to estimate his services to Athens, for later generations did their utmost to deny and conceal them, giving some of his achievements to Solon and some to Theseus, and some even to Erechtheus. He founded an early Athenian empire. He won the island of Salamis from Megara, and until she possessed Salamis Athens had no open road to the sea. Later Athenians ascribed this feat to Solon. He regained Sigeum, on the Troad, after a war with Mitylene. He established the elder Miltiades as tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese. In these movements his policy was obviously to open up trade with the Black Sea, the granary of Greece. He extended olive-culture in Attica. He probably began to work the silver-mines at Laurium, which were thenceforth the principal source of Athenian revenue. He made the unfree tillers of the soil into peasant proprietors by confiscating the estates of his noble opponents. He was allied with Sparta and Argos, Thebes and Thessaly and Naxos. He introduced a police armed with bows into the city of Athens.
He probably did much of what Theseus is supposed to have done in synœcising Athens—that is, transforming Attica from a number of villages with a capital into a city-state with surrounding territory. We know that he sent judges on circuit round the country demes. The other indications are that Peisistratus pulled down the city wall in order that she might be able to expand, that he constructed a proper water-supply, and that he fostered the worship of the Olympian or city deities. At the same time he fostered agriculture, and tried to get the poor of Athens back to the land. As he had owed his return to Athena, he signalised his gratitude by surrounding the old temple of Athena Polias with a marble peristyle and sculptures. Some of the sculptures of this period are preserved on the Acropolis of Athens. They were generally carved of the softer porus or rough limestone, and freely adorned with colour. But the decorations of Peisistratus’ temple are of Parian marble. Heracles and his labours seem to have been preferred to Theseus as a subject for representation. On the plain below the Acropolis Peisistratus began a temple to Olympian Zeus on so huge a scale that republican Athens was unable to complete it until the Emperor Hadrian brought his immense resources into play.
But Peisistratus did more than building for religion. He may fairly be called the founder of the State cults of Athens. He founded the Greater Panathenæa, as the symbol of union for Attica. This was a most solemn yearly procession of all the people, to carry up a new embroidered robe as a gift to the Virgin Goddess on the Acropolis. That is the scene depicted on the frieze of the Parthenon which is now the chief glory of the British Museum. Later Athenians, of course, ascribed the Panathenæa to Theseus or Erechtheus. Along with the procession there were athletic games and sacrifices. And the prizes in the games were those fine big oil-jars, the Panathenaic amphoræ, of which we have a long series preserved.[34] This gave a great impulse to pottery. It is about now that we begin the black-figured type of vase, in which the figures are painted with a lustrous black glaze on the rich brown of the earthenware.
Peisistratus greatly encouraged the idea of Athens as the leading member of the Ionic States of Greece. Up to this time great Ionian cities like Miletus and Ephesus had been far ahead of Athens in wealth and civilisation. It is hard to say how Peisistratus persuaded them that Athens was in some sort their mother city unless such was the fact. He inaugurated the solemn purification of Delos, by removing the dead from the island. Henceforth the Apollo of Delos was to share with the Poseidon of Mycale the patronage of Ionia. Both at the Panionic festivals of Delos and the Panathenaic festivals at Athens the solemn recitation of Homer formed an important part of the proceedings. It was Peisistratus who caused an authorised version of Homer to be prepared at Athens. Certain portions were selected and edited. Thus at length Homer became a fixed canon.
Another festival instituted by Peisistratus led to important literary results. This was the Great Dionysia. Dionysus was a late-comer in Olympian mythology, probably from Thrace. As the god of wine, his coming had to face some opposition from the temperance party, but like a god he triumphed. It was at the Dionysia that, as we shall see, the Athenian drama took its rise as a service of worship to the god.
Literature found a whole-hearted patron in the great
|
1. CORINTHIAN VASE. 3. BLACK-FIGURED VASE. |
2. RED-FIGURED VASE. 4. WHITE POLYCHROME VASE. |
tyrant’s younger son Hipparchus. At his court were, among others, Simonides, Anacreon, and Onomacritus. Simonides of Ceos is specially associated with the dithyramb, the chorus in honour of Dionysus, which played a great part in the development of the chorus of tragedy. He was also a composer of odes of victory for successful athletes, though here his fame was eclipsed by his younger rival Pindar. But it is chiefly as a writer of elegies and epitaphs and epigrams that his fame survives. Every one knows that epitaph he wrote on Leonidas and his Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylæ.
“Go tell at Sparta, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to her word, we lie.”
His fine ode on the same subject is still extant. Anacreon is known even to the “general reader,” through Byron:
“Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon’s song divine,
He served—but served Polycrates—
A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.”
Anacreon’s main business was, as our poet suggests, the writing of banquet songs on love and wine. It is rather melancholy to reflect that his anacreontics were composed—according to his own prescription—on ten parts of water to five of wine; but all the ancients watered their liquor. How closely tyranny is to be associated with the revival of culture is proved by the careers of these two poets. Anacreon passed from the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, to Hipparchus, one of the tyrants of Athens. When he fell Anacreon went to the still more brilliant court of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. Simonides went with him, and there they were joined by Bacchylides, Pindar, and Æschylus.
Onomacritus was a strange person. It seems that Hipparchus had a hobby of collecting oracles, and had commissioned Onomacritus to edit a famous collection of poetical prophecies by Musæus, a half-mythical bard. Onomacritus was detected inserting some of his own compositions, and very properly expelled for a forger. If all the historical forgers of this period had been detected the modern historian’s lot would be a happier one.
One monument of this period is of especial interest, the stēlē or gravestone of Aristion.[35] It is a bas-relief, once adorned with colour, of a warrior in armour with a long spear in his hand. It is not likely that any attempt was made at a portrait of the deceased. As the stēlē was found at Peisistratus’ birthplace it has been suggested that this may be that very Aristion who proposed the decree which gave the tyrant his bodyguard. It certainly belongs to the right period of art, but Aristion was a common name; and is it likely that a record of such a man would have been permitted to survive?
It was the custom after dinner at Athens to pass round the harp, and for each guest as it came to him either to improvise a verse or to cap his neighbour’s impromptu or to sing a stave of some famous song. The most popular of all these “skolia” was “The Myrtle Bough.” One version of it runs:
“I will wear my sword in a myrtle bough,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton
When they killed the tyrant
And made Athens free.
“Dearest Harmodius, thou art not yet dead.
They say thou art in the Isles of the Blessed,
Where dwells Achilles swift of foot
And Diomede, Tydeus’ son.
“I will wear my sword in a myrtle bough,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton
When at the sacrifice of Athena
They killed Hipparchus the tyrant lord.
“Everlasting shall be your glory upon earth,
Dearest Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
For that ye killed the tyrant
And set Athens free.”
| FIG. 1. STELE OF ARISTION | FIG. 2. HARMODIUS |
Plate XXIX
Right down in the days of Demosthenes, nearly two hundred years later, these two men were still mentioned in most of the public decrees, because immunities had been granted to their descendants for ever. They are the only private individuals who had statues erected to them for more than a hundred years. All this extraordinary honour was theirs because they had killed a tyrant.
Although we can see the blessings that the tyrants of Greece had brought to their cities, it is to the credit of the Greeks that they could not. They much preferred to govern themselves badly than to be governed ever so efficiently by some one else. A tyrant might give them wealth, peace, culture, and happiness, but no Greek ever lost sight of the tyrant’s telos, or goal. The tyrant governed, as Aristotle says, “for his own advantage, not that of his subjects.” Hence their execration of tyranny and the extraordinary honour they paid to tyrannicides. Such a sentiment has had an enormous influence in history. The Greeks taught it in their schools, their orators embroidered the theme, the Roman schoolboys learnt declamations against tyrants from their Greek teachers of rhetoric, until finally this old legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton whetted the daggers of Brutus and Cassius against Cæsar.
It was a legend, I am afraid. The Athenian tyranny was put down by a Spartan army persuaded by a bribed oracle at the bidding of the Alcmæonids. All that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had done was to kill Hipparchus, the younger brother of Hippias, by surprise, as he was marshalling the Panathenaic procession. Apparently, too, the motive was merely a love affair of a kind that we consider disreputable; but that only added the necessary touch of romance to the story. No ancient historian supports the belief of the common folk at Athens that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had set Athens free.
This story provided the subject of one of the most famous of archaic statues, the “Harmodius and Aristogeiton” of Antenor. It was carried off by Xerxes to Persia when he sacked Athens in 480, but returned eventually by Antiochus the Great. Meanwhile two other sculptors had been set to reproduce Antenor’s group. It is probably this reproduction from which our many copies have been made. We have them on coins, on vases, on a marble throne, and above all in two separate statues in the Naples Museum, where unfortunately Aristogeiton, who should have been the bearded elder, has been degraded by the addition of one of the pretty curly-haired heads of the fourth or third century. But the Harmodius is a fine type of archaic work, even though it has been freely restored and is of course only a copy. We note how much more successful is the body than the head. But uncouth as the head is it is full of dignity and virility.[36]
From Aristophanes it would appear that it was the mark of a jingo democrat at Athens to sing “the Harmodius” on every possible occasion.
Hippias, as I have said, was expelled by the machinations of the Alcmæonids and the strong arm of Sparta in 510 B.C. It was the Alcmæonid Cleisthenes who was called upon to draw up a new constitution. After emerging from the tyrannical stage all the Greek states developed a republic, either oligarchical or democratic. In the oligarchic type the citizenship was confined to a few hundreds of the richer citizens and the actual government was carried on by a small council of ten or fifteen members. This was the normal type of Greek government. The democracy of Athens was unique. All Greek states had inherited from the earliest times the public meeting in the market-place as one of the rights of citizenship. At Athens eventually all administrative decrees were made at this Assembly, or Ecclesia, without any revision whatsoever, and all adult male citizens could attend and speak if they chose. It amounted to government by mass meeting. It was, of course, an ignorant, fickle, excitable body, especially in conducting a war or a piece of foreign policy. But it was a wonderful instrument of education, and it gave the Athenian citizen that sense of direct participation in the affairs of his state which alone could satisfy the political aspirations of a Greek. Who shall call it a failure because it bungled a war and an empire, if it made Athens the eye of the world for ever and ever? Cleisthenes set up a Council of five hundred members, fifty elected from each of his new ten tribes, but that was only a committee to prepare business for the Assembly. Also there still remained the old patrician council of notables, now chiefly consisting of ex-magistrates, who met upon the Areian Hill and were called the Council of the Areopagus. These had the guardianship of the laws, amounting probably to a veto upon the Assembly’s proceedings, and a general censorship over morals. They were also the highest criminal court for cases of blood-guilt—a solemn and awful tribunal. Consisting of ex-officials, they naturally had great influence over the merely annual magistrates, or archons; and, in fact, as we have recently learnt from Aristotle, they managed most things in Athens until after the Persian wars. The chief executive magistrates were still the nine annual archons, still chosen by popular election. With his new ten tribes Cleisthenes instituted ten strategoi, or generals, to lead them under command of the War Archon. The ten tribes were so grouped as to prevent any recurrence of the local factions which had enabled Peisistratus to rise. And Cleisthenes devised the ingenious system called ostracism, by which any unpopular statesman who had a certain number of votes cast against him was sent into polite and honourable banishment. It was generally the leader of the Opposition who suffered this fate, and such was the intention. Though Greek democracy inevitably developed a party system, it was never recognised. Opposition was considered treachery to the state, as, indeed, it generally was.
Such in general was the constitution under which Athens rose to glory. It was modified, as we shall see, in a democratic direction by Pericles. As yet it can hardly, with its powerful Areopagus and elective magistrates, be called a democracy. But it tends that way, and the course before it is plain. Cleisthenes has lost much of the credit due to him in the process which has assigned superhuman wisdom to Solon. He, with Pericles, is the father of the Athenian democracy.