II. CHANGES DOWN TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
On the establishment of the Eastern empire of the Romans, with Byzantium for its capital, the Greeks began to exert a greater influence in the affairs of government, and, outside of the metropolis itself, the Roman spirit of the administration was gradually destroyed. In the third and fourth centuries Greece suffered from invasions by the Goths and Huns, and all apparent progress was stopped; but during the long reign of Justinian, from 527 to 565, many of its cities were embellished and fortified, and the pagan schools of Athens were closed. No farther events of importance affecting the condition of Greece occurred until the immigrations of the Slavonians and other barbarous races, in the sixth and eighth centuries. The population of Greece had dwindled rapidly, and its revenues were so small that the Eastern emperors cared little to defend it. Hence these northern migratory hordes rapidly acquired possession of its soil. Finally this great body of settlers broke up into a number of tribes and disappeared as a people, leaving behind them, however, still existing evidences of their influence upon the country and its inhabitants.
THE COURTS OF CRUSADING CHIEFTAINS.
The next important changes in the affairs of Greece were wrought by warriors from the West. In 1081 the Norman, Robert Guiscard, and in 1146 Roger, King of Sicily, conquered portions of the country, including Corinth, Thebes, and Athens; and in the time of the fourth Crusade to the Holy Land (1203), when Constantinople was captured by Latin princes (1204), Greece became a prize for some of the most powerful crusading chieftains, under whose rule the courts of Thessaloni'ca, Athens, and the Peloponnesus attained to considerable celebrity even throughout Europe. "But their magnificence," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, "was entirely modern. It centered wholly round their own persons and interests; and although the condition of the people was in no respects worse, in some respects palpably better, still they did but minister to the glory of the houses of Neri or Acciajuoli, or De la Roche or Brienne. The beautiful structures of Athens and the Acropolis were prized, not as heirlooms of departed greatness, but as the ornaments of a feudal court, and the rewards of successful valor."
The Duchy of Athens was the most interesting and renowned of these Frankish kingdoms; and in one of his lectures PRESIDENT FELTON [Footnote: Lecture on "Turkish Conquest of Constantinople.">[ points out the traces which this duchy has left here and there in modern literature. "The fame of the brilliant court of Athens," he says, "resounded through the west of Europe, and many a chapter of old romance is filled with gorgeous pictures of its splendors. One of the heroines of Boccacio's Decameron, in the course of her adventurous life, is found at Athens, inspiring the duke by her charms. Dan'te was a contemporary of Guy II. and Walter de Brienne; and in his Divina Commedia he applies to Theseus, King of ancient Athens, the title so familiar to him, borne by the princely rulers in his own day. Chaucer, too—the bright herald of English poetry—had often heard of the dukes of Athens; and he too, like Dante, gives the title to Theseus. Finally, in the age of Elizabeth, when Italian poetry was much studied by scholars and courtiers, Shakspeare, in the delightful scenes of the Midsummer Night's Dream, introduces Theseus, Duke of Athens, as the conqueror and the lover of Hippol'yta, the warrior-queen of the Amazons."
Theseus. Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword,
And won thy love, doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling.
—Act I. Scene I.
THE TURKISH INVASION.
Some of these Latin principalities and dukedoms existed until they were swept away by the Turks, who, after the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire in 1453, by degrees obtained possession of Greece.
Then, Greece, the tempest rose that burst on thee,
Land of the bard, the warrior, and the sage!
Oh, where were then thy sons, the great, the free,
Whose deeds are guiding stars from age to age?
Though firm thy battlements of crags and snows,
And bright the memory of thy days of pride,
In mountain might though Corinth's fortress rose,
On, unresisted, rolled th' invading tide!
Oh! vain the rock, the rampart, and the tower,
If Freedom guard them not with Mind's unconquered power.
Where were th' avengers then, whose viewless might
Preserved inviolate their awful fane,
When through the steep defiles to Delphi's height
In martial splendor poured the Persian's train?
Then did those mighty and mysterious Powers,
Armed with the elements, to vengeance wake,
Call the dread storms to darken round their towers,
Hurl down the rocks, and bid the thunders break;
Till far around, with deep and fearful clang,
Sounds of unearthly war through wild Parnassus rang.
Where was the spirit of the victor-throng,
Whose tombs are glorious by Scamander's tide,
Whose names are bright in everlasting song,
The lords of war, the praised, the deified?
Where he, the hero of a thousand lays,
Who from the dead at Marathon arose
All armed, and, beaming on th' Athenian's gaze,
A battle-meteor, guided to their foes?
Or they whose forms, to Alaric's awe-struck eye,
[Footnote: GIBBON says: "From Thermopylæ to Sparta the leader of the Goths (Alaric) pursued his victorious march without encountering any mortal antagonist; but one of the advocates of expiring paganism has confidently asserted that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva with her formidable ægis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities of Greece." But Gibbon characteristically adds, "The Christian faith which Alaric had devotedly embraced taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens."—Milman's "Gibbon's Rome," vol. ii., p. 215.]
Hovering o'er Athens, blazed in airy panoply?
Ye slept, oh heroes! chief ones of the earth—
High demi-gods of ancient day—ye slept.
There lived no spark of your ascendant worth,
When o'er your land the victor Moslem swept;
No patriot then the sons of freedom led,
In mountain-pass devotedly to die;
The martyr-spirit of resolve was fled,
And the high soul's unconquered buoyancy;
And by your graves, and on your battle-plains,
Warriors, your children knelt, to wear the stranger's chains.
—MRS. HEMANS.