CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE
The character of every people is more or less closely connected with that of its land. The station which the Greeks filled among nations, the part which they acted, and the works which they accomplished, depended in a great measure on the position which they occupied on the face of the globe. The manner and degree in which the nature of the country affected the bodily and mental frame, and the social institutions of its inhabitants, may not be so easily determined; but its physical aspect is certainly not less important in a historical point of view, than it is striking and interesting in itself. An attentive survey of the geographical site of Greece, of its general divisions, and of the most prominent points on its surface, is an indispensable preparation for the study of its history. In the following sketch nothing more will be attempted, than to guide the reader’s eye over an accurate map of the country, and to direct his attention to some of those indelible features, which have survived all the revolutions by which it has been desolated.
THE LAND
The land which its sons called Hellas, and for which we have adopted the Roman name Greece,[2] lies on the southeast verge of Europe, and in length extends no further than from the thirty-sixth to the fortieth degree of latitude. It is distinguished among European countries by the same character which distinguishes Europe itself from the other continents—the great range of its coast compared with the extent of its surface; so that while in the latter respect it is considerably less than Portugal, in the former it exceeds the whole Pyrenean peninsula. The great eastern limb which projects from the main trunk of the continent of Europe grows more and more finely articulated as it advances towards the south, and terminates in the peninsula of Peloponnesus, the smaller half of Greece, which bears some resemblance to an outspread palm. Its southern extremity is at a nearly equal distance from the two neighbouring continents: it fronts one of the most beautiful and fertile regions of Africa, and is separated from the nearest point of Asia by the southern outlet of the Ægean Sea—the sea, by the Greeks familiarly called their own, which, after being contracted into a narrow stream by the approach of the opposite shores at the Hellespont, suddenly finds its liberty in an ample basin as they recede towards the east and the west, and at length, escaping between Cape Malea and Crete, confounds its waters with the broader main of the Mediterranean. Over that part of this sea which washes the coast of Greece, a chain of islands, beginning from the southern headland of Attica, Cape Sunium, first girds Delos with an irregular belt, the Cyclades, and then, in a waving line, links itself to a scattered group (the Sporades) which borders the Asiatic coast. Southward of these the interval between the two continents is broken by the larger islands Crete and Rhodes. The sea which divides Greece from Italy is contracted, between the Iapygian peninsula and the coast of Epirus, into a channel only thirty geographical miles in breadth; and the Italian coast may be seen not only from the mountains of Corcyra, but from the low headland of the Ceraunian hills.
Thus on two sides Greece is bounded by a narrow sea; but towards the north its limits were never precisely defined. The word Hellas did not convey to the Greeks the notion of a certain geographical surface, determined by natural or conventional boundaries: it denoted the country of the Hellenes, and was variously applied according to the different views entertained of the people which was entitled to that name. The original Hellas was included in the territory of a little tribe in the south of Thessaly. When these Hellenes had imparted their name to other tribes, with which they were allied by a community of language and manners, Hellas might properly be said to extend as far as these national features prevailed. On the east, Greece was commonly held to terminate with Mount Homole at the mouth of the Peneus; the more scrupulous, however, excluded even Thessaly from the honour of the Hellenic name, while Strabo,[f] with consistent laxity, admitted Macedonia. But from Ambracia to the mouth of the Peneus, when these were taken as the extreme northern points, it was still impossible to draw a precise line of demarcation; for the same reason which justified the exclusion of Epirus applied, perhaps much more forcibly, to the mountaineers in the interior of Ætolia, whose barbarous origin, or utter degeneracy, was proved by their savage manners, and a language which Thucydides[g] describes as unintelligible. When the Ætolians bade the last Philip withdraw from Hellas, the Macedonian king could justly retort, by asking where they would fix its boundaries, and by reminding them that of their own body a very small part was within the pale from which they wished to exclude him.
The northern part of Greece is traversed in its whole length by a range of mountains, the Greek Apennines. This ridge first takes the name of Pindus, where it intersects the northern boundary of Greece, at a point where an ancient route still affords the least difficult passage from Epirus into Thessaly. From Pindus two huge arms stretch towards the eastern sea, and enclose the vale of Thessaly, the largest and richest plain in Greece: on the north the Cambunian hills, after making a bend towards the south, terminate in the loftier heights of Olympus, which are scarcely ever entirely free from snow; the opposite and lower chain of Othrys parting, with its eastern extremity, the Malian from the Pagasæan Gulf, sinks gently towards the coast. A fourth rampart, which runs parallel to Pindus, is formed by the range which includes the celebrated heights of Pelion and Ossa; the first a broad and nearly even ridge, the other towering into a steep conical peak, the neighbour and rival of Olympus, with which, in the songs of the country, it is said to dispute the pre-eminence in the depth and duration of its snows. The mountain barrier with which Thessaly is thus encompassed is broken only at the northeast corner, by a deep and narrow cleft, which parts Ossa from Olympus: the defile so renowned in poetry as the vale, in history as the pass, of Tempe. The imagination of the ancient poets and declaimers delighted to dwell on the natural beauties of this romantic glen, and on the sanctity of the site, from which Apollo had transplanted his laurel to Delphi.
From other points of view, the same spot no less forcibly claims the attention of the historian. It is the only pass through which an army can invade Thessaly from the north, without scaling the high and rugged ridges of its northern frontier. The whole glen is something less than five miles long, and opens gradually to the east into a spacious plain, stretching to the shore of the Thermaic Gulf. On each side the rocks rise precipitously from the bed of the Peneus, and in some places only leave room between them for the stream; and the road, which at the narrowest point is cut in the rock, might in the opinion of the ancients be defended by ten men against a host.
On the eastern side of the ridge which stretches from Tempe to the Gulf of Pagasæ, a narrow strip of land, called Magnesia, is intercepted between the mountains and the sea, broken by lofty headlands and the beds of torrents, and exposed without a harbour to the fury of the northeast gales.
South of this gulf the coast is again deeply indented by that of Malis, into which the Sperchius, rising from Mount Tymphrestus, a continuation of Pindus, winds through a long narrow vale, which, though considered as a part of Thessaly, forms a separate region, widely distinguished from the rest by its physical features. It is intercepted between Othrys and Œta, a huge rugged pile, which, stretching from Pindus to the sea at Thermopylæ, forms the inner barrier of Greece, as the Cambunian range is the outer, to which it corresponds in direction, and is nearly equal in height. To the south of Thessaly and between it and Bœotia lie the countries of Doris and Phocis. Doris is small and obscure, but interesting as the foster-mother of a race of conquerors who became the masters of Greece. Phocis is somewhat larger than Doris, and separates it from Bœotia.
The peculiar conformation of the principal Bœotian valleys, the barriers opposed to the escape of the streams, and the consequent accumulation of the rich deposits brought down from the surrounding mountains, may be considered as a main cause of the extraordinary fertility of the land. The vale of the Cephissus especially, with its periodical inundations, exhibits a resemblance, on a small scale, to the banks of the Nile—a resemblance which some of the ancients observed in the peculiar character of its vegetation. The profusion in which the ordinary gifts of nature were spread over the face of Bœotia, the abundant returns of its grain, the richness of its pastures, the materials of luxury furnished by its woods and waters, are chiefly remarkable, in a historical point of view, from the unfavourable effect they produced on the character of the race, which finally established itself in this envied territory. It was this cause, more than the dampness and thickness of their atmosphere, that depressed the intellectual and moral energies of the Bœotians, and justified the ridicule which their temperate and witty neighbours so freely poured on their proverbial failing.
Eubœa, that large and important island, which at a very early period attracted the Phœnicians by its copper mines, and in later times became almost indispensable to the subsistence of Athens, though it covers the whole eastern coast of Locris and Bœotia, is more closely connected with the latter of these countries. The channel of the Euripus which parts it from the mainland, between Aulis and Chalcis, is but a few paces in width, and is broken by a rocky islet, which now forms the middle pier of a bridge.
A wild and rugged, though not a lofty, range of mountains, bearing the name of Cithæron on the west, of Parnes towards the east, divides Bœotia from Attica. Lower ridges, branching off to the south, and sending out arms towards the east, mark the limits of the principal districts which compose this little country, the least proportioned in extent of any on the face of the earth to its fame and its importance in the history of mankind. The most extensive of the Attic plains, though it is by no means a uniform level, but is broken by a number of low hills, is that in which Athens itself lies at the foot of a precipitous rock, and in which, according to the Attic legend, the olive, still its most valuable production, first sprang up.
Attica is, on the whole, a meagre land, wanting the fatness of the Bœotian plains, and the freshness of the Bœotian streams. The waters of its principal river, the Cephisus, are expended in irrigating a part of the plain of Athens, and the Ilissus, though no less renowned, is a mere brook, which is sometimes swollen into a torrent. It could scarcely boast of more than two or three fertile tracts, and its principal riches lay in the heart of its mountains, in the silver of Laurium, and the marble of Pentelicus. It might also reckon among its peculiar advantages the purity of its air, the fragrance of its shrubs, and the fineness of its fruits. But in its most flourishing period its produce was never sufficient to supply the wants of its inhabitants, and their industry was constantly urged to improve their ground to the utmost. Traces are still visible of the laborious cultivation which was carried by means of artificial terraces, up the sides of their barest mountains. After all, they were compelled to look to the sea even for subsistence. Attica would have been little but for the position which it occupied, as the southeast foreland of Greece, with valleys opening on the coast, and ports inviting the commerce of Asia. From the top of its hills the eye surveys the whole circle of the islands, which form its maritime suburbs, and seem to point out its historical destination.
The isthmus connecting Attica with the Peloponnesus is not level. The roots of the Onean Mountains are continued along the eastern coast in a line of low cliffs, till they meet another range, which seems to have borne the same name, at the opposite extremity of the isthmus. This is an important feature in the face of the country: the isthmus at its narrowest part, between the inlets of Schœnus and Lechæum, is only between three and four miles broad; and along this line, hence called the Diolcus, or Draughtway, vessels were often transported from sea to sea, to avoid the delay and danger which attended the circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus. Yet it seems not to have been before the Macedonian period, that the narrowness of the intervening space suggested the project of uniting the two seas by means of a canal. It was entertained for a time by Demetrius Poliorcetes; but he is said to have been deterred by the reports of his engineers, who were persuaded that the surface of the Corinthian Gulf was so much higher than the Saronic, that a channel cut between them would be useless from the rapidity of the current, and might even endanger the safety of Ægina and the neighbouring isles. Three centuries later, the dictator Cæsar formed the same plan, and was perhaps only prevented from accomplishing it by his untimely death. The above-mentioned inequality of the ground would always render this undertaking very laborious and expensive. But the work was of a nature rather to shock than to interest genuine Greek feelings: it seems to have been viewed as an audacious Titanian effort of barbarian power; and when Nero actually began it, having opened the trench with his own hands, the belief of the country people may probably have concurred with the aversion of the Prætorian workmen, to raise the rumour of howling spectres, and springs of blood, by which they are said to have been interrupted.
The face of the Peloponnesus presents outlines somewhat more intricate than those of northern Greece. At first sight the whole land appears one pile of mountains, which, toward the northwest, where it reaches its greatest height, forms a compact mass, pressing close upon the Gulf of Corinth. On the western coast it recedes farther from the sea; towards the centre is pierced more and more by little hollows; and on the south and east is broken by three great gulfs, and the valleys opening into them, which suggested to the ancients the form of a plane leaf, to illustrate that of the peninsula. On closer inspection, the highest summits of this pile, with their connecting ridges, may be observed to form an irregular ring, which separates the central region, Arcadia, from the rest.
The other great divisions of the Peloponnesus are Argolis, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, and Achaia. Argolis, when the name is taken in its largest sense, as the part of the Peloponnesus which is bounded on the land side by Arcadia, Achaia, and Laconia, comprehends several districts, which, during the period of the independence of Greece, were never united under one government, but were considered, for the purpose of description, as one region by the later geographers. It begins on the western side with the little territory of Sicyon, which, beside some inland valleys, shared with Corinth a small maritime plain, which was proverbial among the ancients for its luxuriant fertility. The dominions of Corinth, which also extended beyond the isthmus, meeting those of Megara a little south of the Scironian rocks, occupied a considerable portion of Argolis. The two cities, Sicyon and Corinth, were similarly situated—both commanding important passes into the interior of the peninsula. The lofty and precipitous rock, called the Acrocorinthus, on which stood the citadel of Corinth, though, being commanded by a neighbouring height, it is of no great value for the purposes of modern warfare, was in ancient times an impregnable fortress, and a point of the highest importance.
The plain of Argos, which is bounded on three sides by lofty mountains, but open to the sea, is, for Greece, and especially for the Peloponnesus, of considerable extent, being ten or twelve miles in length, and four or five in width. But the western side is lower than the eastern, and is watered by a number of streams, in which the upper side is singularly deficient. In very ancient times the lower level was injured by excess of moisture, as it is at this day: and hence, perhaps, Argos, which lay on the western side, notwithstanding its advantageous position, and the strength of its citadel, flourished less, for a time, than Mycenæ and Tiryns, which were situate to the east, where the plain is now barren through drought.
A long valley, running southward to the sea, and the mountains which border it on three sides, composed the territory of Laconia. It is to the middle region, the heart of Laconia, that most of the ancient epithets and descriptions relating to the general character of the country properly apply. The vale of Sparta is Homer’s “hollow Lacedæmon,” which Euripides further described as girt with mountains, rugged, and difficult of entrance for a hostile power. The epithet “hollow” fitly represents the aspect of a valley enclosed by the lofty cliffs in which the mountains here abruptly terminate on each side of the Eurotas. The character which the poet ascribes to Laconia,—that it is a country difficult of access to an enemy,—is one which most properly belongs to it, and is of great historical importance. On the northern and the eastern sides there are only two natural passes by which the plain of Sparta can be invaded.
At the northern foot of the Taygetus Mountains begins the Messenian plain, which, like the basin of the Eurotas below Sparta, is divided into two distinct districts, by a ridge which crosses nearly its whole width from the eastern side. The upper of these districts, which is separated from Arcadia by a part of the Lycæan chain, and is bounded towards the west by the ridge of Ithome, the scene of ever memorable struggles, was the plain of Stenyclarus, a tract not peculiarly rich, but very important for the protection and command of the country, as the principal passes, not only from the north, but from the east and west fall into it. The lower part of the Messenian plain, which spreads round the head of the gulf, was a region celebrated in poetry and history for its exuberant fertility; sometimes designated by the title of Macaria, or the Blessed, watered by many streams, among the rest by the clear and full Pamisus. It was, no doubt, of this delightful vale, that Euripides meant to be understood, when, contrasting Messenia with Laconia, he described the excellence of the Messenian soil as too great for words to reach.
The rich pastures on the banks of the Elean Peneus were celebrated in the earliest legends; and an ancient channel, which is still seen stretching across them to the sea, may be the same into which Hercules was believed to have turned the river, to cleanse the stable of Augeas.
When the necessary deduction has been made for the inequalities of its surface, Greece may perhaps be properly considered as a land, on the whole, not less rich than beautiful. And it probably had a better claim to this character in the days of its youthful freshness and vigour. Its productions were various as its aspect: and if other regions were more fertile in grain, and more favourable to the cultivation of the vine, few surpassed it in the growth of the olive, and of other valuable fruits. Its hills afforded abundant pastures: its waters and forests teemed with life. In the precious metals it was perhaps fortunately poor; the silver mines of Laurium were a singular exception; but the Peloponnesian Mountains, especially in Laconia and Argolis, as well as those of Eubœa, contained rich veins of iron and copper, as well as precious quarries. The marble of Pentelicus was nearly equalled in fineness by that of the isle of Paros, and that of Carystus in Eubœa. The Grecian woods still excite the admiration of travellers, as they did in the days of Pausanias,[h] by trees of extraordinary size. Even the hills of Attica are said to have been once clothed with forests; and the present scantiness of its streams may be owed in a great measure to the loss of the shade which once sheltered them. Herodotus[i] observes, that, of all countries in the world, Greece enjoyed the most happily tempered seasons. But it seems difficult to speak generally of the climate of a country, in which each district has its own, determined by an infinite variety of local circumstances. Both in northern Greece and the Peloponnesus the snow remains long on the higher ridges; and even in Attica the winters are often severe. On the other hand, the heat of the summer is tempered, in exposed situations, by the strong breezes from the northwest (the etesian winds), which prevail during that season in the Grecian seas; and it is possible that Herodotus may have had their refreshing influence chiefly in view.
Though no traces of volcanic eruptions appear to have been discovered in Greece, history is full of the effects produced there by volcanic agency; and permanent indications of its physical character were scattered over its surface, in the hot springs of Thermopylæ, Trœzen, Ædepsus, and other places. The sea between the Peloponnesus and Crete has been, down to modern times, the scene of surprising changes wrought by the same forces; and not long before the Christian era, a new hill was thrown up on the coast near Trœzen, no less suddenly than the islands near Thera were raised out of the sea. Earthquakes, accompanied by the rending of mountains, the sinking of land into the sea, by temporary inundations, and other disasters, have in all ages been familiar to Greece, more especially to the Peloponnesus. And hence some attention seems to be due to the numerous legends and traditions which describe convulsions of the same kind as occurring still more frequently, and with still more important consequences, in a period preceding connected history; and which may be thought to point to a state of elemental warfare, which must have subsided before the region which was its theatre could have been fitted for the habitation of man. Such an origin we might be inclined to assign to that class of legends which related to struggles between Poseidon and other deities for the possession of several districts; as his contests with Athene (Minerva) for Athens and Trœzen; with the same goddess, or with Hera (Juno) for Argos—where he was said, according to one account, to have dried up the springs, and according to another, to have laid the plain under water; with Apollo for the isthmus of Corinth.[b]
THE NAME
It is a singular anomaly that a people who habitually called themselves Hellenes should be known to all the world beside as Greeks. This name was derived from the Graians, a small and obscure group. The Romans, chancing to come first in contact with this tribe, gave the name Greek to the whole people. In the course of time it became so fixed in the usage of other nations that it could never be shaken off. Such a change of a proper name was very unusual in antiquity. The almost invariable custom was, when it became necessary to use a proper name from a foreign language, to transcribe it as literally as might be with only such minor changes as a difference in the genius of the language made necessary. Thus the Greeks in speaking of their Persian enemies pronounced and wrote such words as “Cyrus” and “Darius” in as close imitation as possible of the native pronunciation of those names, and the Egyptians in turn, in accepting the domination of the Macedonian Ptolemies, spelled and no doubt pronounced the names of their conquerors with as little alteration as was possible in a language which made scant use of vowels. It was indeed this fact of transliteration rather than translation of foreign proper names which, as we have seen, furnished the clew to the nineteenth century scholars in their investigations of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform writing of Asia. Had not the engraver of the Rosetta stone spelled the word Ptolemy closely as the Greeks spelled it, Dr. Young, perhaps, never would have found the key to the interpretation of the hieroglyphics. And had not the eighty or ninety proper names of the great inscription at Behistun been interpreted by the same signs in the three different forms of writing that make up that inscription, it may well be doubted whether we should even now have any clear knowledge of the cuneiform character of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Indeed, so universal was this custom of retaining proper names in their original form that the failure of the Romans to apply to the Greeks the name which they themselves employed seems very extraordinary indeed. The custom which they thus inaugurated, however, has not been without imitators in modern times, as witness the translation “Angleterre” by which the French designate England, and the even stranger use by the same nation of the word “Allemagne” to designate the land which its residents term “Deutschland” and which in English is spoken of as Germany.
Had the classical writings of Greece been more extensively read throughout Europe in the Middle Ages it is probable that the Roman name Greece would have been discarded in modern usage, and the name Hellas restored to its proper position. An effort to effect this change has indeed been made more recently by many classical scholars, and it is by no means unusual to meet the terms “Hellas” and “Hellenes” in modern books of almost every European language; but to make the substitution in the popular mind after the word Greece has been so closely linked with so wide a chain of associate ideas for so many generations would be utterly impossible, at least in our generation.
THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS
But whether known as Hellas or as Greece, the tiny peninsula designated by these names was inhabited by a people which by common consent was by far the most interesting of antiquity. It has been said that they constituted a race rather than a nation, for the most patent fact about them, to any one who gives even casual attention to their history, was that they lacked the political unity which lies at the foundation of true national existence. Yet the pride of race to a certain extent made up for this deficiency, and if the Greeks recognised no single ruler and were never bound together into a single state, they felt more keenly perhaps than any other nation that has lived at any other period of the world’s history—unless perhaps an exception be made of the modern Frenchman—the binding force of racial affinities and the full meaning of the old adage that blood is thicker than water.
All this of course implies that the Greeks were one race in the narrow sense of the term, sprung in relatively recent time from a single stock. Such was undoubtedly the fact, and the division into Ionians, Dorians, and various lesser branches, on which the historian naturally lays much stress, must be understood always as implying only a minor and later differentiation. One will hear much of the various dialects of the different Greek states, but one must not forget that these dialects represent only minor variations of speech which as compared with the fundamental unity of the language as a whole might almost be disregarded. To be a Greek was to be born of Greek parents, to the use of the Greek language as a mother tongue; for the most part, following the national custom, it was to eschew every other language and to look out upon all peoples who spoke another tongue as “barbarians”—people of an alien birth and an alien genius.
But whence came this people of the parent stock whose descendants made up the historic Greek race? No one knows. The Greeks themselves hardly dared to ask the question, and we are utterly without data for answering it if asked. Their traditions implied a migration from some unknown land to Greece, since those traditions told of a non-Hellenic people who inhabited the land before them. Yet in contradiction of this idea the Greek mind clung always to autocthony. Like most other nations, and in far greater measure than perhaps any other, the Hellenes loved their home—almost worshipped it. To be a Greek and yet to have no association with the mountains and valleys and estuaries and islands of Greece seems a contradiction of terms. True, a major part of the population at a later day lived in distant colonies as widely separated as Asia Minor and Italy, but even here they thought of themselves only as more or less temporary invaders from the parent seat, and even kept up their association with it by considering all lands which Greeks colonised as a part of “Greater Greece.”
That the Greeks are of Aryan stock is of course made perfectly clear by their language. Some interesting conclusions as to the time when they branched from the parent stock are gained by philologists through observation of words which manifestly have the same root and meaning in the different Aryan languages. Thus, for example, the fact that such words as Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Son, Daughter, and the like, are clearly of the same root in Sanskrit and Greek as well as in Latin and the Germanic speech, shows that a certain relatively advanced stage of family life had been attained while the primitive Aryans still formed but a single race. Again the resemblance between the Greek and the Latin languages goes to show that the people whose descendants became Greeks and Romans clung together till a relatively late period, after the splitting up of the primitive race had begun. Yet on the other hand the differences between the Greek and the Latin prove that the two races using these languages had been separated long before either of them is ushered into history.
From which direction the parent stock of the Greeks came into the land that was to be their future abiding place has long been a moot point with scholars, and is yet undetermined. So long as the original cradle of the Aryans was held to be central Asia, it was the unavoidable conclusion that the Aryans of Europe, including the Greeks, had come originally from the East. But when the theory was introduced that the real cradle of the primitive Aryan was not Asia but northwestern Europe all certainty from a priori considerations vanished, for it seemed at least as plausible that the parent Greeks might have dropped aside from the main swarm on its eastern journey to invade Asia as that they should have oscillated back to Greece after that invasion had been established. And more recently the question is still further complicated by the “Mediterranean Race” theory, which includes the Greeks as descendants of a hypothetical stock whose cradle was neither Asia nor Europe, but equatorial Africa.[a]
Some of the latest accounts of Greek origin are stated by Professor Bury who says:
“It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at the task for which destiny had chosen them, of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oak wood of Dodona in Epirus is the earliest sanctuary, whereof we have any knowledge, of their supreme god, Zeus, the dweller of the sky. Thessaly has associations which still appeal intimately to men of European birth. The first Greek settlers in Thessaly were the Achæans; and in the plain of Argos, and in the mountains which gird it about, they fashioned legends which were to sink deeply into the imagination of Europe. We know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coast of the Ægean they found a material civilisation more advanced than their own; and it was so chanced that we know more of this civilisation than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.
“In Greece as in the other two great peninsulas of the Mediterranean, we find, before the invader of Aryan speech entered in and took possession, a white folk not speaking an Aryan tongue. Corresponding to the Iberians in Spain and Gaul, to the Ligurians in Italy, we find in Greece a race which was also spread over the islands of the Ægean and along the coast of Asia Minor. The men of this primeval race gave to many a hill and rock the name which was to abide with it forever. Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympus, Arne and Larissa, are names which the Greeks received from the peoples whom they dispossessed. But this Ægean race, as we may call it for want of a common name, had developed, before the coming of the Greek, a civilisation of which we have only very lately come to know. This civilisation went hand in hand with an active trade, which in the third millennium spread its influence far beyond the borders of the Ægean, as far at least as the Danube and the Nile, and received in return gifts from all quarters of the world. The Ægean peoples therefore plied a busy trade by sea, and their maritime intercourse with the African continent can be traced back to even earlier times, since at the very beginning of Egyptian history we find in Egypt obsidian, which can have come only from the Ægean isles. The most notable remains of this civilisation have been found at Troy, in the little island of Amorgos, and in the great island of Crete.
“The conquest of the Greek peninsula by the Greeks lies a long way behind recorded history, and the Greeks themselves, when they began to reflect on their own past, had completely forgotten what their remote ancestors had done ages and ages before.
“The invaders spoke an Aryan speech, but it does not follow that they all came of Aryan stock. There was, indeed, an Aryan element among them, and some of them were descendants of men of Aryan race who had originally taught them their language and brought them some Aryan institutions and Aryan deities. But the infusion of the Aryan blood was probably small; and in describing the Greeks, as well as any other of the races who speak sister tongues, we must be careful to call them men of Aryan speech, and not men of Aryan stock.[c]”
Perhaps the very latest view of sterling authority is that of Professor William Ridgeway,[d] who, after marshalling a vast amount of argument and induction based upon the extant and newly discovered relics of early Grecian civilisations, sums up his theories briefly and definitely. He accepts the existence of a “Pelasgian” race, which many have scouted, and credits it with the art-work and commerce revealed at Mycenæ and elsewhere and called “Mycenæan.” This was a dark-skinned (or melanochroöus) race which “had dwelt in Greece from a remote antiquity and had at all times, in spite of conquests, remained a chief element in the population of all Greece, whilst in Arcadia and Attica it had never been subjugated.” The Mycenæan civilisation had its origin, he believes, in the mainland of Greece and spread thence outwards to the isles of the Ægean, Crete, Egypt, and north to the Euxine. This Mycenæan era differs widely from the Homeric,—as in the treatment of the dead, and in the use of metals,—and preceded the Homeric by a great distance, the Mycenæan period belonging to the Bronze Age, the Homeric to the Iron Age.
The Homeric people were not melanochroöus, but xanthochroöus (fair and blond), and were evidently a conquering race—the Achæans. These Achæans, according to Greek tradition, came from Epirus, and indeed a study of the relics and “the culture of the early Iron Age of Bosnia, Carniola, Styria, Salzburg, and upper Italy revealed armour, weapons, and ornaments exactly corresponding to those described in Homer. Moreover we found that a fair-haired race greater in stature than the melanochroöus Ægean people had there been domiciled for long ages, and that fresh bodies of tall, fair-haired people from the shores of the northern ocean continually through the ages had kept pressing down into the southern peninsulas. From this it followed that the Achæans of Homer were one of these bodies of Celts, who had made their way down into Greece and had become masters of the indigenous race.”
The history of the round shield, the use of buckles and brooches, the custom of cremating the dead, and the distribution of iron in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seem to Professor Ridgeway to point still more sharply to a theory that these features of Greek civilisation previously existed in central Europe and were brought thence into Greece. A study of the dialect in which the Homeric poems are written indicates that the language and metre belonged to the earlier race, the Pelasgians, whom the Achæans conquered. The earliest Greeks spoke an Aryan or Indo-Germanic language of which the Arcadian dialect was the purest remnant, since the Achæans and Dorians never conquered Arcadia. The introduction of labialism into the Greek, Ridgeway believes to be a proof of the Celtic origin of the invaders who accepted, as conquerors usually do, the language of the conquered and yet modified it. “Labialism” is the changing of a hard consonant as “k” into a lip-consonant as “p”—as the older Greek word for horse was “hikkos,” which became “hippos.” The result, then, of Ridgeway’s erudite research is his belief that “the Achæans were a Celtic tribe who made their way into Greece,” and for this theory he asserts that “archæology, tradition, and language are all in harmony.”
The original source of this migration,—for it was rather migration than an invasion,—seems to have been in the northwest of the Balkan peninsula. Some extraordinary pressure must have been brought to bear on the Greeks by the Illyrians who may themselves have been forced out of their own homes by some unrecorded power. At the same time the people then living in Macedonia and Thrace were dispossessed and shoved into Phrygia and the regions of Troy in Asia Minor. The possession of Greece by the Greeks was doubtless very gradual and the Peloponnesus was the last to be visited, possibly by boat across the Corinthian Gulf. In some places the new-comers were doubtless compelled to fight, elsewhere they drifted in almost unnoticed and gradually asserted a sway. The new-comers imposed their speech eventually on the older people, but as usual they must have been themselves largely influenced by the older civilisation in the matter of customs and conditions.[a]
EARLY CONDITIONS AND MOVEMENTS
In the Pelasgic period we find the ancient Greeks in a primitive, but not really barbaric condition. There are settled peoples engaged in agriculture, as well as half nomadic pastoral tribes. The latter form, for a long time, a very unstable element of the population, ever ready under pressure of circumstances to leave their old homes and fight for new ones, bearing disturbance and anarchy into the civilised districts.
The life of these peasants and shepherds was very simple and patriarchal. The ox and the horse were known to them, and drew their wagons and their ploughs; the principal source of their wealth consisted in great herds of swine, sheep, and cattle. Fishermen already navigated the numerous arms of the seas that indented the land. Public life had perfectly patriarchal forms. “Kings” were to be found everywhere as ruling heads of the numerous small tribes. Religion appeared essentially as a cult of the mighty forces of nature. The deities were worshipped without temples and images, and were appealed to with prayers, with both bloody and bloodless sacrifices,—at the head Zeus, the god of the sky; at his side Dione, the goddess of earth, who, however, was early replaced by the figure of Hera; Demeter, the earth mother, the patron of agriculture and of settled life; Hestia, the patron of the hearth fire and the altar fire; Hermes, the swift messenger of heaven, driver of the clouds and guardian of the herds; Poseidon, the god of the waters; and the chthonic [i.e. subterranean] divinity Aidoneus or Hades. The art of prophecy was developed early; the oracle of Dodona in Epirus was universally known.
We know not how long the ancient Greeks remained in the quiet Pelasgic conditions. But we can distinguish the causes that produced the internal movement and mighty ferment, from which the chivalrous nation of the Achæans finally came. Most important were the influences of the highly developed civilisation of the Orient upon the youthful, gifted Greek nation. The Phœnicians were the principal bearers of this influence. They had occupied many of the islands of the Ægean, and had planted colonies even on the mainland, as at Thebes and Acrocorinthus. The merchants exchanged the products of Phœnician and Babylonian industry for wool, hides, and slaves. They worked the copper mines of Cyprus and Argolis and the gold mines of Thasos and Thrace, but obtained even greater wealth from the purple shellfish of the Grecian waters.
For about a century the Phœnicians exerted a strong pressure on the coasts of Greece, and they left considerable traces in Grecian mythology and civilisation. The gifted Greeks, who in all periods of their history were quick to profit by foreign example, were deeply impressed by the superior civilisation of the Phœnicians. The activity and skill of the men of Sidon in navigation and fortification had a very permanent effect. For a long time the Greeks made the Phœnicians their masters in architecture, mining, and engineering; later they received from them the alphabet and the Babylonian system of weights and measures. The industry and the artistic skill of the Greeks also began to practice on the models brought into the land by the Sidonians.
Internal dissensions, raids of the rude pastoral tribes upon the settled peoples of the lowlands and the coast, and feuds between the nomads themselves, were, doubtless, also a powerful factor in the transition from the peaceful patriarchism of Pelasgic times to the more stirring and warlike period that followed. The necessity of protecting person and property from bold raiders by sea and land led to the erection of fortresses, massive walls of rough stones piled upon one another and held together only by the law of gravity. The best example of such “Cyclopean” remains is the well-preserved citadel of Tiryns in Argolis. Here on a hill only fifty feet high, the top of which is nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide, a wall without towers follows the edge of the rock. With an apparent thickness of twenty-five feet the real wall, as it appears to-day, cannot be estimated at more than fifteen feet. On each side of this run covered passages or galleries. By degrees the Greeks learned from Phœnician models to construct these fortresses better and finally to make real citadels of them. Little city communities were gradually formed at the foot of the hill, but until far into the Hellenic period the upper city, the “acropolis” remained the more important. Here were the sanctuaries and the council chamber, the residence of the king and often also the houses of the nobility.
The military nobility, the ancient Greek chivalry, also originated in pre-historic times. In the storms of the new time the patriarchal chieftains developed into powerful military princes who everywhere forced the “Pelasgian” peasant to keep his sling or his sword, his lance or his javelin, always at hand. A class of lords also arose, consisting of families that supported themselves rather by the trade of arms than by the pursuit of agriculture. This new nobility, which gradually grew to great numerical strength, held a very important position down to the days of democracy.
This transition period was subsequently called by the Hellenes the Heroic Age. The myths and legends which the memory of the Greek tribes and their poets preserved of this period have a varied character. On the one hand, heroic figures are repeatedly developed from the local names or the surnames of divinities, or the mythical history of a god is transferred to a human being. On the other hand, this imaginative people loved to concentrate its historical recollections and to load the deeds and experiences of whole tribes and epochs upon one or another heroic personality, whose cycle of legends in the course of further development underwent new colourings and extensions through the mixture of fresh elements. This is the way in which the legends of Hercules and Theseus, of the Argonauts and the “Seven against Thebes” grew up. The most glorious poetical illumination is cast upon the alleged greatest deed of pre-Hellenic times, the ten years’ war waged by nearly the whole body of Achæan heroes against the Teucrian Troy or Ilion.
The warlike, chivalrous-romantic nation of poetry and legendary history at the close of the pre-Hellenic period we are accustomed to call the Achæans. It seems to us safe to accept the theory that the name Achæans means “the noble, excellent,” and belongs to the entire “hero-nation,” not to a single tribe after which the Greeks as a whole were afterwards called.
At least a few important remains of the tribal and state relations of this age passed over into the Hellenic period. The Dorians were at this time an insignificant mountain race in the mountains on the northern edge of the beautiful basin of northeastern Greece, which had not yet received the name of Thessaly, while the principal part was played there by the Lapithæ on Mount Ossa and the lower Peneus, the Bœotians in the southwest of the Peneus district, and especially the Minyæ, with one branch at Iolcus on the gulf of Pagasæ and another in the western part of the basin of the Copaïs, where they were in constant rivalry with the Cadmeans of Thebes. The Ionic race was spread over the northern coast of the Peloponnesus on the Gulf of Corinth, over a portion of the eastern coast of this peninsula on the Gulf of Saron, and over Megaris and Attica. Among the Ionic cantons Attica had already attained considerable importance. Here the so-called Theseus, or rather a family of warlike chieftains descended from the Ionic tribal hero Theseus, had succeeded in uniting the four different portions of this district.
Of greater importance than any of these in the pre-Doric period were the feudal states of the Peloponnesus. The strongest among these was the royal house of the Atridæ, upon whose glory terrible legends cast a dark and bloody shadow. From their capital at Mycenæ they ruled over the whole of Argolis; chieftains in Tiryns, in Argos and on the coast of the peninsula of Parnon acknowledged their authority. The remains of the citadel of this royal family are still preserved. The hill on which this citadel stood is surmounted by a small circular wall, and lower down is surrounded by a mighty wall which everywhere follows the edge of the cliff, and which in some places is built of rough layers of massive stones, elsewhere of carefully fitted polygonal blocks, but also for considerable stretches of rectangular blocks, in horizontal courses.
On the southwestern side is the principal gate, the famous Gate of the Lions, which takes its name from the oldest extant remains of sculpture in Greece. In the triangular gap in the wall above the lintel an enormous slab of yellow limestone is fitted; it is divided in the middle by a perpendicular column, on either side of which stands a lioness. In this acropolis Schliemann found graves with human remains, with vessels of clay, alabaster, and gold, ornaments of rock-crystal, copper, silver, gold, and ivory.
Near the Gate of the Lions begin the walls of the lower city, which stood on the ridge extending from the western declivity of the citadel to the south. In this lower city are a number of remarkable subterranean buildings, sepulchres and treasure houses of the ancient monarchs. The best preserved and largest of these is the noteworthy round building known as the “treasure house of Atreus” (also as the “grave of Agamemnon”), which is especially interesting on account of its tholos, or interior circular vault.
So in a large part of the Greek world a not inconsiderable degree of civilisation had already begun to flourish. War, to be sure, was governed, even down to the period of the highest culture, by a “martial law” that recognised no right of the vanquished, delivered conquered cities to the flames, and gave the person and the family of the captured enemy to the victor as booty. The battle itself however, was conducted according to certain mutually recognised chivalrous forms. The Greek knights, rushing into battle in their chariots, hurled their terrible javelins at the enemy, but made less use of the sword, and still less of the bow, sought single combat with a foe of equal birth, and as a rule avoided slaughtering the common soldier. The development of a class of slaves in consequence of the incessant feuds was of great influence in determining the whole future character of the later Hellenic states. On the other hand, it is worthy of note that the ancient cruelty and bloodthirsty savagery disappeared more and more, although breaking out frightfully on occasion when the heat of Greek passion burst through all restraint. But murder and even simple homicide, as they are recorded with traces of blood in the older legendary history, ceased to be daily occurrences.
Tradition shows traces of a beautiful moral idealism. The tenderest friendship, respect of the Greek youth for age, conjugal loyalty of the women, ardent love of family, and the highest degree of receptivity for the good and the noble shine forth from the traditions of the Achæans with a charm that warms the heart.
The beginnings of common religious assemblages, or Amphictyons, also appear to belong to this time. So Greek life had already a quite complex structure when a last echo of the ancient movement of peoples on the Illyrian-Greek peninsula once more produced a general upheaval in all the lands between Olympus and Malea, between the Ionian Sea and the mountains of the coast of Asia Minor, after which Greece on either side of the Ægean Sea had acquired the ethnographic physiognomy that it retained until the invasion of the Slavs and Bulgarians.[e]
FOOTNOTES
[2] [The Latin Græcus was, however, derived from the old Greek name Γραϊκός.]
