Under Pisistratus or his sons (or, less probably, under Solon) Homer was recalled from Ionia and domiciled on the mainland. Whatever may be the details about a formal recension and publication at this time, recitations from Homer were made an integral part of the public festivals, and Athens became the clearing-house for an intellectual currency good throughout all Hellas. The name “Pan-Athenian,” passing even beyond Pan-Ionian, was to be equated with a culture that was Pan-Hellenic. This befitted the epic breadth transcending mere local traditions. “The Iliad was not composed for any king or tyrant. If it is aristocratic, its appeal is not to any given set of noble families, but to all brave men of Greek legend.” And the spirit in which this epic trust was administered tallies well with the restraint of Pisistratus in respecting, as far as possible, the laws of Solon. If there were Attic interpolations in the poems, they do not glorify his house. In the “Catalogue of the Ships” the Athenians received honourable but not excessive mention. The brief reference to the ships from Salamis, as ranged under the command of the Athenians, would seem to suggest the recent conquest of the island under Solon or even the suspicion that Solon had himself interpolated it beforehand as proof of the ancient suzerainty of Athens:—
“Twelve ships from Salamis Aias commanded. He brought them and placed them there where Athenian squadrons were marshalled.”
But perhaps the easiest solution of all questions in regard to interpolations in the Homeric poems is to pin our uncritical faith to the authenticity of Lucian’s interview with Homer in Elysium: “I went up to Homer the poet, when we were both at leisure, and after making other inquiries ... I asked him further about the rejected verses, whether they were written by him. And he declared that he wrote them all!”
The greatest and most characteristically Attic contribution of the sixth century was the fostering of the drama, in connection with the worship of Dionysus. This Thracian divinity, on his journey southwards, had been welcomed in the villages of Attica, where vineyard and winepress awaited his blessing. The Pisistratidæ, who have been called “the providential defenders of the faith of Dionysus” against the aristocratic disdain felt for a peasant’s god, invited him to a new temple in the Lenæa—the Marshes—below the Acropolis, where, at the time of the winter solstice, the Feast of the Winepress once more identified the capital with the country it had outgrown. But Pisistratus went further in establishing the City Dionysia, a spring festival destined to a long life and splendid renown. Instead of private performances at rural feasts, the drama now became part of the official administration of the city. The first dated performance of a play by Thespis was in 534 B. C. This may have been on the occasion of the opening of the “orchestra,” north of the Areopagus, near the new Market-place, where the spectators henceforth found seats on wooden scaffolding until the more permanent theatre was erected south of the Acropolis. Athens was now ready for the great dramatists. The wine-god looms up as a rival to Athena, as may be seen by his ubiquity on the vase paintings and his dominant presence in the Attic calendar. “In the actual religious ritual Dionysus became of more importance at Athens than Zeus, Apollo, or even Athena.”
Thus in diverse ways does Pisistratus present a fair claim for having made Athens greater, in steady progression from the wise policies of Solon. Solon himself must often have feared an excess of luxury and splendour. No one of his generation could have dreamed of a regretful modern desire to have seen, because of its charming simplicity, “the little earlier Athens of Pisistratus.” But many a Periclean Greek may have forestalled it. Aristophanes was forever seeking for a revival of—
“the precepts which taught
The heroes of old to be hardy and bold, and the men who at Marathon fought!”[[6]]
These were the precepts which taught Æschylus. We are apt to think of him only in his maturity, a fighter at Marathon, a seasoned warrior at Salamis, a poet of the post-Persian epoch. But his childhood fell in the time of the Pisistratidæ, and it is by no means idle to speculate on the influences which then encompassed him. The memory of Solon’s ethics and vocabulary he carried with him through life. Foreign poets also, attracted to Athens by the sons of Pisistratus, must have seemed to him important personages. Two of the “ten” lyric poets were at this time identified with the city. Anacreon, when Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, had no longer a home to offer him, was brought in triumph to Athens in a fifty-oared galley sent by Hipparchus. And Simonides of Ceos, who was to be the chief mouthpiece of liberated Greece, was well content to enjoy the patronage of the despot.
Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been assassinated earlier, at one of the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his comic stock in trade.
“In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,