Pheidôn was designated by Ephorus as the tenth, and by Theopompus as the sixth, in lineal descent from Têmenus. Respecting the date of his existence, opinions the most discrepant and irreconcilable have been delivered; but there seems good reason for referring him to the period a little before and a little after the 8th Olympiad,—between 770 B. C. and 730 B. C.[521] Of the preceding kings of Argos we hear little: one of them, Eratus, is said to have expelled the Dryopian inhabitants of Asinê from their town on the Argolic peninsula, in consequence of their having coöperated with the Spartan king, Nikander, when he invaded the Argeian territory, seemingly during the generation preceding Pheidôn; there is another, Damokratidas, whose date cannot be positively determined, but he appears rather as subsequent than as anterior to Pheidôn.[522] We are informed, however, that these anterior kings, even beginning with Medôn, the grandson of Têmenus, had been forced to submit to great abridgment of their power and privileges, and that a form of government substantially popular, though nominally regal, had been established.[523] Pheidôn, breaking through the limits imposed, made himself despot of Argos. He then re-established the power of Argos over all the cities of her confederacy, which had before been so nearly dissolved as to leave all the members practically independent.[524] Next, he is said to have acquired dominion over Corinth, and to have endeavored to assure it, by treacherously entrapping a thousand of her warlike citizens; but his artifice was divulged and frustrated by Abrôn, one of his confidential friends.[525] He is farther reported to have aimed at extending his sway over the greater part of Peloponnesus,—laying claim, as the descendant of Hêraklês, through the eldest son of Hyllus, to all the cities which that restless and irresistible hero had ever taken.[526] According to Grecian ideas, this legendary title was always seriously construed, and often admitted as conclusive; though of course, where there were strong opposing interests, reasons would be found to elude it. Pheidôn would have the same ground of right as that which, two hundred and fifty years afterwards, determined the Herakleid Dôrieus, brother of Kleomenês king of Sparta, to acquire for himself the territory near Mount Eryx in Sicily, because his progenitor,[527] Hêraklês, had conquered it before him. So numerous, however, were the legends respecting the conquests of Hêraklês, that the claim of Pheidôn must have covered the greater part of Peloponnesus, except Sparta and the plain of Messêne, which were already in the hands of Herakleids.
Nor was the ambition of Pheidôn satisfied even with these large pretensions. He farther claimed the right of presiding at the celebration of those religious games, or Agônes, which had been instituted by Hêraklês,—and among these was numbered the Olympic Agôn, then, however, enjoying but a slender fraction of the lustre which afterwards came to attach to it. The presidency of any of the more celebrated festivals current throughout Greece, was a privilege immensely prized. It was at once dignified and lucrative, and the course of our history will present more than one example in which blood was shed to determine what state should enjoy it. Pheidôn marched to Olympia, at the epoch of the 8th recorded Olympiad, or 747 B. C.; on the occasion of which event we are made acquainted with the real state of parties in the peninsula.
The plain of Olympia,—now ennobled only by immortal recollections, but once crowded with all the decorations of religion and art, and forming for many centuries the brightest centre of attraction known in the ancient world,—was situated on the river Alpheius, in the territory called the Pisatid, hard by the borders of Arcadia. At what time its agonistic festival, recurring every fifth year, at the first full moon after the summer solstice, first began or first acquired its character of special sanctity, we have no means of determining. As with so many of the native waters of Greece,—we follow the stream upward to a certain point, but the fountain-head, and the earlier flow of history, is buried under mountains of unsearchable legend. The first celebration of the Olympic contests was ascribed by Grecian legendary faith to Hêraklês,—and the site of the place, in the middle of the Pisatid, with its eight small townships, is quite sufficient to prove that the inhabitants of that little territory were warranted in describing themselves as the original administrators of the ceremony.[528] But this state of things seems to have been altered by the Ætolian settlement in Elis, which is represented as having been conducted by Oxylus and identified with the Return of the Herakleids. The Ætolo-Eleians, bordering upon the Pisatid to the north, employed their superior power in subduing their weaker neighbors,[529] who thus lost their autonomy and became annexed to the territory of Elis. It was the general rule throughout Greece, that a victorious state undertook to perform[530] the current services of the conquered people towards the gods,—such services being conceived as attaching to the soil: hence, the celebration of the Olympic games became numbered among the incumbences of Elis, just in the same way as the worship of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr, when Eleusis lost its autonomy, was included among the religious obligations of Athens. The Pisatans, however, never willingly acquiesced in this absorption of what had once been their separate privilege; they long maintained their conviction, that the celebration of the games was their right, and strove on several occasions to regain it. On those occasions, the earliest, so far as we hear, was connected with the intervention of Pheidôn. It was at their invitation that the king of Argos went to Olympia, and celebrated the games himself, in conjunction with the Pisatans, as the lineal successor of Hêraklês; while the Eleians, being thus forcibly dispossessed, refused to include the 8th Olympiad in their register of the victorious runners. But their humiliation did not last long, for the Spartans took their part, and the contest ended in the defeat of Pheidôn. In the next Olympiad, the Eleian management and the regular enrolment appear as before, and the Spartans are even said to have confirmed Elis in her possession both of Pisatis and Triphylia.[531]
Unfortunately, these scanty particulars are all which we learn respecting the armed conflict at the 8th Olympiad, in which the religious and the political grounds of quarrel are so intimately blended,—as we shall find to be often the case in Grecian history. But there is one act of Pheidôn yet more memorable, of which also nothing beyond a meagre notice has come down to us. He first coined both copper and silver money in Ægina, and first established a scale of weights and measures,[532] which, through his influence, became adopted throughout Peloponnesus, and acquired, ultimately, footing both in all the Dorian states, and in Bœotia, Thessaly, northern Hellas generally, and Macedonia,—under the name of the Æginæan Scale. There arose subsequently another rival scale in Greece, called the Euboic, differing considerably from the Æginæan. We do not know at what time it was introduced, but it was employed both at Athens and in the Ionic cities generally, as well as in Eubœa,—being modified at Athens, so far as money was concerned, by Solon’s debasement of the coinage.
The copious and valuable information contained in M. Boeckh’s recent publication on Metrology, has thrown new light upon these monetary and statical scales.[533] He has shown that both the Æginæan and the Euboic scales—the former standing to the latter in the proportion of 6 : 5—had contemporaneous currency in different parts of the Persian empire; the divisions and denominations of the scale being the same in both, 100 drachmæ to a mina, and 60 minæ to a talent. The Babylonian talent, mina, and drachma are identical with the Æginæan: the word mina is of Asiatic origin; and it has now been rendered highly probable, that the scale circulated by Pheidôn was borrowed immediately from the Phœnicians, and by them originally from the Babylonians. The Babylonian, Hebraic, Phœnician, Egyptian,[534] and Grecian scales of weight (which were subsequently followed wherever coined money was introduced) are found to be so nearly conformable, as to warrant a belief that they are all deduced from one common origin; and that origin the Chaldæan priesthood of Babylon. It is to Pheidôn, and to his position as chief of the Argeian confederacy, that the Greeks owe the first introduction of the Babylonian scale of weight, and the first employment of coined and stamped money.
If we maturely weigh the few, but striking acts of Pheidôn which have been preserved to us, and which there is no reason to discredit, we shall find ourselves introduced to an early historical state of Peloponnesus very different from that to which another century will bring us. That Argos, with the federative cities attached to her, was at this early time decidedly the commanding power in that peninsula, is sufficiently shown by the establishment and reception of the Pheidonian weights, measures, and monetary system,—while the other incidents mentioned completely harmonize with the same idea. Against the oppressions of Elis, the Pisatans invoked Pheidon,—partly as exercising a primacy in Peloponnesus, just as the inhabitants of Lepreum in Triphylia,[535] three centuries afterwards, called in the aid of Sparta for the same object, at a time when Sparta possessed the headship,—and partly as the lineal representative of Hêraklês, who had founded those games from the management of which they had been unjustly extruded. On the other hand, Sparta appears as a second-rate power. The Æginæan scale of weight and measure was adopted there as elsewhere,[536]—the Messenian Dorians were still equal and independent,—and we find Sparta interfering to assist Elis by virtue of an obligation growing (so the legend represents it) out of the common Ætolo-Dorian emigration; not at all from any acknowledged primacy, such as we shall see her enjoying hereafter. The first coinage of copper and silver money is a capital event in Grecian history, and must be held to imply considerable commerce as well as those extensive views which belong only to a conspicuous and leading position. The ambition of Pheidôn to resume all the acquisitions made by his ancestor Hêraklês, suggests the same large estimate of his actual power. He is characterized as a despot, and even as the most insolent of all despots:[537] how far he deserved such a reputation, we have no means of judging. We may remark, however, that he lived before the age of despots or tyrants, properly so called, and before the Herakleid lineage had yet lost its primary, half-political, half-religious character. Moreover, the later historians have invested his actions with a color of exorbitant aggression, by applying them to a state of things which belonged to their time and not to his. Thus Ephorus represents him as having deprived the Lacedæmonians of the headship of Peloponnesus, which they never possessed until long after him,—and also as setting at naught the sworn inviolability of the territory of the Eleians, enjoyed by the latter as celebrators of the Olympic games; whereas the Agonothesia, or right of superintendence claimed by Elis, had not at that time acquired the sanction of prescription,—while the conquest of Pisa by the Eleians themselves had proved that this sacred function did not protect the territory of a weaker people.
How Pheidôn fell, and how the Argeians lost that supremacy which they once evidently possessed, we have no positive details to inform us: with respect to the latter point, however, we can discern a sufficient explanation. The Argeians stood predominant as an entire and unanimous confederacy, which required a vigorous and able hand to render its internal organization effective or its ascendency respected without. No such leader afterwards appeared at Argos, the whole history of which city is destitute of eminent individuals: her line of kings continued at least down to the Persian war,[538] but seemingly with only titular functions, for the government had long been decidedly popular. The statements, which represent the government as popular anterior to the time of Pheidôn, appear unworthy of trust. That prince is rather to be taken as wielding the old, undiminished prerogatives of the Herakleid kings, but wielding them with unusual effect,—enforcing relaxed privileges, and appealing to the old heroic sentiment in reference to Hêraklês, rather than revolutionizing the existing relations either of Argos or of Peloponnesus. It was in fact the great and steady growth of Sparta, for three centuries after the Lykurgean institutions, which operated as a cause of subversion to the previous order of command and obedience in Greece.
The assertion made by Herodotus,—that, in earlier times, the whole eastern coast of Laconia as far as Cape Malea, including the island of Kythêra and several other islands, had belonged to Argos,—is referred by O. Müller to about the 50th Olympiad, or 580 B. C. Perhaps it had ceased to be true at that period; but that it was true in the age of Pheidôn, there seem good grounds for believing. What is probably meant is, that the Dorian towns on this coast, Prasiæ, Zarêx, Epidaurus Limêra, and Bœæ, were once autonomous, and members of the Argeian confederacy,—a fact highly probable, on independent evidence, with respect to Epidaurus Limêra, inasmuch as that town was a settlement from Epidaurus in the Argolic peninsula: and Bœæ too had its own œkist and eponymus, the Herakleid Bœus,[539] noway connected with Sparta,—perhaps derived from the same source as the name of the town Bœon in Doris. The Argeian confederated towns would thus comprehend the whole coast of the Argolic and Saronic gulfs, from Kythêra as far as Ægina, besides other islands which we do not know: Ægina had received a colony of Dorians from Argos and Epidaurus, upon which latter town it continued for some time in a state of dependence.[540] It will at once be seen that this extent of coast implies a considerable degree of commerce and maritime activity. We have besides to consider the range of Doric colonies in the southern islands of the Ægean and in the south-western corner of Asia Minor,—Krête, Kôs, Rhodes (with its three distinct cities), Halikarnassus, Knidus, Myndus, Nisyrus, Symê, Karpathus, Kalydna, etc. Of the Doric establishments here named, several are connected (as has been before stated) with the great emigration of the Têmenid Althæmenês from Argos: but what we particularly observe is, that they are often referred as colonies promiscuously to Argos, Trœzên, Epidaurus[541]—more frequently however, as it seems, to Argos. All these settlements are doubtless older than Pheidôn, and we may conceive them as proceeding conjointly from the allied Dorian towns in the Argolic peninsula, at a time when they were more in the habit of united action than they afterwards became: a captain of emigrants selected from the line of Hêraklês and Têmenus was suitable to the feelings of all of them. We may thus look back to a period, at the very beginning of the Olympiads, when the maritime Dorians on the east of Peloponnesus maintained a considerable intercourse and commerce, not only among themselves, but also with their settlements on the Asiatic coast and islands. That the Argolic peninsula formed an early centre for maritime rendezvous, we may farther infer from the very ancient Amphiktyony of the seven cities (Hermionê, Epidaurus, Ægina, Athens, Prasiæ, Nauplia, and the Minyeian Orchomenus), on the holy island of Kalauria, off the harbor of Trœzên.[542]
The view here given of the early ascendency of Argos, as the head of the Peloponnesian Dorians and the metropolis of the Asiatic Dorians, enables us to understand the capital innovation of Pheidôn,—the first coinage, and the first determinate scale of weight and measure, known in Greece. Of the value of such improvements, in the history of Grecian civilization, it is superfluous to speak, especially when we recollect that the Hellenic states, having no political unity, were only held together by the aggregate of spontaneous uniformities, in language, religion, sympathies, recreations, and general habits. We see both how Pheidôn came to contract the wish, and how he acquired the power, to introduce throughout so much of the Grecian world an uniform scale; we also see that the Asiatic Dorians form the link between him and Phœnicia, from whence the scale was derived, just as the Euboic scale came, in all probability, through the Ionic cities in Asia, from Lydia. It is asserted by Ephorus, and admitted even by the ablest modern critics, that Pheidôn first coined money “in Ægina:”[543] other authors (erroneously believing that his scale was the Euboic scale) alleged that his coinage had been carried on “in a place of Argos called Eubœa.”[544] Now both these statements appear highly improbable, and both are traceable to the same mistake,—of supposing that the title, by which the scale had come to be commonly known, must necessarily be derived from the place in which the coinage had been struck. There is every reason to conclude, that what Pheidôn did was done in Argos, and nowhere else: his coinage and scale were the earliest known in Greece, and seem to have been known by his own name, “the Pheidonian measures,” under which designation they were described by Aristotle, in his account of the constitution of Argos.[545] They probably did not come to bear the specific epithet of Æginæan until there was another scale in vogue, the Euboic, from which to distinguish them; and both the epithets were probably derived, not from the place where the scale first originated, but from the people whose commercial activity tended to make them most generally known,—in the one case, the Æginetans; in the other case, the inhabitants of Chalkis and Eretria. I think, therefore, that we are to look upon the Pheidonian measures as emanating from Argos, and as having no greater connection, originally, with Ægina, than with any other city dependent upon Argos.
There is, moreover, another point which deserves notice. What was known by the name of the Æginæan scale, as contrasted with and standing in a definite ratio (6 : 5) with the Euboic scale, related only to weight and money, so far as our knowledge extends:[546] we have no evidence to show that the same ratio extended either to measures of length or measures of capacity. But there seems ground for believing that the Pheidonian regulations, taken in their full comprehension, embraced measures of capacity as well as weights: Pheidôn, at the same time when he determined the talent, mina, and drachm, seems also to have fixed the dry and liquid measures,—the medimnus and metrêtês, with their parts and multiples: and there existed[547] Pheidonian measures of capacity, though not of length, so far as we know. The Æginæan scale may thus have comprised only a portion of what was established by Pheidôn, namely, that which related to weight and money.