HISTORY OF GREECE.
PART II.
CONTINUATION OF HISTORICAL GREECE.
CHAPTER IX.
CORINTH, SIKYON, AND MEGARA. — AGE OF THE GRECIAN DESPOTS.
The preceding volume brought down the history of Sparta to the period marked by the reign of Peisistratus at Athens; at which time she had attained her maximum of territory, was confessedly the most powerful state in Greece, and enjoyed a proportionate degree of deference from the rest. I now proceed to touch upon the three Dorian cities on and near to the Isthmus,—Corinth, Sikyôn, and Megara, as they existed at this same period.
Even amidst the scanty information which has reached us, we trace the marks of considerable maritime energy and commerce among the Corinthians, as far back as the eighth century B. C. The foundation of Korkyra and Syracuse, in the 11th Olympiad, or 734 B. C. (of which I shall speak farther in connection with Grecian colonization generally), by expeditions from Corinth, affords a good proof that they knew how to turn to account the excellent situation which connected them with the sea on both sides of Peloponnesus: and Thucydides,[1] while he notices them as the chief liberators of the sea, in early times, from pirates, also tells us that the first great improvement in ship-building,—the construction of the trireme, or ship of war, with a full deck and triple banks for the rowers,—was the fruit of Corinthian ingenuity. It was in the year 703 B. C., that the Corinthian Ameinoklês built four triremes for the Samians, the first which those islanders had ever possessed: the notice of this fact attests as well the importance attached to the new invention, as the humble scale on which the naval force in those early days was equipped. And it is a fact of not less moment, in proof of the maritime vigor of Corinth in the seventh century B. C., that the earliest naval battle known to Thucydides was one which took place between the Corinthians and the Korkyræans, B. C. 664.[2]
It has already been stated, in the preceding volume, that the line of Herakleid kings in Corinth subsides gradually, through a series of empty names, into the oligarchy denominated Bacchiadæ, or Bacchiads, under whom our first historical knowledge of the city begins. The persons so named were all accounted descendants of Hêraklês, and formed the governing caste in the city; intermarrying usually among themselves, and choosing from their own number an annual prytanis, or president, for the administration of affairs. Of their internal government we have no accounts, except the tale respecting Archias the founder of Syracuse,[3] one of their number, who had made himself so detested by an act of brutal violence terminating in the death of the beautiful youth Aktæôn, as to be forced to expatriate. That such a man should have been placed in the distinguished post of œkist of the colony of Syracuse, gives us no favorable idea of the Bacchiad oligarchy: we do not, however, know upon what original authority the story depends, nor can we be sure that it is accurately recounted. But Corinth, under their government, was already a powerful commercial and maritime city, as has already been stated.
Megara, the last Dorian state in this direction eastward, and conterminous with Attica at the point where the mountains called Kerāta descend to Eleusis and the Thracian plain, is affirmed to have been originally settled by the Dorians of Corinth, and to have remained for some time a dependency of that city. It is farther said to have been at first merely one of five separate villages,—Megara, Heræa, Peiræa, Kynosura, Tripodiskus,—inhabited by a kindred population, and generally on friendly terms, yet sometimes distracted by quarrels, and on those occasions carrying on war with a degree of lenity and chivalrous confidence which reverses the proverbial affirmation respecting the sanguinary character of enmities between kindred. Both these two statements are transmitted to us (we know not from what primitive source) as explanatory of certain current phrases:[4] the author of the latter cannot have agreed with the author of the former in considering the Corinthians as masters of the Megarid, because he represents them as fomenting wars among these five villages for the purpose of acquiring that territory. Whatever may be the truth respecting this alleged early subjection of Megara, we know it[5] in the historical age, and that too as early as the 14th Olympiad, only as an independent Dorian city, maintaining the integrity of its territory under its leader Orsippus, the famous Olympic runner, against some powerful enemies, probably the Corinthians. It was of no mean consideration, possessing a territory which extended across Mount Geraneia to the Corinthian gulf, on which the fortified town and port of Pêgæ, belonging to the Megarians, was situated; it was mother of early and distant colonies,—and competent, during the time of Solon, to carry on a protracted contest with the Athenians, for the possession of Salamis, wherein, although the latter were at last victorious, it was not without an intermediate period of ill-success and despair.