Athens thus comes rather late into Greek history. Only two facts stand out with any clearness from the period before the sixth-century tyrannies: the attempted tyranny of Cylon and the early law-giving. Both these facts were recalled by events of subsequent history. The attempt of Cylon involved a curse upon one of the greatest of Athenian families, the Alcmæonids, to which belonged celebrated names like Megacles, Cleisthenes, Pericles, and Alcibiades. The Law-givers of Athens are indeed historical personages, which is more than we can say with any confidence for the Spartan Law-giver Lycurgus, but they have served as pegs for much legend and a good deal of deliberate falsification. Athens undoubtedly possessed ancient wooden tablets of laws (though it is rather a question whether they could have survived the two burnings of Athens by the Persians), and some of these laws probably bore the names of Dracon and Solon; but it is very certain that later orators lent weight to any old law they wished to quote with approval, by giving it one of these respectable names. On the other hand we know that when Athenian writers began to take an interest in constitutional history, which was not until two hundred years later, they used Dracon and Solon to father their own theories, because it was possible to form the most conflicting views of what those legislators had really done. One great point was to make out that the democracy was as old as the hills, and in this sense Solon was made the inventor of the Assembly, the Council, and even the popular jury courts. Some ascribed to him the invention of the old Council of the Areopagus. Others maintained that Solon was not a democrat, but the author of a limited franchise on a property basis—in fact, of just the system that Theramenes and his party were proposing in 404 B.C. Others, again, went one better, and attributed a democratic system to Dracon, a still earlier Law-giver, in spite of the fact that Solon had abolished all his laws except those about murder and blood-guiltiness. Thucydides, however, being a scientifically minded historian with an impartial love of truth, passes over this early period with the remark that people will accept without testing any sort of traditions even when they concern their own country. And that is the right attitude for us. There were no historians until the fifth century, no contemporary records whatever, except a very few ancient inscriptions, and the work of the lyric poets who flourished in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries. We have, indeed, a considerable bulk of poetry which passes under the name of Solon. Some of it is not above suspicion, for it includes a so-called prelude to a versified edition of his laws, and other lines written in a tone very unsuitable to a philosopher. But from the undoubtedly genuine portion we gather that Solon, so far from being an impartial mediator, collected a popular following, vehemently attacked the rich, and then “gave to the people so much power as sufficeth, neither diminishing nor increasing their honour.” His principal work was to codify the laws which had hitherto existed only in the bosoms of the nobles. He did a great deal to fix the existing social classes in Athens by arranging the people in four ranks according to their property, reckoned, of course, on the basis of land-holding. And he removed agrarian grievances by forbidding loans on the security of the person, a custom which had led to the actual enslaving of the poor by the rich landowners. In these ways he did an immense service to the future liberty of his country. Even a cautious estimate of his work makes him a very great man. But he was not the inventor of democracy.
His personality is hopelessly involved in legend. He is one of the Seven Sages, doubtless real personalities whose names have served as a peg for the inventive faculties of the Greeks. Some of them were natural philosophers, like Thales of Miletus, whose knowledge of astronomy was so exact that he predicted the eclipse of 585 B.C. He is said to have learnt his scientific knowledge, as Solon is said to have learnt his legislative skill, in Egypt, where he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadow. There is very likely a substratum of truth in the stories which make the birth, or rather the revival, of learning in Greece come from Egypt and Crete. Thales knew that the light of the moon came from the sun. He was the first of those natural philosophers of Greece whose main object was to find the “principle” of the universe. Thales held that all things originated from water. Another of the Seven was Bias of Priene, whose activities were mainly political, and who invented maxims like “He is unfortunate who cannot bear misfortune,” and “If thou hast done a good deed, ascribe it to the gods.” At least two of the other four were tyrants. Solon is also associated with a curious figure who went about expounding religion and conducting purificatory rites, Epimenides the Cretan, who was supposed to have lived for fifty years in a cave on nothing but asphodels and water, the father of all hermits. Whatever constitutional enactments Solon did make never had time to get into working order; for the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons followed almost immediately.
To return to the goddess: only two passages of Homer refer to Athens, and both were probably interpolated at the editing of Homer in the days of Peisistratus. Both allude to the connection between Athena and Erechtheus. The goddess is described in one place as visiting “the goodly house of Erechtheus,” which probably means the old Pelasgian palace on the Acropolis; in the other she has received Erechtheus, the son of Earth, into “her own rich shrine.” Modern criticism, however, is apt to reverse the relationship of host and guest—Erechtheus the earth-born was the prehistoric hero, Athena the Olympian interloper. The early shrine of Athena upon the Acropolis has quite recently been discovered on the north side of the plateau by Dörpfeld. It would seem to have been a building of the sixth century or earlier, and to have been surrounded with a peristyle of columns by a later hand—whose we shall presently see. This is the “old temple” superseded for cult purposes by the Parthenon. Our “Erechtheum,” so well known for its caryatid porch, was built right up against this old temple, so that the caryatid porch juts out over the stylobate of it. In the old temple was the old cult image of the goddess afterwards replaced by the splendid creation of Pheidias. It was a xoanon, or pillar statue, of olive-wood, in a standing posture, its rude shape doubtless concealed with offered drapery. It was armed with spear, shield, ægis, and helmet, and stood in act to strike. As the illustration[31] shows, this became a favourite motive in the portraiture of the goddess; she stands there as the champion and protectress of the city. Athena Polias is her fitting title. Pheidias idealised this type in his Athena Promachos. But it does not seem to be very ancient. Probably Athens, like Troy, had possessed an earlier seated Pallas, upon whose knees the women laid their embroidered “peplos.” Nothing in art or ritual need make us doubt that Pallas Athene was far from aboriginal in Athens, that she came in with the Achæans, and that it was not until Athens became a real city-state, with
Plate XXVI. ATHENA POLIAS: BRONZE
English Photo Co., Athens
civic worship of an idealised type, that the great vogue of the Virgin began on the Acropolis.