Ionia
At this time, when the mainland cities of Greece were beginning to revive the old Ægean culture under changed conditions, their kinsmen across the sea on both sides had gone in advance of them in civilisation. Why this was so it is hard to say—impossible, on the old theory that all these great cities from Miletus to Sybaris were merely colonies of Athens or Corinth or poor little Megara. But if it be true that one and the same gifted race had dwelt from Neolithic times on the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, then it is quite natural that the cities furthest removed from the main focus of Northern invasion should be the first to recover from the turmoil of the Dark Ages caused by the coming of Achæans and Dorians. The Ionians at any rate bear all the characteristics that we should expect from the kinsfolk of those pre-Achæan peoples without the Northern stiffening. They are intelligent, artistic, commercial, without any military virtues to speak of. They tend towards naturalistic deities like the Diana of Ephesus, and they scoff at the Olympian system. Their patron god is the sea-god. No deep gulf, such as that of race, separates them from the Lydian and Carian peoples behind them. Moreover, we can find the period and the political motive when the legends of their foundation from Athens first came into vogue. In the East “Javan” was the collective name for the Greeks.
In the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and Mitylene on Lesbos were the greatest cities of the Greek world, in size, riches, and culture. They in their turn were sending colonies into the Black Sea, to tap its rich corn-growing and wool-producing regions. We have seen something of the wisdom of Thales, and we must allow our imaginations to suggest what a vast amount of preliminary knowledge and culture is required before a man can calculate an eclipse. It is likely that this learning came in the merchant ships from Egypt. We have seen also what a great part Ionia played in the development (if not the authorship) of the Homeric epics. It is here too that lyric poetry reaches its apotheosis. We have agreed, I hope, that the epic did not come into being out of the void, but that there must have been songs before there were long poems. Hence we are not driven to the extravagant assumption that Sappho and Alcæus were beginners at their trade.
The great lyric period of the seventh and sixth centuries belongs politically to an era of aristocracies and tyrannies. The aristocracies here were composed, not of farmers, as at Athens, nor of warrior-knights, as at Sparta, but of merchant princes who have always proved lavish patrons of a certain kind of art and literature. Most of the great poets seem to have been members of the aristocracy.
Sappho is a remarkable figure in the history of literature, the only woman who has ever reached the front rank among poets. We have of her only a few score lines of broken fragments, only two poems that exceed ten lines, and not one of thirty. Yet even from these ruined remnants we can feel across the ages the vital throb of her passion, speaking in music of altogether unequalled beauty. It is impossible to describe the emotion which scholars and poets of all ages have felt when they first stumbled upon
“Immortal Aphrodite of the starry throne,
Daughter of God, weaver of guile, I beseech thee
Neither to disgust nor to distress subdue,
Lady, my heart....”
Or the broken marriage chorus:
Maidens
“Like the sweet apple blushing on the topmost twig,
Top of the topmost, which the gatherers forgot.
Forgot? Nay, but they could not reach to it.
Youths