According to the poets, it was by a stratagem that this famous city was at last overcome. They tell us that the Greeks constructed a wooden horse of prodigious size, in the body of which they concealed a number of armed men, and then retired towards the sea-shore, to induce the enemy to believe that the besiegers had given up the enterprise, and were about to return home. Deceived by this manœuvre, the Trojans brought the gigantic horse into the city, and the men who had been concealed within it, stealing out in the night-time, unbarred the gates, and admitted the Grecian army within the walls. The siege of Troy forms the subject of Homer’s sublime poem, the ‘Iliad,’ in which the real events of the war are intermingled with many fictitious and supernatural incidents.
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The Greek princes discovered that their triumph over Troy was dearly paid for by their subsequent sufferings, and the disorganization of their kingdoms at home. Ulysses, if we may believe the poets, spent ten years in wandering over seas and lands before arriving in his island of Ithaca. Others of the leaders died or were shipwrecked on their way home, and several of those who succeeded in reaching their own dominions, found their thrones occupied by usurpers, and were compelled to return to their vessels, and seek in distant lands a place of rest and security for their declining years. But the fate of Agamemnon, the renowned general of the Greeks, was the most deplorable of all. On his return to Argos, he was assassinated by his wife Clytemnestra, who had formed an attachment during his absence to another person. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, was driven into exile, but afterwards returned to Argos, and putting his mother and her accomplices to death, established himself upon the throne. About eighty years after the termination of the Trojan war, an extensive revolution took place in the affairs of Greece, in consequence of the subjugation of nearly the whole Peloponnesus by the descendants of Hercules. That hero, who was a member of the royal family of Mycenæ or Argos, had been driven into exile by some more successful candidate for the throne of that state. After the hero’s death, his children sought refuse in Doris, the king of which became subsequently so much attached to Hyllus, the eldest son of Hercules, that he constituted him the heir of his throne. Twice the Heraclidæan princes unsuccessfully attempted to establish themselves in the sovereignty of the Peloponnesus, which they claimed as their right; but on the third trial, they accomplished their object. In the year 1104 B. C., three brothers named Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, said to have been the great-grandsons of Hyllus, invaded the Peloponnesus at the head of the Dorians, and conquered the greater part of it, with the exception of the province of Arcadia, the mountainous character of which enabled its inhabitants to defend it with success against the invaders.
Temenus obtained the kingdom of Argos, Cresphontes established himself in Messenia, and as Aristodemus had died during the war, his twin sons Eurysthenes and Procles shared between them the throne of Sparta. The thrones of Corinth and Elis were occupied by other branches of the Heraclidæan family. The Dorian troops were rewarded with the lands of the conquered inhabitants, who were driven out of the Peloponnesus, or reduced to slavery. Great numbers of the Peloponnesians, who were expatriated by the Dorian invaders, passed over into Asia Minor, where they founded several colonies in a district afterwards called Æolia, from the name of the people by whom these colonies were established. Others took refuge in Attica, where the Athenians received them in a friendly manner. This, it would appear, gave offence to the new rulers of the Peloponnesian states, and war was commenced between the Dorians and the Athenians. In the year 1070 B. C., Attica was invaded by a numerous army of the Peloponnesians, and Athens itself seemed menaced with destruction. This emergency produced a display of patriotic devotion on the part of Codrus, the Athenian king, which has rarely been paralleled in the annals of mankind, and deserves to be held in everlasting remembrance:—
At Delphi in Phocis there was a temple of Apollo, to the priests of which the Greeks were wont to apply for information regarding future events, in the same manner as the people of comparatively recent times were accustomed to consult astrologers, soothsayers, and other artful imposters on similar questions. Now Codrus had learned that the Peloponnesians had received at Delphi a prophetical response, to the effect that they should not be victorious in the war, if they did not kill the Athenian king. Determined to save his country at the expense of his own life, Codrus disguised himself in a peasant’s dress, and entering the Peloponnesian camp, provoked a quarrel with a soldier, by whom he was killed.
It was not long until the dead body was recognized to be that of the Athenian king, and the Peloponnesians, remembering the condition on which the oracle had promised them success, were afraid to continue the contest any longer, and hastily retreated into their own territories. The Athenians were filled with admiration when they heard of the noble conduct of their monarch, and in the height of their gratitude, they declared that none but Jupiter was worthy of being their king after such a prince as Codrus.
It is supposed that they were partly induced to make this declaration by finding the sons of Codrus evince an inclination to involve the country in a civil war regarding the succession to the throne. The Athenians therefore abolished royalty altogether, and appointed Medon, Codrus’s eldest son, under the title of Archon, as chief magistrate of the republic for life; the office to be hereditary in his family as long as its duties should be performed to the satisfaction of the people. And as Attica was overcrowded with the Peloponnesian refugees, these, together with a large body of Athenians, were sent into Asia Minor, under the charge of Androclus and Neleus, the younger sons of Codrus, to plant colonies to the south of those already formed in Æolia. The settlers founded twelve cities, some of which afterwards rose to great wealth and splendor. Ionia was the name bestowed upon the district, in reference to the Ionic stock from which the Athenians drew their descent.
Several Dorian colonies in Caria, a province still farther south than Ionia, completed the range of Grecian settlements along the western coast of Asia Minor. Cyprus, Rhodes, the coast of Thrace, and the islands of the Ægean Sea, together with a considerable portion of Italy and Sicily, and even of France and Spain, were also colonized by bands of adventurers, who at various periods emigrated from Greece; so that, in process of time, the Grecian race, language, religion, institutions, and manners, instead of being confined to the comparatively small country constituting Greece proper, were diffused over a very extensive region, comprising the fairest portions of Europe and of western Asia.
While this work of colonization was going forward, the parent states of Greece were torn with internal dissensions, and were perpetually harassing each other in wars, of which the objects and incidents are now equally uncertain. Almost all that is known of the history of the two centuries immediately following the death of Codrus is, that they were characterized by great turbulence and confusion, and that, during their lapse, many of the Grecian states and colonies followed the example of Athens by abolishing monarchy. Others did not, till a later period, become republican, and Sparta long retained the singular form of regal government established there at the accession of the twin brothers Eurysthenes and Procles, the descendants of whom continued for several centuries to reign jointly in Lacedæmon, though, practically speaking, no state of Greece was more thoroughly republican in many important respects.
Greece had been all along divided into a number of independent states, and after the abolition of kingly government, several of these were split up into as many distinct republics as the state contained of towns. These divisions of the country, and the obstacles which the almost incessant wars interposed to a free communication between the inhabitants of the different districts, necessarily prevented the advancement of the Greeks in knowledge and civilization; but fortunately, a king of Elis, named Iphitus, at length devised an institution by which the people of all the Grecian states were enabled, notwithstanding their quarrels and wars with one another, to meet periodically on friendly terms, and communicate to each other such information as might be useful for the improvement and welfare of the whole.