Athens too had soon repaired the loss it suffered through Sulla’s massacre, though Piræus did not rise out of its ruins. But the Athenian population was recruited, as it had long been, by the lavish grant or cheap sale of the franchise. It was like the galley of Theseus, retaining nothing but the name and semblance of the old Athenian people, without any real natural identity of race; so that it was no exaggeration, when Piso called it a jumble of divers nations. The poverty indeed of the city, which had been a main cause of its unfortunate accession to the side of Mithridates, still continued, and was but slightly relieved by the bounty of benefactors like Pomponius and Herodes Atticus, or even by the growing influx of wealthy strangers who came to pursue rhetorical or philosophical studies there.
While its splendour was increased by the magnificent structures added to it by Hadrian and Herodes, perhaps the larger part of the freemen was never quite secure of their daily meal. Still the good will of the early emperors was unequivocally manifested. They seem always to have lent a favourable ear to the complaints and petitions of the province, and Nero went so far as to reward the Greeks for their skilful flattery of his musical talents by an entire and general exemption from provincial government, which may have compensated for the presents he exacted from them. The Greeks, it is said, abused their new privileges by discord and tumults, and Vespasian restored the proconsular administration, and above all the tribute—which was perhaps his real motive—with the remark that they had forgotten the use of liberty. But it is evident that on the whole, from the reign of Augustus to that of Trajan, the increase of the population was not checked by oppression or by any calamity. Yet at the end of this period we find Plutarch declaring, that Greece had shared more largely than any other country in the general failure of population which had been caused by the wars and civil conflicts of former times over almost all the world, so that it could then hardly furnish three thousand heavy-armed soldiers—the number raised by Megara alone for the Persian War; and his assertion is confirmed by the pictures drawn by another contemporary witness.
In times when the present was so void and cheerless, the future so dark and hopeless, it was natural that men should seek consolation in the past, even though it had been less full, than was the case among the Greeks, of power and beauty, prosperity and glory. Nor was it necessary then to evoke its images by learned toil out of the dust of libraries or archives. The whole land was covered with its monuments in the most faultless productions of human genius and art. There was no region so desolate, no corner so secluded, as to be destitute of them. Even the rapacity of the Romans could not exhaust these treasures. Though Mummius was said to have filled Italy with the sculptures which he carried away, it is probable that in the immense multitude which remained, their absence, in point of number, might be scarcely perceived. If Nero robbed Delphi of five hundred statues, there might still be more than two thousand left there.
The expressive silence of these memorials was interpreted by legends which lived in the mind and the heart of the people; and so long as any inhabitants remained in a place, a guide was to be found thoroughly versed in this traditional lore. The town of Panopeus at the northern foot of Parnassus, though celebrated by Homer as a royal residence, had been reduced, when it was visited by Pausanias,[f] to a miserable assemblage of huts, in which the traveller could find nothing to deserve the name of a city, as it contained neither an archive, nor a gymnasium, nor a theatre, nor a market-place, nor a fountain; but the people remembered that they were not of Phocian, but of Phlegyan origin: they could show the grave which covered the vast bulk of the great Tityus, and the remnants of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the human race. Relics of like antiquity were at the same period reverently treasured in most parts of Greece. The memory of the past was still more effectually preserved by a great variety of festivals, games, public sacrifices, and other religious solemnities. After the extinction of the national independence, the battle of Platæa did not cease to be commemorated by the Feast of Liberty; as notwithstanding the absence of all political interests, the forms of deliberation were kept up in the Amphictyonic, the Achæan, Phocian, and Bœotian councils. The heroes both of the mythical and the historical age were still honoured with anniversary rites—Aratus and Demosthenes, and the slain at Marathon, no less than Ajax and Achilles, Temenus, Phoroneus, and Melampus.
The religion of the Greeks, which was so intimately associated with almost all their social pleasures and their most important affairs, had never lost its hold on the great body of the nation. We hear much of the change wrought in the state of religious feeling by the speculations of the sophists, and the later kindred philosophical schools, by the frequent examples of sacrilegious violence, by the progress of luxury, and the growing corruption of manners. But the effect seems to have been confined to a not very large circle of the higher classes. With the common people paganism continued, probably as long as it subsisted at all, to be not a mere hereditary usage, but a personal, living, breathing, and active faith. In the age of the Antonines the Attic husbandmen still believed in the potent agency of their hero Marathon, as the Arcadian herdsmen fancied that they could hear the piping of Pan on the top of Mænalus. The national misfortunes, as they led the Greeks to cling the more fondly to their recollections of the past, tended to strengthen the influence of the old religion, and rendered them the less disposed to admit a new faith which shocked their patriotic pride and dispelled many pleasing illusions, while it ran counter to all their tastes and habits, and deprived them of their principal enjoyments. Accordingly, it seems that Christianity, notwithstanding the consolations it offered for all that it took away, made very slow progress beyond the cities in which it was first planted; and its ascendency was not firmly established long before the beginning of a period in which a series of new calamities threatened the very existence of the nation.
The result of the Persian invasion in the mind of the victorious people had been a feeling of exulting self-confidence, which fostered the development of all its powers and resources. The terror of the Celtic inroad was followed by a sense of security earned in a great measure by an honourable struggle. Far different was the impression left by the irruption of Alaric, when Greece was at length delivered from his presence. The progress of the barbarians had been stopped by no resistance before they reached the utmost limits of the land. They retreated indeed before Stilicho, but not broken or discomfited, carrying off all their booty to take undisturbed possession of another, not a distant province. It was long indeed before the Greeks experienced a repetition of this calamity, but henceforth they lived in the consciousness that they were continually exposed to it. They neither had strength to defend themselves, nor could rely on their rulers for protection.
The safety of Greece was one of the last objects which occupied the attention of the court of Constantinople. In the utter uncertainty how soon a fresh invader might tread in the steps of Alaric, every rumour of the movements of the hordes which successively crossed the Danube, might well spread alarm, even in the remotest corners of Peloponnesus. The direction which they might take could be as little calculated as the course of lightning. Who could have foreseen that Attila and Theodoric would be diverted from their career to fall upon other prey—that Genseric after his repulse before Tænarus would not renew his invasion—that the Bulgarians would be so long detained by the plunder of the northern provinces? In the reign of Justinian the advances of the barbarians became more and more threatening, and in the year 540 northern Greece was again devastated by a mixed swarm of Huns and other equally ferocious spoilers, chiefly of the Slavonic race.
The strengthened fortifications of the Isthmus indeed withstood this flood, though they could not shelter the Peloponnesians from the earthquakes and the pestilence, which during this unhappy period were constantly wasting the scanty remains of the Hellenic population which had escaped or survived the inroads of the barbarians. Justinian’s enormous line of fortresses revealed the imminence of the danger, but could not long avert it. In the course of the seventh and eighth centuries the worst forebodings were realised; after many transient incursions the country was permanently occupied by Slavonic settlers. The extent of the transformation which ensued is most clearly proved by the number of the new names which succeeded to those of the ancient geography. But it is also described by historians in terms which have suggested the belief that the native population was utterly swept away, and that the modern Greeks are the descendants of barbarous tribes which subsequently became subject to the empire, and received the language and religion which they have since retained from Byzantine missionaries and Anatolian colonists; and such is the obscurity which hangs over the final destiny of the most renowned nation of the earth, that it is much easier to show the weakness of the grounds on which this hypothesis has been reared, than to prove that it is very wide of the truth.[d]