It has already been pointed out that the question whether the makers of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations were Greeks must still be regarded as an open one. No such question can be raised as to the Homeric Age. The Homeric state. The Achaeans may or may not have been Greek in blood. What is certain is that the Achaean Age forms an integral part of Greek history. Alike on the linguistic, the religious and the political sides, Homer is the starting-point of subsequent developments. In the Greek dialects the great distinction is that between the Doric and the rest. Of the non-Doric dialects the two main groups are the Aeolic and Ionic, both of which have been developed, by a gradual process of differentiation, from the language of the Homeric poems. With regard to religion it is sufficient to refer to the judgment of Herodotus, that it was Homer and Hesiod who were the authors of the Greek theogony (ii. 53 οὗτοί εἰσι οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην Ἔλλησι). It is a commonplace that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. On the political side, Greek constitutional development would be unintelligible without Homer. When Greek history, in the proper sense, begins, oligarchy is almost universal. Everywhere, however, an antecedent stage of monarchy has to be presupposed. In the Homeric system monarchy is the sole form of government; but it is monarchy already well on the way to being transformed into oligarchy. In the person of the king are united the functions of priest, of judge and of leader in war. He belongs to a family which claims divine descent and his office is hereditary. He is, however, no despotic monarch. He is compelled by custom to consult the council (boulē) of the elders, or chiefs. He must ask their opinion, and, if he fails to obtain their consent, he has no power to enforce his will. Even when he has obtained the consent of the council, the proposal still awaits the approval of the assembly (agora), of the people.
Thus in the Homeric state we find the germs not only of the oligarchy and democracy of later Greece, but also of all the various forms of constitution known to the Western world. And a monarchy such as is depicted in the Homeric society. Homeric poems is clearly ripe for transmutation into oligarchy. The chiefs are addressed as kings (βασιλῆες), and claim, equally with the monarch, descent from the gods. In Homer, again, we can trace the later organization into tribe (φυλή), clan (γένος), and phratry, which is characteristic of Greek society in the historical period, and meets us in analogous forms in other Aryan societies. The γένος corresponds to the Roman gens, the φυλή to the Roman tribe, and the phratry to the curia. The importance of the phratry in Homeric society is illustrated by the well-known passage (Iliad ix. 63) in which the outcast is described as “one who belongs to no phratry” (ἀφρήτωρ). It is a society that is, of course, based upon slavery, but it is slavery in its least repulsive aspect. The treatment which Eumaeus and Eurycleia receive at the hands of the poet of the Odyssey is highly creditable to the humanity of the age. A society which regarded the slave as a mere chattel would have been impatient of the interest shown in a swineherd and a nurse. It is a society, too, that exhibits many of the distinguishing traits of later Greek life. Feasting and quarrels, it is true, are of more moment to the heroes than to the contemporaries of Pericles or Plato; but “music” and “gymnastic” (though the terms must be understood in a more restricted sense) are as distinctive of the age of Homer as of that of Pindar. In one respect there is retrogression in the historical period. Woman in Homeric society enjoys a greater freedom, and receives greater respect, than in the Athens of Sophocles and Pericles.
4. The Growth of the Greek States.—The Greek world at the beginning of the 6th century B.C. presents a picture in many respects different from that of the Homeric Age. The Greek race is no longer confined to the Greek peninsula. It occupies the islands of the Aegean, the western seaboard of Asia Minor, the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, of southern Italy and Sicily. Scattered settlements are found as far apart as the mouth of the Rhone, the north of Africa, the Crimea and the eastern end of the Black Sea. The Greeks are called by a national name, Hellenes, the symbol of a fully-developed national self-consciousness. They are divided into three great branches, the Dorian, the Ionian and the Aeolian, names almost, or entirely, unknown to Homer. The heroic monarchy has nearly everywhere disappeared. In Greece proper, south of Thermopylae, it survives, but in a peculiar form, in the Spartan state alone. What is the significance and the explanation of contrasts so profound?
It is probable that the explanation is to be found, directly or indirectly, in a single cause, the Dorian invasion. In Homer the Dorians are mentioned in one passage only (Odyssey xix. 177). They there appear as one of the races which Dorian invasion. inhabit Crete. In the historical period the whole Peloponnese, with the exception of Arcadia, Elis and Achaea, is Dorian. In northern Greece the Dorians occupy the little state of Doris, and in the Aegean they form the population of Crete, Rhodes and some smaller islands. Thus the chief centres of Minoan and Mycenaean culture have passed into Dorian hands, and the chief seats of Achaean power are included in Dorian states. Greek tradition explained the overthrow of the Achaean system by an invasion of the Peloponnese by the Dorians, a northern tribe, which had found a temporary home in Doris. The story ran that, after an unsuccessful attempt to force an entrance by the Isthmus of Corinth, they had crossed from Naupactus, at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, landed on the opposite shore, and made their way into the heart of the Peloponnese, where a single victory gave them possession of the Achaean states. Their conquests were divided among the invaders into three shares, for which lots were cast, and thus the three states of Argos, Sparta and Messenia were created. There is much in this tradition that is impossible or improbable. It is impossible, e.g. for the tiny state of Doris, with its three or four “small, sad villages” (πολεις μικραὶ καὶ λυπρόχωροι, Strabo, p. 427), to have furnished a force of invaders sufficient to conquer and re-people the greater part of the Peloponnese. It is improbable that the conquest should have been either as sudden, or as complete, as the legend represents. On the contrary, there are indications that the conquest was gradual, and that the displacement of the older population was incomplete. The improbability of the details affords, however, no ground for questioning the reality of the invasion.[6] The tradition can be traced back at Sparta to the 7th century B.C. (Tyrtaeus, quoted by Strabo, p. 362), and there is abundant evidence, other than that of legend, to corroborate it. There is the Dorian name, to begin with. If, as Beloch supposes, it originated on the coast of Asia Minor, where it served to distinguish the settlers in Rhodes and the neighbouring islands from the Ionians and Aeolians to the north of them, how came the great and famous states of the Peloponnese to adopt a name in use among the petty colonies planted by their kinsmen across the sea? Or, if Dorian is simply Old Peloponnesian, how are we to account for the Doric dialect or the Dorian pride of race?
It is true that there are great differences between the literary Doric, the dialect of Corinth and Argos, and the dialects of Laconia and Crete, and that there are affinities between the dialect of Laconia and the non-Dorian dialects of Arcadia and Elis. It is equally true, however, and of far more consequence, that all the Doric dialects are distinguished from all other Greek dialects by certain common characteristics. Perhaps the strongest sentiment in the Dorian nature is the pride of race. Indeed, it looks as if the Dorians claimed to be the sole genuine Hellenes. How can we account for an indigenous population, first imagining itself to be immigrant, and then developing a contempt for the rest of the race, equally indigenous with itself, on account of a fictitious difference in origin? Finally, there is the archaeological evidence. The older civilization comes to an abrupt end, and it does so, on the mainland at least, at the very period to which tradition assigns the Dorian migration. Its development is greatest, and its overthrow most complete, precisely in the regions occupied by the Dorians and the other tribes, whose migrations were traditionally connected with theirs. It is hardly too much to say that the archaeologist would have been compelled to postulate an inroad into central and southern Greece of tribes from the north, at a lower level of culture, in the course of the 12th and 11th centuries B.C., if the historian had not been able to direct him to the traditions of the great migrations (μεταναστάσεις), of which the Dorian invasion was the chief. With the Dorian migration Greek tradition connected the expansion of the Greek race eastwards across the Aegean. In the historical period the Greek settlements on the western coast of Asia Minor fall into three clearly defined groups. To the north is the Aeolic group, consisting of the island of Lesbos and twelve towns, mostly insignificant, on the opposite mainland. To the south is the Dorian hexapolis, consisting of Cnidus and Halicarnassus on the mainland, and the islands of Rhodes and Cos. In the centre comes the Ionian dodecapolis, a group consisting of ten towns on the mainland, together with the islands of Samos and Chios. Of these three groups, the Ionian is incomparably the most important. The Ionians also occupy Euboea and the Cyclades. Although it would appear that Cyprus (and possibly Pamphylia) had been occupied by settlers from Greece in the Mycenaean age, Greek tradition is probably correct in putting the colonization of Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean after the Dorian migration. Both the Homeric and the archaeological evidence seem to point to the same conclusion. Between Rhodes on the south and the Troad on the north scarcely any Mycenaean remains have been found. Homer is ignorant of any Greeks east of Euboea. If the poems are earlier than the Dorian Invasion, his silence is conclusive. If the poems are some centuries later than the Invasion, they at least prove that, within a few generations of that event, it was the belief of the Greeks of Asia Minor that their ancestors had crossed the seas after the close of the Heroic Age. It is probable, too, that the names Ionian and Aeolian, the former of which is found once in Homer, and the latter not at all, originated among the colonists in Asia Minor, and served to designate, in the first instance, the members of the Ionic and Aeolic dodecapoleis. As Curtius[7] pointed out, the only Ionia known to history is in Asia Minor. It does not follow that Ionia is the original home of the Ionian race, as Curtius argued. It almost certainly follows, however, that it is the original home of the Ionian name.
It is less easy to account for the name Hellenes. The Greeks were profoundly conscious of their common nationality, and of the gulf that separated them from the rest of mankind. They themselves recognized a common race and language, and a common type of religion and culture, as the chief factors in this sentiment of nationality (see Herod. viii. 144 Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα). “Hellenes” was the name of their common race, and “Hellas” of their common country. In Homer there is no distinct consciousness of a common nationality, and consequently no antithesis of Greek and Barbarian (see Thuc. i. 3). Nor is there a true collective name. There are indeed Hellenes (though the name occurs in one passage only, Iliad ii. 684), and there is a Hellas; but his Hellas, whatever its precise signification may be, is, at any rate, not equivalent either to Greece proper or to the land of the Greeks, and his Hellenes are the inhabitants of a small district to the south of Thessaly. It is possible that the diffusion of the Hellenic name was due to the Dorian invaders. Its use can be traced back to the first half of the 7th century. Not less obscure are the causes of the fall of monarchy. It cannot have been the immediate effect of the Dorian conquest, for the states founded by the Dorians were at first monarchically governed. It may, however, have been an indirect effect of it. We have already seen that the power of the Government. Homeric king is more limited than that of the rulers of Cnossus, Tiryns or Mycenae. In other words, monarchy is already in decay at the epoch of the Invasion. The Invasion, in its effects on wealth, commerce and civilization, is almost comparable to the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman empire. The monarch of the Minoan and Mycenaean age has extensive revenues at his command; the monarch of the early Dorian states is little better than a petty chief. Thus the interval, once a wide one, that separates him from the nobles tends to disappear. The decay of monarchy was gradual; much more gradual than is generally recognized. There were parts of the Greek world in which it still survived in the 6th century, e.g. Sparta, Cyrene, Cyprus, and possibly Argos and Tarentum. Both Herodotus and Thucydides apply the title “king” (βασιλεύς) to the rulers of Thessaly in the 5th century. The date at which monarchy gave place to a republican form of government must have differed, and differed widely, in different cases. The traditions relating to the foundation of Cyrene assume the existence of monarchy in Thera and in Crete in the middle of the 7th century (Herodotus iv. 150 and 154), and the reign of Amphicrates at Samos (Herod, iii. 59) can hardly be placed more than a generation earlier. In view of our general ignorance of the history of the 7th and 8th centuries, it is hazardous to pronounce these instances exceptional. On the other hand, the change from monarchy to oligarchy was completed at Athens before the end of the 8th century, and at a still earlier date in some of the other states. The process, again, by which the change was effected was, in all probability, less uniform than is generally assumed. There are extremely few cases in which we have any trustworthy evidence, and the instances about which we are informed refuse to be reduced to any common type. In Greece proper our information is fullest in the case of Athens and Argos. In the former case, the king is gradually stripped of his powers by a process of devolution. An hereditary king, ruling for life, is replaced by three annual and elective magistrates, between whom are divided the executive, military and religious functions of the monarch (see [Archon]). At Argos the fall of the monarchy is preceded by an aggrandisement of the royal prerogatives. There is nothing in common between these two cases, and there is no reason to suppose that the process elsewhere was analogous to that at Athens. Everywhere, however, oligarchy is the form of government which succeeds to monarchy. Political power is monopolized by a class of nobles, whose claim to govern is based upon birth and the possession of land, the most valuable form of property in an early society. Sometimes power is confined to a single clan (e.g. the Bacchiadae at Corinth); more commonly, as at Athens, all houses that are noble are equally privileged. In every case there is found, as the adviser of the executive, a Boulē, or council, representative of the privileged class. Without such a council a Greek oligarchy is inconceivable. The relations of the executive to the council doubtless varied. At Athens it is clear that the real authority was exercised by the archons;[8] in many states the magistrates were probably subordinate to the council (cf. the relation of the consuls to the senate at Rome). And it is clear that the way in which the oligarchies used their power varied also. The cases in which the power was abused are naturally the ones of which we hear; for an abuse of power gave rise to discontent and was the ultimate cause of revolution. We hear little or nothing of the cases in which power was exercised wisely. Happy is the constitution which has no annals! We know, however, that oligarchy held its ground for generations, or even for centuries, in a large proportion of the Greek states; and a government which, like the oligarchies of Elis, Thebes or Aegina, could maintain itself for three or four centuries cannot have been merely oppressive.
The period of the transition from monarchy to oligarchy is the period in which commerce begins to develop, and trade-routes to be organized. Greece had been the centre of an active trade in the Minoan and Mycenaean epochs. Trade. The products of Crete and of the Peloponnese had found their way to Egypt and Asia Minor. The overthrow of the older civilization put an end to commerce. The seas became insecure and intercourse with the East was interrupted. Our earliest glimpses of the Aegean after the period of the migrations disclose the raids of the pirate and the activity of the Phoenician trader. It is not till the 8th century has dawned that trade begins to revive, and the Phoenician has to retire before his Greek competitor. For some time to come, however, no clear distinction is drawn between the trader and the pirate. The pioneers of Greek trade in the West are the pirates of Cumae (Thucyd. vi. 4). The expansion of Greek commerce, unlike that of the commerce of the modern world, was not connected with any great scientific discoveries. There is nothing in the history of ancient navigation that is analogous to the invention of the mariner’s compass or of the steam-engine. In spite of this, the development of Greek commerce in the 7th and 6th centuries was rapid. It must have been assisted by the great discovery of the early part of the former century, the invention of coined money. To the Lydians, rather than the Greeks, belongs the credit of the discovery; but it was the genius of the latter race that divined the importance of the invention and spread its use. The coinage of the Ionian towns goes back to the reign of Gyges (c. 675 B.C.). And it is in Ionia that commercial development is earliest and greatest. In the most distant regions the Ionian is first in the field. Egypt and the Black Sea are both opened up to Greek trade by Miletus, the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean by Phocaea and Samos. It is significant that of the twelve states engaged in the Egyptian trade in the 6th century all, with the exception of Aegina, are from the eastern side of the Aegean (Herod. ii. 178). On the western side the chief centres of trade during these centuries were the islands of Euboea and Aegina and the town of Corinth. The Aeginetan are the earliest coins of Greece proper (c. 650 B.C.); and the two rival scales of weights and measures, in use amongst the Greeks of every age, are the Aeginetan and the Euboic. Commerce naturally gave rise to commercial leagues, and commercial relations tended to bring about political alliances. Foreign policy even at this early epoch seems to have been largely determined by considerations of commerce. Two leagues, the members of which were connected by political as well as commercial ties, can be recognized. At the head of each stood one of the two rival powers in the island of Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria. Their primary object was doubtless protection from the pirate and the foreigner. Competing routes were organized at an early date under their influence, and their trading connexions can be traced from the heart of Asia Minor to the north of Italy. Miletus, Sybaris and Etruria were members of the Eretrian league; Samos, Corinth, Rhegium and Zancle (commanding the Straits of Messina), and Cumae, on the Bay of Naples, of the Chalcidian. The wool of the Phrygian uplands, woven in the looms of Miletus, reached the Etruscan markets by way of Sybaris; through Cumae, Rome and the rest of Latium obtained the elements of Greek culture. Greek trade, however, was confined to the Mediterranean area. The Phoenician and the Carthaginian navigators penetrated to Britain; they discovered the passage round the Cape two thousand years before Vasco da Gama’s time. The Greek sailor dared not adventure himself outside the Black Sea, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Greek trade, too, was essentially maritime. Ports visited by Greek vessels were often the starting points of trade-routes into the interior; the traffic along those routes was left in the hands of the natives (see e.g. Herod. iv. 24). One service, the importance of which can hardly be overestimated, was rendered to civilization by the Greek traders—the invention of geography. The science of geography is the invention of the Greeks. The first maps were made by them (in the 6th century); and it was the discoveries and surveys of their sailors that made map-making possible.
Closely connected with the history of Greek trade is the history of Greek colonization. The period of colonization, in its narrower sense, extends from the middle of the 8th to the middle of the 6th century. Greek colonization Colonization. is, however, merely a continuation of the process which at an earlier epoch had led to the settlement, first of Cyprus, and then of the islands and coasts of the Aegean. From the earlier settlements the colonization of the historical period is distinguished by three characteristics. The later colony acknowledges a definite metropolis (“mother-city”); it is planted by a definite oecist (οἰκιστής); it has a definite date assigned to its foundation.[9] It would be a mistake to regard Greek colonization as commercial in origin, in the sense that the colonies were in all cases established as trading-posts. This was the case with the Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements, most of which remained mere factories; and some of the Greek colonies (e.g. many of those planted by Miletus on the shores of the Black Sea) bore this character. The typical Greek colony, however, was neither in origin nor in development a mere trading-post. It was, or it became, a polis, a city-state, in which was reproduced the life of the parent state. Nor was Greek colonization, like the emigration from Europe to America and Australia in the 19th century, simply the result of over-population. The causes were as various as those which can be traced in the history of modern colonization. Those which were established for the purposes of trade may be compared to the factories of the Portuguese and Dutch in Africa and the Far East. Others were the result of political discontent, in some form or shape; these may be compared to the Puritan settlements in New England. Others again were due to ambition or the mere love of adventure (see Herod. v. 42 ff., the career of Dorieus). But however various the causes, two conditions must always be presupposed—an expansion of commerce and a growth of population. Within the narrow limits of the city-state there was a constant tendency for population to become redundant, until, as in the later centuries of Greek life, its growth was artificially restricted. Alike from the Roman colonies, and from those founded by the European nations in the course of the last few centuries, the Greek colonies are distinguished by a fundamental contrast. It is significant that the contrast is a political one. The Roman colony was in a position of entire subordination to the Roman state, of which it formed a part. The modern colony was, in varying degrees, in political subjection to the home government. The Greek colony was completely independent; and it was independent from the first. The ties that united a colony to its metropolis were those of sentiment and interest; the political tie did not exist. There were, it is true, exceptions. The colonies established by imperial Athens closely resembled the colonies of imperial Rome. The cleruchy (q.v.) formed part of the Athenian state; the cleruchs kept their status as citizens of Athens and acted as a military garrison. And if the political tie, in the proper sense, was wanting, it was inevitable that political relations should spring out of commercial or sentimental ones. Thus we find Corinth interfering twice to save her colony Syracuse from destruction, and Megara bringing about the revolt of Byzantium, her colony, from Athens. Sometimes it is not easy to distinguish political relations from a political tie (e.g. the relations of Corinth, both in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, to Ambracia and the neighbouring group of colonies). When we compare the development of the Greek and the modern colonies we shall find that the development of the former was even more rapid than that of the latter. In at least three respects the Greek settler was at an advantage as compared with the colonist of modern times. The differences of race, of colour and of climate, with which the chief problems of modern colonization are connected, played no part in the history of the Greek settlements. The races amongst whom the Greeks planted themselves were in some cases on a similar level of culture. Where the natives were still backward or barbarous, they came of a stock either closely related to the Greek, or at least separated from it by no great physical differences. We need only contrast the Carian, the Sicel, the Thracian or even the Scythian, with the native Australian, the Hottentot, the Red Indian or the Maori, to apprehend the advantage of the Greek. Amalgamation with the native races was easy, and it involved neither physical nor intellectual degeneracy as its consequence. Of the races with which the Greeks came in contact the Thracian was far from the highest in the scale of culture; yet three of the greatest names in the Great Age of Athens are those of men who had Thracian blood in their veins, viz. Themistocles, Cimon and the historian Thucydides. In the absence of any distinction of colour, no insuperable barrier existed between the Greek and the hellenized native. The demos of the colonial cities was largely recruited from the native population,[10] nor was there anything in the Greek world analogous to the “mean whites” or the “black belt.” Of hardly less importance were the climatic conditions. In this respect the Mediterranean area is unique. There is no other region of the world of equal extent in which these conditions are at once so uniform and so favourable. Nowhere had the Greek settler to encounter a climate which was either unsuited to his labour or subversive of his vigour. That in spite of these advantages so little, comparatively speaking, was effected in the work of Hellenization before the epoch of Alexander and the Diadochi, was the effect of a single counteracting cause. The Greek colonist, like the Greek trader, clung to the shore. He penetrated no farther inland than the sea-breeze. Hence it was only in islands, such as Sicily or Cyprus, that the process of Hellenization was complete. Elsewhere the Greek settlements formed a mere fringe along the coast.
To the 7th century there belongs another movement of high importance in its bearing upon the economic, religious and literary development of Greece, as well as upon its constitutional history. This movement is the rise of The tyrants. the tyrannis. In the political writers of a later age the word possesses a clear-cut connotation. From other forms of monarchy it is distinguished by a twofold differentiation. The tyrannus is an unconstitutional ruler, and his authority is exercised over unwilling subjects. In the 7th and 6th centuries the line was not drawn so distinctly between the tyrant and the legitimate monarch. Even Herodotus uses the words “tyrant” and “king” interchangeably (e.g. the princes of Cyprus are called “kings” in v. 110 and “tyrants” in v. 109), so that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a legitimate monarch or a tyrant is meant (e.g. Aristophilides of Tarentum, iii. 136, or Telys of Sybaris, v. 44). But the distinction between the tyrant and the king of the Heroic Age is a valid one. It is not true that his rule was always exercised over unwilling subjects; it is true that his position was always unconstitutional. The Homeric king is a legitimate monarch; his authority is invested with the sanctions of religion and immemorial custom. The tyrant is an illegitimate ruler; his authority is not recognized, either by customary usage or by express enactment. But the word “tyrant” was originally a neutral team; it did not necessarily imply a misuse of power. The origin of the tyrannis is obscure. The word tyrannus has been thought, with some reason, to be a Lydian one. Probably both the name and the thing originated in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, though the earliest tyrants of whom we hear in Asia Minor (at Ephesus and Miletus) are a generation later than the earliest in Greece itself, where, both at Sicyon and at Corinth, tyranny appears to date back to the second quarter of the 7th century. It is not unusual to regard tyranny as a universal stage in the constitutional development of the Greek states, and as a stage that occurs everywhere at one and the same period. In reality, tyranny is confined to certain regions, and it is a phenomenon that is peculiar to no one age or century. In Greece proper, before the 4th century B.C., it is confined to a small group of states round the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs. The greater part of the Peloponnese was exempt from it, and there is no good evidence for its existence north of the Isthmus, except at Megara and Athens. It plays no part in the history of the Greek cities in Chalcidice and Thrace. It appears to have been rare in the Cyclades. The regions in which it finds a congenial soil are two, Asia Minor and Sicily. Thus it is incorrect to say that most Greek states passed through this stage. It is still wider of the mark to assume that they passed through it at the same time. There is no “Age of the Tyrants.” Tyranny began in the Peloponnese a hundred years before it appears in Sicily, and it has disappeared in the Peloponnese almost before it begins in Sicily. In the latter the great age of tyranny comes at the beginning of the 5th century; in the former it is at the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th. At Athens the history of tyranny begins after it has ended both at Sicyon and Corinth. There is, indeed, a period in which tyranny is non-existent in the Greek states; roughly speaking, the last sixty years of the 5th century. But with this exception, there is no period in which the tyrant is not to be found. The greatest of all the tyrannies, that of Dionysius at Syracuse, belongs to the 4th century. Nor must it be assumed that tyranny always comes at the same stage in the history of a constitution; that it is always a stage between oligarchy and democracy. At Corinth it is followed, not by democracy but by oligarchy, and it is an oligarchy that lasts, with a brief interruption, for two hundred and fifty years. At Athens it is not immediately preceded by oligarchy. Between the Eupatrid oligarchy and the rule of Peisistratus there comes the timocracy of Solon. These exceptions do not stand alone. The cause of tyranny is, in one sense, uniform. In the earlier centuries, at any rate, tyranny is always the expression of discontent; the tyrant is always the champion of a cause. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the discontent is necessarily political, or that the cause which he champions is always a constitutional one. At Sicyon it is a racial one; Cleisthenes is the champion of the older population against their Dorian oppressors (see Herod. v. 67, 68). At Athens the discontent is economic rather than political; Peisistratus is the champion of the Diacrii, the inhabitants of the poorest region of Attica. The party-strifes of which we hear in the early history of Miletus, which doubtless gave the tyrant his opportunity, are concerned with the claims of rival industrial classes. In Sicily the tyrant is the ally of the rich and the foe of the demos, and the cause which he champions, both in the 5th century and the 4th, is a national one, that of the Greek against the Carthaginian. We may suspect that in Greece itself the tyrannies of the 7th century are the expression of an anti-Dorian reaction. It can hardly be an accident that the states in which the tyrannis is found at this epoch, Corinth, Megara, Sicyon, Epidaurus, are all of them states in which a Dorian upper class ruled over a subject population. In Asia Minor the tyrannis assumes a peculiar character after the Persian conquest. The tyrant rules as the deputy of the Persian satrap. Thus in the East the tyrant is the enemy of the national cause; in the West, in Sicily, he is its champion.