Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Grasshopper" to "Greek Language" / Volume 12, Slice 4

by Various

Tyranny is not a phenomenon peculiar to Greek history. It is possible to find analogies to it in Roman history, in the power of Caesar, or of the Caesars; in the despotisms of medieval Italy; or even in the Napoleonic empire. Between the tyrant and the Italian despot there is indeed a real analogy; but between the Roman principate and the Greek tyrannis there are two essential differences. In the first place, the principate was expressed in constitutional forms, or veiled under constitutional fictions; the tyrant stood altogether outside the constitution. And, secondly, at Rome both Julius and Augustus owed their position to the power of the sword. The power of the sword, it is true, plays a large part in the history of the later tyrants (e.g. Dionysius of Syracuse); the earlier ones, however, had no mercenary armies at their command. We can hardly compare the bodyguard of Peisistratus to the legions of the first or the second Caesar.

The view taken of the tyrannis in Greek literature is almost uniformly unfavourable. In this respect there is no difference between Plato and Aristotle, or between Herodotus and the later historians.[11] His policy is represented as purely selfish, and his rule as oppressive. Herodotus is influenced partly by the traditions current among the oligarchs, who had been the chief sufferers, and partly by the odious associations which had gathered round tyranny in Asia Minor. The philosophers write under their impressions of the later tyrannis, and their account is largely an a priori one. It is seldom that we find any attempt, either in the philosophers or the historians, to do justice to the real services rendered by the tyrants.[12] Their first service was a constitutional one. They helped to break down the power of the old aristocratic houses, and thus to create the social and political conditions indispensable to democracy. The tyrannis involved the sacrifice of liberty in the cause of equality. When tyranny falls, it is never succeeded by the aristocracies which it had overthrown. It is frequently succeeded by an oligarchy, but it is an oligarchy in which the claim to exclusive power is based, not upon mere birth, but upon wealth, or the possession of land. It would be unfair to treat this service as one that was rendered unconsciously and unwillingly. Where the tyrant asserted the claims of an oppressed class, he consciously aimed at the destruction of privilege and the effacement of class distinctions. Hence it is unjust to treat his power as resting upon mere force. A government which can last eighty or a hundred years, as was the case with the tyrannies at Corinth and Sicyon, must have a moral force behind it. It must rest upon the consent of its subjects. The second service which the tyrants rendered to Greece was a political one. Their policy tended to break down the barriers which isolated each petty state from its neighbours. In their history we can trace a system of widespread alliances, which are often cemented by matrimonial connexions. The Cypselid tyrants of Corinth appear to have been allied with the royal families of Egypt, Lydia and Phrygia, as well as with the tyrants of Miletus and Epidaurus, and with some of the great Athenian families. In Sicily we find a league of the northern tyrants opposed to a league of the southern; and in each ease there is a corresponding matrimonial alliance. Anaxilaus of Rhegium is the son-in-law and ally of Terillus of Himera; Gelo of Syracuse stands in the same relation to Theron of Agrigentum. Royal marriages have played a great part in the politics of Europe. In the comparison of Greek and modern history it has been too often forgotten how great a difference it makes, and how great a disadvantage it involves, to a republic that it has neither sons nor daughters to give in marriage. In commerce and colonization the tyrants were only continuing the work of the oligarchies to which they succeeded. Greek trade owed its expansion to the intelligent efforts of the oligarchs who ruled at Miletus and Corinth, in Samos, Aegina and Euboea; but in particular cases, such as Miletus, Corinth, Sicyon and Athens, there was a further development, and a still more rapid growth, under the tyrants. In the same way, the foundation of the colonies was in most cases due to the policy of the oligarchical governments. They can claim credit for the colonies of Chalcis and Eretria, of Megara, Phocaea and Samos, as well as for the great Achaean settlements in southern Italy. The Cypselids at Corinth, and Thrasybulus at Miletus, are instances of tyrants who colonized on a great scale.

In their religious policy the tyrants went far to democratize Greek religion. The functions of monarchy had been largely religious; but, while the king was necessarily a priest, he was not the only priest in the community. Religion under the “tyrants.” There were special priesthoods, hereditary in particular families, even in the monarchical period; and upon the fall of the monarchy, while the priestly functions of the kings passed to republican magistrates, the priesthoods which were in the exclusive possession of the great families tended to become the important ones. Thus, before the rise of tyranny, Greek religion is aristocratic. The cults recognized by the state are the sacra of noble clans. The religious prerogatives of the nobles helped to confirm their political ones, and, as long as religion retained its aristocratic character, it was impossible for democracy to take root. The policy of the tyrants aimed at fostering popular cults which had no associations with the old families, and at establishing new festivals. The cult of the wine-god, Dionysus, was thus fostered at Sicyon by Cleisthenes, and at Corinth by the Cypselids; while at Athens a new festival of this deity, which so completely overshadowed the older festival that it became known as the Great Dionysia, probably owed its institution to Peisistratus. Another festival, the Panathenaea, which had been instituted only a few years before his rise to power, became under his rule, and thanks to his policy, the chief national festival of the Athenian state. Everywhere, again, we find the tyrants the patrons of literature. Pindar and Bacchylides, Aeschylus and Simonides found a welcome at the court of Hiero. Polycrates was the patron of Anacreon, Periander of Arion. To Peisistratus has been attributed, possibly not without reason, the first critical edition of the text of Homer, a work as important in the literary history of Greece as was the issue of the Authorized Version of the Bible in English history. If we would judge fairly of tyranny, and of what it contributed to the development of Greece, we must remember how many states there were in whose history the period of greatest power coincides with the rule of a tyrant. This is unquestionably true of Corinth and Sicyon, as well as of Syracuse in the 5th, and again in the 4th century; it is probably true of Samos and Miletus. In the case of Athens it is only the splendour of the Great Age that blinds us to the greatness of the results achieved by the policy of the Peisistratids.

With the overthrow of this dynasty tyranny disappears from Greece proper for more than a century. During the century and a half which had elapsed since its first appearance the whole aspect of Greek life, and of the Greek world, had changed. The development was as yet incomplete, but the lines on which it was to proceed had been clearly marked out. Political power was no longer the monopoly of a class. The struggle between the “few” and the “many” had begun; in one state at least (Athens) the victory of the “many” was assured. The first chapter in the history of democracy was already written. In the art of war the two innovations which were ultimately to establish the military supremacy of Greece, hoplite tactics and the trireme, had already been introduced. Greek literature was The arts. no longer synonymous with epic poetry. Some of its most distinctive forms had not yet been evolved; indeed, it is only quite at the end of the period that prose-writing begins; but both lyric and elegiac poetry had been brought to perfection. In art, statuary was still comparatively stiff and crude; but in other branches, in architecture, in vase-painting and in coin-types, the aesthetic genius of the race had asserted its pre-eminence. Philosophy, the supreme gift of Greece to the modern world, had become a living power. Some of her most original thinkers belong to the 6th century. Criticism had been applied to everything in turn: to the gods, to conduct, and to the conception of the universe. Before the Great Age begins, the claims of intellectual as well as of political freedom had been vindicated. It was not, however, in Greece proper that progress had been greatest. In the next century the centre of gravity of Greek civilization shifts to the western side of the Aegean; in the 6th century it must be looked for at Miletus, rather than at Athens. In order to estimate how far the development of Greece had advanced, or to appreciate the distinctive features of Greek life at this period, we must study Ionia, rather than Attica or the Peloponnese. Almost all that is greatest and most characteristic is to be found on the eastern side of the Aegean. The great names in the history of science and philosophy before the beginning of the 5th century—Thales, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, Hecataeus; names which are representative of mathematics, astronomy, geography and metaphysics, are all, without exception, Ionian. In poetry, too, the most famous names, if not so exclusively Ionian, are connected either with the Asiatic coast or with the Cyclades. Against Archilochus and Anacreon, Sappho and Alcaeus, Greece has nothing better to set, after the age of Hesiod, than Tyrtaeus and Theognis. Reference has already been made to the greatness of the Ionians as navigators, as colonizers and as traders. In wealth and in population, Miletus, at the epoch of the Persian conquest, must have been far ahead of any city of European Greece. Sybaris, in Magna Graecia, can have been its only rival outside Ionia. There were two respects, however, in which the comparison was in favour of the mother-country. In warfare, the superiority of the Spartan infantry was unquestioned; in politics, the Greek states showed a greater power of combination than the Ionian.

Finally, Ionia was the scene of the first conflicts with the Persian. Here were decided the first stages of a struggle which was to determine the place of Greece in the history of the world. The rise of Persia under Cyrus was, as External relations. Herodotus saw, the turning-point of Greek history. Hitherto the Greek had proved himself indispensable to the oriental monarchies with which he had been brought into contact. In Egypt the power of the Saite kings rested upon the support of their Greek mercenaries. Amasis (569-525 B.C.), who is raised to the throne as the leader of a reaction against the influence of the foreign garrison, ends by showing greater favour to the Greek soldiery and the Greek traders than all that were before him. With Lydia the relations were originally hostile; the conquest of the Greek fringe is the constant aim of Lydian policy. Greek influences, however, seem to have quickly permeated Lydia, and to have penetrated to the court. Alyattes (610-560 B.C.) marries an Ionian wife, and the succession is disputed between the son of this marriage and Croesus, whose mother was a Carian. Croesus (560-546 B.C.) secures the throne, only to become the lavish patron of Greek sanctuaries and the ally of a Greek state. The history of Hellenism had begun. It was the rise of Cyrus that closed the East to Greek enterprise and Greek influences. In Persia we find the antithesis of all that is characteristic of Greece—autocracy as opposed to liberty; a military society organized on an aristocratic basis, to an industrial society, animated by a democratic spirit; an army, whose strength lay in its cavalry, to an army, in which the foot-soldier alone counted; a morality, which assigned the chief place to veracity, to a morality which subordinated it to other virtues; a religion, which ranks among the great religions of the world, to a religion, which appeared to the most spiritual minds among the Greeks themselves both immoral and absurd. Between two such races there could be neither sympathy nor mutual understanding. In the Great Age the Greek had learned Persian wars. to despise the Persian, and the Persian to fear the Greek. In the 6th century it was the Persian who despised, and the Greek who feared. The history of the conflicts between the Ionian Greeks and the Persian empire affords a striking example of the combination of intellectual strength and political weakness in the character of a people. The causes of the failure of the Ionians to offer a successful resistance to Persia, both at the time of the conquest by Harpagus (546-545 B.C.) and in the Ionic revolt (499-494 B.C.), are not far to seek. The centrifugal forces always tended to prove the stronger in the Greek system, and nowhere were they stronger than in Ionia. The tie of their tribal union proved weaker, every time it was put to the test, than the political and commercial interests of the individual states. A league of jealous commercial rivals is certain not to stand the strain of a protracted struggle against great odds. Against the advancing power of Lydia a common resistance had not so much as been attempted. Miletus, the greatest of the Ionian towns, had received aid from Chios alone. Against Persia a common resistance was attempted. The Panionium, the centre of a religious amphictyony, became for the moment the centre of a political league. At the time of the Persian conquest Miletus held aloof. She secured favourable terms for herself, and left the rest of Ionia to its fate. In the later conflict, on the contrary, Miletus is the leader in the revolt. The issue was determined, not as Herodotus represents it, by the inherent indolence of the Ionian nature, but by the selfish policy of the leading states. In the sea-fight at Lade (494 B.C.) the decisive battle of the war, the Milesians and Chians fought with desperate courage. The day was lost thanks to the treachery of the Samian and Lesbian contingents.

The causes of the successful resistance of the Greeks to the invasions of their country, first by Datis and Artaphernes (490 B.C.), in the reign of Darius, and then by Xerxes in person (480-479 B.C.), are more complex. Their success was partly due to a moral cause. And this was realized by the Greeks themselves. They felt (see Herod. vii. 104) that the subjects of a despot are no match for the citizens of a free state, who yield obedience to a law which is self-imposed. But the cause was not solely a moral one. Nor was the result due to the numbers and efficiency of the Athenian fleet, in the degree that the Athenians claimed (see Herod. vii. 139). The truth is that the conditions, both political and military, were far more favourable to the Greek defence in Europe than they had been in Asia. At this crisis the centripetal forces proved stronger than the centrifugal. The moral ascendancy of Sparta was the determining factor. In Sparta the Greeks had a leader whom all were ready to obey (Herod. viii. 2). But for her influence the forces of disintegration would have made themselves felt as quickly as in Ionia. Sparta was confronted with immense difficulties in conducting the defence against Xerxes. The two chief naval powers, Athens and Aegina, had to be reconciled after a long and exasperating warfare (see [Aegina]). After Thermopylae, the whole of northern Greece, with the exception of Athens and a few minor states, was lost to the Greek cause. The supposed interests of the Peloponnesians, who formed the greater part of the national forces, conflicted with the supposed interests of the Athenians. A more impartial view than was possible to the generation for which Herodotus wrote suggests that Sparta performed her task with intelligence and patriotism. The claims of Athens and Sparta were about equally balanced. And in spite of her great superiority in numbers,[13] the military conditions were far from favourable to Persia. A land so mountainous as Greece is was unsuited to the operations of cavalry, the most efficient arm of the service in the Persian Army, as in most oriental ones. Ignorance of local conditions, combined with the dangerous nature of the Greek coast, exposed their ships to the risk of destruction; while the composite character of the fleet, and the jealousies of its various contingents, tended to neutralize the advantage of numbers. In courage and discipline, the flower of the Persian infantry was probably little inferior to the Greek; in equipment, they were no match for the Greek panoply. Lastly, Xerxes laboured under a disadvantage, which may be illustrated by the experience of the British army in the South African War—distance from his base.

5. The Great Age (480-338 B.C.).—The effects of the repulse of Persia were momentous in their influence upon Greece. The effects upon Elizabethan England of the defeat of the Spanish armada would afford quite an inadequate parallel. It gave the Greeks a heightened sense, both of their own national unity and of their superiority to the barbarian, while at the same time it helped to create the material conditions requisite alike for the artistic and political development of the 5th century. Other cities besides Athens were adorned with the proceeds of the spoils won from Persia, and Greek trade benefited both from the reunion of Ionia with Greece, and from the suppression of piracy in the Aegean and the Hellespont. Do these developments justify us in giving to the period, which begins with the repulse of Xerxes, and ends with the victory of Philip, the title of “the Great Age”? If the title is justified in the case of the 5th century, should the 4th century be excluded from the period? At first sight, the difference between the 4th century and the 5th may seem greater than that which exists between the 5th and the 6th. On the political side, the 5th century is an age of growth, the 4th an age of decay; on the literary side, the former is an age of poetry, the latter an age of prose. In spite of these contrasts, there is a real unity in the period which begins with the repulse of Xerxes and ends with the death of Alexander, as compared with any preceding one. It is an age of maturity in politics, in literature, and in art; and this is true of no earlier age. Nor can we say that the 5th century is, in all these aspects of Greek life, immature as compared with the 4th, or, on the other hand, that the 4th is decadent as compared with the 5th. On the political side, maturity is, in one sense, reached in the earlier century. There is nothing in the later century so great as the Athenian empire. In another sense, maturity is not reached till the 4th century. It is only in the later century that the tendency of the Greek constitutions to conform to a common type, democracy, is (at least approximately) realized, and it is only in this century that the principles upon which democracy is based are carried to their logical conclusion. In literature, if we confine our attention to poetry, we must pronounce the 5th century the age of completed development; but in prose the case is different. The style even of Thucydides is immature, as compared with that of Isocrates and Plato. In philosophy, however high may be the estimate that is formed of the genius of the earlier thinkers, it cannot be disputed that in Plato and Aristotle we find a more mature stage of thought. In art, architecture may perhaps be said to reach its zenith in the 5th, sculpture in the 4th century. In its political aspect, the history of the Great Age resolves itself into the history of two movements, the imperial and the democratic. Hitherto Greece had meant, politically, an aggregate of independent states, very numerous, and, as a rule, very small. The principle Systems of government. of autonomy was to the Greek the most sacred of all political principles; the passion for autonomy the most potent of political factors. In the latter half of the 6th century Sparta had succeeded in combining the majority of the Peloponnesian states into a loose federal union; so loose, however, that it appears to have been dormant in the intervals of peace. In the crisis of the Persian invasion the Peloponnesian League was extended so as to include all the states which had espoused the national cause. It looked on the morrow of Plataea and Mycale (the two victories, won simultaneously, in 479 B.C., by Spartan commanders, by which the danger from Persia was finally averted) as if a permanent basis for union might be found in the hegemony of Sparta. The sense of a common peril and a common triumph brought with it the need of a common union; it was Athens, however, instead of Sparta, by whom the first conscious effort was made to transcend the isolation of the Greek political system and to bring the units into combination. The league thus founded (the Delian League, established in 477 B.C.) was under the presidency of Athens, but it included hardly any other state besides those that had conducted the defence of Greece. It was formed, almost entirely, of the states which had been liberated from Persian rule by the great victories of the war. The Delian League, even in the form in which it was first established, as a confederation of autonomous allies, marks an advance in political conceptions upon the Peloponnesian League. Provision is made for an annual revenue, for periodical meetings of the council, and for a permanent executive. It is a real federation, though an imperfect one. There were defects in its constitution which rendered it inevitable that it should be transformed into an empire. Athens was from the first “the predominant partner.” The fleet was mainly Athenian, the commanders entirely so; the assessment of the tribute was in Athenian hands; there was no federal court appointed to determine questions at issue between Athens and the other members; and, worst omission of all, the right of secession was left undecided. By the middle of the century the Delian League has become the Athenian empire. Henceforward the imperial idea, in one form or another, dominates Greek politics. Athens failed to extend her authority over the whole of Greece. Her empire was overthrown; but the triumph of autonomy proved the triumph of imperialism. The Spartan empire succeeds to the Athenian, and, when it is finally shattered at Leuctra (371 B.C.), the hegemony of Thebes, which is established on its ruins, is an empire in all but name. The decay of Theban power paves the way for the rise of Macedon.

Thus throughout this period we can trace two forces contending for mastery in the Greek political system. Two causes divide the allegiance of the Greek world, the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. The formation of the confederacy of Delos did not involve the dissolution of the alliance between Athens and Sparta. For seventeen years more Athens retained her place in the league, “which had been established against the Mede” under the presidency of Sparta in 480 B.C. (Thuc. i. 102). The ascendancy of Cimon and the Philolaconian party at Athens was favourable to a good understanding between the two states, and at Sparta in normal times the balance inclined in favour of the party whose policy is best described by the motto “quieta non movere.”

In the end, however, the opposition of the two contending forces proved too strong for Spartan neutrality. The fall of Cimon (461 B.C.) was followed by the so-called “First Peloponnesian War,” a conflict between Athens and The Peloponnesian Wars. her maritime rivals, Corinth and Aegina, into which Sparta was ultimately drawn. Thucydides regards the hostilities of these years (460-454 B.C.), which were resumed for a few months in 446 B.C., on the expiration of the Five Years’ Truce, as preliminary to those of the great Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). The real question at issue was in both cases the same. The tie that united the opponents of Athens was found in a common hostility to the imperial idea. It is a complete misapprehension to regard the Peloponnesian War as a mere duel between two rival claimants for empire. The ultimatum presented by Sparta on the eve of the war demanded the restoration of autonomy to the subjects of Athens. There is no reason for doubting her sincerity in presenting it in this form. It would, however, be an equal misapprehension to regard the war as merely a struggle between the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. Corresponding to this fundamental contrast there are other contrasts, constitutional, racial and military. The military interest of the war is largely due to the fact that Athens was a sea power and Sparta a land one. As the war went on, the constitutional aspect tended to become more marked. At first there were democracies on the side of Sparta, and oligarchies on the side of Athens. In the last stage of the war, when Lysander’s influence was supreme, we see the forces of oligarchy everywhere united and organized for the destruction of democracy. In its origin the war was certainly not due to the rivalry of Dorian and Ionian. This racial, or tribal, contrast counted for more in the politics of Sicily than of Greece; and, though the two great branches of the Greek race were represented respectively by the leaders of the two sides, the allies on neither side belonged exclusively to the one branch or the other. Still, it remains true that the Dorian states were, as a rule, on the Spartan side, and the Ionian states, as a rule, on the Athenian—a division of sentiment which must have helped to widen the breach, and to intensify the animosities.