Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been
to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight.’

“And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every
man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter for there fell
of Israel thirty thousand[162] footmen. And the ark of God was taken;
and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.

“And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to Shiloh the
same day with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head. And when
he came, lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart
trembled for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city and
told it, all the city cried out. And when Eli heard the noise of the
crying, he said, ‘What meaneth the noise of this tumult?’ And the man
came in hastily, and told Eli. Now Eli was ninety and eight years old;
and his eyes were dim, that he could not see. And the man said unto Eli,
‘I am he that came out of the army, and I fled to-day out of the army.’
And he said, ‘What is there done, my son?’ And the messenger answered
and said, ‘Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been
also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni
and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.’ And it came to
pass when he made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off his
seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died:
for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.

“And his daughter in law, Phinehas’ wife, was with child, near to be
delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken,
and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself
and travailed; for her pains came upon her. And about the time of her
death the women that stood by her said unto her, ‘Fear not; for thou
hast born a son! But she answered not, neither did she regard it. And
she named the child I-chabod,[163] saying, ‘The glory is departed from
Israel:’ because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in
law and her husband.” (1 Sam., chap. iv.)

The successor of Eli and the last of the Judges was Samuel, and at the
end of his rule came an event in the history of Israel which paralleled
and was suggested by the experience of the greater nations around. A
king arose. We are told in vivid language the plain issue between the
more ancient rule of priestcraft and the newer fashion in human affairs.
It is impossible to avoid a second quotation.

“Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to
Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him: ‘Behold, thou art old, and thy
sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the
nations.’

“But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, ‘Give us a king to
judge us.’ And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto
Samuel, ‘Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto
thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I
should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have
done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this
day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they
also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet
protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that
shall reign over them.’

“And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of
him a king. And he said, ‘This will be the manner of the king that shall
reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself,
for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his
chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains
over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his
harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his
chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your
vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to
his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your
vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will
take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young
men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of
your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that
day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord
will not hear you in that day.’

“Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they
said, ‘Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like
all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us,
and fight our battles.’” (I Sam., chap. viii.)

§ 2

But the nature and position of their land was against the Hebrews, and
their first king Saul was no more successful than their judges. The long
intrigues of the adventurer David against Saul are told in the rest of
the first book of Samuel, and the end of Saul was utter defeat upon
Mount Gilboa. His army was overwhelmed by the Philistine archers.

“And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to strip
the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen in Mount
Gilboa. And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent
into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house
of their idols, and among the people. And they put his armour in the
house of Ashtaroth; and they fastened his body to the wall of
Beth-shan.” (I Sam., chap, xxxi.)

David (990 B.C. roughly) was more politic and successful than his
predecessor, and he seems to have placed himself under the protection
of Hiram, King of Tyre. This Phœnician alliance sustained him, and
was the essential element in the greatness of his son Solomon. His
story, with its constant assassinations and executions, reads rather
like the history of some savage chief than of a civilized monarch. It is
told with great vividness in the second book of Samuel.

The first book of Kings begins with the reign of King Solomon (960 B.C.
roughly). The most interesting thing in that story, from the point of
view of the general historian, is the relationship of Solomon to the
national religion and the priesthood, and his dealings with the
tabernacle, the priest Zadok, and the prophet Nathan.

The opening of Solomon’s reign is as bloody as his father’s. The last
recorded speech of David arranges for the murder of Shimei; his last
recorded word is “blood.” “But his hoar head bring thou down to the
grave with blood,” he says, pointing out that though old Shimei is
protected by a vow David had made to the Lord so long as David lives,
there is nothing to bind Solomon in that matter. Solomon proceeds to
murder his brother, who has sought the throne but quailed and made
submission. He then deals freely with his brother’s party. The weak hold
of religion upon the racially and mentally confused Hebrews at that time
is shown by the ease with which he replaces the hostile chief priest by
his own adherent Zadok, and still more strikingly by the murder of Joab
by Benaiah, Solomon’s chief ruffian, in the Tabernacle, while the victim
is claiming sanctuary and holding to the very horns of Jehovah’s altar.
Then Solomon sets to work, in what was for that time a thoroughly modern
spirit, to recast the religion of his people. He continues the alliance
with Hiram, King of Sidon, who uses Solomon’s kingdom as a high road by
which to reach and build shipping upon the Red Sea, and a hitherto
unheard-of wealth accumulates in Jerusalem as a result of this
partnership. Gang labour appears in Israel; Solomon sends relays of men
to cut cedarwood in Lebanon under Hiram, and organizes a service of
porters through the land. (There is much in all this to remind the
reader of the relations of some Central African chief to a European
trading concern.) Solomon then builds a palace for himself, and a temple
not nearly as big for Jehovah. Hitherto, the Ark of the Covenant, the
divine symbol of these ancient Hebrews, had abode in a large tent,
which had been shifted from one high place to another, and sacrifices
had been offered to the God of Israel upon a number of different high
places. Now the ark is brought into the golden splendours of the inner
chamber of a temple of cedar-sheathed stone, and put between two great
winged figures of gilded olivewood, and sacrifices are henceforth to be
made only upon the altar before it.

This centralizing innovation will remind the reader of both Akhnaton and
Nabonidus. Such things as this are done successfully only when the
prestige and tradition and learning of the priestly order has sunken to
a very low level.[164]

“And he appointed, according to the order of David his father, the
courses of the priests to their service, and the Levites to their
charges, to praise and minister before the priests, as the duty of every
day required; the porters also by their courses at every gate; for so
had David the man of God commanded. And they departed not from the
commandment of the king unto the priests and Levites concerning any
matter, or concerning the treasures.”

Neither Solomon’s establishment of the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem
upon this new footing, nor his vision of and conversation with his God
at the opening of his reign, stood in the way of his developing a sort
of theological flirtatiousness in his declining years. He married
widely, if only for reasons of state and splendour, and he entertained
his numerous wives by sacrificing to their national deities, to the
Sidonian goddess Ashtaroth (Ishtar), to Chemosh (a Moabitish god), to
Moloch, and so forth. The Bible account of Solomon does, in fact, show
us a king and a confused people, both superstitious and mentally
unstable, in no way more religious than any other people of the
surrounding world.

A point of considerable interest in the story of Solomon, because it
marks a phase in Egyptian affairs, is his marriage to a daughter of
Pharaoh: This must have been one of the Pharaohs of the XXIst Dynasty:
In the great days of Amenophis III, as the Tel Amarna letters witness,
Pharaoh could condescend to receive a Babylonian princess into his
harem, but he refused absolutely to grant so divine a creature as an
Egyptian princess in marriage to the Babylonian monarch. It points to
the steady decline of Egyptian prestige that now, three centuries later,
such a petty monarch as Solomon could wed on equal terms with an
Egyptian princess. There was, however, a revival with the next Egyptian
dynasty (XXII); and the Pharaoh Shishak, the founder, taking advantage
of the cleavage between Israel and Judah, which had been developing
through the reigns of both David and Solomon, took Jerusalem and looted
the all-too-brief splendours both of the new temple and of the king’s
house.

Shishak seems also to have subjugated Philistia. From this time onward
it is to be noted that the Philistines fade in importance. They had
already lost their Cretan language and adopted that of the Semites they
had conquered, and although their cities remain more or less
independent, they merge gradually into the general Semitic life of
Palestine.

There is evidence that the original rude but convincing narrative of
Solomon’s rule, of his various murders, of his association with Hiram,
of his palace and temple building, and the extravagances that weakened
and finally tore his kingdom in twain, has been subjected to extensive
interpolations and expansions by a later writer, anxious to exaggerate
his prosperity and glorify his wisdom. It is not the place here to deal
with the criticism of Bible origins, but it is a matter of ordinary
common sense rather than of scholarship to note the manifest reality and
veracity of the main substance of the account of David and Solomon, an
account explaining sometimes and justifying sometimes, but nevertheless
relating facts, even the harshest facts, as only a contemporary or
almost contemporary writer, convinced that they cannot be concealed,
would relate them, and then to remark the sudden lapse into adulation
when the inserted passages occur. It is a striking tribute to the power
of the written assertion over realities in men’s minds that this Bible
narrative has imposed, not only upon the Christian, but upon the Moslim
world, the belief that King Solomon was not only one of the most
magnificent, but one of the wisest of men. Yet the first book of Kings
tells in detail his utmost splendours, and beside the beauty and wonder
of the buildings and organizations of such great monarchs as Thotmes III
or Rameses II or half a dozen other Pharaohs, or of Sargon II or
Sardanapalus or Nebuchadnezzar the Great, they are trivial. His temple,
measured internally, was twenty cubits broad, about 35 feet[165]--that
is, the breadth of a small villa residence--and sixty cubits, say, 100
feet, long. And as for his wisdom and statescraft, one need go no
further than the Bible to see that Solomon was a mere helper in the
wide-reaching schemes of the trader-king Hiram, and his kingdom a pawn
between Phœnicia and Egypt. His importance was due largely to the
temporary enfeeblement of Egypt, which encouraged the ambition of the
Phœnician and made it necessary to propitiate the holder of the key
to an alternate trade route to the East. To his own people Solomon was a
wasteful and oppressive monarch, and already before his death his
kingdom was splitting, visibly to all men.

With the reign of King Solomon the brief glory of the Hebrews ends; the
northern and richer section of his kingdom, long oppressed by taxation
to sustain his splendours, breaks off from Jerusalem to become the
separate kingdom of Israel, and this split ruptures that linking
connection between Sidon and the Red Sea by which Solomon’s gleam of
wealth was possible. There is no more wealth in Hebrew history.
Jerusalem remains the capital of one tribe, the tribe of Judah, the
capital of a land of barren hills, cut off by Philistia from the sea and
surrounded by enemies.

The tales of wars, of religious conflicts, of usurpations,
assassinations, and of fratricidal murders to secure the throne goes on
for three centuries. It is a tale frankly barbaric. Israel wars with
Judah and the neighbouring states; forms alliances first with one and
then with the other. The power of Aramean Syria burns like a baleful
star over the affairs of the Hebrews, and then there rises behind it the
great and growing power of the last Assyrian Empire. For three centuries
the life of the Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon
living in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being
run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries.

“Pul” (apparently the same person as Tiglath Pileser III) is, according
to the Bible narrative, the first Assyrian monarch to appear upon the
Hebrew horizon, and Menahem buys him off with a thousand talents of
silver (738 B.C.). But the power of Assyria is heading straight for the
now aged and decadent land of Egypt, and the line of attack lies through
Judea; Tiglath Pileser III returns and Shalmaneser follows in his steps,
the King of Israel intrigues for help with Egypt, that “broken reed,”
and in 721 B.C., as we have already noted, his kingdom is swept off into
captivity and utterly lost to history. The same fate hung over Judah,
but for a little while it was averted. The fate of Sennacherib’s army in
the reign of King Hezekiah (701 B.C.), and how he was murdered by his
sons (II Kings xix. 37), we have already mentioned. The subsequent
subjugation of Egypt by Assyria finds no mention in Holy Writ, but it is
clear that before the reign of Sennacherib, King Hezekiah had carried on
a diplomatic correspondence with Babylon (700 B.C.), which was in revolt
against Sargon II of Assyria. There followed the conquest of Egypt by
Esarhaddon, and then for a time Assyria was occupied with her own
troubles; the Scythians and Medes and Persians were pressing her on the
north, and Babylon was in insurrection. As we have already noted, Egypt,
relieved for a time from Assyrian pressure, entered upon a phase of
revival, first under Psammetichus and then under Necho II.

Again the little country in between made mistakes in its alliances. But
on neither side was there safety. Josiah opposed Necho, and was slain at
the battle of Megiddo (608 B.C.). The king of Judah became an Egyptian
tributary. Then when Necho, after pushing as far as the Euphrates, fell
before Nebuchadnezzar II, Judah fell with him (604 B.C.).
Nebuchadnezzar, after a trial of three puppet kings, carried off the
greater part of the people into captivity in Babylon (586 B.C.), and the
rest, after a rising and a massacre of Babylonian officials, took refuge
from the vengeance of Chaldea in Egypt.

“And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the
treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king, and
of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the
house of God and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the
palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.
And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon;
where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the
kingdom of Persia.” (II Chron. xxxvi. 18, 19, 20.)

So the four centuries of Hebrew kingship comes to an end. From first to
last it was a mere incident in the larger and greater history of Egypt,
Syria, Assyria, and Phœnicia. But out of it there were now to arise
moral and intellectual consequences of primary importance to all
mankind.

§ 3

The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two generations,
to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus were a very different
people from the warring Baal worshippers and Jehovah worshippers, the
sacrificers in the high places and sacrificers at Jerusalem of the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The plain fact of the Bible narrative is
that the Jews went to Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They
went a confused and divided multitude, with no national
self-consciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive
national spirit. They went with no common literature generally known to
them, for it was only about forty years before the captivity that king
Josiah is said to have discovered “a book of the law” in the temple (II
Kings xxii.), and, besides that, there is not a hint in the record of
any reading of books; and they returned with most of their material for
the Old Testament. It is manifest that, relieved of their bickering and
murderous kings, restrained from politics and in the intellectually
stimulating atmosphere of that Babylonian world, the Jewish mind made a
great step forward during the captivity.

It was an age of historical inquiry and learning in Babylonia. The
Babylonian influences that had made Sardanapalus collect a great library
of ancient writings in Nineveh were still at work. We have already told
how Nabonidus was so preoccupied with antiquarian research as to neglect
the defence of his kingdom against Cyrus. Everything, therefore,
contributed to set the exiled Jews inquiring into their own history, and
they found an inspiring leader in the prophet Ezekiel. From such hidden
and forgotten records as they had with them, genealogies, contemporary
histories of David, Solomon, and their other kings, legends and
traditions, they made out and amplified their own story, and told it to
Babylon and themselves. The story of the Creation and the Flood, much of
the story of Moses, much of Samson, were probably incorporated from
Babylonian sources.[166] When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, only the
Pentateuch had been put together into one book, but the grouping of the
rest of the historical books was bound to follow.

The rest of their literature remained for some centuries as separate
books, to which a very variable amount of respect was paid. Some of the
later books are frankly post-captivity compositions. Over all this
literature were thrown certain leading ideas. There was an idea, which
even these books themselves gainsay in detail, that all the people were
pure-blooded children of Abraham; there was next an idea of a promise
made by Jehovah to Abraham that he would exalt the Jewish race above all
other races; and, thirdly, there was the belief first of all that
Jehovah was the greatest and most powerful of tribal gods, and then that
he was a god above all other gods, and at last that he was the only true
god. The Jews became convinced at last, as a people, that they were the
chosen people of the one God of all the earth.

And arising very naturally out of these three ideas, was a fourth, the
idea of a coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who would realize the
long-postponed promises of Jehovah.

This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented people in
the course of the “seventy years” is the first instance in history of
the new power of the written word in human affairs. It was a mental
consolidation that did much more than unite the people who returned to
Jerusalem. This idea of belonging to a chosen race predestined to
pre-eminence was a very attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who
remained in Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established
in Egypt. It affected the mixed people who had been placed in Samaria,
the old capital of the kings of Israel when the ten tribes were deported
to Media. It inspired a great number of Babylonians and the like to
claim Abraham as their father, and thrust their company upon the
returning Jews. Ammonites and Moabites became adherents. The book of
Nehemiah is full of the distress occasioned by this invasion of the
privileges of the chosen. The Jews were already a people dispersed in
many lands and cities, when their minds and hopes were unified and they
became an exclusive people. But at first their exclusiveness is merely
to preserve soundness of doctrine and worship, warned by such lamentable
lapses as those of King Solomon. To genuine proselytes of whatever race,
Judaism long held out welcoming arms.

To Phœnicians after the falls of Tyre and Carthage, conversion to
Judaism must have been particularly easy and attractive. Their language
was closely akin to Hebrew. It is possible that the great majority of
African and Spanish Jews are really of Phœnician origin. There were
also great Arabian accessions. In South Russia, as we shall note later,
there were even Mongolian Jews.

§ 4

The historical books from Genesis to Nehemiah, upon which the idea of
the promise to the chosen people had been imposed later, were no doubt
the backbone of Jewish mental unity, but they by no means complete the
Hebrew literature from which finally the Bible was made up. Of such
books as Job, said to be an imitation of Greek tragedy, the Song of
Solomon, the Psalms, Proverbs, and others, there is no time to write in
this _Outline_, but it is necessary to deal with the books known as “the
Prophets” with some fullness. For those books are almost the earliest
and certainly the best evidence of the appearance of a new kind of
leading in human affairs.[167]

These prophets are not a new class in the community; they are of the
most various origins--Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and of priestly
sympathies, and Amos was a shepherd; but they have this in common, that
they bring into life a religious force outside the sacrifices and
formalities of priesthood and temple. The earlier prophets seem most
like the earlier priests, they are oracular, they give advice and
foretell events; it is quite possible that at first, in the days when
there were many high places in the land and religious ideas were
comparatively unsettled, there was no great distinction between priest
and prophet. The prophets danced, it would seem, somewhat after the
Dervish fashion, and uttered oracles. Generally they wore a distinctive
mantle of rough goat-skin. They kept up the nomadic tradition as against
the “new ways” of the settlement. But after the building of the temple
and the organization of the priesthood, the prophetic type remains over
and outside the formal religious scheme. They were probably always more
or less of an annoyance to the priests. They became informal advisers
upon public affairs, denouncers of sin and strange practices,
“self-constituted,” as we should say, having no sanction but an inner
light. “Now the word of the Lord came unto”--so and so; that is the
formula.

In the latter and most troubled days of the kingdom of Judah, as Egypt,
North Arabia, Assyria, and then Babylonia closed like a vice upon the
land, these prophets became very significant and powerful. Their appeal
was to anxious and fearful minds, and at first their exhortation was
chiefly towards repentance, the pulling down of this or that high place,
the restoration of worship in Jerusalem, or the like. But through some
of the prophecies there runs already a note like the note of what we
call nowadays a “social reformer.” The rich are “grinding the faces of
the poor”; the luxurious are consuming the children’s bread; influential
and wealthy people make friends with and imitate the splendours and
vices of foreigners, and sacrifice the common people to these new
fashions; and this is hateful to Jehovah, who will certainly punish the
land.

But with the broadening of ideas that came with the Captivity, the
tenour of prophecy broadens and changes. The jealous pettiness that
disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God give place to a new idea of a
god of universal righteousness. It is clear that the increasing
influence of prophets was not confined to the Jewish people; it was
something that was going on in those days all over the Semitic world.
The breaking down of nations and kingdoms to form the great and changing
empires of that age, the smashing up of cults and priesthoods, the
mutual discrediting of temple by temple in their rivalries and
disputes--all these influences were releasing men’s minds to a freer
and wider religious outlook. The temples had accumulated great stores of
golden vessels and lost their hold upon the imaginations of men. It is
difficult to estimate whether, amidst these constant wars, life had
become more uncertain and unhappy than it had ever been before, but
there can be no doubt that men had become more conscious of its miseries
and insecurities. Except for the weak and the women, there remained
little comfort or assurance in the sacrifices, ritual and formal
devotions of the temples. Such was the world to which the later prophets
of Israel began to talk of the One God, and of a Promise that some day
the world should come to peace and unity and happiness. This great God
that men were now discovering lived in a temple “not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens.” There can be little doubt of a great body of
such thought and utterance in Babylonia, Egypt, and throughout the
Semitic east. The prophetic books of the Bible can be but specimens of
the prophesyings of that time....

We have already drawn attention to the gradual escape of writing and
knowledge from their original limitation to the priesthood and the
temple precincts, from the shell in which they were first developed and
cherished. We have taken Herodotus as an interesting specimen of what we
have called the free intelligence of mankind. Now here we are dealing
with a similar overflow of moral ideas into the general community. The
Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas towards one God
in all the world, is a parallel development of the free conscience of
mankind. From this time onward there runs through human thought, now
weakly and obscurely, now gathering power, the idea of one rule in the
world, and of a promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace
and happiness in human affairs. From being a temple religion of the old
type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a large extent, a prophetic and
creative religion of a new type. Prophet succeeds prophet. Later on, as
we shall tell, there was born a prophet of unprecedented power, Jesus,
whose followers founded the great universal religion of Christianity.
Still later Muhammad, another prophet, appears in Arabia and founds
Islam. In spite of very distinctive features of their own, these two
teachers do in a manner arise out of, and in succession to these Jewish
prophets. It is not the place of the historian to discuss the truth and
falsity of religion, but it is his business to record the appearance of
great constructive ideas. Two thousand four hundred years ago, and six
or seven or eight thousand years after the walls of the first Sumerian
cities arose, the ideas of the moral unity of mankind and of a world
peace had come into the world.[168]

XXII

THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS[169]

§ 1. _The Hellenic Peoples._ § 2. _Distinctive Features of Hellenic
Civilization._ § 3. _Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy in Greece._ §
4. _The Kingdom of Lydia._ § 5. _The Rise of the Persians in the East._
§ 6. _The Story of Crœsus._ § 7. _Darius Invades Russia._ § 8. _The
Battle of Marathon._ § 9. _Thermopylæ and Salamis._ § 10. _Platæa and
Mycale._

§ 1

And now our history must go back again to those Aryan-speaking peoples
of whose early beginnings we have given an account in Chapters XIV and
XV. We must, for the sake of precision, repeat here two warnings we have
already given the reader: first, that we use the word Aryan in its
widest sense, to express all the early peoples who spoke languages of
the “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European” group; and, secondly, that when
we use the word Aryan we do not imply any racial purity.

The original speakers of the fundamental Aryan language, 2000 or 3000
years B.C., were probably a specialized and distinctive Nordic race of
fair white men, accustomed to forests and cattle, who wandered east of
the Rhine and through the forests of the Danube valley, the Balkan
peninsula, Asia Minor, and eastward to the north and west of the great
Central Asian Sea; but very early they had encountered and mixed
themselves extensively, and as they spread they continued to mix
themselves with other races, with races of uncertain affinities in Asia
Minor and with Iberian and Mediterranean peoples of the dark-haired
white race. For instance, the Aryans, spreading and pressing westward
in successive waves of Keltic-speaking peoples through Gaul and Britain
and Ireland, mixed more and more with Iberian races, and were affected
more and more by that Iberian blood and their speech by the
characteristics of the language their Keltic tongue superseded. Other
waves of Keltic peoples washed with diminishing force into Spain and
Portugal, where to this day the pre-Keltic strain is altogether dominant
although the languages spoken are Aryan. Northward, in Europe, the Aryan
peoples were spreading into hitherto uninhabited country, and so
remaining racially more purely Nordic blonds. They had already reached
Scandinavia many centuries B.C.

From their original range of wandering, other Aryan tribes spread to the
north as well as to the south of the Black Sea, and ultimately, as these
seas shrank and made way for them, to the north and east of the Caspian,
and so began to come into conflict with and mix also with Mongolian
peoples of the Ural-Altaic linguistic group, the horse-keeping people of
the grassy steppes of Central Asia. From these Mongolian races the
Aryans seem to have acquired the use of the horse for riding and
warfare. There were three or four prehistoric varieties or sub-species
of horse in Europe and Asia, but it was the steppe or semi-desert lands
that first gave horses of a build adapted to other than food uses.[170]
All these peoples, it must be understood, shifted their ground rapidly,
a succession of bad seasons might drive them many hundreds of miles, and
it is only in a very rough and provisional manner that their “beats” can
now be indicated. Every summer they went north, every winter they swung
south again. This annual swing covered sometimes hundreds of miles. On
our maps, for the sake of simplicity, we represent the shifting of
nomadic peoples by a straight line; but really they moved in annual
swings, as the broom of a servant who is sweeping out a passage swishes
from side to side as she advances. Spreading round the north of the
Black Sea, and probably to the north of the Caspian, from the range of
the original Teutonic tribes of Central and North-central Europe to the
Iranian peoples who became the Medes and Persians and (Aryan) Hindus,
were the grazing lands of a confusion of tribes, about whom it is truer
to be vague than precise, such as the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, and
those Scythians who, together with the Medes and Persians, came into
effective contact with the Assyrian Empire by 1000 B.C. or earlier.

East and south of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Medes and
Persians, and to the north of the Semitic and Mediterranean peoples of
the sea coasts and peninsulas, ranged another series of equally
ill-defined Aryan tribes, moving easily from place to place and
intermixing freely--to the great confusion of historians. They seem, for
instance, to have broken up and assimilated the Hittite civilization,
which was probably pre-Aryan in its origin. They were, perhaps, not so
far advanced along the nomadic line as the Scythians of the great
plains.

The general characteristics of the original Aryan peoples we have
already discussed in Chapter XV. They were a forest people, not a steppe
people, and, consequently, wasteful of wood; they were a cattle people
and not a horse people. The Greeks appear in the dim light before the
dawn of history (say 1500 B.C.), as one of the wandering imperfectly
nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually extending the range of their
pasturage southward into the Balkan peninsula and coming into conflict
and mixing with that preceding Ægean civilization of which Cnossos was
the crown.

[Illustration: Map showing Distribution of

ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES between about 1,000 & 500 B.C.]

[Illustration: Distribution of the Hellenic Races 1000 to 800 B.C.]

In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common language, and a
common tradition upheld by the epic poems keeps them together in a loose
unity; they call their various tribes by a common name, _Hellenes_. They
probably came in successive waves. Three main variations of the ancient
Greek speech are distinguished; the Ionic, the Æolic, and the Doric.
There was a great variety of dialects in Greece, almost every city
having its own output of literature.[171] The Doric apparently
constituted the last and most powerful wave of the migration. These
Hellenic tribes conquered and largely destroyed the Ægean civilization
that had preceded their arrival; upon its ashes they built up a
civilization of their own. They took to the sea and crossed by way of
the islands to Asia Minor; and, sailing through the Dardanelles and
Bosphorus, spread their settlements along the south, and presently along
the north borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of
Italy, which was called at last Magna Græcia, and round the northern
coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town of Marseilles on the
site of an earlier Phœnician colony. They began settlements in Sicily
in rivalry with the Carthaginians as early as 735 B.C.

In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Macedonians and
Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians crossed by the Bosphorus
into Asia Minor.

[Illustration: An early Greek sea-fight. From a painted vase, about 550
B.C.]

We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the
beginnings of written history. By the seventh century B.C.--that is to
say, by the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews--the landmarks
of the ancient world of the pre-Hellenic civilization in Europe have
been obliterated. Tiryns and Cnossos are unimportant sites; Mycenæ and
Troy survive in legend; the great cities of this new Greek world are
Athens, Sparta (the capital of Lacedemon), Corinth, Thebes, Samos,
Miletus. The world our grandfathers called “Ancient Greece” had arisen
on the forgotten ruins of a still more Ancient Greece, in many ways as
civilized and artistic, of which to-day we are only beginning to learn
through the labours of the excavator. But the newer Ancient Greece, of
which we are now telling, still lives vividly in the imaginations and
institutions of men because it spoke a beautiful and most expressive
Aryan tongue akin to our own, and because it had taken over the
Mediterranean alphabet and perfected it by the addition of vowels, so
that reading and writing were now easy arts to learn and practise, and
great numbers of people could master them and make a record for later
ages.[172]

§ 2

Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South Italy and
Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C., is a civilization
differing in many important respects from the two great civilized
systems whose growths we have already traced, that of the Nile and that
of the Two Rivers of Mesopotamia. These civilizations grew through long
ages where they are found; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a
primitive agriculture; priest kings and god kings consolidated such
early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herdsmen raiders
came southward into a world whose civilization was already an old story.
Shipping and agriculture, walled cities and writing, were already there.
The Greeks did not grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one
and put another together upon and out of the ruins.

To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple-state stage, no
stage of priest kings, in the Greek record. The Greeks got at once to
the city organization that in the east had grown round the temple. They
took over the association of temple and city; the idea was ready-made
for them. What impressed them most about the city was probably its wall.
It is doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away.
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a continual
suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place in a time of
strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper feature of the city.
They came into this inheritance of a previous civilization with the
ideas and traditions of the woodlands still strong in their minds. The
heroic social system of the _Iliad_ took possession of the land, and
adapted itself to the new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks
became more religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered
welled up from below.[173]

We have already said that the social structure of the primitive Aryans
was a two-class system of nobles and commoners, the classes not very
sharply marked off from each other, and led in warfare by a king who was
simply the head of one of the noble families, _primus inter pares_, a
leader among his equals. With the conquest of the aboriginal population
and with the building of towns there was added to this simple social
arrangement of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled
and unskilled workers, who were for the most part slaves. But all the
Greek communities were not of this “conquest” type. Some were “refugee”
cities representing smashed communities, and in these the aboriginal
substratum would be missing.

In many of the former cases the survivors of the earlier population
formed a subject class, slaves of the state as a whole, as, for
instance, the Helots in Sparta. The nobles and commoners became
landlords and gentlemen farmers; it was they who directed the
shipbuilding and engaged in trade. But some of the poorer free citizens
followed mechanic arts, and, as we have already noted, would even pull
an oar in a galley for pay. Such priests as there were in this Greek
world were either the guardians of shrines and temples or sacrificial
functionaries; Aristotle, in his _Politics_, makes them a mere
subdivision of his official class. The citizen served as warrior in
youth, ruler in his maturity, priest in his old age. The priestly
_class_, in comparison with the equivalent class in Egypt and Babylonia,
was small and insignificant. The gods of the Greeks proper, the gods of
the heroic Greeks, were, as we have already noted, glorified human
beings, and they were treated without very much fear or awe; but beneath
these gods of the conquering freemen lurked other gods of the subjugated
peoples, who found their furtive followers among slaves and women. The
original Aryan gods were not expected to work miracles or control men’s
lives. But Greece, like most of the Eastern world in the thousand years
B.C., was much addicted to consulting _oracles_ or soothsayers. Delphi
was particularly famous for its oracle. “When the Oldest Men in the
tribe could not tell you the right thing to do,” says Gilbert Murray,
“you went to the blessed dead. All oracles were at the tombs of Heroes.
They told you what was ‘Themis,’ what was the right thing to do, or, as
religious people would put it now, what was the Will of the God.”

[Illustration: Rowers in an Athenian warship, about 400 B.C. (Fragment
of relief found on the Acropolis)]

The priests and priestesses of these temples were not united into one
class, nor did they exercise any power as a class. It was the nobles and
free commoners, two classes which, in some cases, merged into one common
body of citizens, who constituted the Greek state. In many cases,
especially in great city states, the population of slaves and
unenfranchised strangers greatly outnumbered the citizens. But for them
the state did not exist; it existed for the select body of citizens
alone. It might or might not tolerate the outsider and the slave, but
they had no legal voice in their treatment--any more than if it had been
a despotism.[174]

This is a social structure differing widely from that of the Eastern
monarchies. The exclusive importance of the Greek citizen reminds one a
little of the exclusive importance of the children of Israel in the
later Jewish state, but there is no equivalent on the Greek side to the
prophets and priests, nor to the idea of an over-ruling Jehovah.

Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the human
communities to which we have hitherto given attention is their
continuous and incurable division. The civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria,
China, and no doubt North India, all began in a number of independent
city states, each one a city with a few miles of dependent agricultural
villages and cultivation around it, but out of this phase they passed by
a process of coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end
of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. Commonly, this
is ascribed to the geographical conditions under which they lived.
Greece is a country cut up into a multitude of valleys by mountain
masses and arms of the sea that render intercommunication difficult; so
difficult that few cities were able to hold many of the others in
subjection for any length of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on
islands and scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city
states of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and some
had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, the largest of the Greek
cities, at the climax of its power had a population of perhaps a third
of a million. Hardly any other Greek cities ever exceeded 50,000. Of
this, half or more were slaves and strangers, and two-thirds of the free
body women and children.

§ 3

The government of these city states varied very widely in its nature. As
they settled down after their conquests the Greeks retained for a time
the rule of their kings, but these kingdoms drifted back more and more
to the rule of the aristocratic class. In Sparta (Lacedemon) kings were
still distinguished in the sixth century B.C. The Lacedemonians had a
curious system of a double kingship; two kings, drawn from different
royal families, ruled together. But most of the Greek city states had
become aristocratic republics long before the sixth century. There is,
however, a tendency towards slackness and inefficiency in most families
that rule by hereditary right; sooner or later they decline; and as the
Greeks got out upon the seas and set up colonies and commerce extended,
new rich families arose to jostle the old and bring new personalities
into power. These _nouveaux riches_ became members of an expanded ruling
class, a mode of government known as oligarchy--in opposition to
aristocracy--though, strictly, the term oligarchy (= government by the
few) should of course include hereditary aristocracy as a special case.

In many cities persons of exceptional energy, taking advantage of some
social conflict or class grievance, secured a more or less irregular
power in the state. This combination of personality and opportunity has
occurred in the United States of America, for example, where men
exercising various kinds of informal power are called _bosses_. In
Greece they were called _tyrants_. But the tyrant was rather more than a
boss; he was recognized as a monarch, and claimed the authority of a
monarch. The modern boss, on the other hand, shelters behind legal forms
which he has “got hold of” and uses for his own ends. Tyrants were
distinguished from kings, who claimed some sort of right, some family
priority, for example, to rule. They were supported, perhaps, by the
poorer class with a grievance; Peisistratus, for example, who was tyrant
of Athens, with two intervals of exile, between 560 and 527 B.C., was
supported by the poverty-struck Athenian hillmen. Sometimes, as in Greek
Sicily, the tyrant stood for the rich against the poor. When, later on,
the Persians began to subjugate the Greek cities of Asia Minor, they set
up pro-Persian tyrants.

Aristotle, the great philosophical teacher, who was born under the
hereditary Macedonian monarchy, and who was for some years tutor to the
king’s son, distinguishes in his _Politics_ between kings who ruled by
an admitted and inherent right, such as the King of Macedonia, whom he
served, and tyrants who ruled without the consent of the governed. As a
matter of fact, it is hard to conceive of a tyrant ruling without the
consent of many, and the active participation of a substantial number of
his subjects; and the devotion and unselfishness of your “true kings”
has been known to rouse resentment and questioning. Aristotle was also
able to say that while the king ruled for the good of the state, the
tyrant ruled for his own good. Upon this point, as in his ability to
regard slavery as a natural thing and to consider women unfit for
freedom and political rights, Aristotle was in harmony with the trend of
events about him.

A third form of government that prevailed increasingly in Greece in the
sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., was known as _democracy_. As
the modern world nowadays is constantly talking of democracy, and as the
modern idea of democracy is something widely different from the
democracy of the Greek city states, it will be well to be very explicit
upon the meaning of democracy in Greece. Democracy then was government
by the commonalty, the Demos; it was government by the whole body of the
citizens, by the many as distinguished from the few. But let the modern
reader mark that word “citizen.” The slave was excluded, the freedman
was excluded, the stranger; even the Greek born in the city, whose
father had come eight or ten miles from the city beyond the headland,
was excluded. The earlier democracies (but not all) demanded a property
qualification from the citizen, and property in those days was land;
this was subsequently relaxed, but the modern reader will grasp that
here was something very different from modern democracy. At the end of
the fifth century B.C. this property qualification had been abolished in
Athens, for example; but Pericles, a great Athenian statesman of whom we
shall have more to tell later, had established a law (451 B.C.)
restricting citizenship to those who could establish Athenian descent on
both sides. Thus, in the Greek democracies quite as much as in the
oligarchies, the citizens formed a _close corporation_, ruling
sometimes, as in the case of Athens in its great days, a big population
of serfs, slaves, and “outlanders.” A modern politician used to the
idea, the entirely new and different idea, that democracy in its
perfected form means that every adult man and woman shall have a voice
in the government, would, if suddenly spirited back to the extremist
Greek democracy, regard it as a kind of oligarchy. The only real
difference between a Greek “oligarchy” and a Greek democracy was that in
the former, the poorer and less important citizens had no voice in the
government, and in the latter every citizen had. Aristotle, in his
_Politics_, betrays very clearly the practical outcome of this
difference. Taxation sat lightly on the rich in the oligarchies; the
democracies, on the other hand, taxed the rich, and generally paid the
impecunious citizen a maintenance allowance and special fees. In Athens
fees were paid to citizens even for attending the general assembly. But
the generality of people outside the happy order of citizens worked and
did what they were told, and if one desired the protection of the law,
one sought a citizen to plead for one. For only the citizen had any
standing in the law courts. Greek democracy was, in fact, a sort of
government by a swarm of hereditary barristers. Our modern idea, that
any one in the state is a citizen, would have shocked the privileged
democrats of Athens profoundly.[175]

One obvious result of this monopolization of the state by the class of
citizens was that the patriotism of these privileged people took an
intense and narrow form. They would form alliances, but never coalesce
with other city states. That would have obliterated every advantage by
which they lived. There would have been no more fees, no more
privileges. The narrow geographical limits of these Greek states added
to the intensity of their feeling. A man’s love for his country was
reinforced by his love for his native town, his religion, and his home;
for these were all one. Of course the slaves did not share in these
feelings, and in the oligarchic states very often the excluded class got
over its dislike of foreigners in its greater dislike of the class at
home which oppressed it. But in the main, patriotism in the Greek was a
personal passion of an inspiring and dangerous intensity. Like rejected
love, it was apt to turn into something very like hatred. The Greek
exile resembled the French or Russian _émigré_ in being ready to treat
his beloved country pretty roughly in order to save her from the devils
in human form who had taken possession of her and turned _him_ out.

In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relationships with a
number of other Greek city states which is often spoken of by historians
as the Athenian Empire. But all the other city states retained their own
governments. One “new fact” added by the Athenian Empire was the
complete and effective suppression of piracy; another was the
institution of a sort of international law. The law, indeed, was
Athenian law; but actions could now be brought and justice administered
between citizens of the different states of the League, which of course
had not been possible before. The Athenian Empire had really developed
out of a league of mutual defence against Persia; its seat had
originally been in the island of Delos, and the allies had contributed
to a common treasure at Delos; the treasure of Delos was carried off to
Athens because it was exposed to a possible Persian raid. Then one city
after another offered a monetary contribution instead of military
service, with the result that in the end Athens was doing almost all the
work and receiving almost all the money. She was supported by one or two
of the larger islands. The “League” in this way became gradually an
“Empire,” but the citizens of the allied states remained, except where
there were special treaties of intermarriage and the like, practically
foreigners to one another. And it was chiefly the poorer citizens of
Athens who sustained this empire by their most vigorous and incessant
personal service. Every citizen was liable to military service at home
or abroad between the ages of eighteen and sixty, sometimes on purely
Athenian affairs and sometimes in defence of the cities of the Empire
whose citizens had bought themselves off. There was probably no single
man over twenty-five in the Athenian Assembly who had not served in
several campaigns in different parts of the Mediterranean or Black Sea,
and who did not expect to serve again. Modern imperialism is denounced
by its opponents as the exploitation of the world by the rich; Athenian
imperialism was the exploitation of the world by the poorer citizens of
Athens.

Another difference from modern conditions, due to the small size of the
Greek city states, was that in a democracy every citizen had the right
to attend and speak and vote in the popular assembly. For most cities
this meant a gathering of only a few hundred people; the greatest had no
more than some thousands of citizens. Nothing of this sort is possible
in a modern “democracy” with, perhaps, several million voters. The
modern “citizen’s” voice in public affairs is limited to the right to
vote for one or other of the party candidates put before him. He, or
she, is then supposed to have “assented” to the resultant government.
Aristotle, who would have enjoyed the electoral methods of our modern
democracies keenly, points out very subtly how the outlying farmer class
of citizens in a democracy can be virtually disenfranchised by calling
the popular assembly too frequently for their regular attendance. In the
later Greek democracies (fifth century) the appointment of public
officials, except in the case of officers requiring very special
knowledge, was by casting lots. This was supposed to protect the general
corporation of privileged citizens from the continued predominance of
rich, influential, and conspicuously able men.

Some democracies (Athens and Miletus, _e.g._) had an institution called
the ostracism,[176] by which in times of crisis and conflict the
decision was made whether some citizen should go into exile for ten
years. This may strike a modern reader as an envious institution, but
that was not its essential quality. It was, says Gilbert Murray, a way
of arriving at a decision in a case when political feeling was so
divided as to threaten a deadlock. There were in the Greek democracies
parties and party leaders, but no regular government in office and no
regular opposition. There was no way, therefore, of carrying out a
policy, although it might be the popular policy, if a strong leader or a
strong group stood out against it. But by the ostracism, the least
popular or the least trusted of the chief leaders in the divided
community was made to retire for a period without loss of honour or
property. Professor Murray suggests that a Greek democracy, if it had
found itself in such a position of deadlock as the British Empire did
upon the question of Home Rule for Ireland in 1914, would have probably
first ostracized Sir Edward Carson, and then proceeded to carry out the
provisions of the Home Rule Bill.

This institution of the ostracism has immortalized one obscure and
rather illiterate member of the democracy of Athens. A certain Aristides
had gained a great reputation in the law court for his righteous
dealing. He fell into a dispute with Themistocles upon a question of
naval policy; Aristides was for the army, Themistocles was a “strong
navy” man, and a deadlock was threatened. There was resort to an
ostracism to decide between them. Plutarch relates that as Aristides
walked through the streets while the voting was in progress, he was
accosted by a strange citizen from the agricultural environs
unaccustomed to the art of writing, and requested to write his own name
on the proffered potsherd.

“But why?” he asked. “Has Aristides ever injured you?”

“No,” said the citizen. “No. Never have I set eyes on him. But, oh! I am
so _bored_ by hearing him called Aristides the Just.”

Whereupon, says Plutarch, without further parley Aristides wrote as the
man desired....

When one understands the true meaning of these Greek constitutions, and
in particular the limitation of all power, whether in the democracies or
the oligarchies, to a locally privileged class, one realizes how
impossible was any effective union of the hundreds of Greek cities
scattered about the Mediterranean region, or even of any effective
co-operation between them for a common end. Each city was in the hands
of a few or a few hundred men, to whom its separateness meant everything
that was worth having in life. Only conquest from the outside could
unite the Greeks, and until Greece was conquered they had no political
unity. When at last they were conquered, they were conquered so
completely that their unity ceased to be of any importance even to
themselves; it was a unity of subjugation.

Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between all the
Greeks, based on a common language and script, on the common possession
of the heroic epics, and on the continuous intercourse that the maritime
position of the states made possible. And, in addition, there were
certain religious bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines
of the god Apollo in the island of Delos and at Delphi, for example,
were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or
Amphictyonies (= League of neighbours), which in such instances as the
Delphic amphictyony became very wide-reaching unions. The league
protected the shrine and the safety of pilgrims, kept up the roads
leading thereunto, secured peace at the time of special festivals,
upheld certain rules to mitigate the usages of war among its members,
and--the Delian league especially--suppressed piracy. A still more
important link of Hellenic union was the Olympian games that were held
every four years at Olympia. Foot races, boxing, wrestling, javelin
throwing, quoit throwing, jumping, and chariot and horse racing were the
chief sports, and a record of victors and distinguished visitors was
kept. From the year 776 B.C. onward[177] these games were held regularly
for over a thousand years, and they did much to maintain that sense of a
common Greek life (pan-Hellenic) transcending the narrow politics of the
city states.

Such links of sentiment and association were of little avail against the
intense “separatism” of the Greek political institutions. From the
History of Herodotus the student will be able to gather a sense of the
intensity and persistence of the feuds that kept the Greek world in a
state of chronic warfare. In the old days (say, to the sixth century
B.C.) fairly large families prevailed in Greece, and something of the
old Aryan great household system (see Chap. XV), with its strong clan
feeling and its capacity for maintaining an enduring feud, still
remained. The history of Athens circles for many years about the feud of
two great families, the Alcmæonidæ and the Peisistratidæ; the latter
equally an aristocratic family, but founding its power on the support of
the poorer class of the populace and the exploitation of their
grievances. Later on, in the sixth and fifth centuries, a limitation of
births and a shrinkage of families to two or three members--a process
Aristotle notes without perceiving its cause--led to the disappearance
of the old aristocratic clans, and the later wars were due rather to
trade disputes and grievances caused and stirred up by individual
adventurers than to family vendettas.

It is easy to understand, in view of this intense separatism of the
Greeks, how readily the Ionians of Asia and of the islands fell first
under the domination of the kingdom of Lydia, and then under that of the
Persians when Cyrus overthrew Crœsus, the king of Lydia. They
rebelled only to be reconquered. Then came the turn of European Greece.
It is a matter of astonishment, the Greeks themselves were astonished,
to find that Greece itself did not fall under the dominion of the
Persians, these barbaric Aryan masters of the ancient civilizations of
Western Asia. But before we tell of this struggle we must give some
attention to these Asiatics against whom they were pitted; and
particularly to these Medes and Persians who, by 538 B.C., were already
in possession of the ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, and
about to subjugate Egypt.

§ 4

We have had occasion to mention the kingdom of Lydia, and it may be well
to give a short note here upon the Lydians before proceeding with our
story. The original population of the larger part of Asia Minor may
perhaps have been akin to the original population of Greece and Crete.
If so, it was of “Mediterranean” race. Or it may have been another
branch of those still more generalized and fundamental darkish peoples
from whom arose the Mediterranean race to the west and the Dravidians to
the east. Remains of the same sort of art that distinguishes Cnossos and
Mycenæ are to be found scattered over Asia Minor. But just as the Nordic
Greeks poured southward into Greece to conquer and mix with the
aborigines, so did other and kindred Nordic tribes pour over the
Bosphorus into Asia Minor. Over some areas these Aryan peoples prevailed
altogether, and became the bulk of the inhabitants and retained their
Aryan speech. Such were the Phrygians, a people whose language was
almost as close to that of the Greeks as the Macedonian. But over other
areas the Aryans did not so prevail. In Lydia the original race and
their language held their own. The Lydians were a non-Aryan people
speaking a non-Aryan speech, of which at the present time only a few
words are known. Their capital city was Sardis.

Their religion was also non-Aryan. They worshipped a Great Mother
goddess. The Phrygians also, though retaining their Greek-like language,
became infected with mysterious religion, and much of the mystical
religion and secret ceremonial that pervaded Athens at a later date was
Phrygian (when not Thracian) in origin.

At first the Lydians held the western seacoast of Asia Minor, but they
were driven back from it by the establishment of Ionian Greeks coming by
the sea and founding cities. Later on, however, these Ionian Greek
cities were brought into subjection by the Lydian kings.

The history of this country is not clearly known, and were it known it
would scarcely be of sufficient importance to be related in this
historical outline, but in the eighth century B.C. one monarch, named
Gyges, becomes noteworthy. The country under his rule was subjected to
another Aryan invasion; certain nomadic tribes called the Cimmerians
came pouring across Asia Minor, and they were driven back with
difficulty by Gyges and his son and grandson. Sardis was twice taken and
burnt by these barbarians. And it is on record that Gyges paid tribute
to Sardanapalus, which serves to link him up with our general ideas of
the history of Assyria, Israel, and Egypt. Later, Gyges rebelled against
Assyria, and sent troops to help Psammetichus I to liberate Egypt from
its brief servitude to the Assyrians.

It was Alyattes, the grandson of Gyges, who made Lydia into a
considerable power. He reigned for seven years, and he reduced most of
the Ionian cities of Asia Minor to subjection. The country became the
centre of a great trade between Asia and Europe; it had always been
productive and rich in gold, and now the Lydian monarch was reputed the
richest in Asia. There was a great coming and going between the Black
and Mediterranean Seas, and between the East and West. We have already
noted that Lydia was reputed to be the first country in the world to
produce coined money, and to provide the convenience of inns for
travellers and traders. The Lydian dynasty seems to have been a trading
dynasty of the type of Minos in Crete, with a banking and financial
development.... So much we may note of Lydia by way of preface to the
next section.

§ 5

Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had developed along the
lines we have described in Greece, Magna Græcia, and around the shores
of the Black Sea, another series of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose
originally Nordic blood was perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian
element, were settling and spreading to the north and east of the
Assyrian and Babylonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like
dispersion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black and
Caspian Seas; it was probably by this route that the Aryan-speaking
races gradually came down into what is now the Persian country, and
spread, on the one hand, eastward to India (? 2000 to 1000 B.C.), and on
the other, increased and multiplied in the Persian uplands until they
were strong enough to assail first Assyria (650 B.C.) and then Babylon
(538 B.C.).

There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of climate that
have been going on in Europe and Asia during the last 10,000 years. The
ice of the last glacial age receded gradually, and gave way to a long
period of steppe or prairie-like conditions over the great plain of
Europe. About 12,000 or 10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this
state of affairs was giving place to forest conditions. We have already
noted how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse
hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer hunters; and
these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agriculturists. For some
thousands of years the European climate seems to have been warmer than
it is to-day. A great sea spread from the coast of the Balkan peninsula
far into Central Asia and extended northward into Central Russia, and
the shrinkage of that sea and the consequent hardening of the climate of
south Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with the
development of the first civilizations in the river valleys. Many facts
seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe and western Asia, and
still more strongly to a greater luxuriance of plant and vegetable life,
4000 to 3000 years ago, than we find to-day. There were forests then in
south Russia and in the country which is now Western Turkestan, where
now steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1500 and
2000 years ago, the Aral-Caspian region was probably drier and those
seas smaller than they are at the present time.

We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the fifteenth
century B.C.), in his expedition beyond the Euphrates, hunted a herd of
120 elephants in that region. Again, an Ægean dagger from Mycenæ, dating
about 2000 B.C., shows a lion-hunt in progress. The hunters carry big
shields and spears, and stand in rows one behind the other. The first
man spears the lion, and when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat
under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to repeat
his stroke, and so on, until the lion is speared to death. This method
of hunting is practised by the Masai to-day, and could only have been
worked out by a people in a land where lions were abundant. But abundant
lions imply abundant game, and that again means abundant vegetation.
About 2000 B.C. the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the
Old World, to which we have already referred, which put an end to
elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece,[178] was turning the faces
of the nomadic Aryan peoples southward towards the fields and forests of
the more settled and civilized nations.

These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian regions into history
about the time that Mycenæ and Troy and Cnossos are falling to the
Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle the different tribes and races
that appear under a multitude of names in the records and inscriptions
that record their first appearance, but, fortunately, these distinctions
are not needed in an elementary outline such as this present history. A
people called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya and
Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia to Elam. In the
ninth century B.C. a people called the Medes, very closely related to
the Persians to the east of them, appear in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II, names already familiar in this story,
profess to have made them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the
inscriptions as the “dangerous Medes.” They are as yet a tribal people,
not united under one king.

About the ninth century B.C. Elam and the Elamites, whose capital was
Susa, a people which possessed a tradition and civilization at least as
old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish from history. We do not know what
happened. They seem to have been overrun and the population absorbed by
the conquerors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians.

[Illustration: Scythians ... as portrayed by a Greek artist....

ONE OF THE FEW EXISTING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ANCIENT SCYTHIANS. FROM A
GREEK ELECTRUM VASE.]

A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear at this time
in the narrative of Herodotus, are the “Scythians.” For a while the
monarchs of Assyria play off these various kindred peoples, the
Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Scythians, against each
other. Assyrian princesses (a daughter of Esarhaddon, _e.g._) are
married to Scythian chiefs. Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the other hand,
marries a daughter of Cyaxares, who has become king of all the Medes.
The Aryan Scythians are for the Semitic Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for
the Semitic Babylonians. It was this Cyaxares who took Nineveh, the
Assyrian capital, in 606 B.C., and so released Babylon from the Assyrian
yoke to establish, under Chaldean rule, the Second Babylonian Empire.
The Scythian allies of Assyria drop out of the story after this. They go
on living their own life away to the north without much interference
with the peoples to the south. A glance at the map of this period shows
how, for two-thirds of a century, the Second Babylonian Empire lay like
a lamb within the embrace of the Median lion.

Into the internal struggles of the Medes and Persians, that ended at
last in the accession of Cyrus “the Persian” to the throne of Cyaxares
in 550 B.C., we will not enter. In that year Cyrus was ruling over an
empire that reached from the boundaries of Lydia to Persia and perhaps
to India. Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian rulers, was, as we have
already told, digging up old records and building temples in Babylonia.

§ 6

But one monarch in the world was alive to the threat of the new power
that lay in the hands of Cyrus. This was Crœsus, the Lydian king. His
son had been killed in a very tragic manner, which Herodotus relates,
but which we will not describe here. Says Herodotus:

“For two years then, Crœsus remained quiet in great mourning, because
he was deprived of his son; but after this period of time, the
overthrowing of the rule of the son of Cyaxares by Cyrus, and the
growing greatness of the Persians, caused Crœsus to cease from his
mourning, and led him to a care of cutting short the power of the
Persians if by any means he might, while yet it was in growth and before
they should have become great.”

He then made trial of the various oracles. His method of trial we will
not relate here, but it led him to the belief that the Delphi Oracle was
alone trustworthy. What follows is rather a lengthy passage, but it is
so characteristic of the garrulousness and wonder-loving mind of the
Father of History, and with such a pleasant touch of spite against the
Lacedemonians, that it is impossible to resist the quotation.

[Illustration: Map showing the relation of the MEDIAN and second
BABYLONIAN (Chaldean) EMPIRES in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great]

“After this, with great sacrifices, he endeavoured to win the favour of
the god at Delphi: for of all the animals that are fit for sacrifice he
offered three thousand of each kind, and he heaped up couches overlaid
with gold and overlaid with silver, and cups of gold, and robes of
purple, and tunics, making of them a great pyre, and this he burnt up,
hoping by these means the more to win over the god to the side of the
Lydians; and he proclaimed to all the Lydians that every one of them
should make sacrifice with that which each man had. And when he had
finished the sacrifice, he melted down a vast quantity of gold, and of
it he wrought half-plinths, making them six palms in length and three in
breadth, and in height one palm; and their number was one hundred and
seventeen. Of these four were of pure gold weighing two talents and a
half each, and the others of gold alloyed with silver weighing two
talents. And he caused to be made also an image of a lion of pure gold
weighing ten talents; which lion, when the temple at Delphi was being
burnt down, fell from off the half-plinths, for upon these it was set,
and is placed now in the treasury of the Corinthians, weighing six
talents and a half, for three talents and a half were melted away from
it. So Crœsus, having finished all these things, sent them to Delphi,
and with them these besides: two mixing-bowls of great size, one of gold
and the other of silver, of which the golden bowl was placed on the
right hand as one enters the temple, and the silver on the left, but the
places of these also were changed after the temple was burnt down....
Moreover, Crœsus sent four silver wine-jars, which stand in the
treasury of the Corinthians, and two vessels for lustral water, one of
gold and the other of silver, of which the gold one is inscribed ‘from
the Lacedemonians,’ who say that it is their offering; therein, however,
they do not speak rightly, for this also is from Crœsus, but one of
the Delphians wrote the inscription upon it, desiring to gratify the
Lacedemonians; and his name I know, but I will not make mention of
it.... And many other votive offerings Crœsus sent with these, not
specially distinguished, among which are certain castings of silver of a
round shape, and also a golden figure of a woman three cubits high,
which the Delphians say is a statue of the baker of Crœsus. Moreover,
Crœsus dedicated the ornaments from his wife’s neck and her
girdles....

“To the Lydians who were to carry these gifts to the temples Crœsus
gave charge that they should ask the Oracles this question also: whether
Crœsus should march against the Persians, and, if so, whether he
should join with himself any army of men as his friends. And when the
Lydians had arrived at the places to which they had been sent and had
dedicated the votive offerings, they inquired of the Oracles, and said:
‘Crœsus, king of the Lydians and of other nations, considering that
these are the only true Oracles among men, presents to you gifts such as
your revelations deserve, and asks you again now whether he shall march
against the Persians, and, if so, whether he shall join with himself any
army of men as allies.’ They inquired thus, and the answers of both the
Oracles agreed in one, declaring to Crœsus that if he should march
against the Persians he should destroy a great empire.... So when the
answers were brought back and Crœsus heard them, he was delighted
with the Oracles, and expecting that he would certainly destroy the
kingdom of Cyrus, he sent again to Pytho, and presented to the men of
Delphi, having ascertained the number of them, two staters of gold for
each man: and in return for this the Delphians gave to Crœsus and to
the Lydians precedence in consulting the Oracle and freedom from all
payments, and the right to front seats at the games, with this privilege
also for all time, that any one of them who wished should be allowed to
become a citizen of Delphi.”

But here we may not run on as Herodotus loved to do. Suffice it to say
that Crœsus made a defensive alliance both with the Lacedemonians and
the Egyptians. We will not quote the story of how a great bronze
mixing-bowl that the Lacedemonians sent to Crœsus went astray, but we
will note a light on the life of the Medes and Persians of that time.

“Thus, then, it happened about the mixing-bowl; but meanwhile Crœsus,
mistaking the meaning of the Oracle, was making a march into Cappadocia,
expecting to overthrow Cyrus and the power of the Persians; and while
Crœsus was preparing to march against the Persians, one of the
Lydians, who even before this time was thought to be a wise man, but in
consequence of this opinion got a very great name for wisdom among the
Lydians, had advised Crœsus as follows: ‘O king, thou art preparing
to march against men who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their
clothing is of leather also; and they eat food not such as they desire,
but such as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and,
moreover, they make no use of wine but drink water; and no figs have
they for dessert, nor any other good thing. On the one hand, if thou
shalt overcome them, what wilt thou take away from them, seeing they
have nothing? and, on the other hand, if thou shalt be overcome,
consider how many good things thou wilt lose; for once having tasted our
good things, they will cling to them fast, and it will not be possible
to drive them away. I, for my own part, feel gratitude to the gods that
they do not put it into the minds of the Persians to march against the
Lydians.’ Thus he spoke not persuading Crœsus; for it is true indeed
that the Persians before they subdued the Lydians had no luxury nor any
good thing.”

Crœand Cyrus fought an indecisive battle at Pteria, from which
Crœretreated. Cyrus followed him up, and he gave battle outside his
capital town of Sardis. The chief strength of the Lydians lay in their
cavalry; they were excellent, if undisciplined, horsemen, and fought
with long spears.

“Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians being arrayed for battle, fearing their
horsemen, did on the suggestion of Harpagos, a Mede, as follows: All the
camels which were in the train of his army carrying provisions and
baggage he gathered together, and he took off their burdens and set men
upon them provided with the equipment of cavalry; and, having thus
furnished them, forth he appointed them to go in front of the rest of
the army towards the horsemen of Crœsus; and after the camel-troop he
ordered the infantry to follow; and behind the infantry he placed his
whole force of cavalry. Then, when all his men had been placed in their
several positions, he charged them to spare none of the other Lydians,
slaying all who might come in their way, but Crœsus himself they were
not to slay, not even if he should make resistance when he was being
captured. Such was his charge: and he set the camels opposite the
horsemen for this reason--because the horse has a fear of the camel and
cannot endure either to see his form or to scent his smell; for this
reason then the trick had been devised, in order that the cavalry of
Crœsus might be useless, that very force wherewith the Lydian king
was expecting most to shine. And as they were coming together to the
battle, so soon as the horses scented the camels and saw them, they
turned away back, and the hopes of Crœsus were at once brought to
nought. The Lydians, however, for their part did not upon that act as
cowards, but when they perceived what was coming to pass, they leapt
from their horses and fought with the Persians on foot. At length,
however, when many had fallen on either side, the Lydians turned to
flight; and having been driven within the wall of their fortress, they
were besieged by the Persians.”

In fourteen days Sardis was stormed and Crœsus taken prisoner....

“So the Persians having taken him brought him into the presence of
Cyrus; and he piled up a great pyre and caused Crœsus to go up upon
it bound in fetters, and along with him twice seven sons of Lydians,
whether it was that he meant to dedicate this offering as first-fruits
of his victory to some god, or whether he desired to fulfil a vow, or
else had heard that Crœsus was a god-fearing man, and so caused him
to go up on the pyre because he wished to know if any one of the divine
powers would save him, so that he should not be burnt alive. He, they
say, did this; but to Crœsus as he stood upon the pyre there came,
although he was in such evil case, a memory of the saying of Solon, how
he had said with divine inspiration that no one of the living might be
called happy. And when this thought came into his mind, they say that
he sighed deeply and groaned aloud, having been for long silent, and
three times he uttered the name of Solon. Hearing this, Cyrus bade the
interpreters ask Crœsus who was this person on whom he called; and
they came near and asked. And Crœsus for a time, it is said, kept
silence when he was asked this, but afterwards, being pressed, he said:
‘One whom more than much wealth I should have desired to have speech
with all monarchs.’ Then, since his words were of doubtful import, they
asked again of that which he said; and as they were urgent with him and
gave him no peace, he told how once Solon, an Athenian, had come and
having inspected all his wealth had made light of it, with such and such
words; and how all had turned out for him according as Solon had said,
not speaking at all especially with a view to Crœsus himself, but
with a view to the whole human race, and especially those who seem to
themselves to be happy men. And while Crœsus related these things,
already the pyre was lighted and the edges of it round about were
burning. Then they say that Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what
Crœsus had said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself
also was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who had been
not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire; and, moreover,
he feared the requital, and reflected that there was nothing of that
which men possessed which was secure; therefore, they say, he ordered
them to extinguish as quickly as possible the fire that was burning, and
to bring down Crœsus and those who were with him from the pyre; and
they, using endeavours, were not able now to get the mastery of the
flames. Then it is related by the Lydians that Crœsus, having learned
how Cyrus had changed his mind, and seeing that every one was trying to
put out the fire, but that they were no longer able to check it, cried
aloud, entreating Apollo that if any gift had ever been given by him
which was acceptable to the god, he would come to his aid and rescue him
from the evil which was now upon him. So he with tears entreated the
god, and suddenly, they say, after clear sky and calm weather clouds
gathered and a storm burst, and it rained with a very violent shower,
and the pyre was extinguished. Then Cyrus, having perceived that
Crœsus was a lover of the gods and a good man, caused him to be
brought down from the pyre and asked him as follows: ‘Crœsus, tell
me who of all men was it who persuaded thee to march upon my land and so
to become an enemy to me instead of a friend?’ And he said: ‘O king, I
did this to thy felicity and to my own misfortune, and the causer of
this was the god of the Hellenes, who incited me to march with my army.
For no one is so senseless as to choose of his own will war rather than
peace, since in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the
fathers bury their sons. But it was pleasing, I suppose, to the divine
powers that these things should come to pass thus.’”

But Herodotus is too alluring a companion for one who would write an
Outline of History; and the rest of the life of Crœsus, and how he
gave wise counsels to Cyrus, must be read in his ampler page.

When Lydia was subdued, Cyrus turned his attention to Nabonidus in
Babylon. He defeated the Babylonian army, under Belshazzar, outside
Babylon, and then laid siege to the town. He entered the town (538
B.C.), probably as we have already suggested, with the connivance of the
priests of Bel.

§ 7

Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who took an army into Egypt
(525 B.C.). There was a battle in the delta, in which Greek mercenaries
fought on both sides. Herodotus declares that he saw the bones of the
slain still lying on the field fifty or sixty years later, and comments
on the comparative thinness of the Persian skulls. After this battle
Cambyses took Memphis and most of Egypt.

In Egypt, we are told, Cambyses went mad. He took great liberties with
the Egyptian temples, and remained at Memphis “opening ancient tombs and
examining the dead bodies.” He had already murdered both Crœsus,
ex-king of Lydia, and his own brother Smerdis before coming to Egypt,
and he died in Syria on the way back to Susa of an accidental wound,
leaving no heirs to succeed him. He was presently succeeded by Darius
the Mede (521 B.C.), the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors
of Cyrus.

The empire of Darius I was larger than any one of the preceding empires
whose growth we have traced. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, that
is to say, the ancient Lydian and Hittite empires, all the old Assyrian
and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media,
Persia, and it extended, perhaps, into India to the Indus. The nomadic
Arabians alone of all the peoples of what is nowadays called the Near
East, did not pay tribute to the satraps (provincial governors) of
Darius. The organization of this great empire seems to have been on a
much higher level of efficiency than any of its precursors. Great
arterial roads joined province to province, and there was a system of
royal posts;[179] at stated intervals post horses stood always ready to
carry the government messenger, or the traveller if he had a government
permit, on to the next stage of his journey. Apart from this imperial
right-of-way and the payment of tribute, the local governments possessed
a very considerable amount of local freedom. They were restrained from
internecine conflict, which was all to their own good. And at first the
Greek cities of the mainland of Asia paid the tribute and shared in this
Persian Peace.

Darius was first incited to attack the Greeks in Europe by a homesick
Greek physician at his court, who wanted at any cost to be back in
Greece. Darius had already made plans for an expedition into Europe,
aiming not at Greece, but to the northward of Greece, across the
Bosphorus and Danube. He wanted to strike at South Russia, which he
believed to be the home country of the Scythian nomads who threatened
him on his northern and north-eastern frontiers. But he lent an
attentive ear to the tempter, and sent agents into Greece.[180]

This great expedition of Darius opens out our view in this history. It
lifts a curtain upon the Balkan country behind Greece about which we
have said nothing hitherto; it carries us to and over the Danube. The
nucleus of his army marched from Susa, gathering up contingents as they
made their way to the Bosphorus. Here Greek allies (Ionian Greeks from
Asia) had made a bridge of boats, and the army crossed over while the
Greek allies sailed on in their ships to the Danube, and, two days’ sail
up from its mouth, landed to make another floating bridge. Meanwhile,
Darius and his host advanced along the coast of what is now Bulgaria,
but which was then called Thrace. They crossed the Danube, and prepared
to give battle to the Scythian army and take the cities of the
Scythians.

But the Scythians had no cities, and they evaded a battle, and the war
degenerated into a tedious and hopeless pursuit of more mobile enemies.
Wells were stopped up and pastures destroyed by the nomads. The Scythian
horsemen hung upon the skirts of the great army, which consisted mostly
of foot soldiers, picking off stragglers and preventing foraging; and
they did their best to persuade the Ionian Greeks, who had made and were
guarding the bridge across the Danube, to break up the bridge, and so
ensure the destruction of Darius. So long as Darius continued to
advance, however, the loyalty of his Greek allies remained unshaken.

But privation, fatigue, and sickness hindered and crippled the Persian
army; Darius lost many stragglers and consumed his supplies, and at last
the melancholy conviction dawned upon him that a retreat across the
Danube was necessary to save him from complete exhaustion and defeat.

In order to get a start in his retreat he sacrificed his sick and
wounded. He had these men informed that he was about to attack the
Scythians at nightfall, and under this pretence stole out of the camp
with the pick of his troops and made off southward, leaving the camp
fires burning and the usual noises and movements of the camp behind him.
Next day the men left in the camp realized the trick their monarch had
played upon them, and surrendered themselves to the mercy of the
Scythians; but Darius had got his start, and was able to reach the
bridge of boats before his pursuers came upon him. They were more mobile
than his troops, but they missed their quarry in the darkness. At the
river the retreating Persians “were brought to an extremity of fear,”
for they found the bridge partially broken down and its northern end
destroyed.

[Illustration: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its
greatest extent.]

At this point a voice echoes down the centuries to us. We see a group of
dismayed Persians standing about the Great King upon the bank of the
streaming river; we see the masses of halted troops, hungry and
war-worn; a trail of battered transport stretches away towards the
horizon, upon which at any time the advance guards of the pursuers may
appear. There is not much noise in spite of the multitude, but rather an
inquiring silence. Standing out like a pier from the further side of the
great stream are the remains of the bridge of boats, an enigma.... We
cannot discern whether there are men over there or not. The shipping of
the Ionian Greeks seems still to be drawn up on the further shore, but
it is all very far away.

“Now there was with Darius an Egyptian who had a voice louder than that
of any other man on earth, and this man Darius ordered to take his stand
upon the bank of the Ister (Danube) and to call Histiæus of Miletus.”

This worthy--a day is to come, as we shall presently tell, when his
decapitated head will be sent to Darius at Susa--appears approaching
slowly across the waters in a boat.

There is a parley, and we gather that it is “all right.”

The explanation Histiæus has to make is a complicated one. Some
Scythians have been and have gone again. Scouts, perhaps, these were. It
would seem there had been a discussion between the Scythians and the
Greeks. The Scythians wanted the bridge broken down; they would then,
they said, undertake to finish up the Persian army and make an end to
Darius and his empire, and the Ionian Greeks of Asia could then free
their cities again. Miltiades, the Athenian, was for accepting this
proposal. But Histiæus had been more subtle. He would prefer, he said,
to see the Persians completely destroyed before definitely abandoning
their cause. Would the Scythians go back and destroy the Persians to
make sure of them while the Greeks on their part destroyed the bridge?
Anyhow, whichever side the Greeks took finally, it was clear to him that
it would be wise to destroy the northern end of the bridge, because
otherwise the Scythians might rush it. Indeed, even as they parleyed the
Greeks set to work to demolish the end that linked them to the Scythians
as quickly as possible. In accordance with the suggestions of Histiæus
the Scythians rode off in search of the Persians, and so left the Greeks
safe in either event. If Darius escaped they could be on his side; if he
was destroyed, there was nothing of which the Scythians could complain.

Histiæus did not put it quite in that fashion to Darius. He had at least
kept the shipping and most of the bridge. He represented himself as the
loyal friend of Persia, and Darius was not disposed to be too critical.
The Ionian ships came over. With a sense of immense relief the remnant
of the wasted Persians were presently looking back at the steely flood
of the Danube streaming wide between themselves and their pursuers....

The pleasure and interest had gone out of the European expedition for
Darius. He returned to Susa, leaving an army in Thrace, under a trusted
general Megabazus. This Megabazus set himself to the subjugation of
Thrace, and among other states which submitted reluctantly to Darius was
a kingdom, which thus comes into our history for the first time, the
kingdom of Macedonia, a country inhabited by a people so closely allied
to the Greeks that one of its princes had already been allowed to
compete and take a prize in the Olympian games.

Darius was disposed to reward Histiæus by allowing him to build a city
for himself in Thrace, but Megabazus had a different opinion of the
trustworthiness of Histiæus, and prevailed upon the king to take him to
Susa, and, under the title of councillor, to keep him a prisoner there.
Histiæus was at first flattered by this court position, and then
realized its true meaning. The Persian court bored him, and he grew
homesick for Miletus. He set himself to make mischief, and was able to
stir up a revolt against the Persians among the Ionian Greeks on the
mainland. The twistings and turnings of the story, which included the
burning of Sardis by the Ionians and the defeat of a Greek fleet at the
battle of Ladé (495 B.C.), are too complicated to follow here. It is a
dark and intricate story of treacheries, cruelties, and hate, in which
the death of the wily Histiæus shines almost cheerfully. The Persian
governor of Sardis, through which town he was being taken on his way
back to Susa as a prisoner, having much the same opinion of him as
Megabazus had, and knowing his ability to humbug Darius, killed him
there and then, and sent on the head only to his master.

Cyprus and the Greek islands were dragged into this contest that
Histiæus had stirred up, and at last Athens. Darius realized the error
he had made in turning to the right and not to the left when he had
crossed the Bosphorus, and he now set himself to the conquest of all
Greece. He began with the islands. Tyre and Sidon were subject to
Persia, and ships of the Phœnician and of the Ionian Greeks provided
the Persians with a fleet by means of which one Greek island after
another was subjugated.

§ 8

The first attack upon Greece proper was made in 490 B.C. It was a sea
attack upon Athens, with a force long and carefully prepared for the
task, the fleet being provided with specially built transports for the
conveyance of horses. This expedition made a landing near Marathon in
Attica. The Persians were guided into Marathon by a renegade Greek,
Hippias, the son of Peisistratus, who had been tyrant of Athens. If
Athens fell, then Hippias was to be its tyrant, under the protection of
the Persians. Meanwhile, so urgent was the sense of a crisis in the
affairs of Hellas, that a man, a herald and runner, went from Athens to
Sparta, forgetful of all feuds, to say: “Lacedemonians, the Athenians
make request of you to come to their help, and not to allow a city most
anciently established among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the
means of Barbarians; for even now Eretria has been enslaved and Hellas
has become the weaker by a city of renown.” This man, Pheidippides, did
the distance from Athens to Sparta, nearly a hundred miles as the crow
flies, and much more if we allow for the contours and the windings of
the way, in something under eight and forty hours.

But before the Spartans could arrive on the scene the battle was joined.
The Athenians charged the enemy. They fought--“in a memorable fashion:
for they were the first of all the Hellenes about whom we know who went
to attack the enemy at a run, and they were the first also who endured
to face the Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to
this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a terror to
hear.”

The Persian wings gave before this impetuous attack, but the centre
held. The Athenians, however, were cool as well as vigorous; they let
the wings run and closed in on the flanks of the centre, whereupon the
main body of the Persians fled to their ships. Seven vessels fell into
the hands of the Athenians; the rest got away, and, after a futile
attempt to sail round to Athens and seize the city before the army
returned thither, the fleet made a retreat to Asia. Let Herodotus close
the story with a paragraph that still further enlightens us upon the
tremendous prestige of the Medes at this time:

[Illustration: The WARS of the GREEKS and PERSIANS]

“Of the Lacedemonians there came to Athens two thousand after the full
moon, making great haste to be in time, so that they arrived in Attica
on the third day after leaving Sparta: and though they had come too late
for the battle, yet they desired to behold the Medes; and accordingly
they went on to Marathon and looked at the bodies of the slain: then
afterwards they departed home, commending the Athenians and the work
which they had done.”

§ 9

So Greece, unified for a while by fear, gained her first victory over
Persia. The news came to Darius simultaneously with the news of a
rebellion in Egypt, and he died while still undecided in which direction
to turn. His son and successor, Xerxes, turned first to Egypt and set up
a Persian satrap there; then for four years he prepared a second attack
upon Greece. Says Herodotus, who was, one must remember, a patriotic
Greek, approaching now to the climax of his History:

“For what nation did Xerxes not lead out of Asia against Hellas? and
what water was not exhausted, being drunk by his host, except only the
great rivers? For some supplied ships, and others were appointed to
serve in the land-army; to some it was appointed to furnish cavalry, and
to others vessels to carry horses, while they served in the expedition
themselves also; others were ordered to furnish ships of war for the
bridges, and others again ships with provisions.”

[Illustration: Monument of Athenian foot soldier, found near Marathon.]

Xerxes passed into Europe, not as Darius did at the half-mile crossing
of the Bosphorus, but at the Hellespont (the Dardanelles). In his
account of the assembling of the great army, and its march from Sardis
to the Hellespont, the poet in Herodotus takes possession of the
historian. The great host passes in splendour by Troy, and Xerxes, who
although a Persian and a Barbarian, seems to have had the advantages of
a classical education, turns aside, says our historian, to visit the
citadel of Priam. The Hellespont was bridged at Abydos, and upon a hill
was set a marble throne from which Xerxes surveyed the whole array of
his forces.

“And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships and all the
shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then Xerxes pronounced
himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanus, his
uncle, therefore perceiving him--the same who at first boldly declared
his opinion advising Xerxes not to march against Hellas--this man, I
say, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: ‘O king, how
far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now
and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man,
thou art now shedding tears.’ He said: ‘Yea, for after I had reckoned
up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the
whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive
when a hundred years have gone by.’”

This may not be exact history, but it is great poetry. It is as splendid
as anything in _The Dynasts_.

The Persian fleet, coasting from headland to headland, accompanied this
land multitude during its march southward; but a violent storm did the
fleet great damage and 400 ships were lost, including much corn
transport. At first the united Hellenes marched out to meet the invaders
at the Vale of Tempe near Mount Olympus, but afterwards retreated
through Thessaly, and chose at last to await the advancing Persians at a
place called Thermopylæ, where at that time--2300 years have altered
these things greatly--there was a great cliff on the landward side and
the sea to the east, with a track scarcely wide enough for a chariot
between. The great advantage to the Greeks of this position at
Thermopylæ was that it prevented the use of either cavalry or chariots,
and narrowed the battle front so as to minimize their numerical
inequality. And there the Persians joined battle with them one summer
day in the year 480 B.C.

For three days the Greeks held this great army, and did them much damage
with small loss to themselves, and then on the third day a detachment
of Persians appeared upon the rear of the Greeks, having learnt of a way
over the mountains from a peasant. There were hasty discussions among
the Greeks; some were for withdrawing, some for holding out. The leader
of the whole force, Leonidas, was for staying; and with him he would
keep, he said, 300 Spartans. The rest of the Greek army could,
meanwhile, make good its retreat to the next defensible pass. The
Thespian contingent of 700, however, refused to fall back. They
preferred to stay and die with the Spartans. Also a contingent of 400
Thebans remained. As Thebes afterwards joined the Persians, there is a
story that these Thebans were detained by force against their will,
which seems on military as well as historical grounds improbable. These
1400 stayed, and were, after a conflict of heroic quality, slain to a
man. Two Spartans happened to be away, sick with ophthalmia. When they
heard the news, one was too ill to move; the other made his helot guide
him to the battle, and there struck blindly until he was killed. The
other, Aristodemus, was taken away with the retreating troops, and
returned to Sparta, where he was not actually punished for his conduct,
but was known as Tresas, “the man who retreated.” It was enough to
distinguish him from all other Spartans, and he got himself killed at
the Battle of Platæa a year later, performing prodigies of reckless
courage.... For a whole day this little band had held the pass, assailed
in front and rear by the whole force of the Persians. They had covered
the retreat of the main Greek army, they had inflicted great losses on
the invaders, and they had raised the prestige of the Greek warrior over
that of the Mede higher even than the victory of Marathon had done.

The Persian cavalry and transport filtered slowly through the narrow
passage of Thermopylæ, and marched on towards Athens, while a series of
naval encounters went on at sea. The Hellenic fleet retreated before the
advance of the Persian shipping, which suffered seriously through its
comparative ignorance of the intricate coasts and of the tricks of the
local weather. Weight of numbers carried the Persian army forward to
Athens; now that Thermopylæ was lost, there was no line of defence
nearer than the Isthmus of Corinth, and this meant the abandonment of
all the intervening territory, including Athens. The population had
either to fly or submit to the Persians. Thebes with all Bœotia
submitted, and was pressed into the Persian army, except one town,
Platæa, whose inhabitants fled to Athens. The turn of Athens came next,
and great efforts were made to persuade her to make terms; but, instead,
the whole population determined to abandon everything and take to the
shipping. The women and non-combatants were carried to Salamis and
various adjacent islands. Only a few people too old to move and a few
dissentients remained in the town, which was occupied by the Persians
and burnt. The sacred objects, statues, etc., which were burnt at this
time, were afterwards buried in the Acropolis by the returning
Athenians, and have been dug up in our own day with the marks of burning
visible upon them. Xerxes sent off a mounted messenger to Susa with the
news, and he invited the sons of Peisistratus, whom he had brought back
with him, to enter upon their inheritance and sacrifice after the
Athenian manner upon the Acropolis.

Meanwhile, the Hellenic confederate fleet had come round to Salamis, and
in the council of war there were bitter differences of opinion. Corinth
and the states behind the Isthmus wanted the fleet to fall back to that
position, abandoning the cities of Megara and Ægina. Themistocles
insisted with all his force on fighting in the narrows of Salamis. The
majority was steadily in favour of retreat, when there suddenly arrived
the news that retreat was cut off. The Persians had sailed round Salamis
and held the sea on the other side. This news was brought by that
Aristides the Just, of whose ostracism we have already told; his sanity
and eloquence did much to help Themistocles to hearten the hesitating
commanders. These two men had formerly been bitter antagonists; but with
a generosity rare in those days, they forgot their differences before
the common danger. At dawn the Greek ships pulled out to battle.

The fleet before them was a fleet more composite and less united than
their own. But it was about three times as great. On one wing were the
Phœnicians, on the other Ionian Greeks from Asia and the Islands.
Some of the latter fought stoutly; others remembered that they too were
Greeks. The Greek ships, on the other hand, were mostly manned by
freemen fighting for their homes. Throughout the early hours the battle
raged confusedly. Then it became evident to Xerxes, watching the
combat, that his fleet was attempting flight. The flight became
disaster.

Soldiers of the Persian body-guard.

(From frieze in the audience hall of Darius at Susa.)]

Xerxes had taken his seat to watch the battle. He saw his galleys rammed
by the sharp prows of other galleys; his fighting-men shot down; his
ships boarded. Much of the sea-fighting in those days was done by
ramming; the big galleys bore down their opponents by superior weight of
impact, or sheared off their oars and so destroyed their manœuvring
power and left them helpless. Presently, Xerxes saw that some of his
broken ships were surrendering. In the water he could see the heads of
Greeks swimming to land; but “of the Barbarians the greater number
perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim.” The clumsy attempt of the
hard-pressed first line of the Persian fleet to put about led to
indescribable confusion. Some were rammed by the rear ships of their
own side. This ancient shipping was poor, unseaworthy stuff by any
modern standards. The west wind was blowing and many of the broken ships
of Xerxes were now drifting away out of his sight to be wrecked on the
coast beyond. Others were being towed towards Salamis by the Greeks.
Others, less injured and still in fighting trim, were making for the
beaches close beneath him that would bring them under the protection of
his army. Scattered over the further sea, beyond the headlands, remote
and vague, were ships in flight and Greek ships in pursuit. Slowly,
incident by incident, the disaster had unfolded under his eyes. We can
imagine something of the coming and going of messengers, the issuing of
futile orders, the changes of plan, throughout the day. In the morning
Xerxes had come out provided with tables to mark the most successful of
his commanders for reward. In the gold of the sunset he beheld the sea
power of Persia utterly scattered, sunken and destroyed, and the Greek
fleet over against Salamis unbroken and triumphant, ordering its ranks,
as if still incredulous of victory.

The Persian army remained as if in indecision for some days close to the
scene of this sea fight, and then began to retreat to Thessaly, where it
was proposed to winter and resume the campaign. But Xerxes, like Darius
I before him, had conceived a disgust for European campaigns. He was
afraid of the destruction of the bridge of boats. With part of the army
he went on to the Hellespont, leaving the main force in Thessaly under a
general, Mardonius. Of his own retreat the historian relates:

“Whithersoever they came on the march and to whatever nation they seized
the crops of that people and used them for provisions; and if they found
no crops, then they took the grass which was growing up from the earth,
and stripped off the bark from the trees and plucked down the leaves and
devoured them; alike of the cultivated trees and of those growing wild;
and they left nothing behind them: thus they did by reason of famine.
Then plague too seized upon the army and dysentery, which destroyed them
by the way, and some of them also who were sick the king left behind,
laying charge upon the cities where at the time he chanced to be in his
march, to take care of them and support them; of these he left some in
Thessaly, and some at Siris in Paionia, and some in Macedonia.... When,
passing on from Thrace they came to the passage, they crossed over the
Hellespont in haste to Abydos by means of the ships, for they did not
find the floating bridges still stretched across, but broken up by a
storm. While staying there for a time they had distributed to them an
allowance of food more abundant than they had had by the way, and from
satisfying their hunger without restraint and also from the changes of
water there died many of those in the army who had remained safe till
then. The rest arrived with Xerxes at Sardis.”

§ 10

The rest of the Persian army remained in Thessaly under the command of
Mardonius, and for a year he maintained an aggressive campaign against
the Greeks. Finally, he was defeated and killed in a pitched battle at
Platæa (479 B.C.), and on the same day the Persian fleet and a land army
met with joint disaster under the shadow of Mount Mycale on the Asiatic
mainland, between Ephesus and Miletus. The Persian ships, being in fear
of the Greeks, had been drawn up on shore and a wall built about them;
but the Greeks disembarked and stormed this enclosure. They then sailed
to the Hellespont to destroy what was left of the bridge of boats, so
that later the Persian fugitives, retreating from Platæa, had to cross
by shipping at the Bosphorus, and did so with difficulty.

Encouraged by these disasters of the imperial power, the Ionian cities
in Asia began for a second time to revolt against the Persians.

With this the ninth book of the _History_ of Herodotus comes to an end.
He was born about 484 B.C., so that at the time of the battle of Platæa
he was a child of five years old. Much of the substance of his story was
gathered by him from actors in, and eye-witnesses of, the great events
he relates. The war still dragged on for a long time; the Greeks
supported a rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt, and tried
unsuccessfully to take Cyprus; it did not end until about 449 B.C. Then
the Greek coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek cities in the Black Sea
remained generally free, but Cyprus and Egypt continued under Persian
rule. Herodotus, who had been born a Persian subject in the Ionian city
of Halicarnassus, was five and thirty years old by that time, and he
must have taken an early opportunity after this peace of visiting
Babylon and Persia. He probably went to Athens, with his History ready
to recite, about 438 B.C.

The idea of a great union of Greece for aggression against Persia was
not altogether strange to Herodotus. Some of his readers suspect him of
writing to enforce it. It was certainly in the air at that time. He
describes Aristagoras, the son-in-law of Histiæus, as showing the
Spartans “a tablet of bronze on which was engraved a map of the whole
earth with all the seas and rivers.” He makes Aristagoras say: “These
Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You, on the other hand, have now
attained to the utmost skill in war. They fight with bows and arrows and
a short spear: they go into battle wearing trousers and having caps on
their heads. You have perfected your weapons and discipline. They are
easily to be conquered. Not all the other nations of the world have what
they possess: gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and
slaves; _all this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired_.”

[Illustration: The World according to HERODOTUS]

It was a hundred years before these suggestions bore fruit.

Xerxes was murdered in his palace about 465 B.C., and thereafter Persia
made no further attempts at conquest in Europe. We have no such
knowledge of the things that were happening in the empire of the Great
King as we have of the occurrences in the little states of Central
Greece. Greece had suddenly begun to produce literature, and put itself
upon record as no other nation had ever done hitherto. After 479 B.C.
(Platæa) the spirit seems to have gone out of the government of the
Medes and Persians. The empire of the Great King enters upon a period of
decay. An Artaxerxes, a second Xerxes, a second Darius, pass across the
stage; there are rebellions in Egypt and Syria; the Medes rebel; a
second Artaxerxes and a second Cyrus, his brother, fight for the throne.
This history is even as the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt in
the older times. It is autocracy reverting to its normal state of palace
crime, blood-stained magnificence, and moral squalor. But the last-named
struggle produced a Greek masterpiece, for this second Cyrus collected
an army of Greek mercenaries and marched into Babylonia, and was there
killed at the moment of victory over Artaxerxes II. Thereupon, the Ten
Thousand Greeks, left with no one to employ them, made a retreat to the
coast again (401 B.C.), and this retreat was immortalized in a book, one
of the first of personal war books, the _Anabasis_, by their leader
Xenophon.

Murders, revolts, chastisements, disasters, cunning alliances, and base
betrayals, and no Herodotus to record them. Such is the texture of
Persian history. An Artaxerxes III, covered with blood, flourishes dimly
for a time. “Artaxerxes III is said to have been murdered by Bagoas, who
places Arses, the youngest of the king’s sons, on the throne only to
slay him in turn when he seemed to be contemplating independent
action.”[181] So it goes on. Beneath the crimes and disorders of the
palaces, the life of the city and country ran a similar course.

Justice was fitful and law venal. Wars that were unmeaning catastrophes
swept down upon any little gleam of prosperity or decency to which this
or that community clambered. Athens, prospering for a time after the
Persian repulse, was smitten by the plague, in which Pericles, its
greatest ruler, died (428 B.C.). But, as a noteworthy fact amidst these
confusions, the Ten Thousand of Xenophon were scattering now among the
Greek cities, repeating from their own experience the declaration of
Aristagoras that the Persian empire was a rich confusion which it would
be very easy to conquer.

XXIII

GREEK THOUGHT AND LITERATURE[182]

     § 1. _The Athens of Pericles._ § 2. _Socrates._ § 3. _What was the
     Quality of the Common Athenians?_ § 4. _Greek Tragedy and Comedy._
     § 5. _Plato and the Academy._ § 6. _Aristotle and the Lyceum._ § 7.
     _Philosophy becomes Unworldly._ § 8. _The Quality and Limitations
     of Greek Thought._

§ 1

Greek history for the next forty years after Platæa and Mycale is a
story of comparative peace and tranquillity. There were wars, but they
were not intense wars. For a little while in Athens, for a section of
the prosperous, there was leisure and opportunity. And by a combination
of accidents and through the character of a small group of people, this
leisure and opportunity produced the most remarkable and memorable
results. A beautiful literature was produced; the plastic arts
flourished, and the foundations of modern science were laid. Then, after
an interlude of fifty odd years, the long-smouldering hostility between
Athens and Sparta broke out into a fierce and exhausting war, which
sapped at last the vitality of this creative movement.

This war is known in history as the Peloponnesian War; it went on for
nearly thirty years, and wasted all the power of Greece. At first Athens
was in the ascendant, then Sparta. Then arose Thebes, a city not fifty
miles from Athens, to overshadow Sparta. Once more Athens flared into
importance as the head of a confederation. The story must be told at
considerable length or not told at all. It is a story of narrow
rivalries and inexplicable hatreds that would have vanished long ago
out of the memories of men, were it not that it is recorded and
reflected in a great literature.

Through all this time Persia appears and reappears as the ally first of
this league and then of that. About the middle of the fourth century
B.C., Greece becomes aware of a new influence in its affairs, that of
Philip, King of Macedonia. Macedonia does, indeed, arise in the
background of this incurably divided Greece as the Medes and Persians
arose behind the Chaldean Empire. A time comes when the Greek mind turns
round, so to speak, from its disputes, and stares in one united dismay
at the Macedonian.

Planless and murderous squabbles are still planless and murderous
squabbles even though Thucydides tells the story, even though the great
beginnings of a new civilization are wrecked by their disorders; and in
this general outline we can give no space at all to the particulars of
these internecine feuds, to the fights and flights that sent first this
Greek city and then that up to the sky in flames. Upon a one-foot globe
Greece becomes a speck almost too small to recognize; and in a short
history of mankind, all this century and more of dissension between the
days of Salamis and Platæa and the rise of King Philip, shrinks to a
little, almost inaudible clash of disputation, to a mere note upon the
swift passing of opportunity for nations as for men.

But what does not shrink into insignificance, because it has entered
into the intellectual process of all subsequent nations, because it is
inseparably a part of our mental foundation, is the literature that
Athens produced during such patches and gleams of tranquillity and
security as these times afforded her.

Says Professor Gilbert Murray:[183]

“Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other nations,
is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and deceit. It is the
inner history, the history of thought and feeling and character, that is
so grand. They had some difficulties to contend with which are now
almost out of our path. They had practically no experience, but were
doing everything for the first time; they were utterly weak in material
resources, and their emotions, their ‘_desires and fears and rages_,’
were probably wilder and fiercer than ours. Yet they produced the Athens
of Pericles and of Plato.”

This remarkable outbreak of creative power, which for three and twenty
centuries has been to men of intelligence a guiding and inspiring beacon
out of the past, flared up after the battles of Marathon and Salamis had
made Athens free and fearless, and, without any great excesses of power,
predominant in her world. It was the work of a quite small group of men.
A number of her citizens lived for the better part of a generation under
conditions which, in all ages, have disposed men to produce good and
beautiful work; they were secure, they were free, and they had pride;
and they were without that temptation of apparent and unchallenged power
which disposes all of us to inflict wrongs upon our fellow men. When
political life narrowed down again to the waste and crimes of a
fratricidal war with Sparta, there was so broad and well-fed a flame of
intellectual activity burning that it lasted through all the windy
distresses of this war and beyond the brief lifetime of Alexander the
Great, for a period altogether of more than a hundred years after the
wars began.

Athens, it must be understood, was by far the largest of all the Greek
city democracies. Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly
won, her people did for a time rise towards nobility. Under the guidance
of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief official of the Athenian
general assembly, and a politician statesman rather of the calibre of
Gladstone or Lincoln in modern history, they were set to the task of
rebuilding their city and expanding their commerce. For a time they were
capable of following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a
generous leader. In Pericles there was mingled in the strangest fashion
political ability with a real living passion for deep and high and
beautiful things. He kept in power for over thirty years. He was a man
of extraordinary vigour and liberality of mind. He stamped these
qualities upon his time. As Winckler has remarked, the Athenian
democracy had for a time “the face of Pericles.” He was sustained by
what was probably a very great and noble friendship. There was a woman
of unusual education, Aspasia, from Miletus, whom he could not marry
because of the law that restricted the citizenship of Athens to the
home-born, but who was in effect his wife. She played a large part in
gathering about him men of unusual gifts. All the great writers of the
time knew her, and several have praised her wisdom. Plutarch, it is
true, accuses her of instigating a troublesome and dangerous but finally
successful war against Samos, but, as he himself shows later, this was
necessitated by the naval hostility of the Samians, which threatened the
overseas trade of Athens, upon which all the prosperity of the republic
depended.

Men’s ambitions are apt to reflect the standards of their intimates.
Pericles was content, at any rate, to serve as a leader in Athens rather
than to dominate as a tyrant. Alliances were formed under his guidance,
new colonies and trading stations were established from Italy to the
Black Sea; and the treasures of the league at Delos were brought to
Athens. Convinced of his security from Persia, Pericles spent the war
hoard of the allies upon the beautification of his city. This was an
unrighteous thing to do by our modern standards, but it was not a base
or greedy thing to do. Athens had accomplished the work of the Delian
League, and is not the labourer worthy of his hire? This sequestration
made a time of exceptional opportunity for architects and artists. The
Parthenon of Athens, whose ruins are still a thing of beauty, was but
the crown set upon the clustering glories of the Athens Pericles
rebuilt. Such sculptures as those of Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus that
still survive, witness to the artistic quality of the time.

The reader must bear in mind that illuminating remark of Winckler’s,
which says that this renascent Athens bore for a time the face of
Pericles. It was the peculiar genius of this man and of his atmosphere
that let loose the genius of men about him, and attracted men of great
intellectual vigour to Athens. Athens wore his face for a time as one
wears a mask, and then became restless and desired to put him aside.
There was very little that was great and generous about the common
Athenian. We have told of the spirit of one sample voter for the
ostracism of Aristides, and Lloyd (in his _Age of Pericles_) declares
that the Athenians would not suffer the name of Miltiades to be
mentioned in connection with the battle of Marathon. The sturdy
self-respect of the common voters revolted presently against the
beautiful buildings rising about them; against the favours shown to such
sculptors as Phidias over popular worthies in the same line of
business; against the donations made to a mere foreigner like Herodotus
of Halicarnassus; against the insulting preference of Pericles for the
company and conversation of a Milesian woman. The public life of
Pericles was conspicuously orderly, and that presently set the man in
the street thinking that his private life must be very corrupt. One
gathers that Pericles was “superior” in his demeanour; he betrayed at
times a contempt for the citizens he served.

“Pericles acquired not only an elevation of sentiment, and a loftiness
and purity of style far removed from the low expression of the vulgar,
but likewise a gravity of countenance which relaxed not into laughter, a
firm and even tone of voice, an easy deportment, and a decency of dress
which no vehemence of speaking ever put into disorder. These things, and
others of a like nature, excited admiration in all that saw him. Such
was his conduct, when a vile and abandoned fellow loaded him a whole day
with reproaches and abuse; he bore it with patience and silence, and
continued in public for the despatch of some urgent affairs. In the
evening he walked softly home, this impudent wretch following, and
insulting him all the way with the most scurrilous language. And as it
was dark when he came to his own door, he ordered one of his servants to
take a torch and light the man home. The poet Ion, however, says he was
proud and supercilious in conversation, and that there was a great deal
of vanity and contempt of others mixed with his dignity of manner.... He
appeared not in the streets except when he went to the forum or the
senate house. He declined the invitations of his friends, and all social
entertainments and recreations; insomuch that in the whole time of his
administration, which was a considerable length, he never went to sup
with any of his friends but once, which was at the marriage of his
nephew Euryptolemus, and he stayed there only until the ceremony of
libation was ended. He considered that the freedom of entertainments
takes away all distinction of office, and that dignity is but little
consistent with familiarity....”[184]

There was as yet no gutter journalism to tell the world of the vileness
of the conspicuous and successful; but the common man, a little out of
conceit with himself, found much consolation in the art of comedy,
which flourished exceedingly. The writers of comedy satisfied that
almost universal craving for the depreciation of those whose apparent
excellence offends our self-love. They threw dirt steadily and
industriously at Pericles and his friends. Pericles was portrayed in a
helmet; a helmet became him, and it is to be feared he knew as much.
This led to much joy and mirth over the pleasant suggestion of a
frightfully distorted head, an onion head. The “goings on” of Aspasia
were of course a fruitful vineyard for the inventions of the street....

[Illustration: Athene of the Parthenon.]

Dreaming souls, weary of the vulgarities of our time, have desired to be
transferred to the sublime Age of Pericles. But, plumped down into that
Athens, they would have found themselves in very much the atmosphere of
the lower sort of contemporary music-hall, very much in the vein of our
popular newspapers; the same hot blast of braying libel, foul
imputation, greedy “patriotism,” and general baseness would have blown
upon them, the “modern note” would have pursued them. As the memories of
Platæa and Salamis faded and the new buildings grew familiar, Pericles
and the pride of Athens became more and more offensive to the homely
humour of the crowd. He was never ostracized--his prestige with the
quieter citizens saved him from that; but he was attacked with
increasing boldness and steadfastness. He lived and died a poor man; he
was perhaps the most honest of demagogues; but this did not save him
from an abortive prosecution for peculation. Defeated in that, his
enemies resorted to a more devious method; they began to lop away his
friends.

Religious intolerance and moral accusations are the natural weapons of