Ancient History Sourcebook:
11th Brittanica: History of Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece to 146 B.C.
I. Introductory.-It is necessary to indicate at the outset the scope and object of the present article. The reader must not expect to find in it a compendious summary of the chief events in the history of ancient Greece. It is not intended to supply an "Outlines of Greek History." It may be questioned whether such a sketch of the history, within the limits of space which are necessarily imposed in a work of reference, would be of utility to any class of readers. At any rate, the plan of the present work, in which the subject of Greek history is treated of in a large number of separate articles, allows of the narrative of events being given in a more satisfactory form under the more general of the headings (e.g. ATHENS, SPARTA, PELOPONNESIAN WAR) The character of the history itself suggests a further reason why a general article upon Greek history should not be confined to, or even attempt, a narrative of events. A sketch of Greek history is not possible in the sense in which a sketch ol Roman history, or even of English history, is possible. Greek history is not the history of a single state. When Aristotle composed his work upon the constitutions of the Greek states, he found it necessary to extend his survey to no less that 158 states. Greek history is thus concerned with more than 150 separate and independent political communities. Nor is it even the history of a single country. The area occupied by the Greek race extended from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus, and from southern Russia to northern Africa. It is inevitable, therefore that the impression conveyed by a sketch of Greek history should be a misleading one. A mere narrative can hardly fai' to give a false perspective. Experience shows that such a sketch is apt to resolve itself into the history of a few grea movements confine itself, at any rate for the greater part of the period dealt with, to the history of Greece in the narrower sense i.e. of the Greek peninsula. For the identification of Greect with Greece proper there may be some degree of excuse when w~ come to the sth and 4th centuries. In the period that lies behinc the year 500 B.C. Greece proper forms but a small part of the Greek world. In the 7th and 6th centuries it is outside Greece itself that we must look for the most active life of the Greel people and the most brilliant manifestations of the Greek spirit The present article, therefore, will be concerned with the cause and conditions of events, rather than with the events themselves it will attempt analysis rather than narrative. Its object wil be to indicate problems and to criticize views; to sugges lessons and parallels, and to estimate the importance of the Hellenic factor in the development of civilization.
2. The Minoan and Mycenaean Ages-When does Greek history begin? Whatever may be the answer that is given to this question, it will be widely different from any that could have been proposed a generation ago. Then the question was How late does Greek history begin? Today the question is How early does it begin? The suggestion made by Grote that the first Olympiad (776 B.C.) should be taken as the starting point of the history of Greece, in the proper sense of the tern "history," seemed likely, not so many years ago, to win genera acceptance. At the present moment the tendency would seen to be to go back as far as the 3rd or 4th millennium B.C. in order to reach a startingpoint. It is to the results of archaeologica research during the last thirty years that we must attribute so startling a change in the attitude of historical science toward this problem. In the days when Grote published the first volume of his History of Greece archaeology was in its infancy. It results, so far as they affected the earlier periods of Greek history were scanty; its methods were unscientific. The methods have been gradually perfected by numerous workers in the field; by the results, which have so profoundly modified our conception of the early history of the Aegean area, are principally due Evans. A full account of these discoveries will be found elsewhere (see AEGEAN CIVILIZATION and CRETE). It will be sufficient to mention here that Schliemann's labours began with the excavations on the site of Troy in the years 1870-1873; that he passed on to the excavations at Mycenae in 1876 and to those at Tiryns in 1884. It was the discoveries of these years that reveal~ to us the Mycenaean age, and carried back the history to the middle of the 2nd millennium. The discoveries of Dr A. J. Eva in the island of Crete belong to a later period. The work excavation was begun in 1900, and was carried on in subseque years. It has revealed to us the Minoan age, and enabled to tra.ce back the development and origins af the civilization for a further period of 1000 or 1500 years. The dates assigned by archaeologists to the different periods of Mycenaean and Minoan art must be regarded as merely approximate. Ev the relation of the two civilizations is still, to some extent, matter of conjecture. The general chronological scheme, however, in the sense of the relative order of the various periods and the approximate intervals between them, is too firmly established, both by internal evidence, such as the development of the styles of pottery, and of the art in general, and by external evidence, such as the points of contact with Egyptian art and history, to admit of its being any longer seriously called in question.
If, then, by "Greek history" is to be understood the history of the lands occupied in later times by thd Greek race (i.e. the Greek peninsula and the Aegean basin), the beginnirigs of the history must be carried back some 2000 years before Grote's proposed startingpoint. If, however, "Greek history" is taken to mean the history of the Greek people, the determination of the startingpoint is far from easy. For tbe question to which archaeology daes not as yet supply any certain answer is the question of race. Were the creators of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization Greeks or were they not? In some degree the Minoan evidence has modified the answer suggested by the Mycenaean. Although wide differences of opinion as to the origin of the Mycenaean civilization existed among scholars when the results of Schliemann's labours were first given to the world, a general agreement had gradually been arrived at in favour of the view which would identify Mycenaean with Achaean or Homeric. In presence of the Cretan evidence it is no longer possible to maintain this view with the same confidence. The two chief difficulties in the way of attributing either the Minoan or the Mycenaean civilization to an Hellenic people are connected respectively with the script and the religion. The excavations at Cnossus have yielded thousands of tablets written in the linear script. There is evidence that this script was in use among the Mycenaeans as well. If Greek was the language spoken at Cnossus and Mycenae, how is it that all attempts to decipher the script have hitherto failed? The Cretan excavations, agaiin, have taught us a great deal as to the religion of the Minoan age; they have, at the same time, thrown a new light upon the evidence supplied by Mycenaean sites. It is no longer possib}e to ignore the contrast between the cults of the Minoan and Mycenaean ages, and the religious conceptions which they imply, and the cults and religious conceptions prevalent in the historical period. On the other hand, it may safely be asserted that the argument derived from the Mycenaean art, in which we seem to trace a freedom of treatment which is akin to the spirit of the later Greek art, and is in complete contrast to the spirit of Oriental art, has received striking confirmation from the remains of Minoan art. The decipherment of the script would at once solve the problem. We should at least know whether the dominant race in Crete in the Minoan age spoke an Hellenic or a nonHellenic dialect. And what could be inferred with regard to Crete in the Minoan age could al~nost certainly be inferred with regard to the mainland in the Mycenaean age. In the meanwhile, possibly until the tablets are read, at any rate until further evidence is forthcorning, any answer that can be given to the question must necessarily be tentative and provisional. (See aegean civilization.)
It has already been implied that this period of the history of Greece may be subdivided into a Minoan and a Mycenaean age. Whether these terms are appropriate is a question of comparatively little importance. They at least serve to remind us of the part played by the discoveries at Mycenae and Cnossus in the reconstruction of the history. The term "Mycenaean," it is true, has other associations than those of locality. It may seem to imply that the civilization disclosed in the excavations at Mycenae is Achaean in character, and that it is to be connected with the Pelopid dynasty to which Agamemnon belonged. In its scientific use, the term must be cleared of all such associations. Further, as opposed to "Minoan" it must be understood in a more definite sense than that in which it has often been employed. It has come to be generally recognized that two different periods are to be distinguished in Schliemann's discoveries at Mycenae itself. There is an earlier period, to which belong the objects found in the shaftgraves, and there is a later period, to which belong the beehive tombs and the remains of the palaces. It is the latter period rhich is "Mycenaean" in the strict sense; .6. it is "Mycenaean" as opposed to "Minoan." To this period belong also the palace at Tiryns, the beehivetombs discovered elsewhere on the mainland of Greece and one of the cities on the site of Troy (Schliemann's sixth). The pottery of this period is as characteristic of it, both in its forms (e.g. the "Stirrup or "falsenecked" form of vase) and in its peculiar glaze, as is the architecture of the palaces and the beehivetombs. Although the chief remains have been found on the mainland of Greece itself, the art of this period is found to have extended as far north as Troy and as far east as Cyprus. On the other hand, hardly any traces of it have been discovered on the west coast of Asia Minor, south of the Troad. The Mycenaean age, in this sense, may be regarded as extending from 600 to 200 B.C. The Minoan age is of far wider extent. Its latest period includes both the earlier and the later periods of the remains found at Mycenae. This is the period called by Dr Evans "Late Minoan." To this period belong the Great Palace at Cnossus and the linear system of writing. The "Middle Minoan" period, to which the earlier palace belongs, is characterized by the pictographic system of writing and by polychrome pottery of a peculiarly beautiful kind. Dr Evans proposes to carry baclc this period as far as 2500 B.C. Even behind it there are traces of a still earlier civilization. Thus the Minoan age, even if limited to the middle and }ater periods, will cover at least a thousand years. Perhaps the most surprising result of the excavations in Crete is the discovery that Minoan art is on a higher level than Mycenaean art. To the scholars of a generation ago itseemed a thing incredible that the art of the shaftgraves, and the architecture of the beehivetombs and the palaces, could belong to the age before the Dorian invasion. The most recent discoveries seem to indicate that the art of Mycenae is a decadent art; they certainly prove that an art, hardly inferior in its way to the art of the classical period, and a civilization which implies the command of great material resources, were flourishing in the Aegean perhaps a thousand years before the siege of Troy.
To the question, "What is the origin of this civilization? Is it of foreign derivation or of native growth?" it is not possible to give a direct answer. It is clear, on the one hand that it was developed, by a gradual process of differentiation, from a culture which was common to the whole Aegean basin and extended as far to the west as Sicily. It is equally clear, on the other hand, that foreign influences contributed largely to the process of development. Egyptian influences, in particular, can be traced throughout the "Minoan" and "Mycenaean" periods. The developed art, however, both in Crete and on the mainland, display characteristics which are the very opposite of those which are commonly associated with the term "oriental." Egyptian worh, even of the best period, is stiff and conventional; in the best Cretan work, and, in a less degree, in Mycenaean work, we find an originality and a freedom of treatment which remind one of the spirit of the Greek artists. The civilization is, in many respects, of an advanced type. The Cretan architects could design on a grand scale, and could carry out their designs with no small degree of mechanical skill. At Cnossus we find a system of drainage in use, which is far in advance of anything known in the modern world before the Igth century. If the art of the Minoan age falls short of the art of the Periclean age, it is hardly inferior to that of the age of Peisistratus. It is a civilization, too, which has long been familiar with the art of writing. But it is one that belongs entirely to the Bronze Age. Iron is not found until the very end of the Mycenaean period, and then only in small quantities. Nor is this the only point of contrast between the culture of the earliest age and that of the historical period in Greece. The chief seats of the early culture are to be found either in the island of Crete, or, on the mainland, at Tiryns and Mycenae. In the later history Crete plays no part, and Tiryns and Mycenae are obscure. With the great names of a later age, Argos, Sparta and Athens, no great discoveries are connected. In northern Greece, Orchomenos rather than Thebes is the centrer of influence. Further points of contrast readily suggest themselves. Tke socalled Phoenician alphabet, in use amongst the later Greeks, is unknown in the earliest age. Its systems of writing, both the earlier and the later one, are syllabic in character, and analogous to those in vogue in Asia Minor and Cyprus. In the art of war, the chariot is of more importance than the footsoldier, and the latter, unlikc the Greek hoplite, is lightly clad, and trusts to a shield large enough to cover the whole body, rather than to the metal helmet, breastplate and greaves of later times (see ARMS and ARMOUR: Grcek). The political system appears to have been a despotic monarchy, and the realm of the monarch to have extended to far wider limits than those of the "citystates" of historical Greece. It is, perhaps, in the religious practices of the age, and in the ideas implied in them, that the contrast is most apparent. Neither in Crete nor on the mainland is there any trace of the worship of the "Olympian" deities. The cults in vogue remind us rather of Asia than of Greece. The worship of pillars and of trees carries us back to Canaan, while the doubleheaded axe, so prominent in the ritual of Cnossus, survives in later times as the symbol of the national deity of the Carians. The beehivetombs, found on many sites on the mainland besides Mycenae, are evidence both of a method of sepulture and of ideas of the future state, which are alien to the practice and the thought of the Greeks of history. It is only in one region-in the island of Cyprus-that the culture of the Mycenaean age is found surviving into the historical period. As late as the beginning of the 9th century B.C. Cyprus is still ruled by kings, the alphabet has not yet displaced a syllabary, the characteristic forms of Mycenaean vases still linger on, and the chief deity of the island is the goddess with attendant doves whose images are among the common objects of Mycenaean finds.
3. The Homeric Age-Alike in Crete and on the mainland the civilization disclosed by excavation comes abruptly to an end. In Crete we can trace it back from c. 1200 B.C. to the Neolithic period. From the Stone Age to the end of the Minoan Age the development is continuous and uninterrupted. But between the culture of the Early Age and the culture of the Dorians, who occupied the island in historical tirnes, no connexion whatever can be established. Between the two there is a great gulf fixed. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that presented by the rude life of the Dorian cornmunities in Crete when it is compared with the political power, the material resources and the extensive commerce of the earlier period. The same gap between the archaeological age and the historical exists dn the mainland also. It is true that the solution of continuity is here less complete. Mycenaean art continues, here and there, in a debased form down to the 9th century, a date to which we can trace back the beginnings of the later Greek art. On one or two lines (e.g. architecture) it is even possible to establish some sort of conncxion between them. But Greek art as a whole cannot be evolved from Mycenaean art. We cannot bridge over the interval that separates the latter art, even in its decline, from the former. It is sufficient to compare the "dipylon" ware (with which the process of development begins, which culminates in the pottery of the Great Age) with the Mycenaean vases, to satisfy oneself that the gulf exists. What then is the relatian of the Heroic or Homeric Age (i.e. the age whose life is portrayed for us in the poems of Homer) to the Earliest Age? It too presents many contrasts to the later periods. On the other hand, it presents contrasts to the Minoan Age, which, in their way, are not less striking. Is it then to be identified with the Mycenaean Age? Schliemann, the discoverer of the Mycenaean culture, unhesitatingly identified Mycenaean with Homeric. He even identified the shaftgraves of Mycenae with the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Later inquirers, while refusing to discover so literal a correspondence between things Homeric and things Mycenaean, have not hesitated to accept a general correspondence between the Homeric Age and the Mycenaean. Where it is a case of comparing literary evidence with archaeological, an exact coincidence is not of course to be demanded. The most that can be asked is that a general correspondence should be established. It may be conceded that the case for such a correspondence appears prima facie a strong one. There is much in Homer that seems to find confirmation or explanation in Schliemann's finds. Mycenae is Agamemnon's city; the plan of the Homeric house agrees fairly well with the palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae; the forms and the technique of Mycenaean art serve to illustrate passages in the poems; such are only a few of the arguments that have been urged. It is the great merit of Professor Ridgeway's work (The Early Age of Greece) that it has demonstrated, once and for all, that Mycenaean is not Homeric pure and simp]e. He insists upon differences as great as the resemblances. Iron is in common use in Homer; it is practically unknown to the Mycenaeans. In place of the round shield and the metal armour of the Homeric soldier, we find at Mycenae that the warrior is lightly clad in linen, and that he fights behind an oblong shield, which covers the whole body; nor are the chariots the same in form. The Homeric dead are cremated; the Mycenaean are buried. The gods of Homer are the deities of Olympus, of whose cult no traces are to be found in the Mycenaean Age. The novelty of Professor Ridgeway's theory is that for the accepted equation, Homeric=Achaean=Mycenaean, he proposes to substitute the equations, Homeric=Achaean=postMycenaean, and Mycenaean = preAchaean = Pelasgian. The Mycenaean civilization he attributes to the Pelasgians, whom he regards as the indigenous population of Greece, the ancestors of the later Greeks, and themselves Greek both in speech and blood. The Homeric heroes are Achaeans, a fairhaired Celtic race, whose home was in the Danube valley, where they had learned the use of iron. In Greece they are newcomers, a conquering class comparable to the Norman invaders of England or Ireland~ and like them they have acquired the language of their subjects in the course of a few generations. The Homeric civilization is thus Achaean, i.e. it is Pelasgian (Mycenaean) civilization, appropriated by a ruder race; but the Homeric culture is far inferior to the Mycenaean. Here, at any rate, the Norman analogy breaks down. Norman art in England is far in advance of Saxon. Even in Normandy (as in Sicily), where the Norman appropriated rather than introduced, he not only assimilated but developed. In Greece the process must have been reversed.
The theory thus outlined is probably stronger on its destructive side than on its constructive. To treat the Achaeans as an immigrant race is to run counter to the tradition of the Greeks themselves, by whom the Achaeans were regarded as indigenous (cf. Herod. viii. 73). Nor is the Pelasgian part of the theory easy to reconcile with the Homeric evidence. If the Achaeans were a conquering class ruling over a Pelasgian population, we should expect to find this difference of race a prominent feature in Homeric society. We should, at least, expect to find a Pelasgian background to the Homeric picture. As a matter of fact, we find nothing of the sort. There is no consciousness in the Homeric poems of a distinction of race between the governing and the subject classes. There are, indeed, Pelasgians in Homer, but the references either to the people or the name are extraordinarily few. They appear as a people, presumably in Asia Minor, in alliance with the Trojans; they appear also, in a single passage, as one of the tribes inhabiting Crete. The name survives in "Pelasgicon Argos," which is probably to be identified with the valley of the Spercheius, and as an epithet of Zeus of Dodona. The population, however, of Pelasgicon Argos and of Dodona is no longer Pelasgian. Thus, in the age of Homer, the Pelasgians belong, so far as Greece proper is concerned, to a past that is already remote. It is inadmissible to appeal to Herodotus against Homer. For the conditions of the Homeric age Homer is the sole authoritative witness. If, however, Professor Ridgeway has failed to prove that "Mycenaean" equals "Pelasgian," he has certainly proved that much that is Homeric is postMycenaean. It is possible that different strata are to be di,stinguished in the Homeric poems. There are passages which seem to assume the conditions of the Mycenaean age; there are others which presuppose the conditions of a later age. It may be that the latter passages reflect the circumstances of the poet's own times, while the former ones reproduce those of an earlier period. If so, the substitution of iron for bronze must have been effected in the interval bet~een the earlier and the later periods.
It has already been pointed out that the question whether the makers of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations were Greeks must still be regarded as an open one. No such question can be raised as to the Homeric Age. The Achaeans may or may not have been Greek in blood. What is certain is that the Achaean Age forms an integral part of Greek history. Alike on the linguistic, the religious and the political sides, Homer is the startingpoint of subsequent developments. In the Greek dialects the great distinction is that between the Doric and the rest. Of the non-Doric dialects the two main groups are the Aeolic and Ionic, both of which have been developed, by a gradual process of differentiation, from the language of the Homeric poems. With regard to religion it is sufficient to refer to the judgment of Herodotus, that it was Homer and Hesiod who were the authors of the Greek theogony . . . . It is a commonplace that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. On the political side, Greek constitutional development would be unintelligible without Homer. When Greek history, in the proper sense, begins, oligarchy is almost universal. Everywhere, however, an antecedent stage of monarchy has to be presupposed. In the Homeric system monarchy is the sole form of government; but it is monarchy already well on the way to being transformed into oligarchy. In the person of the king are united the functions of priest, of judge and of leader in war. He belongs to a family which claims divine descent and his of fice is hereditary. He is, however, no despotic monarch. He is compelled by custom to consult the council (boule) of the elders, or chiefs. He must ask their opinion, and, if he fails to obtain their consent, he has no power to enforce hrs will. Even when he has obtained the consent of the council, the proposal still awaits the approval of the assembly (agora), of the people.
Thus in the Homeric state we find the germs not only of the oligarchy and democracy of later Greece, but also of all the various forms of constitution known to the Western world. And a monarchy such as is depicted in the Homeric poems ls clearly ripe for transmutation into oligarchy. The chiefs are addressed as kings . . ., and claim, equally with the monarch, descent from the gods. In Homer, again, we can trace the later organization into tribe (tulh), clan (genos), and phratry, which is characteristic of Greek society in the historical period, and meets us in analogous forms in other Aryan societies. The genos corresponds to the Roman gens, the tulh to the Roman tribe, and the phratry to the curia. The importance of the phratry in Homeric society is illustrated by the wellknown passage (Iliad ix. 63) in which the outcast is described as "one who belongs to no phratry" (atrhtor). It is a society that is, of course, based upon slavery, but it is slavery in its least repulsive aspect. The treatment which Eumaeus and Eurycleia receive at the hands of the poet of the Odyssey is highly creditable to the humanity of the age. A society which regarded the slave as a mere chattel would have been impatient of the interest shown in a swineherd and a nurse. It is a society, too, that exhibits many of the distinguishing traits of later Greek life. Feasting and quarrels, it is true, are of more moment to the heroes than to the contemporaries of Pericles or Plato; but "music" and "gymnastic" (though the terms rnust be understood in a more restricted sense) are as distinctive of the age of Homcr as of that of Pindar. In one respect there is retrogression in the historical period. Woman in Homeric society enjoys a greater freedom, and receives greater respect, than in the Athens of Sophocles and Pericles.
4. The Growth of the Greek States-The Greek wodd at the beginning of the 6th century B.C. presents a picture in many respects different from that of the Homeric Age. The Greek race is no longer confined to the Greek peninsula. It occupiec the islands of the Aegean, the western seaboard of Asia Minor the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, of southern Italy and Sicily. Scattered settlements are found as far apart as the mouth of the Rhone, the north of Africa, the Crimea and the eastern end of the Black Sea. The Greeks are called by a national name Hellenes, the symbol of a fullydeveloped national selfconsciousness. They are divided into three great branches, the Dorian, the Ionian and the Aeolian, names almost, or entirely unknown to Homer. The heroic monarchy has nearly everywhere appeared. In Greece proper, south of Thermopylae, it survives but in a peculiar form, in the Spartan state alone. What is the significance and the explanation of contrasts so profound?
It is probable that the explanation is to be found, directly or indirectly, in a single cause, the Dorian invasion. In Home the Dorians are mentioned in one passage only (Odyssey xix. 177). They there appear as one of the races which inhabit Crete. In the historical period the whole Peloponnese, with the exception of Arcadia, Elis and Achaea is Dorian. In northern Greece the Dorians occupy the little state of Doris, and in the Aegean they form the populatior of Crete, Rhodes and some smaller islands. Thus the chief centres of Minoan and Mycenaean culture have passed into Dorian hands, and the chief seats of Achaean power are included in Dorian states. Greek tradition explained the overthrow ol the Achaean system by an invasion of the Peloponnese by tht Dorians, a northern tribe, which had found a temporary home in Doris. The story ran that after an unsuccessful attempt, to force an entrance by the Isthmus of Corinth, they had crossed from Naupactus, at the mouth of the Corinthian Gul£, landed on the opposite shore, and made their way into the heart of the Peloponnese, where a single victory gave them possession of the Achaean states. Their conquests were divided among the invaders into three shares, for which lots were cast, and thus the three states of Argos, Sparta and Messenia were created There is much in this tradition that is impossible or improbable It is impossible, e.g. for the tiny state of Doris, with its three or four "small, sad villages" (moleus mikrai kai lumrocopoi, Strabo, p. 427), to have furnished a force of invaders sufficient to conquer and re-people the greater part of the Peloponnese. It is improbable that the conquest should have been either as sudden, or as complete, as the legend represents. On the contrary, there are indications that the conquest was gradual, and that the displacement of the older population was incomplete The improbability of the details affords, however, no ground for questioning the reality of the invasion. The tradition can be traced back at Sparta to the 7th century B.C. (Tyrtaeus quoted by Strabo, p. 362), and there is abundant evidence, other than that of legend, to corroborate it. There is the Dorian name, to begin with. If, as Beloch supposes, it originated on the coast of Asia Minor, where it served to distinguish the settlers in Rhodes and the neighbouring islands from the Ionians and Aeolians to the north of them, how came the great and famouc states of the Peloponnese to adopt a name in use among the petty colonies planted by their kinsmen across the sea? Or, if Dorian is simply Old Peloponnesian, how are we to account fo the Doric dialect or the Dorian pride of race?
It is true that there are great differences between the literary Doric, the dialect of Corinth and Argos, and the dialects ol Laconia and Crete, and that there are affinities between the dialect of Laconia and the nonDorian dialects of Arcadia and Elis. It is equally true, however, and of far more consequence that all the Doric dialects are distinguished from all other Greek dialects by certain common characteristics. Perhaps the strongest sentiment in the Dorian nature is the pride of race Indeed, it looks as if the Dorians claimed to be the sole genuine Hellenes. How can we account for an indigenous population, first imagining itself to be immigrant, and then developing a contempt for the rest of the race, equally indigenous with itself, on account of a fictitious difference in origin? Finally, there is the archaeological evidence. The older civilization comes to an abrupt end, and it does so, on the mainland at least, at the very period to which tradition assigns the Dorian migration. Its development is greatest, and its overthraw most complete, precisely in the regions occupied by the Dorians and the other tribes, whose migrations were traditionally connected with theirs. It is hardly too much to say that the archaeologist would have been compelled to postulate an inroad into central and southern Greece of tribes from the north, at a lower leqel'of culture, in the course of the 12th and 11th centuiies B.C., if the historian had not been able to direct him to the traditions of the great migrations . . ., of which the Dorian invasion was the chief. With the Dorian rnigration Greek tradition connected the expansion of the Greek race eastwards across the Aegean. In the historical period the Greek settlements on the western coast of Asia Minor fall into three clearly defined groups. To the north is the Aeolic group, consisting of the island of Lesbos and twelve towns, mostly insignificant, on the opposite mainland. To the south is the Dorian hexapolis, consisting of Cnidus and Halicarnassus on the mainland, and the islands of Rhodes and Cos. In the centre comes the Ionian dodecapolis, a group consisting of ten towns on the mainland, together with; the islands of Samos and Chios. Of these three groups, the Ionian is incomparably the most important. The Ionians also occupy Euboea and the Cyclades. Although it would appear that Cyprus (and possibly Pamphylia) had been occupied by settlers from Greece in the Mycenaean age, Greek tradition is probably correct in putting the colonization of Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean after the Dorian migration. Both the Homeric and the archaeological evidence seem to point to the same conclusion. Between Rhodes on the south and the Troad on the north scarcely any Mycenaean remains have been found. Homer is ignorant of any Greeks east of Euboea. If the pocms are earlier than the Dorian Invasion, his silence is conclusive. If the poems are some centuries later than the Invasion, they at least prove that, within a few generations of that event, it was the belief of the Greeks of Asia Minor that their ancestors had crossed the seas after the close of the Heroic Age. It is probable, too, that the names Ionian and Aeolian, the former of which is found once in Homer, and the latter not at aUj originated among the colonists in Asia Minor, and served to designate, in the.first instance, the members of the Ionic and Aeolic dodecapoleis. As Curtius pointed out, the only Ionia known to history is in Asia Minor. It does not follow that Ionia is the original home of the Ionian race, as Curtius argued. It almost certainly follows, however, that it is the original home of the Ionian name.
It is less easy to account for the name Hellenes. The Greeks were profoundly conscious of their common nationality, and of the gulf that separated them from the rest of mankind. They themselves recognized a common race and language, and a common type of religion and cuiture, as the chief factors in this sentiment of nationality (see Herod. viii. 144. . .). "Hellenes" was the name of their common race, and "Hellas" of their common country. In Homer there is no distinct consciousness of a common nationality, and consequently no antithesis of Greek and Barbarian (see Thuc. i. 3). Nor is there a true collective name. There are indeed Hellenes (though the name occurs in one passage only, Iliad ii. 684), and there is a Hellas; but his Hellas, whatever its precise signification may be, is, at any rate, not equivalent either to Greece proper or to the land of the Greeks, and his Hellenes are the inhabitants of a small district to the south of Thessaly. It is possible that the diffusion of the Hellenic name was due to the Dorian invaders. Its use can be traced back to the first half of the 7th century. Not less obscure are the causes of the fall of monarchy. It cannot have been the immediate effect of the Dorian conquest, for'the states founded by the Dorians were at first monarchically governed. It may, however, have been an indirect effect of it. We have already secn that the power of the Homeric king is more limited than that of the rulers of Cnossus, Tiryns or Mycenae. In other words, monarchy is already in decay at the epoch of the Invasion. The invasion, in its effects on wealth, commerce and civilization, is almost comparable to the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman empire. The monarch of the Minoan and Mycenaean age has extensive revenues at his command; the monarch of the early Dorian statcs is little better than a petty chief. Thus the interval, once a uride one, that separates him from the nobles tends to disappear. The decay of monarchy was gradual; much more gradual than is generally recognized. There were parts of the Greek world in which it still survived in the 6th century, e.g. Sparta, Cyrene, Cyprus, and possibly Argos and Tarentum. Both Herodotus and Thucydides apply the title "king" (Basileus) to the rulers of Thessaly in the sth century. The date at which monarchy gave place to a republican form of government must have differed, and differed widely, in different cases. The traditions relating to the foundation of Cyrene assume the existence of monarchy in Thera and in Crete in the middle of the 7th century (Herodotus iv. 150 and 154), and the reign of Amphicrates at Samos (Herod. iii. 59) can hardly be placed more than a generation earlier. In view of our general ignorance of the history of the 7th and 8th centuries, it is hazardous to pronounce these instances exceptional. On the other hand, the change from monarchy to oligarchy was completed at Athens before the end of the 8th century, and at a still earlier date in some of the other states. The process, again, by which the change was effected was, in all probability, less uniform than is generally assumed. There are extremely few cases in which we have any trustworthy evidence, and the instances a'oout which we are informed refuse to be reduced to any common type. In Greece proper our information is fuUest in the case of Athens and Argos. In the former case, the king is gradually stripped of his powers by a 'process of devolution. An hereditary king, ruling for life, is replaced by three annual and elective magistrates, between whom are divided the executive, military and religious functions of the monarch (see ARCHON). At Argos the fall of the monarchy is preceded by an aggrandisement of the royal prerogatives. There is nothing in common between these two cases, and there is no reason to suppose that the process elsewhere was analogous to that at Athens. Everywhere, however, oligarchy is the form of government which succeeds to monarchy. Political power is monopolized by a class of nobles, whose claim to govern is based upon birth and the possession of land, the most valuable form of property in an early society. Sometimes power is confined to a single clan (e.g. the Bacchiadae at Corinth); more commonly, as at Athens, all houses that are noble are equally privileged. In every case there is found, as the adviser of the executive, a Boule, or council, representative of the privileged class. Without such a council a Greek oligarchy is inconceivable. The relations of the executive to the council doubtless varied. At Athens it is clear that the real authority was exercised by the archons; in many states the magistrates were probably subordinate to the council (cf. the relation of the consuls to the senate at Rome). And it is clear that the way in which the oligarchies used their power varied also. The cases in which the power was abused are naturally the ones of which we hear; for an abuse of power gave rise to discontent and was the ultimate cause of revolution. We hear little or nothing of the cases in which power was exercised wisely. Happy is the constitution which has no annals! We know, however, that oligarchy held its ground for generations, or even for centuries, in a large proportion of the Greek states; and a government which, like the oligarchies of Elis, Thebes or Aegina, could maintain itself for three or four centuries cannot have been merely oppressive.
The period of the transition from monarchy to oligarchy is che period in which commerce begins to develop, and traderoutes to be organised. Greece had been the centre of an active trade in the Minoan and Mycenaean epochs. The products of Crete and of the Peloponnese had found their way to Egypt and Asia Minor. The overthrow of the older civiilization put an end to commerce. The seas became insecure and intercourse with the East was interrupted. Our earliest glimpses of the Aegean after the period of the migrations disclose the raids of the pirate and the activity of the Phoenician trader. It is not till the 8th century has dawned that trade begins to thrive, and the Phoenician has to retire before his Greek competitor. For some time to come, however, no clear distinction is drawn between the trader and the pirate. The pioneers of Greek trade in the West are the pirates of Cumae (Thucyd. vi. 4). The expansion of Greek commerce, unlike that of the commerce of the modern world, was not connected with any great scientific discoveries. There is nothing in the history of ancient navigation that is analogous to the invention of the mariner's compass or of the steamengine. In spite of this, the development of Greek commerce in the 7th and 6th centuries was rapid. It must have been assisted by the great discovery of the early part of the former century, the invention of coined money. To the Lydians, rather than the Greeks, belongs the credit of the discovery; but it was the genius of the latter race that divined the importance of the invention and spread its use. The coinage of the Ionian towns goes back to the reign of Gyges (c. 675 B.C.). And it is in Ionia that commercial development is earliest and greatest. In the most distant regions the Ionian is first in the field. Egypt and the Black Sea are both opened up to Greek trade by Miletus, the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean by Phocaea and 9amos. It is significant that of the twelve states engaged in the Egyptian trade in the 6th century all, with the exception of Aegina, are from the eastern side of the Aegean (Herod. ii. 178). On the western side the chief centres of trade during these centuries were the islands of Euboea and Aegina and the town of Corinth. The Aeginetan are the earliest coins of Greece proper (c. 650 B.C.); and the two rival scales of weights and measures, in use amongst the Greeks of every age, are the Aeginetan and the Euboic. Commerce naturally gave rise to commercial leagues, and commercial relations tended to bring about political alliances. Foreign policy even at this early epoch seems to have been largely determined by considerations of commerce. Two leagues, the members of which were connected by political as well as commercial ties, can be recognized. At the head of each stood one of the two rival powers in the island of Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria. Their primary object was doubtless protection from the pirate and the foreigner. Competing routes were organized at an early date under their influence, aud their trading connexions can be traced from the heart of Asia Minor to the north of Italy. Miletus, Sybaris and Etruria were members of the Eretrian league; Samos, Corinth, Rhegium and Zancle (commanding the Straits of Messina), and Cumae, on the Bay of Naples, of the Chalcidian. The wool of the Phrygian uplands, woven in the looms of Miletus, reached the Etruscan markets by way of Sybaris; through Cumae, Rome and the rest of Latium obtained the elements of Greek culture. Greek trade, however, was confined to the Mediterranean area. The Phoenician and the Carthaginian navigators penetrated to Britain; they discovered the passage round the Cape two thousand years before Vasco da Gama's tirne. The Greek sailor dsred not adventure himself outside the Black Sea, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Greek trade, too, was essentially mariti~e. Ports visited by Greek vessels were often the starting points of traderoutes into the interior; the traffic along those mutes was left in the hands of the natives (see e.g. Herod. iv. 24). One service, the importance of which can hardly be overestimated, is rendered to civilization by the Greek traders-the invention of geography. The science of geography is the invention of theGreeks. The first maps were made by them (in the 6th century); and it was the discoveries and surveys of their sailors that made map-making possible.
Closely connected with the history of Greek trade is the history of Greek colonization. The period of colonization, in its narrower sense, extends from the middle of the 8th to the middle of the 6th century. Greek colonization is, however, merely a continuation of the process which at an earlier epoch had led to the settlement, first of Cyprus, and then of the islands and coasts of the Aegean. From the earlier settlements the colonization of the historical period is distinguished by three characteristics. The later colony acknowledges a definite metropolis ("mothercity"); it is planted by a definite oecist . . .; it has a definite date assigned to its foundation. It would be a mistake to regard Greek colonization as commercial in arigin, in the sense that the colonies were in all cases established as tradingposts. This was the case with the Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements, most of which remained mere factories; and some of the Greek colonies (e.g. many of those planted by Miletus on the shores of the Black Sea) bore this character. The typical Greek colony, however, was neither in origin nor in development a mere tradingpost. It was, or it became, a polis, a citystate, in which was reproduced the life of the parent state. Nor was Greek colonization, like the emigration from Europe to America and Australia in the 19th century, simply the result of overpopulation. The causes were as various as those which can be traced in the history of modern colonization. Those which were established for the purposes of trade may be compared to the factories of the Portuguese and Dutch in Africa and the Far East. Others were the result of political discontent, in some form or shape; these may be compared to the Puritan settlements in New England. Others again were due to ambition or the mere love of adventure (see Herod. v. 42 ff., the career of Dorieus). But however various the causes, two conditions must always be presupposed-an expansion of commerce and a growth of population. Within the narrow limits of the citystate there was a constant tendency for population to become redundant, until, as in the later centuries of Greek life, its growth was artificially restricted. Alike from the Roman colonies, and from those founded by the European nations in the course of the last few centuries, the Greek colonies are distiniguished by a fundamental contrast. It is significant that the contrast is a political one. The Roman colony was in a position of entire subordination to the Roman state, of which it formcd a part. The modern colony was, in varying degrees, in political subjection to the home government. The Greek colony was completely independent; and it was independent from the first. The ties that united a colony to its metropolis were those of sentiment and interest; the political tie did not exist. There were, it is true, exceptions. The colonies established by imperial Athens closely resembled the colonies of imperial Rome. The cleruchy (q.v.) formed part of the Athenian state, the cleruchs kept their status as citizens of Athens and acted as a military garrison. And if the political tie, in the proper sense, was wanting, it was inevitable that political relations should spring out of commercial or sentimental ones. Thus we find Corinth interfering twice to save her colony Syracuse from destruction, and Megara bAnging about the revolt of Byzantium, her colony, from Athens. Sometimes it is not easy to distinguish political relations from a political tie (e.g. the relations of Corinth, both in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, to Ambracia and the neighbouring group of colonies). When we compare the development of the Greek and the modern colonies we shall find that the development of the former was even more rapid than that of the latter. In at least three respects the Greek settler was at an advantage as compared with the colonist of modern times. The differences of race, of colour and of climate, with which the chief problems of modern colonization are connected, played no part in the history of the Greek settlements. The races amongst whom the Greeks planted themselves were in some cases on a. similar level of culture. Where the natives were still backward or barbarous, they came of a stock either closely related to the Greek, or at least separated from it by no great physical differences. We need only contrast the Carian, the Sicel, the Thracian or even the Scythian, with the native Australian, the Hottcntot, the Red Indian or the Maori, to apprehend the advantage of the Greek. Amalgamation with the native races was easy, and it involved neither phys1cal nor intellectual degeneracy as its consequence. Of the races with which the Greeks came in contact the Thracian was far from the highest in the scale of culture; yet three of the greatest names in the Great Age of Athens are those of men who had Thracian blood in their veins, viz. Themistocles, Cimon and the historian Thucydides. In the absence of any distinction of colour, no insuperable barrier existed between the Greek and the hellenized native. The demos of the colonial cities was largely recruited from the native population,l nor was there anything in the Greek world analogous to the "mean whites" or the "black belt." Of hardly less importance were the climatic conditions. In this respect the Mediterranean area is unique. There is no other region of the world of equal extent in which these conditions are at once so uniform and so favourable. Nowhere had the Greek settler to encounter a climate which was either unsuited to his labour or subversive of his vigour. That in spite of these advantages so little, comparatively speaking, was effected in the work of Hellenization before the epoch of Alexander and the Diadochi, was the effect of a single counteracting cause. The Greek colonist, like the Greek trader, clung to the shore. He penetrated no farther inland than the seabreeze. Hence it was only in islands, such as Sicily or Cyprus, that the process of Hellenization was complete. Elsewhere the Greek settlements formed a mere fringe along the coast.
To the 7th century there belongs another movement of high importance in its bearing upon the economic, religious and literary development of Greece, as well as upon its bhr nts constitutional history. This movement is the rise of the tyrannis. In the political writers of a later age the word possesses a clearcut connotation. From other forms of monarchy: it is distinguished by a twofold differentiation. The tyrannus is an unconstitutional ruler, and his authority is exercised over unwilling subjects. In the 7th and 6th centuries the line was not drawn so distinctly between the tyrant and the legitimate monarch. Even Herodotus uses the words "tyrant" and "king" interchangeably (e.g. the princes of Cyprus are called "kings" in v. 110 and "tyrants" in v. 109), so that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a legitimate monarch or a tyrant is meant (e.g. Aristophilides of Tarentum, iii I36, or Telys of Sybaris, v. 44). But the distinction between the tyrant and the king of the Heroic Age is a valid one. It is not true that his rule was always exercised over unwilling subjects; it is true that his position was always unconstitutional. The Horneric king is a legitirnate monarch; his authority is invested with the sanctions of religion and immemorial custom. The tyrant Ss an illegitimate ruler; his authority is not recognized, either by customary usage or by express enactment. But the word "tyrant" was originally a neutral term; it did not necessarily imply a misuse of power. The origin of the tyrannis is obscure. The word tyrannus has been thought, with some reason, to be a Lydian one. Probably both the name and the thing originated in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, though the earliest tyrants of whom we hear in Asia Minor (at Ephesus and Miletus3 are a generation later than the earliest in Greece itself, where, both at Sicyon and at Corinth, tyranny appears to date back to the second quarter of the 7th century. It is not unusual to regard tyranny as a universal stage in the constitutional development of the Greek states, and as a stage that occurs everywhere at one and the same period.; In reality, tyranny is confined to certain regions, and it is a phenomenon that is peculiar to no one age or century. In Greece proper, before the 4th century b.c., it is confined to a small group of states round the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs. The greater part of the Peloponnese was exempt from it, and there is no good evidence for its existence north of the Isthmus, except at Megara and Athens. It plays.no part in the history of the Greek cities in Chalcidice and Thrace. It appears to have been rare in the Cyclades. The regions in which it finds a congenial soil are two, Asia Minor and Sicily. Thus it is incorrect to say that most Greek states passed through this stage. It is still wider of the mark to assume that they passed through it at the same time. There is no "Age of the Tyrants." Tyranny began in the Peloponnese a hundred years before it appears in Sicily, and it has disappeared in the Peloponnese almost before it begins in Sicily. In the latter the great age of tyranny comes at the beginning of the sth century; in the former it is at the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th. At Athens the history of tyranny begins after it has ended both at Sicyon and Corinth. There is, indeed, a period in which tyranny is nonexistent in the Greek states; roughly speaking, the last sixty years of the sth century. But with this exception, there is no period in which the tyrant is not to befound. The greatest of all the tyrannies, that of Dionysius at Syracuse, belongs to the 4th century. Nor must it be assumed that tyranny always comes at the same stage in the history of a constitution; that it is always a stage between oligarchy and democracy. At Corinth it is followed, not by democracy but by oligarchy, and it is an oligarchy that lasts, with a brief interruption, for two hundred and fifty years. At Athens it is not immediately preceded by oligarchy. Between the Eupatrid oligarchy and the rule of Peisistratus there comes the timocracy of Solon. These exceptions do not stand alone. The cause of tyranny is, in one sense, uniform. In the earlier centuries, at any rate, tyranny is always the expression of discontent; the tyrant is always the champion of a cause. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the discontent is necessarily political, or that the cause which he charnpions is always a constitutional one. At Sicyon it is a racial one; Cleisthenes is the champion of the older population against their Dorian oppressors (see Herod. v. 67, 68). At Athens the discontent is economic rather than political; Peisistratus is the champion of the Diacrii, the inhabitants of the poorest region of Attica. The partystrifes of which we hear in the early history of Miletus, which doubtless gave the tyrant his opportunity, are concerned with the claims of rival industrial classes. In Sicily the tyrant is the ally of the rich and the foe of the demos, and the cause which he champions, both in the sth century and the 4th, is a national one, that of the Greek against the Carthaginian. We may suspect that in Greece itself the tyrannies of the 7th century are the expression of an antiDorian reaction. It can hardly be an accident that the states in which the tyrannis is found at this epoch, Corinth, Megara, Sicyon, Epidaurus, are all of them states in which a Dorian upper class ruled over a subject population. In Asia Minor the tyrannis assumes a peculiar character after the Persian conquest. The tyrant rules as the deputy of the Persian satrap. Thus in the East the tyrant is the enemy of the national cause; in the West, in Sicily, he is its champion.
Tyranny is not a phenomenon peculiar to Greek history. It is possible to find analogies to it in Roman history, in the power of Caesar, or of the Caesars; in the despotisms of medieval Italy; or even in the Napoleonic empire. Between the tyrant and the Italian despot there is indeed a real analogy; but between the Roman principate and the Greek tyrannis there are two essential differences. In the first place, the principate was expressed in constitutional forms, or veiled under constitutional fictions; the tyrant stood altogether outside the constitution. And, secondly, at Rome both Julius and Augustus owed their position to the power of the sword. The power of the sword, it is true, plays a large part in the history of the later tyrants (e.g. Dionysius of Syracuse); the earlier ones, however, had no mercenary armies at their command. We can hardly compare the bodyguard of Peisistratus to the legions of the first or the second Caesar.
The view taken of the tyrannis in Greek literature is almoat uniforrnly unfavourable. In this respect there is no difference between Plato and Aristotle, or between Herodotus and the later historians. His policy is represented as purely selfish, and his rule as oppressive. Herodotus is influenced partly by the ttaditions current among the oligarchs, who had been the chief sufferers, and partly by the odious associations which had gathered round tyranny in Asia Minor. The philosophes write under their impressions of the later tyrannis, and their account is largely an a priori one. It is seldom that we find any attempt, either in the philosophers or the historians, to do justice to the real services rendered by the tyrants. Their first service was a constitutional one. They helped to break down the power of the old aristocratic houses, and thus to create the social and political conditions indispensable to democracy. The tyrannis involved the sacrifice of liberty in the cause of equality. When tyranny falls, it is never succeeded by the aristocracies which it had overthrown. It is frequently succeeded by an oligarchy, but it is an oligarchy in which the claim to exclusive power is based, not upon mere birth, but upon wealth, or the possession of land. It would be unfair to treat this service as one that was rendered unconsciously and unwillingly. Where the tyrant asserted the claims of an oppressed class, he consciously aimed at the destruction of privilege and the effacement of class distinctions. Hence it is unjust to treat his power as resting upon mere force. A government which can last eighty or a hundred years, as was the case with the tyrannies at Corinth and Sicyon, must have a moral force behind it. It must rest upon the consent of its subjects. The second service which the tyrants rendered to Greece was a political one. Their policy tended to break down the barriers which isolated each petty state from its neighbours. In their history we can trace a system of widespread alliances, which are often cemented by matrimonial connexions. The Cypselid tyrants of Corinth appear to have been allied with the royal families of Egypt, Lydia and Phrygia, as well as with the tyrants of Miletus and Epidaurus, and with some of the great Athenian families. In Sicily we find a league of the northern tyrants opposed to a league of the southern; and in each case there is a corresponding matrimonial alliance. Anaxilaus of Rhegium is the soninlaw and ally of Terillus of Himera; Gelo of Syracuse stands in the same relation to Theron of Agrigentum. Royal marriages have played a great part in the politics of Europe. In the comparison of Greek and modern history it has been too often forgotten how great a difference it makes, and how great a disadvantage it involves, to a republic that it has neither sons nor daughters to give in marriage. In commerce and colonization the tyrants were only continuing the work of the oligarchies to which they succeeded. Greek trade owed its expansion to the intelligent efforts of the oligarchs who ruled at Miletus and Corinth, in Samos, Aegina and Euboea; but in particular cases, such as Miletus, Corinth, Sicyon and ~thens, there was a further development, and a still more rapid growth, under the tyrants. In the same way, the foundation of the colonies was in most cases due to the policy of the oligarchical governments. They can claim credit for the colonies of Chalcis and Eretria, of Megara, Phocaea and Samos, as well as for the great Achaean settlements in southern Italy. The Cypselids at Corinth, and Thrasybulus at Miletus, are instances of tyrants who colonized on a great scale.
In their religious policy the tyrants went far to democratize Greek religion. The functions of monarchy had been largely religious, but, while the king was necessarily a priest, he was not the only priest in the community. There were special priesthoods, hereditary in particular families, even in the monarchical period; and upon the fall of the monarchy, while the priestly functions of the kings passed to republican magistrates, the priesthoods which were in the exclusive possession of the grcat families tended to become the important ones. Thus, before the rise of tyranny, Greek religion is aristocratic. The cults recognized by the state are the sacra of noble clans. The religious prerogatives of the nobles helped to confirm their political ones and, as long as religion retained its aristocratic character, it was impossible for democracy to take root. The policy of the tyrants aimed at fostering popular cults which had no associations with the old families, and at establishing new festivals. The cult of the winegod, Dionysus, was thus fostered at Sicyon by Cleisthenes, and at Corinth by the Cypselids; while at Athens anew festival of this!deity, which so completely overshadowed the older festival that it became known as the Great Dionysia probably owed its institution to Peisistratus. Another festival, the Panathenaea, which had been instituted only a few years before his rise to power, became under his rule, and thanks to his policy, the chief national festival of the Athenian state Everywhere, again, we find the tyrants the patrons of iiterature. Pindar and Bacchylides, Aeschylus and Simonides found a welcome at the court of Hiero. Polycrates was the patron of Anacreon, Periander of Arion. To Peisistratus has been attributed, possibly not without reason, the first critical edition of the text of Homer, a work as important in the literary history of Greece as was the issue of the Authorized Version of the Bible in English history. It we would judge fairly of tyranny, and of what it contributed to the development of Greece, we must remember how many states there were in whose history the period of greatest power coincides with the rule of a tyrant. This is unquestionably true of Corinth and Sicyon, as well as of Syracuse in the 5th, and again in the 4th century; it is probably true of Samos and Miletus. In the case of Athens it is only the splendour of the Great Age that blinds us to the greatness of the results achieved by the policy of the Peisistratids.
With the overthrow of this dynasty tyranny disappears from Greece proper for more than a century During the century and a half which had elapsed since its first appearance the whole aspect of Greek life, and of the Greek world, had changed. The development was as yet incomplete, but the lines on which it was to proceed had been clearly marked out. Political power was no longer the monopoly of a class. The struggle between the "few" and the "many" had begun; in one state at least (Athens) the victory of the "many" was assured. The first chapter in the history of democracy was already written. In the art of war the two innovations which were ultimately to establish the military supremacy of Greece, hoplite tactics and the trireme, had already been introduced. Greek literature was no longer synonymous with epic poetry. Some of its most distinctive forms had not yet been evolved; indeed, it is only quite at the end of the period that prosewriting begins; but both lyric and elegiac poetry had been brought to perfection. In art, statuary was still comparatively stiff and crude; but in other branches, in architecture, in vasepainting and in cointypes, the aesthetic genius of the race had asserted its preeminence. Philosophy, the supreme gift of Greece to the modern world, had become a living power. Some of her most original thinkers belong to the 6th century. Criticism had been applied to everything in turn: to the gods, to conduct, and to the conception of the universe. Before the Great Age begins, the claims of intellectual as well as of politic~l freedom had been vindicated. It was not, however, in Greece proper that progress had been greatest. In the next century the centre of gravity of Greek civilization shifts to the western side of the Aegean; in the 6th century it must be looked for at Miletus, rather than at Athens. In order to estimate how far the development of Greece had advanced, or to appreciate the distinctive features of Greek life at this period, we must study Ionia, rather than Attica or the Peloponnese. Almost all that is greatest and most characteristic is to be found on the eastern side of the Aegean. The great names in the history of science and philosophy before the beginning ofthe sth century Thales, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, Hecataeus; names which are representative of mathematics, astronomy, geography and metaphysics, are all, without exception, Ionian. In poetry, too, the most famous names, if not so exclusively Ionian, are connected either with the Asiatic coast or with the Cyclades. Against Archilochus and Anacreon, Sappho and Alcaeus, Greece has nothing better to set, after the age of Hesiod, than Tyrtaeus and Theognis. Reference has already been made to the greatness of the Ionians as navigators, as colonizers and as traders. In wealth and in population, ~ailetus, at the epoch of the Persian conquest, must have been far ahead of any city of European Greece. Sybaris, in Magna Gr~ecia, can have been its only rival outside Ionia. There were two respects, however, in which the comparison was in favour of the mothercountry.In warfare, the superiority of the Spartan infantry was unquestioned; in politics, the Greek states showed a greater power of combination than the Ionian.
Finally, Ionia was the scene of the first conflicts with the Persian. Here were decided the first stages of a struggle which was to determine the place of Greece in the history of the world. The rise of Persia under Cyrus was, as Herodotus saw, the turningpoint of Greek history. Hitherto the Greek had proved himself indispensable to the oriental monarchies with which he had been brought into contact. In Egypt the power of the Saite kings rested upon the support of their Greek mercenaries. Amasis (569-525 b.c.), who is raised to the throne as the leader of a reaction against the influence of the foreign garrison, ends by showing greater favour to the Greek soldiery and the Greek traders than all that were before him. With Lydia the relations were originally hostile; the conquest of the Greek fringe is the constant aim of Lydian policy. Greek influences, however, seem to have quickly permeated Lydia, and to have penetrated to the court. Alyattes (610-560 B.C.) marries an Ionian wife, and the succession is disputed between the son of this marriage and Croesus, whose mother was a Carian. Croesus (560-546 B.C.) secures the throne, only to become the lavish patron of Greek sanctuaries and the ally of a Greek state. The history of Hellenism had begun. It was the rise of Cyrus that closed the East to Greek enterprise and Greek influences. In Persia we find the antithesis of all that is characteristic of Greece-autocracy as opposed to liberty; a military society organized on an aristocratic basis, to an industrial society, animated by a democratic spirit; an army, whose strength lay in its cavalry, to an army, in which the footsoldier alone counted; a morality, which assigned the chief place to veracity, to a morality which subordinated it to other virtues; a religion, which ranks among thc great religions of the world, to a religion, which appeared to the mostspiritual minds among the Greeks themselves both immoral and absurd. Between two such races there could be neither sympathy nor mutual understanding. In the Great Age the Greek had learned to despise the Persian, and the Persian to fear the Greek. In the 6th century it was the Persian who despised, and the Greek who feared. The history of the conflicts between the Ionian Greeks and the Persian empire affords a striking example of the combination of intellectual strength and political weakness in the character of a people. The causes of the failure of the Ionians to offer a successful resistance to Persia, both at the time of the conquest by Harpagus (546-545 B.C.) and in the Ionic revolt (499-494 B.C.), are not far to seek. The centrifugal forces always tended to prove the stronger in the Greek system, and nowhere were they stronger than in Iorlia. The tie of their tribal union proved weaker, every time it was put to the test, than the.political and commercial interests of the individual states. A league of jealous commercial rivals is certain not to stand the strain of a protracted struggle against great odds. Against the advancing power of Lydia a common resistance had not so much as been attempted. Miletus, the greatest of the Ionian towns, had received aid from Chios alone. Against Persia a common resistance was attempted. The Paniorlium, the centre of a religious amphictyony, became for the moment the centre of a political league. At the time of the Persian conquest Miletus held aloof. She secured favourable terms for herself, and left the rest of Ionia to its fate. In the later conflict, on the contrary, Miletus is the leader in the revolt. The issue was determined, not as Herodotus represents it, by policy of the leading states. In the seafight at Lade (494 B.C.) the decisive battle of the war, the Milesians and Chians fought with desperate courage. The day was lost thanks to the treachery of the Samian and Lesbian contingents.
The causes of the successful resistance of the Greeks to the invas}ons of their country, first by Datis and Artaphernes (490 B.C.) in the reign of Darius, and then by Xerxes in person (480-479 B.C.) are more complex. Their success was partly due to a moral cause. And this was realized by the Greeks themselves. They felt (see Herod. vii. 104) that the subjects of a despot are no rnatch for the citizens of a free state, who yield obedience to a law which is selfimposed. But the cause was not solely a moral one. Nor was the result due to the numbers and efficiency of the Athenian fleet, in the degree that the Athenians claimed (see Herod. vii. 139). The truth is that the conditions, both political and military, were far more favourable to the Greek defence in Europe than they had been in Asia. At this crisis the centripetal forces proved stronger than the centrifugal. The moral ascendancy of Sparta was the determining factor. In Sparta the Greeks had a leader whom all were ready to obey (Herod. viii. 2). But for her influence the forces of disintegration would have made themselves felt as quickly as in Ionia. Sparta was confronted with immense difiiculties in conducting the defence against Xerxes. The two chief naval powers, Athens and Aegina, had to be reconciled after a long and exasperating warfare (see AEGINA). After Thermopylae, the whole of northern Greece, with the exception of Athens and a few minor states, was lost to the Greek cause. The supposed interests of the Peloponnesians, who formed the greater part of the national forces, confticted with the supposed interests of the Athenians. A more impartial view than was possible to the generation for which Herodotus wrote suggests that Sparta performed her task with intelligence and patriotism. The claims of Athens and Sparta were about equally balanced. And in spite of her great superiority in numbers,l the militsry conditians were far from favourable to Persia. A land so rnountainous as Greece is was unsuited to the operations of cavalry, the most efficient arm of the service in the Persian Army, as in most oriental ones. Ignorance of local conditions, combined with the dangerous nature of the Greek coast, exposed their ships to the risk of destruction; while the composite character of the fleet, and the jealousies of its various contingents, tended to neutralize the advantage of numbers. In courage and discipline, the flower of the Persian infantry was probably little inferior to the Greek; in equipment, they were no match for the Greek panopty. Lastly, Xerxes laboured under a disadvantage, which may be illustrated by the experience of the British army in the South African War-distance frarn his base.
5. The Great Age (480-338 B.C.)-The effects of the repulse of Persia were momentous in their influence upon Greece. The effects upon Elizabethan England of the defeat of the Spanish armada would afford quite an inadequate parallel. It gave the Greeks a heightened sense, both of their own national unity and of their superiority to the barbarian, while at the same time it helped to create the material conditions requisite alike for the artistic and political development of the sth century. Other cities besides Athens were adorned with the proceeds of the spoils won from Persia, and Greek trade benefited both from the reunion of Ionia with Greece, and from the suppression of piracy in the Aegean and the Hellespont. Do these developments justify us in giving to the period, which begins with the repulse of Xerxes, and ends with the victory of Philip, the title of "the Great Age"? If the title is justified in the case of the 5th century, should the 4th century be excluded from the period? At first sight, the difference between the 4th century and the 5th may seem greater than that which exists between the sth and the 6th. On thc political side, the 5th century is an age of growth, the 4th an age of decay; on the literary side, the former is an age of poetry, the latter an age of prose. In spite of these contrasts, there is a real unity in the period which begins with the repulse of Xerxes and ends with the death of Atexander, as compared with any preceding one. It is an age of maturity in potitics, in literature, and in art; and this is true of no earlier age. Nor can we say that the sth century is, in alt these aspects of Greek tife, immature as compared with the 4th, or, on the other hand, that the 4th is decadent as compared with the 5th. On the political side, maturity is, in one sense, reached in the earlier century. There is nothing in the later century so great as the Athenian empire. In another sense, maturity is not reached till the 4th century. It is only in the later century that the tendency of the Greek constitutions to conform to a common type, democracy, is (at least approximately) realized, and it is only in this century that the principles upon which democracy is based are carried to their logical conclusion. In literature, if we confine our attention to poetry, we must pronounce the sth century the age of completed development; but in prose the case is different. The style even of Thucydides is immature, as compared with that of Isocrates and Plato. In philosophy, however high may be the estimate that is formed of the genius of the earlier thinkers, it cannot be disputed that in Plato and Aristotle we find a more mature stage of thought. In art, architecture may perhaps be said to reach its zenith in the sth, sculpture in the 4th century. In its political aspect, the history of the Great Age resolves itself into the history of two movements, the imperial and the democratic. Hitherto Greece had meant, politically, an aggregate of independent states, very numerous, and, as a rule, very small. The principle of autonomy was to the Greek the most sacred of all political principles; the passion for autonomy the most potent of political factors. In the latter half of the 6th century Sparta had succeeded in combining the majority of the Peloponnesian states into a loose federal union; so loose, however, that it appears to have been dormant in the intervals of peace. In the crisis of the Persian invasion the Peloponnesian League was extended so as to include all the states which had espoused the national cause. It looked on the morrow of Plataea and Mycale (the two victories, won simultaneously, in 479 B.C. by Spartan commanders, by which the danger from Persia was finally averted) as if a permanent basis for union might be found in the hegemony of Sparta. The sense of a common peril and a common triumph brought with it the need of a common union; it was Athens, however, instead of Sparta, by whom the first conscious effort was made to transcend the isolation of the Greek political system and to bring the units into combination. The league thus founded (the Delian League, established in 477 B.C. was under the presidency of Athens, but it included hardly any other state besides those that had conducted the defence of Greece. It was formed, almost entirely, of the states which had been liberated from Persian rule by the great victories of the war. The Delian League, even in the form in which it was first established, as a confederation of autonomous allies, marks an advance in political conccptions upon the Peloponnesian League. Provision is made for an annual revenue, for periodical meetings of the council, and for a permanent executive. It is a real fcderation, though an imperfect one. There were defects in its constitution which rendered it inevitable that it should be transformed into an empire. Athens was from the first "the predominant partner." The fleet was mainly Athenian, the commanders entirely so; the assessment of the tribute was in Athenian hands; there was no federal court appointed to determine questions at issue between Athens and the other members; and, worst omission of all, the right of secession was left undecided. By the middle of the century the Delian League has become the Athenian empire. Henceforward the imperial idea, in one form or another, dominates Greek politics. Athens failed to extend her authority over the whole of Greece. Her empire was overthrown; but thc triumph of autonomy proved the triumph of imperialisra. The Spartan empire succeeds to the Athenian, arld, when it is finally shattered at Leuctra (37 B.C.), the hegemony of Thebes, which is established on its ruins, is an empire in all but name. The decay of Theban power paves the way for the rise of Macedon.
Thus throughout this period we can trace two forces contending for mastery in the Greek political system. Two causes divide the allegiance of the Greek world, the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. The formation of the confederacy of Delos did not involve the dissolution of the alliance between Athens and Sparta. or seventeen years more Athens retained her place in the league, "which had been established against the Mede" under the presidency of Sparta in 480 B.C. (Thuc. i. 102) The ascendancy of Cimon and the Philolaconian party at Athens was favourable to a good understanding between the two states, and at Sparta in normal times the balance inclined in favour of the party whose policy is best described by the motto "quieta non movere."
In the end, however, the opposition of the two contending forces proved too strong for Spartan neutrality. The fall of Cimon (461 B.C.) was followed by the socalled "First Peloponnesian War," a conflict between Athens and her maritime rivals, Corinth and Aegina, into which wars Sparta was ultimately drawn. Thucydides regards the hostilities of these years (460-454 B.C.), which were resumed for a few months in 446 B.C., on the expiration of the Five Years' Truce, as preliminary to those of the great Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). The real question at issue was in both cases the same. The tie that united.the opponents of Athens was found in a common hostility to the imperial idea. It is a complete misapprehension to regard the Peloponnesian War as a mere duel between two rival claimants for empire. The ultimatum presented by Sparta on the eve of the war demandedthe restoratiorl of autonomy to the subjects of Athens. There is no reas~n for doubting her sincerity in presenting it in this form. It would, however, be an equal misapprehension to regard the war as merely a struggle between the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. Corresponding to this fundamental contrast there are other contrasts, constitutional, racial and military. The military interest of the war is largely due to the fact that Athens was a sea power and Sparta a land one. As the war went on, the constitutional aspect tended to become more marked. At first there were democracies on the side of Sparta, and oligarchies on the side of Athens. In the last stage of the war, when Lysander's influence was supreme, we see the forces of oligarchy everywhere united and organized for the destruction of democracy. In its origin the war was certainly not due to the rivalry of Dorian and Ionian. This racial, or tribal, contrast counted for more in the politics of Sicily than of Greece; and, though the two great branches of the Greek race were represented respectively by the leaders of the two sides, the allies on neither side belonged exclusively to the one branch or the other. Still, it remains true that the Dorian states were, as a rule, on the Spartan side, and the Ionian states, as a rule, on the Athenian-a division of sentiment which must have helped to widen the breach, and to intensify the animosities.
As a political experiment the Athenian empire possesses a unique interest. It represents the first attempt to fuse the principles of imperialism and democracy. It is at once the first empire in history possessed and administered by a sovereign people, and the first which sought to establish a common system of dernocratic institutions amongst its subjects. It was an experiment that failedj partly owing to the inherent strength of the oligarchic cause, partly owing to the exclusive character of ancient citizenship. The Athenians themselves recognized that their empire depended for its existence upon the solidarity of democratic interests (see Thuc. iii. 47; PseudoXenophon, de Rep. Ath. i. I4, iii. 10). An understanding existed between the democratic leaders in the subjectstates and the democratic party at Athens. Charges were easily trumped up against obnoxious oligarchs, and conviction as easily obtained in the Athenian courts of law. Such a system forced the oligarchs into an attitude of opposition. How much this opposition counted for was realized when the Sicilian disaster (413 B.C.) gave the subjects their chance to revolt. The organization of the oligarchical party throughout the empire, which was effected by Lysander in the last stage of the war, contributed to the overthrow of Athenian ascendancy hardly Iess than the subsidies of Persia. Had Athens aimed at establishing a community of interest between herself and her subjects, based upon a common citizenshiR, her empire might have endured. It would have been a policy akin to that which secured the permanence of the Roman empire. And it was a policy which found advocates when the day for it was past (see Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 514 ff.; cf. the grant of citizenship to the Samians after Aegospotami, C.I.A. iv. 2. 1b). But the policy pursued by Athens in the plenitude of her power was the reverse of the policy pursued by Rome in her treatment of the franchise. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the fate of the empire was sealed by the law of Pericles (451 B.C.), by which the franchise was restricted to those who could establish Athenian tescent on both sides. It was not merely that the process of amalgamation through intermarriage was abruptly checked; what was more serious was that a hard and fast line was drawn, once and for all, between the small body of privileged rulers and the great mass of unprivileged subjects. Maine (Early Institutions, lecture I3) has classed the Athenian empire with those of the familiar Oriental type, which attempt nothing beyond the raising of taxes and the levying of troops. The Athenian empire cannot, indeed, be classed with the Roman, or with the British rule in India; it does not, therefore, deserve to be classed with the empires of Cyrus or of Jenghiz Khan. Though the basis of its organization, like that of the Persian empire under Darius, was financial, it attempted, and secured, objects beyond the mere payment of tribute and the supply of ships. If Athens did not introduce a common religion, or a common system of education, or a common citizenship, she did introduce a common type of political institutions, and a common jurisdiction. She went some way, too, in the direction of establishing a common system of coins, and of weights and measures. A common language ~vas there already. In a word, the Athenian empire marks a definite stage of political evolution.
The other great political movement of the age was the progress of democracy. Before the Persian invasion democracy was a rare phenomenon in Greek politics. Where it was found it existed in an undeveloped form, and its tenure of power was precarious. By the beginning of the Peloponnesian War it had become the prevalent form of government. The great majority of Greek states had adopted democratic constitutions. Both in the Athenian sphere of influence and in the colonial world outside that sphere, democracy was ali but the only form of constitution known. It was only in Greece proper that oligarchy held its own. In the Peloponnese it could count a majority of the states; in northern Greece at least a half of them. The spread of democratic institutions was arrested by the victory of Sparta in the East, and the rise of Dionysius in the West. There was a moment at the end of the sth century when it looked as if democracy was a lost cause. Even Athens was for a brief period under the ruie of the Thirty (404-403 B.C.). In the regions which had formed the empire of Athens the decarchies set up by Lysander were soon overthrown, and democracies restored in most cases, but oligarchy continued to be the prevaient form in Greece proper until Leuctra (371 B.C.), and in Sicily tyranny had a still longer tenure of power. By the end of the Great Age oligarchy has aimost disappeared from the Greek world, except in the sphere of Persian influence. The Spartan monarchy stili survives; a few Peloponnesian states still maintain the rule of the few; here and there in Greece itself we meet with a revival of the tyrannts; but, with these exceptions, democracy is everywhere the only type of constitution. And democracy has developed as well as spread. At the end of the 5th century the constitution of Cleisthenes, which was a democracy in the view of his contemporaries, had come to be regarded as an aristocracy (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 29. 3). We can trace a similar change of sentiment in Siciiy. As compared with the extreme form of constitution adopted at Syracuse after the defeat of the Athenian expedition, the democracies established two generations earlier, on the fall of the tyranis, appeared oligarchical. The changes by which the character of the Greek democracies was revolutionized were four in number: the substitution of sortition for election, the abolition of a property qualification, the payment of officials and the rise of a class of professional politicians. In the democracy of Cleisthenes no payment was given for service, whether as a magistrate, a juror or a member of the Boule. The higher magistracies were filled by election, and they were held almost exclusively by the members of the great Athenian families. For the highest office of all, the archonship, none but Pentacosiomedimni (the first of the four Solonian classes) were eligible. The introduction of pay and the removal of the property quali fication formed part of the reforms of Pericles. Sortition had been instituted for election a generation earlier (487 B.C.). What is perhaps the most important of all these changes, the rise of the demagogues, belongs to the era of the Peloponnesian War. From the time of Cleisthenes to the outbreak of the war every statesman of note at Athens, with the exception of Themistocles (and, perhaps, of Ephialtes), is of aristocratic birth. Down to the fall of Cimon the course of Athenian politics is to a great extent determined by the alliances and antipathies of the great clans. With the Peloponnesian War a new epoch begins. The chief office, the strategia, is still, as a rule, held by.men of rank. But leadership in the Ecclesia has passed to men of a different class. The demagogues were not necessarily poor men. Cleon was a wealthy man; Eucrates, Lysicles and Hyperbolus were, at any rate, tradesmen rather than artisans. The first "labour member" proper is Cleophon (411-404 B.C.), a Iyremaker. They belonged, however, not to the landowning, but to the in dustrial classes; they were distinguished from the older race of partyleaders by a vulgar accent, and by a violence of gesture in public speaking, and they found their supporters among the population of the city and its port, the Peiraeus, rather than among the farmers of the country districts. In the 4th century the demagogues, though under another name, that of orators, have acquired entire control of the Ecclesia. It is an age of professionalism, and the professional soldier has his counterpart in the professional politician. Down to the death of Pericles the partyleader had always held office as Strategus. His rival, Thucydides, son of Melesias, forms a solitary exception ta this statement. In the 4th century the divorce between the general and the statesman is complete. The generals are professiond soldiers, who aspire to no political influence in the state, and the statesmen devote themselves exclusively to politics, a career for which they have prepared themselves by a professional training in oratory or administrative work. The ruin of agriculture during the war had reduced the old families to insignificance. Birth counts for less than nothing as a political asset in the age of Demosthenes.
But great as are the contrasts which have been pointed out between the earlier and the later democracy, those that distinguish the ancient conception of democracy from the modern are of a still more esscntial nature. The differences that distinguish the democracies of ancient Greece from those of the modern world have their origin, to a great extent, in the difference between a citystate and a nationstate. Many of the most famous Greek states had an area of a few square miles; the largest of them was no larger than an English county. Political theory put the limit of the citizenbody at 10,000. Though this number was exceeded in a few cases, it is doubtful if any state, except Athens, ever counted more than 20,000 citizens. In the nationstates of modern times, democratic government is possible only under the form of a representative system; in the citystate representative government was unnecessary, and therefore unknown. In the ancient type of democracy a popular chamber has no existence. The Ecclesia is not a chamber in any sense of the term; it is an assembly of the whole people, which every citizen is entitled to attend, and in which every one is equally entitled to vote and speak. The question raised in modern political science, as to whether sovereignty resides in the electors or their representatives, has thus neither place nor meaning in ancient theory. In the same way, one of the most familiar results of modern analysis, the distinction between the executive and the legislative, finds no recognition in the Greek writers. In a direct system of government there can be no executive in the proper sense. Executive functions are discharged by the ecclesia, to whose decision the details of administration may be referred. The position of the strategi, the chief officials in the Athenian democracy of the sth century, was in no sense comparable to that of a modern cabinet. Hence the individual citizen in an ancient democracy was concerned in, and responsible for, the actual work of government to a degree that is inconceivable in a modern state. Thus participation in the administrative and judicial business of the state is made by Aristotle the differentia of the citizen (. . . Aristot. Politics, p. 1275 a 20). A large proportion of the citizens of Athens, in addition to frequent service in the courts of law, must in the course of their lives have held a magistracy, great or small, or have acted for a year or two as members of the Boule. It must be remembered that there was nothing corresponding to a permanent civil service in the ancient state. Much of the work of a government omce would have been transacted by the Athenian Boule. It must be remembered, too, that political and administrative questions of great importance came before the popular courts of law. Hence it follows that the ordinary citizen of an ancient democracy, in the course of his service in the Boule or the lawcourts, acquiled an interest in political questions, and a grasp of administrative work, which none but a select few can hope to acquire under the conditions of the modern system. Where there existed neither a popular chamber nor a distinct executive, there was no opportunity for the growth of a partysystem. There were, of course, political parties at Athens and elsewhere-oligarchs and democrats, conservatives and radicals, a peaceparty and a warparty, according to the burning question of the day. There was, however, nothing equivalent to a general election, to a cabinet (or to that collective responsibility which is of the essence of a cabinet), or to the government and the opposition. Party organization, therefore, and a party system, in the proper sense, were never developed. Whatever may have been the evils incident to the ancient form of democracy, the "boss," the caucus and the spoilssystem were not among them.
Besides these differences, which, directly or indirectly, result from the difference of scale, there are others, hardly less profound, which are not connected with the size of the citystate. Perhaps the most striking contrast between the democracies of ancient and of modern times is to be found in their attitude towards privilege. Ancient democracy implies privilege; modern democracy implies its destruction. In the more fully developed democracies of the modern world (e.g. in the United States, or in Australia), the privilege of class is unknown; in some of them (e.g. New Zealand, Australia, Norway) even the privilege o f sex has been abohshed. Ancient dernocracy was bound up with privilege as much as oligarchy was. The transition from the latter to the former was effected by enlarging the area of privilege and by altering its basis. In an oligarchical state citizenship might be confined to 10% of the free population; under a democracy 50% might enjoy it. In the former case the qualification might be wealth or land; in the latter case it might be, as it was at Athens, birth, i.e. descent, on both sides, from a citizen family. But, in both cases alike, the distinction between a privileged and an unprivileged body of freeborn residents is fundamental. To the unprivileged class belonged, not only foreigners temporarily resident (xenoi) and aliens permanently domiciled (metoikoi),but also those nativeborn inhabitants of the state who were of foreign extraction, on one side or the other. The privileges attaching to citizenship included, in addition to eligibility for office and a vote in the assembly, such private rights as that of owning land or a house, or oi contracting a marriage with one of citizen status. The citizen, too, was alone the recipient of all the various forms of pay (e.g. for attendance in the assembly, for service in the Boule or the lawcourts, or for the celebration of the great festivals) which are so conspicuous a feature in the developed democracy of the 4th century. The metoeci could not even plead in a court of law in person, but only through a patron . . . . It is intelligible that privileges so great should be jealously guarded. In the democracies of the modern world naturalization is easy; in those of ancient Greece admission to the franchise was rarely accorded. In modern times, again,we are accustomed to connect democracy with the emancipation of women. It is true that only a few democratic constitutions grant them the suffrage; but though, as a rule, they are denied public rights, the growth of popular government has been almost everywhere accompanied by an extension of their private rights, and by the removal of the restrictions impo.sed by law, custom or public opinion upon their freedom of action. In ancient Greece the democracies were as illiberal in their policy as the oligarchies. Women of the respectable class were condemned to comparative seclusion. They enjoyed far less freedom in 4thcentury Athens than in the Homeric Age. It is not in any of the democracies, but in conservative Sparta, that they possess privilege and exercise influence.
The most fundamental of all the contrasl:s between democracy in its ancient and in its modern form remains to be stated. The ancient state was inseparable from slavery. In this respect there was no difference between democracy and the other forms of government. No inconsistency was felt, therefore, between this institution and the democratic principle. Modern political theory has been profoundly affected by the conception of the dignity of labour; ancient political theory tended to regard labour as a disqualification for the exercise of political rights. Where slavery exists, the taint of it will inevitably cling to all labour that can be performed by the slave. In ancient Athens (which may be taken as typical of the Greek democracies) unskilled labour was almost entirely slavelabour, and skilled labour was largely so. The arts and crafts were, to some extent, exercised by citizens, but to a les~ extent in the 4th than in the 6th century. They were, however, chiefly left to aliens or slaves. The citizenbody of Athens in the age of Demosthenes has been stigmatized as consisting in great measure of salaried paupers. There is, doubtless, an exaggeration in this. It is, however, true, both that the system of statepay went a long way towards supplying the simple wants of a southern population, and that a large proportion of the citizens had time to spare for the service of the state. Had the life of the lower class of citizens been absorbed in a round of mechanical labours, as fully as is the life of our industrial classes, the working of an ancient democracy would have been impossible. In justice to the ancient democraciesit must be conceded that, while popular government carried with it neither the enfranchixment of the alien nor the emancipation of the slaveJ the rights secured to both classes were more considerable in the democratic states than elsewhere. The lot of the slave, as well as that of the alien, was a peculiarly favourable one at Athens. The pseudo-Xenophon in the 5th century (De rep. Ath. I. 10-12) and Plato in the 4th (Republic, p. 563 B), prove that the spirit of liberty with which Athenian life was permeated, was not without its influence upvn the position of these classes. When we read that critiw complained of the opulence of slaves, and of the liberties they took, and when we are told that the slave could not be distinguished from the poorer class of citizens either by his dress or his look, we begin to realize the difference between the slavery of ancient Athens and the system as it was worked on the Roman latifundia or the plantations of the New World.
It had been anticipated that the fall of Athens would mean the triumph of the principle of autonomy. If Athens had surrendered within a year or so of the Sicilian catastrophe, this anticipation would probably have been fulfilled. It was the last phase of the struggle (412-404 B.C.) that rendered a Spartan empire inevitable. The oligarchical governments established by Lysander recognized that their tenure of power was dependent upon Spartan support, while Lysander himself, to whose genius, as a political organizer not less than as a commander, the triumph of Sparta was due, was unwilling to see his work undone. The Athenian empire had never included the greater part of Greece proper; since the Thirty Years' Peace its possessions on the mainland, outside the boundaries of Attica, were limited to Naupactus and Plataea. Sparta, on the other hand, attempted the control of the entire Greek world east of the Adriatic. Athens had been compelled to acknowledge a dual system; Sparta sought to establish uniformity. The attempt failed from the first. Within a year of the surrender of Athens, Thebes and Corinth had drifted into an attitude of opposition, while Argos remained hostile. It was not long before the policy of Lysander succeeded in uniting against Sparta the very forces upon which she had relied when she entered on the Peloponnesian War. The Corinthian War (394-387 B.C.) was brought about by the alliance of all the secondclass powers-Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Argos-against the one firstclass power, Sparta. Though Sparta emerged successful from the war, it was with the loss of her maritime empire, and at the cost of recognizing the principle of autonomy as the basis of the Greek political system. It was already evident, thus early in the century, that the centrifugal forces were to prove stronger than the centripetal. Two further causes may be indicated which help to explain the failure of the Spartan empire. In the first place Spartan seapower was an artificial creation. History seems to show that it is idle for a state to aspire to naval supremacy unless it possesses a great commercial marine. Athens had possessed such a marine; her naval supremacy was due not to the mere size of her fleet, but to the numbers and skill of her seafaring population. Sparta had no cornmerce. She could build fleets more easily than she could man them. A single defeat (at Cnidus, 391 B.C.) sufficed for the ruin of her seapower. The second cause is to be found in the iinancial weakness of the Spartan state. The Spartan treasury had been temporarily enriched by the spoils of the Peloponnesian War, but neither during that war, nor afterwards, did Sparta suceeed in developing any scientific financial system, Athens was the only state which either possessed a large annual revenue or accumulated a considerable reserve. Under the conditions of Greek warfare, fleets were more expensive than armies. Not only was money needed for the building and maintenance of the ships, but the sailor must be paid, while the soldier served for nothing. Hence the power with the longest purse could both build the largest fleet and attract the most skilful seamen.
The battle of Leuctra transferred the hegemony from Sparta to Thebes, but the attempt to unite Greece under the leadership of Thebes was from the first doomed to failure. The conditions were less favourable to Thebes than they had been to Athens or Sparta. Thebes was even more exclusively a landpower than Sparta. She had no revenue comparable to that of Athens in the preceding century. Unlike Athens and Sparta, she had not the advantage of being identified with a political cause. As the enemy of Athens in the 5th century, she was on the side of oligarchy; as the rival of Sparta in the 4th, she was on the side of democracy; but in her bid for primacy she coula not appeal, as Athens and Sparta could, to a great political tradition, nor had she behind her, as they had, the moral force of a great political principle. Her position, too, in Boeotia itself was insecure. The rise of Athens was in great measure the result of the synoecism . . . of Attica. All inhabitants of Attica were Athenians. But "Boeotian" and "Theban" were not synonymous terms. The Boeotian league was an imperfect form of union, as compared with the Athenian state, and the claim of Thebes to the presidency of the league was, at best, sullenly acquiesced in by the other towns. The destruction of some of the most famous of the Boeotian cities, however necessary it may have been in order to unite the country, was a measure which at once impaired the resources of Thebes and outraged Greek sentiment. It has been often held that the failure of Theban policy was due to the death of Epaminondas (at the battle of Mantinea, 362 B.C.). For this view there is no justification. His policy had proved afailure before his death. Where it harmonized with the spirit of the age, the spirit of dissidence, it succeeded; where it attempted to run counter to it, it failed. It succeeded in destroying the supremacy of Sparta in the Peloponnese; it failed to unite the Peloponnese on a new basis. It failed still more signally to unite Greece north of the Isthmus. It left Greece weaker and more divided than it found it (see the concluding words of Xenophon's Hellenics). It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of his policy as a destructive force; as a constructive force it effected nothing. The Peloponnesian system which Epaminondas overthrew had lasted two hundred years. Under Spartan leadership the Peloponnese had enjoyed almost complete immunity from invasion and comparative immunity from stasis (faction). The claim that Isocrates makes for Sparta is probably wellfounded (Archidamus, 64-69; during the period of Spartan ascendency the Peloponnesians were omalismenoi ton Ellhnon). Peloponnesian sentiment had been one of the chief factors in Greek politics; to it, indeed, in no small degree was due the victory over Persia. The Theban victory at Leuctra destroyed the unity, and with it the peace and the prosperity, of the Peloponnese. It inaugurated a period of misery, the natural result of stasis and invasion, to which no parallel can be found in the earlier history (See Isocrates, Archidamus, 65, 66; the Peloponnesians were omalismenoi sumtorais). It destroyed, too, the Peloponnesian sentiment of hostility to the invader. The bulk of the army that defeated Mardonius at Plataea came from the Peloponnese; at Chaeronea no Peloponnesian state was represented.
The question remains, Why did the citystate fail to save Greece fram conquest by Macedon? Was this result due to the inherent weakness either of the citystate itself, or of one particular form of it, democracy? It is clear, in any case, that the triumph of Macedon was the effect of causes which had long been at work. If neither Philip nor Alexander had appeared on the scene, Greece might have maintained her independence for another generation or two; but, when invasion came, it would have found her weaker and more distracted, and the conquerors might easily have been less imbued with the Greek spirit, and less sympathetic towards Greek ideals, than the great Macedonian and his son. These causes are to be found in the tendencies of the age, political, economic and moral. Of the two movements which characterized the Great Age in its political aspect, the imperial and the democratic, the one failed and the other succeeded. The failure and the success were equally fatal to the chances of Greece in the con9ict with Macedon. By the middle of the 4th century Greek politics had come to be dominated by the theory of the balance of power. This theory, enunciated in its coarsest form by Demosthenes (Pro Megalopolit. 4 . . .; cf. in Aristocrat. 102, 103), had shaped the foreign policy of Athens since the end of the Peloponnesian War. As long as Sparta was the stronger, Athens inclined to a Theban alliance; after Leuctra she tended in the direction of a Spartan one. At the epoch of Philip's accession the forces were everywhere nicely balanced. The Peloponnese was fairly equally divided between the Theban and the Spartan interests, andcentral Greece was similarly divided between the Theban and the Athenian. Farther north we get an Athenian party opposed to an Olynthian in Chalcidice, and a republican party, dependent upon the support of Thebes, opposed to that of the tyrants in Thessaly. It is easy to see that the political conditions of Greece, both in the north and in the south, invited interference from without. And the triumph of temocracy in its extreme form was ruinous to the military efficiency of Greece. On the one side there was a monarchical state, in which all powers, civil as well as military, were concentrated in the hands of a single ruler; on the other, a constitutional system, in which a complete separation had been effected between the responsibility of the statesman and that of the commander.
It could not be doubtful with which side victory would rest. Meanwhile, the economic conditions were steadily grovving worse. The cause which Aristotle assigns for the decay of the Spartan state-a declining population (see Politics, p. 1270. . .)-might be extended to the Greek world generally. The loss of population was partly the result of war and stasis-Isocrates speaks of the number of political exiles from the various states as enormous~ but it was also due to a declining birthrate,and totheexposure of infants. Aristotle, while condemning exposure, sanctions the procuring of abortion (Politics, 1335 b). It is probable that both antenatal and postnatal infanticide were rife everywhere, except among the more backward communities. A people which has condemned itself to racial suicide can have little chance when pitted against a nation in which healthier instincts prevail. The materials for forming a trustworthy estimate of the population of Greece at any given epoch are not available; there is enough evidence, however, to prove that the military population of the leading Greek states at the era of the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) fell far short of what it had been at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. The decline in population had been accompanied by a decline in wealth, both public and private; and while revenues had shrunk, expenditure had grown. It was a century of warfare; and warfare had become enormously more expensive, partly through the increased em ployment of mercenaries, partly through the enhanced cost of material. The power of the purse had made itself felt even in the sth century; Persian gold had helped to decide the issue of the great war. In the politics of the 4th century the power of the purse becomes the determining factor. The public finance of the ancient world was singularly simple in character, and the expedients for raising a revenue were comparatively few. The distinction between direct and indirect taxation was recog nized in practice, but states as a rule were reluctant to submit to the former system. The revenue of Athens in the sth century was mainly derived from the tribute paid by her subjects; it was only in time of war that a direct tax was levied upon the citizenbody.3 In the age of Demosthenes the revenue derived from the Athenian Confederacy was insignificant. The whole burden of the expenses of a war fell upon the I 200 richest citizens, who were subject to direct taxation in the dual form of the Trieratchy and the Eisphora (propertytax). The revenue thus raised was wholly insufficient for an effort on a great scale; yet the revenues of Athens at this period must have exceeded those of any other state. It is to mo'ral causes, however, rather than to political or economic ones, that the failure of Greece in the conflict with ~acedon is attributed by the most famous Greek statesmen of that age. Demosthenes is never weary of insisting upon the decay of patriotism among the citizens and upon the decay af probity among their leaders. Venality had always been the besetting sin of Greek statesmen. Pericles' boast as to his own incorrupibility (Thuc. ii. 60) is significant as to the reputation of his contemporaries. In the age of Demosthenes the level of public life in this respect had sunk at least as low as that which prevails in many states of the modern world (see Demosthenes. On the Crown, 61 . . .). Corruption was certainly not confined to the Macedonian party. The best that can be said in defence of the patriots, as well as of their opponents, is that they honestly believed that the policy which they were bribed to advocate was the best for their country's interests. The evidence for the general decay of patriotism among the mass, of the citizens is less conclusive. The battle of Megalopolis (331 B.C.), in which the Spartan soldiery " went down in a blaze of glory," proves that the spirit of the Lacedemonian state remained unchanged. But at Athens it seemed to contemporary observers-to Isocrates equally with Demosthenes-that the spirit of the great days was extinct (see Isocr. On the Peace, 47, 48). It cannot, of course, be denied that public opinion was obstinately opposed to the diversion of the Theoric Fund to the purposes of the war with Philip. It was not till the ycar before Chaeronea that Demosthenes succeeded in persuading the assembly to devote the entire surplus to the expenses of the war. Nor can it be denied that mercenaries were far more largely employed in the 4th century than in the 5th. In justice, however, to the Athenians of the Demosthenic era, it should be remembered that the burden of direct taxation was rarely imposed, and was reluctantly endured, in the previous century. It must also be remembered that, even in the 4h century, the Athenian citizen was ready to take the field, provided that it was not a question of a distant expedition or of prolonged service.5 For distant expeditions, or for prolonged service, a citizenmilitia is unsuited. The substitution of a professional force for an unprofessional one is to be explained, partly by the change in the character of Greek warfare, and partly by the operation of the laws of supply and demand. There had been a time when warfare meant a brief campaign in the summer months against a neighbouring state. It had come to mean prolonged operations against a distant enemy. Athens was at war,e.g. with Philip, for eleven years continuously (357346 B.C.). If winter campaigns in Thrace were unpopular at this epoch, they had been hardly less unpopular in the epoch of the Peloponnesian War. In the days of her greatness, too, Athens had freely employed mercenaries, but it was in the navy rather than the army. In the age of Pericles the supply of mercenary rowers was abundantj the supply of mercenary troops inconsiderable. In the age of Demosthenes incessant warfare and ceaseless revolution had filled Greece with crowds of homeless adventurers. The supply helped to create the demand. The mercenary was as cheap as the citizensoldier, and much more effective. On the whole, then, it may be inferred that it is a mistake to regard the prevalence of the mercenary system as the expression of a declining patriotism. It would be nearer the mark to treat the transition from the voluntary to the professional system as cause rather than effect: as one among the causes which contributed to the decay of public spirit in the Greek world.
6. From Alexander to the Roman Conquest (336-146 B.C.).-In the history of Greece proper during this period the interest is mainly constitutional. It may be called the age of federation. Federation, indeed, was no novelty in Greece. Federal unions had existed in Thessaly, in Boeotia and elsewhere, and the Boeotian league can be traced back at least to the 6th century. Two newlyfounded federations, the Chalcidian and the Arcadian, play no inconsiderable part in the politics of the 4th century. But it is not till the 3rd century that federation attains to its full development in Greece, and becomes the normal type of polity. The two great leagues of this period are the Aetolian and the Achaean. Both had existed in the 4th century, but the latter, which had been dissolved shortly before the beginning of the 3rd century, becomes important only after its restoration in 280 B.C., about which date the former, too, first begins to attract notice. The interest of federalism lies in the fact that it rnarl~s an advance beyond the conception of the citystate. It is an attempt to solve the problem which the Athenian empire failed to solve, the reconciliation of the claims of local autonomy with those of national union. The federal leagues of the 3rd century possess a further interest for the modern world, in that there can be traced in their constitutions a nearer approach to a representative system than is found elsewhere in Greek experience. A genuine representative system, it is true, was never developed in any Greek polity. What we find in the leagues is a sort of compromise between the principle of a primary assembly and the principle of a representative chamber. In both leagues the nominal sovereign was a primary assembly, in which every individual citizen had the right to vote. In both of them, however, the real power lay with a council . . . composed of members representative of each of the component states.l The real interest of this period, however, is to be looked for elsewhere than in Greece itself. Alexander's career is one of the turningpoints in history. He is one of the few to whom it has been given to modify the whole future of the human race. He originated two forces which have profoundly affected the development of civilization. He created Hellenism, and he created for the western world the monarchical ideal. Greece had produced personal rulers of ability, or even of genius; but to the greatest of these, to Peisistratus, to Dionysius, even to Jason of Pherae, there clung the fatal taint of illegitimacy. As yet no ruler had succeeded in making the person of the monarch respectable. Alexander made it sacred. From him is derived, for the West, that " divinity that doth hedge a king." And in creating Hellenism he created, for the first time, a common type of civilization, with a common language, literature and art, as well as a common form of political organization. In Asia Minor he was content to reinforce the existing Hellenic elements (cf. the case of Side, Arrian, Anabasis, i. 26. 4). In the rest of the East his instrument of hellenization was the polis. He is said to have founded no less than seventy cities, destined to become centres of Greek influence; and the great majority of these were in lands in which citylife was almost unknown. In this respect his example was emulated by his successors. The eastern provinces were soon lost, though Greek influences lingered on even in Bactria and across the Indus. It was only the regions Iying to the west of the Euphrates that were effectively hellenized, and the permanence of this result was largely due to the policy of Rome. But after all deductions have been made, the great fact remains that for many centuries after Alexander's death Greek was the language of literature~and religion, of commerce and of administration throughout the Nearer East. Alexander had created a universal empire as well as a universal culture. His empire perished at his death, but its central idea survived-that of the municipal freedom of the Greek polis within the framework of an imperial system. Hellenistic civilization may appear degenerate when compared with Hellenic; when compared with the civilizations which it superseded in nonHellenic lands, it marks an unquestionable advance. (For the history of Greek civilization in the East, see HELLENISM.) Greece left her mark upon the civilization of the West as well as upon that of the East, but the process by which her influence was diffused was essentially different. In the East Hellenism came in the train of the conqueror, and Rome was content to build upon the foundations laid by Alexander. In the West Greek influences were diffused by the Roman conquest of Greece. It was through the ascendancy which Greek literature, philosophy and art acquired over the Roman mind that Greek culture penetrated to the nations of western Europe. The civilization of the East remained Greek. The civilization of the West became and remained Latin, but it was a Latin civilization that was saturated with Greek influences. The ultimate division, both of the empire and the church, into two halves, finds its explanation in this original difference of culture.
ANCIENT AUTHORITIES.-(I.) For the earliest periods of Greek history, the socalled Minoan and Mycenaean, the evidence is purely archaeological. It is sufficient here to refer to the article AEGEAN CIVILIZATION. For the next period, the Heroic or Homeric Age, the evidence is derived from the poems of Homer. In any estimate of the value of these poems as historical evidence, much will depend upon the view taken of the authorship, age and unity of the poems. For a full discussion of these questions see HO1~ER. It cannot be questioned that the poems are evidence for the existence of a period in the history of the Greek race, which differed from later periods in political and social, military and economic conditions. But here agreement ends. If, as is generally held by German critics, the poems are not earlier than the gth century, if they contain large interpolations of considerably later date and if they are Ionian in origin, the authorit~ of the poems becomes comparatively slight. The existence d different strata in the poems will imply the existence of inconsistencies and contradictions in the evidence; nor will the evidence be that of a contemporary. It will also follow that the picture of the heroic age contained in the poems is an idealized one. The more extreme critics, e.g. Beloch, deny that the poems are evidence even for the existence of a preDorian epoch. If, on the other hand, the poems are assigned to the 11th or 12th century, to a Peloponnesian writer, and to a period anterior to the Dorian Invasion and the colonization of Asia Minor (this is the view of the late Dr D. B. Munro), the evidence becomes that of a contemporary, and the authority of the poems for the distribution of races and tribes in the Heroic Age, as well as for the social and political conditions of the poet's time, would be conclusive. Homer recognizes no Dorians in Greece, except in Crete (see Odyssey, xix. 177), and no Greek colonies in Asia Minor. Only two explanations are possible. Either there is deliberate archaism in the poems, or else they are earlier in date than the Dorian Invasion and the colonization of Asia Minor.
II. For the period that extends from the end of the Heroic Age to the end of the Peloponnesian War the two principal authorities are Herodotus and Thucydides. Not only have the other historical works which treated of this period perished (those at least whose date is earlier than the Christian era), but their authority was secondary and their material chiefly derived from these two writers. In one respect then this period of Greek history stands alone. Indeed, it might be said, with hardly an exaggeration, that there is nothing like it elsewhere in history. Almost our sole authorities are two writers of unique genius, and they are writers whose works have come down to us intact. For the period which ends with the repulse of the Persian invasion our authority is Herodotus. For the period which extends from 478 to 411 we are dependent upon Thucydides'. In each case, however, a distinction must be drawn. The Persian Wars form the proper subject of Herodotus's work; the Peloponnesian War is the subject of Thucydides. The interval between the two wars is merely sketched by Thucydides; while of the period anterior to the conflicts of the Greek with the Persian, Herodotus does not attempt either a complete or a continuous narrative. His references to it are episodical and accidental. Hence our kno,wledge of the Persian Wars and of the Peloponnesian War is widely different in character from our knowledge of the rest of this period. In the history of these wars the lacunae are few; in the rest of the history they are alike frequent and serious. In the history, therefore, of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars little is to be learnt from the secondary sources. Elsewhere, especially in the interval between the two wars, they become relatively important.
In estimating the authority of Herodotus (q.v.) we must be careful to distinguish between the invasion of Xerxes and all that is earlier. Herodotus's work was published soon after 430 B.C., i.e. about half a century after the invasion. Much of his information was gathered in the course of the preceding twenty years. Although his evidence is not that of an eyewitness, he had had opportunities of meeting those who had themselves played a part in the war, on one side or the other (e.g. Thersander of Orchomenos, ix. I6). In any case, we are dealing with a tradition which is little more than a generation old, and the events to which the tradition relates, the incidents of the struggle against Xerxes, were of a nature to impress themselves indelibly upon the minds of contemporaries. Where, on the other hand, he is treating of the period anterior to the invasion of Xerxes, he is dependent upon a tradition which is never less than two generations old, and is sometimes centuries old. His informants were, at best, the sons or grandsons of the actors in the wars (c.g. Archias the Spartan, iii. 55). Moreover, the invasion of Xerxes, entailing, as it did, the destruction of cities and sanctuaries, especially of Athens and its temples, marks a dividing line in Greek history. It was not merely that evidence perished and records were destroyed. What in reference to tradition is even more important, a new consciousness of power was awakened, new interests were aroused, and new questions and problems came to the front. The former things had passed away; all things were become new. A generation that is occupied with making history on a great scale is not likely to busy itself with the history of the past. Consequently, the earlier traditions became faint and obscured, and the history difficult to reconstruct. As we trace back the conflict between Greece and Persia to its beginnings and antecedents, we are conscious that the tradition becomes less trustworthy as we pass back from one stage to another. The tradition of the expedition of Datis and Artaphernes is less credible in its details than that of the expedition of Xerxes, but it is at once fuller and more credible than the tradition of the Ionian revolt. When we get back to the Scythian expedition, we can discover but few grains of historical truth.
Much recent criticism of Herodotus has been directed against his veracity as a traveller. With this we are not here concerned. The criticism of him as an historian begins with Thucydides. Among the references of the latter writer to his predecessor are the following passages: i. 21; i. 2 2 ad fin.; i. 20 ad fin. (cf. Herod. ix. 53, and vi. 57 ad fin.); iii. 62 §4 (cf. Herod. ix. 87); ii. 2 §§ 1 and 3 (cf. Herod. vii. 233); ii. 8 § 3 (cf. Herod. vi. 98). Perhaps the two clearest examples of this criticism are to be found in Thucydides' correction of Herodotus's account of the Cylonian conspiracy (Thuc. i. 126, cf. Herod. v. 71) and in his appreciation of the character of Themistocles-a veiled protest against the slanderous tales accepted by Herodotus (i. 138). In Plutarch's tract "On the Malignity of Herodotus "there is much that is suggestive, although his general standpoint, viz. that Herodotus was in duty bound to suppress all that was discreditable to the valour or patriotism of the Greeks, is not that of the modern critic. It must be conceded to Plutarch Ohat he makes good his charge of bias in Herodotus's attitude towards certain of the Greek states. The question, however, may fairly be asked, how far this bias is personal to the author, or how far it is due to the character of the sources from which his information was derived. He cannot, indeed, altogether be acquitted of personal bias. His work is, to some extent, intended as an apolog1,a for the Athenian empire. In answer to the charge that Athens was guilty of robbing other Greek states of their freedom, Herodotus seeks to show, firstly, that it was to Athens that the Greek world, as a whole, owed its freedom from Persia, and secondly, that the subjects of Athens, the Ionian Greeks, were unworthy to be free. This leads him to be unjust both to the services of Sparta and to the qualities of the Ionian race. For his estimate of the debt due to Athens see vii. I39. For bias against the Ionians sec especially iv. I42 (cf. Thuc. vi. 77); cf. also i. 143 and 146, vi. I 2I4 (Lade), vi. 112 ad fin. A striking example of his prejudice in favour of Athens is furnished by vi. 91. At a moment when Greece rang with the crime of 455 Athens in expelling the Aeginetans from their island, he uentures to trace in their expulsion the vengeance of heaven for an act of sacrilege nearly sixty years earlier (see AEGINA). As a rule, however, the bias apparent in his narrative is due to the sources from which it is derived. Writing at Athens, in the first years of the Peloponnesian War, he can hardly help seeing the past through an Athenian medium. It was inevitable that much of what he heard should come to him from Athenian informants, and should be coloured by Athenian prejudices. We may thus explain the leniency which he shows towards Argos and Thessaly, the old allies of Athens, in marked contrast to his treatment of Thebes, Corinth and Aegina, her deadliest foes. For Argos cf. vii. 152; Thessaly, vii. 172-174; Thebes, vii. 132, vii. 233, ix. 87; Corinth (especially the Corinthian general Adeimantus, whose son Aristeus was the most active enemy of Athens at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War), vii. 5, vii. 21, viii. 29 and 61, Yii. 94; Aegina, ix. 78-80 and 85. In his intimacy with members of the great Alcmaeonid house we probably have the explanation of his depreciation of the services of Themistocles, as well as of his defence of the family from the charges brought against it in connexion with Cylon and with the incident of the shield shown on Pentelicus at the time of Marathon (v. 71, vi. 121-124). His failure to do justice to the Cypselid tyrants of Corinth (v. 92), and to the Spartan king Cleomenes, is to be accounted for by the nature of his sources-in the former case, the tradition of the Corinthian oligarchy; in the latter, accounts, partly derived from the family of the exiled king Demaratus and partly representative of the view of the ephorate. Much of the earlier history is cast in a religious mould, e.g. the story of the Mermnad kings of Lydia in book i., or of the fortunes of the colony of Cyrene (iv. 145-167). In such cases we cannot fail to recognize the influence of the Delphic priesthood. Grote has pointed out that the moralizing tendency observable in Herodotus is partly to be explained by the fact that much of his information was gathered from priests and at temples, and that it was given in explanation of votive offerings, or of the fulfilment of oracles. Hence the determination of the sources of his narrative has become one of the principal tasks of Herodotean criticism. In addition to the current tradition of Athens, the family tradition of the Alcmaeonidae, and the stories to be heard at Delphi and other sanctuaries, there may be indicated the Spartan tradition, in the form in which it existed in the middle of the sth century; that of his native Halicarnassus, to which is due the prominence of its queen Artemisia; the traditions of the Ioman cities, especially of Samos and Miletus (important both for the history of the Mermnadae and for the Ionian Revolt); and those current in Sicily and Magna Graecia, which were learned during his residence at Thurii (Sybaris and Croton, v. 44, 45; Syracuse and Gela, vii. 153-167). Among his more special sources we can point to the descendants of Demaratus, who still held, at the beginning of the 4th century, the plincipality in the Troad which had been granted to their ancestor by Darius (Xen. Hell. iii. I. 6), and to the family of the Persian general Artabazus, in which the satrapy of Dascylium (Phrygia) was hereditary in the sth century. His use of written material is more difficult to determine. It is generally agreed that the list of Persian satrapies, with their respective assessments of tribute (iii. 89-97), the description of the royal road from Sardis to Susa (v. 5254), and of the march of Xerxes, together with the list of the contingents that took part in the expedition (vii. 26-131), are all derived from documentary and author;tative sources. From previous writers (e.g. Dionysius of Miletus, Hecataeus, Charon of Lampsacus and Xanthus the Lydian) it is probable that he has borrowed little, though the fragments are too scanty to permit of adequate comparison. His references to monuments, dedicatory offerings, inscriptions and oracles are frequent.
The chief defects of Herodotus are his failure too grasp the principles of historical criticism, to understand the nature of military operations, and to appreciate the importance of chronology. In place of historical criticism we find a crude rationalism (e.c. ii. 45, vii. 129, viii. 8). Having no conception of the distinction between occasion and cause, he is content to find the explanation of great historical movements in trivial incidents or personal motives. An example of this is furnished by his account of the Ionian revolt, in which he fails to discover the real causes either of the movement or of its result. Indeed, it is clear that he regarded criticism as no part of his task as an historian. In vii. 152 he states the principles which have guided him- . . . . In obedience to this principle he again and again gives two or more versions of a story. We are thus frequently enabled to arrive at the truth by a comparison of the discrepant traditions. It would have been fcrtunate if all ancient writers who lacked the critical genius of Thucydides had been content to adopt the practice of Herodotus. His accounts of battles are always unsatisfactory. The great battles, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, present a series of problems. This result is partly due tG the character of the traditions which he follows- traditions which were to some extent inconsistent or contradictory, and were derived from different sources; it is, however, in great measure due to his inability to think out a strategical combination or a tactical movement. It is not too much to say that the battle of Plataea, as described by Herodotus, is wholly unintelligible. Most serious of all his deficiencies is his careless chronology. Even in the case of the sth century, the data which he affords are inadequate or ambiguous. The interval between the Scythian expedition and the Ionian revolt is described by so vague an expression as. . . (v. 28). In the history of the revolt itseli, though he gives us the interval between its outbreak and the fall of Miletus (vi. 18), he does not give us the interval between this and the battle of Lade, nor does he indicate wlth sufEcient precision the years to which the successive phases of the movement belong. Throughout the work professed synchronisms too often prove to be mere literary devices for facilitating a transition from one subject to another (cf. e.g. v. 81 with 89, go; or vi. 51 with 87 and 94). In the 6th century, as Grote pointed out, a whole generation, or more, disappears in his historical perspective (cf. i. 30, vi. I25, v. 94, iii. 47, 48, v. 113 contrasted with v. 104 and iv. 162). The attempts to reconstruct the chronology of this century upon the basis of the data afforded by Herodotus (e.g. by Beloch, Rheinisches Museum, civ., 1890, pp. 465-473) have completely failed. In spite of all such defects Herodotus is an author, not only of unrivalled literary charm, but of the utmost value to the historian.' If much remains uncertain or obscure, even in the history of the Persian Wars, it is chiefly to motives or policy, to topography or strategy, to dates or numbers, that uncertainty attaches. It is to these that a sober criticism will confine itself.
Thucydides is at once the father of contemporary history and the father of historical criticism. From a comparison of i. I, i. 22 and v. 26, we may gather both the principles to which he adhered in the composition of his work and the conditions under which it was composed. It is seldom that the circumstances of an historical writer have been so favourable for the accomplishment of his task. Thucydides was a contemporary of the TwentySeven Years' War in the fullest sense of the term. He had reached manhood at its outbreak, and he survived its close by at least halfadozen years. And he was more than a mere contemporary. As a man of high birth, a member of the Periclean circle, and the holder of the chief political office in the Athenian state, the strategia, he was not only familiar with the business of administration and the conduct of military operations, but he possessed in addition a personal knowledge of those who played the principal part in the political life of the age. His exile in the year 424 afforded him opportunities of visiting the scenes of distant operations (e.g. Sicily) and of coming in contact with the actors on the other side. He himself tells us that he spared no pains to obtain the he began collecting materials for his work from the very beginning of the war. Indeed, it is probable that much of books i.-v. 24 was written soon after the Peace of Nicias (421), just as it is possible that the history of the Sicilian Expedition (boaks vi. and vii.) was originally intended to form a separate work. To the view, however, which has obtained wide support in recent years, that books i.-v. 22 and books vi. ard vii. were separately published, the rest of book v. and book viii. being little mors than a rough draught, composed after the author had adopted the theory of a single war of twentyseven years' duration, of which the Sicilian Expedition and the operations of the years 431-421 formed iritegral parts, there seem to the present writer to be insuperable objections. The work, as a whole, appears to have been composed in the first years of the 4th century, after his return from exile in 404, when the material already in existence must have been revised and largely recast. There are exceedingly few passages, such as iv. 48. 5, which appear to have been overlooked in the process of revision. It can hardly be questioned that the impression left upon the reader's mind is that the point of view of the author, in all the books alike, is that of one writing after the fall of Athens.
The task of historical criticism in the case of the Peloponnesian War is widely different from its task in the case of the Persian Wars. It has to deal, not with facts as they appear in the traditions of an imaginative race, but with facts as they appeared to a scientific observer. Facts, indeed, are seldom in dispute. The question is rather whether facts of importance are omitted, whether the explanation of causes is correct, or whether the judgment of men and measures is just. Such inaccuracies as have been brought home to Thucydides on the strength, e.g. of epigraphic evidence, are, as a rule, trivial. His most serious errors relate to topographical details, in cases where he was dependent on the information of others. Sphacteria (see PYLOS (see G. B. Grundy, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xvi., 1896, p. 1) is a case in point. Nor have the difficulties connected with the siege of Plataea been cleared up either by Grundy or by others (see Grundy, Topography of the Battle of Plataea, &c., 1894. Where, on the contrary, he is writing at first hand his descriptions of sites are surprisingly correct. The most serious charge as yet brought against his authority as to matters of fact relates to his account of the Revolution of the Four Hundred, which appears, at first sight, to be inconsistent with the documentary evidence supplied by Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (q.v.). It may be questioned, however, whether the documents have been correctly interpreted by Aristotle. On the whole, it is probable that the general course of events was such as Thucydides describes (see E. Meyer, Forschungen, ii. 406-436), though he failed to appreciate the position of Theramenes and the Moderate party, and was clearly misinformed on some important points of detail. With regard to the omission of facts, it is unquestionable that much is omitted that would not be omitted by a modern writer. Such omissions are generally due to the author's Iconception of his task. Thus the internal history of Athens is passed over as forming no part of the history of the war. It is only where the course of the war is directly affected by the course of political events (e.g. by the Revolution of the Four Hundred) that the internal history is referred to. However much it may be regretted that the relations of political parties are not more fully described, especially in book v., it cannot be denied that from his standpoint there is logical justification even for the omission of the ostracism of Hyperbolus. There are omissions, however, which are not so easily explained. Perhaps the most notable instance is that of the raising of the tribute in 425 B.C. (see DELIAN LEAGUE).
Nowhere is the contrast between the historical methods of Herodotus and Thucydides more apparent than in the treatment of the causes of events. The distinction between the occasion and the cause is constantly present to the mind of Thucydides, and it is his tendency to make too little rather than too much of the personal factor. Sometimes, however, it may be doubted whether his explanation of the causes of an event is adequate or correct. In tracing the causes of the Peloponnesian War itself, modern writers are disposed to allow more weight to the commercial rivalry of Corinth; while in the case of the Sicilian expedition, they would actually reverse his judgment (ii. 65 . . .). To us it seems that the very idea of the expedition implied a gigantic miscalculation of the resources of Athens and of the difliculty of the task. His judgments of men and of measures have been criticized by writers of different schools and from different points of view. Grote criticized his verdict upon Cleon, while he accepted his estimate of the policy of Pericles. More recent writers, on the other hand, have accepted his view of Cleon, while they have selected for attack his appreciation alike of the policy and the strategy of Pericles. He has been charged, too, with failure to do justice to the statesmanship of Alcibiades. There are cases, undoubtedly, in which the balance of recent opinion will be adverse to the view of Thucydides There are many more in which the result of criticism has been to establish his view. That he should occasronally have been mistaken in his judgment and his views is certainly no detraction from his claim to greatness.
On the whole, it may be said that while the criticism of Herodotus, since Grote wrote, has tended seriously to modify our view of the Persian Wars, as well as of the earlier history, the criticism of Thucydides, in spite of its imposing bulk, has affected but slightly our view of the course of the Peloponnesian War. The labours of recent workers in this field have borne best fruit where they have been directed to subjects neglected by Thucydides, such as the history of political parties, or the organization of the empire (G. Gilbert's Innere Geschichte Athens im Zeitalter des pel. Krieges is a good example of such work).
In regard to Thucydides' treatment of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars (the socalled Pentecontaeteris) it should be remembered that he does not profess to give, even in outline, the history of this period as a whole. The period is regarded simply as a prelude to the Peloponnesian War. There is no attempt to sketch the history of the Greek world or of Greece proper during this period. There is, indeed, no attempt to give a complete sketch of Athenian history. His object is to trace the growth of the Athenian Empire, and the causes that made the war inevitable. Much is therefore omitted not only in the history of the other Greek states, especially the Peloponnesian, but even in the history of Athens. Nor does Thucydides attempt an exact chronology. He gives us a few dates (e.g. surrender of Ithome, in the tenth year, I. 103; of Thasos, in the third year, I. 101; duration of the Egyptian expedition six years, I. 108; interval between Tanagra and Oenophyta 61 days, I. 108.; revolt of Samos, in the sixth year after the Thirty Years' Truce, I. 115), but from these data alone it would be impossible to reconstruct the chronology of the period. In spite of all that can be gleaned from our other authorities, our knowledge of this, the true period of Athenian greatness, must remain slight and imperfect as compared with our knowledge of the next thirty years.
Of the secondary authorities for this period the two principal ones are Diodorus (xi. 38 to xii. 37) and Plutarch. Diodorus is of value chiefly in relation to Sicilian affairs, to which he devotes about a third of this section of his work and for which he is almost our sole authority. His source for Sicilian history is the Sicilian writer Timaeus (q.v.), an author of the 3rd century s.c. For the history of Greece Proper during the Pentecontaetia Diodorus contributes comparatively little of importance. Isolated notices of particular events (e.g. the Synoecism of Elis, 471 B.C., or the foundation of Amphipolis, 437 B.C.), which appear to be derived from a chronological writer, may generally be trusted. The greater part of his narrative is, however, derived from Ephorus, who appears to have had before him little authentic information for this period of Greek history other than that afforded by Thucydides' work. Four of Plutatch's Lives are concerned with this period, viz. Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon and Pericles. From the Aristides little can be gained. Plutarch, in this biography, appears to be mainly dependent upon Idomeneus of Lampsacus, an excessivelyuntrustworthy writer of the 3rd century B.C., who is probably to be credited with the invention of the oligarchical conspiracy at the time of the battle of Plataea (ch. 13), and of the decree of Aristides, rendering all four classes of citizen eligible for the archonship (ch,. 22). The Cimon, on the other hand, contains much that is valuable; such as, e.g. the account o£ the battle of the Eurymedon (chs. 12 and 13). To the Pericles we owe several quotations from the Old Comedy. Two other of the Lives, Lycurgus and Solon, are amongst our most important sources for the early history of Sparta and Athcns respectively. Of the two (besides Perides) which relate to the Peloponnesian War, Alcibiades adds little to what can be gained from Thucydides and Xenophon; the Nicias, on the other hand, supplements Thucydides' narrative of the Sicilian expedition with many valuable details, which, it may safely be assumed, are derived from the contemporary historian, Philistus of Syracuse. Amongst the most valuable material afforded by Plutarch are the quotations, which occur in almost all the Lives, from the collection of Athenian decrees . . . formed by the Macedonian writer Craterus, in the 3rd century B.C. Two other works may be mentioned in connexion with the history of Athens. For the history of the Athenian Constitution down to the end of the 5th century B.C. Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (q.v.) is our chief authority. The other Constitution of Athens, erroneously attributed to Xenophon, a tract of singular interest both on literary and historical grounds, throws a good deal of light on the internal condition of Athens, and on the system of government, both of the state and of the empire, in the age of the Peloponnesian War, during the earlier years of which it was composed.
To the literary sources for the history of Greece, especially of. Athens, in the 5th century B.C. must be added the epigraphic. Few inscriptions have been discovered which date back beyond the Persian Wars. For the latter half of the 5th century they are both numerous and important. Of especial value are the series of Quotalists, from which can be calculated the amount of tribute paid by the subjectallies of Athens from the year 454 B.C. onwards. The great majority of the inscriptions of this period are of Athenian origin. Their value is enhanced by the fact that they relate, as a rule, to questions of organization, finance and administration, as to which little information is to be gained from the literary sources.
For the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, iii. I, is indispensable. Hillis Sources of Greek History, B.C. 478-43I (Oxford, 1897) is excellent. It gives the most important inscriptions in a convenient form.
III. The 4th Century to the Death of Alexander.-Of thehistorians who flourished in the 4th century the sole writer whose works have come down to us is Xenophon. It is a singular accident of fortune that neither of the two authors, who at once were most representative of their age and did most to determine the views of Greek history current in subsequent generations, Ephorus (q.v.) and Theopompus (q.v.), should be extant. It was from them, rather than from Herodotus, Thucydides or Xenophon that the Roman world obtained its knowledge of the history of Greece in the past, and its conception of its significance. Both were pupils of Isocrates, and both, therefore, bred up in an atmosphere of rhetoric. Hence their popularity and their in~uence. The scientific spirit of Thucydides was alien to the temper of the 4th century, and hardly more congenial to the age of Cicero or Tacitus. To the rhetorical spirit, which is common to both, each added defects peculiar to himself. Theopompus is a strong partisan, a sworn foe to Athens and to Democracy. Ephorus, though a military historian, is ignorant of the art of war. He is also incredibly careless and uncritical. It is enough to point to his description of the battle of the Eurymedon (Diodorus xi. 60-62), in which, misled by an epigram, which he supposed to relate to this engagement (it really refers to the Athenian victory off Salamis in Cyprus, 449 B.C.). he makes the coast of Cyprus the scene of Cimon's naval victoryj and finds no difficulty in putting it on the same day as the victory on shore on the banks of the Eurymedon, in Pamphylia. Only a few fragments remain of either writer, but Theopompus (q.v.) was largely used by Plutarch in several of the Lives, while Ephorus continues to be the main source of Diodorus' history, as far as the outbreak of the Sacred War (Fragments of Ephorus in Miiller's Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum, vol. i.; of Theopompus in Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, cum Theopompi et Cratippi fragmentis, ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, 1909).
It may be at least claimed for Xenophon (q.v.) that he is free from all taint of the rhetorical spirit. It may also be claimed for him that, as a witness, he is both honest and wellinformed. But, if there is no justification for the charge of deliberate falsification, it cannot be denied that he had strong political prejudices, and that his narrative has suffered from them. His historical writings are the Anabasis, an account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, the Hellenica and the Agesilaus, a eulogy of the Spartan king. Of these the Hellenica is far the most important for the student of history. It consists of two distinct par'ts (though there is no ground for the theory that the two parts were separately written and published), books i. and ii., and books iii. to vii. The first two books are intended as a continuation of Thucydides' work. They begin, quite abruptly, in the middle of the Attic year 411/10, and they carry the history down to the fall of the Thirty, in 403. Books iii. to vii., the Hellenica proper, cover the period from 401 to 362, and give the histories of the Spartan and Theban hegemonies down to the death of Epaminondas. There is thus a gap of two years between the point at which the first part ends and that at which the second part begins. The two parts differ widely, both in their aim and in the arrangement of thc material. In the first part Xenophon attempts, though not ~vith complete success, to follow the chronological method of Thucydides, and to make each successive spring, when military and naval operations were resumed after the winter's interruption, the startingpoint of a fresh section. The resemblance between the two writers ends, however, with the outward form of the narrative. All that is characteristic of Thucydides is absent in Xenophon. The latter writer shows neither skill in portraiture, nor insight into motives. He is deficient in the sense of proportion and of the distinction between occasion and cause. Perhaps his worst fault is a lack of imagination. To make a story intelligible it is necessary sometimes to put oneself in the reader's place, and to appreciate his ignorance of circumstances and events which would be perfectly familiar to the actors in the scene or to contemporaries. It was not given to Xenophon, as it was to Thucydides, to discriminate between the circumstances that are essential and those that are not essential to the comprehension of the story. In spite, therefore, of its wealth of detail, his narrative is frequently obscure. It is quite clear that in the trial of the generals, e.g., something is omitted. It may be supplied as Diodorus has supplied it (xiii. 101), or it may be supplied otherwise. It is probable that, when under cross-examination before the council, the generals, or some of them, disclosed the commission given to Theramenes and Thrasybulus. The important point is that Xenophon himself has omitted to supply it. As it stands his narrative is unintelligible. In the first two books, though there are omissions (e.g. the loss of Nisaea, 409 B.C.), they are not so serious as in the last five, nor is the bias so evident. It is true that if the account of the rule of the Thirty given in Aristotle's Constitition of Athens be accepted, Xenophon must have deliberately misrepresented the course of events to the prejudice of Theramenes. But it is at least doubtful whether Aristotle's version can be sustained against Xenophon's, though it may be admitted, not only that there are mistakes as to details in the latter writer's narrative, but that less than justice is done to the policy and motives of the "Buskin." The Hellenica was written, it should be remembered, at Corinth, after 362. More than forty years had thus elapsed since the events recorded in the first two books, and after so long an interval accuracy of detail, even where the detail is of importance, is not always to be expected. In the second part the chronological method is abandoned. A subject once begun is followed out to its natural ending, so that sections of the narrative which are consecutive in order are frequently parallel in point of date. A good example of this will be found in book iv. In chapters 2 to 7 the history of the Corinthian war is carried down to the end of 390, so far as the operations on land are concerned, while chapter 8 contains an account of the naval operations from 394 to 388. In this second part of the Hellenica the author's disqualifications for his task are more apparent than in the first two books. The more he is acquitted of bias in his selection of events and in his omissions, the more clearly does he stand convicted of ]acking all sense of the proportion of things. Down to Leuctra (371 B.C.) Sparta is the centre of interest, and it is of the Spartan state alone that a complete or continuous history is given. After Leuctra, if the point of view is no longer exclusively Spartan, the narrative of events is hardly less incomplete. Throughout the second part of the Hellenica omissions abound which it is difficult either to explain or justify. The formation of the Second Athenian Confederacy of 377 B.C., the foundation of Megalopolis and the restoration of the Messenian state are all left unrecorded. Yet the writer who passes them over without mention thinks it worth while to devote more than onesixth of an entire book to a chronicle of the unimportant feats of the citizens of the petty state of Phlius. Nor is any attempt made to appraise the policy of the great Theban leaders, Pelopidas and Epaminondas. The former, indeed, is mentioned only in a single passage, relating to the embassy to Susa in 368; the latter does not appear on the scene till a year later, and receives mention but twice before the battle of Mantinea. An author who omits from his narrative some of the most important events of his period, and elaborates the portraiture of an Agesilaus while not attempting the bare outline of an Epaminondas, may be honest; he may even write without a consciousness of bias; he certainly cannot rank among the great writers of history.
For the history of the 4th century Diodorus assumes a higher degree of importance than belongs to him in the.earlier periods. This is partly to be explained by the deficiencies of Xenophon's Hellenica, partly by the fact that for the interval between the death of Epaminondas and the accession of Alexander we have in Diodorus alone a continuous narrative of events. Books xiv. and xv. of his history include the period covered by the Hellenica. More than half of book xiv. is devoted to the history of Sicily and the reign of Dionysius, the tyrant of Svracuse. For this period of Sicilian history he is, practically, our sole authority. In the rest of the book, as well as in book xv., there is much of value, especially in the notices of Macedonian history. Thanks to Diodorus we are enabled to supply many of the omissions of the Hellenica. Diodorus is, e.g., our sole literary authority for the Athenian naval confederation of 377. Book xvi. must rank, with the Hellenica and Arrian's Anabasis, as one of the three principal authorities for this century, so far, at least, as works of an historical character are concerned. It is our authority for the Social and the Sacred Wars, as well as for the reign of Philip. It is a curious irony of fate that, for what is perhaps the most momentous epoch in the history of Greece, we should have to turn to a writer of such inferior capacity. For this period his material is better and his importance greater: his intelligence is as limited as ever. Who but Diodorus would be capable of narrating the siege and capture of Methone twice over, once under the year 354, and again under the year 352 (xvi. 31 and 34; cf. xii. 35 and 42; Archidamus (q.v.) dies in 434, commands Peloponnesian army in 431); or of giving three different numbers of years (eleven, ten and nine) in three different passages (chs. 14, 23 and 59) for the length of the sacred War; or of asserting the conclusion of peace between Athens and Philip in 340, after the failure of his attack on Perinthus and Byzantium? Amongst the subjects which are omitted is the Peace of Philocrates. For the earlier chapters, which bring the narrative down to the outbreak of the Sacred War, Ephorus, as in the previous book, is Diodorus' main source. His source for the rest of the book, i.e. for the greater part of Philip's reign, cannot be determined. It is generally agreed that it is,not the Philippica of Theopompus.
For the reign of Alexander our earliest extant authority is Diodorus, who belongs to the age of Augustus. Of the others, Q. Curtius Rufus, who wrote in Latin, lived in the reign of the emperor Claudius, Arrian and Plutarchin the 2nd century A.D. Yet Alexander's reign is one of the best known periods of ancient history. The Peloponnesian War and the twenty years of Roman history which begin with 63 A.D. are the only two periods which we can be said to know more fully or for which we have more trustworthy evidence. For there is no period of ancient history which was recorded by a larger number of contemporary writers, or for which better or more abundant materials were available. Of the writers actually contemporary with Alexander there were five of importance-Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Callisthenes, Onesicritus and Nearchus; and all of them occupied positions which afforded exceptional opportunities of ascertaining the facts. Four of them were officers in Alexander's service. Ptolemy, the future king of Egypt, was one of the somatophylaces (we may, perhaps, regard them as corresponding to Napoleon's marshals); Aristobulus was also an officer of high rank (see Arrian, Anab. vi. 29. 10); Nearchus was admiral of the fleet which surveyed the Indus and the Persian Gulf, and Onesicritus was one of his subordinates. The fifth, Callisthenes, a pupil of Aristotle, accompanied Alexander on his march down to his death in 327 and was admitted to the circle of his intimate friends. A sixth historian, Cleitarchus, was possibly also a contemporary; at any rate he is not more than a generation later. These writers had at their command a mass of official documents, such as . . .the Gazette and Court Circu1ar combined-edited and published after Alexander's death by his secretary, Eumenes of Cardia; the . . . records of the marches of the armies, which were carefully measured at the time; and the official reports on the conquered provinces. That these documents were made use of by the historians is proved by the references to them which are to be found in Arrian, Plutarch and Strabo; e.g. Arrian, Anab. vii. 25 and 26, and Plutarch, Alexander 76. . . ; Strabo xv. 723 . . . (reports drawn up on the various provinces). We have, in addition, in Plutarch numerous quotations from Alexander's correspondence with his mother, Olympias, and with his officers. The contemporary historians may be roughly divided into two groups. On the one hand there are Ptolemy and Aristobulus, who, except in a single instance, are free from all suspicion of deliberate invention. On the other hand, there are Callisthenes, Onesicritus and Cleitarchus, whose tendency is rhetorical. Nearchus appears to have allowed full scope to his imagination in dealing with the wonders of India, but to have been otherwise veracious. Of the extant writers Arrian (q.v.) is incomparably the most valuable. His merits are twofold. As the commander of Roman legions and the author of a work on tactics, he combined a practical with a theoretical knowledge of the military art, while the writers whom he follows in the Anabasis are the two most worthy of credit, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. We may well hesitate to call in question the authority of writers who exhibit an agreement which it would be difficult to parallel elsewhere in the case of two independent historians. It may be inferred from Arrian's references to them tha~ there were only eleven cases in all in which he found discrep~ncies between them. The most serious drawback which can be alleged against them is an inevitable bias in Alexander's favour. It would be only natural that they should pass over in silence the worst blots on their great commander's fame. Next in value to the Anabasis comes Plutarch's Life of Alexander, the merits of which, however, are not to be gauged by the influence which it has exercised upon literature. The Life is a valuable supplement to the Anabasis, partly because Plutarch, as he is writing biography rather than history (for his conception of the difference between the two see the famous preface, Life of Alexanda, ch. i.), is concerned to record all that will throw light upon Alexander's character (e.g. his epigrammatic sayings and quotations from his letters); partly because he tells us much about his early life, before he became king, while Arrian tells us nothing. It is unfortunate that Plutarch writes in an uncritical spirit; it is hardly less unfortunate that he should have formed no clear conception and drawn no consistent picture of Alexander's character Book xvii. of Diodorus and the Historiae Alexandri of Curtius Rufus are thoroughly rhetorical in spirit. It is probable that in both cases the ultimate source is the work of Clitarchus.
It is towards the end of the sth century that a fresh source of information becomes available in the speeches of the orators, the earliest of whom is Antiphon (d. 411 B.C.). Lysias is of great importance for the history of the Thirty (see the speeches against Eratosthenes and Agoratus), and a good deal may be gathered from Andocides with regard to the lzst years of the 5th and the opening years of the next century. At the other end of this period Lycurgus, Hyperides and Dinarchus throw light upon the time of Philip and Alexander. The three, however, who are of most importance to the historian are Isocrates, Aeschines and Demosthenes. Isocrates (q.v.), whose long life (436-338) more than spans the interval between the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and the triumph of Macedon at Chaeronea, is one of the most characteristic figures in the Greek world of his day. To comprehend that world the study of Isocrates is indispensable; for in an age dominated by rhetoric he is the prince of rhetoricians. It is difficult for a modern reader to do him justice, so alien is his spiritand the spirit of his age from ours. It must be allowed that he is frequently monotonous and prolix; at the same time it must not be forgotten that, as the most famous representative of rhetoric, he was read from one end of the Greek world to the other. He was the friend of Evagoras and Archidamus, of Dionysius and Philip; he was the master of Aeschines and Lycurgus amongst orators and of Ephorus and Theopompus amongst historians, No other contemporary writer has left so indelible a stamp upon the style and the sentiment of his generation. It is a commonplace that Isocrates is the apostle of Panhellenism. It is not so generally recognized that he is the prophet of Hellenism. A passage in the Panegyricus . . . is the key to the history of the next three centuries. Doubtless he had no conception of the extent to which the East was to be hellenized. He was, however, the first to recognize that it would be hellenized by the diffusion of Greek culture rather than of Greek blood. His Panhellenism was the outcome of his recognition of the new forces and tendencies which were at work in the midst of a new generation. When Greek culture was becoming more and more international, the exaggeration of the principle of autonomy in the Greek polilical system was becoming more and more absurd. He had sufficient insight to be aware that the price paid for this autonomy was the domination of Persia; a domination which meant the servitude of the Greek states across the Aegean and the demoralization of Greek political life at home. His Panhellenism led him to a more liberal view of the distinction between what was Greek and what was not than was possible to the intenser patriotism of a Demosthenes. In his later orations he has the courage not only to pronounce that the day of Athens as a firstrate power is past, but to see in Philip the needful leader in the crusade against Persia. The earliest and greatest of his political orations is the Panegyricus, published in 380 B.C., midway between the peace of Antalcidas and Leuctra. It is his apologia for Panhellenism. To the period of the Social War belong the De pace (355 B.C.) and the Arcopagigicus (354 B.C.), both of great value as endence for the internal conditions of Athens at the beginning of the struggle with Macedon. The Plataicus (373 B.C.) and the Archidamus (366 B.C.) throw light upon the politics of Boeotia and the Peloponnese respectively. The Panathenaicus (339 B.C.), the child of his old age, contains little that may not be found in the earlier orations. The Phillppus (346 B.C.) is of peculiar interest, as giving the views of the Macedohian party.
Not the least remarkable feature in recent historical criticism is the reaction agairist the view which was at one time almost universally accepted of the character, statesmanship and authority of the orator Demosthenes (q.v.). During the last quarter of a century his character and itatesmanship have been attacked, and his authority impugned, by a series of writers of whom Holm and Beloch are the best known. With the estimate of his character and statesmanship we are not here concerned. With regard to his value as an authority for the history of the period, it is to his speeches, and to those of his contemporaries, Aeschines, Hypereides, Dinarchus and Lycurgus, that we owe our intimate knowledge, both of the working of the constitutional and legal systems, and of the life of the people, at this period of Athenian history. From this point of view his value can hardly be overestimated. As a witness, however, to matters of fact, his authority can no longer be rated as highly as it once was, e.g. by Schaefer and by Grote. The orator's attitude towards events, both in the past and in the present, is inevitably a different one from the historian's. The object of a Thucydides is to ascertain a fact, or to exhibit it in its true relations. The object of Demosthenes is to make a point, or to win his case. In their dealings with the past the orators exhibit a levity which is almost inconceivable to a modern reader. Andocides, in a passage of his speech On the Mysteries (§ 107), speaks of Marathon as the crowning victory of Xerxes' campaign; in his speech On the Peace (§ 3) he confuses Miltiades with Cimon, and the Five Years' Peace with the Thirty Years' Truce. Though the latter passage is a mass of absurdities and confusions, it was so generally admired that it was incorporated by Aeschines in his speech On the Embassy (§§ 172-176). If such was their attitude towards the past; if, in order to make a point, they do not hesitate to pervert history, is it likely that they would con£orm to a higher standard of veracity in their statements as to the present-as to their contemporaries, their rivals or their own actions? When we compare different speeches of Demosthenes, separated by an interval of years, we cannot fail to observe a marked difference in his statements. The farther he is from the events, the bolder are his misstatements. It is onIy necessary to compare the speech On the Crown with that On the Embassy, and this latter speech with the Philippics and Olynthiacs, to find illustrations. It has come to be recognized that no statement as to a matter of fact is to be accepted, unless it receives independent corroboration, or unless it is admitted by both sides. The speeches of Demosthenes may be conveniently divided into four classes according to their dates. To the pre-Philippic period belong the speeches On the Syrnmories (354 B.C.), On Megalopolis (352 B.C.), Against Aristocrates (351 B.C.); and, perhaps, the speech On Rhodes (? 351 B.C.). These speeches betray no consciousness of the danger threatened by Philip's ambition. The policy recommended is one based upon the principle of the balance of power. To the succeeding period, which ends with the peace of Philocrates (346 B.C.), belong the First Philippic and the three Olynthiacs. To the period between the peace of Philocrates and Chaeronea belong the speech On the Peace (346 B.C.), the Second Philippic (344 B.C.), the speeches On the Embassy (344 B.C.) and On the Chersonese (341 B.C.), and the Third Philippic. The masterpiece of his genius, the speech On the Crown, was delivered in 330 B.C., in the reign of Alexander. Of the three extant speeches of Aeschines (q.v.) that On the Embassy is of great value, as enabling us to correct the mis-statements of Demosthenes. For the period from the death of Alexander to the fall of Corinth (323-146 B.C.) our literary authorities are singularly defective. For the Diadochi Diodorus (books xviii.-xx.) is our chief source. Thgese books form the most valuable part of Diodorus' work. They are mainly based upon the work of Hieronymus of Cardia, a writer who combin~d exceptional opportunities for ascertaining the truth (he was ih the service first of Eumenes, and then of Antigonus) with an exceptional sense of its importance. Hieronymus ended his history at the death of Pyrrhus (272 B.C.), but, unfortunately, book xx. of Diodorus' work carries us no farther than 303 B.C., and of the later books we have but scanty fragments. The narrative of Diodorus may be supplemented by the fragments af Arrian's History of the events after Alexander's death (which reach, however, only to 321 B.C.), and by Plutarch's Lives of Eumenes and of Demetrius. For the rest of the 3rd century and the first half of the 2nd we have his Lives of Pyrrhus, of Aratus, of Philopoemen, and of Agis and Cleomenes. For the period from 220 B.C. onwards Polybius (q.v.) is our chief authority (see ROME: Ancient Hiistory, section "Authorities"). In a period in which the literary sources are so scanty great weight attaches to the epigraphic and numismatic evidence.
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