VOLUME XII SLICE IV Grasshopper to Greek Language (continued 7)

4. The Growth of the Greek States.—The Greek world at the beginning of the 6th century B.C. presents a picture in many respects different from that of the Homeric Age. The Greek race is no longer confined to the Greek peninsula. It occupies the islands of the Aegean, the western seaboard of Asia Minor, the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, of southern Italy and Sicily. Scattered settlements are found as far apart as the mouth of the Rhone, the north of Africa, the Crimea and the eastern end of the Black Sea. The Greeks are called by a national name, Hellenes, the symbol of a fully-developed national self-consciousness. They are divided into three great branches, the Dorian, the Ionian and the Aeolian, names almost, or entirely, unknown to Homer. The heroic monarchy has nearly everywhere disappeared. In Greece proper, south of Thermopylae, it survives, but in a peculiar form, in the Spartan state alone. What is the significance and the explanation of contrasts so profound?

It is probable that the explanation is to be found, directly or indirectly, in a single cause, the Dorian invasion. In Homer the Dorians are mentioned in one passage only (Odyssey xix. 177). They there appear as one of the races which Dorian invasion. inhabit Crete. In the historical period the whole Peloponnese, with the exception of Arcadia, Elis and Achaea, is Dorian. In northern Greece the Dorians occupy the little state of Doris, and in the Aegean they form the population of Crete, Rhodes and some smaller islands. Thus the chief centres of Minoan and Mycenaean culture have passed into Dorian hands, and the chief seats of Achaean power are included in Dorian states. Greek tradition explained the overthrow of the Achaean system by an invasion of the Peloponnese by the Dorians, a northern tribe, which had found a temporary home in Doris. The story ran that, after an unsuccessful attempt to force an entrance by the Isthmus of Corinth, they had crossed from Naupactus, at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, landed on the opposite shore, and made their way into the heart of the Peloponnese, where a single victory gave them possession of the Achaean states. Their conquests were divided among the invaders into three shares, for which lots were cast, and thus the three states of Argos, Sparta and Messenia were created. There is much in this tradition that is impossible or improbable. It is impossible, e.g. for the tiny state of Doris, with its three or four “small, sad villages” (πολεις μικραὶ καὶ λυπρόχωροι, Strabo, p. 427), to have furnished a force of invaders sufficient to conquer and re-people the greater part of the Peloponnese. It is improbable that the conquest should have been either as sudden, or as complete, as the legend represents. On the contrary, there are indications that the conquest was gradual, and that the displacement of the older population was incomplete. The improbability of the details affords, however, no ground for questioning the reality of the invasion.6 The tradition can be traced back at Sparta to the 7th century B.C. (Tyrtaeus, quoted by Strabo, p. 362), and there is abundant evidence, other than that of legend, to corroborate it. There is the Dorian name, to begin with. If, as Beloch supposes, it originated on the coast of Asia Minor, where it served to distinguish the settlers in Rhodes and the neighbouring islands from the Ionians and Aeolians to the north of them, how came the great and famous states of the Peloponnese to adopt a name in use among the petty colonies planted by their kinsmen across the sea? Or, if Dorian is simply Old Peloponnesian, how are we to account for the Doric dialect or the Dorian pride of race?

It is true that there are great differences between the literary Doric, the dialect of Corinth and Argos, and the dialects of Laconia and Crete, and that there are affinities between the dialect of Laconia and the non-Dorian dialects of Arcadia and Elis. It is equally true, however, and of far more consequence, that all the Doric dialects are distinguished from all other Greek dialects by certain common characteristics. Perhaps the strongest sentiment in the Dorian nature is the pride of race. Indeed, it looks as if the Dorians claimed to be the sole genuine Hellenes. How can we account for an indigenous population, first imagining itself to be immigrant, and then developing a contempt for the rest of the race, equally indigenous with itself, on account of a fictitious difference in origin? Finally, there is the archaeological evidence. The older civilization comes to an abrupt end, and it does so, on the mainland at least, at the very period to which tradition assigns the Dorian migration. Its development is greatest, and its overthrow most complete, precisely in the regions occupied by the Dorians and the other tribes, whose migrations were traditionally connected with theirs. It is hardly too much to say that the archaeologist would have been compelled to postulate an inroad into central and southern Greece of tribes from the north, at a lower level of culture, in the course of the 12th and 11th centuries B.C., if the historian had not been able to direct him to the traditions of the great migrations (μεταναστάσεις), of which the Dorian invasion was the chief. With the Dorian migration Greek tradition connected the expansion of the Greek race eastwards across the Aegean. In the historical period the Greek settlements on the western coast of Asia Minor fall into three clearly defined groups. To the north is the Aeolic group, consisting of the island of Lesbos and twelve towns, mostly insignificant, on the opposite mainland. To the south is the Dorian hexapolis, consisting of Cnidus and Halicarnassus on the mainland, and the islands of Rhodes and Cos. In the centre comes the Ionian dodecapolis, a group consisting of ten towns on the mainland, together with the islands of Samos and Chios. Of these three groups, the Ionian is incomparably the most important. The Ionians also occupy Euboea and the Cyclades. Although it would appear that Cyprus (and possibly Pamphylia) had been occupied by settlers from Greece in the Mycenaean age, Greek tradition is probably correct in putting the colonization of Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean after the Dorian migration. Both the Homeric and the archaeological evidence seem to point to the same conclusion. Between Rhodes on the south and the Troad on the north scarcely any Mycenaean remains have been found. Homer is ignorant of any Greeks east of Euboea. If the poems are earlier than the Dorian Invasion, his silence is conclusive. If the poems are some centuries later than the Invasion, they at least prove that, within a few generations of that event, it was the belief of the Greeks of Asia Minor that their ancestors had crossed the seas after the close of the Heroic Age. It is probable, too, that the names Ionian and Aeolian, the former of which is found once in Homer, and the latter not at all, originated among the colonists in Asia Minor, and served to designate, in the first instance, the members of the Ionic and Aeolic dodecapoleis. As Curtius7 pointed out, the only Ionia known to history is in Asia Minor. It does not follow that Ionia is the original home of the Ionian race, as Curtius argued. It almost certainly follows, however, that it is the original home of the Ionian name.

It is less easy to account for the name Hellenes. The Greeks were profoundly conscious of their common nationality, and of the gulf that separated them from the rest of mankind. They themselves recognized a common race and language, and a common type of religion and culture, as the chief factors in this sentiment of nationality (see Herod. viii. 144 Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα). “Hellenes” was the name of their common race, and “Hellas” of their common country. In Homer there is no distinct consciousness of a common nationality, and consequently no antithesis of Greek and Barbarian (see Thuc. i. 3). Nor is there a true collective name. There are indeed Hellenes (though the name occurs in one passage only, Iliad ii. 684), and there is a Hellas; but his Hellas, whatever its precise signification may be, is, at any rate, not equivalent either to Greece proper or to the land of the Greeks, and his Hellenes are the inhabitants of a small district to the south of Thessaly. It is possible that the diffusion of the Hellenic name was due to the Dorian invaders. Its use can be traced back to the first half of the 7th century. Not less obscure are the causes of the fall of monarchy. It cannot have been the immediate effect of the Dorian conquest, for the states founded by the Dorians were at first monarchically governed. It may, however, have been an indirect effect of it. We have already seen that the power of the Government. Homeric king is more limited than that of the rulers of Cnossus, Tiryns or Mycenae. In other words, monarchy is already in decay at the epoch of the Invasion. The Invasion, in its effects on wealth, commerce and civilization, is almost comparable to the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman empire. The monarch of the Minoan and Mycenaean age has extensive revenues at his command; the monarch of the early Dorian states is little better than a petty chief. Thus the interval, once a wide one, that separates him from the nobles tends to disappear. The decay of monarchy was gradual; much more gradual than is generally recognized. There were parts of the Greek world in which it still survived in the 6th century, e.g. Sparta, Cyrene, Cyprus, and possibly Argos and Tarentum. Both Herodotus and Thucydides apply the title “king” (βασιλεύς) to the rulers of Thessaly in the 5th century. The date at which monarchy gave place to a republican form of government must have differed, and differed widely, in different cases. The traditions relating to the foundation of Cyrene assume the existence of monarchy in Thera and in Crete in the middle of the 7th century (Herodotus iv. 150 and 154), and the reign of Amphicrates at Samos (Herod, iii. 59) can hardly be placed more than a generation earlier. In view of our general ignorance of the history of the 7th and 8th centuries, it is hazardous to pronounce these instances exceptional. On the other hand, the change from monarchy to oligarchy was completed at Athens before the end of the 8th century, and at a still earlier date in some of the other states. The process, again, by which the change was effected was, in all probability, less uniform than is generally assumed. There are extremely few cases in which we have any trustworthy evidence, and the instances about which we are informed refuse to be reduced to any common type. In Greece proper our information is fullest in the case of Athens and Argos. In the former case, the king is gradually stripped of his powers by a process of devolution. An hereditary king, ruling for life, is replaced by three annual and elective magistrates, between whom are divided the executive, military and religious functions of the monarch (see Archon). At Argos the fall of the monarchy is preceded by an aggrandisement of the royal prerogatives. There is nothing in common between these two cases, and there is no reason to suppose that the process elsewhere was analogous to that at Athens. Everywhere, however, oligarchy is the form of government which succeeds to monarchy. Political power is monopolized by a class of nobles, whose claim to govern is based upon birth and the possession of land, the most valuable form of property in an early society. Sometimes power is confined to a single clan (e.g. the Bacchiadae at Corinth); more commonly, as at Athens, all houses that are noble are equally privileged. In every case there is found, as the adviser of the executive, a Boulē, or council, representative of the privileged class. Without such a council a Greek oligarchy is inconceivable. The relations of the executive to the council doubtless varied. At Athens it is clear that the real authority was exercised by the archons;8 in many states the magistrates were probably subordinate to the council (cf. the relation of the consuls to the senate at Rome). And it is clear that the way in which the oligarchies used their power varied also. The cases in which the power was abused are naturally the ones of which we hear; for an abuse of power gave rise to discontent and was the ultimate cause of revolution. We hear little or nothing of the cases in which power was exercised wisely. Happy is the constitution which has no annals! We know, however, that oligarchy held its ground for generations, or even for centuries, in a large proportion of the Greek states; and a government which, like the oligarchies of Elis, Thebes or Aegina, could maintain itself for three or four centuries cannot have been merely oppressive.

The period of the transition from monarchy to oligarchy is the period in which commerce begins to develop, and trade-routes to be organized. Greece had been the centre of an active trade in the Minoan and Mycenaean epochs. Trade. The products of Crete and of the Peloponnese had found their way to Egypt and Asia Minor. The overthrow of the older civilization put an end to commerce. The seas became insecure and intercourse with the East was interrupted. Our earliest glimpses of the Aegean after the period of the migrations disclose the raids of the pirate and the activity of the Phoenician trader. It is not till the 8th century has dawned that trade begins to revive, and the Phoenician has to retire before his Greek competitor. For some time to come, however, no clear distinction is drawn between the trader and the pirate. The pioneers of Greek trade in the West are the pirates of Cumae (Thucyd. vi. 4). The expansion of Greek commerce, unlike that of the commerce of the modern world, was not connected with any great scientific discoveries. There is nothing in the history of ancient navigation that is analogous to the invention of the mariner’s compass or of the steam-engine. In spite of this, the development of Greek commerce in the 7th and 6th centuries was rapid. It must have been assisted by the great discovery of the early part of the former century, the invention of coined money. To the Lydians, rather than the Greeks, belongs the credit of the discovery; but it was the genius of the latter race that divined the importance of the invention and spread its use. The coinage of the Ionian towns goes back to the reign of Gyges (c. 675 B.C.). And it is in Ionia that commercial development is earliest and greatest. In the most distant regions the Ionian is first in the field. Egypt and the Black Sea are both opened up to Greek trade by Miletus, the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean by Phocaea and Samos. It is significant that of the twelve states engaged in the Egyptian trade in the 6th century all, with the exception of Aegina, are from the eastern side of the Aegean (Herod. ii. 178). On the western side the chief centres of trade during these centuries were the islands of Euboea and Aegina and the town of Corinth. The Aeginetan are the earliest coins of Greece proper (c. 650 B.C.); and the two rival scales of weights and measures, in use amongst the Greeks of every age, are the Aeginetan and the Euboic. Commerce naturally gave rise to commercial leagues, and commercial relations tended to bring about political alliances. Foreign policy even at this early epoch seems to have been largely determined by considerations of commerce. Two leagues, the members of which were connected by political as well as commercial ties, can be recognized. At the head of each stood one of the two rival powers in the island of Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria. Their primary object was doubtless protection from the pirate and the foreigner. Competing routes were organized at an early date under their influence, and their trading connexions can be traced from the heart of Asia Minor to the north of Italy. Miletus, Sybaris and Etruria were members of the Eretrian league; Samos, Corinth, Rhegium and Zancle (commanding the Straits of Messina), and Cumae, on the Bay of Naples, of the Chalcidian. The wool of the Phrygian uplands, woven in the looms of Miletus, reached the Etruscan markets by way of Sybaris; through Cumae, Rome and the rest of Latium obtained the elements of Greek culture. Greek trade, however, was confined to the Mediterranean area. The Phoenician and the Carthaginian navigators penetrated to Britain; they discovered the passage round the Cape two thousand years before Vasco da Gama’s time. The Greek sailor dared not adventure himself outside the Black Sea, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Greek trade, too, was essentially maritime. Ports visited by Greek vessels were often the starting points of trade-routes into the interior; the traffic along those routes was left in the hands of the natives (see e.g. Herod. iv. 24). One service, the importance of which can hardly be overestimated, was rendered to civilization by the Greek traders—the invention of geography. The science of geography is the invention of the Greeks. The first maps were made by them (in the 6th century); and it was the discoveries and surveys of their sailors that made map-making possible.

Closely connected with the history of Greek trade is the history of Greek colonization. The period of colonization, in its narrower sense, extends from the middle of the 8th to the middle of the 6th century. Greek colonization Colonization. is, however, merely a continuation of the process which at an earlier epoch had led to the settlement, first of Cyprus, and then of the islands and coasts of the Aegean. From the earlier settlements the colonization of the historical period is distinguished by three characteristics. The later colony acknowledges a definite metropolis (“mother-city”); it is planted by a definite oecist (οἰκιστής); it has a definite date assigned to its foundation.9 It would be a mistake to regard Greek colonization as commercial in origin, in the sense that the colonies were in all cases established as trading-posts. This was the case with the Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements, most of which remained mere factories; and some of the Greek colonies (e.g. many of those planted by Miletus on the shores of the Black Sea) bore this character. The typical Greek colony, however, was neither in origin nor in development a mere trading-post. It was, or it became, a polis, a city-state, in which was reproduced the life of the parent state. Nor was Greek colonization, like the emigration from Europe to America and Australia in the 19th century, simply the result of over-population. The causes were as various as those which can be traced in the history of modern colonization. Those which were established for the purposes of trade may be compared to the factories of the Portuguese and Dutch in Africa and the Far East. Others were the result of political discontent, in some form or shape; these may be compared to the Puritan settlements in New England. Others again were due to ambition or the mere love of adventure (see Herod. v. 42 ff., the career of Dorieus). But however various the causes, two conditions must always be presupposed—an expansion of commerce and a growth of population. Within the narrow limits of the city-state there was a constant tendency for population to become redundant, until, as in the later centuries of Greek life, its growth was artificially restricted. Alike from the Roman colonies, and from those founded by the European nations in the course of the last few centuries, the Greek colonies are distinguished by a fundamental contrast. It is significant that the contrast is a political one. The Roman colony was in a position of entire subordination to the Roman state, of which it formed a part. The modern colony was, in varying degrees, in political subjection to the home government. The Greek colony was completely independent; and it was independent from the first. The ties that united a colony to its metropolis were those of sentiment and interest; the political tie did not exist. There were, it is true, exceptions. The colonies established by imperial Athens closely resembled the colonies of imperial Rome. The cleruchy (q.v.) formed part of the Athenian state; the cleruchs kept their status as citizens of Athens and acted as a military garrison. And if the political tie, in the proper sense, was wanting, it was inevitable that political relations should spring out of commercial or sentimental ones. Thus we find Corinth interfering twice to save her colony Syracuse from destruction, and Megara bringing about the revolt of Byzantium, her colony, from Athens. Sometimes it is not easy to distinguish political relations from a political tie (e.g. the relations of Corinth, both in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, to Ambracia and the neighbouring group of colonies). When we compare the development of the Greek and the modern colonies we shall find that the development of the former was even more rapid than that of the latter. In at least three respects the Greek settler was at an advantage as compared with the colonist of modern times. The differences of race, of colour and of climate, with which the chief problems of modern colonization are connected, played no part in the history of the Greek settlements. The races amongst whom the Greeks planted themselves were in some cases on a similar level of culture. Where the natives were still backward or barbarous, they came of a stock either closely related to the Greek, or at least separated from it by no great physical differences. We need only contrast the Carian, the Sicel, the Thracian or even the Scythian, with the native Australian, the Hottentot, the Red Indian or the Maori, to apprehend the advantage of the Greek. Amalgamation with the native races was easy, and it involved neither physical nor intellectual degeneracy as its consequence. Of the races with which the Greeks came in contact the Thracian was far from the highest in the scale of culture; yet three of the greatest names in the Great Age of Athens are those of men who had Thracian blood in their veins, viz. Themistocles, Cimon and the historian Thucydides. In the absence of any distinction of colour, no insuperable barrier existed between the Greek and the hellenized native. The demos of the colonial cities was largely recruited from the native population,10 nor was there anything in the Greek world analogous to the “mean whites” or the “black belt.” Of hardly less importance were the climatic conditions. In this respect the Mediterranean area is unique. There is no other region of the world of equal extent in which these conditions are at once so uniform and so favourable. Nowhere had the Greek settler to encounter a climate which was either unsuited to his labour or subversive of his vigour. That in spite of these advantages so little, comparatively speaking, was effected in the work of Hellenization before the epoch of Alexander and the Diadochi, was the effect of a single counteracting cause. The Greek colonist, like the Greek trader, clung to the shore. He penetrated no farther inland than the sea-breeze. Hence it was only in islands, such as Sicily or Cyprus, that the process of Hellenization was complete. Elsewhere the Greek settlements formed a mere fringe along the coast.

To the 7th century there belongs another movement of high importance in its bearing upon the economic, religious and literary development of Greece, as well as upon its constitutional history. This movement is the rise of The tyrants. the tyrannis. In the political writers of a later age the word possesses a clear-cut connotation. From other forms of monarchy it is distinguished by a twofold differentiation. The tyrannus is an unconstitutional ruler, and his authority is exercised over unwilling subjects. In the 7th and 6th centuries the line was not drawn so distinctly between the tyrant and the legitimate monarch. Even Herodotus uses the words “tyrant” and “king” interchangeably (e.g. the princes of Cyprus are called “kings” in v. 110 and “tyrants” in v. 109), so that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a legitimate monarch or a tyrant is meant (e.g. Aristophilides of Tarentum, iii. 136, or Telys of Sybaris, v. 44). But the distinction between the tyrant and the king of the Heroic Age is a valid one. It is not true that his rule was always exercised over unwilling subjects; it is true that his position was always unconstitutional. The Homeric king is a legitimate monarch; his authority is invested with the sanctions of religion and immemorial custom. The tyrant is an illegitimate ruler; his authority is not recognized, either by customary usage or by express enactment. But the word “tyrant” was originally a neutral team; it did not necessarily imply a misuse of power. The origin of the tyrannis is obscure. The word tyrannus has been thought, with some reason, to be a Lydian one. Probably both the name and the thing originated in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, though the earliest tyrants of whom we hear in Asia Minor (at Ephesus and Miletus) are a generation later than the earliest in Greece itself, where, both at Sicyon and at Corinth, tyranny appears to date back to the second quarter of the 7th century. It is not unusual to regard tyranny as a universal stage in the constitutional development of the Greek states, and as a stage that occurs everywhere at one and the same period. In reality, tyranny is confined to certain regions, and it is a phenomenon that is peculiar to no one age or century. In Greece proper, before the 4th century B.C., it is confined to a small group of states round the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs. The greater part of the Peloponnese was exempt from it, and there is no good evidence for its existence north of the Isthmus, except at Megara and Athens. It plays no part in the history of the Greek cities in Chalcidice and Thrace. It appears to have been rare in the Cyclades. The regions in which it finds a congenial soil are two, Asia Minor and Sicily. Thus it is incorrect to say that most Greek states passed through this stage. It is still wider of the mark to assume that they passed through it at the same time. There is no “Age of the Tyrants.” Tyranny began in the Peloponnese a hundred years before it appears in Sicily, and it has disappeared in the Peloponnese almost before it begins in Sicily. In the latter the great age of tyranny comes at the beginning of the 5th century; in the former it is at the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th. At Athens the history of tyranny begins after it has ended both at Sicyon and Corinth. There is, indeed, a period in which tyranny is non-existent in the Greek states; roughly speaking, the last sixty years of the 5th century. But with this exception, there is no period in which the tyrant is not to be found. The greatest of all the tyrannies, that of Dionysius at Syracuse, belongs to the 4th century. Nor must it be assumed that tyranny always comes at the same stage in the history of a constitution; that it is always a stage between oligarchy and democracy. At Corinth it is followed, not by democracy but by oligarchy, and it is an oligarchy that lasts, with a brief interruption, for two hundred and fifty years. At Athens it is not immediately preceded by oligarchy. Between the Eupatrid oligarchy and the rule of Peisistratus there comes the timocracy of Solon. These exceptions do not stand alone. The cause of tyranny is, in one sense, uniform. In the earlier centuries, at any rate, tyranny is always the expression of discontent; the tyrant is always the champion of a cause. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the discontent is necessarily political, or that the cause which he champions is always a constitutional one. At Sicyon it is a racial one; Cleisthenes is the champion of the older population against their Dorian oppressors (see Herod. v. 67, 68). At Athens the discontent is economic rather than political; Peisistratus is the champion of the Diacrii, the inhabitants of the poorest region of Attica. The party-strifes of which we hear in the early history of Miletus, which doubtless gave the tyrant his opportunity, are concerned with the claims of rival industrial classes. In Sicily the tyrant is the ally of the rich and the foe of the demos, and the cause which he champions, both in the 5th century and the 4th, is a national one, that of the Greek against the Carthaginian. We may suspect that in Greece itself the tyrannies of the 7th century are the expression of an anti-Dorian reaction. It can hardly be an accident that the states in which the tyrannis is found at this epoch, Corinth, Megara, Sicyon, Epidaurus, are all of them states in which a Dorian upper class ruled over a subject population. In Asia Minor the tyrannis assumes a peculiar character after the Persian conquest. The tyrant rules as the deputy of the Persian satrap. Thus in the East the tyrant is the enemy of the national cause; in the West, in Sicily, he is its champion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 The Athenian empire. by a sovereign people, and the first which sought to establish a common system of democratic institutions amongst its subjects.14 It was an experiment that failed, 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; Pseudo-Xenophon, de Rep. Ath. i. 14, iii. 10). An understanding existed between the democratic leaders in the subject-states 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 less than the subsidies of Persia. Had Athens aimed at establishing a community of interest between herself and her subjects, based upon a common citizenship, 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, 574 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 descent 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 13) 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.15 She went some way, too, in the direction of establishing a common system of coins, and of weights and measures. A common language was 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 The mature democracy. 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 all 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 5th century when it looked as if democracy was a lost cause. Even Athens was for a brief period under the rule 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 prevalent 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 almost disappeared from the Greek world, except in the sphere of Persian influence. The Spartan monarchy still 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 tyrannis; 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 Sicily. 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 tyrannis, 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 Boulē. 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 qualification formed part of the reforms of Pericles. Sortition had been instituted for election a generation earlier (487 B.C.).16 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 lyre-maker. They belonged, however, not to the land-owning, but to the industrial classes; they were distinguished from the older race of party-leaders 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 party-leader had always held office as Strategus. His rival, Thucydides, son of Melesias, forms a solitary exception to this statement. In the 4th century the divorce between the general and the statesman is complete. The generals are professional 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 essential nature. The The city-state. 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 city-state and a nation-state. 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 citizen-body 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 nation-states of modern times, democratic government is possible only under the form of a representative system; in the city-state 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 5th 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 (πολίτης ἐστὶν ὁ μετέχων κρίσεως καὶ ἀρχῆς, 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 Boulē.17 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 office would have been transacted by the Athenian Boulē. 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 Boulē or the law-courts, acquired 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 party-system. There were, of course, political parties at Athens and elsewhere—oligarchs and democrats, conservatives and radicals, a peace-party and a war-party, 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 spoils-system 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 city-state. 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 of sex has been abolished. Ancient democracy 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 free-born residents is fundamental. To the unprivileged class belonged, not only foreigners temporarily resident (ξένοι) and aliens permanently domiciled (μέτοικοι), but also those native-born inhabitants of the state who were of foreign extraction, on one side or the other.18 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 of 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 Boulē or the law-courts, 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 (προστάτης). 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 Position of women. 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 imposed 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 4th-century 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 contrasts 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 Slavery. 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 slave-labour, and skilled labour was largely so. The arts and crafts were, to some extent, exercised by citizens, but to a less extent in the 4th than in the 6th century. They were, however, chiefly left to aliens or slaves. The citizen-body 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 state-pay 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 democracies it must be conceded that, while popular government carried with it neither the enfranchisement of the alien nor the emancipation of the slave, 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. 1. 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 upon the position of these classes. When we read that critics 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 The Spartan empire. 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 second-class powers—Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Argos—against the one first-class 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 sea-power 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 commerce. 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 sea-power. The second cause is to be found in the financial 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 succeed 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 Theban hegemony. had been to Athens or Sparta. Thebes was even more exclusively a land-power 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 could 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 (συνοικισμός 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 a failure 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 significantly 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.19 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 well-founded (Archidamus, 64-69; during the period of Spartan ascendency the Peloponnesians were εὐδαιμονέστατοι τῶν Ἑλλήνων). 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 ὡμαλισμένοι ταῖς συμφοραῖς). 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 city-state fail to save Greece from conquest by Macedon? Was this result due to the inherent weakness either of the city-state itself, or of one particular form of it, democracy? It is clear, in The rise of Macedon. 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 conflict 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 συμφέρει τῇ πόλει καὶ Λακεδαιμονίους ἀσθενεῖς εἶναι καὶ Θηβαίους; 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, and central 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 democracy 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.20

It could not be doubtful with which side victory would rest. Meanwhile, the economic conditions were steadily growing worse. The cause which Aristotle assigns for the decay of the Spartan state—a declining population (see Politics, p. 1270 a ἀπώλετο ἡ πόλις τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων διὰ τὴν ὀλιγανθρωπίαν)—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 enormous21—but it was also due to a declining birth-rate, and to the exposure of infants. Aristotle, while condemning exposure, sanctions the procuring of abortion (Politics, 1335 b). It is probable that both ante-natal and post-natal 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 employment of mercenaries, partly through the enhanced cost of material. The power of the purse had made itself felt even in the 5th 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 recognized in practice, but states as a rule were reluctant to submit to the former system. The revenue of Athens in the 5th 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 citizen-body.22 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 1200 richest citizens, who were subject to direct taxation in the dual form of the Trierarchy and the Eisphora (property-tax). 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 moral causes, however, rather than to political or economic ones, that the failure of Greece in the conflict with Macedon 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 of probity among their leaders. Venality had always been the besetting sin of Greek statesmen. Pericles’ boast as to his own incorruptibility (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 Demosth. On the Crown, 61 παρὰ τοῖς Ἔλλησιν, οὐ τισὶν ἀλλ᾽ ἅπασιν ὁμοίως φορὰ προδοτῶν καὶ δωροδόκων συνέβη; cf. §§ 295, 296). 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 year before Chaeronea that Demosthenes succeeded in persuading the assembly to devote the entire surplus to the expenses of the war.23 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 4th 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.24 For distant expeditions, or for prolonged service, a citizen-militia 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.25 Athens was at war, e.g. with Philip, for eleven years continuously (357-346 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 abundant, 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 citizen-soldier, 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 Federal government. 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 newly-founded 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 marks an advance beyond the conception of the city-state. 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 (βουλή) composed of members representative of each of the component states.26

The real interest of this period, however, is to be looked for elsewhere than in Greece itself. Alexander’s career is one of the turning-points in history. He is one of the few to whom it has been given to modify the whole future Alexander’s empire. 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 city-life 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 lying 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 non-Hellenic 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 so-called 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 Homer. 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 9th century, if they contain large interpolations of considerably later date and if they are Ionian in origin, the authority of the poems becomes comparatively slight. The existence of 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 pre-Dorian 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.