 Chapter 1 Part 7 The Dorian Conquest The heroic age of Greece may be said to have come to an end within two generations after the Trojan War. A dark period of about two centuries followed, which were marked by the disappearance of the old civilization, by the expansion of the Greek race over the Aegean, and by wide political changes in the mother country. The transition to the new period corresponds to the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age. The old Aegean fashions of pottery are replaced by a style distinguished by geometrical decorations, and hence in the history of art the geometric age is often used as a convenient designation. The pressure of Illyrian peoples across the northern frontiers of Greece seems to have been the principal cause of the changes. The Dorians, who appear upon the scene and play the leading part in transforming Greece, were probably of Illyrian stock. Unlike the earlier northern invaders, the Aegeans, they destroyed instead of adopting the civilization which they found. The Dorians did not come with horses, they fought on foot, and their weapons were iron. The southward pressure of the Illyrians was fatal to Etolia. In the Homeric poems we have a reflected glimpse of the prosperity of the Etolian coastland. We see that Pluron by the sea and Rocky Caledon, and the other strong cities of that region were abreast of the civilization of the heroic age, and the Etolian myth of Meligar and the hunting of the Caledonian bear became a part of the heritage of the national legend of Greece. Maritime Etolia was then a land of wine. Its pride in its vineyards is displayed in the names of its mythic kings. But in the later ages of Greek history all this is changed. We find Etolia regarded as a half-barbarous country, the abode of men who speak indeed a Greek tongue, but have lagged ages and ages behind the rest of Greece in science and civilization. And we find the neighboring countries in the same case. Aperius, or the greater part of it, had been Hellenized when the worship of Zeus was introduced at Dodona, to become famous and venerable throughout the Greek world. Suddenly it lapses into comparative barbarism and the sanctuary of Dodona remains a lonely outpost. The explanation of this falling away is the eruption and conquest of Illyrian invaders. It was not through laziness or degeneracy or through geographical disadvantages that the Greeks of Aperius and Etolia fell out of the race. It was because they were overwhelmed by a rude and barbarous people who swamped their civilization instead of assimilating it. The Etolians and Aperots of later history are mainly of Illyrian stock. This invasion naturally drove some of the Greek inhabitants to seek new homes elsewhere. It was easy to cross the Gulf, and Etolian immigrants made their way to the River Peneas, where they settled and took to themselves the name of Ilians or Daelsmen. They won dominion over the Epians, the first Greek settlers, and gradually extended their power to the Alpheus. Their land was attractive downs with a harbourless coast, and they never became a maritime power. The people in this western plain of the peninsula were distinguished by the veneration of the hero Pelops. His worship had taken deep root at Pisa on the banks of the river Alpheus. It was a spot which in a later age, when the Greeks had spread overseas into distant lands, was to become one of the holiest seats of Greek religion, where the greatest of the Arian, the supremist of the Hellenic, gods was to draw to his sacred precinct men from all quarters of the Greek world to do him honour with the sacrifices and gains. But even when Pisa had come to be illustrious as Olympia, even when the temple and altar of the Olympian Zeus had eclipsed all other associations of the place, Pelops still received his offering. But though Pelops himself was remembered only as a legendary figure, except in one or two places like Olympia where his old worship survived, his name is living still in one of the most familiar geographical names of Greece. It is in the regions near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, where the existence of the bridge at Corinth may be easily unremembered, that men would be most tempted to call the great peninsula an island. And so when Pelops was still widely worshipped, the name island of Pelops may have originated on that side, not probably in the peninsula itself but on the opposite shores, in Atolia, for example, and then it made its way into universal use and clung hence forward to southern Greece. The pressure of the Illyrians in Epirus may be associated with two movements of great consequence, the Thessalonian and the Bocian migration. A backward Greek folk named the Pethaloi, but called by men of the other districts Thessaloi, crossed the hills and settled in the western corner of the land which is bounded by Pelion and Pindus. They gained the upper hand and spread their sway over the whole plain. They drove the Achaeans southwards into the mountains of Pythia, and hence forward these Achaeans play no part of any note in the history of Greece. The Thessalian name soon spread over the whole country, which is called Thessaly to the present day. Cranon, Pagase, Larisse, and Fere became the seats of lords who reared horses and governed the surrounding districts. The conquered people were reduced to serfdom and were known as the laborers. They cultivated the soil at their own risk, paying a fixed amount to their lords, and they had certain privileges they could not be sold abroad or arbitrarily put to death. But they gained one victory over their conquerors, the Achaean language prevailed. The Thessalians gave up their own idiom and learned, not indeed without modifying the speech of their subjects, so that the dialect of historic Thessaly bears a close resemblance to the tongue which we find spoken by the Achaean settlers in Asia Minor. When they had established themselves in the lands of the Penaeus, the Thessalians pressed northward against the Ferebi, eastward against the Magnits, and southward against the Achaeans of Pythia, and reduced them all to tributary subjection. We know almost nothing of the history of the Thessalian kingdoms. In later times we find the whole country divided into four great divisions—Thessaloitus in the southwest, the quarter which may have been the first settlement and home of the Thessalian invaders, Pythioitus of the Achaeans in the south, Pelisgoitus, a name which records the survival of the Peliscaeans, one of the older peoples, and Histioitus, the land of the Histaeans, who have no separate identity in history. All the lordships of the Achaean were combined in a very loose political organization, which lay dormant in times of peace, but through which, to meet any emergency of war, they could elect a common captain with the title of Tegos. But all the folk did not remain to fall under the thralldom imposed by the new lords. A portion of the Achaeans migrated southward to the Peloponnesus and founded settlements along the strip of coast which forms the southern side of the Corinthian Gulf, and was henceforth called Achaea. Thus there were two Achaean lands, the old Achaea in the north now shrunk to the mountains of Pythia and the new Achaea in the south. There was also apparently a movement to Yuboa, in consequence of the Thessalian invasion, according to tradition, Histaea in the north of the island and Eritrea in the center owed their origin to settlers from Thessaly, and there is independent evidence that there was truth in this tradition. The lands of Helican and Catheron experienced a similar shock to that which unsettled and changed the lands of Olympus and Atheris, but the results were not the same. The old home of the Boshans was in Mount Boan in Ipirus, the mountain gave them their name. Their dialect was probably closely akin to the original dialect of the Thessalians. Being marked by certain characters which enable us to distinguish roughly a north-western group of dialects from those spoken by the earliest invaders of Greece. Coming from the west or north, the Boshans first occupied places in the west of the land which they were to make their own. From Chironia and Coronia they won Thebes, the city of the Cadmians. Thence they sought to spread their power over the whole land. They spread their name over it, for it was called Boshia, but they did not succeed in winning full domination as rapidly as the Thessalians succeeded in Thessaly. The rich lords of Orco Menes preserved their independence for hundreds of years, and it was not till the sixth century that anything like a Boshan unity was established. The policy of the Boshan conquerors, who were perhaps comparatively few in number, was unlike that of the Thessalians. The conquered communities were not reduced to serfdom. On the other hand they did not, like the Thessalians, adopt or adapt the speech of the older inhabitants, but the idioms of the conquerors and conquered coalesced and formed a new Boshan dialect. The Boshan conquest, there can be little doubt, caught some of the older peoples to wander forth to other lands, and it may explain the participation of the Cadmians and the men of Lebedia and others in some of the Ionian settlements in Asia Minor. Moreover the coming of the Boshans probably unsettled some of the neighboring peoples and drove them to change their abodes. West of Bosha, in the land of the Foshans, amid the regions of Mount Parnassus, there were dislocations of a less simple kind. Hither came the Dorians. For a while it would seem a large space of mountainous country between Mount Ota and the Corinthian Gulf, including a great part of focus, became Dorian land. The greater part of them soon went forth to seek fair abodes in distant places, but a few remained behind in the small basin-like district between Mount Ota and Mount Parnassus, where they preserved the illustrious Dorian name throughout the course of Grecian history in which they never played a part. It would seem that the Dorians also took possession of Delphi, the rocky threshold of Apollo, and planted some families there who devoted themselves to the service of the God. After the departure of the Dorian wanderers the Foshans could breathe again, but Doris was lost to them and Delphi, which, as we shall see, they often essayed to recover. And the Foshans had to reckon with other neighbors. In later times we found the Locrians split up into three divisions and the Foshans wedged in between. One division, the Azolian Locrians, are on the Corinthian Gulf, to the west of Focus. The other two divisions are on the Euboian Sea, to the northeast of Focus. The Auslians were one of the most backward peoples of Greece. The Locrians of the north play a part in the Iliad under the leadership of their hero, Iax, who ruled over Thronian as well as over Opus, and Locris was probably a continuous strip along the coast of the Euboian Straits. The Foshans wanted an outlet to the sea and severed it into two parts. The departure of the Dorians from the regions of Parnassus was probably gradual and it was accomplished by sea. They built ships, perhaps the name of Napactus, the place of the shipbuilding, is a record of their ventures, and they sailed around the Peloponneses to the southeastern parts of Greece. One band of adventurers brought a new element to Crete, the island of many races, others settled in Thera and Melas, others sailed away eastward beyond the limits of the Aegean and found a home on the southern coast of Asia Minor, where, surrounded by barbarians and forgotten by the Greek world, they lived a life apart, taking no share in the history of Helus. But they preserved their Hellenic speech and their name, the Pamphylians, recorded their Dorian origin, being the name of one of the three tribes by which the Dorians were everywhere recognized. The next conquests of the Dorians were in the Peloponneses. They had found it impossible to attack on the north and west. They now assayed it on the south and east. There were three distinct conquests, conquest of Laconia on the conquest of Argelis, the conquest of Corinth. The Dorians took possession of the rich veil of the Eurotus, and keeping their own Dorian stock, pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects. It seems probable that the Dorian invaders who subdued Laconia were more numerous than the Dorian invaders elsewhere. The eminent quality which distinguished the Dorians from other branches of the Greek race was that which we call character, and it was in Laconia that this quality most fully displayed and developed itself. For here the Dorian seems to have remained more purely Dorian. In Argelis the course of things ran otherwise. The invaders who landed under a king called Temenos had doubtless a hard fight, but their conquest took the shape not of subjugation but of amalgamation. The Argyve State was indeed organized on the Dorian system with the three Dorian tribes, the Hillis, the Pampholi, and the Daminis, but otherwise few traces of the conquest remained. It is to the time of this conquest that the overthrow of Mycenae is probably to be referred. Certain it is that both Mycenae and Tyrians were destroyed suddenly and set on fire. Henceforward Argos under her lofty citadel was to be undisputed queen of the Argyve plain. Greater indeed was the feat which the Dorians wrought in their southern conquest, the feat of making lowly Sparta, without citadel or wall, the queen of the Laconian Vale. Dorian ships were also rode up the Seronic Gulf. It was the adventure of a prince whom the legend calls Erand, the son of Ryder, and seized the high hill of Acro Corinth, the key of the peninsula. This was the making of Corinth. Here, as in Argyllus, there was no subjection, no distinction between the conquerors and the conquered. The geographical position of Corinth between her seas determined for her people a career of commerce, and her history shows that the Dorians had the qualities of bold and skillful traders. From Argos the Dorians made two important settlements in the north on the river Asipus, Sisyon on its lower, and Philius on its upper banks. And beyond Mount Jeronea another Dorian city arose, we know not how, on the commanding hill which looks down upon the western shore of Salamis. Its name was Nyssa. But the hill had been crowned by a royal palace in the heroic age, and so the place came to be known Majara, the palace, and in historical times no other name was known, though the old name lurked in the name of the Harmor Nyssaea. In later days Dorian Majara was associated politically with the Peloponnesus rather than with northern Greece. In pre-Dorian days it had been reckoned as part of Boshia, separated though it was from that country by the western portion of the massive range of Catheron. The island, whose conical mountain in the midst of the Seronic waters is visible to all the coasts around, also was destined to become a Dorian land. A Gena was conquered by Dorian settlers from Epidaurus, but the conquest was perhaps not affected for two hundred years or more after the subjugation of Argolis. In a Gena, too, there was doubtless effusion of the old inhabitants and the new settlers, and we may be sure that it had been before, as it was after, the change an island of bold and adventurous sailors. In Crete and Laconia we meet, as we shall see, some peculiar institutions which seem to have been characteristically Dorian, but are not found in Argos or Corinth. Yet all the Dorian settlements remembered their common Dorian origin, and the conquerors of Laconia at least looked with emotions of filiopiety towards the little obscure Doris in the highlands of Parnassus as their mother country. The evidence of the three Dorian tribes might help to maintain the consciousness of a Dorian section of Greece, but it was perhaps the rise of a new Doris on the other side of the Aegean that elevated the Dorian name into permanent national significance. CHAPTER 1 THE Expansion of the Greeks over the Aegean Islands and the plantation of Greek settlements along the western coast of Asia Minor began when the heroic Aege was drawing to a close, and continued for about a century and a half. This movement was promoted and in some of its stages directly caused by the consequences of the Dorian invasion and the migrations in northern Greece, but it may have begun without any external pressure, perhaps on account of overpopulation and partly in a spirit of enterprise which was tempted by the fertile river valleys and plains of the Asiatic coast, where there was now no great power to oppose them. The Hittite Empire had fallen back from the west, which it was never to reach again. It does not appear even on the distant horizon in the Homeric poems. Apart from the early settlements in the island of Rhodes, which were previous to the Trojan War, the first Greeks who sailed across the Aegean to find new homes were the Achaeans and their fellows from the hills and plains of Thessaly, and the plains of the Spurcius. Their expeditions probably started from the landlocked bay of Pagasae, and tradition long afterwards associated the first sea ventures of the Greeks with the port of Eovolpus. Along with the Achaeans, they sailed as comrades and allies the Aeolians. Some indeed believe that Aeolian was simply another name for Achaean. But it seems safer to regard the Aeolians as distinct from, though closely related to, the Achaeans. It is impossible to determine whether those who crossed the Aegean were settlers in Thessaly, and not rather some of the Aeolians who lived beyond the mountains by another seaboard on the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf. We know that in early times these Aeolians were engaged in constant warfare with the Aetolians, who ultimately won the upper hand and gave their name to the whole country. And perhaps the pressure of these foes induced some of them to throw in their lot with the Achaeans who were sailing in search of new homes beyond the sea. It was to the northern part of Asia Minor, the island of Lesbos and the opposite shores, that the Achaean and Aeolian adventurers steered their ships. Here they planted the first Hellenic settlements on Aegean soil. The beginning of a movement which, before a thousand years had passed away, was to carry Greek conquerors to the Indian Ocean. The coastlands of western Asia Minor are, like Greece itself, suitable for the habitations of a seafaring people. A series of river valleys are divided by mountain chains which run out into promontories so as to form deep bays. And the promontories are continued in islands. The valleys of the Hermes and the Caigus are bounded on the north by a chain of hills which run out into Lesbos. The valley of the Hermes is parted from that of the Keister by mountains which are prolonged in Chios. And the valley of the Keister is separated from the valley of the Meander by a chain which terminates in Samos. South of the Meander valley, there are bays and islands, but the mountains of the mainland are broken by no rivers. The Greek occupation of the lower waters of the Hermes and Caigus is known to us only by its result. The invaders won the coastlands from the Mysean natives and seized a number of strong places which they could defend. Catana, Marina, Sima, Ege, Old Smyrna. They pressed up the rivers and on the Hermes they founded Magnesia under Matt Cipollus. All this, needless to say, was not done at once. It must have been a work of many years and of successive expeditions from the mother country. The Achaean wave of emigration was succeeded by another wave, flowing mainly from the coasts of Attica and Arglas, and new settlements were planted south of the Elder Achaean settlements. The two-pronged peninsula between the Hermes and the Keister rivers with the offline Isle of Chios, the valleys of the Keister and Meander, with Samos and the peninsula south of Mount Latmos, were studded with communities which came to form a group distinct from the older group in the north. Each group of settlements came to be called by a collective name. As the Achaeans were the most illustrious of the settlers in the north, one might expect to find the northern group known as Achaean. But it is not thus that names are given in primitive times. A number of cities or settlements, which have no political union and are merely associated together by belonging to the same race and speaking the same tongue, do not generally choose themselves a common name. It rather happens that when they get a common name it is given to them by strangers who, looking from the outside, regard them as a group and do not think of the differences of which they are themselves more vividly conscious. And it constantly happens that the name of one member of the group is, by some accident, picked out and applied to the whole. Thus it befell that the Aeolian and not the Achaean name was selected to designate the northern division of the Greek settlements in Asia, just as our own country came to be called not Saxony, but England. The southern and larger group of colonies received the name of Iavones or Iones as they call themselves when they lost the letter V. The Iavones were a people who had settled on the coasts of Argolis and Attica, but there the name fell out of use and perhaps passed out of memory until on Asiatic soil it attained celebrity and re-echoed with glory to their old homes. But it would probably be a mistake to regard these two groups as well defined from the first. To begin with it is possible that they overlapped chronologically. The latest of the Aeolian settlements may have been founded subsequently to the earliest of the Ionian. In the second place the original homes of the settlers overlapped. Though the Aeolian colonies mainly came from the lands north of Mount Iida, apart from those who came from Etolia, they included some settlers from the coasts of Boetia and Euboea. Thus Sema in Aeolus derived its name from Euboean Sema and on the other hand though the Ionian colonies were chiefly derived from the coasts of Attica and Argolis apart from some contingents from Crete and other places in the south. There were also some settlers from the north. Thirdly the two groups ran into each other geographically. Focaya for example which is geographically in Aeolus standing on the promontory north of the Hermus river was included in Ionia. Its name shows that some of the men who colonized it were Phocians and some of the places in north Ionia, Teos for instance, had received Achaean settlements first and were then resettled by Ionians. In Chios which was afterwards fully in Ionia, a language of Aeolic complexion was once spoken. Of the foundation of the famous colonies of Ionia, of the order in which they were founded, and of the relations of the settlers with the Lydian natives, we know as little as of the settlements of Achaeans. Clasimene and Teos arose on the north and south sides of the neck of the peninsula which runs out to meet Chios. And Chios on the east coast of her island faces Arithrae on the mainland. Arithrae the crimson so called from its purple fisheries the resort of tyron traders. Levitus and Colophon lie on the coast as it retires eastward from Teos to reach the mouth of the kyster. And there was founded Ephesus, the city of Artemis. By the streams of the kyster was a plain called the Asian Meadow, which destiny in some odd way selected to bestow a name upon one of the continents of the earth. South of Ephesus and on the northern slope of Mount Michael was the religious gathering place of the Ionians, the temple of the Hellicomian Poseidon which when once the Ionians became conscious of themselves as a sort of nation and learned to glory in their common name, served to foster a sense of unity among all their cities from Foquea in the north to Malatis in the south. Samos faces Mount Makala and the worship of Hera which was the religious feature of Samos is thought to point to men of Argos as participators in its original foundation. South of Makala the cities of Myas and Pryena were planted on the meander. Then the coast retires to skirt Mount Latmos and breaks forward again to form the promontory at the northern point of which was Malatis with its once splendid harbour. There was one great inland city, Magnesia on the meander, which must not be confused with the inland Aeolian city, Magnesia on the Hermas. Though counted to Ionia it was not a Ionian origin for it was founded by the magnetes of Thessaly and settlers from Iboa and Boesha took part in the colonization of Ionia as well as the Ionians of Argolis and Attica. The old inhabitants, Lelegies, Maonians, Carians probably offered no prolonged resistance to the invaders. And in some places as the Carians for example at Malatis they mixed with the Greek strangers. The colonists carried with them into the new Greece beyond the seas. Traditions of the old civilization which in the mother country was being overwhelmed by the Dorian invaders. And those traditions helped to produce the luxurious Ionian civilization that was the old civilization which in the mother country was being overwhelmed by the Dorian invaders. And those traditions helped to produce the luxurious Ionian civilization which meets us some centuries later when we come into the clearer light of recorded history. And they carried with them their minstrelsy, their laze of Troy, celebrating the deeds of Achilles and Agamemnon and Odysseus. The epic poetry of Greece entered upon a new period in Ionia. It was perhaps in the 9th century that the Iliad as we know it came into being. A poet of supreme genius arose and it may be that he was the singer whose name was actually Homer. This famous name has the humble meaning of hostage and we may fancy if we care that the poet was carried off in his youth as a hostage in some local strife. He composed his poetry in rugged Kyos and he gives us a local touch when he describes the sun as rising over the sea. From him the Homerid family of the Bards of Kyos were sprung. He took as his main argument the older poem of the Wrath of Achilles and expanded it into the shape and compass of the greater part of the Iliad including one of the noblest episodes in the whole epic, Prime's Ransoming of Hector. Tradition made Homer the author of both the great epics, the Odyssey as well as the Iliad. This is not probable, but no great length of time needs separate the composition of the two poems. Homer did not give to the Iliad the exact shape in which it was ultimately transmitted, for it received from his successors in the art some additions and extensions which were not entirely to its advantage. He was no mere stringer together of ancient Lays. He took the motives, he caught the spirit of the older poems, he wove them into the fabric of his own composition, but he was himself as divinely inspired as any of the Elder Minstrels and he was the father of epic poetry in the sense in which we distinguish an epic poem with a large argument from a short heroic lay. His work was thoroughly artificial, French's art as the greatest poetry always is and it is probable that he committed the Iliad to writing. As he and his successors sang in Ionia at the Courts of Ionian Princes, he dealt freely with the dialect of the Old Achean poems. The Iliad was arrayed in Ionic dress and ultimately became so identified with Ionia that the Achean origin of the older poetry was forgotten. The transformation was not indeed perfect, for sometimes the Ionian forms did not suit the meter and the Ionian forms were used, but the change was accomplished with wonderful skill. It is probable that the Ionian poet also did much to adapt the epic material which he used to the taste and moral ideas of a more refined age. The Iliad is notably free from the features of crude savagery which generally marked the early literature of primitive peoples. Only a few slight traces remained to show that there was in the background ugly and barbarous things over which a veil has been drawn. In other respects, the Ionian poets have faithfully preserved the atmosphere of the past ages of which they sang. They preserved its manners, its environment, its geography. Only an occasional anachronism slips in, which in the otherwise consistent picture can easily be detected. Unwittingly, for instance, the poet of the Odyssey allows it to escape that he lived in the Iron Age for such a proverb as, the mere gleam of iron lures a man to strife, could not have arisen until iron weapons had long been in use. But he is at pains to preserve the weapons and gear of the Bronze Age. Homer preserved the memory of the Trojan War as a great national enterprise. The Iliad was regarded as something of far greater significance than an Ionian poem. It was accepted as a national epic, and was, from the first, a powerful influence in promoting among the Greeks community of feeling and tendencies toward national unity. For two hundred years after its birth, the Iliad went on gathering editions, and the bards were not unready to make insertions in order to satisfy the pride of the princely and noble families at whose courts they sang. The Odyssey, affiliated as it was to the Trojan legend, became a national epic too. And the interest awakened in Greece by the idea of the Trojan War was displayed by the composition of a series of epic poems, dealing with those events of the siege which happened both before and after the events described in the Iliad, and with the subsequent history of some of the Greek heroes. These poems were anonymous, and passed under the name of Homer. Along with the Iliad and Odyssey, they formed a chronological series which came to be known as the Epic Cycle. The Ionic settlements did not complete the Greek colonizations of Asia Minor. A Dorian conquest of the Eastern Peloponnesus was followed by a Dorian expansion beyond the seas and a colonization of the Asiatic coast to the south of Ionia. The Carrians had spread over this region down to the border of Lycia, and had pressed the older inhabitants into the promontory which faces the island of Polymna. Here the Lelegus participated in the latest stages of the Aegean civilization, as we know by the pottery and other things which have been discovered at Tirmura and chamber tombs. These round tombs, not hewn out of the earth like the vaulted sepulchres of Mycenae, but built above ground, are found in many parts of the peninsula, and remain as the most striking memorial of the Lelegus. The bold promontories below Meletus, the islands of Kos and Rhodes, were occupied by colonists from Argelis, Laconia, Corinth, and Crete. On the mainland, Halecarnassus was the most important Dorian settlement, but it was formed in concert with the Carrian natives and was half Carrian. This new Dorus eclipsed in fame, and shed a new luster on the old Dorus under Mount Aida. All the settlements were independent, but they kept alive their communion of interest and sentiment by the common worship of the Triope and Apollo. The Carrians were a vigorous people. They impressed themselves upon their land, and soon men began to forget that it had not always been Carrian. They took to the sea, and formed a maritime power of some strength, so that in later ages a tradition was abroad that there was once upon a time a Carrian sea supremacy, though no one could mention anything that it had achieved. The Carrians also claimed to have made contributions to the art of war by introducing shield handles and the crested helmet, and the emblazoning of shields, claims which we cannot test. The Greek fringe of western Asia Minor was complete. It was impossible for Dorus to creep around the corner and join hands with Pamphylia, for the Lycians presented an insuperable barrier. The Lycians were not a folk of Aryan speech, as a widely spread error supposes them to have been. Their language is related to the Carrian. Their proper name was Trimilli, but the name Lycian seems to have been given them by others as well as by the Greeks who recognized in the chief Trimilian deity their own Apollo Lycius. Though Lycia was not colonized, the Aegean was now entirely within the Greek sphere, accepting only its northern margin, where Greek enterprise in the future was to find a difficult field. It is important to observe that the process by which Asiatic Greece was created differs in character from the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. The settlements of Ionia and Dorus are examples of colonization. Bands of settlers went forth from their homes to find new habitations for themselves, but they left a home country behind them. The Dorian movements, on the other hand, partake of the character of folk wandering. The essential fact is that a whole people dispersed to seek new fields and pastures. For the paltry remnant which remained in the sequestered nook beyond Parnassus could not be called the parent people except by courtesy. The people, as a whole, had gone elsewhere. Before the completion of the Greek occupation of the western coast of Asia Minor, another migration left the shores of the Peloponnesus to seek a more distant home. Cyprus, an island whose geographical position marks it out to be contested between three continents, was now to receive European settlers. Throughout the Bronze Age it played an important part in supplying the Aegean countries with copper, and it exported timber, but it did not begin to share in the advanced civilization of the Aegean until the very last days of Kenassian supremacy. Then it received colonists from the Aegean and developed an art which shows the characteristics of Cretan and Mycenaean art with its own local peculiarities. At Salamis in the east of the island, sepulchres have been found which show how Aegean culture flourished in Cyprus in the 14th century. The Cypriots presently learned the craft of manufacturing iron which was beginning to come into use. Their position, near Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, gave them favorable opportunities for commerce which brought them wealth. The island was destined, however, to play a part in the world's debate as a wrestling ground between the European and the Asiatic, and the first Europeans who went forth for the struggle were the Peloponnesian Greeks whom, we may suspect, the events of the Dorian invasion incited to wander. Much about the same time, the Phoenicians also began to plant settlements in the island, mainly in the center. Amethyst, Sidion, Adalion, Temassus, Lopathus, and some places seem to have been colonized jointly by Phoenicians and Greeks, just as on the coast of Asia Minor, Greeks and Carians mingled. A new Cypriot culture arose out of the intermingling of the two races and the old inhabitants. The worship of the great mother goddess, attended by Doves, was native to Cyprus as Decrete, and the Greeks identified her with Aphrodite, who became universally known as the Cypriotus. The settlers in Cyprus spoke the Arcadian dialect, but this does not prove that their old homes were in Arcadia. Before the Dorians came and developed new dialects, the Arcadian's speech with but slight variations seems to have prevailed in the coastlands as well as in the center of the peninsula, and some of the Cypriot Greeks went forth from Laconia and Argelis. Some sailed from Salamis in the Attic Bay and gave their name to Salamis in Cyprus. The colonists found already established a mode of linear writing which exhibits close resemblances to the Cretan system, and had probably been imported with the rest of Aegean civilization. This syllabic system was ill-adapted to express the Greek language, but the colonists adapted it to their use. And although nothing is clumsier than a Greek writing in the Cypriot character, yet the Greeks of Cyprus clung to it when the rest of their race had learned the use of a finer instrument. If we look back now upon the early history of the Greeks, we see that though we can establish a probable... if we look back now upon the early history of the Greeks, we see that though we can establish a probable chronology, there is only a single date which can lay claim to precision. And this concerns an event of minor importance, and a can raid on Egypt. For all the leading changes in movements, we must be content with approximate limits. Greek-speaking peoples occupied Greece, third millennium. Crete, leading power in Aegean, circa 2200 to 1400 BC. Advanced Aegean civilization in Greece, from circa 1600 BC. Fall of Knossos, circa 1400 BC. Achaeans invade North Greece, before 1300 BC. Achaeans found principalities in Peloponnesus, 1300 to 1250 BC. Fall of Fifth City of Troy, circa 1250 BC. Achaeans of Thessaly, joined in raid on Egypt, 1229 BC. Trojan War, early in 12th century. The Sallian conquest, Boeotian conquest, and beginnings of Achaean migration to Asia Minor, towards the end of 12th century. Ionian colonization in Asia Minor begins Dorian conquests in Peloponnesus and Crete, Dorian colonization in Asia Minor begins, and Greek colonization of Cyprus, 11th century. Section 9. Fall of Greek monarchies and rise of the republics. Under their kings, the Greeks had conquered the coasts and islands of the Aegean, and had created the city-state. These were the two great contributions of monarchy to Grecian history. In forwarding the change from rural life in scattered thorps to life in cities, the kings were doubtless considering themselves as well as their people. They thought that the change would consolidate their own power by bringing the whole folk directly under their own eyes, but it also brought the king more directly under the eye of his folk. The frailties, incapacities, and misconduct of a weak lord were more noticed in the small compass of a city. He was more generally criticized and judged. City life, too, was less appropriate to the patriarchal character of the Homeric shepherd of the people. Moreover, in a city, those who were ill-pleased with the king's rule were more tempted to murmur together and able more easily to conspire. Considerations like these may help us to imagine how it came about that throughout the greater part of Greece in the 8th century, the monarchies were declining and disappearing and republics were taking my place. It is a transformation of which the actual process is hidden from us, and we can only guess at probable causes, but we may be sure that the deepest cause of all was the change to city life. The revolution was general, the infection caught and spread, but the change in different states must have had different occasions, just as it took different shapes. In some cases gross misrule may have led to the violent deposition of the king. In other cases, if the succession to the scepter devolved upon an infant or a paltry man, the nobles may have taken it upon themselves to abolish the monarchy. In many places, perhaps the change was slower. The kings who had already sought to strengthen their authority by the foundation of cities must have sought also to increase or define those vague powers which belonged to an Aryan ruler, sought, perhaps, to act of their own free will without due regard to the council's advice. When such attempts at magnifying the royal power went too far, the elders of the council might rise and gainsay the king, and force him to enter into a contract with his people that he would govern constitutionally. Of the existence of such contracts we have evidence. The old monarchy lasted into late times in remote Molochia, and there the king was obliged to take a solemn oath to rule his people according to law. In other cases, the rights of the king might be strictly limited in consequence of his seeking to usurp undue authority, and the imposition of limitations might go on until the office of king, although maintained in name, became in fact a mere majesty in a state wherein the real power had passed elsewhere. Of the survival of the monarchy in a limited form we have an example at Sparta. Of its survival as a mere majesty we have an example at Athens, and it should be observed that the functions of the monarch were already restricted by limits which could easily be contracted further. Though he was the supreme giver of dooms, there might be other heads of clans or tribes in the state who could give dooms and judgment as well as he. Though he was the chief priest, there were other families than his to which certain priesthoods were confined. He was, therefore, not the sole fountain of justice or religion. There is a vivid scene in Homer which seems to have been painted when kings were seeking to draw tighter the reins of royal power. The poet, who was in sympathy with the kings, draws a comic and odious character of the bold carol with the gift of fluent speech, who criticizes the conduct and policy of the kings. Such an episode could hardly have suggested itself in the old days before city life had begun. Thercities is assuredly a product of the town. Odysseus, who rates and beats him, announces, in another part of the same scene, a maxim which has become as famous as Thercities himself. The sovereignty of many is not good. Let there be one sovereign, one king. That is a maxim which would win applause for the minstrel in the banquet halls of monarchs who were trying to carry through a policy of centralization at the expense of the chiefs of the tribes. Where the monarchy was abolished, the government passed into the hands of those who had done away with it, the noble families of the state. The distinction of the nobles from the rest of the people is, as we have seen, an ultimate fact with which we have to start. When the nobles assume the government and become the rulers, an aristocratic republic arises. Sometimes the power is won, not by the whole body of the noble clans, but by the clan to which the king belonged. This was the case at Corinth, where the royal family of the backyards became the rulers. In most cases, the aristocracy and the whole nobility coincided, but in others, as at Corinth, the aristocracy was only a part of the nobility, and the constitution was an oligarchy of the narrowest form. At this stage of society, the men of the noble class were the nerve and sinew of the state. Birth was then the best general test of excellence that could be found, and the rule of the nobles was a true aristocracy, the government of the most excellent. They practiced the craft of ruling, they were trained in it, they handed it down from father to son, and though no great men arose, great men are dangerous in an aristocracy, the government was conducted with knowledge and skill. Close aristocracies like the Corinthian were apt to become oppressive, and when the day approached for aristocracies in their turn to give way to new constitutions, there were signs of grievous degeneration. But on the whole, the Greek republics flourished in the aristocratic age, and were guided with eminent ability. The rise of the republics is about to take us into a new epoch of history, but it is important to note the continuity of the work which was to be done by the aristocracies, with that which was accomplished by the kings. The two great achievements of the aristocratic age are the planting of Greek cities and lands far beyond the limits of the Aegean Sea, and the elaboration of political machinery. The first of these is simply the continuation of the expansion of the Greeks around the Aegean itself. But the new movement of expansion is distinguished, as we shall see, by certain peculiarities in its outward forms, features which were chiefly due to the fact that city life had been introduced before the colonization began. The beginning of colonization belonged to the age of transition from Monarchita Republic. It was systematically promoted by the aristocracies, and it took a systematic shape. The creation of political machinery carried on the work of consolidation, which the kings had begun when they gathered together into cities the loose elements of their states. When royalty was abolished, or put, as we say, into commission, the ruling families of the republic had to substitute magistracies tenable for limited periods, and had to determine how the magistrates were to be appointed, how their functions were to be circumscribed, how the provinces of authority were to be assigned. New machinery had to be created to replace that one of the three parts of the constitution which had disappeared. It may be added that under the aristocracies the idea of law began to take a clearer shape in men's minds, and the traditions which guided usage began to assume the form of laws. In the Lays of Homer we hear only of the single dooms given by the kings or judges in particular cases. At the close of the aristocratic period comes the age of the lawgivers, and the aristocracies had prepared the material which the lawgivers improved, qualified, and embodied in codes. End of chapter one, part nine, recording by Calinda in Dover, New Hampshire, on July 10th, 2007. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by Nicholas James Bridgewater. Chapter one, part ten, of a history of grief to the death of Alexander the Great, volume one. The Greeks were destined to become a great seafaring people, but sea trade was a business which it took them many ages to learn, after they had reached the coast of the Aegean. It was long before they could step into the place of the old sea kings of Crete. For several centuries after the Trojan War, the trade of the Aegean with the east was partly carried on by strangers. The men who took advantage of this opening were the traders of the city-states of Sidon and Tyre on the Syrian coast, men of that Semitic stock to which Jew, Arab, and Assyrian alike belonged. These coastlanders, born merchants like the Jews, seemed to have migrated to the shores of the Mediterranean from an older home on the shores of the Red Sea. The Greeks knew these bronze Semitic traders by the same name, foinikes, or red men, which they had before applied to the Cretans. This led to some confusion in their traditions. We have seen how the Cretan Cadmus and Europa were transferred to Phoenicia in the legend. We have no warrant for speaking of a Phoenician sea lordship in the Aegean. The evidence of the Homeric poems shows clearly that between the commercial enterprise of the heroic age, and the commercial enterprise of the later Greeks, there was an interval of perhaps 200 years of their abouts, during which no Greek state possessed a sea power strong enough to exclude foreign merchants from the Greek seas, and trade was consequently shared by Greek and Tyrian merchants. It was not only Phoenician carriers who came to Greece, the Greeks also sailed to Syria and Cyprus, and the Carians developed a considerable sea power. We shall see in the next chapter how the men of Tyre and Sidon made a new Phoenicia in the western Mediterranean. But on the shores of the Aegean they seemed to have made no serious attempts, or at least to have succeeded in no attempts, to plant permanent settlements except at Camyrus in Rhodes, and possibly in the island of Kythera. It may be that they had stations at the purple fisheries of Kos and Nisiros and Irithrai and elsewhere, it has been supposed that they were the first to tap the gold mines of Sifnos and Thassos, and even the silver mines of Attica. It has been held that there were Phoenician settlements on the Isthmus of Corinth, under the Acropolis of Athens, and even at inland Thebes. There is no assurance or possibility that such settlements were ever made. The Phoenicians doubtless had marks here and there on Coaster Island, but there is no reason to think that Canaanites ever made homes for themselves on Greek soil or introduced Semitic blood into the population of Greece. It was not here that the struggle was to be fought out between Baal and Zeus. Their ships were ever winding in and out of the Aegean seas from south to north, bearing fair naperies from Syria, fine wrought bowels and cups from the workshops of Sidonian and Cypriot smilversmiths, and all manner of luxuries and ornaments. And this constant commercial intercourse lasting for two centuries is amply sufficient to account for all the influence that Phoenicia exerted upon Greece. In the worship of Aphrodite and other Greek goddesses, we see the influence of the cult of Syrian Astati, and the Phoenician god Melchart was not only taken into Greek mythology under the name of Melchertes, but was identified in many places with the Greek god Heracles. The briskest trade was perhaps driven with the thriving cities of Ionia, and the Phoenicians adopted the Ionian name and effused it in Syria as the general designation of all the Greeks. These things were of slight concern compared with one inestimable service which the Phoenicians rendered to Hellas and thereby to Europe. They gave the Greeks the most useful instrument of civilization, alphabetic writing. It was perhaps at the beginning of the 9th century, hardly later, that the Phoenician alphabet was molded to the needs of the Greek language. In this adaptation the Greeks showed their genius. The alphabet of the Phoenicians and their Semitic brethren is an alphabet of consonants. The Greeks added the vowels. They took some of the consonantal symbols for which their own language had no corresponding sounds and used these superfluous signs to represent the vowels. Several alphabets differing in certain details were diffused in various parts of the Hellenic world, but they all agree in the main points, and we may suppose that the original idea was worked out in Ionia. In Ionia, at all events, writing was introduced at an early period and was perhaps used by poets of the 9th century. Perhaps the earliest example of a Greek writing that we possess is on an Attic jar of the 7th century. It says the jar shall be the prize of the dancer who dances more gaily than all others. But the lack of early inscriptions is what we should expect. The new art was used for ordinary and literary purposes long before it was employed for official records. It was the gift which the Semites gave to Europe. Section 11, Greek Reconstruction of Early Greek History. We must now see what the Greeks thought of their own early history. Their construction of it, though founded on legendary tradition and framed without much historical sense, has considerable importance, since their ideas about the past affected their views of the present. Their belief in their legendary past was thoroughly practical. Mythic events were often the basis of diplomatic transactions, claims the territory might be founded on the supposed conquests or dominions of ancient heroes of divine birth. At first, before the growth of historical curiosity, the chief motive for investigating the past was the desire of noble families to derive their origin from a god. For this purpose they sought to connect their pedigrees with heroic ancestors, especially with Heracles or with the warriors who had fought at Troy. The Trojan War was, with some reason, regarded as a national enterprise, and Heracles, who seems originally to have been specially associated with Argolis, was looked on as a national hero. The consequence was that the Greeks framed their history on genealogies and determined their chronology by generations, reckoning three generations to a hundred years. The later Homeric poets must have contributed a great deal to the fixing of the mutual relations of legendary events, but it was the poets of the School of Hesiod in the seventh century who did most to reduce to a historical system the legends of the heroic age. Their poems are lost, but they were worked up into still more complete and elaborate schemes by the prose logographers or story writers of the sixth and fifth centuries, of whom perhaps the most influential were Hecateus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos. The original works of the logographers have also perished, but their teaching has come down to us fully enough in the works of later compilers and commentators. In the first place, it had to be determined how the various branches of the Greek race were related. As soon as the Greeks came to be called by the common name of Helliness, they derived their whole stock from an eponymous ancestor, Helene, who lived in Thessaly. They are then to account for its distribution into a number of different branches. In Greece proper they might have searched long among the various folks speaking various idioms for some principle of classification which are determined near and further degrees of kinship between the divisions of the race, and established two or three original branches to which every community could trace itself back. But when they looked over to the eastern Greece on the farther side of the Aegean, they saw, as it were, a reflection of themselves, their own children divided into three homogenous groups, Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians. This gave a simple classification. Three families sprung from Aeolus, Ion, and Dorus, who must evidently have been the sons of Helene. But there was one difficulty. Homer's Aegeans had still to be accounted for. They could not be affiliated to Aeolians or Ionians or Dorians, none of whom play a part in the Iliad. Accordingly it was arranged that Helene had three sons, Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus, and Ion and Achaeus were the sons of Xuthus. It was easy enough then by the help of tradition and language to fit the ethnography of Greece under these labels, and the manifold dialects were forced under three artificial divisions, the two great events on which everything turned and to which all other events were related with the Trojan War and the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus. The most curious version of the Dorian conquest was invented in Argos and won its way into general belief. It is a striking illustration of the motives and methods of the Greeks in reconstructing their past. The Temenids, the royal family of Argos, derive themselves from Aegymus, to whom the foundation of the Dorian institutions were ascribed. But as the fame and glory of Heracles waxed great, the Temenids desired to connect themselves with him, the problem was solved with wonderful skill. The eponymous ancestors of the three Dorian tribes, Helus, Panphelus, and Daemon, were naturally regarded as the sons of Aegymus. According to the news story, Helus was really the son of Heracles. It was said that Heracles fought against the Lapiths for Aegymus who was a Dorian king in Thessaly, and that he received a third of the kingdom as a reward for his valiant service. On his death his children were protected by Aegymus, who adopted Helus and confirmed him in the possession of his father's third. The sons of Helus failed in their attempts to recover the possessions of Heracles in the Peloponnesus. The achievement was reserved for his great-grandchildren, Temenus, Cresfontes, and Aristodemus. With a Dorian host, they crossed from Naupactus under the guidance of a one-eyed Italian man named Oxelus, and conquered all the Peloponnesus except Arcadia. They gave Elist Oxelus for his pains. Those of the Achaian inhabitants of the peninsula, who did not migrate beyond the sea, retreated to the northern coast land, the historical Achaia. The other three parts of the Peloponnesus fell by lot to the three brothers Mycenia to Cresfontes, Laconia to Aristodemus, and Argos to Temenus. An explanation was added how there were two royal houses at Sparta. Aristodemus died prematurely, and Laconia was divided between his twin sons, Eurysthanes and Procles. Thus the Dorian invasion was justified as a recovery of usurped rights, and the royal houses of Argos and Sparta renounced their Dorian origin and connected themselves by blood with Heracles, who was associated with the pre-Dorian lords of Argolis. Every place in Greece had its own local legends, which grew up quite independently. Sometimes they were adapted and modified to suit the legendary scheme of the poets and story writers, but often they lived on, unscrupulously accepted notwithstanding all incompatibilities. In several cases we find, in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, legends which are inconsistent with those which became currently accepted. Thus Cadmus was the founder of Thebes, according to the current legend, but in the Odyssey Thebes is built by Ampheon and Zithos. The origin of Corinth was traced on one hand to Ephir, the daughter of Ocean, on the other to Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus. The received genealogy of pre-Dorian Argos had no connection with Helene and his sons. Argos derived its origin from Inagos, a personification of the stream of Inagos which flows by the town, who, like most rivers, was regarded as a son of Ocean. Argos was his great-grandson, Aeol, from whom the Danaioi were descended, was his daughter. Thus it emerges that the pre-Dorian archives were not Helene's, for they were not derived from Helene. If the legend had been true to history, they should have been traced from Aeon, as there was probably a large Aeonian element in Argolis. But for most of the Greeks, connections with Helene and his sons were manufactured. It was to Aeolus that most descents were traced. He had seven sons and five daughters, and it was not difficult to work out more or less plausible connections. Aetolian legends fasten themselves on to his daughter Kallike, his son Sisyphus founded Corinth. The Thessalian heroes Admetus and Jason were derived from another son, Cretius. Perhaps the most interesting instance is the genealogy which was established for the Codrid families of Miletus and other cities of Aeonia. They traced up their lineage to Poseidon, and at the same time derived themselves from Helene. The story was that Salmoneus, son of Aeolus, had a daughter who bore to Poseidon twin sons, Pelius and Nelius. As Pelius won the Thessalian kingdom of Iolcus, Nelius went forth from the land and founded a kingdom for himself at Pelus, in the southwest of the Peloponisus. He was succeeded by Nestor, who in his old age bore a part in the Trojan War. Nestor's fourth successor Melanthus was a ruler of Pelus, when the Dorians came down into the Peloponisus, and he retreated before their attack to Athens, where he became king and was the father of Codrus. Then Nelius, a son of Codrus, led the Aeonian migration to Asia Minor. Thus a number of different traditions were wrought into a narrative, which originating in Aeonia was accepted in Attica and influenced the ideas of the Athenians about a part of their own early history. The Greeks were not content that their legends should be confined to the range of their own country and their own race, and in curious contrast with that exclusive pride which drew a hard and fast line between Greek and barbarian, they brought their ancestors and their myths in connection with foreign lands. Thus the myth of Iol made the Danoë of Argos, cousins of the Egyptians. By her Amor with Zeus, Iol became the grandmother of Danus, and Egiptus, the eponymous ancestors of the two peoples. Cadmus, the name sire of the Cadmeans of Thebes, was represented as a Phoenician who went forth from his own land in quest of his sister Europa and settled in Boeotia. The tale which gained widest belief made Pelops, son of the Phrygian Tantalus king of Sipulus, whence he migrated to the Peloponisus and founded the royal line of Argos, from which Agamemnon was sprung. A Corinthian legend brought the early history of Corinth into connection with Colchis, representing Aetes, offspring of the sun, as the first Corinthian king and his daughter Medea as Aeres to the land. The true home of the Greeks, before they won dominion in Greece, had passed clean out of their remembrance, and they looked to the east, not to the north, as the quarter from which some of their ancestors had migrated. Of the legends which once sincere credence among the Greeks, and assumed, as we may say, a national significance, none is more curious or more obscure in its origin than that of the Amazons. A folk of warrior women, strong and brave, living apart from men, were conceived to have dwelt in Asia in the heroic age, and proved themselves worthy foes of the Greek heroes. An obvious etymology of their name, breastless, suggests the belief that they used to burn off the right breast that they might the better draw the bow. In the Iliad, Priam tells how he fought against their army in Phrygia, and one of the perilous tasks which are set to bellerophon is to march against the Amazons. In a later Homeric poem, the Amazon Penthesilia appears as the dreaded adversary of the Greeks at Troy. To win the girdle of the Amazon queen was one of the labors of Heracles. All these adventures happened in Asia Minor, and though this female folk was located in various places, its original and proper home was ultimately placed on the river Thermodon near the Greek colony of Amisus. But the Amazons attacked Greece itself. It was told that Thesius carried off their queen Antiochpe, and so they came and invaded Attica. There was a terrible battle in the town of Athens, and the invaders were defeated after a long struggle. At the feast of Thesius, the Athenians used to sacrifice to the Amazons. There was a building called the Amazonaeon in the western quarter of the city, and the episode was believed by such men as Isocrates and Plato to be as truly an historical fact as the Trojan War itself. The battles of Greeks with Amazons were a favourite subject of Grecian sculptures, and, like the Trojan War and the adventures of the Golden Fleece, the Amazon story fitted into the conception of an ancient and long strife between Greece and Asia. The details of the famous legends, the labors of Heracles, the Trojan War, the voyage of the Argonauts, the tale of Cadmus, the life of Edipus, the two sieges of Thieves by the Argyve, Adrastus, and all the other familiar stories belong to the mythology and lie beyond our present scope. But we have to realise that the later Greeks believed them and discussed them as sober history, and that many of them had a genuine historical basis, however slender. The story of the Trojan War has more historical matter in it than any other, but we have seen that the Argonautic legend and the tale of Cadmus contain dim memories of actual events. It is quite probable that the heroic age witnessed rivalry and war between Thebes and Argos. Two powerful generating forces of these historic myths had been the custom of families and cities to trace their origin to a god, and the instinct of the Greeks to personify places, especially towns, rivers and springs. Then, when men began both to become keenly conscious of a community of race and language, and to speculate upon the past, attempts were naturally made to bring the various myths of Greece into harmony. Since they were true, they must be reconciled. Ultimately, they were reduced into chronological systems, which were based upon genealogical reckonings by generations. Hecataius of Miletus counted a generation as 40 years, but it was more usual to reckon three generations to a hundred years. According to the scheme, which finally won the widest acceptance, Troy was taken in 1184 BC, and the Dorians invaded the Peloponnesus under the leadership of the Heraclids in 1104 BC, and both these dates occurred more closely than one might expect, considering the method by which they were obtained with the general probabilities of the case. Leading dates according to the system Averatosthenes, circa 220 BC. Cadmus, 1313 BC. Pelops, 1283 BC. Heracles, 1261-1209. Argonauts, 1225. Seven against Thebes, 1213. Fall of Troy, 1184. Thessalion Conquest, and Boitian, and Aeolic Migration, 1124 BC. Return of Heraclidae, 1104 BC. Death of Chodros, 1044. Ionic Migration, 1044. Lisurgius at Sparta, 885. End of Chapter 1, Part 11 Chapter 2, Parts 1 and 2 of A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Graham Redman A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 1 by John Bagnell Bury. Chapter 2, The Expansion of Greece Part 1, Causes and Character of Greek Colonization The expansion of the Greeks beyond Greece proper, and the coasts of the Aegean, the plantation of Greek colonies on the shores of Thrace and the Black Sea, in Italy and Sicily, even in Spain and Gaul, began it is uncertain when, and was completed in the sixth century. But it must not be regarded as a single or isolated phenomenon. It was the continuation of the earlier expansion over the Aegean Islands and the coast of Asia Minor, the details of which were forgotten by the Greeks themselves, and are consequently unknown to us. The cause of Greek colonization is not to be found in mere trade interests. These indeed were, in most cases, a motive, and in some of the settlements on the Black Sea they were perhaps a leading motive. But the great difference between Greek and Phoenician colonization is that, while the Phoenicians aimed solely at promoting their commerce, and only a few of their settlements, notably Carthage, became more than mere trading stations or factories, Greek colonization satisfied other needs than desire of commercial profit. It was the expression of the adventurous spirit, which has been poetically reflected in the legends of the sailing of the Argo and the homecoming of Odysseus, the same spirit not to be expressed in any commercial formula which prompted English colonization. Trade, of course, sometimes paved the way. Colonists followed in the paths of trade, and the merchants of Miletus who had ventured themselves in the dangerous waters of the Yuxain observed natural harbours and inviting sites for cities, and when they returned home organized parties of settlers. The adventurous, the discontented, and the needy were always to be found. But in the case of the early colonies, at least, it was not overpopulation of the land so much as the nature of the land system that drove men to emigrate. In various ways, under the family system which was ill-suited to independent and adventurous spirits, it would come about that individual members were excluded from a share in the communist state and separated from their kin. Such lacklands were ripe for colonial enterprise. Again, the political circumstances of most Greek states in the eighth and seventh centuries favored emigration. We have seen that at this time the aristocratic form of government generally prevailed. Sometimes a king was formally at the head, but he was really no more than the first of peers. A body of nobles were the true masters. Sometimes there was an aristocracy within an aristocracy, or a large clan like the backyards at Corinth held the power. In all cases the distinction between the members of the ruling class and the mass of free citizens was widened and deepened. It was the tendency of the rulers to govern in their own interest and oppress the multitude, and they cared little to disguise their contempt for the mass of the people. At Mitellini things went so far that the Penthylids, who had secured the chief power, went about in the streets armed with clubs, and knocked down citizens whom they disliked. Under these conditions there were strong inducements for men to leave their native city, where they were of little account and had to endure the slights, if nothing worse, of their rulers, and to join in the foundation of a new police where they might themselves rule. The same inducement drew nobles who did not belong to the inner oligarchical circle. In fact political discontent was an immediate cause of Greek colonization, and conversely it may be said that colonization was a palladium of aristocracy. If this outlet had not existed, or if it had not suited the Hellenic temper, the aristocracies might not have lasted so long, and they wisely discerned that it was their own interest to encourage colonization. But while we recognize the operation of general causes, we must not ignore special causes. We must for instance take into account the fact that Miletus and the South Ionian cities were unable to expand in Caria, as the North Ionian cities expanded in Lydia, because the Carians were too strong for them, and Lycia presented the same kind of barrier to Rhodes. Otherwise perhaps neither Rhodes nor Miletus would have sent settlers to distant lands. Wherever the Greek went he retained his customs and language, and made a Greek polis. It was as if a bit of Greece were set down on the remote shores of the Yuxain, or in the far west on the wild coasts of Gaul or Iberia. The colony was a private enterprise, but the bond of kinship with the mother city was carefully fostered, and though political discontent might have been the cause which drove the founders forth, yet that solemn departure for a distant land where a new city-state protected by the same gods was to spring up always sealed a reconciliation. The emigrants took fire from the public hearth of their city to light the fire on that of their new home. Intercourse between colonies and the mother country was specially kept up at the great religious festivals of the year, and various marks of filial respect were shown by the daughter to the mother. When, as frequently befell, the colony determined herself in turn to throw off a new chute, it was the recognized custom that she should seek the esist, or leader, of the colonists from the mother city. Thus the Magarian colony Byzantium, when it founded its own colony Mesembria, must have sought an esist from Megara. The political importance of colonization was sanctified by religion, and it was a necessary formality whenever a settlement was to be made to ask the approbation of the Delphic god. The most ancient oracular god of Greece was Zeus of Dodona. The celli, his priests and interpreters, are mentioned in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey Dodona appears as a place to which a king of the west might go to ask the will of Zeus from the lofty oak, wherein the god was conceived to dwell. But the oak shrine in the highlands of Epirus was too remote to become the chief oracle of Greece, and the central position of Delphi enabled the astute priests of the Pythian Apollo to exalt the authority of their god as a true prophet to the supreme place in the Greek world. Footnote, the Delphic oracle, is also mentioned in the Odyssey in the passage of the legend of Edipus, Book 19, line 296, end of footnote. There were other oracular deities who foretold the future. There was not far off Trafonius at Biotian Lebedia. There was Amphiarius in the land of the Greys, not yet Biotian, but none of these ever became even a rival of the Delphian Apollo, who by the seventh century at least had won the position of advisor to Greece. Footnote, the influence of the oracle is another question, end of footnote. It is worthy of notice that colonization tended to promote a feeling of unity among the Greek peoples, and it did so in two ways. By the wide diffusion of their race on the fringe of barbarous lands it brought home to them more fully the contrast between Greek and barbarian, and by consequence the community of the Greeks. The Greek dwellers in Asia Minor, neighbors of not Greek peoples, were naturally impressed with their own unity in a way which was strange to dwellers in Biotia or Attica, who were surrounded on all sides by Greeks, and were therefore alive chiefly to local differences. With the diffusion of their sons over various parts of the world the European Greeks acquired a stronger sense of unity. In the second place colonization led to the association of Greeks of different cities. An ecist who decided to organize a party of colonists could not always find in his own city a sufficient number of men willing to take part in the enterprise. He therefore enlisted comrades from other cities, and thus many colonies were joint undertakings, and contained a mixture of citizens of various nationality. This feature was not indeed confined to the later epoch of colonization. It is one of the few facts about the earlier settlements on the Asiatic coast of which we can be certain. End of chapter 2 part 1. Chapter 2 part 2 Colonies on the coasts of the Uxine, Propontis and North Egean. The voyage of the Argonauts in quest of the golden fleece commemorates in a delightful legend the memorable day on which Greek sailors for the first time burst into the waters of the Uxine Sea. Acustened to the island's straits and short distances of the Egean, they fancied that when they had passed the Bosphorus they were embarking on a boundless ocean, and they called it the main, Pontus. Even when they had circumnavigated its shores it might still seem boundless, for they knew not where the great rivers, the Ister, the Tanaeus, the Danopris, might lead. The little preliminary sea into which the Helispont widens to contract again into the narrow passage of the Bosphorus was appropriately named the vestibule of the Pontus, Propontis. Full of creeks and recesses it is happily described by Euripides as the bade water key of the boundless sea. The Pontus was a treacherous field for the barks of even experienced mariners, and it was supposed to have received for this reason its name Uxine, or hospitable, in accordance with the habit of the Greeks to seek to propitiate adverse powers by pleasant names. Footnote, but this explanation is by no means certain, end of footnote. It was when the compass of the Uxine was still unknown, and men were beginning shyly to explore its coasts, that the tale of the wanderings of Odysseus took form. He was imagined to have sailed from Troy into the Pontus, and after having been driven about in its waters to have at last reached Ithaca by an overland journey through Thrace and Epirus. In the Odyssey, as we have it now, compounded of many different legends and poems, this is disguised. The island of Cersei has been removed to the far west, and the scene of the descent to the underworld translated to the Atlantic Ocean. But Cersei, the daughter of the sun, and sister of King Eetes, who possessed the Golden Fleece, belongs to the seas of Colchis, and the world of shades beyond the Cimmerians is to be sought near the Cimmerian Bosphorus. The mention of Sicily in some of the later parts of the poem, and the part played by Ithaca, which, with the other islands of the Ionian Sea lay on the road to the western Mediterranean, reflect the beginning of the expansion of Greece in that direction. But the original wanderings of Odysseus were connected not with the west, but with the exploration of the Uxine. A mist of obscurity hangs about the beginnings of the first Greek cities which arose on the Pontic shores. Here Miletus was the pioneer. Merchants carrying the stuffs which were manufactured from the wool of Milesian sheep may have established trading stations along the southern coast. Flags from Colchis, steel and silver, slaves, were among the chief products which their wool bought. But the work of colonisation beyond the gate of the Bosphorus can hardly have fully begun until the gate itself was secured by the enterprise of Megara, which sent out men in the first part of the seventh century to found the towns of Calcedon and Byzantium. Byzantium could command the trade of the Black Sea, but the great commercial and political importance of her situation was not fully appreciated until a thousand years had passed when she became the rival and successor of Rome, and took, in honour of her second founder, the name Constantinople. This is the first appearance of the little state of Megara in Greek history, and none of her contemporaries took a step that was destined to lead to greater things than the settlement on the Bosphorus. The story was that Calcedon was founded first before the Megarians perceived the striking advantages of the opposite shore, and the Delphic Oracle, which they consulted as a matter of course, chid them as blind men. Westward from Byzantium they also founded Silimbria on the north coast of the prepontis. Eastward they established Heraclea in Pontus, on the coast of Bithynia. The enterprise of the Megarians stimulated Miletus, and she determined to anticipate others in seizing the best sites on the Pontic shore. At the most northerly point of the southern coast a straight-necked cape forms two natural harbours, an attractive site for settlers, and here the Milesians planted the city Sinope. Footnote, this city claimed to date from the eighth century to have been swept away in the invasion of the Cimmerians, and to have risen again in the seventh, but it is highly improbable that any of the Pontic cities were older than the towns of the Bosphorus and Propontis. End of footnote. Far the east, halfway to that extreme eastern point of the sea, where the faces flows out at the foot of Mount Caucasus, arose another Milesian colony, Trapezius. At the Bosphorus the Milesians had been anticipated by Megara, but they partly made up for this by planting a bidus on the helispont opposite Cestals, and they also seized a jutting promontory on the south coast of the Propontis, where a narrow neck, as at Sinope, forms two harbours. The town was named Sidzicus, and the peninsula was afterwards transformed into an island. The tony fish on the coins of the city shows what was one of the chief articles of her trade. Lamsikus at the northern end of the helispont, once a Venetian factory, was colonised by another Ionian city, Phocere, about the same time, and the winged sea-horse on Lamsikine coins speaks of naval enterprise which led afterwards to wealth and prosperity. The foundation of Parion was due to a joint undertaking of Miletus and Erythry, and Cladsomini joined Miletus in planting Cardia at the neck of the Thracian Cursonis in the important position of an advance fort against Thrace. On the southern side of the helispont the lands of the Scamander invited the Greeks of Lesbos, and a number of small Iolian settlements arose. Greek settlements also sprang up in the more remote parts of the Yuxain. Diascurias and faces were founded in the Far East in the fabled land of Colchis. On the Tauric Cursonisus, or peninsular, now the Crimea, Panticapium was founded over against Phanagoria at the entrance to the Miotic Lake, and Tanaeus at the mouth of the like-named river. Heraclea, or Cursonisus, on the western side of the peninsular, was destined to preserve the municipal forms of an old Greek city for more than a thousand years, albeit at the mouth of the Dnipa, Odessus, Istrus, Massembria, were only some of the Greek settlements which complete the circuit of the Black Sea. This sea and the Propontis were the special domain of the sea-guard Achilles, whose fame grew greater by his association as a hero with the legend of Troy. He was worshiped along the coast as Lord of the Pontis, and in Lucie, the shining island near the Danube's mouth, the lonely island where no man dwelled, he had a temple, and the birds of the sea were said to be its warders. If Miletus and Megara took the most prominent part in extending the borders of the Greek world eastward of the Helispont, the northwestern corner of the Aegean was the special domain of Euboea. The barren islands of Seathus and Peperythus were the bridge from Euboea to the coast of Macedonia, which, between the rivers Axius and Strymon, runs out into a huge three-pronged promontory. Here Calces planted so many towns that the whole promontory was named Calcidici. Some of the chief cities, however, were founded by other states, notably Carinthian Potidia, on the most westerly of the three prongs, which was called Pelini. Sithonia was the central prong, and Actii, ending in Mount Athos, the eastern. Some of the colonies on Pelini were founded by Eretria, and those north of Actii by Andros, which was dependent on Eretria. Hence we may regard this group of cities as Eubaean, though we cannot regard it as Calcydian. On the west side of the Thermaeic Bay, two Eubaean colonies were planted, Pidna and Methoni, on Macedonian soil. End of chapter 2, part 2. Recording by Graham Redmon