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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


Ex  Libris 
[    C.  K.  OGDEN 


THE   GREEK   RENAISSANCE 


THE 
GREEK    RENAISSANCE 


BY 


P.  N.  URE,  M.A. 

w 

PROFESSOR    OF   CLASSICS,    UNIVERSITY    COLLEGE,    READING 


WITH    TWELVE    ILLUSTRATIONS 


METHUEN  &  GO.   LTD. 

36    ESSEX    STREET   W.  G. 

LONDON 


First  Published  in  1921 


PREFACE 

THE  object  of  this  little  volume  is  to 
indicate  the  scope  and  character  of 
what  the  Greeks  achieved  in  the  first 
two  centuries  of  their  recorded  history.  With 
this  end  in  view  it  deals  with  as  many  sides  as 
possible  of  ancient  Greek  achievement,  with 
art  and  industry,  literature  and  science,  no 
less  than  with  politics  and  economics  ;  but  in 
each  case  the  endeavour  has  been  not  to  sum- 
marise the  subject,  but  to  write  an  introduction 
that  will  give  the  reader  who  is  not  familiar 
with  Greek  history  some  opportunity  of  seeing 
whether  it  might  not  be  worth  his  while  to 
follow  up  further  the  particular  topic  with 
which  it  deals. 

Books  that  will  help  him  to  do  so  are  men- 
tioned in  the  course  of  the  work.  My  obliga- 
tions are  for  the  most  part  acknowledged  in 
the  sections  where  they  have  been  incurred, 
but  I  should  like  here  to  express  my  indebted- 


V*l 


viii        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

ness  to  two  of  my  colleagues,  my  wife  and 
Mr.  E.  R.  Dodds,  who  have  been  constantly 
ready  with  help  and  suggestions. 

P.  N.  URE 
UNIVERSITY  COLLEGE 
READING 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

PREFACE vii 

I.     INTRODUCTION  :      GREECE     AND     HER 

FORERUNNERS  i 

II.    THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE.         .         .      22 

III.  GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  AT  THE 

END  OF  THE  DARK  AGES          .         .      38 

IV.  THE    RENAISSANCE    IN    ARTS,    CRAFTS, 

AND  COMMERCE        ....      67 

V.    THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT    .         . 


VI.    THE  GOVERNMENTS  OF  THE  DARK  AGES 

AND  THE  RISE  OF  CAPITALIST  TYRANTS  I2O 

VII.    THE  TYRANTS 138 

VIII.    CONCLUSION 163 

INDEX         ......  171 


LIST  OF  PLATES 


PLATE 


I.    DORIC  TEMPLE,  THE  "  THESEION,"  AT  ATHENS 

From  a  photograph  by  English  Photo  Co. 

II.    IONIC  TEMPLE  OF  ATHENA  NIKE  AT  ATHENS 

From  a  photograph  by  English  Photo  Co. 

III.  ARTEMIS  FROM  DELOS  (ATHENS  MUSEUM) 

From  a  photograph  by  English  Photo  Co. 

IV.  HERA  FROM  SAMOS  (LOUVRE  MUSEUM,  PARIS) 

From  a  photograph  by  A.  Giraudoh 

V.    STATUE  FROM  THE  ATHENIAN  ACROPOLIS  (No.  679) 

From  a  photograph  by  English  Photo  Co. 

VI.    STATUE  FROM  THE  ATHENIAN  ACROPOLIS  (No.  682) 

From  a  photograph  by  English  Photo  Co. 

VII.    APOLLO  FROM  TENEA  (MUNICH  MUSEUM) 

From  a  photograph  by  Bruckmann 

VIII.     («)  GEOMETRIC  VASE  FROM  DIPYLON  CEMETERY 

IN  ATHENS  (ATHENS  MUSEUM) 
(b)  PLATE  FROM  RHODES  (BRITISH  MUSEUM) 

IX.    CORINTHIAN  VASES  (BRITISH  MUSEUM) 

X.    ATTIC  BLACK  FIGURE  VASE  (THE  FRANCOIS  VASE, 
FLORENCE  MUSEUM) 

From  a  photograph  by  Brogi 

XL    ATTIC  RED  FIGURE  VASE  PAINTING  BY  EUPHONIOS 
(BRITISH  MUSEUM) 

XII.    COINS  OF  LYDIA  (?),  ^EGINA,  ATHENS  AND  CORINTH 

From  a  photograph  by  W.  A.  Mansell  and  Co. 


PLATE  1 


PLATE  II 


PLATE  III 


ARTEMIS   FROM    DELOS 

(Athens  Museum} 


PLATE  IV 


HERA   FROM   SAMOS 

(Louvre  Museum,  Paris) 


[See  page  77 


STATUE    FROM    THE   ATHENIAN    ACROPOLIS 

(Acropolis  Museum  No.  679) 


[See  page  79 


PLATE  VI 


STATUE    FROM    THE    ATHENIAN    ACROPOLIS 

(Acropolis  Museum  No.  682) 


PLATEAU 


APOLLO    FROM    TENEA 

(Munich  Museum) 


[See  page  80 


PLATE  VIII 


PLATE  IX 


3  I 

>  o> 

in 

55  3 

-  — 

H  in 

2  3 

S  '^ 

o  a 


PLATE  X 


ATTIC    BLACK    FIGURE    VASE 

(The  Francois  Vase,  Florence  Museum)" 


[See  page  85 


PLATE  XI 


PLATE  XII 


COINS   OF    LYDIA    (?),    AEG1NA,    ATHENS,    AND    CORINTH 


[See  p;tges  52,  141 


THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 


CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTION 
GREECE  AND  HER  FORERUNNERS 


study  of  history  has  been  pro- 
foundly influenced  by  the  great 
scientific  movement  of  the  last  few 
generations.  On  the  whole  this  influence 
has  been  good.  It  has  taught  the  his- 
torian how  to  use  his  material  and,  what  is 
more  important  still,  where  to  look  for  it. 
It  has  put  an  end  to  the  catastrophic  history 
in  which  a  succession  of  picturesque  figures 
hanging  loose  in  space  and  time  deal  with  a 
series  of  disconnected  military  and  political 
crises  that  arise  out  of  nothing  and  lead  no- 
where except  to  dungeons  and  palaces  and 
scaffolds  and  thrones.  But  this  advance  has 
not  been  made  without  certain  attendant 
losses.  The  evolution  dogma  which  has  been 
the  inspiration  of  so  much  modern  scientific 


2  THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

work,  particularly  in  the  sciences  most  allied  to 
history,  has  sometimes  been  applied  to  history 
itself  with  unfortunate  results.  The  golden 
age  has  been  shifted  from  the  past  to  the 
future,  and  our  respect  for  the  past  has  naturally 
suffered.  Furthermore,  in  abandoning  the 
catastrophic  view  of  history  there  has  been  a 
very  natural  tendency  to  forget  that  there 
are  a  number  of  well-marked  epochs  even  in 
the  comparatively  recent  history  of  the  human 
race.  Inspired  by  the  discovery  that  we  have 
in  some  ways  got  far  beyond  any  previous 
age,  we  have  been  tempted  to  imagine  that  we 
are  completely  emancipated  from  the  past,  and 
that  it  is  not  only  possible  but  desirable  to  fix 
our  eyes  exclusively  on  the  future.  Because 
Hippocrates  is  now  out  of  date  as  a  manual 
for  medical  students  it  does  not  follow  that 
the  study  of  Greek  is  a  cancer  in  our  educational 
system,  or  even  that  it  might  not  be  fatal  for 
us  to  cease  to  study  the  history  of  the  past. 

Fortunately  such  false  impressions,  which 
at  first  were  only  intensified  by  the  absurd 
conservatism  of  classical  scholars,  are  now 
being  rapidly  dispelled.  History  and  pre-history 
are  linking  up  with  such  sciences  as  geology 
at  the  one  end  and  economics  at  the  other  and 
finding  their  rightful  place  in  the  general 
intellectual  movement  of  the  period.  Taken 


INTRODUCTION  3 

in  its  broadest  sense  history  is  perhaps  destined 
to  be  the  most  important  science  of  the  immedi- 
ate future.  Already  it  is  of  all  subjects  the 
most  widely  studied.  It  is  the  one  subject  in 
which  our  knowledge  is  brought  more  or  less 
up  to  date  in  periodicals  that  appear  not  yearly 
or  monthly  or  weekly,  but  twice  a  day,  and 
that  too  in  the  whole  of  the  civilised  world. 
The  urgency  for  a  better  study  of  modern 
history  will  not  now  be  disputed  anywhere. 
Governments  are,  indeed,  constantly  placing 
difficulties  in  the  way  of  this  particular  study, 
but  even  those  who  daily  suppress  historical 
truth  in  detail  are  loud  on  the  need  of  publish- 
ing it  as  a  whole.  Only,  where  is  an  educated 
democracy  to  begin  the  study  of  the  conditions 
in  which  it  finds  itself  ?  To-day  is  not  to  be 
entirely  explained  by  yesterday,  or  even  by 
last  year.  Simply  in  order  to  realise  our 
bondage  to  the  present — and  till  the  bondage 
has  been  recognised  there  is  little  hope  of  escap- 
ing from  it — we  are  driven  quickly  back  into 
the  past.  And  science  itself  shows  us  that  we 
must  be  prepared  to  go  back  a  long  way.  To 
those  who  approach  history  from  the  point 
of  view  of  modern  geology  and  anthropology 
a  thousand  years  may  well  be  but  as  yesterday  ; 
possibly  they  will  be  found  to  be  earlier  phases 
of  the  present  day. 


4          THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

We  have,  in  fact,  to  go  back  more  than 
twice  that  period  to  reach  the  age  when  modern 
civilisation  took  its  essential  form  and  features. 
It  was  probably  in  the  Greek  world  of  the 
seventh  and  sixth  centuries  B.C.  that  all  the 
main  streams  of  modern  thought  and  energy 
first  took  shape.  All  our  knowledge  of  earlier 
civilisations  points  to  fundamental  differences 
between  them  and  our  own.  It  is  among  the 
Greeks  of  the  seventh  and  sixth  centuries  B.C. 
that  we  first  find  men  who  intellectually  and 
politically  share  our  outlook  in  a  way  that  is 
becoming  more  and  more  striking  the  more 
the  world  emancipates  itself  from  the  mediaeval- 
ism  that  it  is  in  the  process  of  casting  off. 

The  civilisation  that  developed  so  remarkably 
in  the  age  that  we  are  about  to  consider  does 
not  appear  to  have  been  the  result  of  a  long 
period  of  evolution.  It  was  a  rapid  and  almost 
sudden  renaissance.  The  remarkable  ancient 
civilisation  that  had  its  centre  in  Crete,  after 
lasting  for  at  least  as  long  as  from  the  Norman 
Conquest  to  the  present  day,  had  come  to  a 
sudden  end  at  some  time  near  the  close  of  the 
second  millennium  B.C.  :  the  still  more  ancient 
civilisation  of  Egypt  had  collapsed  at  about 
the  same  time.  Only  in  Mesopotamia  had 
there  been  no  such  catastrophe.  To  understand 
the  movements  of  the  seventh-century  renais- 


INTRODUCTION  5 

sance  it  is  necessary  to  have  some  idea  of  these 
earlier  civilisations  and  of  the  dark  ages  that 
followed  their  eclipse.  The  rest  of  this  chapter 
will  be  devoted  to  Egypt,  Mesopotamia,  and 
Crete.  Chapter  two  will  deal  somewhat  less 
hastily  with  the  dark  age  of  the  first  three 
centuries  of  the  first  millennium,  which  bring 
us  down  to  the  period  with  which  we  are 
immediately  concerned. 

EGYPT. — The  great  achievements  of  Egypt 
belong  to  the  early  dynastic  period  (about 
3400-2500  B.C.).  Already  in  the  days  of  the 
earliest  pharaohs  the  floods  of  the  Nile  were 
under  human  control,  and  Egypt  was  a  land 
of  expert  engineers  and  agriculturalists.  The 
pyramids  were  mainly  built  by  the  kings  of 
the  third  to  sixth  dynasties  (about  3000-2500 
B.C.),  and  as  works  of  mechanical  skill  they 
still  excite  wonder.  Some  of  the  masterpieces 
of  Egyptian  sculpture  and  painting  belong  to 
this  same  early  period.  The  statues  are  often 
life-like  portraits.  There  are  kings  and  nobles, 
overseers  and  scribes,  who  died  in  Egypt 
more  than  forty-five  centuries  ago,  but  whose 
features  are  as  well  known  to  us  as  if  we  had 
their  photographs.  Some  of  the  paintings 
and  relief  sculptures  of  birds  and  animals 
might  well  be  usecl  as  illustrations  in  modern 


6          THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

works  on  natural  history.  Politically  the  whole 
country  enjoyed  the  full  benefits  of  orderly 
government,  and  perhaps  we  people  of  the 
twentieth  century  A.D.,  who  are  attempting  to 
introduce  law  and  order  into  the  relationships 
of  the  warring  states  of  the  world,  can  particu- 
larly well  appreciate  the  achievements  of  these 
statesmen  of  five  thousand  years  ago,  who  first 
established  law  and  order  among  the  warring 
tribes  and  interests  of  a  single  great  country. 
Most  important  of  all,  this  early  age  of  Egypt 
evolved  a  system  of  writing  and  developed 
the  habit  of  keeping  records.  The  museum  of 
Palermo  in  Sicily  possesses  fragments  of  an 
Egyptian  chronicle  composed  early  in  the  third 
millennium  B.C.  and  dealing  with  the  kings  of 
the  first  five  dynasties. 

Those  of  us  who  are  not  Egyptologists  are 
probably  inclined  to  exaggerate  the  sameness 
of  the  monuments  of  ancient  Egypt  and  of  the 
products  of  its  art  and  industries.  But  making 
all  allowance  for  misleading  perspective  and 
imperfect  knowledge,  there  is  probably  a  great 
deal  of  truth  in  this  first  impression  of  extreme 
conservatism.  The  things  which  Egypt  appears 
never  to  have  attempted  are  sometimes  as 
striking  as  those  which  she  achieved.  If 
the  pyramids  bear  witness  to  extraordinary 
mechanical  skill  they  are  monuments  also  of 


INTRODUCTION  7 

the  most  absolute  autocracy.  Ancient  Egypt 
often  enjoyed  a  strong  government,  but  never 
anything  resembling  freedom.  When  the  central 
government  weakened  it  meant  merely  a  multi- 
plication of  autocrats  and  a  corresponding 
diminution  of  material  prosperity.  The  political 
system  was  early  sheltered  by  religion  and 
remained  so  till  the  end.  But  most  serious  of 
all  was  the  limitation  in  intellectual  outlook, 
which  was  early  fastened  on  the  Egyptians  by 
their  peculiar  religious  beliefs.  Egypt  is  the 
land  above  all  others  where  the  works  of  man 
are  least  liable  to  decay.  The  results  of  this 
on  Egyptian  thought  were  most  unfortunate. 
It  caused  it  to  be  side-tracked  into  speculations 
upon  crudely  material  forms  of  personal  im- 
mortality. In  the  land  of  pyramids  and 
mummies  there  was  little  that  could  inspire 
or  foster  anything  at  all  resembling  modern 
developments  either  political  or  intellectual. 
Somewhere  about  the  time  when  Cretan  civilisa- 
tion was  overthrown  in  the  ^Egean,  Egypt  was 
affected  in  a  similar  way  and  relapsed  into  a 
state  of  semi-feudal  anarchy  from  which  it 
only  emerged  in  the  seventh  century  B.C., 
when  a  strong  central  government  was  re- 
established by  a  new  dynasty,  the  twenty- 
sixth,  that  had  its  home  at  Sais  in  the  Delta 
at  no  great  distance  from  tjie  Mediterranean, 


8          THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Saite  Egypt  shared  in  the  great  renaissance  of 
the  period,  and  there  will  be  occasion  to  revert 
to  it  in  a  later  chapter. 

MESOPOTAMIA. — The  Garden  of  Eden  has  long 
been  recognised  as  one  of  the  regions  where  the 
human  race  first  began  to  lead  a  civilised  life, 
but  it  is  only  within  the  last  few  generations 
that  archaeology  has  given  us  a  fairly  clear 
notion  of  its  historical  significance.  As  early 
as  3800  B.C.  there  was  in  the  land  between  the 
Tigris  and  the  Euphrates  a  great  kingdom 
ruled  over  by  a  certain  Sargon  of  Accad  whose 
subjects  made  a  serious  study  of  astronomy, 
carved  gems  with  considerable  skill,  and  used 
a  system  of  writing,  of  which  we  still  have 
specimens,  written  in  arrow-headed  characters 
on  tablets  of  clay.  There  is  no  need  here  to 
follow  the  various  changes  in  dynasty  and  seat 
of  power  that  occurred  in  the  three  thousand 
years  following,  during  which  Mesopotamia 
was  dominated  by  a  succession  of  great  central- 
ised states.  As  a  typical  specimen  of  one  of 
these  rulers  we  may  take  Khammurabi,  the 
Amraphel  of  Genesis,1  who  was  king  of  Babylon 
about  2340  B.C.  Khammurabi  issued  a  code  of 
laws  of  which  a  copy  was  recently  discovered.2 

1  Gen.  xiv.  9. 

2  C.  H.  W.  Johns,  The  Oldest  Code  of  Laws  in  the  World, 
from  which  the  extracts  above  are  taken. 


INTRODUCTION  9 

These  laws  throw  much  light  on  the  life  of  the 
period  and  show  that  society  was  fairly  complex 
and  highly  organised.  There  are  elaborate 
provisions  as  to  the  liabilities  of  market 
gardeners  who  cultivate  plots  of  land  on  lease, 
of  doctors  negligent  or  even  unfortunate  in 
treating  their  patients,  of  contractors  who  put 
up  jerry-built  houses  and  the  like.  A  few 
samples  will  best  show  the  character  of  the 
code. 

If  a  man  has  given  a  field  to  a  gardener  to 
plant  a  garden  and  the  gardener  has  planted 
the  garden,  four  years  he  shall  rear  the 
garden,  in  the  fifth  the  owner  of  the  garden 
and  the  gardener  shall  share  equally,  the 
owner  of  the  garden  shall  cut  off  his  share 
and  take  it. 

If  the  gardener  has  not  included  all  the 
field  in  the  planting,  has  left  a  waste  place, 
he  shall  set  the  waste  place  in  the  share  that 
he  takes. 

If  the  doctor  has  treated  a  gentleman  for 
a  severe  wound  with  a  lancet  of  bronze  and 
has  caused  the  gentleman  to  die,  or  has 
opened  an  abscess  of  the  eye  for  a  gentleman 
with  the  bronze  lancet  and  has  caused  the 
loss  of  the  gentleman's  eye,  one  shall  cut  off 
his  hands. 

If  a  doctor  has  treated  the  severe  wound 


10        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

of  a  slave  of  a  poor  man  with  a  bronze  lancet 
and  has  caused  his  death,  he  shall  render 
slave  for  slave. 

If  a  builder  has  built  a  house  for  a  man 
and  has  not  made  strong  the  work  and  the 
house  he  built  has  fallen  and  he  has  caused 
the  death  of  the  owner  of  the  house,  that 
builder  shall  be  put  to  death. 

If  he  has  caused  the  son  of  the  owner  of 
the  house  to  die,  one  shall  put  to  death  the 
son  of  the  builder. 

The  picture  suggested  by  these  laws  is  one  of 
justice  untempered  by  mercy,  and  this  impres- 
sion is  probably  correct.  When  a  king  of 
Babylon  wished  to  commemorate  the  reduction 
of  a  rebel  or  enemy  town,  he  had  his  achieve- 
ments carved  in  sculptures  that  showed  his 
defeated  enemies  writhing  on  the  tops  of  poles 
on  which  they  had  been  impaled.  Technically 
these  sculptures  are  remarkable  achievements. 
Huge  figures  were  carved  in  the  hardest  stone, 
and  they  adorned  massive  palaces  built  of 
similar  material.  But  for  the  most  part  the 
art  of  Nineveh  and  Babylon  is  inhuman  and 
repellant.  Its  typical  product  is  the  winged 
bull  whose  human  head  with  its  Semitic  nose 
and  long  and  elaborately  curled  beard  gives 
perhaps  the  best  representation  of  combined 


INTRODUCTION  11 

strength,  cruelty,  and  pride  that  any  artist  has 
so  far  achieved. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  suppose  that  nothing 
flourished  between  the  banks  of  the  two  great 
rivers  besides  militarism,  commercialism,  and 
a  purely  vindictive  form  of  justice.  It  seems 
as  though  those  qualities  can  never  be  rampant 
without  provoking  some  sort  of  passionate  re- 
action. But  however  that  may  be,  in  the  region 
of  ideas  the  Greeks  of  the  seventh  century  B.C. 
do  not  seem  to  have  owed  much  to  the  great 
empires  of  the  East.  What  they  did  probably 
owe  to  them  was  much  of  their  technical  and 
mechanical  skill  and  their  introduction  to  such 
practical  sciences  as  astronomy.  How  Greece 
of  the  seventh  and  sixth  centuries  came  into 
contact  with  Assyria  and  Babylonia  will  best 
be  explained  in  the  third  chapter,  when  we 
come  to  consider  the  relations  of  the  Asiatic 
Greeks  to  the  Lydia  of  King  Gyges,  who  for 
part  at  any  rate  of  his  reign  acknowledged 
himself  the  vassal  of  the  great  king  of  Assyria. 

CRETE. — Till  the  beginning  of  the  present 
century  only  two  great  early  civilisations  were 
known,  those,  namely,  that  have  just  been 
touched  on,  both  of  which  arose  on  the  banks 
of  great  rivers  and  had  their  character  largely 
determined  by  that  fact,  It  is  thanks  to  the 


12        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

excavations  of  Sir  Arthur  Evans  at  Cnossus, 
followed  by  those  of  other  archaeologists,  mainly 
British,  American,  Italian,  and  Greek,  that  we 
now  have  some  idea  of  the  remarkable  civilisa- 
tion that  sprang  up  almost  as  early  in  the  island 
of  Crete  and  spread  from  there  over  many  of  the 
Greek  islands,  much  of  the  mainland  of  Greece, 
as  far  West  as  South  Italy  and  Sicily,  and  as 
far  East  as  Philistia.  In  the  days  of  the  earliest 
Egyptian  dynasties  Crete  was  hardly  abreast  of 
Egypt,  though  Egyptian  influence  was  already 
felt  in  the  island  and  the  art  of  writing  was 
already  known.  But  by  the  time  of  the  eleventh 
and  twelfth  Egyptian  dynasties,  which  corre- 
spond roughly  with  the  middle  period  (Middle 
Minoan)  of  the  three  into  which  Evans  has 
divided  this  early  Cretan  history,  Crete  had 
attained  a  culture  that  will  compare  with  that 
of  Egypt  itself.  Palaces  were  built  of  the  most 
solid  and  finely  wrought  masonry,  metals  and 
precious  stones  were  worked  with  great  skill, 
while  the  pottery  of  the  period  has  never  been 
surpassed  for  fineness  and  delicacy.  The  third 
of  Evans'  epochs  (Late  Minoan)  corresponds 
roughly  with  the  eighteenth  to  twentieth 
dynasties  in  Egypt.  In  the  first  part  of  this 
period  Crete  made  still  further  progress.  Her 
palaces  show  a  drainage  system  that  would 
meet  the  requirements  of  a  modern  sanitary 


INTRODUCTION  13 

inspector  ;  her  frescoes,  reliefs  in  plaster,  vase 
paintings  and  the  like  are  works  of  real  art. 
But  about  the  year  1400  B.C.  the  prosperity 
of  Crete  began  to  decline.  The  great  palaces 
were  destroyed,  and  though  they  were  again 
occupied  it  was  not  on  the  same  scale,  and  after 
a  few  centuries  of  decline  the  great  Cretan 
civilisation  came  to  an  end. 

These  recent  Cretan  discoveries  have  enabled 
us  to  place  in  their  proper  historical  setting 
the  remarkable  remains  at  such  places  as 
Mycenae  and  Tiryns  on  the  mainland  of  Greece, 
the  cities  whose  excavation  by  Schliemann  in 
the  'eighties  of  the  last  century  first  revealed 
to  the  modern  world  the  existence  of  a  great 
prehistoric  civilisation  in  the  area  of  the 
^Egean  Sea.  The  most  striking  of  these  remains 
are  the  buildings.  At  Tiryns  there  is  a  citadel 
wall  built  of  enormous  stones  which  in  parts 
of  the  wall  are  roughly  squared,  in  other  and 
earlier  parts  left  nearly  in  their  natural  shape 
with  only  the  surface  roughly  worked  into  an 
approximate  plane.  These  walls  imply  an 
extremely  skilful  band  of  builders  and  masons. 
At  one  part  a  gallery  has  been  constructed 
within  the  thickness  of  the  walls  with  a  roof 
that  has  the  appearance  though  not  the  con- 
struction of  a  Gothic  arch.  At  Mycenae  also 
the  citadel  walls  are  still  standing.  They  are 


14        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

built  of  squared  stones  several  feet  in  height 
and  broad  and  deep  in  proportion.  The  main 
entrance  is  by  the  famous  lion  gate,  which  has 
a  lintel  composed  of  one  enormous  block  of 
stone  surmounted  by  a  triangular  slab  on  which 
is  carved  in  relief  a  pair  of  lions  grouped  heraldi- 
cally  on  either  side  of  a  sacred  pillar.  But  even 
more  impressive  than  the  walls  of  the  city  are 
the  tombs  of  the  dead.  These  beehive  tombs, 
as  they  are  generally  called,  consist  of  a  sub- 
terranean chamber  shaped  much  like  the  old- 
fashioned  beehive,  but  sometimes  nearly  fifty 
feet  in  height  and  wrought  of  beautifully 
squared  stones  some  feet  in  dimension  either 
way.  They  are  built  in  the  side  of  a  hill  and 
approached  by  passages  of  similar  masonry 
which  lead  to  a  spacious  doorway  that  is  often 
like  the  lion  gateway  built  of  enormous  stones. 
The  lintel  of  the  largest  measures  some  twenty- 
seven  feet  wide  by  fifteen  deep  and  three  thick. 
In  and  around  these  dwellings  of  the  living 
and  the  dead  there  have  been  found  vast 
numbers  of  small  objects  in  stone,  metal  and 
other  materials  wrought  with  the  highest  skill  ; 
for  example,  precious  stones  elaborately  carved, 
gold  ornaments  with  embossed  decoration, 
daggers  with  hunting  scenes  inlaid  in  the  blade. 
The  walls  themselves  sometimes  show  remains  of 
frescoes  painted  with  considerable  skill.  The 


INTRODUCTION  15 

mass  of  pottery  found  on  the  sites  is  overwhelm- 
ing. After  repeated  excavations  and  explora- 
tions, conducted  with  increasing  care,  it  is  still 
possible  to  pick  up  on  a  site  during  a  casual  visit 
pocketfuls  of  potsherds  showing  the  typical 
"Mycenaean"  decoration.  Pottery,  frescoes,  and 
the  other  finds  all  show  that  the  great  days  of 
Mycenae  and  Tiryns  correspond  to  the  "  Late 
Minoan  "  period  of  Cretan  history.  Of  other 
Mycenaean  sites  on  the  Greek  mainland  the  most 
interesting  historically  is  Thebes,  where  some 
ten  years  ago  the  Greek  archaeologist  Keramo- 
poullos  discovered  remains  of  a  palace  with 
frescoed  walls  and  painted  pottery  in  the 
"Late  Minoan"  style.  The  Thebans  of  this 
early  period  buried  their  distinguished  dead  in 
beehive  tombs  like  those  at  Mycenae  itself. 

Schliemann  was  inspired  to  explore  Mycenae 
by  reading  in  his  youth,  when  he  was  a  grocer's 
assistant  in  Germany,  the  two  great  Homeric 
epics,  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey.  These  two 
poems  are  the  key  to  a  proper  understanding 
of  the  relationship  of  Mycenaean  civilisation  to 
the  renaissance  of  the  seventh  century,  and 
before  proceeding  further  it  will  be  well  to 
summarise  their  contents  and  character. 

At  the  opening  of  the  Iliad  a  great  Greek 
expedition  has  for  nine  years  been  besieging 
the  city  of  Troy  in  the  north-west  corner  of 


16         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Asia  Minor,  near  the  southern  entrance  to  the 
Dardanelles.  A  council  of  war  is  being  held. 
The  debate  leads  to  a  violent  quarrel  between 
Agamemnon,  the  commander-in-chief,  and 
Achilles,  the  strongest  and  bravest  of  his 
lieutenants,  who  finally  refuses  to  have  any- 
thing more  to  do  with  the  fighting,  and  retires 
to  his  quarters  among  his  followers,  the  Myr- 
midons, where  he  waits  to  see  Agamemnon 
mismanage  the  campaign  without  him.  His 
hopes  are  not  disappointed.  The  Greeks  are 
driven  back  to  their  ships  and  would  have 
come  to  disaster  if  Achilles  had  not  been 
influenced  by  his  great  friend  Patroclus  and 
allowed  him  to  lead  out  the  Myrmidon  forces  to 
help  the  other  Greeks.  Achilles  has  sworn  to 
take  no  further  part  himself,  but  he  allows  his 
friend  to  wear  his  armour,  and  Patroclus 
"  went  forth  like  to  the  god  of  war,  but  it  was 
for  him  the  beginning  of  evil."  He  is  killed 
by  Hector,  the  Trojan  commander.  Then 
Achilles  in  fury  forgets  his  oath  and  marches 
out  and  kills  Hector  in  battle.  "  So  the  Trojans 
busied  themselves  with  the  burying  of  Hector, 
tamer  of  horses,"  with  which  statement  the 
poem  closes. 

In  the  Odyssey  Troy  has  already  fallen. 
The  poem  recounts  the  subsequent  adventures 
and  wanderings  of  the  Greek  hero  Odysseus 


INTRODUCTION  17 

(Latin  Ulysses)  on  his  way  home  and  after  his 
arrival  there.  On  his  journey  home  he  was 
carried  out  of  his  way  far  into  the  west  and 
encountered  Circe,  the  witch  who  turned  her 
victims  into  beasts ;  Polyphemus,  the  one- 
eyed  savage  who  eat  up  most  of  Odysseus' 
crew  and  came  very  near  to  making  a  meal  of 
the  hero  himself ;  the  Sirens  who,  with  their 
beautiful  singing,  lure  men  to  shipwreck,  and 
various  other  perils  of  a  similar  kind.  Finally, 
after  ten  years  of  wanderings  he  arrives  alone 
in  his  native  island  of  Ithaca,  where  he  finds 
all  the  eligible  young  men  in  the  island,  and 
some  too  of  maturer  years,  living  in  his  house 
and  wasting  his  substance  till  his  wife  Penelope 
shall  decide  which  of  them  she  intends  to  marry. 
Disguising  himself  as  a  beggar  he  manages  to 
get  them  together  unarmed  in  a  single  room, 
where  he  shoots  them  all  down  with  a  bow. 
Next  he  proceeds  to  hang  a  few  of  Penelope's 
maids  who  had  abetted  the  wicked  suitors, 
after  which  he  makes  himself  known  to  Penelope 
and  the  tale  is  practically  at  an  end. 

The  excavations  of  the  last  half  century 
have  revolutionised  our  views  as  to  the  historical 
background  of  the  Homeric  poems.  For  Mr. 
Gladstone  Homer  pictured  the  youthful  prime 
of  the  pagan  world,  and  his  epics  are  a  sort  of 
secular  Old  Testament  which  might  fairly  claim 


18         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

a  place  side  by  side  with  the  Jewish  writings 
in  the  normal  liberal  education.  Schliemann 
and  Evans  have  taught  us  that  this  Garden  of 
Eden  outlook  is  entirely  mistaken.  The 
Homeric  poems  come  at  the  end,  not  the  be- 
ginning, of  a  long  period  of  civilisation.  In 
fact,  they  are  our  main  source  of  information 
as  to  how  the  great  Cretan-Mycenaean  civilisa- 
tion came  to  an  end.  The  yellow-haired, 
beef-eating  heroes  of  Homer,  whose  favourite 
title  of  honour  is  "  sacker  of  cities,"  are  now 
generally  recognised  as  leaders  of  Northern 
tribes  forcing  their  way  southward  to  a  place 
in  the  sun  much  as  was  done  fifteen  centuries 
later  by  the  Goths,  Huns,  and  Vandals  who 
overthrew  the  empire  of  Rome.  It  was  an  age 
of  sieges,  of  which  the  most  important  appear 
to  have  been  that  of  Troy  and  the  two  sieges 
in  two  successive  generations  of  the  great 
mainland  city  of  Thebes.  The  epic  which  told 
of  the  Theban  exploits  has  been  lost,  but  the 
legends  are  preserved  in  later  writers,  and  it 
would  seem  that  the  first  floods  of  invasion 
swept  past  the  great  city,  which  fell  at  last  to 
forces  that  attacked  it  from  the  south. 

Of  any  great  struggle  in  Crete  itself  legend 
says  nothing,  but  this  silence  agrees  with  the 
archaeological  evidence.  To  the  present  day 
the  walls  of  Tiryns,  Mycenae  and  other  main- 


INTRODUCTION  19 

land  sites  of  this  ancient  culture  impress  by 
their  extraordinary  massiveness  and  strength. 
If  little  sign  of  such  walls  is  left  at  Thebes  it  is 
that,  unlike  so  many  Mycenaean  sites,  it  has 
been  thickly  populated  all  through  classical 
and  mediaeval  times.  Keramopoullos  has 
carried  on  his  digging  under  considerable  diffi- 
culties owing  to  the  buildings  that  still  occupy 
the  site.  But  in  Crete  the  great  Minoan  sites 
are  all  unwalled.  Crete  relied  on  the  power  of 
its  navy,  and  the  struggle  with  the  invader  was 
probably  settled  before  he  reached  the  island. 
Only  one  legend  bears  directly  on  the  dissolu- 
tion of  the  Cretan  power.  In  the  days  of 
Minos,  a  name  which  appears  to  cover  all  the 
kings  of  prehistoric  Crete,  the  people  of  Athens 
had  to  send  yearly  to  the  island  a  contingent 
of  young  men  and  women  to  feed  the  Minotaur, 
a  bull-headed  monster  who  probably  played  an 
important  part  in  the  Cretan  religion.  But 
when  Prince  Theseus  was  of  age  to  be  one 
of  these  victims  he  volunteered  to  be  sent,  and 
on  his  arrival  killed  the  Minotaur,  rescued  his 
fellow-captives,  and  brought  them  safely  back 
to  Athens,  after  which  the  Athenians  ceased  to 
pay  tribute  to  the  Cretan  power.  Another 
legend  about  Theseus  and  Minos  tells  how  the 
Cretan  king  cast  into  the  sea  a  ring  which  the 
prince  of  Athens  went  down  and  secured  for 


20         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

himself.  Whether  or  no  in  this  last  legend  the 
ring  of  Minos  is  like  the  ring  with  which  the 
doge  of  Venice  used  to  wed  the  ocean,  and 
the  Theseus  exploit  means  that  the  Athenians 
wrested  from  the  Cretans  the  control  of  the 
sea,1  Theseus  is  certainly  a  half -historical 
figure  like  our  own  Arthur  who,  when  the 
Roman  empire  is  breaking  up,  refuses  any 
longer  to  pay  tribute  to  the  great  lords  of  Rome. 
The  parallel  is,  indeed,  suggestive  in  more 
ways  than  one.  Just  as  Arthur,  the  half 
Romanised  rebel  from  decaying  Rome,  spends 
most  of  his  time  in  trying  to  put  down  the 
robber  barons  of  his  own  realm  and  to  maintain 
an  order  that  is  passing  away,  so  we  find 
Theseus  engaged  in  a  whole  series  of  campaigns 
against  the  robber  chiefs  who  infested  Attica. 
It  would,  of  course,  be  foolish  to  look  for  much 
historical  truth  in  legends  such  as  those  of 
Theseus  and  Arthur.  But  their  similarity  is 
of  some  significance.  They  arose  independently 
under  similar  circumstances  and  tend  to  make 
us  realise  that  even  in  the  most  destructive 
periods  there  are  conservative  forces  at  work. 
We  know  that  much  of  Rome  survived  the 
dark  age  which  began  in  the  fifth  century  of 
the  present  era.  How  much  precisely  Classical 
Greece  owed  to  the  civilisations  from  whose 

1  This  explanation  is  due  to  the  French  scholar,  S.  Reinach. 


INTRODUCTION  21 

wreck  she  rose  is  harder  to  determine,  princi- 
pally because  we  have  nothing  from  Crete  or 
even  from  Egypt  or  Babylon  that  can  be 
remotely  compared  with  the  literature  that  has 
come  down  to  us  from  ancient  Rome.  But 
even  with  this  limitation  it  must  profoundly 
alter  our  conception  of  Classical  Greek  civilisa- 
tion when  we  realise  that  the  darkness  out  of 
which  it  emerged  was  not  the  darkness  of 
primal  chaos  but  a  temporary  eclipse.  Indeed, 
enough  is  known  of  this  dark  period  to  make 
it  possible  and  desirable  to  devote  to  it  the 
whole  of  the  following  chapter.1 

1  For  a  particularly  vivid  picture  of  the  break  up  of  the 
old  Cretan  civilisation  see  Gilbert  Murray's  Rise  of  the  Epic, 
a  book  to  which  the  account  here  given  is  much  indebted,  j  ^ 


CHAPTER   II 
THE   DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE 

ACCORDING  to  the  writers  of  the  four 
gospels  mastery  of  mind  tends  to  mani- 
fest itself  in  mastery  over  matter,  and 
history  supports  this  view.  In  our  own  country, 
for  instance,  the  Roman  period  has  left  impres- 
sive monuments  like  the  walls  of  Silchester  or 
Caerwent,  the  great  wall  from  Newcastle  to 
Carlisle,  and  the  vast  masses  of  small  objects 
of  excellent  workmanship  that  are  found  all  over 
the  country.  The  mediaeval  period  again  has 
left  its  monument  almost  in  every  village.  But 
the  Angles  and  Saxons  and  all  the  other  de- 
stroyers of  cities  who  forced  Roman  Britain 
back  to  barbarism  were  equally  unconstructive 
in  all  directions.  Some  fairly  well  made  iron 
weapons,  a  few  objects  of  personal  adornment 
for  the  great  chiefs  of  the  period,  and  a  certain 
amount  of  astonishingly  incompetent  coarse 
pottery  is  all  that  the  whole  long  period  of  the 
Saxon  conquest  has  left  behind  it.  The  same 
is  true  of  the  dark  age  that  came  on  Greece  after 

22 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE        23 

the  great  war  lords  from  the  North  had  over- 
thrown the  Mycenaean  civilisation.  It  has  left  us 
no  great  buildings  like  the  palaces  and  gates 
and  tombs  of  Cnossus  and  Mycenae  or  the 
temples  of  Classical  Greece.  In  fact,  it  has  left 
us  no  buildings  at  all  nor  any  other  monuments 
wrought  in  stone.  Like  our  own  Saxon  period 
it  is  known  mainly  from  its  metal  work  and 
pottery.  Both  these  are  technically  com- 
petent. The  potter  of  this  period  could  throw 
a  vase  several  feet  high,  excellently  propor- 
tioned and  strongly  made.  Such  vases  were 
placed  over  the  graves  of  great  nobles  at  this 
period  in  lieu  of  tombstones,  and  a  fine  series 
of  them  may  now  be  seen  in  the  National 
Museum  at  Athens.1  But  the  decoration  of 
these  vases  is  childish.  The  human  figure  is 
rendered  by  a  combination  of  triangles  and 
straight  lines.  For  ornament  there  is  nothing 
but  zigzags,  meanders,  concentric  circles,  and 
the  like  ;  and  the  whole  effect  is  so  linear 
and  angular  that  the  name  geometric  is  com- 
monly given  to  this  whole  class  of  vases,  a 
specimen  of  which  is  figured  below,  Plate 
VIII  (a). 

The  remains  are  what  might  be  expected  from 
the  period,  which  was  one  of  wanderings  as 

1  Some  good  examples  are  also  to  be  seen  in  the  Louvre 
at  Paris. 


24         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

well  as  wars.  Odysseus  is  the  prototype  of 
many  chieftains  who  roamed  over  the  whole 
Greek  world  in  search  of  adventure  and  plunder, 
and  a  whole  cycle  of  lost  epics  celebrated  the 
doings  of  these  adventurers.  It  was  quite  good 
manners  to  ask  a  sailor  whether  he  was  a  mer- 
chant or  a  pirate.  Such  an  age  does  not  foster 
architecture  or  any  of  the  more  monumental 
arts.  There  is  no  point  in  a  nomad  erecting 
a  settled  abiding  place  either  for  himself  or  his 
gods.  Even  if  he  has  the  skill  he  will  hardly 
have  the  desire.  The  potter,  on  the  other  hand, 
may  be  the  more  in  demand  from  the  lack  of 
most  of  the  conveniences  of  material  civilisation. 
"  Potter  falls  out  with  potter  "  is  how  the  one 
writer  of  this  period  tells  us  that  two  of  a  trade 
never  agree. 

But  the  most  important  industry  for  a  mili- 
tary race  is  the  working  of  metals  and  the 
making  of  weapons,  and  in  this  the  men  of 
the  Dark  Ages  excelled  their  predecessors.  The 
civilised  inhabitants  of  Cnossus  and  Mycenae 
were  skilful  goldsmiths  and  coppersmiths,  but 
iron  appears  to  have  been  practically  unknown 
to  them  till  the  arrival  of  the  destroyers  of 
cities,  who  threw  the  whole  ^Egean  region  back 
into  barbarism.  The  early  history  of  iron  is 
obscure.  Partly  this  is  due  to  difficulties  in 
interpreting  the  literary  evidence.  Copper  is 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE       25 

certainly  the  older  metal,  and  all  smiths  were 
originally  coppersmiths.  When  iron  first  entered 
the  Greek  area  it  seems  fairly  certain  that  the 
smiths  who  now  worked  both  copper  and  iron, 
and  perhaps  mainly  the  latter,  still  called  them- 
selves coppersmiths,  much  as  in  England  we 
still  call  pennies  coppers  though  they  are  made 
of  bronze,  and  the  French  call  all  money  silver 
though  they  long  ago  began  coining  in  gold. 
When  therefore  we  find  Homer  speaking  nor- 
mally of  coppersmiths  and  arms  of  copper  we 
cannot  be  sure  that  he  means  what  he  says. 
This  would  be  the  case  even  if  the  word  iron 
never  occurred  in  his  poems,  which  in  fact  it 
occasionally  does.    Archaeologically,  again,  the 
evidence   may  be  misleading,  since  iron  rusts 
away   so   much   more   easily  than  the   softer 
metals.    If  all  our  evidence  came  from  carefully 
conducted  excavations  this  would  not  so  much 
matter,  for  though  iron  disintegrates  it  does  not 
so  often  completely  disappear.    Unfortunately 
much    of    our    archaeological    material    comes 
from  chance  finds  or  from  digs  carelessly  con- 
ducted.    We  must  be  cautious,  therefore,  in 
advancing  negative  evidence  as  to  the  exclusive 
use  of  copper  in  any  age.1     But  the  material 

1  Some  years  ago  when  excavating  a  Greek  grave  of  the 
sixth  century  B.C.  the  writer  found  a  small  iron  vessel  with 
bronze  handles  and  a  bronze  stand:  the  handles  and  stand 


26 

available  for  writing  the  history  of  the  metals 
in  the  Minoan  period  is  now  considerable,  and 
it  may  be  fairly  claimed  for  it  that  it  establishes 
the  Minoan  period  as  essentially  an  age  of 
bronze,  and  that  the  end  of  it  coincides  with  the 
appearance  of  iron  in  the  ^Egean  area.  The 
coincidence  was  no  accident.  It  was  the  hard 
iron  swords  of  the  sackers  of  cities  that  decided 
the  issue  between  Cretan  culture  and  Northern 
barbarism.  So  early  in  the  world's  history  do 
we  find  civilisation  suffering  a  disastrous  set-back 
through  the  discovery  of  some  new  powerful 
weapon  of  offence. 

Modern  archaeologists  are  not  the  first  to 
have  seen  that  this  post-Cretan  age  of  dark- 
ness was  an  age  of  iron  replacing  an  age  of 
bronze  and  gold.  It  is  so  described  by  a  Greek 
who  actually  lived  during  that  period  and  whose 
works  have  fortunately  come  down  to  us. 
The  rest  of  this  chapter  will  be  devoted  to  giving 
some  account  of  this  remarkable  writer.  His 
name  was  Hesiod,  and  he  lived  in  Bceotia, 
close  under  Mount  Helicon  at  a  place  called 
Ascra,  a  miserable  hamlet,  to  use  his  own  words, 
"  bad  in  winter,  sultry  in  summer,  and  good 
at  no  time."  The  poet  was  not  a  Boeotian  by 

were  in  excellent  condition,  but  the  vessel  was  reduced  to 
a  mass  of  small  corroded  fragments  that  were  only  found 
by  careful  search. 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE        27 

descent.  His  father  had  come  over  from 
Cyme  in  North- West  Asia  Minor,  one  of  the 
Greek  settlements  established  on  that  coast  in 
the  generations  following  the  siege  of  Troy, 
and  not  so  very  far  from  Troy  itself.  He  left 
Cyme,  "  crossing  a  great  stretch  of  sea  "  to  the 
Greek  mainland,  and  "  fled  not  from  riches 
and  substance,  but  from  wretched  poverty, 
which  Zeus  lays  on  men."  Hesiod  himself 
was  not  a  wanderer.  He  tells  us  that  he  had  no 
skill  in  seafaring  nor  in  ships,  and  that  he  had 
never  sailed  by  ship  over  the  wide  sea,  but  only 
from  Aulis  in  Bceotia,  the  starting  place  of  the 
Trojan  expedition,  to  the  island  of  Eubcea 
opposite,  to  the  games  of  wise  Amphidamas. 
"And  there,"  he  writes,  "I  boast  that  I  gained 
the  victory  with  song  and  carried  off  a  tripod 
with  handles  which  I  dedicated  to  the  muses 
of  Helicon  in  the  place  where  they  first  set 
me  in  the  way  of  clear  song." 

Three  poems  have  come  down  to  us  under 
Hesiod's  name.  The  "  Shield  of  Heracles," 
480  lines  long,  is  a  descriptive  piece  in  the 
heroic  vein  of  the  Homeric  epic.  Perhaps  it 
was  with  some  such  composition  that  the  poet 
won  the  prize  at  the  games  of  the  wise  Amphi- 
damas. It  need  not  here  detain  us.  A  second 
poem,  the  "Theogony,"  just  over  1000  lines 
in  length,  is,  as  its  title  implies,  a  book  of  the 


28         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

pedigrees  of  the'numerous  Greek  divinities.  Such 
a  celestial  birthday  book  is  always  interesting. 
The  "  Theogony  "  enables  us  to  form  some  notion 
of  the  religious  background  of  Hesiod's  days, 
just  as  legends  of  the  saints  supplement  the 
picture  of  our  own  Middle  Ages  that  is  to  be 
drawn  from  the  rolls  and  charters  of  the  period. 
In  a  later  chapter  we  shall  have  to  revert 
to  the  "Theogony"  and  the  attacks  that  were 
made  on  it  in  the  sixth  century  B.C.  by  reason 
of  its  low  and  obsolescent  moral  tone.  Space 
forbids  us  to  discuss  it  here. 

The  third  of  these  poems,  and  that  which  most 
concerns  us  here,  is  named  the  "Works  and 
Days."  Its  theme  is  farming  and  how  and  when 
the  farmer  should  perform  his  various  tasks. 
It  is  addressed  to  the  poet's  brother  Perses, 
who  appears  to  have  been  rather  a  waster,  and 
the  treatment  is  discursive.  But  the  work  is 
meant  to  be  a  practical  manual,  quite  as  much 
as  the  similarly  discursive  treatises  on  similar 
subjects  written  by  William  Cobbett,  who  too 
sometimes  addresses  to  a  relative  advice  and 
instruction  intended  for  the  public  at  large. 
Even  the  metrical  form  of  the  "  Works  and 
Days  "  was  not  without  its  practical  useful- 
ness in  times  when  most  possible  students  of 
the  manual  were  unable  to  read  and  had  to 
learn  their  handbook  off  by  heart.  The  poet 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE        29 

begins  by  impressing  on  his  brother  the  law 
of  God  that  man  must  work.  This  leads  him 
to  explain  why  the  world  is  such  a  hard  place 
to  live  in,  and  why  evil  must  be  accepted  as 
an  inevitable  fact.  "  Full  is  the  earth  of  evils, 
full  the  sea."  The  reason  is  to  be  found  in  the 
law  of  deterioration,  which  for  Hesiod  was  as 
absolute  a  dogma  as  the  law  of  progress  was 
in  Europe  for  the  century  just  past.  Mankind 
for  Hesiod  had  passed  through  successive  ages 
of  gold,  silver,  and  bronze,  and  was  now  living 
in  the  age  of  iron.  In  the  paradise  of  the 
golden  age  "men  lived  like  gods  without 
sorrow  .  .  .  and  dwelt  in  ease  and  peace  upon 
their  lands  with  many  good  things,  rich  in 
flocks  :  and  when  they  died  it  was  as  though 
they  were  overcome  with  sleep."  The  next  age, 
that  of  silver,  was  "  less  noble  by  far."  The 
men  of  this  age  took  one  hundred  years  to  grow 
up  and  then  soon  died,  destroyed  by  Zeus, 
"  because  they  could  not  keep  from  wronging 
one  another,  nor  would  they  sacrifice  on  the 
holy  altars  of  the  blessed  ones  as  it  is  right 
for  men  to  do  wherever  they  dwell."  Third 
comes  the  age  of  bronze.  The  men  of  the 
bronze  age  were  "  terrible  and  strong  :  they 
loved  the  woeful  works  of  the  war  god  :  they 
ate  no  bread,  but  were  hard  of  heart  like 
adamant,  fearful  men.  .  .  .  Their  armour  was 


30        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

of  bronze  and  their  houses  of  bronze,  and  of 
bronze  were  their  implements  :  there  was  no 
black  iron.  These  were  destroyed  by  their  own 
hands."  Between  this  bronze  age  and  the  age 
of  iron  that  would  naturally  follow  the  poet 
inserts  an  age  of  heroes,  "  the  race  before  our 
own,"  "  nobler  and  more  righteous  than  the 
age  of  bronze."  "  Grim  war  and  dread  battle 
destroyed  a  part  of  these,  some  at  seven  gated 
Thebes  and  some  at  Troy." 

Finally  we  have  the  iron  age,  the  poet's  own 
age,  when  "  men  never  rest  from  labour  and 
sorrow  by  day  and  from  perishing  by  night." 
"  Would,"  says  the  poet,  "  that  I  were  not 
among  the  men  of  this  generation,  but  had 
either  died  before  or  been  born  afterwards." 
Even  this  last  wish  is  a  lapse  into  unwarranted 
optimism,  since  on  the  whole  things  seem  to 
be  going  from  bad  to  worse.  "  Might,"  he 
prophesies  of  the  coming  generation,  "  shall  be 
their  right ;  and  one  man  shall  sack  another's 
city  .  .  .  bitter  sorrows  shall  be  left  for  mortal 
men,  and  there  will  be  no  help  against  evil." 

Such  is  the  historical  outlook  of  the  "  Works 
and  Days."  The  picture  is  not  in  the  main 
fanciful.  The  poet  was  right  in  asserting  that 
as  far  as  the  memory  of  his  age  and  country 
went  back  the  state  of  things  had  been  in- 
variably getting  worse,  sometimes  by  a  steady 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE       31 

process  of  deterioration,  as  depicted  in  the 
transition  from  the  age  of  gold  to  that  of  silver, 
sometimes  catastrophically,  as  in  the  age  of 
bronze.  The  only  exception  is  the  age  of  heroes, 
and  even  that  is  only  an  apparent  one,  for  the 
age  of  heroes  interrupts  the  metallic  sequence 
and  is  probably  an  alternative  version  of  the 
age  of  bronze,  treated  more  historically  and 
written  from  a  standpoint  that  could  see 
nothing  disastrous  to  Jigean  culture  in  the 
downfall  of  two  of  its  chief  centres,  Troy  and 
Thebes. 

Even  the  names  given  by  Hesiod  to  his  four 
ages  are  now  seen  to  have  been  based  on  and 
suggested  by  a  profound  historical  fact.  Silver 
began  to  be  worked  much  later  than  gold, 
and  though  bronze  was  also  worked  much 
earlier  than  silver,  Hesiod  is  right  in  the  dating 
of  his  bronze  age  if,  as  his  account  implies, 
he  means  an  age  of  violence  earlier  than  the 
age  of  the  great  invasions  by  the  men  with 
the  swords  of  iron. 

It  is  not  surprising  that  Hesiod  should  have 
preserved  for  us  such  traditions  as  were  still 
in  his  days  surviving  concerning  the  great 
vanished  past.  His  father's  home  at  Cyme 
was  not  fifty  miles  distant  from  the  Troad, 
and  his  own  home  in  Bceotia  was  near  the  great 
city  of  Thebes.  Thebes  played  no  great  part 


32         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

in  the  renaissance  of  the  seventh  century  B.C.  ; 
but,  as  we  have  noticed  already,  she  had  been 
one  of  the  greatest  centres  of  the  old  civilisa- 
tion, and  legend  made  her  the  place  where 
mainland  Greeks  first  learned  to  write. 

What  gives  the  "Works  and  Days  "  its  unique 
value  is  the  picture  that  it  draws  for  us  of  the 
age  in  which  it  was  written.  The  picture  is, 
of  course,  incomplete.  The  book  is  a  manual 
for  farmers  and  not  a  history.  But  the  very 
fact  that  Hesiod  had  no  intention  of  writing 
contemporary  history  perhaps  increases  the 
historical  value  of  what  he  says  about  his  own 
age.  His  directions  for  wood-cutting,  plough- 
making,  sowing,  reaping,  threshing,  and  the 
like  are  detailed  and  precise,  and  this  means 
that  they  give  us  a  fair  notion  of  the  technical 
skill  commanded  by  the  people  of  his  age. 
Incidentally  they  often  throw  an  interesting 
light  on  the  general  life  of  the  period.  When, 
for  instance,  the  ploughman  is  told  to  begin 
operations  by  going  into  the  forest  and  looking 
about  for  a  suitable  tree  for  cutting  down  and 
shaping  into  a  plough,  we  see  at  once  that  he 
lived  in  an  age  that  had  no  conception  of  the 
division  of  labour,  and  we  are  not  surprised 
a  little  further  on  to  find  the  farmer  told  how 
to  weave  the  cloth  for  his  winter  clothes.  The 
market  town  which  bulks  so  largely  in  the  life 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE        33 

of  the  modern  farmer  and  was  equally  impor- 
tant in  the  Italy  of  the  days  of  Virgil  does  not 
exist  for  Hesiod.  The  only  common  centre  for 
the  whole  district  appears  to  be  the  court  of 
the  chief.  The  poet  is  very  insistent  on  the 
danger  of  spending  too  much  time  in  these 
courts  either  as  a  litigant  or  as  a  mere  spectator 
of  cases  in  which  neighbours  were  concerned. 
Nearer  home  the  smithy  is  the  great  tempta- 
tion. It  seems  to  have  had  all  the  seductive- 
ness of  the  village  inn,  and  the  farmer  is  warned 
to  pass  it  by  "  in  winter  time  when  cold  keeps 
men  from  field  work  ;  for  then  an  industrious 
man  can  greatly  prosper  his  home."  The 
social  instinct  receives  little  sympathy  anywhere 
in  the  whole  poem.  "  Let  a  brisk  fellow  of 
forty  follow  (the  oxen)  with  a  loaf  of  four 
quarters  and  eight  slices  for  his  dinner,  one  who 
will  attend  to  his  work  ...  for  a  man  less 
staid  gets  disturbed,  hankering  after  his  fellows." 
There  is  here  and  there  a  curious  lack  of  the 
feeling  of  social  obligation.  "  So  soon  as  you 
have  safely  stored  all  your  stuff  indoors  I  bid 
you  put  your  bondman  out  of  doors  and  look 
out  for  a  servant  girl  with  no  children,  for  a 
servant  with  a  child  to  nurse  is  troublesome." 
This  dislike  of  "  encumbrances  "  goes,  as  so 
often,  with  indulgence  in  a  primitive  form  of 
parasitic  luxury.  The  North  wind  that  pierces 

3 


34         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

the  farmer  and  his  beasts  "  does  not  blow 
through  the  tender  maiden  who  stays  indoors 
with  her  dear  mother  and  washes  her  soft  body 
and  anoints  herself  with  oil  and  lies  down  in  an 
inner  room  within  the  house."  Economically 
the  state  of  things  is  equally  primitive.  As 
there  is  no  division  of  labour  it  naturally  follows 
that  there  can  be  no  co-operative  undertakings, 
nor  anything  to  check  man's  primal  acquisitive- 
ness. "It  is  better  to  have  your  stuff  at 
home,  for  whatever  is  abroad  may  mean  loss." 
Logically  enough  the  poet  preaches  the  practices 
of  the  French  peasant  proprietor  :  '  There 
should  be  an  only  son  .  .  .  for  so  wealth  will 
increase  in  the  home."  Generosity  is  a  mis- 
take. "  Give  to  one  who  gives,  but  do  not  give 
to  one  who  does  not  give." 

The  wisdom  of  which  specimens  have  just 
been  quoted  was  probably  inherited  by  the 
poet.  It  is  of  the  sort  that  men  must  have 
learned  right  at  the  beginning  of  the  Dark 
Ages.  There  are,  however,  other  passages  of 
the  poem  where  Hesiod  seems  to  be  dealing 
with  the  problems  and  aspirations  of  his  own 
age,  when  life  though  still  hard  was  becoming 
more  settled.  Such  are,  for  instance,  the 
numerous  passages  where  he  dwells  on  the 
need  for  peace  and  expresses  his  hatred  of  war 
and  violence.  "  Cease  altogether  to  think  of 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE       35 

violence.  For  the  son  of  Cronus  has  ordained 
this  law  for  men,  that  fishes  and  beasts  and 
winged  fowl  should  devour  one  another,  for 
justice  is  not  in  them.  But  to  mankind  he  gave 
justice."  The  problem  of  strife  caused  Hesiod 
much  thought  :  his  conclusion  was  this,  that 
there  are  two  kinds  of  strife  :  "  one  fosters 
evil  war  and  battle,  being  cruel ;  her  no  man 
loves,  but  perforce,  through  the  will  of  the 
deathless  gods,  men  pay  harsh  strife  due 
honour  .  .  .  but  the  other  is  far  kinder  to 
men.  She  stirs  up  even  the  shiftless  to  toil, 
for  a  man  grows  eager  to  work  when  he  considers 
his  neighbour,  a  rich  man  who  hastens  to 
plough  and  plant,  and  neighbour  vies  with  his 
neighbour  as  he  hurries  after  wealth."  This 
idea  of  setting  against  the  strife  of  war  the 
rivalries  of  industrial  competition  recalls  the 
common  language  of  a  much  more  recent 
period  of  darkness.  Already  in  the  days  of 
Hesiod  the  peaceful  form  of  strife  had  its  cruel 
side  and  could  practise  its  cruelty  in  the  name 
of  religion  :  "  sacrifice  to  the  gods  and  pro- 
pitiate them  .  .  .  that  they  may  be  gracious 
to  you  .  .  .  and  so  you  may  buy  another's 
holding  and  not  another  yours." 

Another  sign  of  the  times  in  which  Hesiod 
lived  is  to  be  found  in  his  bitter  attacks  on  the 
princes  who  ruled  the  land,  "  bribe  swallowing 


36         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

lords  .  .  .  fools  who  know  not  how  much 
more  the  half  is  than  the  whole."  "  The  people 
pay  for  the  mad  folly  of  their  princes  who 
evilly  minded  pervert  judgment."  Historians 
have  long  noticed  how  different  this  language 
is  from  that  of  Homer,  whose  princes  rule  by 
divine  right  and  whose  only  agitator  is  soundly 
beaten  amidst  universal  laughter  and  approval. 
To  some  extent,  no  doubt,  the  difference  between 
the  two  poets  is  due  to  the  different  audiences 
for  whom  they  wrote,  but  this  difference  of 
audience  is  itself  a  sign  of  the  times.  Literature 
has  ceased  to  be  inspired  exclusively  by  princely 
patrons.  But  it  is  highly  probable  that  the 
princes  themselves  had  changed  in  character, 
and  that  the  change  had  been  all  for  the  worse. 
The  more  or  less  benevolent  military  autocrat 
had  been  succeeded  by  the  greedy  landlord  with 
the  law  courts  behind  him  to  help  him  in  his 
exactions.  Hesiod  has  no  alternative  govern- 
ment to  propose,  but  he  tells  the  princes  very 
plainly  that  they  are  bleeding  their  subjects  to 
economic  ruin,  and  that  the  ruin  of  the  subject 
will  mean  the  ruin  of  the  master. 

But  perhaps  the  most  characteristic  of  all  the 
precepts  of  Hesiod  are  his  repeated  exhortations 
to  work.  Work  is  for  Hesiod  the  law  of  life. 
"  Both  gods  and  men  are  angry  with  the  man 
who  lives  idle,  for  in  nature  he  is  like  the 


THE  DARK  AGE  IN  GREECE       37 

stingless  drones  who  waste  the  labour  of  the 
bees,  eating  without  working."  ..."  Work 
is  no  disgrace  ;  it  is  idleness  that  is  a  disgrace." 
The  law  of  labour  is  of  divine  origin  :  "  the  gods 
keep  hidden  from  men  the  means  of  life.  Else 
would  you  easily  do  work  enough  in  a  day  to 
supply  you  for  a  full  year  even  without 
working."  In  preaching  the  dignity  of  labour, 
as  in  protesting  against  despotism  and  violence, 
Hesiod  is  deliberately  breaking  with  the  age 
of  feudalism  in  which  he  lived  and  heralding 
the  age  of  renewed  enlightenment  that  led  to 
the  great  renaissance.1 

1  In  quoting  from  the  "  Works  and  Days  "  use  has  been 
made  of  the  excellent  translation  by  H.  Evelyn  White, 
published  in  the  Loeb  Classical  Library.  Considering  the 
shortness  of  the  poem  detailed  references  have  not  been  given. 


CHAPTER   III 

GREECE   AND   HER   NEIGHBOURS   AT   THE 
END   OF  THE   DARK   AGES 

HESIOD  shows  sufficiently  that  the 
Greeks  of  his  age  were  ready  for  a 
new  order  of  things.  But  the  influ- 
ence that  inspired  and  moulded  the  new  age 
that  begins  early  in  the  seventh  century  B.C. 
did  not  come  from  Boeotia  or  from  any  of  the 
old  seats  of  civilisation  on  the  Greek  mainland. 
The  new  light  came  mainly  from  the  East, 
and  to  understand  how  it  reached  the  Greeks 
it  is  necessary  to  have  some  notion  of  their 
geographical  distribution  at  this  period  and 
of  the  races  with  whom  they  were  brought  in 
contact. 

Ancient  Greece  was  not  a  country  as  we  under- 
stand it.  There  was  no  state  or  organisation 
that  could  speak  in  the  name  of  the  whole 
nation.  The  political  unit  was  the  city.  Each 
city  had  its  own  government,  its  own  laws,  its 
own  army,  and,  when  metal  coins  began  to  be 
issued,  its  own  coinage  struck  on  its  own 

38 


particular  metrical  system.  Social  customs 
differed  widely  from  city  to  city,  and  in  religion 
though  all  the  Greeks  acknowledged  up  to  a 
point  the  godhead  of  all  the  Greek  gods,  in 
practice  each  city  had  its  own  particular  patron 
on  whom  it  concentrated  its  devotions  and  whom 
it  worshipped  in  its  own  particular  way.  The 
growth  of  these  small  city  states  is  to  be  ex- 
plained by  the  physical  geography  of  the 
country.  The  southern  parts  of  the  Balkan 
peninsula,  which  from  the  days  of  Homer 
onwards  have  been  the  central  home  of  the 
Greeks,  are  largely  wild  mountainous  regions, 
where  human  settlement  on  any  scale  has  always 
been  impossible.  From  the  very  nature  of  the 
land  the  population  has  always  been  concen- 
trated in  the  small  plains  that  are  found  here 
and  there,  principally  in  the  eastern  part  of 
the  country.  Each  of  these  plains  is  a  separate 
and,  from  the  landward  point  of  view,  a  self- 
contained  entity.  As  a  rule  they  are  bounded 
on  one  side  by  the  sea  and  on  the  rest  by  high 
and  barren  mountains.  The  sea  connects  them 
with  the  outer  world,  the  mountains  cut  them 
off  from  it. 

When  the  country  began  to  be  overrun  by 
the  invading  Achaeans  and  Dorians  and  the 
other  hordes  of  sackers  of  cities  who  brought 
the  Mycenaean  civilisation  to  an  end,  the  old 


40        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

inhabitants  took  to  their  ships  and  fled  over  the 
seas  and  there  established  fresh  city  states 
like  those  that  they  had  left.  Soon  the  earlier 
of  these  invaders,  crowded  out  by  later  hordes 
that  followed  them  from  the  North,  took 
ship  in  like  manner  and  founded  similar  settle- 
ments overseas.  Since  most  of  the  cities  on 
the  Greek  mainland  look  east  and  the  east- 
ward route  across  the  ^Egean  archipelago  has 
far  fewer  terrors  than  the  voyage  across  the 
less  known  open  seas  towards  the  West,  these 
earliest  emigrants  fled  eastward,  with  the 
result  that  the  whole  of  the  west  coast  of  Asia 
Minor  was  soon  fringed  with  Greek  cities.  In 
the  South,  opposite  the  island  of  Rhodes,  there 
was  a  group  of  cities  founded  by  the  Dorians, 
one  of  the  latest  races  to  pour  southwards  into 
Greece  after  the  downfall  of  Mycenae.  In  the 
North,  spreading  southwards  from  the  Troad, 
was  a  group  of  cities  of  Jiolian  race,  a  name 
which  implies  that  they  were  of  mixed  ancestry. 
Between  them  lay  the  largest  group,  belonging 
to  the  ancient  Ionian  race.  The  land  they 
occupied  was  known  as  Ionia.  We  shall  have 
frequent  occasions  to  refer  to  the  name  in  the 
succeeding  pages. 

Before  the  end  of  the  Dark  Ages  the  whole 
western  coast  of  Asia  Minor  had  been  com- 
pletely settled  by  these  various  Greeks  and  the 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     41 

stream  of  emigration  had  turned  west,  princi- 
pally to  Sicily  and  South  Italy.  In  Sicily 
Greek  settlers  of  various  races  founded  cities 
on  the  most  important  sites  all  round  the 
coast,  except  in  the  extreme  west,  where  the 
Carthaginians  had  anticipated  them.  In  Italy 
they  settled  in  a  similar  way  all  round  the 
coast  from  Cumae  close  by  Naples  on  the  west 
coast  to  Brindisi  on  the  east.  So  completely 
was  this  southern  part  of  Italy  dominated  by 
the  Greek  settlers  that  it  got  to  be  known 
as  Greater  Greece.  The  beginning  of  this 
westward  movement  goes  back  to  days  before 
Hesiod,  who  tells  us  how  Agrios  and  Latinos 
and  Telegonos,  sons  of  Odysseus  and  Circe, 
"  ruled  over  the  famous  Etruscans  very  far 
off  in  a  recess  of  the  holy  islands."  But  the 
great  period  of  colonisation  in  these  distant 
western  regions  begins  in  the  second  half 
of  the  eighth  century  B.C.  and  continues 
through  the  seventh  century  into  the  sixth. 
In  the  course  of  it  Greek  settlers  penetrated 
even  farther  west  and  founded  Marseilles 
and  other  cities  on  the  south  coast  of  France 
and  one  or  two  settlements  of  less  import- 
ance on  the  east  coast  of  Spain,  two  of  which, 
Rhode  and  Emporiae,  still  preserve  their 
Greek  names  in  the  forms  Rosas  and  Am- 
purias. 


42         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

To  complete  the  picture  of  the  Greek  world 
at  this  time  mention  should  be  made  of  the 
group  of  cities  that  was  founded  on  the  African 
coast  due  south  of  Greece  in  the  latter  part 
of  the  seventh  century,  of  which  the  most 
famous  was  Cyrene,  of  the  cities  founded  by 
Chalcis  in  the  great  three-pronged  peninsula 
that  lies  to  the  south  and  east  of  Salonika, 
and  of  the  colonies  planted  mainly  by  Megara 
and  Miletus  on  the  Sea  of  Marmora  and  the 
straits  at  either  end  of  it  and  the  Black 
Sea.  Of  these  one  of  the  earliest  and  most 
important  was  Byzantium,  now  known  as  Con- 
stantinople. 

The  Greeks  who  founded  these  colonies  were 
plainly  a  nation  of  sailors.  This  is  implied  even 
in  Hesiod.  Personally,  as  we  have  seen  already, 
he  intensely  disliked  the  sea.  "  For  my  part 
I  do  not  praise  it,  for  my  heart  does  not  like 
it  "  is  what  he  says  about  spring  voyages  and 
obviously  felt  about  seafaring  at  all  times  of 
the  year.  Nobody,  he  practically  says,  would 
ever  become  a  sailor  unless  he  either  had  a 
"  misguided  heart  "  or  wished  "  to  escape  from 
debt  and  joyless  hunger."  But  all  the  same 
he  proceeds  to  give  directions  as  to  sea  voyaging 
that  assume  it  to  be  the  normal  alternative  to 
agriculture. 

This  constant  association  with  the  sea  is  one 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  43 

of  the  determining  factors  in  Greek  history. 
The  sea  itself  played  an  enormous  part  in 
educating  the  Greeks  and  in  moulding  their 
outlook.  But  besides  doing  that  it  brought 
them  into  contact  with  a  variety  of  foreign 
races.  It  was  this  familiarity  with  a  large 
number  of  widely  differing  foreign  races  that 
made  the  Greeks  at  the  same  time  so  very 
conscious  of  their  nationality  and  (except,  of 
course,  in  periods  of  war)  comparatively  free 
from  the  intense  provincialism  that  is  so  dis- 
tressing a  feature  of  much  modern  nationalism. 
Before  proceeding  further  it  will  be  well,  there- 
fore, to  give  some  brief  account  of  these  various 
foreign  influences. 

Some  of  these  foreigners  were  still  in  a  fairly 
primitive  state,  notably  the  Scythians,  who 
occupied  the  lands  just  north  of  the  Black  Sea, 
and  the  Thracians  to  the  south-west  of  them, 
who  occupied  the  country  behind  the  north 
coast  of  the  Sea  of  Marmora  and  the  region 
westwards  towards  Macedonia.  The  Scythians 
were  in  race,  too,  very  different  from  the  Greeks, 
and  may  have  had  a  Mongolian  strain.  Else- 
where, as  in  North  Africa,  Macedonia,  Sicily, 
and  South  Italy  the  natives  were  probably  more 
advanced  in  culture  and  more  akin  in  race. 
The  Macedonians  appear  to  have  been  closely 
related  to  some  of  the  tribes  who  had  forced 


44         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

their  way  down  into  Greece  in  the  Dark  Ages. 
Others,  however,  of  the  tribes  in  these  parts 
must  have  belonged  to  the  original  small  dark- 
haired  type  that  alone  seems  able  to  maintain 
its  own  permanently  in  those  southern  lands, 
and  to  the  same  Mediterranean  race  belonged 
the  peoples  whom  the  Greeks  found  occupying 
the  Cyrenaica  in  North  Africa,  the  race  which 
has  survived  Greek,  Punic,  Roman,  Vandal, 
Arab,  and  Italian  invasions,  and  is  now  known 
as  Berber. 

Only  one  fully  civilised  race  met  the  Greeks 
in  any  of  the  regions  just  mentioned  :  but 
that  was  one  that  for  some  centuries  had  been 
playing  an  important  part  in  the  development 
of  Greece.  This  race  was  the  Punic  or  Phoe- 
nician, which  occupied  the  principal  sites  in  the 
west  corner  of  Sicily.  The  Phoenicians  had  been 
before  the  Greeks  in  the  Far  West  and,  in  fact, 
over  the  whole  area  of  the  Mediterranean.  In 
Homer  articles  of  luxury  come  mainly  from  their 
great  city  of  Sidon  on  the  Syrian  coast,  and 
tradition  dated  the  foundation  of  Carthage  by 
the  people  of  Tyre,  the  neighbour  of  Sidon, 
somewhere  in  the  middle  of  the  ninth  century 
B.C.  or  even  earlier.  It  was  from  Carthage, 
which  lay  only  some  hundred  miles  south-west 
of  the  western  end  of  Sicily,  that  the  Phoenicians 
had  settled  in  the  island.  Like  some  other  great 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  45 

branches  of  the  Semite  stock  the  Phoenicians 
seem  to  have  been  transmitters  rather  than 
creators,  but  in  this  middleman  capacity  they 
did  much  for  the  early  Greeks.  To  the  south 
of  their  home  in  the  land  of  Canaan  lay  Egypt, 
to  the  east  lay  Mesopotamia,  and  the  people  of 
the  Phoenician  trading  cities  felt  the  power  and 
influence  of  both  these  states.  Thus  in  the  Far 
West  the  Greeks  found  themselves  in  close 
touch  with  the  people  who  for  centuries  had 
been  their  chief  means  of  communication  with 
the  old  civilisations  of  the  East.  In  later  ages, 
from  the  fifth  century  onwards,  Greeks  and 
Canaanites  were  deadly  enemies  in  Sicily,  and 
this  fact  has  rather  obscured  the  friendly  rela- 
tions that  at  first  existed.  There  is  little  doubt 
that  one  of  the  most  notable  of  the  earliest 
Greek  rulers  of  whom  we  hear  in  Sicily  was  much 
devoted  to  the  worship  of  the  Canaanitish  god 
Moloch.  That  at  least  seems  the  only  explana- 
tion of  his  unhappy  habit  of  roasting  human 
victims  alive  in  a  brazen  bull,  a  proceeding 
quite  familiar  in  Syria  as  an  act  of  religious 
devotion,  but  altogether  alien  to  Greek  feeling 
and  practice.  It  would  be  unfair  to  Phalaris, 
the  ruler  in  question,  to  suppose  that  when  he 
borrowed  this  practice  from  his  Phoenician 
neighbours  he  was  not  indebted  to  them  in 
other  ways  as  well. 


46        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

But  the  neighbours  who  most  influenced  the 
Greeks  of  our  period  are  those  whom  they  found 
as  a  result  of  their  settlement  of  Asia  Minor, 
and  about  these  it  will  be  necessary  to  speak  in 
rather  more  detail.  The  powers  in  question 
are  Lydia  and  Egypt,  and  it  will  be  convenient 
to  deal  first  with  Lydia.  Lydia  only  comes 
into  prominence  about  the  year  700  B.C.  Its 
rise  thus  coincides  with  the  beginnings  of  the 
Greek  renaissance,  and  the  two  events  were 
probably  not  unconnected.  It  may  help  us 
to  understand  the  connection  if  for  a  moment 
we  revert  to  an  earlier  period. 

In  the  days  of  the  siege  of  Troy  and  of  the 
Greek  settlement  of  the  western  coast  of 
Asia  Minor  the  greatest  and  most  civilised 
power  in  the  peninsula  was  that  of  the  Hittites. 
Remains  of  this  rather  elusive  people  have  been 
found  between  Sardis  and  the  sea,  but  the  sites 
where  they  can  be  traced  grow  increasingly 
numerous  as  we  proceed  eastward,  and  the 
centre  of  their  power  lay  right  at  the  other  end 
of  the  peninsula.  It  extended  southward  into 
Syria,  and  thus  came  into  contact  with  Egypt, 
and  eastward  up  to  the  Euphrates,  where  it 
touched  the  great  power  of  Mesopotamia.  The 
remains,  and  particularly  the  inscriptions,  still 
unfortunately  undeciphered,  show  the  influence 
of  these  two  main  centres  of  earliest  civilisation. 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  47 

The  Hittites  were  already  a  great  power  before 
the  middle  of  the  second  millennium  B.C.,  and 
their  long  ascendency  determined  the  character 
of  the  civilisation  of  the  whole  of  the  peninsula.1 
But  towards  the  end  of  the  eighth  century  the 
whole  land  from  the  Euphrates  to  the  ^Egean 
was  overrun  by  barbaric  hordes  from  the  North 
known  as  the  Cimmerians,  a  name  still  synony- 
mous with  the  blackest  barbarism.  The  peoples 
of  Central  and  Eastern  Asia  Minor  appear  to 
have  been  the  worst  sufferers.  None  of  them 
ever  again  played  any  important  part.  It  was 
this  disaster  to  the  peoples  further  east  that 
opened  the  way  to  the  predominence  of  Lydia, 
much  as  the  destruction  of  the  great  Etruscan 
power  in  North  Italy  by  the  Gauls  about  the 
year  400  B.C.  opened  the  way  for  the  rise  of 
Rome,  the  power  against  which  the  flood  of 
Gallic  barbarism  finally  broke.  In  both  cases 
we  find  the  new  power  advancing  as  the  wave 
of  invasion  recedes,  and  before  long  the  kings 
of  Lydia  had  extended  their  frontier  to  the 
Halys,  which  rises  a  little  north-east  of  the 
source  of  the  Euphrates  and  flowing  first  in  a 
south-westerly  direction  then  sweeps  round  in 
a  great  semicircle  into  the  Black  Sea.  In  this 
way  Lydia  was  brought  into  direct  contact  with 

1  On  this  subject  see  D.  G.  Hogarth,  Ionia  and  the  East. 


48         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Assyria,  which  from  its  capital  Nineveh  (Mosul) 
on  the  upper  Tigris  had  dominated  the  whole 
of  Mesopotamia  from  the  opening  years  of  the 
first  millennium  B.C.  Gyges,  the  king  who 
founded  the  dynasty  under  which  Lydia  rose 
to  this  dominant  position,  acknowledged  the 
king  of  Assyria  as  his  overlord,  and  a  clay 
tablet,  discovered  in  Assyria  and  brought  to 
the  British  Museum  by  George  Smith  in  the 
'seventies  of  the  last  century,  tells  us  how 
this  Gyges,  or  Gugu,  as  the  tablet  calls  him, 
met  his  death  at  the  hands  of  the  Cim- 
merians. 

It  is  easy  to  see  how  these  changes  affected 
the  Greeks  of  the  cities  on  the  coast.  They  were 
now  the  immediate  neighbours  of  the  greatest 
power  in  the  Near  East,  and  had  only  that 
power  between  them  and  what  had  been  for  the 
last  few  centuries  the  greatest  and  most  civilised 
power  in  the  whole  world.  Relations  were  not 
always  friendly.  There  were,  in  fact,  per- 
petual wars  between  the  Lydians  and  one  or 
other  of  the  Greek  states,  and  occasionally  they 
proved  disastrous  for  the  Greeks.  The  long- 
suffering  Greek  city  of  Smyrna  was  captured 
in  one .  of  these  Lydian  invasions.  But  as  a 
rule  the  struggle  was  not  carried  to  extremities. 
This,  for  instance,  is  how  the  war  was  carried 
on  against  the  city  of  Miletus:  "Every  year 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     49 

when  the  crops  were  ripe  the  king  marched  his 
army  into  the  land.  The  army  marched  to  the 
music  of  mouth  organs  and  harps  and  flutes, 
both  male  and  female.  And  when  they  reached 
the  Milesian  territory  they  neither  pulled  down 
nor  set  fire  to  the  houses  in  the  country,  nor 
removed  their  doors,  but  left  them  as  they 
found  them.  But  after  destroying  the  trees 
and  the  crops  on  the  land  they  went  back 
home  ;  for  the  Milesians  had  control  of  the 
sea,  so  that  there  was  no  point  in  a  siege.  The 
reason  why  the  Lydian  did  not  pull  down  the 
houses  was  this,  that  the  Milesians  might  have 
the  means  of  sowing  and  working  their  land 
again,  and  as  a  result  he  might  be  able  to  damage 
them  at  the  next  invasion.  In  this  way  he 
carried  on  the  war  for  eleven  years."1  The 
words  just  quoted  are  taken  from  a  Greek 
historian  who  was  born  in  one  of  these  Asiatic 
coast  cities  only  two  generations  after  the  order 
of  things  that  he  here  describes  had  passed 
away.  The  explanation  he  gives  may  be  half 
fanciful  and  humorous,  but  it  probably  em- 
bodies a  fundamental  fact  when  it  says  that 
these  Lydian  invaders  realised  that  it  was  not 
to  their  own  interest  to  destroy  the  prosperity 
of  their  Greek  neighbours  even  if  for  the  time 

1  Herodotus,  i.  17. 
4 


50 

they  found  themselves  in  a  state  of  war  with 
them. 

Such  phenomenal  intelligence  calls  for  an 
explanation.  Partly  it  may  have  been  due 
to  the  fact  that  Lydia  had  risen  to  power  as 
the  leader  of  the  resistance  to  the  Cimmerians, 
who  threatened  Greeks  and  Lydians  alike. 
One  of  the  earliest  fragments  of  Eastern  Greek 
literature  comes  from  a  poem  by  Callinus  of 
Ephesus,  in  which  he  exhorts  his  countrymen 
to  take  up  arms  against  the  Cimmerian  hordes. 
Without  the  Lydians  the  Greeks  would  have 
gone  under,  and  they  may  have  felt  a  lasting 
gratitude. 

But  the  main  reason  why  Lydia  dealt  on 
the  whole  gently  with  the  Greek  cities  of  the 
coast  was  that  without  them  she  would  have 
ceased  at  once  to  be  a  great  and  wealthy  power. 
The  greatness  of  Lydia  depended  partly  on  her 
mines,  of  which  we  shall  have  more  to  say  in 
a  moment.  But  the  mines  owed  much  of  their 
importance  to  the  other  great  factor  in  the 
history  of  the  country,  and  that  was  the  great 
road  that  ran  eastwards  from  Sardis,  the 
Lydian  capital,  through  the  whole  length  of 
the  peninsula  and  enabled  caravans  to  convey 
the  products  of  Babylon  and  Nineveh  and 
the  civilised  East  into  the  young  and  newly 
developing  countries  of  the  Far  West.  It  is  not 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  51 

difficult  to  see  why  about  this  time  Sardis  be- 
came the  most  important  point  in  the  whole  route. 
Situated  as  it  was  at  roughly  the  same  distance 
from  quite  a  number  of  the  Greek  seaports  it 
became  the  clearing  house  where  the  Easterners 
discharged  their  caravan  loads  for  distribution 
by  the  Lydians  themselves  among  the  Greek 
cities  of  the  coast.  These  latter  in  their  turn 
would  carry  them  by  ship  all  over  the  Mediter- 
ranean and  the  Black  Sea  and  return  with  the 
raw  products,  which  would  be  collected  at 
Sardis  and  there  be  loaded  on  to  the  caravans 
that  transported  them  to  the  Far  East.  The 
statements  just  made  are  not  mere  deductions 
from  the  geographical  situation.  The  Greeks 
themselves  recognised  the  great  part  played 
in  commercial  history  by  the  Lydians,  who 
are  actually  said  to  have  been  the  earliest 
merchants.  The  authority  for  this  statement 
is  Herodotus,  the  historian  who  has  just  been 
quoted  on  Lydian  relationships  with  the  Greeks 
of  Asia.1 

A  still  more  important  part  in  the  history  of 
commerce  is  ascribed  to  the  Lydians  by  several 
good  ancient  authorities,2  according  to  whom 
they  were  the  first  people  in  the  world  to  strike 

1  Herodotus,  i.  94. 

2  Among  them  Herodotus  (i.  94). 


52         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

and  issue  metal  coins.  Some  modern  critics 
have  disputed  the  Lydians'  claim  to  this 
epoch-making  discovery,  but  the  evidence  is 
all  in  favour  of  the  ancient  tradition.  The 
earliest  extant  coins  are  very  thick  and  rather 
amorphous  pieces  with  a  type  only  on  one 
side  (see  Plate  XII,  i).  They  are  found  princi- 
pally in  West  Asia  Minor,  and  if  not  struck  by 
the  Lydians  must  have  been  the  work  of  their 
Greek  neighbours  to  the  west.  If  hitherto  they 
have  been  found  mainly  on  the  coast  the  reason 
may  well  be  that  the  coast  has  been  much  more 
accessible  than  the  interior,  and  the  Greeks 
who  still  inhabit  it  are  much  more  alive  than 
the  Turks  of  the  interior  to  the  value  of  finds 
of  ancient  coins.  The  metal  used  for  these 
very  early  pieces  is  neither  gold  nor  silver,  but 
a  natural  mixture  of  the  two  known  as  white 
gold  or  electrum.  The  sources  of  this  metal 
were  the  mines  on  the  Lydian  Mount  Tmolus 
and  the  washings  of  the  Lydian  River  Pactolus, 
and  though,  of  course,  the  metal  need  not  have 
been  coined  where  it  was  found,  the  Lydian 
origin  of  the  metal  lends  a  certain  probability 
to  the  claims  of  Lydia  to  be  the  maker  of  the 
coins.1 

1  The  early  date  of  these  electrum  coins  is  shown  by  the 
find  recently  made  by  the  British  Museum  authorities  when 
excavating  the  temple  of  Artemis  (Diana)  at  Ephesus.  This 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS  53 

If  we  try  to  visualise  the  state  of  things  that 
led  to  the  great  invention,  we  shall  be  further 
confirmed  in  the  belief  that  the  tradition  that 
attributes  it  to  Lydia  is  true.  So  far  as  a  metal 
currency  has  been  a  blessing  to  mankind,  it 
has  been  so  because  it  made  it  possible  for 
property  to  be  transferred  and  distributed 
much  more  expeditiously  and  with  much  less 
waste  of  labour  than  had  been  possible  under 
any  earlier  system  of  exchange.  Who  then, 
about  the  time  at  which  we  know  that  coins 
were  first  struck,  would  have  found  the  greatest 
benefit  from  the  invention  ?  The  Greeks,  as 
pointed  out  by  the  French  scholar  Radet  in  his 
history  of  Lydia,1  were  essentially  merchant 
seamen.  They  would  set  out  from  Ephesus  or 
Miletus  with  a  cargo  of  manufactured  articles 
or  materials  from  their  own  cities  or  the  civilised 

building  was  first  erected  on  a  grand  scale  in  the  days  of 
Croesus,  king  of  Lydia  from  about  560  to  546  B.C.  The 
excavators  found  the  remains  of  two  successive  buildings  that 
must  have  been  earlier  than  the  temple  of  Croesus,  and  in  a 
position  that  showed  them  to  be  earlier  than  the  earliest  of 
these  buildings  they  found  a  large  number  of  these  electrum 
coins.  The  same  date  is  suggested  by  the  style  of  the  coins. 
We  know  that  by  about  550  B.C.  coins  were  struck  with 
"  heads  "  and  "  tails  "  like  those  we  still  use  (see  e.g. 
Plate  XII,  3).  The  primitive  electrum  coins  have  a  design 
on  one  side  only  and  are  technically  not  nearly  so  advanced 
as  the  coins  known  to  have  been  current  in  the  middle  of  the 
sixth  century. 

1  G.  Radet,  La  Lydie  et  le  Monde  Grec. 


54         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

countries  further  east,  and  return  with  the 
raw  products  of  some  such  undeveloped  country 
as  Italy,  Spain,  or  South  Russia.  It  is  a  matter 
of  exchanging  cargo  for  cargo.  The  whole 
transaction  is  best  done  without  the  use  of 
anything  like  money  as  we  now  understand  it. 
But  at  Sardis  the  state  of  things  was  different. 
The  baggage  animals  that  came  with  carpets 
and  the  like  from  Central  Asia  were  in  no  need 
of  heavy  loads  to  serve  as  ballast  on  the  home- 
ward route.  Very  often  they  would  be  more 
than  contented  to  return  with  a  small  but 
precious  load  of  gold  or  silver  from  the  Far 
West  or  elect  rum  from  Lydia  itself.  We  may 
be  fairly  sure  that  the  precious  metals  travelled 
eastward  in  some  abundance  in  this  caravan 
trade,  and  consequently  that  the  Lydian  mer- 
chants in  the  bazaars  at  Sardis  would  have  a 
strong  motive  for  keeping  their  stock  of  these 
metals  in  the  form  most  convenient  for  trade. 
It  is  hardly  rash  to  assume  that  a  nation  of  shop- 
keepers, such  as  the  Lydians  unquestionably 
were,  must  have  realised  that  the  middleman's 
profits  are  safest  and  probably  in  the  long  run 
greatest  when  the  largest  possible  amount  of 
business  passes  through  his  hands.  In  other 
words,  we  find  in  Lydia  precisely  the  circum- 
stances that  would  inspire  the  invention  of 
a  metal  coinage.  The  trader  who  kept  his 


precious  metals  in  the  form  of  coins  of  a  fixed 
weight  and  guaranteed  quality  would  have 
struck  his  bargain  and  be  already  getting 
on  with  the  next  piece  of  business  while  his 
old-fashioned  rival  was  only  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  elaborate  operation  of  sawing  up 
gold  bars  or  sorting  out  gold  rings  in  order 
to  make  some  corresponding  payment,  the 
operation  being  rendered  the  more  complicated 
by  the  fact  that  like  Lot  and  Abraham  he 
still  kept  his  accounts  in  units  of  sheep  and 
oxen. 

It  would  probably  be  difficult  to  over- 
estimate the  influence  that  Lydia  exercised  on 
the  Greeks  of  the  coast  just  west  of  it.  It 
made  them  the  nation  of  traders  that  they 
have  been  ever  since,  and  that  by  itself,  with 
a  people  gifted  like  the  Greeks,  meant  that  it 
made  them  exceptionally  quick-witted  and 
keen  observers.  But  that  was  only  a  small 
part  of  the  effect  of  contact  with  the  people 
who  controlled  the  great  East  road.  All  sorts 
of  wrought  articles  passed  westwards  along  it, 
and  their  skilful  workmanship  stimulated  the 
Greeks  to  emulate  and  later  to  surpass  their 
models.  Nor  was  it  only  material  things 
that  travelled  thus.  Skilled  workmen  from  the 
East  may  have  come  at  least  as  far  west  as  the 
royal  residence  at  Sardis,  and  directly  or  in- 


56         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

directly  Greek  workmen  must  have  become 
their  pupils.  In  engineering,  too,  and  in  some 
of  the  sciences,  notably  astronomy,  the  peoples 
of  Mesopotamia  were  comparative  experts, 
and  in  these  spheres  also  the  wisdom  of  the 
East  came  now  in  some  measure  to  cities  like 
Miletus  and  Ephesus  along  the  great  Lydian 
road. 

While  Gyges  was  building  up  Lydia  into  a 
great  power  in  Asia  Minor,  Egypt  was  recover- 
ing its  lost  greatness  under  a  prince  named 
Psamtek,  or,  as  the  Greeks  called  him,  Psam- 
metichus.  The  centuries  that  followed  the 
overthrow  of  Mycenaean  civilisation  in  the 
££gean  had  been  equally  black  for  Egypt. 
The  country  had  broken  up  into  a  number  of 
petty  principalities  whose  rulers  spent  their 
time  in  feuds  with  one  another  like  so  many 
mediaeval  barons.  We  even  find  tournaments 
organised  in  a  way  that  curiously  recalls  those 
of  our  own  mediaeval  period,1  while  the  subject 
of  the  joust,  a  piece  of  armour  belonging  to  a 
dead  prince,  and  the  general  behaviour  of  the 
chieftains  and  the  angry  impotence  of  their 
nominal  overlord  suggest  a  comparison  with 
Agamemnon  and  his  unruly  subordinates  before 

1  Maspero,  Popular  Stories  of  Ancient  Egypt,  translated 
by  Mrs.  C.  H.  W.  Johns,  pp.  217  f.  (The  High  Emprise  for  the 
Cuirass). 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     57 

the  walls  of  Troy.  These  internal  dissensions 
had  opened  the  way  for  foreign  invaders,  and 
the  kings  of  Assyria  had  entered  the  country 
from  the  north-east,  while  the  Ethiopians  had 
advanced  into  it  from  the  south,  and  in 
the  eighth  century  established  some  sort  of 
supremacy  over  the  whole  country.  Psamtek, 
who  was  prince  of  Sais  in  the  western  part 
of  the  Delta,  made  himself  king  of  the  whole 
country,  reducing  the  other  princes  to  the  posi- 
tion of  vassals  and  driving  the  Assyrians  and 
Ethiopians  out  of  the  land.  This,  of  course, 
meant  that  he  had  more  men  and  more  money 
than  his  rivals,  and  it  was  to  secure  these 
advantages  that  he  opened  up  the  country  to 
the  Greeks.  He  made  his  money  by  trading 
with  foreigners  across  the  sea,  among  whom 
were  certainly  the  Greeks  of  the  Asiatic  coast, 
and  he  enlisted  to  fight  for  him  Ionian  Greeks, 
that  is,  Greeks  from  the  central  cities  of  that 
same  region.  When  Psammetichus  was  firmly 
established  he  did  not  disband  these  mercenaries, 
but  concentrated  them  in  a  camp  on  the  Suez 
frontier  in  a  place  known  to  the  Greeks  as 
Daphnae  :  in  the  Bible  the  name  appears  in  the 
form  Tapahnes  :  it  is  the  place  where  Jeremiah 
sought  refuge  from  the  Babylonians.  Some 
thirty  years  ago  the  site  was  excavated  by 
Flinders  Petrie,  and  the  numerous  finds  that 


58         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

he  made  there  of  objects  both  Greek  and 
Egyptian  enable  us  to  form  some  picture  of 
the  ancient  town  and  to  fill  in  many  historical 
details  as  to  the  Greek  occupation. 

Psamtek  founded  a  dynasty,  the  twenty- 
sixth,  which  continued  to  prosper  and  govern 
Egypt  during  the  whole  period  of  the  Greek 
renaissance.  All  through  this  period  of  over 
one  hundred  and  fifty  years  the  Egyptian 
pharaohs  depended  largely  on  their  Greek 
mercenaries,  and  continued  the  facilities  for 
the  Greeks  to  trade  in  Egypt.  Somewhere 
towards  the  end  of  the  seventh  century  a 
brother  of  the  poetess  Sappho  is  known  to 
have  traded  with  Egypt  in  the  wines  of  his 
native  Mitylene.  The  chief  port  in  Egypt  for 
this  Greek  trade  was  Naucratis,  a  city  lying 
some  way  up  the  most  western  branch  of  the 
Nile.  This  site,  too,  has  been  excavated, 
and  the  finds  show  what  a  flourishing  place  this 
Greek  emporium  was.1 

These  traders  and  mercenaries  must  have 
kept  their  fellow-countrymen  in  touch  with 
Egypt  all  through  the  period  whose  history  we 

1  Some  doubts  have  been  expressed  as  to  whether 
the  Greek  settlement  goes  back  to  the  early  days  of 
Psamtek,  but  a  full  examination  of  the  exidence  of  both 
excavations  and  ancient  writers  shows  fairly  decisively  that 
it  did. 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     59 

are  tracing,  and  it  is  inconceivable  that  under 
these  circumstances  Egypt  should  not  have 
played  a  considerable  part  in  the  great  move- 
ments that  were  taking  place  in  the  Greek 
world.  Now  Egypt  herself,  under  the  twenty- 
sixth  dynasty,  witnessed  a  remarkable  revival 
of  all  her  ancient  prosperity,  the  armed  retainers 
of  the  petty  chiefs  of  the  preceding  period  giving 
place  to  armies  of  artisans  and  craftsmen 
engaged  in  building  great  temples,  carving  great 
statues,  and  generally  in  making  good  the  losses 
of  some  centuries  of  anarchy  and  civil  war.  We 
cannot  here  trace  in  detail  the  ways  in  which 
Egyptian  influence  was  felt  in  Greece,  but  the 
influence  is  manifest  at  the  first  glance  to 
anyone  who  has  ever  compared  an  early 
sixth  century  Greek  statue  (e.g.  Plate  III) 
with  the  work  of  Egyptian  sculptors.  There 
can  be  little  doubt,  too,  that  the  antiquity 
of  the  temples  and  monuments  that  he  saw 
everywhere  in  Egypt  roused  the  historical 
imagination  of  the  Greek  visitor,  while  his 
geographical  sense  was  similarly  stimulated  by 
the  mighty  river  which  in  so  obvious  and 
striking  a  manner  positively  makes  the  land  of 
Egypt.  Here  again  we  are  not  indulging  in 
pure  speculation  or  a  priori  probabilities.  We 
can  detect  these  influences  in  the  Greek  historian 
Herodotus,  who  visited  Egypt  less  than  a  cen- 


60        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

tury  after  the  overthrow  of  the  dynasty  that 
Psamtek  founded. 

The  Greeks  who  at  this  period  traded  with 
Egypt  or  supplied  its  kings  with  soldiers  came 
mainly  from  the  same  Asiatic  cities  that  saw 
so  much  of  the  armies  and  the  traders  of  the 
kingdom  of  Lydia.  The  original  mercenaries 
of  Psamtek  are  said  to  have  been  lonians, 
their  earliest  settlement  in  Egypt  was  known 
as  the  Milesians'  Fort,  while  of  twelve  Greek 
cities  that  enjoyed  the  privilege  of  permanent 
quarters  in  Naucratis  only  one,  the  island  of 
JEgin.3.,  belonged  to  European  Greece  :  the  rest 
all  lay  on  the  Asiatic  coast  or  on  the  islands 
immediately  off  it.  In  Egypt  and  in  the  Further 
East  these  comparatively  new  Greek  cities  were 
brought  face  to  face  with  civilisations  much 
older  and  more  developed  than  their  own.  In 
other  directions,  as  observed  already,  they  were 
constantly  meeting  with  peoples  very  much 
more  primitive.  Miletus,  for  instance,  was 
engaged  in  planting  her  settlements  round  the 
shores  of  the  Black  Sea,  which,  with  the  vast 
rich  plains  behind  them,  soon  came  to  mean 
to  the  Greek  world  something  of  what  Canada 
has  meant  for  modern  England.  The  neigh- 
bouring Samians,  in  a  famous  voyage  to  which 
we  shall  have  occasion  to  revert  in  Chapter  VII, 
explored  as  far  as  Tartessos,  the  Biblical  Tar- 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS    61 

shish,  in  Spain,  and  won  enormous  wealth  by 
exploiting  its  silver  mines,  or  rather  the  natives 
who  worked  them. 

This  concludes  our  very  brief  survey  of  the 
geographical  distribution  and  grouping  of  the 
Greek  race  and  the  alien  races  with  which 
at  this  time  it  found  itself  in  contact.  It 
remains  in  this  chapter  to  indicate  some  of 
the  ways  in  which  the  Greeks  of  this  period 
were  moulded  and  influenced  by  their  environ- 
ment. 

One  inevitable  effect  of  the  wanderings  of 
the  Greeks  themselves  was  that  they  had 
become  a  very  mixed  race.  The  population  of 
the  mother  country  itself  was  the  result  of 
successive  waves  of  immigration.  In  some 
spots  no  doubt,  and  notably  in  Sparta,  two 
separate  streams  of  invaders  and  the  aboriginal 
stock  each  maintained  all  through  the  historical 
period  a  quite  separate  existence.  In  others, 
including  perhaps  Athens,  the  floods  of  invasion 
had  swept  past  and  left  the  original  population 
practically  undisturbed,  except  by  refugees  of 
their  own  race.  But  even  in  regions  that 
escaped  invasion  there  must  often  have  been 
much  peaceful  penetration  by  foreign  elements, 
notably  in  Athens  itself,  while  in  most  invaded 
districts  there  must  have  been  much  inter- 


62         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

marriage.  On  the  Asiatic  coast  not  only  did 
the  original  Greek  settlers  come  in  three 
different  groups,  but  on  their  arrival  they  inter- 
married largely  with  the  various  native  races 
whom  they  dispossessed.  This  may  safely  be 
assumed  from  the  character  of  such  expeditions, 
where  among  the  invaders  men  are  bound  to 
be  in  an  immense  preponderance,  while  the 
invasion  is  almost  certain  to  leave  the  native 
women  more  numerous  than  the  marriageable 
men  of  their  race.  In  the  case  of  the  Milesians, 
whose  city  soon  won  the  first  place  among  the 
new  settlements,  we  are  expressly  told  that  the 
invaders  intermarried  largely  with  the  native 
Carian  women.  If  we  wish  for  a  more  vivid 
picture  of  the  sort  of  thing  that  must  have  been 
constantly  happening  we  have  only  to  read  the 
story  of  Briseis  in  the  Iliad,  whom  Achilles 
took  to  live  with  him  after  he  had  sacked  her 
city  and  killed  off  all  her  male  relations.  The 
Greeks  of  this  period  were,  therefore,  a  mixed 
race,  and  the  mixture  was  by  no  means  uniform. 
In  the  main,  however,  it  was  the  union  of 
the  youthful  North  with  the  more  ancient  and 
sophisticated  South,  a  union  that  more  than 
once  has  been  found  to  produce  a  particularly 
gifted  progeny.  As  a  work  of  art  no  doubt 
the  prize  goes  to  the  thoroughbred,  but  from 
the  point  of  view  of  creative  genius  and 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     63 

intelligence  the  mixed  breed  is  generally 
found  to  come  easily  first. 

Antecedents  and  upbringing  also  played  their 
part  in  making  the  Greeks  what  they  were. 
For  generations  past  they  had  been  an  adven- 
turous people.  In  the  days  of  the  actual 
migrations  there  must  have,  indeed,  been 
restless  spirits,  with  something  in  them  of 
Homer's  Odysseus,  who  took  their  whole  future 
into  their  hands  and  sought  a  new  home  across 
the  seas.  Right  on  into  the  days  of  the  renais- 
sance this  thirst  for  adventure  continued  equally 
strong.  Without  it  the  Black  Sea  would  never 
have  been  fringed  with  Ionian  colonies,  and 
Psamtek  of  Egypt  would  never  have  gathered 
together  the  Ionian  mercenaries  with  whose 
help  he  became  pharaoh  and  re-established 
Egypt  as  a  great  power. 

But  what  differentiated  these  adventurers 
of  the  seventh  century  B.C.  from  their  ancestors 
in  the  eighth  century  and  earlier  was  that  their 
wanderings  were  not  due  merely  to  external 
pressure  or  aimless  unrest.  They  had  by  now 
become  the  enterprises  of  an  organised  society 
with  definite  constructive  aims. 

The  period  of  exploration  was  practically  at 
an  end.  The  whole  Mediterranean  area  had 
been  opened  up  to  Greek  trade,  and  every 
Greek  city  began  to  form  more  or  less  regular 


64        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

and  recognised  connections  with  mother  or 
sister  cities  in  other  parts  of  this  greater  Greek 
world.  Each  of  the  cities  of  Sicily  or  South 
Italy,  for  instance,  was  in  fairly  constant 
communication  with  some  definite  group  of 
cities  in  the  mother  country  and  with  one  or 
more  of  the  Greek  settlements  still  further 
to  the  north  and  west.  Even  the  Greek 
cities  of  Spain  are  shown  by  archaeological  finds 
to  have  been  in  frequent  touch  with  their  mother 
cities  in  Asia  Minor.  Life  was  still  sufficiently 
rich  in  adventure  and  variety  to  drive  home 
the  fact  that  human  nature  is  not  static  and 
uniform.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  suffi- 
ciently stable  and  ran  on  definite  enough  lines 
to  allow  for  and  encourage  a  continuous  growth 
and  development.  This  was  the  case  all  over 
the  Greek  world,  but  most  of  all  in  the  Ionic 
cities,  and  this  is  perhaps  the  main  reason 
why  they  took  the  lead. 

In  one  other  point  Ionia  was  peculiarly 
favoured.  Too  often  it  happens  that  the 
milk  and  honey  of  the  promised  land  prove  the 
ultimate  downfall  of  its  possessors.  The  enter- 
prising nation  pushing  its  way  to  a  place  in 
the  sun  advances  just  a  little  too  far  so  that 
the  warmth  produces  enervation.  To  the 
modern  inhabitant  of  Northern  Europe  the 
climate  of  the  East  ^Egean  may  seem  too  warm 


GREECE  AND  HER  NEIGHBOURS     65 

for  a  really  energetic  life  ;  but  on  this  point 
it  is  necessary  to  remember  that  climate  may 
change  in  the  course  of  twenty-five  centuries  : 
the  retirement  northwards  of  the  great  ice 
belt  of  the  last  glacial  period  is  a  comparatively 
recent  event,  and  apart  from  such  purely 
natural  considerations  it  must  be  remembered 
that  the  climate  of  any  given  region  can  be 
to  some  extent  affected  by  the  people  who 
inhabit  it  according  as  they  treat  the  vegeta- 
tion and  the  surface  water  of  their  land.  The 
neglected  Mesopotamia  of  the  Turks  must  be 
very  different  climatically  from  the  elaborately 
irrigated  and  canalised  Mesopotamia  of  the 
great  empires  of  antiquity.  And  not  only  may 
the  actual  climate  change  but  also  the  climatic 
requirements  of  humanity  in  its  varying  phases 
of  development.  Bearing  these  facts  in  mind 
there  is  no  reason  for  not  accepting  for  this 
period  the  words  of  Herodotus,  who  asserts 
that  from  the  point  of  view  of  climate  Ionia 
was  favoured  above  all  the  regions  of  the  known 
world.1 

But  though  the  Asiatic  cities  were  thus 
specially  favoured  and  took  the  lead,  the 
rest  of  the  Greek  world  followed  close 
behind.  What  they  severally  achieved  in  the 

1  Herodotus,  i.  142, 


66         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

various  spheres  of  art  and  literature,  science 
and  philosophy,  political  and  social  organisa- 
tion will  be  indicated  in  the  chapters  that 
follow. 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE   RENAISSANCE    IN   ARTS,  CRAFTS 
AND   COMMERCE 


f  "^HE  disastrous  effects  of  an  age  of  wars 
and  invasions  are  not  to  be  measured 
A  merely  by  an  inventory  of  positive  de- 
struction. Achilles  and  Agamemnon  did  more 
than  destroy  Troy.  They  destroyed  for  the 
time  being  at  any  rate  the  will  to  reconstruct 
it.  Men  will  build  well  and  strongly  only  when 
there  is  a  reasonable  prospect  of  their  work 
enduring,  and  the  fall  of  Troy  and  Cnossus 
must  have  meant  to  the  men  of  that  period 
that  no  such  prospect  longer  existed.  It  was 
nearly  half  a  millennium  before  any  serious 
attempt  at  reconstruction  began.  Some  of  the 
factors  that  inspired  the  renaissance  have  been 
touched  on  already  in  Chapter  III,  but  none 
of  them  would  have  had  any  serious  permanent 
effect  on  Greece  but  for  the  fact  that  the 
Greeks  themselves  were  settling  down  and  be- 
coming comparatively  peaceful  and  law-abiding 

67 


members  of  organised  societies.  To  the  end  of 
their  history  the  Greek  city  states  were  in  a 
chronic  state  of  war  with  one  another,  but  from 
the  seventh  century  B.C.  onward  within  the  city 
walls  life  was  comparatively  safe.  Men  began 
to  go  about  the  streets  of  their  own  city  un- 
armed. It  was  an  epoch-making  change  and 
from  it  Thucydides  dates  the  beginning  of 
Greek  greatness. 

The  new  sense  of  security  profoundly  altered 
the  whole  life  of  the  Greeks.  There  was  an 
outburst  of  constructive  activity  such  as  the 
world  has  seldom  seen.  It  affected  thought  still 
more  than  action,  but  even  the  material  results 
were  sufficiently  remarkable.  Greek  art  still 
sets  our  standards  even  where  it  does  not 
furnish  us  with  models.  The  rest  of  this 
chapter  will  be  devoted  to  giving  a  short 
account  of  the  way  in  which  it  developed  its 
main  characteristics. 

In  architecture  the  great  achievement  of 
seventh-century  Greece  was  the  evolution  of 
the  Greek  temple,  the  general  plan  and  style 
of  which  will  be  familiar  to  most  readers  of 
these  pages.  A  rectangular  hall  is  surrounded 
externally  by  a  colonnade  and  the  whole 
covered  by  a  gabled  roof.  Until  late  in  Greek 
history  all  Greek  temples  were  erected  in  one 
or  other  of  two  styles.  In  the  simpler  and 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   69 

severer,  which  is  known  as  the  Doric  (see 
Plate  I),  the  pillars  rise  directly  from  the 
platform  on  which  the  temple  is  erected ;  the 
pillar  itself  tapers  upward,  not,  however,  in 
a  straight  line  but  with  a  slight  convex  curve 
that  adds  greatly  to  the  impression  of  strength  ; 
the  broad  shallow  flutings  that  run  from  top 
to  bottom  of  the  pillar  are  carved  so  close 
together  that  only  a  sharp  edge  is  left  be- 
tween them ;  the  capital  of  the  column 
consists  of  a  round  member,  something  like 
an  inverted  bun,  placed  beneath  a  square 
plinth  on  which  rests  the  architrave,  or  prin- 
cipal horizontal  member  for  the  support  of 
the  roof  ;  over  the  architrave  is  another 
horizontal  member  divided  into  squares  known 
alternately  as  metopes  and  triglyphs  :  the 
triglyph  is  always  carved  vertically  with 
sharp  angular  flutings,  the  metopes  are  some- 
times left  plain  but  more  often  decorated  with 
sculpture. 

In  Ionic  architecture  (Plate  II)  the  pillars 
rest  on  a  base ;  the  pillar  itself  is  slenderer 
and  has  not  the  subtle  curve  of  the  Doric  ;  the 
flutings  are  placed  slightly  apart  from  one 
another  ;  the  capital  consists  of  two  volutes  ; 
the  architrave  is  carved  horizontally  to  give 
the  effect  of  three  courses  of  which  the  two 
highest  each  slightly  overlaps  the  one  beneath  ; 


70        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

while  over  this  again,  in  the  place  of  the  Doric 
triglyphs  and  metopes,  we  find  a  continuous 
band  of  sculpture.  There  is  no  need  here  to 
describe  in  detail  the  other  parts  of  a  Greek 
temple.  Of  the  general  character  of  Greek 
architecture  some  idea  may  be  formed  from 
such  modern  imitations  as  the  British  Museum 
or  St.  Pancras  Church  in  London,  both  of 
which  are  strictly  correct  in  their  rendering 
of  details.  But  these  modern  copies  and  adapta- 
tions never  catch  anything  of  the  atmosphere 
of  the  old  Greek  buildings,  while  even  in  ex- 
ternals they  give  no  idea  of  two  of  the  most 
striking  characteristics  of  the  ancient  Greek 
temple.  The  first  of  these  is  the  rigid  way  in 
which  it  adhered  to  a  single  plan  and  to  one 
or  other  of  these  two  schemes  of  decoration. 
The  great  cathedrals  left  us  by  our  own  Middle 
Ages  have  accustomed  us  to  expect  great 
variety  of  shape  and  the  promiscuous  use  in 
one  and  the  same  building  of  numerous  styles 
of  decoration.  But  with  one  or  two  exceptions 
the  Greek  temple  keeps  rigidly  to  its  rectangular 
form,  and  almost  without  exception  it  will  be 
found  that  any  given  temple  is  pure  Doric 
throughout  or  pure  Ionic.  If  a  modern  tourist 
could  follow  in  the  footsteps  of  the  Greek 
Pausanias,  who  wrote  a  sort  of  Baedeker's  guide 
to  Ancient  Greece  in  the  second  century  A.D., 


he  would  probably  feel  that  there  was  a  good 
deal  of  monotony  about  these  old  temples. 
But  that  was  not  the  feeling  of  the  men  who 
put  them  up.  There  is  no  doubt  that  they  were 
out  to  realise  an  ideal,  and  that  mathematical 
theories  played  a  large  part  in  their  conceptions. 
They  had  a  keen  practical  sense  of  proportion. 
That  is  shown  in  the  extant  remains  of  their 
buildings.  But  they  had  something  else  besides 
this.  Their  work  had  a  mathematical  basis. 
The  sense  of  proportion  was  for  them  not  a 
matter  of  intuition,  but  of  mathematical  reason- 
ing. This  unremitting  intellectual  control  gives 
to  Greek  architecture  perhaps  its  most  out- 
standing character.  The  Greek  architect  some- 
times made  mistakes,  but  he  was  never  silly 
in  the  way  that  more  recent  architects  so  often 
are.  There  is  another  aspect  of  this  rigid 
adherence  to  type  that  deserves  our  notice. 
It  has  no  connexion  with  the  apparently 
similar  phenomenon  that  may  be  observed  in 
modern  slum  architecture.  This  latter  means 
simply  intellectual  idleness  on  the  part  of  the 
builders,  who  will  not  be  bothered  to  think 
out  plans  of  their  own.  Greek  uniformity  meant 
something  quite  different.  It  meant  that  a 
whole  band  of  workers  was  concentrated  on 
solving  a  single  problem,  much  like  the  great 
builders  of  any  one  generation  of  the  Gothic 


72         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

period,  or  the  great  artists  of  modern  times  who 
have  evolved  our  steam  engines  and  ships  and 
aeroplanes,  or  their  minor  contemporaries  who 
have  perfected  the  cricket  bat  and  the  tennis 
racket.  All  these  men  have  worked  under  the 
same  inspiration,  namely,  that  of  believing 
that  by  infinite  pains  something  like  perfec- 
tion might  be  obtained  within  a  given  limited 
sphere. 

The  other  great  difference  between,  let  us 
say,  the  British  Museum  as  we  see  it  to-day 
and  a  Greek  temple  as  it  appeared  while  still 
in  repair  is  in  the  matter  of  colour.  Greek 
temples  were  coloured  outside  as  well  as  in, 
the  various  details  being  picked  out  in  blue, 
red,  and  other  bright  colours.  This  may  sound 
cheap  and  garish  to  readers  whose  ideas  of 
good  external  architecture  are  all  based  on 
the  weathered  stone  and  brick  of  our  own 
best  buildings,  especially  if  he  connects  coloured 
exteriors  with  the  modern  atrocities  in  glazed 
tiles  that  at  present  disfigure  so  many  of  our 
streets.  But  there  is  little  doubt  that  our  own 
great  mediaeval  architects  only  refrained  from 
colouring  the  outsides  of  their  buildings  because 
they  could  not  in  our  moist  climate  devise  any 
scheme  of  outside  colouring  that  would  not 
quickly  wear  off.  Internally  their  buildings 
were  one  mass  of  colours,  walls  and  roof  as  well 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   73 

as  windows.  If  they  had  had  the  means  and 
material,  they  would  have  coloured  their  ex- 
teriors quite  as  freely  as  did  the  mediaeval 
builders  of  Florence  or  Orvieto.  But  whereas 
Giotto's  tower  at  Florence  and  the  great 
western  facade  of  Orvieto  Cathedral  produce 
their  colour  schemes  by  the  lavish  use  of 
coloured  marbles,  the  Greeks,  on  the  other 
hand,  when  they  came  to  build  stone  temples, 
secured  coloured  exteriors  by  the  use  of  paint. 
The  morals  and  merits  of  this  process  will  be 
discussed  later  in  the  chapter,  when  something 
has  been  said  of  Greek  sculptors,  who  also  made 
considerable  use  of  it.  A  word,  however,  may 
here  be  said  about  the  history  of  the  practice 
as  applied  to  the  outside  of  buildings.  The 
marble  temple  was  not  in  Greece  the  result 
of  a  gradual  evolution.  It  was  a  translation 
into  more  monumental  material  of  a  type  of 
building  that  in  its  earlier  stages  had  been 
mainly  of  wood  and  in  the  next  stages  of  soft 
stone.  Both  these  materials  need  protection 
from  the  weather.  When  wood  was  employed 
this  had  been  secured  by  facing  the  more  ex- 
posed parts  of  the  building  (as  well,  of  course, 
as  the  roof)  with  terra-cotta.  The  terra-cotta 
vases  of  this  period  were  gaily  coloured,  and 
the  architectural  terra-cottas,  which  were 
doubtless  produced  by  the  same  firms  as  the 


74         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

vases,  were  coloured  in  the  same  way.1  These 
highly  coloured  architectural  terra-cottas  were 
used  widely  and  for  a  long  period  ;  there  are 
many  specimens  in  our  museums.2  When  wood 
and  bricks  gave  way  to  stone,  the  stone  first 
employed,  being  soft  and  by  no  means  weather- 
proof, was  largely  protected  by  means  of 
stucco  and  paint.  This  painted  stone  architec- 
ture was  very  prevalent  in  the  sixth  century. 
But  even  when  marble  was  employed  numerous 
details  were  still  picked  out  in  colours.  A 
building  of  bare  white  marble  unrelieved  by 
any  colour  would  have  struck  a  Greek  as  chilly 
and  bleak. 

It  is  not  only  in  its  colouring  that  the  marble 
temple  betrays  its  wooden  prototype.  Many 
details  of  the  ornamentation  are  almost  literal 
translations  from  wood  into  stone.  For  instance, 
the  triglyphs  described  above  represent  the 
wooden  beams  that  bore  the  weight  of  the  roof, 
while  the  metopes  were  originally  slabs  of 

1  In  North  Nigeria,  so  I  am  informed  by  my  friend,  J.  W.  S. 
Macfie,  of  the  West  African  medical  service,  they  actually  use 
plates  for  this  purpose,  particularly  soup  plates,  which  from 
their  shape  can  be  better  embedded  in  the  walls  of  the  native 
mud  huts. 

8  See,  e.g.,  the  fine  set  from  Lanuvium  now  in  the  British 
Museum.  Fresh  examples  are  constantly  being  discovered, 
e.g.  the  splendid  fragments  recently  unearthed  by  Orsi  at 
Syracuse. 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS    75 

terra-cotta  or  other  material  placed  between 
these  beam  ends  to  prevent  the  damp  getting 
in  and  rotting  the  woodwork. 

This  bold  borrowing  of  forms  that  were 
structural  in  the  older  material  to  serve  for 
purely  ornamental  purposes  in  the  new  is 
particularly  interesting  to  students  of  modern 
architecture  ;  for  modern  architects  are  face 
to  face  with  a  similar  problem,  namely,  how 
far  they  are  to  preserve  the  effects  of  brick  and 
stone  in  the  new  buildings  whose  structure  is 
based  on  concrete  and  iron. 

In  sculpture  the  Greeks  are  generally  ad- 
mitted to  have  produced  works  that  have 
never  been  surpassed.  Complete  mastery  was 
only  reached  in  the  fifth  century  B.C.,  but  it 
is  easier  to  realise  what  was  being  done  in  the 
sixth  century  if  we  first  turn  for  a  moment  to 
the  achievements  of  the  fifth.  These  latter  can 
nowhere  be  better  studied  than  in  the  British 
Museum,  which  possesses  a  magnificent  series 
of  reliefs  and  figures  in  the  round  that  once 
adorned  the  Parthenon,  the  chief  temple  of 
Athens,  erected  between  the  years  447  and 
438  B.C.,  but  were  brought  to  England  by  Lord 
Elgin  a  century  ago.  It  is  difficult  and  danger- 
ous to  try  to  write  a  verbal  appreciation  of  a 
work  of  art,  but  among  the  words  that  best 
suggest  what  these  Greek  artists  achieved  we 


76         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

may  safely  put  beauty,  sanity,  appropriate- 
ness, and  a  certain  solemn  restfulness.  The 
modern  world  is  only  too  familiar  with  sculp- 
tures that  abound  in  force  and  in  nothing  else. 
In  all  periods  when  sculptors  have  thoroughly 
mastered  their  technique  they  tend  to  try  and 
express  in  bronze  and  marble  conceptions  that 
are  quite  unsuitable  to  such  materials.  Some- 
times, again,  sculpture  has  been  captured  by 
mysticism  and  symbolism  and  ceased  to  appeal 
to  any  except  sectarians  and  the  historians  who 
study  their  aberrations.  In  process  of  time  the 
Greek  artists  fell  astray  in  all  these  ways  ;  but 
unlike  the  sculptors  of  most  races  and  epochs 
they  were  not  perverted  till  after  they  had 
for  one  brief  period  expressed  in  bronze  and 
marble  statues  just  what  is  best  expressed  in 
that  way  and  cannot  so  adequately  be  ex- 
pressed in  any  other. 

Why  the  Greeks  excelled  so  in  sculpture  is 
hard  to  state.  In  painting  they  were  probably 
not  nearly  so  successful.  To  judge  from  such 
evidence  as  we  have  at  our  disposal  it  is  probable 
that  Greek  painting  even  of  the  very  best 
period  would  have  seemed  to  us  charming 
but  rather  thin,  and  not  nearly  so  expressive  as 
the  best  modern  work.  It  is,  indeed,  arguable 
that  the  Greeks  were  just  at  that  stage  of 
development  when  artistic  ideas  were  best 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   77 

expressed  by  sculpture,  whereas  in  modern 
life,  where  form  appeals  less  and  atmosphere 
more,  sculpture  is  an  archaism,  except  for 
decorative  purposes,  and  the  picture,  station- 
ary or  moving,  the  one  live  vehicle  for  artistic 
ideas. 

But  to  pass  from  so  controversial  a  point 
there  seems  little  doubt  that  one  reason  why 
Greek  sculpture  succeeded  in  attaining  its  goal 
was  this  :  it  enjoyed  a  natural  and  uninter- 
rupted evolution  with  just  sufficient  external 
stimulus  and  assistance,  but  no  more.  This 
fact  may  serve  to  remind  us  that  we  are  con- 
cerned here  only  with  the  earlier  stages  of  the 
evolution  to  which  it  is  time  that  we  now 
reverted. 

In  sculpture  as  in  architecture  the  Dark  Ages 
have  left  us  practically  nothing.  Possibly  the 
gods  and  great  men  of  the  period  were  repre- 
sented in  wood,  since  some  of  the  earliest  stone 
statues  of  the  Renaissance  appear  to  have  a 
partly  wooden  pedigree.  In  some  of  them,  as 
for  instance  a  statue  of  the  goddess  Artemis 
found  on  the  island  of  Delos  (Plate  III),  the 
body  is  flat  and  rectangular  like  a  piece  of 
squared  wood;  in  others,  as  in  a  statue  of 
Hera  found  on  the  island  of  Samos  (Plate  IV), 
the  body  is  round  in  section  like  the  trunk  of 
a  tree  and  the  folds  of  the  drapery  are  treated 


78         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

in  a  way  that  rather  recalls  the  grain  of  wood. 
These  earliest  Greek  statues  often  strike  the 
spectator  as  Egyptian  in  character,  and  it  is 
not  unlikely  that  Egypt  supplied  part  at  least 
of  the  inspiration  and  possibly  of  the  technique. 
None  of  them  goes  back  earlier  than  the 
Egyptian  revival  under  the  Saite  dynasty  and 
the  Greek  settlements  in  Egypt  early  in  the 
seventh  century  B.C.  But  Greek  tradition 
ascribed  the  first  debt  of  Greek  sculpture  not 
to  Egypt  but  to  Crete,  and  though  modern 
excavation  has  not  directly  confirmed  this 
tradition,  it  accords  well  with  the  recent  dis- 
covery of  the  great  part  played  by  Crete  in 
prehistoric  times. 

To  turn  from  origins  to  developments,  the 
statues  of  Artemis  and  Hera  above  referred  to 
both  represent  standing  draped  female  figures, 
and  it  so  happens  that  we  are  particularly  well 
able  to  trace  the  progressive  treatment  of  this 
type.  Draped  female  figures  were  set  up  in 
numbers  on  the  Acropolis  at  Athens,  where 
they  were  doubtless  regarded  as  particularly 
appropriate,  since  Athens  was  the  city  of  the 
virgin  goddess  Athena.  In  480  B.C.,  when  the 
Persians  sacked  Athens,  they  damaged  and 
overthrew  a  whole  series  of  such  statues.  It 
was  a  period  when  fashions  in  art  were  rapidly 
changing,  and  so  instead  of  restoring  and 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   79 

re-erecting  these  damaged  works  the  Athenians 
made  new  ones  and  used  the  old  as  building 
material  to  help  to  raise  the  level  of  the  Acro- 
polis. There  they  lay  buried  till  1886,  when  the 
Greek  archaeological  society  excavated  the 
site,  rediscovered  these  buried  statues,  and  re- 
erected  them  in  a  place  of  honour  in  the  new 
museum  on  the  Acropolis  within  a  few  yards 
of  the  places  where  they  must  have  stood  till 
Xerxes  cast  them  down.  They  have  been 
studied  with  great  care  and  classed  in  various 
groups  according  to  their  dates  and  schools. 
Some  of  them  (see  e.g.  Plate  V)  show  obvious 
affinities  with  the  primitive  Artemis  of  Delos, 
but  others  (see  e.g.  Plate  VI)  show  a  very  high 
skill  and  advanced  technique.  In  more  ways 
than  one,  however,  the  whole  series  contradicts 
our  common  conceptions  of  Greek  art.  The 
treatment  is  not  broad  and  simple  and  severe, 
but  elaborate  and  sophisticated  and  even 
modish.  The  ladies'  dress  is  highly  compli- 
cated and  has  been  the  subject  of  much  con- 
troversy among  experts.  Their  hair  must 
have  required  hours  of  attention  daily.  Even 
their  smile  is  highly  cultivated.  In  many  ways 
their  merits  are  those  that  are  commonly 
claimed  for  Japanese  art  rather  than  for  Greek. 
But  side  by  side  with  this  draped  female  type 
of  statue  the  Greeks  were  developing  another 


80         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

that  even  from  its  earlier  stages  had  a  character 
pre-eminently  Greek.  This  was  the  nude  male 
figure  (Plate  VII).  At  first  the  type  is  treated 
in  a  primitive  enough  way,  standing  at  atten- 
tion with  arms  glued  to  the  side,  mouth  straight 
like  a  slot  or  curved  upwards  in  what  is  now 
known  among  archaeologists  as  the  archaic 
smile,  and  large  staring  eyes  such  as  befit  a 
new  arrival  upon  our  earth.  Statues  of  this 
type  have  been  found  in  many  parts  of  Greece, 
and  a  development  of  treatment  can  be  easily 
traced.  The  legs  are  detached  from  one  another 
and  the  arms  from  the  body  ;  muscles  and 
anatomical  details  generally  get  to  be  repre- 
sented with  more  and  more  skill ;  similar 
progress  is  made  in  the  treatment  of  the 
face,  though  eyes  and  mouth  long  baffled  the 
artist. 

Greek  art  found  its  true  self  when  these  two 
conflicting  currents  at  last  converged.  It  was, 
indeed,  long  held  that  no  such  convergence 
ever  took  place ;  that  the  Athenian  elabora- 
tion of  the  sixth  century  B.C.  was  something 
that  conflicted  radically  with  all  that  was  best 
in  the  Greek  genius  ;  and  that  Greek  art  only 
found  its  true  expression  when  the  Persian 
wars  had  swept  away  this  over-elaboration,  and 
caused  all  Greece,  Athens  included,  to  adopt 
the  ideals  of  the  severe  Dorian  school  that  had 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   81 

developed  the  virile  athletic  type  in  art.  Such 
a  view  is  not  supported  by  the  archaeological 
evidence.  Athens  was  already  casting  aside  this 
over-elaboration  before  the  Persian  wars  began, 
and  Greek  art  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.  is  not 
a  repudiation  of  Athenian  art  of  the  sixth. 
The  simplicity  of  Pheidias  is  like  that  of  Plato  : 
it  is  the  last  word  in  culture  and  refinement, 
which  nearly  always  passes  through  a  stage 
of  over-elaboration  before  it  reaches  its  goal. 
Like  the  corresponding  change  that  took  place 
at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  this 
revolution  in  dress  reflected  a  revolution  in 
politics  and  thought.  It  was  Rousseau  and  the 
French  Revolution  that  put  an  end  to  wigs  and 
powder  and  introduced  the  Byronic  collar,  and 
the  course  of  events  in  Greece  towards  the  end 
of  the  sixth  century  was  probably  not  dis- 
similar. As  will  be  seen  in  subsequent  chapters, 
the  seventh  and  sixth  centuries  B.C.  were  an 
age  of  enlightened  despotism  and  luxurious 
refinement.  In  all  probability  the  movement 
towards  simplicity  in  the  latter  part  of  the 
sixth  century  B.C.  was  closely  bound  up  with 
the  overthrow  of  these  enlightened  but  luxuri- 
ous despots. 

One  striking  feature  of  ancient  Greek  sculp- 
ture that  has  already  been  mentioned  in  the 
section  on  architecture  remains  to  be  noticed 

6 


82         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

a  little  more  fully  here.  The  statues  were 
coloured.  In  most  extant  specimens  the  colour- 
ing has  entirely  disappeared.  The  only  series 
where  it  is  preserved  at  all  completely  is  that 
of  the  draped  female  statues  from  the  Athenian 
Acropolis.  From  them,  however,  we  can  still 
get  a  fair  idea  of  the  original  effect.  Heavy 
opaque  colours  are  used  only  for  minor  details, 
such  as  the  hair  and  patterns  (generally  borders) 
on  the  dresses  (see  Plates  V,  VI).  Larger  sur- 
faces are  treated  with  light  transparent  stains 
that  leave  the  texture  of  the  marble  visible. 
The  result  is  something  far  less  tiring  to  the 
eye  and  far  more  beautiful  and  expressive  than 
anything  that  can  be  achieved  in  plain  white 
stone.  It  is  important  to  realise  that  it  is  we 
and  not  the  Greeks  who  are  abnormal  in  this 
respect.  The  ancient  Egyptians  made  use  of 
colour  in  their  statues  and  reliefs.  So,  too,  did 
the  great  sculptors  of  mediaeval  Europe.  White 
stone  statues  came  in  with  whitewashed 
churches  and  other  artistic  aberrations  of 
the  Puritan  movements  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  Why  a  reaction  towards  normal  con- 
ditions has  been  so  slow  in  coming  may  be 
easily  explained.  The  choice,  as  we  generally 
see  it  now,  is  between  honest  work  in  plain 
marble  and  highly  coloured  efforts  in  wax 
or  plaster  that  are  thoroughly  meritricious  in 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   83 

every  way.  Colour,  in  short,  as  connected 
with  statuary,  has  come  to  connote  cheap 
material  and  bad  art.  But  the  connotation 
is  purely  accidental.  We  have  only  to  look 
beyond  the  narrow  limits  of  our  own  epoch 
to  see  it  for  what  it  is  worth  and  treat  it 
accordingly. 

But  for  the  study  of  early  Greek  handwork 
far  the  most  abundant  material  is  supplied 
by  pottery,  and  Greek  pottery  is  exceptionally 
valuable  from  the  historical  point  of  view. 
In  the  first  place  the  Greeks  of  this  period  were 
very  fond  of  painting  pictures  on  their  vases, 
and  these  vase  paintings,  besides  being  often 
very  interesting  from  their  subjects,  are  now 
our  chief  source  of  knowledge  as  to  the  achieve- 
ments of  Greek  painters  and  draughtsmen. 
The  potters  of  the  Dark  Ages  had  also  painted 
pictures  on  their  pots,  but  their  drawing,  as 
already  mentioned,1  was  childish  in  the  extreme, 
a  primitive  form  of  cubism  in  which  the  human 
figure  was  represented  by  various  arrangements 
of  squares,  triangles,  and  straight  lines.  This 
geometric  pottery  (Plate  VIII  a)  lasted  well 
into  the  seventh  century,  but  after  700  B.C.  it 
was  no  longer  the  most  popular  style.  The  new 
school  of  vase  painters  was  less  aspiring  in 

1  Above,  p.  23. 


84         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

its  subjects,  but  far  more  skilful  in  the  execu- 
tion. Instead  of  attempting  long  funeral  pro- 
cessions or  battle  scenes  and  such  difficult 
problems  as  that  of  representing  the  deceased 
in  his  coffin  or  the  internal  arrangements  of 
a  man  of  war,  the  new  artists  spent  most  of 
their  time  in  drawing  long  friezes  of  animals 
or  birds,  and  it  was  only  after  a  long  apprentice- 
ship at  this  sort  of  work  that  they  began  to 
paint  men  and  gods.  Two  schools  of  these 
animal  artists  are  to  be  distinguished,  one  of 
which  flourished  in  the  Greek  cities  of  Asia 
Minor  and  is  generally  known  as  Ionian  (Plate 
VIII  b),  the  other  on  the  Greek  mainland  at 
Corinth.  Both  schools  got  their  main  effect  by 
drawing  in  black  silhouette  on  a  creamy 
ground  ;  but  the  Corinthians  painted  the  whole 
figure  in  silhouette  and  then  expressed  or 
emphasised  details  by  means  of  patches  of 
purple  paint  or  by  incised  lines  (Plate  IX), 
whereas  the  Ionian  painters  only  used  sil- 
houettes for  the  main  part  of  their  figures, 
while  the  heads  were  left  in  outline,  thus 
enabling  them  to  paint  in  such  details  as  the 
eyes  and  mouth.  Both  schools  alike  are 
decorative  rather  than  descriptive,  and  filled 
up  the  empty  spaces  between  the  various 
animals  and  even  the  voids  left  between  their 
legs  or  above  their  backs  with  ornamental 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS    85 

patterns  such  as  rosettes.1  These  fill  orna- 
ments, as  they  are  called,  cause  vase  paintings 
in  these  two  styles  to  look  not  unlike  pieces  of 
tapestry  or  Persian  carpet.  The  resemblance 
is  probably  not  accidental.  Homer  praises 
the  woven  work  of  the  women  of  Sidon,  and  it 
was  probably  some  such  work  that  afforded  the 
models  used  by  the  potters  of  Miletus  and 
Corinth. 

In  the  change  from  animal  decoration  to 
subjects  that  are  mainly  human  and  descriptive 
the  Corinthians  and  lonians  certainly  contri- 
buted,2 but  the  leading  part  was  soon  assumed 
by  Athens.  The  Athenian  potters  come  to  the 
fore  early  in  the  sixth  century.  One  of  the 
earliest  of  their  masterpieces  is  reproduced  on 
Plate  X.  Like  the  Corinthians  they  drew  their 
figures  in  black  silhouette  with  details  expressed 
by  incised  lines,  and  like  them  too  they  some- 
times used  other  colours  for  details,  notably 
white  for  the  flesh  of  women  and  purple  for  the 
beards  of  men.  The  latter  seems  to  have  no 
relation  to  the  facts  of  nature,  but  the  white 
probably  tells  a  melancholy  truth.  The  women 
of  Athens  seldom  left  their  houses,  and  the 

1  Differently  drawn  in  the  two  styles,  cp.  Plate  VIII  b 
with  Plate  IX. 

1  See,  e.g.  Plate  VIII  b,  a  comparatively  late  specimen  of 
its  style. 


86        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

unhealthy  pallor  of  their  complexions  must 
have  offered  a  striking  contrast  to  the  bronzed 
faces  of  the  men.  The  ground  colour  of  Athenian 
vases  is  not  cream  but  red. 

Now  that  the  vase  painters  were  drawing  real 
pictures  the  rosettes  and  other  fill  ornaments 
of  the  earlier  styles  were  only  in  the  way,  and 
soon  they  disappeared.  Their  places,  however, 
were  not  always  left  vacant.  More  and  more 
frequently  the  potter  is  a  man  who  can  read 
and  write  and  he  labels  his  gods  and  heroes  with 
their  respective  names.  Sometimes,  again,  he 
puts  words  into  the  mouths  of  his  figures  : 
one  of  these  vase  painters,  for  instance,  has 
drawn  us  two  elegant  Athenians  sitting  very 
lightly  clad  and  both  looking  at  a  swallow. 
"  See,  the  swallow !  "  says  one  of  them.  "  By 
Heracles,  spring  already,"  replies  the  other. 
Another  symptomatic  fact  is  that  these  Athenian 
potters  often  sign  their  names.  Some  vases  bear 
the  signature  of  the  potter,  some  of  the  painter, 
a  few  of  both.  Of  one  of  these  potters,  by  name 
Nicosthenes,  we  possess  over  ninety  signed 
vases.  Perhaps  it  is  no  accident  that  this 
particular  potter  turned  out  on  the  whole 
worse  ware  than  any  of  his  less  productive  and 
pushful  contemporaries. 

About  the  year  530  B.C.  the  Attic  potters 
developed  a  new  style  of  vase  painting,  known 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   87 

generally  as  red  figure  in  contradistinction 
to  the  black  figure  style  that  it  replaced. 
In  the  red  figure  style  (Plate  XI)  the  artist 
drew  his  outline  as  before  on  the  red  or  terra- 
cotta coloured  ground  of  the  vase  ;  but  instead 
of  filling  in  the  outline  in  black  he  filled  in  the 
background  with  black  and  left  the  figures 
in  red.  This  enabled  him  to  paint  in  details 
with  fine  pencil  lines  instead  of  the  incisions 
used  on  the  black  figure  vases,  and  as  regards 
individual  figures  enabled  him  to  express  him- 
self as  freely  as  the  modern  artist  working  in 
pen  and  ink.  This  is  perhaps  as  far  as  the 
great  artists  got  whose  pictures  the  vase 
painter  humbly  borrowed  from.  There  is  no 
evidence  that  the  possibilities  of  background 
and  atmosphere  were  realised  even  by  the 
greatest  of  Greek  painters.  Even  in  drawing 
the  sixth-century  Attic  vase  painters  were  not 
yet  technically  perfect.  They  had  not,  for 
instance,  realised  that  though  the  human  eye 
is  almond-shaped  it  does  not  appear  so  and 
therefore  should  not  be  drawn  so  when  the  face 
is  in  profile.  We  may,  indeed,  love  them 
simply  for  their  very  quaintness.  But  there  is 
also  a  refinement  and  charm  about  their 
drawings  that  will  be  sought  in  vain  among  the 
facile  and  florid  productions  of  later  ages. 
Greek  vases  of  the  styles  just  described  have 


88         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

been  found  in  enormous  quantities  not  only  in 
Attica  and  other  parts  of  Greece,  but  also  in 
Italy,  Egypt,  South  Russia,  and  elsewhere. 
This  fact  by  itself  is  enough  to  show  how 
Greek  trade  was  developing  in  all  directions. 
For  the  vases  discovered  can  only  form  a  minute 
fraction  of  those  that  were  exported,  and  if 
Greek  vases  penetrated  everywhere  in  this 
way  we  may  be  sure  that  other  kinds  of  Greek 
goods  did  so  equally.  Pottery  is  not  a  particu- 
larly portable  commodity.  Where  it  differs 
from  most  others  is  in  being  practically  in- 
destructible. If  we  visit  any  ancient  site, 
Greek,  Roman,  ancient  British,  or  even  early 
Saxon,  we  shall  if  we  use  our  eyes  find  plenty 
of  potsherds  of  the  period,  but  of  other  remains 
often  none  at  all.  Wood  rots,  metal  rusts,  most 
stones  are  more  or  less  friable,  while  such  as 
are  not  get  taken  away  to  be  used  elsewhere 
for  other  purposes.  But  potsherds  have  no 
intrinsic  value.  Violent  treatment  diminishes 
their  size  but  increases  their  number,  and 
thus  the  amount  and  quality  of  pottery  on  a 
site  gives  some  idea  of  the  amount  and  quality 
of  other  products  that  were  once  in  use  there. 
Apart  from  the  archaeological  evidence  we 
know  from  ancient  writers  that  commerce  and 
industry  were  rapidly  developing.  Thucydides 
regarded  the  growth  of  trade  and  shipping  as 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS    89 

one  of  the  dominant  features  of  our  period. 
The  Dark  Ages  had  been  ages  of  isolation  and 
exclusiveness.  Ships  there  were,  indeed,  and 
in  some  number  :  but  they  were  mostly  pirates 
or  ships  equipped  to  keep  the  pirates  off.  But 
in  the  seventh  century  B.C.  we  begin  to  hear  of 
Greek  merchant  adventurers  somewhat  of  the 
Dick  Whittington  description,  who  sail  away 
into  distant  lands  and  come  back  incredibly 
wealthy  as  a  result  of  bartering  Greek  goods  for 
the  products  of  the  lands  they  visit.  After 
a  time  the  leading  Greek  cities  began  to  have 
regular  trade  connexions  with  this  or  that 
quarter  of  the  foreign  world  or  the  Greek 
world  overseas.  There  were,  for  instance,  close 
trade  connexions  between  Miletus  in  Asia 
Minor  and  Sybaris  in  South  Italy. 

On  the  land,  too,  a  similar  development  was 
taking  place.  The  city  states  were  still  in  a 
condition  of  chronic  antagonism  as  acute  and 
as  absurd  as  that  which  prevails  in  Europe  at 
this  day.  But  the  governments  of  this  particu- 
lar period  were  largely  trying  to  mitigate  this 
condition  of  things.  Most  of  the  leading  states 
established  about  this  time  a  typically  Greek 
institution  in  the  shape  of  solemn  games,  held 
in  some  cases  annually,  in  some  biennially,  in 
some  once  every  four  years.  These  games  were 
primarily  athletic  and  literary  competitions  in 


90        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

which  all  Greeks  were  eligible  to  compete.  In 
point  of  fact  they  became  as  well  a  kind  of 
great  fair  held  under  conditions  that  recall  the 
mediaeval  truce  of  God.  All  kinds  of  people 
gathered  at  these  meetings  and  they  came  to 
mean  among  other  things  that  at  regular 
periods  members  of  all  Greek  cities,  whether 
allies,  neutrals,  or  belligerents,  had  an  oppor- 
tunity of  discussing  business,  politics,  or  even 
ideas.  Pindar,  who  began  writing  at  the  close 
of  our  period,  and  whose  extant  works  are  all 
occasional  poems  written  in  honour  of  victors 
at  these  games,  makes  frequent  allusions  to  the 
commercial  ties  of  the  cities  that  he  glorifies. 
For  him,  as  for  the  other  more  enlightened 
supporters  of  these  institutions,  the  games  were 
great  inter-city,  or  as  we  should  say,  inter- 
national gatherings  that  made  for  understanding 
and  reconcilement  among  the  states  assembled. 
His  hopes,  it  is  true,  proved  as  baseless  as  those 
of  the  men  who  organised  the  Great  Exhibition 
of  1851,  not  to  mention  more  recent  aspirations 
in  the  same  direction.  But  though  these 
festivals  failed  to  achieve  all  that  poets  hoped 
of  them,  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  estimate 
lightly  the  value  of  what  they  did  in  fact 
achieve.  When  all  is  said  these  Greek  games 
remain  one  of  the  few  notable  efforts  to  recon- 
cile a  deeply  rooted  local  patrotism  with  a 


RENAISSANCE  IN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS   91 

really  live  internationalism  that  the  world  has 
so  far  seen.1 

1  No  popular  books  are  devoted  exclusively  to  the  arts 
and  industries  of  Greece  during  the  archaic  period,  but  they 
are,  of  course,  dealt  with  incidentally  in  all  general  accounts 
of  the  subjects,  e.g.  (to  quote  only  works  of  very  modest 
prices)  H.  B.  Walters'  little  volume  on  Greek  Art  in  the  Little 
Books  on  Art  series,  and  the  Guide  to  Greek  and  Roman  An- 
tiquities in  the  British  Museum  and  the  similar  Guide  to  Greek 
and  Roman  Life,  both  published  by  the  Museum  Authorities 
and  obtainable  at  the  Museum.  Better  still,  of  course,  if 
these  can  be  supplemented  by  a  study  of  the  originals.  For 
sculpture,  see  the  earlier  part  of  E.  Gardner's  Handbook  of 
Greek  Sculpture. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT 

THE  artists  and  craftsmen  whose  work 
was  the  subject  of  Chapter  IV  were 
conscious  of  their  debt  to  more  ancient 
civilisations,  and  particularly  to  that  of  Crete. 
Some  of  them  are  described  as  sons  of  Daedalus, 
the  marvellous  craftsman  who  had  worked  for 
the  Cretan  King  Minos.  Daedalus  had  put  such 
life  into  his  statues  that  they  had  to  be  chained 
up  to  prevent  them  from  walking  away  from 
then:  pedestals,  and  it  was  very  possibly  the 
rediscovery  of  Cretan  masterpieces  that  in- 
spired the  artists  of  the  seventh  and  sixth 
centuries  B.C.  just  as  the  discovery  of  Greek 
and  Roman  masterpieces  fired  the  artists  of 
the  modern  European  renaissance. 

Whether  the  renaissance  in  thought  had  a 
similar  origin  is  hard  to  say.  Some  of  the 
earliest  Greek  writers  and  speculators  are  said 
to  have  travelled  in  Egypt,  where  they  un- 
doubtedly were  much  impressed  by  the  written 
wisdom  of  the  priests.  But  the  wisdom  of 

92 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  93 

ancient  Egypt  is  a  dull  and  dead  thing  com- 
pared with  that  of  these  early  Greeks ;  and 
even  if  it  was  greater  than  the  extant  documents 
suggest,  it  is  doubtful  how  far  it  was  accessible 
to  casual  Greek  tourists.  Perhaps  the  in- 
accessibility of  Egyptian  wisdom  to  the  Greeks 
made  it  the  more  inspiring.  Early  Greek 
thinkers  became  acutely  conscious  of  the  exist- 
ence of  learning  and  accomplishments  that  in 
some  ways  obviously  far  surpassed  their  own  : 
but  knowing  nothing  precise  about  Egyptian 
learning  they  were  not  led  to  fancy  that 
wisdom  could  be  attained  by  any  definite  and 
prescribed  course  of  study,  however  long  and 
thorough,  and,  equally  important,  they  were 
thrown  back  on  themselves  to  make  good  their 
deficiencies.  Whatever  the  other  factors  that 
contributed  to  the  sudden  outburst  of  intel- 
lectual activity  in  seventh-century  Greece, 
there  can  be  no  question  that  much  was  due  to 
the  fact  that  a  powerful  stimulus  to  thought 
was  combined  as  it  has  seldom  been  at  any 
other  period  with  a  remarkable  absence  of  any 
influence  to  force  the  new  thought  into  old  and 
misleading  channels.  This  explains  the  fresh- 
ness and  independence  that  to  this  day  marks 
off  early  Greek  writers  from  those  who  have 
written  under  the  incubus  of  a  classical  tra- 
dition. 


94        THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

The  writers  who  were  least  obviously  opening 
up  new  paths  were  the  poets  ;  for  poetry  had 
continued  in  Greece  throughout  the  Dark  Ages. 
But  even  the  poetry  of  the  new  age  shows  a 
fundamental  break  with  the  past.  The  Iliad 
and  the  Odyssey  tell  us  as  little  of  the  men  who 
wrote  them  as  the  Waverley  novels  tell  us  of 
Sir  Walter  Scott.  But  the  new  writers  of  the 
seventh  and  sixth  centuries  B.C.  were  above  all 
things  interested  in  themselves  and  the  people 
and  happenings  of  their  own  age.  Time  has  not 
treated  the  writers  of  this  period  kindly  ;  all 
through  this  chapter  we  shall  have  to  deal 
with  mere  fragments  of  literature,  accidentally 
preserved  through  being  quoted  by  some  learned 
professor  or  grammarian  of  a  later  age,  or 
else  rediscovered  recently  on  some  Egyptian 
rubbish  heap.  But  even  these  fragments, 
preserved  in  such  casual  ways,  are  enough  to 
show  the  quality  of  the  men  and  women  who 
wrote  them. 

One  of  the  earliest  and  greatest  of  the  new 
poets  was  Archilochus.  He  was  a  native  of 
the  island  of  Paros,  and  lived  his  adventurous 
life  in  the  first  half  of  the  seventh  century. 
Only  one  complete  poem  of  his  has  come  down 
to  us  and  that  one  is  only  four  lines  long.  It 
tells  us  how  the  poet  behaved  in  a  battle  against 
the  Saians  : 


"  One  of  the  Saians  is  rejoicing  in  my 
shield,  that  blameless  weapon  which  re- 
luctantly I  left  behind  a  bush.  But  I  my- 
self escaped  the  doom  of  death.  So  let  the 
shield  go  hang  :  I'll  get  another  just  as 
good." 

On  the  same  island  as  Archilochus  there 
lived  a  young  lady  of  high  rank  named  lambe, 
with  whom  the  poet  fell  in  love.  But  her 
people,  who  appear  to  have  looked  down  on 
the  poet  and  his  family,  would  not  allow  a 
marriage,  and  the  lady  seems  to  have  accepted 
their  decision.  This  so  enraged  the  poet  that 
his  passion  was  turned  from  love  to  hatred,  and 
he  published  such  scathing  verses  about  lambe 
and  her  whole  family  that  they  one  and  all 
went  and  hanged  themselves.  The  correct 
thing  now  for  Archilochus  to  do  was  plainly 
to  be  overcome  with  remorse,  and  either  follow 
their  example  or  spend  the  rest  of  his  days  in 
shame  and  misery.  But  Archilochus  was  dis- 
tinctly unconventional.  Instead  of  doing  any- 
thing of  the  kind  he  wrote  another  poem 
exulting  in  the  success  of  his  previous  attacks. 
Only  one  line  of  it  has  survived,  but  that  by 
itself  is  sufficiently  expressive.  It  refers  to 
the  family  he  had  driven  to  suicide  and  it  runs 
as  follows  : 


96         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

"  They  bowed  their  heads  and  gurgled  forth 
their  pride." 

Another  poet  of  this  period  who  had  an 
immense  reputation  in  antiquity  was  Alcaeus, 
who  lived  a  generation  or  two  after  Archilochus 
in  the  island  of  Lesbos  or  Mitylene.  He,  too, 
ran  away  in  battle  and  recorded  the  fact  in 
a  poem,  and  he,  too,  expressed  his  pleasure  in 
the  death  of  his  enemy  without  mincing  his 
words  : 

"  Now  we  must  get  drunk,  now  we  must 
drink  hard,  for  Myrsilus  has  been  killed." 

But  probably  the  most  notable  of  all  the  great 
poets  of  this  period  was  a  woman,  also  a  native 
of  Mitylene.  Sappho  lived  at  the  same  time  as 
well  as  in  the  same  town  with  Alcseus,  who 
tells  us  that  she  had  black  hair  and  a  sweet 
smile.  She  established  a  sort  of  school  in 
which  she  educated  a  small  band  of  young 
women.  Little  is  known  of  her  aims  and  less 
of  her  methods,  except  that  her  training  was 
by  no  means  purely  intellectual.  It  is,  however, 
as  a  poet  rather  than  as  a  pioneer  in  the  higher 
education  of  women  that  Sappho  best  deserves 
to  be  remembered.  The  two  complete  poems  of 
hers  that  have  fortunately  survived  are  too 
long  to  quote  here  in  full  and  too  good  to  quote 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT   97 

otherwise ;  but  a  few  of  her  fragments  will  give 
some  notion  of  her  character  : 

"  The  moon  has  set  and  the  Pleiads ;  midnight  has  come ; 

my  bloom  is  passing  and  I  sleep  alone." 
"  Sweet  mother,  I  cannot  ply  the  loom,  for  I  am  subdued 

with  longing  for  a  lad  through  tender  Aphrodite." 

"  As  for  me,  I  love  luxury." 

One  other  poet  of  the  period  who  must  here 
be  mentioned  is  Mimnermus  of  Smyrna,  who 
was  writing  about  620  B.C.  His  fragments 
illustrate  the  decadent  realism  which  seems  to 
be  an  inevitable  by-product  of  an  age  of 
enlightenment.  Everywhere  around  him  the 
poet  sees  death,  except  where  he  finds  im- 
mortality, and  either  alternative  fills  him 
equally  with  gloom.  The  immortal  sun  has 
been  sentenced  to  hard  labour  for  eternity 
without  the  prospect  of  even  a  day's  release. 
Mortal  men  can  but  snatch  a  few  hurried 
pleasures  before  they  are  carried  off  by 
death,  or  its  still  more  horrible  alternative 
old  age. 

What  is  life,  what  pleasure  without  Aphrodite  the  golden  ? 

Let  me  die  when  I  cease  longer  to  love  what  she  brings, 
Stolen  kisses  and  honey  sweet  gifts  and  lovers'  embraces. 

These  and  the  like  are  the  great  glorious  prizes  of  youth 
Both  for  men  and  for  women  :  but  when  with  his  aches 
and  his  agues 

Oncoming  age  makes  a  man  ugly  and  villainous  too, 

7 


98         THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Villainous  cares  ever  ring  him  around  and  pull  at  his  heait 

strings ; 

Nor  doth  he  longer  rejoice  seeing  the  light  of  the  sun. 
Young  men  eye  him  with  hate,  he  is  held  in  scorn  by  the 

women. 
Such  an  affliction  to  men  age  has  been  made  by  the  god. 

These  bald  translations  of  a  few  scattered 
fragments  nevertheless  suggest  something  of 
the  quality  of  the  writers  from  whom  they  are 
taken.  They  show  that  all  alike  are  intensely 
concerned  with  their  own  personal  experiences, 
and  all  alike  are  passionately,  almost  extrava- 
gantly, anxious  to  discover  and  state  the  truth 
about  their  own  inner  selves.  This  by  itself 
makes  them  noteworthy  figures.  In  most  ages 
such  seeking  after  truth  has  been  taboo.  The 
normal  practice  has  been  to  try  to  train  and 
alter  human  nature  by  methods  of  repression. 
A  man  must  not  confess  his  fears  even  to  him- 
self, and  still  less  must  a  woman  avow  her 
passions.  But  these  are  the  very  things  about 
which  Archilochus,  Alcseus,  and  Sappho  write. 
They  lead  the  way  in  the  line  of  great  writers 
who  have  held  self-knowledge  as  a  passionate 
faith  and  preached  the  doctrine  in  the  only 
practicable  way  by  publishing  confessions  of 
their  own.  The  form  and  the  spirit  have 
differed  in  different  writers  and  in  different 
periods.  Byron,  perhaps,  comes  nearest  to  these 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  99 

early  Greeks  in  both  respects ;  but  something 
of  the  same  spirit  has  inspired  writers  as 
different  in  other  ways  as  the  writer  of  some  of 
the  psalms,  St.  Augustine,  and  some  of  our 
modern  novelists.  The  writer  of  confessions 
is  open  to  obvious  dangers.  The  thirst  for  self- 
knowledge  may  be  contaminated  by  a  craving 
for  sensational  revelation.  Everyone  is  familiar 
with  the  Byronic  pose.  But  as  far  as  the 
evidence  allows  us  to  judge,  the  Greek  poets 
suffered  remarkably  little  from  the  defects  of 
their  qualities.1 

In  writing  of  themselves  in  this  intimate 
way  the  early  Greek  poets  were  obeying  the 
precept,  "  know  thyself,"  which  was  written 
up  on  the  front  of  the  great  national  temple 
at  Delphi.  But  this  precept  is  one  that  nobody 
can  properly  follow  without  knowing  all  that 
is  possible  of  his  surroundings.  The  personal 
poetry  of  Sappho  and  Archilochus  illustrates 
one  side  of  a  movement  that  on  another  side 
found  its  expression  in  a  great  outbreak  of 
purely  scientific  work.  The  city  that  led  the 
way  here  was  Miletus,  and  modern  scholars 
have  noticed  that  Miletus  was  said  to  have 
belonged  originally  to  the  Carians,  a  race  con- 
stantly associated  with  early  Crete,  and  that 

1  For  a  good  short  account  of  Greek  literary  achievements, 
see  Gilbert  Murray's  Ancient  Greek  Literature. 


100       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

this  tradition  of  Cretan  connexions  is  confirmed 
by  finds  made  recently  on  the  site.    It  is  perhaps 
equally  significant  that  Miletus  lay  on  the  main- 
land of  Asia  Minor  at  the  end  of  the  trade  route 
which  led  up  the  River  Meander  towards  the  Far 
East,  and  further  that  the  Milesians  were  the 
first  Greeks  to  settle  in  any  numbers  in  Egypt. 
All    these    influences,    Cretan,    Mesopotamian, 
and  Egyptian,  may  have  contributed  towards 
the  Milesian  movement,  and  there  may  well 
have  been   a   fundamental  truth   behind  the 
story  that  one  of  these  Milesian  "  philosophers  " 
(as   all   students   and   speculators   were   then 
called)  went  and  studied  in  Egypt  and  then 
proceeded   to   start   teaching   his   instructors. 
He  taught  them,  so  it  is  said,  to  measure  the 
height  of  a  pyramid.    Geometry  and  astronomy 
occupied   much   of   the   time    of   these   early 
speculators.    Thales,  the  philosopher  just  men- 
tioned, is  stated  further  to  have  invented  a 
method  of  measuring  the  distance  of  ships  at 
sea,   and    to  have    foretold   the  date   of    an 
eclipse. 

But  the  pivot  of  this  scientific  movement 
appears  to  have  been  the  attempt  to  determine 
what  the  earth  is  made  of.  There  was  a  general 
belief  that  all  things  came  from  a  single  primal 
substance  ;  but  on  the  question  as  to  what 
that  substance  was  there  was  a  variety  of 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  101 

opinions.  Thales  thought  that  the  earth  was 
made  of  water.  We  know  little  of  his  lines  of 
argument.  No  doubt  he  had  realised  how  mis- 
taken is  the  notion  that  the  solid  state  is  the 
most  permanent :  probably,  too,  he  thought 
of  the  vital  force  as  something  liquid,  and 
observed  how  all  things  alike  depend  on  moisture 
in  some  form  or  other  to  keep  them  alive. 
Another  of  these  philosophers,  Anaximenes  by 
name,  went  further  and  maintained  that  the 
primal  element  was  air.  He  seems  to  have 
pondered  much  on  problems  of  condensation 
and  rarefaction,  and  to  have  regarded  condensa- 
tion as  the  deviation  from  the  normal,  a  view 
that  seems  to  imply  that  body  is  spirit  that  has 
deviated  from  its  normal  rarefied  state. 

Somewhat  earlier  than  Anaximenes  a  still 
more  advanced  view  had  been  put  forward 
by  Anaximander,  who  taught  that  all  created 
things  came  from  what  he  called  the  "  unde- 
fined "  or  "  infinite." 

Another  particularly  interesting  philosopher 
of  this  period  was  Heraclitus,  who  held  that 
the  primary  element  was  fire.  He  taught  that 
nothing  was  permanent,  all  things  being  in  a 
state  of  flux.  "  All  flows  and  nought  stands 
firm,"  or,  as  he  put  it  figuratively,  "You  can- 
not step  into  the  same  stream  twice."  This 
conception  of  fire  as  the  fundamental  element 


102       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

was  a  marked  advance  on  the  theory  of  Thales  ; 
for  fire  was  not  clearly  differentiated  from  heat, 
and  thus  the  Heraclitan  doctrine  to  some  extent 
anticipates  the  modern  theories  of  the  material 
world  in  which  chemistry  tends  to  become  sub- 
ordinate to  physics. 

A  word  of  warning  is  perhaps  desirable  at 
this  point.  Reading  of  these  old  philosophers 
in  the  light  of  modern  scientific  work  there  is 
a  danger  of  overestimating  the  amount  of 
attention  that  they  paid  to  pure  science.  In 
spite  of  their  being  so  absorbed  in  the  problem 
of  the  composition  of  the  earth  they  were  not 
specialists  in  geo-chemistry.  In  the  truest 
sense  they  were  philosophers.  The  surroundings 
in  which  they  lived  forced  them  to  realise  with 
special  clearness  the  transitory  nature  of  much 
that  had  long  been  thought  permanent,  and  the 
uncertain  character  of  much  that  had  long 
been  accepted  without  dispute.  The  object 
of  their  quest  was  ultimate  reality.  They  were 
emerging  from  a  crude  materialistic  period, 
and  almost  inevitably  in  their  search  for  the 
true  nature  of  things  they  turned  first  to  the 
material  universe  out  of  which  our  world  pre- 
sumably came.  The  sort  of  part  played  by 
purely  physical  speculations  in  their  general 
outlook  may  be  illustrated  from  Heraclitus, 
whose  views  are  known  to  us  rather  better  than 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  103 

those  of  Thales,  Anaximander,  or  Anaximenes. 
We  know,  for  instance,  that  he  had  doubts  as 
to  the  evidence  of  the  senses  :  "  Eyes  and  ears," 
he  tells  us,  "  are  bad  witnesses  to  men  if  they 
have  souls  that  understand  not  their  language." 
He  is  the  first  of  a  long  line  of  thinkers,  ancient 
and  modern,  who  have  attempted  to  interpret 
sense  experiences  in  the  light  of  the  critical 
reason  so  as  to  form  a  truer  notion  of  the  under- 
lying reality.  His  solution  of  the  problem  in 
some  respects  strikingly  resembles  that  of  Hegel. 
The  world  of  appearances,  the  world  we  know 
through  our  eyes  and  ears,  is  one  of  contra- 
dictory opposites,  such  as  life  and  death,  war 
and  peace,  heat  and  cold,  surfeit  and  hunger. 
In  the  world  of  reality  all  these  apparent  con- 
tradictions are  reconciled.  Even  good  and 
evil  are  one  in  the  world  of  God.  '  To  God  all 
things  are  fair  and  good  and  right,  but  men 
hold  some  things  wrong  and  some  right." 
"It  is  the  same  thing  in  us  that  is  quick  and 
dead,  awake  and  asleep,  young  and  old ;  the 
former  are  shifted  and  become  the  latter,  and 
the  latter  in  turn  are  shifted  and  become  the 
former."  As  to  how  this  metaphysical  teaching 
about  opposites  was  combined  with  the  physical 
doctrine  about  fire  some  idea  may  be  gleaned 
from  other  fragments  :  "  God  is  day  and  night, 
winter  and  summer,  war  and  peace,  surfeit  and 


104       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

hunger,  just  as  fire  when  it  is  mingled  with 
spices  is  named  according  to  the  savour  of 
each."  "  Fire  lives  the  death  of  air,  and  air 
lives  the  death  of  fire  ;  water  lives  the  death  of 
earth,  and  earth  that  of  water."  With  Hera- 
clitus  it  is  plain  that  natural  science  played  a 
secondary  and  subordinate  role  to  metaphysics  ; 
but  there  was  no  such  sharp  distinction  between 
the  two  subjects  as  has  been  drawn  in  modern 
times.  This  comes  out  particularly  plainly 
in  the  teaching  of  Anaximander,  who  introduced 
curious  ideas  of  justice  and  injustice  into  his 
explanations  of  purely  material  phenomena  : 
"  And  into  that  form  from  which  things  take 
their  rise  they  pass  away  once  more  as  is 
ordained  ;  for  they  make  reparation  and  satis- 
faction to  one  another  for  their  injustice 
according  to  the  appointed  time." 

But  of  all  the  men  who  speculated  on  the 
nature  of  things  a  generation  or  so  after  Thales 
the  most  interesting  is  perhaps  Pythagoras. 
More  than  any  of  the  thinkers  just  mentioned 
Pythagoras  struck  the  general  imagination, 
and,  as  so  often  happens,  it  was  not  his  main 
doctrine  that  most  interested  the  public,  but 
the  circumstance  that  he  founded  brotherhoods 
to  live  in  accordance  with  them,  and  still  more 
perhaps  the  fact  that  he  was  peculiar  in  his 
diet  and  had  a  conscientious  objection  to 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  105 

eating  beans.  The  Pythagoreans  sought  ultimate 
truth  by  the  road  of  advanced  mathematics. 
Much  of  their  researches  dealt  with  problems  of 
musical  notes  and  sound  generally.  Some  of 
the  discoveries  that  they  made  in  this  direction 
were  epoch-making.  They  are  the  pioneers 
who  led  the  way  to  the  advanced  mathematics 
of  the  present  day.  On  certain  other  sides, 
however,  the  teaching  of  Pythagoras  and  his 
school  was  reactionary  and  obscurantist.  He 
seems  to  have  accepted  a  whole  system  of 
taboos.  His  disciples  were,  for  instance,  for- 
bidden to  touch  a  white  cock,  to  sit  on  a  quart 
measure,  or  to  look  in  a  mirror  beside  a  light. 
When  a  Pythagorean  took  a  pot  off  the  fire,  he 
was  not  to  leave  the  mark  of  it  in  the  ashes 
but  stir  them  together.  When  he  rose  from 
bed,  he  must  roll  the  bedclothes  together  and 
smooth  out  the  impress  of  his  body.  Even  in 
the  region  of  pure  mathematics,  where  the 
school  did  such  epoch-making  work,  serious 
research  went  hand  in  hand  with  the  most 
childish  fancies.  Numbers  became  a  sort  of 
fetish,  the  origin  and  explanation  of  all  things. 
Things,  in  fact,  were  numbers,  justice,  for  in- 
stance, being  identified  with  four,  marriage 
with  three.  It  is  instructive  to  bear  in  mind 
how  closely  the  wheat  and  tares  grew  up 
together  in  the  systems  of  these  great  thinkers, 


106       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

There  can  be  no  question  that  the  system  of 
Pythagoras  made  a  tremendous  appeal.  Ulti- 
mately, however,  the  mystical  fervour  of  the 
school  caused  its  members  to  be  generally 
suspected  as  bad  unpatriotic  persons  and  they 
were  extirpated,  but  fortunately  for  us  their 
mathematical  studies  were  followed  up  in  the 
fourth  century  by  Plato  and  his  school. 

To  the  man-in-the-street  these  thinkers  were 
a  curious  phenomenon.  People  used  to  tell  how 
Thales  was  so  absent-minded  and  incapable 
of  looking  after  himself  that  he  fell  down  a 
well  while  looking  at  the  stars.  But  there 
was  at  the  same  time  an  uncomfortable 
feeling  abroad  that,  even  measured  by  the 
wisdom  of  the  generation  in  which  they  lived, 
perhaps  these  philosophers  were  not  such 
fools  as  they  looked.  It  was  a  money-making 
age  (we  owe  to  it  the  proverb,  "  Money  maketh 
man  "),  and  Thales,  so  the  story  tells  us,  was 
criticised  for  following  so  profitless  an  occupa- 
tion. There  seemed  in  those  days  to  be  no 
money  in  natural  science.  But  Thales  was 
among  other  things  a  meteorologist,  and  he 
foresaw  a  particularly  good  olive  harvest.  With 
this  in  view  he  quietly  made  a  corner  in  oil 
presses,  proceeded  without  excessive  profiteering 
to  make  a  fortune  in  oil,  and  then  at  once  got 
on  with  his  researches, 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  107 

On  the  whole,  science  in  this  early  period  did 
not  turn  itself  to  practical  applications  as  it 
has  done  in  recent  times  with  such  varied  and 
notable  effects.  But  there  were  other  ways 
in  which  it  did  come  into  collision  with  every- 
day life.  Greek  religion  had  hitherto  been  a 
chaotic  medley  of  all  sorts  of  beliefs  and  tra- 
ditions clustering  round  all  sorts  of  devils 
and  divinities.  In  Homer  gods  and  goddesses 
mingle  freely  with  men,  and  being  stronger 
and  cleverer  than  mortals  allow  themselves  all 
sorts  of  licences  that  the  human  beings  in  the 
poem  fear  to  take.  The  gods  to  whom  Hesiod 
devotes  his  "  Theogony  "  are  mostly  gloomy 
forbidding  beings  whom  the  poet  tells  us  about 
for  the  strictly  practical  purpose  of  enabling 
us  to  influence  or  placate  them  or  get  out  of 
their  way.  These  two  poets  in  course  of  time 
had  become  a  sort  of  Bible  to  the  Greeks,  and 
the  result  was  what  always  happens  in  similar 
cases.  Many  really  religious  natures  with  a 
natural  capacity  for  conformity  found  it  easy 
enough,  by  fixing  their  attention  on  the  more 
edifying  parts  of  the  medley,  to  draw  from  it 
the  spiritual  nourishment  that  they  needed  ; 
but  with  the  masses  the  immorality  and  worse 
of  their  sacred  books  and  stories  must  have 
found  a  congenial  reflexion  in  their  own  lives, 
and  probably  did  much  to  prevent  any  general 


108       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

raising  of  their  moral  standards.  No  doubt 
these  orthodox  upholders  of  the  old  immoralities 
were  often  enough  shocked  by  the  views  of  the 
new  scientists.1  The  feeling,  however,  was 
reciprocated,  as  we  know  from  a  fragment  of 
Xenophanes',  who  survived  as  an  old  man  into 
the  fifth  century  B.C.,  but  lived  most  of  his 
life  in  the  sixth  and  had  been  a  pupil  of  Anaxi- 
mander.  The  views  of  the  new  science  on  the 
old  religion  cannot  be  better  expressed  than 
in  Xenophanes'  own  words  : 

God  is  one  :  alone  of  gods  and  men  the  most  mighty, 
Neither  in  bodily  form  like  men  nor  in  understanding, 
All  of  him  seeing  and  all  of  him  thinking  and  all  of  him 

hearing. 
Labouring  not  by  the  thought  of  his  heart  he  ordereth  all 

things. 
Ever  the  same  unchanged  he  abides  nor  doth  anything 

move  him. 
How  were  it  fitting  that  he  should  go  seeking  now  hither 

now  thither  ? 

Only  mortals  imagine  that  gods  are  made  after  their  image 
Having  the  selfsame  senses  as  men  and  voices  and  bodies. 
But  if  fingers  and  hands  were  possessed  by  oxen  and  lions, 
And  they  could  paint  with  their  hands  and  perform  the 

work  that  men  can, 
Horses  would  paint  the  gods  like  horses  and  oxen  like 

oxen, 

1  In  the  fifth  century  B.C.  an  Athenian  philosopher  was 
suspected  of  immorality  and  atheism  for  saying  that  the 
moon  was  as  big  as  the  Morea. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  109 

Making  the  shapes  and  forms  of  their  bodies  such  as  their 

own  are. 

All  things  Homer  ascribed  to  the  gods  and  Hesiod  also, 
All  that  is  held  among  men  a  reproach  and  utterly  blameful, 
Picking  and  stealing,  committing  adultery,  cheating  each 

other.1 

The  Greek  word  for  research  was  historia, 
and  it  is  only  in  comparatively  recent  times 
that  "  history  "  has  been  narrowed  down  to 
embrace  nothing  but  the  recorded  activities  of 
the  human  race.  A  relic  of  the  wider  use  is 
still  to  be  found  in  the  term  "  natural  history." 
History  as  we  now  understand  it  developed 
in  Greece  rather  later  than  the  "natural 
history  "  or  inquiry  into  the  works  of  nature 
pursued  by  the  Ionian  philosophers.  The 
reason  for  this  order  of  events  may  have  been 
accidental.  The  Dark  Ages  had  left  the  Greeks 
with  little  of  their  own  past  except  a  mass  of 
legend  which  the  best  minds  were  beginning 
to  regard  as  valueless  as  records  of  fact.  Politi- 
cal circumstances  were  also  against  their  taking 
a  broad  view  of  history,  since  the  city  state 
with  all  its  good  qualities  tended  to  make  its 
citizens  deeply  and  disastrously  regardless  of 

1  Readers  interested  in  early  Greek  Science  and  Philosophy 
are  recommended  to  consult  Early  Greek  Philosophy,  by 
J.  Burnet  (3rd  edition,  1920),  whose  versions  have  been 
adopted  in  all  the  fragments  here  quoted  except  the  last, 
where  the  writer  has  attempted  to  reproduce  the  original 
metrical  form. 


110       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

all  that  went  on  outside  it. x  Chroniclers,  indeed, 
arose  in  the  sixth  century  B.C.,  but  to  judge  from 
the  scanty  fragments  that  have  been  preserved 
none  of  them  showed  any  very  remarkable 
abilities.  The  first  great  Greek  historian,  one 
of  the  greatest  of  the  world's  historians,  was 
not  born  till  a  generation  or  so  after  the  close 
of  our  period.  But  he  was  a  native  of  Asia  Minor 
and  wrote  in  the  dialect  of  the  Ionic  philo- 
sophers, and  a  short  account  of  him  may 
reasonably  be  included  in  this  chapter,  which 
would,  indeed,  be  incomplete  without  it.  We  have 
already  had  occasion  to  quote  him  more  than  once. 
His  name  was  Herodotus,  and  his  native  city 
was  Halicarnassus,  which  lay  in  the  south-west 
corner  of  Asia  Minor,  not  far  from  the  island 
of  Rhodes.  The  date  of  his  birth  was  about 
484  B.C.,  and  his  history  mentions  events  of 
430  B.C.,  but  is  conspicuously  silent  about 
the  events  of  415-413  B.C.,  and  appears  to  be 
ignorant  of  what  happened  in  424.  He  was 
a  great  traveller  and  made  far  journeys  north, 
south,  east,  and  west,  including  a  visit  to 
Egypt  and  a  prolonged  stay  in  South  Italy. 
The  subject  of  his  work  is  the  great  war  between 

1  Again  and  again  in  later  Greek  history  we  find  great 
foreign  powers  like  Persia  and  Macedonia  regarded  merely 
as  sources  from  which  to  raise  money,  munitions,  or  men  to 
help  in  some  petty  domestic  quarrel. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  111 

Persia  and  Greece,  of  which  the  main  events 
were  the  unsuccessful  invasion  of  Greece  by  the 
fleet  of  King  Darius  I  of  Persia  in  490  B.C., 
and  the  much  more  serious  but  equally  unsuc- 
cessful invasion  by  Xerxes,  the  son  and  successor 
of  Darius,  in  480-479  B.C.  But  our  historian 
took  a  broad  view  of  his  subject.  He  saw 
these  Persian  wars  as  one  phase  in  the  age-long 
struggle  between  Europe  and  Asia,  in  which 
the  most  famous  incident  previous  to  the  age 
of  Herodotus  had  been  the  siege  of  Troy  by 
the  Greeks,  and  of  which  later  periods  have 
been  marked  by  the  Crusades,  the  Turkish  in- 
vasion of  Europe,  and  the  various  steps  by 
which  the  Turks  have  been  driven  out  of  the 
lands  they  had  enslaved. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  Herodotus  it  was 
impossible  to  understand  the  Persian  wars 
without  some  knowledge  of  the  Persians  and 
the  various  countries  that  they  had  overthrown 
and  incorporated  in  their  empire.  Accordingly 
the  first  half  of  his  work  deals  mainly  with 
the  history  and  habits  of  such  nations  as 
the  Lydians,  Babylonians,  Medes,  Egyptians, 
Scythians,  and  Thracians.  But  even  within 
these  broad  limits  Herodotus  allows  himself  the 
most  discursive  treatment.  For  instance,  the 
section  on  Egypt,  which  covers  a  ninth  of  the 
whole  work,  describes  the  best  way  to  catch  a 


112       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

crocodile,  the  method  of  constructing  a  pyramid, 
the  various  explanations  of  the  periodic  inun- 
dations of  the  Nile,  and  the  habits  and  appear- 
ance of  the  phoenix,  the  last  from  a  picture 
since,  as  the  writer  himself  informs  us,  it  was 
only  in  pictures  that  he  had  encountered  that 
particular  bird.  Not  only  is  the  history  full  of 
good  stories,  but  the  stories  are  told  extremely 
well,  so  that  for  many  ages  Herodotus  was 
regarded  rather  as  a  first-class  story-teller  than 
a  great  historian.  We  realise  now  that  he  is 
both.  His  arrangement  of  his  material  may 
be  criticised,  but  no  serious  historian  will  now 
complain  of  its  character.  If  Herodotus  de- 
scribes the  nature  of  the  crocodile  in  his  history 
of  the  great  war  of  his  own  period,  the  most 
notable  history  so  far  written  as  the  result  of 
a  corresponding  catastrophe  in  our  own  day 
describes  creatures  quite  as  extraordinary  as 
the  crocodile  or  phcenix.  It  is  only  the  more 
recent  and  scientific  school  of  historians  (as 
distinguished  from  the  old-fashioned  writers  on 
politics  and  strategy)  that  have  realised  the 
absolute  relevance  of  Herodotus'  excursions  into 
natural  history,  geography,  economics,  sociology 
and  all  the  other  sciences  of  which  the  dis- 
covery and  development  forms  one  of  the  main 
chapters  in  human  history. 

A  proper  conception  of  the  scope  of  history 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  113 

profits  little,  however,  if  it  is  not  combined 
with  a  proper  appreciation  of  and  regard  for 
concrete  facts,  and  on  this  latter  ground 
Herodotus  has  been  frequently  assailed.  These 
attacks  must  go  back  almost  to  his  own  days, 
since  he  is  charged  with  carelessness  and  in- 
accuracy by  Thucydides,  who  cannot  have  been 
much  more  than  twenty  years  his  junior.  But 
the  charges  made  by  Thucydides  tend  rather 
to  vindicate  than  to  damage  the  reputation 
that  he  attacks.  The  points  which  he  selects 
as  typical  of  his  predecessor's  alleged  inaccuracy 
are  a  very  minor  matter  about  the  royal  vote 
in  the  Spartan  senate  and  the  name  of  a  regi- 
ment of  the  Spartan  army.  Inaccuracies  are  in 
a  sense  always  unpardonable  in  a  historian,  but 
within  limits  they  are  almost  inevitable  in  a 
work  of  any  length,  and  it  is  hard  to  imagine 
cases  more  trivial  than  those  specified  by 
Thucydides.  Two  other  criticisms  of  Hero- 
dotus need  to  be  noticed.  In  the  first  place 
he  certainly  did  record  a  number  of  assertions 
that  are  not  facts.  But  in  most  of  these  cases 
he  quotes  his  authorities  and  tells  us  that  he 
does  not  accept  them.  Some  of  these  false 
assertions  and  opinions  are  among  the  most 
valuable  parts  of  his  work.  Few  chapters  of 
history  are  more  important  and  illuminating 
and  more  worthy  of  a  faithful  record  than  that 

8 


114       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

which  deals  with  human  errors  and  misconcep- 
tions. The  second  direction  in  which  Herodotus 
frequently  goes  wrong  is  that  of  basing  wrong 
conclusions  upon  careful  but  inadequate 
observations.  Once  more  his  treatment  of  the 
crocodile  offers  a  case  in  point.  He  observes 
quite  rightly  that  of  all  rivers  he  knew  none 
but  the  Nile  bred  crocodiles.  He  could  find 
no  one  who  had  followed  up  the  Nile  from 
Egypt  to  its  source.  But  in  Gyrene  he  had 
heard  of  men  who  had  travelled  from  that  city 
far  to  the  south-west  and  found  a  river  flowing 
east  and  containing  crocodiles.  The  stream  in 
question,  as  we  now  know,  must  have  been  the 
upper  part  of  the  Niger ;  but  Herodotus, 
writing  at  the  time  he  did,  made  a  very  reason- 
able suggestion  when  he  used  this  zoological 
evidence  for  what  was  till  quite  recently  an 
unsolved  problem  of  geography.  If  a  fuller 
record  has  shown  that  he  was  mistaken  he  is 
no  more  to  be  blamed  than  modern  archaeo- 
logists and  historians  who  sometimes  allow 
themselves  to  draw  plausible  conclusions  from 
equally  inadequate  evidence.1 

1  For  further  specimens  of  Herodotus  see  particularly 
below  Chapter  VII.  Readers  who  are  beginning  the  study 
of  Greek  history  are  strongly  urged  to  procure  a  complete 
translation  of  this  most  entertaining  of  ancient  historians 
and  to  read  it  from  end  to  end.  An  inexpensive  version  is  that 
of  Rawlinson,  edited  by  Blakeney  for  the  Everyman  Library. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  115 

In  the  modern  movement  it  is  mainly  in  the 
younger  sciences,  such  as  archaeology,  that 
serious  workers  still  tend  to  draw  sweeping 
conclusions  from  inadequate  material.  In  the 
days  of  the  Greek  scientists  this  tendency  was 
universal,  and  the  circumstances  under  which 
these  early  thinkers  worked  made  it  almost 
inevitable  that  this  should  be  so.  In  all  branches 
of  history  and  geography  there  was  a  grievous 
want  of  records,  and  a  want  that  is  universal 
is  seldom  acutely  felt.  The  same  was  true  in 
subjects  like  botany  and  zoology,  at  least  till 
the  period  of  Alexander  the  Great.  Students 
of  pure  science  were  similarly  handicapped  by 
want  of  instruments  with  which  to  conduct 
minute  and  accurate  observations.  It  was 
this  alone  that  prevented  the  followers  of 
Thales  and  Heraclitus  from  anticipating  the 
discoveries  of  the  last  century.  They  had  the 
modern  curiosity  and  capacity  for  observation, 
and  more  perhaps  than  the  modern  capacity  for 
drawing  acute  inferences  from  such  observa- 
tions as  they  made. 

In  their  beliefs  or  illusions  as  to  the  possi- 
bility and  power  of  knowledge  these  early 
Greeks  curiously  anticipated  the  modern  atti- 
tude. The  questions  they  put  and  the  way 
they  tried  to  solve  them  both  assume  that 
the  universe  is  fundamentally  simple,  and  that 


116       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

its  secrets  can  be  discovered  and  understood 
by  human  intelligence.  Even  the  world  we 
live  in  was  assumed  to  have  its  surface  laid 
out  on  a  symmetrical  plan,  and  Herodotus  was 
confirmed  in  his  view  that  the  Upper  Niger 
was  the  Upper  Nile  by  his  equally  false  opinion 
that  the  Danube  rose  in  the  Pyrenees  :  for 
make  independently  these  two  false  assump- 
tions and  you  have  both  in  Europe  and  in 
Africa  a  great  river  running  from  West  to  East 
parallel  to  the  central  sea,  an  arrangement 
so  symmetrical  that  it  must  be  true.  Such 
a  view  may  seem  comic  to  the  modern  reader, 
but  it  is  not  more  so  than  many  theories  of 
uniform  human  progress  that  were  formulated 
in  the  nineteenth  century  under  the  influence 
of  the  new  doctrine  of  evolution. 

Why  was  it  that  the  movement  started  in 
the  seventh  century  came  to  a  standstill  a  few 
centuries  later  and  was  not  resumed  for  pretty 
well  two  thousand  years  ?  There  is  no  evidence 
that  it  had  not  within  itself  the  seed  of  indefi- 
nite developments.  When  Alexander  the  Great 
opened  up  half  the  world  to  the  Greeks  one 
immediate  result  was  that  Greek  scientists  pro- 
duced works  on  botany  and  zoology  that  are 
entirely  modern  in  their  accuracy  of  detail  and 
methods  of  classification.  In  history  a  younger 
contemporary  of  Herodotus  himself  wrote  an 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  117 

account  of  the  great  war  of  the  period  which, 
though  in  some  ways  narrow  and  reactionary, 
was  not  only  a  great  masterpiece  of  literature, 
but  also  a  conscientious  and  accurate  collection 
of  detailed  fact,  while  Aristotle  and  his  pupils 
engaged  in  scientific  historical  work  on  a  large 
scale  when  they  collected  all  the  known  facts 
about  the  political  constitutions  of  over  150 
states.  Other  movements  of  the  same  period 
were,  no  doubt,  less  promising.  The  hope  and 
enthusiasm  that  had  inspired  the  early  lonians 
was  suffering  something  of  a  set-back.  Men 
were  realising  that  the  universe  was  not  quite 
so  simple  a  proposition  as  it  had  seemed  in 
the  first  days  of  the  movement.  The  Academy 
that  Plato  founded  in  the  fourth  century  B.C. 
preserved  the  master's  words,  but  very  soon 
lost  his  spirit,  so  that  the  term  academic  soon 
ceased  to  have  any  connotation  of  progress  and 
discovery.  The  same  is  true  of  the  Sceptics, 
who  also  date  from  the  fourth  century.  The 
word  sceptic  is  in  origin  almost  synonymous 
with  researcher,  but  almost  from  the  beginning 
it  came  to  denote  a  researcher  who  sets  out 
with  the  conviction  that  he  cannot  be  successful 
in  his  quest.  Thoughtful  men  of  a  more  practi- 
cal bent  were  turning  away  from  research  of 
any  kind  and  concentrating  their  attention  on 
immediate  problems  of  conduct  and  morality. 


118       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Hence  arose  the  systems  of  the  Stoics  and  the 
Epicureans,  whose  founders,  Zeno  and  Epicurus, 
both  flourished  at  the  beginning  of  the  new 
epoch.1    But  a  reaction  such  as  this  is  inevit- 
able in  any  great  movement.     It  is  no  more 
than  the  despondent  utterances  of  Mimnermus, 
a   proof  that   Greek  thought   had  passed  its 
prime.     The  reason  why  the  Greek  scientific 
movement   never   recovered   from  this   fit   of 
depression  and  was  thus  finally  arrested  before 
reaching  the  stage  of  organised  experiment  is 
perhaps  to  be  sought  in  the  political  changes 
that  occurred  just  at  this  time.    The  hand  that 
seemed  to  give  it  its  opportunity  may,  in  fact, 
have  given  it  its  death  blow.     The  victories 
of  Alexander  had  other  effects  besides  that  of 
providing  Greek  scientists  for  the  first   time 
with  adequate  zoological  and  botanical  material. 
His  conquests  were  inherited  by  his  generals, 
and  for  the  next  few  centuries  there  were  two 
great  empires,  the  Ptolemaic  in  Egypt  and  the 
Seleucid  in  Asia,  where  Greek  was  the  official 
language  and  there  was  a  whole  hierarchy  of 
Greek  administrators  and  officials.    When  Rome 
took   over   these    Greek   conquests   the   great 
patriotic  poet  of  the  Roman  empire  told  his 
countrymen  that  their  task  was  to  spare  the 
vanquished  and  subdue  the  proud.    Art,  litera- 

1  Zeno  came  to  Athens  in  320  B.C.  ;  Epicurus  in  306. 


THE  RENAISSANCE  IN  THOUGHT  119 

ture,  and  science  must  be  left  to  others.  No 
Greek  of  the  third  century  B.C.  is  known  to  have 
preached  this  doctrine  to  his  fellow-countrymen. 
But  something  like  it  may  well  have  induced 
many  a  young  Greek  of  the  period  to  turn  back 
from  following  Plato  or  Aristotle  for  the  less 
arduous  service  of  some  Ptolemy  or  Seleucus. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  GOVERNMENTS  OF  THE  DARK 
AGES  AND  THE  RISE  OF  CAPITALISTS 
TYRANTS 

AL  through  the  Dark  Ages  the  govern- 
ments of  the  various  city  states  that 
made  up  Greece  had  remained  in  the 
hands  of  the  nobles  and  princes,  the  "  Zeus- 
born  princes  "  of  Homer,  the  "  princes  that 
devour  their  people  "  as  they  are  termed  by 
Hesiod,  who  saw  them  from  a  different  point 
of  view.  Originally  these  dark-age  govern- 
ments appear  to  have  been  monarchies ;  but 
before  long,  as  we  see,  for  instance,  in  the  case 
of  Agamemnon  in  Homer,  the  king  tended  to 
be  at  the  mercy  of  his  nobles,  and  in  most 
cities  the  monarchy  was  gradually  converted 
into  an  aristocracy  (government  by  the  best 
people),  or  as  the  Greeks  generally  preferred 
to  call  it,  an  oligarchy  (government  by  the 
few).  This  change  was  by  no  means  an  improve- 
ment for  the  common  people.  As  in  England 
in  the  days  of  the  barons,  so  in  early  Greece,  the 

120 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    121 

most  powerful  of  the  monarchs  probably  treated 
the  commons  best.  As  the  monarchy  decreased 
in  power  and  the  government  fell  into  the  hands 
of  the  nobles  these  latter  began  to  oppress  the 
commons  as  they  had  never  been  oppressed 
before. 

With  the  great  changes  in  other  directions 
that  began  in  the  seventh  century  B.C.  a  new 
political  order  arose.  The  new  governments 
were  monarchies,  but  they  were  monarchies  of 
an  entirely  new  sort.  The  new  monarchs  were 
known  by  a  new  name,  and  were  called  tyrants, 
a  word  that  is  not  found  at  all  in  the  writings 
of  Homer  and  Hesiod  and  first  occurs  in  Archi- 
lochus.  Later  in  this  chapter  some  general 
account  will  be  given  of  this  new  form  of 
government,  while  in  the  chapter  that  follows 
we  shall  deal  with  some  of  the  tyrants  in- 
dividually and  discuss  the  origin  and  basis  of 
their  power.  But  before  coming  to  that  part 
of  the  subject  it  will  be  well  to  say  something 
of  the  political,  social,  and  economic  conditions 
under  which  tyranny  first  arose.  Fortunately 
there  is  a  fair  amount  of  almost  contemporary 
evidence  on  these  points. 

The  writers  to  whom  we  owe  this  evidence 
are  Solon  and  Theognis.  Solon  was  an  Athenian 
statesman  who  flourished  about  the  year  600 
B.C.  For  reasons  that  will  be  explained  in  the 


122       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

next  chapter  tyranny  was  established  in  Athens 
rather  later  than  it  reached  most  Greek  cities. 
There  had  been  an  unsuccessful  attempt  to  set 
one  up  about  630  B.C.,  but  no  tyrant  perma- 
nently established  himself  till  right  at  the  end 
of  Solon's  long  career,  a  large  part  of  which 
was  spent  in  trying  to  prevent  the  rise  of  a 
tyrant  by  removing  the  conditions  that  led 
to  tyranny.  With  this  end  in  view  Solon 
published  a  series  of  pamphlets  of  which 
extracts  have  been  preserved.  Like  all  litera- 
ture of  this  period  they  were  written  in  verse. 
The  extant  fragments  number  some  hundreds 
of  lines. 

Theognis  appears  to  have  lived  in  the  city 
of  Megara,  half-way  between  Athens  and  the 
Isthmus  of  Corinth,  about  the  middle  of  the 
sixth  century  B.C.,  when  the  tyranny  had 
already  been  overthrown.  His  gnomes  or  wise 
sayings  have  come  down  to  us  in  the  form  of  over 
one  thousand  verses  addressed  to  a  young  noble 
named  Kyrnos,  whom  he  wished  to  guide  in  the 
right  way.  His  verses  show  that  at  least  in 
Megara  the  aristocracy  had  learnt  nothing  from 
the  experiences  that  they  had  so  recently  under- 
gone. In  the  attitude  that  they  express  they 
are  far  behind  the  times,  and  for  that  very 
reason  it  will  be  convenient  to  examine  them 
first. 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    123 

To  a  large  extent  the  verses  consist  of  pre- 
cepts as  to  the  social  behaviour  suitable  to  a 
young  nobleman.  The  picture  presented  or 
rather  implied  in  these  precepts  is  not  a  very 
pleasing  one.  Some  of  the  advice  on  the  subject 
of  wine  is  worth  quoting  for  the  light  that  it 
throws  on  social  conditions  at  the  time. 

"  To  drink  much  wine  is  bad,  but  if  a 
man  drinks  it  sensibly  wine  is  not  bad  but 
good." 

This  is  a  precept  in  which  many  will  concur. 
But  the  poet's  ideal  of  temperance  seems  to 
have  been  rather  loose,  and  his  pupil  seems 
seldom  to  have  lived  up  to  even  this  loose 
ideal.  The  time  to  "  stop  drinking  and  go 
home "  is  "  when  things  which  are  above 
appear  to  be  below."  What  the  drinking  was 
really  like  is  implied  clearly  enough  in  the 
poet's  advice  as  to  how  the  host  should  treat 
his  guests  on  these  occasions. 

"  Constrain  not  any  of  them  to  stop  with 
us  against  his  will,  nor  show  any  to  the  door  if 
he  wants  not  to  depart :  nor  wake  up  from  his 
sleep  whichever  of  us  is  drunk  with  wine  and 
held  by  sweet  sleep  :  nor  bid  the  wakeful  go 
to  sleep  against  his  will ;  for  compulsion  is 
always  a  disagreeable  thing.  And  when  a  man 


124       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

wants  to  drink  let  the  wine-bearer  fill  his  cup. 
It  is  not  every  night  that  we  can  have  a  gay 
time.  But  I,  since  I  have  had  my  measure  of 
honey  sweet  wine,  will  go  home  and  bethink 
me  of  sleep  that  sets  free  from  trouble.  For 
I  am  neither  sober  longer  nor  yet  unduly 
drunk." 

These  idle,  drunken  young  nobles  cannot  have 
been  very  attractive  people  even  when  seen 
among  their  friends,  the  people  whom  they 
speak  of  with  evident  conviction  as  "  the 
good."  When  dealing  with  those  whom  they 
regarded  as  their  inferiors,  which  meant  anyone 
outside  their  own  set,  they  must  have  been 
intolerable.  Theognis,  it  is  true,  tells  them  to 
be  all  things  to  all  men — 

"  Among  the  mad  I'm  very  mad,  but 
among  the  righteous  I  am  of  all  men  the 
most  righteous." 

But  this  advice  in  the  mouth  of  Theognis 
means  something  very  different  from  what  it 
means  in  the  mouth  of  St.  Paul.  For  Theognis 
it  meant  simply  that  his  pupils  ought  to  be  care- 
ful not  to  display  their  real  feelings  till  it  was 
to  their  interest  to  do  so. 

"  Speak    your    enemy    fair :     but    when 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    125 

you  have  him  in  your    power,  then    take 
your  revenge  without  offering  any  pretext." 

A  writer  who  addresses  himself  to  such  an 
audience  and  in  such  a  tone  is  not  likely  to  be 
very  sympathetic  towards  the  distress  and  dis- 
content of  the  common  people,  and,  in  fact, 
for  Theognis  any  popular  movement  was  a 
proof  that  the  unprivileged  classes  are  going  to 
the  bad  and  have  lost  all  sense  of  their  proper 
position. 

"  Kyrnos,  this  city  is  still  a  city,  but 
the  people  are  changed.  In  the  good  old 
days  they  knew  nought  of  rights  or  laws, 
but  wore  goat  skins  on  their  backs  and 
herded  outside  this  city  like  cattle.  But 
now,  Kyrnos,  they  are  gentlemen,  while 
they  that  before  were  of  high  estate  are 
now  brought  low.  Who  could  endure  the 
sight  of  this  ?  " 

The  whole  poem  is  full  of  pathetic  com- 
plaints of  the  poverty  that  has  overtaken  the 
upper  classes  and  the  disastrous  effects,  physical, 
mental,  and  moral,  that  "  soul-destroying 
poverty  "  has  produced. 

"  Ah,  cruel  poverty,  why  dost  thou  plant 


126       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

thyself  on  my  back  and  cripple  both  my 
body  and  my  mind  ?  ' 

"  It  is  better,  dear  Kyrnos,  for  a  poor  man 
to  die  than  to  live  oppressed  by  cruel 
poverty." 

Such  being  the  character  of  poverty  the  poet 
very  logically  counsels  his  pupil  to  avoid  it 
above  all  things. 

"  You  must  traverse  the  earth  and  the 
broad  back  of  the  sea  in  quest,  Kyrnos,  of 
a  release  from  cruel  poverty." 

One  method  of  escape  seems  to  have  been 
practised  then  that  has  again  found  favour 
in  recent  times. 

"He  knows  how  mean  her  birth,  and  yet 
he  is  marrying  her,  induced  by  money, 
despite  his  own  good  name  and  her  ill-fame ; 
for  strong  necessity  has  hold  of  him,  which 
makes  a  man  submissive." 

Such  were  the  petty  cares  and  interests  of 
the  upper  classes  in  Megara  in  the  period  of 
which  we  are  writing.  But  there  were  other 
classes,  more  numerous  and  more  important, 
whose  thoughts  and  cares  were  of  a  very 
different  order.  For  the  great  mass  of  the 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    127 

Megareans  life  did  not  present  itself  as  intoler- 
able simply  because  there  seemed  no  third 
alternative  to  either  working  for  one's  living 
or  marrying  a  rich  plebeian  wife.  In  city 
after  city  during  the  seventh  and  sixth  centuries 
there  had  been  extreme  economic  crises  which 
had  been  felt  far  more  acutely  by  the  poor 
than  the  rich.  But  on  this  subject  we  must 
turn  to  the  evidence  of  Solon,  a  man  whose 
sympathies  were  as  broad  as  those  of  Theognis 
were  narrow.  This  is  the  state  of  the  poorer 
classes  in  Attica  about  the  year  600  B.C.  as 
described  by  Solon  : 

"  Of  the  poor  many  are  going  off  to  foreign 
lands,  bound  fast  in  cruel  bonds  and  sold 
as  slaves  :  thus  does  the  trouble  of  the  State 
come  home  to  each  man." 

The  fact  was  that  the  whole  Greek  world 
was  going  through  one  of  the  greatest  economic 
revolutions  in  all  history,  and  this  economic 
revolution  was  affecting  the  social  and  political 
life  of  the  whole  community. 

The  cause  of  it  all  was  an  invention  with  which 
everyone  is  now  so  familiar  that  we  find  it 
hard  to  realise  the  state  of  things  that  pre- 
ceded it.  It  was,  in  short,  no  other  than  the 
invention  of  a  metal  coinage,  already  described 
and  discussed  in  Chapter  III. 


128       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Students  of  history  during  the  last  few 
generations  have  been  in  a  position  to  realise 
the  significance  of  this  great  financial  invention 
in  a  way  that  was  impossible  till  then.  What 
gives  the  last  few  generations  this  greater 
insight  is  the  fact  that  they  have  lived  through 
a  similar  financial  revolution.  Recent  events 
have  only  hastened  on  the  change  from  a  currency 
of  metal  coins  to  a  system  of  trade  in  which 
the  metal  coin  is  replaced  by  a  currency  of 
paper,  partly  in  the  form  of  Government  notes, 
partly  in  that  of  private  cheques,  or  stocks, 
shares,  and  the  like. 

The  effects  of  this  financial  revolution  are  in 
their  main  outlines  familiar  to  everyone.  Wealth 
has  acquired  a  mobility  that  it  never  possessed 
before.  With  the  aid  of  these  new  paper 
currencies  private  fortunes  are  being  made  on 
a  scale  and  at  a  rate  that  would  have  seemed 
inconceivable  in  the  old  days  of  metallic 
currency.  This  increased  mobility  has  also 
made  it  very  much  more  difficult  for  the 
Government  to  control  the  currency.  So 
striking  is  this  phenomenon  that  it  has  led 
a  perplexed  but  picturesque  American  financier 
to  declare  that  a  few  financial  magnates  in 
his  country  possess  a  secret  by  which  paper 
dollars  may  be  "  made  from  nothing  in  un- 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    129 

limited  quantities  subject  to  no  law  of  man  or 
nature."1 

Our  natural  tendency  is  to  follow  William 
Cobbett  and  contrast  this  elusive  paper  currency 
with  the  more  stable  metal  currencies  that  it 
is  displacing.  But  in  the  seventh  and  sixth 
centuries  B.C.,  when  metal  coins  were  a  new 
phenomenon,  it  was  this  new  metallic  currency 
that  was  the  mobile  and  elusive  thing.  And 
for  this  very  reason  it  was  also  in  all  probability 
the  form  of  wealth  that  the  Government  found 
hardest  to  control.  We  are  apt  to  think  of 
the  image  and  superscription  of  Caesar  on  the 
Roman  coinage  and  the  royal  or  national 
emblems  on  the  coins  of  our  own  day  and  to 
assume  that  from  the  very  beginning  a  metal 
coinage  was  a  Government  monopoly.  No 
decisive  evidence  is  available  on  the  point, 
but  the  balance  of  evidence  inclines  in  the 
opposite  direction,  and  makes  it  probable  that 
the  earliest  coins  ever  struck  were  private 
issues.2 

The  scope  of  this  little  book  does  not  allow 
us  to  resume  the  evidence  for  this  view.  It 
is  based  partly  on  the  character  of  the  earliest 

1  Thos.  W.  Lawson,  Frenzied  Finance,  p.  35. 

z  The  evidence  for  this  view  has  been  presented  in  a  short 
and  attractive  form  by  a  French  numismatist,  E.  Babelon, 
in  a  volume  entitled  Les  Origines  de  la  Monnaie. 

9 


130       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

coins  themselves,  some  of  which  show  groups  of 
punch  marks  that  seem  to  bear  more  resem- 
blance to  the  various  trade  marks  found,  for 
instance,  on  modern  spoons,  than  to  anything 
in  the  way  of  a  Government  stamp,  partly  on 
the  analogies  of  various  other  countries  where 
the  coinage  is  known  to  have  been  first  a  private 
concern  which  was  only  subsequently  taken 
over  by  the  State.  In  fact,  everything  points 
to  a  considerable  resemblance  between  the  early 
history  of  metal  currency  some  two  and  a  half 
thousand  years  ago  and  the  early  history  of 
paper  currency  of  which  the  record  is  con- 
temporary history. 

There  was  the  same  wild  pursuit  of  money 
in  all  directions.  To  quote  once  more  Theognis  : 

"  There  is  no  limit  of  wealth  established 
among  mortals  ;  for  those  of  us  who  have 
most  riches  redouble  the  pursuit.  Who 
could  sate  all  ?  Money  is  becoming  a  craze 
among  mortals.  And  from  this  craze  ruin 
is  arising,  and  when  that  is  sent  by  Zeus 
to  weary  men  now  one  is  involved  therein 
and  now  another." 

With  these  facts  before  us  we  may  revert 
to  the  question  raised  at  the  beginning  of 
this  chapter  and  ask  what  was  the  relation- 
ship between  this  economic  revolution  and 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    131 

the  new  form  of  government  that  arose  at 
this  time,  the  peculiar  form  of  monarchy 
to  which  the  Greeks  gave  the  name  of 
tyranny. 

One  fact  stands  out  very  plainly.  The 
normal  tyrant  made  his  city  a  pleasanter  place 
both  to  look  at  and  to  live  in  than  it  had  been 
in  the  days  of  the  Zeus-born  princes.  They 
were  all  great  builders  and  put  up  fine  temples 
of  stone,  the  remains  of  which  are  in  some 
cases  still  to  be  seen.  Their  secular  buildings 
are  equally  impressive.  Greece  is  a  dry,  ill- 
watered  land,  and  in  cities  of  any  size  the 
water  supply  was  a  serious  problem.  The 
tyrants  dealt  with  this  problem  with  remark- 
able success.  Repeatedly  we  find  them  bringing 
water  from  a  considerable  distance  to  the  heart 
of  the  city.  The  tyrant  of  Samos,  for  example, 
pierced  a  great  mountain  for  this  purpose,  and 
the  tunnel  that  he  dug  is  still  to  be  seen.  The 
idea  of  laying  on  the  water  to  each  private 
house  was  at  the  time  inconceivable,  but  fine 
fountains  were  erected  at  which  a  number  of 
people  might  fill  their  pitchers  simultaneously 
from  elegant  spouts  conveniently  arranged  on 
a  raised  platform  under  a  colonnade.  How 
popular  these  new  erections  were  is  shown  from 
the  frequency  with  which  they  are  depicted 
on  contemporary  vases,  as,  for  instance,  on 


132       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

the  vase  figured  on  Plate  X  (in  the  zone  below 
the  handle). 

The  tyrant  of  Samos  also  made  improve- 
ments in  the  harbour  there,  and  is  said  to  have 
invented  a  new  kind  of  ship. 

These  "  public  works  "  as  the  Greeks  called 
them  must  have  meant  whole  armies  of  workers. 
In  Classical  Greece  from  the  fifth  century  B.C. 
onwards  manual  work  was  regarded  as  degrad- 
ing, but  this  attitude  seems  to  have  developed 
with  the  growth  of  the  slave  market.  In  the 
days  of  Homer  princes  were  proud  of  their  skill 
as  carpenters,  and  princesses  did  the  palace 
washing  and  thoroughly  enjoyed  it.  Solon 
states  in  one  of  his  poems  that  many  of  his 
fellow-citizens  were  manual  labourers.  Every- 
thing shows  that  the  men  who  worked  for  the 
tyrants  were  likewise  free  citizens.  The  tyrants 
are,  in  fact,  accused  of  having  raised  their 
great  works  simply  because  they  were  afraid 
that  unemployment  would  breed  discontent 
among  their  subjects  and  give  them  leisure  to 
plot  against  the  government.  This  statement 
comes  from  an  unfriendly  source,  and  the 
statement  about  the  tyrants'  motives  is  there- 
fore less  trustworthy  than  that  about  their 
action.  The  latter  is  probably  to  be  brought 
into  connexion  with  another  item  of  policy 
sometimes  ascribed  to  the  tyrants,  that,  namely, 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    133 

of  forcing  their  subjects  to  work  on  the  land 
and  not  allowing  them  to  live  in  the  city. 
As  it  stands  this  contradicts  the  statement 
about  the  employment  of  citizens  on  the 
"  public  works,"  which  nearly  all  meant  much 
concentration  of  labour  within  the  city  walls. 
The  two  statements  of  fact  can,  however,  be 
easily  reconciled  if  we  dismiss  the  motives  to 
which  they  are  ascribed  and  see  in  the  land 
law  a  restriction  on  the  tendency  of  urban 
employment  to  draw  the  agricultural  popula- 
tion away  from  the  land. 

In  short,  everything  points  to  the  age  of  the 
tyrants  having  been  a  period  of  considerable 
material  prosperity  in  which  the  mass  of  the 
population  to  some  extent  shared.  From  the 
modern  standpoint  there  may  have  been  much 
to  criticise.  Housing  accommodation  must 
have  been  inadequate  and  sanitary  arrange- 
ments shocking.  But  against  these  and  similar 
defects  must  be  set  some  very  solid  compensa- 
tions. The  climate  made  an  open-air  life  possible, 
and  the  men  (though  unfortunately  not  the 
women  also)  spent  the  greater  part  of  their 
leisure  time  as  well  as  their  working  hours  in 
the  open  air.  Much  of  the  work  too,  assuming 
anything  like  tolerable  conditions  for  it,  must 
have  been  enjoyable  to  the  workmen.  Masons, 
builders,  decorators,  potters,  and  vase  painters 


134       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

were  expert  craftsmen  and  their  work  not  yet 
unduly  specialised.  Potters  and  vase  painters, 
as  noticed  above,  begin  to  put  their  names 
on  their  products,  which  means  probably  that 
they  took  a  conscious  pride  in  their  work. 
Life  was  altogether  a  less  gloomy  affair  than 
in  the  surroundings  pictured  by  Hesiod  and 
longed  for  by  Theognis. 

Lastly,  the  tyranny  as  a  rule  seems  to  have 
brought  comparative  peace.  Wars  were,  in- 
deed, frequent  enough  and  many  of  the  tyrants 
were  also  soldiers.  But  on  the  whole  the  wars 
of  this  period  seem  to  have  been  rather  minor 
sort  of  affairs.  The  tyrants  seem  to  have 
organised  their  cities  mainly  not  for  war,  but 
for  industry  and  peace.  We  hear  little  of  wars 
between  tyrant  and  tyrant.  The  tendency  was 
quite  the  other  way.  Tyrannies  flourished  side 
by  side  for  over  two  generations  in  the  great 
neighbouring  cities  of  Corinth  and  Sicyon  with 
no  apparent  friction.  The  tyrants  of  Athens 
and  Samos  were  on  the  friendliest  of  terms. 
The  age  of  the  tyrants  is,  in  fact,  the  one  period 
in  Classical  Greek  history  in  which  the  energies 
of  the  country  were  not  being  disastrously 
distracted  and  devasted  by  war  on  the  grand 
scale.  Mention  has  been  made  already  in 
Chapter  IV  of  the  great  games  which  at  this 
period  did  so  much  to  encourage  peaceful 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    135 

communication  between  the  various  Greek 
states.  The  early  history  of  these  gatherings 
is  naturally  obscure,  but  a  large  number  of 
them  are  known  to  have  been  fostered  and 
developed  by  the  tyrants.  Pheidon,  tyrant  of 
Argos,  for  instance,  is  known  to  have  controlled 
the  games  at  Olympia  ;  Cleisthenes  reorganised 
those  of  Sicyon  when  he  was  tyrant  of  that 
city ;  the  Panathenaic  games  are  similarly 
associated  with  the  tyrants  of  Athens.  Poly- 
crates,  the  tyrant  of  Samos,  celebrated  the 
Delian  games.  These  last,  which  were  held 
on  the  barren  little  island  of  Delos,  in  the  very 
centre  of  the  Greek  archipelago,  were  certainly 
much  older  than  the  reign  of  the  Samian 
tyrant,  which  dates  from  about  540  to  522  B.C., 
whereas  the  games  are  described,  as  an  estab- 
lished institution,  in  a  Greek  hymn  that  is 
not  likely  to  have  been  written  after  600  B.C. 
Already  in  the  hymn  these  Delian  games  were 
frequented  by  people  from  all  over  the  Greek 
archipelago  and  the  shores  of  the  surrounding 
mainland.  In  patronising  them  the  Samian 
tyrant  was  encouraging  a  form  of  peaceful 
communication  that  must  on  the  whole  have 
tended  to  make  war  less  likely,  and  when  war 
did  break  out  provided  a  common  meeting- 
ground  for  the  belligerents. 

But  in  spite  of  the  peace  and  prosperity  that 


136       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

the  tyrants  brought  to  the  cities  that  they 
governed  the  fact  remains  that  tyranny  no- 
where succeeded  in  establishing  itself  perma- 
nently. In  many  cases,  as  for  instance  in 
Argos,  Agrigentum,  and  Samos,  it  practically 
perished  with  its  founder.  Only  rarely,  as  at 
Corinth,  did  it  maintain  itself  for  three  genera- 
tions, while  the  case  of  Sicyon,  where  four 
generations  of  a  single  family  held  the  tyranny 
for  a  century,  is  quite  exceptional.  In  part 
this  failure  may  be  due  to  the  fact  that  all  the 
tyrants  tried  to  keep  the  tyranny  in  their  own 
family.  The  first  tyrant  must  obviously  have 
reigned  by  sheer  ability,  but  this  was  not 
always  inherited  by  his  successor,  and  where 
it  was  not  men  would  soon  remember  or  be 
reminded  by  the  tyrant's  enemies  that  he  was 
not  of  the  race  of  Zeus-born  kings.  But  this 
is  not  an  entire  explanation.  Usurpers  in  a 
general  way  find  no  insuperable  difficulty  in 
securing  the  necessary  pedigree  if  they  possess 
all  else  that  is  needful.  In  some  cities,  too, 
there  are  indications  of  rival  aspirants  to  the 
tyranny ;  but  in  no  case  when  the  first  holder 
or  his  family  is  overthrown  do  we  find  a  member 
of  some  rival  family  securing  the  position. 
Nobles  and  commons  alike  seem  to  have 
decided  that  they  had  no  use  for  tyrants  of 
this  early  type  in  spite  of  all  their  beneficent 


GOVERNMENTS  OF  DARK  AGES    137 

activities.  To  understand  why  tyranny  was 
so  completely  overthrown  it  is  necessary  to 
examine  more  closely  the  manner  in  which  it 
arose.  The  origin  of  tyranny  will  be  dealt 
with  in  our  next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  VII 
THE    TYRANTS 


f  "^HE  new  currency  of  our  epoch  has  given 
our  financial  magnates  a  vast  political 
JL  power  that  is  as  unquestionable  as  it  is 
hard  to  define.  Modern  students  of  Roman 
history,  reading  it  in  the  light  of  existing  con- 
ditions in  Europe  and  America,  have  seen 
that  in  a  similar  way  wealth  acquired  similar 
powers  at  Rome  when  the  State  passed  from 
being  a  community  of  farmers  and  became 
an  elaborate  organisation  of  paupers  and 
profiteers.  We  realise,  for  instance,  how  the 
millions  of  the  arch-profiteer  Crassus  were 
behind  the  political  and  military  adventures 
of  Pompey  and  Caesar.  Compared  with  the 
empires  of  Rome  or  Great  Britain  the  Greek 
city  states  were  very  simple  organisms.  It 
would  therefore  not  be  surprising  if  the  financial 
revolutions  which  they  witnessed  in  the  seventh 
and  sixth  centuries  B.C.  reacted  with  excep- 
tional directness  on  the  political  situation. 
Such  evidence  as  we  still  possess  points  to  their 

138 


THE  TYRANTS  139 

having  done  so.  If  it  is  not  altogether  misread 
in  the  pages  that  follow  the  new  monarchs 
owed  their  tyrannies  to  wealth  acquired  directly 
or  indirectly  as  a  result  of  the  economic  revolu- 
tion, and  it  was  this  circumstance  of  political 
supremacy  being  based  on  wealth  that  made 
the  new  monarchs  a  new  phenomenon  in  history 
and  caused  them  to  receive  the  new  title  of 
tyrant. 

In  this  little  book  it  is  not  possible  at  all 
adequately  to  present  the  evidence  for  this 
view,  most  of  which  involves  the  very  detailed 
discussion  of  particular  types  of  Greek  coins, 
vases,  inscriptions,  or  the  like.  Still  less  is  it 
possible  here  to  point  out  in  detail  the  various 
difficulties  involved  in  the  various  conflicting 
accounts  of  these  early  tyrants  that  have  been 
published  during  the  last  two  thousand  years.1 
With  this  warning,  however,  it  is  hoped  that 
it  will  not  be  misleading  to  quote  here  the 
principal  passages  that  lend  support  to  the 

1  The  view  here  taken  was  first  put  forward  by  the  writer 
fifteen  years  ago  in  a  paper  published  in  the  Journal  of  Hellenic 
Studies  (Vol.  XXVI,  1906,  pp.  131-42),  on  which  the  account 
here  offered  is  mainly  based.  A  full  presentation  and  dis- 
cussion of  the  evidence  is  being  published,  under  the  title  of 
The  Origin  of  Tyranny,  by  the  Cambridge  University  Press, 
and  to  this  the  writer  would  refer  any  readers  who  wish  to 
go  fully  into  the  question  of  the  connexions  between  the 
origins  of  coinage  and  of  tyranny. 


140       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

view  that  the  early  tyrannies  were  normally 
gained  and  maintained  by  wealth.  As  far 
as  possible  the  statements  of  ancient  writers 
are  given  in  close  translations,  with  brief 
observations  as  to  the  dates  at  which  they 
wrote  and  the  historical  value  of  their 
writings, 

The  first  city  in  Greece  proper  to  fall  under 
a  tyrant  was  Argos.  This  famous  city  lies  only 
a  few  miles  from  Mycenae,  which  it  supplanted 
in  importance  about  the  beginning  of  the  first 
millennium  B.C.,  when  the  Dorians  conquered 
the  Peloponnese.  It  continued  to  be  ruled  by 
hereditary  kings  down  to  the  fifth  century  B.C. 
But  right  at  the  very  opening  of  the  renaissance 
period  one  of  these  kings  so  changed  the 
character  of  the  royal  power  that  we  find  him 
classed  by  Aristotle  and  other  writers  as  the 
founder  of  a  tyranny.  What  was  the  step  that 
caused  him  to  be  so  regarded  ?  The  earliest 
account  of  Pheidon  appears  in  Herodotus.  It 
appears  there  as  a  digression  from  a  digression 
and  is  naturally  short  ;  but  from  its  form  it  is 
plainly  intended  to  give  the  outstanding  features 
of  the  tyrant's  rule.  It  runs  as  follows  :  "  And 
from  the  Peloponnesus  came  Leokedes,  the  son 
of  Pheidon  the  tyrant  of  the  Argives,  the 
Pheidon  who  created  for  the  Peloponnesians 
their  measures  and  behaved  quite  the  most 


THE  TYRANTS  141 

outrageously  of  all  the  Greeks,  for  having 
removed  the  Eleian  directors  of  the  games  he 
himself  directed  the  games  at  Olympia." 

The  significance  of  this  interference  in  the 
great  games  at  Olympia  has  been  already 
touched  on.1  It  was  very  possibly  an  attempt 
to  secure  control  of  one  of  the  chief  channels 
of  peaceful  commercial  intercourse  in  the  Greece 
of  the  period.  But  in  the  narrative  of  Herodotus 
this  venture  only  occupies  the  second  place 
in  his  summary  of  Pheidon.  The  tyrant  is 
first  and  foremost  the  man  who  instituted  the 
Peloponnesian  metric  system,  a  description 
which  plainly  defines  this  early  tyrant  as  a 
commercially-minded  type  of  ruler.  Later 
writers,  beginning  with  Ephorus,  who  wrote 
in  the  fourth  century  B.C.,  state  that  Pheidon 
was  the  first  man  to  strike  coins  in  Greece,  and 
that  he  did  so  in  ^Egina.  The  ^ginetan  coins 
(Plate  XII,  2),  stamped  on  one  side  with  a 
tortoise  and  the  other  with  a  sort  of  square 
windmill  pattern,  are  generally  admitted  to 
have  been  the  first  coins  to  be  struck  in  Europe  ; 
but  the  claim  of  Pheidon  to  have  struck  them 
has  been  frequently  disputed.  The  evidence, 
however,  for  accepting  Ephorus  is  stronger 
than  these  critics  are  inclined  to  admit.  To 

1  Above,  Chap.  VI,  p.  135. 


a  large  extent  it  hangs  together  with  the  diffi- 
cult question  of  Pheidon's  date,  on  which  also 
there  is  much  divergence  of  opinion  among 
authorities  both  ancient  and  modern.  Without 
attempting  here  to  deal  with  so  very  involved 
a  question  of  chronology  it  may  be  safely 
asserted  that  the  balance  of  opinion  all  points 
to  the  conclusion  that  Pheidon  was  the  earliest 
ruler  of  the  new  type  to  arise  in  Greece.  Thus 
two  converging  lines  of  evidence  point  to  the 
interesting  conclusion  that  the  earliest  tyrant 
to  arise  in  this  continent  was  also  the  first  man 
to  strike  coins  in  it,  and  that  it  was  as  master 
of  this  new  money  power  that  he  became  recog- 
nised as  a  new  kind  of  ruler,  a  tyrant  ruling  by 
right  of  the  purse  instead  of  a  Zeus-born  king 
ruling  by  divine  right. 

This  view  as  to  the  essential  character  of 
Pheidon's  government  is  borne  out  by  evidence 
derived  from  Lydia.  In  a  previous  chapter  we 
have  seen  how  important  a  part  in  the  com- 
mercial developments  of  the  seventh  century 
was  played  by  that  country,  whose  capital, 
Sardis,  occupied  so  commanding  a  position  on 
the  great  caravan  route  from  the  Far  East  to 
the  .^Egean.  We  saw,  too,  that  according  to 
the  high  authority  of  Herodotus  the  Lydians 
were  the  first  people  to  strike  coins.  This 
latter  claim  is,  of  course,  quite  compatible 


THE  TYRANTS  143 

with  the  statement  of  Ephorus  about  the 
coinage  of  Pheidon.  For  European  Greeks 
the  inventor  of  coinage  would  be  the  first  man 
to  strike  coins  in  their  own  part  of  the  world. 
The  case  is  something  like  that  of  many  modern 
inventions,  including  that  of  the  steam  engine, 
where  at  any  rate  in  school  history  books  the 
name  of  the  inventor  tends  to  vary  with  the 
language  in  which  the  book  is  written.  We 
may  therefore  accept  the  statements  about  the 
coinage  both  of  Pheidon  and  the  Lydians  as 
essentially  true,  and  proceed  to  note  that  in 
Asia  Minor  as  in  European  Greece  the  be- 
ginnings of  coinage  are  associated  with  the 
beginning  of  tyranny,  for  according  to  certain 
late  Greek  writers  the  first  tyrant  to  arise 
anywhere  was  Gyges  of  Lydia.  This  statement 
may,  it  is  true,  be  only  a  conjecture  based  on 
the  fact  that  the  title  tyrant  is  associated  with 
the  name  of  Gyges  by  his  contemporary,  the 
Greek  poet  Archilochus  (see  p.  121),  the  first 
writer  known  to  have  used  the  word.  But 
even  so  the  statement  may  be  true  enough. 
The  word  is  certainly  not  Greek,  and  may  well 
be  Lydian.  The  internal  history  of  Lydia 
hardly  falls  within  the  scope  of  this  little  book, 
but  we  may  notice  in  passing  that  from  the 
middle  of  the  eighth  century  till  the  end  of  our 
period  there  are  repeated  indications  that  in 


144       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

this    special   home    of    tyranny   the   monarch 
owed  his  throne  to  his  money. 

In  European  Greece  the  next  two  cities  of 
importance  after  Argos  to  fall  under  tyrants 
were  Corinth  and  Sicyon.  Corinth  was  at  this 
time  probably  the  most  important  commercial 
centre  in  all  Greece.  It  lay  on  the  narrow 
isthmus  that  afforded  the  one  means  of  com- 
munication by  land  between  North  and  South 
Greece,  and  it  also  controlled  what  was  for  the 
sailors  of  that  time  the  one  safe  route  from 
Asia  Minor  and  Eastern  Greece  to  Western 
Greece  and  the  Greek  cities  across  the  Adriatic 
in  Sicily  and  South  Italy.  As  observed  by 
Thucydides,  writing  at  the  end  of  the  fifth 
century  B.C.  of  the  Corinthians  some  three 
hundred  years  earlier,  "  offering  a  market  in 
both  directions  they  raised  their  city  to  power 
through  its  revenues  of  money."1  Corinth 
was  not  only  a  great  emporium.  It  was  also  a 
very  important  centre  of  industry,  where  even 
as  late  as  the  time  of  Herodotus  manual 
labourers  were  held  in  less  contempt  than 
anywhere  else  in  Greece.2  Beyond  a  few  brief 
scattered  allusions  like  the  two  just  quoted 
ancient  Greek  writers  tell  us  little  about 
economic  and  industrial  conditions  in  ancient 

1  Thucydides,  I,  13. 

2  Herodotus,  II,  167. 


THE  TYRANTS  145 

Corinth.  Fortunately  archaeology  comes  at 
this  point  to  our  aid.  From  excavations  and 
chance  finds  we  now  know  that  in  the  seventh 
century  B.C.  the  city  supplied  a  large  part 
of  the  Greek  world  with  painted  pottery 
(Plate  IX).  The  finds  are  so  widespread  and 
so  abundant  that  it  is  plain  that  Corinth  at 
this  period  must  have  been  the  pottery  town 
par  excellence  in  the  Greek  world. 

With  this  fact  in  mind  it  is  interesting  to 
turn  to  the  story  told  in  Herodotus  about  the 
early  days  of  Cypselus,  the  man  who,  about 
the  year  660  B.C.,  established  tyranny  in  the 
city.  According  to  this  account  Cypselus  was 
the  son  of  an  undistinguished  father  named 
Eetion  and  a  lady  of  high  birth  named  Labda. 
The  government  of  the  city  was  in  the  hands 
of  a  nobility  much  like  that  which  we  find  in 
many  other  Greek  cities  at  the  end  of  the 
Dark  Ages.  Labda  belonged  to  this  governing 
nobility,  and  only  married  so  much  beneath 
her  because  she  was  deformed  and  could  not 
find  a  husband  of  her  own  rank.  Shortly 
before  the  birth  of  the  child  an  oracle 
prophesied  that  when  it  grew  up  it  would 
bring  disaster  on  the  reigning  nobility,  and 
the  prophecy  came  to  the  ears  of  the  nobles. 
What  happened  next  we  will  leave  Herodotus 
to  tell  in  his  own  words.  His  version  of  the 


10 


146       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

story  would  be  spoilt  if  we  tried  to  paraphrase 
or  abbreviate. 

"  As  soon  as  the  woman  had  given  birth 
they  sent  ten  of  their  number  to  the  deme 
in  which  Eetion  dwelt  to  slay  the  child.  And 
they,  coming  to  Petra  and  passing  into  the 
courtyard  of  Eetion,  asked  for  the  child  :  and 
Labda,  knowing  nothing  of  why  they  had 
come,  and  thinking  they  were  asking  out  of 
friendship  to  the  father,  brought  it  and  gave 
it  into  the  arms  of  one  of  them.  Now  they 
had  resolved  on  the  way,  that  the  first  of  them 
to  take  the  child  should  dash  it  to  the  ground. 
But  when  Labda  brought  it  and  gave  it,  by 
a  divine  chance  the  child  smiled  on  the  man 
who  took  it  :  and  he,  noticing  this,  was  stayed 
by  a  kind  of  compassion  from  slaying  it  :  and 
pitying  it,  he  passed  it  to  the  second  ;  and  he 
to  the  third  ;  and  in  this  way  it  passed  through 
the  hands  of  all  the  ten,  not  one  of  them  being 
willing  to  despatch  it.  So  giving  back  the  child 
to  its  mother  and  going  out,  they  stood  at  the 
door  and  tried  to  fasten  the  blame  on  one 
another,  and  most  of  all  on  the  first  to  take 
the  child,  because  he  had  not  acted  in  accord- 
ance with  their  resolutions  :  until,  after  a  time, 
they  resolved  to  go  in  again  and  all  take  part 
in  the  murder.  But  it  was  bound  to  be  that 
from  the  race  of  Eetion  troubles  should  arise  for 


THE  TYRANTS  147 

Corinth.  For  Labda  was  listening  to  all  this, 
standing  right  by  the  door  ;  and  fearing  that 
they  would  change  their  minds  and  take  the 
child  again  and  slay  it,  she  took  it  and  hid  it 
in  what  seemed  to  her  the  place  they  were 
least  likely  to  think  of,  namely,  in  a  cypsele, 
knowing  that  if  they  returned  to  make  a  search 
they  were  sure  to  look  everywhere.  And  this 
is  just  what  happened.  They  came  and  searched, 
but  since  the  child  was  not  to  be  found  they 
decided  to  depart  and  to  say  to  those  who  had 
sent  them  that  they  had  carried  out  all  their 
instructions.  So  they  went  off  and  reported 
accordingly.  .  .  .  And  after  that  the  son  of 
Eetion  grew  up,  and  since  he  had  escaped 
this  danger  in  a  cypsele  he  was  given  the 
name  of  Cypselus."1 

As  it  stands  this  anecdote  is  perhaps  too  good 
to  be  true.  But  it  affords  a  good  illustration 
of  the  way  in  which  stories  that  are  obviously 
not  mere  unvarnished  records  of  facts  may 
yet  be  valuable  historical  material.  It  is 
part  of  the  historian's  task  to  study  the  various 
ways  in  which  facts  tend  to  get  perverted  or 
embellished.  Even  if  a  story  is  patently  un- 
authentic  it  is  often  worth  while  trying  to 
determine  why  it  has  been  attached  to  this  or 

1  Herodotus,  V,  92. 


148       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

that  historical  personage.  We  may  notice, 
therefore,  that  a  cypsele  was  a  large  kind  of  pot, 
and  that  the  name  Cypselus  means  a  particular 
kind  of  potter.  Even  if  the  Cypselus  story  as  we 
have  it  was  developed  to  explain  the  name  it  is 
still  interesting  to  observe  that  the  tyrant  of 
the  pottery  town  bore  a  name  connected  with 
pots.  It  suggests  the  possibility  that  the  king 
of  the  potteries  had  previously  been  the  pottery 
king,  somewhat  after  the  pattern  of  the  oil 
kings  and  similar  industrial  magnates  of  the 
present  age. 

Space  forbids  any  detailed  account  of  the 
interesting  tyrant  family  that  arose  in  Sicyon. 
We  can  only  note  that  according  to  a  recently 
discovered  fragment  of  some  unknown  Greek 
historian  the  founder  of  the  dynasty  "  until 
he  reached  maturity  continued  to  receive  the 
nurture  and  education  natural  for  the  son  of 
a  butcher."1  The  fragment  is  one  of  the 
many  scraps  of  papyrus  rescued  by  the  two 
Oxford  scholars,  Grenfell  and  Hunt,  from  an 
ancient  rubbish  heap  in  Egypt.  It  would  be 
interesting  to  have  had  the  author's  views  on 
the  sort  of  education  that  is  natural  for  the 

1  Grenfell  and  Hunt,  Oxyrhincus  Papyri,  Vol.  XI,  No.  1365. 
The  author  of  this  fragment  is  thought  to  have  lived  in  the 
third  century  B.C. 


THE  TYRANTS  149 

son  of  a  butcher,  but  for  our  present  purpose 
it  is  enough  to  notice  that  there  can  be  no 
education  natural  for  the  son  of  a  butcher 
unless  we  assume  that  the  son  was  to  follow 
his  father's  trade,  or  at  any  rate  to  be 
some  sort  of  tradesman.  In  other  words,  the 
first  tyrant  of  Sicyon  is  described  as  a  man 
of  humble  origin  who  had  been  brought  up  to 
a  trade. 

Athens  only  fell  under  a  tyrant  in  560  B.C., 
when  Peisistratus  made  himself  supreme  in  the 
city.  An  attempt  made  two  generations  earlier 
by  a  certain  Cylon  seems  to  have  failed  because 
the  agricultural  element  was  still  stronger  than 
the  city  population,  while  events  in  the  first 
third  of  the  sixth  century  were  guided  and 
perhaps  guided  out  of  their  natural  course  by  the 
remarkable  personality  of  Solon.  One  result 
of  the  tyranny  arising  so  late  in  what  was  soon 
to  become  the  centre  of  the  world's  literature 
was  that  the  records  of  the  tyrants'  career 
are  comparatively  abundant  and  well  authenti- 
cated. Fortunately,  too,  from  our  immediate 
point  of  view  Peisistratus  had  a  constant 
struggle  to  maintain  his  position  and  was  twice 
banished  and  twice  returned  to  power.  We 
possess  a  certain  number  of  well-attested  state- 
ments both  as  to  how  he  first  rose  to  power, 
how  he  recovered  the  tyranny  when  in  banish- 


150       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

ment,  and  how  he  finally  established  his 
position.  Naturally  enough  with  a  self-made 
man  like  the  Athenian  tyrant  the  later  phases 
of  his  life  are  better  attested  than  the  earlier, 
and,  apart  from  that,  the  last  years  of  the 
tyrant's  life  must  have  come  within  the 
personal  recollection  of  some  of  the  informants 
of  Herodotus,  since  Peisistratus  did  not  die  till 
527  B.C.,  only  forty-three  years  before  the 
historian's  birth.  It  will  be  best,  therefore, 
to  proceed  from  the  better  known  to  the  less 
known  and  begin  with  the  last  phase  of  the 
tyrant's  career.  The  statements  as  to  the 
character  of  his  power  during  this  latest  period 
of  his  reign  could  not  be  more  explicit.  "  He 
rooted  his  tyranny  on  a  crowd  of  mercenaries 
and  on  revenues  of  money  that  came  in,  some 
from  the  home  country,  some  from  the  River 
Strymon."1  The  foreign  revenues  were  not 
the  result  of  his  restoration.  On  the  contrary, 
the  restoration  was  due  to  the  control  of  these 
revenues.  When  banished  for  the  second  time 
the  tyrant  had  "  crossed  to  the  districts 
round  Pangaion.  There  he  made  money  and 
hired  troops,  and  then  in  the  eleventh  year 
he  proceeded  to  Eretria  and  made  his  first 
attempt  to  recover  his  throne  by  force,"  the 

1  Herodotus,  I,  64. 


THE  TYRANTS  151 

result  was  that  "he  now  held  the  tyranny 
securely."1 

The  Strymon  is  the  Struma,  the  river  that 
recently  figured  so  largely  in  reports  from  the 
Salonica  front.  Mount  Pangaion  is  the  moun- 
tain region  just  to  the  west  of  it  that  was  so 
famous  in  antiquity  for  its  mines  of  gold  and 
silver.  There  is  every  reason  for  assuming  that 
the  money  made  by  Peisistratus  in  this  mining 
district  came  from  the  mines.  Now  Attica 
itself  also  contains  important  mines.  They 
formed,  indeed,  one  of  the  main  sources  of 
the  wealth  of  the  country,  which  had  a 
notoriously  poor  soil  that  offered  little  attrac- 
tion for  the  farmer.  These  facts  have  led  a 
French  scholar  to  suggest  that  Peisistratus' 
home  revenues  were  derived  from  the  Attic 
mines,  a  suggestion  which  implies  that  mining 
revenues  were  the  one  great  root  of  the  tyrant's 
power.2 

Let  us  now  turn  to  the  accounts  of  Peisis- 
tratus' rise  to  power.  Before  his  appearance 

1  Aristotle,  Constitution  of  Athens,  Chap.  XV.    This  work, 
written  in  the  second  half  of  the  fourth  century  B.C.,  was  first 
made  known  to  the  modern  world  in  1891  by  Sir  F.  Kenyon, 
who  published  the  first  edition  of  the  ancient  papyrus  copy  of 
the  treatise  that  had  shortly  before  been  acquired  from  Egypt 
by  the  British  Museum. 

2  Guiraud,  La  Main-d'ceuvre  dans   I'ancienne   Grece,    pp. 
30-31. 


152       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

in  Athenian  politics  there  were  two  parties  in 
Athens,  the  "  Plain  "  and  the  "  Shore,"  named 
after  the  parts  of  Attica  that  they  occupied 
and  consisting  the  one  of  the  landed  gentry 
and  their  supporters,  the  other  of  the  sea- 
faring population  led  by  the  great  merchants 
of  the  port.  The  leader  of  this  "  Shore  "  party 
is  known  to  have  acquired  enormous  wealth  by 
dealings,  presumably  commercial,  with  Lydia. 
Peisistratus  rose  to  power  by  organising  a 
third  party  known  as  the  Hill  men.  To  quote 
the  precise  words  of  Herodotus,  ''When  the 
men  of  the  shore  and  the  men  of  the  plain  were 
engaged  in  party  strife  .  .  .  Peisistratus  having 
formed  designs  on  the  tyranny  raised  a  third 
party.  He  collected  members  for  his  party, 
put  himself  at  the  head  of  what  were  called 
the  Hill  men,1  and  proceeded  as  follows." 
Unfortunately  Herodotus  proceeds  to  give  us 
only  the  ruse  by  which  he  finally  got  together 
a  band  of  armed  supporters  and  seized  the 
acropolis.  On  the  far  more  important  ques- 
tion of  the  character  and  occupation  of  these 
supporters  from  the  Hill  country  he  tells  us 
nothing.  Modern  scholars  have  assumed  that 
they  were  the  shepherds  and  small  farmers 
of  the  high  mountains  of  North  and  Central 

1  Herodotus,  I,  59. 


THE  TYRANTS  153 

Attica.  But  a  careful  examination  of  the 
evidence  shows  that  there  is  nothing  to  sup- 
port these  assumptions.  All  the  evidence 
points  to  the  conclusion  that  these  Hill  men 
lived  in  the  hilly  but  not  mountainous  district 
of  South  Attica,  where  lay  the  famous  silver 
mines,  and  that  they  themselves  were  miners. 
Hill  men  seems  to  be  a  natural  way  of  describing 
miners.  Both  in  Wales  and  in  Germany  the 
common  word  for  miners  means  literally  people 
of  the  hills.  In  short,  the  tyrant  who  recovered 
and  rooted  his  power  by  means  of  revenues 
derived  from  mines  seems  to  have  originally 
gained  it  from  precisely  the  same  source.  The 
tyrant  of  the  chief  mining  state  in  Greece 
proper  appears,  in  other  words,  to  have  been 
the  leader  of  the  mining  population. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  know  what  was 
the  status  of  miners  in  those  early  days.  Later, 
from  the  fifth  century  onwards,  they  were  all 
slaves.  But  such  evidence  as  there  is  leads 
to  the  conclusion  that  in  the  sixth  century 
mining  was  still  a  free  man's  occupation.  It 
is,  therefore,  not  impossible  that  Peisistratus 
was  not  merely  the  leader  but  also  the  employer 
of  the  Attic  miners,  in  which  case  his  position 
at  the  time  that  he  seized  the  tyranny  may 
be  compared  with  that  of  Phalaris  described 
below. 


154       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Samos,  like  Athens,  only  fell  late  under  a 
tyranny.  The  reason  appears  to  have  been 
the  same  as  at  Athens.  The  city  of  Samos 
dominated  the  whole  of  the  large  and  fertile 
island  on  which  it  is  situated,  with  the  result 
that  the  landed  interest  continued  longer  than 
in  most  Greek  cities  to  outweigh  any  element 
in  the  city  population.  But  if  in  these  early 
times  the  landed  interest  was  predominant, 
there  was  plenty  of  room  for  trade  and  industry 
as  well.  When  about  the  year  700  B.C.  the 
Corinthians  first  began  to  build  ships  on  what 
a  fifth-century  historian  calls  "  the  modern 
pattern  "  the  Samians  were  the  first  to  adopt 
the  new  improvements,1  and  it  was  not  long 
before  they  turned  them  to  remarkable  account. 
About  the  year  620  B.C.  a  Samian  ship  actually 
sailed  out  beyond  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar  (or 
Pillars  of  Hercules  as  they  were  then  called), 
discovered  Tartessus  (Tarshish),  which  seems 
to  have  been  already  a  considerable  place, 
and  returned  home  laden  with  silver  from  the 
Spanish  mines.  The  adventure  and  the  wealth 
it  resulted  in  so  impressed  even  Herodotus, 
writing  nearly  two  hundred  years  later,  that  he 
claims  divine  guidance  for  the  ship,  which,  it 
may  be  noticed,  followed  the  southern  route 

1  Thucydides,  I,  13. 


THE  TYRANTS  155 

along  the  northern  coast  of  Africa.1  The 
route  suggests  that  the  Samian  vessel  was  not 
engaged  in  pure  geographical  research  or  adven- 
ture, but  rather  in  following  on  the  track  of 
the  Semitic  Carthaginians,  who  were  already 
beginning  to  exploit  the  Far  West.  However 
that  may  be  this  voyage  is  only  one  of  many 
indications  that  already  by  the  end  of  the 
seventh  century  the  Samians  were  great  mer- 
chant venturers.  Perhaps,  too,  from  this 
great  influx  of  silver  dates  their  reputation 
as  workers  in  metal  and  particularly  in  the 
precious  metals.  It  is  not  unlikely  also  that 
the  fine  woollen  goods  for  which  Samos  was 
famous  in  later  times  were  already  at  this 
period  being  made  in  the  island. 

Polycrates  became  tyrant  of  Samos  about 
the  year  540  B.C.,  and  trade  and  shipping 
flourished  under  his  government.  He  built 
a  famous  mole  to  protect  the  harbour  of  Samos  ; 
he  imported  fine  sheep  from  Miletus  (very 
probably  with  the  purpose  of  improving  the 
Samian  wool),  and  he  employed  the  famous 
Samian  metal-worker  Theodorus.  Taken  by 
themselves  these  statements  might  mean  merely 
that  the  tyrant  patronised  home  industries 
much  as  many  more  recent  monarchs  have 

1  Herodotus,  IV,  152. 


156       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

done.  But  there  is  a  statement  in  Athenaeus 
that  suggests  something  more  than  this. 
"  Before  he  became  tyrant,"  so  this  writer 
informs  us,  "  he  used  to  manufacture  expen- 
sive wraps  and  drinking  vessels  and  hire  them 
out  to  people  celebrating  weddings  or  holding 
great  receptions."  Athenseus  is  unfortunately 
not  a  first-class  authority.  He  lived  in  the  third 
century  A.D.,  and  wrote  a  long  tedious  treatise 
called  Deipnosophistes  (The  Expert  Diner},  which, 
like  so  much  of  the  literature  of  the  imperial  age, 
is  much  on  the  intellectual  level  of  our  own 
snippet  weeklies.  But  the  writer  makes 
frequent  quotations  from  other  writers,  many 
of  them  early  and  reliable  authorities.  He  is 
a  writer  of  whom  it  may  be  said  that  the  parts 
are  greater  than  the  whole.  There  seems  little 
reason  to  discredit  this  particular  statement 
about  Polycrates,  which  says  that  in  Samos 
the  tyranny  was  secured  by  a  man  who  had 
previously  been  known  as  a  trader  in  the  two 
chief  industries  of  his  city. 

Our  account  of  the  early  career  of  the  tyrant 
of  Agrigentum  runs  as  follows :  "  Phalaris 
of  Agrigentum  was  a  tax  gatherer.  When 
the  people  wanted  to  erect  a  temple  of  Zeus 
for  two  hundred  talents  on  the  acropolis  .  .  . 
he  promised,  if  made  contractor  for  the 
undertaking,  to  employ  the  best  workmen 


THE  TYRANTS  157 

and  to  provide  the  material  cheap,  and  to 
submit  reliable  securities  for  the  money.  The 
people  believed  him,  thinking  that  his  pro- 
fessional career  had  given  him  experience  of 
such  proceedings.  But  when  he  had  got  the 
common  funds  he  hired  many  foreign  workmen, 
purchased  many  slaves,  and  carried  up  to  the 
citadel  a  great  supply  of  stone,  wood,  and  iron. 
When  the  foundations  were  now  being  dug 
he  sent  down  a  messenger  to  proclaim  that 
anyone  who  would  give  information  against 
the  persons  who  had  stolen  wood  and  iron  on 
the  citadel  should  receive  such  and  such  a 
reward.  The  people  were  much  annoyed,  since 
they  imagined  that  the  material  was  being 
stolen.  '  Then/  said  he,  '  allow  me  to  enclose 
the  citadel.'  The  city  gave  him  permission  to 
enclose  it  and  to  erect  a  wall  all  round.  He 
released  the  slaves,  armed  them  with  the  stones, 
axes,  and  hatchets  .  .  .  and  having  killed  most 
of  the  men  and  made  himself  master  of  women 
and  children  he  became  tyrant  of  the  city  of 
Agrigentum." 

The  passage  just  quoted  comes  from 
Polyaenus,  a  Greek  writer  of  the  second  cen- 
tury A.D.,  who  dedicated  to  the  emperor, 
Marcus  Aurelius,  his  book  of  "  stratagems," 
or  short  historical  anecdotes,  which  he  tells 
us  in  his  preface  that  he  ventured  to  offer  to 


158       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

the  emperor  in  lieu  of  personal  military  service. 
The  value  of  any  given  anecdote  depends,  of 
course,  on  the  source  from  which  Polysenus 
derived  it.  Some  of  them  are  drawn  from 
good  and  early  sources  such  as  Herodotus  and 
Thucydides.  In  this  particular  case  the  source 
is  not  known,  but  there  is  no  reason  for  regard- 
ing the  story  with  suspicion.  Phalaris  only 
became  tyrant  about  570  B.C.,  a  date  late 
enough  to  make  contemporary  records  not 
unlikely. 

Agrigentum  (now  Girgenti)  lies  on  the  south 
coast  of  Sicily.  It  would  be  easy  to  follow 
this  inquiry  further  and  show  that  similar 
causes  appear  during  this  period  to  have  been 
producing  similar  effects  as  far  West  as  Rome 
and  as  far  East  as  Egypt.  But  Egypt  and 
Rome  would  take  us  too  far  afield.  The  common 
features  in  the  accounts  of  the  rise  of  tyranny 
in  Lydia  and  Argos,  Corinth  and  Sicyon, 
Athens,  Samos,  and  Agrigentum,  are  enough 
in  themselves  to  establish  the  probability  that 
the  normal  Greek  tyrant  of  this  early  period 
based  his  power  on  some  outstanding  position 
that  he  had  acquired  previously  in  either  the 
financial,  the  commercial,  or  the  industrial 
world. 

The  commercial  tyrant  is  not  a  phenomenon 
peculiar  to  this  early  period  of  Mediterranean 


THE  TYRANTS  159 

history.  He  reappears  some  two  thousand 
years  later  in  Italy.  Of  these  commercial 
despots  of  the  early  days  of  our  own  renaissance 
the  most  notable  are  the  Medici  of  Florence.1 
Unlike  France  and  England  mediaeval  Italy 
was  never  united  into  a  single  state.  The 
political  unit  was  the  free  and  independent 
city,  much  as  it  had  been  in  Classical  Greece, 
with  forms  of  government  that  varied  from  city 
to  city  and  from  age  to  age.  In  Florence  during 
the  fourteenth  century  the  government  was  a 
republic  in  which,  however,  most  of  the  power 
rested  with  the  "  greater  guilds  "  or  associa- 
tions of  merchants  and  manufacturers  of  the 
wealthier  sorts.  The  greatness  of  the  house 
of  Medici  begins  with  Giovanni  (A.D.  1360-1429), 
who  realised  an  enormous  fortune  by  trade, 
establishing  banks  in  Italy  and  abroad,  which 
in  his  successors'  hands  became  the  most 
efficacious  engine  of  political  power.  He  him- 
self led  the  way  in  this  direction,  and  gained 
much  influence  in  his  city  by  making  liberal 
loans  of  money  to  all  who  were  in  need  of  it. 
His  son  Cosimo  (known  generally  as  Cosimo 
the  elder,  1389-1464),  the  first  of  the  family  to 
be  supreme  in  the  city,  was  trained  to  com- 
merce and  remained  devoted  to  it  till  the  day 

1  See  the  article  Medici  in  the  Encyclopedia  Britannica, 
eleventh  edition,  on  which  the  following  account  is  based. 


160       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

of  his  death.  To  further  his  political  aims  he 
lent  and  gave  money  generously.  At  one  stage 
in  his  career  he  was  banished  by  his  opponents 
the  Albizzi,  but  in  exile  he  spent  money  lavishly 
to  recover  his  position,  with  the  result  that  he 
returned  to  Florence  in  triumph  in  1434  and 
was  thenceforth  practically  master  of  the  city. 
We  cannot  here  follow  the  further  fortunes  of 
this  great  family,  which  maintained  its  position 
in  Florence  till  less  than  two  centuries  ago  ; 
but  some  general  features  of  their  government 
call  here  for  comment.  When  Giovanni  dei 
Medici  started  his  banking  operations,  banking 
was  still  in  a  fairly  primitive  stage.  He  was, 
in  fact,  one  of  the  pioneers  in  a  great  financial 
revolution.  His  family  established  their  politi- 
cal supremacy  in  Florence  only  after  they  had 
made  themselves  kings  of  the  new  finance,  and 
they  maintained  their  power  by  the  same 
means  by  which  they  had  first  acquired  it. 
Even  as  late  as  the  time  of  a  second  Cosimo 
(known  generally  as  Cosimo  I),  who  reigned 
from  1537-1574,  the  despot  relied  chiefly  on 
his  personal  talents  and  wealth.  Our  own 
Tudors  were  given  to  selling  to  their  subjects 
monopolies  or  the  exclusive  right  of  engaging 
in  this  or  that  branch  of  trade.  The  Medici 
went  one  step  further  and  repeatedly  estab- 
lished practical  monopolies  for  commercial  enter- 


THE  TYRANTS  161 

prises  which  they  themselves  conducted.  Their 
quarrels  were  mainly  with  rivals  who  threatened 
to  compete  with  them  in  wealth.1  They  were 
constant  patrons  of  all  sorts  of  creative  geniuses, 
whether  poets  like  Pulci  (whose  "Morgante" 
inspired  Byron's  "  Don  Juan  "),  men  of  science 
like  the  great  astronomer  Galileo,  or  artists  like 
Luca  della  Robbia  and  Donatello.  They  were 
great  promoters  of  public  works,  which  included 
not  only  palaces  and  churches,  but  also  the 
cutting  of  canals,  the  draining  of  marshes,  and 
the  harbour  works  that  founded  the  greatness 
of  Leghorn.  Like  the  ancient  tyrants  of 
Athens  they  preserved,  if  only  in  name,  the 
institutions  of  the  republic,  and  like  them 
again  they  consistently  supported  the  poorer 
classes  against  the  rich  and  won  their  favour 
by  public  festivities. 

The  points  just  quoted  are  enough  to  show 
how  striking  are  the  resemblances  between  the 
Florentine  Medici  and  such  ancient  Greek 
tyrants  as  the  Athenian  Peisistratus  or  the 
Samian  Poly  crates.  Important  differences  are, 
of  course,  also  to  be  found.  There  is,  for  in- 
stance, nothing  in  any  Greek  tyrant's  career 
that  quite  corresponds  to  the  dealings  of  the 

1  See,  e.g.  their  treatment  of  the  Pazzi,  Encyc.  Brit.,  article 
Medici,  p.  33. 
ii 


162       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

Medici  with  the  papacy.1  But  when  all  allow- 
ances of  this  kind  have  been  made,  the  analogies 
between  the  tyrants  of  ancient  Greece  and  the 
despots  of  renaissance  Italy  are  still  extremely 
striking.  In  both  cases  we  have  city  states 
and  a  period  of  financial  revolution,  and  in 
both  cases  the  result  is  a  commercial  or  financial 
despotism. 

1  Some  of  the  Greek  tyrants  and  would-be  tyrants  had 
interesting  dealings  with  the  Delphic  oracle,  but  this  analogy 
is  at  the  best  remote. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
CONCLUSION 

IN  giving  to  this  little  book  the  title  of 
The  Greek  Renaissance  the  author  was  not 
unaware  that  it  might  prove  misleading. 
The  word  renaissance  has  come  to  be  so  closely 
associated  with  the  great  revival  that  spread 
over  Western  Europe  at  the  close  of  our  own 
Middle  Ages,  and  that  revival  was  so  largely 
a  Greek  creation  that  the  name,  as  he  realised, 
might  very  well  suggest  this  later  period. 
But  in  spite  of  this  difficulty  the  title  was 
still  retained.  Renaissance  is  not  a  phenomenon 
peculiar  to  the  period  of  Michael  Angelo.  It 
is  a  permanent  if  perhaps  intermittent  factor 
in  the  whole  course  of  human  history.  And 
while  this  is  so  it  is  equally  true  that  within 
the  limits  of  recorded  history  there  are  two 
outstanding  periods  when  the  world's  great 
age  has  begun  anew,  namely,  that  which  began 
little  more  than  four  centuries  ago,  and  the 
period  when  Greek  life  and  thought  took 
shape  in  the  world.  Clearness  of  vision  and  not 

163 


164       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

confusion  must  be  the  result  of  describing 
these  parallel  phenomena  by  one  and  the  same 
name.  A  very  brief  resume  will  suffice  to  recall 
how  close  the  parallel  is. 

Greece  in  the  seventh  century  B.C.  received 
her  great  stimulus  from  the  more  ancient 
civilisations  of  lands  further  to  the  East.. 
Our  own  renaissance  was  due  directly  to  the 
influx  of  learned  Greeks  into  Western  Europe, 
caused  by  the  break  up  of  the  Byzantine 
empire  and  its  final  overthrow  by  the  Turks  in 
A.D.  1453.  Greece  in  the  seventh  century  B.C. 
was  at  last  settling  down  after  suffering  for 
centuries  from  streams  of  barbaric  invasion 
from  the  North.  The  same  is  true  of  renaissance 
Italy  and  to  an  almost  equal  extent  of  England 
and  France,  where  Northmen  of  various  descrip- 
tions had  been  gradually  fusing  with  the  earlier 
population.  Perhaps  it  would  not  be  extrava- 
gant to  compare  the  part  played  by  the  Crusades 
in  welding  modern  Europe  with  that  played  by 
the  great  Trojan  expedition  in  the  making  of 
ancient  Greece.  The  barons  who  typify  the 
political  structure  of  mediaeval  Europe  have 
been  frequently  compared  with  the  princely 
families  of  Homeric  literature.  The  evolution 
from  the  Viking  type  depicted  in  the  Odyssey 
to  the  nobility  who  prey  upon  their  own  people 
is  very  similar  in  the  two  cases. 


CONCLUSION  165 

Passing  from  these  earlier  ages  to  the  actual 
periods  of  renaissance  the  resemblances  become 
still  more  striking  and  profound.  This  fact 
need  not  here  be  further  stressed.  The  theme 
of  the  last  five  chapters  has  been  the  essential 
modernity  of  the  ancient  Greek  movement 
alike  in  its  literature  and  science,  its  philosophy 
and  art,  and  in  its  whole  economic,  political, 
and  social  outlook.  All  the  more  interesting 
is  it,  therefore,  to  observe  certain  important 
differences  that  distinguish  the  Greek  move- 
ment from  that  which  took  shape  in  the  fifteenth 
century  and  is  still  in  progress. 

Politically,  as  has  been  seen  already,  the 
Greek  unit  was  the  city  state.  At  the  beginning 
of  our  own  renaissance  autonomous  cities  like 
Florence  played  a  considerable  part  at  least 
in  Italy,  but  the  whole  trend  of  the  last  four 
centuries  has  been  against  the  city  state. 
Everywhere  in  the  West  of  Europe  large  central- 
ised national  states  have  absorbed  all  smaller 
units.  The  process  was  not  unnatural.  In  an 
age  when  communications  are  easy  and  inter- 
national morality  practically  non-existent  the 
city  state  is  bound  to  be  unduly  susceptible 
to  destruction  from  without.  But  that  fact 
should  not  blind  us  to  the  advantages  of  the 
smaller  community  so  long  as  it  could  manage 
to  maintain  its  existence,  Within  the  limits 


166       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

of  its  citizen  population  the  Greek  city  state 
allowed  the  individual  to  develop  his  full 
faculties  more  completely  perhaps  than  any 
other  way  of  life  that  has  so  far  been  evolved. 
In  spite  of  newspapers  and  facilities  for  travel 
the  modern  man  has  generally  little  real 
acquaintance  with  anything  except  one  particu- 
lar section  of  the  community  in  which  he  lives. 
Every  class  of  the  population  seems  tending 
to  concentrate  in  some  sort  of  self-constituted 
ghetto.  At  first  sight  this  tendency  may  seem 
the  inevitable  corollary  of  modern  specialisa- 
tion. But  this  is  the  point  at  which  a  wider 
survey  of  history  comes  to  our  aid  by  teaching 
us  that  the  achievements  of  any  age  are  not 
inevitably  bound  up  with  its  failures.  We 
realise  that  it  was  an  accident  that  the  city 
states  of  the  Greek  renaissance  did  not  develop 
experimental  science  and  all  its  applications, 
and  conversely  it  becomes  questionable  whether 
modern  conditions  make  it  impossible  for  us 
to  enjoy  something  like  the  advantages  of  the 
city  state. 

Intellectually  it  was  in  this  failure  to  develop 
experimental  science  that  the  Greek  renaissance 
compares  most  unfavourably  with  our  own. 
It  limited  not  only  their  sphere  of  thought, 
but  also  their  mechanism  for  the  diffusion  of 
knowledge  and  for  political  organisation.  On 


CONCLUSION  167 

this   point,    however,    enough   has   been   said 
already  in  Chapter  V. 

But  if  the  Greeks  suffered  in  some  vital 
directions  from  lack  of  adequate  material,  our 
own  renaissance  has  been  hampered  in  another 
by  a  superabundance.  In  discussing  the  in- 
fluences that  inspired  the  Greek  movement  we 
had  occasion  to  notice  that  the  seventh-century 
Greeks  were  fortunate  in  drawing  from  earlier 
civilisations  just  the  requisite  amount  of  in- 
spiration and  just  the  requisite  amount  of 
guidance.  In  our  own  renaissance  the  case 
has  been  very  different.  When  the  classical 
literatures  of  Greece  and  Rome  were  suddenly 
revealed  in  all  their  fullness  to  the  first  few 
generations  of  renaissance  scholars  the  effect 
was  almost  overwhelming.  Both  these  old 
literatures  were  vastly  superior  to  the  writings 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  alike  in  breadth  of  know- 
ledge and  in  power  of  thought  and  expression. 
Even  to  the  most  active  and  independent  minds 
of  this  period  it  must  have  seemed  as  though 
the  main  task  for  the  age  in  which  they  lived 
was  to  bring  to  life  and  light  again  the  wisdom 
of  Greece  and  Rome.  A  few  of  the  ablest 
doubtless  looked  beyond  this  stage  to  one  of 
independent  thought  and  research,  and  by 
their  attitude  and  outlook  prepared  the  way 
for  the  great  scientific  developments  of  the 


168       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

present  age.  But  to  the  bulk  of  intelligent 
but  not  over-imaginative  students  the  fount  of 
ancient  wisdom  must  have  seemed  boundless. 
They  could  find  no  subject  on  which  these 
wonderful  ancients  had  not  said  the  last  word. 
And  just  when  this  first  overwhelming  impres- 
sion might  have  been  modified  by  greater 
familiarity  there  came  the  period  of  theological 
bibliolatry  which  could  not  but  profoundly 
affect  the  general  attitude  towards  the  litera- 
tures of  Greece  and  Rome.  They  became 
something  like  a  pagan  counterpart  to  the 
sacred  scriptures,  and  received  a  sort  of  re- 
flected glory  from  the  doctrine  of  verbal  in- 
spiration. In  other  words,  they  were  exalted 
into  the  classics  par  excellence,  the  models  on 
which  all  orthodox  thinking  and  writing  on 
secular  subjects  had  to  be  based. 

Nothing  could  have  been  more  unfortunate. 
From  making  an  author  a  classic  it  is  only  a 
step  to  converting  him  into  a  species  of  fetish, 
and  that  is  what,  till  recently  at  any  rate,  was 
often  done  with  the  classics  of  Greece  and 
Rome.  In  the  case  of  the  Greeks,  and  especially 
of  those  great  pioneers  with  whom  we  are 
here  particularly  concerned,  the  result  has  been 
curious.  Hosts  of  people  whose  natural  sym- 
pathies are  all  with  Heraclitus,  and  Archilochus 
and  Xenophanes  have  been  estranged  from 


CONCLUSION  169 

Greek  studies,  while  among  those  who  uphold 
them  have  been  found  many  who  would  be 
shocked  inexpressibly  if  they  thought  that 
these  writers  meant  what  they  said.  Fortu- 
nately there  is  growing  up  a  large  body  of 
more  enlightened  opinion.  More  and  more 
people  are  turning  to  ancient  Greece  because 
they  realise  that  the  men  who  made  it  have 
a  special  significance  for  this  present  age.  Like 
ourselves  they  were  in  revolt  against  existing 
conditions,  they  questioned  existing  institu- 
tions and  existing  reputations,  they  challenged 
the  blind  acceptance  of  authority  and  feared 
nothing  but  the  lie  in  the  soul.  They  were  on 
the  side  of  Samuel  Butler  and  H.  G.  Wells  and 
all  similar  assailants  of  a  classical  education. 
It  is  the  extreme  of  irony  that  these  early 
Greek  rebels  and  innovators  and  flouters  of 
convention  should  have  been  commandeered 
for  the  services  of  an  education  which  with  all 
its  merits  was  fundamentally  opposed  to  their 
teaching.  To  explain  in  detail  how  this  came 
about  is  beyond  our  present  scope.  It  would 
require  us  to  describe  how  Rome  treated  Greek 
literature  and  thought,  and  how  in  more 
recent  times  Greece  has  been  constantly  seen 
through  Roman  spectacles. 

The    time    has    come    for    removing    these 
spectacles,  and  they  are,  in  fact,  in  process  of 


170       THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 

being  removed,  with  the  result  already  that 
ancient  Greece  and  the  men  who  made  it  have 
been  brought  far  nearer  to  us  than  ever  they 
were  to  our  fathers.  They  have  not  lost  but 
gained  by  this  nearer  and  clearer  view.  We 
see  now  what  they  have  to  offer  us,  and  that 
the  offer  is  unique.  It  is  nothing  less  than 
the  opportunity  of  comparing  experiences  with 
the  one  people  of  an  earlier  age  who  have 
sought  similar  objectives  to  our  own  and  done 
so  with  a  not  dissimilar  equipment.1 

1  Readers  who  wish  to  pursue  the  study  of  Greek  history 
will  find  an  admirable  handbook  in  J.  B.  Bury's  History  of 
Greece.  For  the  place  of  these  early  Greeks  in  Universal 
History  they  are  referred  to  H.  G.  Wells'  epoch-making  Outline 
of  History. 


INDEX 


Abraham,  55 

Academy,  117 

Accad,  8 

Achaeans,  39 

Achilles,  16,  62,  67 

Acropolis    (Athenian),    78,    79, 

82 

Adriatic,  144 
JEgean,  7,  13,  24,  26,  31,  40,  47, 

56,  64,  142 

^Egina,  ^Eginetans,  60,  141 
.iEolians,  40 

Africa,  42-44,  74  n.  i,  116,  155 
Agamemnon,  16,  56,  67,  120 
Agrigentum,  136,  156-158 
Agrios,  41 
Albizzi,  1 60 
Alcaeus,  96,  98 
Alexander  the  Great,  115,  116, 

118 

America,  Americans,  12,  138 
Amphidamas,  27 
Ampurias,  41 

Amraphel.    See  Khammurabi 
Anaximander,  101,  103,  104,  108 
Anaximenes,  101,  103 
Angles,  22 
Aphrodite,  97 
Arabs,  44 
Archilochus,  94-96,  98,  99,  121, 

143,  168 
Argos,  Argives,  135,  136,  140- 

142,  144,  158 

Aristotle,  117,  119,  140,  151  w.  i 
Artemis,  52  w.  i,  77-79 
Arthur,  20 
Ascra,  26 
Asia  Minor,  16,  27,  40,  46, 47,  5 1 , 

52.  56,  57,  60,  62,  64,  65,  84, 

89,  100,  no,  143,  144 


Assyria,  11,  48,  57 

Athena,  78 

Athenaeus,  156 

Athens,  Athenians,  19,  20,  23, 
61,  75,  78-81,  85, 86,  108  n.  i, 
118  w,  i,  121,  122,  134,  135, 
I49-i53,  154,  158  161 

Attica,   Attic,   20.    86-88,    127, 

I5I-I53 

Augustine,  St.,  99 
Aulis,  27 

Babelon,  E.,  Les  Origines  de  la 

Monnaie,  129  n.  2 
Babylon,  Babylonians,  8,  10,  n, 

21,  50,  57,  in 
Baedeker,  70 
Balkan  peninsula,  39 
Berbers,  44 
Bible,  56,  60,  107 
Black  Sea,  42,  43,  47,  51,  60, 

63 

Blakeney,  1 14  n.  i 

Boeotia,  26,  27,  31,  38 

Brindisi,  41 

Briseis,  62, 

Britain,  British,  12,  22,  88 

British  Museum,  48,  52  n.  i,  70, 
71,  74  «.  2,  75,  151  n.  i 

British  Museum  Guide  to  Greek 
and  Roman  Antiquities,  91  n.  i 

British  Museum  Guide  to  Greek 
and  Roman  Life,  91  n.  i 

Burnet,  J.,  Early  Greek  Phil- 
osophy, 109  n.  i 

Bury,  J.  B.,  History  of  Greece, 
170  n.  i 

Butler,  Samuel,  169 

Byron,  Byronic,  81,  98,  99,  161 

Byzantium,  42,  164 


171 


172      THE   GREEK  RENAISSANCE 


Caerwent,  22 

Caesar,  129,  138 

Callinus,  50 

Canaan,  Canaanites,  45 

Canada,  60 

Carians,  62,  99 

Carlisle,  22 

Carthage,  Carthaginians,  41,  44, 

iSS 

Chalcis,  42 

Cimmerians,  47,  48,  50 
Circe,  17,  41 

Cleisthenes  of  Sicyon,  135 
Cnossus,  12,  23,  24,  67 
Cobbett,  William,  28,  129 
Constantinople,  42 
Constitution  of  Athens,  151  «.  2 
Corinth,    Corinthians,    84,    85, 

122,  134,   136,  144-148,  154, 

IS8 

Corinthian  pottery,  84 
Crassus,  138 
Crete,  4,  5,  7,  11-21,  26,  78,  92, 

99,  1 60 

Croesus,  52  n.  i 
Cronus  (father  of  Zeus),  35 
Crusades,  in,  164 
Cuirass,  The  High  Emprise  for 

the,  56  n.  i 
Cumae,  41 
Cylon,  149 
Cyme,  27,  31 
Cypselus,  145-148 
Cyrene,  Cyrenaica,  42,  44,  114 

Daedalus,  92 

Danube,  116 

Daphnae,  57 

Dardanelles,  16 

Darius  I,  in 

Deipnosophistes,  156 

della  Robbia,  Luca,  161 

Delos,  Delian,  77,  79,  135 

Delphi,  99,  162  n.  i 

Delta,  7,  57 

Diana  (see  also  Artemis),  52  «.  i 

Don  Juan,  161 

Donatello,  161 

Dorians,  39,  40.  80,  140 

Doric  architecture,  69,  70 


Eden,  Garden  of ,  8,  18 

Eetion,  145-147 

Egypt,  Egyptians,  4-8,  12,  21, 

45,  46,  56,  58-60,  63,  78,  82, 

88,  92-94,  100,  no,  in,  114, 

118,  148,  158 
Eleians,  141 
Elgin,  Lord,  75 
Emporiae,  41 
Encyclopedia  Britannica,  159  n. 

i,  161  n.  i 

England,  25,60,75, 120,  159, 164 
Ephesus,  50,  52  n.  i,  53,  56 
Ephorus,  141,  143 
Epicurus,  Epicureans,  1 1 8 
Eretria,  150 
Ethiopians,  57 
Etruscans,  41,  47 
Eubcea,  27 
Euphrates,  8,  46,  47 
Europe,  29,  89,  in,   116,  138, 

141,  164 

Evans,  Sir  Arthur,  12,  1 8 
Evelyn  White,  H.,  translation  of 

Hesiod,  37  n.  i 
Exhibition  (of  1851),  90 

Florence,  73,  159-162,  165 
France,  French,  23,  34,  41,  53, 

151,  159,  164 
French  Revolution,  81 
Frenzied  Finance.    See  Lawson 

Galileo,  161 

Gardner,  E.,  Handbook  of  Greek 

Sculpture,  91  n.  i 
Gauls,  47 
Genesis,  8 
Germany,  15,  153 
Gibraltar,  154 
Giotto,  73 

Girgenti.    See  Agrigentum 
Gladstone,  17 
Gothic,  13,  71 
Goths,  1 8 
Greek  Archaeological  Society,  12, 

79 

Greek  Art.    See  Walters 
Greek  Literature,  Ancient.     See 

Murray 


INDEX 


173 


Greek    Philosophy,    Early.      See 

Burnet 
Greek    Sculpture,   Handbook   of. 

See  Gardner 
Grenfell  and  Hunt,  Oxyrhynchus 

Papyri,  148 
Guiraud,  La  Main-d' ceuvre  dans 

I'ancienne  Grece,  151  n.  2 
Gyges  (Gugu),  u,  48,  56,  143 

Halicarnassus,  no 

Halys,  47 

Hector,  16 

Hegel,  103 

Helicon,  26,  27 

Hera,  77,  78 

Heracles  (Hercules),  86,  154 

Heracles,  Shield  of,  27 

Heraclitus,  101-104,  115,  168 

Herodotus,  49,  51,  59,  65,  no- 

114,    116,    140-142,    144-147, 

150,  152,  154,  158 
Hesiod,  26-37,  38,  41,  42,  107, 

109,  120,  121,  134 
"  Hill    country,"    "  Hill-men," 

152,  153 
Hippocrates,  2 
History  of  Greece.    See  Bury 
History,  Outline  of.    See  Wells 
Hittites,  46,  47 
Hogarth,  D.  G.,  Ionia  and  the 

East,  47  n.  i 
Homer,  Homeric  poems,  17,  18, 

23.  27,  39.  44,  63,  85,  107,  109, 

I2O,  121,   132,   164 

Huns,  1 8 

Hunt.    See  Grenfell. 

lambe,  95 

Iliad,  15,  62,  94 

Ionia,  lonians,  40,  57,  60,  63,  64, 

109,  1 10,  117 

Ionia  and  the  East.    See  Hogarth 
Ionic  architecture,  69,  70 
Ionic  pottery,  84 
Italy,  Italians,  12,  33,  41,  43,  44, 

47,  54,  64,  88,  89,  1 10,   144, 

159,  164,  165 
Ithaca,  17 


Japanese,  79 
Jeremiah,  57 
Johns,  C.  H.  W.,  The  Oldest  Code 

of  Laws  in  the  World,  8  n.  2 
Johns,  Mrs.  C.  H.  W.    See  Mas- 

pero 
Journal  of  Hellenic  Studies,  139 

n.  i 

Kenyon,  Sir  Frederic,  151  n.  i 
Keramopoullos,  15,  19 
Khammurabi,  8 
Kyrnos,  122,  125,  126 

Labda, 145-147 

Lanuvium,  74  n.  2 

Latinos,  41 

Lawson,    Thos.    W.,    Frenzied 

Finance,  129  n.  i 
Leghorn,  161 
Leokedes,  140 

Lesbos  (see  also  Mitylene),  96 
Loeb  Classical  Library,  37  n.  i 
Lot,  55 
Louvre,  23 
Lydia,  Lydians,  n,  46-56,  60, 

in,  142,  143,  152,  158 
La  Lydie  et  le  Monde  Grec.    See 

Radet 

Macedonia,     Macedonians,     43, 

no  n.  i 

Macne,  J.  W.  S.,  74  n.  i 
la  Main-d' ceuvre  dans  I'ancienne 

Grece.    See  Guiraud 
Marcus  Aurelius,  157 
Marmora,  42,  43 
Marseilles,  41 
Maspero,     Popular    Stories     of 

Ancient  Egypt,  translated  by 

Mrs.  C.  H.  W.  Johns,  56  n.  i 
Meander,  100 
Medes,  1 1 1 
Medici,  159-162 

Mediterranean,  7,  44,  51,  63,  158 
Megara,  Megareans,  42, 122, 126, 

127 
Mesopotamia,  4,  5,  8-n,  45,  46 

48,  56,  65, 100 
Michael  Angelo,  163 


174      THE  GREEK  RENAISSANCE 


Miletus,   Milesians,  42,  48,  49, 
53.  56,  60,  62,  85,  89,  99,  100, 

155 

Milesians'  Fort,  60 

Mimnermus,  97,  1 1 8 

Minoan,  12,  15,  19,  26 

Minos,  19,  20,  92 

Minotaur,  19 

Mitylene,  58,  96 

Moloch,  45 

Mongolian,  43 

Morea   (see   a/so   Peloponnese), 

108  n.  i 

M organic.    See  Pulci 
Mosul  (see  a/so  Nineveh),  48 
Murray,  Gilbert,  Ancient  Greek 

Literature,  99  n.  I  ;  .Rise  o//Ae 

Epic,  21  n.  i 
Mycenae,  Mycenaean,  13,  15,  18, 

23,  24,  39,  40,  56,  140 
Myrmidons,  16 
Myrsilus,  96 

Naples,  41 
Naucratis,  58,  60 
Newcastle,  22 
Nicosthenes,  86 
Niger,  114,  1 1 6 
Nigeria,  74 

Nile,  5,  58,  112,  114,  116 
Nineveh,  10,  48,  50 
Norman  Conquest,  4 
Northmen,  164 

Odysseus,  16,  17,  24,  41,  63 

Odyssey,  15,  16,  94,  164 

Old  Testament,  17 

Olympia,  135,  141 

Origin  of  Tyranny.    See  Ure 

Origines   de   la    Monnaie.      See 

Babelon 
Orsi,  74  n.  2 
Orvieto,  73 
Oxyrhynchus  Papyri.    See  Gren- 

fell 

Pactolus,  52 

Palermo,  6 

Panathenaic  games,  135 

St.  Pancras  Church,  London,  70 


Pangaion,  Mt.,  150,  151 

Paris,  23 

Paros,  94 

Parthenon,  75 

Patroclns,  16 

Paul,  St.,  124 

Pausanias,  70 

Pazzi,  161  n.  i 

Peisistratus,  149-1  53,  161 

Peloponnese,    Peloponnesians, 

Peloponnesus  (see  also  Morea), 

140,  141 
Penelope,  17 
Perses,  28 
Persia,    Persians,    78,    80,    81, 

1 10  n.  i,  in 
Persian  carpet,  85 
Petra,  146 
Petrie,  Flinders,  57 
Phalaris,  45,  153,  156-158 
Pheidias,  8 1 
Pheidon,  135,  140-143 
Philistia,  12 

Phoenician  (Punic),  44,  45 
"  Plain,"  152 
Plato,  81,  106,  117,  119 
Pleiads,  97 
Polysenus,  157,  158 
Polycrates,  135,  155,  156,  161 
Polyphemus,  17 
Pompey,  138 
Popular  Stories  of  A  ncient  Egypt. 

See  Maspero 
Psamtek    (Psammetichus),    56- 

58,  60,  63 

Ptolemy,  Ptolemaic,  118,  119 
Pulci,  Morgante,  161 
Punic.    See  Phoenician 
Puritans,  82 
Pyrenees,  116 
Pythagoras,  Pythagoraeans,  104- 

106 

Radet,  G.,  La  Lydie  et  le  Monde 
Grec,  53  n.  i 

Rawlinson,  translation  of  Hero- 
dotus, 114  n.  i 

Reinach,  S.,  20 

Rhode,  41 

Rhodes,  40,  1 10 


INDEX 


175 


Rise    of    the    Epic,    The.      See 

Murray 
Rome,  Romans,  18,  20,  21,  23, 

44.  47.  88,  92,  118,  129,  138, 

158,  167-169 
Rosas,  41 
Rousseau,  81 
Russia,  54,  88 

Saians,  94,  95 

Sais,  7,  8,  57,  78 

Salonika,  42,  151 

Samos,  Samians,  60, 77, 131, 132, 

134-136,  154-156,  158,  161 
Sappho,  58,  96,  98,  99 
Sardis,  46,  50,  51,  54,  55,  142 
Sargon,  8 
Saxons,  22,  88 
Sceptics,  117 
Schliemann,  13,  15,  18 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,  94 
Scythians,  43,  in 
Seleucus,  Seleucids,  118,  119 
Semites,  45,  155 
"  Shore,"  152 
Sicily,  6,  12,  41,  43-45,  64,  144, 

158 
Sicyon,  134-136,  144,  148,  149, 

158 

Sidon,  44,  85 
Silchester,  22 
Sirens,  17 
Smith,  Geo.,  48 
Smyrna,  48,  97 
Solon,  121,  122,  127,  132,  149 
Spain,  41,  54,  61,  64,  154 
Sparta,  6 1 ,  113 
Stoics,  1 1 8 

Strymon  (Struma),  150,  151 
Suez,  57 
Sybaris,  89 
Syracuse,  74  n.  2 
Syria,  44-46 

Tapahnes,  57 

Tartessus  (Tarshish),  60,  154 


Telegonos,  41 

Thales,  100-104,  106,  115 

Thebes  (in  Greece),  15,  18,  19, 

30,  31 

Theodorus,  155 
Theognis,  121-127,  130,  134 
Theogony,  27,  28,  107 
Theseus,  19,  20 
Thracians,  43,  in 
Thucydides,   68,   88,    113,    144, 

154  «•  i,  158 
Tigris,  8,  48 
Tiryns,  13,  15,  18 
Tmolus,  Mt.,  52 
Troy,  Troad,  Trojans,  1 5, 16, 18, 

27.  30.  3i.  40,  46,  57.67,  in, 

164 

Tudors,  1 60 
Turks,  52,  65,  in,  164 
Tyre,  44 

Ulysses.    See  Odysseus. 
Ure,    P.    N.,    The     Origin     of 
Tyranny,  139  n.  i 

Vandals,  18,  44 
Venice,  20 
Vikings,  164 
Virgil,  33,  118 

Wales,  153 

Walters,  H.  B.,  Greek  Art,  91  n.  i 

Waverley  Novels,  94 

Wells,  H.  G.,   169  ;    Outline  of 

History,  112,  170  n.  I 
Whittington,  Dick,  89 
Works  and  Days,  28-37 

Xenophanes,  109,  168 
Xerxes,  79,  1 1 1 

Zeno, 118 

Zeus,  27,  29,  120,  130,  131,  136 

142,  156 


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CLAYHANGER,  9s.  net.  HILDA  LBSSWAYS, 
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NORTH.  THE  MATADOR  OF  THE  Frvs 
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SPANISH  GOLD.  THE  SEARCH  PARTY. 
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A  PRINCESS  OF  MARS,  6s.  net.  THE  GODS 
OF  MARS,  6s.  net.  THE  WARLORD  OF 
MARS,  6j.  net. 

Conrad  (Joseph).   A  SET  OF  SIX.  Fourth 
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VICTORY:      AN    ISLAND    TALE.       Sixth 
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CHRISTIAN,  8*.  6d.  net.  TEMPORAL  POWER  : 
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TONGUES  OF  CONSCIENCE,  js.  6d.  net. 
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THB  CHRONICLES  OF  COUNT  ANTONIO. 
SIMON  DALE.  THE  KING'S  MIRROR. 
QUISANTE.  THE  DOLLY  DIALOGUES. 
TALES  OF  Two  PEOPLE.  A  SERVANT  OF 
THE  PUBLIC.  MRS.  MAXON  PROTESTS. 
A  YOUNG  MAN'S  YEAR.  BEAUMAROY 
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SALTHAVEN,  y.  net.  SAILORS'  KNOTS,  y. 
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Illustrated.  Ninth  Edition.  Cr.  Svo.  js. 
fxi.net. 

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VIVIEN.  THE  GUARDED  FLAME.  ODD 
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\ 

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A  WEAVER  OF  WEBS.  PROFIT  AND  Loss. 
THE  SONG  OF  HYACINTH,  and  Other 
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THE  QUEST  OF  THE  GOLDEN  ROSE.  MARY 
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VALMOND  CAME  TO  PONTIAC  :  The  Story  of 
a  Lost  Napoleon.  AN  ADVENTURER  OF  THE 
NORTH  :  The  Last  Adventures  of  '  Pretty 
Pierre.'  THE  SEATS  OF  THE  MIGHTY.  THE 
BATTLE  OF  THE  STRONG:  A  Romance 
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THE  ORCHARD  OF  TEARS.  THE  GOLDEN 
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THE  LIGHTNING  CONDUCTOR  :  The  Strange 
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ACROSS  THE  WATER.  SCARLET  RUNNER. 
LORD  LOVBLAND  DISCOVERS  AMERICA. 
THE  GUESTS  OF  HERCULES.  IT  HAPPENED 
IN  EGYPT.  A  SOLDIER  OF  THE  LKGION. 
THE  SHOP  GIRL.  THE  LIGHTNING  CON- 
DUCTRESS. SECRET  HISTORY.  THE  LOVE 
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