manifestly formed from the same original "root"; and because
they differ in these respects from all other languages. The
nations thus identified as Aryan are the nations that have
acted the most important parts in all human history except the
history of extremely ancient times. Besides the Celtic peoples
already mentioned, they include the English, the Dutch, the
Germans, and the Scandinavians, forming the Teutonic race; the
Russians, Poles, and others of the Slavonic group; the ancient
Greeks and Romans, with their modern representatives, and the
Persians and Hindus in Asia. According to the evidence of
their languages, there must have been a time and a place, in
the remote past, when and where a primitive Aryan race, which
was ancestral to all these nations, lived and multiplied until
it outgrew its original country and began to send forth
successive "swarms," or migrating hordes, as many unsettled
races have been seen to do within the historic age.
{991}
It is hopeless, perhaps, to think of determining the time when
such a dispersion of the Aryan peoples began; but many
scholars believe it possible to trace, by various marks and
indications, in language and elsewhere, the lines of movement
in the migration, so far as to guess with some assurance the
region of the primitive Aryan home; but thus far there are
great disagreements in the guessing. Until recent years, the
prevailing judgment pointed to that highland district in
Central Asia which lies north of the Hindoo-Koosh range of
mountains, and between the upper waters of the Oxus and
Jaxartes. But later studies have discredited this first theory
and started many opposing ones. The strong tendency now is to
believe that the cradle of all the peoples of Aryan speech was
somewhere in Europe, rather than in Asia, and in the north of
Europe rather than in the center or the south. At the same
time, there seems to be a growing opinion that the language of
the Aryans was communicated to conquered peoples so
extensively that its spread is not a true measure of the
existing diffusion of the race.
The Celtic Branch.
Whatever may have been the starting-point of the Aryan
migrations, it is supposed that the branch now distinguished
as Celtic was the first to separate from the parent stem and
to acquire for itself a new domain. It occupied southwestern
Europe, from northern Spain to the Rhine, and across the
Channel to the British islands, extending eastward into
Switzerland, North It&ly and the Tyrol. But little of what the
tribes and nations forming this Celtic race did is known,
until the time when another Aryan people, better civilized,
came into collision with them, and drew them into the written
history of the world by conquering them and making them its
subjects.
The people who did this were the Romans, and the Romans and
the Greeks are believed to have been carried into the two
peninsulas which they inhabited, respectively, by one and the
same movement in the Aryan dispersion. Their languages show
more affinity to one another than to the other Aryan tongues,
and there are other evidences of a near relationship between
them; though they separated, it is quite certain, long before
the appearance of either in history.
The Hellenes, or Greeks.
The Greeks, or Hellenes, as they called themselves, were the
first among the Aryan peoples in Europe to make themselves
historically known, and the first to write the record which
transmits history from generation to generation. The peninsula
in which they settled themselves is a very peculiar one in its
formation. It is crossed in different directions by mountain
ranges, which divide the land into parts naturally separated
from one another, and which form barriers easily defended
against invading foes. Between the mountains lie numerous
fertile valleys. The coast is ragged with gulfs and bays,
which notch it deeply on all sides, making the whole main
peninsula a cluster of minor peninsulas, and supplying the
people with harbors which invite them to a life of seafaring
and trade. It is surrounded, moreover, with islands, which
repeat the invitation.
Almost necessarily, in a country marked with such features so
strongly, the Greeks became divided politically into small
independent states--city-states they have been named--and
those on the sea-coast became engaged very early in trade with
other countries of the Mediterranean Sea. Every city of
importance in Greece was entirely sovereign in the government
of itself and of the surrounding territory which formed its
domain. The stronger among them extended their dominion over
some of the weaker or less valiant ones; but even then the
subject cities kept a considerable measure of independence.
There was no organization of national government to embrace
the whole, nor any large part, of Greece. Certain among the
states were sometimes united in temporary leagues, or
confederacies, for common action in war; but these were
unstable alliances, rather than political unions. In their
earliest form, the Greek city-states were governed by kings,
whose power appears to have been quite limited, and who were
leaders rather than sovereigns. But kingship disappeared from
most of the states in Greece proper before they reached the
period of distinct and accepted history. The kings were first
displaced by aristocracies--ruling families, which took all
political rights and privileges to themselves, and allowed
their fellows (whom they usually oppressed) no part or voice
in public affairs. In most instances these aristocracies, or
oligarchies, were overthrown, after a time, by bold agitators
who stirred up a revolution, and then contrived, while
confusion prevailed, to gather power into their own hands.
Almost every Greek city had its time of being ruled by one or
more of these Tyrants, as they were called. Some of them, like
Pisistratus of Athens, ruled wisely and justly for the most
part, and were not "tyrants" in the modern sense of the term;
but all who gained and held a princely power unlawfully were
so named by the Greeks. The reign of the Tyrants was nowhere
lasting. They were driven out of one city after another until
they disappeared. Then the old aristocracies came uppermost
again in some cities, and ruled as before. But some, like
Athens, had trained the whole body of their citizens to such
intelligence and spirit that neither kingship nor oligarchy
would be endured any longer, and the people undertook to
govern themselves. These were the first democracies--the first
experiments in popular government--that history gives any
account of. "The little commonwealths of Greece," says a great
historian, "were the first states at once free and civilized
which the world ever saw. They were the first states which
gave birth to great statesmen, orators, and generals who did
great deeds, and to great historians who set down those great
deeds in writing. It was in the Greek commonwealths, in short,
that the political and intellectual life of the world began."
In the belief of the Greeks, or of most men among them, their
early history was embodied with truth in the numerous legends
and ancient poems which they religiously preserved; but people
in modern times look differently upon those wonderful myths
and epics, studying them with deep interest, but under more
critical views. They throw much light on the primitive life of
the Hellenes, and more light upon the development of the
remarkable genius and spirit of those thoughtful and
imaginative people; but of actual history there are only
glimpses and guesses to be got from them.
{992}
The Homeric poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," describe a
condition of things in which the ruling state of Peloponnesus
(the southern peninsula of Greece) was a kingdom of the
Achaians, having its capital at Mycenæ, in Argolis,--the realm
of King Agamemnon,--and in which Athens is unknown to the
poet. Within recent years, Dr. Schliemann has excavated the
ruins of Mycenæ, and has found evidence that it really must
have been, in very early times, the seat of a strong and rich
monarchy. But the Achaian kingdom had entirely disappeared,
and the Achaian people had shrunk to an insignificant
community, on the Gulf of Corinth, when the first assured
views of Greek history open to us.
The Dorians.
It seems to be a fact that the Achaians had been overwhelmed
by a great invasion of more barbarous Greek tribes from the
North, very much as the Roman Empire, in later times, was
buried under an avalanche of barbarism from Germany. The
invaders were a tribe or league of tribes called Dorians, who
had been driven from their own previous home on the slopes of
the Pindus mountain range. Their movement southward was part,
as appears, of an extensive shifting of place, or migration,
that occurred at that time (not long, it is probable, before
the beginning of the historic period) among the tribes of
Hellas. The Dorians claimed that in conquering Peloponnesus
they were recovering a heritage from which their chiefs had
been anciently expelled, and their legends were shaped
accordingly. The Dorian chiefs appeared in these legends as
descendants of Hercules, and the tradition of the conquest
became a story of "The Return of the Heraclids."
The principal states founded or possessed and controlled by
the Dorians in Peloponnesus, after their conquest, were
Sparta, or Lacedæmon, Argos, and Corinth. The Spartans were
the most warlike of the Greeks,--the most resolute and
energetic,--and their leadership in practical affairs common
to the whole came to be generally acknowledged. At the same
time they had little of the intellectual superiority which
distinguished some of their Hellenic kindred in so remarkable
a degree. Their state was organized on military principles;
its constitution (the body of famous ordinances ascribed to
Lycurgus) was a code of rigid discipline, which dealt with the
citizen as a soldier always under training for war, and
demanded from him the utmost simplicity of life. Their form of
government combined a peculiar monarchy (having two royal
families and two kings) with an aristocratic senate (the
Gerousia), and a democratic assembly (which voted on matters
only as submitted to it by the senate), with an irresponsible
executive over the whole, consisting of five men called the
Ephors. This singular government, essentially aristocratic or
oligarchical, was maintained, with little disturbance or
change, through the whole independent history of Sparta. In
all respects, the Spartans were the most conservative and the
least progressive among the politically important Greeks.
At the beginning of the domination of the Dorians in
Peloponnesus, their city of Argos took the lead, and was the
head of a league which included Corinth and other city-states.
But Sparta soon rose to rivalry with Argos; then reduced it to
a secondary place, and finally subjugated it completely.
The Ionians.
The extensive shifting of population which had produced its
most important result in the invasion of Peloponnesus by the
Dorians, must have caused great commotions and changes
throughout the whole Greek peninsula; and quite as much north
of the Corinthian isthmus as south of it. But in the part
which lies nearest to the isthmus--the branch peninsula of
Attica--the old inhabitants appear to have held their ground,
repelling invaders, and their country was affected only by an
influx of fugitives, flying from the conquered Peloponnesus.
The Attic people were more nearly akin to the expelled
Achaians and Ionians than to the conquering Dorians, although
a common brotherhood in the Hellenic race was recognized by
all of them. Whatever distinction there may have been before
between Achaians and Ionians now practically disappeared, and
the Ionic name became common to the whole branch of the Greek
people which derived itself from them. The important division
of the race through all its subsequent history was between
Dorians and Ionians. The Æolians constituted a third division,
of minor importance and of far less significance. The
distinction between Ionians and Dorians was a very real one,
in character no less than in traditions and name. The Ionians
were the superior Greeks on the intellectual side. It was
among them that the wonderful genius resided which produced
the greater marvels of art, literature and philosophy in Greek
civilization. It was among them, too, that the institutions of
political freedom were carried to their highest attainment.
Their chief city was Athens, and the splendor of its history
bears testimony to their unexampled genius. On the other hand,
the Dorians were less thoughtful, less imaginative, less broad
in judgment or feeling--less susceptible, it would seem, of a
high refinement of culture; but no less capable in practical
pursuits, no less vigorous in effective action, and sounder,
perhaps, in their moral constitution. Sparta, which stood at
the head of the Doric states, contributed almost nothing to
Greek literature, Greek thought, Greek art, or Greek commerce,
but exercised a great influence on Greek political history.
Other Doric states, especially Corinth, were foremost in
commercial and colonizing enterprise, and attained some
brilliancy of artistic civilization, but with moderate
originality.
Greeks and Phœnicians.
It was natural, as noted above, that the Greeks should be
induced at an early day to navigate the surrounding seas, and
to engage in trade with neighboring nations. They were not
original, it is supposed, in these ventures, but learned more
or less of ship-building and the art of navigation from an
older people, the Phœnicians, who dwelt on the coast of Syria
and Palestine, and whose chief cities were Sidon and Tyre. The
Phœnicians had extended their commerce widely through the
Mediterranean before the Greeks came into rivalry with them.
Their ships, and their merchants, and the wares they bartered,
were familiar in the Ægean when the Homeric poems were
composed.
{993}
They seem to have been the teachers of the early Greeks in
many things. They gave them, with little doubt, the invention
of the alphabet, which they themselves had borrowed from
Egypt. They conveyed hints of art, which bore astonishing
fruits when planted in the fertile Hellenic imagination. They
carried from the East strange stories of gods and demigods,
which were woven into the mythology of the Greeks. They gave,
in fact, to Greek civilization, at its beginning, the greatest
impulse it received. But all that Hellas took from the outer
world it wrought into a new character, and put upon it the
stamp of its own unmistakable genius. In navigation and
commerce the Greeks of the coast-cities and the islands were
able, ere long, to compete on even terms with the Phœnicians,
and it happened, in no great space of time, that they had
driven the latter entirely from the Ægean and the Euxine seas.
Greek Colonies.
They had now occupied with colonies the coast of Asia Minor
and the islands on both their own coasts. The Ionian Greeks
were the principal colonizers of the Asiatic shore and of the
Cyclades. On the former and near it they founded twelve towns
of note, including Samos, Miletus, Ephesus, Chios, and Phocæa,
which are among the more famous cities of ancient times. Their
important island settlements in the Cyclades were Naxos,
Delos, Melos, and Paros. They possessed, likewise, the great
island of Eubœa, with its two wealthy cities of Chalcis and
Eretria. These, with Attica, constituted, in the main, the
Ionic portion of Hellas.
The Dorians occupied the islands of Rhodes and Cos, and
founded on the coast of Asia Minor the cities of Halicarnassus
and Cnidus. The important Æolian colonies in Asia were Smyrna
(acquired later by the Ionians), Temnos, Larissa, and Cyme. Of
the islands they occupied Lesbos and Tenedos.
From these settlements on neighboring coasts and islands the
vigorous Greeks pushed on to more distant fields. It is
probable that their colonies were in Cyprus and Crete before
the eighth century, B. C. In the seventh century B. C., during
a time of confusion and weakness in Egypt, they had entered
that country as allies or as mercenaries of the kings, and had
founded a city, Naucratis, which became an important agent in
the exchange of arts and ideas, as well as of merchandise,
between the Nile and the Ægean. Within a few years past the
site of Naucratis has been uncovered by explorers, and much
has been brought to light that was obscure in Greek and
Egyptian history before. Within the same seventh century,
Cyrene and Barca had been built on the African coast, farther
west. Even a century before that time, the Corinthians had
taken possession of Corcyra (modern Corfu), and they, with the
men of Chalcis and Megara, had been actively founding cities
that grew great and rich, in Sicily and in southern Italy,
which latter acquired the name of "Magna Græcia" (Great
Greece). At a not much later time they had pressed northwards
to the Euxine or Black Sea, and had scattered settlements
along the Thracian and Macedonian coast, including one
(Byzantium) on the Bosphorus, which became, after a thousand
years had passed, the imperial city of Constantinople. About
597 B. C., the Phocæans had planted a colony at Massalia, in
southern Gaul, from which sprang the great city known in
modern times as Marseilles. And much of all this had been
done, by Ionians and Dorians together, before Athens (in which
Attica now centered itself, and which loomed finally greater
in glory than the whole Hellenic world besides) had made a
known mark in history.
Rise of Athens.
At first there had been kings in Athens, and legends had
gathered about their names which give modern historians a
ground-work for critical guessing, and scarcely more. Then the
king disappeared and a magistrate called Archon took his
place, who held office for only ten years. The archons are
believed to have been chosen first from the old royal family
alone; but after a time the office was thrown open to all
noble families. This was the aristocratic stage of political
evolution in the city-state. The next step was taken in 683 B.
C. (which is said to be the beginning of authentic Athenian
chronology) when nine archons were created, in place of the
one, and their term of office was reduced to a single year.
Fifty years later, about 621 B. C., the people of Athens
obtained their first code of written law, ascribed to one
Draco, and described as a code of much severity. But it gave
certainty to law, for the first time, and was the first great
protective measure secured by the people. In 612 B. C. a noble
named Kylon attempted to overthrow the aristocratic government
and establish a tyranny under himself, but he failed.
Legislation of Solon.
Then there came forward in public life another noble, who was
one of the wisest men and purest patriots of any country or
age, and who made an attempt of quite another kind. This was
Solon, the famous lawgiver, who became archon in 594 B. C. The
political state of Athens at that time has been described for
us in an ancient Greek treatise lately discovered, and which
is believed to be one of the hitherto lost writings of
Aristotle. "Not only," says the author of this treatise, "was
the constitution at this time oligarchical in every respect,
but the poorer classes, men, women, and children, were in
absolute slavery to the rich. ... The whole country was in the
hands of a few persons, and if the tenants failed to pay their
rent, they were liable to be haled into slavery, and their
children with them. Their persons were mortgaged to their
creditors." Solon saw that this was a state of things not to
be endured by such a people as the Athenians, and he exerted
himself to change it. He obtained authority to frame a new
constitution and a new code of laws for the state. In the
latter, he provided measures for relieving the oppressed class
of debtors. In the former, he did not create a democratic
government, but he greatly increased the political powers of
the people. He classified them according to their wealth,
defining four classes, the citizens in each of which had
certain political duties and privileges measured to them by
the extent of their property and income. But the whole body of
citizens, in their general assembly (the Ecclesia), were given
the important right of choosing the annual archons, whom they
must select, however, from the ranks of the wealthiest class.
At the same time, Solon enlarged the powers of the old
aristocratic senate--the Areopagus--giving it a supervision of
the execution of the laws and a censorship of the morals of
the people.
{994}
"These changes did not constitute Democracy,--a form of
government then unknown, and for which there was as yet no
word in the Greek language. But they initiated the democratic
spirit. ... Athens, thus fairly started on her
way,--emancipated from the discipline of aristocratic
school-masters, and growing into an age of manly liberty and
self-restraint,--came eventually nearer to the ideal of 'the
good life' [Aristotle's phrase] than any other State in
Hellas."
(W. W. Fowler.)
Tyranny of Pisistratus.
But before the Athenians reached their nearness to this "good
life," they had to pass under the yoke of a "tyrant,"
Pisistratus, who won the favor of the poorer people, and, with
their help, established himself in the Acropolis (560 B. C.)
with a foreign guard to maintain his power. Twice driven out,
he was twice restored, and reigned quite justly and prudently,
on the whole, until his death in 527 B. C. He was succeeded by
his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus; but the latter was
killed in 514, and Hippias was expelled by the Spartans in 510
B. C.; after which there was no tyranny in Athens.
The Democratic Republic.
On the fall of the Pisistratidæ, a majority of the noble or
privileged class struggled hard to regain their old
ascendancy; but one of their number, Cleisthenes, took the
side of the people and helped them to establish a democratic
constitution. He caused the ancient tribal division of the
citizens to be abolished, and substituted a division which
mixed the members of clans and broke up or weakened the
clannish influence in politics. He enlarged Solon's senate or
council and divided it into committees, and he brought the
"ecclesia," or popular assembly, into a more active exercise
of its powers. He also introduced the custom of ostracism,
which permitted the citizens of Athens to banish by their vote
any man whom they thought dangerous to the state. The
constitution of Cleisthenes was the final foundation of the
Athenian democratic republic. Monarchical and aristocratic
Sparta resented the popular change, and undertook to restore
the oligarchy by force of arms; but the roused democracy of
Athens defended its newly won liberties with vigor and
success.
The Persian Wars.
Not Athens only, but all Greece, was now about to be put to a
test which proved the remarkable quality of both, and formed
the beginning of their great career. The Ionian cities of Asia
Minor had recently been twice conquered, first by Crœsus, King
of Lydia, and then by Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian
empire, who had overthrown Crœsus (B. C. 547), and taken his
dominions. The Persians oppressed them, and in 500 B. C. they
rose in revolt. Athens and Eretria sent help to them, while
Sparta refused. The revolt was suppressed, and Darius, the
king of Persia, planned vengeance upon the Athenians and
Eretrians for the aid they had given to it. He sent an
expedition against them in 493 B. C., which was mostly
destroyed by a storm. In 490 B. C. he sent a second powerful
army and fleet, which took Eretria and razed it to the ground.
The great Persian army then marched upon Athens, and was met at
Marathon by a small Athenian force of 9,000 men. The little
city of Platæa sent 1,000 more to stand with them in the
desperate encounter. They had no other aid in the fight, and
the Persians were a great unnumbered host. But Miltiades, the
Greek general that day, planned his battle-charge so well that
he routed the Asiatic host and lost but 192 men. The Persians
abandoned their attempt and returned to their wrathful king.
One citizen of Athens, Themistocles, had sagacity enough to
foresee that the "Great King," as he was known, would not rest
submissive under his defeat; and with difficulty he persuaded
his fellow citizens to prepare themselves for future conflicts
by building a fleet and by fortifying their harbors, thus making
themselves powerful at sea. The wisdom of his counsels was
proved in 480 B. C., when Xerxes, the successor of Darius, led
an army of prodigious size into Greece, crossing the
Hellespont by a bridge of boats. This time, Sparta, Corinth,
and several of the lesser states, rallied with Athens to the
defence of the common country; but Thebes and Argos showed
friendship to the Persians, and none of the important
island-colonies contributed any help. Athens was the brain and
right arm of the war, notwithstanding the accustomed
leadership of Sparta in military affairs.
The first encounter was at Thermopylæ, where Leonidas and his
300 Spartans defended the narrow pass, and died in their place
when the Persians found a way across the mountain to surround
them. But on that same day the Persian fleet was beaten at
Artemisium. Xerxes marched on Athens, however, found the city
deserted, and destroyed it. His fleet had followed him, and
was still stronger than the naval force of the Greeks.
Themistocles forced a battle, against the will of the
Peloponnesian captains, and practically destroyed the Persian
fleet. This most memorable battle of Salamis was decisive of
the war, and decisive of the independence of Greece. Xerxes,
in a panic, hastened back into Asia, leaving one of his
generals, Mardonius, with 300,000 men, to pursue the war. But
Mardonius was routed and his host annihilated, at Platæa, the
next year, while the Persian fleet was again defeated on the
same day at Mycale.
The Golden Age of Athens.
The war had been glorious for the Athenians, and all could see
that Greece had been saved by their spirit and their
intelligence much more than by the valor of Sparta and the
other states. But they were in a woful condition, with their
city destroyed and their families without homes. Wasting no
time in lamentations, they rebuilt the town, stretched its
walls to a wider circuit, and fortified it more strongly than
before, under the lead of the sagacious Themistocles. Their
neighbors were meanly jealous, and Sparta made attempts to
interfere with the building of the walls; but Themistocles
baffled them cunningly, and the new Athens rose proudly out of
the ashes of the old.
{995}
The Ionian islands and towns of Asia Minor (which had broken
the Persian yoke) now recognized the superiority and
leadership of Athens, and a league was formed among them,
which held the meetings of its deputies and kept its treasury
in the temple of Apollo on the sacred island of Delos; for
which reason it was called the Confederacy of Delos, or the
Delian League. The Peloponnesian states formed a looser rival
league under the headship of Sparta. The Confederacy of Delos
was in sympathy with popular governments and popular parties
everywhere, while the Spartans and their following favored
oligarchies and aristocratic parties. There were many
occasions for hostility between the two.
The Athenians, at the head of their Confederacy, were strong,
until they impaired their power by using it in tyrannical
ways. Many lesser states in the league were foolish enough to
commute in money payments the contribution of ships and men
which they had pledged themselves to make to the common naval
force. This gave Athens the power to use that force
despotically, as her own, and she did not scruple to exercise
the power. The Confederacy was soon a name; the states forming
it were no longer allies of Athens, but her subjects; she
ruled them as the sovereign of an Empire, and her rule was
neither generous nor just. Thereby the double tie of kinship
and of interest which might have bound the whole circle of
Ionian states to her fortunes and herself was destroyed by her
own acts. Provoking the hatred of her allies and challenging
the jealous fear of her rivals, Athens had many enemies.
At the same time, a dangerous change in the character of her
democratic institutions was begun, produced especially by the
institution of popular jury-courts, before which prosecutions
of every kind were tried, the citizens who constituted the
courts acting as jury and judge at once. This gave them a
valuable training, without doubt, and helped greatly to raise
the common standard of intelligence among the Athenians so
high; but it did unquestionably tend also to demoralizations
that were ruinous in the end. The jury service, which was
slightly paid, fell more and more to an unworthy class, made
up of idlers or intriguers. Party feeling and popular passions
gained an increasing influence over the juries, and demagogues
acquired an increasing skill in making use of them.
But these evils were scarcely more than in their seed during
the great period of "Athenian Empire," as it is sometimes
called, and everything within its bounds was suffused with the
shining splendor of that matchless half-century. The genius of
this little Ionic state was stimulated to amazing achievements
in every intellectual field. Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Aristophanes, within a single generation, crowded Athenian
literature with the masterpieces of classic drama. Pheidias
and his companions crowned the Acropolis and filled the city
with works that have been the models in art for all ages
since. Socrates began the quizzing which turned philosophy
into honest truth-seeking paths, and Plato listened to him and
was instructed for his mission. Thucydides watched events with
sagacious young eyes, and prepared his pen for the chronicling
of them; while Herodotus, pausing at Athens from his wide
travels, matured the knowledge he had gathered up and
perfected it for his final work. Over all of them came
Pericles to preside and rule, not as a master, or "tyrant,"
but as leader, guide, patron, princely republican,--statesman
and politician in one.
The Peloponnesian War.
The period of the ascendancy of Pericles was the "golden age"
of Athenian prosperity and power, both material and
intellectual. The beginning of the end of it was reached a
little before he died, when the long-threatened war between
Athens and the Peloponnesian league, led by Sparta, broke out
(B. C. 431). If Athens had then possessed the good will of the
cities of her own league, and if her citizens had retained
their old sobriety and intelligence, she might have triumphed
in the war; for she was all powerful at sea and fortified
almost invincibly against attacks by land. But the subject
states, called allies, were hostile, for the most part, and
helped the enemy by their revolts, while the death of Pericles
(B. C. 429) let loose on the people a swarm of demagogues who
flattered and deluded them, and baffled the wiser and more
honest, whose counsels and leadership might have given her
success.
The fatal folly of the long war was an expedition against the
distant city of Syracuse (B. C. 415-413), into which the
Athenians were enticed by the restless and unscrupulous
ambition of Alcibiades. The entire force sent to Sicily
perished there, and the strength and spirit of Athens were
ruinously sapped by the fearful calamity. She maintained the
war, however, until 404 B. C., when, having lost her fleet in
the decisive battle of Ægospotami, and being helplessly
blockaded by sea and land, the city was surrendered to the
Spartan general Lysander. Her walls and fortifications were
then destroyed and her democratic government was overthrown,
giving place to an oligarchy known as the "thirty tyrants."
The democracy soon suppressed the thirty tyrants and regained
control, and Athens, in time, rose somewhat from her deep
humiliation, but never again to much political power in
Greece. In intellect and cultivation, the superiority of the
Attic state was still maintained, and its greatest productions
in philosophy and eloquence were yet to be given to the world.
Spartan and Theban Ascendancy.
After the fall of Athens, Sparta was dominant in the whole of
Greece for thirty years and more, exercising her power more
oppressively than Athens had done. Then Thebes, which had been
treacherously seized and garrisoned by the Spartans, threw off
their yoke (B. C. 379) and led a rising, under her great and
high-souled citizen, Epaminondas, which resulted in bringing
Thebes to the head of Greek affairs. But the Theban ascendancy
was short-lived, and ended with the death of Epaminondas in
362 B. C.
Macedonian Supremacy.
Meantime, while the city-states of Hellas proper had been
wounding and weakening one another by their jealousies and
wars, the semi-Greek kingdom of Macedonia, to the north of
them, in their own peninsula, had been acquiring their
civilization and growing strong. And now there appeared upon
its throne a very able king, Philip, who took advantage of
their divisions, interfered in their affairs, and finally made
a practical conquest of the whole peninsula, by his victory at
the battle of Chæronea (B. C. 338). At Athens, the great
orator Demosthenes had exerted himself for years to rouse
resistance to Philip. If his eloquence failed then, it has
served the world immortally since, by delighting and
instructing mankind.
{996}
King Philip was succeeded by his famous son, Alexander the
Great, who led an army of Macedonians and Greeks into Asia (B.
C. 334), overthrew the already crumbling Persian power,
pursued his conquests through Afghanistan to India, and won a
great empire which he did not live to rule. When he died (B.
C. 323), his generals divided the empire among them and fought
with one another for many years. But the general result was
the spreading of the civilization and language of the Greeks,
and the establishing of their intellectual influence, in
Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, and beyond.
In Greece itself, a state of disturbance and of political
confusion and weakness prevailed for another century. There
was promise of something better, in the formation, by several
of the Peloponnesian states, of a confederacy called the
Achaian League, which might possibly have federated and
nationalized the whole of Hellas in the end; but the Romans,
at this juncture, turned their conquering arms eastward, and
in three successive wars, between 211 and 146 B. C., they
extinguished the Macedonian kingdom, and annexed it, with the
whole peninsula, to the dominions of their wonderful republic.
The Romans.
The Romans, as stated already, are believed to have been
originally near kindred to the Greeks. The same movement, it
is supposed, in the successive outswarmings of Aryan peoples,
deposited in one peninsula the Italian tribes, and in the next
peninsula, eastward, the tribes of the Hellenes. Among the
Italian tribes were Latins, Umbrians, Sabines, Samnites, etc.,
occupying the middle and much of the southern parts of the
peninsula, while a mysterious alien people, the Etruscans,
whose origin is not known, possessed the country north of them
between the Arno and the Tiber. In the extreme south were
remnants of a primitive race, the Iapygian, and Greek colonies
were scattered there around the coasts. From the Latins sprang
the Romans, at the beginning of their separate existence; but
there seems to have been a very early union of these Romans of
the primitive tradition with a Sabine community, whereby was
formed the Roman city-state of historical times. That union
came about through the settlement of the two communities,
Latin and Sabine, on two neighboring hills, near the mouth of
the river Tiber, on its southern bank. In the view of some
historians, it is the geographical position of those hills,
hardly less than the masterful temper and capacity of the race
seated on them, which determined the marvellous career of the
city founded on that site. Says Professor Freeman: "The whole
history of the world has been determined by the geological
fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Tiber
and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one another
than most of the other hills of Latium. On a site marked out
above all other sites for dominion, the centre of Italy, the
centre of Europe, as Europe then was, a site at the junction
of three of the great nations of Italy, and which had the
great river as its highway to lands beyond the bounds of
Italy, stood two low hills, the hill which bore the name of
Latin Saturn, and the hill at the meaning of whose name of
Palatine scholars will perhaps guess for ever. These two
hills, occupied by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood
so near to one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on
those who dwelled on them. They must either join together on
terms closer than those which commonly united Italian leagues,
or they must live a life of border warfare more ceaseless,
more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of Italian enemies.
Legend, with all likelihood, tells us that warfare was tried;
history, with all certainty, tells us that the final choice
was union. The two hills were fenced with a single wall; the
men who dwelled on them changed from wholly separate
communities into tribes of a single city."
The followers of Romulus occupied the Palatine Mount, and the
Sabines were settled on the Quirinal. At subsequent times, the
Cœlian, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Esquiline and the
Viminal hills were embraced in the circumvallation, and the
city on the seven hills thus acquired that name.
If modern students and thinkers, throwing light on the
puzzling legends and traditions of early Rome from many
sources, in language and archæology, have construed their
meaning lightly, then great importance attaches to those first
unions or incorporations of distinct settlements in the
forming of the original city-state. For it was the beginning
of a process which went on until the whole of Latium, and then
the whole of Italy, and, finally, the whole Mediterranean
world, were joined to the seven hills of Rome. "The whole
history of Rome is a history of incorporation"; and it is
reasonable to believe that the primal spring of Roman
greatness is found in that early adoption and persistent
practice of the policy of political absorption, which gave
conquest a character it had never borne before. At the same
time, this view of the creation of the Roman state contributes
to an understanding of its early constitutional history. It
supposes that the union of the first three tribes which
coalesced--those of the Palatine, the Quirinal and Capitoline
(both occupied by the Sabines) and the Cœlian hills--ended the
process of incorporation on equal terms. These formed the
original Roman people--the "fathers," the "patres," whose
descendants appear in later times as a distinct class or
order, the "patricians"--holding and struggling to maintain
exclusive political rights, and exclusive ownership of the
public domain, the "ager publicus," which became a subject of
bitter contention for four centuries. Around these heirs of
the "fathers" of Rome arose another class of Romans, brought
into the community by later incorporations, and not on equal
terms. If the first class were "fathers," these were children,
in a political sense, adopted into the Roman family, but without
a voice in general affairs, or a share in the public lands, or
eligibility to the higher offices of the state. These were the
"plebeians" or "plebs" of Rome, whose long struggle with the
patricians for political and agrarian rights is the more
interesting side of Roman history throughout nearly the whole
of the prosperous age of the republic.
{997}
At Rome, as at Athens, there was a period of early kingship,
the legends of which are as familiar to us all as the stories
of the Bible, but the real facts of which are almost totally
unknown. It is surmised that the later kings--the well known
Tarquins of the classical tale--were Etruscan princes (it is
certain that they were Etruscans), who had broken for a time
the independence of the Romans and extended their sovereignty
over them. It is suspected, too, that this period of Etruscan
domination was one in which Roman civilization made a great
advance, under the tuition of a more cultivated people. But if
Rome in its infancy did know a time of subjugation, the
endurance was not long. It ended, according to Roman
chronology, in the 245th year of the city, or 509 B.C., by the
expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, the last of the kings.
The Roman Republic.
The Republic was then founded; but it was an aristocratic and
not a democratic republic. The consuls, who replaced the
kings, were required to be patricians, and they were chosen by
the landholders of the state. The senate was patrician; all
the important powers of government were in patrician hands,
and the plebs suffered grievous oppression in consequence.
They were not of a tamely submissive race. They demanded
powers for their own protection, and by slow degrees they won
them--strong as the patricians were in their wealth and their
trained political skill.
Precisely as in Athens, the first great effort among the
common people was to obtain relief from crushing burdens of
debt, which had been laid upon them in precisely the same
way--by loss of harvests while in military service, and by the
hardness of the laws which creditors alone had framed. An army
of plebs, just home from war, marched out of the city and
refused to return until magistrates of their own choosing had
been conceded to them. The patricians could not afford to lose
the bone and sinew of their state, and they yielded the point
in demand (B. C. 494). This first "secession of the plebs"
brought about the first great democratic change in the Roman
constitution, by calling into existence a powerful
magistracy--the Tribunes of the Plebs--who henceforth stood
between the consuls and the common people, for the protection
of the latter.
From this first success the plebeian order went forward, step
by step, to the attainment of equal political rights in the
commonwealth, and equal participation in the lands which Roman
conquest was continually adding to the public domain. In 450
B. C., after ten years of struggle, they secured the
appointment of a commission which framed the famous Twelve
Tables of the Law, and so established a written and certain
code. Five years later, the caste exclusiveness of the
patricians was broken down by a law which permitted marriages
between the orders. In 367 B. C. the patrician monopoly of the
consular office was extinguished, by the notable Licinian
Laws, which also limited the extent of land that any citizen
might occupy, and forbade the exclusive employment of slave
labor on any estate. One by one, after that, other
magistracies were opened to the plebs; and in 287 B. C. by the
Lex Hortensia, the plebeian concilium, or assembly, was made
independent of the senate and its acts declared to be valid
and binding. The democratic commonwealth was now completely
formed.
Roman Conquest of Italy.
While these changes in the constitution of their Republic were
in progress, the Romans had been making great advances toward
supremacy in the peninsula. First they had been in league with
their Latin neighbors, for war with the Æquians, the
Volscians, and the Etruscans. The Volscian war extended over
forty years, and ended about 450 B. C. in the practical
disappearance of the Volscians from history. Of war with the
Æquians, nothing is heard after 458 B. C., when, as the tale
is told, Cincinnatus left his plow to lead the Romans against
them. The war with the Etruscans of the near city of Veii had
been more stubborn. Suspended by a truce between 474 and 438
B. C., it was then renewed, and ended in 396 B. C., when the
Etruscan city was taken and destroyed. At the same time the
power of the Etruscans was being shattered at sea by the
Greeks of Tarentum and Syracuse, while at home they were
attacked from the north by the barbarous Gauls or Celts.
These last named people, having crossed the Alps from Gaul and
Switzerland and occupied northern Italy, were now pressing
upon the more civilized nations to the south of the Po. The
Etruscans were first to suffer, and their despair became so
great that they appealed to Rome for help. The Romans gave
little aid to them in their extremity; but enough to provoke
the wrath of Brennus, the savage leader of the Gauls. He
quitted Etruria and marched to Rome, defeating an army which
opposed him on the Allia, pillaging and burning the city (B.
C. 390) and slaying the senators, who had refused to take
refuge, with other inhabitants, in the capitol. The defenders
of the capitol held it for seven months; Rome was rebuilt,
when the Gauls withdrew, and soon took up her war again with
the Etruscan cities. By the middle of the same century she was
mistress of southern Etruria, though her territories had been
ravaged twice again by renewed incursions of the Gauls. In a
few years more, when her allies of Latium complained of their
meager share of the fruits of these common wars, and demanded
Roman citizenship and equal rights, she fought them fiercely
and humbled them to submissiveness (B. C. 339-338), reducing
their cities to the status of provincial towns.
And now, having awed or subdued her rivals, her friends, and
her enemies, near at hand, the young Republic swung into the
career of rapid conquest which subdued to her will, within
three-fourths of a century, the whole of Italy below the mouth
of the Arno.
In 343 B. C. the Roman arms had been turned against the
Samnites at the south, and they had been driven from the
Campania. In 327 B. C. the same dangerous rivals were again
assailed, with less impunity. At the Caudine Forks, in 321 B.
C., the Samnites inflicted both disaster and shame upon their
indomitable foes; but the end of the war (B. C. 304) found
Rome advanced and Samnium fallen back. A third contest ended
the question of supremacy; but the Samnites (B. C. 290)
submitted to become allies and not subjects of the Roman
state.
In this last struggle the Samnites had summoned Gauls and
Etruscans to join them against the common enemy, and Rome had
overcome their united forces in a great fight at Sentinum.
This was in 295 B. C. Ten years later she annihilated the
Senonian Gauls, annexed their territory and planted a colony
at Sena on the coast. In two years more she had paralyzed the
Boian Gauls by a terrible chastisement, and had nothing more
to fear from the northward side of her realm. Then she turned
back to finish her work in the south.
{998}
War with Pyrrhus.
The Greek cities of the southern coast were harassed by
various marauding neighbors, and most of them solicited the
protection of Rome, which involved, of course, some surrender
of their independence. But one great city, Tarentum, the most
powerful of their number, refused these terms, and hazarded a
war with the terrible republic, expecting support from the
ambitious Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, on the Greek coast opposite
their own. Pyrrhus came readily at their call, with dreams of
an Italian kingdom more agreeable than his own. Assisted in
the undertaking by his royal kinsmen of Macedonia and Syria,
he brought an army of 25,000 men, with 20 elephants--which
Roman eyes had never seen before. In two bloody fights (B. C.
280-279), Pyrrhus was victorious; but the cost of victory was
so great that he dared not follow it up. He went over to
Sicily, instead, and waged war for three years (B. C. 278-276)
with the Carthaginians, who had subjugated most of the island.
The Epirot king brought timely aid to the Sicilian Greeks, and
drove their Punic enemies into the western border of the
island; but he claimed sovereignty over all that his arms
delivered, and was not successful in enforcing the claim. He
returned to Italy and found the Romans better prepared than
before to face his phalanx and his elephants. They routed him
at Beneventum, in the spring of 275 B. C. and he went back to
Epirus, with his dreams dispelled. Tarentum fell, and Southern
Italy was added to the dominion of Rome.
Punic Wars.
During her war with Pyrrhus, the Republic had formed an
alliance with Carthage, the powerful maritime Phœnician city
on the African coast. But friendship between these two cities
was impossible. The ambition of both was too boundless and too
fierce. They were necessarily competitors for supremacy in the
Mediterranean world, from the moment that a narrow strait
between Italy and Sicily was all that held them apart. Rome
challenged her rival to the duel in 264 B. C., when she sent
help to the Mamertines, a band of brigands who had seized the
Sicilian city of Messina, and who were being attacked by both
Carthaginians and Syracusan Greeks. The "First Punic War,"
then begun, lasted twenty-four years, and resulted in the
withdrawal of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and in their
payment of an enormous war indemnity to Rome. The latter
assumed a protectorate over the island, and the kingdom of
Hiero of Syracuse preserved its nominal independence for the
time; but Sicily, as a matter of fact, might already be looked
upon as the first of those provinces, beyond Italy, which Rome
bound to herself, one by one, until she had compassed the
Mediterranean with her dominion and gathered to it all the
islands of that sea.
The "Second Punic war," called sometimes the "Hannibalic war,"
was fought with a great Carthaginian, rather than with
Carthage herself. Hamilcar Barca had been the last and ablest
of the Punic generals in the contest for Sicily. Afterwards he
undertook the conquest of Spain, where his arms had such
success that he established a very considerable power, more
than half independent of the parent state. He nursed an
unquenchable hatred of Rome, and transmitted it to his son
Hannibal, who solemnly dedicated his life to warfare with the
Latin city. Hamilcar died, and in due time Hannibal found
himself prepared to make good his oath. He provoked a
declaration of war (B. C. 218) by attacking Saguntum, on the
eastern Spanish coast--a town which the Romans "protected."
The latter expected to encounter him in Spain; but before the
fleet bearing their legions to that country had reached
Massilia, he had already passed the Pyrenees and the Rhone,
with nearly 100,000 men, and was crossing the Alps, to assail
his astounded foes on their own soil. The terrific barrier was
surmounted with such suffering and loss that only 20,000 foot
and 6,000 horse, of the great army which left Spain, could be
mustered for the clearing of the last Alpine pass. With this
small following, by sheer energy, rapidity and precision of
movement--by force, in other words, of a military genius never
surpassed in the world--he defeated the armies of Rome again
and again, and so crushingly in the awful battle of Cannæ (B.
C. 216) that the proud republic was staggered, but never
despaired. For fifteen years the great Carthaginian held his
ground in southern Italy; but his expectation of being joined
by discontented subjects of Rome in the peninsula was very
slightly realized, and his own country gave him little
encouragement or help. His brother Hasdrubal, marching to his
relief in 207 B. C., was defeated on the river Metaurus and
slain. The arms of Rome had prospered meantime in Sicily and
in Spain, even while beaten at home, and her Punic rival had
been driven from both. In 204 B. C. the final field of battle
was shifted to Carthaginian territory by Scipio, of famous
memory, thereafter styled Africanus, because he "carried the
war into Africa." Hannibal abandoned Italy to confront him,
and at Zama, in the autumn of 202 B. C., the long contention
ended, and the career of Carthage as a Power in the ancient
world was forever closed. Existing by Roman sufferance for
another half century, she then gave her implacable conquerors
another pretext for war, and they ruthlessly destroyed her
(B.C. 146).
Roman Conquest of Greece.
In that same year of the destruction of Carthage, the conquest
of Greece was finished. The first war of the Romans on that
side of the Adriatic had taken place during the Second Punic
war, and had been caused by an alliance formed between
Hannibal and King Philip of Macedonia (B. C. 214). They
pursued it then no further than to frustrate Philip's designs
against themselves; but they formed alliances with the Greek
states oppressed or menaced by the Macedonian, and these drew
them into a second war, just as the century closed. On
Cynoscephalæ, Philip was overthrown (B. C. 197), his kingdom
reduced to vassalage, and the freedom of all Greece was
solemnly proclaimed by the Roman Consul Flaminius.
{999}
And now, for the first time, Rome came into conflict with an
Asiatic power. The throne of the Syrian monarchy, founded by
one of the generals of Alexander the Great, was occupied by a
king more ambitious than capable, who had acquired a large and
loosely jointed dominion in the East, and who bore the
sounding name of Antiochus the Great. This vainglorious King,
having a huge army and many elephants at his disposal, was
eager to try a passage at arms with the redoubtable men of
Rome. He was encouraged in his desire by the Ætolians in
Greece, who bore ill-will to Rome. Under this encouragement,
and having Hannibal--then a fugitive at his court--to give him
counsel, which he lacked intelligence to use, Antiochus
crossed the Ægean and invaded Greece (B. C. 192). The Romans
met him at the pass of Thermopylæ; drove him back to the
shores from which he came; pursued him thither; crushed and
humbled him on the field of Magnesia, and took the kingdoms
and cities of Asia Minor under their protection, as the allies
(soon to be subjects) of Rome.
Twenty years passed with little change in the outward
situation of affairs among the Greeks. But discontent with the
harshness and haughtiness of Roman "protection" changed from
sullenness to heat, and Perseus, son of Philip of Macedonia,
fanned it steadily, with the hope of bringing it to a flame.
Rome watched him with keen vigilance, and before his plans
were ripe her legions were upon him. He battled with them