READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER XX

THE GROWTH OF THE DORIAN STATES

THE Dorian Conquest ended the wasteful splendour of the Heroic Age, and began that Dark Age which came like a winter on the mainland of Greece. Dark and unproductive as winter, it was full of germination, and in due time there followed the spring and the summer, the Hellenic Renaissance and the Hellenic Prime. In Peloponnese, the winter belongs to Argos, the spring to Corinth, the summer to Sparta.

All these were cities of the Dorians, who had conquered for themselves the east and the south of Peloponnese. In the north­west corner, their fellow-conquerers, the Eleans, had acquired the Peneus valley and were slowly expanding to east and south. Between lay the pre-Dorians, still unconquered in Arcadia, Triphylia and Messenia. To the north, beyond the Arcadian mountains, the little towns of Achaea were scattered along the Corinthian Gulf. Chance had preserved for them this name of ‘Achaeans,’ which tradition gave to the pre-Dorians: judged by their dialect, they were a quasi-Dorian people akin to the Eleans and the nations across the Gulf. A remote and backward people, their part in history (except for their share in the colonization of the west) is reserved for the third century b.c.

I

ARGOS IN THE DARK AGE

Argos was the Dorian substitute for Mycenae, as mistress of the Inachus valley and of an empire beyond. Her empire could not compare with Mycenae’s for size or splendour. Though she was reputed the mother of cities as distant as the islands of Crete and Rhodes, in the long lull which followed the Conquest she kept little touch with these, and the ‘Heritage of Temenus’ (as her dominion was called, after the founder of her dynasty) covered only east Peloponnese and the adjacent islands. There is little doubt that Dorian Sparta is younger than Dorian Argos, and that the founders of Sparta came from Argolis, but these pioneers in Laconia seem never to have allowed any Argive suzerainty, and the Temenid dominion stopped at the mountain barrier, Parthenius-Parnon.

Some scholars have claimed for Argos far more than this, and have not hesitated to speak of an Argive empire stretching to Crete and the Euxine, Epirus and Thrace. This theory is based partly on the geographical distribution of myths, an exceedingly insecure foundation, but also on the very wide horizon implied in certain Argive cults and especially the names of the Argive phratries. This empire has been credited partly to king Pheidon, the outstanding figure of early Argive history, and partly to the Dark Age before him. The masterful and picturesque personality of King Pheidon is like champagne to the unaccustomed head of the historian of the Greek twilight: a sober judgment will remember how much more it costs to construct empires out of flesh and blood, than on paper. To Pheidon we must come back in due course; meanwhile we may perhaps draw, from this alleged wide horizon of early Argos, conclusions more consonant with explicit Greek tradition, about a city who did not lack her sacri vates.

The conclusions cannot be secure, because the evidence is extremely casual: it is especially hard to date with any certainty such things as the growth of legends, the introduction of cults, the naming of phratries. However, the prominence of Argive heroes among the Argonauts, and the evident fact that Argos is the geographical centre from which the Twelve Labours of Heracles radiate, make it likely that Argos exercised an influence, fairly early, in the development of these legends. In these legends Heracles passes through Arcadia to Erymanthus and beyond, and the Argonauts penetrate the Euxine and the Adriatic; but that does not mean that the armies and viceroys of Argos followed. Trade may go ahead of the flag, and a poet’s fancy assuredly may. And if Argos adopted cults and fancy-names for her phratries from beyond her political frontier, nothing is proved except that the Argive imagination was stirred by the opening up of new horizons. But since the Argive poets could win acceptance for the tales they told, Argos appears to have had a dominance in culture, as she had in religion, over the great cities around her. She never permanently lost this dominance.

Two of the great colonizing cities, Megara, who was opening the Euxine, and Corinth, who was opening the Adriatic and the West, lay immediately in the sphere of Argive culture. We have very early evidence for this. During the Dark Age, the alphabet spread over the Greek world, and just as the main currents of the Migrations are discernible in the distribution of dialects, so are those of the Dark Age in the distribution of the various forms of the alphabet. The Dark Age ends with the beginning of colonization, and by then the local alphabets are fixed, the colonies in each case use the alphabet of the mother-city. Most of the various Greek (and Italian) alphabets can be classed into two large groups, an Eastern group and a Western group. The cities of the Isthmus, Sicyon, Megara and Corinth, agree with Argos in using the Eastern alphabet: the rest of Peloponnese (including the cities of the Argolic Akte—Epidaurus, Troezen and Hermione) use the Western. Thus there was an early community of culture between Argos and the Isthmus, and probably a common horizon, which the sailors of Corinth and Megara widened, and the poets of Argos enriched. This division of labour was of course not absolute. Corinth had her poets, and Argos may have had her sailors: there is some evidence that Argos shared with Megara in the founding of Byzantium, and a more doubtful tradition speaks of an early Argive king of Syracuse (Aristotle).

But by the middle of the eighth century, when this era of colonization began, the Heritage of Temenus was crumbling to pieces. Nature forbade the permanent union of this domain. Argos was separated from all her federate cities by the mountain ranges, which divide eastern Peloponnese into a number of plains, each turning its back upon the others. In her long struggle with Sparta, Argos was foredoomed to failure by the hardness of combining even her immediate neighbours effectively. The first half-century of colonization saw the disruption of her domain, and then arose King Pheidon. Under him, Argos makes her last serious bid for the control of Peloponnese.

II

ARCADIA

Arcadia is the mountainous centre of Peloponnese, which the Dorians and their fellow-invaders never conquered. Already in the Catalogue of Ships Homer calls Arcadia an inland country, her men know nothing of the sea. But before or during the Migrations, men of Arcadian speech reached Cyprus, and there are signs enough that Arcadia once had a wider extension and indeed a sea-coast. The Arcadians themselves laid claim to Pellene in the north and Triphylia in the west, and south-eastwards the Cynurians were a pre-Dorian people with namesakes in historical Arcadia. It is, however, in the south-west, where the invading streams from Elis and Argolis penetrated last of all, that Arcadia probably longest maintained her ancient extension: in Messenia, where the native dynasty in Stenyclarus (though the Heraclid legend rather clumsily sewed it on to Cresphontes, the brother of Temenus) is Arcadian in origin and named after the Arcadian hero Aepytus; and probably in Triphylia.

In this south-west of Peloponnese lay Nestor’s kingdom of Pylos, the last stronghold (except Arcadia itself) of the pre-Dorian order. This coastal empire included probably a great mixture of population on an Arcadian substratum: for example the Minyans of Triphylia, whom a very artificial tale of Herodotus makes quite recent immigrants, are far older and already known in Homer. Under the pressure of the oncoming invaders, the kingdom of Pylos totally disappears. Sparta took the greater portion and called it Messenia: her settlement of the Messenian Gulf with Perioecic towns has been already recorded, the conquest of Stenyclarus must be recorded shortly. Triphylia fell to Elis, we cannot say at what date: a conquest or reconquest took place in the lifetime of Herodotus. Elis and Sparta thus join hands at last, and Arcadia is completely surrounded.

The central mass of Arcadia, though never conquered, has its edges worried by the same two peoples. The Eleans, working up from the Peneus valley, conquer Acroreia (the Elean ‘Highlands’) and Lasion: finally they conclude a hundred years’ treaty with Heraea, which is henceforward Arcadia’s north-west frontier state. The south-east frontier state, which bears the brunt of the long struggle against Sparta, is Tegea. There are traditions of very early wars between Tegea and the Lacedaemonians in the reign of the Spartan king Charillus (f. 800 BC).

One would not expect the two states to come in contact until Sparta had penetrated some of the hilly country which lay between her and Tegea. Aegytis, a bare land around the upper waters of the Eurotas, lay on her natural line of expansion, and the Spartan tradition ascribes its conquest, reasonably enough, to their king Charillus. After this, the Spartan territory almost marched with the Tegean, and the district of Sciritis which lay along their frontier very probably belonged to Tegea. So it is not impossible that Spartan and Tegean arms met in the reign of Charillusi the Tegean legend, which seems largely based on a light-hearted reminiscence of Herodotus1, says with disaster to Sparta. Sciritis was probably not definitely acquired by Sparta until about 600 BC, but early in the seventh century a Spartan army marches through Tegeatis—to meet annihilation at Argive hands. This battle, dated traditionally to 669 BC, was at Hysiae, and the Spartan army could be coming from nowhere except Tegeatis. It is possible Tegea and Sparta were allied against Argos, as later Argos and Tegea against Sparta: a question of balance of power. The issue was finally fought out in the sixth century.

The stress of their position imposed upon these two frontier communities, Heraea and Tegea, an earlier maturity than we find in most of Arcadia. The earliest Arcadian coinage is the very fine silver money issued at Heraea between c. 550 and 500. Tegea had both a severer struggle and a more favourable position, and in the Spartan wars of the sixth century it is her lead which the rest of Arcadia follows. The great sanctuary of Athena Aiea at Tegea, which, as excavation shows, dates- back into the Dark Age, was venerated in all Peloponnese.

There were at first kings in Arcadia. The best-attested of them ruled about the end of the seventh century, King Aristocrates of Orchomenus, who was allied by marriage with the tyrant of Epidaurus, and later with Periander himself. His grave was shown at Orchomenus: he is said to have come to a bad end after violating a priestess of Artemis, and there seem to have been no more kings in Arcadia after him. Though he belonged to the age of the Tyrants, King Aristocrates is not one of them. Arcadia doubtless gave countenance to the rise of Tyranny in the Dorian states, but herself she had neither the racial nor the social cleavage necessary to provoke this violent remedy. The historian Theopompus has left us (from a much later date, it is true) a picture of the Arcadian yeomen at dinner with their labourers, all eating the same pork and drinking the same wine, a sharp contrast to the serf-owning nobility of the Dorian lands. And when Cyrene, about the middle of the sixth century, wished to make her monarchy constitutional, the Delphic oracle told her to ask for a law­giver from the Mantineans, an Arcadian people. Demonax, whom the Mantineans sent, became famous for his moderation and fairness, but the kings of Cyrene soon found his settlement more liberal than they liked.

In later days, Mantinea and Tegea became rivals and their border feuds were chronic. But Mantinea’s importance, built on the decay of Orchomenus, seems to date from the early fifth century: in the days of Demonax, she was as yet no rival to Tegea, and Delphi chose her rather for her political innocence. Nevertheless, through the jealousy or at least the independence of her small communities, Arcadia never took the position that the numbers and toughness of her men might have given her. In the Renaissance which succeeded the Dark Age in Greece, Arcadia and especially its north-west parts lay out of the main current of progress, and looked to the past. They were the oldest race in Greece, older than the moon, there was the first man born: but to the Aeolic poet Alcaeus they are a byword for primitive savagery.

Religion in north and west Arcadia was far more primitive than in the city states of Greece. Of the mountain sanctuary of Zeus Lykaios, the religious centre of Arcadia, Plato tells a dark tale of were-wolves and human sacrifice; of their many beast­shaped deities perhaps the most notable is the Goat God Pan, who after the Persian Wars became famous throughout Greece. ‘Pan, Ruler of Arcadia,’ sings Pindar, ‘Guardian of the holy shrines, Companion of the Great Mother, Darling of the Graces.’ In the last phrase, we might suspect Pindar of giving a Hellenic brightness to the Arcadian Goat: but we should do wrong to conceive too darkly of this people. Like the Spartans, they re­joiced in music and dancing, and if they had no poets, they were early famous for their musical victories at Delphi. They had too the Greek delight in games, and were great boxers and wrestlers both at their local meetings and at Olympia.

There are of course no Arcadian colonies, but individual Arcadians early found their way abroad. The Iamids, an ancient family from Stymphalus, had connections with the west (Pindar calls one of them co-founder of Syracuse), and it is not uncommon to find men holding a double citizenship, of an Arcadian and a western city. This favoured the growth of strange legends, and none stranger than that which ascribed to Arcadians the first founding of Rome.

III

THE END OF THE DARK AGE

After the violence of the Migrations, in the quiet generations which follow, a new civilization is born, and it comes to flower in the eighth century. In almost every valley of Greece, the here­ditary nobles, grouped sometimes round a ‘heroic’ king, were gradually evolving the elements of the Greek city—the worship of common gods at visible altars, the acceptance of a common Law, administered at a fixed place, and, above all, the common facing of danger for the city’s defence, in that new instrument of war, the Greek Hoplite Phalanx. It was by only a few that the gods could be served, the laws known, or the city defended: the members of this aristocracy, the Aristoi, were the indispensable leaders, l'état c’etait eux. The rest of the people, the Laos, heard and obeyed; their masters ensured to them no little prosperity, and the people multiplied.

It was probably about the middle of the eighth century that the men of Chalcis and Eretria, ‘the spear-famed lords of Euboea’, developed the tactics which for some centuries were to command the civilized world—the ranging of heavy­armed men in close order behind a wall of shields. And, about the same time, the growing populations of Greece were passing the point at which the land could comfortably support them. The need and the means matched, and the Greek expansion over the coasts of the Mediterranean began. The Euboeans led the way.

It was unmistakably the dawn. Not only was the western horizon receding, and hope and adventure stirring in men’s minds, but a new intellectual and artistic life was coming from the east: it was the Greek Renaissance. There had doubtless been preparations for the dawn; adventurers—call them buccaneers or merchants—had been exploring the western seas1, and the contact with Ionia can never .have been quite utterly broken. By 700 BC free contact, from Asia Minor to Sicily, is established.

In these circumstances the cities round the Corinthian Isthmus which look both to the east and the west assume a new importance: it is probably now that the centre of gravity inside the Heritage of Temenus first shifts northwards, to Corinth instead of Argos. The aristocracy which ruled at Corinth, the Bacchiads, has won its way into the region of romance, and we have an abundant, if uncertain, tradition. The names of the early kings of Corinth, from Aletes the founder, have been preserved by the ancient chronographers to whom they gave a framework of chronology down to the First Olympiad. The names are of no value; but we need not doubt there were kings in Corinth as elsewhere, and that in the eighth century they gave way before the aristocracy. This aristocracy was composed of a number of families who all claimed descent from Bacchis, the fifth king; a singularly exclusive and inbred aristocracy, whose strict intermarriage within the clan was perhaps due to their dislike that an heiress’s portion should pass outside.

Among the famous Bacchiads is Eumelus the poet. He is dated to the middle of the eighth century, and if this date is accepted his fragments are a remarkable indication of the influx of Ionian culture, not only because they follow the method and form of the Ionian Epic, but by the interest they show in the Milesian discovery of the Euxine. He handled the myth of the Argonauts, and placed Medea’s home in Phasis, the ‘world’s end’ of the early sailors in that sea: he also mentions Sinope. These references confirm our traditions that the Milesians had already entered the Euxine and settled at Sinope in the first half of the eighth century, before the Cimmerians came; though after the passing of that scourge the work needed to be done again. More remarkable perhaps is the north-Euxine name Borysthenis, which Eumelus gives to one of his three Muses. A second Muse, from nearer home, is Achelois, which shows Corinth already conscious of the western mouth of her Gulf: and we see also signs of the rising fame of Delphi.

Slightly later are the two great Bacchiad colonizers, Archias the founder of Syracuse, and Chersicrates the founder of Dorian Corcyra. 734 BC is the date ascribed to the foundation of Syracuse, and Corcyra also—Archias and Chersicrates are said to have set sail together. The exact synchronism may be questioned, but the dates are certainly right within a few years. Plutarch in his Tales of Love tells us how Archias and his companions tore to pieces the youthful Actaeon, and in consequence fled the country and went to Syracuse: elsewhere, the tale is more suitably located on Mount Cithaeron, with mad dogs in place of the drunken Bacchiads. The efficient cause of the founding of Syracuse was the desire for more land: the leading colonists were Gamoroi, landowners: one light-hearted emigrant, named in Archilochus, gambled his estate away on the voyage, before they reached their new home. Corcyra was to provide, besides more land for the landless, a port of call on the voyage west. The undutiful colony did not always fulfil this programme.

At Corcyra Corinth found the Eretrians in possession: and we must wonder what were the relations between Corinth and her Euboean forerunners in the west. Towards the end of the century, Chalcis and Eretria, who shared the colonization of Cumae, c. 750 BC, are at grips in their secular struggle for the Lelantine Plain. We have good evidence that many Greek cities took sides in this feud, that among others Samos gave help to Chalcis, and that about 704 the Corinthians lent to the Samians their shipbuilder Ameinocles, to construct for them war­ships of the most modern type: it is a fair inference that Corinth’s interest is for the moment with Chalcis and against Eretria. But by now both Eretria and Chalcis have done with western ambitions, and this grouping cannot safely be maintained for the generations before, when Euboeans and Corinthians were emulously discovering the New World. Whether this emulation was bitter at first or not, it was soon clear that a splendid prize was at stake. Corinth was far the better base for western voyages, and she gradually displaced her rivals, supplanting both Eretrians in Corcyra and Chalcidians in Aetolian Chalcis.

The skill and knowledge with which Corinth chose the sites of her early colonies is evident in the later greatness of both Corcyra and Syracuse. These two foundations, and Ameinocles’ advance in naval construction, are the really momentous achievements of the Bacchiad regime in Corinth.

Megara, who shared the Isthmus with Corinth, never came near attaining either power or fame like those of her southern neighbour. It is said that the Bacchiads of Corinth annexed her land, and imposed on her people burdens analogous to those laid by Sparta on the Messenians. Her brief prime begins after 750 and ends before 600. Some time in the eighth century she asserted herself against Corinthian encroachment, and the hero of these Wars of Liberation was Orrippus, the Olympian victor of 720 BC. His victories in battle, which are presumably later than his victory at Olympia, rectified the frontier and assured for Megara about a century of prosperity. But even before Orrippus, Megara had not been wholly crushed by Corinth. About 730 she just finds room, between Chalcis and Corinth, for one Sicilian colony, called after herself Megara Hyblaea, which in turn founds a hundred years later a daughter city, Selinus: this is the sum of her westward expansion. A richer, or less crowded, field awaited her in the north-east, where, after the Cimmerians had vanished, she shared with Miletus the re­opening of the Euxine. Megara’s great activity in this region is confined to one generation in the early seventh century, beginning with the founding of Chalcedon, c. 680, and ending with Byzantium, c. 660. It is approximately the generation of King Pheidon: how the blossoming of Megara suited with his general foreign policy, we shall see later.

Westward of Corinth, and in a far more fertile plain, lay Sicyon, also a Dorian city, and once part of the Heritage of Temenus. Perhaps because her own land sufficed for her citizens, we hear of no Sicyonian colonies. The beautiful and delicate ware, called the ‘Proto-Corinthian’ pottery, seems to have been made, largely if not exclusively, at Sicyon. It is the first of the mainland potteries to escape from the rigidity of Geometric Art: in delicacy of observation, and in simplicity, it is perhaps more pleasing than the more strongly orientalized wares which followed it. About 730 BC it begins to dominate the western market.

Westward of Sicyon again, and as far as the borders of Elis, stretched the long line of little Achaean cities, who occupied most of the south shore of the Corinthian Gulf. In the late eighth century, Achaea shared with her neighbours across the Gulf, Crisa and Locris, the colonization of south Italy. Their colonies were called ‘Greaf Hellas’, and the two Achaean foundations of Croton and Sybaris were perhaps the most prosperous, and their sites the most skilfully chosen, of all. Like Corinth at Corcyra (and possibly the Megarians in Cephallenia), the Achaeans made for themselves an advanced base at Zacynthus.

There were two famous cities in south Italy which were not founded from the Gulf of Corinth, namely Rhegium and Tarentum (Taras). The founding of both was described by the fifth century Syracusan historian, Antiochus, and in both cases connected with the Spartan War of Conquest in Messenia. Rhegium is connected with the beginning of the war. The Chalcidians on their way to Rhegium (c. 730) took with them certain Messenians, who had been disgraced by their countrymen, their offence being that, when sacrilege had been committed at a festival of Artemis just across the Spartan frontier, they were in favour of giving satisfaction: the tempeh of the Messenians in general was for defying Sparta, and the War of Conquest was the consequence. The disgraced minority found safety and honour at Rhegium; sic hos servavit Apollo. Tarentum is connected with the close of the war. It was founded (c. 705) by the young Spartans who had been born and had grown up during the war. All true Spartans, it was said, had been away in Messenia all those twenty years, and any children born meanwhile were base-born, and should never be citizens. The young men, called Partheniae or ‘Bastards’, attempted revolution, and failing, were sent away to Tarentum.

These two tales—whose details are unimportant enough—date the conquest of Messenia to the latter part of the eighth century, and make it exactly contemporary with the colonizing of the west. The list of Olympic victors confirms this date. Down to 736 the victors are from west Peloponnese in general, and chiefly from Messenia: after that date no Messenian victor occurs at all, and in 716 is the first of many Spartan victors.

The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, writing some two generations later, has left us the only good account of this war. The conqueror of Messenia was King Theopompus, it was a tough fight and lasted for twenty years, the centre of resistance was Mount Ithome. The Messenian Gulf was already planted with the cities of the Spartan Perioikoi, and Theopompus now turns to conquer the rich inland plain of Stenyclarus, of which Mount Ithome is the key. Tyrtaeus does not disguise the motive, it was the acres of arable, orchard and vineyard, that Sparta desired: the Messenians fought desperately, for defeat meant slavery indeed. This too Tyrtaeus has described, saying how the Messenian landowners became ‘like asses bent beneath great burdens,’ paying to their masters one-half of the whole produce of the land, and suffering indignities besides. Thus did Messenia become a Dorian land.

The conquest of Messenia is not only contemporary with the colonization of the west, it is the Spartan counterpart of that movement. It solved the problem of growing population and land-hunger, and just as the Syracusan Gamoroi made serfs of the inhabitants of the land, so Sparta did in Messenia. But Sparta was the only Greek state who thus conquered and permanently enslaved another Greek state next door to her: the effect on Sparta was profound. Like most Dorian states, she had her serfs already, the famous Helots; but their number is now more than doubled and henceforward every Spartan citizen is a large landowner and large serf owner. Further, in the rest of Greece, the overseas colonization had a certain psychological effect on the mother-cities. The opening of the horizon bred a taste for adventure, and a readiness to accept new values: more tangibly, it suggested the possibilities of overseas commerce, and prepared the way for the introduction of coinage, and that substitution of Trade for Land as the main basis of wealth which followed in the seventh century. The conservative spirit was dying, a liberal spirit was being born.

By all this Sparta is completely untouched. Here the old conservative, aristocratic, land-owning regime is strengthened, precisely at the moment when, in the rest of Greece, it is beginning to break up.

Perhaps the most palpable evidence of this dawn of the Greek Renaissance is to be found in the pottery. From about 1000 BC, while Greece lay fallow after the tremendous disturbances of the Heroic Age and the Migrations, the Geometric style, in its numberless local varieties, dominated the mainland. By 700 it has almost completely disappeared. In the second half of the eighth century, the so-called Proto-Corinthian or Sicyonian ware v appears in the earliest cemeteries of the western colonies; from about 700 the Corinthian begins to flood the market. In the new styles the Oriental influence is growing. Out of the East the facile and observant naturalism of Mediterranean art is flowing back upon those abstract and ideal forms in which the northern invaders had found expression: Hellenic art was born of this union.

There is another, perhaps even more significant, difference. The geometric styles were local, different in almost every valley of Greece: the new styles cover the fast expanding civilized world. In the Dark Age men stayed at home; with the dawn of the Renaissance men and things began to travel, from Ionia, past Peloponnese, into the west.

IV.

KING PHEIDON

It was not possible that Argos should see without concern the growing strength and ambition of Corinth and Sparta. Argos had not resigned her prescriptive right to rule the Dorians; she had a great tradition, brave soldiers and in due course a ruler of the force and intelligence to assert her claims—namely King Pheidon. He was hereditary king of Argos, for Argos, like Sparta, had retained the legitimate monarchy: and to the strength which at that time a single capable ruler could secure for a city, some of his astonishing successes are doubtless due. At the time of his accession we are told that the Heritage of Temenus had fallen to pieces, the Dorian cities of eastern Peloponnese no longer allowed the suzerainty of Argos. In the south, Sparta, independent from the first, had grown to be aggressive—had conquered the long strip, once Argive, running down to Cythera, and had invaded the very plain of Argos. But the kings before him had not been altogether idle. Three or four generations back, the Spartan Nicander, father of Theopompus, is said to have invited the city of Asine, south-east of Argos, to join in an attack on her mistress. When the Spartans had gone home, the Argives captured and destroyed the offending city: and at some date unknown (the reign of Damocratidas), the same fate for the same offence befell the neighbouring city of Nauplia. Argos was beginning to be mistress in her own house. It was thus a struggling and straitened Argos to whose throne Pheidon came. We cannot trace the stages by which, in the words of Ephorus, ‘he re­assembled the Heritage of Temenus,’ and made Argos the first power in Peloponnese. But by gathering the notices of victories and other achievements ascribed to him, or to Argos during these years, we can gauge the man’s activities. It is probably in this reign that the Argive soldiers win their great name: an oracle, which should be referred to the seventh century, speaks of ‘the linen-corseted Argives, the goads of war’ as the finest soldiers in the world—finer than the soldiers of Chalcis.

The most dangerous rivals of Argos were Sparta, Athens and Corinth. To the two first the resurgent Argives gave such severe blows as kept them for a few generations out of the rank of first-class powers. The Spartans, intent on securing their hold on the Plain of Thyrea, were caught in the Pass between this and the Plain of Tegea, in the mountain valley of Hysiae, and were thoroughly defeated. For the time, Spartan ambition seemed checked. She relapses into that period of peace and good living whose enchanting picture we have in the lyrical fragments of Aleman, and the oracle which celebrates the Argive warriors, gives equal praise to the ladies of Sparta. Some years later she is wakened from this rich and pleasant life, by the revolt of those serfs whose land and whose labour provided the material for all the gaiety and song: and then the Spartan lords kept the tradition of all the world’s great aristocracies:

Una est nobilitas argumentumque coloris Ingenui timidas non habuisse manus.

With Athens Argos collided because of Aegina. The ‘beginning of enmity’ between Athens and Aegina, which Herodotus loosely places in the far past, can be fixed by several considerations to the early seventh century. In revolt from Epidaurus, and threatened with an invasion from Athens, the Aeginetans appealed to Argos: the Argives responded, and together they practically annihilated the Athenian invaders. The victory gave Argos con­trol of both Epidaurus and Aegina, and was an important stage in Pheidon’s regathering of his heritage. It broke such sea-power as Athens then had. Most important of all, it turned Pheidon’s eyes to the sea: to the wealth of commerce, and the silver mines of the Aegean. It was in Aegina that Pheidon established his mint.

Corinth received no such smashing blow as Athens and Sparta had. It is indeed likely that Corinth, where Pheidon is alleged to have met his death—the city with whom the immediate future lay—foiled at last the Argive’s brilliant reaction. There is no lack of stories of Pheidon’s interferences at Corinth, but their dates are confused past remedy, and there seems to be no hope of winnowing out what may be true in them. But—as he had played Aegina against Epidaurus—we can probably see him playing Megara against Corinth. From the founding of Chalcedon (c. 680), to that of Byzantium (c. 660), Megara has a period of expansion in which she does not (as in Sicily) take the leavings of greater cities, but occupies the very finest sites of all. This colonization of the north-east is later by about two generations than that of the west, and of a different kind. The western colonists had sought land, but found besides, in sea-borne com­merce with the world outside Greece, a new source of wealth. The colonists of the Euxine sought commerce first, fleeces and grain and much else; it is as points on a trade-route—the gates of the north-east—that Chalcedon and Byzantium have so mag­nificent a position. The hand of Pheidon, raising up Megara to overshadow Corinth, is to be guessed in this brief activity; and in fact, in the founding of Byzantium at least we have good evidence of Argive co-operation.

The oracle already quoted as praising Spartan ladies and Argive warriors goes on to say ‘But you, men of Megara, are neither third nor fourth, nor twelfth, nor in count or number at all.’ The taunt has point, if men thought that Megara’s transient greatness was not her own, but the work of the linen-corseted Argives. Towards the close of the century, Megara built a Treasury at Olympia: Pausanias saw there an inscription which said it was built with spoils taken from the Corinthians; and he adds that the Argives had helped Megara in this battle, and that it took place some years before the Treasury was built.

The Megarian men of straw contract their ambitions when Pheidon falls. Byzantium was, for some generations, the last Megarian colony, and Miletus occupied the Euxine coasts with­out competition. But Megara did not resign her interests in that region. She long continued to divide with Miletus the woollen trade of the Greek world; towards the end of the century, she disputed with Samos the right to colonize the northern Propontis; and in the sixth century, the days of her decline, she starts colonizing once more. Heraclea Pontica, on the south coast of the Euxine, and mother of cities on the north and west coasts, was founded c. 560.

For Pheidon, then, the function of Megara was to check, by a balance of power, the dangerous growth of Corinth, who, by whatever means, must be kept weak and loyal. He was kicking against the pricks, for the destiny of Corinth was greater than he could control.

In both Aegina and Megara, Pheidon came in contact with Aegean commerce and the cities of Asia Minor. In Asia Minor the dynasty of the Mermnad kings of Lydia was arising, and it was probably the first of these, his contemporary Gyges (c. 685—650), who introduced to the Greeks the use of coin. Pheidon introduced this into his own dominions, and, establishing his mint at Aegina, issued coins on that Aeginetan standard which appears to be his creation. How momentous was the invention of coinage for Greek economic and social life will become clear later. It changed the nature of wealth, which, more clearly separable now from divine right, was to be as powerful as ever. More than any one thing, coinage destroyed the old aristocracies. The brilliant Argive, attempting to leash these new forces to the service of the old hereditary order, failed. The Spartans were less opportunist; secure in their immense landed wealth, they kept themselves untouched by commerce, and denied the new coinage any entrance to their state.

At the zenith of his power, when Argos must have been the most powerful city in Greece, Pheidon went to Olympia. ‘The most unrighteous of all Greeks,’ says Herodotus, ‘he usurped by force from Elis the presidency of the Festival.’ The rancour of the Eleans has done Pheidon’s name some little harm; but their festival probably owed to him much of its splendour. It had already grown out of its early simplicity; and, besides the original footrace, there was boxing and wrestling and the Pentathlum, and a chariot race. Here, then, in the far corner of Peloponnese, Pheidon displayed his power. In Argolis itself, the temple of Hera, which lay between Mycenae and Tiryns, appears to date from his reign and to have preserved the tradition of his deeds. Here he dedicated some bundles of iron spits, when he replaced this rude currency by his minted silver; and one of these bundles is now in the Museum at Athens.

Of Pheidon’s end we know nothing. His son, Lacedes, was known as a weak creature, and it is plain that with Pheidon’s death the splendour of Argos decays. There follow immediately the great Tyrants of the Isthmian cities, and the Heritage of Temenus is once more, and for ever, torn to pieces. Aristotle says Pheidon began as a hereditary king and ended as one of the Tyrants1. This is a difficult saying: he indeed tried to secure in advance for Argos and the old order the greatness which belonged to the Tyrants; but every man in Peloponnese must have known that Pheidon the Temenid stood for the claim of the Dorian rulers to control the future as they had controlled the past. On his death the Tyrants rose up to resist that claim.

V.

ELIS AND OLYMPIA

The Eleans, invaders from Aetolia, first took possession of the great plain west of Mount Erymanthus, around the lower waters of the Peneus, perhaps the finest plain in Greece south of Thessaly. In this plain, called subsequently Hollow Elis, they made their homes, and it became their patrimony; and when later they expanded by further conquest, Hollow Elis remained the nucleus of the land and the seat of the ruling race. Many centuries later Polybius gives us a picture of this green and pleasant land, full of villages and country shrines, from which the new city of Elis, founded after the Persian War, could not tempt away the old Elean families. Many Eleans were exceedingly wealthy, the inherited riches of such a man as Xenias in 400 BC reminds us of the great nobles of Thessaly and Etruria. Elis may indeed in many ways be compared with these spectators of the Greek civilization. It is true of Elis, what Pindar said of Thessaly, that Fortune gave her no small portion of the delights of Hellas, and we might add that, like these remote and wealthy peoples, she enjoyed these delights rather than created them, were it not for the one thing which made Elis unique among the states of Greece: the sanctuary of Olympia.

It was natural that so large a unit as these Eleans should extend their power beyond their own borders. They expanded eastwards into Arcadia, and southwards into the Alpheus valley (where lay Olympia), and farther south still, into Triphylia. These lands formed a Perioikis, a fringe of subject peoples, and their acquisition continued down into the fifth century: with them, Elis formed in the Peloponnesian League far the largest single state outside Laconia. But of these wars of expansion, until the fifth century, we have no real knowledge: they are enveloped in that general obscurity which conceals the whole early history of Elis. We know nothing of how the fusion of races took place in the Peneus valley: of the two traditions, one, that the invaders expelled the former owners, the other, that invaders and invaded claimed kinship and settled down together, neither has any claim on our belief, but both show that the fusion was complete. We hear nothing of any serfdom, nor of any early constitutional struggles: we do not know if there was ever a tyranny in Elis. Of law-giving, probably early in the sixth century, we have some traces; a famous inscription from Olympia puts certain restrictions on the family vendetta, and Aristotle reports a law ascribed to Oxylus, which forbade the mortgaging of land for debt. So in Elis as elsewhere the oppressed demanded and obtained protection in law, but we hear nothing of how this came about. It seems likely the Eleans were not a keenly political people, and most of them were content to enjoy the fatness of their land in peace. Aristotle says that a Council of ninety members, holding office for life, succeeded in getting all political power into their hands, and formed what he calls an oligarchy inside an oligarchy. He is describing the situation which preceded the democracy (c. 470): we cannot apply his description to any period earlier than the sixth century.

In the ancient writers (unhappily none is earlier than the fourth century BC, and most of them are of the Roman period) the whole early history of Elis is made up of the struggles of Elis and Pisa for the sanctuary of Olympia and the presidency of the Games which were held at that sanctuary. The narratives quite shamelessly contradict each other, and an almost infinite variety of interpretations has been put on them by modern scholars.

The word ‘Pisa’ appears to denote the holy site of Olympia and its immediate surroundings. Pindar gives the name Pisatans to the mythical King Oenomaus and his daughter Hippodameia: but he never mentions any modern Pisatans, he speaks of Pisa as the Eleans’ own land, and he nowhere betrays the least consciousness that Pisa and Elis were ancient rivals and enemies. In 399 the Spartans desired to humiliate Elis: and Xenophon says they were aware of the existence of an older claim than hers to the Sanctuary, but forbore to recognize it, since the claimants were country folk and not equal to the duties of the festival. In 365 the Arcadians captured Olympia and, needing someone with an ancient claim to conduct the Games, created an independent state of Pisatis. We now hear for the first time by name of the post-mythical Pisatans, in Xenophon’s narrative of the events and in a contemporary inscription at Olympia.

The stories of a Pisatan interlude in the presidency, subsequent to the first Olympiad, first appear unmistakably in writers such as Strabo, Pausanias, and Eusebius, who have the labours of the scholars of Alexandria behind them. The stories do not tally. Strabo gives the simplest version: after the 26th Olympiad (676—673) the Pisatans regained their independence from Elis, and presided until ‘some time later.’ Eusebius is more precise: the Pisatans first preside at the 28th Olympiad (668) because the Eleans are detained elsewhere, then, at the 30th (660) they revolt from Elis and preside continuously for twenty-two celebrations, i.e. till 576, the 51st Olympiad. The divergence here is perhaps not grave, but Pausanias’ account, taken apparently from the Elean records, is harder to reconcile. He admits no continuous Pisatan presidency, but says that the presidency was twice violently usurped, at the 28th Olympiad by Pheidon of Argos in conjunction with the Pisatans, and at the 34th by the Pisatan tyrant Pantaleon. These two festivals, and the similar case in 364, were no true Olympiads, and were called the three ‘Anolympiads.’

It has been urged that the three accounts, however widely they disagree, all suggest the existence of a Pisatan interlude, which began about the 28th Olympiad (668 BC), possibly under Pheidon’s auspices, and ended about the 50th (580). Signs of this may be found even in Pausanias’ narrative: he mentions a Pisatan dynasty at this time (Pantaleon in 664, Damophon in 588, and after him his brother Pyrrhus), whose existence seems to imply the separation of Olympia from Elis: under the last, Pisa is destroyed by the Eleans: and in 580 the Eleans reorganize the festival, appointing two stewards instead of one.

It is one theme, with free variations. There were changes in the management of the Games, and the tradition has been embroidered in different interests. The last important change may be reasonably fixed to the 50th Olympiad, or thereabouts. The appointment of the second steward, which Pausanias ascribes to that date, has already the respectable authority of Aristotle: the earliest foundations of the Council House at Olympia are also dated to about this time: the traces of Elean law-giving, probably early sixth century, have been already noted. All this suggests a constitutional change, and may well be connected with the fall of the dynasty of Pantaleon. What was this dynasty?

It fell about 580, and began, probably, about 670 or 660. It saw a period of great brilliance at Olympia. The festival was becoming more and more Panhellenic: the sanctuary was receiving the rich offerings of the tyrants Myron of Sicyon and the Cypselids of Corinth. It was during this period that distant cities began to make a home for themselves at the holy site by the erection of ‘treasuries.’ Megara, probably in the person of her tyrant Theagenes, built one of these, also Gela and Metapontum, repre­senting those western cities whose devotion was to make Olympia one of the chief centres of the Greek world. Most important of all was the great temple of Hera, erected in the latter half of the seventh century1, which even after the building of Zeus’ temple in the fifth century remained the second glory of Olympia. Thus the rule of Pantaleon and his sons at Olympia coincides almost precisely with the rule of the Cypselids in Corinth; it had the munificent support of these Cypselids, and is stamped with the same external brilliance. Here then, it seems, we have another of those tyrannies which clustered round the great Corinthians. A tyranny implies a city, and their city clearly lay close to Olympia and the River Alpheus. They were called Pisatans, but it is extremely doubtful if there was ever a city called Pisa: there are, however, two cities which, so it seems, gave trouble to the Eleans at this time, and were involved in the fall of Pantaleon’s house—Dyspontium and Scillus. Dyspontium was destroyed, and her people fled north to Apollonia and Epidamnus: Scillus, nearest to Olympia of all, was reduced, and an inscription preserved at Olympia defines her new status. We may compare how Argos gradually reduced the towns which lay around the Argive Heraeum.

Thus the house of Pantaleon championed the town civilizations of the Alpheus valley against the landowners of the Peneus valley, the older population against the later invaders. The sanc­tuary of Olympia is not indeed older than the Migrations, yet there is good reason for thinking it was a sanctuary before the Eleans penetrated south from Hollow Elis. At Pisa two athletic festivals were held: the Olympia, in honour of Zeus Olympios, for men; and the Heraea, for girls. The length of the stadium differed for the two festivals, and the girls’ stadium was equal to one side of the sacred enclosure, the Altis. The men’s stadium was longer by one-fifth, and this lengthened stadium encroached on the precinct of Demeter Chamyna, whose priestess (in consequence of this encroachment) had the privilege of being a spectator at the Olympia, when all other women were excluded. The clear inference that the masculine element, from Zeus downwards, was a later intruder on the girls’ festival of Hera, is confirmed in many ways, and we may perhaps regard the Olympia as belonging to the Elean conquerors, and the Heraea as older than their conquest of this valley.

So we may disengage the following outlines of the history of Olympia. Soon after the Migrations, the people of the Alpheus valley made a sanctuary there to Hera. In 776, the Eleans from the Peneus valley established the worship of Zeus, and the Olympian Games. About 660, Pantaleon used the confusion caused by Pheidon’s visit to make the Alpheus valley the political centre: about 580, the Eleans of the Peneus valley reassert their supremacy.—The story was often retold in the light of later political theories, and the two valleys, under the names Elis and Pisa, appear as two nations struggling for the sanctuary. We should be cautious of this reconstruction, which seems unknown to Herodotus and Pindar. Herodotus indeed places in the period of Pantaleon’s dynasty an Elean embassy to Egypt, in which the envoys boast of the admirable fairness of the Elean presidents. This evidence should not be pressed too far: yet it suggests that the changes of management were not the result of a struggle between two states; rather within the one state of Elis, comprising both valleys, power shifted as elsewhere from aristocrats to tyrants, and then to oligarchs, and last to democrats.

The Eleans came south from Hollow Elis into the Alpheus valley and for their own good reasons founded the four-yearly festival of Zeus in 776, and gave scope to one of the most natural delights of man. It was at first a small local festival, but its fame grew steadily: after fifty years it drew competitors from all Peloponnese, after a hundred years, from all Greece. A list of the victors in the Stadium or foot-race was kept: it was edited in the fifth century BC by the Elean scholar Hippias, and has been preserved for us by Africanus. This is most fortunate, for it is of far more interest who won the race than who presided. As the festival grew more popular, the programme was enlarged from the simple foot-race which was at first the only event, arid included wrestling and boxing, chariot races and horse races, and boys’ events. The games grew at last so important that a Hellenic truce was arranged during the celebration. It is not easy to fix the date for this: Aristotle saw an engraved disc at Olympia, which he believed to be archaic, stating that the sacred truce was guaranteed by Iphitus and Lycurgus. If this inscription was a genuine con­temporary document, it is hardly likely that the truce was consecrated before 700, and indeed before that date the Games were hardly of sufficient importance to require it. It is most improbable that ‘Lycurgus’ has anything to do with any Spartan: both names, Iphitus and Lycurgus, are heroic names which occur in Homer, and Lycurgus as a hero is not confined to Sparta. But the idea caught the fancy of ancient scholars, and Ephorus gives us the fantastic story of how the whole of Elis was made by Sparta into a Holy Land without war for ever. The whole of Elean history contradicts this improbable fiction.

It is quite uncertain when Elis entered the Spartan alliance. Later writers say a good deal of the part Elis and Pisa played in the Messenian Wars, and how Sparta helped the Eleans against Pheidon of Argos and later against the Pisatan kings; but some of these stories are clearly untrue, and they are all artificially constructed. Nevertheless, from the beginning of the seventh century the Spartans are very remarkably prominent among the Olympic victors: the first victor in a new event is frequently a Spartan, which suggests that their advice had weight in the arrangement of the programme. It is likely then that Elis was the first of Sparta’s allies. They both had in Arcadia an alien hinterland, and the pre-Dorians of south-west Peloponnese, Triphylians and Messenians, were their common prey. An early alliance explains how Elis was able to enter the Peloponnesian League with so large and compact a territory, an anomaly which Sparta only righted at the end of the fifth century. We may guess (it is only a guess) that Sparta helped Elis to overthrow her tyrants, c. 580, and the alliance was then concluded.

VI.

THE TYRANTS

Soon after 660 BC the great Tyrant dynasties were established in Corinth and Sicyon. The Tyrants were the most powerful men in Greece of their day, and their courts were centres of a brilliant culture. Their reigns are cardinal in the development of Greece, leading up to the emergence of the Demos, and forming an inter­regnum between the mediaeval aristocracies and the classical democracies and oligarchies.

Tyrannos is probably a Lydian word; and Gyges was the great Tyrannos, the pattern of the Greek Tyrants. From Gyges, the name passed to the new-made princes of Ionia, such as Melas of Ephesus, his son-in-law, and later the great Thrasybulus of Miletus. Thence it spread to the cities of the Isthmus, and thence again to the west. The movement was a product of unrest: these cities which lay along the great trade-route from Asia to Italy were the most affected by the ferment of new hopes and new values, with which the lifting of the horizons filled men’s minds. In Corinth and the neighbouring cities, the mass of the people which, in fact or in feeling, was largely pre-Dorian, wondered if life did not hold something better than generations of submission to the Dorian nobles. For generations past these lords had been indispensable, none but they knew the Laws or could approach the gods, not many beside them could even fight. The doubts, whether this must be so for ever, found encouragement in certain of the non-Dorians among the wealthy, who, in most of these cities, were grouped apart from the Dorians, in a fourth tribe of their own.

From among these leaders rose the Tyrants. Their title, Tyrannos, was new and foreign. It certainly conveyed no sort of stigma, it is given to the gods (Zeus Tyrannos, like Iuppiter Maximus), and in the Ionic of Herodotus1 it seems to be an exact synonym of Basileus. But the word Basileus gathered its connotations of awe during the Heroic Age. Tyrannos acquired its colour during the Greek Renaissance, a critical irreverent generation. The Tyrant rested on the will of the immature Demos, not on Established Law. His power derived from circumstance, not from Zeus. When circumstance, or the will, changed, his commission was ended, and he never had the bedrock of a loyal nobility, nor the social and religious sanction which that can give.

The founder of Tyranny at Sicyon was Orthagoras. Tradition calls him son of a cook, or butcher; his family belonged to the non-Dorian tribe. A table of his house is appended to this chapter. For the dates, Myron I, who was the second tyrant, won a chariot race at Olympia in 648. The dynasty lasted about a hundred years: it ended therefore before 548, possibly in 556, and thus began about 656.

The great days of Sicyon came with the reign of Cleisthenes, between 600 and 560. The earlier tyrants, it is probable, did not attain his power and magnificence. Myron I, indeed, besides his victory at Olympia, dedicated there a large bronze thalamus, or ‘chamber’ (perhaps a model of some building), of nearly twenty tons weight: the bronze was said to be from Tartessus. So Myron perhaps knew the western markets, and he had bronze-workers who were forerunners of the great Sicyonian artists. But Sicyon has not yet much weight among her neighbours. We hear that Orthagoras waged a defensive war against Pellene, on the west; and at Phlius in the south, when a certain Hippasus attempted to bring the city into line with Sicyon by raising the non-Dorian element, he found the Dorian (that is, the Argive) influence still too strong, and had to take refuge abroad1. To the east, lay Corinth.

The Tyranny in Corinth begins about the same time as in Sicyon, and is another and more serious symptom of the crumbling of Argive power. We can recover the dates commonly accepted in antiquity: Cypselus became tyrant c. 655, his son Periander succeeded him c. 625, the tyranny lasted just over seventy years. On his mother’s side, Cypselus belonged to the Dorian aristo­cracy, but his father was a non-Dorian, and the hostility which Cypselus displayed towards the Dorian nobles was most likely inherited. An attempt (too much depending on indifferent sources) to show the family relations of Cypselus and his descend­ants is made at the end of this chapter.

Cypselus founded his throne on the overthrow of the Dorian nobility. These nobles, the Bacchiads, had planted the great colonies of Syracuse and Corcyra, and by the end of the eighth century Corinth was the first sea-power in Greece. But in the early seventh century, the rise of the Argive Pheidon had fostered her internal discords, and externally, in addition to the attacks from Megara, she was losing the control of her colonies: in 664 or thereabouts was the first sea-battle between Corinth and Corcyra. Thus the prestige of the ruling Bacchiads was probably waning, but it is a question upon whose shoulders Cypselus rose to destroy them. The later Greek writers called him a demagogue, who used his position of polemarch to win the support of the needy classes. The civil functions here assigned to the polemarch make the picture improbable: at that time, the supporters of a popular polemarch were not the destitute, but men of the hoplite class. It was this class to whom the exclusiveness, and latterly perhaps the incompetence, of the Bacchiad rule seemed most intolerable, and they were probably the backbone of Cypselus’ following: with their support he was able to dispense with the usual Tyrant’s bodyguard. Thus, because the ruling aristocracy had been exceptionally narrow, Cypselus could put his revolution on an exceptionally wide basis: in an oracle quoted by Herodotus, he even has the constitutional title Basileus. But it was none the less a revolution against the Dorian nobles, and like himself many of his supporters were non-Dorian— whether in fact or, what is the more important historical factor, in feeling. The new government purged Corinth of the Bacchiad families, partly, it may be, by bloodshed, but mainly by banishment. The few who remained acquiesced in the new regime.

The exiles turned, many of them, to Corcyra—the island with whom they had been at war some ten years back, when they were still rulers of Corinth. Corcyra now gave them welcome, and flourished under their influence: throughout Cypselus’ reign she maintained her independence, and was mistress of the neighbouring seas. It is hard to determine her relations with Corinth. There was certainly no truceless war, for Cypselus was known as a man of peace, nor can any intermission be detected in the export of Corinthian wares to the west. But the two powers had probably slight collisions round the Ambracian Gulf, whither Cypselus sent three of his sons to settle in Ambracia, Anactorium and Leucas, and to secure the region for Corinth. One such collision may be that battle near Ambracia, on the banks of the river Aratthus, where Arniadas of Corcyra died: another, the victory which the sons of Cypselus won over Heraclea and commemorated by a golden bowl in Olympia.

Cypselus however was a patron of peace: and a few such incidents, even if they could be more certainly fixed to his reign, would not conflict with this tradition. He nursed the commerce of Corinth, and to him we must almost certainly ascribe her earliest coinag, issued on the so-called ‘Euboic’ standard. Recent metrologists find the basis of this standard in the mina of 425 grammes then current in Lydia and Miletus and perhaps Naucratis. The Corinthian stater (fifty to one such mina) gave Corinth a place in that profitable world. It is the first known silver in Europe of the ‘Euboic’ standard: it was soon followed by the coins of Cyrene and the Hellenic west, and, at Solon’s advice, by the reformed Athenian currency.

Cypselus died a rich and powerful monarch, c. 625, and Periander his son succeeded. In his reign of forty years, Periander raised himself and Corinth to far greater power and magnificence than Greece had known since before the Dark Age; and in an age of acutely conflicting interests, he acquired the strong man’s share of enemies. But in the early years of his reign, he was still le bien-aimé, the air was full of conciliation. We hear of one typical instance: at the outset of his reign, Corcyra, who, as we saw, had welcomed the refugees and grown to be an independent power, founded the port of Epidamnus on the Illyrian coast. The site was of value, whether for Corcyra or Corinth. It secured access to the silver mines of Damastium, and was also the head of an important trade route which ran inland, through Lyncestis (whose princes claimed descent from the Bacchiads), to Macedonia and the Aegean. With perfect correctness, the Corcyreans asked the Corinthian government to furnish a leader for the colony, and Periander sent out Phalius, one of the nobles who had remained in Corinth. This was excellent manners all round; but Periander, once secure on his throne, had no further use for compromise. He struck hard, where Cypselus had dealt as gently as might be. He eradicated the remains of the nobility from Corinth, and proceeded to conquer and annex Corcyra, which he made into a viceroyalty for the Heir Apparent: his son Lycophron ruled it first, and then his nephew Psammetichus. As for the continental route through Lyncestis, he secured both ends of it for Corinth by his twin foundations of Apollonia and Potidae.

The man whose counsels are said to have thus hardened the tyrant’s heart was Thrasybulus the Tyrant of Miletus: Periander kept touch with the east as well as the west. He was a friend of the kings of Egypt and of Lydia, and was chosen arbitrator by Athens and Mitylene in that war for Sigeum in which the poet Alcaeus fought. Far the most notable of the Greek Tyrants of the Renaissance, he is for better or worse the type of them—ruthless to the old aristocracy, his enemies, but powerful and fortunate, and momentous for the civilization of Greece. He was counted by many among the Seven Sages, and his court was a rendezvous for foreign poets, where Chersias of Orchomenus flourished, and Arion of Lesbos first gave literary form and definite plots to that Bacchic mumming which was the origin of Greek drama: later, at the rival court of Sicyon, Epigenes first looked for plots outside the Bacchic cycle. It is Arion whom Pindar has chiefly in mind when he praises the ‘ancient inventions’ of Corinth in poetry.

With poetry Pindar couples architecture, an art which hardly existed in post-Mycenean Greece until the Tyrants disposed of labour and wealth enough to build strongly and beautifully, whether temples like that of Apollo at Corinth, or works of utility like the fountains with which the Tyrants freshened the Greek summer in their cities. The fifth century pamphleteer, whose Constitution of Athens has survived among the works of Xenophon, describes those public amenities of a Greek city which had distributed a civilized culture so widely that the Demos had come to think itself as good as the nobles. These were, briefly, public festivals, public baths, and “a great and beautiful city to live in”; and these, which took from the nobles their monopoly of culture, all had their first beginning under the Tyrants. By such processes the noble monopolies, of wealth, of law, of culture, of religion, of arms, were all one by one broken: and the paternal Aristoi, the indispensable Shepherds of the People, became the jealous Oligoi, vowed to remain if not Fit, at any rate Few.

Periander was the centre of a group of Tyrants who ruled in the cities immediately neighbouring on Corinth. In Epidaurus, reigned his father-in-law and contemporary Procles, until Periander at the very end of his reign incorporated the city in his own dominions. The decline of Epidaurus begins with the independence of Aegina: when Procles tore his portion out of Pheidon’s kingdom he may well have included Aegina, but with the fall of Procles the island enters on her own destiny. She rises rapidly and becomes a rival to Corinth and a menace to her eastern connections. The Megarian Tyrant, Theagenes, is an earlier contemporary of Periander: he is dated by the help he gave to Cylon, his son-in-law, the would-be Tyrant of Athens (probably 632, BC). Theagenes illustrates the essential characteristics of the Isthmian Tyrant, in his hostility to the great landowners, whose livestock he slaughtered, and in his care for the public amenities of his city, for whose water supply he undertook elaborate constructions. In Epidaurus, Megara, and Sicyon, we hear of a class of serfs, known variously as Dustyfoots, Sheepskins, Club-bearers, etc.: ancient writers compared them to the Spartan Helots, and they appear to have been liberated by the Tyrants. Theognis, writing when a violent democracy had succeeded the tyranny in Megara, says ‘Our city is still a city, but the people are changed; folk who of old knew nothing of right or law, but wrapt their ribs in goat­skins and dwelt like deer outside the city. They’re now the nobles, the old nobles are now the rascals.’ The liberation of serfs was as essential a plank in the Tyrants’ platform as the breaking of the landlords or the adornment of the city. But the Tyrants probably took steps to prevent the new amenities of the city attracting too many of these newly freed serfs and so depopulating the land; if we believe Theognis, the succeeding democracy was less careful.

Periander outlasted the tyranny in Epidaurus and Megara, but in Sicyon it outlasted him. Towards the end of his long life (he reigned for forty, and lived for eighty, years) his essentially personal power began to crack: Herodotus says he thought of abdication. While his sun was sinking, that of the Tyrant of Sicyon was rising. No date can be fixed for the accession of Cleisthenes, the great Sicyonian, but as early as the Sacred War his navy appears to be the most important in the Corinthian Gulf. The Sacred War ended with the destruction of ‘holy Crisa,’ the rich port of Delphi, about 590. Five years later Periander died, within less than ten years the Cypselid dynasty was overthrown: Cleisthenes caught their falling mantle. There are signs that Periander had feared the growing Sicyonian power, and tried to check it. It is recorded that his friend, the Milesian Thrasybulus, at one time captured the harbour of Sicyon, and that Cleisthenes usurped the throne of his brother Isodemus by accusing the latter of conspiring with the Cypselids. With the fall of the Cypselids, the power of Corinth rapidly declines. In the east, the dangerous rivalry of Aegina begins, and in the west, Corcyra breaks off, and though Corinthian influence persisted around the Ambracian Gulf, where the Cypselids apparently maintained themselves rather longer than in Corinth, yet her connections were largely picked up by Sicyon. We can best gauge the influence of Sicyon from the account of the wooing of Cleisthenes’ daughter and heiress, Agariste, c. 570. Suitors came from all the old Corinthian north-west, from Italy, Epidamnus, Epirus, and Aetolia: and the suitor most favoured at first was Hippocleides of Athens, whose grandfather, so it seems, had been a successful suitor for the daughter of Cypselus. But Cleisthenes passed over this hare-brained youth in favour of another Athenian, the Alcmeonid Megacles, a member of the most politically-gifted house in Greece. His son was Cleisthenes the Lawgiver, and among his descendants were Pericles and Alcibiades.

It fell to Cleisthenes, as the last of the great Isthmian Tyrants, to maintain the cause of the non-Dorians against the Dorians, and he discharged this duty with vigour. It was the old fight against Argos and her double influence, the pressure of her culture within and of her arms without. Internally, Cleisthenes renamed the tribes: to the three Dorian tribes, which Sicyon shared with Argos, he gave mock-names, Pigmen, Swinemen, Assmen, his own non-Dorian tribesmen were called the rulers. It sounds very childish, and how far the childishness is due to Cleisthenes or to his historian we cannot say. But the end was gained, through pretty well the whole sixth century Dorian Argos was without honour in Sicyon. In the same spirit Cleisthenes expelled the rhapsodes who sang of Argos; and the Argive hero Adrastus, who was buried in Sicyon, and whose story was providing plots for the rudimentary tragedians of the city, was induced to quit. Externally, Cleisthenes waged continual war on Argos, and pushed his influence into the debatable ground which lay between the two cities. In Phlius, rather less than a century before, the Argive influence had been too strong for the rise of an anti­Dorian Tyrant, but in Cleisthenes’ reign Leon of Phlius succeeded where Hippasus had failed.

So Argos and the Isthmian cities fought each other to a stand­still, while Sparta, not without her own troubles, watched the way being prepared for herself. The Tyrants had torn the empire of Pheidon to pieces, but Argos could still hit back. Before Cleisthenes was dead, the insulted and exiled Adrastus had found a home: the Nemean Games, near Cleonae, were established in his honour in 573. The Isthmian Games, established slightly earlier, in 581—580, mark a similar reaction against the Tyrants: their foundation celebrated the downfall of the Cypselids. It is worth while to take stock of the situation about Argos has lost Phlius, but gained Cleonae. The non-Dorian Tyranny is stronger than ever in Sicyon, but it has disappeared in Corinth. Of the two great sanctuaries which either led or followed Hellenic opinion, Delphi had declared against the Tyrants—and this is the more notable in view of the support she had once given them, and her close union with Cleisthenes as recently as the Sacred War—and Olympia had declared for them. The balance was pretty even, and the combatants tired: everything was ready for the tactful intervention of Sparta.

The Cypselids fell c. 582, from internal causes: Sparta, whose way to the Isthmus was still barred, cannot have interfered. Of the constitution then devised, which lasted for many generations, we have an account in Nicolaus of Damascus, and possibly a reference to it in Aristotle. The citizen body was divided into eight tribes, and a cabinet of eight Probouloi (elected, it would seem, one from each tribe, like the Strategi at Athens) was the chief deliberate body in the state: by their side was a larger Boule whose size we cannot determine, unless, indeed, this is the same as the body of eighty mentioned by Thucydides. Aristotle observes that the larger body can deliberate but cannot initiate business, and this, he thinks, makes for permanency, for it combines the advantages of democracy and oligarchy, and prevents both discontent and revolution.

Meanwhile in Sparta there was no Tyrant. The Spartan nobles had conquered Messenia and had land enough to decline the new forms of wealth which commerce and coinage offered; and they now enter on that phase of conscious conservatism which was to make their city unique in Greece. The huge social revolution which we have watched take place under the Tyrants was in Sparta successfully resisted, but even there it had its repercussion : the Revolt of Messenia.

The social antagonism, between master and serf, came to a head in this revolt, and was met with a categorical no. This answer was possible, first and foremost because of the iron resolution of the Spartan character: but also because in Sparta the social question was not, as elsewhere, complicated by the racial question. The rebelling Messenians were, indeed, of non­Dorian stock; but they found no champion among the Spartan citizens, for this body, though not exclusively Dorian, yet allowed no distinction of origin to appear: aut Spartanus aut nullus. Of the course of the revolt we know almost nothing. The war poems of Tyrtaeus were written for this war, but his fragments (so rich in information as to the War of Conquest) tell us nothing as to place, duration, incidents, or allies on either side. On the other hand, after the Liberation of Messenia in 369, the earlier Wars of Liberation were freely treated as themes of romance, and to this seventh-century war especially were attached the deeds of the national hero Aristomenes. It was probably Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes who was first responsible for this, and for conceiving the war as one in which all Peloponnese was involved. The whole story, conceived with romantic enthusiasm, is immortal in the pages of Strabo, Pausanias and William Morris, but it is almost certainly false to history. The date of the war can be fixed with fair security somewhere between 650 and 600: during this half-century, when the Tyrants were at the height of their power, it is hardly conceivable that all Peloponnese was divided for a protracted war into two camps, one led by Spartans and one by Messenians1. For years on end, in this far corner of Peloponnese, the Spartan lords and Messenian serfs fought out their private quarrel: and the issue was bigger with history than all the splendour of Periander.

VII.

SPARTA: THE EUNOMIA

After crushing the Messenian Revolt, the Spartans took stock of their position. They had successfully denied the Rights of Man to nine-tenths of the inhabitants of their land, their aristocracy of landed wealth had survived one more crisis: but they knew now they were living on a volcano. They met this situation with the Eunomia, the famous legislation which later generations associated with the name of Lycurgus. It was in part a sort of inoculation against democracy, whereby they accepted a harmless form of the disease and rendered themselves immune against the real thing. But it was chiefly a subjecting of their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, to a discipline as rigid as any religious rule, in the strength of which they defied not the Devil but the Helots. This reorganization of the Spartan army was so radical that it changed the face of Spartan civilization.

We have already had glimpses of this civilization, which reached its flower in the time of Aleman just before the Messenian Revolt. For two things in which an aristocratic society will always show its quality—an exquisite womanhood and fine hunting— Sparta was early famed. We have heard the seventh century oracle which placed the Spartan ladies first among all in Greece: and we have more convincing evidence of the beauty of a Spartan girl’s life in what is left of Aleman’s Maidens' Songs. And even in the sixth century the pictures which Theognis gives us of Spartan hospitality are singularly charming. The hunting and other sport to be had in Laconia was early famous and long remained so. The Spartan Dioscuri were the patrons of horsemanship, and Castor was the inventor of hunting on horseback. Above all, the Spartan dogs were the noblest breeds in Greece, especially the great Castor hounds; while the little ‘fox-dogs’ were prized as house-dogs and pets. In the Homeric hymn, ‘To Earth, Mother of All,’ there is a beautiful account of the life of such a landed aristocracy.

The ploughland’s heavy with wheat of life, in the pasture

Cattle abound, good substance fills the house.

Fair women are in their city, and with just laws

They rule, in wealth and great prosperity.

The boys go proudly in fresh-blossom’d gladness,

The girls with flowery dances and gay heart

Gambol and frolick in the turf’s soft flowers

If thou giv’st grace, great Queen, Goddess of Bounty.

But Laconia was not, like Thessaly, a land of backwoodsmen nobles. Aleman sneers at the boorishness of the Thessalians, while Sparta was a centre of the arts. The early history of Greek music is laid mostly in Sparta: Thaletas and Polymnastus are dim names, but Terpander and, above all, Aleman, are real enough. Most of these, and possibly Aleman himself, were foreigners drawn to the hospitable city as Arion to Corinth. Aleman was said by one half of the ancient scholars to have been a Lydian from Sardes. He certainly held Sardes to be a centre of civilization, and Sparta was in constant touch with Lydia and welcomed what that land could offer to the Greek Renaissance2. Besides these lyrists, we have the names, from the seventh century or earlier, of epic poets and sculptors in bronze, above all Gitiadas the architect of the Brazen House. The earliest victor statue of which we have record at Olympia was that of the Spartan Eutelidas, set up 628, and one of the most beautiful of seventh century pottery wares was made in Laconia.

Spartan art, however, was not so unique in quality as Spartan society: it was in virtue of the latter that, during the great social revolution of the Tyrannis, Sparta became the last stronghold of the ancien regime. In the acute crisis which the Messenian Revolt had disclosed, she resolved to keep the essence of her society, and if her art must go, to let it. Such was the spirit of the Lycurgan Eunomia.

The central feature of the Lycurgan reform was the abolition of the three Dorian Tribes, and the substitution of five new Tribes, based not on descent but on locality: and it is thus a curiously close anticipation of the reform of Cleisthenes at Athens a century later. Of these five Tribes four (Pitana, Konooura, Limnai, Mesoa) were the quarters of Sparta town, the fifth, Amyclae, lay a few miles south and had been early incorporated. The significance of this reform was first and foremost military: the Spartan army henceforward (until a further reorganization in the fifth century) consisted of five regiments recruited by locality, instead of three regiments recruited by descent. It was probably a larger army, if the five new Tribes contained more citizens than the three old Tribes: it was far better organized, for the new regiment was elaborately subdivided into platoons and sections, each with its own officer. Most important of all, a discipline that was long unique among the world’s armies was secured by a system of training which took the citizen when he was seven years old and kept an iron hold throughout the whole of his active life.

The significance was, in the second place, social. The five Tribes probably contained a number of new citizens: when Messenia was reconquered, it seems that the Stenyclarus Plain was divided up among the citizens, and a number of non-citizens who had served well in the war also obtained shares, and thus became citizens. For Spartan citizenship depended on a man owning sufficient land to be able to live on the produce and devote his whole energies to the public service—to be able, in fact, to pay his mess-bill without any private employment. Given this qualification, any further distinction of rich and poor was carefully obscured: the citizens were all called the ‘Peers’ and all went through precisely the same training, wore the same clothes, lived in the same way. The original citizens however seem to have retained some distinctions, such as certain religious privileges at the Carneia, and, a matter of more importance, the Gerontes were chosen only from them: and perhaps they alone possessed freehold land west of Taygetus, and thus were richer than the new ‘Peers’. But the extra wealth mattered little, for no Spartan could raise his standard of living, nor in so socialistic a state could wealth mean power. Above all, it could not breed: for the land was by custom if not by law inalienable, and all other accumulation of property was prevented by the law which forbade not only coinage, but even the circulation of the precious metals. A seventh century pessimist had invented the proverb ‘Money maketh man’: Sparta defied the power of money by legislation.

And thirdly, the significance of the reform was political. Plutarch has preserved for us a document known as the Rhetra or Law, which defines the new political situation. It first enacts the creation of the new Tribes (which probably involved the incor­poration of new citizens), and then constitutes two bodies, the Gerousia, consisting of the two Kings and twenty-eight Gerontes, and the Apella, consisting of all citizens. To the former body (for which probably only original citizens were eligible) certain powers are reserved, of which the most important enabled them to dismiss the Apella at discretion. From a contemporary poem of Tyrtaeus, it appears that they alone could initiate business, the Apella could only vote on it. Sovereignty, however, is cate­gorically affirmed to reside in the Apella.

The sovereign body which can be dismissed at discretion (‘if it votes wrongly,’ in the naive words of the ‘Law’) appears to us the clumsiest of compromises, a mark of political infancy. The Apella never indeed became a serious deliberative assembly; but the sovereignty of the whole citizen body, as opposed to the inner aristocracy represented in the Gerousia, was soon asserted in the persons of the five Ephors. The office of Ephor had existed in Sparta long before the Eunomia: a list of eponymous Ephors was known to ancient scholars which reached back into the eighth century. But the College of five Ephors, as we know it in classical Sparta, dates clearly from the creation of the five Tribes. This College, unlike the Gerousia, was open to old and new citizens alike: it was as the annual representatives of the whole Demos that the Ephors attained their enormous power. This power was not contemplated in the ‘Law,’ which does not even mention the Ephorate, and the first Ephor to assert the full strength of the office was Chilon, Ephor in 556 b.c. some fifty years after the creation of the College of Five: he, we are told, ‘made them equal to the Kings.’

Thus Sparta became a democracy—in the sense that the chief magistrates were elected by, and from, the whole body of citizens; and a socialist state—in the sense that the interests of any individual were effectively subjected to those of this same citizen body. But such terms are in fact absurd, since that body was at no time more than one-tenth of the inhabitants of the country. Sparta was a city of nobles, because only the nobles had citizenship.

It has been here assumed that this great reform took place shortly before 600 BC, immediately after the suppression of the Messenian Revolt, the direct consequence of that revolt. In that war the Spartan army is still brigaded in the old Three Tribes: our first evidence, perhaps, of the new Five Tribes is the board of five arbitrators who adjudged Salamis to Athens (c. 570): we meet the five annual Agathoergoi about 560; the five regiments first, for certain, at the Battle of Plataea in 479. The same date is implied in Herodotus’ account of the Eunomia, where he relates the Arcadian Wars of the early sixth century as the immediate consequence of the reform. It was indeed an age of legislators: and the use of the word Demos in the ‘Law’ in a political sense has parallels in a Chian inscription of about the same date, and in the later poems of Solon; but not, it appears, earlier. The poem called Eunomia of Tyrtaeus will thus be contemporary with the reform, and written late in life: the poet saw the Revolt of Messenia in his manhood, and the Eunomia in his old age. Finally, the excavators of Sparta have shown conclusive evidence at this period of a great change in Spartan life.

Such, then, was the Reform which Herodotus and Tyrtaeus described, and of which the Rhetra is a document. Herodotus ascribed it to Lycurgus, and all antiquity, at least after 400 BC, followed him. Though they differ singularly in the date they ascribe to Lycurgus, they all concur in putting him far earlier than 600 BC: and Herodotus stultifies his narrative by implying that the Reform took place some centuries before those immediate consequences which gave him occasion to mention the matter at all. There is little profit in discussing whether the lawgiver’s name of c. 600 was Lycurgus or not: suppose it were, it is certain that we know nothing of him, and all that we are told is fable.

The Spartans said that their lawgiver had got the ideas for his Eunomia from Crete. This is likely enough in itself, for the island of Minos and Rhadamanthys was famous for lawgiving, and the fragments of the Code of Gortyn, discovered by scholars of our own generation, confirm this reputation; moreover the reopening of the Levant in the seventh century (and especially, for Sparta, the founding of Cyrene) had put Crete once more on one of the main highways of Greece. And certainly many features of Spartan life, including some which are strikingly analogous to the customs of modern nomadic peoples, occur also in the Cretan cities: the sexes are separated, the men have meals in common from which women are excluded, and in progressive preparation for this life the boys are classed by their ages into ‘herds.’ And both in Crete and in Sparta the population falls into three main divisions, first the ruling class who come under this strict discipline, next the rest of the free population, which does not, and last the serfs, who cultivate the land of the first class.

In this singular discipline, the Spartans were probably right to recognize a conscious imitation of Crete. It is true there are many differences in detail, and the likenesses named above might be due to the fact that in both countries the Dorians, many times outnumbered by the conquered, never felt enough at home to abandon altogether their nomad life. In these matters, perhaps, the Cretan model was acceptable because it resembled their own traditions.

But in the political institutions, and especially the organs of government, the likeness is not to be explained by parallel development. The Cretan cities had discarded their kings, and a rather close aristocracy of blood had taken their place. The Spartan lawgiver proposed to retain the kingship, and to dilute the aristocracy of blood by abolishing the Dorian tribes: and his remarkable plan of calling every citizen a ‘Peer,’ and thus making Nobility and Demos co-extensive, has no prototype in Crete. But to clothe these new conceptions he borrowed the Cretan forms. What these forms were in the seventh century, we can only infer from later documents: according to these, the Gerousia and the transparently nominal sovereignty of the Assembly are both to be found in Crete: and the Cretan Kosmoi apparently suggested the new form of the College of Ephors. The Kosmoi in the Cretan cities were, in effect, the king in commission: ten colleagues elected annually from a limited circle of families, they wielded the royal power, notably the command in war. Many, perhaps most, of their powers were of course, in the Spartan adaptation, reserved to the kings; enough remained to make the nucleus from which the great power of the Ephors was to grow. The two Colleges are strangely unlike: indeed, if with Cicero we compare the Ephors with the Roman Tribunes, the Kosmoi will rather correspond to the Consuls and Praetors. The purely formal likeness so often remarked in antiquity is not due to analogy of growth: rather it suggests a conscious adaptation.

In some matters the Spartan lawgiver got no guidance from his model. Crete was an island while Sparta was not, and it was a commonplace in antiquity that with any extreme form of government your best security against revolution was to live on an island. The Athenian democracy sought an artificial insularity in their Long Walls, the Spartan serfowners in their Xenelasia, a rigorous Alien Act ready for application at need. It was not completely successful. ‘The Cretan serfs,’ Aristotle observed, ‘give less trouble than the Helots: for in their remoteness the Cretan cities have as it were a Xenelasia in permanent operation.’ Again, the Cretans held, it seems, that laws should be codified and published: the Spartan lawgiver saw that his new Sparta had room for no ‘sea-lawyers,’ and he forbade the laws to be written down. His Spartans became, as he desired, amateurs in jurisprudence and professionals in war.

Whether it was fetched from Crete or not, the discipline meant, for Sparta, saying Good-bye to much of her own civilization. The city, where life had been as beautiful as anywhere in Greece, became a barracks: there are no more Spartan poets after Tyrtaeus, no more artists after Gitiadas. Henceforward, Sparta had none of the splendour of a Greek city: to look at her, said Thucydides, you would never believe the greatness of her people. The discipline impoverished their spirit: in the generation of the Eunomia, Spartans still could build, as the new temple of Orthia and the Brazen House of Gitiadas testify. Fifty years later, they were still proud that foreigners should build for them; the Magnesian Bathycles built Apollo’s throne at Amyclae about 550 BC, the Samian Theodorus built their Town Hall, the Skias, about the same time. And during this half century, 600—550, they could still make beautiful pottery. But there was no more building after 550, and the pottery declines, and the little offerings to Orthia become steadily poorer. In the first half of the sixth century, King Agesicles had said that Sparta had nothing to learn from foreigners, and after the collapse of the Lydian alliance, she put this into practice.

VIII.

SPARTA: THE BEGINNINGS OF THE LEAGUE

The Eunomia gave Sparta the finest army in Greece, and she itched to use it. Designed to secure the tranquil possession of Messenia, why should it not conquer a second Messenia? Arcadia, and especially the rich plain of Tegea, was the appointed victim, and Sparta embarked on those Arcadian Wars which fill the first half of the sixth century. Herodotus records the oracle which was said to have encouraged Sparta to these wars, and it represents faithfully enough the Spartan intentions: ‘I will give you Tegea to dance in,’ Apollo is alleged to say, ‘and the fine plain to mete out with measuring ropes.’ The Spartan lords wanted more land, and with their new army were not afraid of more serfs.

Happily for Sparta, this war of conquest was a failure, and the huge disproportion of serfs to masters was not increased. There was about a generation’s unprosperous fighting (Herodotus says, the reign of kings Leon and Agesicles, c. 590—560) and then the new kings, Anaxandridas and Ariston, abandoned the idea of annexation; after a few more campaigns, the Tegeans, instead of becoming Helots, were admitted to alliance. In this momentous change of policy—we may for convenience call it the beginning of the ‘League’ policy—Herodotus sees the proximate cause of Sparta’s appearance, about 550 BC, as a World-Power.

The date can be fixed approximately. It is well before 546, the year of the fall of Sardes. Sparta has adopted the ‘League’ policy, her fortunes have mended, Tegea has been received into alliance, the rest of Arcadia and other cities have followed—all this before Croesus singles out Sparta as the leading Greek city by asking her alliance: and there still remain his expedition beyond the Halys, its failure, and the siege of Sardes, before we reach 546. On the other hand, we cannot well put it earlier than 560. Anaxandridas and Ariston are the kings in Sparta; and in 480 their two sons, Leonidas and Demaratus, are both present, one on the Greek and one on the Persian side, at Thermopylae; it is hardly credible that the fathers should both be reigning more than eighty years previously, that is to say, before 560. About 560, then, or slightly later, Sparta begins the building of her League.

The change of policy was announced to the world by bringing the Bones of Orestes to Sparta. This use of relics for the symbolical announcement of foreign policy is frequent in early Greek history. We have seen, about a generation earlier, the case of Adrastus at Sicyon; a century later, the bringing of Rhesus to Amphipolis is a rather closer parallel. In Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, we must see the representative of the pre-Dorian peoples of Peloponnese; the institution of his worship in Sparta was a movement of conciliation to these peoples. It was remarkably opportune. Not only did the prospect of tolerable terms weaken the resistance of Arcadia, the citadel of the pre-Dorians, but the gesture opened the way for Sparta’s interference in those cities round the Isthmus, where the question of the two races had long been burning. Sparta, unimpeachably Dorian in fact, had never stressed the point of race, and she now unites the pretensions of Argos as leader of the Dorians, with those of the Tyrants as champion of the pre-Dorians. As the heir of both, she claims allegiance from the whole of Peloponnese, and later from the whole of Greece.

Later Spartan opinion was less conscious of having made, on this great occasion, a concession to pre-Dorian opinion, than of having claimed the lordship of Peloponnese. The Bones were not freely given, but stolen, and in virtue of them they claimed that Agamemnon’s self would cry out if Sparta’s lordship were questioned. But that there was concession is clear. The Tegeans were given a post of honour in the allied army, on the strange ground that a king of Tegea had once led Peloponnese in resisting the Dorian Invasion. And there was need for such concession. The Greek race was deeply divided in two: how deeply is well shown by a temple inscription of the fifth century from Paros, ‘The Dorian foreigner, and the slave, may not enter.’

The same barrier was met by Cleomenes on the Acropolis of Athens, shortly before 500 BC. He wished to enter the temple of Athena, and the priestess said ‘Spartan foreigner, no Dorian may enter.’ Cleomenes tries to break down the barrier by the same gesture with which Sparta had won Arcadia, ‘Lady, I am no Dorian but an Achaean.’ In view of this utterance of Cleomenes, and of the marked personal loyalty of Arcadia to the Agiad house —the most striking case is when Cleomenes threatens his own city at the head of an Arcadian army sworn to his personal service, but many more cases can be cited—we may be inclined to ascribe the new policy to Cleomenes’ father, Anaxandridas. If it was due to Anaxandridas, its success will explain how, by the reign of Cleomenes, the Agiad has come to be the paramount house. It was not so always. The outstanding figure in early Spartan history is King Theopompus, a Eurypontid, and the facts that Lycurgus was originally counted a Eurypontid, and that King Eunomus appears in the Eurypontid pedigree, suggest that the Eunomia was fathered by a Eurypontid king.

The hypothesis, that the Agiads are thus the creators of the Spartan League, and the Eurypontids the creators of the enlarged Helotry and the Eunomia which should secure it, illuminates the subsequent history of Sparta. The Agiads are generally imperial­ists, and often revolutionaries: for it was soon evident that the gifts with which her two royal houses had dowered Sparta were mutually destructive. The unstable equilibrium at home, whereby a few thousand citizens under a monastic rule kept ten times their numbers in serfdom, made Sparta unequal to the responsibilities of leading Greece. The Helot system or the empire must eventually be abandoned: at Leuctra she lost both. Meanwhile, the Agiads are imperialists: the Eurypontids cleave to the Constitution, and do not shrink from the ‘Little-Sparta’ policy which that entailed.

The close of the Arcadian Wars opened the roads to the Isthmus. Sciritis, the Arcadian hill country on the straight road between Sparta and Tegea, was probably annexed by Sparta during these wars, and the hard Sciritans were made into a regiment of their own with a privileged post of danger, which forms an excrescence on the symmetry of the New-Model army. Sparta also secured the better road over the Eurotas watershed, which ran thence past Orestheum into the plain of Tegea. The story, how Sparta occupied Phigalea after the Messenian Revolt was crushed, and later a hundred picked men of Orestheum turned the Spartans out, suggests how the fighting went. Sparta established her frontier on the Eurotas watershed, and south of the Neda; and Phigalea and Orestheum remained Arcadian cities.

The cities on the Isthmus were ripe for Spartan intervention. At Corinth, the Tyrants had been expelled, probably over twenty years before, but the ruling oligarchs would be glad of Sparta’s support, and the commons had little to fear from her new moderation. It seems likely that she gave a signal proof of this at the neighbouring city of Sicyon. There, the great Cleisthenes had died a few years before, but there was still a Tyrant ruling, a certain Aeschines. The Spartans expelled him, and probably set up an oligarchy, but they made no root and branch reforms, and even allowed the new tribe names, which Cleisthenes had pre­scribed in mockery of the Dorians, to continue in use: they lasted till about the end of the century, when, probably under the reviving influence of Argos, they were dropped1.

With such statesmanlike moderation, Sparta performed what is probably the first of those Expulsions of Tyrants for which she became famous. As a date one may suggest 556, the year tradition assigns to the ephorate of Chilon; for a papyrus fragment imputes the policy to the Ephor Chilon and King Anaxandridas; and since Chilon is said to have made much of his ephorate, it is quite likely that the policy was initiated that year. It has been conjectured above that Anaxandridas was the more active of the kings during these years.

Megara did not join the League as yet. After the fall of Theagenes she fell on evil days, under repeated blows from Athens. The island of Salamis was in dispute, and the Spartan arbitrators awarded it to her enemy. She seems to have found some slight support in her troubles from Boeotia, with whose help she made her last colonizing effort, the foundation of Heraclea in the Black Sea, c. 560. Internally, she was suffering from violent alternations of oligarchy and democracy, and of these troubles Aristotle and Plutarch have preserved traditions, but the most vivid picture is in the poems of the contemporary Theognis. The problems of the new wealth, and of the increasing demands of the many, dealt with so wisely in Athens and so resolutely in Sparta, are seen here in full fever. Theognis, a passionate oligarch, is exiled and goes to the Sicilian Megara, and (the natural haven of oligarchs) to Sparta. In one memorable poem he is aware of a larger issue than the rancours of class­consciousness. In 546 Sardes fell, and Persia appeared on the Greek horizon. He prays Apollo to save his own city of Megara ‘for I am afraid indeed when I see the folly of the Greeks and their ruinous dissension’; but in another poem he invites his friends to drink and talk gaily and put the Mede out of mind. For Theognis is, after all, the light-hearted type of the late Renaissance, a gay and exquisite viveur,

Megara was not yet in danger, the Persians left Europe alone for the present. But Spartan honour was involved. Croesus had got little good from ‘the strongest of the Greeks,’ and whilst Sardes was falling, the Spartans had been settling, this time for good, the old dispute with Argos about the Plain of Thyrea. At the Battle of the Champions, in 546, three hundred champions of Argos and Sparta fought for the Plain, and the issue was then fought out again in earnest by the full armies. Sparta won, her defeat by King Pheidon was at last avenged. The victory ranked as one of Sparta’s chief battle-honours: the Thyrea dead were celebrated every year at the Gymnopaidiai, the ‘Dance of Naked Boys,’ the most brilliant of those solemn revels that sweetened the austerity of the new Spartan life, and later the same honour was given to the Thermopylae dead alone. In their pride, the Spartans sent word to Cyrus, who had conquered their ally, to keep his hands off the Greek cities of Asia. He answered scornfully, Sparta should soon have her own troubles to mind. The insult of Cyrus gave Sparta a sterner sense of realities than the flatteries of Croesus: it was just at this time, c. that Cleomenes was born. An almost exact contemporary of Darius, he stands at the beginning of what Herodotus so strangely calls the ‘ Century of Sorrow,’ a period of graver dangers and more serious issues than his fathers had known, and, more truly than that of Agamemnon, a Heroic Age.

CHAPTER XXI

EARLY ATHENS