Page images
PDF
EPUB

as to the mode in which they grew up. The Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesos is shrouded in the mists of popular tradition; and when we reach the historical ages we can but accept facts as we find them. These facts exhibit to us an oligarchical body filling towards the other inhabitants the relation of feudal lords to their dependents, supported, like the Thessalian nobility, entirely from their lands, and regarding all labour, whether agricultural or mechanical, as derogatory to their dignity. In their relations with one another these lords were the soldiers of an army of occupation, and subjected, as such, to a severe military discipline. In fact, they retained their citizenship only on condition of submitting to this discipline and of paying their quota to the Syssitia or public messes. Failure in either of these duties intailed disfranchisement: and as the Spartans were forbidden to labour, many would by the failure of this means become unable to pay their contribution. The citizens thus disfranchised came to be known by the name Hypomeiones or Inferiors. The full citizens were distinguished by the title of Homoioi, or Peers.

Such a polity was not one to justify any great feeling of security on the part of the rulers. We find accordingly that the Spartan government looked with constant anxiety to the classes which itregarded with an instinctive dread. The ephors could put Perioikoi to death without trial; and the Krypteia (even if we reject the idea of deliberate annual massacres of the Helots) was yet a police institution by which young citizens were employed to carry out a system of espionage through the whole of Lakonia.

The empire of Sparta was extended to the western sea by the result of two wars with the Messenians, the second of which ended in their utter ruin. Of these wars we have some scanty knowledge from the fragments which remain of the elegies of the Athenian Tyrtaios, who tells us that the two contests were separated by an interval of two generations. The fathers of our fathers, he said, conquered the Messenians; but this first conquest, he tells us, was achieved at the cost of a war which lasted for twenty years. The second war he describes as not less obstinate and dangerous for Sparta, against which the Messenians were supported by the aid of other states in the Peloponnesos. This is practically all that we learn from Tyrtaios, and it is not much; nor do we know anything more about them from writers preceding the age of the great Theban general Epamei

nondas; and it seems likely that for the wealth of incident and splendour of colouring thrown over the narrative of this long struggle we are indebted not to traditions of the time but to fictions which grew up after the restoration of Messenia and the founding of the city of Messênê. The great Messenian hero Aristomenes fought according to some in the first war: others spoke of him as their champion in the second. In both the wars the Messenians are almost uniformly victorious, but in some way or other beaten in the end. Still, in spite of all its contradictions, we cannot fail to see the beauty of the tale which tells us how Aristomenes, the dragon's son, entered Sparta by night, how he went straight to the temple of Athana of the Brazen House, and how in the morning a shield was seen nailed up on the wall with an inscription which declared it to be an offering by Aristomenes from Spartan spoil. When in the next year, the story goes on to tell us, his enemies met him by the Boar's Grave in the plain of Stenyklaros, they were saved from destruction, only because Aristomenes, sitting down under a wild pear-tree, was robbed of his shield by the Dioskouroi. Still so splendid was his victory that the Messenian maidens crowned him with garlands and gave utterance to their joy in songs which told how into the midst of the Stenyklarian plain and up to the summit of the hill Aristomenes chased the flying Lakedaimonians. Open force, it was clear, could avail nothing against him, and the Spartans found it easier to work their way by corruption. Ample bribes secured the treachery of Aristokrates, the Arkadian ally of the Messenians; but although he was thus defeated in the battle of the Great Trench, Aristomenes gathered his routed forces, and taking refuge on mount Eira, held his ground for eleven years longer. Far from reaping any benefit from the victory, the Spartans saw their lands ravaged, their people worn down by famine or by seditions more fatal than famine, and learnt at length that Aristomenes had surpassed his former exploit in the Brazen House by the capture of Amyklai not three miles distant from Sparta. He had plundered the city and was retreating with the spoil when the enemy overtook him in overwhelming numbers, and made him prisoner with fifty of his fellows. With these he was thrown into a pit called the Keadas. The fifty were at once killed. Aristomenes alone reached the bottom alive, borne, as some said, on the outstretched wings of an eagle. Rescued from this dismal cavern,

like Sindbad in the Arabian tale, by following a fox which came to prey upon the dead, the hero appeared once more at Eira and offered up for the second time the Hekatomphonia or sacrifice for the slaughter of a hundred enemies. Again he lost by the craft of his foes what he had gained by his own prowess. In a time of truce he was seized by some Kretan bowmen; but a maiden had dreamed the night before that wolves had brought into the city a chained and clawless lion, and that she had given him claws and set him free. The sight of Aristomenes amongst his captors revealed the meaning of her vision, and having made the archers drunk, she placed a dagger in his hands and cut his bonds. Seizing the weapon, the hero slew his enemies; and the maiden was rewarded by becoming the wife of his son Gorgos. But the fated time was now drawing near. The Pythian priestess had warned him that the god could no longer defend Messênê if the he-goat (Tragos) should drink the waters of the Neda. The Messenians thought of beasts and felt no fear; but a fig-tree sprang up, and, instead of spreading its branches in the air, let them droop into the stream, and the seer Theoklos, as he looked upon it, knew that this was the deadly sign, for in the Messenian dialect the fig-tree was called Tragos. Warned by the prophet, Aristomenes hastened away to Eira, and here again treachery accomplished what strength could not achieve. Yet so terrible was Aristomenes, as he stood at bay with his men formed in square round the women and children, that his enemies readily suffered him to pass free with those whom he still guarded. Retreating into Arkadia, he planned another attack upon Sparta, and was again foiled by the treachery of Aristokrates. But the spirit of the Messenians was broken, Aristomenes went to take counsel at Delphoi, and there met Damagetos, the king of the Rhodian Ialysos, who had been bidden to marry the daughter of the bravest of the Hellenes. Damagetos, knowing that none could challenge the right of Aristomenes to this title, besought of him his child and offered him a home in the beautiful island which rose up from the sea to be the bride of the sun. To Rhodes therefore he went, and thus became the progenitor of the illustrious family of the Diagoridai. A peaceful end in the happy island of the sun was the fittest close of a career in which, as in a stormy day, the blackness of darkness is from time to time broken by outbursts of dazzling light.

C

Far older than the comparatively modern romances of the Messenian wars were the legends which told the story of Spartan aggressions or conquests in the direction of Arkadia and Argolis.

Before the last Lydian king Kroisos sought alliance with the chief state of Western Hellas, Sparta had, we are told, gained possession of that long strip of Argive territory which, lying between the range of Mount Thornax and the sea, stretched from Thyrea to the Malean cape. The dispute about the Thyreatis was settled, it is said, by a duel, in which three hundred Spartans fought with three hundred Argives on a field from which all but the combatants were shut out. The combat was as fierce and fatal as that of the Clans Chattan and Key on the Inch of Perth before Robert III. of Scotland, and at sundown the only survivors were the Spartan Othryades and the Argives Chromios and Alkenor. The latter hastened home, elaiming the victory; the Spartan kept his post until on the next day the Spartan and Argive armies came to see the result. The Argives declared that by the terms of the agreement Thyrea must remain with them as two of their champions had returned home. The Spartans argued that the victory must be adjudged to the side which held the ground, and the controversy ended in a battle which rendered the previous duel superfluous. The countrymen of Othryades were again conquerors; but Othryades, ashamed to return to Sparta as the sole survivor of the three hundred, slew himself on the field. However it may have been acquired, the conquest of Thyrea marked the utmost extension of Spartan territory within the limits of the Peloponnesos; and in this result we have the most important fact in the early history of the Greeks.

CHAPTER VI.

THE GREEK DESPOTS.

ALTHOUGH the foundations of Aryan society were laid, as we have seen, in an intense selfishness which regarded all persons not actual members of the family as beyond the pale of law, yet from the first it was possible that two or more of the heads of such families might enter into a league either for mutual

protection or to advance their own interests. The heads of families thus combined would naturally form a close and exclusive order—in other words, an oligarchy, while these members of the dominant houses would be called Gamoroi (or landowners) and Eupatridai (i.e. well-born) indifferently. But the growth of population would, by increasing the number of younger sons, multiply the number of so-called Gamoroi who would not be owners of land, but who, by virtue of their common descent from the same sacred stock, would belong to the great patrician order. Thus far the natural tendency of Hellenic society would be towards oligarchy. The chiefs of the houses thus formed into clans, having been originally independent or each other, would be theoretically at least on an equality. Each would of necessity have his seat and his vote in the council, and his voice would carry equal weight with that of the wealthiest and most powerful of his fellows. But if equal among themselves, in relation to their subjects they would be college of kings, owing no duties except to the members of their own houses, and acknowledging no responsibility even to them.

We are justified, therefore, in regarding Hellenic kingship as a comparatively late developement which carried with it the signs of its speedy decay; and when an Hellenic dynasty was set aside and an oligarchy set up in its place, this was strictly nothing more than a return to the earlier form of government. The great chiefs resumed the full rights, of which they had conceded, or been compelled to yield, some portion to the king. For this reason also the change from monarchy to oligarchy seems to have been effected generally without any great convulsion and even without much disturbance.

It might be supposed that the Greek cities which were thus governed by oligarchies were now on the high road to constitutional order and freedom. But in truth the change from kingship to oligarchy had been in theory no change for any except the free citizens; and the later state of things differed from the former only in this, that even in the ruling class there were persons whose discontent and disaffection might break out at any time in revolution, and who, to achieve their own selfish purpose, might court the favour of the people, and enlist their aid by promising them justice. This was, in fact, the most potent, and perhaps the most frequently employed of the modes

« PreviousContinue »