Hellas. It could produce all or nearly all that the needs of Greek life required: its powers of production, whether in grain, wine, or oil, were turned to account with systematic diligence and skill; and their merchant ships could bring to their doors the wealth of foreign lands. But we have to remember that the country of which we have thus far spoken was not the whole of Hellas, nor did it contain the richest or the most splendid of Greek cities. It is, however, the land in which political wisdom, and art, and science, reached their highest growth, and from whose history we learn the most important lessons. The physical features of other parts of the widely scattered Greek world will be best noticed when our story brings us to deal with each in turn.

CHAPTER II.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF GREEK CIVILISATION.

GREEKS and Romans, Germans and Englishmen, with other European nations, belong to that family of the human race which has been called Aryan, to distinguish it from the Semitic tribes of Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, and from the Turanian hordes which have issued from the deserts of northern Asia to be the scourge of happier regions. All these Aryan tribes or nations have certain features or characteristics in common, and by examining these we may go back to the earliest forms of society from which their present civilisation has sprung. If we do so we find that in each case we are brought to a condition of things to which the closest likeness is furnished by the village communities existing in India to the present day. But the complete isolation of these village societies carries us back to a state of things still more ancient and to a time when the house of each of our Aryan progenitors was to him what the den is to the wild beast which dwells in it—something, that is, to which he only has a right and which he allows his mate and his offspring to share, but which no other living thing may enter except at the risk of life.

Now, when we find that in Greece and in Rome, as in India, the house had an inviolable religious character, we see that each house must have been the stronghold of a family long

before it acquired this religious sanction. In Greece as in Italy each house was carefully cut off by its precinct from every other. No party walls could join together the possessions of different families; no plough might break the neutral ground which left each abode in impenetrable seclusion. The curse attached to the removing of a neighbour's landmark shows that the majesty of law was intended to effect that which the Aryan of an earlier age would have accomplished by brute force.

But the den which the primitive man defended for his mate and his offspring with the instinct of a brute would have remained a den for ever, if no higher feeling had been awakened in the mind of its owner. This higher feeling was roused by the belief that men live on after they are dead. For his children the primitive Aryan still continued after death to be the lord of his own house, with the further title to reverence that he was now the object of its worship, its god. It was further believed that if the disembodied spirit cannot obtain the rest which it needs, it will wreak its vengeance on the living; and it cannot rest unless the body is buried. But the funeral rites could be performed only by the dead man's legitimate representative, that is, by his eldest son, born in lawful wedlock of a woman initiated into the family religion. Thus the living master of the house ruled as the vicegerent of the dead, whose despotic authority he had inherited. His wife was his slave, and so long as he lived, his sons, though they might be fathers themselves, could not escape from his rule. The master of each household was also its priest and its king. He alone could offer the sacrifices before its sacred hearth, and no one not belonging to the family could be admitted to take part in its worship. Hence, too, if the dead were to rest in peace, the family must be kept up without break. Thus marriage became a duty; and if no sons were born, the remedy lay in adoption, which was effected by a religious ceremony of the most solemn kind. The subject of it renounced his own family, and the worship of its gods, to pass to another hearth and the worship of other deities.

Thus we find everywhere the principle of exclusiveness in its strictest form; and exclusiveness must show itself in intolerance, and, where it is thwarted, in merciless rage. Hence arose caste, as in Egypt or India, and, as we may fairly say also,

in Greece and in Rome. Two or more families, thus isolated each in its own religion, might indeed combine for the purpose of extending their power or increasing it; but this union was accomplished only by the establishment of a common worship. United in this way, the Hellenic houses or families, called Genê, formed a Phratria, or brotherhood; but in their new society the bond of union was as strictly religious as that of the family. So, again, as the grouping of families had formed the Phratria or clan, the union of Phratriai formed the religious society known as the tribe. Lastly, tribes which were locally near each other would be sure, sooner or later, to desire for themselves a union similar to that of the clans and families. This final union of tribes constituted the Polis or State, which was strictly a confederacy, each unit in which retained all its original rights and powers.

Thus far the Greek advanced rapidly; but, on the whole, he never advanced further. The basis of the federation was an exclusive religion, and the intolerance which was its natural consequence was never wholly shaken off. In blood the men of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta were as closely connected perhaps as the men of London, Manchester, and Liverpool; but in going to war with each other Athens, Thebes, and Sparta could not even be charged with the violation of any duty, and of the country called Hellas, as a whole, we can say no more than that it contained a number of cities which might or might not be in alliance. So long as they were allied, they were bound to deal justly and honestly by each other, but no longer. The society which had grown up slowly from the religious basis of the family could keep no faith with those who had been cut off from this sacred fellowship, and in the event of victory could show them no mercy. The fallen enemy became a slave whom his conqueror killed or sold or held in bondage according to his good plea

sure.

CHAPTER III.

THE MYTHOLOGY AND TRIBAL LEGENDS OF THE GREEKS.

WHEN in the Hindu story we read that Krishna rescued from the dark giant Naraka and at the same moment wedded sixteen thousand one hundred maidens, multiplying himself into so

many forms that each of these damsels thought that he had wedded her alone, we can see how truthfully the legend describes the dew which, becoming visible only when the darkness of night is dispelled, reflects the same sun in its thousands of sparkling drops. But we must feel that an immeasurably deeper as well as purer feeling underlies the Greek story of Prokris, the child of the dew (Hersê) slain by the spear (the solar ray) of him whom she loves, far down in the thicket where the last drop flashes as the sun rises high in the heaven. In such stories as these the Greek gathered together all that he knew, or thought that he knew, of the heaven and the earth, of day and night, of fire and frost, of light and darkness, of the bright and the swarthy gods, of giants and nymphs and heroes. This rich harvest of popular stories sprang up with a random or irregular growth, into which later collectors tried to introduce something like order; but whatever might be their beauty and whatever their truth as pictures of the outward world, they all lie far beyond the domain of history, nor can they challenge the attention of the historian except as illustrating the growth and the course of Greek thought and of Greek art in its widest meaning. It is enough to say that for the Greek, as for the Aryan conquerors of India, the whole world of sense was alive. For him the trees, the clouds, the waters were all sentient beings: the dawn and the gloaming were living persons, connected with the brilliant god whose daily approach wakened all things from slumber, and whose departure left them in darkness repulsive as that of death. All these beings with a thousand others were objects of love or fear, of veneration or reverence; and the worship of some among them may be regarded as the very foundation of the brilliant social life of the Greeks.

The naming of a few of the stories related by the Greeks about the gods whom they worshipped, or the heroes whose descendants they claimed to be, can give no idea of the stupendous fabric reared by later poets when they came to cement together the stones which they found more or less ready hewn to their hand. Not only were there stories which belonged to particular families, clans, or cities; but around these flowed the stream of a tradition which professed to furnish a continuous history in the tales of the Kalydonian boar hunt, of the voyage of the Argonauts, of the war of Troy for the rescuing of Helen, of the returns of the heroes after that long struggle, of

the banishment of the Herakleids or children of Herakles, and of their triumphant restoration in the end to their ancient homes. All these stories were to the several tribes or cities genuine records of actual events of history, the independent chronicles of kings and heroes; and from first to last this conviction was a delusion. Regarded as a whole, these stories strictly resemble a prism, in which a thousand pictures flash from a few planes while all are reflected from a single piece of glass. The telling of these tales is therefore no part of the historian's task. Grains of fact may be buried beneath them; but we have not the means for separating the fact from the fiction. There may, of course, have been a Trojan war undertaken to avenge the wrongs of an earthly Helen. But it is admitted on all hands that for this war we have no contemporary history; and if we examine the story, we find that in its main features it is a tale told in every Aryan land, and that, if such a war ever took place, it must be carried back to a time preceding the dispersion of the Aryan tribes. It has, therefore, in strictness of speech, nothing to do with Greek history.

Among traditions for which a large credit has been claimed the legend which relates the return of the Herakleids stands pre-eminent. The story ran that when Herakles died, his tormentor Eurystheus insisted on the surrender of his sons, and that Hyllos with his brothers hastily fled, and after wandering to many other places found a refuge at last in the only city where the children of Herakles could be safe. Eurystheus marches with his hosts against Athens, and the Athenians come forth to meet him, led by Theseus, who is accompanied by the banished Hyllos. Eurystheus is slain, and Hyllos, having carried his head to Alkmênê, goes to Thebes. The next stage in the history is another homeward journey of the Herakleids which ends in the slaughter of Hyllos in single combat with Echemos; and the Herakleids are bound by a compact to forego all attempts at return for fifty or a hundred years. The subsequent fortunes of Kleodaios and Aristomachos, the son and grandson of Herakles, simply repeat those of Hyllos; but at length in the next generation the story pauses, and the repetition of the whole drama is prevented by the gradual awakening of the historical sense in the Hellenic tribes. With the partition of Peloponnesos among the conquerors the tale comes to an end. Argos falls to the lot of Temenos, while Sparta