Pallas Athene

Plate XXII.VIEW OF MODERN SPARTA, WITH MOUNT TAYGETUSEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate XXII.VIEW OF MODERN SPARTA, WITH MOUNT TAYGETUS

English Photo Co., Athens

mean etymologically “government by the best”? Besides, there was the practical proof of excellence that Sparta alone was free from the ever endemic Greek disease of “stasis” or civil strife, and that Sparta alone of Greek States had never witnessed a successful revolution.

In the common meaning of the term also Sparta was an aristocracy. Her citizen body—the Spartiates, as they called themselves—were always a minority of nobles, living armed and watchful amid a great subject population of serfs. These Helots were of the same blood as the neighbouring peoples of Messenia and Arcadia—that is to say, they are the aboriginal stratum of Greece—and if they had a chance would no doubt prove as intelligent and artistic as their ancestors. But no chance was given them; they were ruthlessly oppressed, cruelly exploited, and there was an organised secret service to remove any men of mark that might arise from their ranks. On the battlefield of Platæa every Spartan soldier was followed by seven Helots. Thus every Spartan is to be ranked with the mediæval knight, though he fought on foot. Between these two classes of knights and serfs there was also an intermediate rank—the Neighbours, or Perioikoi. If the theory of racial stratification is to be applied to them they must represent a pre-Dorian wave of conquest, Achæan presumably, which in its turn had to yield, but, being not entirely alien, was treated on a superior footing. Though they had no political or social standing, the Perioikoi were not oppressed. They lived mostly in the country and on the sea-coast. They provided the sailors, the farmers, and, so far as Laconia had any trade, the traders. They seem to have been contented with their lot, but we know singularly little about them.

The city of Sparta itself—the only unwalled city in Greece, planted on the banks of the Eurotas, under Mount Taygetus[27]—consisted, then, of a circle of knights and their slaves. The Spartiates formed a very exclusive and haughty clique of military men, extremely narrow and oppressive tothose about and beneath them, ever vigilant against rebellion, and conscious that their spears and shields had to take the place of a wall for Lacedæmon. Among themselves they lived an absolutely equal communistic life. Their meals were provided at common mess-tables, each a little club with power to elect and reject its members. As this institution also prevailed among the Dorians of Crete, it is to be regarded as something very ancient and characteristically Dorian. It meant, of course, the complete absence of home and family life. It was by such habits that the Spartans remained a conquering race, victorious first over their Messenian neighbours in two long wars, the details of which are legendary, and then gradually extending their control over the whole Peloponnesus, including their Dorian kinsmen of Argos and Epidaurus.

It is possible that the remarkable discipline and asceticism of Sparta which is proverbially linked with her name had gradually increased. Recent excavations have shown that seventh-century Sparta was not destitute of art. From the lyric poets of the seventh century we get glimpses of a Sparta not entirely ascetic or contemptuous of culture. On the contrary, she is a patroness of foreign poets like Tyrtæus. But already she appreciates most the martial song and dance. It must be remembered that in Greece poetry, music, and the dance were far more closely allied than with us. Not only did Greek dramatists originally train their own choruses in the dance and compose their own music, but even Hesiod in that Eubœan competition had to chant his verses aloud. So at Sparta Terpander and Alcman were first musicians and secondly lyric poets, and Tyrtæus, the Athenian bard, was there to conduct martial dances and to train the boys of Sparta in their musical drill. Thus there was no contradiction in early times between strict military discipline and a love of lyric poetry. Afterwards, when music grew softer and poetry less martial, the Spartans banished all musicians and poets from their midst, though they retainedthe old marching tunes of antiquity. One of these poets, Alcman, seems to have come to Sparta as a captive from luxurious Lydia, and he does sing of cakes and kisses, but the small fragments of Tyrtæus are all military:

“Come, ye sons of dauntless Sparta,Warrior sons of Spartan citizens,With the left advance the buckler,Stoutly brandish spears in right hands,Sparing not your lives for Sparta:Such is not the Spartan custom.”

Terpander praises Sparta for three things, the courage of her youths, her love of music, and her justice. A Spartan proverb, apparently ancient, runs: “Sparta will fall by love of wealth, naught else.” They were, and always remained, a covetous people; but for that very reason when coined money began to be used in Greece about the seventh century Sparta forbade its introduction lest commerce should taint the warrior spirit of her citizens, so that Sparta had no coinage until the second century, but continued to use, where money was necessary, the ancient clumsy ingots of iron. Change for five pounds at Sparta needed a cart to bring it home in. But money is not the only form of wealth, and it is probably an Athenian lampoon which represents the Spartan as living on nothing but the celebrated black soup. As every Spartan had his land (the equality and inalienability of the lots is probably a later fiction), with any number of Helots to till it, while the young men spent their leisure in the chase, there was plenty to supply the Spartan larder, and to provide wine and sweetmeats for Lydian poets as well.

It was in education that the discipline is most characteristically “Spartan.” From birth to death the Spartan was in the grip of an iron system. Indeed, it began before birth, for the Spartans are the only people in history who have dared to carry out the principles of modern eugenics. They trained the bodies of their girls with running[28]and wrestlingand throwing of quoits and javelins, that when the time came they might bear stalwart sons, and bear them bravely. “The Law-giver,” says Plutarch, “put away all coquettishness and hysteria and effeminacy by making the girls strip for processions, dances, and choruses at the temples, with the youths present as spectators. This stripping of the maidens involved no shame, for modesty was there and lewdness was absent, but it produced unaffected manners and a desire for physical fitness, and it gave the female sex some taste of a not ignoble pride, in that they too had their share of manly worth and ambition to excel. Whence came to them that thought which is expressed in the traditional repartee of Leonidas’ wife Gorgo. A foreign woman remarking to her, ‘You Laconians are the only women who rule the men,’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we are the only women who are the mothers ofmen.’”

The strongest moral suasion compelled Spartan men to marry. The marriage customs of Sparta were peculiar and carry us back to the remotest antiquity. The bridegroom carried off his bride by a pretence of violence, and the bride cut her hair short and dressed like a man. There was no marriage feast; the young husband dined at his mess-table, visited his young wife by stealth, and returned to barracks. Sometimes a wife bore children to a man whose face she had never seen. The child was not considered to belong to his father, but to the city. “The Law-giver thought it absurd to take trouble about the breed of horses and dogs, and then let the imbecile, the elderly, and the diseased bear and beget children.” There was another celebrated Spartan repartee about adultery:

“We have no adulterers in Sparta.”

“Suppose you had, what is the penalty?”

“The fine is a big bull that jumps over Taygetus and drinks from the Eurotas.”

“My dear sir, how could there be such a monstrous animal?”

PlatePlate23.—Running Girl.Anderson.

PlatePlate23.—Running Girl.

Anderson.

“My dear sir, how could there be adultery at Sparta?”

At birth the babe was taken away from its parent to a hall where the elders of the tribe sat to examine it. If it was plump and strong they said, “Rear it.” If not it was exposed to die in a cleft of the mountain. “For they thought better, both for it and the city, that it should die than that it should live if it was not naturally healthy and strong. That was why the women washed it with wine instead of water as a test of its strength.” They had scientific methods of rearing babies, no swaddling-clothes, no fear of the dark or solitude. Foreigners used to hire Laconian women for their nurses.

As soon as they were seven years old the children were drafted off into “herds.” The most “sensible and combative” of each herd was made prefect, whose orders the others had to obey implicitly and suffer his punishments without wincing. The older men watched them at their play, and set them to fight one another. They learnt letters, but nothing else except music and drill. They walked without sandals, and generally played naked.

At the age of twelve they were allowed one mantle a year, no tunic. “They had no experience of baths and unguents; only for a few days each year they were allowed such luxuries.” They slept in their herds on rushes, which they had to cut from the river-banks. “In winter they used to mix thistles with their bedding, from the idea that there was some warmth in them.” At this age they began to associate with older youths on those curious terms of male love peculiar to the Greeks. Their elders would take a fatherly interest in the achievements of their beloved, chastise and encourage them.

Also, there was a public tutor appointed from among the grown-up nobles for each “herd,” as well as prefects from the wisest and most warlike of the youths of twenty. The latter had his “fags” entirely under his orders. Stealing of food was encouraged as a martial virtue likely to lead to sharpening the wits for warlike purposes. In a state which practised communism there was, of course, no dishonesty involved.If they were caught they were thrashed for their bad stealing. To encourage theft, their public rations were kept short. They were also thrashed for the good of their souls, to encourage endurance. “We have seen many of the youths die under the blows at the altar of Artemis the Upright,” says Plutarch, or rather the authority he is quoting. But modern students consider that this flagellation at the altar was probably a religious ritual, of which there are many other examples. If the beater spared his victim the goddess manifested her displeasure.

After mess, at which he was waited on by his fags, the prefect would address himself to their intellectual education. Some had to sing, to others he would put questions in ethical casuistry. “Who is the best of the men?” “What do you think of this or that action?” The answer had to be brief and pointed—“Laconic,” in fact. The boy had to give reasons for his answer. A bad answer was punished by a bite on the back of the hand, but if older men were present the prefect had to justify his punishments. If a boy cried out ignobly in fighting, his lover was punished also. But the real source of their education was in music, marching songs, and hymns in praise of the heroes of Spartan history. One such song is preserved:

“Old Men.We were warriors of old.“Men.As we are. Who doubts? Behold.“Boys.Some day we shall be more bold.”

“Old Men.We were warriors of old.

“Men.As we are. Who doubts? Behold.

“Boys.Some day we shall be more bold.”

Laconic, but Spartan!

The Spartan youths did not neglect their personal appearance, especially in the matter of fine armour. They prided themselves on their long and well-groomed hair. In the pass of Thermopylæ the Persian monarch was astonished to see the three hundred Spartans, who ought to have been trembling and saying their prayers, carefully combing their long hair. In war-time discipline was relaxed. When the line of battle was drawn up in the face of the enemy, first the king sacrificed agoat, and the warriors crowned themselves with garlands of flowers, while the flute-players played the song of Kastor. Then they stepped forward gravely to the sound of the marching pæan, all in step, without disorder or confusion, but “led gently and cheerfully by the music into danger.” There was no fear, for the hymn “made them feel that the god was with them.” When they had routed their enemy they only pursued so far as to assure defeat, “considering it neither gentlemanly nor Hellenic to cut and slay those who yielded and retired.” This was the spirit of all their warfare; they never destroyed a beaten city.

As soon as they were of military age the army and the secret police took most of their time and thought. Arts, crafts, and business they considered the work of slaves. Dancing, singing, modest banquets, and hunting were their relaxations. It was not until the age of thirty that a Spartan could go into the agora and enjoy his rights as a citizen. Even then lounging in the market-place was not encouraged; most of the day was spent in the gymnasiums and clubs. There was, of course, no private family life whatever. King Agis, coming back victorious from a campaign, asked permission to dine with his wife. It was refused by the Ephors, whose power, no doubt, was derived from their position as overseers of this singular disciplinary system. The old men were highly honoured, and the supreme object of an old Spartan’s ambition was a seat on the Senate.

And what sort of character did this strange system produce? Well, it produced the three hundred warriors who died to a man round their king Leonidas at the pass of Thermopylæ. It produced the Spartan king who refused the request of his allies to destroy Athens. It produced the women who mourned after the great defeat of Mantinea because no sons or husbands oftheirshad died for Sparta. It produced the only good infantry of Greece, and the only stable form of government. It produced good men like Brasidas and Gylippus. Sparta was the state that swept tyranny out ofGreece, and bore the brunt of the land-fighting against the Persians. But, on the other hand, the system encouraged that stupid and bigoted conservatism which ruined Sparta, partly through refusing to learn anything new in the art of warfare, and partly through declining to supplement the dwindling warrior caste by extending the franchise to the other inhabitants of Sparta. No doubt, also, the strict discipline of life in the city led to the moral breakdown of her victorious generals Pausanias and Lysander when they came in contact with the fascinations of Eastern luxury. It made the Spartans oppressive and unjust when they had to govern an empire. The typical Spartan is narrow-minded, superstitious, and covetous, but he is always brave, patriotic, and often chivalrous. Sparta has left us no art or literature, but she has left us an extraordinary experiment (for a warning) of aristocratic communism combined with unfettered militarism.

Sparta and Athens are the counterparts and complements of one another: Sparta drilled, orderly, efficient, and dull; Athens free, noisy, fickle, and brilliant. Sparta’s watchword in history is Eunomia (order); the motto of Athens is Eleutheria (liberty) and Parrhesia (free speech and free thought). But Sparta was orderly and powerful over all the Peloponnese long before Athens was free or cultured.

Both Apollo and Athena were deities specially concerned with cities and good government. If Apollo was the god of prophecy, music, poetry, and athletics, Athena’s arts were those of the craftsman, the potter, and the weaver. Athena, though a fair, grey-eyed goddess, was nevertheless an enemy to love, wise in counsel and fond of battle. So strictly maidenly was she that they gave her a virgin birth. No female had a hand in her making, for she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus at a blow from the hammer of Hephæstus. That was the scene depicted on the front gable of the Parthenon. The worship of Athena is singularly pure and civilised; it is almost

Plate XXIV.ATHENA PROMACHOS. FROM A PANATHENAIC AMPHORA

entirely free from magic and mystery, for Athena is emphatically a civic goddess, having hardly any connection with the powers of Nature. She is pure intellect. True, she has a pugnacious aspect, she is armed with spear and shield, and with a breastplate, or ægis, bearing the Gorgon’s head and snaky coils of hair.[29]It has been ingeniously suggested that the ægis had been evolved by art from the skin of a beast worn over the shoulders, with the fierce head hanging over the breast of the wearer, and the legend of Medusa the Gorgon invented to explain it. Anyhow, Athena is a hoplite goddess. Whatever connection she may have with water elsewhere, at Athens she is armed for land warfare.

All these signs convince us that the Athena worshipped on the Acropolis of Athens is not a primitive goddess. Her character, her weapons, and her cult all point to a Northern origin, like that of Zeus and Apollo. Moreover, we have, in the legend of her successful strife with Poseidon for the patronage of the city, a clear account of her importation, and she shared a temple with the old earth-born hero of Athens, Erechtheus. How then did she come to give her name to the city? Is it true that Athens had been called Cecropia in times past? It is hard to believe that the goddess was called after the city, for there were strong local cults of Athena elsewhere, so markedly individual in character that the name cannot have been due to a mere identification of local heroines with the famous goddess of a famous city. It is not in the least likely that the Spartans, of all people, would call the goddess who played a very important part in the life of their State by the name of an essentially Athenian deity. Nor, again, can we believe that a goddess could completely change her character and become civilised without leaving distinct traces of her past. The only conclusion is that Pallas Athene was an Achæan goddess who came rather late upon the Acropolis of Athens. It is true that the Athenians boasted themselves to be an aboriginal people of the old stock, and it is veryprobable that the main bodies of Northern invaders did, as Thucydides alleges, pass by that stony promontory of Attica as beneath notice. But they can hardly have left a strong citadel unconquered, and though Athens and her king Menestheus play a rather humble part in the Iliad, yet there was an Athenian contingent in the Achæan host. It is probable that Athens received an Achæan king and that the Acropolis itself passed into Achæan hands. But the population of Attica received little Northern intermixture. Herodotus tells us that the Athenian maidens going down from the citadel to draw water were liable to constant attacks from the Pelasgians who lived on Mount Hymettus.

In all the elaborate rebuilding of Periclean days the rock of Acropolis was pretty thoroughly scoured of ancient remains. But we still see traces of Cyclopean masonry, as at Tiryns and Mycenæ, forming what the Athenians called “the Pelasgic Wall.” To that period belong such traditional royalties as Cecrops, Erechtheus, and Pandion, possibly real names of prehistoric kings who ruled over the rock and part of the plain below, but by no means over the whole of Attica. In artistic representation these ancient worthies are rather apt to develop serpents’ tails in place of their lower limbs. As they worshipped Poseidon, we may be sure that these Cecropians or Pelasgians were a trading, seafaring people, having intercourse with Crete and their kinsmen of Caria and Ionia. Poseidon was always the common deity of the Ionian people, who looked to Athens as their head, probably because she had suffered so little infusion of Northern blood. It is not likely that Athens was ever a citadel of equal importance with Mycenæ or Cnossos in pre-Achæan days. Attica has yielded but few important relics of the Bronze Age, but, on the other hand, the Attic sites contain an unbroken series of artistic design from the earliest to the latest times.

The great legendary King of Athens was Theseus, a figure much embroidered by later mythologists because hehad been made the patron hero of the Athenian democracy and the synœcist of Athens—that is, the man who made Attica into a city-state instead of a congeries of village demes. Of course that is not history. All the legends seem to admit that Theseus was originally an alien. His descendants were said to have been driven out by the Homeric King of Athens Menestheus. After the Persian wars the bones of a giant were discovered in the island of Scyros; they were at once recognised as those of Theseus, and brought with great ceremony to be reinterred at Athens.

During this Achæan period the Athenians seem to have largely deserted the sea for agriculture and olive-culture. It will be remembered that Athena’s gift to the city by which she outbid the sea-god was the olive-tree. Of course there were still fishermen on the coast, but when history begins dimly in the seventh century Athens is mainly agricultural and by no means yet a city-state. She was not yet a fully developed city-state when Sparta had long been settled in government and had already extended her hegemony over the whole Peloponnesus. By this time the Athenian kingship had dissolved into aristocracy, and the aristocrats, or Eupatridæ, were a clique of oppressive landowners whose farms were largely worked for them, as at Sparta, on themétayersystem, by which the tenant pays a certain proportion of the produce to the proprietor. The troubles which Solon had to face were agrarian troubles connected with boundary-stones. He reckons property in bushels of corn and oil. His enactments, or the ancient laws which pass under his name, are largely concerned with dogs and wolves and olive-culture. The only export permitted is that of olive oil. Even after Solon the local parties that divide the state are not divisions of city-dwellers, but of country folk—the shepherds of the hills, the farmers of the plain, and the fishermen of the coast. These facts emerge in despite of subsequent Athenian historians, who, to please theamour propreof a democratic city, tried to make out that democracyhad existed long before the tyranny of Peisistratus—in fact, as far back as Theseus, and certainly Solon. But it is fairly clear to any one discounting this tendency and reading their early traditions impartially that until the time of the tyrants Attica was by no means a true city-state, much less a democracy. Until city life was developed democracy was impossible.

Strange relics of this agricultural life survive in the religious customs of Athens—as, for example, in the sacrifice called Diipolia or Ox-murder. “They choose,” says Porphyry, “some girls as water-carriers, and they bring water for sharpening the axe and the knife. When the axe has been sharpened one person hands it and another hits the ox, another slaughters him, others flay him, and they all partake of him. After this they sew up the hide of the ox and stuff it with hay and set it up, just like life, and yoke it to the plough as if it were going to draw it. A trial is held about the murder, and each passes on the blame for the deed to another. The water-carriers accuse those who sharpened the knife, the sharpeners blame the man who handed it, he passes the guilt on to the man who struck, the striker to the slaughterer, the slaughterer blames the knife itself; and the knife, as it cannot speak, is found guilty and thrown into the sea.” All these offices are held in certain families by hereditary right. The whole ceremony clearly points back to days when the ploughing ox was held sacred. The older worship of Attica is all agricultural. The Eleusinian mysteries are in honour of Demeter (the Earth-Mother), Koré, her daughter, also called Persephone, and Triptolemus, who brought corn from Egypt.[30]There are the Athenian mysteries called Thesmophoria, in which the women cast mysterious objects, really pieces of decayed pig and dough in the shape of snakes and men, into clefts in the earth. They were intended to produce fertility in fields and women. There was the Hersephoria also, in which maidens carried baskets containing objects whose nature they must not know to the precinct of the goddess of

Plate XXV.DEMETER, PERSEPHONE AND TRIPTOLEMUSEnglish Photo Co., Athens[ELEUSINIAN RELIEF

Plate XXV.DEMETER, PERSEPHONE AND TRIPTOLEMUS

English Photo Co., Athens

[ELEUSINIAN RELIEF

]

child-birth. Tradition said that two girls did peep in, and saw a child and a snake, which pursued and killed them. The Skirophoria was similar; it included a rite of daubing the image of Pallas with the white clay which was used as a dressing for olive-trees. There was another ceremony in which young girls dressed as bears danced in honour of Artemis of Brauron. There were the three sacred ploughings of Attic soil every year. Besides snake-heroes and snake-kings, there was the wolf-god who became identified with Apollo, and the goat-god Pan. It is possible that Athena’s owl is a relic of those days of Nature-worship. Most of these cults are Attic rather than Athenian, and are specially localised in the country demes. They visibly belong to the same religious area as the snaky figures of Cnossos; and, indeed, Crete figures largely in the mythology of this period. Anthropomorphic religion probably began at Athens with a rude female xoanon, or wooden pillar-like statue, who received in due course the name of the warrior maiden as Athena Polias.

Athens thus comes rather late into Greek history. Only two facts stand out with any clearness from the period before the sixth-century tyrannies: the attempted tyranny of Cylon and the early law-giving. Both these facts were recalled by events of subsequent history. The attempt of Cylon involved a curse upon one of the greatest of Athenian families, the Alcmæonids, to which belonged celebrated names like Megacles, Cleisthenes, Pericles, and Alcibiades. The Law-givers of Athens are indeed historical personages, which is more than we can say with any confidence for the Spartan Law-giver Lycurgus, but they have served as pegs for much legend and a good deal of deliberate falsification. Athens undoubtedly possessed ancient wooden tablets of laws (though it is rather a question whether they could have survived the two burnings of Athens by the Persians), and some of these laws probably bore the names of Dracon and Solon; but it is very certain that later orators lent weight to any old law they wished to quote with approval, by giving it one ofthese respectable names. On the other hand we know that when Athenian writers began to take an interest in constitutional history, which was not until two hundred years later, they used Dracon and Solon to father their own theories, because it was possible to form the most conflicting views of what those legislators had really done. One great point was to make out that the democracy was as old as the hills, and in this sense Solon was made the inventor of the Assembly, the Council, and even the popular jury courts. Some ascribed to him the invention of the old Council of the Areopagus. Others maintained that Solon was not a democrat, but the author of a limited franchise on a property basis—in fact, of just the system that Theramenes and his party were proposing in 404B.C.Others, again, went one better, and attributed a democratic system to Dracon, a still earlier Law-giver, in spite of the fact that Solon had abolished all his laws except those about murder and blood-guiltiness. Thucydides, however, being a scientifically minded historian with an impartial love of truth, passes over this early period with the remark that people will accept without testing any sort of traditions even when they concern their own country. And that is the right attitude for us. There were no historians until the fifth century, no contemporary records whatever, except a very few ancient inscriptions, and the work of the lyric poets who flourished in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries. We have, indeed, a considerable bulk of poetry which passes under the name of Solon. Some of it is not above suspicion, for it includes a so-called prelude to a versified edition of his laws, and other lines written in a tone very unsuitable to a philosopher. But from the undoubtedly genuine portion we gather that Solon, so far from being an impartial mediator, collected a popular following, vehemently attacked the rich, and then “gave to the people so much power as sufficeth, neither diminishing nor increasing their honour.” His principal work was to codify the laws which had hitherto existed only in the bosoms of the nobles. He did a great deal to fix the existingsocial classes in Athens by arranging the people in four ranks according to their property, reckoned, of course, on the basis of land-holding. And he removed agrarian grievances by forbidding loans on the security of the person, a custom which had led to the actual enslaving of the poor by the rich landowners. In these ways he did an immense service to the future liberty of his country. Even a cautious estimate of his work makes him a very great man. But he was not the inventor of democracy.

His personality is hopelessly involved in legend. He is one of the Seven Sages, doubtless real personalities whose names have served as a peg for the inventive faculties of the Greeks. Some of them were natural philosophers, like Thales of Miletus, whose knowledge of astronomy was so exact that he predicted the eclipse of 585B.C.He is said to have learnt his scientific knowledge, as Solon is said to have learnt his legislative skill, in Egypt, where he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadow. There is very likely a substratum of truth in the stories which make the birth, or rather the revival, of learning in Greece come from Egypt and Crete. Thales knew that the light of the moon came from the sun. He was the first of those natural philosophers of Greece whose main object was to find the “principle” of the universe. Thales held that all things originated from water. Another of the Seven was Bias of Priene, whose activities were mainly political, and who invented maxims like “He is unfortunate who cannot bear misfortune,” and “If thou hast done a good deed, ascribe it to the gods.” At least two of the other four were tyrants. Solon is also associated with a curious figure who went about expounding religion and conducting purificatory rites, Epimenides the Cretan, who was supposed to have lived for fifty years in a cave on nothing but asphodels and water, the father of all hermits. Whatever constitutional enactments Solon did make never had time to get into working order; for the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons followed almost immediately.

To return to the goddess: only two passages of Homer refer to Athens, and both were probably interpolated at the editing of Homer in the days of Peisistratus. Both allude to the connection between Athena and Erechtheus. The goddess is described in one place as visiting “the goodly house of Erechtheus,” which probably means the old Pelasgian palace on the Acropolis; in the other she has received Erechtheus, the son of Earth, into “her own rich shrine.” Modern criticism, however, is apt to reverse the relationship of host and guest—Erechtheus the earth-born was the prehistoric hero, Athena the Olympian interloper. The early shrine of Athena upon the Acropolis has quite recently been discovered on the north side of the plateau by Dörpfeld. It would seem to have been a building of the sixth century or earlier, and to have been surrounded with a peristyle of columns by a later hand—whose we shall presently see. This is the “old temple” superseded for cult purposes by the Parthenon. Our “Erechtheum,” so well known for its caryatid porch, was built right up against this old temple, so that the caryatid porch juts out over the stylobate of it. In the old temple was the old cult image of the goddess afterwards replaced by the splendid creation of Pheidias. It was a xoanon, or pillar statue, of olive-wood, in a standing posture, its rude shape doubtless concealed with offered drapery. It was armed with spear, shield, ægis, and helmet, and stood in act to strike. As the illustration[31]shows, this became a favourite motive in the portraiture of the goddess; she stands there as the champion and protectress of the city. Athena Polias is her fitting title. Pheidias idealised this type in his Athena Promachos. But it does not seem to be very ancient. Probably Athens, like Troy, had possessed an earlier seated Pallas, upon whose knees the women laid their embroidered “peplos.” Nothing in art or ritual need make us doubt that Pallas Athene was far from aboriginal in Athens, that she came in with the Achæans, and that it was not until Athens became a real city-state, with

Plate XXVI.ATHENA POLIAS: BRONZEEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate XXVI.ATHENA POLIAS: BRONZE

English Photo Co., Athens

civic worship of an idealised type, that the great vogue of the Virgin began on the Acropolis.

All this time art has been slowly reviving. Lyric poetry and music had found a patroness in the advancing city of Sparta. The Heroic and Olympian cults which were fostered by the epic poets and by the influence of the Delphic oracle undoubtedly gave an impetus to art, partly by requiring temples and temple statues, and partly by fixing certain artistic types for the principal deities. Even the potter, though he is still where we left him in the Dipylon and Geometric styles of ornament, begins to depict the heroic mythology, and to evolve types which can be imitated and improved. This fixing of types or motives was essential to the progress of ancient art. The Greek sculptor does not carve a statue, as novel and original as possible, to send to an exhibition of art. He is commissioned to make, we will say, an Athena; in that case he has to express the armour, the ægis, the owl, perhaps the snake. He tries, indeed, to make the goddess as lovely and strong and benignant as he can. Perhaps he is allowed to choose between the Polias type or the seated statue, but in any case the type is fixed for him. Or he may be asked to make an athlete statue; in that case he will have to carve a nude male figure as physically perfect as possible, in an athletic attitude. He will not be asked, yet, to portray accidental facts, such as the lineaments of the particular man the statue is to honour. That is how, by concentrating on a limited number of motives, Greek art succeeded in a few generations in approaching so near to perfection.

Show me the patron, and I will show you the style of art which will prevail. The horse-riding aristocracies of Northern ancestry, who prevailed everywhere in Greece in the eighth century, cared little for art. Poetry they could enjoy, if it sang the praises of their ancestors, or if it cheered them at their cups. Hence the popularity of Homer and the Homeridæand Hesiod on the one hand, of Archilochus, Simonides, and Alcman on the other. But these little “Basileis” were not kings enough to keep courts where art could flourish without starving, and as yet there were few cities great enough to supply the want of a patron. Once more we must look to politics if we wish to understand the revival of art.

The little states of old, with their natural citadels, provided a splendid opportunity for any ambitious and unscrupulous person who wished to make himself tyrant. All you had to do was to stand forth as champion of the oppressed “demos” against the oppressive aristocracy, declare that your life was in danger, acquire a bodyguard of a few score stout knaves armed with spears, or even cudgels, then seize the citadel, and, if you had not forgotten provisions, there you were. It was a simple trick that was tried again and again in Greek history, and it nearly always succeeded. For example, at Corinth there was a singularly offensive aristocracy called Bacchiads. One of them had a deformed daughter who was permitted to marry beneath her. Her son, Cypselus, was not received in Bacchiad circles; he felt aggrieved, and he adopted the programme I have indicated. He founded a little dynasty which lasted more than seventy years, until it was put down by the Spartans in 581B.C.The same thing had happened a little earlier at Sicyon; it was repeated at Megara a little later, and at Epidaurus. At Athens the first attempt by Cylon, about 621, failed; at Miletus a similar attempt succeeded. In the sixth century tyranny broke out everywhere in Sicily. In 560 Athens followed suit with the tyranny of Peisistratus. Polycrates of Samos comes about thirty years later. Thus many states in Greece went through the tyrannical phase about this time.

Although the Greeks, to their eternal honour, ever afterwards detested the name of tyrant, and although they tried to expunge the benefits they owed to them from the tablets of their history, yet we can see that tyranny was a valuable, almost a necessary, stage in the progress of the Greek state. Anything is better than aristocracy of the Bacchiad type: even

Plate 27.—Corinthian Vases.

a tyrant has the merit of possessing a single throat. As a matter of fact, most of the Greek tyrants, with the exception of Phalaris of Acragas, who had a habit of roasting his subjects in a brazen bull, were intelligent and not oppressive rulers. They were able to form a consistent foreign policy, which is always the strong point of autocracies, to found colonies, acquire empires, form alliances, and marry their neighbours’ daughters. We hear of tyrants having relations with Egypt and Lydia, and importing copper from Spain. At home they policed their cities and made them appreciate the benefits of order. Above all, no doubt from sordid motives, they encouraged commerce. The flourishing commerce of Minoan days had ceased with the end of the thalassocracy. Piracy had become rife on the Ægean, as we see in Homer, where no visitor thinks it impolite to be asked whether he is or is not a pirate. For art and literature, here at last were the patrons. It is under the tyrants of the late seventh and sixth centuries that the art revival begins.

Coin of Corinth. Sixth century

Corinth, with her mighty natural fortress, more than a mile in circuit and 1800 feet high, her two seas and her command over a narrow isthmus, was admirably situated for commerce. She was one of the earliest states to develop a tyranny, to found an empire, and to revive the arts. Her colonies were mostly towards the west, and in Corcyra she had a valuable stepping-stone for Sicily and Italy. It is at Corinth that a new type of vase-painting appears early in the sixth century. It is very obvious that the motive was still derived from textile art, probably from Assyrian embroidery. The result, with its rich purples, is very pleasing from a decorative point of view, though the actual scenes and ornaments are unmeaning, and therefore un-Greek.[32]The coin types of Corinth in the sixth century are already beautiful designs. It was Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth,who dedicated at Olympia that famous chest of which we have spoken, with its parallel bands of mythological scenes. Periander, his son, was originally one of the Seven Sages, though Plato wanted to cast him out for a tyrant. The name of the third, Psammetichus, proves the close intercourse of Corinth with Egypt. It was Corinth under her tyrants that evolved a new poetical form, the dithyramb, and that first erected a Doric temple in Greece proper. This grave and splendid style of architecture was very probably based upon Egyptian models, but with characteristically Greek modifications. The earliest Greek temples seem to have been of wood and sun-baked brick. Such originally was the temple of Hera at Olympia, but as the wooden columns fell down one by one they were replaced with stone. In many features of Doric architecture it is possible to trace development from wooden technique. The whole roofing system is one of joists and beams, even when the roof is of stone. The triglyphs are the ends of the beams, translated into stone. The metopes were originally left open, then filled with terra-cotta reliefs, and finally with slabs of stone carved in high relief. In the earliest Doric temples the columns are very thick and heavy and the intercolumnar spaces very narrow. These things indicate that the architect had not yet fully realised the superior strength of stone. An ignorant or hasty glance might suggest that there was no progress in Greek architecture, but the close observer sees how the succeeding generations of architects continued to make subtle improvements, rendering the shafts more graceful, the mouldings more refined in their curves, correcting most cunningly the optical illusions of a straight row of tall columns, improving the lighting arrangements, improving the masonry, substituting stone for wood and precious marble for stone, adding ornament where it was appropriate, as on the frieze inside the peristyle, rejecting it where it was unsuitable, as on the architrave, which, being a main beam,oughtto look heavy and strong, reaching forward, in fact, to thetelos, the ultimate end of the type which hispredecessors had set him. That is the Greek way. The Parthenon is the goal at which this old temple of Corinth had been aiming.

DORIC STYLEIONIC STYLE

DORIC STYLE

IONIC STYLE

Seven columns of the Corinthian temple[33]have stood through the Roman destruction of Corinth and all the subsequent batterings of history. Their antiquity is shown by their clumsy strength. The height of the columns is only about four times the diameter of the base. Each column is a monolith of rough limestone covered with stucco and painted, in height 23½ feet, in diameter tapering rather sharply from the base (5 feet 8 inches) to the top (4 feet 3 inches). The temple was peripteral—i.e.it had a colonnade all round the nave, six columns at each end, fifteen on each side. Already there is an attempt to correct the optical illusion which makeshorizontal lines seem to sink in the middle and vertical lines seem to bulge outwards, the stylobate, or floor from which the columns rise, being slightly curved, so that the centre columns stand about 2 centimetres higher than those on the wing. The interior building consists of two oblong chambers back to back, without communication between them. The side walls are prolonged at each end so as to form wings, and between each pair of wings stood two columns “in antis.” Thus there is a porch at each end under the colonnade. From the existence of the two separate chambers we conclude either that the temple united two distinct cults, or that one of the chambers was a treasury, for temples in Greece were always used as banks. I have gone into some detail in describing this building, because it is probably the oldest Doric temple in Greece, except the old wooden Heræum at Olympia. Roof-tiles, which made a sloping roof possible, were said to be an actual Corinthian invention. The Corinthian colony of Corcyra (Corfu) can boast a similar temple about fifty years later (? 600B.C.).

It was under these Cypselid tyrants that Corinth began to acquire her historical character of a luxurious, sensual, and cosmopolitan city. Aphrodite, as she was worshipped at Corinth, was none other than “Ashtaroth, the abomination of the Sidonians,” and was imported along with the Tyrian purple from Phœnicia. She had a famous temple on the citadel of Corinth, which was thronged by her sacred slaves, the courtesans. Their numbers grew to more than a thousand, and they were a notorious snare to the commercial travellers of antiquity. You had to be a rich man to visit Corinth, as the proverb said:

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