George Grote

“ If the habits of the Scythians were such as to create in the near observer no other feeling than repugnance, their force at least inspired terror. They appeared in the eyes of Thucydidês so numerous and so formidable, that he pronounces them irresistible, if they could but unite, by any other nation within his knowledge. Herodotus, too, conceived the same idea of a race among whom every man was a warrior and a practised horse-bowman, and who were placed by their mode of life out of all reach of an enemy’s attack. ”

“ Had Epimenidês himself come to Athens in those days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative to all public purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phyê, clothed and equipped as the goddess Athênê, which had succeeded so completely in the days of Peisistratus,—a stratagem which even Herodotus treats as incredibly absurd, although, a century before his time, both the city of Athens and the demes of Attica had obeyed, as a divine mandate, the orders of this magnificent and stately woman, to restore Peisistratus. ”

“ This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king: the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen,—but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. ”

“ The hero Adrastus, whose chapel Herodotus himself saw in the Sikyonian agora, was common both to Argos and to Sikyôn, and was the object of special reverence at both: he figures in the legend as king of Argos, and as the grandson and heir of Polybus, king of Sikyôn. He was the unhappy leader of the two sieges of Thebes, so famous in the ancient epic,—and the Sikyonians listened with delight both to the exploits of the Argeians against Thebes, as celebrated in the recitations of the epical rhapsodes, and to the mournful tale of Adrastus and his family misfortunes, as sung in the tragic chorus. ”

“ Such remarkable diversity of soil and climate rendered Calabria a land of promise for Grecian settlement: the plains and lower eminences being as productive of corn, wine, oil, and flax, as the mountains in summer-pasture and timber,—and abundance of rain falling upon the higher ground, which requires only industry and care to be made to impart the maximum of fertility to the lower: moreover, a long line of sea-coast,—though not well furnished with harbors,—and an abundant supply of fish, came in aid of the advantages of the soil. ”

“ A single chief, perpetual and unresponsible, was noway essential for the maintenance of union. In modern Europe, for the most part, the different political societies which grew up out of the extinction of the Roman empire embraced each a considerable population and a wide extent of territory and the monarchical form presented itself as the only known means of union between the parts, the only visible and imposing symbol of a national identity. ”

“ The moving of such vast masses of stone as were seen in the ancient edifices both of upper and lower Egypt, with the imperfect mechanical resources then existing, must have tasked the efforts of the people yet more severely than the excavation of the half-finished canal of Nekôs. Indeed, the associations with which the Pyramids were connected, in the minds of those with whom Herodotus conversed, were of the most odious character. Such vast works, Aristotle observes, are suitable to princes who desire to consume the strength and break the spirit of their people. ”

“ To maintain an unresponsible king, and then to contrive accompaniments which shall extract from him the benefits of responsible government, is in reality a highly complicated system, though, as has been remarked, we have become familiar with it in modern Europe: the more simple and obvious change is, to substitute one or more temporary and responsible magistrates in place of the king himself. Such was the course which affairs took in Greece. ”

“ There is no reason to doubt the general fact, that Athens, like so many other communities of Greece, was in its primitive times governed by an hereditary line of kings, and that it passed from that form of government into a commonwealth, first oligarchical, afterwards democratical.
We are in no condition to determine the civil classification and political constitution of Attica, even at the period of the archonship of Kreôn, 683 B. C., when authentic Athenian chronology first commences,—much less can we pretend to any knowledge of the anterior centuries. ”

“ It was always an oligarchy which arose on the defeasance of the heroic kingdom: the age of democratical movement was yet far distant, and the condition of the people—the general body of freemen—was not immediately altered, either for better or worse, by the revolution; the small number of privileged persons, among whom the kingly attributes were distributed and put in rotation, being those nearest in rank to the king himself, perhaps members of the same large gens with him, and pretending to a common divine or heroic descent. ”

“ We must recollect that the Spartan political constitution was both simplified in its character, and aided in its working, by the comprehensive range of the Lykurgean discipline, with its rigorous equal pressure upon rich and poor, which averted many of the causes elsewhere productive of sedition,—habituating the proudest and most refractory citizen to a life of undeviating obedience,—satisfying such demand as existed for system and regularity,—rendering Spartan personal habits of life much more equal than even democratical Athens could parallel ”

“ It will be observed that in this enactment of Solon, the existing government is ranked merely as one of the contending parties. The virtuous citizen is enjoined not to come forward in its support, but to come forward at all events, either for it or against it: positive and early action is all that is prescribed to him as matter of duty. In the age of Solon, there was no political idea or system yet current which could be assumed as an unquestionable datum,—no conspicuous standard to which the citizens could be pledged under all circumstances to attach themselves. ”

“ To a people in this state of feeling, a loan on interest presents the repulsive idea of making profit out of the distress of the borrower; moreover, it is worthy of remark, that the first borrowers must have been for the most part men driven to this necessity by the pressure of want, and contracting debt as a desperate resource, without any fair prospect of ability to repay: debt and famine run together, in the mind of the poet Hesiod. ”

“ If a father had not taught his son some art or profession, Solon relieved the son from all obligation to maintain him in his old age. And it was to encourage the multiplication of these artisans, that he insured, or sought to insure, to the residents in Attica a monopoly of all its landed produce except olive-oil, which was raised in abundance more than sufficient for their wants. It was his wish that the trade with foreigners should be carried on by exporting the produce of artisan labor, instead of the produce of land. ”

“ This massive grouping belongs to the character of legend,—the Æolic and Ionic emigrations, as well as the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus, are each invested with unity, and imprinted upon the imagination as the results of a single great impulse. But such is not the character of the historical colonies: when we come to relate the Italian and Sicilian emigrations, it will appear that each colony has its own separate nativity and causes of existence. ”

“ Even during the Homeric period of Greece, these countries had attained a certain civilization in mass, without the acquisition of any high mental qualities or the development of any individual genius: the religious and political sanction, sometimes combined and sometimes separate, determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties, and his place in society, without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the agent himself. ”

“ To this feeling, for what exceeded the demands of practical convenience and security, the wonders both in Egypt and Assyria chiefly appealed; while the execution of such colossal works demonstrates habits of regular industry, a concentrated population under one government, and above all, an implicit submission to the regal and priestly sway,—contrasting forcibly with the small autonomous communities of Greece and western Europe, wherein the will of the individual citizen was so much more energetic and uncontrolled. ”

“ A third form of despot, some presumptuous wealthy man, like Kylôn at Athens, without even the pretence of popularity, was occasionally emboldened by the success of similar adventures in other places to hire a troop of retainers and seize the acropolis; and there were examples, though rare, of a fourth variety,—the lineal descendant of the ancient kings,—who, instead of suffering himself to be restricted or placed under control by the oligarchy, found means to subjugate them, and to extort by force an ascendency as great as that which his forefathers had enjoyed by consent. ”

“ These few observations will suffice to intimate that a new phase of Grecian history is now on the point of opening. Down to the time of Crœsus, almost everything which is done or suffered by the Grecian cities bears only upon one or other of them separately: the instinct of the Greeks repudiates even the modified forms of political centralization, and there are no circumstances in operation to force it upon them. Relation of power and subjection exist, between a strong and a weak state, but no tendency to standing political coördination. ”

“ For the heroic government, with which Grecian communities begin, is the rudest and most infantine of all governments; destitute even of the pretence of system or security, incapable of being in any way foreknown, and depending only upon the accidental variations in the character of the reigning individual, who, in most cases, far from serving as a protection to the poor against the rich and great, was likely to indulge his passions in the same unrestrained way as the latter, and with still greater impunity. ”

“ All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor,—once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world,—combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one [p. 95] man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him. Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor, until he could find means either of paying it or working it out ”

“ To an historian like Mr. Mitford, full of English ideas respecting government, this anti-monarchical feeling appears of the nature of insanity, and the Grecian communities like madmen without a keeper: while the greatest of all benefactors is the hereditary king, who conquers them from without,—the second-best is the home-despot, who seizes the acropolis and puts his fellow-citizens under coercion. ”

“ On departing from Athens, Solon first visited Egypt, where he communicated largely with Psenôphis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Saïs, Egyptian priests, who had much to tell respecting their ancient history, and from whom he learned matters, real or pretended, far transcending in alleged antiquity the oldest Grecian genealogies,—especially the history of the vast submerged island of Atlantis, and the war which the ancestors of the Athenians had successfully carried on against it, nine thousand years before. ”

“ No other conception of the probable tendencies of kingship was justified either by a general knowledge of human nature, or by political experience as it stood from Solon downward: no other feeling than abhorrence could be entertained for the character so conceived: no other than a man of unprincipled ambition would ever seek to invest himself with it. ”

“ It was after this peace with Alyattês, as far as we can make out the series of events in Herodotus, that Kyaxarês collected all his forces and laid siege to Nineveh, but was obliged to desist by the unexpected inroad of the Scythians. Nearly at the same time that Upper Asia was desolated by these formidable nomads, Asia Minor too was overrun by other nomads,—the Cimmerians,—Ardys being then king of Lydia; and the two invasions, both spreading extreme disaster, are presented to us as indirectly connected together in the way of cause and effect. ”

“ It had happened in several Grecian states, that the governing oligarchies, either by quarrels among their own members or by the general bad condition of the people under their government, were deprived of that hold upon the public mind which was essential to their power; and sometimes, as in the case of Pittakus of Mitylênê, anterior to the archonship of Solon, and often in the factions of the Italian republics in the Middle Ages, the collision of opposing forces had rendered society intolerable, and driven all parties to acquiesce in the choice of some reforming dictator. ”

“ We scarcely trace in either of them the higher sentiment of art, which owes its first marked development to Grecian susceptibility and genius. But the human mind is in every stage of its progress, and most of all in its rude and unreflecting period, strongly impressed by visible and tangible magnitude, and awe-struck by the evidences of great power. ”