Philip Lake, James D. Bourchier, Edward M. Walker, Maximilian O. B. Caspari

“ We hear little or nothing of the cases in which power was exercised wisely. Happy is the constitution which has no annals! We know, however, that oligarchy held its ground for generations, or even for centuries, in a large proportion of the Greek states; and a government which, like the oligarchies of Elis, Thebes or Aegina, could maintain itself for three or four centuries cannot have been merely oppressive.
The period of the transition from monarchy to oligarchy is the period in which commerce begins to develop, and trade-routes to be organized. ”

“ It is a society that is, of course, based upon slavery, but it is slavery in its least repulsive aspect. The treatment which Eumaeus and Eurycleia receive at the hands of the poet of the Odyssey is highly creditable to the humanity of the age. A society which regarded the slave as a mere chattel would have been impatient of the interest shown in a swineherd and a nurse. It is a society, too, that exhibits many of the distinguishing traits of later Greek life. Feasting and quarrels, it is true, are of more moment to the heroes than to the contemporaries of Pericles or Plato ”

“ If we would judge fairly of tyranny, and of what it contributed to the development of Greece, we must remember how many states there were in whose history the period of greatest power coincides with the rule of a tyrant. This is unquestionably true of Corinth and Sicyon, as well as of Syracuse in the 5th, and again in the 4th century; it is probably true of Samos and Miletus. In the case of Athens it is only the splendour of the Great Age that blinds us to the greatness of the results achieved by the policy of the Peisistratids. ”

“ In spite of these contrasts, there is a real unity in the period which begins with the repulse of Xerxes and ends with the death of Alexander, as compared with any preceding one. It is an age of maturity in politics, in literature, and in art; and this is true of no earlier age. Nor can we say that the 5th century is, in all these aspects of Greek life, immature as compared with the 4th, or, on the other hand, that the 4th is decadent as compared with the 5th. On the political side, maturity is, in one sense, reached in the earlier century. ”

“ The Greeks have always been a maritime people, and the real centre of the national life is now, as in antiquity, the Aegean Sea or Archipelago. Thickly studded with islands and bordered by deeply indented coasts with sheltered creeks and harbours, the Aegean in the earliest days of navigation invited the enterprise of the mariner; its shores, both European and Asiatic, became covered with Greek settlements and its islands, together with Crete and Cyprus, became Greek. True to their maritime instincts, the Greeks rarely advanced inland to any distance from the sea ”

“ The social aspect of Greek life henceforward becomes its most attractive feature. After a long period of storm and stress, the European Hellenes had relapsed into a quiet and resigned frame of mind which stands in sharp contrast on the one hand with the energy and ability, and on the other with the vulgar intriguing of their Asiatic kinsmen. Seeing no future before them, the inhabitants were content to dwell in contemplation amid the glories of the past. National pride was fostered by the undisguised respect with which the leading Romans of the age treated Hellenic culture. ”

“ All Greeks, in whatever country they may reside, work together for the realization of the Great Idea (ἡ Μεγάλη Ἰδέα) —the supremacy of Hellenism in the East—and to this object they freely devote their time, their wealth and their talents; the large fortunes which they amass abroad are often bequeathed for the foundation of various institutions in Greece or Turkey, for the increase of the national fleet and army, or for the spread of Hellenic influence in the Levant. ”

“ In spite of all such defects Herodotus is an author, not only of unrivalled literary charm, but of the utmost value to the historian. If much remains uncertain or obscure, even in the history of the Persian Wars, it is chiefly to motives or policy, to topography or strategy, to dates or numbers, that uncertainty attaches. It is to these that a sober criticism will confine itself. ”

“ On the other hand, the independent character of the Greeks is favourably illustrated by the circumstance that Greece is the only country in the Balkan peninsula in which the government cannot count on securing a majority by official pressure at the elections. Few scruples are observed in political warfare, but attacks on private life are rare. The love of free discussion is inherent in the strongly-rooted democratic instinct of the Greeks. They are in spirit the most democratic of European peoples ”

“ To the scholars of a generation ago it seemed a thing incredible that the art of the shaft-graves, and the architecture of the beehive-tombs and the palaces, could belong to the age before the Dorian invasion. The most recent discoveries seem to indicate that the art of Mycenae is a decadent art; they certainly prove that an art, hardly inferior in its way to the art of the classical period, and a civilization which implies the command of great material resources, were flourishing in the Aegean perhaps a thousand years before the siege of Troy. ”

“ To comprehend that world the study of Isocrates is indispensable; for in an age dominated by rhetoric he is the prince of rhetoricians. It is difficult for a modern reader to do him justice, so alien is his spirit and the spirit of his age from ours. It must be allowed that he is frequently monotonous and prolix; at the same time it must not be forgotten that, as the most famous representative of rhetoric, he was read from one end of the Greek world to the other. He was the friend of Evagoras and Archidamus, of Dionysius and Philip ”

“ Where slavery exists, the taint of it will inevitably cling to all labour that can be performed by the slave. In ancient Athens (which may be taken as typical of the Greek democracies) unskilled labour was almost entirely slave-labour, and skilled labour was largely so. The arts and crafts were, to some extent, exercised by citizens, but to a less extent in the 4th than in the 6th century. They were, however, chiefly left to aliens or slaves. The citizen-body of Athens in the age of Demosthenes has been stigmatized as consisting in great measure of salaried paupers. ”

“ A mere narrative can hardly fail to give a false perspective. Experience shows that such a sketch is apt to resolve itself into the history of a few great movements and of a few leading states. What is still worse, it is apt to confine itself, at any rate for the greater part of the period dealt with, to the history of Greece in the narrower sense, i.e. of the Greek peninsula. For the identification of Greece with Greece proper there may be some degree of excuse when we come to the 5th and 4th centuries. ”

“ Moreover, the invasion of Xerxes, entailing, as it did, the destruction of cities and sanctuaries, especially of Athens and its temples, marks a dividing line in Greek history. It was not merely that evidence perished and records were destroyed. What in reference to tradition is even more important, a new consciousness of power was awakened, new interests were aroused, and new questions and problems came to the front. ”

“ The history of Hellenism had begun. It was the rise of Cyrus that closed the East to Greek enterprise and Greek influences. In Persia we find the antithesis of all that is characteristic of Greece—autocracy as opposed to liberty; a military society organized on an aristocratic basis, to an industrial society, animated by a democratic spirit; an army, whose strength lay in its cavalry, to an army, in which the foot-soldier alone counted; a morality, which assigned the chief place to veracity, to a morality which subordinated it to other virtues ”

“ The interest of federalism lies in the fact that it marks an advance beyond the conception of the city-state. It is an attempt to solve the problem which the Athenian empire failed to solve, the reconciliation of the claims of local autonomy with those of national union. The federal leagues of the 3rd century possess a further interest for the modern world, in that there can be traced in their constitutions a nearer approach to a representative system than is found elsewhere in Greek experience. A genuine representative system, it is true, was never developed in any Greek polity. ”

“ If, then, by “Greek history” is to be understood the history of the lands occupied in later times by the Greek race (i.e. the Greek peninsula and the Aegean basin) , the beginnings of the history must be carried back some 2000 years before Grote’s proposed starting-point. If, however, “Greek history” is taken to mean the history of the Greek people, the determination of the starting-point is far from easy. For the question to which archaeology does not as yet supply any certain answer is the question of race. Were the creators of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization Greeks or were they not? ”

“ In ancient Greece the democracies were as illiberal in their policy as the oligarchies. Women of the respectable class were condemned to comparative seclusion. They enjoyed far less freedom in 4th-century Athens than in the Homeric Age. It is not in any of the democracies, but in conservative Sparta, that they possess privilege and exercise influence.
The most fundamental of all the contrasts between democracy in its ancient and in its modern form remains to be stated. The ancient state was inseparable from slavery. ”

“ Always the most civilized race in the East, they have successively influenced their Macedonian, Roman and Turkish conquerors, and their remarkable intellectual endowments bid fair to secure them a brilliant position in the future. The intense patriotic zeal of the Greeks may be compared with that of the Hungarians; it is liable to degenerate into arrogance and intolerance; it sometimes blinds their judgment and involves them in ill-considered enterprises, but it nevertheless offers the best guarantee for the ultimate attainment of their national aims. ”

“ Had the life of the lower class of citizens been absorbed in a round of mechanical labours, as fully as is the life of our industrial classes, the working of an ancient democracy would have been impossible. In justice to the ancient democracies it must be conceded that, while popular government carried with it neither the enfranchisement of the alien nor the emancipation of the slave, the rights secured to both classes were more considerable in the democratic states than elsewhere. The lot of the slave, as well as that of the alien, was a peculiarly favourable one at Athens. ”

“ It is a commonplace that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. On the political side, Greek constitutional development would be unintelligible without Homer. When Greek history, in the proper sense, begins, oligarchy is almost universal. Everywhere, however, an antecedent stage of monarchy has to be presupposed. In the Homeric system monarchy is the sole form of government; but it is monarchy already well on the way to being transformed into oligarchy. In the person of the king are united the functions of priest, of judge and of leader in war. ”

“ By the end of the Great Age oligarchy has almost disappeared from the Greek world, except in the sphere of Persian influence. The Spartan monarchy still survives; a few Peloponnesian states still maintain the rule of the few; here and there in Greece itself we meet with a revival of the tyrannis; but, with these exceptions, democracy is everywhere the only type of constitution. And democracy has developed as well as spread. ”

“ It was from them, rather than from Herodotus, Thucydides or Xenophon that the Roman world obtained its knowledge of the history of Greece in the past, and its conception of its significance. Both were pupils of Isocrates, and both, therefore, bred up in an atmosphere of rhetoric. Hence their popularity and their influence. The scientific spirit of Thucydides was alien to the temper of the 4th century, and hardly more congenial to the age of Cicero or Tacitus. To the rhetorical spirit, which is common to both, each added defects peculiar to himself. ”

“ It can hardly be questioned that the impression left upon the reader’s mind is that the point of view of the author, in all the books alike, is that of one writing after the fall of Athens.
The task of historical criticism in the case of the Peloponnesian War is widely different from its task in the case of the Persian Wars. It has to deal, not with facts as they appear in the traditions of an imaginative race, but with facts as they appeared to a scientific observer. Facts, indeed, are seldom in dispute. ”

“ How can we account for an indigenous population, first imagining itself to be immigrant, and then developing a contempt for the rest of the race, equally indigenous with itself, on account of a fictitious difference in origin? Finally, there is the archaeological evidence. The older civilization comes to an abrupt end, and it does so, on the mainland at least, at the very period to which tradition assigns the Dorian migration. ”

“ A more indirect but none the less far-reaching drawback to Greek prosperity was the diversion of trade which followed upon the establishment of direct communication between Italy and the Levant. The most lucrative source of wealth which remained to the European Greeks was pasturage in large domains, an industry which almost exclusively profited the richer citizens and so tended to widen the breach between capitalists and the poorer classes, and still further to pauperize the latter. ”

“ The worship of pillars and of trees carries us back to Canaan, while the double-headed axe, so prominent in the ritual of Cnossus, survives in later times as the symbol of the national deity of the Carians. The beehive-tombs, found on many sites on the mainland besides Mycenae, are evidence both of a method of sepulture and of ideas of the future state, which are alien to the practice and the thought of the Greeks of history. It is only in one region—in the island of Cyprus—that the culture of the Mycenaean age is found surviving into the historical period. ”