Hippias of Athens

“ And when Hippias had returned to Asia from Lacedemon, he set everything in motion, stirring up enmity between the Athenians and Artaphrenes, and using every means to secure that Athens should come under the rule of himself and of Dareios. Hippias, I say, was thus engaged; and the Athenians meanwhile hearing of these things sent envoys to Sardis, and endeavoured to prevent the Persians from following the suggestions of the exiled Athenians. Artaphrenes however commanded them, if they desired to be preserved from ruin, to receive Hippias back again. ”

“ Upon you, O Callimachus, it alone depends, whether Athens shall be enslaved, or whether, in the preservation of its liberties, it shall perpetuate your name even beyond the glory of Harmodius and Aristogiton. Our country is now reduced to a more delicate and dangerous predicament than it has ever before experienced; if conquered, we know our fate, and must prepare for the tyranny of Hippias; if we overcome, our city may be made the first in Greece. ”

“ The arrival and the intrigues of this formidable guest at the court of Sardis soon reached the ears of the vigilant Athenians; they sent to Artaphernes, exhorting him not to place confidence in those whose offences had banished them from Athens. "If you wish for peace," returned the satrap, "recall Hippias." Rather than accede to this condition, that brave people, in their petty share of the extremity of Greece, chose to be deemed the enemies of the vast monarchy of Persia. ”

“ He did not know that such grand people are never found in enslaved, oppressed countries, like his own, and he wanted to have them all under his power, so he began to raise his forces from all parts of his empire, for the conquest of what seemed to him the insolent little cities of Greece, and Hippias, now an old man, undertook to show him the way to Athens, and to betray his country. ”

“ EXPULSION OF THE TYRANTS FROM ATHENS (510 B.C.) .—The two sons of Pisistratus, Hippias and Hipparchus, succeeded to his power. At first they emulated the example of their father, and Athens flourished under their parental rule. But at length an unfortunate event gave an entirely different tone to the government. Hipparchus, having insulted a young noble, was assassinated. Hippias escaped harm, but the event caused him to become suspicious and severe. His rule now became a tyranny indeed, and was brought to an end in the following way. ”

“ When Hippias was driven away from Athens, and the tyrannic dynasty of the Pisistratidæ finally overthrown in B.C. 510, the banished tyrant and his adherents, after vainly seeking to be restored by Spartan intervention, had betaken themselves to Sardis, the capital city of the satrapy of Artaphernes. There Hippias—in the expressive words of Herodotus—began every kind of agitation, slandering the Athenians before Artaphernes, and doing all he could to induce the satrap to place Athens in subjection to him, as the tributary vassal of King Darius. ”

“ Although at first the Athenians paid little attention to what Harmodius and Aristogiton had done and had suffered, they began ere long to think of them as heroes who had freed Athens from the rule of one of the tyrants. Perhaps this was because Hippias, frightened by his brother’s death, brought hired soldiers into the city, raised the taxes that he might have money with which to pay his mercenaries, and began to oppress the citizens in many other ways. ”

“ Never since the foundation of Athens was she placed in so imminent a peril. If she succumb to the Mede, she is rendered again to the tyranny of Hippias—but if she conquer, she may rise to the first eminence among the states of Greece. How this may be accomplished, and how upon your decision rests the event, I will at once explain. The sentiments of our leaders are divided—these are for instant engagement, those for procrastination. Depend upon it, if we delay, some sedition, some tumult will break out among the Athenians, and may draw a part of them to favour the Medes ”

“ Again, when Miltiades has to retire from the Chersonese before the return of Darius, he does not go to Athens, from which it follows that Hippias was still tyrant in Athens. Thucydides tells us that when Hippias, after the murder of Hipparchus, was looking about for alliances he married his daughter to Aeantides, the son of Hippoclus, tyrant of Lampsacus, because he saw that Hippoclus was in great repute with Darius. This influence Hippoclus must have gained in the Scythian expedition; he led the ships of his city to the Danube and voted for remaining there. ”

“ Many were slain, and many fled to join the exiled Alemæonidæ, whose cause became daily more popular at Athens, and throughout the rest of Greece, until at length they gained strength sufficient to enable them, with the assistance of Lacedæmon, to lay siege to Hippias in Athens, in the fourth year after the death of Hipparchus. ”

“ They came, because for some time whenever they sent to Delphi to ask any advice of the Oracle, the answer always came, "First set Athens free." With this help, Hippias was driven out and sent into exile.
Athens was free. The rule of the Tyrants was over, and Athens was once more able to rule herself, to become that state of which, when it was asked "what shepherd rules and lords it o'er their people?" the answer could be given, "Of no man are they called the slaves or subjects." ”

“ It was apparently about a year before the death of Hipparchus, that Stesagoras, the nephew and successor of that Miltiades who departed from Athens to found a colony in the Thracian Chersonesus, perished by an assassin's blow. Hippias, evidently deeming he had the right, as sovereign of the parent country, to appoint the governor of the colony, sent to the Chersonesus in that capacity the brother of the deceased, a namesake of the first founder, whose father, Cimon, from jealousy of his power or repute, had been murdered by the sons of Pisistratus [245] . ”

“ Hipparchus, ancient astronomer, born at Nicæa; flourished in the 2nd century B.C.; discovered among other things the precession of the equinoxes, determined the place of the equinox, and catalogued 1000 fixed stars.
Hippias, tyrant of Athens, son of Pisistratus; expelled from Athens, applied to the Persians to reinstate him, and kindled the first Persian War with Greece; fell at Marathon, 490 B.C.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, born at Cos, 460 B.C.; was a contemporary of Socrates and Plato; was of wide-spread renown as a physician ”

“ His sons Hipparchus and Hippias [170] appear to have succeeded quietly to his authority; which they shared in common, Hipparchus filling the more prominent station. Their father’s virtues descended to them, and Athens for some time flourished under their guidance. The strong expression of Plato is, that the Athenians lived as in old times under the reign of Saturn. He goes on to say that Hipparchus made the collection of Homer’s poems which others have ascribed to Pisistratus, and caused them to be publicly read in the order of their arrangement [169] at the Panathenaic festival ”

“ The defeat of Hippias was of no less value than that of Darius; and the same blow which struck down the foreign invader smote also the hopes of domestic tyrants.
One successful battle for liberty quickens and exalts that proud and emulous spirit from which are called forth the civilization and the arts that liberty should produce, more rapidly than centuries of repose. To Athens the victory of Marathon was a second Solon. ”

“ Mitford at this treason? “We have seen,” says that historian, “the democracy of Athens itself setting the example (among the states of old Greece) of soliciting Persian protection. Will, then, the liberal spirit of patriotism and equal government justify the prejudices of Athenian faction (!!!) and doom Hippias to peculiar execration, because, at length, he also, with many of his fellow-citizens, despairing of other means for ever returning to their native country, applied to Artaphernes at Sardis?” ”

“ They intrusted their designs to few, believing that if once the attempt was begun the people would catch the contagion, and rush spontaneously to the assertion of their freedom. The festival arrived. Bent against the elder tyrant, perhaps from nobler motives than those which urged them against Hipparchus 239, each armed with a dagger concealed in the sacred myrtle bough which was borne by those who joined the procession, the conspirators advanced to the spot in the suburbs where Hippias was directing the order of the ceremonial. ”

“ Moreover, the men of Athens knew that in the camp before them was their own banished tyrant, Hippias, who was seeking to be reinstated by foreign scimitars in despotic sway over any remnant of his countrymen that might survive the sack of their town, and might be left behind as too worthless for leading away into Median bondage. ”

“ On reaching the plain of Athens, he was assailed by the Thessalian horse, but repelled them in so gallant a style, that they at once rode off and returned to their native country; abandoning their allies with a faithlessness not unfrequent in the Thessalian character. Cleomenes marched on to Athens without further resistance, and found himself, together with the Alcmæonids and the malcontent Athenians generally, in possession of the town. At that time there was no fortification except around the Acropolis, into which Hippias retired with his mercenaries and the citizens most faithful to him ”

“ Seeing one of their accomplices speaking to Hippias, and imagining that they were being betrayed, they prematurely attacked and slew Hipparchus alone. Harmodius was cut down on the spot by the guards, and Aristogeiton was soon captured and tortured to death. When Hippias was expelled (510) , Harmodius and Aristogeiton became the most popular of Athenian heroes; their descendants were exempted from public burdens, and had the right of public entertainment in the Prytaneum, and their names were celebrated in popular songs and scolia (after-dinner songs) as the deliverers of Athens. ”

“ For Athens was then still governed by the Peisistratids; what she was, under them, we have had occasion to notice in a former chapter. She had then no courage for energetic self-defence, and probably Hippias himself, far from offering resistance, would have found it advantageous to accept Persian dominion as a means of strengthening his own rule, like the Ionian despots: moreover, Grecian habit of coöperation was then only just commencing. But fortunately, the Persian invader did not touch the shore of Greece until more than twenty years afterwards, in 490 B. C. ”

“ Returning to Athens on the death of Hippias (510 B.C.) , they united with the democracy, and the then head of the family, Cleisthenes, gave a new constitution to the city.
[440] Queen of Halicarnassus, in Caria; an ally of the Persian King Xerxes in his invasion of Greece; she fought gallantly at the battle of Salamis.
[441] A double entendre—with allusion to the posture in sexual intercourse known among the Greeks as [Greek: hippos] , in Latin 'equus,' the horse, where the woman mounts the man in reversal of the ordinary position. ”

“ On the application of Isagoras and his party, Sparta, jealous of the growing strength of Athens, made three unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the Athenian democracy, and reinstate Hippias in supreme command. She finally abandoned the project, as she could find no allies to assist in the enterprise. "Athens had now entered upon her glorious career. The institutions of Clisthenes had given her citizens a personal interest in the welfare and the grandeur of their country, and a spirit of the warmest patriotism rapidly sprung up among them. ”

“ Athens always was the great field for acquiring fame and profit in this line; yet those who first attained eminence in it were foreigners there, Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily, Prodicus of the little island of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. All these are said to have acquired considerable riches by their profession. Their success invited numbers to follow their example; and Greece, but far more especially Athens, shortly abounded with those who, under the name of sophists, professors of wisdom, undertook to teach every science. ”

“ The two latter are specimens of a class of men new at Athens since the expulsion of Hippias, and contrasting forcibly with Peisistratus, Lykurgus, and Megaklês, the political leaders of the preceding generation. ”

“ Chalkis was still more powerful than Eretria; both were in early times governed by an oligarchy, which among the Chalkidians was called hippobotæ, or horse-feeders,—proprietors probably of most part of the plain called Lelantum, and employing the adjoining mountains as summer pasture for their herds. The extent of their property is attested by the large number of four thousand kleruchs, or out-freemen, whom Athens quartered upon their lands, after the victory gained over them when they assisted the expelled Hippias in his efforts to regain the Athenian sceptre. ”

“ His generals, Datis and Artaphernes, now landed on the Attic shore with about 100,000 men, under the guidance of Hippias, who had accompanied his father Peisistratus by the same route to Athens nearly fifty years before, when he was returning from exile the second time to take possession of the city. But Athens was a very different community now from what it was then. It had enjoyed more than twenty years of self-government, and its citizens were now united as one man in the determination to resist the eastern despot to the uttermost. ”

“ Whatever the benefit that followed the prescriptions of Hippocrates, it is certain that the fact of his being called in to administer them by the most famous citizen of Greece, largely increased his reputation, and that even beyond the border of Greece. The great physician’s return from Athens was speedily followed by an invitation from Artaxerxes, King of Persia. [78] The plague that had devastated Greece had passed eastward, and was committing destructive ravages throughout the Persian Empire. Artaxerxes implored Hippocrates to give him and his subjects the benefit of his advice. ”