Rhaetia

“ In Troezen, where my grandsire Pittheus reign'd
Of yore and I am now acknowledged King,
I leave you free, free as myself,--and more.
ARICIA
Your kindness is too great, 'tis overwhelming.
Such generosity, that pays disgrace
With honour, lends more force than you can think
To those harsh laws from which you would release me.
HIPPOLYTUS
Athens, uncertain how to fill the throne
Of Theseus, speaks of you, anon of me,
And then of Phaedra's son.
ARICIA
Of me, my lord?
HIPPOLYTUS
I know myself excluded by strict law:
Greece turns to my reproach a foreign mother. ”

“ ARICIA
Shall I believe that ere his destined hour
A mortal may descend into the gulf
Of Hades? What attraction could o'ercome
Its terrors?
ISMENE
He is dead, and you alone
Doubt it. The men of Athens mourn his loss.
Troezen already hails Hippolytus
As King. And Phaedra, fearing for her son,
Asks counsel of the friends who share her trouble,
Here in this palace.
ARICIA
Will Hippolytus,
Think you, prove kinder than his sire, make light
My chains, and pity my misfortunes? ”

“ The hand of death has seized your peerless husband, And you are last to hear of this disaster. OENONE What say you, Panope? PANOPE The queen, deceived By a vain trust in Heav'n, begs safe return For Theseus, while Hippolytus his son Learns of his death from vessels that are now In port. PHAEDRA Ye gods! PANOPE Divided counsels sway The choice of Athens; some would have the prince, Your child, for master; others, disregarding The laws, dare to support the stranger's son. 'Tis even said that a presumptuous faction Would crown Aricia and the house of Pallas. ”

“ Ratnodbhava became a merchant, and in the way of traffic made many long journeys by land and sea. The other sons, after their fathers' death, succeeded to their offices, according to the custom of the country. When Râjahansa had reigned some years, war broke out between him and the king of the adjoining country of Mâlwa, the haughty and ambitious Mânasâra, whom he marched to encounter with a numerous army, making the earth tremble with the tread of his elephants, and disturbing even the dwellers in the sky with the clang of kettledrums louder than the roar of the stormy ocean. ”

“ Rhea, the wife of Cronus, and mother of Zeus and the other great gods of Olympus, personified the earth, and was regarded as the Great Mother and unceasing producer of all plant-life. She was also believed to exercise unbounded sway over the animal creation, more especially over the lion, the noble king of beasts. Rhea is generally represented wearing a crown of turrets or towers and seated on a throne, with lions crouching at her feet. She is sometimes depicted sitting in a chariot, drawn by lions. ”

“ Phrygia became a province of Lydia B. C. 560.
58. In later times Lydia became the greatest kingdom in Asia Minor, both in wealth and power, absorbing in its dominion the whole peninsula, except Lycia, Cilicia, and Cappadocia. Three dynasties successively bore rule: the Atyadæ, before 1200 B. C.; the Heraclidæ, for the next 505 years; and the Mermnadæ, from B. C. 694 until 546, when Crœsus, the last and greatest monarch, was conquered by the Persians. The name of this king has become proverbial from his enormous wealth. ”

“ Rhea, in the Greek mythology a goddess, the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, the wife of Kronos, and mother of the chief Olympian deities, Zeus, Pluto, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia, and identified by the Greeks of Asia Minor with the great earth goddess Cybele, and whose worship as such, like that of all the other earth deities, was accompanied with wild revelry. ”

“ One of these was the kingdom of Lydia, whose history is of the highest importance to us, since the conflicts between Lydia and the coast colonies were the first steps towards the invasion of Greece by the Persians, that most important event in early Grecian history.
These conflicts began in the reign of Crœsus, an ambitious king of Lydia in the sixth century before Christ. What gave rise to the war between Lydia and the Greek settlements of Ionia and Æolia we do not very well know. An ambitious despot does not need much pretext for war. He wills the war, and the pretext follows. ”

“ Why did he gather The flow'r of Greece, and leave Hippolytus? Oh, why were you too young to have embark'd On board the ship that brought thy sire to Crete? At your hands would the monster then have perish'd, Despite the windings of his vast retreat. To guide your doubtful steps within the maze My sister would have arm'd you with the clue. But no, therein would Phaedra have forestall'd her, Love would have first inspired me with the thought; And I it would have been whose timely aid Had taught you all the labyrinth's crooked ways. What anxious care a life so dear had cost me! ”

“ The Greek cities were conquered, and the coast of Ionia included within the Lydian kingdom. The successes of Alyattes and of Croesus finally changed the Lydian kingdom into a Lydian empire, and all Asia Minor westward of the Halys, except Lycia, owned the supremacy of Sardis. Lydia never again shrank back into its original dimensions. After the Persian conquest the Maeander was regarded as its southern boundary, and in the Roman period it comprised the country between Mysia and Caria on the one side and Phrygia and the Aegean on the other. ”

“ Gæa represents the earth as a whole, with its mighty subterranean forces; Rhea is that productive power which causes vegetation to spring forth, thus sustaining men and animals; Demeter, by presiding over agriculture, directs and utilizes Rhea's productive powers. But in later times, when Rhea, like other ancient divinities, loses her importance as a ruling deity, Demeter assumes all her functions and attributes, and then becomes the goddess of the life-producing and life-maintaining earth-crust. ”

“ Lydia
Who can stand against him, then? Who is there can oppose this conqueror of the Persians?
Phocion
Every Athenian—every Greek who loves our city more than he fears the Macedonian.
Lydia
All Athens, then!
Phocion
All the best in Athens.
[Lydia looks nervously over her shoulder towards the city and Acropolis. [88] The dusk deepens. The first star shows.
Lydia
(Shudders.) Your speech is often mysterious like this now—dark with meaning. Each night as twilight gathers from the sea about our city, there are footsteps on the causeway that make me tremble. ”

“ We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.
Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the popular belief of his time, were deeply indebted to Lydia for their civilization. ”

“ These were Media, Lydia, and Babylon. The capital of Lydia was Sardis. According to Herodotus, the first king of Lydia was Manes. In the semi-mythic period of Lydian history rose the great dynasty of the [Greek: Heraclidæ] , which reigned for 505 years, numbering twenty-two kings—B.C. 1229 to B.C. 745. The Lydians are said by Herodotus to have colonized Tyrrhenia, in the Italic peninsula, and to have extended their conquests into Syria, where they founded Ascalon in the territory later known as Palestine. ”

“ If a Ramcsos or a Sesostris had ever penetrated to their country, he had met with a brave resistance, and had left monuments indicating his respect for their courage. Neither Babylon nor Assyria had ever given a king to the Lydians—on the contrary, the Lydian tradition was, that they had themselves sent forth Belus and Ninus from their own country to found dynasties and cities in Mesopotamia. In a still more remote age they had seen their colonists embark upon the western waters, and start for the distant Hesperia, where they had arrived in safety, and had founded the great Etruscan nation. ”

“ A similar legend has been found in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. There the King is called the “Prouti” or “Pharaoh”. “Prouti” is probably the original of Homer’s “Proteus,” “Pharaoh” of his “Pharos.” It is significant that our first glimpse of the coast should be through the eyes of a Greek sailor.
(ii) . But our historical survey must begin with Rhakotis. Rhakotis was a small Egyptian town built on the rise where “Pompey’s Pillar” stands now, and it existed as long ago as 1,300 B.C., for statues of that time have been found here. The people were coast guards and goat herds. ”

“ We see mothers with their children, carriage journeys, riders, processions, banquets, and feasts, and finally battle-pieces, in which the combatants are partly armed as Lycians and partly as Greeks. Nothing, not even in the pictures of battles, reminds us of the horrors of death, or of a judgment in the under world. The monuments of Lycia prove that the supremacy of the Persians did not interrupt the progress of Lycian art. But the creations of the later period enable us to see that Greek art, in her bloom, obtained and exercised the strongest influence over the Lycians. ”

“ Ly̆cia, a country of Asia Minor, bounded by the Mediterranean on the south, Caria on the west, Pamphylia on the east, and Phrygia on the north. It was anciently called Milyas and Tremile, from the Milyæ or Solymi, a people of Crete, who came to settle there. The country received the name of Lycia, from Lycus the son of Pandion, who established himself there. The inhabitants have been greatly commended by all the ancients, not only for their sobriety and justice, but their great dexterity in the management of the bow. They were conquered by Crœsus king of Lydia, and afterwards by Cyrus. ”

“ If it be asked how Media, in her hour of peril, came to receive no assistance from the great Powers with which she had made such close alliances—Babylonia and Lydia—the answer would seem to be that Lydia was too remote from the scene of strife to lend her effective aid, while circumstances had occurred in Babylonia to detach that state from her and render it unfriendly. The great king, Nebuchadnezzar, had he been on the throne, would undoubtedly have come to the assistance of his brother-in-law, when the fortune of war changed, and it became evident that his crown was in danger. ”

“ The Greeks from the first saw in the Great Mother a resemblance to their own Rhea, and finally identified the two completely, though the Asiatic peculiarities of the cult were never universally popular with them (Showerman, p. 294) . In her less Asiatic aspect, i.e. without Attis, she was sometimes identified with Gaia and Demeter. It was in this phase that she was worshipped in the Metroön at Athens. In reality, the Mother Goddess appears under three aspects: Rhea, the Homeric and Hesiodic goddess of Cretan origin; the Phrygian Mother, with Attis ”

“ Kenkenes asked. "Let me tell thee how Egypt hath used Rachel. She is free-born, of noble blood, even as thou art and as I am. Her house was wealthy, the name powerful. There were ten of her family—four of her mother's, six of her father's. Rameses, the Incomparable Pharaoh, had use for their treasure and need of their labor in the brick-fields and mines. This day Rachel possesses not even her own soul and body, nor one garment to cover herself, nor a single kinsman to shield her from the power of her masters! ”

“ Rhigas's five companions were secretly drowned, but he himself offered so violent a resistance that he was shot by two Turkish soldiers. His last words are reported as being: “I have sown a rich seed; the hour is coming when my country will reap its glorious fruits.” Rhigas, writing in the popular dialect instead of in classical Greek, aroused the patriotic fervour of his contemporaries and his poems were a serious factor in the awakening of modern Greece. ”

“ There are many links revealed both by legend and cult that associate Crete with the country adjacent to the Troad, with Lydia and Caria. And we may tentatively hold to the dogma that Kybele-Rhea, Hipta of Lydia, who appears now as a virgin, now as a mother-goddess, Mā who appears in Caria, but whose chief historic centre was Comana of Cappadocia, were all descended from or specialised forms of an aboriginal Aegean or Anatolian goddess whose cult was also maintained by the Hittites. ”

“ The tumuli which mark the sepulchres of the kings of Lydia, rose like small hills on the opposite and distant bank of the Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the “wealth of Crœsus,” lay still fertile and green along the banks of their historic river. Thyatira and Philadelphia were almost within reach of my eye, and I stood upon Sardis—in the midst of the sites of the Seven Churches. Below lay the path of the myriad armies of Persia, on their march to Greece; here Alexander pitched his tents after the battle of Granicus, wiling away the winter in the lap of captive Lydia ”

“ But he continued his conquests on the mainland till in the end all Asia Minor was under his sway, and Lydia had [Pg 79] become one of the great kingdoms of the earth. Such wealth came to Crœsus as a result of his conquests and unchanging good fortune that he became accounted the richest monarch upon the earth, while Sardis grew marvellous for its splendor and prosperity. At an earlier date there had come thither another of the seven wise men of Greece, Solon, the law-giver of Athens. What passed between this far-seeing visitor and the proud monarch of Lydia we have already told. ”