Geographi home in triumph and laid the Olympian crown in the chief temple of his city. It may seem strange that the greatest and most glorious of all cal position Panhellenic festivals should have been celebrated near the western of shores of the Peloponnesus. One might have looked to find it nearer Olympia, the Aegean. But situated where it was, the scene of the great facing westward. games was all the nearer to the Greeks beyond the western sea; and none of the peoples of the mother-country vied more eagerly or more often in the contests of Olympia than the children who had found new homes far away on Sicilian and Italian soil. This nearness of Olympia to the western colonies comes into one's thoughts, when standing in the sacred altis one beholds the terrace on the northern side of the precinct, and the scanty remains of the row of twelve treasure-houses which once stood there. For of those treasuries. twelve treasuries five at least were dedicated by Sicilian and Italian Festival cities. Thus the Olympian festival helped the colonies of the west The promotes national feeling in Greece. (Battle of Hysiae; traditional to keep in touch with the mother-country; it furnished a centre where Greeks of all parts met and exchanged their ideas and experiences; it was one of the institutions which expressed and quickened the consciousness of fellowship among the scattered folks of the Greek race; and it became a model, as we shall see, for other festivals of the same kind, which concurred in promoting a feeling of national unity. The final success of Sparta in the long struggle with Messenia marks the period at which the balance of power among the Peloponnesian states began to shift. In the seventh century, Argos is the leading state. She has reduced Mycenae; she has annihilated Asine; she has made Tiryns an Argive fort; she has defeated Sparta at Hysiae. There can be little doubt that Pheidon's authority date, 669-8 extended over all Argolis; possibly his influence was felt in Aegina, B.C.) and the Laconian island of Cythera may have been an Argive Decline of possession, as well as the whole eastern coast of Laconia. But his Argos and reign is the last manifestation of the greatness of the southern Argos. rise of Sparta. Fifty years after the subjugation of Messenia, the Spartans become the strongest state in the Peloponnesus, and the Argives sink into the position of a second-rate power-always able to maintain their independence, always a thorn in the side of Sparta, always to be reckoned with as a foe and welcomed as a friend, but never leading, dominant, or originative. SECT. 6. DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS. LAWGIVERS AND TYRANTS It is clear that there is no security that equal justice will be meted out to all, so long as the laws by which the judge is supposed laws. to act are not accessible to all. A written code of laws is a condition Demand of just judgment, however just the laws themselves may be. It for written was therefore natural that one of the first demands the people in Greek cities pressed upon their aristocratic governments, and one of the first concessions those governments were forced to make, was a written law. It must be borne in mind that in old days deeds which injured only the individual and did not touch the gods or the state, were left to the injured person to deal with as he chose or could. The state did not interfere. Even in the case of bloodshedding, it devolved upon the kinsfolk of the slain man to wreak punishment upon the slayer. Then, as social order developed along with centralisation, the state took justice partly into its own hands; and the injured man, before he could punish the wrong-doer, was obliged to charge him before a judge, who decided the punishment. But it must be noted that no crime could come before a judge, unless the injured person came forward as accuser. The case of bloodshedding was exceptional, owing to the religious ideas connected with it. It was felt that the shedder of blood was not only impure himself, but had also defiled the gods of the community; so that, as a consequence of this theory, manslaughter of every form came under the class of crimes against the religion of the state. century). The work of writing down the laws, and fixing customs in legal Early lawshape, was probably in most cases combined with the work of re- givers (7th forming; and thus the great codifiers of the seventh century were also lawgivers. Among them the most famous were the misty figures of Zaleucus who made laws for the western Locrians, and Charondas the legislator of Catane; the clearer figure of the Athenian Dracon, of whom more will be said hereafter, and, most famous of all, Solon the Wise. But other cities in the elder Greece had their lawgivers too, men of knowledge and experience; the names of some are preserved but they are mere names. It is probable that the laws of Sparta herself, which she afterwards attributed to a god, were first shaped and written down at this period. The cities of Crete too were affected by the prevalent spirit of law-shaping, and some fragments are preserved of the early laws of Gortyn, which were the beginning of an epoch of legislative activity culminating in the Gortynian Code which has come down to us on tablets of stone. In many cases the legislation was accompanied by political Political concessions to the people, and it was part of the lawgiver's task to struggles: modify the constitution. But for the most part this was only the democratic beginning of a long political conflict; the people striving for freedom and equality, the privileged classes struggling to retain their exclusive rights. The social distress, touched on in a previous L movements. monarchies in some states. chapter, was the sharp spur which drove the people on in this effort towards popular government. The struggle was in some cases to end in the establishment of a democracy; in many cases, the oligarchy succeeded in maintaining itself and keeping the people down; in most cases, perhaps, the result was a perpetual oscillation between oligarchy and democracy. —an endless series of revolutions, 'too often sullied by violence. But though democracy was not everywhere victorious-though even the states in which it was most firmly established were exposed to the danger of oligarchical conspiracies yet everywhere the people aspired to it; and we may say that the chief feature of the domestic history of most Greek cities, from the end of the seventh century forward, is an endeavour, here successful, yonder frustrated, to establish or maintain popular govern、ment. In this sense then we have now reached a period in which the Greek world is striving and tending to pass from the aristocratic to the democratic commonwealth. The movement passed by some states, like Thessaly,-just as there had been some exceptions, like Argos, to the general fall of the monarchies; while remote kingdoms like Macedonia and Molossia were not affected. Rise of new As usually, or at least frequently, happens in such circumstances, unconstitu- the popular movement received help from within the camp of the tional adversary. It was help indeed for which there was no reason to be grateful to those who gave it; for it was not given for love of the people. In many cities feuds existed between some of the powerholding families; and, when one family was in the ascendant, its rivals were tempted to make use of the popular discontent in order to subvert it. Thus discontented nobles came forward to be the leaders of the discontented masses. But when the government was overthrown, the revolution generally resulted in a temporary return to monarchy. The noble leader seized the supreme power and maintained it by armed might. The mass of the people were not yet ripe for taking the power into their own hands; and they were generally glad to entrust it to the man who had helped them to overthrow the hated government of the nobles. This new kind of monarchy was very different from the old; for the position of the monarch did not rest on hereditary right but on physical force. The tyrannis. Such illegitimate monarchs were called tyrants, to distinguish them from the hereditary kings, and this form of monarchy was called a tyrannis. The name "tyrant" was perhaps derived from Lydia, and first used by Greeks in designating the Lydian monarchs; Archilochus, in whose fragments we first meet "tyrannis," applied it to the sovereignty of Gyges. The word was in itself morally neutral and did not imply that the monarch was bad or cruel; there was nothing self-contradictory in a good tyrant, and many tyrants were beneficent. But the isolation of these rulers, who, being without the support of legitimacy, depended on armed force, so often urged them to be suspicious and cruel, that the tyrannis came into bad odour; arbitrary acts of oppression were associated with the name; and "tyrant" inclined to the evil sense in which modern languages have adopted it. For the Greek dislike of the tyrannis there was however a deeper cause than the fact that many tyrants were oppressors. It placed in the hands of an unconstitutional ruler arbitrary control, whether he exercised it or not, over the lives and fortunes of the citizens. It was thus repugnant to the Greek love of freedom, and it seemed to arrest their constitutional growth. As a matter of fact, this temporary arrest during the period when the first tyrannies prevailed may have been useful; for the tyrannis, though its direct political effect was retarding, forwarded the progress of the people in other directions. And even from a constitutional point of view it may have had its uses at this period. In some cases, it secured an interval of repose and growth, during which the people won experience and knowledge to fit them for self-government. Greek his The period which saw the fall of the aristocracies is often called No such the age of the tyrants. The expression is unhappy, because it might thing in easily mislead. The tyrannis first came into existence at this period; there was a large crop of tyrants much about the same time in tory as an age of different parts of Greece; they all performed the same function of tyrannies. overthrowing aristocracies, and in many cases they paved the way for democracies. But on the other hand, the tyrannis was not a form of government which appeared only at this transitional crisis, and then passed away. There is no age in the subsequent history of Greece which might not see, and did not actually see, the rise of tyrants here and there. Tyranny was always with the Greeks. It, as well as oligarchy, was a danger by which their democracies were threatened at all periods. Greece. Ionia seems to have been the original home of the tyrannis, and Tyrants in this may have been partly due to the seductive example of the rich Asiatic court of the Lydian "tyrants" at Sardis. But of the Ionian tyrannies we know little. We hear of factions and feuds in the cities, of aristocratic houses overthrown and despotisms established in various states. A tyrant of Ephesus marries the daughter of the Lydian monarch Alyattes. The most famous of these tyrants was Thrasy- Thrasybulus of Miletus, under whose rule that city held a more brilliant bulus, c. position than ever. Abroad, he took part in planting some of the 610 B.C. colonies on the Black Sea, and successfully resisted the menaces of Lydia. At home, he developed the craft of tyranny to a fine art. In Lesbian Mytilene we see the tyrannis and also a method by Mytilene which it might be avoided. Mytilene had won great commercial |
