The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  (XIII) Alcinous is so moved with sympathy by Odysseus’ tale that he bids his men row Odysseus to Ithaca, but to blindfold him lest he learn and reveal the location of their happy land. On Ithaca the goddess Athena guides the wanderer to the hut of his old swineherd Eumaeus, who (XIV), though not recognizing him, receives him with Gargantuan hospitality, (XV) When Telemachus is led by the goddess to the same hut Odysseus (XVI) makes himself known to his son, and both “wail aloud vehemently.” He unfolds to Telemachus a plan for slaying all the suitors, (XVII-XVIII) In the guise of a beggar he enters his palace, sees the wooers feasting at his expense, and rages inwardly when he hears that they lie with his maidservants at night even while courting Penelope by day. (XIX-XX) He is insulted and injured by the suitors, but he defends himself with vigor and patience, (XXI) By this time the wooers have discovered the trick of Penelope’s web, and have forced her to finish it. She agrees to marry whichever or them can string Odysseus’ great bow—which hangs on the wall—and shoot an arrow through the openings of twelve axes ranged in line. They all try, and all fail. Odysseus asks for a chance, and succeeds. (XXII) Then with a wrath that frightens everyone, he casts off his disguise, turns his arrows upon the suitors, and, with the help of Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Athena, slays them all. (XXIII) He finds it hard to convince Penelope that he is Odysseus; it is difficult to surrender twenty suitors for one husband, (XXIV) He meets the attack of the suitors’ sons, pacifies them, and re-establishes his kingdom.

  Meanwhile in Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was pursuing its course. Orestes, son of Agamemnon, grown to manhood and aroused by his bitter sister Electra, avenged their father by murdering their mother and her paramour. After many years of madness and wandering Orestes ascended the throne of Argos-Mycenae (ca. 1176 B.C.) and later added Sparta to his kingdom.* But from his accession the house of Pelops began to decline. Perhaps the decline had begun with Agamemnon, and that vacillating chieftain had used war as a means of uniting a realm that was already falling to pieces. But his victory completed his ruin. For few of his chieftains ever returned, and the kingdoms of many others had lost all loyalty to them. By the end of the age that had opened with the siege of Troy the Achaean power was spent, the blood of Pelops was exhausted. The people waited patiently for a saner dynasty.

  VI. THE DORIAN CONQUEST

  About the year 1104 B.C. a new wave of immigration or invasion came down upon Greece from the restlessly expanding north. Through Illyria and Thessaly, across the Corinthian Gulf at Naupactus, and over the Isthmus at Corinth, a warlike people, tall, roundheaded, letterless, slipped or marched or poured into the Peloponnesus, mastered it, and almost completely destroyed Mycenaean civilization. We guess at their origin and their route, but we know their character and their effect. They were still in the herding and hunting stage; now and then they stopped to till the soil, but their main reliance was upon their cattle, whose need for new pasturage kept the tribes ever on the move. One thing they had in unheard-of quantity—iron. They were the emissaries of the Hallstatt* culture to Greece; and the hard metal of their swords and souls gave them a merciless supremacy over Achaeans and Cretans who still used bronze to kill. Probably from both west and east, from Elis and Megara, they came down upon the separate little kingdoms of the Peloponnesus, put the ruling classes to the sword, and turned the Mycenaean remnant into helot-serfs. Mycenae and Tiryns went up in flames, and for some centuries Argos became the capital of Pelops’ isle. On the Isthmus the invaders seized a commanding peak—the Acrocorinthus—and built around it the Dorian city of Corinth.80a The surviving Achaeans fled, some of them into the mountains of the northern Peloponnesus, some into Attica, some overseas to the islands and coasts of Asia. The conquerors followed them into Attica, but were repulsed; they followed them to Crete,81 and made final the destruction of Cnossus; they captured and colonized Melos, Thera, Cos, Cnidus, and Rhodes. Throughout the Peloponnesus and Crete, where the Mycenaean culture had most flourished, the devastation was most complete.

  This terminal catastrophe in the prehistory of Aegean civilization is what modern historians know as the Dorian conquest, and what Greek tradition called the Return of the Heracleidae. For the victors were not content to record their triumph as a conquest of a civilized people by barbarians; they protested that what had really happened was that the descendants of Heracles, resisted in their just re-entry into the Peloponnesus, had taken it by heroic force. We do not know how much of this is history, and how much is diplomatic mythology designed to transform a bloody conquest into a divine right. It is difficult to believe that the Dorians were such excellent liars in the very youth of the world. Perhaps, as disputants will never allow, both stories were true: the Dorians were conquerors from the north, led by the scions of Heracles.

  Whatever the form of the conquest, its result was a long and bitter interruption in the development of Greece. Political order was disturbed for centuries; every man, feeling unsafe, carried arms; increasing violence disrupted agriculture and trade on land, and commerce on the seas. War flourished, poverty deepened and spread. Life became unsettled as families wandered from country to country seeking security and peace.82 Hesiod called this the Age of Iron, and mourned its debasement from the finer ages that had preceded it; many Greeks believed that “the discovery of iron had been to the hurt of man.”83 The arts languished, painting was neglected, statuary contented itself with figurines; and pottery, forgetting the lively naturalism of Mycenae and Crete, degenerated into a lifeless “Geometrical Style” that dominated Greek ceramics for centuries.

  But not all was lost. Despite the resolution of the invading Dorians to keep their blood free from admixture with that of the subject population—despite the racial antipathies between Dorian and Ionian that were to incarnadine all Greece—there went on, rapidly outside of Laconia, slowly within, a mingling of the new stocks with the old; and perhaps the addition of the vigorous seed of Achaeans and Dorians with that of the more ancient and volatile peoples of southern Greece served as a powerful biological stimulant. The final result, after centuries of mingling, was a new and diverse people, in whose blood “Mediterranean,” “Alpine,” “Nordic,” and Asiatic elements were disturbingly fused.

  Nor was Mycenaean culture entirely destroyed. Certain elements of the Aegean heritage—instrumentalities of social order and government, elements of craftsmanship and technology, modes and routes of trade, forms and objects of worship,84 ceramic and toreutic skills, the art of fresco painting, decorative motives and architectural forms—maintained a half-stifled existence through centuries of violence and chaos. Cretan institutions, the Greeks believed, passed down into Sparta85 and the Achaean assembly remained the essential structure of even democratic Greece. The Mycenaean megaron probably provided the ground plan of the Doric temple,86 to which the Dorian spirit would add freedom, symmetry, and strength. The artistic tradition, slowly reviving, lifted Corinth, Sicyon, and Argos to an early Renaissance, and made even dour Sparta, for a while, smile with art and song; it nourished lyric poetry through all this historyless Dark Age; it followed Pelasgian, Achaean, Ionian, Minyan exiles in their flight-migration to the Aegean and Asia, and helped the colonial cities to leap ahead of their mother states in literature and art. And when the exiles came to the islands and Ionia they found the remains of Aegean civilization ready to their hands. There, in old towns a little less disordered than on the Continent, the Age of Bronze had kept something of its ancient craft and brilliance; and there on Asiatic soil would come the first reawakening of Greece.

  In the end the contact of five cultures—Cretan, Mycenaean, Achaean, Dorian, Oriental—brought new youth to a civilization that had begun to die, that had grown coarse on the mainland through war and plunder, and effeminate in Crete through the luxury of its genius. The mixture of races and ways took centuries to win even a moderate stability, but it contributed to produce the unparalleled variety, flexibility, and subtlety of Greek thought and life. Instead of thinking of Greek culture as
a flame that shone suddenly and miraculously amid a dark sea of barbarism, we must conceive of it as the slow and turbid creation of a people almost too richly endowed in blood and memories, and surrounded, challenged, and instructed by warlike hordes, powerful empires, and ancient civilizations.

  BOOK II

  THE RISE OF GREECE

  1000-480 B.C.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK II

  Notes: All dates before 480, except 776, are uncertain. A place name without other description indicates the traditional date of its first Greek settlement.

  B.C.

  1100-850:

  Aeolian and Ionian migrations

  1000:

  Temple of Hera at Olympia

  840:

  Probable period of Homer

  776:

  First (?) Olympic Games

  770:

  Sinope and Cumae

  757-6:

  Cyzicus and Trapezus

  752:

  First decennial archons

  750-650:

  Greeks settle Thracian peninsula

  750-594:

  Age of the aristocracies

  750:

  Probable period of Hesiod

  735:

  Naxos (Sicily)

  734:

  Corcyra and Syracuse

  730-29:

  Rhegium, Leontini, Catana

  725-05:

  First Messenian War

  725:

  Coinage in Lydia and Ionia

  721:

  Sybaris; 710, Crotona

  705:

  Taras; 700, Poseidonia; beginnings of Greek architecture in stone

  683:

  First annual archons at Athens

  680:

  Pheidon dictator at Argos; earliest state coinage in Greece

  676:

  Orthagoras dictator at Sicyon

  670:

  Terpander of Lesbos, poet and musician; Archilochus of Paros, poet; Homeric hymns to Apollo and Demeter

  660:

  Laws of Zaleucus at Locri

  658:

  Byzantium; 654, Lampsacus

  655-25:

  Cypselus dictator at Corinth

  651:

  Selinus; 650, Abdera and Olbia

  648:

  Himera; Myron dictator at Sicyon

  640-31:

  Second Messenian War; Tyrtaeus, poet, at Sparta

  630:

  Laws of Lycurgus at Sparta (?)

  630:

  Cyrene; 615, Abydos

  625-585:

  Periander dictator at Corinth

  620:

  Laws of Draco at Athens

  615:

  Thrasybulus dictator at Miletus

  610:

  Laws of Charondas at Catana

  600:

  Naucratis; Massalia (Marseilles); Cleisthenes dictator at Sicyon, Pittacus at Mytilene; Sappho and Alcaeus, poets of Lesbos; Thales of Miletus, philosopher; Alcman, poet, at Sparta; rise of sculpture

  595:

  First Sacred War

  594:

  Laws of Solon at Athens

  590:

  Age of the Seven Wise Men; rise of the Amphictyonic League and Orphism; second Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

  582:

  First Pythian and Isthmian games; the Acropolis statues and the “Apollos”

  B.C.

  580:

  Acragas; Aesop of Samos, fabulist

  576:

  First Nemean games

  570:

  Phalaris dictator at Acragas; Stesichorus of Himera, poet; Anaximander of Miletus, philosopher

  566:

  First Panathenaic games

  561-60:

  First dictatorship of Peisistratus

  560-46:

  Croesus of Lydia subjugates Ionia

  558:

  Carthage conquers Sicily and Corsica

  550:

  Emporium (Spain); 535, Elea (Italy)

  546-27:

  Second dictatorship of Peisistratus

  545:

  Persia subjugates Ionia

  544:

  Anaximenes of Miletus, philosopher

  540:

  Hipponax of Ephesus, poet

  535-15:

  Polycrates dictator of Samos; Theodorus of Samos, artist; Anacreon of Teos, poet

  534:

  Thespis establishes drama at Athens

  530:

  Theognis of Megara, poet

  529-00:

  Pythagoras, philosopher, at Crotona

  527-10:

  Hippias dictator at Athens

  520:

  Olympieum begun at Athens

  517:

  Simonides of Ceos, poet

  514:

  Conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogeiton

  511:

  Phrynichus of Athens, dramatist

  510:

  Destruction of Sybaris by Crotona

  507:

  Cleisthenes extends democracy at Athens

  500:

  Hecataeus of Miletus, geographer

  499:

  Ionia revolts; Aeschylus’ first play

  497:

  Ionian Greeks burn Sardis

  494:

  Persians defeat Ionians at Lade

  493:

  Themistocles archon at Athens

  490:

  Marathon; temple of Aphaea at Aegina

  489:

  Aristides archon; trial of Miltiades

  488-72:

  Theron dictator at Acragas

  487:

  First selection of archons by lot

  485-78:

  Gelon dictator at Syracuse

  485:

  Epicharmus establishes comedy at Syracuse

  482:

  Ostracism of Aristides

  480:

  Battles of Artemisium, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Himera; Ageladas of Argos, sculptor

  479:

  Battles of Plataea and Mycale

  CHAPTER IV

  Sparta

  I. THE ENVIRONMENT OF GREECE

  LET us take an atlas of the classic world* and find our way among the neighbors of ancient Greece. By Greece, or Hellas, we shall mean all lands occupied, in antiquity, by peoples speaking Greek.

  We begin where many invaders entered—over the hills and through the valleys of Epirus. Here the ancestors of the Greeks must have tarried many a year, for they set up at Dodona a shrine to their thundering sky-god Zeus; as late as the fifth century the Greeks consulted the oracle there, and read the divine will in the clangor of caldrons or the rustling leaves of the sacred oak.1 Through southern Epirus flowed the river Acheron, amid ravines so dark and deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell. In Homer’s day the Epirots were largely Greek in speech and ways; but then new waves of barbarism came down upon them from the north, and dissuaded them from civilization.

  Farther up the Adriatic lay Illyria, sparsely settled with untamed herdsmen who sold cattle and slaves for salt.2 On this coast, at Epidamnus (the Roman Dyrrachium, now Durazzo), Caesar disembarked his troops in pursuit of Pompey. Across the Adriatic the expanding Greeks snatched the lower coasts from the native tribes, and gave civilization to Italy. (In the end those native tribes would sweep back upon them, and one tribe, almost barbarous till Alexander’s time, would swallow them up, along with their motherland, in an unprecedented empire.) Beyond the Alps ranged the Gauls, who were to prove very friendly to the Greek city of Massalia (Marseilles); and at the western end of the Mediterranean lay Spain, already half civilized and fully exploited by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians when, about 550, the Greeks established their timid colony at Emporium (Ampurias). On the coast of Africa, menacingly opposite Sicily, was imperial Carthage, founded by Dido and the Phoenicians, tradition said, in 813; no mere village, but a city of 700,000 population, monopolizing the commerce of the western Mediterranean, dominating Utica, Hippo, and three hundred other towns in Africa,
and controlling prosperous lands, mines, and colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. This fabulously wealthy metropolis was fated to lead the Oriental thrust against Greece in the west, as Persia would lead it in the east.