Book xvii. of Diodorus and the _Historiae Alexandri_ of Curtius Rufus

are thoroughly rhetorical in spirit. It is probable that in both cases the ultimate source is the work of Clitarchus.

The orators.

Isocrates.

It is towards the end of the 5th century that a fresh source of information becomes available in the speeches of the orators, the earliest of whom is Antiphon (d. 411 B.C.). Lysias is of great importance for the history of the Thirty (see the speeches against Eratosthenes and Agoratus), and a good deal may be gathered from Andocides with regard to the last years of the 5th and the opening years of the next century. At the other end of this period Lycurgus, Hyperides and Dinarchus throw light upon the time of Philip and Alexander. The three, however, who are of most importance to the historian are Isocrates, Aeschines and Demosthenes. Isocrates (q.v.), whose long life (436-338) more than spans the interval between the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and the triumph of Macedon at Chaeronea, is one of the most characteristic figures in the Greek world of his day. 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; he was the master of Aeschines and Lycurgus amongst orators and of Ephorus and Theopompus amongst historians. No other contemporary writer has left so indelible a stamp upon the style and the sentiment of his generation. It is a commonplace that Isocrates is the apostle of Panhellenism. It is not so generally recognized that he is the prophet of Hellenism. A passage in the Panegyricus (§ 50 [Greek: hôste to tôn Hellênon onoma mêketi tou genous alla tês dianoias dokein einai kai mallon Hellênas kaleisthai tous tês paideuseôs tês hêmeteras ê tous tês koinês physeôs metechontas]) is the key to the history of the next three centuries. Doubtless he had no conception of the extent to which the East was to be hellenized. He was, however, the first to recognize that it would be hellenized by the diffusion of Greek culture rather than of Greek blood. His Panhellenism was the outcome of his recognition of the new forces and tendencies which were at work in the midst of a new generation. When Greek culture was becoming more and more international, the exaggeration of the principle of autonomy in the Greek political system was becoming more and more absurd. He had sufficient insight to be aware that the price paid for this autonomy was the domination of Persia; a domination which meant the servitude of the Greek states across the Aegean and the demoralization of Greek political life at home. His Panhellenism led him to a more liberal view of the distinction between what was Greek and what was not than was possible to the intenser patriotism of a Demosthenes. In his later orations he has the courage not only to pronounce that the day of Athens as a first-rate power is past, but to see in Philip the needful leader in the crusade against Persia. The earliest and greatest of his political orations is the _Panegyricus_, published in 380 B.C., midway between the peace of Antalcidas and Leuctra. It is his _apologia_ for Panhellenism. To the period of the Social War belong the _De pace_ (355 B.C.) and the _Areopagiticus_ (354 B.C.), both of great value as evidence for the internal conditions of Athens at the beginning of the struggle with Macedon. The _Plataicus_ (373 B.C.) and the _Archidamus_ (366 B.C.) throw light upon the politics of Boeotia and the Peloponnese respectively. The _Panathenaicus_ (339 B.C.), the child of his old age, contains little that may not be found in the earlier orations. The _Philippus_ (346 B.C.) is of peculiar interest, as giving the views of the Macedonian party.

Demosthenes.

Not the least remarkable feature in recent historical criticism is the reaction against the view which was at one time almost universally accepted of the character, statesmanship and authority of the orator Demosthenes (q.v.). During the last quarter of a century his character and statesmanship have been attacked, and his authority impugned, by a series of writers of whom Holm and Beloch are the best known. With the estimate of his character and statesmanship we are not here concerned. With regard to his value as an authority for the history of the period, it is to his speeches, and to those of his contemporaries, Aeschines, Hypereides, Dinarchus and Lycurgus, that we owe our intimate knowledge, both of the working of the constitutional and legal systems, and of the life of the people, at this period of Athenian history. From this point of view his value can hardly be overestimated. As a witness, however, to matters of fact, his authority can no longer be rated as highly as it once was, e.g. by Schaefer and by Grote. The orator's attitude towards events, both in the past and in the present, is inevitably a different one from the historian's. The object of a Thucydides is to ascertain a fact, or to exhibit it in its true relations. The object of a Demosthenes is to make a point, or to win his case. In their dealings with the past the orators exhibit a levity which is almost inconceivable to a modern reader. Andocides, in a passage of his speech _On the Mysteries_ (§ 107), speaks of Marathon as the crowning victory of Xerxes' campaign; in his speech _On the Peace_ (§ 3) he confuses Miltiades with Cimon, and the Five Years' Peace with the Thirty Years' Truce. Though the latter passage is a mass of absurdities and confusions, it was so generally admired that it was incorporated by Aeschines in his speech _On the Embassy_ (§§ 172-176). If such was their attitude towards the past; if, in order to make a point, they do not hesitate to pervert history, is it likely that they would conform to a higher standard of veracity in their statements as to the present--as to their contemporaries, their rivals or their own actions? When we compare different speeches of Demosthenes, separated by an interval of years, we cannot fail to observe a marked difference in his statements. The farther he is from the events, the bolder are his mis-statements. It is only necessary to compare the speech _On the Crown_ with that _On the Embassy_, and this latter speech with the _Philippics_ and _Olynthiacs_, to find illustrations. It has come to be recognized that no statement as to a matter of fact is to be accepted, unless it receives independent corroboration, or unless it is admitted by both sides. The speeches of Demosthenes may be conveniently divided into four classes according to their dates. To the pre-Philippic period belong the speeches _On the Symmories_ (354 B.C.), _On Megalopolis_ (352 B.C.), _Against Aristocrates_ (351 B.C.), and, perhaps, the speech _On Rhodes_ (? 351 B.C.). These speeches betray no consciousness of the danger threatened by Philip's ambition. The policy recommended is one based upon the principle of the balance of power. To the succeeding period, which ends with the peace of Philocrates (346 B.C.), belong the _First Philippic_ and the three _Olynthiacs_. To the period between the peace of Philocrates and Chaeronea belong the speech _On the Peace_ (346 B.C.), the _Second Philippic_ (344 B.C.), the speeches _On the Embassy_ (344 B.C.) and _On the Chersonese_ (341 B.C.), and the _Third Philippic_. The masterpiece of his genius, the speech On the Crown, was delivered in 330 B.C., in the reign of Alexander. Of the three extant speeches of Aeschines (q.v.) that _On the Embassy_ is of great value, as enabling us to correct the mis-statements of Demosthenes. For the period from the death of Alexander to the fall of Corinth (323-146 B.C.) our literary authorities are singularly defective. For the Diadochi Diodorus (books xviii.-xx.) is our chief source. These books form the most valuable part of Diodorus' work. They are mainly based upon the work of Hieronymus of Cardia, a writer who combined exceptional opportunities for ascertaining the truth (he was in the service first of Eumenes, and then of Antigonus) with an exceptional sense of its importance. Hieronymus ended his history at the death of Pyrrhus (272 B.C.), but, unfortunately, book xx. of Diodorus' work carries us no farther than 303 B.C., and of the later books we have but scanty fragments. The narrative of Diodorus may be supplemented by the fragments of Arrian's _History of the events after Alexander's death_ (which reach, however, only to 321 B.C.), and by Plutarch's _Lives of Eumenes_ and of _Demetrius_. For the rest of the 3rd century and the first half of the 2nd we have his _Lives of Pyrrhus_, of _Aratus_, of _Philopoemen_, and of _Agis and Cleomenes_. For the period from 220 B.C. onwards Polybius (q.v.) is our chief authority (see ROME: _Ancient History_, section "Authorities"). In a period in which the literary sources are so scanty great weight attaches to the epigraphic and numismatic evidence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The literature which deals with the history of Greece, in its various periods, departments and aspects, is of so vast a bulk that all that can be attempted here is to indicate the most important and most accessible works.

_General Histories of Greece._--Down to the middle of the 19th century the only histories of Greece deserving of mention were the products of English scholarship. The two earliest of these were published about the same date, towards the end of the 18th century, nearly three-quarters of a century before any history of Greece, other than a mere compendium, appeared on the Continent. John Gillies' _History of Greece_ was published in 1786, Mitford's in 1784. Both works were composed with a political bias and a political object. Gillies was a Whig. In the dedication (to George III.) he expresses the view that "the History of Greece exposes the dangerous turbulence of Democracy, and arraigns the despotism of Tyrants, while it evinces the inestimable benefits, resulting to Liberty itself, from the steady operation of well-regulated monarchy." Mitford was a Tory, who thought to demonstrate the evils of democracy from the example of the Athenian state. His _History_, in spite of its bias, was a work of real value. More than fifty years elapsed between Mitford's work and Thirlwall's. Connop Thirlwall, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, afterwards bishop of St David's, brought a sound judgment to the aid of ripe scholarship. His _History of Greece_, published in 1835-1838 (8 vols.), is entirely free from the controversial tone of Mitford's volumes. Ten years later (1846) George Grote published the first volumes of his history, which was not completed (in 12 vols.) till 1856. Grote, like Mitford, was a politician--an ardent Radical, with republican sympathies. It was in order to refute the slanders of the Tory partisan that he was impelled to write a history of Greece, which should do justice to the greatest democracy of the ancient world, the Athenian state. Thus, in the case of three of these four writers, the interest in their subject was mainly political. Incomparably the greatest of these works is Grote's. Grote had his faults and his limitations. His prejudices are strong, and his scholarship is weak; he had never visited Greece, and he knew little or nothing of Greek art; and, at the time he wrote, the importance of coins and inscriptions was imperfectly apprehended. In spite of every defect, however, his work is the greatest history of Greece that has yet been written. It is not too much to say that nobody knows Greek history till he has mastered Grote. No history of Greece has since appeared in England on a scale at all comparable to that of Grote's work. The most important of the more recent ones is that by J. B. Bury (1 vol., 1900), formerly fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, afterwards Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Mitford and Bury end with the death of Alexander; Gillies and Grote carry on the narrative a generation farther; while Thirlwall's work extends to the absorption of Greece in the Roman Empire (146 B.C.).

While in France the _Histoire des Grecs_ (ending at 146 B.C.) of Victor Duruy (new edition, 2 vols., 1883), Minister of Public Instruction under Napoleon III., is the only one that need be mentioned, in Germany there has been a succession of histories of Greece since the middle of the 19th century. Kortüm's _Geschichte Griechenlands_ (3 vols., 1854), a work of little merit, was followed by Max Duncker's _Geschichte der Griechen_ (vols. 1 and 2 published in 1856; vols. 1 and 2, Neue Folge, which bring the narrative down to the death of Pericles, in 1884; the two former volumes form vols. 5, 6 and 7 of his _Geschichte des Altertums_), and by the _Griechische Geschichte_ of Ernst Curtius (3 vols., 1857-1867). An English translation of Duncker, by S. F. Alleyne, appeared in 1883 (2 vols., Bentley), and of Curtius, by A. W. Ward (5 vols., Bentley, 1868-1873). Among more recent works may be mentioned the _Griechische Geschichte_ of Adolf Holm (4 vols., Berlin, 1886-1894; English translation by F. Clarke, 4 vols., Macmillan, 1894-1898), and histories with the same title by Julius Beloch (3 vols., Strassburg, 1893-1904) and Georg Busolt (2nd ed., 3 vols., Gotha, 1893-1904). Holm carries on the narrative to 30 B.C., Beloch to 217 B.C., Busolt to Chaeronea (338 B.C.).[32] Busolt's work is entirely different in character from any other history of Greece. The writer's object is to refer in the notes (which constitute five-sixths of the book) to the views of every writer in any language upon every controverted question. It is absolutely indispensable, as a work of reference, for any serious study of Greek history. The ablest work since Grote's is Eduard Meyer's _Geschichte des Altertums_, of which 5 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1884-1902) have appeared, carrying the narrative down to the death of Epaminondas (362 B.C.). Vols. 2-5 are principally concerned with Greek history. It must be remembered that, partly owing to the literary finds and the archaeological discoveries of the last thirty years, and partly owing to the advance made in the study of epigraphy and numismatics, all the histories published before those of Busolt, Beloch, Meyer and Bury are out of date.

_Works bearing on the History of Greece._--Earlier works and editions are omitted, except in the case of a work which has not been superseded.

_Introductions._--C. Wachsmuth, _Einleitung in das Studium der alten Geschichte_ (1 vol., Leipzig, 1895); E. Meyer, _Forschungen zur alten Geschichte_ (2 parts, Halle, 1892-1899; quite indispensable); J. B. Bury, _The Ancient Greek Historians_ (London, 1909).

_Constitutional History and Institutions._--G. F. Schömann, _Griechische Altertümer_ (2 vols., Berlin, 1855-1859; vol. i., tr. by E. G. Hardy and J. S. Mann, Rivingtons, 1880); G. Gilbert, _Griechische Staatsaltertümer_ (2nd ed., 2 vols., Leipzig, 1893; vol. i. tr. by E. J. Brooks and T. Nicklin, Swan Sonnenschein, 1895); K. F. Hermann, _Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten_ (6th ed., 4 vols., Freiburg, 1882-1895); Iwan Müller, _Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_ (9 vols., Nördlingen, 1886, in progress; several of the volumes are concerned with Greek history); J. H. Lipsius, _Das attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren_ (Leipzig, 1905, in progress); A. H. J. Greenidge, _Handbook of Greek Constitutional History_ (1 vol., Macmillan, 1896); Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_ (Stuttgart, 1894 foll.).

_Geography._--E. H. Bunbury, _History of Ancient Geography amongst the Greeks and Romans_ (2nd ed., 2 vols., Murray, 1883), W. M. Leake, _Travels in the Morea_ (3 vols., 1830), and _Travels in Northern Greece_ (4 vols., 1834); H. F. Tozer, _Lectures on the Geography of Greece_ (1 vol., Murray, 1873), and _History of Ancient Geography_ (1 vol., Cambridge, 1897); J. P. Mahaffy, _Rambles and Studies in Greece_ (3rd ed., 1 vol., Macmillan, 1887, an admirable book); C. Bursian, _Geographie von Griechenland_ (2 vols., Leipzig, 1872); H. Berger, _Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen_ (4 parts, Leipzig, 1887-1893); Ernst Curtius, _Peloponnesos_ (2 vols., Gotha, 1850-1851).

_Epigraphy and Numismatics._--_Corpus inscriptionum Atticarum_ (Berlin, 1875, in progress), _Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum_ (Berlin, 1892, in progress). The following selections of Greek inscriptions may be mentioned: E. F. Hicks and G. F. Hill, _Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions_ (new ed., 1 vol., Oxford, 1901): W. Dittenberger, _Sylloge inscriptionum Graecarum_ (2nd ed., 2 vols., Berlin, 1898); C. Michel, _Recueil d'inscriptions grecques_ (Paris, 1900). Among works on numismatics the English reader may refer to B. V. Head, _Historia numorum_ (1 vol., Oxford, 1887); G. F. Hill, _Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins_ (1 vol., Macmillan, 1899), as well as to the _British Museum Catalogue of Greek Coins_. In French the most important general work is the _Monnaies grecques_ of F. Imhoof-Blumer (Paris, 1883).

_Chronology, Trade, War, Social Life, &c._--H. F. Clinton, _Fasti Hellenici_ (3rd ed., 3 vols., Oxford, 1841, a work of which English scholarship may well be proud; it is still invaluable for the study of Greek chronology); B. Büchsenschütz, _Besitz und Erwerb im griechischen Altertume_ (1 vol., Halle, 1869; this is still the best book on Greek commerce); J. Beloch, _Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt_ (1 vol., Leipzig, 1886); W. Rüstow and H. Köchly, _Geschichte des griechischen Kriegswesens_ (1 vol., Aarau, 1852); J. P. Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_ (2nd ed., 1 vol., 1875). (E. M. W.)

b. _Post-Classical: 146 B.C.-A.D. 1800_

I. THE PERIOD OF ROMAN RULE.--(i.) _Greece under the Republic_ (146-27 B.C.). After the collapse of the Achaean League (q.v.) the Senate appointed a commission to reorganize Greece as a Roman dependency. Corinth, the chief centre of resistance, was destroyed and its inhabitants sold into slavery. In addition to this act of exemplary punishment, which may perhaps have been inspired in part by the desire to crush a commercial competitor, steps were taken to obviate future insurrections. The national and cantonal federations were dissolved, commercial intercourse between cities was restricted, and the government transferred from the democracies to the propertied classes, whose interests were bound up with Roman supremacy. In other respects few changes were made in existing institutions. Some favoured states like Athens and Sparta retained their full sovereign rights as _civitates liberae_, the other cities continued to enjoy local self-government. The ownership of the land was not greatly disturbed by confiscations, and though a tribute upon it was levied, this impost may not have been universal. General powers of supervision were entrusted to the governor of Macedonia, who could reserve cases of high treason for his decision, and in case of need send troops into the country. But although Greece was in the _provincia_ of the Macedonian proconsul, in the sense of belonging to his sphere of command, its status was in fact more favourable than that of other provincial dependencies.

This settlement was acquiesced in by the Greek people, who had come to realize the hopelessness of further resistance. The internal disorder which was arising from the numerous disputes about property rights consequent upon the political revolutions was checked by the good offices of the historian Polybius, whom the Senate deputed to mediate between the litigants. The pacification of the country eventually became so complete that the Romans withdrew the former restrictions upon intercourse and allowed some of the leagues to revive. But its quiet was seriously disturbed during the first Mithradatic War (88-84 B.C.), when numerous Greek states sided with Mithradates (q.v.). The success which the invader experienced in detaching the Greeks from Rome is partly to be explained by the skilful way in which his agents incited the imperialistic ambitions of prominent cities like Athens, partly perhaps by his promises of support to the democratic parties. The result of the war was disastrous to Greece. Apart from the confiscations and exactions by which the Roman general L. Cornelius Sulla punished the disloyal communities, the extensive and protracted campaigns left Central Greece in a ruinous condition. During the last decades of the Roman republic European Greece was scarcely affected by contemporary wars nor yet exploited by Roman magistrates in the same systematic manner as most other provinces. Yet oppression by officials who traversed Greece from time to time and demanded lavish entertainments and presentations in the guise of _viaticum_ or _aurum coronarium_ was not unknown. Still greater was the suffering produced by the rapacity of Roman traders and capitalists: it is recorded that Sicyon was reduced to sell its most cherished art treasures in order to satisfy its creditors. 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 coast districts and islands also suffered considerably from swarms of pirates who, in the absence of any strong fleet in Greek waters, were able to obtain a firm footing in Crete and freely plundered the chief trading places and sanctuaries; the most notable of such visitations was experienced in 69 B.C. by the island of Delos. This evil came to an end with the general suppression of piracy in the Mediterranean by Pompey (67 B.C.), but the depopulation which it had caused in some regions is attested by the fact that the victorious admiral settled some of his captives on the desolated coast strip of Achaea.

In the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Greeks provided the latter with a large part of his excellent fleet. In 48 B.C. the decisive campaign of the war was fought on Greek soil, and the resources of the land were severely taxed by the requisitions of both armies. As a result of Caesar's victory at Pharsalus, the whole country fell into his power; the treatment which it received was on the whole lenient, though individual cities were punished severely. After the murder of Caesar the Greeks supported the cause of Brutus (42 B.C.), but were too weak to render any considerable service. In 39 B.C. the Peloponnese for a short time was made over to Sextus Pompeius. During the subsequent period Greece remained in the hands of M. Antonius (Mark Antony), who imposed further exactions in order to defray the cost of his wars. The extensive levies which he made in 31 B.C. for his campaign against Octavian, and the contributions which his gigantic army required, exhausted the country's resources so completely that a general famine was prevented only by Octavian's prompt action after the battle of Actium in distributing supplies of grain and evacuating the land with all haste. The depopulation which resulted from the civil wars was partly remedied by the settlement of Italian colonists at Corinth and Patrae by Julius Caesar and Octavian; on the other hand, the foundation of Nicopolis (q.v.) by the latter merely had the effect of transferring the people from the country to the city.

(ii.) _The Early Roman Empire_ (27 B.C.-A.D. 323).--Under the emperor Augustus Thessaly was incorporated with Macedonia; the rest of Greece was converted into the province of Achaea, under the control of a senatorial proconsul resident at Corinth. Many states, including Athens and Sparta, retained their rights as free and nominally independent cities. The provincials were encouraged to send delegates to a communal synod ([Greek: koinon tôn Achaiôn]) which met at Argos to consider the general interests of the country and to uphold national Hellenic sentiment; the Delphic amphictyony was revived and extended so as to represent in a similar fashion northern and central Greece.

Social conditions.

Economic conditions did not greatly improve under the empire. Although new industries sprang up to meet the needs of Roman luxury, and Greek marble, textiles and table delicacies were in great demand, the only cities which regained a really flourishing trade were the Italian communities of Corinth and Patrae. Commerce languished in general, and the soil was mainly abandoned to pasturage. Though certain districts retained a measure of prosperity, e.g. Thessaly, Phocis, Elis, Argos and Laconia, huge tracts stood depopulated and many notable cities had sunk into ruins; Aetolia, Acarnania and Epirus never recovered from the effects of former wars and from the withdrawal of their surviving inhabitants into Nicopolis. Such wealth as remained was amassed in the hands of a few great landowners and capitalists; the middle class continued to dwindle, and large numbers of the people were reduced to earning a precarious subsistence, supplemented by frequent doles and largesses.

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. And although this sentiment could degenerate into antiquarian pedantry and vanity, such as finds its climax in the diatribes of Apollonius of Tyana against the "barbarians," it prevented the nation from sinking into some of the worst vices of the age. A healthy social tone repressed extravagant luxury and the ostentatious display of wealth, and good taste long checked the spread of gladiatorial contests beyond the Italian community of Corinth. The most widespread abuse of that period, the adulation and adoration of emperors, was indeed introduced into European Greece and formed an essential feature of the proceedings at the Delphic amphictyony, but it never absorbed the energies of the people in the same way as it did in Asia. In order to perpetuate their old culture, the Greeks continued to set great store by classical education, and in Athens they possessed an academic centre which gradually became the chief university of the Roman empire. The highest representatives of this type of old-world refinement are to be found in Dio Chrysostom and especially in Plutarch of Chaeroneia (q.v.).

The relations between European Greece and Rome were practically confined to the sphere of scholarship. The Hellenes had so far lost their warlike qualities that they supplied scarcely any recruits to the army. They retained too much local patriotism to crowd into the official careers of senators or imperial servants. Although in the 1st century A.D. the astute Greek man of affairs and the _Graeculus esuriens_ of Juvenal abounded in Rome, both these classes were mainly derived from the less pure-blooded population beyond the Aegean.

The influx of Greek rhetoricians and professors into Italy during the 2nd and 3rd centuries was balanced by the large number of travellers who came to Greece to frequent its sanatoria, and especially to admire its works of art; the abundance in which these latter were preserved is strikingly attested in the extant record of Pausanias (about A.D. 170).

Roman administration.

The experience of the Greeks under their earliest governors seems to have been unfortunate, for in A.D. 15 they petitioned Tiberius to transfer the administration to an imperial legate. This new arrangement was sanctioned, but only lasted till A.D. 44, when Claudius restored the province to the senate. The proconsuls of the later 1st and 2nd centuries were sometimes ill qualified for their posts, but cases of oppression are seldom recorded against them. The years 66 and 67 were marked by a visit of the emperor Nero, who made a prolonged tour through Greece in order to display his artistic accomplishments at the various national festivals. In return for the flattering reception accorded to him he bestowed freedom and exemption from tribute upon the country. But this favour was almost neutralized by the wholesale depredations which he committed among the chief collections of art. A scheme for cutting through the Corinthian isthmus and so reviving the Greek carrying trade was inaugurated in his presence, but soon abandoned.

As Nero's grant of self-government brought about a recrudescence of misplaced ambition and party strife, Vespasian revoked the gift and turned Achaea again into a province, at the same time burdening it with increased taxes. In the 2nd century a succession of genuinely phil-Hellenic emperors made serious attempts to revive the nation's prosperity. Important material benefits were conferred by Hadrian, who made a lengthy visit to Greece. Besides erecting useful public works in many cities, he relieved Achaea of its arrears of tribute and exempted it from various imposts. In order to check extravagance on the part of the free cities, he greatly extended the practice of placing them under the supervision of imperial functionaries known as _correctores_. Hadrian fostered national sentiment by establishing a new pan-Hellenic congress at Athens, while he gave recognition to the increasing ascendancy of Hellenic culture at Rome by his institution of the Athenaeum.

In the 3rd century the only political event of importance was the edict of Caracalla which threw open the Roman citizenship to large numbers of provincials. Its chief effect in Greece was to diminish the preponderance of the wealthy classes, who formerly had used their riches to purchase the franchise and so to secure exemption from taxation. The chief feature of this period is the renewal of the danger from foreign invasions. Already in 175 a tribe named Costoboci had penetrated into central Greece, but was there broken up by the local militia. In 253 a threatened attack was averted by the stubborn resistance of Thessalonica. In 267-268 the province was overrun by Gothic bands, which captured Athens and some other towns, but were finally repulsed by the Attic levies and exterminated with the help of a Roman fleet.

(iii.) _The Late Roman Empire._--After the reorganization of the empire by Diocletian, Achaea occupied a prominent position in the "diocese" of Macedonia. Under Constantine I. it was included in the "prefecture" of Illyricum. It was subdivided into the "eparchies" of Hellas, Peloponnesus, Nicopolis and the islands, with headquarters at Thebes, Corinth, Nicopolis and Samos. Thessaly was incorporated with Macedonia. A complex hierarchy of imperial officials was now introduced and the system of taxation elaborated so as to yield a steady revenue to the central power. The levying of the land-tax was imposed upon the [Greek: dekaprôtoi] or "ten leading men," who, like the Latin _decuriones_, were entrusted henceforth with the administration in most cities. The tendency to reduce all constitutions to the Roman municipal pattern became prevalent under the rulers of this period, and the greater number of them was stereotyped by the general regulations of the Codex Theodosianus (438). Although the elevation of Constantinople to the rank of capital was prejudicial to Greece, which felt the competition of the new centre of culture and learning and had to part with numerous works of art destined to embellish its privileged neighbour, the general level of prosperity in the 4th century was rising. Commercial stagnation was checked by a renewed expansion of trade consequent upon the diversion of the trade routes to the east from Egypt to the Euxine and Aegean Seas. Agriculture remained in a depressed condition, and many small proprietors were reduced to serfdom; but the fiscal interests of the government called for the good treatment of this class, whose growth at the expense of the slaves was an important step in the gradual equalization of the entire population under the central despotism which restored solidarity to the Greek nation.

This prosperity received a sharp set-back by a series of unusually severe earthquakes in 375 and by the irruption of a host of Visigoths under Alaric (395-396), whom the imperial officers allowed to overrun the whole land unmolested and the local levies were unable to check. Though ultimately hunted down in Arcadia and induced to leave the province, Alaric had time to execute systematic devastations which crippled Greece for several decades. The arrears of taxation which accumulated in consequence were remitted by Theodosius II. in 428.

The emperors of the 4th century made several attempts to stamp out by edict the old pagan religion, which, with its accompaniment of festivals, oracles and mysteries, still maintained an outward appearance of vigour, and, along with the philosophy in which the intellectual classes found comfort, retained the affection of the Greeks. Except for the decree of Theodosius I. by which the Olympian games were interdicted (394), these measures had no great effect, and indeed were not rigorously enforced. Paganism survived in Greece till about 600, but the interchange of ideas and practices which the long-continued contact with Christianity had effected considerably modified its character. Hence the Christian religion, though slow in making its way, eventually gained a sure footing among a nation which accepted it spontaneously. The hold of the Church upon the Greeks was strengthened by the judicious manner in which the clergy, unsupported by official patronage and often out of sympathy with the Arian emperors, identified itself with the interests of the people. Though in the days when the orthodox Church found favour at court corruption spread among its higher branches, the clergy as a whole rendered conspicuous service in opposing the arbitrary interferences of the central government and in upholding the use of the Hellenic tongue, together with some rudiments of Hellenic culture.

The separation of the eastern and western provinces of the empire ultimately had an important effect in restoring the language and customs of Greece to their predominant position in the Levant. This result, however, was long retarded by the romanizing policy of Constantine and his successors. The emperors of the 5th and 6th centuries had no regard for Greek culture, and Justinian I. actively counteracted Hellenism by propagating Roman law in Greece, by impairing the powers of the self-governing cities, and by closing the philosophical schools at Athens (529). In course of time the inhabitants had so far forgotten their ancient culture that they abandoned the name of Hellenes for that of Romans (_Rhomaioi_). For a long time Greece continued to be an obscure and neglected province, with no interests beyond its church and its commercial operations, and its culture declined rapidly. Its history for some centuries dwindles into a record of barbarian invasions which, in addition to occasional plagues and earthquakes, seem to have been the only events found worthy of record by the contemporary chroniclers.

In the 5th century Greece was only subjected to brief raids by Vandal pirates (466-474) and Ostrogoths (482). In Justinian's reign irruptions by Huns and Avars took place, but led to no far-reaching results. The emperor had endeavoured to strengthen the country's defences by repairing the fortifications of cities and frontier posts (530), but his policy of supplanting the local guards by imperial troops and so rendering the natives incapable of self-defence was ill-advised; fortunately it was never carried out with energy, and so the Greek militias were occasionally able to render good service against invaders.

Slavonic immigrations.

Towards the end of the century mention is made for the first time of an incursion by Slavonic tribes (581). These invaders are to be regarded as merely the forerunners of a steady movement of immigration by which a considerable part of Greece passed for a time into foreign hands. It is doubtful how far the newcomers won their territory by force of arms; in view of the desolation of many rural tracts, which had long been in progress as a result of economic changes, it seems probable that numerous settlements were made on unoccupied land and did not challenge serious opposition. At any rate the effect upon the Greek population was merely to accelerate its emigration from the interior to the coastland and the cities. The foreigners, consisting mainly of Slovenes and Wends, occupied the mountainous inland, where they mostly led a pastoral life; the natives retained some strips of plain and dwelt secure in their walled towns, among which the newly-built fortresses of Monemvasia, Corone and Calamata soon rose to prosperity. The Slavonic element, to judge by the geographical names in that tongue which survive in Greece, is specially marked in N.W. Greece and Peloponnesus; central Greece appears to have been protected against them by the fortress-square of Chalcis, Thebes, Corinth and Athens. For a long time the two nations dwelt side by side without either displacing the other. The Slavs were too rude and poor, and too much distracted with cantonal feuds, to make any further headway; the Greeks, unused to arms and engrossed in commerce, were content to adopt a passive attitude. The central government took no steps to dislodge the invaders, until in 783 the empress Irene sent an expedition which reduced most of the tribes to pay tribute. In 810 a desperate attempt by the Slavs to capture Patrae was foiled; henceforth their power steadily decreased and their submission to the emperor was made complete by 850. A powerful factor in their subjugation was the Greek clergy, who by the 10th century had christianized and largely hellenized all the foreigners save a remnant in the peninsula of Maina.

II. THE BYZANTINE PERIOD.--In the 7th century the Greek language made its way into the imperial army and civil service, but European Greece continued to have little voice in the administration. The land was divided into four "themes" under a yearly appointed civil and military governor. Imperial troops were stationed at the chief strategic points, while the natives contributed ships for naval defence. During the dispute about images the Greeks were the backbone of the image-worshipping party, and the iconoclastic edicts of Leo III. led to a revolt in 727 which, however, was easily crushed by the imperial fleet; a similar movement in 823, when the Greeks sent 350 ships to aid a pretender, met with the same fate. The firm government of the Isaurian dynasty seems to have benefited Greece, whose commerce and industry again became flourishing. In spite of occasional set-backs due to the depredations of pirates, notably the Arab corsairs who visited the Aegean from the 7th century onwards, the Greeks remained the chief carriers in the Levant until the rise of the Italian republics, supplying all Europe with its silk fabrics.

In the 10th century Greece experienced a renewal of raids from the Balkan tribes. The Bulgarians made incursions after 929 and sometimes penetrated to the Isthmus; but they mostly failed to capture the cities, and in 995 their strength was broken by a crushing defeat on the Spercheius at the hands of the Byzantine army. Yet their devastations greatly thinned the population of northern Greece, and after 1084 Thessaly was occupied without resistance by nomad tribes of Vlachs. In 1084 also Greece was subjected to the first attack from the new nations of the west, when the Sicilian Normans gained a footing in the Ionian islands. The same people made a notable raid upon the seaboard of Greece in 1145-1146, and sacked the cities of Thebes and Corinth. The Venetians also appear as rivals of the Greeks, and after 1122 their encroachments in the Aegean Sea never ceased.

In spite of these attacks, the country on the whole maintained its prosperity. The travellers Idrisi of Palermo (1153) and Benjamin of Tudela (1161) testify to the briskness of commerce, which induced many foreign merchants to take up their residence in Greece. But this prosperity revived an aristocracy of wealth which used its riches and power for purely selfish ends, and under the increasing laxity of imperial control the _archontes_ or municipal rulers often combined with the clergy in oppressing the poorer classes. Least of all were these nobles prepared to become the champions of Greece against foreign invaders at a time when they alone could have organized an effectual resistance.

III. _The Latin Occupation and Turkish Conquest._--The capture of Constantinople and dissolution of the Byzantine empire by the Latins (1204) brought in its train an invasion of Greece by Frankish barons eager for new territory. The natives, who had long forgotten the use of arms and dreaded no worse oppression from their new masters, submitted almost without resistance, and only the N.W. corner of Greece, where Michael Angelus, a Byzantine prince, founded the "despotat" of Epirus, was saved from foreign occupation. The rest of the country was divided up between a number of Frankish barons, chief among whom were the dukes of Achaea (or Peloponnese) and "grand signors" of Thebes and Athens, the Venetians, who held naval stations at different points and the island of Crete, and various Italian adventurers who mainly settled in the Cyclades. The conquerors transplanted their own language, customs and religion to their new possessions, and endeavoured to institute the feudal system of land-tenure. Yet recognizing the superiority of Greek civil institutions they allowed the natives to retain their law and internal administration and confirmed proprietors in possession of their land on payment of a rent; the Greek church was subordinated to the Roman archbishops, but upheld its former control over the people. The commerce and industry of the Greek cities was hardly affected by the change of government.

Greek history during the Latin occupation loses its unity and has to be followed in several threads. In the north the "despots" of Epirus extended their rule to Thessaly and Macedonia, but eventually were repulsed by the Asiatic Greeks of Nicaea, and after a decisive defeat at Pelagonia (1259) reduced to a small dominion round Iannina. Thessaly continued to change masters rapidly. Till 1308 it was governed by a branch line of the Epirote dynasty. When this family died out it fell to the Grand Catalan Company; in 1350 it was conquered along with Epirus by Stephen Dushan, king of Servia. About 1397 it was annexed by the Ottoman Turks, who after 1431 also gradually wrested Epirus from its latest possessors, the Beneventine family of Tocco (1390-1469).

The leading power in central Greece was the Burgundian house de la Roche, which established a mild and judicious government in Boeotia and Attica and in 1261 was raised to ducal rank by the French king Louis IX. A conflict with the Grand Catalan Company resulted in a disastrous defeat of the Franks on the Boeotian Cephissus (1311) and the occupation of central Greece by the Spanish mercenaries, who seized for themselves the barons' fiefs and installed princes from the Sicilian house of Aragon as "dukes of Athens and Neopatras" (Thessaly). After seventy-five years of oppressive rule and constant wars with their neighbours the Catalans were expelled by the Peloponnesian baron Nerio Acciaiuoli. The new dynasty, whose peaceful government revived its subjects' industry, became tributary to the Turks about 1415, but was deposed by Sultan Mahommed II., who annexed central Greece in 1456.

The conquest of the Peloponnese was effected by two French knights, William Champlitte and Geoffrey Villehardouin, the latter of whom founded a dynasty of "princes of all Achaea." The rulers of this line were men of ability, who controlled their barons and spiritual vassals with a firm hand and established good order throughout their province. The Franks of the Morea maintained as high a standard of culture as their compatriots at home, while the natives grew rich enough from their industry to pay considerable taxes without discontent. The climax of the Villehardouins' power was attained under Prince William, who subdued the last independent cities of the coast and the mountaineers of Maina (1246-1248). In 1259, however, the same ruler was involved in the war between the rulers of Epirus and Nicaea, and being captured at the battle of Pelagonia, could only ransom himself by the cession of Laconia to the restored Byzantine empire. This new dependency after 1349 was treated with great care by the Byzantine monarchs, who sought to repress the violence of the local aristocracies by sending their kinsmen to govern under the title of "despots." On the other hand, with the extinction of the Villehardouin dynasty the Frankish province fell more and more into anarchy; at the same time the numbers of the foreigners were constantly dwindling through war, and as they disdained to recruit them by intermarriage, the preponderance of the native element in the Morea eventually became complete. Thus by 1400 the Byzantines were enabled to recover control over almost the whole peninsula and apportion it among several "despots." But the mutual quarrels of these princes soon proved fatal to their rule. Already in the 14th century they had employed Albanians and the Turkish pirates who harried their coasts as auxiliaries in their wars. The Albanians largely remained as settlers, and the connexion with the Turks could no longer be shaken off. In spite of attempts to fortify the Isthmus (1415) an Ottoman army penetrated into Morea and deported many inhabitants in 1423. An invasion of central Greece by the despot Constantine was punished by renewed raids in 1446 and 1450. In 1457 the despot Thomas withheld the tribute which he had recently stipulated to pay, but was reduced to obedience by an expedition under Mahommed II. (1458). A renewed revolt in 1459 was punished by an invasion attended with executions and deportations on a large scale, and by the annexation of the Morea to Turkey (1460).

IV. _The Turkish Dominion till 1800._--Under the Ottoman government Greece was split up into six _sanjaks_ or military divisions: (1) Morea, (2) Epirus, (3) Thessaly, (4) Euboea, Boeotia and Attica, (5) Aetolia and Acarnania, (6) the rest of central Greece, with capitals at Nauplia, Jannina, Trikkala, Negropont (Chalkis), Karlili and Lepanto; further divisions were subsequently composed of Crete and the islands. In each _sanjak_ a number of fiefs was apportioned to Turkish settlers, who were bound in return to furnish some mounted men for the sultan's army, the total force thus held in readiness being over 7000. The local government was left in the hands of the archontes or primates in each community, who also undertook the farming of the taxes and the policing of their districts. Law was usually administered by the Greek clergy. The natives were not burdened with large imposts, but the levying of the land-tithes was effected in an inconvenient fashion, and the capitation-tax, to which all Christians were subjected was felt as a humiliation. A further grievance lay in the requisitions of forced labour which the pashas were entitled to call for; but the most galling exaction was the tribute of children for the recruiting of the Janissaries (q.v.), which was often levied with great ruthlessness. The habitual weakness of the central government also left the Greeks exposed to frequent oppression by the Turkish residents and by their own magistrates and clergy. But the new rulers met with singularly little opposition. The dangerous elements of the population had been cleared away by Mahommed's executions; the rest were content to absorb their energies in agriculture and commerce, which in spite of preferential duties and capitulations to foreign powers largely fell again into the hands of Greeks. Another important instrument by which the people were kept down was their own clergy, whom the Turkish rulers treated with marked favour and so induced to acquiesce in their dominion.

In the following centuries Greece was often the theatre of war in which the Greeks played but a passive part. Several wars with Venice (1463-79, 1498-1504) put the Turks in possession of the last Italian strongholds on the mainland. But the issue was mainly fought out on sea; the conflicts which had never ceased in the Aegean since the coming of the Italians now grew fiercer than ever; Greek ships and sailors were frequently requisitioned for the Turkish fleets, and the damage done to the Greek seaboard by the belligerents and by fleets of adventurers and corsairs brought about the depopulation of many islands and coast-strips. The conquest of the Aegean by the Ottomans was completed by 1570; but Venice retained Crete till 1669 and never lost Corfu until its cession to France in 1797.

In 1684 the Venetians took advantage of the preoccupation of Turkey on the Danube to attack the Morea. A small mercenary army under Francesco Morosini captured the strong places with remarkable ease, and by 1687 had conquered almost the whole peninsula. In 1687 the invaders also captured Athens and Lepanto; but the former town had soon to be abandoned, and with their failure to capture Negropont (1688) the Venetians were brought to a standstill. By the peace of Karlowitz (1699) the Morea became a possession of Venice. The new rulers, in spite of the commercial restrictions which they imposed in favour of their own traders, checked the impoverishment and decrease of population (from 300,000 to 86,000) which the war had caused. By their attempts to cooperate with the native magistrates and the mildness of their administration they improved the spirit of their subjects. But they failed to make their government popular, and when in 1715 the Ottomans with a large and well-disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea, the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the peace of Passarowitz (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time in the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania.

The condition of the Greeks in the 18th century showed a great improvement which gave rise to yet greater hopes. Already in the 17th century the personal services of the subjects had been commuted into money contributions, and since 1676 the tribute of children fell into abeyance. The increasing use of Greek officials in the Turkish civil service, coupled with the privileges accorded to the Greek clergy throughout the Balkan countries, tended to recall the consciousness of former days of predominance in the Levant. Lastly, the education of the Greeks, which had always remained on a comparatively high level, was rapidly improved by the foundation of new schools and academies.

The long neglect which Greece had experienced at the hands of the European Powers was broken in 1764, when Russian agents appeared in the country with promises of a speedy deliverance from the Turks. A small expedition under Feodor and Alexis Orloff actually landed in the Morea in 1769, but failed to rouse national sentiment. Although the Russian fleet gained a notable victory off Chesme near Chios, a heavy defeat near Tripolitza ruined the prospects of the army. The Albanian troops in the Turkish army subsequently ravaged the country far and wide, until in 1779 they were exterminated by a force of Turkish regulars. In 1774 a concession, embodied in the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, by which Greek traders were allowed to sail under the protection of the Russian flag, marked an important step in the rehabilitation of the country as an independent power. Greek commerce henceforth spread swiftly over the Mediterranean, and increased intercourse developed a new sense of Hellenic unity. Among the pioneers who fostered this movement should be mentioned Constantine Rhigas, the "modern Tyrtaeus," and Adamantios Coraës (q.v.), the reformer of the Greek tongue. The revived memories of ancient Hellas and the impression created by the French revolution combined to give the final impulse which made the Greeks strike for freedom. By 1800 the population of Greece had increased to 1,000,000, and although 200,000 of these were Albanians, the common aversion to the Moslem united the two races. The military resources of the country alone remained deficient, for the _armatoli_ or local militias, which had never been quite disbanded since Byzantine times, were at last suppressed by Ali Pasha of Iannina and found but a poor substitute in the klephts who henceforth spring into prominence. But at the first sign of weakness in the Turkish dominion the Greek nation was ready to rise, and the actual outbreak of revolt had become merely a question of time.

AUTHORITIES.--General: G. Finlay, _History of Greece_ (ed. Tozer, Oxford, 1877), especially vols. i., iv., v.; K. Paparrhigopoulos, [Greek: Historia tou Hellênikou ethnous] (4th ed., Athens, 1903), vols. ii.-v.; _Histoire de la civilisation hellénique_ (Paris, 1878); R. v. Scala, _Das Griechentum seit Alexander dem Grossen_ (Leipzig and Vienna, 1904); and specially W. Miller, _The Latins in the Levant_ (1908).

Special--(a) The Roman period: Strabo, bks. viii.-x.; Pausanias, _Descriptio Graeciae_; G. F. Hertzberg, _Die Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer_ (Halle, 1866-1875); Sp. Lampros, [Greek: Historia tês Hellados] (Athens, 1888 sqq.), vol. iii.; A. Holm, _History of Greece_ (Eng. trans., London, 1894-1898). vol. iv., chs. 19, 24, 26, 28 seq.; Th. Mommsen, _The Provinces of the Roman Empire_ (Eng. trans., London, 1886, ch. 7); J. P. Mahaffy, _The Greek World under Roman Sway, from Polybius to Plutarch_ (London, 1890); W. Miller, "The Romans in Greece" (_Westminster Review_, August 1903, pp. 186-210); L. Friedländer, "Griechenland unter den Römern" (_Deutsche Rundschau_, 1899, pp. 251-274, 402-430). (b) The Byzantine and Latin periods: G. F. Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens_ (Gotha, 1876-1879), vols. i., ii.; C. Hopf, _Geschichte Griechenlands im Mittelalter_ (Leipzig, 1868); J. A. Buchon, _Histoire des conquêtes et de l'établissement des Français dans les États de l'ancienne Grèce_ (Paris, 1846); G. Schmitt, _The Chronicle of Morea_ (London, 1904); W. Miller, "The Princes of the Peloponnese" (_Quarterly Review_, July 1905, pp. 109-135); D. Bikelas, _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_ (Paisley and London, 1890); _La Grèce byzantine et moderne_ (Paris, 1893), pp. 1-193. (c) The Turkish and Venetian periods: Hertzberg, _op. cit._, vol. iii.; K. M. Bartholdy, _Geschichte Griechenlands von der Eroberung Konstantinopels_ (Leipzig, 1870), bks. i. and ii., pp. 1-155; K. N. Sathas, [Greek: Tourkokratoumenê Hellas] (Athens, 1869); W. Miller, "Greece under the Turks" (_Westminster Review_, August and September 1904, pp. 195-210, 304-320; _English Historical Review_, 1904, pp. 646-668); L. Ranke, "Die Venetianer in Morea" (_Historisch-politische Zeitschrift_, ii. 405-502). (d) Special subjects: Religion. E. Hatch, _The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church_ (London, 1890). Ethnology. J. P. Fallmerayer, _Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters_ (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1830); S. Zampelios, [Greek: Peri pêgôn neoellênikês ethnotêtos] (Athens, 1857); A. Philippson, "Zur Ethnographie des Peloponnes" [_Petermann's Mitteilungen_ 36 (1890), pp. 1-11, 33-41]; A. Vasiljev, "Die Slaven in Griechenland" [_Vizantijsky Vremennik_, St Petersburg, 5 (1898), pp. 404-438, 626-670].

See also ROMAN EMPIRE, LATER; ATHENS. (M. O. B. C.)

c. _Modern History: 1800-1908._

The decadence of Turkey.

At the beginning of the 19th century Greece was still under Turkish domination, but the dawn of freedom was already breaking, and a variety of forces were at work which prepared the way for the acquisition of national independence. The decadence of the Ottoman empire, which began with the retreat of the Turks from Vienna in 1683, was indicated in the 18th century by the weakening of the central power, the spread of anarchy in the provinces, the ravages of the janissaries, and the establishment of practically independent sovereignties or fiefs, such as those of Mehemet of Bushat at Skodra and of Ali Pasha of Tepelen at Iannina; the 19th century witnessed the first uprisings of the Christian populations and the detachment of the outlying portions of European Turkey. Up to the end of the 18th century none of the subject races had risen in spontaneous revolt against the Turks, though in some instances they rendered aid to the sultan's enemies; the spirit of the conquered nations had been broken by ages of oppression. In some of the remoter and more mountainous districts, however, the authority of the Turks had never been completely established; in Montenegro a small fragment of the Serb race maintained its independence; among the Greeks, the Mainotes in the extreme south of the Morea and the Sphakiote mountaineers in Crete had never been completely subdued. Resistance to Ottoman rule was maintained sporadically in the mountainous districts by the Greek _klephts_ or brigands, the counterpart of the Slavonic _haiduks_, and by the pirates of the Aegean; the _armatoles_ or bodies of Christian warriors, recognized by the Turks as a local police, often differed little in their proceedings from the brigands whom they were appointed to pursue.

Russian influence.

Of the series of insurrections which took place in the 19th century, the first in order of time was the Servian, which broke out in 1804; the second was the Greek, which began in 1821. In both these movements the influence of Russia played a considerable part. In the case of the Servians Russian aid was mainly diplomatic, in that of the Greeks it eventually took a more material form. Since the days of Peter the Great, the eyes of Russia had been fixed on Constantinople, the great metropolis of the Orthodox faith. The policy of inciting the Greek Christians to revolt against their oppressors, which was first adopted in the reign of the empress Anna, was put into practical operation by the empress Catharine II., whose favourite, Orlov, appeared in the Aegean with a fleet in 1769 and landed in the Morea, where he organized a revolt. The attempt proved a failure; Orlov re-embarked, leaving the Greeks at the mercy of the Turks, and terrible massacres took place at Tripolitza, Lemnos and elsewhere. By the treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarji (July 21, 1774) Russia obtained a vaguely-defined protectorate over the Orthodox Greek subjects of Turkey, and in 1781 she arrived at an arrangement with Austria, known as the "Greek project," for a partition of Turkish territory and the restoration of the Byzantine empire under Constantine, the son of Catharine II. The outbreak of the French Revolution distracted the attention of the two empires, but Russia never ceased to intrigue among the Christian subjects of Turkey. A revolt of the inhabitants of Suli in 1790 took place with her connivance, and in the two first decades of the 19th century her agents were active and ubiquitous.

Greek revolutionary activity.

The influence of the French Revolution, which pervaded all Europe, extended to the shores of the Aegean. The Greeks, who had hitherto been drawn together mainly by a common religion, were now animated by the sentiment of nationality and by an ardent desire for political freedom. The national awakening, as in the case of the other subject Christian nations, was preceded by a literary revival. Literary and patriotic societies, the Philhellenes, the Philomousi, came into existence; Greek schools were founded everywhere; the philological labours of Coraës, which created the modern written language, furnished the nation with a mode of literary expression; the songs of Rhigas of Velestino fired the enthusiasm of the people. In 1815 was founded the celebrated _Philiké Hetaerea_, or friendly society, a revolutionary organization with centres at Moscow, Bucharest, Triest, and in all the cities of the Levant; it collected subscriptions, issued manifestos, distributed arms and made preparations for the coming insurrection. The revolt of Ali Pasha of Iannina against the authority of the sultan in 1820 formed the prelude to the Greek uprising; this despot, who had massacred the Greeks by hundreds, now declared himself their friend, and became a member of the Hetaerea. In March 1821 Alexander Ypsilanti, a former aide-de-camp of the tsar Alexander I., and president of the Hetaerea, entered Moldavia from Russian territory at the head of a small force; in the same month Archbishop Germanos of Patras unfurled the standard of revolt at Kalavryta in the Morea.

Independence of Greece.

For the history of the prolonged struggle which followed see GREEK WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. The warfare was practically brought to a close by the annihilation of the Egyptian fleet at Navarino by the fleets of Great Britain, France and Russia on the 20th of October 1827. Nine months previously, Count John Capo d'Istria (q.v.), formerly minister of foreign affairs of the tsar Alexander, had been elected president of the Greek republic for seven years beginning on January 18, 1828. By the protocol of London (March 22, 1829) the Greek mainland south of a line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo, the Morea and the Cyclades were declared a principality tributary to the sultan under a Christian prince. The limits drawn by the protocol of London were confirmed by the treaty of Adrianople (September 14, 1829), by which Greece was constituted an independent monarchy. The governments of Russia, France and England were far from sharing the enthusiasm which the gallant resistance of the Greeks had excited among the peoples of Europe, and which inspired the devotion of Byron, Cochrane, Sir Richard Church, Fabvier and other distinguished Philhellenes; jealousies prevailed among the three protecting powers, and the newly-liberated nation was treated in a niggardly spirit; its narrow limits were reduced by a new protocol (February 3, 1830), which drew the boundary line at the Aspropotamo, the Spercheios and the Gulf of Lamia. Capo d'Istria, whose Russian proclivities and arbitrary government gave great offence to the Greeks, was assassinated by two members of the Mavromichalis family (October 9, 1831), and a state of anarchy followed. Before his death the throne of Greece had been offered to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, afterwards king of the Belgians, who declined it, basing his refusal on the inadequacy of the limits assigned to the new kingdom and especially the exclusion of Crete.

King Otto.

By the convention of London (May 7, 1832) Greece was declared an independent kingdom under the protection of Great Britain, France and Russia with Prince Otto, son of King Louis I. of Bavaria, as king. The frontier line, now traced from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Lamia, was fixed by the arrangement of Constantinople (July 21, 1832). King Otto, who had been brought up in a despotic court, ruled absolutely for the first eleven years of his reign; he surrounded himself with Bavarian advisers and Bavarian troops, and his rule was never popular. The Greek chiefs and politicians, who found themselves excluded from all influence and advancement, were divided into three factions which attached themselves respectively to the three protecting powers. On the 15th of September 1843 a military revolt broke out which compelled the king to dismiss the Bavarians and to accept a constitution. A responsible ministry, a senate nominated by the king, and a chamber elected by universal suffrage were now instituted. Mavrocordatos, the leader of the English party, became the first prime minister, but his government was overthrown at the ensuing elections, and a coalition of the French and Russian parties under Kolettes and Metaxas succeeded to power. The warfare of factions was aggravated by the rivalry between the British and French ministers, Sir Edmond Lyons and M. Piscatory; King Otto supported the French party, and trouble arose with the British government, which in 1847 despatched warships to enforce the payment of interest on the loan contracted after the War of Independence. A British fleet subsequently blockaded the Peiraeus in order to obtain satisfaction for the claims of Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew under British protection, whose house had been plundered during a riot. On the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Turkey in 1853 the Greeks displayed sympathy with Russia; armed bands were sent into Thessaly, and an insurrection was fomented in Epirus in the hope of securing an accession of territory. In order to prevent further hostile action on the part of Greece, British and French fleets made a demonstration against the Peiraeus, which was occupied by a French force during the Crimean War. The disappointment of the national hopes increased the unpopularity of King Otto, who had never acquiesced in constitutional rule. In 1862 a military revolt broke out, and a national assembly pronounced his deposition. The vacant throne was offered by the assembly to Duke Nicholas of Leuchtenberg, a cousin of the tsar, but the mass of the people desired a constitutional monarchy of the British type; a plebiscite was taken, and Prince Alfred of England was elected by an almost unanimous vote. The three protecting powers, however, had bound themselves to the exclusion of any member of their ruling houses. In the following year Prince William George of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, whom the British government had designated as a suitable candidate, was elected by the National Assembly with the title "George I., king of the Hellenes." Under the treaty of London (July 13, 1863) the change of dynasty was sanctioned by the three protecting powers, Great Britain undertaking to cede to Greece the seven Ionian Islands, which since 1815 had formed a commonwealth under British protection.

Accession of George I.

On the 29th of October 1863 the new sovereign arrived in Athens, and in the following June the British authorities handed over the Ionian Islands to a Greek commissioner. King George thus began his reign under the most favourable auspices, the patriotic sentiments of the Greeks being flattered by the acquisition of new territory. He was, however, soon confronted with constitutional difficulties; party spirit ran riot at Athens, the ministries which he appointed proved short-lived, his counsellor, Count Sponneck, became the object of violent attacks, and at the end of 1864 he was compelled to accept an ultra-democratic constitution, drawn up by the National Assembly. This, the sixth constitution voted since the establishment of the kingdom, is that which is still in force. In the following year Count Sponneck left Greece, and the attention of the nation was concentrated on the affairs of Crete. The revolution which broke out in that island received moral and material support from the Greek government, with the tacit approval of Russia; military preparations were pressed forward at Athens, and cruisers were purchased, but the king, aware of the inability of Greece to attain her ends by warlike means, discouraged a provocative attitude towards Turkey, and eventually dismissed the bellicose cabinet of Koumoundouros. The removal of a powerful minister commanding a large parliamentary majority constituted an important precedent in the exercise of the royal prerogative; the king adopted a similar course with regard to Delyannes in 1892 and 1897. The relations with the porte, however, continued to grow worse, and Hobart Pasha, with a Turkish fleet, made a demonstration off Syra. The Cretan insurrection was finally crushed in the spring of 1869, and a conference of the powers, which assembled that year at Paris, imposed a settlement of the Turkish dispute on Greece, but took no steps on behalf of the Cretans. In 1870 the murder of several Englishmen by brigands in the neighbourhood of Athens produced an unfavourable impression in Europe; in the following year the confiscation of the Laurion mines, which had been ceded to a Franco-Italian company, provoked energetic action on the part of France and Italy. In 1875, after an acute constitutional crisis, Charilaos Trikoupes, who but ten months previously had been imprisoned for denouncing the crown in a newspaper article, was summoned to form a cabinet. This remarkable man, the only great statesman whom modern Greece has produced, exercised an extraordinary influence over his countrymen for the next twenty years; had he been able to maintain himself uninterruptedly in power during that period, Greece might have escaped a long succession of misfortunes. His principal opponent, Theodore Delyannes, succeeded in rallying a strong body of adherents, and political parties, hitherto divided into numerous factions, centred around these two prominent figures.

New frontier, 1881.

In 1877 the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War produced a fever of excitement in Greece; it was felt that the quarrels of the party leaders compromised the interests of the country, and the populace of Athens insisted on the formation of a coalition cabinet. The "great" or "oecumenical" ministry, as it was called, now came into existence under the presidency of the veteran Kanares; in reality, however, it was controlled by Trikoupes, who, recognizing the unpreparedness of the country, resolved on a pacific policy. The capture of Plevna by the Russians brought about the fall of the "oecumenical" ministry, and Koumoundouros and Delyannes, who succeeded to power, ordered the invasion of Thessaly. Their warlike energies, however, were soon checked by the signing of the San Stefano Treaty, in which the claims of Greece to an extension of frontier were altogether ignored. At the Berlin congress two Greek delegates obtained a hearing on the proposal of Lord Salisbury. The congress decided that the rectification of the frontier should be left to Turkey and Greece, the mediation of the powers being proposed in case of non-agreement; it was suggested, however, that the rectified frontier should extend from the valley of the Peneus on the east to the mouth of the Kalamas, opposite the southern extremity of Corfu, on the west. In 1879 a Greco-Turkish commission for the delimitation met first at Prevesa, and subsequently at Constantinople, but its conferences were without result, the Turkish commissioners declining the boundary suggested at Berlin. Greece then invoked the arbitration of the powers, and the settlement of the question was undertaken by a conference of ambassadors at Berlin (1880). The line approved by the conference was practically that suggested by the congress; Turkey, however, refused to accept it, and the Greek army was once more mobilized. It was evident, however, that nothing could be gained by an appeal to arms, the powers not being prepared to apply coercion to Turkey. By a convention signed at Constantinople in July 1881, the demarcation was entrusted to a commission representing the six powers and the two interested parties. The line drawn ran westwards from a point between the mouth of the Peneus and Platamona to the summits of Mounts Kritiri and Zygos, thence following the course of the river Arta to its mouth. An area of 13,395 square kilometres, with a population of 300,000 souls, was thus added to the kingdom, while Turkey was left in possession of Iannina, Metzovo and most of Epirus. The ceded territory was occupied by Greek troops before the close of the year.

Trikoupes and Delyannes.

In 1882 Trikoupes came into power at the head of a strong party, over which he exercised an influence and authority hitherto unknown in Greek political life. With the exception of three brief intervals (May 1885 to May 1886, October 1890 to February 1892, and a few months in 1893), he continued in office for the next twelve years. The reforms which he introduced during this period were generally of an unpopular character, and were loudly denounced by his democratic rivals; most of them were cancelled during the intervals when his opponent Delyannes occupied the premiership. The same want of continuity proved fatal to the somewhat ambitious financial programme which he now inaugurated. While pursuing a cautious foreign policy, and keeping in control the rash impetuosity of his fellow-countrymen, he shared to the full the national desire for expansion, but he looked to the development of the material resources of the country as a necessary preliminary to the realization of the dreams of Hellenism. With this view he endeavoured to attract foreign capital to the country, and the confidence which he inspired in financial circles abroad enabled him to contract a number of loans and to better the financial situation by a series of conversions. Under a stable, wise, and economical administration this far-reaching programme might perhaps have been carried out with success, but the vicissitudes of party politics and the periodical outbursts of national sentiment rendered its realization impossible. In April 1885 Trikoupes fell from power, and a few months later the indignation excited in Greece by the revolution of Philippopolis placed Delyannes once more at the head of a warlike movement. The army and fleet were again mobilized with a view to exacting territorial compensation for the aggrandizement of Bulgaria, and several conflicts with the Turkish troops took place on the frontier. The powers, after repeatedly inviting the Delyannes cabinet to disarm, established a blockade of Peiraeus and other Greek ports (8th May 1886), France alone declining to cooperate in this measure. Delyannes resigned (11th May) and Trikoupes, who succeeded to power, issued a decree of disarmament (25th May). Hostilities, however, continued on the frontier, and the blockade was not raised till 7th June. Trikoupes had now to face the serious financial situation brought about by the military activity of his predecessor. He imposed heavy taxation, which the people, for the time at least, bore without murmuring, and he continued to inspire such confidence abroad that Greek securities maintained their price in the foreign market. It was ominous, however, that a loan which he issued in 1890 was only partially covered. Meanwhile the Cretan difficulty had become once more a source of trouble to Greece. In 1889 Trikoupes was grossly deceived by the Turkish government, which, after inducing him to dissuade the Cretans from opposing the occupation of certain fortified posts, issued a firman annulling many important provisions in the constitution of the island. The indignation in Greece was intense, and popular discontent was increased by the success of the Bulgarians in obtaining the _exequatur_ of the sultan for a number of bishops in Macedonia. In the autumn of 1890 Trikoupes was beaten at the elections, and Delyannes, who had promised the people a radical reform of the taxation, succeeded to power. He proved unequal, however, to cope with the financial difficulty, which now became urgent; and the king, perceiving that a crisis was imminent, dismissed him and recalled Trikoupes. The hope of averting national bankruptcy depended on the possibility of raising a loan by which the rapid depreciation of the paper currency might be arrested, but foreign financiers demanded guarantees which seemed likely to prove hurtful to Greek susceptibilities; an agitation was raised at Athens, and Trikoupes suddenly resigned (May 1893). His conduct at this juncture appears to have been due to some misunderstandings which had arisen between him and the king. The Sotiropoulos-Rhalles ministry which followed effected a temporary settlement with the national creditors, but Trikoupes, returning to power in the autumn, at once annulled the arrangement. He now proceeded to a series of arbitrary measures which provoked the severest criticism throughout Europe and exposed Greece to the determined hostility of Germany. A law was hastily passed which deprived the creditors of 70% of their interest, and the proceeds of the revenues conceded to the monopoly bondholders were seized (December 1893). Long negotiations followed, resulting in an arrangement which was subsequently reversed by the German bondholders. In January 1895 Trikoupes resigned office, in consequence of a disagreement with the crown prince on a question of military discipline. His popularity had vanished, his health was shattered, and he determined to abandon his political career. His death at Cannes (11th April 1896), on the eve of a great national convulsion, deprived Greece of his masterly guidance and sober judgment at a critical moment in her history.

Nationalist agitation, 1896.

His funeral took place at Athens on 23rd April, while the city was still decorated with flags and garlands after the celebration of the Olympic games. The revival of the ancient festival, which drew together multitudes of Greeks from abroad, led to a lively awakening of the national sentiment, hitherto depressed by the economic misfortunes of the kingdom, and a secret patriotic society, known as the _Ethniké Hetaerea_, began to develop prodigious activity, enrolling members from every rank of life and establishing branches in all parts of the Hellenic world. The society had been founded in 1894, by a handful of young officers who considered that the military organization of the country was neglected by the government; its principal aim was the preparation of an insurrectionary movement in Macedonia, which, owing to the activity of the Bulgarians and the reconciliation of Prince Ferdinand with Russia, seemed likely to be withdrawn for ever from the domain of Greek irredentism. The outbreak of another insurrection in Crete supplied the means of creating a diversion for Turkey while the movement in Macedonia was being matured; arms and volunteers were shipped to the island, but the society was as yet unable to force the hand of the government, and Delyannes, who had succeeded Trikoupes in 1895, loyally aided the powers in the restoration of order by advising the Cretans to accept the constitution of 1896. The appearance of strong insurgent bands in Macedonia in the summer of that year testified to the activity of the society and provoked the remonstrances of the powers, while the spread of its propaganda in the army led to the issue of a royal rescript announcing grand military manoeuvres, the formation of a standing camp, and the rearmament of the troops with a new weapon (6th December). The objects of the society were effectually furthered by the evident determination of the porte to evade the application of the stipulated reforms in Crete; the Cretan Christians lost patience, and indignation was widespread in Greece. Emissaries of the society were despatched to the island, and affairs were brought to a climax by an outbreak at Canea on 4th February 1897. The Turkish troops fired on the Christians, thousands of whom took refuge on the warships of the powers, and a portion of the town was consumed by fire.

Cretan crisis, 1897.

Delyannes now announced that the government had abandoned the policy of abstention. On the 6th two warships were despatched to Canea, and on the 10th a torpedo flotilla, commanded by Prince George, left Peiraeus amid tumultuous demonstrations. The ostensible object of these measures was the protection of Greek subjects in Crete, and Delyannes was still anxious to avoid a definite rupture with Turkey, but the Ethniké Hetaerea had found means to influence several members of the ministry and to alarm the king. Prince George, who had received orders to prevent the landing of Turkish reinforcements on the island, soon withdrew from Cretan waters owing to the decisive attitude adopted by the commanders of the international squadron. A note was now addressed by the government to the powers, declaring that Greece could no longer remain a passive spectator of events in Crete, and on the 13th of February a force of 1500 men, under Colonel Vassos, embarked at Peiraeus. On the same day a Greek warship fired on a Turkish steam yacht which was conveying troops from Candia to Sitia. Landing near Canea on the night of the 14th, Colonel Vassos issued a proclamation announcing the occupation of Crete in the name of King George. He had received orders to expel the Turkish garrisons from the fortresses, but his advance on Canea was arrested by the international occupation of that town, and after a few engagements with the Turkish troops and irregulars he withdrew into the interior of the island. Proposals for the coercion of Greece were now put forward by Germany, but Great Britain declined to take action until an understanding had been arrived at with regard to the future government of Crete. Eventually (2nd March) collective notes were addressed to the Greek and Turkish governments announcing the decision of the powers that (1) Crete could in no case in present circumstances be annexed to Greece; (2) in view of the delays caused by Turkey in the application of the reforms, Crete should be endowed with an effective autonomous administration, calculated to ensure it a separate government, under the suzerainty of the sultan. Greece was at the same time summoned to remove its army and fleet within the space of six days, and Turkey was warned that its troops must for the present be concentrated in the fortified towns and ultimately withdrawn from the island. The action of the powers produced the utmost exasperation at Athens; the populace demanded war with Turkey and the annexation of Crete, and the government drew up a reply to the powers in which, while expressing the conviction that autonomy would prove a failure, it indicated its readiness to withdraw some of the ships, but declined to recall the army. A suggestion that the troops might receive a European mandate for the preservation of order in the island proved unacceptable to the powers, owing to the aggressive action of Colonel Vassos after his arrival. Meanwhile troops, volunteers and munitions of war were hurriedly despatched to the Turkish frontier in anticipation of an international blockade of the Greek ports, but the powers contented themselves with a pacific blockade of Crete, and military preparations went on unimpeded.

War with Turkey.

While the powers dallied, the danger of war increased; on 29th March the crown prince assumed command of the Greek troops in Thessaly, and a few days later hostilities were precipitated by the irregular forces of the Ethniké Hetaerea, which attacked several Turkish outposts near Grevena. According to a report of its proceedings, subsequently published by the society, this invasion received the previous sanction of the prime minister. On 17th April Turkey declared war. The disastrous campaign which followed was of short duration, and it was evident from the outset that the Greeks had greatly underrated the military strength of their opponents (see GRECO-TURKISH WAR). After the evacuation of Larissa on the 24th, great discontent prevailed at Athens; Delyannes was invited by the king to resign, but refusing to do so was dismissed (29th April). His successor, Rhalles, after recalling the army from Crete (9th May) invoked the mediation of the powers, and an armistice was concluded on the 19th of that month. Thus ended an unfortunate enterprise, which was undertaken in the hope that discord among the powers would lead to a European war and the dismemberment of Turkey. Greek interference in Crete had at least the result of compelling Europe to withdraw the island for ever from Turkish rule. The conditions of peace put forward by Turkey included a war indemnity of £10,000,000 and the retention of Thessaly; the latter demand, however, was resolutely opposed by Great Britain, and the indemnity was subsequently reduced to £4,000,000. The terms agreed to by the powers were rejected by Rhalles; the chamber, however, refused him a vote of confidence and King George summoned Zaimes to power (October 3). The definitive treaty of peace, which was signed at Constantinople on the 6th of December, contained a provision for a slight modification of the frontier, designed to afford Turkey certain strategical advantages; the delimitation was carried out by a commission composed of military delegates of the powers and representatives of the interested parties. The evacuation of Thessaly by the Turkish troops was completed in June 1898. An immediate result of the war was the institution of an international financial commission at Athens, charged with the control of certain revenues assigned to the service of the national debt. The state of the country after the conclusion of hostilities was deplorable; the towns of northern Greece and the islands were crowded with destitute refugees from Thessaly; violent recriminations prevailed at Athens, and the position of the dynasty seemed endangered. A reaction, however, set in, in consequence of an attempt to assassinate King George (28th February 1898), whose great services to the nation in obtaining favourable terms from the powers began to receive general recognition. In the following summer the king made a tour through the country, and was everywhere received with enthusiasm. In the autumn the powers, on the initiative of Russia, decided to entrust Prince George of Greece with the government of Crete; on 26th November an intimation that the prince had been appointed high commissioner in the island was formally conveyed to the court of Athens, and on 21st December he landed in Crete amid enthusiastic demonstrations (see CRETE).

Macedonian troubles.

In April 1899 Zaimes gave way to Theotokes, the chief of the Trikoupist party, who introduced various improvements in the administration of justice and other reforms including a measure transferring the administration of the army from the minister of war to the crown prince. In May 1901 a meeting took place at Abbazia, under the auspices of the Austro-Hungarian government, between King George and King Charles of Rumania with a view to the conclusion of a Graeco-Rumanian understanding directed against the growth of Slavonic, and especially Bulgarian, influence in Macedonia. The compact, however, was destined to be short-lived owing to the prosecution of a Rumanian propaganda among the semi-Hellenized Vlachs of Macedonia. In November riots took place at Athens, the patriotic indignation of the university students and the populace being excited by the issue of a translation of the Gospels into modern Greek at the suggestion of the queen. The publication was attributed to Panslavist intrigues against Greek supremacy over the Orthodox populations of the East, and the archbishop of Athens was compelled to resign. Theotokes, whose life was attempted, retired from power, and Zaimes formed a cabinet. In 1902 the progress of the Bulgarian movement in Macedonia once more caused great irritation in Greece. Zaimes, having been defeated at the elections in December, resigned, and was succeeded by Delyannes, whose popularity had not been permanently impaired by the misfortunes of the war. Delyannes now undertook to carry out extensive economic reforms, and introduced a measure restoring the control of the army to the ministry of war. He failed, however, to carry out his programme, and, being deserted by a section of his followers, resigned in June 1903, when Theotokes again became prime minister. The new cabinet resigned within a month owing to the outbreak of disturbances in the currant-growing districts, and Rhalles took office for the second time (July 8). The Bulgarian insurrection in Macedonia during the autumn caused great excitement in Athens, and Rhalles adopted a policy of friendship with Turkey (see MACEDONIA). The co-operation of the Greek party in Macedonia with the Turkish authorities exposed it to the vengeance of the insurgents, and in the following year a number of Greek bands were sent into that country. The campaign of retaliation was continued in subsequent years.

Murder of Delyannes.

In December Rhalles, who had lost the support of the Delyannist party, was replaced by Theotokes, who promulgated a scheme of army reorganization, introduced various economies and imposed fresh taxation. In December the government was defeated on a vote of confidence and Delyannes once more became prime minister, obtaining a considerable majority in the elections which followed (March 1905), but on the 13th of June he was assassinated. He was succeeded by Rhalles, who effected a settlement of the currant question and cultivated friendly relations with Turkey in regard to Macedonia.

In the autumn anti-Greek demonstrations in Rumania led to a rupture of relations with that country. In December the ministry resigned owing to an adverse vote of the chamber, and Theotokes formed a cabinet. The new government, as a preliminary to military and naval reorganization, introduced a law directed against the candidature of military officers for parliament. Owing to obstruction practised by the military members of the chamber a dissolution took place, and at the subsequent elections (April 1906) Theotokes secured a large majority. In the autumn various excesses committed against the Greeks in Bulgaria in reprisal for the depredations of the Greek bands in Macedonia caused great indignation in Greece, but diplomatic relations between the two countries were not suspended. On the 26th of September Prince George, who had resigned the high commissionership of Crete, returned to Athens; the designation of his successors was accorded by the protecting powers to King George as a satisfaction to Greek national sentiment (see CRETE). The great increase in the activity of the Greek bands in Macedonia during the following spring and summer led to the delivery of a Turkish note at Athens (July 1907), which was supported by representations of the powers.

In October 1908 the proclamation by the Cretan assembly of union with Greece threatened fresh complications, the cautious attitude of the Greek government leading to an agitation in the army, which came to a head in 1909. On the 18th of July a popular demonstration against his Cretan policy led to the resignation of Theotokes, whose successor, Rhalles, announced a programme of military and economical reform. The army, however, took matters into its own hands, and on the 23rd of August Rhalles was replaced by Mavromichales, the nominee of the "Military League." For the next six months constitutional government was practically superseded by that of the League, and for a while the crown itself seemed to be in danger. The influence of the League, however, rapidly declined; army and navy quarrelled; and a fresh _coup d'état_ at the beginning of 1910 failed of its effect, owing to the firmness of the king. On the 7th of February Mavromichales resigned, and his successor, Dragoumis, accepting the Cretan leader Venezelo's suggestion of a national assembly, succeeded in persuading the League to dissolve (March 29) on receiving the king's assurance that such an assembly would be convened. On the 31st, accordingly, King George formally proclaimed the convocation of a national assembly to deal with the questions at issue.

AUTHORITIES.--Finlay, _History of Greece_ (Oxford, 1877); K. N. Sathas, [Greek: Mesaiônikê Bibliothêkê] (7 vols., Venice, 1872-1894); and [Greek: Mnêmeia Hellênikês historias]. _Documents inédits relatifs à l'histoire du moyen âge_ (9 vols., Paris, 1880-1890); Sp. Trikoupes, [Greek: Historia tês Hellênikês epanastaseôs] (4 vols., 3rd ed., Athens, 1888); K. Paparrhegopoulos, [Greek: Historia tou Hellênikou ethnous] (5 vols., 4th ed., Athens, 1903); J. Philemon, [Greek: Dokimion historikon peri tês Hellênikês epanastaseôs] (Athens, 1859-1861); P. Kontoyannes, [Greek: Oi Hellênes kata ton prôton epi Aikaterinês 'Rhôssotourkikon polemon] (Athens, 1903); D. G. Kampouroglos, [Greek: Historia tôn Athênaiôn, Tourkokratia,] 1458-1687 (2 vols., Athens, 1889-1890); and [Greek: Mnêmeia tês historias tôn Athênaiôn], (3 vols., Athens, 1889-1892); G. E. Mavrogiannes, [Greek: Historia tôn Ioniôn nêsôn,] 1797-1815 (2 vols., Athens, 1889); P. Karolides, [Greek: Historia tou ith aiônos], 1814-1892 (Athens, 1891-1893); E. Kyriakides, [Greek: Historia tou sugchronou Hellênismou] 1832-1892 (2 vols., Athens, 1892); G. Konstantinides, [Greek: Historia tôn Hathênôn apo Xristou gennêseôs mechri tou] 1821 (2nd ed., Athens, 1894); D. Bikelas, _La Grèce byzantine et moderne_ (Paris, 1893). (J. D. B.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See also GREEK ART, GREEK LANGUAGE, GREEK LAW, GREEK LITERATURE, GREEK RELIGION.

[2] For the Geology of Greece see: M. Neumayr, &c., _Denks. k. Akad. Wiss. Wien, math.-nat. Cl._ vol. xl. (1880); A. Philippson, _Der Peloponnes_ (Berlin, 1892) and "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der griechischen Inselwelt," _Peterm. Mitt._, Ergänz.-heft No. 134 (1901); R. Lepsius, _Geologie von Attika_ (Berlin, 1893); L. Cayeux, "Phénomènes de charriage dans la Méditerranée orientale," _C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris_, vol. cxxxvi. (1903) pp. 474-476; J. Deprat, "Note préliminaire sur la géologie de l'île d'Eubée," _Bull. Soc. Géol. France_, ser. 4, vol. iii. (1903) pp. 229-243, p. vii. and "Note sur la géologie du massif du Pélion et sur l'influence exercée par les massifs archéens sur la tectonique de l'Égéide," _ib._ vol. iv. (1904), pp. 299-338.

[3] No state survey of Greece was available in 1908, though a survey had been undertaken by the ministry of war.

[4] It would be more accurate to say to the year 1500 B.C. At Cnossus the palace is sacked soon after this date, and the art, both in Crete and in the whole Aegean area, becomes lifeless and decadent.

[5] See T. W. Allen in the _Classical Review_, vol. xx. (1906), No. 4 (May).

[6] It has been impugned by J. Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, i. 149 ff.

[7] _History of Greece_ (Eng. trans., i. 32 ff.); cf. the same writer's _Ioner vor der ionischen Wanderung_.

[8] If the account of early Athenian constitutional history given in the _Athenaion Politeia_ were accepted, it would follow that the archons were inferior in authority to the Eupatrid Boule, the Areopagus.

[9] The dates before the middle of the 7th century are in most cases artificial, e.g. those given by Thucydides (book vi.) for the earlier Sicilian settlements. See J. P. Mahaffy, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, ii. 164 ff.

[10] At Syracuse the _demos_ makes common cause with the Sicel serf-population against the nobles (Herod. vii. 155).

[11] An exception should perhaps be made in the case of Thucydides.

[12] The Peisistratidae come off better, however.

[13] The numbers given by Herodotus (upwards of 5,000,000) are enormously exaggerated. We must divide by ten or fifteen to arrive at a probable estimate of the forces that actually crossed the Hellespont.

[14] It has been denied by some writers (e.g. by A. H. J. Greenidge) that Athens interfered with the constitutions of the subject-states. For the view put forward in the text, the following passages may be quoted: Aristotle, _Politics_ 1307 b 20; Isocrates, _Panegyricus_, 105, 106, _Panathenaicus_, 54 and 68; Xenophon, _Hellenica_, iii. 4. 7; Ps.-Xen. _Athen. Constit._ i. 14, iii. 10.

[15] The evidence seems to indicate that all the more important criminal cases throughout the empire were tried in the Athenian courts. In civil cases Athens secured to the citizens of the subject-states the right of suing Athenian citizens, as well as citizens of other subject-states.

[16] After this date, and partly in consequence of the change, the archonship, to which sortition was applied, loses its importance. The _strategi_ (generals) become the chief executive officials. As election was never replaced by the lot in their case, the change had less practical meaning than might appear at first sight. (See ARCHON; STRATEGUS.)

[17] For an estimate of the numbers annually engaged in the service of Athens, see Aristot. _Ath. Pol._ 24. 3.

[18] Foreign is not used here as equivalent to non-Hellenic. It means "belonging to another state, whether Greek or barbarian."

[19] It failed even to create a united Arcadia or a strong Messenia.

[20] See Demosthenes, _On the Crown_, 235. Philip was [Greek: autokratôr, despotês, êgemôn, kurios panton.]

[21] See _Archidamus_, 68; Philippus, 96, [Greek: ôste raon eínai sustêsai stratopedon meizon kai kreltton ek ton planômênôn e ek ton politeuomenon.]

[22] The _Liturgies_ (e.g. the trierarchy) had much the same effect as a direct tax levied upon the wealthiest citizens.

[23] His extreme caution in approaching the question at an earlier date is to be noticed. See, e.g., _Olynthiacs_, i. 19, 20.

[24] e.g. the two expeditions sent to Euboea, the cavalry force that took part in the battle of Mantinea, and the army that fought at Chaeronea. The troops in all these cases were citizens.

[25] For the altered character of warfare see Demosthenes, _Philippics_, iii. 48, 49.

[26] It is known that the councillors were appointed by the states in the Aetolian league; it is only surmised in the case of the Achaean.

[27] Strictly speaking, to 411 B.C. For the last seven years of the war our principal authority is Xenophon, _Hellenica_, i., ii.

[28] Possibly some of his information about Persian affairs may have been derived, at first or second hand, from Zopyrus, son of Megabyzus, whose flight to Athens is mentioned in iii. 160.

[29] For a defence of Thucydides' judgment on all three statesmen, see E. Meyer, _Forschungen_, ii. 296-379.

[30] On the discrepancies between Xenophon's account of the Thirty, and Aristotle's, see G. Busolt, _Hermes_ (1898), pp. 71-86.

[31] The fragment of the New Historian (_Oxyrhynchus Papyri_, vol. v.) affords exceedingly important material for the criticism of Xenophon's narrative. (See THEOPOMPUS.)

[32] Vol. iii. goes down to the end of the Peloponnesian War.

GREEK ART. It is proposed in the present article to give a brief account of the history of Greek art and of the principles embodied in that history. In any broad view of history, the products of the various arts practised by a people constitute an objective and most important record of the spirit of that people. But all nations have not excelled in the same way: some have found their best expression in architecture, some in music, some in poetry. The Greeks most fully embodied their ideas in two ways, first in their splendid literature, both prose and verse, and secondly, in their plastic and pictorial art, in which matter they have remained to our days among the greatest instructors of mankind. The three arts of architecture, sculpture and painting were brought by them into a focus; and by their aid they produced a visible splendour of public life such as has perhaps been nowhere else attained.

The volume of the remains of Greek civilization is so vast, and the learning with which these have been discussed is so ample, that it is hopeless to attempt to give in a work like the present any complete account of either. Rather we shall be frankly eclectic, choosing for consideration such results of Greek art as are most noteworthy and most characteristic. In some cases it will be possible to give a reference to a more detailed treatment of particular monuments in these volumes under the heading of the places to which they belong. Architectural detail is relegated to ARCHITECTURE and allied architectural articles. Coins (see NUMISMATICS) and gems (see GEMS) are treated apart, as are vases (CERAMICS), and in the bibliography which closes this article an effort is made to direct those who wish for further information in any particular branch of our subject.

1. _The Rediscovery of Greek Art._--The visible works of Greek architect, sculptor and painter, accumulated in the cities of Greece and Asia Minor until the Roman conquest. And in spite of the ravages of conquering Roman generals, and the more systematic despoilings of the emperors, we know that when Pausanias visited Greece, in the age of the Antonines, it was from coast to coast a museum of works of art of all ages. But the tide soon turned. Works of originality were no longer produced, and a succession of disasters gradually obliterated those of previous ages. In the course of the Teutonic and Slavonic invasions from the north, or in consequence of earthquakes, very frequent in Greece, the splendid cities and temples fell into ruins; and with the taking of Constantinople by the Franks in 1204 the last great collection of works of Greek sculpture disappeared. But while paintings decayed, and works in metal were melted down, many marble buildings and statues survived, at least in a mutilated condition, while terra-cotta is almost proof against decay.

With the Renaissance attention was directed to the extant remains of Greek and Roman art; as early as the 15th century collections of ancient sculpture, coins and gems began to be formed in Italy; and in the 16th the enthusiasm spread to Germany and France. The earl of Arundel, in the reign of James I., was the first Englishman to collect antiques from Italy and Asia Minor: his marbles are now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Systematic travel in Greece for the discovery of buildings and works of art was begun by Spon and Wheler (1675-1676); and the discovery of Pompeii in 1748 opened a new chapter in the history of ancient art.

But though kings delighted to form galleries of ancient statues, and the great Italian artists of the Renaissance drew from them inspiration for their paintings and bronzes, the first really critical appreciation of Greek art belongs to Winckelmann (_Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums_, 1764). The monuments accessible to Winckelmann were but a very small proportion of those we now possess, and in fact mostly works of inferior merit: but he was the first to introduce the historical method into the treatment of ancient art, and to show how it embodied the ideas of the great peoples of the ancient world. He was succeeded by Lessing, and the waves of thought and feeling set in motion by these two affected the cultivated class in all nations,--they inspired in particular Goethe in Germany and Lord Byron in England.

The second stage in the recovery of Greek art begins with the permission accorded by the Porte to Lord Elgin in 1800 to remove to England the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon and other buildings of Athens. These splendid works, after various vicissitudes, became the property of the English nation, and are now the chief treasures of the British Museum. The sight of them was a revelation to critics and artists, accustomed only to the base copies which fill the Italian galleries, and a new epoch in the appreciation of Greek art began. English and German savants, among whom Cockerell and Stackelberg were conspicuous, recovered the glories of the temples of Aegina and Bassae. Leake and Ross, and later Curtius, journeyed through the length and breadth of Greece, identifying ancient sites and studying the monuments which were above ground. Ross reconstructed the temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis of Athens from fragments rescued from a Turkish bastion.

Meantime more methodical exploration brought to light the remains of remarkable civilizations in Asia, not only in the valley of the Euphrates, but in Lycia, whence Sir Charles Fellows brought to London the remains of noteworthy tombs, among which the so-called Harpy Monument and Nereid Monument take the first place. Still more important were the accessions derived from the excavations of Sir Charles Newton, who in the years 1852-1859 resided as consul in Asia Minor, and explored the sites of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the shrine of Demeter at Cnidus. Pullan at Priene, and Wood at Ephesus also made fruitful excavations.

The next landmark is set by the German excavations at Olympia (1876 and foll.), which not only were conducted with a scientific completeness before unknown, and at great cost, but also established the principle that in future all the results of excavations in Greece must remain in the country, the right of first publication only remaining with the explorers. The discovery of the Hermes of Praxiteles, almost the only certain original of a great Greek sculptor which we possess, has furnished a new and invaluable fulcrum for the study of ancient art. In emulation of the achievements of the Germans at Olympia, the Greek archaeological society methodically excavated the Athenian acropolis, and were rewarded by finding numerous statues and fragments of pediments belonging to the age of Peisistratus, an age when the promise of art was in full bud. More recently French explorers have made a very thorough examination of the site of Delphi, and have succeeded in recovering almost complete two small treasuries, those of the people of Athens and of Cnidus or Siphnos, the latter of 6th-century Ionian work, and adorned with extremely important sculpture.

No other site of the same importance as Athens, Olympia and Delphi remains for excavation in Greece proper. But in all parts of the country, at Tegea, Corinth, Sparta and on a number of other ancient sites, striking and important monuments have come to light. And at the same time monuments already known in Italy and Sicily, such as the temples of Paestum, Selinus and Agrigentum have been re-examined with fuller knowledge and better system. Only Asia Minor, under the influence of Turkish rule, has remained a country where systematic exploration is difficult. Something, however, has been accomplished at Ephesus, Priene, Assos and Miletus, and great works of sculpture such as the reliefs of the great altar at Pergamum, now at Berlin, and the splendid sarcophagi from Sidon, now at Constantinople, show what might be expected from methodic investigation of the wealthy Greek cities of Asia.

From further excavations at Herculaneum we may expect a rich harvest of works of art of the highest class, such as have already been found in the excavations on that site in the past; and the building operations at Rome are constantly bringing to light fine statues brought from Greece in the time of the Empire, which are now placed in the collections of the Capitol and the Baths of Diocletian.

The work of explorers on Greek sites requires as its complement and corrective much labour in the great museums of Europe. As museum work apart from exploration tends to dilettantism and pedantry, so exploration by itself does not produce reasoned knowledge. When a new building, a great original statue, a series of vases is discovered, these have to be fitted in to the existing frame of our knowledge; and it is by such fitting in that the edifice of knowledge is enlarged. In all the museums and universities of Europe the fresh examination of new monuments, the study of style and subject, and attempts to work out points in the history of ancient art, are incessantly going on. Such archaeological work is an important element in the gradual education of the world, and is fruitful, quite apart from the particular results attained, because it encourages a method of thought. Archaeology, dealing with things which can be seen and handled, yet being a species of historic study, lies on the borderland between the province of natural science and that of historic science, and furnishes a bridge whereby the methods of investigation proper to physical and biological study may pass into the human field.

These investigations and studies are recorded, partly in books, but more particularly in papers in learned journals (see bibliography), such as the _Mitteilungen_ of the German Institute, and the English _Journal of Hellenic Studies_.

An example or two may serve to give the reader a clearer notion of the recent progress in the knowledge of Greek art.

To begin with architecture. Each of the palmary sites of which we have spoken has rendered up examples of early Greek temples. At Olympia there is the Heraeum, earliest of known temples of Greece proper, which clearly shows the process whereby stone gradually superseded wood as a constructive material. At Delphi the explorers have been so fortunate as to be able to put together the treasuries of the Cnidians (or Siphnians) and of the Athenians. The former (see fig. 17) is a gem of early Ionic art, with two Caryatid figures in front in the place of columns, and adorned with the most delicate tracery and fine reliefs. On the Athenian acropolis very considerable remains have been found of temples which were destroyed by the Persians when they temporarily occupied the site in 480 B.C. And recently the ever-renewed study of the Erechtheum has resulted in a restoration of its original form more valuable and trustworthy than any previously made.

In the field of sculpture recent discoveries have been too many and too important to be mentioned at any length. One instance may serve to mark the rapidity of our advance. When the remains of the Mausoleum were brought to London from the excavations begun by Sir Charles Newton in 1856 we knew from Pliny that four great sculptors, Scopas, Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus, had worked on the sculpture; but we knew of these artists little more than the names. At present we possess many fragments of two pediments at Tegea executed under the direction of Scopas, we have a basis with reliefs signed by Bryaxis, we have identified a group in the Vatican museum as a copy of the Ganymede of Leochares, and we have pedimental remains from Epidaurus which we know from inscriptional evidence to be either the works of Timotheus or made from his models. Any one can judge how enormously our power of criticizing the Mausoleum sculptures, and of comparing them with contemporary monuments, has increased.

In regard to ancient painting we can of course expect no such fresh illumination. Many important wail-paintings of the Roman age have been found at Rome and Pompeii: but we have no certain or even probable work of any great Greek painter. We have to content ourselves with studying the colouring of reliefs, such as those of the sarcophagi at Constantinople, and the drawings on vases, in order to get some notion of the composition and drawing of painted scenes in the great age of Greece. As to the portraits of the Roman age painted on wood which have come in considerable quantities from Egypt, they stand at a far lower level than even the paintings of Pompeii. The number of our vase-paintings, however, increases steadily, and whole classes, such as the early vases of Ionia, are being marked off from the crowd, and so becoming available for use in illustrating the history of Hellenic civilization.

The study of Greek art is thus one which is eminently progressive. It has over the study of Greek literature the immense advantage that its materials increase far more rapidly. And it is becoming more and more evident that a sound and methodic study of Greek art is quite as indispensable as a foundation for an artistic and archaeological education as the study of Greek poets and orators is as a basis of literary education. The extreme simplicity and thorough rationality of Greek art make it an unrivalled field for the training and exercise of the faculties which go to the making of the art-critic and art historian.

2. _The General Principles of Greek Art._--Before proceeding to sketch the history of the rise and decline of Greek art, it is desirable briefly to set forth the principles which underlie it (see also P. Gardner's _Grammar of Greek Art_).

As the literature of Greece is composed in a particular language, the grammar and the syntax of which have to be studied before the works in poetry and prose can be read, so Greek works of art are composed in what may be called an artistic language. To the accidence of a grammar may be compared the mere technique of sculpture and painting: to the syntax of a grammar correspond the principles of composition and grouping of individual figures into a relief or picture. By means of the rules of this grammar the Greek artist threw into form the ideas which belonged to him as a personal or a racial possession.

We may mention first some of the more external conditions of Greek art; next, some of those which the Greek spirit posited for itself.

No nation is in its works wholly free from the domination of climate and geographical position; least of all a people so keenly alive to the influence of the outer world as the Greeks. They lived in a land where the soil was dry and rocky, far less hospitable to vegetation than that of western Europe, while on all sides the horizon of the land was bounded by hard and jagged lines of mountain. The sky was extremely clear and bright, sunshine for a great part of the year almost perpetual, and storms, which are more than passing gales, rare. It was in accordance with these natural features that temples and other buildings should be simple in form and bounded by clear lines. Such forms as the cube, the oblong, the cylinder, the triangle, the pyramid abound in their constructions. Just as in Switzerland the gables of the chalets match the pine-clad slopes and lofty summits of the mountains, so in Greece, amid barer hills of less elevation, the Greek temple looks thoroughly in place. But its construction is related not only to the surface of the land, but also to the character of the race. M. Émile Boutmy, in his interesting _Philosophie de l'architecture en Grèce_, has shown how the temple is a triumph of the senses and the intellect, not primarily emotional, but showing in every part definite purpose and design. It also exhibits in a remarkable degree the love of balance, of symmetry, of a mathematical proportion of parts and correctness of curvature which belong to the Greek artist.

The purposes of a Greek temple may be readily judged from its plan. Primarily it was the abode of the deity, whose statue dwelt in it as men dwell in their own houses. Hence the cella or _naos_ is the central feature of the building. Here was placed the image to which worship was brought, while the treasures belonging to the god were disposed partly in the cella itself, partly in a kind of treasury which often existed, as in the Parthenon, behind the cella. There was in large temples a porch of approach, the _pronaos_, and another behind, the _opisthodomos_. Temples were not meant for, nor accommodated to, regular services or a throng of worshippers. Processions and festivals took place in the open air, in the streets and fields, and men entered the abodes of the gods at most in groups and families, commonly alone. Thus when a place had been found for the statue, which stood for the presence of the god, for the small altar of incense, for the implements of cult and the gifts of votaries, little space remained free, and great spaces or subsidiary chapels such as are usual in Christian cathedrals did not exist (see TEMPLE).

Here our concern is not with the purposes or arrangements of a temple, but with its appearance and construction, regarded as a work of art, and as an embodiment of Greek ideas. A few simple and striking principles may be formulated, which are characteristic of all Greek buildings:--

(i.) Each member of the building has one function, and only one, and this function controls even the decoration of that member. The pillar of a temple is made to support the architrave and is for that purpose only. The flutings of the pillar, being perpendicular, emphasize this fact. The line of support which runs up through the pillar is continued in the triglyph, which also shows perpendicular grooves. On the other hand, the wall of a temple is primarily meant to divide or space off; thus it may well at the top be decorated by a horizontal band of relief, which belongs to it as a border belongs to a curtain. The base of a column, if moulded, is moulded in such a way as to suggest support of a great weight; the capital of a column is so carved as to form a transition between the column and the cornice which it supports.

(ii.) Greek architects took the utmost pains with the proportions, the symmetry as they called it, of the parts of their buildings. This was a thing in which the keen and methodical eyes of the Greeks delighted, to a degree which a modern finds it hard to understand. Simple and natural relations, 1:2, 1:3, 2:3 and the like, prevailed between various members of a construction. All curves were planned with great care, to please the eye with their flow; and the alternations and correspondences of features is visible at a glance. For example, the temple must have two pediments and two porches, and on its sides and fronts triglyph and metope must alternate with unvarying regularity.

(iii.) Rigidity in the simple lines of a temple is avoided by the device that scarcely any outline is actually straight. All are carefully planned and adapted to the eye of the spectator. In the Parthenon the line of the floor is curved, the profiles of the columns are curved, the corner columns slope inward from their bases, the columns are not even equidistant. This elaborate adaptation, called entasis, was expounded by F. C. Penrose in his work on Athenian architecture, and has since been observed in several of the great temples of Greece.

(iv.) Elaborate decoration is reserved for those parts of the temple which have, or at least appear to have, no strain laid upon them. It is true that in the archaic age experiments were made in carving reliefs on the lower drums of columns (as at Ephesus) and on the line of the architrave (as at Assus). But such examples were not followed. Nearly always the spaces reserved for mythological reliefs or groups are the tops of walls, the spaces between the triglyphs, and particularly the pediments surmounting the two fronts, which might be left hollow without danger to the stability of the edifice. Detached figures in the round are in fact found only in the pediments, or standing upon the tops of the pediments. And metopes are sculptured in higher relief than friezes.

"When we examine in detail even the simplest architectural decoration, we discover a combination of care, sense of proportion, and reason. The flutings of an Ionic column are not in section mere arcs of a circle, but made up of a combination of curves which produce a beautiful optical effect; the lines of decoration, as may be best seen in the case of the Erechtheum, are cut with a marvellous delicacy. Instead of trying to invent new schemes, the mason contents himself with improving the regular patterns until they approach perfection, and he takes everything into consideration. Mouldings on the outside of a temple, in the full light of the sun, are differently planned from those in the diffused light of the interior. Mouldings executed in soft stone are less fine than those in marble. The mason thinks before he works, and while he works, and thinks in entire correspondence with his surroundings."[1]

Greek architecture, however, is treated elsewhere (see ARCHITECTURE); we will therefore proceed to speak briefly of the principles exemplified in sculpture. Existing works of Greek sculpture fall easily into two classes. The first class comprises what may be called works of substantive art, statues or groups made for their own sake and to be judged by themselves. Such are cult-statues of gods and goddesses from temple and shrine, honorary portraits of rulers or of athletes, dedicated groups and the like. The second class comprises decorative sculptures, such as were made, usually in relief, for the decoration of temples and tombs and other buildings, and were intended to be subordinate to architectural effect.

Speaking broadly, it may be said that the works of substantive sculpture in our museums are in the great majority of cases copies of doubtful exactness and very various merit. The Hermes of Praxiteles is almost the only marble statue which can be assigned positively to one of the great sculptors; we have to work back towards the productions of the peers of Praxiteles through works of poor execution, often so much restored in modern times as to be scarcely recognizable. Decorative works, on the other hand, are very commonly originals, and their date can often be accurately fixed, as they belong to known buildings. They are thus infinitely more trustworthy and more easy to deal with than the copies of statues of which the museums of Europe, and more especially those of Italy, are full. They are also more commonly unrestored. But yet there are certain disadvantages attaching to them. Decorative works, even when carried out under the supervision of a great sculptor, were but seldom executed by him. Usually they were the productions of his pupils or masons. Thus they are not on the same level of art as substantive sculpture. And they vary in merit to an extraordinary extent, according to the capacity of the man who happened to have them in hand, and who was probably but little controlled. Every one knows how noble are the pedimental sculptures of the Parthenon. But we know no reason why they should be so vastly superior to the frieze from Phigalia; nor why the heads from the temple at Tegea should be so fine, while those from the contemporary temple at Epidaurus should be comparatively insignificant. From the records of payments made to the sculptors who worked on the Erechtheum at Athens it appears that they were ordinary masons, some of them not even citizens, and paid at the rate of 60 drachms (about 60 francs) for each figure, whether of man or horse, which they produced. Such piece-work would not, in our days, produce a very satisfactory result.

Works of substantive sculpture may be divided into two classes, the statues of human beings and those of the gods. The line between the two is not, however, very easy to draw, or very definite. For in representing men the Greek sculptor had an irresistible inclination to idealize, to represent what was generic and typical rather than what was individual, and the essential rather than the accidental. And in representing deities he so fully anthropomorphized them that they became men and women, only raised above the level of everyday life and endowed with a superhuman stateliness. Moreover, there was a class of heroes represented largely in art who covered the transition from men to gods. For example, if one regards Heracles as a deity and Achilles as a man of the heroic age and of heroic mould, the line between the two will be found to be very narrow.

FIG. 56.--HEAD OF YOUNG ALEXANDER. (BRIT. MUS.)

_Photo, Seebah._ FIG. 57.--HERMES OF ALCAMENES. (CONSTANTINOPLE.)

FIG. 58.--THESEUS AND AMAZON (ERETRIA).

_Photo, Mansell._ FIG. 59.--DRUM OF COLUMN FROM EPHESUS. (BRIT. MUS.)

_Photo, Baldwin Coolidge._ FIG. 60.--YOUNG HERMES. (MUS. OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.)]

Nevertheless one may for convenience speak first of human and afterwards of divine figures. It was the custom from the 6th century onwards to honour those who had done any great achievement by setting up their statues in conspicuous positions. One of the earliest examples is that of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton, a group, a copy of which has come down to us (Plate I. fig. 50[2]). Again, people who had not won any distinction were in the habit of dedicating to the deities portraits of themselves or of a priest or priestess, thus bringing themselves, as it were, constantly under the notice of a divine patron. The rows of statues before the temples at Miletus, Athens and elsewhere came thus into being. But from the point of view of art, by far the most important class of portraits consisted of athletes who had won victories at some of the great games of Greece, at Olympia, Delphi or elsewhere. Early in the 6th century the custom arose of setting up portraits of athletic victors in the great sacred places. We have records of numberless such statues executed by all the greatest sculptors. When Pausanias visited Greece he found them everywhere far too numerous for complete mention.

It is the custom of studying and copying the forms of the finest of the young athletes, combined with the Greek habit of complete nudity during the sports, which lies at the basis of Greek excellence in sculpture. Every sculptor had unlimited opportunities for observing young vigorous bodies in every pose and in every variety of strain. The natural sense of beauty which was an endowment of the Greek race impelled him to copy and preserve what was excellent, and to omit what was ungainly or poor. Thus there existed, and in fact there was constantly accumulating, a vast series of types of male beauty, and the public taste was cultivated to an extreme delicacy. And of course this taste, though it took its start from athletic customs, and was mainly nurtured by them, spread to all branches of portraiture, so that elderly men, women, and at last even children, were represented in art with a mixture of ideality and fidelity to nature such as has not been reached by the sculpture of any other people.

The statues of the gods began either with stiff and ungainly figures roughly cut out of the trunk of a tree, or with the monstrous and symbolical representations of Oriental art. In the Greece of late times there were still standing rude pillars, with the tops sometimes cut into a rough likeness to the human form. And in early decoration of vases and vessels one may find Greek deities represented with wings, carrying in their hands lions or griffins, bearing on their heads lofty crowns. But as Greek art progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism. In the language of Brunn, the Greek artists borrowed from Oriental or Mycenaean sources the letters used in their works, but with these letters they spelled out the ideas of their own nation. What the artists of Babylon and Egypt express in the character of the gods by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the sculptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant addition of something which is above the ordinary level of humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Demeter of Cnidus. When the decay of the high ethical art of Greece sets in, the gods become more and more warped to the merely human level. They lose their dignity, but they never lose their charm.

The decorative sculpture of Greece consists not of single figures, but of groups; and in the arrangement of these groups the strict Greek laws of symmetry, of rhythm, and of balance, come in. We will take the three most usual forms, the pediment, the metope and the frieze, all of which belong properly to the temple, but are characteristic of all decoration, whether of tomb, trophy or other monument.

The form of the pediment is triangular; the height of the triangle in proportion to its length being about 1:8. The conditions of space are here strict and dominant; to comply with them requires some ingenuity. To a modern sculptor the problem thus presented is almost insoluble; but it was allowable in ancient art to represent figures in a single composition as of various sizes, in correspondence not to actual physical measurement but to importance. As the more important figures naturally occupy the midmost place in a pediment, their greater size comes in conveniently. And by placing some of the persons of the group in a standing, some in a seated, some in a reclining position, it can be so contrived that their heads are equidistant from the upper line of the pediment.

The statues in a Greek pediment, which are after quite an early period usually executed in the round, fall into three, five or seven groups, according to the size of the whole. As examples to illustrate this exposition we take the two pediments of the temple at Olympia, the most complete which have come down to us, which are represented in figs. 33 and 34. The east pediment represents the preparation for the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus. The central group consists of five figures, Zeus standing between the two pairs of competitors and their wives. In the corners recline the two river-gods Alpheus and Cladeus, who mark the locality; and the two sides are filled up with the closely corresponding groups of the chariots of Oenomaus and Pelops with their grooms and attendants. Every figure to the left of Zeus balances a corresponding figure on his right, and all the lines of the composition slope towards a point above the apex of the pediment.

In the opposite or western pediment is represented the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs which broke out at the marriage of Peirithous in Thessaly. Here we have no less than nine groups. In the midst is Apollo. On each side of him is a group of three, a centaur trying to carry off a woman and a Lapith striking at him. Beyond these on each side is a struggling pair, next once more a trio of two combatants and a woman, and finally in each corner two reclining female figures, the outermost apparently nymphs to mark locality. A careful examination of these compositions will show the reader more clearly than detailed description how clearly in this kind of group Greek artists adhered to the rules of rhythm and of balance.

The metopes were the long series of square spaces which ran along the outer walls of temples between the upright triglyphs and the cornice. Originally they may have been left open and served as windows; but the custom came in as early as the 7th century, first of filling them in with painted boards or slabs of stone, and next of adorning them with sculpture. The metopes of the Treasury of Sicyon at Delphi (Plate IV. fig. 66) are as early as the first half of the 6th century. This recurrence of a long series of square fields for occupation well suited the genius and the habits of the sculptor. As subjects he took the successive exploits of some hero such as Heracles or Theseus, or the contemporary groups of a battle. His number of figures was limited to two or three, and these figures had to be worked into a group or scheme, the main features of which were determined by artistic tradition, but which could be varied in a hundred ways so as to produce a pleasing and in some degree novel result.

With metopes, as regards shape, we may compare the reliefs of Greek tombs, which also usually occupy a space roughly square, and which also comprise but a few figures arranged in a scheme generally traditional. A figure standing giving his hand to one seated, two men standing hand in hand, or a single figure in some vigorous pose is sufficient to satisfy the simple but severe taste of the Greeks.

In regard to friezes, which are long reliefs containing figures ranged between parallel lines, there is more variety of custom. In temples the height of the relief from the background varies according to the light in which it was to stand, whether direct or diffused. Almost all Greek friezes, however, are of great simplicity in arrangement and perspective. Locality is at most hinted at by a few stones or trees, never actually portrayed. There is seldom more than one line of figures, in combat or procession, their heads all equidistant from the top line of the frieze. They are often broken up into groups; and when this is the case, figure will often balance figure on either side of a central point almost as rigidly as in a pediment. An example of this will be found in the section of the Mausoleum frieze shown in fig. 70, Plate IV. Some of the friezes executed by Greek artists for semi-Greek peoples, such as those adorning the tomb at Trysa in Lycia, have two planes, the figures in the background being at a higher level.

The rules of balance and symmetry in composition which are followed in Greek decorative art are still more to be discerned in the paintings of vases, which must serve, in the absence of more dignified compositions, to enlighten us as to the methods of Greek painters. Great painters would not, of course, be bound by architectonic rule in the same degree as the mere workmen who painted vases. Nevertheless we must never forget that Greek painting of the earlier ages was of extreme simplicity. It did not represent localities, save by some slight hint; it had next to no perspective; the colours used were but very few even down to the days of Apelles. Most of the great pictures of which we hear consisted of but one or two figures; and when several figures were introduced they were kept apart and separately treated, though, of course, not without relation to one another. Idealism and ethical purpose must have predominated in painting as in sculpture and in the drama and in the writing of history.

We will take from vases a few simple groups to illustrate the laws of Greek drawing; colouring we cannot illustrate.

The fields offered to the draughtsman on Greek vases naturally follow the form of the vase; but they may be set down as approximately round, square or oblong. To each of these spaces the artist carefully adapts his designs. In fig. 1 we have a characteristic adaptation to circular form by the vase painter Epictetus.

In the early period of painting all the space not occupied by the figures is filled with patterns or accessories, or even animals which have no connexion with the subject (fig. 9). In later and more developed art, as in this example, the outlines are so figured as to fill the space.

When the space is square we have much the same problem as is presented by the metope spaces of a temple. In the case of both square and oblong fields the laws of balance are carefully observed. Thus if there is an even number of figures in the scheme, two of them will form a sort of centre-piece, those on either side balancing one another. If the number of figures is uneven, either there will be a group of three in the midst, or the midmost figure will be so contrived that he belongs wholly to neither side, but is the balance between them. These remarks will be made clear by figs. 2 and 3, which repeat the two sides of an amphora, one of which bears a design of three figures, the other of four.

The Greek artist not only adhered to the architectonic laws of balance and symmetry, but he thought in schemes. Certain group arrangements had a recognized signification. There are schemes for warriors fighting on equal terms, and schemes which represent the defeat of one of these by the other; the vanquished has commonly fallen on his knees, but still defends himself. There is a scheme for the leading away of a captive woman; the captor leads her by the hand looking back at her, while a friend walks behind to ward off pursuit. Such schemes, are constantly varied in detail, and often very skilfully varied; but the Greek artist uses schemes as a sort of shorthand, to show as clearly as possible what he meant. They serve the same purpose as the mask in the acting of a play, the first glance at which will tell the spectators what they have to look for.

No doubt the great painters of Greece were not so much under the dominion of these schemes as the very inferior painters of vases. They used the schemes for their own purposes instead of being used by them. But as great poets do not revolt against the restrictions of the sonnet or of rhyme, so great artists in Greece probably found recognized conventions more helpful than hurtful.

Students of Greek sculpture and vases must be warned not to suppose that Greek reliefs and drawings can be taken as direct illustrations of Homer or the dramatists. Book illustration in the modern sense did not exist in Greece. The poet and the painter pursued courses which were parallel, but never in actual contact. Each moved by the traditions of his own craft. The poet took the accepted tale and enshrined it in a setting of feeling and imagination. The painter took the traditional schemes which were current, and altered or enlarged them, adding new figures and new motives, but not attempting to set aside the general scheme. But varieties suitable to poetry were not likely to be suitable in painting. Thus it is but seldom that a vase-painter seems to have had in his mind, as he drew, passages of the Homeric poems, though these might well be familiar to him. And almost never does a vase-painting of the 5th century show any sign of the influence of the dramatists, who were bringing before the Athenian public on the stage many of the tales and incidents popular with the vase-painter. Only on vases of lower Italy of the 4th century and later we can occasionally discern something of Aeschylean and Euripidean influence in the treatment of a myth; and even in a few cases we may discern that the vase-painter has taken suggestions direct from the actors in the theatre.

3. _Historic Sketch._--We propose next to trace in brief outline the history of Greek art from its rise to its decay. We begin with the rise of a national art, after the destruction of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of early Greece by the irruption of tribes from the north, that is to say, about 800 B.C., and we stop with the Roman age of Greece, after which Greek art works in the service of the conquerors (see ROMAN ART). The period 800-50 B.C. we divide into four sections: (1) the period down to the Persian Wars, 800-480 B.C.; (2) the period of the early schools of art, 480-400 B.C.; (3) the period of the later great schools, 400-300 B.C.; (4) the period of Hellenistic art, 300-50 B.C. In dealing with these successive periods we confine our sketch to the three greater branches of representative art, architecture, sculpture and painting, which in Greece are closely connected. The lesser arts, of pottery, gem-engraving, coin-stamping and the like, are treated of under the heads of CERAMICS, GEM, NUMISMATICS, &c., while the more technical treatment of architectural construction are dealt with under ARCHITECTURE and allied architectural articles. Further, for brief accounts of the chief artists the reader is referred to biographical articles, under such heads as PHEIDIAS, PRAXITELES, APELLES. We treat here only of the main course of art in its historic evolution.

Northern invasion.

_Period I. 800-480_ B.C.--The fact is now generally allowed that the Mycenaean, or as it is now termed Aegean, civilization was for the most part destroyed by an invasion from the north. This invasion appears to have been gradual; its racial character is much in dispute. Archaeological evidence abundantly proves that it was the conquest of a more by a less rich and civilized race. In the graves of the period (900-600 B.C.) we find none of the wealthy spoil which has made celebrated the tombs of Mycenae and Vaphio (q.v.). The character of the pottery and the bronze-work which is found in these later graves reminds us of the art of the necropolis of Hallstatt in Austria, and other sites belonging to what is called the bronze age of North Europe. Its predominant characteristic is the use of geometrical forms, the lozenge, the triangle, the maeander, the circle with tangents, in place of the elaborate spirals and plant-forms which mark Mycenaean ware. For this reason the period from the 9th to the 7th century in Greece passes by the name of "the Geometric Age." It is commonly held that in the remains of the Geometric Age we may trace the influence of the Dorians, who, coming in as a hardy but uncultivated race, probably of purer Aryan blood than the previous inhabitants of Greece, not only brought to an end the wealth and the luxury which marked the Mycenaean age, but also replaced an art which was in character essentially southern by one which belonged rather to the north and the west. The great difficulty inherent in this view, a difficulty which has yet to be met, lies in the fact that some of the most abundant and characteristic remains of the geometric age which we possess come, not from Peloponnesus, but from Athens and Boeotia, which were never conquered by the Dorians.

Geometric ware.

The geometric ware is for the most part adorned with painted patterns only. Fig. 4 is a characteristic example, a small two-handled vase from Rhodes in the Ashmolean Museum, the adornment of which consists in zigzags, circles with tangents, and lines of water birds, perhaps swans. Sometimes, however, especially in the case of large vases from the cemetery at Athens, which adjoins the Dipylon gate, scenes from Greek life are depicted, from daily life, not from legend or divine myth. Especially scenes from the lying-in-state and the burial of the dead are prevalent. An excerpt from a Dipylon vase (fig. 5) shows a dead man on his couch surrounded by mourners, male and female. Both sexes are apparently represented naked, and are distinguished very simply; some of them hold branches to sprinkle the corpse or to keep away flies. It will be seen how primitive and conventional is the drawing of this age, presenting a wonderful contrast to the free drawing and modelling of the Mycenaean age. In the same graves with the pottery are sometimes found plaques of gold or bronze, and towards the end of the geometric age these sometimes bear scenes from mythology, treated with the greatest simplicity. For example, in the museum of Berlin are the contents of a tomb found at Corinth, consisting mainly of gold work of geometric decoration. But in the same tomb were also found gold plates or plaques of repoussé work bearing subjects from Greek legend. Two of these are shown in fig. 6. On one Theseus is slaying the Minotaur, while Ariadne stands by and encourages the hero. The tale could not have been told in a simpler or more straightforward way. On the other we have an armed warrior with his charioteer in a chariot drawn by two horses. The treatment of the human body is here more advanced than on the vases of the Dipylon. On the site of Olympia, where Mycenaean remains are not found, but the earliest monuments show the geometric style, a quantity of dedications in bronze have been found, the decoration of which belongs to this style. Fig. 7 shows the handle of a tripod from Olympia, which is adorned with geometric patterns and surmounted by the figure of a horse.

It was about the 6th century that the genius of the Greeks, almost suddenly, as it seems to us, emancipated itself from the thraldom of tradition, and passed beyond the limits with which the nations of the east and west had hitherto been content, in a free and bold effort towards the ideal. Thus the 6th century marks the stage in art in which it may be said to have become definitely Hellenic. The Greeks still borrowed many of their decorative forms, either from the prehistoric remains in their own country or, through Phoenician agency, from the old-world empires of Egypt and Babylon, but they used those forms freely to express their own meaning. And gradually, in the course of the century, we see both in the painting of vases and in sculpture a national spirit and a national style forming under the influence of Greek religion and mythology, Greek athletic training, Greek worship of beauty. We must here lay emphasis on the fact, which is sometimes overlooked in an age which is greatly given to the Darwinian search after origins, that it is one thing to trace back to its original sources the nascent art of Greece, and quite another thing to follow and to understand its gradual embodiment of Hellenic ideas and civilization. The immense success with which the veil has in late years been lifted from the prehistoric age of Greece, and the clearness with which we can discern the various strands woven into the web of Greek art, have tended to fix our attention rather on what Greece possessed in common with all other peoples at the same early stage of civilization than on what Greece added for herself to this common stock. In many respects the art of Greece is incomparable--one of the great inspirations which have redeemed the world from mediocrity and vulgarity. And it is the searching out and appreciation of this unique and ideal beauty in all its phases, in idea and composition and execution, which is the true task of Greek archaeological science.

Ionian vases.

In very recent years it has been possible, for the first time, to trace the influence of Ionian painting, as represented by vases, on the rise of art. The discoveries at Naucratis and Daphnae in Egypt, due to the keenness and pertinacity of W. M. Flinders Petrie, threw new light on this matter. It became evident that when those cities were first inhabited by Ionian Greeks, in the 7th century, they used pottery of several distinct but allied styles, the most notable feature of which was the use of the lotus in decoration, the presence of continuous friezes of animals and of monsters, and the filling up of the background with rosettes, lozenges and other forms. Fig. 8 shows a vase found in Rhodes which illustrates this Ionian decoration. The sphinx, the deer and the swan are prominent on it, the last-named serving as a link between the geometric ware and the more brilliant and varied ware of the Ionian cities. The assignment of the many species of early Ionic ware to various Greek localities, Miletus, Samos, Phocaea and other cities, is a work of great difficulty, which now closely occupies the attention of archaeologists. For the results of their studies the reader is referred to two recent German works, Böhlau's _Aus ionischen und italischen Nekropolen_, and Endt's _Beiträge zur ionischen Vasenmalerei_. The feature which is most interesting in this pottery from our present point of view is the way in which representations of Greek myth and legend gradually make their way, and relegate the mere decoration of the vases to borders and neck. One of the earliest examples of representation of a really Greek subject is the contest of Menelaus and Euphorbus on a plate found in Rhodes. On the vases of Melos, of the 7th century, which are, however, not Ionian, but rather Dorian in character, we have a certain number of mythological scenes, battles of Homeric heroes and the like. One of these is shown in fig. 9. It represents Apollo in a chariot drawn by winged horses, playing on the lyre, and accompanied by a pair of Muses, meeting his sister Artemis. It is notable that Apollo is bearded, and that Artemis holds her stag by the horns, much in the manner of the deities on Babylonian cylinders; in the other hand she carries an arrow; above is a line of water birds.

Some sites in Asia Minor and the islands adjoining, such cities as Samos, Camirus in Rhodes, and the Ionian colonies on the Black Sea, have furnished us with a mass of ware of the Ionian class, but it seldom bears interesting subjects; it is essentially decorative. For Ionian ware which has closer relation to Greek mythology and history we must turn elsewhere. The cemeteries of the great Etruscan cities, Caere in particular, have preserved for us a large number of vases, which are now generally recognized as Ionian in design and drawing, though they may in some cases be only Italian imitations of Ionian imported ware. Thus has been filled up what was a blank page in the history of early Greek art. The Ionian painting is unrestrained in character, characterized by a licence not foreign to the nature of the race, and wants the self-control and moderation which belong to Doric art, and to Attic art after the first.

Some of the most interesting examples of early Ionic painting are found on the sarcophagi of Clazomenae. In that city in archaic times an exceptional custom prevailed of burying the dead in great coffins of terra-cotta adorned with painted scenes from chariot-racing, war and the chase. The British Museum possesses some remarkable specimens, which are published in A. S. Murray's _Terra-Cotta Sarcophagi of the British Museum_. On one of them he sees depicted a battle between Cimmerian invaders and Greeks, the former accompanied to the field by their great war-dogs. In some of the representations of hunting on these sarcophagi the hunters ride in chariots, a way of hunting quite foreign to the Greeks, but familiar to us from Assyrian wall-sculptures. We know that the life of the Ionians before the Persian conquest was refined and not untinged with luxury, and they borrowed many of the stately ways of the satraps of the kings of Assyria and Persia.

Fig. 10 shows a curious product of the Ionian workshops, a fish of solid gold, adorned with reliefs which represent a flying eagle, lions pulling down their prey, and a monstrous sea-god among his fishes. This relic is the more valuable on account of the spot where it was found--Vettersfelde in Brandenburg. It furnishes a proof that the influence and perhaps the commerce of the Greek colonies on the Black Sea spread far to the north through the countries of the Scythians and other barbarians. The fish dates from the 6th century B.C.

We may compare some of the gold ornaments from Camirus in Rhodes, which show an Ionian tendency, perhaps combined with Phoenician elements. On one of them (fig. 11) we see a centaur with human forelegs holding up a fawn, on the other the oriental goddess whom the Greeks identified with their Artemis, winged, and flanked by lions. This form was given to Artemis on the Corinthian chest of Cypselus, a work of art preserved at Olympia, and carefully described for us by Pausanias.

From Ionia the style of vase-painting which has been called by various names, but may best be termed the "orientalizing," spread to Greece proper. Its main home here was in Corinth; and small Corinthian unguent-vases bearing figures of swans, lions, monsters and human beings, the intervals between which are filled by rosettes, are found wherever Corinthian trade penetrated, notably in the cemeteries of Sicily. For the larger Corinthian vases, which bore more elaborate scenes from mythology, we must again turn to the graves of the cities of Etruria. Here, besides the Ionian ware, of which mention has already been made, we find pottery of three Greek cities clearly defined, that of Corinth, that of Chalcis in Euboea, and that of Athens. Corinthian and Chalcidian ware is most readily distinguished by means of the alphabets used in the inscriptions which have distinctive forms easily to be identified. Whether in the style of the paintings coming from the various cities any distinct differences may be traced is a far more difficult question, into which we cannot now enter. The subjects are mostly from heroic legend, and are treated with great simplicity and directness. There is a manly vigour about them which distinguishes them at a glance from the laxer works of Ionian style. Fig. 12 shows a group from a Chalcidian vase, which represents the conflict over the dead body of Achilles. The corpse of the hero lies in the midst, the arrow in his heel. The Trojan Glaucus tries to draw away the body by means of a rope tied round the ankle, but in doing so is transfixed by the spear of Ajax, who charges under the protection of the goddess Athena. Paris on the Trojan side shoots an arrow at Ajax.

In fig. 13, from a Corinthian vase, Ajax falls on his sword in the presence of his colleagues, Odysseus and Diomedes. The short stature of Odysseus is a well-known Homeric feature. These vases are black-figured; the heroes are painted in silhouette on the red ground of the vases. Their names are appended in archaic Greek letters.

Athens.

The early history of vase-painting at Athens is complicated. It was only by degrees that the geometric style gave way to, or developed into, what is known as the black-figured style. It would seem that until the age of Peisistratus Athens was not notable in the world of art, and nothing could be ruder than some of the vases of Athens in the 7th century, for example that here figured, on one side of which are represented the winged Harpies (fig. 14) and on the other Perseus accompanied by Athena flying from the pursuit of the Gorgons. This vase retains in its decoration some features of geometric style; but the lotus and rosette, the lion and sphinx which appear on it, belong to the wave of Ionian influence. Although it involves a departure from strict chronological order, it will be well here to follow the course of development in pottery at Athens until the end of our period. Neighbouring cities, and especially Corinth, seem to have exercised a strong influence at Athens about the 7th century. We have even a class of vases called by archaeologists Corintho-Attic. But in the course of the 6th century there is formed at Athens a distinct and marked black-figured style. The most-remarkable example of this ware is the so-called François vase at Munich, by Clitias and Ergotimus, which contains, in most careful and precise rendering, a number of scenes from Greek myth. One of these vases is dated, since it bears the name and the figure of Callias in his chariot (_Mon. dell' Inst._ iii. 45), and this Callias won a victory at Olympia in 564 B.C. Fig. 15 shows the reverse of a somewhat later black-figured vase of the Panathenaic class, given at Athens as a prize to the winner of a foot-race at the Panathenaea, with the foot-race (_stadion_) represented on it. A large number of Athenian vases of the 6th century have reached us, which bear the signatures of the potters who made, or the artists who painted them; lists of these will be found in the useful work of Klein, _Griechische Vasen mit Meistersignaturen_. The recent excavations on the Acropolis have proved the erroneousness of the view, strongly maintained by Brunn, that the mass of the black-figured vases were of a late and imitative fabric. We now know that, with a few exceptions, vases of this class are not later than the early part of the 5th century. The same excavations have also proved that red-figured vase-painting, that is, vase-painting in which the background was blocked out with black, and the figures left in the natural colour of the vase originated at Athens in the last quarter of the 6th century. We cannot here give a detailed account of the beautiful series of Athenian vases of this fabric. Many of the finest of them are in the British Museum. As an example, fig. 16 presents a group by the painter Pamphaeus, representing Heracles wrestling with the river-monster Achelous, which belongs to the age of the Persian Wars. The clear precision of the figures, the vigour of the grouping, the correctness of the anatomy and the delicacy of the lines are all marks of distinction. The student of art will perhaps find the nearest parallel to these vase-pictures in Japanese drawings. The Japanese artists are very inferior to the Greek in their love and understanding of the human body, but equal them in freshness and vigour of design. At the same time began the beautiful series of white vases made at Athens for the purpose of burial with the dead, and found in great quantities in the cemeteries of Athens, of Eretria, of Gela in Sicily, and of some other cities. They are well represented in the British Museum and that of Oxford.

Delphi.

We now return to the early years of the 6th century, and proceed to trace, by the aid of recent discoveries, the rise of architecture and sculpture. The Greek temple in its character and form gives the clue to the whole character of Greek art. It is the abode of the deity, who is represented by his sacred image; and the flat surfaces of the temple offer a great field to the sculptor for the depicting of sacred legend. The process of discovery has emphasized the line which divides Ionian from Dorian architecture and art. We will speak first of the temples and the sculpture of Ionia. The Ionians were a people far more susceptible than were the Dorians to oriental influences. The dress, the art, the luxury of western Asia attracted them with irresistible force. We may suspect, as Brunn has suggested, that Ionian artists worked in the great Assyrian and Persian palaces, and that the reliefs which adorn the walls of those palaces were in part their handiwork. Some of the great temples of Ionia have been excavated in recent years, notably those of Apollo at Miletus, of Hera at Samos, and of Artemis at Ephesus. Very little, however, of the architecture of the 6th-century temples of those sites has been recovered. Quite recently, however, the French excavators at Delphi have successfully restored the treasury of the people of Cnidus, which is quite a gem of Ionic style, the entablature being supported in front not by pillars but by two maidens or Corae, and a frieze running all round the building above. But though this building is of Ionic type, it is scarcely in the technical sense of Ionic style, since the columns have not Ionic capitals, but are carved with curious reliefs. The Ionic capital proper is developed in Asia by degrees (see ARCHITECTURE and CAPITAL; also Perrot and Chipiez, _Hist. de l'art_, vii. ch. 4).

The Doric temple is not wholly of European origin. One of the earliest examples is the old temple of Assus in Troas. Yet it was developed mainly in Hellas and the west. The most ancient example is the Heraeum at Olympia, next to which come the fragmentary temples of Corinth and of Selinus in Sicily. With the early Doric temple we are familiar from examples which have survived in fair preservation to our own days at Agrigentum in Sicily, Paestum in Italy, and other sites.

Of the decorative sculpture which adorned these early temples we have more extensive remains than we have of actual construction. It will be best to speak of them under their districts. On the coast of Asia Minor, the most extensive series of archaic decorative sculptures which has come down to us is that which adorned the temple of Assus (fig. 18). These were placed in a unique position on the temple, a long frieze running along the entablature, with representations of wild animals, of centaurs, of Hercules seizing Achelous, and of men feasting, scene succeeding scene without much order or method. The only figures from Miletus which can be considered as belonging to the original temple destroyed by Darius, are the dedicated seated statues, some of which, brought away by Sir Charles Newton, are now preserved at the British Museum. At Ephesus Mr Wood has been more successful, and has recovered considerable fragments of the temple of Artemis, to which, as Herodotus tells us, Croesus presented many columns. The lower part of one of these columns, bearing figures in relief of early Ionian style, has been put together at the British Museum; and remains of inscriptions recording the presentation by Croesus are still to be traced. Reliefs from a cornice of somewhat later date are also to be found at the British Museum. Among the Aegean Islands, Delos has furnished us with the most important remains of early art. French excavators have there found a very early statue of a woman dedicated by one Nicandra to Artemis, a figure which may be instructively compared with another from Samus, dedicated to Hera by Cheramues. The Delian statue is in shape like a flat beam; the Samian, which is headless, is like a round tree. The arms of the Delian figure are rigid to the sides; the Samian lady has one arm clasped to her breast. A great improvement on these helpless and inexpressive figures is marked by another figure found at Delos, and connected, though perhaps incorrectly, with a basis recording the execution of a statue by Archermus and Micciades, two sculptors who stood, in the middle of the 6th century, at the head of a sculptural school at Chios. The representation (fig. 19) is of a running or flying figure, having six wings, like the seraphim in the vision of Isaiah, and clad in long drapery. It may be a statue of Nike or Victory, who is said to have been represented in winged form by Archermus. The figure, with its neatness and precision of work, its expressive face and strong outlines, certainly marks great progress in the art of sculpture. When we examine the early sculpture of Athens, we find reason to think that the Chian school had great influence in that city in the days of Peisistratus.

Athenian sculpture.

At Athens, in the age 650-480, we may trace two quite distinct periods of architecture and sculpture. In the earlier of the two periods, a rough limestone was used alike for the walls and the sculptural decoration of temples; in the later period it was superseded by marble, whether native or imported. Every visitor to the museum of the Athenian acropolis stands astonished at the recently recovered groups which decorated the pediments of Athenian temples before the age of Peisistratus--groups of large size, rudely cut in soft stone, of primitive workmanship, and painted with bright red, blue and green, in a fashion which makes no attempt to follow nature, but only to produce a vivid result. The two largest in scale of these groups seem to have belonged to the pediments of the early 6th-century temple of Athena. On other smaller pediments, perhaps belonging to shrines of Heracles and Dionysus, we have conflicts of Heracles with Triton or with other monstrous foes. It is notable how fond the Athenian artists of this early time are of exaggerated muscles and of monstrous forms, which combine the limbs of men and of animals; the measure and moderation which mark developed Greek art are as completely absent as are skill in execution or power of grouping. Fig. 20 shows a small pediment in which appears in relief the slaying of the Lernaean hydra by Heracles. The hero strikes at the many-headed water-snake, somewhat inappropriately, with his club. Iolaus, his usual companion, holds the reins of the chariot which awaits Heracles after his victory. On the extreme left a huge crab comes to the aid of the hydra.

There can be little doubt that Athens owed its great start in art to the influence of the court of Peisistratus, at which artists of all kinds were welcome. We can trace a gradual transformation in sculpture, in which the influence of the Chian and other progressive schools of sculpture is visible, not only in the substitution of island marble for native stone, but in increased grace and truth to nature, in the toning down of glaring colour, and the appearance of taste in composition. A transition between the older and the newer is furnished by the well-known statue of the calf-bearer, an Athenian preparing to sacrifice a calf to the deities, which is made of marble of Hymettus, and in robust clumsiness of forms is not far removed from the limestone pediments. The sacrificer has been commonly spoken of as Hermes or Theseus, but he seems rather to be an ordinary human votary.

In the time of Peisistratus or his sons a peristyle of columns was added to the old temple of Athena; and this necessitated the preparation of fresh pediments. These were of marble. In one of them was represented the battle between gods and giants; in the midst Athena herself striking at a prostrate foe (fig. 21). In these figures no eye can fail to trace remarkable progress. On about the same level of art are the charming statues dedicated to Athena, which were set up in the latter half of the 6th century in the Acropolis, whose graceful though conventional forms and delicate colouring make them one of the great attractions of the Acropolis Museum. We show a figure (fig. 22) which, if it be rightly connected with the basis on which it stands, is the work of the sculptor Antenor, who was also author of a celebrated group representing the tyrant-slayers, Harmodius and Aristogiton. To the same age belong many other votive reliefs of the Acropolis, representing horsemen, scribes and other votaries of Athena.

Dorian sculpture.

From Athens we pass to the seats of Dorian art. And in doing so we find a complete change of character. In place of Dorian draped goddesses and female figures, we find nude male forms. In place of Ionian softness and elegance, we find hard, rigid outlines, strong muscular development, a greater love of and faithfulness to the actual human form--the influence of the palaestra rather than of the harem. To the known series of archaic male figures, recent years have added many examples. We may especially mention a series of figures from the temple of Apollo Ptoos in Boeotia, probably representing the god himself. Still more noteworthy are two colossal nude figures of Apollo, remarkable both for force and for rudeness, found at Delphi, the inscriptions of which prove them to be the work of an Argive sculptor. (Plate V. fig. 76.) From Crete we have acquired the upper part of a draped figure (fig. 23), whether male or female is not certain, which should be an example of the early Daedalid school, whence the art of Peloponnesus was derived; but we can scarcely venture to treat it as a characteristic product of that school; rather the likeness to the dedication of Nicandra is striking.

Another remarkable piece of Athenian sculpture, of the time of the Persian Wars, is the group of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton, set up by the people of Athens, and made by the sculptors Critius and Nesiotes. These figures were hard and rigid in outline, but showing some progress in the treatment of the nude. Copies are preserved in the museum of Naples (Plate I. fig. 50). It should be observed that one of the heads does not belong.

Olympia, Sparta, Selinus.

Next in importance to Athens, as a find-spot for works of early Greek art, ranks Olympia. Olympia, however, did not suffer like Athens from sudden violence, and the explorations there have brought to light a continuous series of remains, beginning with the bronze tripods of the geometric age already mentioned and ending at the barbarian invasions of the 4th century A.D. Notable among the 6th-century stone-sculpture of Olympia are the pediment of the treasury of the people of Megara, in which is represented a battle of gods and giants, and a huge rude head of Hera (fig. 24), which seems to be part of the image worshipped in the Heraeum. Its flatness and want of style are noteworthy. Among the temples of Greece proper the Heraeum of Olympia stands almost alone for antiquity and interest, its chief rival, besides the temples of Athens, being the other temple of Hera at Argos. It appears to have been originally constructed of wood, for which stone was by slow degrees, part by part, substituted. In the time of Pausanias one of the pillars was still of oak, and at the present day the varying diameter of the columns and other structural irregularities bear witness to the process of constant renewal which must have taken place. The early small bronzes of Olympia form an important series, figures of deities standing or striding, warriors in their armour, athletes with exaggerated muscles, and women draped in the Ionian fashion, which did not become unpopular in Greece until after the Persian Wars. Excavations at Sparta have revealed interesting monuments belonging to the worship of ancestors, which seems in the conservative Dorian states of Greece to have been more strongly developed than elsewhere. On some of these stones, which doubtless belonged to the family cults of Sparta, we see the ancestor seated holding a wine-cup, accompanied by his faithful horse or dog; on some we see the ancestor and ancestress seated side by side (fig. 25), ready to receive the gifts of their descendants, who appear in the corner of the relief on a much smaller scale. The male figure holds a wine-cup, in allusion to the libations of wine made at the tomb. The female figure holds her veil and the pomegranate, the recognized food of the dead. A huge serpent stands erect behind the pair. The style of these sculptures is as striking as the subjects; we see lean, rigid forms with severe outline carved in a very low relief, the surface of which is not rounded but flat. The name of Selinus in Sicily, an early Megarian colony, has long been associated with some of the most curious of early sculptures, the metopes of ancient temples, representing the exploits of Heracles and of Perseus. Even more archaic metopes have in recent years been brought to light, one representing a seated sphinx, one the journey of Europa over the sea on the back of the amorous bull (fig. 26), a pair of dolphins swimming beside her. In simplicity and in rudeness of work these reliefs remind us of the limestone pediments of Athens (fig. 20), but yet they are of another and a severer style; the Ionian laxity is wanting.

Delphi.

The recent French excavations at Delphi add a new and important chapter to the history of 6th-century art. Of three treasure-houses, those of Sicyon, Cnidus and Athens, the sculptural adornments have been in great part recovered. These sculptures form a series almost covering the century 570-470 B.C., and include representations of some myths of which we have hitherto had no example. We may say here a few words as to the sculpture which has been discovered, leaving to the article DELPHI an account of the topography and the buildings of the sacred site. Of the archaic temple of Apollo, built as Herodotus tells us by the Alcmaeonidae of Athens, the only sculptural remains which have come down to us are some fragments of the pedimental figures. Of the treasuries which contained the offerings of the pious at Delphi, the most archaic of which there are remains is that belonging to the people of Sicyon. To it appertain a set of exceedingly primitive metopes. One represents Idas and Dioscuri driving off cattle (Plate IV. fig. 66); another, the ship Argo; another, Europa on the bull, others merely animals, a ram or a boar. The treasury of the people of Cnidus (or perhaps Siphnos) is in style some half a century later (see fig. 17). To it belongs a long frieze representing a variety of curious subjects: a battle, perhaps between Greeks and Trojans, with gods and goddesses looking on; a gigantomachy in which the figures of Poseidon, Athena, Hera, Apollo, Artemis and Cybele can be made out, with their opponents, who are armed like Greek hoplites; Athena and Heracles in a chariot; the carrying off of the daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux; Aeolus holding the winds in sacks. The Treasury of the Athenians, erected at the time of the Persian Wars, was adorned with metopes of singularly clear-cut and beautiful style, but very fragmentary, representing the deeds of Heracles and Theseus.

Aegina.

We have yet to speak of the most interesting and important of all Greek archaic sculptures, the pediments of the temple at Aegina (q.v.). These groups of nude athletes fighting over the corpses of their comrades are preserved at Munich, and are familiar to artists and students. But the very fruitful excavations of Professor Furtwängler have put them in quite a new light. Furtwängler (_Aegina: Heiligtum der Aphaia_) has entirely rearranged these pediments, in a way which removes the extreme simplicity and rigour of the composition, and introduces far greater variety of attitudes and motive. We repeat here these new arrangements (figs. 27 and 28), the reasons for which must be sought in Furtwängler's great publication. The individual figures are not much altered, as the restorations of Thorwaldsen, even when incorrect, have now a prescriptive right of which it is not easy to deprive them. Besides the pediments of Aegina must be set the remains of the pediments of the temple of Apollo at Eretria in Euboea, the chief group of which (Plate II. fig. 58), Theseus carrying off an Amazon, is one of the most finely executed works of early Greek art.

_Period II. 480-400 B.C._--The most marvellous phenomenon in the whole history of art is the rapid progress made by Greece in painting and sculpture during the 5th century B.C. As in literature the 5th century takes us from the rude peasant plays of Thespis to the drama of Sophocles and Euripides; as in philosophy it takes us from Pythagoras to Socrates; so in sculpture it covers the space from the primitive works made for the Peisistratidae to some of the most perfect productions of the chisel.

Architecture.

In architecture the 5th century is ennobled by the Theseum, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, the temples of Zeus at Olympia, of Apollo at Phigalia, and many other central shrines, as well as by the Hall of the Mystae at Eleusis and the Propylaea of the Acropolis. Some of the most important of the Greek temples of Italy and Sicily, such as those of Segesta and Selinus, date from the same age. It is, however, only of their sculptural decorations, carried out by the greatest masters in Greece, that we need here treat in any detail.

Painting.

It is the rule in the history of art that innovations and technical progress are shown earlier in the case of painting than in that of sculpture, a fact easily explained by the greater ease and rapidity of the brush compared with the chisel. That this was the order of development in Greek art cannot be doubted. But our means for judging of the painting of the 5th century are very slight. The noble paintings of such masters as Polygnotus, Micon and Panaenus, which once adorned the walls of the great porticoes of Athens and Delphi, have disappeared. There remain only the designs drawn rather than painted on the beautiful vases of the age, which in some degree help us to realize, not the colouring or the charm of contemporary paintings, but the principle of their composition and the accuracy of their drawing.

Polygnotus of Thasos was regarded by his compatriots as a great ethical painter. His colouring and composition were alike very simple, his figures quiet and statuesque, his drawing careful and precise. He won his fame largely by incorporating in his works the best current ideas as to mythology, religion and morals. In particular his painting of Hades with its rewards and punishments, which was on the walls of the building of the people of Cnidus at Delphi, might be considered as a great religious work, parallel to the paintings of the Campo Santo at Pisa or to the painted windows of such churches as that at Fairford. But he also introduced improvements in perspective and greater freedom in grouping.

It is fortunate for us that the Greek traveller Pausanias has left us very careful and detailed descriptions of some of the most important of the frescoes of Polygnotus, notably of the Taking of Troy and the Visit to Hades, which were at Delphi. A comparison of these descriptions with vase paintings of the middle of the 5th century has enabled us to discern with great probability the principles of Polygnotan drawing and perspective. Professor Robert has even ventured to restore the paintings on the evidence of vases. We here represent one of the scenes depicted on a vase found at Orvieto (fig. 29), which is certainly Polygnotan in character. It represents the slaying of the children of Niobe by Apollo and Artemis. Here we may observe a remarkable perspective. The different heights of the rocky background are represented by lines traversing the picture on which the figures stand; but the more distant figures are no smaller than the nearer. The forests of Mount Sipylus are represented by a single conventional tree. The figures are beautifully drawn, and full of charm; but there is a want of energy in the action.

There can be little doubt that the school of Polygnotus exercised great influence on contemporary sculpture. Panaenus, brother of Pheidias, worked with Polygnotus, and many of the groupings found in the sculptures of the Parthenon remind us of those usual with the Thasian master. At this simple and early stage of art there was no essential difference between fresco-painting and coloured relief, light and shade and aerial perspective being unknown. We reproduce two vase-paintings, one (fig. 30) a group of man and horse which closely resembles figures in the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon (fig. 31); the other (fig. 32) representing Victory pouring water for a sacrificial ox to drink, which reminds us of the balustrade of the shrine of Wingless Victory at Athens.

Most writers on Greek painting have supposed that after the middle of the 5th century the technique of painting rapidly improved. This may well have been the case; but we have little means of testing the question. Such improvements would soon raise such a barrier between fresco-painting and vase-painting,--which by its very nature must be simple and architectonic,--that vases can no longer be used with confidence as evidence for contemporary painting. The stories told us by Pliny of the lives of Greek painters are mostly of a trivial and untrustworthy character. Some of them are mentioned in this _Encyclopaedia_ under the names of individual artists. We can only discern a few general facts. Of Agatharchus of Athens we learn that he painted, under compulsion, the interior of the house of Alcibiades. And we are told that he painted a scene for the tragedies of Aeschylus or Sophocles. This has led some writers to suppose that he attempted illusive landscape; but this is contrary to the possibilities of the time; and it is fairly certain that what he really did was to paint the wooden front of the stage building in imitation of architecture; in fact he painted a permanent architectural background, and not one suited to any particular play. Of other painters who flourished at the end of the century, such as Zeuxis and Aristides, it will be best to speak under the next period.

It is now generally held, in consequence of evidence furnished by tombs, that the 5th century saw the end of the making of vases on a great scale at Athens for export to Italy and Sicily. And in fact few things in the history of art are more remarkable than the rapidity with which vase-painting at Athens reached its highest point and passed it on the downward road. At the beginning of the century black-figured ware was scarcely out of fashion, and the masters of the severe red-figured style, Pamphaeus, Epictetus and their contemporaries, were in vogue. The schools of Euphronius, Hiero and Duris belong to the age of the Persian wars. With the middle of the century the works of these makers are succeeded by unsigned vases of most beautiful design, some of them showing the influence of Polygnotus. In the later years of the century, when the empire of Athens was approaching its fall, drawing becomes laxer and more careless, and in the treatment of drapery we frequently note the over-elaboration of folds, the want of simplicity, which begin to mark contemporary sculpture. These changes of style can only be satisfactorily followed in the vase rooms of the British Museum, or other treasuries of Greek art (see also A. B. Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_; and the article CERAMICS).

Olympia: Temple of Zeus.

Among the sculptural works of this period the first place may be given to the great temple of Zeus at Olympia. The statue by Pheidias which once occupied the place of honour in that temple, and was regarded as the noblest monument of Greek religion, has of course disappeared, nor are we able with confidence to restore it. But the plan of the temple, its pavement, some of its architectural ornaments, remain. The marbles which occupied the pediments and the metopes of the temple have been in large part recovered, having been probably thrown down by earthquakes and gradually buried in the alluvial soil. The utmost ingenuity and science of the archaeologists of Germany have been employed in the recovery of the composition of these groups; and although doubt remains as to the places of some figures, and their precise attitudes, yet we may fairly say that we know more about the sculpture of the Olympian temple of Zeus than about the sculpture of any other great Greek temple. The exact date of these sculptures is not certain, but we may with some confidence give them to 470-460 B.C. (In speaking of them we shall mostly follow the opinion of Dr Treu, whose masterly work in vol. iii. of the great German publication on Olympia is a model of patience and of science.) In the eastern pediment (fig. 33), as Pausanias tells us, were represented the preparations for the chariot-race between Oenomaüs and Pelops, the result of which was to determine whether Pelops should find death or a bride and a kingdom. In the midst, invisible to the contending heroes, stood Zeus the supreme arbiter. On one side of him stood Oenomaüs with his wife Sterope, on the other Pelops and Hippodameia, the daughter of Oenomaüs, whose position at once indicates that she is on the side of the newcomer, whatever her parents may feel. Next on either side are the four-horse chariots of the two competitors, that of Oenomaüs in the charge of his perfidious groom Myrtilus, who contrived that it should break down in the running, that of Pelops tended by his grooms. At either end, where the pediment narrows to a point, reclines a river god, at one end Alpheus, the chief stream of Olympia, at the other end his tributary Cladeus. Only one figure remains, not noticed in the careful description of Pausanias, the figure of a handmaid kneeling, perhaps one of the attendants of Sterope. Our engraving gives two conjectural restorations of the pediment, that of Treu and that of Kekule, which differ principally in the arrangement of the corners of the composition; the position of the central figures and of the chariots can scarcely be called in question. The moment chosen is one, not of action, but of expectancy, perhaps of preparation for sacrifice. The arrangement is undeniably stiff and formal, and in the figures we note none of the trained perfection of style which belongs to the sculptures of the Parthenon, an almost contemporary temple. Faults abound, alike in the rendering of drapery and in the representation of the human forms, and the sculptor has evidently trusted to the painter who was afterwards to colour his work, to remedy some of his clumsiness, or to make clear the ambiguous. Nevertheless there is in the whole a dignity, a sobriety, and a simplicity, which reconcile us to the knowledge that this pediment was certainly regarded in antiquity as a noble work, fit to adorn even the palace of Zeus. In the other, the western pediment (fig. 34), the subject is the riot of the Centaurs when they attended the wedding of Peirithous in Thessaly, and, attempting to carry off the bride and her comrades, were slain by Peirithous and Theseus. In the midst of the pediment, invisible like Zeus in the eastern pediment, stands Apollo, while on either side of him Theseus and Peirithous attack the Centaurs with weapons hastily snatched. Our illustration gives two possible arrangements. The monsters are in various attitudes of attempted violence, of combat and defeat; with each grapples one of the Lapith heroes in the endeavour to rob them of their prey. In the corners of the pediment recline female figures, perhaps attendant slaves, though the farthest pair may best be identified as local Thessalian nymphs, looking on with the calmness of divine superiority, yet not wholly unconcerned in what is going forward. Though the composition of the two pediments differs notably, the one bearing the impress of a parade-like repose, the other of an overstrained activity, yet the style and execution are the same in both, and the shortcomings must be attributed to the inferior skill of a local school of sculptors compared with those of Athens or of Aegina. It even appears likely that the designs also belong to a local school. Pausanias, it is true, tells us that the pediments were the work of Alcamenes, the pupil of Pheidias, and of Paeonius, a sculptor of Thrace, respectively; but it is almost certain that he was misled by the local guides, who would naturally be anxious to connect the sculptures of their great temple with well-known names.

The metopes of the temple are in the same style of art as the pediments, but the defects of awkwardness and want of mastery are less conspicuous, because the narrow limits of the metope exclude any elaborate grouping. The subjects are provided by the twelve labours of Heracles; the figures introduced in each metope are but two or at most three; and the action is simplified as much as possible. The example shown (fig. 35) represents Heracles holding up the sky on a cushion, with the friendly aid of a Hesperid nymph, while Atlas, whom he has relieved of his usual burden, approaches bringing the apples which it was the task of Heracles to procure.

Another of the fruits of the excavations of Olympia is the floating Victory by Paeonius, unfortunately faceless (fig. 36), which was set up in all probability in memory of the victory of the Athenians and their Messenian allies at Sphacteria in 425 B.C. The inscription states that it was dedicated by the Messenians and people of Naupactus from the spoils of their enemies, but the name of the enemy is not mentioned in the inscription. The statue of Paeonius, which comes floating down through the air with drapery borne backward, is of a bold and innovating type, and we may trace its influence in many works of the next age.

Delphic charioteer.

Among the discoveries at Delphi none is so striking and valuable to us as the life-size statue in bronze of a charioteer holding in his hand the reins. This is maintained by M. Homolle to be part of a chariot-group set up by Polyzalus, brother of Gelo and Hiero of Syracuse, in honour of a victory won in the chariot-race at the Pythian games at Delphi (fig. 37). The charioteer is evidently a high-born youth, and is clad in the long chiton which was necessary to protect a driver of a chariot from the rush of air. The date would be about 480-470 B.C. Bronze groups representing victorious chariots with their drivers were among the noblest and most costly dedications of antiquity; the present figure is our only satisfactory representative of them. In style the figure is very notable, tall and slight beyond all contemporary examples. The contrast between the conventional decorousness of face and drapery and the lifelike accuracy of hands and feet is very striking, and indicates the clashing of various tendencies in art at the time when the great style was formed in Greece.

The three great masters of the 5th century, Myron, Pheidias and Polyclitus are all in some degree known to us from their works. Of Myron we have copies of two works, the Marsyas (Plate III. fig. 64) and the Discobolus. The Marsyas (a copy in the Lateran Museum) represents the Satyr so named in the grasp of conflicting emotions, eager to pick up the flutes which Athena has thrown down, but at the same time dreading her displeasure if he does so. The Discobolus has usually been judged from the examples in the Vatican and the British Museum, in which the anatomy is modernized and the head wrongly put on. We have now photographs of the very superior replica in the Lancelotti gallery at Rome, the pose of which is much nearer to the original. Our illustration represents a restoration made at Munich, by combining the Lancelotti head with the Vatican body (Plate IV. fig. 68).

Of the works of Pheidias we have unfortunately no certain copy, if we except the small replicas at Athens of his Athena Parthenos. The larger of these (fig. 38) was found in 1880: it is very clumsy, and the wretched device by which a pillar is introduced to support the Victory in the hand of Athena can scarcely be supposed to have belonged to the great original. Tempting theories have been published by Furtwängler (_Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture_) and other archaeologists, which identify copies of the Athena Lemnia of Pheidias, his Pantarces, his Aphrodite Urania and other statues; but doubt hangs over all these attributions.

A more pertinent and more promising question is, how far we may take the decorative sculpture of the Parthenon, since Lord Elgin's time the pride of the British Museum, as the actual work of Pheidias, or as done from his designs. Here again we have no conclusive evidence; but it appears from the testimony of inscriptions that the pediments at all events were not executed until after Pheidias's death.

Of course the pediments and frieze of the Parthenon (q.v.), whose work soever they may be, stand at the head of all Greek decorative sculpture. Whether we regard the grace of the composition, the exquisite finish of the statues in the round, or the delightful atmosphere of poetry and religion which surrounds these sculptures, they rank among the masterpieces of the world. The Greeks esteemed them far below the statue which the temple was made to shelter; but to us, who have lost the great figure in ivory and gold, the carvings of the casket which once contained it are a perpetual source of instruction and delight. The whole is reproduced by photography in A. S. Murray's _Sculptures of the Parthenon_.

An abundant literature has sprung up in regard to these sculptures in recent years. It will suffice here to mention the discussions in Furtwängler's _Masterpieces_, and the very ingenious attempts of Sauer to determine by a careful examination of the bases and backgrounds of the pediments as they now stand how the figures must have been arranged in them. The two ends of the eastern pediment (Plate III. fig. 65) are the only fairly well-preserved part of the pediments.

Among the pupils of Pheidias who may naturally be supposed to have worked on the sculptures of the Parthenon, the most notable were Alcamenes and Agoracritus. Some fragments remain of the great statue of Nemesis at Rhamnus by Agoracritus. And an interesting light has been thrown on Alcamenes by the discovery at Pergamum of a professed copy of his Hermes set up at the entrance to the Acropolis at Athens (Plate II. fig. 57). The style of this work, however, is conventional and archaistic, and we can scarcely regard it as typical of the master.

Another noted contemporary who was celebrated mainly for his portraits was Cresilas, a Cretan. Several copies of his portrait of Pericles exist, and testify to the lofty and idealizing style of portraiture in this great age.

We possess also admirable sculpture belonging to the other important temples of the Acropolis, the Erechtheum and the temple of Nike. The temple of Nike is the earlier, being possibly a memorial of the Spartan defeat at Sphacteria. The Erechtheum belongs to the end of our period, and embodies the delicacy and finish of the conservative school of sculpture at Athens just as the Parthenon illustrates the ideas of the more progressive school. The reconstruction of the Erechtheum has been a task which has long occupied the attention of archaeologists (see the paper by Mr Stevens in the _American Journal of Archaeology_, 1906). Our illustration (Plate V. fig. 75) shows one of the Corae or maidens who support the entablature of the south porch of the Erechtheum in her proper setting. This use of the female figure in place of a pillar is based on old Ionian precedent (see fig. 17) and is not altogether happy; but the idea is carried out with remarkable skill, the perfect repose and solid strength of the maiden being emphasized.

Beside Pheidias of Athens must be placed the greatest of early Argive sculptors, Polyclitus. His two typical athletes, the Doryphorus or spear-bearer (Plate VI. fig. 80) and the Diadumenus, have long been identified, and though the copies are not first-rate, they enable us to recover the principles of the master's art.

Polyclitus.

Among the bases discovered at Olympia, whence the statues had been removed, are three or four which bear the name of Polyclitus, and the definite evidence furnished by these bases as to the position of the feet of the statues which they once bore has enabled archaeologists, especially Professor Furtwängler, to identify copies of those statues among known works. Also newly discovered copies of Polyclitan works have made their appearance. At Delos there has been found a copy of the Diadumenus, which is of much finer work than the statue in the British Museum from Vaison. The Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, U.S.A., has secured a very beautiful statue of a young Hermes, who but for the wings on the temples might pass as a boy athlete of Polyclitan style (Plate II. fig. 60). In fact, instead of relying as regards the manner of Polyclitus on Roman copies of the Doryphorus and Diadumenus, we have quite a gallery of athletes, boys and men, who all claim relationship, nearer or more remote, to the school of the great Argive master. It might have been hoped that the excavations, made under the leadership of Professor Waldstein at the Argive Heraeum, would have enlightened us as to the style of Polyclitus. Just as the sculptures of the Parthenon are the best monument of Pheidias, so it might seem likely that the sculptural decoration of the great temple which contained the Hera of Polyclitus would show us at large how his school worked in marble. Unfortunately the fragments of sculpture from the Heraeum are few. The most remarkable is a female head, which may perhaps come from a pediment (fig. 39). But archaeologists are not in agreement whether it is in style Polyclitan or whether it rather resembles in style Attic works. Other heads and some highly-finished fragments of bodies come apparently from the metopes of the same temple. (See also article Argos.)

Another work of Polyclitus was his Amazon, made it is said in competition with his great contemporaries, Pheidias, Cresilas and Phradmon, all of whose Amazons were preserved in the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus. In our museums are many statues of Amazons representing 5th century originals. These have usually been largely restored, and it is no easy matter to discover their original type. Professor Michaelis has recovered successfully three types (fig. 40). The attribution of these is a matter of controversy. The first has been given to the chisel of Polyclitus; the second seems to represent the Wounded Amazon of Cresilas; the third has by some archaeologists been given to Pheidias. It does not represent a wounded amazon, but one alert, about to leap upon her horse with the help of a spear as a leaping pole.

Lycia.

We can devote little more than a passing mention to the sculpture of other temples and shrines of the later 5th century, which nevertheless deserve careful study. The frieze from the temple of Apollo at Phigalia, representing Centaur and Amazon battles, is familiar to visitors of the British Museum, where, however, its proximity to the remains of the Parthenon lays stress upon the faults of grouping and execution which this frieze presents. It seems to have been executed by local Arcadian artists. More pleasing is the sculpture of the Ionic tomb called the Nereid monument, brought by Sir Charles Fellows from Lycia. Here we have not only a series of bands of relief which ran round the tomb, but also detached female figures, whence the name which it bears is derived. A recent view sees in these women with their fluttering drapery not nymphs of the sea, but personifications of sea-breezes.

The series of known Lycian tombs has been in recent years enriched through the acquisition by the museum of Vienna of the sculptured friezes which adorned a heroon near Geul Bashi. In the midst of the enclosure was a tomb, and the walls of the enclosure itself were adorned within and without with a great series of reliefs, mostly of mythologic purport. Many subjects which but rarely occur in early Greek art, the siege of Troy, the adventure of the Seven against Thebes, the carrying off of the daughters of Leucippus, Ulysses shooting down the Suitors, are here represented in detail. Professor Benndorf, who has published these sculptures in an admirable volume, is disposed to see in them the influence of the Thasian painter Polygnotus. Any one can see their kinship to painting, and their subjects recur in some of the great frescoes painted by Polygnotus, Micon and others for the Athenians. Like other Lycian sculptures, they contain non-Hellenic elements; in fact Lycia forms a link of the chain which extends from the wall-paintings of Assyria to works like the columns of Trajan and of Antoninus, but is not embodied in the more purely idealistic works of the highest Greek art. The date of the Vienna tomb is not much later than the middle of the 5th century. A small part of the frieze of this monument is shown in fig. 41. It will be seen that in this fragment there are two scenes, one directly above the other. In the upper line Ulysses, accompanied by his son Telemachus, is in the act of shooting the suitors, who are reclining at table in the midst of a feast; a cup-bearer, possibly Melanthius, is escaping by a door behind Ulysses. In the lower line is the central group of a frieze which represents the hunting of the Calydonian boar, which is represented, as is usual in the best time of Greek art, as an ordinary animal and no monster.

Portraits.

Archaeologists have recently begun to pay more attention to an interesting branch of Greek art which had until recently been neglected, that of sculptured portraits. The known portraits of the 5th century now include Pericles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Anacreon, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates and others. As might be expected in a time when style in sculpture was so strongly pronounced, these portraits, when not later unfaithful copies, are notably ideal. They represent the great men whom they portray not in the spirit of realism. Details are neglected, expression is not elaborated; the sculptor tries to represent what is permanent in his subject rather than what is temporary. Hence these portraits do not seem to belong to a particular time of life; they only represent a man in the perfection of physical force and mental energy. And the race or type is clearly shown through individual traits. In some cases it is still disputed whether statues of this age represent deities or mortals, so notable are the repose and dignity which even human figures acquire under the hands of 5th-century masters. The Pericles after Cresilas in the British Museum, and the athlete-portraits of Polyclitus, are good examples.

_Period III. 400-300 B.C._--The high ideal level attained by Greek art at the end of the 5th century is maintained in the 4th. There cannot be any question of decay in it save at Athens, where undoubtedly the loss of religion and the decrease of national prosperity acted prejudicially. But in Peloponnesus the time was one of expansion; several new and important cities, such as Messene, Megalopolis and Mantinea, arose under the protection of Epaminondas. And in Asia the Greek cities were still prosperous and artistic, as were the cities of Italy and Sicily which kept their independence. On the whole we find during this age some diminution of the freshness and simplicity of art; it works less in the service of the gods and more in that of private patrons; it becomes less ethical and more sentimental and emotional. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that technique both in painting and sculpture advanced with rapid strides; artists had a greater mastery of their materials, and ventured on a wider range of subject.

In the 4th century no new temples of importance rose at Athens; the Acropolis had taken its final form; but at Messene, Tegea, Epidaurus and elsewhere, very admirable buildings arose. The remains of the temple at Tegea are of wonderful beauty and finish; as are those of the theatre and the so-called _Tholus_ of Epidaurus. In Asia Minor vast temples of the Ionic order arose, especially at Miletus and Ephesus. The colossal pillars of Miletus astonish the visitors to the Louvre; while the sculptured columns of Ephesus in the British Museum (Plate II. fig. 59) show a high level of artistic skill. The Mausoleum erected about 350 B.C. at Halicarnassus in memory of Mausolus, king of Caria, and adorned with sculpture by the most noted artists of the day, was reckoned one of the wonders of the world. It has been in part restored in the British Museum. Mr Oldfield's conjectural restoration, published in _Archaeologia_ for 1895, though it has many rivals, surpasses them all in the lightness of the effect, and in close correspondence to the description by Pliny. We show a small part of the sculptural decoration, representing a battle between Greeks and Amazons (Plate IV. fig. 70), wherein the energy of the action and the careful balance of figure against figure are remarkable. We possess also the fine portraits of Mausolus himself and his wife Artemisia, which stood in or on the building, as well as part of a gigantic chariot with four horses which surmounted it.

Another architectural work of the 4th century, in its way a gem, is the structure set up at Athens by Lysicrates, in memory of a choragic victory. This still survives, though the reliefs with which it is adorned have suffered severely from the weather.

The 4th century is the brilliant period of ancient painting. It opens with the painters of the Asiatic School, Zeuxis and Parrhasius and Protogenes, with their contemporaries Nicias and Apollodorus of Athens, Timanthes of Sicyon or Cythnus, and Euphranor of Corinth. It witnesses the rise of a great school at Sicyon, under Eupompus and Pamphilus, which was noted for its scientific character and the fineness of its drawing, and which culminated in Apelles, the painter of Alexander the Great, and probably the greatest master of the art in antiquity. To each of these painters a separate article is given, fixing their place in the history of the art. Of their paintings unfortunately we can form but a very inadequate notion. Vase-paintings, which in the 5th century give us some notion at least of contemporary drawing, are less careful in the 4th century. Now and then we find on them figures admirably designed, or successfully foreshortened; but these are rare occurrences. The art of the vase decorator has ceased to follow the methods and improvements of contemporary fresco painters, and is pursued as a mere branch of commerce.

But very few actual paintings of the age survive, and even these fragmentary remains have with time lost the freshness of their colouring; nor are they in any case the work of a noteworthy hand. We reproduce two examples. The first is from a stone of the vault of a Crimean grave (Plate IV. fig. 67). The date of the grave is fixed to the 4th century by ornaments found in it, among which was a gold coin of Alexander the Great. The representation is probably of Demeter or her priestess, her hair bound with poppies and other flowers. The original is of large size. The other illustration (fig. 42) represents the remains of a drawing on marble, representing a group of women playing knucklebones. It was found at Herculaneum. Though signed by one Alexander of Athens, who was probably a worker of the Roman age, Professor Robert is right in maintaining that Alexander only copied a design of the age of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In fact the drawing and grouping is so closely like that of reliefs of about 400 B.C. that the drawing is of great historic value, though there be no colouring. Several other drawings of the same class have been found at Herculaneum, and on the walls of the Transtiberine Villa at Rome (now in the Terme Museum).

Praxiteles.

Until about the year 1880, our knowledge of the great Greek sculptors of the 4th century was derived mostly from the statements of ancient writers and from Roman copies, or what were supposed to be copies, of their works. We are now in a far more satisfactory position. We now possess an original work of Praxiteles, and sculptures executed under the immediate direction of, if not from the hand of, other great sculptors of that age--Scopas, Timotheus and others. Among all the discoveries made at Olympia, none has become so familiar to the artistic world as that of the Hermes of Praxiteles. It is the first time that we have become possessed of a first-rate Greek original by one of the greatest of sculptors. Hitherto almost all the statues in our museums have been either late copies of Greek works of art, or else the mere decorative sculpture of temples and tombs, which was by the ancients themselves but little regarded. But we can venture without misgiving to submit the new Hermes to the strictest examination, sure that in every line and touch we have the work of a great artist. This is more than we can say of any of the literary remains of antiquity--poem, play or oration. Hermes is represented by the sculptor (fig. 43 and Plate VI. fig. 82) in the act of carrying the young child Dionysus to the nymphs who were charged with his rearing. On the journey he pauses and amuses himself by holding out to the child-god a bunch of grapes, and watching his eagerness to grasp them. To the modern eye the child is not a success; only the latest art of Greece is at home in dealing with children. But the Hermes, strong without excessive muscular development, and graceful without leanness, is a model of physical formation, and his face expresses the perfection of health, natural endowment and sweet nature. The statue can scarcely be called a work of religious art in the modern or Christian sense of the word religious, but from the Greek point of view it is religious, as embodying the result of the harmonious development of all human faculties and life in accordance with nature.

The Hermes not only adds to our knowledge of Praxiteles, but also confirms the received views in regard to him. Already many works in galleries of sculpture had been identified as copies of statues of his school. Noteworthy among these are, the group at Munich representing Peace nursing the infant Wealth, from an original by Cephisodotus, father of Praxiteles; copies of the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, especially one in the Vatican which is here illustrated (Plate V. fig. 71); copies of the Apollo slaying a lizard (Sauroctonus), of a Satyr (in the Capitol Museum), and others. These works, which are noted for their softness and charm, make us understand the saying of ancient critics that Praxiteles and Scopas were noted for the pathos of their works, as Pheidias and Polyclitus for the ethical quality of those they produced. But the pathos of Praxiteles is of a soft and dreamy character; there is no action, or next to none; and the emotions which he rouses are sentimental rather than passionate. Scopas, as we shall see, was of another mood. The discovery of the Hermes has naturally set archaeologists searching in the museums of Europe for other works which may from their likeness to it in various respects be set down as Praxitelean in character. In the case of many of the great sculptors of Greece--Strongylion, Silanion, Calamis and others--it is of little use to search for copies of their works, since we have little really trustworthy evidence on which to base our inquiries. But in the case of Praxiteles we really stand on a safe level. Naturally it is impossible in these pages to give any sketch of the results, some almost certain, some very doubtful, of the researches of archaeologists in quest of Praxitelean works. But we may mention a few works which have been claimed by good judges as coming from the master himself. Professor Brunn claimed as work of Praxiteles a torso of a satyr in the Louvre, in scheme identical with the well-known satyr of the Capitol. Professor Furtwängler puts in the same category a delicately beautiful head of Aphrodite at Petworth. And his translator, Mrs Strong, regards the Aberdeen head of a young man in the British Museum as the actual work of Praxiteles. Certainly this last head does not suffer when placed beside the Olympian head of Hermes. At Mantinea has been found a basis whereon stood a group of Latona and her two children, Apollo and Artemis, made by Praxiteles. This base bears reliefs representing the musical contest of Apollo and Marsyas, with the Muses as spectators, reliefs very pleasing in style, and quite in the manner of Attic artists of the 4th century. But of course we must not ascribe them to the hand of Praxiteles himself; great sculptors did not themselves execute the reliefs which adorned temples and other monuments, but reserved them for their pupils. Yet the graceful figures of the Muses of Mantinea suggest how much was due to Praxiteles in determining the tone and character of Athenian art in relief in the 4th century. Exactly the same style which marks them belongs also to a mass of sepulchral monuments at Athens, and such works as the Sidonian sarcophagus of the Mourning Women, to be presently mentioned.

Scopas.

Excavation on the site of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea has resulted in the recovery of works of the school of Scopas. Pausanias tells us that Scopas was the architect of the temple, and so important in the case of a Greek temple is the sculptural decoration, that we can scarcely doubt that the sculpture also of the temple at Tegea was under the supervision of Scopas, especially as he was more noted as a sculptor than as an architect. In the pediments of the temple were represented two scenes from mythology, the hunting of the Calydonian boar and the combat between Achilles and Telephus. To one or other of these scenes belong several heads of local marble discovered on the spot, which are very striking from their extraordinary life and animation. Unfortunately they are so much injured that they can scarcely be made intelligible except by the help of restoration; we therefore engrave one of them, the helmeted head, as restored by a German sculptor (Plate III. fig. 63). The strong bony frame of this head, and its depth from front to back, are not less noteworthy than the parted lips and deeply set and strongly shaded eye; the latter features impart to the head a vividness of expression such as we have found in no previous work of Greek art, but which sets the key to the developments of art which take place in the Hellenistic age. A draped torso of Atalanta from the same pediment has been fitted to one of these heads. Hitherto Scopas was known to us, setting aside literary records, only as one of the sculptors who had worked at the Mausoleum. Ancient critics and travellers, however, bear ample testimony to his fame, and the wide range of his activity, which extended to northern Greece, Peloponnese and Asia Minor. His Maenads and his Tritons and other beings of the sea were much copied in antiquity. But perhaps he reached his highest level in statues such as that of Apollo as leader of the Muses, clad in long drapery.

Timotheus, Bryaxis, Leochares.

The interesting precinct of Aesculapius at Epidaurus has furnished us with specimens of the style of an Athenian contemporary of Scopas, who worked with him on the Mausoleum. An inscription which records the sums spent on the temple of the Physician-god, informs us that the models for the sculptures of the pediments, and one set of acroteria or roof adornments, were the work of Timotheus. Of the pedimental figures and the acroteria considerable fragments have been recovered, and we may with confidence assume that at all events the models for these were by Timotheus. It is strange that the unsatisfactory arrangement whereby a noted sculptor makes models and some local workman the figures enlarged from those models, should have been tolerated by so artistic a people as the Greeks. The subjects of the pediments appear to have been the common ones of battles between Greek and Amazon and between Lapith and Centaur. We possess fragments of some of the Amazon figures, one of which, striking downwards at the enemy, is here shown (fig. 44). Their attitudes are vigorous and alert; but the work shows no delicacy of detail. Figures of Nereids riding on horses, which were found on the same site, may very probably be roof ornaments (acroteria) of the temple. We have also several figures of Victory, which probably were acroteria on some smaller temple, perhaps that of Artemis. A base found at Athens, sculptured with figures of horsemen in relief, bears the name of Bryaxis, and was probably made by a pupil of his. Probable conjecture assigns to Leochares the originals copied in the Ganymede of the Vatican, borne aloft by an eagle (Plate I. fig. 53) and the noble statue of Alexander the Great at Munich (see LEOCHARES). Thus we may fairly say that we are now acquainted with the work of all the great sculptors who worked on the Mausoleum--Scopas, Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus; and are in a far more advantageous position than were the archaeologists of 1880 for determining the artistic problems connected with that noblest of ancient tombs.

Contemporary with the Athenian school of Praxiteles and Scopas was the great school of Argos and Sicyon, of which Lysippus was the most distinguished member. Lysippus continued the academic traditions of Polyclitus, but he was far bolder in his choice of subjects and more innovating in style. Gods, heroes and mortals alike found in him a sculptor who knew how to combine fine ideality with a vigorous actuality. He was at the height of his fame during Alexander's life, and the grandiose ambition of the great Macedonian found him ample employment, especially in the frequent representation of himself and his marshals.

We have none of the actual works of Lysippus; but our best evidence for his style will be found in the statue of Agias an athlete (Plate V. fig. 74) found at Delphi, and shown by an inscription to be a marble copy of a bronze original by Lysippus. The Apoxyomenus of the Vatican (man scraping himself with a strigil) (Plate VI. fig. 79) has hitherto been regarded as a copy from Lysippus; but of this there is no evidence, and the style of that statue belongs rather to the 3rd century than the 4th. The Agias, on the other hand, is in style contemporary with the works of 4th-century sculptors.

Of the elaborate groups of combatants with which Lysippus enriched such centres as Olympia and Delphi, or of the huge bronze statues which he erected in temples and shrines, we can form no adequate notion. Perhaps among the extant heads of Alexander the one which is most likely to preserve the style of Lysippus is the head from Alexandria in the British Museum (Plate II. fig. 56), though this was executed at a later time.

Many noted extant statues may be attributed with probability to the latter part of the 4th or the earlier part of the 3rd century. We will mention a few only. The celebrated group at Florence representing Niobe and her children falling before the arrows of Apollo and Artemis is certainly a work of the pathetic school, and may be by a pupil of Praxiteles. Niobe, in an agony of grief, which is in the marble tempered and idealized, tries to protect her youngest daughter from destruction (Plate VI. fig. 78). Whether the group can have originally been fitted into the gable of a temple is a matter of dispute.

Two great works preserved in the Louvre are so noted that it is but necessary to mention them, the Aphrodite of Melos (Plate VI. fig. 77), in which archaeologists are now disposed to see the influence of Scopas, and the Victory of Samothrace (Plate III. figs. 61 and 62), an original set up by Demetrius Poliorcetes after a naval victory won at Salamis in Cyprus in 306 B.C. over the fleet of Ptolemy, king of Egypt.

Nor can we pass over without notice two works so celebrated as the Apollo of the Belvidere in the Vatican (Plate II. fig. 55), and the Artemis of Versailles. The Apollo is now by most archaeologists regarded as probably a copy of a work of Leochares, to whose Ganymede it bears a superficial resemblance. The Artemis is regarded as possibly due to some artist of the same age. But it is by no means clear that we have the right to remove either of these figures from among the statues of the Hellenistic age. The old theory of Preller, which saw in them copies from a trophy set up to commemorate the repulse of the Gauls at Delphi in 278 B.C., has not lost its plausibility.

Sarcophagi of Sidon.

This may be the most appropriate place for mentioning the remarkable find made at Sidon in 1886 of a number of sarcophagi, which once doubtless contained the remains of kings of Sidon. They are now in the museum of Constantinople, and are admirably published by Hamdy Bey and T. Reinach (_Une Nécropole royale à Sidon_, 1892-1896). The sarcophagi in date cover a considerable period. The earlier are made on Egyptian models, the covers shaped roughly in the form of a human body or mummy. The later, however, are Greek in form, and are clearly the work of skilled Greek sculptors, who seem to have been employed by the grandees of Phoenicia in the adornment of their last resting-places. Four of these sarcophagi in particular claim attention, and in fact present us with examples of Greek art of the 5th and 4th centuries in several of its aspects. To the 5th century belong the tomb of the Satrap, the reliefs of which bring before us the activities and glories of some unknown king, and the Lycian sarcophagus, so called from its form, which resembles that of tombs found in Lycia, and which is also adorned with reliefs which have reference to the past deeds of the hero buried in the tomb, though these deeds are represented, not in the Oriental manner directly, but in the Greek manner, clad in mythological forms. To the 4th century belong two other sarcophagi. One of these is called the Tomb of Mourning Women. On all sides of it alike are ranged a series of beautiful female figures, separated by Ionic pillars, each in a somewhat different attitude, though all attitudes denoting grief (fig. 45). The pediments at the ends of the cover are also closely connected with the mourning for the loss of a friend and protector, which is the theme of the whole decoration of the sarcophagus. We see depicted in them the telling of the news of the death, with the results in the mournful attitude of the two seated figures. The mourning women must be taken, not as the representation of any persons in particular, but generally as the expression of the feeling of a city. Such figures are familiar to us in the art of the second Attic school; we could easily find parallels to the sarcophagus among the 4th-century sepulchral reliefs of Athens. We can scarcely be mistaken in attributing the workmanship of this beautiful sarcophagus to some sculptor trained in the school of Praxiteles. And it is a conjecture full of probability that it once contained the body of Strato, king of Sidon, who ruled about 380 B.C., and who was _proxenos_ or public friend of the Athenians.

More celebrated is the astonishing tomb called that of Alexander, though there can be no doubt that, although it commemorates the victories and exploits of Alexander, it was made not to hold his remains, but those of some ruler of Sidon who was high in his favour. Among all the monuments of antiquity which have come down to us, none is more admirable than this, and none more characteristic of the Greek genius. We give, in two lines, the composition which adorned one of the sides of this sarcophagus. It represents a victory of Alexander, probably that of the Granicus (fig. 46). On the left we see the Macedonian king charging the Persian horse, on the right his general Parmenio, and in the midst a younger officer, perhaps Cleitus. Mingled with the chiefs are foot-soldiers, Greek and Macedonian, with whom the Persians are mingled in unequal fray. What most strikes the modern eye is the remarkable freshness and force of the action and the attitudes. Those, however, who have seen the originals have been specially impressed with the colouring, whereof, of course, our engraving gives no hint, but which is applied to the whole surface of the relief with equal skill and delicacy. There are other features in the relief on which a Greek eye would have dwelt with special pleasure--the exceedingly careful symmetry of the whole, the balancing of figure against figure, the skill with which the result of the battle is hinted rather than depicted. The composition is one in which the most careful planning and the most precise calculation are mingled with freedom of hand and expressiveness in detail. The faces in particular show more expression than would be tolerated in art of the previous century. We are unable as yet to assign an author or even a school to the sculptor of this sarcophagus; he comes to us as a new and striking phenomenon in the history of ancient art. The reliefs which adorn the other sides of the sarcophagus are almost equally interesting. On one side we see Alexander again, in the company of a Persian noble, hunting a lion. The short sides also show us scenes of fighting and hunting. In fact it can scarcely be doubted that if we had but a clue to the interpretation of the reliefs, they would be found to embody historic events of the end of the 4th century. There are but a few other works of art, such as the Bayeux tapestry and the Column of Trajan, which bring contemporary history so vividly before our eyes. The battles with the Persians represented in some of the sculpture of the Parthenon and the temple of Nike at Athens are treated conventionally and with no attempt at realism; but here the ideal and the actual are blended into a work of consummate art, which is at the same time, to those who can read the language of Greek art, a historic record. The portraits of Alexander the Great which appear on this sarcophagus are almost contemporary, and the most authentic likenesses of him which we possess. The great Macedonian exercised so strong an influence on contemporary art that a multitude of heads of the age, both of gods and men, and even the portraits of his successors, show traces of his type.

We have yet to mention what are among the most charming and the most characteristic products of the Greek chisel, the beautiful tombs, adorned with seated or standing portraits or with reliefs, which were erected in great numbers on all the main roads of Greece. A great number of these from the Dipylon cemetery are preserved in the Central Museum at Athens, and impress all visitors by the gentle sentiment and the charm of grouping which they display (Gardner, _Sculptured Tombs of Hellas_).

_Period IV., 300-50 B.C._--There can be no question but that the period which followed the death of Alexander, commonly called the age of Hellenism, was one of great activity and expansion in architecture. The number of cities founded by himself and his immediate successors in Asia and Egypt was enormous. The remains of these cities have in a few cases (Ephesus, Pergamum, Assus, Priene, Alexandria) been partially excavated. But the adaptation of Greek architecture to the needs of the semi-Greek peoples included in the dominions of the kings of Egypt, Syria and Pergamum is too vast a subject for us to enter upon here (see ARCHITECTURE).

Painting during this age ceased to be religious. It was no longer for temples and public stoae that artists worked, but for private persons; especially they made frescoes for the decoration of the walls of houses, and panel pictures for galleries set up by rich patrons. The names of very few painters of the Hellenistic age have come down to us. There can be no doubt that the character of the art declined, and there were no longer produced great works to be the pride of cities, or to form an embodiment for all future time of the qualities of a deity or the circumstances of scenes mythical or historic. But at the same time the mural paintings of Pompeii and other works of the Roman age, which are usually more or less nearly derived from Hellenistic models, prove that in technical matters painting continued to progress. Colouring became more varied, groups more elaborate, perspective was worked out with greater accuracy, and imagination shook itself free from many of the conventions of early art. Pompeian painting, however, must be treated of under Roman, not under Greek art. We figure a single example, to show the elaboration of painting at Alexandria and elsewhere, the wonderful Pompeian mosaic (fig. 47), which represents the victory of Alexander at Issus. This work being in stone has preserved its colouring; and it stands at a far higher level of art than ordinary Pompeian paintings, which are the work of mere house-decorators. This on the contrary is certainly copied from the work of a great master. It is instructive to compare it with the sarcophagus illustrated in Fig. 46, which it excels in perspective and in the freedom of individual figures, though the composition is much less careful and precise. Alexander charges from the left (his portrait being the least successful part of the picture), and bears down a young Persian; Darius in his chariot flees towards the right; in the foreground a young knight is trying to manage a restive horse. It will be observed how very simple is the indication of locality: a few stones and a broken tree stand for rocks and woods.

Among the original sculptural creations of the early Hellenistic age, a prominent place is claimed by the statue of Fortune, typifying the city of Antioch (Plate VI. fig. 81), a work of Eutychides, a pupil of Lysippus. Of this we possess a small copy, which is sufficient to show how worthy of admiration was the original. We have a beautiful embodiment of the personality of the city, seated on a rock, holding ears of corn, while the river Orontes, embodied in a young male figure, springs forth at her feet.

This is, so far as we know, almost the only work of the early part of the 3rd century which shows imagination. Sculptors often worked on a colossal scale, producing such monsters as the colossal Apollo at Rhodes, the work of Chares of Lindus, which was more than 100 ft. in height. But they did not show freshness or invention; and for the most part content themselves with varying the types produced in the great schools of the 4th century. The wealthy kings of Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor formed art galleries, and were lavish in their payments; but it has often been proved in the history of art that originality cannot be produced by mere expenditure.

A great artist, whose date has been disputed, but who is now assigned to the Hellenistic age, Damophon of Messene, is known to us from his actual works. He set up in the shrine of the _Mistress_ (Despoena) at Lycosura in Arcadia a great group of figures consisting of Despoena, Demeter, Artemis and the Titan Anytus. Three colossal heads found on the spot probably belong to the three last-mentioned deities. We illustrate the head of Anytus, with wild disordered hair and turbulent expression (fig. 48). Dr Dörpfeld has argued, on architectural grounds, that shrine and images alike must be given to a later time than the 4th century; and this judgment is now confirmed by inscriptional and other evidence.

In one important direction sculpture certainly made progress. Hitherto Greek sculptors had contented themselves with studying the human body whether in rest or motion, from outside. The dissection of the human body, with a consequent increase in knowledge of anatomy, became usual at Alexandria in the medical school which flourished under the Ptolemies. This improved anatomical knowledge soon reacted upon the art of sculpture. Works such as the Fighter of Agasias in the Louvre (Plate IV. fig. 69), and in a less degree the Apoxyomenus (Plate VI. fig. 79), display a remarkable internal knowledge of the human frame, such as could only come from the habit of dissection. Whether this was really productive of improvement in sculpture may be doubted. But it is impossible to withhold one's admiration from works which show an astonishing knowledge of the body of man down to its bony framework, and a power and mastery of execution which have never since been surpassed.

With accuracy in the portrayal of men's bodies goes of necessity a more naturalistic tendency in portraiture. As we have seen, the art of portraiture was at a high ideal level in the Pheidian age; and even in the age of Alexander the Great, notable men were rendered rather according to the idea than the fact. To a base and mechanical naturalism Greek art never at any time descended. But from 300 B.C. onwards we have a marvellous series of portraits which may be termed rather characteristic than ideal, which are very minute in their execution, and delight in laying emphasis on the havoc wrought by time and life on the faces of noteworthy men. Such are the portraits of Demosthenes, of Antisthenes, of Zeno and others, which exist in our galleries. And it was no long step from these actual portraits to the invention of characteristic types to represent the great men of a past generation, such as Homer and Lycurgus, or to form generic images to represent weatherbeaten fishermen or toothless old women.

Altar of Pergamum.

Our knowledge of the art of the later Hellenistic age has received a great accession since 1875 through the systematic labours directed by the German Archaeological Institute, which have resulted in recovering the remains of Pergamum, the fortress-city which was the capital of the dynasty of the Philetaeri. Among the ancient buildings of Pergamum none was more ambitious in scale and striking in execution than the great altar used for sacrifices to Zeus, a monument supposed to be referred to in the phrase of the Apocalypse "where Satan's throne is." This altar, like many great sacrificial altars of later Greece, was a vast erection to which one mounted by many steps, and its outside was adorned with a frieze which represented on a gigantic scale, in the style of the 2nd century B.C., the battle between the gods and the giants. This enormous frieze (see PERGAMUM) is now one of the treasures of the Royal Museums of Berlin, and it cannot fail to impress visitors by the size of the figures, the energy of the action, and the strong vein of sentiment which pervades the whole, giving it a certain air of modernity, though the subject is strange to the Christian world. In early Greek art the giants where they oppose the gods are represented as men armed in full panoply, "in shining armour, holding long spears in their hands," to use the phrase in which Hesiod describes them. But in the Pergamene frieze the giants are strange compounds, having the heads and bodies of wild and fierce barbarians, sometimes also human legs, but sometimes in the place of legs two long serpents, the heads of which take with the giants themselves a share in the battle. Sometimes also they are winged. The gods appear in the forms which had been gradually made for them in the course of Greek history, but they are usually accompanied by the animals sacred to them in cultus, between which and the serpent-feet of the giants a weird combat goes on. We can conjecture the source whence the Pergamene artist derived the shaggy hair, the fierce expression, the huge muscles of his giants (fig. 49); probably these features came originally from the Galatians, who at the time had settled in Asia Minor, and were spreading the terror of their name and the report of their savage devastations through all Asia Minor. The victory over the giants clearly stands for the victory of Greek civilization over Gallic barbarism; and this meaning is made more emphatic because the gods are obviously inferior in physical force to their opponents, indeed, a large proportion of the divine combatants are goddesses. Yet everywhere the giants are overthrown, writhing in pain on the ground, or transfixed by the weapons of their opponents; everywhere the gods are victorious, yet in the victory retain much of their divine calm. The piecing together of the frieze at Berlin has been a labour of many years; it is now complete, and there is a special museum devoted to it. Some of the groups have become familiar to students from photographs, especially the group which represents Zeus slaying his enemies with thunderbolts, and the group wherein Athena seizes by the hair an overthrown opponent, who is winged, while Victory runs to crown her, and beneath is seen Gaia, the earth-goddess who is the mother of the giants, rising out of the ground, and mourning over her vanquished and tortured children. Another and smaller frieze which also decorated the altar-place gives us scenes from the history of Telephus, who opposed the landing of the army of Agamemnon in Asia Minor and was overthrown by Achilles. This frieze, which is quite fragmentary, is put together by Dr Schneider in the _Jahrbuch_ of the German Archaeological Institute for 1900.

Since the Renaissance Rome has continually produced a crop of works of Greek art of all periods, partly originals brought from Greece by conquering generals, partly copies, such as the group at Rome formerly known as Paetus and Arria, and the overthrown giants and barbarians which came from the elaborate trophy set up by Attalus at Athens, of which copies exist in many museums. A noted work of kindred school is the group of Laocoon and his sons (Plate I. fig. 52), signed by Rhodian sculptors of the 1st century B.C., which has been perhaps more discussed than any work of the Greek chisel, and served as a peg for the aesthetic theories of Lessing and Goethe. In our days the histrionic and strained character of the group is regarded as greatly diminishing its interest, in spite of the astounding skill and knowledge of the human body shown by the artists. To the same school belong the late representations of Marsyas being flayed by the victorious Apollo (Plate II. fig. 54), a somewhat repulsive subject, chosen by the artists of this age as a means for displaying their accurate knowledge of anatomy.

On what a scale some of the artists of Asia Minor would work is shown us by the enormous group, by Apollonius and Tauriscus of Tralles, which is called the Farnese Bull (Plate I. fig. 51), and which represents how Dirce was tied to a wild bull by her stepsons Zethus and Amphion.

Rome.

The extensive excavations and alterations which have taken place at Rome in recent years have been very fruitful; the results may be found partly in the palace of the Conservatori on the Capitol, partly in the new museum of the Terme. Among recently found statues none excel in interest some bronzes of large size dating from the Hellenistic age. In the figure of a seated boxer (Plate V. fig. 72), in scale somewhat exceeding life, attitude and gesture are expressive. Evidently the boxer has fought already, and is awaiting a further conflict. His face is cut and swollen; on his hands are the terrible caestus, here made of leather, and not loaded with iron, like the caestus described by Virgil. The figure is of astounding force; but though the face is brutal and the expression savage, in the sweep of the limbs there is nobility, even ideal beauty. To the last the Greek artist could not set aside his admiration for physical perfection. Another bronze figure of more than life-size is that of a king of the Hellenistic age standing leaning on a spear. He is absolutely nude, like the athletes of Polyclitus. Another large bronze presents us with a Hellenistic type of Dionysus.

Besides the bronzes found in Rome we may set those recently found in the sea on the coast of Cythera, the contents of a ship sailing from Greece to Rome, and lost on the way. The date of these bronze statues has been disputed. In any case, even if executed in the Roman age, they go back to originals of the 5th and 4th centuries. The most noteworthy among them is a beautiful athlete (Plate V. fig. 73) standing with hand upraised, which reflects the style of the Attic school of the 4th century.

After 146 B.C. when Corinth was destroyed and Greece became a Roman province, Greek art, though by no means extinct, worked mainly in the employ of the Roman conquerors (see ROMAN ART).

IV. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.[3]--I. General works on Greek Art.--The only recent general histories of Greek art are: H. Brunn, _Griechische Kunstgeschichte_, bks. i. and ii., dealing with archaic art; W. Klein, _Geschichte der griechischen Kunst_, no illustrations; Perrot et Chipiez, _Histoire de l'art dans l'antiquité_, vols. vii. and viii. (archaic art only).

Introductory are: P. Gardner, _Grammar of Greek Art_; J. E. Harrison, _Introductory Studies in Greek Art_; H. B. Walters, _Art of the Greeks_.

Useful are also: H. Brunn, _Geschichte der griechischen Künstler_, (new edition, 1889); J. Overbeck, _Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Griechen_; untranslated passages in Latin and Greek; the Elder Pliny's _Chapters on the History of Art_, edited by K. Jex-Blake and E. Sellers; H. S. Jones, _Ancient Writers on Greek Sculpture_.

II. Periodicals dealing with Greek Archaeology.--England: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_; _Annual of the British School at Athens_; _Classical Review_. France: _Revue archéologique_; _Gazette archéologique_; _Bulletin de correspondance hellénique_. Germany: _Jahrbuch des K. deutschen arch. Instituts_; _Mitteilungen des arch. Inst._, Athenische Abteilung, Römische Abteilung; _Antike Denkmäler_. Austria: _Jahreshefte des K. Österreich. arch. Instituts_. Italy: Publications of the _Accademia dei Lincei_; _Monumenti antichi_; _Not. dei scavi_; _Bulletino comunale di Roma_. Greece: _Ephemeris archaiologikè_; _Deltion archaiologikon_; _Praktika_ of the Athenian Archaeological Society.

III. Greek Architecture.--General: Perrot et Chipiez, _Histoire de l'art dans l'antiquité_, vol. vii.; A. Choisy, _Histoire de l'architecture_, vol. i.; Anderson and Spiers, _Architecture of Greece and Rome_; E. Boutmy, _Philosophie de l'architecture en Grèce_; R. Sturgis, _History of Architecture_, vol. i.; A. Marquand, _Greek Architecture_.

IV. Greek Sculpture.--General: M. Collignon, _Histoire de la sculpture grecque_ (2 vols.); E. A. Gardner, _Handbook of Greek Sculpture_; A. Furtwängler, _Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture_, translated and edited by E. Sellers; Friederichs and Wolters, _Bausteine zur Geschichte der griechisch-römischen Plastik_ (1887); von Mach, _Handbook of Greek and Roman Sculpture_, 500 plates; H. Bulle, _Der schöne Mensch in der Kunst: Altertum_, 216 plates; S. Reinach, _Répertoire de la statuaire grecque et romaine_, 3 vols.

V. Greek Painting and Vases.--Woltmann and Woermann, _History of Painting_, vol. i., translated and edited by S. Colvin (1880); H. B. Walters, _History of Ancient Pottery_ (2 vols.); Harrison and MacColl, _Greek Vase-paintings_ (1894); O. Rayet et M. Collignon, _Histoire de la céramique grecque_ (1888); P. Girard, _La Peinture antique_ (1892); S. Reinach, _Répertoire des vases peints grecs et étrusques_ (2 vols.); Furtwängler und Reichhold, "Griechische Vasenmalerei," _Wiener Vorlegeblätter für archäologische Übungen_ (1887-1890).

VI. Special Schools and Sites.--A. Joubin, _La Sculpture grecque entre les guerres médiques et l'époque de Périclès_; C. Waldstein, _Essays on the Art of Pheidias_ (1885); W. Klein, _Praxiteles_; G. Perrot, _Praxitèle_; A. S. Murray, _Sculptures of the Parthenon_; W. Klein, _Euphronios_; E. Pottier, _Douris_; P. Gardner, _Sculptured Tombs of Hellas_; E. A. Gardner, _Ancient Athens_; A. Bötticher, _Olympia_; Bernoulli, _Griechische Ikonographie_; P. Gardner, _The Types of Greek Coins_ (1883); E. A. Gardner, _Six Greek Sculptors._

VII. Books related to the subject.--J. G. Frazer, _Pausanias's Description of Greece_ (6 vols.); J. Lange, _Darstellung des Menschen in der älteren griechischen Kunst_; E. Brücke, _The Human Figure; its Beauties and Defects_; A. Michaelis, _Ancient Marbles in Great Britain_ (1882); _Catalogue of Greek Sculpture in the British Museum_ (3 vols.); _Catalogue of Greek Vases in the British Museum_ (4 vols.); J. B. Bury, _History of Greece_ (illustrated edition); Baumeister, _Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums_ (3 vols.). (P. G.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Grammar of Greek Art._

[2] It may here be pointed out that it was found impossible, with any regard for the appearance of the pages, to arrange the Plates for this article so as to preserve a chronological order in the individual figures; they are not arranged consecutively as regards the history or the period, and are only grouped for convenience in paging.--Ed.

[3] The date is given when the work cannot be considered new.

GREEK FIRE, the name applied to inflammable and destructive compositions used in warfare during the middle ages and particularly by the Byzantine Greeks at the sieges of Constantinople. The employment of liquid fire is represented on Assyrian bas-reliefs. At the siege of Plataea (429 B.C.) the Spartans attempted to burn the town by piling up against the walls wood saturated with pitch and sulphur and setting it on fire (Thuc. ii. 77), and at the siege of Delium (424 B.C.) a cauldron containing pitch, sulphur and burning charcoal, was placed against the walls and urged into flame by the aid of a bellows, the blast from which was conveyed through a hollow tree-trunk (Thuc. iv. 100). Aeneas Tacticus in the following century mentions a mixture of sulphur, pitch, charcoal, incense and tow, which was packed in wooden vessels and thrown lighted upon the decks of the enemy's ships. Later, as in receipts given by Vegetius (_c._ A.D. 350), naphtha or petroleum is added, and some nine centuries afterwards the same substances are found forming part of mixtures described in the later receipts (which probably date from the beginning of the 13th century) of the collection known as the _Liber ignium_ of Marcus Graecus. In subsequent receipts saltpetre and turpentine make their appearance, and the modern "carcass composition," containing sulphur, tallow, rosin, turpentine, saltpetre and crude antimony, is a representative of the same class of mixtures, which became known to the Crusaders as Greek fire but were more usually called wildfire. Greek fire, properly so-called, was, however, of a somewhat different character. It is said that in the reign of Constantine Pogonatus (648-685) an architect named Callinicus, who had fled from Heliopolis in Syria to Constantinople, prepared a wet fire which was thrown out from siphons ([Greek: to dia tôn siphônôn ekpheromenon pyr hugron]), and that by its aid the ships of the Saracens were set on fire at Cyzicus and their defeat assured. The art of compounding this mixture, which is also referred to as [Greek: pyr thalassion], or sea fire, was jealously guarded at Constantinople, and the possession of the secret on several occasions proved of great advantage to the city. The nature of the compound is somewhat obscure. It has been supposed that the novelty introduced by Callinicus was saltpetre, but this view involves the difficulty that that substance was apparently not known till the 13th century, even if it were capable of accounting for the properties attributed to the wet fire. Lieut.-Colonel H. W. L. Hime, after a close examination of the available evidence, concludes that what distinguished Greek fire from the other incendiaries of the period was the presence of quicklime, which was well known to give rise to a large development of heat when brought into contact with water. The mixture, then, was composed of such materials as sulphur and naphtha with quicklime, and took fire spontaneously when wetted--whence the name of wet fire or sea fire; and portions of it were "projected and at the same time ignited by applying the hose of a water engine to the breech" of the siphon, which was a wooden tube, cased with bronze.

See Lieut.-Col. H. W. L. Hime, _Gunpowder and Ammunition, their Origin and Progress_ (London, 1904).

GREEK INDEPENDENCE, WAR OF, the name given to the great rising of the Greek subjects of the sultan against the Ottoman domination, which began in 1821 and ended in 1833 with the establishment of the independent kingdom of Greece. The circumstances that led to the insurrection and the general diplomatic situation by which its fortunes were from time to time affected are described elsewhere (see GREECE: _History_; TURKEY: _History_). The present article is confined to a description of the general character and main events of the war itself. If we exclude the abortive invasion of the Danubian principalities by Prince Alexander Ypsilanti (March 1821), which collapsed ignominiously as soon as it was disavowed by the tsar, the theatre of the war was confined to continental Greece, the Morea, and the adjacent narrow seas. Its history may, broadly speaking, be divided into three periods: the first (1821-1824), during which the Greeks, aided by numerous volunteers from Europe, were successfully pitted against the sultan's forces alone; the second, from 1824, when the disciplined troops of Mehemet Ali, pasha of Egypt, turned the tide against the insurgents; the third, from the intervention of the European powers in the autumn of 1827 to the end.

When, on the 2nd of April 1821, Archbishop Germanos, head of the _Hetaeria_ in the Morea, raised the standard of the cross at Kalavryta as the signal for a general rising of the Christian population, the circumstances were highly favourable. In the Morea itself, in spite of plentiful warning, the Turks were wholly unprepared; while the bulk of the Ottoman army, under the _seraskier_ Khurshid Pasha, was engaged in the long task of reducing the intrepid Ali, pasha of Iannina (see ALI, pasha of Iannina).

Another factor, and that the determining one, soon came to the aid of the Greeks. In warfare carried on in such a country as Greece, sea-girt and with a coast deeply indented, inland without roads and intersected with rugged mountains, victory--as Wellington was quick to observe--must rest with the side that has command of the sea. This was assured to the insurgents at the outset by the revolt of the maritime communities of the Greek archipelago. The Greeks of the islands had been accustomed from time immemorial to seafaring; their ships--some as large as frigates--were well armed, to guard against the Barbary pirates and rovers of their own kin; lastly, they had furnished the bulk of the sailors to the Ottoman navy which, now that this recruiting ground was closed, had to be manned hastily with impressed crews of dock-labourers and peasants, many of whom had never seen the sea. The Turkish fleet, "adrift in the Archipelago"--as the British seamen put it--though greatly superior in tonnage and weight of metal, could never be a match for the Greek brigs, manned as these were by trained, if not disciplined, crews.

Outbreak of the insurrection.

The war was begun by the Greeks without definite plan and without any generally recognized leadership. The force with which Germanos marched from Kalavryta against Patras was composed of peasants armed with scythes, clubs and slings, among whom the "primates" exercised a somewhat honorary authority. The town itself was destroyed and those of its Mussulman inhabitants who could not escape into the citadel were massacred; but the citadel remained in the hands of the Turks till 1828. Meanwhile, in the south, leaders of another stamp had appeared: Petros, bey of the Maina (q.v.) chief of the Mavromichales, who at the head of his clan attacked Kalamata and put the Mussulman inhabitants to the sword; and Kolokotrones, a notable brigand once in the service of the Ionian government, who--fortified by a vision of the Virgin--captured Karytaena and slaughtered its infidel population. Encouraged by these successes the revolt spread rapidly; within three weeks there was not a Mussulman left in the open country, and the remnants of the once dominant class were closely besieged in the fortified towns by hosts of wild peasants and brigands. The flames of revolt now spread across the Isthmus of Corinth: early in April the Christians of Dervenokhoria rose, and the whole of Boeotia and Attica quickly followed suit; at the beginning of May the Mussulman inhabitants of Athens were blockaded in the Acropolis. In the Morea, meanwhile, a few Mussulman fortresses still held out: Coron, Modon, Navarino, Patras, Nauplia, Monemvasia, Tripolitsa. One by one they fell, and everywhere were repeated the same scenes of butchery. The horrors culminated in the capture of Tripolitsa, the capital of the vilayet. In September this was taken by storm; Kolokotrones rode in triumph to the citadel over streets carpeted with the dead; and the crowning triumph of the Cross was celebrated by a cold-blooded massacre of 2000 prisoners of all ages and both sexes. This completed the success of the insurrection in the Morea, where only Patras, Nauplia, and one or two lesser fortresses remained to the Turks.

Meanwhile, north of the Isthmus, the fortunes of war had been less one-sided. In the west Khurshid's lieutenant, Omar Vrioni (a Mussulman Greek of the race of the Palaeologi), had inflicted a series of defeats on the insurgents, recaptured Levadia, and on the 30th of June relieved the Acropolis; but the rout of the troops which Mahommed Pasha was bringing to his aid by the Greeks in the defile of Mount Oeta, and the news of the fall of Tripolitsa, forced him to retreat, and the campaign of 1821 ended with the retirement of the Turks into Thessaly.

The month of April had witnessed the revolt of the principal Greek islands, Spetsae on the 7th, Psara on the 23rd, Hydra on the 28th and Samos on the 30th. Their fleets were divided into squadrons, of which one, under Tombazes, was deputed to watch for the entrance of the Ottomans into the archipelago, while the other under Andreas Miaoulis (_q.v._) sailed to blockade Patras and watch the coasts of Epirus. At sea, as on land, the Greeks opened the campaign with hideous atrocities, almost their first exploit being the capture of a vessel carrying to Mecca the sheik-ul-Islam and his family, whom they murdered with every aggravation of outrage.

General character of the war.

These inauspicious beginnings, indeed, set the whole tone of the war, which was frankly one of mutual extermination. On both sides the combatants were barbarians, without discipline or competent organization. At sea the Greeks rapidly developed into mere pirates, and even Miaoulis, for all his high character and courage, was often unable to prevent his captains from sailing home at critical moments, when pay or booty failed. On land the presence of a few educated Phanariots, such as Demetrios Ypsilanti or Alexander Mavrocordato, was powerless to inspire the rude hordes with any sense of order or of humanity in warfare; while every lull in the fighting, due to a temporary check to the Turks, was the signal for internecine conflicts due to the rivalry of leaders who, with rare exceptions, thought more of their personal power and profit than of the cause of Greece.

Turkish reprisals.

Europe and the rising Philhellenism.

This cause, indeed, was helped more by the impolitic reprisals of the Turks than by the heroism of the insurgents. All Europe stood aghast at the news of the execution of the Patriarch Gregorios of Constantinople (April 22, 1821) and the wholesale massacres that followed, culminating as these did in the extermination of the prosperous community of Scio (Chios) in March 1822. The cause of Greece was now that of Christendom, of the Catholic and Protestant West, as of the Orthodox East. European Liberalism, too, gagged and fettered under Metternich's "system," recognized in the Greeks the champions of its own cause; while even conservative statesmen, schooled in the memories of ancient Hellas, saw in the struggle a fight of civilization against barbarism. This latter belief, which was, moreover, flattering to their vanity, the Greek leaders were astute enough to foster; the propaganda of Adamantios Coraës (_q.v._) had done its work; and wily brigands, like Odysseus of Ithaka, assuming the style and trappings of antiquity, posed as the champions of classic culture against the barbarian. All Europe, then, hailed with joy the exploit of Constantine Kanaris, who on the night of June 18-19 succeeded in steering a fire-ship among the Turkish squadron off Scio, and burned the flag-ship of the capudan-pasha with 3000 souls on board.

Expedition of Dramali, 1822.

Meanwhile Sultan Mahmud, now wide awake to the danger, had been preparing for a systematic effort to suppress the rising. The threatened breach with Russia had been avoided by Metternich's influence on the tsar Alexander; the death of Ali of Iannina had set free the army of Khurshid Pasha, who now, as _seraskier_ of Rumelia, was charged with the task of reducing the Morea. In the spring of 1822 two Turkish armies advanced southwards: one, under Omar Vrioni, along the coast of Western Hellas, the other, under Ali, pasha of Drama (Dramali), through Boeotia and Attica. Omar was held in check by the mud ramparts of Missolonghi; but Dramali, after exacting fearful vengeance for the massacre of the Turkish garrison of the Acropolis at Athens, crossed the Isthmus and with the over-confidence of a conquering barbarian advanced to the relief of the hard-pressed garrison of Nauplia. He crossed the perilous defile of Dervenaki unopposed; and at the news of his approach most of the members of the Greek government assembled at Argos fled in panic terror. Demetrios Ypsilanti, however, with a few hundred men joined the Mainote Karayanni in the castle of Larissa, which crowns the acropolis of ancient Argos. This held Dramali in check, and gave Kolokotrones time to collect an army. The Turks, in the absence of the fleet which was to have brought them supplies, were forced to retreat (August 6); the Greeks, inspired with new courage, awaited them in the pass of Dervenaki, where the undisciplined Ottoman host, thrown into confusion by an avalanche of boulders hurled upon them, was annihilated. In Western Greece the campaign had an outcome scarcely less disastrous for the Turks. The death of Ali of Iannina had been followed by the suppression of the insurgent Suliotes and the advance of Omar Vrioni southwards to Missolonghi; but the town held out gallantly, a Turkish surprise attack, on the 6th of January 1823, was beaten off, and Omar Vrioni had to abandon the siege and retire northwards over the pass of Makrynoros.

Civil war among the Greeks.

Campaign of 1823.

The victorious outcome of the year's fighting had a disastrous effect upon the Greeks. Their victories had been due mainly to the guerilla tactics of the leaders of the type of Kolokotrones; Mavrocordato, whose character and antecedents had marked him out as the natural head of the new Greek state, in spite of his successful defence of Missolonghi, had been discredited by failures elsewhere; and the Greeks thus learned to despise their civilized advisers and to underrate the importance of discipline. The temporary removal of the common peril, moreover, let loose all the sectional and personal jealousies, which even in face of the enemy had been with difficulty restrained, and the year 1823 witnessed the first civil war between the Greek parties. These internecine feuds might easily have proved fatal to the cause of Greece. In the Archipelago Hydriotes and Spetsiotes were at daggers drawn; the men of Psara were at open war with those of Samos; all semblance of discipline and cohesion had vanished from the Greek fleet. Had Khosrev, the new Ottoman admiral, been a man of enterprise, he might have regained the command of the sea and, with it, that of the whole situation. But the fate of his predecessor had filled him with a lively terror of Kanaris and his fire-ships; he contented himself with a cruise round the coasts of Greece, and was happy to return to safety under the guns of the Dardanelles without having accomplished anything beyond throwing supplies and troops into Coron, Modon and Patras. On land, meanwhile, the events of the year before practically repeated themselves. In the west an army of Mussulman and Catholic Albanians, under Mustai Pasha, advanced southwards. On the night of the 21st of August occurred the celebrated exploit of Marko Botzaris and his Suliotes: a successful surprise attack on the camp of the Ottoman vanguard, in which the Suliote leader fell. The jealousy of the Aetolian militia for the Suliotes, however, prevented the victory being decisive; and Mustai advanced to the siege of Anatoliko, a little town in the lagoons near Missolonghi. Here he was detained until, on the 11th of December, he was forced to raise the siege and retire northwards. His colleague, Yussuf Pasha, in East Hellas fared no better; here, too, the Turks gained some initial successes, but in the end the harassing tactics of Kolokotrones and his guerilla bands forced them back into the plain of the Kephissos. At the end of the year the Greeks were once more free to renew their internecine feuds.

Just when these feuds were at their height, in the autumn of 1823, the most famous of the Philhellenes who sacrificed themselves for the cause of Greece, Lord Byron, arrived in Greece.

Second civil war, 1824.

Intervention of Mehemet Ali.

The year 1824 was destined to be a fateful one for the Greek cause. The large loans raised in Europe, the first instalment of which Byron had himself brought over, while providing the Greeks with the sinews of war, provided them also with fresh material for strife. To the struggle for power was added a struggle for a share of this booty, and a second civil war broke out, Kolokotrones leading the attack on the forces of the government. Early in 1825 the government was victorious; Kolokotrones was in prison; and Odysseus, the hero of so many exploits and so many crimes, who had ended by turning traitor and selling his services to the Turks, had been captured, imprisoned in the Acropolis, and finally assassinated by his former lieutenant Gouras (July 16, 1824). But a new and more terrible danger now threatened Greece. Sultan Mahmud, despairing of suppressing the insurrection by his own power, had reluctantly summoned to his aid Mehemet Ali, pasha of Egypt, whose well-equipped fleet and disciplined army were now thrown into the scale against the Greeks. Already, in June 1823, the pasha's son-in-law Hussein Bey had landed in Crete, and by April of the following year had reduced the insurgent islanders to submission. Crete now became the base of operations against the Greeks. On the 19th of June Hussein appeared before Kasos, a nest of pirates of evil reputation, which he captured and destroyed. The same day the Egyptian fleet, under Ibrahim Pasha, sailed from Alexandria. Khosrev, too, emboldened by this new sense of support, ventured to sea, surprised and destroyed Psara (July 2), and planned an attack on Samos, which was defeated by Miaoulis and his fire-ships (August 16, 17). On the 1st of September, however, Khosrev succeeded in effecting a junction with Ibrahim off Budrun, and two indecisive engagements followed with the united Greek fleet on the 5th and 10th. The object of Ibrahim was to reach Suda Bay with his transports, which the Greeks should at all costs have prevented. A first attempt was defeated by Miaoulis on the 16th of November, and Ibrahim was compelled to retire and anchor off Rhodes; but the Greek admiral was unable to keep his fleet together, the season was far advanced, his captains were clamouring for arrears of pay, and the Greek fleet sailed for Nauplia, leaving the sea unguarded. On the 5th of December Ibrahim again set sail, and reached Suda without striking a blow. Here he completed his preparations, and, on the 24th of February 1825, landed at Modon in the Morea with a force of 4000 regular infantry and 500 cavalry. The rest followed, without the Greeks making any effort to intercept them.

Ibrahim in the Morea.

The conditions of the war were now completely changed. The Greeks, who had been squandering the money provided by the loans in every sort of senseless extravagance, affected to despise the Egyptian invaders, but they were soon undeceived. On the 21st of March Ibrahim had laid siege to Navarino, and after some delay a Greek force under Skourti, a Hydriote sea-captain, was sent to its relief. The Greeks had in all some 7000 men, Suliotes, Albanians, _armatoli_ from Rumelia, and some irregular Bulgarian and Vlach cavalry. On the 19th of April they were met by Ibrahim at Krommydi with 2000 regular infantry, 400 cavalry and four guns. The Greek entrenchments were stormed at the point of the bayonet by Ibrahim's fellahin at the first onset; the defenders broke and fled, leaving 600 dead on the field. The news of this disaster, and of the fall of Pylos and Navarino that followed, struck terror into the Greek government; and in answer to popular clamour Kolokotrones was taken from prison and placed at the head of the army. But the guerilla tactics of the wily klepht were powerless against Ibrahim, who marched northward, and, avoiding Nauplia for the present, seized Tripolitsa, and made this the base from which his columns marched to devastate the country far and wide.

Reshid "Kutahia" besieges Missolonghi.

Meanwhile from the north the Ottomans were making another supreme effort. The command of the army that was to operate in west Hellas had been given to Reshid "Kutahia," pasha of Iannina, an able general and a man of determined character. On the 6th of April, after bribing the Albanian clansmen to neutrality, he passed the defile of Makrynoros, which the Greeks had left undefended, and on the 7th of May opened the second siege of Missolonghi. For twelve months the population held out, repulsing the attacks of the enemy, refusing every offer of honourable capitulation. This resistance was rendered possible by the Greek command of the sea, Miaoulis from time to time entering the lagoons with supplies; it came to an end when this command was lost. In September 1825 Ibrahim, at the order of the sultan, had joined Reshid before the town; piecemeal the outlying forts and defences now fell, until the garrison, reduced by starvation and disease, determined to hazard all on a final sortie. This took place on the night of the 22nd of April 1826; but a mistaken order threw the ranks of the Greeks into disorder, and the Turks entered the town pell-mell with the retreating crowd. Only a remnant of the defenders succeeded in gaining the forests of Mount Zygos, where most of them perished.

Karaiskakis.

The fall of Missolonghi, followed as this was by the submission of many of the more notable chiefs, left Reshid free to turn his attention to East Hellas, where Gouras had been ruling as a practically independent chief and in the spirit of a brigand. The peasants of the open country welcomed the Turks as deliverers, and Reshid's conciliatory policy facilitated his march to Athens, which fell at the first assault on the 25th of August, siege being at once laid to the Acropolis, where Gouras and his troops had taken refuge. Round this the war now centred; for all recognized that its fall would involve that of the cause of Greece. In these straits the Greek government entrusted the supreme command of the troops to Karaiskakis, an old retainer of Ali of Iannina, a master of the art of guerilla war, and, above all, a man of dauntless courage and devoted patriotism. A first attempt to relieve the Acropolis, with the assistance of some disciplined troops under the French Colonel Fabvier, was defeated at Chaidari by the Turks. The garrison of the Acropolis was hard pressed, and the death of Gouras (October 13th) would have ended all, had not his heroic wife taken over the command and inspired the defenders with new courage. For months the siege dragged on, while Karaiskakis fought with varying success in the mountains, a final victory at Distomo (February 1827) over Omar Vrioni securing the restoration to the Greek cause of all continental Greece, except the towns actually held by the Turks.

Cochrane and Church.

Greek defeat at Athens.

It was at this juncture that the Greek government, reinforced by a fresh loan from Europe, handed over the chief command at sea to Lord Cochrane (earl of Dundonald, _q.v._), and that of the land forces to General (afterwards Sir Richard) Church, both Miaoulis and Karaiskakis consenting without demur to serve under them. Cochrane and Church at once concentrated their energies on the task of relieving the Acropolis. Already, on the 5th of February, General Gordon had landed and entrenched himself on the hill of Munychia, near the ancient Piraeus, and the efforts of the Turks to dislodge him had failed, mainly owing to the fire of the steamer "Karteria" commanded by Captain Hastings. When Church and Cochrane arrived, a general assault on the Ottoman camp was decided on. This was preceded, on the 25th of April, by an attack, headed by Cochrane, on the Turkish troops established near the monastery of St Spiridion, the result of which was to establish communications between the Greeks at Munychia and Phalerum and isolate Reshid's vanguard on the promontory of the Piraeus. The monastery held out for two days longer, when the Albanian garrison surrendered on terms, but were massacred by the Greeks as they were marching away under escort. For this miserable crime Church has, by some historians, been held responsible by default; it is clear, however, from his own account that no blame rests upon him (see his MS. _Narrative_, vol. i. chap. ii. p. 34). The assault on the Turkish main camp was fixed for the 6th of May; but, unfortunately, a chance skirmish brought on an engagement the day before, in the course of which Karaiskakis was killed, an irreparable loss in view of his prestige with the wild _armatoli_. The assault on the following day was a disastrous failure. The Greeks, advancing prematurely over broken ground and in no sort of order, were fallen upon in flank by Reshid's horsemen, and fled in panic terror. The English officers, who in vain tried to rally them, themselves only just escaped by scrambling into their boats and putting off to the war-vessels, whose guns checked the pursuit and enabled a remnant of the fugitives to escape. Church held Munychia till the 27th, when he sent instructions for the garrison of the Acropolis to surrender. On the 5th of June the remnant of the defenders marched out with the honours of war, and continental Greece was once more in the power of the Turks. Had Reshid at once advanced over the Isthmus, the Morea also must have been subdued; but he was jealous of Ibrahim, and preferred to return to Iannina to consolidate his conquests.

Renewed anarchy.

The fate of Greece was now in the hands of the Powers, who after years of diplomatic wrangling had at last realized that intervention was necessary if Greece was to be saved for European civilization. The worst enemy of the Greeks was their own incurable spirit of faction; in the very crisis of their fate, during the siege of Missolonghi, rival presidents and rival assemblies struggled for supremacy, and a third civil war had only been prevented by the arrival of Cochrane and Church. Under their influence a new National Assembly met at Troezene in March 1827 and elected as president Count Capo d'Istria (_q.v._), formerly Russian minister for foreign affairs; at the same time a new constitution was promulgated which, when the very life of the insurrection seemed on the point of flickering out, set forth the full ideal of Pan-Hellenic dreams. Anarchy followed; war of Rumeliotes against Moreotes, of chief against chief; rival factions bombarded each other from the two forts at Nauplia over the stricken town, and in derision of the impotent government. Finally, after months of inaction, Ibrahim began once more his systematic devastation of the country. To put a stop to this the Powers decided to intervene by means of a joint demonstration of their fleets, in order to enforce an armistice and compel Ibrahim to evacuate the Morea (Treaty of London, July 6, 1827). The refusal of Ibrahim to obey, without special instruction from the sultan, led to the entrance of the allied British, French and Russian fleet into the harbour of Navarino and the battle of the 20th of October 1827 (see NAVARINO). This, and the two campaigns of the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29, decided the issue.

AUTHORITIES.--There is no trustworthy history of the war, based on all the material now available, and all the existing works must be read with caution, especially those by eye-witnesses, who were too often prejudiced or the dupes of the Greek factions. The best-known works are: G. Finlay, _Hist. of the Greek Revolution_ (2 vols., London, 1861); T. Gordon, _Hist. of the Greek Revolution_ (London, 1833); C. W. P. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, _Geschichte Griechenlands_, &c. (_Staatengeschichte der neuesten Zeit_) (2 vols., Leipzig, 1870-1874); F. C. H. L. Pouqueville, _Histoire de la régénération de la Grèce, &c._ (4 vols., Paris, 1824),--the author was French resident at the court of Ali of Iannina and afterwards consul at Patras; Count A. Prokesch-Osten, _Geschichte des Abfalls der Griechen vom türkischen Reich, &c._ (6 vols., Vienna, 1867), the last four volumes consisting of _pièces justificatives_ of much value. See also W. Alison Phillips, _The War of Greek Independence_ (London and New York, 1897), a sketch compiled mainly from the above-mentioned works: Spiridionos Tricoupi, [Greek: Historia tês Hellênikês epanastaseôs] (Athens, 1853); J. Philemon, [Greek: Dokimion historikon peri tês Hellênikês epanastaseôs] (Athens, 1859), in four parts: (1) History of the Hetaeria Philike, (2) The heralding of the war and the rising under Ypsilanti, (3 and 4). The insurrection in Greece to 1822, with many documents. Of great value also are the 29 volumes of Correspondence and Papers of Sir Richard Church, now in the British Museum (Add MSS. 36,543-36,571). Among these is a Narrative by Church of the war in Greece during his tenure of the command (vols. xxi.-xxiii., Nos. 36,563-36,565), which contains the material for correcting many errors repeated in most works on the war, notably the strictures of Finlay and others on Church's conduct before Athens. For further references see the bibliography appended to W. Alison Phillips's chapter on "Greece and the Balkan Peninsula" in the _Cambridge Modern History_, x. 803. (W. A. P.)

GREEK LANGUAGE. Greek is one of the eight main branches into which the Indo-European languages (q.v.) are divided. The area in which it is spoken has been curiously constant throughout its recorded history. These limits are, roughly speaking, the shores of the Aegean, on both the European and the Asiatic side, and the intermediate islands (one of the most archaic of Greek dialects being found on the eastern side in the island of Cyprus), and the Greek peninsula generally from its southern promontories as far as the mountains which shut in Thessaly on the north. Beyond Mt. Olympus and the Cambunian mountains lay Macedonia, in which a closely kindred dialect was spoken, so closely related, indeed, that O. Hoffmann has argued (_Die Makedonen_, Göttingen, 1906) that Macedonian is not only Greek, but a part of the great Aeolic dialect which included Thessalian to the south and Lesbian to the east. In the north-west, Greek included many rude dialects little known even to the ancient Greeks themselves, and it extended northwards beyond Aetolia and Ambracia to southern Epirus and Thesprotia. In the Homeric age the great shrine of Pelasgian Zeus was at Dodona, but, by the time of Thucydides, Aetolia and all north of it had come to be looked upon as the most backward of Greek lands, where men lived a savage life, speaking an almost unintelligible language, and eating raw flesh ([Greek: agnôstotatoi de glôssan kai ômophagoi], Thuc. iii. 94, of the Aetolian Eurytanes). The Greeks themselves had no memory of how they came to occupy this land. Their earliest legends connected the origin of their race with Thessaly and Mt. Pindus, but Athenians and Arcadians also boasted themselves of autochthonous race, inhabiting a country wherein no man had preceded their ancestors. The Greek language, at any rate as it has come down to us, is remarkably perfect, in vowel sounds being the most primitive of any of the Indo-European languages, while its verb system has no rival in completeness except in the earliest Sanskrit of the Vedic literature. Its noun system, on the other hand, is much less complete, its cases being more broken down than those of the Aryan, Armenian, Slavonic and Italic families.

The most remarkable characteristic of Greek is one conditioned by the geographical aspect of the land. Few countries are so broken up with mountains as Greece. Not only do mountain ranges as elsewhere on the European continent run east and west, but other ranges cross them from north to south, thus dividing the portions of Greece at some distance from the sea into hollows without outlet, every valley being separated for a considerable part of the year from contact with every other, and inter-communication at all seasons being rendered difficult. Thus till external coercion from Macedon came into play it was never possible to establish a great central government controlling the Greek mainland. The geographical situation of the islands in the Aegean equally led to the isolation of one little territory from another. To these geographical considerations may be added the inveterate desire of the Greeks to make the [Greek: polis], the city state, everywhere and at all times an independent unit, a desire which, originating in the geographical conditions, even accentuated the isolating effect of the natural features of the country. Thus at one time in the little island of Amorgos there were no less than three separate and independent political units. The inevitable result of geographical and political division was the maintenance of a great number of local characteristics in language, differentiating in this respect also each political community from its nearest neighbours. It was only natural that the inhabitants of a country so little adapted to maintain a numerous population should have early sent off swarms to other lands. The earliest stage of colonization lies in the borderland between myth and history. The Greeks themselves knew that a population had preceded them in the islands of the Cyclades which they identified with the Carians of Asia Minor (Herodotus i. 171; Thucydides i. 4. 8). The same population indeed appears to have preceded them on the mainland of Greece, for there are similar place-names in Caria and in Greece which have no etymology in Greek. Thus the endings of words like Parnassus and Halicarnassus seem identical, and the common ending of place-names in -[Greek: inthos, Korinthos, Probalinthos], &c., seems to be the same in origin with the common ending of Asiatic names in -_nda_, Alinda, Karyanda, &c. Probably the earliest portion of Asia Minor to be colonized by the Greeks was the north-west, to which came settlers from Thessaly, when the early inhabitants were driven out by the Thesprotians, who later controlled Thessaly. The name Aeolis, which after times gave to the N.W. of Asia Minor, was the old name for Thessaly (Hdt. vii. 176). These Thesprotians were of the same stock as the Dorians, to whose invasion of the Peloponnese the later migration, which carried the Ionians to Asia and the Cypriot Greeks to Cyprus, in all probability was due. From the north Aegean probably the Dorians reached Crete, where alone their existence is recorded by Homer (_Odyssey_, xix. 175 ff.; Diodorus Siculus v. 80. 2); cp. Fick, _Vorgriechische Ortsnamen_ (1906).

Among the Greeks of the pre-Dorian period Herodotus distinguishes various stocks. Though the name is not Homeric, both Herodotus and Thucydides recognize an Aeolian stock which must have spread over Thessaly and far to the west till it was suppressed and absorbed by the Dorian stock which came in from the north-west. The name of Aeolis still attached in Thucydides' time to the western area of Calydon between the mountains and the N. side of the entrance to the Corinthian gulf (iii. 102). In Boeotia the same stock survived (Thuc. vii. 57. 5), overlaid by an influx of Dorians, and it came down to the isthmus; for the Corinthians, though speaking in historical times a Doric dialect, were originally Aeolians (Thuc. iv. 42). In the Peloponnese Herodotus recognizes (viii. 73) three original stocks, the Arcadians, the Ionians of Cynuria, and the Achaeans. In Arcadia there is little doubt that the pre-Dorian population maintained itself and its language, just as in the mountains of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Connemara the Celtic language has maintained itself against the Saxon invaders. By Herodotus' time the Cynurians had been doricized, while the Ionians, along the south side of the Corinthian gulf, were expelled by the Achaeans (vii. 94, viii. 73), apparently themselves driven from their own homes by the Dorian invasion (Strabo viii. p. 333 _fin_.). However this may be, the Achaeans of historical times spoke a dialect akin to that of northern Elis and of the Greeks on the north side of the Corinthian gulf. How close the relation may have been between the language of the Achaeans of the Peloponnese in the Homeric age and their contemporaries in Thessaly we have no means of ascertaining definitely, the documentary evidence for the history of the dialects being all very much later than Homeric times. Even in the Homeric catalogue Agamemnon has to lend the Arcadians ships to take them to Troy (_Iliad_, ii. 612). But a population speaking the same or a very similar dialect was probably seated on the eastern coast, and migrated at the beginning of the Doric invasion to Cyprus. As this population wrote not in the Greek alphabet but in a peculiar syllabary and held little communication with the rest of the Greek world, it succeeded in preserving in Cyprus a very archaic dialect very closely akin to that of Arcadia, and also containing a considerable number of words found in the Homeric vocabulary but lost or modified in later Greek elsewhere.

On this historical foundation alone is it possible to understand clearly the relation of the dialects in historical times. The prehistoric movements of the Greek tribes can to some extent be realized in their dialects, as recorded in their inscriptions, though all existing inscriptions belong to a much later period. Thus from the ancient Aeolis of northern Greece sprang the historical dialects of Thessaly and Lesbos with the neighbouring coast of Asia Minor. At an early period the Dorians had invaded and to some extent affected the character of the southern Thessalian and to a much greater extent that of the Boeotian dialect. The dialects of Locris, Phocis and Aetolia were a somewhat uncouth and unliterary form of Doric. According to accepted tradition, Elis had been colonized by Oxylus the Aetolian, and the dialect of the more northerly part of Elis, as already pointed out, is, along with the Achaean of the south side of the Corinthian gulf, closely akin to those dialects north of the Isthmus. The most southerly part of Elis--Triphylia--has a dialect akin to Arcadian. Apart from Arcadian the other dialects of the Peloponnese in historical times are all Doric, though in small details they differ among themselves. Though we are unable to check the statements of the historians as to the area occupied by Ionic in prehistoric times, it is clear from the legends of the close connexion between Athens and Troezen that the same dialect, had been spoken on both sides of the Saronic gulf, and may well have extended, as Herodotus says, along the eastern coast of the Peloponnese and the south side of the Corinthian gulf. According to legend, the Ionians expelled from the Peloponnese collected at Athens before they started on their migrations to the coast of Asia Minor. Be that as it may, legend and language alike connected the Athenians with the Ionians, though by the 5th century B.C. the Athenians no longer cared to be known by the name (Hdt. i. 143). Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros, which had long belonged to Athens, were Athenian also in language. The great island of Euboea and all the islands of the central Aegean between Greece and Asia were Ionic. Chios, the most northerly Ionic island on the Asiatic coast, seems to have been originally Aeolic, and its Ionic retained some Aeolic characteristics. The most southerly of the mainland towns which were originally Aeolic was Smyrna, but this at an early date became Ionic (Hdt. i. 149). The last important Ionic town to the south was Miletus, but at an early period Ionic widened its area towards the south also and took in Halicarnassus from the Dorians. According to Herodotus, there were four kinds of Ionic ([Greek: charaktêres glôssês tesseres], i. 142). Herodotus tells us the areas in which these dialects were spoken, but nothing of the differences between them. They were (1) Samos, (2) Chios and Erythrae, (3) the towns in Lydia, (4) the towns in Caria. The language of the inscriptions unfortunately is a [Greek: koinê], a conventional literary language which reveals no differences of importance. Only recently has the characteristic so well known in Herodotus of [kappa] appearing in certain words where other dialects have [pi] ([Greek: hokôs] for [Greek: hopôs, kou] for [Greek: pou], &c.) been found in any inscription. It is, however, clear that this was a popular characteristic not considered to be sufficiently dignified for official documents. We may conjecture that the native languages spoken on the Lydian and Carian coasts had affected the character of the language spoken by the Greek immigrants, more especially as the settlers from Athens married Carian women, while the settlers in the other towns were a mixture of Greek tribes, many of them not Ionic at all (Hdt. i. 146).

The more southerly islands of the Aegean and the most southerly peninsula of Asia Minor were Doric. In the Homeric age Dorians were only one of many peoples in Crete, but in historical times, though the dialects of the eastern and the western ends of the island differ from one another and from the middle whence our most valuable documents come, all are Doric. By Melos and Thera Dorians carried their language to Cos, Calymnus, Cnidus and Rhodes.

These settlements, Aeolic, Ionic and Doric, grew and prospered, and like flourishing hives themselves sent out fresh swarms to other lands. Most prosperous and energetic of all was Miletus, which established its trading posts in the Black Sea to the north and in the delta of the Nile (Naucratis) to the south. The islands also sent off their colonies, carrying their dialects with them, Paros to Thasos, Euboea to the peninsulas of Chalcidice; the Dorians of Megara guarded the entrance to the Black Sea at Chalcedon and Byzantium. While Achaean influence spread out to the more southerly Ionian islands, Corinth carried her dialect with her colonies to the coast of Acarnania, Leucas and Corcyra. But the greatest of all Corinthian colonies was much farther to the west--at Syracuse in Sicily. Unfortunately the continuous occupation of the same or adjacent sites has led to the loss of almost all that is early from Corinth and from Syracuse. Corcyra has bequeathed to us some interesting grave inscriptions from the 6th century B.C. Southern Italy and Sicily were early colonized by Greeks. According to tradition Cumae was founded not long after the Trojan War; even if we bring the date nearer the founding of Syracuse in 735 B.C., we have apparently no record earlier than the first half of the 5th century B.C., though it is still the earliest of Chalcidian inscriptions. Tarentum was a Laconian foundation, but the longest and most important document from a Laconian colony in Italy comes from Heraclea about the end of the 4th century B.C.--the report of a commission upon and the lease of temple lands with description and conditions almost of modern precision. To Achaea belonged the south Italian towns of Croton, Metapontum and Sybaris. The ancestry of the Greek towns of Sicily has been explained by Thucydides (vi. 2-5). Selinus, a colony of Megara, betrays its origin in its dialect. Gela and Agrigentum no less clearly show their descent from Rhodes. According to tradition the great city of Cyrene in Africa was founded from Thera, itself an offshoot from Sparta.

CHIEF CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREEK DIALECTS

1. _Arcadian and Cyprian._--As Cyprian was written in a syllabary which could not represent a consonant by itself, did not distinguish between voiced, unvoiced and aspirated consonants, did not represent at all a nasal before another consonant, and did not distinguish between long and short vowels, the interpretation of the symbols is of the nature of a conundrum and the answer is not always certain. Thus the same combination of two symbols would have to stand for [Greek: tote, tode, dote, dothê, tonde, tôde, to, dê]. No inscription of more than a few words in length is found in either dialect earlier than the 5th century B.C. In both dialects the number of important inscriptions is steadily increasing. Both dialects change final [omicron] to [upsilon], [Greek: apo] passing into [Greek: apy]. Arcadian changes the verb ending -[Greek: ai] into -[Greek: oi]. Arcadian uses [delta] or [zeta] for an original _gw_-sound, which appears in Attic Greek as [beta]: [Greek: zellô], Attic [Greek: ballô], "throw." In inflexion both agree in changing -[Greek: ao] of masculine -[alpha] stems into [Greek: au] (Arcadian carries this form also into the feminine -[alpha] stems), and in using locatives in -[Greek: ai] and -[Greek: oi] for the dative, such locatives being governed by the prepositions [Greek: apy] and [Greek: ex] (before a consonant [Greek: es] in Arcadian). Verbs in -[Greek: aô], -[Greek: eô] and -[Greek: oô] are declined not as -[omega], but as -[Greek: mi] verbs. The final [iota] of the ending of the 3rd plural present changes the preceding [tau] to [sigma]: [Greek: pheronsi], cp. Laconian (Doric) [Greek: pheronti], Attic [Greek: pherousi], Lesbian [Greek: pheroisi]. Instead of the Attic [Greek: tis], the interrogative pronoun appears as [Greek: sis], the initial [sigma] in Arcadian being written with a special symbol [koppa]. The pronunciation is not certain. The original sound was _qw_, as in Latin _quis_, whence Attic [Greek: tis] and Thessalian [Greek: kis]. In Arcadian [Greek: kan] the Aeolic particle [Greek: ke] and the Ionic [Greek: an] seem to be combined.

2. _Aeolic._--Though Boeotian is overlaid with a Doric element, it nevertheless agrees with Thessalian and Lesbian in some characteristics. Unlike Greek generally, they represent the original _qw_ of the word for _four_ by [pi] before [epsilon], where Attic and other dialects have [tau]: [Greek: pettares], Attic [Greek: tettares]. The corresponding voiced and aspirated sounds are similarly treated: [Greek: Belphaios] the adjective in Thessalian to [Greek: Delphoi], and [Greek: phêr] for [Greek: thêr]. They all tend to change [omicron] to [upsilon]: [Greek: onyma], "name"; [Greek: ou] for [omega] in Thessalian: [Greek: Aploun], "Apollo"; and [upsilon] in Boeotian for [Greek: oi]: [Greek: wukia] ([Greek: oikia]), "house." They also make the dative plural of the third declension in -[Greek: essi], and the perfect participle active is declined like a present participle in -[Greek: ôn]. Instead of the Athenian method of giving the father's name in the genitive when a citizen is described, these dialects (especially Thessalian) tend to make an adjective: thus instead of the Attic [Greek: Dêmosthenês Dêmosthenous], Aeolic would rather have [Greek: D. Dêmostheneios]. Thessalian stands midway between Lesbian and Boeotian, agreeing with Lesbian in the use of double consonants, where Attic has a single consonant, with or without lengthening of the previous syllable: [Greek: emmi], Attic [Greek: eimi] for an original *_esmi_; [Greek: stalla], Attic [Greek: stêlê]; [Greek: xennos] for an earlier [Greek: xenwos], Attic [Greek: xenos], Ionic [Greek: xeinos], Doric [Greek: xênos]. Where Attic has -[Greek: as] from an earlier -[Greek: ans] or -[Greek: ants], Lesbian has -[Greek: ais]: [Greek: tais archais] accusative in Lesbian for older [Greek: tans archans]. Lesbian has no oxyton words according to the grammarians, the accent being carried back to the penult or ante-*penultimate syllable. It has also no "rough breathing," but this characteristic it shared with the Ionic of Asia Minor, and in the course of time with other dialects. The characteristic particle of the dialects is [Greek: ke], which is used like the Doric [Greek: ka], the Arcadian [Greek: kan], and the Attic and Ionic [Greek: an]. Thessalian and Lesbian agree in making their long vowels close, [eta] belonging [Greek: ei] (a close _e_, not a diphthong), [Greek: pateir], "father." The [upsilon] sound did not become _ü_ as in Attic and Ionic, and hence when the Ionic alphabet was introduced it was spelt [Greek: ou], or when in contact with dentals [Greek: iou], as in [Greek: oniouma = onyma], "name," [Greek: tioucha = tychê], "chance"; the pronunciation, therefore, must have been like the English sound in _news_, _tune_. Boeotian developed earlier than other dialects the changes in the vowels which characterize modern Greek: [Greek: ai] became _e_, [Greek: kai] passing into [Greek: kê]: compare [Greek: pateir] and [Greek: wukia] above: [Greek: ei] became [iota] in [Greek: echi], "has." Thessalian shows some examples of the Homeric genitive in -[Greek: oio: polemoio], &c.; its ordinary genitive of [omicron]- stems is in -[Greek: oi].

There are some points of connexion between this group and Arcadian-Cyprian: in both Thessalian and Cyprian the characteristic [Greek: ptolis] (Attic, &c., [Greek: polis]) and [Greek: dauchna]- for [Greek: daphnê] are found, and both groups form the "contracting verbs" not in -[omega] but in -[Greek: mi]. In the second group as in the first there is little that precedes the 5th century B.C. Future additions to our materials may be expected to lessen the gap between the two groups and Homer.

3. _Ionic-Attic._--One of the earliest of Greek inscriptions--of the 7th century, at least--is the Attic inscription written in two lines from right to left upon a wine goblet ([Greek: oinochoê]) given as a prize: [Greek: hos nun orcheston panton | atalotata paizei toto dekan min]. The last words are uncertain. Till lately early inscriptions in Ionic were few, but recently an early inscription has been found at Ephesus and a later copy of a long early inscription at Miletus.

The most noticeable characteristic of Attic and Ionic is the change of [alpha] into [eta] which is universal in Ionic but does not appear in Attic after another vowel or [rho]. Thus both dialects used [Greek: mêtêr, timê] from an earlier [Greek: matêr, tima], but Attic had [Greek: sophia, pragma] and [Greek: chôra], not [Greek: sophiê, prêgma] and [Greek: chôrê] as in Ionic. The apparent exception [Greek: korê] is explained by the fact that in this word a digamma [digamma] has been lost after [rho], in Doric [Greek: korwa]. That the change took place after the Ionians came into Asia is shown by the word [Greek: Mêdoi], which in Cyprian is [Greek: Madoi]; the Medes were certainly not known to the Greeks till long after the conquest of Ionia. While Aeolic and the greater part of Doric kept [digamma], this symbol and the sound _w_ represented by it had disappeared from both Ionic and Attic before existing records begin--in other words, were certainly not in use after 800 B.C. The symbol was known and occurs in a few isolated instances. Both dialects agreed in changing _u_ into _ü_, so that a _u_ sound has to be represented by [Greek: ou]. The short _o_ tended towards _u_, so that the contraction of [omicron] + [omicron] gave [Greek: ou]. In the same way short _e_ tended towards _i_, so that the contraction of [epsilon] + [epsilon] gave [Greek: ei], which was not a diphthong but a close _e_-sound. In Attic Greek these contractions were represented by O and E respectively till the official adoption of the Ionic alphabet at Athens in 403 B.C. So also were the lengthened syllables which represent in their length the loss of an earlier consonant, as [Greek: emeina] and [Greek: eneima], Aeolic [Greek: emenna, enemma], which stand for a prehistoric *[Greek: emensa] and *[Greek: enemsa], containing the -[sigma]- of the first aorist, and [Greek: tous, oikous, echousi] representing an earlier [Greek: tons, oikons, echonti] (3 pl. present) or *[Greek: echontsi] (dative pl. of present participle). Both dialects also agreed in changing [tau] before [iota] into [sigma] (like Aeolic), as in [Greek: echousi] above, and in the 3rd person singular of -[Greek: mi] verbs, [Greek: tithêsi, didôsi], &c., and in noun stems, as in [Greek: dosis] for an earlier *[Greek: dotis]. Neither dialect used the particle [Greek: ke] or [Greek: ka], but both have [Greek: an] instead. One of the effects of the change of [alpha] into [eta] was that the combination [Greek: ao] changed in both dialects to [Greek: êo], which in all Attic records and in the later Ionic has become [Greek: eô] by a metathesis in the quantity of the vowels: [Greek: naos], earlier [Greek: nawos], "temple," is in Homeric Greek [Greek: nêos], in later Ionic and Attic [Greek: neôs]. In the dative (locative) plural of the -[alpha] stems, Ionic has generally -[Greek: êisi] on the analogy of the singular; Attic had first the old locative form in -[Greek: êsi], -[Greek: asi], which survived in forms which became adverbs like [Greek: Athênêsi] and [Greek: thurasi]; but after 420 B.C. these were replaced by -[Greek: ais, thurais], &c. The Ionic of Asia Minor showed many changes earlier than that of the Cyclades and Euboea. It lost the aspirate very early: hence in the Ionic alphabet H is _e_, not _h_; it changed [Greek: au] and [Greek: eu] into [Greek: ao] and [Greek: eo], and very early replaced to a large extent the -[Greek: mi] by the -[omega] verbs. This confusion can be seen in progress in the Attic literature of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., [Greek: deiknymi] gradually giving way to [Greek: deiknyô], while the literature generally uses forms like [Greek: ephiei] for [Greek: ephiê] (impft.). In Attica also the aspiration which survived in the Ionic of Euboea and the Cyclades ceased by the end of the 5th century. The Ionic of Asia Minor has -[Greek: ios] as the genitive of _o_-stems; the other forms of Ionic have -[Greek: idos].

4. _Doric._--As already mentioned, the dialects of the North-West differ in several respects from Doric elsewhere. As general characteristics of Doric may be noted the contractions of [alpha] + [epsilon] into [eta], and of [alpha] + [omicron] or [omega] into [alpha], while the results in Attic and Ionic of these contractions are [alpha] and [omega] respectively: [Greek: enikê] from [Greek: nikaô], Attic [Greek: enika; timames] 1 pl. pres. from [Greek: timaô], Attic [Greek: timômen; timan] gen. pl. of [Greek: tima] "honour," Attic [Greek: timôn]. In inflection the most noticeable points are the pronominal adverbs in locative form: [Greek: toutei, tênei] (this from a stem limited to a few Doric dialects and the Bucolic Poets), [Greek: teide, hopei], &c.; the nom. pl. of the article [Greek: toi, tai], not [Greek: hoi, hai] and so [Greek: toutoi] in Selinus and Rhodes; the 1st pl. of the verb in -[Greek: mes], not in -[Greek: men], cp. the Latin -_mus_; the aorist and future in -[xi]-, where other dialects have -[sigma]-, or contraction from presents in-[Greek: zô]; dikazô, dikasô], Doric [Greek: dikaxô], &c.; the future passive with active endings, [Greek: epimelêthêseunti] (Rhodes), found as yet only in the Doric islands and in the Doric prose of Archimedes; the particles [Greek: ai] "if" and [Greek: ka] with a similar value to the Aeolic [Greek: ke] and the Attic-Ionic [Greek: an]. Doric had an accentuation system different both from Aeolic and from Ionic-Attic, but the details of the system are very imperfectly known.

In older works Doric is often divided into a _dialectus severior_ and a _dialectus mitis_. But the difference is one of time rather than of place, the peculiarities of Doric being gradually softened down till it was ultimately merged in the _lingua franca_, the [Greek: koinê], which in time engulfed all the local dialects except the descendant of Spartan, Tzakonian. Here it is possible to mention its varieties only in the briefest form. (a) The southern dialects are well illustrated in the inscriptions of Laconia recently much increased in number by the excavations of the British School at Athens. Apart from some brief dedications, the earliest inscription of importance is the list of names placed on a bronze column soon after 479 B.C. to commemorate the tribes which had repulsed the Persians. The column, originally at Delphi, is now at Constantinople. The most striking features of the dialect are the retention of [digamma] at the beginning of words, as in the dedication from the 6th century [Greek: wanaxibios] (_Annual of British School_, xiv. 144). The dialect changed -[sigma]- between vowels into -h-, [Greek: môha] for [Greek: môsa] "muse." Later it changed [theta] into a sound like the English _th_, which was represented by [sigma]. Before o-sounds [epsilon] here and in some other Doric dialects changed to [iota]: [Greek: thios, sios] for [Greek: theos] "god." The result of contraction and "compensatory lengthening" was not [Greek: ei] and [Greek: ou] as in Attic and Ionic, but [eta] and [omega]: [Greek: êmen] infinitive = [Greek: einai] from *esmen; gen. sing. of _o_-stems in [omega]: [Greek: theô], acc. pl. in -[Greek: ôs: theôs]; dy was represented by [Greek: dd], not [zeta], as in Attic-Ionic; [Greek: musidde = muthize]. The dialect has many strange words, especially in connexion with the state education and organization of the boys and young men. The Heraclean tables from a Laconian colony in S. Italy have curious forms in -[Greek: assi] for the dat. pl. of the participle [Greek: prassontassi] = Attic [Greek: prattousi]. Of the dialect of Messenia we know little, the long inscription about mysteries from Andania being only about 100 B.C. From Argolis there are a considerable number of early inscriptions, and in a later form of the dialect the cures recorded at the temple of Asklepios at Epidaurus present many points of interest. There is also an inscription of the 6th century B.C. from the temple of Aphaia in Aegina. [Digamma] survives in the old inscriptions: [Greek: wewremena (= eirêmena); ns], whether original or arising by sound change from -_nty_, persists till the 2nd century B.C.: [Greek: hantitychonsa = hê antitychousa, tons huions = tous huious]. The dialect of the Inachus valley seems to resemble Laconian more closely than does that of the rest of the Argolic area. Corinth and her colonies in the earliest inscriptions preserve [Digamma] and [qoppa] (= Latin Q) before [omicron] and [upsilon] sounds, and write [xi] and [psi] by [Greek: chs] and [Greek: phs], the symbols which are used also for this purpose in old Attic. In the Corcyrean and Sicilian forms of the dialect, [lambda] before a dental appears as [nu]: [Greek: Phintias = Philtias]; and in Sicilian the perfect-active was treated as a present: [Greek: dedoikô] for [Greek: dedoika], &c. From Megara has come lately an obscure inscription from the beginning of the 5th century; its colony Selinus has inscriptions from the middle of the same century; the inscriptions from Byzantium and its other Pontic colonies date only from Hellenistic times. In Crete, which shows a considerable variety of subdialects, the most important document is the great inscription from Gortyn containing twelve tables of family law, which was discovered in 1884. The local alphabet has no separate symbols for [chi] and [phi], and these sounds are therefore written with [kappa] and [pi]. As in Argive the combination -[Greek: ns] was kept both medially and finally except before words beginning with a consonant; -_ty_- was represented by [zeta], later by -[Greek: tt]-, as in Thessalian and Boeotian: [Greek: hopottoi], Attic [Greek: hoposoi]; and finally by -[Greek: tt]-; [lambda] combined with a preceding vowel into an au-diphthong: [Greek: auka], Attic [Greek: alkê], cp. the English pronunciation of _talk_, &c. In Gortyn and some other towns -[Greek: st]--was assimilated to--[Greek: tt], where [theta] must have been a spirant like the English _th_ in _thin_; [zeta] of Attic Greek is represented initially by [delta], medially by [Greek: dd], but in some towns by [tau] and [Greek: tt: doos (= zôos), dikadden (= dikazein)]. Final consonants are generally assimilated to the beginning of the next word. In inflection there are many local peculiarities. In Melos and Thera some very old inscriptions have been found written in an alphabet without symbols for [phi], [chi], [phi], [xi], which are therefore written as [pi]h, [kappa]h or [koppa]h, [Greek: ps, ks]. The contractions of [epsilon] + [epsilon] and of [omicron] + [omicron] are represented by E and O respectively. The old rock inscriptions of Thera are among the most archaic yet discovered. The most characteristic feature of Rhodian Doric is the infinitive in -[Greek: mein: domein], &c. (= Attic [Greek: dounai]), which passed also to Gela and Agrigentum. The inscriptions from Cos are numerous, but too late to represent the earliest form of the dialect.

(b) The dialects of N.W. Doric, Locrian, Phocian, Aetolian, with which go Elean and Achaean, present a more uncouth appearance than the other Doric dialects except perhaps Cretan. Only from Locris and Phocis come fairly old inscriptions; later a [Greek: koinê] was developed, in which the documents of the Aetolian league are written, and of which the most distinctive mark is the dative plural of consonant stems in -[Greek: ois: archontois] (= Attic [Greek: archousi]), [Greek: agônois] (= Attic [Greek: agôsi]), &c. Phocian and the Locrian of Opus have also forms like Aeolic in -[Greek: essi]. In place of the dative in -[omega], locatives in -[Greek: oi] are used in Locrian and Phocian. Generally north of the Corinthian gulf the middle present participle from -[Greek: eô]-verbs ends in-[Greek: eimenos]; similar forms are found also in Elean. Locrian changed [epsilon] before [rho] into [alpha]: [Greek: patara] for [Greek: patera]; cf. English _Kerr_ and _Carr_, _sergeant_ and _Sargeaunt_. [Greek: st] appears for [Greek: st], and [koppa] and [Digamma] are still much in use in the 5th century B.C. Many thousands of inscriptions were found in the French excavations at Delphi, but nothing earlier than the 5th century B.C. In the older inscriptions the Aeolic influence--datives in -[Greek: essi, onyma] for [Greek: onoma]--is better marked than later. In the Laws of the Labyad phratry (about 400 B.C.) the genitive is in [Greek: ou], but a form in -[omega] is also found, [Greek: woikô], which seems to be an old ablative fossilized as an adverb. The nom. pl. [Greek: dekatetores] is used for the acc.; similar forms are found in Elean and Achaean.

The more important of the older materials for Achaean come from the Achaean colonies of S. Italy, and being scanty give us only an imperfect view of the dialect, but it is clearly in its main features Doric. Much more remarkable is the Elean dialect known chiefly from inscriptions found at Olympia, some of which are as early as the beginning of the 6th century. The native dialect was replaced first by a Doric and then by the Attic [Greek: koinê], but under the Caesars the archaic dialect was restored. Many of its characteristics it shares with the dialects north of the Corinthian gulf, but it changes original [epsilon] to [alpha]: [Greek: ma = mê], &c.; [delta] was apparently a spirant, as in modern Greek (= _th_ in English _the_, _thine_), and is represented by [zeta] in some of the earliest inscriptions. Final -[sigma] became -[rho]; this is found also in Laconian; -_ty_- became -[Greek: ss]-, but was not simplified as in Attic to -[sigma]-: [Greek: ossa] = Attic [Greek: hosa].

As we have seen, Ionians, Aetolians and Dorians tended to level local peculiarities and make a generally intelligible dialect in which treaties and other important records were framed. The language of literature is always of necessity to some extent a [Greek: koinê]: with some Greek writers the use of a [Greek: koinê] was especially necessary. The local dialect of Boeotia was not easily intelligible in other districts, and a writer like Pindar, whose patrons were mostly not Boeotians, had perforce to write in a dialect that they could understand. Hence he writes in a conventional Doric with Aeolic elements, which forms a strong contrast to that of Corinna, who kept more or less closely to the Boeotian dialect. For different literary purposes Greek had different [Greek: koinai]. A poet who would write an epic must adopt a form of language modelled on that of Homer and Hesiod; Alcaeus and Sappho were the models for the love lyric, which was therefore Aeolic; Stesichorus was the founder of the triumphal ode, which, as he was a Dorian of Sicily, must henceforth be in Doric, though Pindar was an Aeolian, and its other chief representatives, Simonides and Bacchylides, were Ionians from Ceos. The choral ode of tragedy was always conventional Doric, and in the iambics also are Doric words like [Greek: draô, laô], &c. Elegy and epigram were founded on epic; the satirical iambics of Hipponax and his late disciple Herondas are Ionic. The first Greek prose was developed in Ionia, of which an excellent example has been preserved to us in Herodotus. Thucydides was not an Ionian, but he could not shake himself free of the tradition: he therefore writes [Greek: prassô, tassô], &c., with -[Greek: ss]-, which was Ionic, but is never found in Attic inscriptions nor in the writers who imitate the language of common life--Aristophanes (when not parodying tragedy, or other forms of literature or dialect), Plato and the Orators (with the partial exception of Antiphon, who ordinarily has -[Greek: ss]-, but in the one speech actually intended for the law-courts -[Greek: tt]-). Similarly Hippocrates and his medical school in Cos wrote in Ionic, not, however, in the Ionic of Herodotus, but in a language more akin to the Ionic [Greek: koinê] of the inscriptions; and this dialect continued to be used in medicine later, much as doctors now use Latin for their prescriptions. The first literary document written in Attic prose is the treatise on the _Constitution of Athens_, which is generally printed amongst the minor works of Xenophon, but really belongs to about 425 B.C. From the fragment of Aristophanes' _Banqueters_ and from the first speech of Lysias "Against Theomnestos" it is clear that the Attic dialect had changed rapidly in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., and that much of the phraseology of Solon's laws was no longer intelligible by 400 B.C. Among the most difficult of the literary dialects to trace is the earliest--the Homeric dialect. The Homeric question cannot be discussed here, and on that question it may be said _quot homines tot sententiae_. To the present writer, however, it seems probable that the poems were composed in Chios as tradition asserted; the language contains many Aeolisms, and the heroes sung are, except for the Athenians (very briefly referred to), and possibly Telamonian Ajax, not of the Ionic stock. Chios was itself an Ionicized Aeolic colony (Diodorus v. 81. 7). The hypothesis of a great poet writing on the basis of earlier Aeolic lays ([Greek: klea andrôn]) in Chios seems to explain the main peculiarities of the Homeric language, which, however, was modified to some extent in later times first under Ionic and afterwards under Athenian influence.

Of Dorian literature we know little. The works of Archimedes written in the Syracusan dialect were much altered in language by the late copyists. The most striking development of the late classical age in Doric lands is that of pastoral poetry, which, like Spenser, is "writ in no language," but, on a basis of Syracusan and possibly Coan Doric, has in its structure many elements borrowed from the Aeolic love lyric and from epic.

From the latter part of the 5th century B.C. Athens became ever more important as a literary centre, and Attic prose became the model for the later [Greek: koinê], which grew up as a consequence of the decay of the local dialects. For this decay there were several reasons. If the Athenian empire had survived the Peloponnesian War, Attic influence would no doubt soon have permeated the whole of that empire. This consummation was postponed. Attic became the court language of Macedon, and, when Alexander's conquests led to the foundation of great new towns, like Alexandria, filled with inhabitants from all parts of the Greek world, this dialect furnished a basis for common intercourse. Naturally the resultant dialect was not pure Attic. There were in it considerable traces of Ionic. In Attica itself the dialect was less uniform than elsewhere even in the 5th century B.C., because Athens was a centre of empire, literature and commerce. Like every other language which is not under the dominion of the schoolmaster, it borrowed the names of foreign objects which it imported from foreign lands, not only from those of Greek-speaking peoples, but also from Egypt, Persia, Lydia, Phoenicia, Thrace and elsewhere. The Ionians were great seafarers, and from them Athens borrowed words for seacraft and even for the tides: [Greek: amtôtis] "ebb," [Greek: rhachia] "high tide," an Ionic word [Greek: rhêchiê] spelt in Attic fashion. From the Dorians it borrowed words connected with war and sport: [Greek: lochagos, kunagos], &c. A soldier of fortune like Xenophon, who spent most of his life away from Athens, introduced not only strange words but strange grammatical constructions also into his literary compositions. With Aristotle, not a born Athenian but long resident in Athens, the [Greek: koinê] may be said to have begun. Some characteristics of Attic foreigners found it hard to acquire--its subtle use of particles and its accent. Hence in Hellenistic Greek particles are comparatively rare. According to Cicero, Theophrastus, who came from as near Attica as Eretria in Euboea, was easily detected by a market-woman as no Athenian after he had lived thirty years in Athens. Thoucritus, an Athenian, who was taken prisoner in the Peloponnesian War and lived for many years in Epirus as a slave, was unable to recover the Athenian accent on his return, and his family lay under the suspicion that they were an alien's children, as his son tells us in Demosthenes' speech "Against Eubulides." In the [Greek: koinê] there were several divisions, though the line between them is faint and irregular. There was a [Greek: koinê] of literary men like Polybius and of carefully prepared state documents, as at Magnesia or Pergamum; and a different [Greek: koinê] of the vulgar which is represented to us in its Egyptian form in the Pentateuch, in a later and at least partially Palestinian form in the Gospels. Still more corrupt is the language which we find in the ill-written and ill-spelt private letters found amongst the Egyptian papyri. Not out of the old dialects but out of this [Greek: koinê] arose modern Greek, with a variety of dialects no less bewildering than that of ancient Greek. In one place more rapidly, in another more slowly, the characteristics of modern Greek begin to appear. As we have seen, in Boeotia the vowels and diphthongs began to pass into the characteristic sounds of modern Greek four centuries before Christ. Dorian dialects illustrate early the passing of the old aspirate [Greek: th], the sound of which was like the final t in English _bit_, into a sound like the English _th_ in _thin_, _pith_, which it still retains in modern Greek. The change of [gamma] between vowels into a y sound was charged by the comic poets against Hyperbolus the demagogue about 415 B.C. Only when the Attic sound changes stood isolated amongst the Greek dialects did they give way in the [Greek: koinê] to Ionic. Thus the forms with -[Greek: ss]- instead of -[Greek: tt]- won the day, while modern Greek shows that sometimes the -[Greek: rr]- which Attic shared with some Doric dialects and Arcadian was retained, and that sometimes the Ionic -[Greek: rs]-, which was also Lesbian and partly Doric, took its place. In other cases, where Ionic and Attic did not agree, forms came in which were different from either: the genitives of masculine a stems were now formed as in Doric with [alpha], but the analogy of the other cases may have been the effective force. The form [Greek: naos] "temple," instead of Ionic [Greek: nêos], Attic [Greek: neôs], can only be Doric.[1] In the first five centuries of the Christian era came in the modern Greek characteristics of Itacism and vowel contraction, of the pronunciation of [Greek: mp] and [Greek: nt] as _mb_ and _nd_ and many other sound changes, the loss of the dative and the confusion of the 1st with the 3rd declension, the dropping of the -[Greek: mi] conjugation, the loss of the optative and the assimilation of the imperfect and second aorist endings to those of the first aorist.[2] There were meantime spasmodic attempts at the revival of the old language. Lucian wrote Attic dialogue with a facility almost equal to Plato; the old dialect was revived in the inscriptions of Sparta; Balbilla, a lady-in-waiting on Hadrian's empress, wrote epigrams in Aeolic, and there were other attempts of the same kind. But they were only _tours de force_, [Greek: kêpoi Adônidos], whose flowers had no root in the spoken language and therefore could not survive. Even in the hands of a cultivated man like Plutarch the [Greek: koinê] of the 1st century A.D. looks entirely different from Attic Greek. Apart from non-Attic constructions, which are not very numerous, the difference consists largely in the new vocabulary of the philosophical schools since Aristotle, whose jargon had become part of the language of educated men in Plutarch's time, and made a difference in the language not unlike that which has been brought about in English by the development of the natural sciences. It is hardly necessary to say that these changes, whether of the [Greek: koinê] or of modern Greek, did not of necessity impair the powers of the language as an organ of expression; if elaborate inflection were a necessity for the highest literary merit, then we must prefer Cædmon to Milton and Cynewulf to Shakespeare.

_The Chief Characteristics of Greek._

As is obvious from the foregoing account of the Greek dialects, it is not possible to speak of the early history of Greek as handed down to us as that of a single uniform tongue. From the earliest times it shows much variety of dialect accentuated by the geographical characteristics of the country, but arising, at least in part, from the fact that the Greeks came into the country in separate waves divided from one another by centuries. For the history of the language it is necessary to take as a beginning the form of the Indo-European language from which Greek descended, so far as it can be reconstructed from a comparison of the individual I.E. languages (see ANDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES). The sounds of this language, so far as at present ascertained, were the following:--

(a) 11 vowels: _a_, _a_, _e_, _e_, _i_, _i_, _o_, _o_, _u_, _u_, _[schwa]_ (a short indistinct vowel).

(b) 14 diphthongs: _ai_, _au_, _ei_, _eu_, _oi_, _ou_, _ai_, _au_, _ei_, _eu_, _oi_, _ou_, _[schwa]i_, _[schwa]u_.

(c) 20 stop consonants.

Labials: _p_, _b_, _ph_, _bh_ (_ph_ and _bh_ being _p_ and _b_ followed by an audible breath, not _f_ and _v_).

Dentals: _t_, _d_, _th_, _dh_ (_th_ and _dh not_ spirants like the two English sounds in _thin_ and _then_, but aspirated _t_ and _d_).

Palatals: _k_, _g_, _kh_, _gh_ (_kh_ and _gh_ aspirates as explained above).

Velars: _q_, _g_, _qh_, _gh_ (velars differ from palatals by being produced against the soft palate instead of the roof of the mouth).

Labio-velars: _qu_, _qu_, _quh_, _guh_ (these differ from the velars by being combined with a slight labial w-sound).

(d) Spirants--

Labial: _w_.

Dental: _s_, _z_, post-dental _s_, _z_, interdental possibly þ, ð.

Palatal: [chi] (Scotch ch), y.

Velar: _x_ (a deeply guttural [chi], heard now in Swiss dialects), [gh].

Closely akin to _w_ and _y_ and often confused with them were the semi-vowels _u_ and _i_.

(e) Liquids: _l_, _r_.

(f) Nasals: _m_ (labial), _n_ (dental), _ñ_ (palatal), [symbol] (velar), the last three in combination with similar consonants.

(a) As far as the vowels are concerned, Greek retains the original state of things more accurately than any other language. The sounds of short _e_ and short _o_ in Attic and Ionic were close, so that _e_ + _e_ contracted to a long close e represented by [Greek: ei], _o_ + _o_ to a long close _o_ represented by [Greek: oe]. In these dialects _u_, both long and short, was modified to _ü_, and they changed the long _a_ to _e_, though Attic has [alpha] after [epsilon], [iota] and [rho]. In Greek [schwa] appeared regularly as [alpha], but under the influence of analogy often as [epsilon] and [omicron].

(b) The short diphthongs as a whole remained unchanged before a following consonant. Before a following vowel the diphthong was divided between the two syllables, the [iota] or [upsilon] forming a consonant at the beginning of the second syllable, which ultimately disappeared. Thus from a root dheu- "run" comes a verb [Greek: theô] for [Greek: the-wô], from an earlier *[Greek: theu-ô]. The corresponding adjective is [Greek: thoos] "swift," for [Greek: tho-wo-s], from an earlier *[Greek: thou-o-s]. The only dialect which kept the whole diphthong in one syllable was Aeolic. The long diphthongs, except at the ends of words, were shortened in Attic. Some of these appear merely as long vowels, having lost their second element in the proethnic period. Apparent long diphthongs like those in [Greek: lêtourgia, sôzô] arise by contraction of two syllables.

(c) The consonants suffered more extensive change. The voiced aspirates became unvoiced, so that _bh_, _dh_, _gh_, _gh_, _guh_ are confused with original _ph_, _th_, _kh_, _qh_, _quh_: I.E. *_bhero_ (Skt. _bharami_) is Gr. [Greek: pherô]; I.E. *_dhumos_ (Skt. _dhumas_), Gr. [Greek: thymos]; I.E. *_ghimo_- (Skt. _hima_-), Gr. [Greek: (dys)-chimo-s]; I.E. *_stigh_- (Skt. _stigh_-), Gr. [Greek: stiches]; I.E. _guhen_- (Skt. _han_-), Gr. [Greek: theinô] (probably), [Greek: phonos]. The palatal and velar series cannot be distinguished in Greek; for the differences between them resort must be had to languages of the _satem_-group, such as Sanskrit, Zend or Slavonic, where the palatals appear as sibilants (see INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES). The labio-velar series present a great variety of forms in the different Greek dialects, and in the same dialect before different sounds. Thus in Attic before _o_ vowels, nasals and liquids, the series appears as [pi], [beta], [phi]; before _e_ and _i_ vowels as [tau], [beta] ([delta]), [theta]; in combination with _u_, which led to loss of the u by dissimilation, [kappa], [gamma] [chi]. Thus [Greek: hepomai] corresponds to the Latin _sequo-r_, apart from the ending; [Greek: boûs] to Latin _bos_ (borrowed from Sabine), English _cow_; [Greek: phonos] "slaughter," [Greek: epephnon], old Irish _gonim_, "I wound." Parallel to these forms with _p_ are forms in the Italic languages except Latin and Faliscan, and in the Cymric group of the Celtic languages. The dental forms [tau], [delta], [theta] stand by themselves. Thus [Greek: tis] (from the same root as [Greek: pou, poi, pothen], etc.) is parallel to the Latin _quis_, the Oscan _pis_, old Irish cía, Welsh _pwy_, "who?" "what?"; Attic [Greek: tettares], Ionic [Greek: tesseres] "four" is parallel to Latin _quattuor_, Oscan [Greek: petora], old Irish _cethir_, old Welsh _petguar_; [Greek: tisis] is from the same root as [Greek: poinê]. For the voiced sound, [beta] is much more common than [delta] before _e_ and _i_ sounds; thus [Greek: bios] "life," from the same root as Skt. _jivas_, Latin _vivus_; [Greek: bios] "bowstring," Skt. _jya_, &c. In Arcado-Cyprian and Aeolic, [pi] and [beta] often precede _e_ and _i_ sounds. Thus parallel to Attic [Greek: tettares] Lesbian has [Greek: pessyres], Homer [Greek: pisyres], Boeotian [Greek: pettares]; Thessalian [Greek: bellomai], Boeotian [Greek: beilomai] alongside of Attic [Greek: boulomai], Lesbian [Greek: bollomai], Doric [Greek: bôlomai] and also [Greek: dêlomai]. In Arcadian and Cyprian the form corresponding to [Greek: tis] was [Greek: sis], in Thessalian [Greek: kis], where the labialization was lost (see the article on Q).

A great variety of changes in the stopped consonants arose in combination with other sounds, especially _i_ (a semivowel of the nature of English _y_), _u_ (_w_) and _s_; -[Greek: ti-, -thi]- became first -[Greek: ss]- and later -[sigma]- in Attic Greek, -[Greek: tt]- in Boeotian (the precise pronunciation of -[Greek: ss]- and -[Greek: tt]- is uncertain): Attic [Greek: ho-posos], earlier [Greek: ho-possos], Boeotian [Greek: ho-pottos], from the same stem as the Latin _quot_, _quotiens_; Homeric [Greek: messos], Attic [Greek: mesos] from *[Greek: methios], Latin _medius_; -[Greek: ki-, -chi]- became -[Greek: ss]-, Attic -[Greek: tt-: pissa] "pitch," Attic [Greek: pitta] from *[Greek: píkia], cp. Latin _pix_, _picis_, [Greek: elasson], Attic [Greek: elatton] comparative to [Greek: elachus]. [Greek: di] and [Greek: gi] became [zeta]: [Greek: Zeus] (Skt. _Dyaus_) [Greek: elpizo] from [Greek: elpis], stem [Greek: èlpid]-"hope," [Greek: mastizo] from [Greek: mastix], stem [Greek: mastig]- "lash."

(d) The sound _u_ was represented in the Greek alphabet by [digamma], the "digamma," but in Attic and Ionic the sound was lost very early. In Aeolic, particularly Boeotian and Lesbian, it was persistent, and so also in many Doric dialects, especially at the beginning of words. When the Ionic alphabet was adopted by districts which had retained [digamma], it was represented by [beta]: [Greek: brodon] Aeolic for [Greek: rodon], i.e. [Greek: Drodon]. In Attic it disappeared, leaving no trace; in Ionic it lengthened the preceding syllable; thus in Homer [Greek: hupodeisas] is scanned with o long because the root of the verb contained [digamma]: [Greek: ddei]-. Attic has [Greek: xenos], but Ionic [Greek: xeinos] for [Greek: xenwos]. Its combination with [tau] became -[Greek: ss]-, Attic and Boeotian -[Greek: tt]-, in [Greek: tesseres, tettares, pettares] for I.E. [Greek: guetu]-.

But the most effective of all elements in changing the appearance of Greek words was the sound _s_. Before vowels at the beginning, or between vowels in the middle of words, it passed into an _h_ sound, the "rough breathing." Thus [Greek: hepta] is the same word as the Latin _septem_, English _seven_; [Greek: hal-s] has the same stem as the Latin _sal_, English _sal-t_; [Greek: euo] for [Greek: euho] is the same as the Latin _uro_ (*_eusô_). Combined with _i_ or _u_ also it passes into _h_; [Greek: hymên], Skt. _syuman_, "band"; [Greek: hêdus], Doric [Greek: adus], Latin _sua(d)vis_, English sweet; cp. [Greek: oikoio] for *[Greek: woíkosio, nêos], Lesbian [Greek: nauos] "temple," through [Greek: nawos] from *[Greek: naswo-s] connected with [Greek: naiô] "dwell." Before nasals and liquids _s_ was assimilated: [Greek: mei-daô], Latin _mi-ru-s_, English _smile_; [Greek: nipha], Latin _nivem_, English _snow_; [Greek: lêgo], Latin _laxus_, English _slack_; [Greek: rheô] from *_sreu-o_ of the same origin as English _stream_ (where _t_ is a later insertion), imperfect [Greek: erreon] for *_esreuom_; cp. also [Greek: philommeidês, aganniphos, allêktos].

After nasals _s_ is assimilated except finally; when assimilated, in all dialects except Aeolic the previous syllable is lengthened if not already long: Attic [Greek: eneima, emeina] for the first aorist *_enemsa_, *_emensa_; but [Greek: tons, tans], &c., of the accusative pl. either remained or became in Aeolic [Greek: tois, tais], in Ionic and Attic [Greek: tous, tas], in Doric [Greek: tôs, tas]; cp. [Greek: titheis] for *[Greek: tithents, bas] for *[Greek: bants, heis] "one" for *sem-s, then by analogy of the neuter *sens. Assimilation of [sigma] to preceding [rho] and [lambda] is a matter of dialect: Ionic [Greek: tharseo], but Attic [Greek: tharrô], and so also the Doric of Thera: [Greek: ekelsa], but [Greek: esteila] for *[Greek: ettelsa]. With nasals [iota] affected the previous syllable: [Greek: tektainô] (*[Greek: tekteio]), where _n_ is the nasal of the stem [Greek: tektôn], itself forming a syllable (see the article N for these so-called sonant nasals). Before [iota] original _m_ becomes _n_; hence [Greek: bainô] with _n_, though from the same root as English _come_. Original [iota] does not survive in Greek, but is represented by the aspirate at the beginning of words, [Greek: hagnos] = Skt. _yajnas_; medially after consonants it disappears, affecting the preceding consonant or syllable where a consonant precedes; between vowels it disappears. A sound of the same kind is indicated in Cyprian and some other dialects as a glide or transition sound between two vowels.

(e) The most remarkable feature in the treatment of the nasals is that when _n_ or _m_ forms a syllable by itself its consonant character disappears altogether and it is represented by the vowel [alpha] only: [Greek: tatos], Latin _tentus_, [alpha]- negative particle, Latin _in_, English _un_; [Greek: ha-ploos] has the same prefix as the Latin _sim-plex_ (_sm_). The liquids in similar cases show [Greek: la] or [Greek: al] and [Greek: ra] or [Greek: ar: te-tla-men, pe-paltai; edrakon, thrasys, tharsos].

The ends of words were modified in appearance by the loss of all stop-consonants and the change of final _m_ to _n_, [Greek: edeixe], Latin _dixit_; [Greek: zygon], Latin _iugum_.

_Accent._--The vowel system of Greek has been so well preserved because it shows till late times very little in the way of stress accent. As in early Sanskrit the accent was predominantly a pitch accent (see ACCENT).

_Noun System._--The I.E. noun had three numbers, but the dual was limited to pairs, the two hands, the two horses in the chariot, and was so little in use that the original form of the oblique cases cannot be restored with certainty. Ionic has no dual. The I.E. noun had the following cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Ablative, Instrumental, Locative and Dative. The vocative was not properly a case, because it usually stands outside the syntactical construction of the sentence; when a distinctive form appears, it is the bare stem, and there is no form (separate from the nominative) for the plural. Greek has confused genitive and ablative (the distinction between them seems to have been derived from the pronouns), except for the solitary [Greek: woikô = oikothen] in an inscription of Delphi. The instrumental, locative and dative are mixed in one case, partly for phonetic, partly for syntactical reasons. In Arcadian, Elean, Boeotian, and later widely in N. Greece, the locative -[Greek: oi] is used for the dative. The masculine _a_-stems make the nom. in most dialects in -[Greek: as]. The genitive is in -[Greek: ao] (with [omicron] borrowed from the _o_-stems), which remains in Homer and Boeotian, appears in Arcado-Cyprian as -[Greek: au], and with metathesis of quantity -[Greek: eô] in Ionic. The Attic form in -[Greek: ou] is borrowed directly from the _o_-stems. In the plural the -[alpha] and -_o_ stems follow the article in making their nominatives in -[Greek: ai] and -[Greek: oi] instead of the original -_as_ and -_os_. The neuter plural was in origin a collective singular, and for this reason takes a singular verb; the plural of [Greek: zygon] "yoke" was originally *_iuga_, and declined like any other -a stem. But through the influence of the masculine and feminine forms the neuter took the same oblique cases, and like its own singular made the accusative the same as the nominative. In the plural of -_a_ and -_o_ stems, the locative in -[Greek: aisi, -oisi] was long kept apart from the instrumental-dative form in -[Greek: ais, -ois].

_The Verb System._--The verb system of Greek is more complete than that of any of the other I.E. languages. Its only rival, the early Vedic verb system, is already in decay when history begins, and when the classical period of Sanskrit arrives the moods have broken down, and the aorist, perfect, and imperfect tenses are syntactically confused. Throughout the Greek classical period the moods are maintained, but in the period of the [Greek: koinê] the optative occurs less and less and finally disappears. The original I.E. had two voices, an active and a middle, and to these Greek has added a third, the passive, distinguished from the middle in many verbs by separate forms for the future and aorist, made with a syllable -[Greek: thê-, timêthêsomai, etimêthên], though in this instance, [Greek: timêsomai], the future middle, is often used with a passive sense. Other forms which Greek has added to the original system are the pluperfect--in form a past of the perfect stem with aorist endings. It merely expressed the perfect action in past time, and, except as derived from the context, did not possess the notion of relative time (past at a time already past), which attaches to the Latin forms with the same name. The future optative was also a new formation, betraying its origin in the fact that it is almost entirely limited to _Oratio Obliqua_. The aorist imperatives were also new; the history of some of them, as the second sing. act. [Greek: pauson], is not very clear. The whole verb system is affected by the distinction between -_o_ and -_mi_ verbs; the former or thematic verbs have a so-called "thematic vowel" between the root and the personal suffix, while the -_mi_ verbs attach the suffixes directly to the root. The distinction is really one between monosyllabic and disyllabic roots. The history of the personal endings is not altogether clear; the -_o_ verbs have in the present forms for the 2nd and 3rd person in -[Greek: eis] and -[Greek: ei], which are not yet elucidated. In the middle, Greek does not entirely agree with Sanskrit in its personal endings, and the original forms cannot all be restored with certainty. The endings of the primary tenses differed from those of the secondary, but there has been a certain amount of confusion between them.

The syntax of the verb is founded on the original I.E. distinction of the verb forms, not by time (tense), but by forms of action, progressive action (present and imperfect), consummated action (aorist), state arising from action, emphatic or repeated action (perfect). For the details of this see INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--(i.) A grammar of Greek, which will deal fully with the whole material of the language, is at present a _desideratum_, and is hardly possible so long as new dialect material is being constantly added and while comparatively so little has been done on the syntax of the dialects. The greatest collection of material is to be found in the new edition of Kühner's _Griechische Grammatik, Laut- und Formenlehre_, by Blass (2 vols., 1890-1892); _Syntax_, by Gerth (2 vols., 1896, 1900). Blass's part is useful only for material, the explanations being entirely antiquated. The only full historical account of the language (sounds, forms and syntax) at present in existence is K. Brugmann's _Griechische Grammatik_ (3rd ed., 1900). Gustav Meyer's _Griechische Grammatik_ (nothing on accent or syntax), which did excellent pioneer work when it first appeared in 1880, was hardly brought up to date in its 3rd edition (1896), but is still useful for the dialect and bibliographical material collected. See also H. Hirt, _Handbuch der griech. Laut- und Formenlehre_ (1902). Of smaller grammars in English perhaps the most complete is that of J. Thompson (London, 1902). The grammar of Homer was handled by D. B. Monro (2nd ed., Oxford, 1891). The syntax has been treated in many special works, amongst which may be mentioned W. W. Goodwin, _Syntax of the Greek Moods and Tenses_ (new ed., 1889); B. L. Gildersleeve and C. W. E. Miller, _Syntax of Classical Greek from Homer to Demosthenes_, pt. i. (New York, 1901--and following); J. M. Stahl, _Kritisch-historische Syntax des griechischen Verbums_ (1907); F. E. Thompson, _Attic Greek Syntax_ (1907). (ii.) The relations between Greek and the other I.E. languages are very well brought out in P. Kretschmer's _Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache_ (Göttingen, 1896). For comparative grammar see K. Brugmann and B. Delbrück, _Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (the 2nd ed., begun 1897, is still incomplete) and Brugmann's _Kurze vergleichende Grammatik_ (1902-1903); A. Meillet, _Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes_ (2nd ed., 1908). Greek compared with Latin and English: P. Giles, _A Short Manual of Comparative Philology for Classical Students_ (2nd ed., 1901, with an appendix containing a brief account and specimens of the dialects); Riemann and Goelzer, _Grammaire comparative du Grec et du Latin_ (1901), a parallel grammar in 2 vols., specially valuable for syntax. (iii.) For the dialects two works have recently appeared, both covering in brief space the whole field: A. Thumb, _Handbuch der griechischen Dialekte_ (with bibliographies for each dialect, 1909); C. D. Buck, _Introduction to the Study of the Greek Dialects, Grammar, Selected Inscriptions, Glossary_ (Boston, 1910). Works on a larger scale have been undertaken by R. Meister, by O. Hoffmann and by H. W. Smyth. For the [Greek: koinê] may be specially mentioned A. Thumb, _Die griech. Sprache in Zeitalter des Hellenismus_ (1901); E. Mayser, _Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit: Laut- und Wortlehre_ (1906); H. St J. Thackeray, _A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek_, vol. i. (1909); Blass, _Grammar of New Testament Greek_, trans. by Thackeray (1898); J. H. Moulton, _A Grammar of New Testament Greek. I. Prolegomena_ (3rd ed., 1906). (iv.) For the development from the [Greek: koinê] to modern Greek: A. N. Jannaris, _An Historical Greek Grammar, chiefly of the Attic Dialect, as written and spoken from Classical Antiquity down to the Present Time_ (1901); G. N. Hatzidakis, _Einleitung in die neugriechische Grammatik_ (1892); A. Thumb, _Handbuch der neugriechischen Volkssprache_ (2nd ed. 1910). (v.) The inscriptions are collected in _Inscriptiones Graecae_ in the course of publication by the Berlin Academy, those important for dialect in the _Sammlung der griech. Dialektinschriften_, edited by Collitz and Bechtel. The earlier parts of this collection are to some extent superseded by later volumes of the _Inscr. Graecae_, containing better readings and new inscriptions. A good selection (too brief) is Solmsen's _Inscriptiones Graecae ad inlustrandas dialectos selectae_ (3rd ed., 1910). A serviceable lexicon for dialect words is van Herwerden's _Lexicon Graecum suppletorium et dialecticum_ (2nd ed., much enlarged, 2 vols. 1910). (vi.) The historical basis for the distribution of the Greek dialects is discussed at length in the histories of E. Meyer (_Geschichte des Altertums_, ii.) and G. Busolt (_Griechische Geschichte_, i.); by Professor Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, i. (1901), and P. Kretschmer in _Glotta_, i. 9 ff. See also A. Fick, _Die vorgriechischen Ortsnamen_ (1905). (vii.) Bibliographies containing the new publications on Greek, with some account of their contents, appear from time to time in _Indogermanische Forschungen: Anzeiger_ (Strassburg, Trübner), annually in _Glotta_ (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht), and _The Year's Work in Classical Studies_ (London, Murray). (P. Gi.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thumb, _Die griechische Sprache im Zeitalter des Hellenismus_ (1901), pp. 242-243.

[2] Thumb, _op. cit._ p. 249.