Part 2

Well, that was the kind of world in which Greek civilization was born. Do not say I have been describing a remote barbarism. Remoteness is relative to more than space, and to the Ionians the sea was no barrier, but the contrary. They knew the whole south coast of the Black Sea, for instance, better than their own Asiatic hinterland. But even if we exclude the Black Sea and Libya as remote, where did they not at first find barbarism? In Hellas? But they had just escaped from Hellas, driven out by the wild first “Dorians,” who were steadily engaged in ruining what the Ionians in their new home were trying to save. In Mesopotamia? But between it and them lay all mountainous Anatolia crowded with diverse races, most of them savage, all of them hostile. Egypt at first and for long was closed to them by an exclusive foreign policy. The unoriginal and materialistic culture of Phoenicia was withheld (for what it was worth) by commercial rivalry. The West as yet had nothing to give. Weak in numbers, in want of everything, shut in with such neighbours, Ionia discovered in herself the force to rescue her feet from this mire, and to found our modern civilization of reason and freedom and imaginative energy.

Naturally the process took time. The first century or so must have been largely lost in the mere struggle for survival. There may even have been in some ways a retrogression—a fading out of the Mycenaean culture, the admission of “Carian” elements needing gradual assimilation. That period is historically so much of a blank to us, that when we do begin to note the signs of expansion they give us the surprise of suddenness. Miletus is all at once the leading city of the Greek world. It plants colony after colony on the Dardanelles, in the Sea of Marmara, along the shores of the Euxine. Ionia is awake while Hellas is still asleep. Ionian traders, Ionian soldiers, Ionian ships are everywhere. The men of Phokaia opened to trade the Adriatic, Etruria, Spain. In the reign of Psammetichos—the First or Second—some Ionian and Carian pirates were forced to land in Egypt. They were clad according to their fashion in panoply of bronze. An Egyptian came to the Marshes and told the king that “bronze men from the sea are wasting the plain,” having never before seen men in such armour. Now the words of the messenger were the very words of an oracle that had bidden Psammetichos seek the help of “bronze men from the sea,” so the king hired the strangers to serve in his army, and by their aid overcame his enemies. The story (which is in Herodotus) is told in a way to provoke the sceptical. But wait a moment. At Abusimbel in Upper Egypt there is a great temple, and before the temple stand colossal statues. On the legs of one of these are scratched Greek words: _When King Psamatichos came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psamatichos the son of Theokles wrote this; and they went above Kertis, as far up as the river let them, and Potasimpto led the men of alien speech, and Amasis the Egyptians. Archon the son of Hamoibichos and Pelekos the son of Houdamos wrote me_—this is, the inscription. Beneath are the signatures of Greek-speaking soldiers. The writers must have been Ionian mercenaries under a leader who for some reason adopted the king’s name. It is to such fellows we owe our names for Egyptian things. “Crocodile” is just the Ionian word for a lizard, and “pyramid” really means a wheaten cake. Ostriches they called “sparrows.” The British private soldier in Egypt is probably making similar jokes to-day. To return to the inscription, the “men of alien speech” commanded by Potasimpto—an Egyptian name—were probably Carians. The date of the writing cannot be later than 589 B.C. when Psammetichos II ceased to reign. The date is not so striking as the fact that these fighters (who, to put it gently, are not likely to have had the best Ionian education) could legibly write. Their spelling, I admit, is not affectedly purist; but then, spelling is a modern art.

The first great Ionian (discounting the view of some that Homer was an Ionian poet) was the greatest of all. This was Archilochus, who was born in the little island of Paros somewhere about the end of the eighth century before Christ. His poetry is all but lost, his life little more than a startling rumour. The ancients, who had him all to read, spoke of him in the same breath with Homer. He was not only so great a poet, but he was a new kind of poet. Before him men used the traditional style of the heroic epic. This Archilochus sings about himself. We hear in him a voice as personal, as poignant, as in Villon or Heine or Burns; it is a revolutionary voice. Modern literature has nothing to teach Archilochus. One can see that in the miserable scanty fragments of his astonishing poetry that have come down to us.

As for the man himself, the case against him looks pretty black. He himself is quite unabashed. But he also complains of hard luck, and there may be something in this plea. If he was a bastard, much could be forgiven him; but that theory seems to rest on a misapprehension of his meaning. His father was evidently an important man among the Parians. There does not appear to be any good reason why Archilochus should have had so bad a time of it except the reason of temperament. _One great thing I do know_, quoth he, _how to pay back in bitter kind the man who wrongs me._ He certainly did know that, but the knowledge was not going to make him popular. He never could get on with people. He hated Paros, where, one would have thought, his father’s son had a fair chance of happiness. _Damn Paros—and those figs—and a life at sea._ Later he accompanied a colony, led by his father, to the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast; and he did not like Thasos any more than Paros. _It sticks up_, he says in his vivid way, _like a donkey’s backbone, wreathed in wild woods._ He also grumbles that _the plagues of all Hellas have run in a body to Thasos_. He did not like the sea, and yet he was a good deal on it. Pulling at an oar and munching onions no doubt seemed to him a poor conception of life, but a thrilling line _Let us hide the bitter gifts of the Lord Poseidon_ rather breathes an imaginative horror. The man is a master of this kind of sinister beauty. _There were thirty that died—we overtook them with our feet—a thousand were we who slew._ There you have it again. Oh yes, he had an overpowering sense of beauty, and a wonderful imagination—but also he had something else. That was just the tragedy. His genius had a twist in it which hurt himself as well as other people. He had loved a girl whom he saw _playing with a branch of myrtle and a rose, in the shadow of her falling hair_. He believed that she had been promised in marriage to him; but something happened, and they did not marry. It may be said for Neoboule and her father that Archilochus was not the sort they made good husbands of; and if any one is still disposed to condemn them, he may relent when he hears that the poet assailed them with a fabulous bitterness of tongue—assailed them till, according to the story, they hanged themselves. He meantime followed the call of his temperament, or of the poverty into which his temperament had brought him, and became a professional soldier. _I shall be called a mercenary like a Carian_, he says with a touch of what looks like bravado. What a life for a poet! _I am the servant of the Lord of War, and I know the lovely guerdon of the Muses_, he says superbly. His way of living is reflected in his speech. There is lust and drunkenness in it, and a kind of soldierly joviality. _Wild-fig-tree of the rock feeding many crows, good-natured Pasiphile who makes strangers welcome_. Pasiphile hardly needs a commentator. Nor does the half-line preserved by a grammarian (who quoted it to illustrate the dative case)—_plagued with lice_.

Archilochus was sent to fight the Saioi, a wild tribe of the Thracian mainland opposite Thasos. It would seem that the Greeks were defeated. At any rate, he for one ran away, abandoning his shield—to Greek sentiment an unforgivable offence. Who tells us this? Archilochus himself, adding impudently that he doesn’t care; he can easily get another shield, and meantime his skin is whole. The ancient world never quite got over the scandal of this avowal. Archilochus aggravated it by a poem to a friend in which he remarks that a man who pays much attention to charges of cowardice won’t have very many pleasures. But cowards don’t become soldiers, and don’t write humorous accounts of their misbehaviour. He was a fighter to the last. A man of Naxos killed him.

There are in the fragments of Archilochus notes of tenderness and even delicacy, notes of a singularly impressive pathos. There are indeed all notes in him, from the bawdy to the divine. It would be absurd to call him a bad man—quite as absurd as to call him a good one. He is a man. And what makes him so fascinating is just this, that for the first time in literature a man expresses himself. His extraordinary greatness is almost a secondary matter by the side of that portentous phenomenon. It was the Ionians who produced him.

Archilochus was absorbed in his own adventures, but even he must have noted the tremendous events which were changing the nations before his eyes. A fierce and numerous folk, known to the Greeks as the Cimmerians (_Kimmerioi_—their name survives in Crimea and Crim Tartary), broke loose or were thrust from their homes in the steppes and poured into Asia Minor, apparently through what is called the “Sangarios Gap” in Phrygia. You may see them fighting Ionians on a sarcophagus from Clazomenae which is in the British Museum. They rode bareback on half-tamed horses and slew with tremendous leaf-shaped swords. They destroyed the power of Phrygia, then the greatest in the peninsula, and King Midas, last of his race, killed himself (by drinking bull’s blood, men said). Lydia succeeded to the place and the peril of the Phrygians. She was under the rule of a new king (called “Gugu”), who made a strong fight of it, but was ultimately, about 650 B.C., defeated and slain by the half-naked riders under their king Tugdammi, who sacked the Ionian towns. The Ionians, however, made common cause with Ardys the son of Gugu or Gyges, as the Greeks called him, and along with the Lydians they beat this Tugdammi and drove away his people. Then the kings of Lydia, secure and strong and wealthy, turned their arms against Ionia, which thenceforward has to fight one long and losing battle with overmastering enemies. Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, Croesus—they all attacked her. Meantime, in the reign of Alyattes, the greatest of these monarchs, a new and far more imposing power had got itself consolidated to the east of the Lydian empire. This was the kingdom of the Medes. The rivals fought a great battle, which ended in the twilight and alarm of a total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 585 B.C. They made peace for the time, and Alyattes could proceed with the gradual reduction of the ports. But in the next generation—for all the East had been set in motion—the Medes in their turn had fallen under the authority of the kindred Persians and the great conqueror Cyrus, who in due time rushed west with his invincible footmen and his unfamiliar camels, destroyed Lydia in a moment, and contemptuously left a general to complete the conquest of Ionia.

All this time, and even under the Persian, the Ionians continued to develop and enrich the mind of the world. If science means the effort to find a rational instead of a mythological explanation of things, then the Ionians invented science. Thales of Miletus predicted that eclipse. Anaximander of Miletus held a theory about the origin of life which anticipates modern speculation. He wrote a book about it, which was probably the first example of literary prose in Greek. He also made the first map. His fellow-citizen Hecataeus invented history.... These are just some of the things the Ionians did. The rest of the Hellenes—first the colonies in Italy and Sicily, then the Athenians—caught the flame from them and kept it alive through later storms. But there was no more than time for this when the eastern cloud descended on Ionia. Athens could take up the torch. But Ionia was down.

II

KEEPING THE PASS

The innumerable East was pouring out of Thessaly into the Malian Plain, flooding in by two main channels, the hill-road through the pass of Thaumaki and the coast-road along the shore of the westward-bending Gulf of Malis. First came the pioneers, then the fighters, then the multitude of camp-followers and trains of supply which had fed all those numbers over so many leagues of hostile and unharvested regions. On attaining the brow of the steep climb to Thaumaki, had one looked back upon the view which gave this point its name of _The Place of Wondering_, he must have seen the wide Thessalian plain alive with an unwonted stir of men and baggage-wains and animals, and touched with shifting points of barbaric colour. As the continuous stream flowed past him he could note everything in greater detail—“Persians and Medes and Elamites,” the different contingents with their varying armature; footmen and horsemen; sumpter-mules and a number of high-necked, slow-striding camels, some of them showing on their flanks the proof that there were lions in Macedonia. Through the noise of the march would come the babel of strange oriental tongues. Enclosing all this, very far away could be descried a shadowy girdle of great mountains, from the highest and most distant of which the gods of Olympus looked down upon the invasion of Greece.

But Xerxes, driving along the coast-road to where it meets the Thaumaki route at Lamia, beheld a different sight. Mount Oeta stretched its wild massif there before him. At its western extremity (which he was approaching) the range piles itself into a shapeless bulk, crowding together its summits, which here in a surprising manner suddenly leap up some six or seven thousand feet from the plain. As the system trends eastward it sags down to a much lower level, but is there formidably guarded by the black precipices of the Trachinian Cliffs. Eastward yet it continues declining, until it is perhaps not three thousand feet high, then rises again another two thousand. This is the part that was called Kallidromos. Between the marshy shore of the Gulf and the broken cliff-wall of the mountain runs the Pass. Towering over all, at a vast distance rises the strange, enormous peak called Giona; while far to the south may be descried the most famous mountain in the world.

In the fierce sunlight of that sweltering day the King could not have failed to mark on his side of the Pass, under the very highest peaks of the range, a great black gash in the rocky barrier. As he approached it revealed itself to be the gorge through which the tormented Asôpos bores its narrow way between sheer walls of an altitude that disturbs the mind. A little space beyond the gorge, on the farther side of the Asôpos where it enters the Gulf, begins the Pass. The army was halted. Xerxes sent forward a scout.

The scout entered the Pass at a point where the sea barely left room for the road between it and the mountain, which here, gradually accentuating the gentle slope near the summit, comes down precipitously in the last few hundred feet. He rode a mile and met no one. Then the Pass, opening out a little towards the right, showed him the old temples where the Amphiktyones, the “Dwellers Round,” used to meet upon their sacred business. The road kept skirting the sea-marsh for a little, then rose in a long slope. He made his way cautiously to the summit. Arrived there, he all at once saw, thrust as it were into his face (so near they seem) the monstrous precipices of Kallidromos, three thousand feet high, all glistening at its eastern end with the whitish deposit of those clear bluish-green sulphur springs which gave its name to this famous place—the “Hot Gates,” _Thermopylae_. But the scout had no eyes for this great vision, for he saw, where the road again approaches the rocky wall, the red tunics of Spartan hoplites.

What were they doing? Some of them were practising the use of their weapons. Some were sitting on the ground and—yes—combing their long hair! One of them must have made a jest, for the others broke out laughing. The scout could not understand it at all. He counted them: a ridiculous handful. There were in fact rather more of them than he could see; an ancient wall across the Pass hid the rest. The scout rode quietly back with his information. Now one reason why the Spartans were combing their hair was this. It was customary among them to comb the hair of the dead.

They knew what was before them. Two of their spies had been captured by Xerxes, who let them go after fully showing them his whole array. The report of the spies was not likely to fall short of the facts as a result of this policy. All the East was on the march! Besides the Persians, Medes and Kissians, who formed the flower of the invading army, were coming the Assyrians, one of the great conquering races of history, distinguishable by their helmets of bronze and leathern straps curiously interwoven, by their clubs studded with iron nails, and by their linen breastplates. There were coming, the Bactrians with their bows of cane; the Sakai wearing their pointed sheepskin caps and armed with their native battleaxes; dark Indians in their cotton garments, carrying their bows of bamboo and iron-tipped arrows. There were hide-wrapped Caspians bearing sword and bow; Sarangians in dyed raiment and booted to the knee; Paktyes, Outioi, Mykoi, Parikanioi.... There were Arabians in flowing burnous who shot with the long bow; Ethiopians in the pelts of leopards and lions bearing spears of antelope’s horn and bossy maces and huge bows of split palm-wood with little arrows tipped with agate, who when they went to battle coloured half their black bodies with chalk and half with vermilion. (The “Eastern Ethiopians” wore on their heads the scalps of horses with the mane and ears attached; their shields were the backs of cranes.) There were Libyans from North Africa in goatskin garments; and buskined Paphlagonians in plaited headpieces. There were Phrygians, Armenians, Lydians, Mysians. There were Thracians with their foxskin caps, their deer-skin buskins, their long, many-coloured mantles. There were tribes armed with little shields of cow-hide and hunting-spears, two for each warrior; on their heads were bronze helmets and on the helmets the ears and horns of an ox in bronze, their legs were bound in crimson puttees. The Milyai were there, their cloaks fastened by brooches and with leathern skull-caps on their heads; the Moschoi, whose helmets were made of wood; the Tibarenes, the Makrônes, the Mossynoikoi; the Mares; the Colchians with wooden helms and raw-hide shields; the Alarodians and the Saspeires; the tribes from the islands of the Red Sea....

These (and more) were the infantry of the King. In addition there were the cavalry and the fleet.

There was the fine Persian cavalry. There were the Sagartians, who fought with the lasso; Medes and Kissians; Indians, some riding on steeds, some in chariots drawn by horses or by wild asses; Bactrians and Sakai; the Libyan charioteers; Perikanians; Arabians on camels.

To form the vast fleet came the famous mariners of Phoenicia and Syrians of Palestine—helmeted men with linen breastplates and rimless shields, throwers of the javelin. The Egyptians sent their navy, whose men had defences of plaited work on their heads, and carried hollow shields with enormous rims, and were armed with boarding-pikes and poleaxes and great triangular daggers. The Cyprian contingent could be recognized by the turbans of their “kings” and the felt hats of the common sort. The Cilician seamen were there in woollen jerseys. Pamphylians were there. The Lycian crews wore greaves and cuirasses, and were armed with bows of cornel wood and reed arrows without feathers, and with casting-spears; you knew them by the goatskins floating from their shoulders, their plumed hats, their daggers and crescent-shaped falchions. The Dorians of Asia were there, men of Greek race; the subject Ionians, alas; some from the Greek isles; the Aeolians; the “Hellespontians.” On board of every ship was a band of fighting men.

To defend the Pass there were three hundred Spartans; to be exact, 297, all picked men and, that their race might not perish out of Sparta, all fathers of sons. They were accompanied by their less heavily armed attendants. There were 2,196 men from Arcadia, 400 from Corinth, 200 from Phlius, 30 from Homeric Mycenae, now a ruinous little town, 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans of doubtful loyalty, 1,000 Phocians, the whole levy of the Opuntian Locrians; in all not eight thousand men. The whole force was under the command of one of the two Spartan kings. You know his name.

The right flank of the Greeks rested upon the narrow seas between the Malian coast and Euboea. The Athenian fleet was at Artemision guarding the narrows against the vastly superior navy of the enemy. From the heights above the road Leonidas could signal to the Athenian admiral.

The King prepared to attack simultaneously by land and sea. While the great army was making its way into Malis, his fleet was sailing along the iron coast of Magnesia, where the sea breaks under the imminent range of wooded Pelion. A squadron was detached to circumnavigate Euboea and cut off the retreat of the Greek ships in the Straits. Next morning everything would be ready for the concerted assault. The main portion of the fleet would enter the Malian Gulf, while the other ships were entering the “Hollows of Euboea.” Then Xerxes would rush at the Pass.

Only—in the sultry night following the long, hot day thunder began to mutter along the heights of Pelion. It increased to a violent storm, and the watchers on the Euboean mountains saw every now and then the whole range lit up by vivid lightning. Then the wind—the “Hellesponter” from the north-east—rose to so great a fury that the sea was quickly all in a turmoil. For three days the tempest raged, for three nights the bale-fires of the Greeks tossed their red beards in the wind. Great numbers of Persian ships were cast away upon the rocks about Cape Sepias. The squadron sent to round Kaphareus was wrecked in the Hollows. So rich a treasure was lost that a farmer near Sepias became the wealthiest Greek of his time by merely picking up what was washed upon the beach. And for these three days Xerxes must mark time before the Pass.