Part 535

The "heerban" was a military system instituted by Charlemagne, which gave way to the feudal system under his successors. "The basis of the heerban system was the duty of every fighting man to answer directly the call of the king to arms. The freeman, not only of the Franks, but of all the subject peoples, owed military service to the king alone. This duty is insisted upon in the laws of Charlemagne with constant repetition. The summons (heerban) was issued at the spring meeting, and sent out by the counts or missi. The soldier was obliged to present himself at the given time, fully armed and equipped with all provision for the campaign, except fire, water, and fodder for the horses."

_E. Emerton, Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages, chapter 14._

HEGEMONY.

"A hegemony, the political ascendancy of some one city or community over a number of subject commonwealths."

_Sir H. S. Maine, Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, page 131._

HEGIRA, The.

See MAHOMETAN CONQUEST: A. D. 609-632.

HEGIRA, Era of the.

See ERA, MAHOMETAN.

HEIDELBERG: Start--------

HEIDELBERG: A. D. 1622. Capture by Tilly.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1621-1623.

HEIDELBERG: A. D. 1631. Burning of the Castle.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1631-1632.

HEIDELBERG: A. D. 1690. Final destruction of the Castle.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1689-1690.

HEIDELBERG: End--------

HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY.

See EDUCATION, MEDIÆVAL: GERMANY.

HEILBRONN, Union of.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1632-1634.

HELAM, OR HALAMAH, Battle of.

A decisive victory won by King David over the Syrians.

_II. Samuel, x. 15-19._

HELENA, Arkansas, The defense of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (JULY: ON THE MISSISSIPPI).

HELEPOLIS, The.

See RHODES: B. C. 305-304.

HELIÆA, The.

Under Solon's constitution for the government of Athens, "a body of 6,000 citizens was every year created by lot to form a supreme court, called Heliæa, which was divided into several smaller ones, not limited to any precise number of persons. The qualifications required for this were the same with those which gave admission into the general assembly, except that the members of the former might not be under the age of thirty. It was, therefore, in fact, a select portion of the latter, in which the powers of the larger body were concentrated and exercised under a judicial form."

_C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, chapter 11._

HELICON.

See THESSALY.

HELIGOLAND: A. D. 1814. Acquisition by Great Britain.

See SCANDINAVIAN STATES: A. D. 1813-1814.

HELIGOLAND: A. D. 1890. Cession to Germany.

See AFRICA: A. D. 1884-1891.

HELIOPOLIS: Start--------

HELIOPOLIS.

See ON.

HELIOPOLIS: Battle of.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1800 (JANUARY-JUNE).

HELIOPOLIS: End--------

HELLAS. HELLENES. GRAIKOI. GREEKS.

"To the Greek of the historical ages the idea of Hellas was not associated with any definite geographical limits. Wherever a Greek settlement existed, there for the colonists was Hellas. … Of a Hellas lying within certain specified bounds, and containing within it only Greek inhabitants, they knew nothing."

_G. W. Cox, History of Greece, book 1, chapter 1._

"Their language was, … from the beginning, the token of recognition among the Hellenes. … Where this language was spoken—in Asia, in Europe, or in Africa—there was Hellas. … A considerable number of the Greek tribes which immigrated by land [from Asia] into the European peninsula [of Greece] followed the tracks of the Italicans, and, taking a westward route through Pæonia and Macedonia, penetrated through Illyria into the western half of the Alpine country of Northern Greece, which the formation of its hill ranges and valleys renders more easily accessible from the north than Thessaly in its secluded hollow. The numerous rivers, abounding in water, which flow close by one another through long gorges into the Ionian Sea, here facilitated an advance into the south; and the rich pasture-land invited immigration; so that Epirus became the dwelling-place of a dense crowd of population, which commenced its civilized career in the fertile lowlands of the country. Among them three main tribes were marked out, of which the Chaones were regarded as the most ancient. … Farther to the south the Thesprotians had settled, and more inland, in the direction of Pindus, the Molossians. A more ancient appellation than those of this triple division is that of the Greeks (Graikoi), which the Hellenes thought the earliest designation of their ancestors. The same name of Græci (Greeks) the Italicans applied to the whole family of peoples with whom they had once dwelt together in these districts. This is the first collective name of the Hellenic tribes in Europe. … Far away from the coast, in the seclusion of the hills, where lie closely together the springs of the Thyamis, Aous, Aracthus, and Achelous, extends at the base of Tomarus the lake Ioannina, on the thickly wooded banks of which, between fields of corn and damp meadows, lay Dodona, a chosen seat of the Pelasgian Zeus, the invisible God, who announced his presence in the rustling of the oaks, whose altar was surrounded by a vast circle of tripods, for a sign that he was the first to unite the domestic hearths and civic communities into a great association centering in himself. This Dodona was the central seat of the Græci; it was a sacred centre of the whole district before the Italicans commenced their westward journey; and at the same time the place where the subsequent national name of the Greeks can be first proved to have prevailed; for the chosen of the people, who administered the worship of Zeus, were called Selli or Helli, and after them the surrounding country Hellopia or Hellas."

{1636}

_E. Curtius, History of Greece, book 1, chapters 1 and 4 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 2 (volume 2)._

_G. W. Cox, History of Greece, book 1, chapter 4._

_W. E. Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, chapter 4._

HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE. HELLENIC AND HELLENISTIC CULTURE. HELLENISM.

"It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign efficacy of reason. They entered on the pursuit of knowledge with a sure and joyous instinct. Baffled and puzzled they might be, but they never grew weary of the quest. The speculative faculty which reached its height in Plato and Aristotle, was, when we make due allowance for time and circumstance, scarcely less eminent in the Ionian philosophers; and it was Ionia that gave birth to an idea, which was foreign to the East, but has become the starting-point of modern science,—the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. A fragment of Euripides speaks of him as 'happy who has learned to search into causes,' who 'discerns the deathless and ageless order of nature, whence it arose, the how and the why.' The early poet-philosophers of Ionia gave the impulse which has carried the human intellect forward across the line which separates empirical from scientific knowledge; and the Greek precocity of mind in this direction, unlike that of the Orientals, had in it the promise of uninterrupted advance in the future,—of great discoveries in mathematics, geometry, experimental physics, in medicine also and physiology. … By the middle of the fifth century B. C. the general conception of law in the physical world was firmly established in the mind of Greek thinkers. Even the more obscure phenomena of disease were brought within the rule. Hippocrates writing about a malady which was common among the Scythians and was thought to be preternatural says: 'As for me I think that these maladies are divine like all others, but that none is more divine or more human than another. Each has its natural principle and none exists without its natural cause.' Again, the Greeks set themselves to discover a rational basis for conduct. Rigorously they brought their actions to the test of reason, and that not only by the mouth of philosophers, but through their poets, historians, and orators. Thinking and doing—clear thought and noble action—did not stand opposed to the Greek mind. The antithesis rather marks a period when the Hellenic spirit was past its prime, and had taken a one-sided bent. The Athenians of the Periclean age—in whom we must recognise the purest embodiment of Hellenism—had in truth the peculiar power, which Thucydides claims for them, of thinking before they acted and of acting also. … To Greece … we owe the love of Science, the love of Art, the love of Freedom: not Science alone, Art alone, or Freedom alone, but these vitally correlated with one another and brought into organic union. And in this union we recognise the distinctive features of the West. The Greek genius is the European genius in its first and brightest bloom. From a vivifying contact with the Greek spirit Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we call Progress. Strange it is to think that these Greeks, like the other members of the Indo-European family, probably had their cradle in the East; that behind Greek civilisation, Greek language, Greek mythology, there is that Eastern background to which the comparative sciences seem to point. But it is no more than a background. In spite of an resemblances, in spite of common customs, common words, common syntax, common gods, the spirit of the Greeks and of their Eastern kinsmen—the spirit of their civilisation, art, language, and mythology—remains essentially distinct. … From Greece came that first mighty impulse, whose far-off workings are felt by us to-day, and which has brought it about that progress has been accepted as the law and goal of human endeavour. Greece first took up the task of equipping man with all that fits him for civil life and promotes his secular well being; of unfolding and expanding every inborn faculty and energy, bodily and mental; of striving restlessly after the perfection of the whole, and finding in this effort after an unattainable ideal that by which man becomes like to the gods. The life of the Hellenes, like that of their Epic hero Achilles, was brief and brilliant. But they have been endowed with the gift of renewing their youth. Renan, speaking of the nations that are fitted to play a part in universal history, says 'that they must die first that the world may live through them;' that a people must choose between the prolonged life, the tranquil and obscure destiny of one who lives for himself, and the troubled stormy career of one who lives for humanity. The nation which revolves within its breast social and religious problems is always weak politically. Thus it was with the Jews, who in order to make the religious conquest of the world must needs disappear as a nation.' 'They lost a material city, they opened the reign of the spiritual Jerusalem.' So too it was with Greece. As a people she ceased to be. When her freedom was overthrown at Chaeronea, the page of her history was to all appearance closed. Yet from that moment she was to enter on a larger life and on universal empire. Already during the last days of her independence it had been possible to speak of a new Hellenism, which rested not on ties of blood but on spiritual kinship. This presentiment of Isocrates was marvellously realised. As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilisation whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman, bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet. To the modern world too Greece has been the great civiliser, the oecumenical teacher, the disturber and regenerator of slumbering societies. She is the source of most of the quickening ideas which re-make nations and renovate literature and art. If we reckon up our secular possessions, the wealth and heritage of the past, the larger share may be traced back to Greece. One half of life she has made her domain,—all, or well-nigh all, that belongs to the present order of things and to the visible world."

_S. H. Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, pages 9-43._

"The part assigned to [the Greeks] in the drama of the nations was to create forms of beauty, to unfold ideas which should remain operative when the short bloom of their own existence was over, and thus to give a new impulse, a new direction, to the whole current of human life. {1637} The prediction which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian orator has been fulfilled, though not in the sense literally conveyed; 'Assuredly we shall not be without witnesses,' says Pericles; 'there are mighty documents of our power, which shall make us the wonder of this age, and of ages to come.' He was thinking of those wide-spread settlements which attested the empire of Athens. But the immortal witnesses of his race are of another kind. Like the victims of the war, whose epitaph he was pronouncing, the Hellenes have their memorial in all lands, graven, not on stone, but in the hearts of mankind. … Are we not warranted by what we know of Greek work, imperfect though our knowledge is, in saying that no people has yet appeared in the world whose faculty for art, in the largest sense of the term, has been so comprehensive? And there is a further point that may be noted. It has been said that the man of genius sometimes is such in virtue of combining the temperament distinctive of his nation with some gift of his own which is foreign to that temperament; as in Shakespeare the basis is English, and the individual gift a flexibility of spirit which is not normally English. But we cannot apply this remark to the greatest of ancient Greek writers. They present certainly a wide range of individual differences. Yet so distinctive and so potent is the Hellenic nature that, if any two of such writers be compared, however wide the individual differences may be,—as between Aristophanes and Plato, or Pindar and Demosthenes,—such individual differences are less significant than those common characteristics of the Hellenic mind which separate both the men compared from all who are not Hellenes. If it were possible to trace the process by which the Hellenic race was originally separated from their Aryan kinsfolk, the physiological basis of their qualities might perhaps be traced in the mingling of different tribal ingredients. As it is, there is no clue to these secrets of nature's alchemy: the Hellenes appear in the dawn of their history with that unique temperament already distinct: we can point only to one cause, and that a subordinate cause, which must have aided its development, namely, the geographical position of Greece. No people of the ancient world were so fortunately placed. Nowhere are the aspects of external nature more beautiful, more varied, more stimulating to the energies of body and mind. A climate which, within three parallels of latitude, nourishes the beeches of Pindus and the palms of the Cyclades; mountain barriers which at once created a framework for the growth of local federations, and encouraged a sturdy spirit of freedom; coasts abounding in natural harbors; a sea dotted with islands, and notable for the regularity of its wind-currents; ready access alike to Asia and to the western Mediterranean,—these were circumstances happily congenial to the inborn faculties of the Greek race, and admirably fitted to expand them."

_R. C. Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, pages 27-31._

"The sense of beauty which the Greeks possessed to a greater extent than any other people could not fail to be caught by the exceptionally beautiful natural surroundings in which they lived; and their literature, at any rate their poetry, bears abundant testimony to the fact. Small though Greece is, it contains a greater variety, both in harmony and contrast, of natural beauty than most countries, however great. Its latitude gives it a southern climate, while its mountains allow of the growth of a vegetation found in more northern climes. Within a short space occur all the degrees of transition from snow-topped hills to vine-clad fountains. And the joy with which the beauty of their country filled the Greeks may be traced through all their poetry. … The two leading facts in the physical aspect of Greece are the sea and the mountains. As Europe is the most indented and has relatively the longest coast-line of all the continents of the world, so of all the countries of Europe the land of Greece is the most interpenetrated with arms of the sea. …

'Two voices are there: one is of the Sea, One of the Mountains; each a mighty voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice; They were thy chosen music, Liberty!'