Part 83

Darius is credited with the establishment of highroads and swift postal communication between the provinces and the court. The kings of Persia resided in the winter at Susa, a warm place in the plain east of the Lower Tigris; in the summer at Ecbatana, in Media, by the mountains; and Babylon was a third capital of occasional residence in winter. From these different centers of power the Persian monarchs, according to their measure of energy and resolution, controlled the conduct of the satraps in every quarter of their widespread dominions.

ATTEMPT TO INVADE EUROPE, AND WAR WITH THE GREEKS

About 508 B. C. Darius invaded Scythia, and, crossing the Danube, marched far into the territory which is now European Russia; but the expedition ended in a retreat without encountering the enemy, and with great loss of men from famine. On his return his generals subdued Thrace and Macedonia, north of Greece, and added them to the Persian Empire.

His famous war with the Greeks arose out of the revolt of the Ionian Greek cities in Asia Minor in 501, and the burning of the city of Sardis by their Athenian allies. An expedition sent against Greece under the general Mardonius, in 492 B. C., was defeated by the Thracians on land, and frustrated by a storm in the Ægean Sea. In 490 a great armament was sent by Darius under Datis and Artaphernes, and then was fought the decisive battle of Marathon. Darius’s proposed and long-prepared revenge upon the Greeks was baffled by a rebellion in Egypt; and he died in 485, leaving the task to his son and successor, Xerxes.

REIGN OF XERXES THE GREAT

Xerxes reigned from 485-465 B. C., and he began with the suppression of the Egyptian revolt in 484, devoting the next four years to preparations against Greece. The grand effort made in 480 has been ever famous in history for the magnitude of the host of men and ships employed, for the heroism of the resistance on the one side, and the completeness of the final disaster on the other, as will be seen in the history of Greece. Xerxes returned to Sardis, after the destruction of his fleet at Salamis, toward the end of the year 480. The defeat of his general Mardonius at Platæa ended the war in Greece, and the Persians lost their last foothold in Europe by the capture of Sestos on the Hellespont.

ARTAXERXES II. AND THE “RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND GREEKS”

Artaxerxes II., reigned 405-359. At the beginning occurred the revolt of his younger brother Cyrus, satrap in Western Asia, who marched against Babylon, and fell in the battle of Cunaxa, 401 B. C. He was supported by a body of Greek mercenaries, whose retiring march to the Black Sea over the mountains of Kurdistan has been immortalized by Xenophon’s description in his Anabasis, and is known as the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks.” After many conflicts between the Persians and Greeks, the peace of Antalcidas, concluded in 387 B. C., gave to the Persians all the Greek cities in Asia Minor. The Persian Empire, however, was now going to decay. Artaxerxes failed to recover revolted Egypt, and was constantly at war with tributary princes and satraps. The want of cohesion in the unwieldy, ill-assorted aggregate of “peoples, nations, and languages,” was being severely felt.

DARIUS III. LAST OF THE PERSIAN EMPERORS

In 336 B. C., the last king of the Persian Empire, Darius III., surnamed Codomannus, succeeded to power. With the great battle in the plains of Gaugamela, in Assyria, known as the battle of Arbela, from a town fifty miles distant, where Darius had his headquarters before the struggle, the Persian Empire came to an end in October, 331 B. C. The defeat of Darius was decisive; and in 330 he was murdered in Parthia by Bessus, one of his satraps. Asiatic Aryans had succumbed at last to their kinsmen of Europe, who, after repelling Oriental assaults upon the home of a new civilization, had carried the arms of avenging ambition into Asia, and struck a blow to the heart of the older system.

SCIENCE AND THE ARTS IN PERSIA

In science, art, and learning, the Persians developed nothing that was new, except in architecture. In the conquest of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Phœnicians, and Egyptians, the Persian kings and nobles came into possession alike of the scientific acquirements and learning of those peoples, and of the products of their mechanical arts. The Persians were soldiers, and not craftsmen, and had no need to be producers, when they could be purchasers, of the carpets and muslins of Babylon and Sardis, the fine linen of Egypt, and the rich variety of wares that Phœnician commerce spread throughout the empire.

ARCHITECTURE.--In architecture, they were at first pupils of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The splendid palaces and temples of Nineveh and Babylon had existed for centuries before the Persians were anything more than a hardy tribe of warriors, and it was only after the acquirement of imperial sway that they began to erect great and elegant buildings for themselves. When that time came, the Persians showed that they could produce, by adaptation of older models, an architectural style of their own. This style was one that comes between the sombre, massive grandeur of Assyrian and Egyptian edifices and the perfect symmetry and beauty of the achievements of Greek art.

PALACES AND TOMBS, not temples, were the masterpieces of Persian building. The ruins of the city of Persepolis, in the province of Persis, are the most famous remains of Persian architecture. Here, on a terraced platform, stood vast and splendid palaces, the doorways adorned with beautiful bas-reliefs. The great double staircase leading up to the “Palace of Forty Pillars” is especially rich in sculptured human figures. The columns are beautiful in form, sixty feet in total height, with the shaft finely fluted, and the pedestal in the form of the cup and leaves of a pendent lotus. Throughout the ruins a love of ornament and display is visible. In the bas-reliefs are profuse decorations of fretwork fringes, borders of sculptured bulls and lions, and stone-work of carved roses.

PERSIAN CITIES

=Babylon= has been already described.

=Ecbatana=, formerly the capital of the Median Empire, was a very ancient city, surrounded by seven walls, each overtopping the one outside it, and surmounted by battlements painted in five different colors, the innermost two being overlaid with silver and with gold. The strong citadel inside all was the royal treasury.

=Susa= was a square-built city unprotected by walls, but having strongly fortified citadel, containing a royal palace and treasury. The only remains of the place are extensive mounds, on which are found fragments of bricks and broken pottery with cuneiform inscriptions.

=Persepolis= was one of the two burial-places of the Persian kings, and also a royal treasury. Darius I. and Xerxes greatly enlarged and adorned the city, which retained its splendor till it was partially burned by Alexander the Great. The tomb of Cyrus and a colossal bas-relief sculpture of the great founder of the monarchy, was at Murghab, northeast of Persepolis.

=Sardis=, in western Asia Minor, once the capital of the Lydian monarchy, was an almost impregnable citadel, and the residence of the satrap of Lydia, and is often mentioned in connection with the Persian kings.

PERSIAN LIFE

The splendor of Persian life at court and abroad is known to us from many sources. The sculptures of Persepolis show something of the state and ceremony attendant on a Persian king. In the Book of Esther we read of King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) entertaining all “the nobles and princes of the provinces” for “a hundred and fourscore days,” of his making a feast for seven days “in the court of the garden of the king’s palace” for all the people of Susa; of pillars of marble, silver curtain rings, beds of gold and silver, pavements of marble that was red, and blue, and white, and black; of drinking vessels of gold diverse in shape and size, and “royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the king”; of garments of purple and fine linen; and of the absolute power of a Persian despot in his caprices and his wrath, with his “seven chamberlains that served in his presence,” and with the lives of men and women of all ranks held in the hollow of his hand.

THE MAGI.--The priests or Magi had great power, from the reverence of the people for them. The great objects of worship were the heavenly bodies. This national priesthood, like the Chaldeans in the Babylonian Empire, formed a caste to whom belonged all mental culture and legislation. The modern term “magic,” in its superstitious sense, is connected with their professions and practices.

THE GREEKS: GLORY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

The interest of the great story of ancient Greece is inexhaustible. Of all histories of which we know so much, this is the most abounding in consequences to us who now live. The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed. This high claim is justly made on the grounds of the power and efforts that were required for them to achieve what they did for themselves and for mankind. With the exception of Christianity, they were the originators of most of the great things of which the modern world can boast. The period from the permanent settlements in Greece until its final reduction to a Roman province covers about two thousand years.

The name Greece was almost unknown by the people whom we call Greeks, and was never used by them for their own country. It has come to us from the Romans, being really the name of a tribe in Epirus, northwest of Greece, the part of the country first known to them.

THE LAND OF HELLAS AND THE HELLENES

The Greek writers and people called their land Hellas, the term meaning all territory in which their own people, the Hellenes, were settled. Hellas included not only the Greek peninsula, but many of the islands of the Ægean Sea, and the coast settlements and colonies above referred to. The peninsula, much indented by bays, was broken up into many small divisions, connected by the sea. There were numerous mountains in ridges, offshoots, and groups; there were plains, valleys and small rivers. All was diversified. The position and conformation of the country undoubtedly helped to render the Greeks the earliest civilized people in Europe, both by developing, in a life of struggle with nature on land and sea, their special and innate character, and by bringing them into contact with the older civilizations, in Egypt and Phœnicia, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The mountains that divided the country into small isolated districts had a great political importance in giving rise to many separate and independent states, the rivalries and conflicts of which favored the working-out of political problems and the growth of political freedom.

GREAT DIVISIONS OF GREECE

Greece naturally divides itself into Northern, Central and Southern. Northern Greece contained two principal countries, Thessalia and Epirus, though the Greeks themselves did not regard the inhabitants of Epirus (the Epirots) as being of real Hellenic race. It was only in later times that Macedonia, north of Thessalia, was considered a part of Hellas.

Central Greece had nine separate states, the most important of which was Attica, the peninsula jutting out southeastward, and renowned forever through its possession of the city of Athens.

Southern Greece, or the Peloponnesus (meaning “island of Pelops,” a mythical king), contained seven principal states, Laconia being the most important, and sharing the fame of Attica because it contained the city of Sparta.

THE FAMOUS GRECIAN ISLANDS

The largest of the islands on the coast was Eubœa, about ninety miles in length, noted for good pasturage and corn. On the west coast was the group known to modern geography as the “Ionian Isles.” To the south lay Crete, one hundred and sixty miles in length, noted for the skill of its archers. In the Ægean Sea were the two groups called the Cyclades and Sporades. The Cyclades (or “circling isles,” the chief being Delos) are clearly shown upon the map. The Sporades (or “scattered isles”) lay to the east off the southwest coast of Asia Minor. Northward in the Ægean, in mid-sea, or on the Asiatic coast, were Lemnos, Scyros, Lesbos, Chios and Samos.

THE EFFECT OF GREEK COLONIZATION

The establishment of so many colonies in countries pre-eminently favored by nature in productions and climate, and so situated as to prompt the inhabitants to navigation and commerce, gave a great impulse to the civilization of the Hellenic race, and may be regarded as the main cause of its rapid progress.

HISTORY OF THE GREEKS

I. THE PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.--This period includes the mythical accounts of the origin of the Greeks, the Trojan war, the more certain story of the excavations, and the establishment of the peculiar Greek institutions under the so-called rule of the half-mythical kings. Down to the time of the Trojan war very considerable progress had already been made, and civilization among the Greeks had received its first important impulse. The oracles at Delphi and Dodona had been established; the mysteries at Eleusis; the four sacred games; the court of Areopagus at Athens; and the celebrated Amphictyonic Council. The arts and sciences likewise received considerable attention. Letters had been introduced by Cadmus. The accounts of the siege of Thebes and that of Troy show that progress had been made in the various arts pertaining to war, but the history of the period as a whole exhibits that singular mixture of barbarism with cultivation, of savage customs with chivalrous adventures, which marks what is called an _heroic age_.

According to the Greek historians, the earliest inhabitants of Hellas were the so-called Pelasgians, but the information afforded by the ancients on the subject is scant and vague.[3] For our knowledge of the inhabitants and civilization of prehistoric Greece, we are therefore dependent on the more certain witness of the excavations, which, in recent years, have yielded very important results.

[3] Many of the early myths and legends, as narrated by Homer and preserved by Hesiod (in his Theogony), were gathered into somewhat systematic form to explain the genealogy of the Hellenic tribes, their subdivisions, and the origin of the Greek cities. The foundation of Athens, for example, was ascribed to Cecrops, regarded by some as a native of Egypt; he is said to have introduced into Attica the arts of civilized life, and from him the Acropolis was first called Cecropia. Argos was believed to have been founded by another Egyptian, named Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty daughters, and who was elected by the people as their king, and from whom some of the Greeks received the name of Danaï. Thebes, in Bœotia, looked to Cadmus, a Phœnician, as its founder; he was believed to have brought into Greece the art of writing, and from him the citadel of Thebes received the name of Cadmea. The Peloponnesus was said to have been settled by, and to have received its name from Pelops, a man from Phrygia in Asia; he became the king of Mycenæ, and was the father of Atreus, and the grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus; chieftains in the Trojan war. Such traditions as these show that the early Greeks had some notion of their dependence upon the Eastern nations.

LEGENDS OF EARLY NATIONAL EXPLOITS.--The legends are not only grouped about particular places and individual heroes, but have for their subjects national deeds, marked by courage and fortitude.

One of these stories describes the so-called “Argonautic expedition”--an adventurous voyage of fifty heroes, who set sail from Bœotia under the leadership of Jason, in the ship Argo, for the purpose of recovering a “golden fleece” which had been carried away to Colchis, a far distant land on the shores of the Euxine.

Another legend--the “Seven against Thebes”--narrates the tragic story of Œdipus, who unwittingly slew his own father and married his own mother and was banished from Thebes for his crimes, after having been made king; and whose sons quarreled for the vacant throne, one of them with the aid of other chieftains making war upon his native city.

But the most famous of the legendary stories of Greece was that which described the Trojan war--the military expedition of the Greeks to Troy, in order to rescue Helen, who was the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and who had been stolen away by Paris, son of the Trojan king. The details of this story--the wrath of Achilles, the battles of the Greeks and the Trojans, the destruction of Troy, and the return of the Grecian heroes--are the subject of the great epic poems ascribed to Homer. All these legends, whether derived from a foreign source, or produced upon native soil, received the impress of the Greek mind. They form one of the legacies from the prehistoric age, and reveal some of the features of the early Greek character.

THE MINOAN AGE

Excavations at Knossus in Crete have revealed to us the civilization of the Minoan age of Greek history. This civilization is the oldest of which we have knowledge. It flourished about 2000 B. C. Prehistoric Knossus was a city of massive structure in which the fine arts flourished and had reached a remarkably high stage of development (specimens of Minoan pottery are of exceptional beauty and grace) and in which the art of writing was known. This last fact is of great importance, as until recently the art of writing in Greece was supposed to be post-Homeric.

THE MYCENEAN AGE

The next age of Greek civilization on which archæology has concentrated its searchlight is the Mycenean (fl. c. 1600-1100 B. C.). The Mycenean civilization is revealed to us by excavations in the sites of Mycenæ, Tiryns, etc. The characteristic features of these splendid cities is their massiveness and solidity. Pausanias relates that tradition attributed the building of Tiryns and Mycenæ to the Cyclopes (hence the expression “Cyclopean walls” used to denote structures of this massive type), thus testifying to the gigantic edifices of prehistoric times as contrasted with the masonry of a later date. The jewelry, pottery and weapons excavated from these ancient cities are of rare beauty. Iron was practically unknown in the Mycenean age. Its use is more extensive in the Homeric age, and therefore Homeric civilization is probably post-Mycenean.

THE SO-CALLED DORIAN INVASION

But vast invasions swept over Greece, and a ruder civilization displaced this early culture. In the latter half of the eleventh century B. C., the Dorians ravaged Greece. They were a coarser, hardier stock than the peoples they conquered, but they brought to Greece a new vigor and a new robustness, which when toned and harmonized by the finer influences of the land, produced that civilization which is the world’s marvel for all time.

II. PERIOD OF MIGRATIONS AND FORMATION OF STATES.--The first governments of Greece were small monarchies, and they continued such until after the Trojan war. Soon after this we find the country involved in fatal civil wars, in which the people, under a number of petty chieftains hostile to each other, suffered extremely from calamity and oppression. These evils led to change in the form of government, and the substitution of the _popular_ instead of the _regal_ system. The same evils also probably contributed to the spirit of emigration, which so strikingly marks the period. During this period of colonization we notice the origin of the four principal dialects in the Greek language. In this period two of the Grecian states are chiefly conspicuous--Athens and Sparta, whose special effort was to provide themselves with a suitable political constitution, civil code and government.

These great migrations which swept over Greece created a congestion of the population which was eventually relieved by widespread colonization on the west coast of Asia Minor and in the neighboring islands of the Ægean Sea. These colonies were settled by the three races, the Æolians, Ionians and Dorians. The Æolians colonized the northwestern part, the coast of Mysia, and the island of Lesbos. The Ionians settled in the central part, on the coast of Lydia, and in the islands of Chios and Samos. The Dorians occupied the southwest corner of Asia Minor (the coast of Caria) and the adjacent islands. Of all these by far the most important, wealthy and powerful were the Ionians.

OTHER GREEK COLONIES

The Greeks gradually spread themselves in settlements along the northern coast of the Ægean Sea and the Propontis, in Macedonia and Thrace, so that the whole Ægean became encircled with Greek colonies, and its islands were covered with them. The tide of emigration flowed westward also in great strength.

The coasts of Southern Italy were occupied by Dorians, Achæans, and Ionians in settlements which grew to such importance that the region took the name of Magna Græcia, or Greater Greece. The cities of Tarentum, Croton and Sybaris became famous for their wealth, the latter giving rise to the proverbial name for a luxurious liver.

On the southwestern coast of Italy was Rhegium, and farther north came Pæstum, Cumæ, and Neapolis (Naples). In Sicily flourishing Greek settlements abounded, the chief being Messana, Syracuse, Leontini, Catana, Gela, Selinus, and Agrigentum. Farther west still a colony from Phocæa, in Asia Minor, founded the city of Massilia, now Marseilles. On the southern coast of the Mediterranean, westwards from Egypt, the Greek colony of Cyrene became the chief town of a flourishing district called Cyrenaica.

The establishment of the later of these colonies brings us down well within authentic historical times, and the whole period of Greek colonization extends from about 1100 to 600 B. C., the colonies being, in many cases, offshoots of colonies previously established and risen to wealth and over-population. In all these movements and settlements, the enterprise and ability of the Greeks made them great commercial rivals to, and successors of, the Phœnicians.

CONTRAST BETWEEN IONIANS AND DORIANS

The two leading races of Greece were the Ionians and the Dorians, and they stand to each other in a strong contrast of character which largely affected Greek political history. These prominent points of difference run through the whole historical career of the two chief states, _Ionian_ Athens and _Dorian_ Sparta, and were the cause of the strong antagonism that we find so often in action between them. The Dorian was distinguished by severity, bluntness, simplicity of life, conservative ways, and oligarchic tendency in politics; the Ionian was equally marked by vivacity, excitability, refinement, love of change, taste in the arts, commercial enterprise, and attachment to democracy. The Dorian, in the best times of his history, reverenced age, ancient usage, and religion; the Ionian, at all periods of his career, loved enjoyment, novelty and enterprise.

THE EARLY CAREER OF SPARTA

The Spartans, or the people of Lacedæmon, properly the southern half of Laconia, first became the dominant nation in that part of Greece. Of Spartan doings and fortunes we know almost nothing until the time of the great Legislator Lycurgus, who is said to have organized, about 850 B. C. the famous Spartan constitution. The probable account is that he altered and reformed existing usages, and that the reverence of after ages ascribed to him the promulgation and establishment of a full grown, brand new set of institutions, which must have been, in many points, of gradual growth.

THE FAMOUS LAWS OF LYCURGUS