CHAPTER IX

THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE

It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had happened rather differently. Sometimes it seems as if just one event turned the whole course of what happened afterwards.

So here in this great story of ours we may wonder what would have happened to the world if the Persians, pushing their way westward, had not come up against that strong wall of opposition which they found in the Greek phalanx. There was no other power, so far as we know, at this time, in the west, that was at all likely to be able to stop them.

If we look at what happened in the more southward direction of their advance, in Egypt, we shall perhaps be inclined to think that they would not have gone very much farther westward than they did, for the Egyptian story of that time shows that they were not able to establish their power very securely in that country. For nearly forty years after the Persian conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, Egypt was held as a province of Persia, but in 488 B.C. the Egyptians made a successful revolt and threw off the Persian yoke for a time. Three years later they were again subdued by Xerxes, who was then king of Persia, but only fifteen years afterwards they were {130} again revolting, and through the whole of that century, 500 to 400 B.C., they were continually rising against their Persian masters, never quite succeeding in winning their freedom, but constantly giving trouble, never completely subdued. It is evident that the Persians, after their first and most effective conquest, never had a very secure hold over the people of the Nile.

Then, if we turn to look at what was going on farther north, where the Persian cavalry were coming up against that famous Greek phalanx, we shall see good reason why the Persians were not able to give a great deal of attention to making their position good in Egypt. The wonder is that they should have found any forces at all to spare for that enterprise.

The Persian monarch had assumed the title of King of Kings. He claimed dominion over the whole world, as the Persians knew it. It must have been most vexatious to him, and to that great claim and title of his, to find the claim opposed and contested. He had conquered Greeks before--those Spartans whom he had met fighting in the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He would crush them and take possession of their country.

After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece, as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states, but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens. Each of these would form alliances from time to time with other states to fight against the other. Just at this moment, that is just before 500 B.C., the contention between them was most severe. The forms of the government in the two {131} were sharply opposed. The government of Athens had lately fallen into the hands of the people. The people, the democracy (from _demos_, the people, and _kratos_, power) had deposed their king and driven him out of the country. The Spartans, who hated the idea of a democratic government, sympathised with him, and no doubt would have restored him to power had they been able to do so; but he went to Asia Minor, to the court of Darius, who was then king of Persia, and besought his help. The Persian was very willing to give it, but it was not until some years later, in 490 B.C., that the first actual invasion of Greece by the Persians took place. That invasion practically began and ended with what was one of the most famous battles in the world's history, the battle of Marathon.

[Sidenote: Marathon]

It was fought on a small plain, only some three miles wide, on the seashore, where the Persians had disembarked their forces. And here I would give you a word of warning which must apply to all this story of the glorious days of Greece. The battles--Marathon, Thermopylæ, and Salamis--have become very famous, and rightly famous. They were of importance in the story because they--Marathon and Salamis, at all events, which were Grecian victories--put a stop to that westward advance of the Persians which might have extended we cannot say how far but for those victories. But they were battles in which the forces engaged on the one side or the other were almost ridiculously small in comparison with the armies which we have seen put into the field. They were fought over very small spaces of land or sea, and they were very quickly over.

But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in which their story has been told {132} to us by the great historian Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because their story is told so very well.

That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these stories of the glorious days of Greece.

In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon, defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different manner.

There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the Persians {133} had easily repressed. It set out both by land and sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army, but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever reaching Greek territory at all.

But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise, only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King Xerxes himself was the leader.

[Sidenote: Xerxes]

I think we may be safe in saying that no forces as large as these, in the number of men enrolled in them, had ever before been collected for a military purpose, and also that no former expedition had ever been planned with so much care and forethought. Xerxes made two bridges for the passing of his army across the Hellespont; he cut a canal through the Isthmus at Mount Athos for the passage of his fleet. The fleet, you see, if you will look at the map, would coast round along the south of Thrace, accompanying the army, till it came to the Peninsula at the end of which is Mount Athos. Xerxes had established stations in Thrace for the supply of his army with food and all needful things as it went along. It was just off Mount Athos that the storm had scattered the fleet of the former expedition that he had sent against Greece. By making this canal, and so letting the ships go through the Isthmus, he avoided the danger of another storm off the end of the Peninsula.

But there were other dangers besides those from {134} the wind and waves, for a fleet in any part of the Mediterranean. Although the Persian monarch might style himself King of Kings, there was another power that ruled the sea at this time, the power of Carthage, that colony of the Phœnicians of which I asked you to take note the first time that it found a place in this story. The Phœnicians, as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with the Greeks.

For the Greeks, too, as we know, sent out their colonies. They sent them to Ionia, eastward along the coast of Asia Minor, and they also sent them westward, round the heel and toe of Italy, as far as that great island of Sicily lying nearly opposite to where you see Carthage on the African shore. Sicily and the African continent lie at no great distance from each other at the nearest points. And the Carthaginians and other Phœnicians had come into conflict with the Greek colonists in Sicily long before Greece was threatened by the Persians. Xerxes, before making his attempt on Greece, assured himself that his fleet would not be attacked by the great naval power, by making an alliance with Carthage. Phœnician ships were among the best that fought for him. His plans seem to have been laid with every possible care and completeness. The overthrow of Greece, and of {135} that liberty which all Grecian states, in spite of their jealousy of each other and of their incessant quarrels, prized so very highly, seemed certain. It looked as if the King of Kings, who would rule absolutely, according to the Eastern idea, was sure to bring them under his subjection. The danger was so great that for the moment the states of Greece were able to put their jealousies on one side. Athens and Sparta, and the less powerful states with which one or other was in alliance at the time, drew together. It was a terrible moment for them.

The first great battle of the war made it more terrible still.

Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the small population of those city states of Greece.

[Sidenote: Thermopylæ]

With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general, encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He {136} bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of gallantry to all future ages.

And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once they had come through the difficult pass--what hope was there for her? None. Her doom seemed certain.

The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished. The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.

It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles. The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner. He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own shores.

[Sidenote: Platæa]

The following year made the repulse of the Persians {137} complete. Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland from which the battle had its name--Mycale.

That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more; it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The Persian could still set one combination of states against another. The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.

We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions and their government. Their great idea {138} was that the individual man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the state--that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers to defend it and to attack its enemies. It was with that purpose in view that all its laws were made. The Spartans lived not for themselves but for the state. Hardihood, therefore, and courage were what they aimed at in themselves and their children, so that the state might be well served. The Spartan punishments for offences against the laws were fearfully severe. So were the punishments of children by their parents, and for a child to cry or utter a sound under such punishment was regarded as a dreadful disgrace to it. "Spartan fortitude" is a proverbial saying even amongst us to-day. It was training of this kind which made the Spartan troops so steadfast in battle and which gave the Spartans on the whole the leadership over the other states.

It was a very noble idea, very self-sacrificing--this of each citizen living not for himself alone but for the state; but these people were not large-minded enough to carry the idea a little farther and see that it would be for the advantage of all Greece if each state could sacrifice its own interests and good for the sake of the whole. They could sacrifice themselves as individuals for Sparta, but they had no idea of sacrificing Sparta for Greece. On the contrary, they were terribly eager to build up the power of Sparta at the cost of Athens or of any other state. They would even ally themselves with the enemy of all Greece, with Persia, in order to do so.

The other states were equally selfish about their own state interests, but their individuals had not the same idea of self-sacrifice for the good of the state; {139} and therefore their states were not so powerful as Sparta, nor their soldiers so brave and well disciplined.

The Athenians, however, were far more cultivated, better artists, musicians, orators, writers and so on, than the Spartans.

The most glorious days of Greece, we may say, reached from 500 B.C. to 350 B.C. I have made it a rule in this story to bother you as little as possible with names, either of places or persons, and only now and then with dates, because too many names and figures always seem to me to confuse a story; but I am going to name now a few of the greatest persons in these glorious days of Greece because they are the persons who have been makers of the world's very best thoughts and best artistic products.

[Sidenote: Greek literature]

Homer, that great singer, sang--it is much to be doubted whether he ever wrote---long before this period. There were also Sappho, the poetess, and Alcæus, who wrote in those metres from which we have named our Sapphics and Alcaics. These did not come within the most glorious days. But in that splendid time, and inspired no doubt by its splendour, came Sophocles and Æschylus, writers of the finest tragedies; there was Euripides, who was a tragic writer for the stage too, yet has imagined some of his scenes in a lighter and livelier way than those older and fearfully grim writers of the drama. Later came Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, who brings on birds and frogs as actors in his plays. There was the mighty orator, Demosthenes. Oratory and speech-making were very much studied and practised. Probably there were a large number of speakers whom even to-day we would think extraordinarily fine. There were a host of painters {140} and musicians; but we cannot hear their music and the pictures have perished.

Then there was Socrates, the great philosopher, and Plato, who wrote the dialogues in which Socrates, who was his master, was the chief speaker. Socrates was not a writer. I suppose we can never know how much in the dialogues is Plato's and how much Socrates'. We may suspect that very much is due to Plato, though he gives Socrates nearly all the credit. Later came Aristotle, who wrote about everything--about philosophy, about science, about morality, about natural history, about government. Plato, before him, or Socrates speaking to us by Plato's pen, had been very much interested in the art of government--in discussing the best form of government. But the government which they all discussed was the government of those small city states which we have seen in Greece. They did not concern themselves with government of large nations and empires.

[Sidenote: Sculpture]

But almost more glorious than any of these were the sculptors, of whom the greatest were Phidias and Praxiteles. The work of the sculptors was employed chiefly in connection with the work of the architects, of the builders of the temples and the public buildings. The temples were splendidly ornamented with the most perfect statues and cuttings in marble that man has ever produced. The architecture of the Greeks was more perfect than that of any nation before or since. We may suppose, as we have seen, that it owed much to the example of that very fine Minoan art which was produced in Crete very long before, and which was carried to the mainland of Greece, and is especially seen in excavations at Mycenæ.

What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the Babylonian, architecture of temples and {141} tombs is their enormous size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done.

[Illustration: CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).]

The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in the lives of any of {142} the people whom we have met in the whole course of our story.

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine, and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks, religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act, hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as these.

At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews, and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles--which means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.

But they had strong and clear ideas, for all that, of right and wrong, of justice and so on. If they believed {143} at all in a life after death it was of a life so shadowy, and their idea of it was so vague, that it certainly made no difference to their life on earth. The Egyptians were very careful in preserving their dead, in the form of mummies. The Greeks did not treat their dead with quite so much respect. They often burned the bodies, so they had no occasion for immense tombs. A small vase would contain the ashes.

[Sidenote: Life of Greek cities]

It is interesting to try to imagine the way of life of these people in their city states. We may suppose them to have been a people of very busy active minds, always ready to discuss any new thing, whether it were in art, in philosophy, or science. We may imagine endless discussions going on under the porticoes which gave them shelter from the hot sun. "Stoa," these porticoes or colonnades were called in Greek, and it is from the people disputing there that we get the name of the "Stoic" philosophers. Opposed to them in dispute would be the "Epicureans," or disciples of Epicurus.

These would be disputing, and pupils listening to them, imbibing lessons in oratory and philosophy, and then out in the street might perhaps pass some important person like Pericles, the great statesman, or Alcibiades, or Nicias, the admiral. Any of these would be followed by a great retinue of friends and hangers-on and slaves.

In another part of the city there would be busy shops. Most of the Grecian cities were on the coast; and there would be the port and ships coming and going. Then there would be the gymnasia, where the athletes could be watched, doing exercises, playing games, throwing the javelin or the discus, wrestling, and so on.

Some half of the population of the city would {144} probably be slaves, slaves taken in war or by purchase from their parents in Thrace or other barbarous lands. There was a great slave market in Athens itself, and the sea-faring traders and pirates of whom we have spoken did a little slave-trading among their other business. Probably it was seldom that the slaves were badly treated, and we know that they often were set free and often had quite a good time even while they were slaves. The name "slave" really comes from Slav. It is taken from the name of the Slavonic people, because it was from them that most of the slaves were taken. It is not derived from that Latin word "servus," which is translated "slave," and from which our "serf"--the serfs of the Anglo-Saxons--is taken. A slave might rise to quite high employment, and it is curious to think that the large police force in Athens was at one time composed of more than a thousand slaves from Scythia, that land of wild tribes even farther north and east than Thrace.

It seems that the disputations and all the business were very much the affair of the men only. The women took hardly any part. We have spoken of the poetess Sappho; but this was long before. It is evident that the ladies were more important in the Greek society of Homer's day than they were later. We read of no Greek lady of the glorious days as famous in art or music or literature; and only a very few seem to have been allowed to give their opinions on philosophy or politics. It seems as if they counted for less than they ought to count.

The Greeks were great game-players, especially great at athletic games; and we must not forget that though religion appears to have made little difference in their lives, they were a people who had great respect {145} for old customs and were therefore careful to keep up and perform in proper manner religious ceremonies. In some of them the women took a part.

Even in the very midst of their struggle against the Persians, the Greek states were only with the greatest difficulty able to lay aside their jealousy of each other and to come together to fight; and after that danger from the east had been dispelled they were free to fight with each other, or to quarrel about the leadership. They did fight and quarrel unceasingly for some 150 years. After the final repulse of the Persians, Athens for a time gained the leadership, owing to the disgust of the states at the insolence of the Spartans, who had been leaders before. But Sparta was too strong to be put down easily. At last a combination of the rest of the states under the leadership of Thebes fairly conquered Sparta and took possession of the Spartan territory.

[Sidenote: Peloponnesian War]

The most famous of this long succession of fights is that between Sparta on the one side and Athens, as the leader, on the other. It is usually called the Peloponnesian War, the Peloponnese being all that part of Greece below the Isthmus of Corinth, and it is chiefly famous because its story has been so wonderfully well told by Thucydides.

Thucydides was a very famous Greek historian. So, too, was Herodotus, who wrote long before him. But Herodotus was more of a story-teller. He was a traveller who wrote about what he saw; and always writes truly when he is telling us of what he himself saw. He has strange tales to tell, about one-eyed men and men who carried their heads under one arm, and so on, which were told him by people whom he met; but he tells them with a warning that he will not vouch for them, because he did not see such things himself.

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But he has no idea of telling us the real reason why the stories that he tells happened as they did--the political causes, as we should say, of the events. Any trivial reason seems good enough to him to account for a great war. He would have been quite ready to accept the beautiful lady idea as the reason of the siege of Troy.

Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history." There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon, who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks---10,000 in number--who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it.

But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther afield--or oversea--and not for the first time, to Sicily.

And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and another people--of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the story---Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city established on the Tiber.

The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C. or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met there.

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