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PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY

PROBLEMS
IN
GREEK HISTORY

BY

J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A., D.D.

Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin; Knight (Gold
Cross) of the Order of the Redeemer; Hon. Fellow of
Queen's College, Oxford; Author of 'Prolegomena
to Ancient History,' 'Social Life in Greece,'
'A History of Classical Greek
Literature,' &c., &c.

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1892

[All rights reserved]

Oxford
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PREFACE

Even since the following sheets were printed, the researches into prehistoric Greek life, and its relation both to the East, to the Homeric poems, and to the Greece we know in the 7th century B.C., have progressed, and we are beginning to see some light through the mist. I can refer the reader to two books, of which one has just been published in English. The other, the second edition of Busolt's History of Greece, though still in the press, will be accessible to those that read German in a few weeks. I prefer to cite the former—Schuchardt's account of Schliemann's Excavations—in its English form, as it is there enriched with an Introduction, and apparently a revision of the text, by Mr. Walter Leaf. This is the first systematic attempt to bring into a short compass, with the illustrations, and with some regard to chronology, the great body of facts discovered and hastily consigned to many large volumes by the gifted discoverer. There is, moreover, a separate chapter (vi.) which gathers these facts under a theory, not to speak of the acute and cautious criticism of Mr. Leaf, which will be found in the

Introduction to the volume. The Introduction to Busolt's History, of which (by the author's courtesy) I have seen some 130 pages, contains a complete critical discussion of the same evidence.

Here is the general result in Busolt's own exposition (G. G. 2nd ed. pp. 113 sq.): 'The Homeric culture is younger than the Mykenæan, it is also simpler and in better proportion. The former had come to use iron for arms and tools, the latter is strictly in the age of bronze[vi:1]. If the culture of the Epics does show a lower stage of technical development, we perceive also a decline of oriental influences. In many respects, in matters of interment, dress and armour, the epic age contrasts with the Mykenæan, but in many points we find transitions and threads which unite the two civilizations. The Homeric palace shows remarkable agreements with those of Mykenæ and Tiryns. The Homeric heroes fight with sword, spear, and bow, like the Mykenæan. Splendid vases, too, and furniture, such as occur

within the range of the Mykenæan culture, agree even in details with the descriptions of the Epos. The Epos, too, knows Mykenæ "rich in gold," and the "wealthy" Odeomenos. In general the homes of the Mykenæan culture are prominent in the Iliad. The splendour of the Mykenæan epoch was therefore still fresh in the memory of the Æolians and Ionians when the Epos arose.

'If the life thus pictured in the Epos thus shows many kindred features to that of Mykenæ, the Doric life of the Peloponnesus stands in harsh contrast. Not in strong fortresses, but in open camps, do we find the Dorian conquerors. The nobles do not fight on chariots in the van, but serried infantry decides the combat[vii:1].

'It was about from 1550 to 1150, that Mykenæan culture prevailed, and was then replaced, as the legends asserted, by the Dorian invaders.'

Let us note that the earlier and ruder civilisation of Troy may be contrasted with that of Mycenæ, though both of them show successive stages—the later stage of the (second) city of Troy approaching to the intermediate stage of Tiryns, and indeed, forming an unbroken chain with this, Mycenæ, and even the later and more finished

relics of prehistoric art found at Menidi and at Vaphio (Amyclæ). The whole series is homogeneous. The long-misunderstood palace of Troy is of the same kind in plan and arrangement as that of Tiryns and that of Mycenæ; the gold ornaments of Mycenæ are akin to those of Amyclæ; we stand in the presence of an old and organised civilisation which was broken off or ceased in prehistoric days, and recommenced on a different basis, and upon a somewhat different model, among the historical Greeks. And yet the prehistoric dwellers at Tiryns and Mycenæ had certainly some features in common with the later race. Not to speak of details such as the designs in pottery, or in the architecture of the simpler historic temples, they were a mercantile and a maritime people, receiving the products of far lands, and sending their own abroad; above all, they show that combination of receptivity and originality in their handicrafts which gives a peculiar stamp to their successors. While the ruder Trojan remains are said to show no traces of Phœnician importation, the Mycenæan exhibit objects from Egypt, from northern Syria, and from Phœnicia; while on the other hand all the best authorities now recognise in much of the pottery, and of the other handicrafts, intelligent home production, which can even be traced in exports along a line of islands across the southern Ægean and as far as Egypt. This latter fact, and the closer trade-relations with Hittite Syria than

with Egypt or Phœnicia, are brought out by Busolt in his new Introduction.

In what relation do these facts, now reduced to some order, stand to the Homeric poems? According to Schuchardt they vindicate for our Homer an amount of historical value which will astonish the sceptics of our generation. In the first place, however, it is certain that Homer (using the name as a convenient abstraction) has preserved a true tradition of the great seats of culture in prehistoric days. He tells us rightly that Tiryns had gone by when Mycenæ took the lead, and that the civilisation of this great centre of power in Greece was kindred to that of Troy, an equally old and splendid centre, which however was destroyed by fire before it had attained to the perfection of the later stages of Mycenæan art. Homer also implies that seafaring connections existed between Asia Minor and Greece, and that early wars arose from reprisals for piratical raids, as Herodotus confirms.

Some advanced kinds of handicraft, such as the inlaying of metals, which have been brought to light in Mycenæan work, are specially prominent in the Homeric poems. It is hard to conceive the nucleus of the poems having originated elsewhere than in the country where Mycenæan grandeur was still fresh. The legend which brings the rude Dorians into Greece about 1100 B.C. (the date need not be so early) accounts for the disappearance of this splendour, and the migration of the Achæans with their poems to Asia Minor. So far

Mr. Leaf agrees, as well as with the theory of Fick, that the earliest poems were composed, not in Ionic, but in the old dialect of Greece, which may be called Æolic, provided (he adds) we do not identify it with the late Æolic to which it has been reduced by Fick. It is added by Schuchardt that the great body of Nostoi seems irreconcilable with E. Curtius' theory that the lays were composed for the early Æolic settlers, who made Asia Minor their permanent home; so that the Trojan War may really have been a mercantile war of Mycenæ against the Trojan pirates, who were outside the zone of the Mycenæan trade-route, but may have seriously injured it. Mr. Leaf justly points out that the obscure islands along this route, Cos, and Carpathus, together with Rhodes, in which Mycenæan wares have been found, are counted by the Homeric Catalogue as Achæan allies of Mycenæ, while the (Carian) Cyclades, though much larger and perhaps more populated, are ignored.

So far the case for the early date and historic basis of Homer seems considerably strengthened by recent research. Nevertheless, the marked contrasts between the Mycenæan Greeks and the society in Homer create a great difficulty. Some of these have been removed by the aid of (perhaps legitimate) ingenuity, but differences of dress, of burial customs, in the use of iron, &c., remain. The seafaring too of the Homeric Greeks does not seem to me at all what we may infer the Mycenæan seafaring to have been. Minos, or

somebody else, must have suppressed piracy, and prehistoric trading cannot have been so exclusively in the hands of the Phœnicians. The Old Mycenæans were perfectly ignorant of the art of writing, a fact which seems to preclude any systematic dealing with the Phœnicians, though Busolt rather infers from it a want of personal intercourse with the Hittites, and a mere reception of Asiatic luxuries through rude and semi-hostile Sidonian adventurers. Busolt thinks we can follow down prehistoric art through its various steps to that which leads into the Homeric epoch, but as yet such a gradual transition seems to me not clearly shown; I cannot but feel a gulf between the two. Either therefore the original poets of the Iliad were separated by a considerable gap of time from the life they sought to describe—there may have been a period of decadence before the Dorians appeared—or the Ionic recension was far more trenchant than a mere matter of dialect, and by omission or alteration accommodated the already strange and foreign habits of a bygone age to their own day; or else the Alexandrian editors have destroyed traces of old customs far more than has hitherto been suspected[xi:1].

It does not therefore appear to me that the antiquity of the Homer which we possess is materially

established by these newer researches. That the earliest lays embodied in the Iliad were very old has never been doubted by any sane critic, and has always been maintained by me on independent grounds. But I now think it likely that the great man who brought dramatic unity into the Iliad, and who may have lived near 800 B.C., did far more than merely string together, and make intelligible, older poems. He made the old life of Mycenæ into the newer Ionic life of Asia Minor. I am sorry to disagree with Mr. Leaf when he calls that Ionic society 'democratic to the core.' Any one who will read what even Pausanias records of its traditions will see that it was aristocratic to the core, and quite as likely to love heroic legends as any other Greek society of that day.

I must not conclude this Preface without acknowledging the constant help of my younger colleagues in correcting and improving what I write. Of these I will here specify Mr. L. Purser and Mr. Bury.

Trinity College, Dublin,
February, 1892.

FOOTNOTES:

[vi:1] 'In the whole range of the Mykenæan culture, there have only been found in the later graves of the lower city, and in the beehive tomb of Vaphio, remains of some finger-rings of iron, used for ornaments. Iron tools and weapons were unknown to the Mykenæans—in spite of Beloch's opinion to the contrary. In the Iliad bronze is mentioned 279 times, iron 23; in the Odyssey they are named 80 and 25 times respectively, but the use of the later metal was far more diffused than the conventional style of the Epos betrays. Iron weapons are indeed only mentioned in the Iliad IV, 123; VII, 141, 144; and XVIII, 34. Books IV and VII are undoubtedly of later origin. Still the use of iron for tools was known throughout the whole Homeric age, and was gradually increasing during the growth of the Epos.'

[vii:1] Probably, Busolt adds in the sequel, the use of iron weapons by the Dorian invaders may have been one cause of their victory. But it seems to me mainly to have been the victory of infantry over cavalry, and thus a very early type of the decisive day at Orchomenus, when the Spanish infantry of the Grand Catalan Company destroyed Guy de la Roche and his Frankish knights, and seized the country as their spoil.

[xi:1] This last clause is suggested by the fragment of the Iliad, published in my Memoir on the Petrie Papyri, which shows, in thirty-five lines, five unknown to modern texts. Cf. Plate III and p. 34 of that Memoir.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY.

CHAPTER I.

Our Earlier Historians of Greece.

Definite and indefinite problems.

§ 1. There are scientific problems and literary tasks which can be worked out once for all, or which, at least, admit of final solution, to the lasting fame of him that finds that solution, as well as to the permanent benefit of civilized man. There are others, more numerous and far more interesting, which are ever being solved, finally perhaps in the opinion of the discoverer, and even of his generation, but ever arising again, and offering fresh difficulties and fresh attractions to other minds and to newer generations of men.

Examples in theology and metaphysics.

I will cite the largest instances, as the most obvious illustration of this second class. The deep mysteries of Religion, the dark problems of Knowing and Being, which have occupied the theologian and the metaphysician for thousands of years, are still unsettled, and there is hardly an age of thinking men which does not attack these questions

afresh, and offer new systems and new solutions for the acceptance of the human race. Nor can we say that in these cases new facts have been discovered, or new evidence adduced; it is rather that mankind feels there is more in the mystery than is contained in the once accepted explanation, and endeavours by some new manipulation of the old arguments to satisfy the eternal craving for that mental rest which will never be attained till we know things face to face.

Examples in literature.

But perhaps these are instances too lofty for my present purpose: I can show the same pertinacious tendency to re-solve literary problems of a far humbler kind. How striking is the fact that the task of translating certain great masterpieces of poetry seems never completed, and that in the face of scores of versions, each generation of scholars will attack afresh Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divina Commedia, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Goethe's Faust! There are, I believe, forty English versions of Faust. How many there are of the Iliad and the Divina Commedia, I have not ascertained; but of the former there is a whole library, and of the latter we may predict with certainty that the latest version will not be the last. Not only does each generation find for itself a new ideal in translation,—the fine version of the Iliad by Pope is now regarded with scorn,—but each new aspirant is discontented with the earlier renderings of the passages he himself loves best; and so year after year we see the same attempt made, often with great but

never with universally accepted success. For there are always more beauties in the old masterpiece than have been conveyed, and there are always weaknesses in the translation, which show after a little wear.

The case of history generally.

This eternal freshness in great masterpieces of poetry which ever tempts new translators, is also to be found in great historical subjects, especially in the history of those nations which have left a permanent mark on the world's progress. There is no prospect that men will remain satisfied with the extant histories, however brilliant, of England or of France, even for an account of the periods which have long since elapsed, and upon which no new evidence of any importance can be found. Such is likewise the case with the histories of Greece and Rome. No doubt there is frequently new material discovered; the excavator may in a month's digging find stuff for years of speculation. No doubt there is an oscillation in the appreciation even of well-sifted materials: a new theory may serve to rearrange old facts and present them in a new light.

But quite apart from all this, men will be found to re-handle these great histories merely for the sake of re-handling them. In the words of the very latest of these attempts: 'Though we can add nothing to the existing records of Greek history, the estimate placed upon their value and the conclusions drawn from them are constantly changing; and for this reason the story which has been told

so often will be told anew from time to time so long as it continues to have an interest for mankind,—that is, let us hope, so long as mankind continues to exist.'[4:1]

Special claims of Greek history.

§ 2. Perhaps the history of Greece has more right than any other to excite this interest, since the effects of that country and its people are probably far greater, certainly more subtle and various, than those of any other upon our modern life. It is curious that this truth is becoming recognized universally by the very generation which has begun to agitate against the general teaching of Greek in our higher schools. Nobody now attributes any real leading to the Romans in art, in philosophy, in the sciences, nay, even in the science of politics. If their literature was in some respects great, every Roman knew and confessed that this greatness was due to the Greeks; if their practical treatment of law and politics was certainly admirable, the theory of the latter was derived from Hellenic speculation.

The claims of Rome and of the Jews.

Greek Influences In Our Religion.

And when the originality of our Roman teachers is reduced to its very modest proportions, there is no other ancient nation that can be named among our schoolmasters except the Hebrews. Here there has been great exaggeration, and it has not yet been sifted and corrected, as in the case of Rome. It is still a popular truism that while we owe all we have of intellectual and artistic refinement to the Greeks, in one great department of civilization, and that the highest, we owe them

nothing, but are debtors to the Semite spirit,—to the clear revelation and the tenacious dogma conveyed to the world by the Jews. Like many such truisms, this statement contains some truth, but a great deal of falsehood. When we have surveyed the earlier centuries, we shall revert to this question, and show how far the prejudice in favour of the Semite has ousted the Greek from his rightful place. Even serious history is sometimes unjust, much more the hasty generalizations of theologians or mere literary critics. For the history of religion will be found to rest, like everything good which we possess, partly upon a Greek basis; but of course mainly on that portion of Greek history which has only recently risen into public notice among our scholars,—I mean the later and the spiritual development of the nation when the conquests of Alexander had brought the whole ancient world under its sway.

Increasing materials.

So the subject is still quite fresh, and even the evidence of books is as yet unexhausted, not to speak of the yearly increment we obtain from the keen labour of many excavators. The Mittheilungen of the German Institute at Athens, the Bulletin de Correspondance hellénique, the English Hellenic Journal, and even the daily papers at Athens, teem with accounts of new discoveries. A comparison of the newest guide to Greece, the Guide-Joanne (1891), with the older books of the kind will show the wonderful increase in our knowledge of pre-historic antiquities. These recent books and reviews are

following in the wake of Dr. Schliemann, whose great researches have set us more new problems than we are likely to solve in the present century.

Plan of this Essay.

§ 3. What I purpose, therefore, to do in this Essay is to review the general lines followed by the great historians of Greece of the last three generations; to show the main points in which each of them excels, and where each of them still shows a deficiency. I shall then notice some current misconceptions, as well as some errors to be corrected by interesting additions to our evidence, even since the last of our larger histories has appeared; and in doing this shall specially touch on those more disputed and speculative questions which are on principle omitted in practical and non-controversial books. By this means we shall ascertain in a general way what may be expected from any fresh attempt in Greek history, and where there still seems room for discovery or for the better establishing of truths already discovered, but not yet accepted in the current teaching of our day. Whatever occasional digressions may occur will all be subordinate to this general plan, which is in fact an essay, not upon Greek history, but upon the problems of Greek history. We shall conclude with some reflections upon the artistic lessons of Greek life which are at last becoming accessible to the larger public.

Universal histories.

§ 4. I need not go back to the period of Universal Histories, such as that of Bossuet or of Rollin, which were only adequate before special

studies had accumulated vast materials from the records of each separate nation. In our own day there are not wanting universal histories,[7:1] though even the acknowledged genius and the enormous experience of Ranke were insufficient for the task as it now presents itself.[7:2] The first larger Greek histories known to me are those of Gillies and of Mitford[7:3],—the former now totally forgotten; the latter only remembered because it stimulated a great successor to write his famous antidote.

Gillies.

Yet the work of Gillies, first published in 1786, was continued by the author, thirty-five years later, down to the reign of Augustus, when the sixth edition, a stately book in eight volumes, was published. There is no lack of merit in the work; but the writer's standpoint will be apparent from the opening of his Dedication to the King: 'Sir, the history of Greece exposes the dangerous turbulence of democracy, and arraigns the despotism of tyrants. By describing the incurable evils inherent in every form of republican policy, it evinces the inestimable benefits resulting to liberty itself from the lawful domination of hereditary kings.'

One might imagine Gillies a Hellenistic author dedicating his work to a Ptolemy or a Seleucus.

Effects of the French Revolution on the writers of the time.

Mitford:

It is clear enough, though I know not the details of his life, that the horrors of the French Revolution had sunk deep into his soul. This is quite certain in the case of Mitford, a gentleman of fortune, whose education in Greek was early interrupted, but whose long residence at Nice brought him into contact with St. Croix and Villoison, two of the most famous Grecians of that day. After his return in 1777 from France, he found himself a man of leisure and importance, in the same Yeomanry corps with Gibbon, whose friendship he gained, and at whose suggestion he wrote his once popular history.[8:1]

writes a Tory history of Greece;

Mitford wrote in a Tory spirit, and with a distinct feeling of the political significance of Greek history as an example to modern men. He had upon his side the authority of almost every great thinker produced in the days of Hellenic greatness. All these speculators, in their pictures of ideal, as well as their criticisms of the actual, States, regard thorough-going democracy as an evil, and its abuses as the main cause of the early decay of Hellenic greatness. They all point with respect and pride to the permanence and consistency of Spartan life as indicating the sort of government likely to produce the best and most enduring results. Mitford, therefore, not only deserves the credit of having taken up Greek history as a political study, but he

undoubtedly represents the body of learned opinion among the Greeks themselves upon the subject. The literary classes, so far as we can judge from what is extant of their works, were not usually radical or democratic, and it was very natural, in a generation which had witnessed the awful results of a democratic upheaval in France, to appeal to this evidence as showing that the voice of history was against giving power to the masses, and taking it from the classes, of any society.

What popularity Mitford attained can only now be inferred from the editions of his work demanded[9:1], coupled with the all-important fact that he called forth two tremendous refutations,—the monumental works of Thirlwall and of Grote.

he excites splendid refutations.

§ 5. It is very curious that these two famous histories should have been undertaken (like Gillies' and Mitford's) nearly at the same time, and both of them by way of correction for the strong anti-republican views of Mitford. It is also remarkable that each author explicitly declared himself so satisfied with the work of the other that he would not have entered upon the task, had he known of his rival's undertaking. This, however, seems hard to fit in with the dates, seeing that Thirlwall's book began to appear many years earlier than that of

Grote[10:1]. In any case the former represents a different kind of work, or I should rather say an earlier stage of work, and therefore comes logically as well as chronologically first.

Thirlwall:

The Bishop of St. David's was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, a scholar trained in all the precision and refinement of the public schools, a man accustomed to teach the classics and to enforce accuracy of form and correctness of critical judgment. He had also what was then rather a novelty, and what separates him from his distinguished Oxford contemporaries—Gaisford and Clinton—a competent knowledge of German, as well as of other languages, and a consequent acquaintance with the recent studies of the Germans, who were then beginning to write about classics in German instead of using the Latin language.

his merits;

John Stuart Mill, who, when a young man, belonged to a debating society along with Thirlwall, thought him the very best speaker he had ever heard. The qualities which attracted Mill were not passion or imaginative rhetoric, but clear, cold, reasoning powers, together with a full command of the language best suited to express accurately the speaker's argument.

These are the qualities which made all Thirlwall's work enduring and universally respected. His

episcopal charges were certainly the best delivered in his day, and his history, without ever exciting any enthusiasm, has so steadily maintained its high position, that of recent years it is perhaps rather rising than falling in popular esteem[11:1].

his coldness;

his fairness and accuracy;

but without enthusiasm.

But the absence of passion, since it checks enthusiasm in the reader, is a fatal want in any historian. The case before us is a remarkable instance. Both the learning and fairness of Thirlwall are conspicuous. It is difficult for any competent reader to avoid wondering at his caution in receiving doubtful evidence, and his acuteness in modestly suggesting solutions which have since been proved by further evidence. Of course the great body of our materials, the Greek classics, lay before him; the pioneers of modern German philology such as Wolf, Hermann, K. O. Müller, Welcker, were accessible to him. In ordering and criticising these materials he left nothing to be desired, and the student of to-day who is really intimate with Thirlwall's history may boast that he has a sound and accurate view of all the main questions in the political and social development of the Hellenic nation. But he will never have been carried away with enthusiasm; he will never remember with delight great passages of burning force or picturesque beauty such as those which adorn the histories of Gibbon or of Arnold.

He has before him the type of a historian like Hallam, whose work would be the most instructive possible on its period, were it not the dullest of writing. It would be unfair to Thirlwall to say he is dull, but he is too cold and passionless for modern readers. To use the words of Bacon: Lumen siccum et aridum ingenia madida offendit et torret.

Clinton's Fasti.

His merits.

The mention of these qualities in Thirlwall suggests to me that I ought not to omit some mention of the great work of a very similar student—this, too, stimulated by Mitford—I mean the Fasti Hellenici, 'a civil and literary chronology of the Greeks from the earliest times to the death of Augustus[12:1].' It is not, properly speaking, a history, but the materials for the fullest possible history of Greece, with all its offshoots, such as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Hither Asia, arranged and tabulated with a patience and care to which I know no parallel. Any one who examines this work will wonder that it could have been accomplished within the fifteen years during which the several volumes appeared. It is astonishing how difficult the student finds it to detect a passage in the obscurest author that Clinton has not seen; and his ordinary habit is not to indicate, but to quote all the passages verbatim. The book is quite unsuited for a schoolboy, but to any serious enquirer into the history of Greece it is positively indispensable. The influence of Gaisford, then probably the greatest of Greek scholars,

obtained for the book the adequate setting of the Clarendon Press. Clinton worked with a calmness and deliberation quite exceptional; and though he knew no German, had so completely mastered his subject that the Germans have since indeed translated, re-edited, and abridged him: they have never been able to supersede him. Even when he is wrong or obsolete, he can be corrected by the full materials he has laid before the reader. But the perfect coldness of his reasoning, the absence of all passion, the abnegation of all style, make the book unapproachable except to a specialist.

Contrast of Grote's life.

His theory Radicalism.

§ 6. For the same reason Thirlwall's great and solid book was ousted at once from public favour by the appearance of Grote's history. Two minds more unlike can hardly be imagined, admitting that they were both honest and hard workers, and that both knew German as well as Greek, Latin, and French. Instead of a cold, calm college don, loving cautious statement and accurate rendering as the highest of virtues; instead of a mild and orthodox Liberal both in religion and politics,—we have a business man, foreign to university life and its traditions, a sceptic in religion, a Positivist in philosophy, and above all an advanced Radical in politics, invading the subject hitherto thought the preserve and apanage of the pedagogue or the pedant. Of course he occasionally missed the exact force of an optative, or the logic of a particle; he excited the fury of men like Shilleto, to whom accuracy in Greek prose was the one perfection,

containing all the Law and the Prophets. What was far worse, he even mistook and misstated evidence which bore against his theories, and was quite capable of being unfair, not from dishonesty, but from prejudice.

The influences of his time.

To be compared with Gibbon.

He lived in the days when the world was recovering from its horror at the French Revolution, and the reaction against the monarchical restorations in central Europe was setting in. He was persuaded that the great social and political results of Greek history were because of, and not in spite of, the prevalence of democracy among its States, and because of the number and variety of these States. He would not accept the verdict of all the old Greek theorists who voted for the rule of the one or the enlightened few; and he wrote what may be called a great political pamphlet in twelve volumes in vindication of democratic principles. It was this idea which not only marshalled his facts, but lent its fire to his argument; and when combined with his Radicalism in religion and philosophy, produced a book so remarkable, that, however much it may be corrected and criticised, it will never be superseded. It is probably the greatest history among the many great histories produced in this century; and though very inferior in style to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, will rank next to it as a monument of English historical genius.

His eloquence.

His panegyric on democracy.

There are chapters of speculation, such as those on the Greek myths and their historical value, on the Homeric question, on Socrates and the Sophists,

which mark an epoch in the history of their respective subjects, and have been ever since gradually moulding even the most obstinate opponents, who at first rejected his theories with scorn[15:1]. There are chapters of narrative, such as that on the battle of Platæa, or the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, where he so saturates himself with the tragic grandeur of the events, and with the consummate art of his great Greek predecessors, that his somewhat clumsy and unpolished style takes their colour and rises to the full dignity of his great subject. But the greatest novelty among the many which adorn his immortal work is his admirable apologia for democracy,—for that form of government where legislation is the result of discussion; where the minority feels bound to acquiesce in the decision of the majority; and where the administrators of the law are the servants, not the masters, of the nation, appointed with defined powers to terminable magistracies, and liable to indictment for exceeding or abusing these powers. He occupied the whole body of the book in illustrating how the voluntary submission of the free citizen to control of this kind, the alternation in the same men of commanding

and obeying, and the loyalty and patriotism thus engendered, were far higher social factors than the enforced or unreasoning submission of the masses to the dictates of a monarch or a close aristocracy.

Objections: that democracies are short-lived;

§ 7. To the first great objection,—that of the Greek theorists,—that the greatness of democracies is but transient, and must rapidly degenerate into the fickle and violent rule of a mob, he might have answered, that these theorists themselves never contemplated human institutions as permanent, and even assumed that the ideal State of their dreams must be subject to exhaustion and decay. Still more might he have urged that not a long life, but a great life, was the real test of the excellence of the body politic, and that centuries of Spartan respectability had done nothing for the world in comparison with the brief bloom of Attic genius.

that the Athenian democrat was a slaveholder and a ruler over subjects.

Another and more serious objection to the position that Athens was a typical democracy, and that its high culture was the direct result of its political institutions, he seems to me to have practically ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. But the Athenian citizen, however poor, was a slaveholder, and the member of an imperial class, ruling with more or less absolutism over communities of subjects, treating as manifest inferiors even the many resident aliens, who promoted the mercantile wealth of his city. Hence, after all, he was one of a minority, controlling a

vast majority of subjects and slaves with more or less despotic sway. Lord Redesdale[17:1] tells us that this was the point which his brother Mitford thought of capital importance, and which prompted him to write his history. He met, all through revolutionary France, and among the democrats in England, perpetual assertions that Greek democracy was the ideal at which modern Europe should aim, and he felt that these enthusiasts had considered neither the size of modern States, nor the essential difference just stated between the Athenian and the modern democrat.

The Athenian not the ideal of the Greeks.

And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense,—the member of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, as a people, ever held before them was not the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristocrat of Sparta. This latter was admired and copied, so far as he could be copied, in like manner as the English aristocrat has been admired by all the nations of the world,—not because he lives under free institutions, but because he shows in him the traditions and the breeding of a dominant race long accustomed to the dignity and the splendour of ancient wealth and importance.

As Grote could see no superiority whatever in aristocracy over democracy, so he ignored completely this, the aristocratic side of all the Hellenic democracies.

Grote's treatment of the despots.

Their perpetual recurrence in the Greek world.

Advantages of despotism.

§ 8. But, when he comes to treat of the despots, or tyrants, who overthrew governments and made themselves irresponsible rulers, he falls in with all the stock accusations of the aristocratic Greek writers,—Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch,—and represents these despots as an unmixed evil to their country[18:1]. He treats them in a special chapter as a sort of epidemic at a certain epoch of Greek history, whereas the facts show that through the whole series of centuries, from the dawn of history to the conquest by Rome, despots were a constantly recurring phenomenon all over the Greek world. We find them mentioned by scores, and in every corner of Hellas and Asia Minor. Even Sparta ceased in time to form the almost solitary exception. This persistence of tyrants shows that either the people who tolerated them were politically fools, or that despotic government had really some good points, and recommended itself at least as an escape from greater evils[18:2]. The political value of this phase of Greek life I shall treat more fully in the sequel.

Good despots not infrequent.

We hear, of course, of many violent and vicious despots in Greek history; and these are the cases always cited as proving the unsoundness of that form of government. But if a list could be procured of the numerous tyrants who governed wisely or moderately, and who improved the manners and the culture of their subjects, it would probably comprise an immense number of names. The good specimens passed by without notice; the criminal cases were paraded in the schools and upon the stage[19:1]: and so a one-sided estimate has passed into history. This estimate was taken up with warmth, and paraded with great amplitude by the Radical historian. And yet the very history of Europe since he wrote has shown us strong reasons to doubt that every nation is best managed by a parliamentary system. But on this point Grote had no misgivings. The will of the majority was to him the inspired

voice, and he trusted to better education and larger experience to correct the occasional errors from which not even the fullest debate will save an excited populace.

Grote a practical politician.

§ 9. These observations, though meant as strictures upon the sanguine enthusiasm of Grote's Radical views, are not to be understood as detracting from the charm of his work. It is this very enthusiasm which has led him to understand and to interpret political movements or accommodations completely misunderstood by many learned continental professors; for he was a practical politician, accustomed to parliamentary life,—above all to the conservative effects of tradition and practice, even in the face of the most innovating theories. He has, therefore, put the case of an educated democracy with more power and more persuasiveness than any other writer; and for this reason alone his book must occupy a prominent place even in the library of the mere practical politician.

His treatment of Alexander the Great.

Contrast of Thirlwall.

§ 10. Far more serious are the objections to his last volume, on the life and conquests of Alexander the Great. So unequal, indeed, is this episode, which to him was a mere appendix to the story of independent Greece, that a fabulous anecdote prevails of his publisher having persuaded him against his will to pursue his narrative beyond the battle of Chæronea[20:1]. Here it is that the calmness and candour of Thirlwall stand out in marked contrast. The

history of the great conqueror and of the recovered independence (such as it was) of Greece, are treated by the scholar-bishop with the same care and fairness which mark all the rest of his work. But Grote is distinctly unfair to Alexander; his love of democracy led him to hate the man who made it impossible and absurd for Greece, and he shows this bias in every page of his twelfth volume.

Grote ignores the later federations,

As regards the subsequent history, which embraces the all-important development of federal government throughout Greece, he does not condescend to treat it at all. His great work is therefore incomplete in plan, and stops before the proper conclusion of his subject. Of course he would have found it hard to panegyrize his favourite democracies when he came to the Hellenistic age. There the inherent weaknesses of a popular government in days of poverty and decay, in the face of rich and powerful monarchs, showed themselves but too manifestly.

and despises their history.

But he will not confess this weak point; he even covers his retreat by the bold assertion in his preface that Greek history from the generation of Alexander has no interest in itself, or any influence on the world's history—a wonderful judgment! However great therefore and complete the work of Grote is on the earlier periods, this may be added as a warning,—the reader of Greek history should stop with the death of Philip of Macedon, and read the remainder in other books. It is indeed necessary for schoolmasters to limit the bounds of Greek

literature in school studies, and so with common consent they have admitted nothing later than the golden age. But the vast interest and paramount importance of Greek ideas in the culture of the Roman world have tempted me to sketch the subject in my Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest and Greek Life under Roman Sway. Any reader of these volumes will at least concede the vastness, the importance, and the deep interest of the period which Grote despised. But so intricate are the details, and so little arranged, that to write upon it is rather pioneer's work than anything else.

His treatment of the early legends.

Even when plausible, they may be fictions

§ 11. Let us now, before passing to his successors, turn back to the very beginning of the subject, and say a word on his treatment of the elaborate mythical system which the Greeks prefixed to their historical annals. Here the Positivism of the man was sure to bear fruit and produce some remarkable results. He gives, accordingly, with all deliberation and fulness of detail, a complete recital of the stories about the gods and heroes, telling all their acts and adventures, and then proceeds to argue that they are to be regarded as quite distinct from, and unconnected with, any historical facts. He argues that as there is in the legends a large quantity of assertions plainly false and incredible, but intertwined indissolubly with plausible and credible statements, we have no right to pick out the latter and regard them as derived from actual facts. There is such a thing as plausible fiction;

and we have no guarantee that the authors of incredible stories about gods and their miracles did not invent this plausible kind as well. Rejecting, therefore, all historical inferences from the Greek legends, he merely regards them as conclusive evidence of the state of mind of their inventors,—a picture of the Greek mind in what Comte called the 'theological stage.'

Thirlwall's view less extreme.

It is remarkable how fully Thirlwall states this view of the Greek myths, and how clearly his cautious mind appreciates the indisputable weakness of all such legends in affording proper and trustworthy evidence. But when we come to persistent bodies of legend which assert that Oriental immigrants—Cadmus, Danaus, Pelops, &c.—brought civilization to yet barbarous Greece, Thirlwall, with all his doubts, with all his dislike to vague and shifting stories, cannot make up his mind to regard these agreeing myths as mere idle inventions. Moreover, he urged the point, which Grote omitted to consider, that early art might so corroborate a story as to make its origin in fact morally certain.

Influence of Niebuhr on both historians.

No doubt both historians were considerably under the influence of Niebuhr, whose rejection of the old Roman legends, which were often plausible fiction, produced a very great sensation in the literary world[23:1]. Nor did they live to see the great

discoveries in early art and prehistoric culture which have since been made by the archæologists. It seems to me, therefore, that as regards the incunabula of Greek history these great men came at the moment when little more than a negative attitude was possible. The mental history of the nation in its passage from easy faith to utter scepticism was expounded by Grote in a masterly way; but for the construction of the myths he would not admit any other than subjective causes. Here, then, was the point on which some further advance might fairly be expected.

Neither of them visited Greece,

§ 12. There was another matter also, connected with the life and habits of the time, which made the appreciation of the facts less keen and picturesque than it might have been. Neither Thirlwall nor Grote, though each of them possessed ample means and leisure, seems ever to have thought of visiting the country and seeking to comprehend the geographical aspects of their histories from personal experience. They both—Thirlwall especially—cite the earlier travellers who had explored and pictured the Hellenic peninsula; but in those days the traveller was regarded as a different kind of man from the historian, who wrote from books in his closet.

which later historians generally regard as essential.

Ernst Curtius and Victor Duruy.

The value of autopsy in verifying old authors.

It is in the last two features—the interpretation of the legends, and the personal acquaintance with the country—that the more recent attempts excel the older masterpieces. Ernst Curtius spent several years in Greece, and published a

complete and scholarly account of the Peloponnesus before he produced his history. Duruy gives life and colour to his narrative by references to his personal experiences in Greece. To visit and study the scenes of great events is now so easy and so habitual to scholars, that we may count it one of the necessary conditions for any future history which is to take a high place in the ever-increasing series of Hellenic studies[25:1]. In his opening chapters Ernst Curtius breathes such freshness and reality into the once dry preamble of geographical description that we feel we have attained a fresh epoch, and are led to expect great things from an experience gained upon the spot, which can verify the classical descriptions by the local features which remain. It is of course idle to think that this kind of familiarity will compensate for imperfect study. The modern Greek antiquarians, living upon the spot, have not yet shown themselves equal to many who have never seen what they discuss. Nevertheless, this is certain, that new force, and directness, are attained by a personal acquaintance with the coasts, the mountains, the rivers of Greece, and that many a wrong inference from ancient texts may be avoided by knowing that the scene of the events precludes it.

Example in the theatre of Athens.

Its real size.

No landscape for its background.

§ 13. Here is an example. It is commonly inferred from a passage in Plato's Symposium, which speaks of thirty thousand citizens being addressed

by Agathon in his plays, that the theatre held that number of spectators. This is copied into book after book, though I have long ago called attention to the impossibility of maintaining such an interpretation[26:1]. I need not urge the absurdity of speaking from an open-air stage to thirty thousand people. The actual theatre is now recovered, and any one who has seen it and possesses reasonable common-sense will perceive that about fifteen thousand people was the utmost it could ever have contained[26:2]. To expect a larger crowd to hear any performance of human voices would be ridiculous. What the passage, therefore, means is that the whole population of freemen in Athens were in the habit of enjoying the drama,—not, of course, all at the same moment. Other fancies, which have given rise to eloquent musings concerning the picturesque view of the sea and islands enjoyed by the Athenian as a natural background to his tragedy, can be disposed of in the same way by simply sitting even on the top row and making the experiment[26:3],—not to speak of

the false notion of attributing to the Athenian citizen a conscious love of picturesque scenery, or an attempt to combine two heterogeneous and incongruous æsthetic interests.

Greek scenery and art now accessible to all.

If the writer of Greek history is bound to have visited Greece, this cannot be expected of the reader. But for him too our generation has brought its benefits. In the fine illustrations now published of all the objects of interest in Greek museums, and of the finest scenery throughout the country, the general public can find some equivalent; and from this point of view the history of Duruy marks a fresh epoch, even as compared with that of Curtius. For I am not aware that there has hitherto been any accessible collection of all the interesting things in Nature and Art which the student of Greek history ought to have seen, at least in reproduction. There are, of course, splendid monographs on special buildings, such as the works of the Dilettanti Society, or on special discoveries, such as the original and richly adorned volumes of Dr. Schliemann on Mycenæ and Tiryns. But these are beyond the reach of moderate fortunes. The gallery of photographs begun by Mr. Stillman, and now in process of publication by the Hellenic Society, are both more varied and less expensive, and will make the treasures of Greece perfectly familiar to any student who chooses to acquire them.

FOOTNOTES:

[4:1] Mr. Evelyn Abbott's History of Greece, preface.

[7:1] More numerous, and much better, in France and Germany than they are in England.

[7:2] The first volume of his work has recently been translated by Mr. Prothero, of King's College, Cambridge.

[7:3] I have seen but not read Stanyan's Grecian History in 2 vols. (1739), and Gast's History of Greece, published in Dublin (1793). O. Goldsmith's Handbook is one of a number published about a hundred years ago, all of which are forgotten. Of these I have looked through at least six. They have now no value.

[8:1] It is remarkable that he never mentions his contemporary, Gillies, so far as I know.

[9:1] The new (second) edition of 1829 has an interesting defence of his history by Lord Redesdale, his younger brother. There is also a cabinet edition in 8 vols., published in 1835, and continued from the death of Agesilaus, where Mitford had stopped, to that of Alexander, by R. A. Davenport.

[10:1] The dates are, Thirlwall's history, 1835, Grote's first two volumes, 1846. But Grote says he had his materials collected for some years. Upon the publication of these volumes, Thirlwall at once confessed his inferiority, and wrote no more upon the subject.

[11:1] The most obvious proof of this is the price of the book in auction catalogues. The second (octavo) edition is both rare and expensive. The first is the cabinet edition in Lardner's series, the editor of which suggested the work.

[12:1] Published by the Clarendon Press. Clinton alludes to Mitford's effect upon him in his Journal.

[15:1] Thus the recent book on the Homeric theory, by Professor Jebb, a scholar who in an earlier primer had inclined to the views of Theodor Bergk, now advocates mainly Grote's theory. Thus Zeller's latest edition of the History of Greek Philosophy, a masterly work, treats the Sophists with constant reference to Grote's views. Both the recent German histories of Greece, Holm's and Busolt's, acknowledge fully the great merits of Grote, whose attitude towards the Greek myths is indeed maintained by Holm.

[17:1] In his Editorial Preface to the 2nd ed. of Mitford's Greece.

[18:1] This curious contrast should be carefully noted in estimating Grote. The justified and reasonable objections of Greek historians to ultra-democracy he ignores; their violent and personal objections to the despots he adopts without one word of qualification.

[18:2] I am glad to see this point dwelt on with great justice and discrimination in Mr. E. Abbott's recent History of Greece, i. 368.

[19:1] Thus Strabo says, when speaking of Sicyon, that the tyrants who had long ruled the city before its liberation by Aratus were for the most part good men; and this accounts for the high reputation of Sicyon for culture. It was Lycophron, in his tragedy entitled the Casandreans, who painted the typical portrait of a tyrant in the monster Apollodorus. (Cf. my Greek Life and Thought, p. 283.) Whether he was really as bad as he was painted, and whether his Galatian guards really drank human blood, &c., depends on the comparative weight the critic assigns to general improbability, as against the veracity of a stage portrait. We have no other evidence, for the late historians borrow the traditional features without criticism. But let us suppose that in the next century the evidence concerning the character of Napoleon III depended upon Mr. Freeman's allusions in his Federal Government, and upon V. Hugo's monograph, would the inferences from these great writers be even near the real truth?

[20:1] The original preface to his first volume marks out the limits which he duly attained.

[23:1] The first edition of Niebuhr's history appeared in 1811. The second, a wholly different and enlarged work, was published in 1827, and translated into English by Thirlwall and Hare in 1828. Grote quotes Niebuhr constantly, and takes from his Lectures on Ancient History more than from any other modern source.

[25:1] Thus Duncker's chapter on the Olympic games shows at once that he never was at Olympia, and does not understand the site.

[26:1] Rambles and Studies in Greece, p. 107. See also the excellent note in Duruy's History, ii. chap. vii. sect. 1, on the frequent exaggerations of the number of Athenian citizens, which never reached this high figure.

[26:2] Dr. Dörpfeld, with his new map before him, estimated the area for me the last time I was at Athens. He found that counting in every available space, such as gangways, &c., 16,000 was the limit. It seems, therefore, highly probable that an average audience would not exceed 10,000. I cannot remember in Attic literature any allusion to crowding or want of room in this theatre.

[26:3] Op. cit., pp. 108-9. Duruy, at the opening of his twentieth chapter, has given excellent pictures and plans of the theatre in question.

CHAPTER II.

Recent Treatment of the Greek Myths.

The newer histories.

Not justifiable without particular reasons.

Max Duncker.

Not suited to English readers.

§ 14. We may now pass to the more modern treatment of the myths and mythical history of Greece. There are before us the essays of several men since the monumental work of Grote. First there is that of Ernst Curtius; then Duncker's (both translated into English); still more recently the shorter histories of Holm, Busolt, Hertzberg, and other Germans, not to speak of Sir George Cox's history and the first volume of that of Mr. Evelyn Abbott. In fact they are so many and so various that the production of a new work on Greek history requires some special justification. For the time has really come when we may begin to complain of new histories that are not new, but merely reproduce the old facts and the old arguments, without regard to what specialists have been doing to clear up particular questions. Duncker's large work, of which the earlier period of Greek history forms the closing part, is indeed an important book, and cannot be dismissed so easily. But if I may venture to speak out, I do not think it was worth translating into English. Scholars

earnest and patient enough to read through it can hardly fail to have learned German, and therefore require no English version. I cannot believe that the English-speaking public will ever read it, nor do I think this should be expected. For in the first place the book is sadly deficient in style,—not merely in the graces of style, which are seldom attained by professional scholars, but in that higher quality of style produced either by burning passion or delicate æsthetic taste. Duncker is not, like most of the English historians, a politician. To him despot and democracy are mere things to be analyzed. Nor does he strive to advocate novel and picturesque views, like Ernst Curtius. His mind is so conservative that he rather takes a step backward, and reverts, especially in his chronology, to statements which of late seemed likely to be discarded as obsolete. He is always sensible and instructive; he has an excellent habit of making his authorities speak for themselves: but he wants verve as well as originality in treating old, unsettled problems, though he has made some remarkable re-constructions of history from conflicting myths.

Busolt and Holm.

Return to Grote.

Holm's postulate.

The two best recent histories to which I have referred, Busolt's in 1885, Holm's in 1886 (I speak of the first volumes), are by no means so conservative as Duncker; Holm is as advanced in his scepticism as Grote; but, as I shall show in the sequel, their scepticism is still spasmodic, or shall I say varied with touches of credulity, which are probably the necessary relief of all scepticism. Nothing strikes

the reader of these new Greek histories more forcibly than their abandonment of the combinations of the school of E. Curtius, and their return to the attitude of Grote, whose decision concerning the utter untrustworthiness of legends for historical purposes they all quote with approval. The ground taken by Grote was the possibility of 'plausible fiction' which could not possibly be distinguished, as miraculous stories can, from sober history. Holm adds to this some excellent arguments showing the strong temptations to deliberate invention which must have actuated the old chronographers and genealogists[30:1]. Nevertheless, Holm devotes 200 12mo pages, Busolt 100 8vo, of their 'short histories' to the analysis and discussion of the legends and discoveries concerning pre-historic Greece, in the course of which they cannot avoid many inferences from very doubtful evidence. Holm very justly demands that historians should let the reader know in the stating of it, what has been handed down to us, and what is modern hypothesis, and claims to have observed this distinction himself. But there are traditions which are manifestly late and untrustworthy, such as that which fixes the dates of Arktinos and Eumelos, and tells us of written registers in the eighth century B.C., which he accepts without a due caution to his readers.

The modern attitude.

§ 15. I think, moreover, that even the most

trenchant of sceptics does not consistently deny that there must be some truth in legendary history, though we may not be able to disentangle it from miracles and misunderstandings. And when once we have abandoned Grote's position, and hold it more probable that old legends are based on facts than purely invented, nothing will prevent the sanguine student from striving to pick out for himself the facts and making a probable, if not a certain, sketch of the otherwise unrecorded incunabula of a nation's history.

Pure invention a rare occurrence;

plausible fiction therefore not an adequate cause.

This view and these attempts are based upon an ascertained truth in the psychology of all human societies. Just as people will accommodate a small number of distinct words to their perpetually increasing wants, and will rather torture an old root in fifty ways than simply invent a new combination of sounds for a new idea; so in popular legends the human race will always attach itself to what it knows, to what has gone before, rather than set to work and invent a new series of facts. Pure invention is so very rare and artificial that we may almost lay it aside as a likely source for old legends[31:1];

and we may assume either a loose record of real facts, or the adoption and adaptation of the legends of a previous age, as our real, though treacherous, materials for guessing pre-historic truth. This is the reason why we later students have not adhered without hesitation to the sceptical theory that plausible fiction may account for all the Greek myths, and we look for some stronger reason to reject them altogether.

Cases of deliberate invention,

at Pergamum,

which breed general suspicion of marvellous stories.

§ 16. There are cases, for example, where we can see distinct reasons why people in a historic age should have invented links to attach themselves to some splendid ancestry. Just as the heralds of our own day are often convicted of forging the generations which connect some wealthy upstart with an ancient house, so it is in Greek history. No larger and more signal instances of this can be found than the barefaced genealogies made by the learned in the days of Alexander's successors[32:1], when any of the new foundations,—Antioch, Seleucia,

&c.,—wanted to prove themselves ancient Hellenic cities, re-settled upon a mythical foundation. Not different in spirit were the Pergamene fabrications, which not only invented a mythical history for Pergamum, but adopted and enlarged the Sicilian fables which connected a Pergamene hero, Æneas, with the foundation of Rome[33:1]. What capital both the Ilians and the people of Pergamum made out of these bold mendacities, is well known. I shall return in due course to another remarkable instance, which I have set before the world already, where a great record of Olympic games was made up at a late date by a learned man in honour of Elis and Messene. Later Greek history does show us some of these deliberate inventors,—Lobo the Argive, Euhemerus the Messenian, and a few more; a list which the Greeks themselves augmented by adding the travellers who told wonderful tales of distant lands which conflicted with Hellenic climate and experience. But here too the Greeks were over-sceptical, and rejected, as we know, many real truths only because they found them marvellous. In the same way, modern inquirers who come to estimate the doubtful and varying evidence for older history must be expected to differ according to the peculiar temper of their minds.

Example of a trustworthy legend from Roman history.

§ 17. But perhaps the reader will desire to hear of a case where a legend has conveyed acknowledged truth, rather than the multifarious cases where it may lead us into error. I will give an

instance from Roman history, all the more remarkable from the connection in which it is found.

Niebuhr, Arnold, Mommsen.

That history, as we all know, used to commence with a pretty full account of the seven kings, who ruled for very definitely stated periods. The difficulties in accepting this legend were first shown by Niebuhr; and then came Arnold, who told again the legend as a mere nursery tale, refusing to call it history. Mommsen, in his very brilliant work, goes further, and omits the whole story contemptuously, without one word of apology. The modern reader who refers to his book to know who the kings of Rome were, would find one casual and partial list, no official chapter. I am not sure that Mommsen names most of them more than once in any passing mention.

The rex sacrorum at Rome.

But does it follow that Mommsen denies there ever were kings at Rome? Far from it. For there were laws and ordinances, lasting into historical times, which would be wholly inexplicable had they not come down from a monarchy. Thus there remained a priest of great dignity, though of little importance, whose very title—rex sacrorum—shows that his office was created to perform those priestly functions once performed by the abolished kings, and not otherwise provided for in the reformed constitution. The fact therefore asserted by the famous legend, that there were once kings in Rome, is established to the satisfaction of any reasonable man by the evidence of surviving usages.

The king-archon at Athens.

In the same way we have at Athens legends of kings, but all of such antiquity as to make us hesitate in believing them, had there not survived into historical days the king-archon, whose name and functions point clearly to their being a survival of those kingly functions which were thought indispensable on religious or moral grounds, even after the actual monarchs had passed away[35:1].

The legends, therefore, which tell of a gradual change from a monarchy to an aristocracy, and a gradual widening of the Government to embrace more members by making its offices terminable, are no mere plausible fictions, but an obscure, and perhaps inadequate, yet still real account of what did happen in Attica in the days before written records existed.

Legends of foreign immigrants.

Corroborative evidence of art, but not of language.

§ 18. Larger and more important is the great body of stories which agree in bringing Phœnician, Egyptian, and Asianic princes to settle in early Greece, where they found a primitive people, to whom they taught the arts and culture of the East. To deny the general truth of these accounts now would be to contradict facts scientifically ascertained; it is perfectly certain that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phœnician, and it is equally certain that many of the artistic objects found at Orchomenos, in Attica, and at Mycenæ, reveal a

foreign and Oriental origin. At the same time Duruy, in the luminous discussion he has devoted to the subject[36:1], shows that, however certain the early contact with the East, there is hardly any trace in Greece of the language of any non-Hellenic conquerors, as there is, for example (he might have added), in the names of the letters, which mostly bear in Greece their Semitic names. He thinks, therefore, that although early Asianic Greeks were the real intermediaries of this culture, they merely stimulated the latent spark in the natives, which shows itself in certain original non-Asiatic features which mark pre-historic Greek remains. But those who in their enthusiasm for Greece go even further in rejecting any foreign parentage for the higher Greek art[36:2], will now no longer deny that the occurrence of amber, ostrich-eggs, and ivory, which surely were not all imported in a rude or unmanipulated condition, prove at least the lively traffic in luxuries which must have existed, and which cannot exist without many other far-reaching connections.

Corroboration of legends in architecture.

There are even lesser matters, where legends might seem only to set before us the difficulty of harmonizing conflicting statements; and yet archæology finds that there is something real implied. Thus the legend which asserts that the older Perseids were supplanted by the Pelopids in the dominion of Mycenæ is in striking agreement with the fact that there are two styles of wall-building in the extant remains, and that the ruder work has actually been re-faced with the square hewn blocks of the later builders[37:1].

§ 19. But we have here been dealing with political legends, which are less likely than genealogical or adventurous legends to excite the imagination, and so to be distorted from facts. Let us turn to consider some of these latter.

Explanation of myths by the solar theory.

The analogy of Indian and Persian mythology,

When we approach such a story as the rape of Helen by Paris, the consequent expedition of the Greeks, and the siege of Troy, we are confronted, or at least we were confronted a few years ago, with a theory which professed to explain all such stories as mere modifications or misunderstandings of the great phenomena of Nature expressed in pictorial language. The break of day, the conquest of the Sun over the morning mists, his apparent defeat at night, and the victory of the Powers of Darkness,—all this was supposed to have affected so powerfully the imaginations of primitive men that they repeated their original hopes and fears in all manner of metaphors, which by and by became

misinterpreted, and applied to the relations, friendly or hostile, of the various superhuman powers known as gods or heroes. Helen, if you please, was the Dawn, carried off by Paris, the Powers of Night, and imprisoned in Troy. Achilles was only the Sun-god, who struggles against the Night, and after a period of brilliancy succumbs to his enemies. It appeared that in the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta, which may be regarded as older cousins of the Greek mythologies, the names of the gods pointed clearly to their original connection with solar phenomena, and some of the Greek names were shown to be merely the Greek forms of the same words.

expounded by Professor Max Müller,

founded on very wide learning,

It is not necessary for me here to expound more fully this celebrated theory, seeing that it has acquired great popularity in England from the brilliant statement of it by Professor Max Müller in his early Lectures on the Science of Language. It was a learned theory, requiring a knowledge of the various languages as well as the various mythologies of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and even other branches of the great Indo-European family. It required, too, a knowledge of that wonderful new science, the science of comparative etymology, by which two names as diverse as possible could be shown to be really akin. The ordinary reader was surprised at the scientific legerdemain by which Helen was identified with Sarama, and was disposed to accept a great deal from men who claimed to have made such astonishing discoveries.

long since shown inadequate,

because it implies sentimental savages,

which is contrary to our experience.

§ 20. It is now very long since I first declared myself against this theory[39:1], not as false, but as wholly inadequate to explain the great wealth and variety of the Greek legends. On that occasion I argued the case at length, and showed more especially that the mental condition presupposed in the primitive Indo-Europeans by this theory was not provable, and was, moreover, contradicted by everything which we know of the psychological condition of any such people. The theory implies such a daily joy and a nightly terror, when the sun rose and set, as coloured the whole language of the primitive race, and gave them one topic which wholly occupied their imaginations. Seeing that men must have existed for a long time before they invented legends, perhaps even before they used language, such fresh and ever-recurring astonishment would be indeed a marvellous persistence of childish simplicity[39:2]. Moreover, what we do know of savage men shows us that surprise and wonder imply a good deal of intellectual development, and that the primitive savage does not wonder at, but

ignores, those phenomena which interest higher men.

K. O. Müller's contribution.

It is a much more reasonable view to discard the changes of the day, and adopt those of the year, as having suggested early myths of the death of beautiful youths, and the lamentation of those that loved them. I do not know a more masterly treatment of this cause for early myths, such as the death of Adonis, of Linus, of Maneros (in Egypt), than the opening of K. O. Müller's History of Greek Literature. It is a book now fifty years old, and our knowledge has so much advanced that Müller's views are in many points antiquated, as I have shown in re-writing the history of the same great subject[40:1]. But nothing could antiquate the genius of K. O. Müller, or the grace with which he shows that the plaintive lays of shepherd and of vine-dresser express the poignant regrets excited by the burning up of green and bloom in the fierce heats of a semi-tropical summer. We now know that Nature provides this rest for her vegetation in meridional climates; but the sleep of plants in the drought of torrid sunshine seems to men far less natural than their rest in the long nights and under the white pall of a northern winter, and thus were suggested myths of violence and cruelty.

The transference of myths.

Old anecdotes doing fresh duty.

§ 21. These things, however, account for only a

small fraction of the great volume of Greek legend. It is indeed true that the same story will be renewed, the same ideas repeated, by succeeding generations. There is such a principle as the spontaneous transference of myths, similar to the constant recurrence of the same old stories in our modern society under new scenery and with new characters. If, for example, a man of odd ways and ridiculous habits haunts any society for a long time, and becomes what is called 'a character,' a number of anecdotes cluster about his name, which are told to illustrate his peculiarities. Any old person who hears these stories will be certain to recognize some of them as much older than the character in question, and as having been told about some other oddity long passed away; and we may predict with confidence that by and by they will be fitted on again to some new person who is a suitable subject for them. But what would be thought of the logic which inferred that the story must be false from the beginning because it wanders down the lapse of time, making itself a new home in each epoch, or that the person to whom it is fitted must be unreal because he is the hero of a tale which does not originally belong to him? Yet I could show that this has been the very attitude assumed by some of the comparative philologers.

Example from the Trojan legend,

but not therefore false.

§ 22. I will take an instance which the reader will naturally expect to find discussed in this Essay—the legend of the siege of Troy. It may be quite true that old names and old metaphors about the

sun or the summer lie hidden in the names of the heroes. It is to me certain that older stories were taken from their place and fitted on to the newer and more celebrated circumstances of this famous War. But all this I take to be not inconsistent with fact, but even to imply as a necessity that there must really have been such a war, which excited the minds of all the Greeks of a certain date, and so formed the obvious nucleus for all the poetical adventures which clung around it.

The contribution of Dr. Schliemann.

History not an exact science.

The brilliant researches of Dr. Schliemann have demonstrated that the locus of the legend was not chosen at random, but that Troy, or Iliom, was in the first place the site of a prehistoric settlement; in the next, that it was conquered and burned, and re-settled again and again. There existed, moreover, a venerable shrine in the obscure historic town, to which the Locrians, at an early date, sent donations of virgins to atone for the outrage of their mythical ancestor, the lesser Ajax of the Iliad. These facts show that here, as elsewhere, the legend formed itself about a historic site, and with some nucleus of historic fact,—how much will probably for ever remain a subject of dispute[42:1].

If history were an exact science, in which strict demonstration were required at every step, this conclusion might warrant our pursuing Grote's course and rejecting the whole legend as imaginary. But history is really a science of probabilities, in which this perhaps is the greatest charm, that it leaves large room to the imagination in framing hypotheses to supply a rational explanation of results which come before us full-grown, without their beginnings being recorded.

I am not concerned here with the problem of the origin of the Homeric poems. Those who desire a summary of modern research in this great field, and care to know what conclusions I have adopted, may consult my Greek Literature, in which the English reader for the first time found a full conspectus of this great controversy[43:1]. What now comes before us is to estimate the amount of historical truth which can be extracted from our so-called Homer.

Historical value of the Homeric poems.

It is certain that there was a great struggle round the very site given in the poems. It was alleged

to be a struggle of many Greek chiefs, at a time when Mycenæ was the richest capital, against the wealth and discipline of the princes about the Troad, of whom the chief of Ilion was the head. This, too, is remarkable, that in spite of the superior wealth and larger population of Asia Minor, the superiority of the Greek peninsula over this greater and richer land is plainly asserted. The whole course of known history has verified the broad fact taught by the legend. Greece has always been the poorer sister, and the superior, of Asia Minor.

Mycenæ preserved in legend only.

That Mycenæ was really the most powerful city in the Greece of some early period, is another fact which nobody would ever have suspected but for the teaching of the legend. Even Dr. Schliemann's new demonstration of its truth, by the display of wealth and of high art which he found in the royal tombs, would never have been attempted had he not been guided by the consistent assertions of the Iliad. For the massive remains of the fortifications, and the tombs, proved no guides to the historical Greeks, who knew Argos only as the head of that province, and early forgot the splendour of Mycenæ so far as it was not kept alive in their epic Bible.

General teaching of the epic poems.

§ 23. Quite apart from such particular facts, which teach us that the statements of Greek legend are never to be despised, there are large general conclusions which most of us think warranted by the Homeric poems. We may infer the political ideas prevalent when they were composed; the

relative importance of king, nobles, and commons; the usages of peace and war; the life of men in its social side; the position of women and of slaves; the religious notions of the day; and such other questions as must be answered if we desire to obtain a living picture of the people. Every recent history of Greece has a chapter on the Homeric poems from this point of view—none of them fuller or better than the chapters of Grote.

Social Life in Greece.

Alleged artificiality of the poems.

What I had to say on this subject was set down in the opening chapters of my Social Life in Greece, from which some stray critics have indeed expressed their dissent, without undertaking to probe and refute my arguments. Until that is done, the sketch there given of the aristocratic society described in the Iliad and the Odyssey claims to be just, and it is unnecessary to defend it here. Perhaps, however, recent inquiry may have led some students to imagine that I have attached too much credit to the Homeric pictures of life, seeing that they are now often asserted to be artificial, and constructed by the poets to represent an age and a society different from their own.

Examples from the Iliad,

not corroborated by recent discoveries.

We cannot verify what these poets describe by anything which we know in historical Greece, without making very large allowances. The games, for example, described in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, are totally distinct in character from the Olympic games,—the oldest historical contests of the same kind known to us. The monarchy of Agamemnon and of Menelaus is totally different

from that of Sparta, which survived into the light of history; and even the poets themselves constantly tell you that they speak of men not such as the men of their own day, but greater, stronger, and happier. On the other hand, when we seek for support from the very ancient remains found at Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Troy in recent years, we find no clear corroboration, and must admit that the arms, the dress, and probably the life of the great men whose splendour we have unearthed do not correspond to the descriptions of the same things in Homer. This has been the subject of a special book by W. Helbig[46:1], and the general result at which he arrives is merely negative. The civilization found by Dr. Schliemann is apparently not that of Homer. Is the latter then purely imaginary, neither prehistoric nor historic? Is the life described as artificial as the language?

Fick's account of the Homeric dialect.

§ 24. For now we are assured, by the researches of Fick, that the apparent jumble of dialects in the poems cannot possibly be any original language which embraced all the dialects, far less a judicious selection from each due to the genius of the poet, but rather the incongruous result of the adaptation of an older form (Æolic) to the wants of a newer and different (Ionic) public. This rehandling of great poems to make them intelligible is an almost universal phenomenon, and now affords us the first reasonable theory for the extraordinary facts presented by Homer's language. Of course there are

later poems, and possibly later passages in the old poems, where this artificial dialect was deliberately imitated by men who found it already achieved, and merely accepted it as the received epic language. But these passages are insignificant. The body of the poems seems to have been rehandled for the practical purpose of making them intelligible, just as Dryden rehandled Chaucer.

Difficulties in the theory.

In this theory of Fick, which he has defended with extraordinary acuteness and learning, we have the greatest advance made in our day as regards the language of Homer. Of course it has not yet been accepted by the world of scholars[47:1]. I myself think Fick's weak point is his close adherence to the dissection of the Iliad into three successive layers by A. Kirchhoff, and his attempt to show that the parts severed from the older as accretions by Kirchhoff are also exactly the parts which were composed in the later (Ionic) dialect, and which therefore do not show the traces of older forms elsewhere to be found. Fick may be right even here; but I am not persuaded by his arguments[47:2].

Analogies in its favour.

But when the conservatives retorted that in presupposing a rehandling of the dialect, and an imperfect translation into newer forms, he was assuming a fact unique in literature,—certainly in Greek literature,—he smote them 'hip and thigh' by showing parallel cases, not only in mediæval poetry, but in the collateral Greek lyric poetry. He showed that old epigrams, for example, had been altered to make them intelligible, while an occasional form for which no metrical equivalent could be found was allowed to remain[48:1].

Its application to the present argument.

§ 25. I have delayed over this important and novel theory not unduly, because its adoption affects the question of the artificiality of the poems. If, as was thought formerly, the poets were distinctly composing in an artificial dialect, into which they foisted forms from various dialects for the purpose of appearing learned in archaic language, we might fairly suspect such a pedantic school of playing tricks with manners and customs, and of omitting or accentuating as they fancied, in order to make an archaic picture according to their lights. And this is in fact what they are accused of having done by the most recent English historian of Greece[48:2].

Illustration from English poetry.

But on the new theory, we have before us merely verbal changes, perhaps made with all care to preserve the original work in the parts which are old and genuine. It is as if some Englishman were to make one of Burns's Scotch poems, which are so difficult to ordinary people, accessible by turning the hard words into their English equivalents, leaving here and there those which could not be removed without destroying rythm or metre. The new version would doubtless sacrifice the flavour of the rude original, but could in no deeper sense be called an artificial composition, and would probably preserve in its mongrel jargon all the facts set down by the poet.

The use of stock epithets.

There is another point alleged for the artificiality of the Homeric poems which has not any greater weight. It is the use of epithets and of forms evidently determined by the convenience of the metre. In all poetry of all ages metre is a shackle,—perhaps modern rime is more tyrannous than the quantities of the hexameter. Yet these shackles, if they mar the efforts of the poetaster, only serve to bring out into clearer light the excellence of the true poet. And the longer the

Homeric poems are read, the more firmly are all good critics persuaded of their supreme excellence.