GREEK POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. HEROIC MONARCHIES.

The political institutions of the Greeks will be examined first, because the Greeks are known to us at an earlier period than any other European people.

Hellas, the land of the Greeks, is about equal in size to half of Scotland or Ireland or to a third of England15. It is intersected by a network of continuous mountain ranges, which cannot be crossed without difficulty, and these ranges are almost everywhere so near together that it is impossible to travel more than twenty miles in any direction without crossing one of them. There are therefore no plains of any considerable extent, and the country is cut up into very numerous small areas, each enclosed, except towards the sea, within natural barriers which make egress and entrance alike difficult. These areas are of varying minuteness: by far the greater number of them measure only ten miles by ten, or twenty by five, but a few are of larger dimensions, and, in particular, Argolis contains about four hundred and fifty square miles, and is as large as Bedfordshire, Attica contains seven hundred and twenty, and just equals Berkshire, and Laconia, with about nine hundred, is of the same size as Warwickshire16.

If communication by land is difficult, by sea it is easy, and was easy even in the earliest times. Greece and its islands have as much sea-board as any equal area in Europe; most of the natural divisions of the country have their share of coast with sheltered beaches where the boats or small ships of ancient times could be drawn up in safety: the Mediterranean, though it is sometimes as dangerous as any sea, is often calm: and by the age of Homer it had come to be a great highway for war, piracy and commerce.

The career of all the Greek communities, except Sparta, divides itself readily into periods. The first period, lasting till perhaps 700 B.C. or 650 B.C., was the period of tribes and tribal governments: the second, lasting to 338 B.C., was the period of cities and city governments. The period of the cities must however be divided into three lesser periods, each characterised by the prevalence of a certain kind of city government: the first of these lesser periods lasted from about 700 B.C. to 600 B.C., the second from 600 B.C. to 500 B.C., and the third from 500 B.C. to 338 B.C. Between 700 B.C. and 600 B.C. Athens, Corinth and Megara were under the domination of groups of privileged families, and many Greek cities in Sicily were also governed by small groups of citizens distinguished either by birth or by wealth: and, since the rule of a few is known as an aristocracy if the few rulers are the men best qualified to rule and if they use their power for the good of the whole community, but as an oligarchy if the few rulers govern for their own selfish interest, the century may be called the period of the early aristocracies and oligarchies. Between 600 B.C. and 500 B.C. nearly every Greek city, both in Greece proper and elsewhere, came under the rule of a t??a???? or usurper of absolute power, so that the century may be called the age of the tyrants or usurpers. And lastly, between 500 B.C. and 338 B.C. in many of the Greek cities a system of government was set up under which the whole body of the citizens acting collectively conducted the work of government, or at least all parts of it which can in the nature of things be conducted by a numerous assembly, while in other cities a small body of the richest citizens ruled selfishly for their own advantage and the advantage of their class; and, since any system in which the whole body of citizens directly conduct the work of government or the greater part of the work of government is known as a democracy, while the selfish rule of a few is, as we have seen, called an oligarchy, the period may best be called the age of the democracies and of the later oligarchies.

The Spartans were unlike, in their history their institutions and the aims of their policy, not only to all other Greek communities but perhaps to every other community that has ever existed: they never completely grew out of their tribal condition, never entirely abandoned their tribal government, and never formed themselves into a city like the other Greek cities: and besides all this they were in so many ways unlike to the rest of mankind that it will be necessary for me to speak of them by themselves and apart from the rest of the Greeks.

The Greek communities and their political systems from the earliest times to the first overthrow of Greek independence in 338 B.C. will be treated in the present and the next two chapters in the following order: firstly, we shall examine the tribes and the tribal governments, secondly, the institutions and government of the Spartans, and thirdly, the cities and the city-governments.

THE GREEK TRIBES AND TRIBAL GOVERNMENTS.

The numerous tribes which composed the Greek race ranged themselves in several groups, distinguished from one another in name, characteristics and fortunes. Among these groups the AchÆans, the Dorians and the Ionians are historically the most important. The AchÆan group includes all the tribes that are conspicuous in the Iliad and Odyssey: and from this circumstance it may safely be inferred that, when those poems were composed, the AchÆan tribes had made more progress than any other Greeks in knowledge and political organisation. The Dorians in the days of Homer were an obscure tribe living in a little mountain valley of Northern Greece: in the next age they invaded the Peloponnesus, expelled the AchÆans from their homes, and formed themselves into the four peoples of the Spartans, the Messenians, the Corinthians and the Argives. The Ionian tribes, the Athenians and twelve of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, including Miletus and Ephesus, were even later than the Dorian peoples in rising to importance. I shall deal first with the AchÆans and then with the Dorians and Ionians.

1. The AchÆan tribes in the heroic age.

When the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed the AchÆans had formed a great number of small independent communities, some inhabiting islands, and others living in valleys surrounded by chains of mountains. The only tribe whose methods of government are depicted in some detail was one of the least of the Greek peoples, and had its home in Ithaca, a rocky island of the Ionian sea about seventeen miles long and three or four miles broad. The larger tribes were the MycenÆans, the Spartans, and the AchÆans of Phthiotis. All the AchÆan tribes were much alike in their political institutions: for the same political terms as??e??, ?????, ?????te?, ?a?? are used in reference to the various tribes without distinction. Their governments were tribal in character, and we may call them either by the generic name of tribal governments, or by the name, which they more usually bear, of heroic monarchies.

The government of an AchÆan tribe was conducted, in time of peace, in assemblies (????a). The purposes for which they met included the announcement of any important news17, discussion of any public business or question of policy18 or the settlement of a litigation19. Our knowledge of their character and proceedings is derived from a full description in the second book of the Odyssey of an assembly held at Ithaca, and a shorter description in the Iliad20.

Whenever the king desired that an assembly should be held he gave the heralds orders to require the immediate attendance of the elders and the people21. The place of meeting was an open space in the city set apart for the purpose. In the midst was a circle of stone seats for the king and the elders22, and one of the seats belonged specially to the king23: outside were the people, all of whom were compelled by the heralds to seat themselves on the ground24 and to be silent25. When this had been done, the work of the assembly began; the speakers were the king and the elders, and the people either kept silence or perhaps indicated their approval by shouting or their dissent by murmurs. The councillors who sat with the king and had the right of speaking were for the most part (as the name ?????te?, if taken literally, denotes) men of age and experience: but younger men of good family, such as the wooers of Penelope26, were also sometimes present among them and shared their privileges.

The assembly at Ithaca was irregularly summoned. The words of the first speaker, the aged Ægyptius, show that according to custom the king alone had the prerogative of issuing a summons by the voice of the heralds. Odysseus had been absent for twenty years: and Ægyptius says, "Since the godlike Odysseus departed in his hollow ships our assembly and session has never been held. And now who is he that summoned us? who was compelled by so great necessity? has he heard news of our warriors coming back, and hastens to tell us? or has he aught else of our country's weal to speak about? I say he is a good man, God bless him! and may Zeus perform for him whatever his heart desires!27"

The business of the assembly at Ithaca was not exactly judicial and can scarcely be described as deliberation on policy. Telemachus summoned the elders and the people in order to declare to them that the proceedings of the suitors were intolerable to him, that he bade them leave his house, that he would resist them by force, if he could, and that if they were slain in his house no price for their lives would be due from him to their kindred.

The assembly came to no formal resolution: the practical result of it was settled by the speeches of the elders without any intervention of the common folk, and was expressed by the last speaker Leiocritus, who declared that the suitors were not afraid of Telemachus nor of Odysseus himself, and bade all those who were present to go away each about his own business.

An assembly occupied in administering justice was depicted in a compartment of the shield of Achilles, which the poet thus describes28: "A people too was there, gathered in assembly: and in their midst a dispute had arisen, and two men were disputing about the price (wergild) of a man that had been slain. The one was declaring aloud to the multitude that he had paid the whole, the other that he had received none of it. And both were ready to go before a judge to get a decision: and the people on this side and on that were cheering them on, but were restrained by the heralds. And there sat the elders on seats of wrought stone in a circle protected by the gods, holding staves given them by the loud-voiced heralds; and then the elders were arising in turn to give judgement. And in the midst were lying two talents of gold to be given to him whose judgement was the straightest29."

In this assembly, as in the other, power belonged solely to those who formed the inner circle. The presence of the king in the judicial assembly is not mentioned, but kings did sometimes take part in giving dooms, for Nestor says to Agamemnon: "O most famous son of Atreus, Agamemnon, king of men, thou shalt be my ending and thou my beginning, because thou art king of many people and Zeus has given thee the sceptre and judgements that thou mayst be their counselor30."

There is a story in the Odyssey which indicates more clearly than the descriptions of the assemblies that, in time of peace, supreme power belonged to the king and the elders jointly and not to the king alone or to the elders alone. While Laertes was reigning in Ithaca three hundred sheep belonging to Ithacans were stolen by robbers from Messenia. Odysseus, the king's son, was sent to ask satisfaction for the wrong: and it is expressly stated that it was the king and the other elders who empowered him to act as ambassador31.

In time of war the king had supreme and exclusive command over his tribe. Thus when Achilles king of the Phthiotians was angry with Agamemnon, he was able without consultation with any one to withdraw the whole Phthiotian contingent from aiding in the war against the Trojans: and, when he began to relent, nothing was needed but a word from him to place his forces in the field again under the orders of his friend Patroclus32. Agamemnon on the other hand, being the commander of a host composed of contingents from many tribes, found it necessary, before issuing any orders to the whole army, to consult the kings who were taking part with him in his enterprise33.

Our conclusions about the political system which prevailed in the Greek tribes of the heroic age can be shortly summed up. In time of peace all public business was conducted in assemblies: in these assemblies the king and the elders alone had the right of speaking, and the king was expected to act according to the advice of the elders. In time of war the king was commander-in-chief, and could act without control from any one.

Besides the political institutions of the ancient Greeks, some of the general conditions of their life may be noticed. They depended for their subsistence partly on their cattle and partly on the produce of the ground, and most of the poorer free men, not possessing slaves, lived in the country to tend their herds and till their lands. Some, who had no herds and no lands of their own, worked as labourers for hire34. The estates and the cattle of the kings and rich men were committed to the charge of slaves captured in war or in freebooting expeditions35. The kings and rich men themselves lived, not scattered over the open country after the fashion of the Germans described by Tacitus36, but collected in cities. Thus at Ithaca the house of the king and the houses of the wooers of Penelope were all close together: for at the end of the first day in the story of the Odyssey the wooers "went each to his house to sleep37" and on the morrow at the dawn of day at the summons of the heralds they "came very quickly to the assembly38": Pylos, where Nestor lived, is called the gathering place and the abodes of the Pylians39: and, not to multiply instances, words denoting cities are regularly applied in the Homeric poems to the dwelling-places of the heroes.

The cities of the heroic age had, for their defence, in all cases a fortress or strong place of refuge close at hand, and some of them at least were entirely encircled with a wall. Argos lay at the foot of the steep isolated mountain of the Larissa which rose about a thousand feet above it: Corinth was under the still loftier Acrocorinthus; MycenÆ and Athens had each its Acropolis, a strong fortress built on a rock rising abruptly but to no great height above the town. That in some cases the lower city, as distinct from the Acropolis, had also its own outer wall is proved by the whole story of the siege of Troy, which shows that cities entirely enclosed in fortifications were well known to Homer40.

There are numberless passages in the Iliad and Odyssey which prove that the houses of the heroes were well stored with wealth. The suitors who intruded as guests at the house of Telemachus always found plenty of cattle, bread, wine and oil ready at hand for their riotous feasts, and yet Telemachus was but a poor man among the Greek princes. When Telemachus paid a visit to Menelaus and Helen at Sparta he was astonished to find that their palace glittered with gold and silver, with electrum (a mixture of two metals) and with ivory41. The chamber of Odysseus at Ithaca contained abundance of gold and bronze, and clothing in chests and sweet smelling oil and wine in jars against his return42. The metal used for weapons was brass or bronze: agricultural implements were chiefly made of iron: of the precious metals gold was more commonly used than silver43. We do not hear that any of these metals were obtained in the heroic age from the soil of Greece itself, and may fairly conjecture that they were brought to the Greeks by the Phoenicians who in that age were more active in trade than any other people44.

The population of a city must have consisted of the wealthy families who had slaves to till their lands and tend their flocks and of those few artificers or professional men whose business brought them to live near the houses of the rich. Among the handicraftsmen were the carpenter, the copper-smith, the leather-dresser, the worker in gold: the professions were those of the leech, the prophet and the bard45. Thus it may be that in an assembly the people outside the sacred circle did not greatly surpass in number the elders who sat within it: for there were no classes to constitute a people except the younger members of the families of the elders and the few men who were induced to live in the city to find employment for their knowledge or skill.

2. The Dorians and the Ionians in the heroic age.

Before the beginning of Greek History, properly so called, the AchÆan peoples, so important in the eyes of Homer, had sunk into comparative insignificance, and the first places in the Hellenic world had been filled by Dorians and Ionians. The original abode of the Dorians was a small mountainous country called Doris not far from ThermopylÆ46. From hence bands of adventurers had gone forth and, invading Peloponnesus, had expelled the AchÆans from Sparta, Messenia, Argos and Corinth, had occupied their territories and had copied their institutions. The Ionians in Attica had grown in prosperity and power, and, like the Dorian tribes, had adopted that form of government which I have called heroic monarchy.

Of the Dorian kingly government at Corinth we know nothing but its existence47: of the Messenian kings we have many stories told by Myron of Priene, but, on reading them side by side with the stories told by Geoffrey of Monmouth about King Arthur, I thought that for complete untrustworthiness there was nothing to choose between the two authors48: concerning the early kings of Argos Athens and Sparta, a few facts are established on good authority, and these I shall now proceed to state.

Argos, with its two neighbours MycenÆ and Tiryns, was in some respects unlike the other Greek communities. Elsewhere in Greece during the heroic age each community occupied the whole of a natural division of the country, and had its territory fenced round with natural barriers. In the Argolic plain three AchÆan communities had found room to settle, exactly as in Italy many communities found room to settle in and around the plain of Latium: and thus the Argolic communities rather resembled the Latin cities than the Greek tribes. Their city walls were of exceptional strength, as the remains of them testify: their kings were richer and were exalted to a greater eminence above their subjects than the other Greek kings, for the palace of the king at Tiryns occupies nearly the whole of the upper citadel and is such as to demand a most prodigal expenditure of labour for its construction49, and Agamemnon king of MycenÆ is represented by the poet of the Iliad as a powerful monarch. It cannot be doubted that the three cities had the same reasons for making their walls strong and their kings powerful as the Romans had in the days of Servius Tullius: they feared that they might be conquered by their neighbours, and hoped that they might themselves be the conquerors.

After the Dorian conquest the three cities still continued to exist: Argos was the strongest of them, but MycenÆ acted independently of Argos so late as the year 480 B.C. in sending a contingent to fight against the Persians at ThermopylÆ50. The great power of the Dorian monarchy was conspicuous in the reign of Pheidon, who at some time between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C. became so powerful that he was able to conduct an expedition from his own city in the east of the Peloponnesus to Olympia in the west and to deprive the Eleians by force of their prerogative of presiding over the Olympic festival51. He also established a hegemony or lordship over a number of Greek peoples in the neighbourhood of Argos, which had long been independent. The tradition of his conquest says simply that he "recovered the whole lot of TÊmenus which had been broken up into many parts52." TÊmenus, according to the legends of the Heracleids, was one of the leaders of the Dorians in their invasion of the Peloponnesus: and it seems that his "lot" must have included the tribes that lived at CleonÆ, Phlius, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Troezen, and Ægina. Pheidon's conquest of these tribes was a remarkable achievement, since all of them were protected against Argos by mountain ranges or by sea: and it gave him such despotic authority over his own subjects at Argos that he is counted among the t??a????53. But it seems that he ought not, strictly speaking, to be reckoned among them, being unlike to the rest of them in two important particulars: first, that his despotic authority at Argos was no doubt necessary in order to enable Argos to keep control over the dependent peoples, and second, that it is not likely that he ever incurred the hatred of the people of Argos: for, if he had been hated by his own subjects, his power outside Argos must have promptly come to an end. After his time the power of the king at Argos ceased to be despotic, the neighbouring tribes recovered their independence, and the monarchy sank into obscurity, though it continued to exist so late as 480 B.C. when Greece was invaded by the Persians under Xerxes54.

In Attica we can carry back our view not only to the age of the heroic monarchy but to the age which preceded it. The country, though it is, as we have seen, of small extent, and though it is not traversed by any continuous ranges of mountains, was originally peopled by a number of independent communities, each contained within a single village or small township: and it is probable that these little communities retained their independence till after the time of Homer; for Athens, which rose to greatness by subjugating them, is rarely mentioned in the Homeric poems, and never, I believe, in any passage which belongs to the poems as they were originally composed. In course of time however a powerful king arose at Athens, who succeeded in bringing the whole country under a single monarchy of the heroic type: and Thucydides tells us that in his own days the union of Attica under Athens was regularly celebrated at a public festival55.

The Spartans, instead of having one king, had two kings and two royal families56, so that their system of government may best be described as a dual heroic kingship. Of this government, and of the conquests made by the Spartans while they lived under it, I shall have more to say in the next chapter.

Of the other tribes in the prehistoric age we have no traditions: but Thucydides57 says without hesitation concerning the early Greeks in general that their governments were "hereditary kingly governments with limited prerogatives": and the same view, which was shared by all the later Greeks, falls in with the little that is known of the Greek peoples in the first two or three centuries of their history.

It is clear from many indications that the monarchical part of the old tribal constitutions was necessary or especially useful to the primitive Greek peoples so long as they were employed in making conquests or settlements of new territory, and no longer. In the prehistoric age the Athenians and all the Dorian peoples were conquering peoples: and all of them made their conquests under the leadership of kings. In the next age, which came between the heroic period and the beginning of Greek history in the proper sense of the word, the great majority of the Greek peoples had ceased to acquire new territory within Greece and had also ceased or were ceasing to be monarchically governed: two peoples, the Spartans and the Argives, were exceptional both in continuing to make territorial conquests and in still living under kingly rule.