Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 12

The colonisation of the Asiatic coasts and islands extended over some hundreds of years, and it was doubtless accelerated and promoted at certain stages of its progress by changes and dislocations which were happening in the mother country. The ultimate cause of these movements, which affected almost the whole of Greece from north to south, was probably the pressure of the Illyrians; but we have no means of determining how these movements were related to one another as cause and effect; so that, although we may suspect their interdependence, it is safer to treat them as separate and distinct.

The downward pressure of the Illyrians was fatal to Aetolia. In the Homeric poems we have a reflected glimpse of the prosperity of the Aetolian coast-land. We see that “Pleuron by the sea and rocky Calydon” and the other strong cities of that region were abreast of the civilisation of the heroic age; and the Aetolian myth of Meleager and the hunting of the Calydonian boar became a part of the heritage of the national legend of Greece. Maritime Aetolia was then a land of wine; its pride in its vineyards is displayed in the name of its mythic kings. But in the later ages of Greek history all this is changed. We find Aetolia regarded as a half barbarous country, the abode of men who speak indeed a Greek tongue, but have lagged ages and ages behind the rest of Greece in science and civilization. And we find the neighboring countries in the same case. Epirus, or the greater part of it, had been hellenized when the worship of Zeus was introduced at Dodona, to become famous and venerable throughout the Greek world. Suddenly it lapses into comparative barbarism, and the sanctuary of Dodona remains a lonely outpost. The explanation of this falling away is the irruption and conquest of Illyrian invaders. It was not through laziness or degeneracy, or through geographical disadvantages, that the Greeks of Epirus and Aetolia fell out of the race; it was because they were overwhelmed by a rude and barbarous people, who swamped their civilization instead of assimilating it. The Aetolians and Epirots of history are mainly of Illyrian stock.

This invasion naturally drove some of the Greek inhabitants to seek new homes elsewhere. It was easy to cross the gulf, and Aetolian emigrants made their way to the river Peneus, where they settled and took to themselves the name of Eleans or “Dalesmen”. They won dominion over the Epeans, the first Greek settlers and gradually extended their power to the Alpheus. Their land was a tract of downs with a harbourless coast, and they never became a maritime power. The people in this western plain of the peninsula were distinguished by their veneration of Pelops, a god who, though his name is Greek, perhaps represents a native deity. His worship had taken deep root at Pisa on the banks of the river Alpheus. It was a spot which in a later age, when the Greeks had spread overseas into distant lands, was to become one of the holiest seats of Greek religion, where the greatest of the Aryan, the supremest of the Hellenic, gods was to draw to his sacred precinct men from all quarters of the Greek world, to do him honour with sacrifices and games. But even when Pisa had come to be illustrious as Olympia, even when the temple and altar of the Olympian Zeus had eclipsed all other associations of the place, Pelops still received his offering. He was degraded indeed to the rank of a hero—a fate which befell many other old deities to whom early legend had given no place in Olympus among the divine sons and daughters of Zeus. But though Pelops himself was remembered only as a legendary figure, except in one or two places like Olympia where his old worship survived, his name is living still in one of the most familiar geographical names of Greece. It is in the regions near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, where the existence of the bridge at Corinth may be easily unremembered, that men would be most tempted to call the great peninsula an island. And so, when Pelops was still widely worshipped, the most honoured god on the western coast, the name “island of Pelops” originated on that side—not, probably, in the peninsula itself, but on the opposite shores, in Aetolia for example; and then it made its way into universal use and clung henceforward to southern Greece.

The pressure of the Illyrians in Epirus led to two movements of great consequence, the Thessalian and the Boeotian migration. There is nothing to show decisively that these two movements happened at the same time or were connected with each other. A folk named Petthăloi, but called by men of other dialects Thessaloi, crossed the bills and settled in the western corner of the land which is bounded by Pelion and Pindus. They gained the upper hand and spread their sway over northern Argos. They drove the Achaeans southwards into the mountains of Phthia, and henceforward these Achaeans play no part of any note in the history of Greece. The Thessalian name soon spread over the whole country, which is called Thessaly to the present day. Crannon, Pagasae, Larisa, and Pherae became the seats of lords who reared horses and governed the surrounding districts. The conquered people were reduced to serfdom and were known as the Labourers they cultivated the soil, at their own risk, paying a fixed amount to their lords; and they had certain privileges; they could not be sold abroad or arbitrarily put to death. But they gained one victory over their conquerors; the Achaean language prevailed. The Thessalians gave up their own idiom and learned, not indeed without modifying, the speech of their subjects, so that the dialect of historic Thessaly bears a close resemblance to the tongue which we find spoken by the Achaean settlers in Asia Minor. When they had established themselves in the lands of the Peneus, the Thessalians pressed northward against the Perrhaebi, eastward against the Magnetes, and southward against the Achaeans of Phthia, and reduced them all to tributary subjection. We know almost nothing of the history of the Thessalian kingdoms; in later times we find the whole country divided into four great divisions: Thessaliotis, in the south-west, the quarter which may have been the first settlement and home of the Thessalian invaders; Phthiotis of the Achaeans in the south; Pelasgiotis, a name which records the survival of the Pelasgians, one of the older peoples; and Histiaeotis, the land of the Histiaeans, who have no separate identity in history. All the lordships of the land were combined in a very loose political organisation, which lay dormant in times of peace; but through which, to meet any emergency of war, they could elect a common captain, with the title of tăgos.

But all the folk did not remain to fall under the thraldom imposed by the new lords. A portion of the Achaeans migrated southward to the Peloponnesus. The Achaean wanderers were probably accompanied by their neighbours the Hellenes, who lived on the upper waters of the river Spercheus. The Achaeans and Hellenes together founded settlements along the strip of coast which forms the northern side of the Corinthian Gulf; and the whole country was called Achaea. Thus there were two Achaean lands, the old Achaea in the north, now shrunk into the mountains of Phthia, and the new Achaea in the south; while in the land which ought to have been the greatest Achaea of all, the Asiatic land in which the poetry of Europe took shape, the Achaean name was merged in the less significant title of Aeolis. There was also apparently a movement to Euboea, in consequence of the Thessalian invasion: according to tradition, Histiaea in the north of the island and Eretria in the centre owed their origin to settlers from Thessaly, and there is independent evidence that there was truth in this tradition.

The lands of Helicon and Cithaeron experienced a similar shock to that which unsettled and changed the lands of Olympus and Othrys; but the results were not the same. The old home of the Boeotians was in Mount Boeon in Epirus; the mountain gave them their name. Their dialect was probably closely akin to the original dialect of the Thessalians, being marked by certain characters which enable us to distinguish roughly a north-western group of dialects from those spoken by the earliest invaders of Greece. Coming from the west, or north, the Boeotians first occupied places in the west of the land which they were to make their own. From Chaeronea and Coronea, they won Thebes which was held by an old folk called the Cadmeans. Thence they sought to spread their power over the whole land. They spread their name over it, for it was called Boeotia, but they did not succeed in winning full domination as rapidly as the Thessalians succeeded in Thessaly. The rich lords of Orchomenus preserved their independence for hundreds of years, and it was not till the sixth century that anything like a Boeotian unity was established. The policy of the Boeotian conquerors, who were perhaps comparatively few in number, was unlike that of the Thessalians; the conquered communities were not reduced to serfdom. On the other hand they did not, like the Thessalians, adopt or adapt the speech of the older inhabitants; but the idioms of the conquerors and conquered coalesced and formed a new Boeotian dialect.

The Boeotian conquest, there can be little doubt, caused some of the older peoples to wander forth to other lands; and it may explain the participation of the Cadmeans and the men of Lebadea and others in some of the Ionian settlements. Moreover the coming of the Boeotians probably unsettled some of the neighbouring peoples, and drove them to change their abodes.

West of Boeotia, in the land of the Phocians amid the regions of Mount Parnassus, there were dislocations of a less simple kind. Hither came the Dorians, who, though we cannot set our finger on their original home, belonged to the same “north-western” group of the Greek race as the Thessalians and Boeotians. For a while, it would seem, a large space of mountainous country between Mount Oeta and the Corinthian Gulf, including a great part of Phocis, became Dorian land. But it is not certain that the Dorians, when they came, had any purpose of making an abiding home in these regions; they were perhaps only travelling to find a goodlier country in the south, and were unable to cross to the Peloponnesus, because the Achaeans barred the way. At all events the greater part of them soon went forth to seek fairer abodes in distant places. But a few remained behind in the small basin-like district between Mount Oeta and Mount Parnassus, where they preserved the illustrious Dorian name throughout the course of Grecian history in which they never played a part. It would seem that the Dorians also took possession of Delphi, the “rocky threshold” of Apollo, and planted some families there who devoted themselves to the service of the god. After the departure of the Dorian wanderers, the Phocians could breathe again; but Doris was lost to them, and Delphi, which, as we shall see, they often essayed to recover. And the Phocians had to reckon with other neighbours. In later times we find the Locrians split up into three divisions, and the Phocians wedged in between. One division, the Ozolian Locrians, are on the Corinthian Gulf, to the west of Phocis; the other two divisions are on the Euboean sea, to the north-east of Phocis. The Ozolians were one of the most backward peoples of Greece, and perhaps we may ascribe their retarded civilisation to the same cause which ruined Aetolia—an influx of Illyrian barbarians. This would at the same time account for the Locrian dislocation. The Ozolian was the original Locris; and some of its inhabitants, when the danger came, sought new abodes on the northern sea. But they were unable to hold a continuous strip, as the Phocians wanted an outlet to the sea, and so they were severed into the Locrians of Thronion and the Locrians of Opus.

The departure of the Dorians from the regions of Parnassus was probably gradual, and it was accomplished by sea. They built ships —perhaps the name of Naupactus, “the place of the ship-building”, is a record of their ventures; and they sailed round the Peloponnesus to the south-eastern parts of Greece. The first band of adventurers brought a new element to Crete, the island of many races; others settled in Thera, and in Melos. Others sailed away eastward, beyond the limits of the Aegean, and found a home on the southern coast of Asia Minor, where, surrounded by barbarians and forgotten by the Greek world, they lived a life apart, taking no share in the history of Hellas. But they preserved their Hellenic speech, and their name, the Pamphylians, recorded their Dorian origin, being the name of one of the three tribes by which the Dorians were everywhere recognised.

The next conquests of the Dorians were in the Peloponnesus. They had found it impossible to attack on the north and west; they now essayed it on the south and east. There were three distinct conquests—the conquest of Laconia, the conquest of Argolis, the conquest of Corinth. The Dorians took possession of the rich vale of the Eurotas, overthrew the lords of Amyclae, and, keeping their own Dorian stock pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects. We cannot say how far the fusion between the Hellene and the pre-Hellenic folk had progressed before the Dorian came; but we may suppose that the princes of Amyclae were then of Greek stock. It seems probable that the Dorian invaders who subdued Laconia were more numerous than the Dorian invaders elsewhere. The eminent quality which distinguished the Dorians from other branches of the Greek race was that which we call “character”; and it was in Laconia that this quality most fully displayed and developed itself, for here the Dorian seems to have remained a pure Dorian. How far the Laconian dialect represents the original dialect of the Dorians we cannot decide. But the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood.

In Argolis the course of things ran otherwise. The invaders, who landed under a king named Temenos, had doubtless a hard fight; but their conquest took the shape not of subjection but of amalgamation. The Argive state was indeed organised on the Dorian system, with the three Dorian tribes—the Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes; but otherwise no traces of the conquest remained. It is to the time of this conquest that the overthrow of Mycenae is probably to be referred; and here, as in the case of Amyclae, it seems probable that the old native dynasty had already given place to Greek lords. Certain it is that both Mycenae and Tiryns were destroyed suddenly and set on fire. Henceforward Argos under her lofty citadel was to be queen of the Argive plain. Greater indeed was the feat which the Dorians wrought in their southern conquest, the feat of making lowly Sparta, without citadel or wall, the queen of the Laconian vale.

Dorian ships were also rowed up the Saronic Gulf. It was the adventure of a prince whom the legend calls Errant, the son of Rider. He landed in the Isthmus and seized the high hill of Acrocorinth, the key of the peninsula. This was the making of Corinth. Here, as in Argolis, there was no subjection, no distinction between the conquerors and the conquered. The geographical position of Corinth between her seas determined for her people a career of commerce, and her history shows that the Dorians had the qualities of bold and skillful traders. At first Corinth seems to have been dependent on Argos, whose power was predominant in the eastern Peloponnesus for more than three hundred years.

The Aegean civilization declined and seemed almost to die out in the Peloponnesus, in Thessaly, and in Boeotia. It would be rash to ascribe this entirely to the havoc of war brought upon these countries by the Dorian, Thessalian, and Boeotian conquests, or to the rude spirit of the conquerors. These causes were indeed operative, and it is probable that they were especially effective in Laconia; but it must be remembered that in Attica too, where no invaders came, there was a brake with the old civilisation. We are not in a position to attempt to explain the change; but we may believe that more causes than one were at work. We may suspect that the civilisation of the Peloponnesus and the western Aegean was already declining at the time of the Dorian conquest, and that the conquest was facilitated by the decline. And we may see one cause of the decline in the Achaean and Ionian movements from the western to the eastern shores of the Aegean. This migration, beginning before, and continuing after, the Dorian conquest, must have taken some of the most quickening and vigorous elements from the older country. Moreover there was a decline of the Aegean sea-power about the time of the Dorian invasion; and trade was beginning to pass, not entirely but partially, into the hands of the merchants of Phoenicia. On the other hand the break in civilisation might easily be exaggerated; and it is well to bear in mind such a striking point of continuity in art as the derivation of the entablature of the Doric temple, with its characteristic arrangement of metopes and triglyphs, from the frieze of the heroic age, like that which decorated the palace of Tiryns. The Doric column can also be derived from the column of the Mycenaean builders; and the plan of the Greek temple corresponds to the arrangement of hall and portico in the palaces of the heroic age.

From Argos the Dorians made two important settlements in the north, on the river Asopus—Sicyon on its lower, and Phlius on its upper, banks. And beyond Mount Geraneia, another Dorian city arose, we know not how, on the commanding hill which looks down upon the western shore of Salamis. Its name was Nisa. But the hill had been crowned by a royal palace in the heroic age, and so the place came to be called Megara, “the Palace”, and in historical times no other name was known, though the old name lurked in the name of the harbour Nisaea. In later days, Dorian Megara was associated politically with the Peloponnesus rather than with northern Greece, but in early days it was reckoned as part of Boeotia, separated though it was from that country by the western portion of the massive range of Cithaeron.

The island, whose conical mountain in the midst of the Saronic waters is visible to all the coasts around, was also destined to a Dorian land. Aegina was conquered by Dorian settlers from Epidaurus, but the conquest was perhaps not effected for two hundred years or more after the subjugation of Argolis. In Aegina too there was doubtless a fusion of the old inhabitants and the new settlers; and we may be sure that it had been before, as it was after, the change, an island of bold and adventurous sailors.

In Crete and Laconia we meet, as we shall see, some peculiar institutions, which seem to have been characteristically Dorian, but are not found in Argos or Corinth. Yet all the Dorian settlements remembered their common Dorian origin; and the conquerors of Laconia at least looked with emotions of filial piety towards the little obscure Doris in the highlands of Parnassus, as their mother-country. The evidence of the three Dorian tribes might help to maintain the consciousness of a Dorian section of Greece; but it was perhaps the rise of a new Doris, on the other side of the Aegean, that elevated the Dorian name into permanent national significance.

The conquest of the eastern Peloponnesus was followed by a second Dorian expansion beyond the seas and a colonisation of the Asiatic coast, to the south of the Ionic settlements. We have already seen how these Lelegian lands were being occupied by a new people, the Carians, who spread down to the border of Lycia and pressed the older inhabitants into the promontory which faces the island of Calymna. Here the Leleges participated in the latest stages of the Aegean civilisation, as we know by the pottery and other things which have been discovered at Termera in chamber-tombs. These round tombs, not hewn out of the earth, like the vaulted sepulchres of Mycenae, but built above ground, are found in many parts of the peninsula and remain as the most striking memorial of he Leleges.

The bold promontories below Miletus, the islands of Cos and Rhodes were occupied by colonists from Argolis, Laconia, Corinth, and Crete. On the mainland Halicarnassus was the most important Dorian settlement, but it was formed in concert with the Carian natives, and was half Carian. This new Doris eclipsed in fame, and shed a new lustre on, the old Doris under Mount Oeta; all the settlements were independent, but they kept alive their communion of interest and sentiment by the common worship of the Triopian Apollo. The Carians were a vigorous people. They impressed themselves upon their land, and soon men began to forget that it had not been always Caria. They took to the sea, and formed a maritime power of some strength, so that in later ages a tradition was abroad that there was once upon a time a Carian sea-supremacy, though no one could mention anything that it achieved. The Carians also claimed to have made contributions to the art of war by introducing shield-handles, and the crested helmet, and the emblazoning of shields—claims which we cannot test.

The Greek fringe of western Asia Minor was complete. It was impossible for Doris to creep round the corner and join hands with Pamphylia; for the Lycians presented an insuperable barrier. The Lycians were not a folk of Aryan speech, as a widely-spread error supposes them to have been; their language is related to the Carian. Their proper name was Trmmili; but the name Lycian seems to have been given them by others as well as by the Greeks who recognised in the chief Tremilian deity their own Apollo Lykios. But, though Lycia was not colonised, the Aegean was now entirely within the Greek sphere, excepting only its northern margin, where Greek enterprise in the future was to find a difficult field. It is important to observe that the process by which Asiatic Greece was created differs in character from the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. The settlements of Ionia and Doris are examples of colonisation. Bands of settlers went forth from their homes to find new habitations for themselves, but they left a home-country behind them. The Dorian movements, on the other hand, partake of the character of a folk-wandering. The essential fact is that a whole people dispersed to seek new fields and pastures. For the paltry remnant which remained in the sequestered nook beyond Parnassus could not be called the parent-people except by courtesy; the people, as a whole, had gone elsewhere.

Before the completion of the Greek occupation of the western coast of Asia Minor, another migration left the shores of the Peloponnesus to seek a more distant home. Cyprus, an island whose geographical position marks it out to be contested between three continents, was now to receive European settlers. We have seen that throughout the bronze age it played an important part in supplying the Aegean countries with copper, but though it imported Aegean pottery it had lagged behind the Aegean civilisation. It was destined, however, to play a greater part in the world’s debate as a wrestling-ground between the European and the Asiatic; and the first Europeans who went forth for the struggle were Peloponnesian Greeks whom, we may expect, the events of the Dorian invasion incited to wander. Much about the same time the Phoenicians also began to plant settlements in the island, mainly in the centre—Amathus, Cition, Idalion, Tamassus, Lapathus—and some places seem to have been colonized jointly by Phoenicians and Greeks, just as on the coast of Asia Minor Greeks and Carians mingled. The Greeks brought their Aegean civilization, now in a decadent stage, with them, and abundant relics of it have been found. But a new Cypriot culture arose out of the intermingling of the two races; and the Greeks, under Phoenician influence, became so zealous in the worship of Aphrodite that she was universally known as the Cyprian goddess.

The settlers in Cyprus spoke the Arcadian dialect, but this does not prove that their old homes were in Arcadia. Before the Dorians came and developed new dialects, the Arcadian speech with but slight variations prevailed in the coast-lands as well as in the centre of the peninsula; and some of the Cypriot Greeks went forth from Laconia and Argolis. Some sailed from Salamis in the Attic bay and gave their name to Salamis in Cyprus. The colonists in their distant island might pride themselves on taking a step in advance of the rest of the Greek world—but it was a step which they had better have left untaken. They found there a mode of writing, in which each syllable of a word was represented by a sign. This syllabic system, which had been borrowed from the Hittites, was ill-adapted to express the Greek language; but the colonists adapted it to their use, and were thus able to write many years sooner than their fellow Greeks. But nothing is clumsier than a Greek writing in the Cypriot character, and it would have been better if they had waited longer and learned with the rest of their race the use of a finer instrument.

As for the chronology of all these movements which went to the making of historical Greece, we must be content with approximate limits:—

13th-10th centuries:

Achaean colonization

Fall of Troy

Beginnings of Ionian colonization

Thessalian conquest

Boeotian conquest

Dorian conquest of Crete and islands

Dorian conquest of eastern Peloponnesus

11th century:

Colonization of Cyprus

10th century:

Continuation of Ionian colonization

Dorian colonization of Asia Minor