Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 21

The earliest mention of Sicilian and Italian regions in literature is to be found in some later passages of the Odyssey, which should perhaps be referred to the eighth century. There we meet with the Sicels, and with the sland of Sicania; while Temesa, where Greek traders could buy Tuscan copper, has the distinction of being the first Italian place mentioned by name in a literary record. By the end of the seventh century Greek states stood thick on the east coast of Sicily and round the sweep of the Tarentine Gulf. These colonies naturally fall into three groups:

(1) The Euboean, which were both in Sicily and in Italy.

(2) The Achaean, which were altogether on Italian soil.

(3) The Dorian, which were, with few exceptions, in Sicily.

The chronology is uncertain, and we cannot say whether the island or the mainland was first colonised.

The oldest stories of the adventures of Odysseus were laid, as we have seen, in the half-explored regions of the Black Sea. Nothing shows more impressively the life of this poetry, and the power it had won over the hearts of the Greek folks, than the fact that when the navigation of the Italian and Sicilian seas began, these adventures were transferred from the east to the west; and in the further growth of this cycle of poems a new mythical geography was adopted. At a time when the Greeks knew so little of Italy that the southern promontories could be designated as “sacred islands”, the straits of Messana were identified with Scylla and Charybdis, Lipara became the island of Aeolus, the home of the Cyclopes was found in the fiery mount of Aetna. Then Scheria, the isle of the Phaeacians, was fancied to be Corcyra; an entrance to the underworld was placed at Cumae; and the rocks of the Sirens were sought near Sorrento. And not only did the first glimpses of western geography affect the transmutation of the Odyssey into its final shape, but the Odyssey reacted on the geography of the west. That the promontory of Circei in Latin territory bears the name of the sorceress of Colchis, is an evidence of the spell of Homeric song. Odysseus was not the only hero who was borne westward with Greek ships in the eighth century. Cretan Minos and Daedalus, for example, had links with Sicily. Above all, the earliest navigation of the western seas was ascribed to Heracles, who reached the limits of the land of the setting sun, and stood on the ledge of the world looking out upon the stream of Oceanus. From him the opposite cliffs which form the gate of the Mediterranean were called the Pillars of Heracles.

The earliest colony founded by Greek sailors in the western seas was said to have been Cyme on the coast of Campania. Tradition assigned to it an origin before 1000 BC, a date which modern criticism has decidedly rejected. But though we place its origin in the eighth century, the tradition that it was the earliest Greek city founded in the middle peninsula of the Mediterranean may possibly be true. It was at all events one of the oldest, and it had an unique position. Chalcis, Eretria, and Cyme a town on the eastern coast of Euboea, which at that time had some eminence but afterwards sunk into the obscurity of a village, joined together, and enlisted for their expedition some Graeans who dwelled on the opposite mainland in the neighbourhood of Tanagra. The colonisers settled first on the island of Pithecusae, and soon succeeded in establishing themselves on a rocky height which rises above the sea just where the Italian coast is about to turn sharply eastward to encircle the bay of Naples. The site was happily chosen. It was a strong post, and though there was no harbour, the strangers could haul up their ships on a stretch of sand below. Subsequently they occupied the harbour which was just inside the promontory, and established there the town of Dicaearchia, which afterwards became Puteoli; farther east they founded Naples, “the new city”.

The people in whose midst this outpost of Greek civilisation was planted were the Opicans, one of the chief branches of the Italic race. The colonists were eminently successful in their intercourse with the natives; and the solitary position of Cyme in these regions—for no Greek settlement could be made northward on account of the great Etruscan power, and there was no rival southward until the later plantation of Posidonia—made her influence both wide and noiseless. Her external history is uneventful; there are no striking wars or struggles to record; but the work she did holds an important and definite place in the history of European civilisation. To the Euboeans of Cyme we may say that we owe the alphabet which we use to-day, for it was from them that the Latins learned to write. The Etruscans also got their alphabet independently from the same masters, and, having modified it in certain ways to suit themselves, passed it onto the Oscans and Umbrians. Again, the Cymaeans introduced the neighbouring Italian peoples to a knowledge of the Greek gods and Greek religion. Heracles, Apollo, Castor, and Polydeuces became such familiar names in Italy that they came to be regarded as original Italian deities. The oracles of the Cymaean Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo, were believed to contain the destinies of Rome.

To Cyme, too, western Europe probably owes the name by which she calls Hellas and the Hellenes. The Greeks, when they first came into contact with Latins, had no common name; Hellenes, the name which afterwards united them, was as yet merely associated with a particular tribe. It was only natural that strangers should extend the name of the first Greeks with whom they came in contact to others whom they fell in with later, and so to all Greeks whatsoever. But the curious circumstance is that the settlers of Cyme were known, not by the name of Chalcis or Eretria or Cyme itself, but by that of Graia. Graii was the term which the Latins and their fellows applied to the colonists, and the name Graeci is a derivative of a usual type from Graii. It was doubtless some trivial accident which ruled that we to-day call Hellas “Greece”, instead of knowing it by some name derived from Cyme, Eretria, or Chalcis. The west has got its “Greece” from an obscure district in Boeotia; Greece itself got its “Hellas “from a small territory in Thessaly. This was accidental. But it was no accident that western Europe calls Greece by a name connected with that city in which Greeks first came into touch with the people who were destined to civilise western Europe and rule it for centuries.

The next settlement of the Euboean Greeks was on Sicilian, not Italian, ground. The island of Sicily is geographically a continuation of Italy—just as the Peloponnesus is a continuation of the great eastern peninsula; but its historical importance depends much more on another geographical fact. It is the centre of the Mediterranean; it parts the eastern from the western waters. It has been thus marked out by nature as a meeting-place of nations; and the struggle between European and Asiatic peoples, which has been called the “Eternal Question”, has been partly fought out on Sicilian soil. There has been in historical times no native Sicilian power. The greatness of the island was due to colonisation—not migration—from other lands. Lying as a connecting link between Europe and Africa, it attracted settlers from both sides; while its close proximity to Italy always rendered it an object of acquisition to those who successively ruled in that peninsula.

The earliest inhabitants of the island were the Sicans. They believed themselves to be autochthonous, and we have no record at what time they entered the island or whence they came or to what race they belonged. The nature of things makes it probable that they entered from Italy. From them the island was called Sicania. The next comers were the Sicels, of whom we can speak with more certainty. As we find Sicels in the toe of Italy, we know that tradition correctly described them as settlers from the Italian peninsula, and there is some slight evidence to show that they spoke the same language as that group of Italic peoples, to which the Latins belonged. The likeness of the names Sicel and Sican has naturally led to the view that these two folks were akin in race and language. But likeness of names is deceptive; and it is a remarkable fact that the Greeks, who were only too prone to build up theories on resemblances of words, always carefully distinguished the Sican from the Sicel as ethnically different. Still a connexion is possible, if we suppose that the Sicels were Sicans who remaining behind in Italy had in the course of centuries become Italicised by intercourse with the Latin and kindred peoples, and then, emigrating in their turn to the island, met without recognition the brethren from whom they had parted in the remote past. But all this is uncertain. The Sicels, however, wrested from the Sicans the eastern half of the island, which was thus cut up into two countries, Sicania in the west, Sicelia in the east. In the Odyssey we read of Sicania; perhaps the Greeks of Cyme knew it by this name. At a very early time Sicania was invaded by a mysterious people named Elymians, variously said to have come from Italy and from the north of Asia Minor. The probability is that they were of Iberian race. They occupied a small territory in the north-west of the island.

These were the three peoples who inhabited this miniature continent, soon about to become the battlefield of Greek and Phoenician. The Sicels were the most numerous and most important. The only Sican town of any significance in historical times was Hykkara on the north-west promontory. Minôa, originally Sican on the south coast, became Greek. Camicus, at some distance inland in the same region, was in early days an important stronghold. The Elymian settlements at Segesta and Eryx became of far greater importance than the Sican. The eastern half of the isle, the original Sicelia, was thickly set with Sicel fortresses from Cephaloedium (the modern Cefalu), at the centre of the northern coast, to Motyca, an inland town in the south-eastern corner. Among the most famous were Agyrium, Centuripa, Morgantina, and above all Henna.

At an early age merchants from Phoenicia planted factories on the coasts of the island. At first they did not make any settlements of a permanent kind,—any that could be called cities. For Sicily was to them only a house to call at, lying directly on their way to the land of the farthest west, when they went forth to win the golden treasures of Tarshish and planted their earliest colony, Gades, outside the straits which divide Europe from Africa. Their next colonies were on the coast of Africa over against Sicily, and this settlement had a decisive influence on the destinies of the island. The Phoenician trading-stations on the east coast of Sicily were probably outposts of old Phoenicia, but some at least of those in the west seem to have come from the new and nearer Phoenicia. The of Hippo and Utica, older than Carthage, were probably the parents of the more abiding Phoenician settlements in Sicily. In the east of the island the Phoenicians had no secure foothold. They were not able to dispossess the Sicel natives, or to make a home among them; they appeared purely in the guise of traders. Hence when the Greeks came and seriously set to work to plant true cities, the Phoenicians disappeared and left few traces to show that they had ever been there.

Sicilian, like Italian history, really opens with the coming of the Greeks. They came under the guidance of Chalcis and the auspices of Apollo. It was naturally on the east coast which faces Greece that the first Greek settlement was made, and it is to be noticed that of the coasts of Sicily the east is that which most resembles in character the coast-line of Greece. The site which was chosen by the Chalcidians, Naxos and the Ionians of Naxos who accompanied them, was not a striking one. A little tongue of land, north of Mount Aetna, very different from the height of Cyme, was selected for the foundation of Naxos. Here, as in the case of Cyme, the Chalcidians who led the enterprise surrendered the honour of naming the new city to their less prominent fellow-founders. The first of all the Greek towns of Sicily, Naxos was not destined to live for much more than three hundred years. It was be destroyed by the fire and lava of the dangerous mountain which dominated it. A sort of consecration was always attached to Naxos as the first homestead of the Hellenes in the island which was to become a brilliant part of Hellas. To Apollo Archegetes an altar was erected on the spot where the Greeks first landed,—driven, as ‘the legend told, by contrary winds, owing to Apollo’s dispensation, to the Sicilian shores. It was the habit of ambassadors from old Greece as soon as they arrived in Sicily to offer sacrifice on this altar. In the fertile plain south of Aetna the Chalcidians soon afterwards founded Catane close to the sea and protected by a low range of hills behind, but under the power of Aetna which was to unmake the place again and again; and inland Leontini at the south end of her plain between two hills, with an eastern and western acropolis. These sites, Leontini certainly if not Catane, were wrested from the Sicels. The Chalcidians also won possession of the north-east corner, and thus obtained command of the straits between the island and the mainland. Here Cymaeans and Chalcidians planted Zancle on a low rim of land, which resembles a reaping-hook and gave the place its name. The haven is formed by the curving blade; and when Zancle came in after-days to mint money she engraved on her coins a sickle representing her harbour and a dolphin floating within it. A hundred years later the city was transformed by the immigration of a company of Messenians, and ultimately the old local name was ousted in favour of Messana. From Zancle the Euboeans established the fortress of Mylae on the other side of the north-eastern promontory; and in the middle of the seventh century they founded Himera, the only Greek city on the northern coast, destined to live for scarce two centuries and a half, and then to be swept away by the Phoenician. It was important for Zancle that the land over against her, the extreme point of the Italian peninsula, should be in friendly hands, and therefore the men of Zancle incited their mother-city to found Rhegion; and in this foundation Messenians took part.

While this group of Chalcidian colonies was being formed in north-eastern Sicily, Dorian Greeks began to obtain a footing in south-eastern Sicily, which history decided should become the Dorian quarter. The earliest of the Dorian cities was also the greatest. Syracuse, destined to be the head of Greek Sicily, was founded by Corinthian emigrants under the leadership of Archias before the end of the eighth century. Somewhere about the same time Corinth also colonised Corcyra; the Ionian islands were half-way stations to the west. Which colony was the elder, we know not; tradition did not attempt to decide, for it placed both in the same year. But in both cases Corinth had to dispossess previous Greek settlers, and in both cases the previous settlers were Euboeans. Her colonists had to drive Eretrians from Corcyra and Chalcidians from Syracuse.

The great Haven of Syracuse, with its island and its hill, formed the most striking site on the east coast, and could not fail to invite the earliest colonists. Chalcidians occupied the island of Ortygia (Isle of quails) as it was called—they must have won it from the Sicel or possibly from the Phoenician—and held it long enough to associate it for ever with the name of a fountain in their old home, Arethusa. It is highly probable that the Chalcidian occupation took place very soon after that of Naxos, and it is possible that the Corinthians did not supersede the Chalcidians till many years later. But when they once held Syracuse, they effectually prevented any Chalcidian expansion south of Leontini.

At an early date Megarians also sailed into the West to find a new home. After various unsuccessful attempts to establish themselves, they finally built their city on the coast north of Syracuse, beside the hills of Hybla, and perhaps Sicel natives joined in founding the western Megara. It was the most northerly Dorian town on the east coast. But, like her mother, the Hyblaean Megara was destined to found a colony more famous than herself. In the middle of the seventh century the Megarians sent to their metropolis to invite cooperation in planting a settlement in the south-western part of the island. This settlement, which was to be the farthest outpost of Greek Sicily, was Selinus, the town named of wild celery as its own coins boasted, situated on a low hill on the coast. Megara had been occupied with the goodwill of the Sicel; Selinus was probably held at the expense of the Sican. In the meantime the south-eastern corner was being studded with Dorian cities, though they did not rise by any means so rapidly as the Chalcidian in the north. The Sicels seem to have offered a stouter resistance here. At the beginning of the seventh century, Gela—the name is Sicel—was planted by Rhodian colonists with Cretans in their train. This city was set on a long narrow hill which stretched between the sea and an inland plain. At a later time Acrae and Casmenae were founded by Syracuse. They were overshadowed by the greatness of the mother-city, and never attained as much independence as more distant Camarina which was planted from the same metropolis about half a century later.

The latest Dorian colony of Sicily was only less conspicuous than the first. The Geloans sought an oecist from their Rhodian metropolis and founded, half-way between their own city and Selinus, the lofty town of Acragas, which soon took the second place in Greek Sicily and became the rival of Syracuse. It was perched on a high hill near the sea-shore. The small poor haven was at some distance from the town; “flock-feeding Acragas” never became a maritime power. The symbols on its coins were the eagle and the crab.

In planting their colonies and founding their domination in Sicily, the Greeks had mainly to reckon with the Sicels. In their few foundations in the farther west they had to deal with the Sicans. These older inhabitants were forced to retire from the coasts, but they lived on in their fortresses on the inland hills. The island was too large and its character too continental to invite the newcomers to attempt to conquer the whole of it. With the Phoenicians the Greeks had no trouble. Their factories and temples had not taken root in the soil, and on the landing of a stranger who was resolved to take root they vanished. Traces of their worship sometimes remained, here as in the Aegean. But they did not abandon the western corner of the island, where the Greeks did not attempt to settle. There they maintained three places which now assumed the character of cities. These were Panormus, Solus, and Motya—the Haven, the Rock and the Island. Panormus or “All-haven” in a fertile plain is protected on the north by Mount Hercte, now the Pilgrim Mount, and on the east by Solus. Motya is on an island in a small bay on the west coast The Elymian country lay between Motya and Panormus. The chief town of the Elymians, Segesta (which in Greek mouths became Egesta), was essentially a city, while Eryx farther west, high above the sea but not actually on it, was their outpost of defence. On Eryx they worshipped some goddess of nature, soon to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite. The Elymians were on good terms with the Phoenicians, and western Sicily became a Phoenician corner. While the inland country was left to Sicel and Sican, the coasts were to be the scene of struggles between Phoenician and Greek. And here the natural position of the combatants was reversed, for the Asiatic power was in the west and the European in the east. In the seventh century this struggle was still a long way off, Sicily was still large enough to hold both the Greek and the Canaanite in peace.

The name by which we know the central of the three great peninsulas of the Mediterranean did not extend as far north as the Po in the time of Julius Caesar, and originally it covered a very small area indeed. In the fifth century Thucydides applies the name Italy to the modern Calabria—the western of the two extremities into which the peninsula divides. This extremity was inhabited, when the Greeks first visited it, by Sicels and Oenotrians. But the heel was occupied by peoples of that Illyrian race which had played, as we dimly see, a decisive part in the earliest history of the Greeks. The Illyrian was now astride of the Adriatic; he had reached Italy before the Greek. The Calabrians, who gave their name to the heel, were of Illyrian stock; and along with these were the Messapians, some of whose brethren on the other side of the water seem to have thrown in their fortunes with the Greeks and penetrated into Locris and Boeotia and perhaps into the Peloponnesus. It was on the seaboard of the Sicels and Oenotrians that the Achaeans of the Peloponnesus, probably towards the close of the eighth century, found a field for colonisation. It has been already remarked that the Ionian islands are a sort of stepping-stone to the west, and just as we find Corinthians settling in Corcyra, so we find Achaeans settling in Zacynthus. The first colonies which they planted in Italy were perhaps Sybaris and Croton, famous for their wealth and their rivalry. Sybaris on the river Crathis, in an unhealthy but most fruitful plain, soon extended her dominion across the narrow peninsula and, founding the settlements of Laos and Scidros on the western coast, commanded two seas. Thus having in her hands an overland route to the western Mediterranean, she could forward to her ports on the Tyrrhenian sea the valuable merchandise of the Milesians, whom Chalcidian jealousy excluded from the straits between Italy and Sicily. Thus both agriculture and traffic formed the basis of the remarkable wealth of Sybaris, and the result was an elaboration of luxury which caused the Sybarite name to pass into a proverb. Posidonia, famous for its temples and its roses, was another colony on the western sea, founded from Sybaris. It is said to have been formed by Troezenians who were driven out from that city by the Achaeans.

A good way to the south of Sybaris you come to Croton, before the coast, in its southern trend, has yet reached the Lacinian promontory, on which a stately temple of Hera formed a central place of worship for the Greek settlers in Italy. Unlike the other Achaean colonies, Croton had a good harbour, the only good harbour on the west side of the gulf, but her prosperity, like that of her fellows, rested not on maritime traffic but on the cultivation of land and the rearing of cattle. The Delphic god seems to have taken a more than wonted interest in the foundation of this city, if we may judge from the Delphic tripod which appears on its earliest coins. Like Sybaris, Croton widened its territory and planted colonies of its own. On the Tyrrhenian sea, Terina and Temesa were to Croton what Laos and Scidros were to Sybaris.

Caulonia, perhaps also a Crotoniate settlement, was the most southerly Achaean colony and was the neighbour of the western Locri. This town was founded in the territory of the Sicels, it is not certain by which of the three Locrian states; perhaps it was a joint enterprise of all three. It was agricultural, like its Achaean neighbours, and like them it pushed over to the western sea and founded Medma and Hipponium on the other coast.

The Achaeans and Locrians might quarrel among themselves, but they had more in common with each other than either had with the Dorians, and we may conveniently include Locri in the Achaean group. Thus the southern coast of Italy would have been almost a homogeneous circle if a Dorian colony had not been established in a small sheltered bay at the extreme north point of the gulf to which it gave the name it still bears, Taras or Tarentum. Taras was remarkable as the only foreign settlement ever made by the greatest of all the Dorian peoples. The town—called, like Sybaris, after the name of a neighbouring stream—was founded by the Partheniae, a name which has not yet been explained. There are reasons for thinking that these first founders were pre-Dorian Greeks from the Peloponnesus. But Laconian settlers occupied the place at some unknown date and made of it a Dorian city. A legend then grew up which connected the Partheniae with Sparta, and a historical episode, taking various forms, was manufactured. It was said that in a war with the Messenians, when the Spartans were for many years absent from home, the women bore sons to Helots, and that this progeny, called Partheniae or “Maidens’ Children”, conspired against the state, and being driven out of the country were directed by the oracle to settle at Taras. The hero Phalanthus, who seems to have been originally a local sea-god, degraded to the rank of a hero at the coming of Poseidon, was worshipped by the Tarentines, and his ride overseas on a dolphin was represented on their coins. The framers of the story of the Partheniae made him the leader of the colonists from Laconia.

The prosperity of the Tarentines depended partly on the cultivation of a fruitful territory, but mainly on their manufacturing industry. Their fabrics and dyed wools became renowned, and their pottery was widely diffused. Taras in fact must be regarded as an industrial rather than as an agricultural state. Her position brought her into contact with inhabitants of the Calabrian peninsula, and she had a foe in the Messapian town of Brentesion. She founded the colonies of Callipolis and Hydrus on the eastern coast where she had no Greek rivals. But on the other side, her possible advance was foreseen and hindered by the prudence of the Sybarites. They feared lest the Dorian city might creep round the coast and occupy the fertile lands which are watered by the Bradanos and the Siris. So they induced the Achaeans of old Greece to found a colony at Metapontion on the Bradanos, a place which had derived its name from Messapian settlers; and this the most northerly of the Achaean cities flourished as an agricultural community and cut off the westward expansion of Taras. But in the meantime another rival seized the very place from which the Achaeans had desired to exclude the Dorians. In the middle of the seventh century Colophonians planted a colony at Siris, and this Ionian state threatened to interrupt the Achaean line of cities and cut off Metapontion from her sisters. This solitary instance of an Ionian attempt to found a colony at this period in these regions is rendered interesting through the probability that the poet Archilochus took part in the expedition. But the attempt seems to have failed. There are reasons for thinking, though the evidence is not clear, that the place was seized by its Achaean neighbours and became an Achaean town. Siris, like Sybaris, Croton, and Locri, had her helpmate, though not a daughter, on the Tyrrhenian sea. By the persuasion of common interest she formed a close connexion with Pyxus; the two cities issued common coins; and perhaps organised a rival overland route.

Thus the western coast of the Tarentine gulf was beset with a line of Achaean cities, flanked at one extremity by Western Locri, on the other by Dorian Taras. The common feature, which distinguished them from the cities settled by the men of Chalcis and Corinth, was that their wealth depended on the mainland, not on the sea. Their rich men were landowners, not merchants; it was not traffic but rich soil that had originally lured them to the far west. The unwarlike Sicels and Oenotrians seem to have laid no obstacles in the way of their settlements and to have submitted to their rule. The Iapygians and Messapians of Calabria were of different temper, and it is significant that it was men from warlike Sparta who succeeded in establishing Taras.

These cities, with their dependencies beyond the hills, on the shores of the Tyrrhenian sea, came to be regarded as a group, and the country came to be called Great Hellas. We might rather have looked to find it called Great Achaia, by contrast to the old Achaean lands in Greece; but here, as in other cases, it is the name of a lesser folk which prevails. The Hellenes, who had in earlier days accompanied the Achaeans from their mountain dwellings in the north to their southern homes on the sea-coast, had also gone forth with them to found new cities in the west; and here the Hellenic name rose to celebrity and honour. It was no small thing in itself that the belt of Greek settlements on the Tarentine gulf should come to be called Great Hellas. But it was a small thing compared with the extension of the name Hellenes to designate all peoples of Greek race. There was nothing to lead the Greeks of their own accord to fix on Hellenes as a common name; if they had sought such a name deliberately, their natural choice would have been Achaeans, which Homer had already used in a wide sense. The name must have been given to them from without. Just as the barbarian peoples in central Italy had taken hold of the name of the Graes, so the barbarians in the southern peninsulas took hold of the name of the Hellenes, and used it to denote all settlers and strangers of the same race. Such a common name, applied by barbarian lips to them all alike, brought home to Greek traders the significance of their common race; and they adopted the name themselves as the conjugate of barbarians. So the name Hellenes, obscure when it had gone forth to the west, travelled back to the east in a new sense, and won its way into universal use. The fictitious ancestor Hellen became the forefather of the whole Greek race; and the fictitious ancestors of the Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians were all derived from him. The original Hellenes lost their separate identity as completely as the original Aeolians and Ionians had lost theirs; but their name was destined to live for ever in the speech of men, while those of their greater fellows had passed into a memory.