Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 22

The age of the aristocratic republics saw the face of the Greek world completely transformed. The colonial expansion of Greece eastward and westward was itself part of this transformation, but it also helped signally to bring about other changes. For, while the colonies were politically independent of their mother-states, they reacted in many ways on the mother-country.

We have seen how the system of family property was favourable to colonial enterprise. But the colonists, who had suffered under that system were not likely to introduce it in their new settlements, and thus the institution of personal landownership was probably first established and regulated in the colonies. Their example reacted on the mother-country, where other natural causes were also gradually undermining the family system. In the first place, as the power of the state grew greater the power of the family grew less; and when the head of the state, whether king or republican government, was felt as a formidable authority, the prestige of the head of the family, overshadowed by the power of the state, became insensibly weaker. In the second place, it was common to assign a portion of an estate to one member of the family, to manage and enjoy the undivided use of it; and although it did not become his and he had no power of disposing of it, yet the natural tendency would have been to allow it on his death to pass to his son on the same conditions. It is clear that such a practice tended to the ultimate establishment of personal proprietorship of the soil. Again, side by side of the undivided family estate, personal properties were actually acquired. At this period there was much wild unallotted land, “which wild beasts haunt”, especially on the hill-slopes, and when a man of energy reclaimed a portion of this land for tillage, the new fields became his own, for they had belonged to no man. We can thus see generally how inevitable it was that the old system should disappear and the large family estates break up into private domains; but the change was not accomplished by legislation, and the gradual process by which it was brought about is withdrawn from our eyes. It was only when private landownership had become an established fact, that the law came in and recognised it by regulating sales of land and allowing men to bequeath it freely.

The Boeotian poet Hesiod has given us a picture of rural life in Greece at this period. He was a husbandman himself near Ascra, where his father, who had come as a stranger from Cyme in Aeolis, had put under cultivation a strip of waste land on the slopes of Helicon. The farm was divided between his two sons, Perses and Hesiod, but in unequal shares; and Hesiod accuses Perses of winning the larger moiety by bribing the lords of the district. But Perses managed his farm badly and it did not prosper. Hesiod wrote his poem the Works to teach such unthrifty farmers as his brother true principles of agriculture and economy. His view of life is profoundly gloomy, and suggests a condition of grave social distress in Boeotia. This must have been mainly due to the oppression of the nobles, “gift-devouring” princes as he calls them. The poet looks back to the past with regret. The golden age, the silver, and the bronze, have all gone by, and the age of the heroes who fought at Troy; and mankind is now in the iron age, and “will never cease by day or night from weariness and woe”. “Would that I did not live in this generation, would that I had died before, or were born hereafter!” The poem gives minute directions for the routine of the husbandman’s work, the times and tides of sowing and reaping, and the other labours of the field, the fashion of the implements of tillage; and all this is accompanied by maxims of proverbial wisdom.

Apart from the value of his poem as a social picture, Hesiod has a great significance as the first spokesman of the common folk. In the history of Europe, his is the first voice raised from among the toiling classes and claiming the interest of mankind in their lot. It is a voice indeed of acquiescence, counselling fellow-toilers to make the best of an evil case; the stage of revolt has not yet been reached. But the grievances are aired, and the lords who wield the power are exhorted to deal just judgments, that the land may prosper. The new poet is, in form and style, under the influence of the Homeric poems, but he is acutely conscious that he is striking new notes and has new messages for men. He comes forward, unlike Homer, in his own person; he contrasts himself with Homer when he claims that the Muses can teach truth as well as beautiful fiction. In his other poem, the Theogony, he tells us that the daughters of Zeus taught Hesiod as he fed sheep on the hill-sides of Helicon; they gave him for staff a branch of bay. The staff was now the minstrel’s emblem; for the epic poems were no longer sung to the lyre, but were recited by the “rhapsode” standing with a staff in his hand. Then the Muses breathed into the shepherd of Ascra the wizard power of declaring the future and the past, and set him the task of singing the race of the blessed gods. In the Theogony he performs this task. He sings how the world was made, the gods and the earth, the rivers and the ocean, the stars and the heaven; how in infinite space which was at the beginning there arose Earth and Tartarus and Love the cosmic principle; and it is notable how he introduces amongst the eldest-born powers of the world such abstractions as love itself, memory, sleep. These speculations on the origin of the universe, and the attempt to work up the popular myths into a system, mark a new stage in the intellectual development of Greece. The Theogony produced a whole school of bards, who merged their identity under the name of Hesiod; and, as we have seens, these Hesiodic poems had a decisive influence in moulding the ideas of the Greeks as to the early history of their race.

Boeotia was always an unenterprising country of husbandmen, and Hesiod had no sympathy with trade or foreign venture, though his father had come from Aeolis. But the growth of trade was the most important fact of the times, and here too the colonies reacted on the mother-country. By enlarging the borders of the Greek world they invited and facilitated the extension of Greek trade and promoted the growth of industries. Hitherto the Greeks had been mainly an agricultural and pastoral people; many of them were now becoming industrial. They had to supply their western colonies with oil and wool, with metal and pottery, and they began to enter into serious competition with the Phoenician trader and to drive eastern goods from the market.

Greek trade moved chiefly along water-ways, and this is illustrated by the neglect of road-making in Greece. There were no paved roads, even in later times, except the Sacred Ways to frequented sanctuaries like that from Athens to Eleusis and Delphi, or that from the sea-coast to Olympia. Yet the Greeks were still timorous navigators, and it was deemed hazardous to sail even in the most familiar waters, except in the late summer. Hesiod expresses in vivid verses the general fear of the sea: “For fifty days after the solstice, till the end of the harvest, is the tide for sailing; then you will not wreck your ship, nor will the sea wash down your crew, unless Poseidon or Zeus wills their destruction. In that season winds are steady and Ocean kind; with mind at rest, launch your ship and stow your freight; but make all speed to return home, and await not the new wine and the rain of the vintage-tide, when the winter approaches, and the terrible South-wind stirs the waves, in fellowship with the heavy autumnal rain of Zeus, and makes the sea cruel”. About this time, however, an important advance was made in seacraft by the discovery of the anchor.

Seafaring states found it needful to build warships for protection against pirates. The usual type of the early Greek warship was the penteconter or “fifty-oar”, a long, narrow galley with twenty-five benches, on each of which two oarsmen sat. The penteconter hardly came into use in Greece before the eighth century. The Homeric Greeks had only smaller vessels of twenty oars, but we can see in the Homeric poems the penteconter coming within their ken as a strange and wonderful thing. The ocean deity, Briareos, called by the name of the Aegean, appears in the Iliad; and he is probably no other than the new racer of the seas, sped by a hundred hands. In the Odyssey the Phaeacians, who are the kings of seacraft, have ships of fifty oars. But before the end of the eighth century a new idea revolutionised shipbuilding in Phoenicia. Vessels were built with two rows of benches, one above the other, so that the number of oarsmen and the speed were increased without adding to the length of the ship. The “bireme”, however, never became common in Greece, for the Phoenicians had soon improved it into the “trireme”, by the superposition of another bank of oars. The trireme, propelled by 170 rowers, was ultimately to come into universal use as the regular Greek warship, though for a long time after its first introduction by the Corinthians the old penteconters were still generally used; but the unknown shipwright who invented the bireme deserves the credit of the new idea. Whatever naval battles were fought in the seventh century were fought mainly, we may be sure, with penteconters. But penteconters and triremes alike were affected by the new invention of the bronze ram on the prow, a weapon of attack which determined the future character of Greek naval warfare.

The Greeks believed that the first regular sea-fight between two Greek powers was fought before the middle of the seventh century between Corinth and her daughter city Corcyra. If the tradition is true, we may be sure that the event was an incident in a struggle for the trade with Italy and Sicily and along the Adriatic coasts. The chief competitors, however, with Corinth in the west were the Euboean cities, Chalcis and Eretria. In the traffic in eastern seas the island city of Aegina, though she had no colonies of her own, took an active part, and became one of the richest mercantile states of Greece. Athens too had ships, but her industries were still on a comparatively small scale, and it was not till a much later period that her trade was sufficient to involve her in serious rivalry with her neighbours. But the most active of all in industry and commerce were the Greeks of Ionia.