Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 23

The Greeks of the Asiatic coast were largely dependent, for good or evil, on the adjacent inland countries. The inland trade added to their prosperity, but at any moment if a strong barbarian power arose their independence might be gravely menaced. At the beginning of the seventh century active intercourse was maintained between the Greeks and the kingdoms of Phrygia and Maeonia. The Phrygian king Midas dedicated a throne to the god of Delphi; both the Phrygians and the Lydians adopted the Greek alphabet, while the Greeks adopted their modes of music and admitted Phrygian legends into Greek mythology.

A considerable Phrygian element had won its way into Lydia, and had gained the upper hand. In the Homeric poems we nowhere read of Lydians but only of Maeonians, and there can be no doubt that name represents the Phrygian settlers or conquerors. A Maeonian dynasty ruled in Lydia at the beginning of the seventh century, and the king bears a Maeonian name, Candaules, “hound-choker”. The Aryan conquerors—conquerors, that is, who spoke an Aryan tongue—had occupied the throne for centuries; and Greek tradition afterwards derived the origin of the family of Candaules from Heracles himself. But they had become degenerate, and Gyges, a native Lydian, of the clan of the Mermnadae, succeeded in slaying Candaules and seizing the crown. This revolution ushered in a new period for the Lydian, as it was now called, no longer Maeonian, kingdom. The dominion of the Maeonian sovereign had probably extended southward to the valley of the Maeander. Gyges extended his power northward to the shores of the Propontis, where he founded Dascylion, and conquered the Troad. But he also designed to make the Aegean his western boundary and bring the Greek cities under his lordship. He pressed down the valley of the Hermus against Smyrna; down the valley of the Cayster against Colophon; down the valley of the Maeander against Miletus and Magnesia. Of these enterprises only the faintest hints have come down to us. It may be that Colophon was actually captured, and perhaps Magnesia; but the other cities beat back the enemy. The poet Mimnermus sings how a warrior, perhaps his own grandfather, wrought havoc in the ranks of the Lydian horsemen in the plain of the Hermus.

But the plans of Gyges against his Greek neighbours were suddenly interrupted by a blow, which descended, as it were from the other side of the world, upon Greeks and Lydians alike. The regions round about Lake Maeotis, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, were inhabited by the Cimmerians, who appear in the marvellous wanderings of Odysseus. They were now driven forth from their abodes to which, however, their name clung and still clings, by a Scythian folk, the Scolotae, who came from the east. Homeless, the Cimmerians wandered to the opposite side of the Euxine; but whether they travelled by the eastern or the western route, by the Caucasus or by the Danube, is not known for certain. On one hand, they seem to have appeared first in eastern Asia Minor; on the other, they seem to have associated with themselves some Thracian peoples—the Trerians, Edonians, and Thynians. The truth may be that they came round by the eastern coast; and that afterwards, when they made their incursions into western Asia Minor, they invited allies from Thrace to help them. Having defeated the Milesians of Sinope, they chose this place to be their chief settlement. They ventured to attack the great Assyrian empire, and King Assarhaddon himself tells how “I smote the Cimmerian Teuspa with all his army”. But they overthrew the realm of Phrygia under its last king Midas, and towards the middle of the seventh century they attacked Lydia. To meet this danger, Gyges sought help from Assyria. The warlike Assarhaddon had been succeeded at Nineveh by Assurbanipal, a peaceful and literary prince, whose refined luxury is caricatured in the Greek conception of Sardanapalus. The lord of Lydia acknowledged the overlordship of the lord of Assyria. He gained a victory over the Cimmerians, and sent their chiefs in chains to Nineveh. But he did not long brook to be the vassal of another sovereign. He threw off his allegiance to Assyria, and sent Ionian and Carian mercenary soldiers to Egypt, to help that country also to free itself from Assyrian dominion. At this moment, perhaps, Gyges was at the height of his power. His wealth was famous, and he too, like Phrygian Midas, sent gifts—among them, six golden mixing-bowls—to the Delphian god. The poet Archilochus, who witnessed his career, sings defiantly that he “cares not for the wealth of golden Gyges”.

But the Cimmerians presently renewed their attack, and fortune changed. Gyges was slain in battle; his capital Sardis was taken, except the citadel; and it was some satisfaction to Assurbanipal to record that Lydia was in the hands of the Cimmerians. It was not long before they swooped down upon the Greek cities. Callinus, a poet of Ephesus, heard the trample of their horses and roused his fellow-citizens to battle; Ephesus defied their attack, but the temple of Artemis outside the walls was burned down. They and their allies from Thrace destroyed Magnesia on the Maeander. The barbarians made a deep impression. The swords which they swept down upon their enemies were enormous; they were equipped with large quivers, and wore the curved caps of the Scythians; fierce hounds ran with their horses. Such was their appearance as they were pourtrayed by a Greek artist of a later generation on a painted sarcophagus found at Clazomenae. But the danger passed away. Ardys succeeded Gyges on the Lydian throne, and he finally not only drave out the Cimmerians from the land, but perhaps succeeded in extending his power into Cappadocia, as far as the Halys.

In the meantime Lydia had made an invention which revolutionised commerce. It is to Lydia that Europe owes the invention of coinage. The Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians made use of weighed gold and silver as a medium of exchange, a certain ratio being fixed between the two metals. A piece of weighed metal becomes a coin when it is stamped by the State and is thereby warranted to have its professed weight and purity. This step was first taken in Lydia, where the earliest money was coined somewhere about the beginning of the seventh century, probably by Gyges. These Lydian coins were made of the native white gold, or electron—a mixture of gold and silver in which the proportion of gold was greater. A bar of the white gold of Sardis was regarded as ten times the value of a silver bar, and three-fourths of the value of a gold bar, of the same weight. Miletus and Samos soon adopted the new invention, which then spread to other Asiatic towns. Then Aegina and the two great cities of Euboea instituted monetary systems, and by degrees all the states of Greece gave up the primitive custom of estimating value in heads of cattle, and most of them had their own mints. As gold was very rare in Greece, not being found except in the islands of Siphnos and Pharos, the Greeks coined in silver. This invention, coming at the very moment when the Greeks were entering upon a period of great commercial activity, was of immense importance, not only in facilitating trade, but in rendering possible the accumulation of capital. Yet it took many generations to supersede completely the old methods of economy by the new system.

The Greeks had derived their systems of weight from Babylonia and Phoenicia. But, when Aegina and the Euboean cities fixed the standard of their silver coinage, they did not adopt the silver standard of either of those countries. The heavier stater (as the standard silver coin was named) of Aegina weighed 196 grains, and slightly exceeded a florin in value; and this system was adopted throughout the Peloponnese and in northern Greece. The lighter stater of Euboea weighed 130 grains, which was the Babylonian standard of gold. This system, at first confined to Euboea, Samos, and a few other places, was afterwards adopted by Corinth, and then, in a slightly modified form, by Athens.

It was highly characteristic of the Greeks that their coinage was marked from the beginning by religious associations; and it has been supposed that the priests of their temples had an important share in initiating the introduction of money. It was in the shrines of their gods that men were accustomed to store their treasures for safe-keeping; the gods themselves possessed costly dedications; and thus the science of weighing the precious metals was naturally studied by the priesthoods. Every coin which a Greek state issued bore upon it a reference to some deity. In early times this reference always took the shape of a symbol; in later times the head of the god was often represented. The Lydian coins of Sardis, the coins of Miletus and other Ionian cities, bore a lion; those of Eretria showed a cow with a sucking calf; Aegina displayed a tortoise, and Cyzicus a tunny-fish; and all these tokens were symbols of the goddess who, whether under the name of Aphrodite or Hera or Artemis, was identified by the Greeks with Astarte of Phoenicia.