Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 44

SECT. 2. ATHENS UNDER PISISTRATUS

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The conqueror of Nisaea was the hero of the day. By professing democratic doctrines and practising popular arts, he ingratiated himself with those extreme democrats who, being bitterly opposed to the nobles and not satisfied by the Solonian compromise, were outside both the Plain and the Coast. Pisistratus thus organised a new party which was called the Hill, as it largely consisted of the poor hillsmen of the highlands of Attica; but it also included the hektemors, for whom Solon had done little, and many discontented men, who, formerly rich, had been impoverished by Solon’s measure of cancelling old debts. With this party at his back, Pisistratus aimed at no less a thing than grasping the supreme power for himself. One day he appeared in the agora, wounded, he said, by a foul attack of his political foes—his foes because he was a friend of the people; and he showed wounds which he bore. In the Assembly, packed by the Hillsmen, a bodyguard of fifty clubsmen was voted to him on the proposal of Aristion. We have a monument, which we may associate with the author of this memorable act, in a sepulchral slab discovered near Brauron, on which is finely wrought in very low relief the portrait of “Aristion” standing armed by his tombstone; and it is hardly too bold to recognise in this contemporary sculpture the friend of Pisistratus, when we remember that the home of the Pisistratid family was at Brauron. Having secured his bodyguard—the first step in the tyrant’s progress—Pisistratus seized the acropolis, and made himself master of the state.

It was the fate of Solon to live long enough to see the establishment of the tyranny which he dreaded. We know not what part he had taken in the troubled world of politics since his return to Athens. The story was invented that he called upon the citizens to arm themselves against the tyrant, but called in vain; and that then, laying his arms outside the threshold of his house, he cried, “I have aided, so far as I could, my country and the constitution, and I appeal to others to do likewise”. Nor has the story that he refused to live under a tyranny and sought refuge with his Cyprian friend the king of Soli, any good foundation. We know only that in his later years he enjoyed the pleasures of wine and love, and that he survived but a short time the seizure of the tyranny by Pisistratus, who at least treated the old man with respect.

The discord of parties had smoothed the way for the schemes of Pisistratus; but his success led in turn to the union of the two other parties, the Plain and the Coast, against him, and at the end of about five years they succeeded in driving him out. But new disunion followed, and Megacles the leader of the Coast seems to have quarrelled not only with the Plain but with his own party. At all events, he sought a reconciliation with Pisistratus and undertook to help him back to the tyranny on condition that the tyrant wedded his daughter. The legend is that the partisans of Pisistratus found in Paeania, an Attic village, a woman of loftier than common stature, whom they arrayed in the guise of the goddess Athena. Her name was Phye. Then heralds, on a certain day, entered Athens, crying that Pallas herself was leading back Pisistratus. Presently a car arrived bearing the tyrant and Phye; and the trick deceived all the common folk.

But the coalition of Pisistratus with Megacles was not more abiding than that of Megacles with Lycurgus. By a former wife Pisistratus had two sons—Hippias and Hipparchus; and as he desired to create a dynasty, he feared that, if he had offspring by a second wife, the interests of his older sons might be injured and family dissensions ensue. So, though he went through the form of marriage with the daughter of Megacles, as he had promised, he did not treat her as his wife. Megacles was enraged when the tyrant’s neglect reached his ears; he made common cause with the enemies of Pisistratus and succeeded in driving him out for the second time, perhaps in the same year in which he had been restored.

The second exile lasted for about ten years, and Pisistratus spent it in forming new connexions in Macedonia. On the Thermaic gulf he organised the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Rhaecelus into some sort of a city-state. He exploited the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus near the Strymon, and formed a force of mercenary soldiers, thus providing himself with money and men to recover his position at Athens. He was supported by Lygdamis, the tyrant of Naxos, and by the friendship of other Greek states, such as Thessaly, which he had cultivated in the days of his power. The aristocracy of Eretrian horsemen were well-disposed to him, and their city was an admirable basis for an attack upon Athens. When he landed at Marathon, his adherents flocked to his standard. The citizens who were loyal to the constitutional government marched forth, and were defeated in battle at Pallene. Resistance was at an end, and once more Pisistratus had the power in his hands. This time he kept it.

The rule of Pisistratus may be described as a constitutional tyranny. He did not stop the wheels of the democracy, but he guided the machine entirely at his own will. The constitution of Solon seems to have been preserved in its essential features, though in some details the lapse of time may have brought modifications. Thus it is possible that even before the first success of Pisistratus the assessment according to measures of corn and oil had been converted into an assessment in money. And as money became cheaper the earlier standards for the division of classes ceased to have the old significance. A man who at the beginning of the sixth century just reached the standard of the first class was passing rich; fifty years later he would be comparatively poor. But it was not to the interest of the tyrant to raise the census for political office. Various measures of policy were adopted by him to protect his position, while he preserved the old forms of government. He managed to exert an influence on the appointment of the archons, so as to secure personal adherents, and one of his own family generally held some office. This involved the suspension or modification of the system of lot introduced by Solon. The tyrant kept up a standing force of paid soldiers—among them, perhaps, Scythian archers, whom we see portrayed on Attic vases of the time. And he kept in his power, as hostages, the children of some noble families which he suspected. Most indeed of his more prominent opponents, including the Alcmaeonids, had left Attica, and the large estates which they abandoned were at his disposal.

These estates gave him the means of solving a problem which Solon had left unsolved, and of satisfying the expectations of a large number of his supporters. He divided the vacant lands into lots and gave them to the labourers who had worked on these and other estates. Thus the way was prepared for the total abolition of the hektemors. They became practically peasant proprietors, and they had to pay only the land-tax, amounting to one-tenth of the produce. The Land was also given to many needy people who idled in the city, land-tax and loans of money to start them. The tax of a tenth, imposed on all estates, formed an important source of the tyrant’s revenue, and it is generally supposed that he introduced it. But this is not probable. We may take it that this land-tax was an older institution which continued under Pisistratus, until either he or his sons were able, through an increase of revenue from other sources, to reduce it to one-twentieth. It has been plausibly suggested that this increase of revenue came from the silver mines of Laurion, which now perhaps began to be more effectively worked. His possessions on the Strymon were another mainstay of the finance of Pisistratus. He exerted himself to improve agriculture, and under his influence the olive, which had long ago found a home in Attica, was planted all over the land.

Under Pisistratus Athens rested from the distractions of party strife, and the old parties gradually disappeared. The mass of discontented hektemors was absorbed in the class of peasant proprietors. Thus the people enjoyed a tranquil period of economical and political development. And as the free forms of the constitution were preserved, the masses, in the Assembly and in the Law-courts, received a training in the routine at least of public affairs, which rendered them fit for the democracy which was to ensue when the tyranny was overthrown.

Abroad it was the consistent policy of Pisistratus to preserve peaceful relations with other states. Aegina indeed was openly the rival of Athens, and humbled Megara could hardly be aught save sullen. But Athens was on friendly terms with both the rival powers of the Peloponnesus, Sparta and Argos; and Thebes, and Thessaly, and the Eretrian knights had helped the tyrant in the days of his adversity. His influence extended to the banks of the Strymon and the coast of Macedonia, as we have already seen; and he had a subservient friend in Lygdamis of Naxos, who, when he was deposed from his tyranny by the Naxian people, was restored by Athenian arms.

It was doubtless with the object of injuring the Megarian trade in Pontic corn, and gaining some counterpoise to Megarian power in the region of the Propontis, that Athens made her first venture in distant seas. It was about forty years before Pisistratus became tyrant that Athens seized the Lesbian fortress of Sigeum on the shore of the Troad at the entrance to the Hellespont. The friendship of Miletus, mother of many Pontic colonies, favoured this enterprise, which however involved Athens in a conflict with Mytilene whose power and settlements extended along the shores of the straits. Mytilene, failing to recover the fortress, built another, the Achilleon, close by, which cut off the Athenians from the sea. It has been already told how the statesman Pittacus was engaged in this war and slew an Athenian commander in single combat, and how the poet Alcaeus threw away his shield. It would seem that while Athens was absorbed in her party conflicts at home, Sigeum slipped from her hands, and that the recapture of it was one of the achievements of Pisistratus. The tyrant showed the importance he attached to it by installing one of his sons as governor. The statesmen who first sent Athenian soldiers to the shores of the Hellespont had in truth opened up a new path for Athenian policy, and Pisistratus pursued that path. It was not long before a much greater acquisition than Sigeum was made in the same region; but this acquisition, though made with the good-will, and even under the auspices, of Pisistratus, was made by one who was his political rival and opponent. Miltiades, son of Cypselus, belonged to the noble family of the Philaids, and was one of the leaders of the Plain. It was after the usurpation of Pisistratus, that as he sat one day in the porch of his country-house at Laciadae on the road from Athens to Eleusis, he saw a company of men in Thracian dress, and armed with spears, passing along the road. He called out to them, invited them into his house, and proffered them hospitality. They were Dolonci, natives of the Thracian Chersonese, and they had come to Greece in search of a helper, who should have the strength and skill to defend them against their northern neighbours, who were pressing them hard in war. They had gone to Delphi, and the oracle had bidden them invite the man who first offered them entertainment after they left the shrine. Miltiades, thus designated by the god, obeyed the call of the Thracians, not reluctant to leave his country fallen under a tyrant’s rule.

The circumstances of the foundation of Athenian power in the Chersonese were thus wrought by the story-shaping instinct of the Greeks into a picturesque tale. The simple fact seems to have been that the Dolonci applied directly to Athens, inviting the settlement of an Athenian colony in their midst. Pisistratus was well pleased to promote Athenian influence on the Hellespontine shores; and the selection of Miltiades was not unwelcome to him, since it removed a dangerous subject. We may feel no doubt that it was as an oecist duly chosen by the Athenian people that Miltiades went forth, blessed by the Delphic oracle, to the land of his Thracian guests. But the oecist who went forth, as it was said, to escape tyranny, became absolute ruler in his new country. He ruled as a Thracian prince over the Dolonci; he ruled as a tyrant over his Athenian fellow-settlers. He protected the peninsula against invasions from the north by a wall which he built across the neck from Cardia to Pactye. We hear of his war with Lampsacus and his friendship with the king of Lydia.

It is not too much to say that Pisistratus took the first steps on the path which led Athens to empire. That path had indeed been pointed out to him by nameless predecessors; but his sword conquered Salamis; under his auspices Athens won a footing on both shores of the Hellespont. We cannot estimate too highly the states- manship which sought a field for Athenian enterprise in the regions of the Propontis. The Ionian cities had forestalled Athens in venturing into the vast spaces of the eastern sea and winning the products of its shores. But though she entered into the contest late, she was destined to outstrip both her friend Miletus, and Megara her foe. Many years indeed were still to run before her ships dominated the Euxine; but it was much that she now set her posts as a watcher on either side of the narrow gate

“Where the sea-ridge of Helle hangs heavier, and east upon west waters break”.

Pisistratus strongly asserted the claim of Athens to be the mother and leader of the Ionian branch of the Greek race. The temple of Apollo in Delos, the island of his mythical birth, had been long a religious centre of the Ionians on both sides of the Aegean. There, as an ancient hymn sang, “the long-robed Ionians gather with their children and their wives,” to honour Apollo with dance and song and games: “a stranger who came upon the Ionians in their throng, seeing the men and the fair-girdled women and the swift ships and all their wealth, would say that they were beings free for ever from death and eld.” Pisistratus “purified” the sacred spot by digging up all the tombs that were within sight of the sanctuary and removing the bones of the dead to another part of the island.

And Athens took not only the Ionian festival under her special care, but also the great Ionian epics. It was probably towards the end of his reign that Pisistratus and his son Hipparchus took in hand the work of arranging and writing down the Homeric poems. Since the poet of Chios had composed the Iliad, since another Ionian poet had framed the Odyssey, new parts had been added by their successors; such as the Catalogue of the Ships and the poem of Dolon. The minstrels who recited Homer, at the Delian festival for example, adhered to no very strict order of parts in their recitations, and discrepancies were inevitable both in the order and in the text. At the instance of Pisistratus, some men of letters undertook the task of fixing definitely the text of both poems, and wrote them down in the old Attic alphabet. Thus Athens became one of the birth-cities of Homer; the Iliad and Odyssey assumed their final shape there. But what the Athenians did for Homer was entirely an achievement in literary criticism; it was in no way a work of original composition. We may say that the Pisistratean revision of Homer was the beginning of literary criticism in Europe. Some liberties indeed were taken with the text; a line or two were added, a line or two may have been omitted, for the sake of the political interest or the vanity of Athens. We have met an instance in regard to Salamis. The Homeric enterprise of Pisistratus was thoroughly successful; Athens grew to be the centre of the Greek book trade, and the Athenian text was circulated through the whole Greek world. But before this circulation began, it had been copied out in a new shape. About half a century later, Athenian poets began to give up the old Attic alphabet and use the more convenient Ionic alphabet instead. Homer was then copied out of the Attic letters into the Ionic, and our texts are still disfigured by some errors which arose in the process.

The immediate purpose of the revision of Pisistratus was to regulate the Homeric recitations which he had made a feature of the great Panathenaic festival. This feast had been remodelled, if not founded, shortly before he seized the tyranny, and, on the pattern of the national gatherings at Olympia and Delphi, was held every fourth year. It was celebrated with athletic and musical contests, but the centre and motive of the feast was the great procession which went up to the house of Athena on her hill, to offer her a robe woven by the hands of Athenian maidens. The rich fane” of Athena, wherein she accorded Erechtheus a place, had the distinction of passing into the Homeric poems. It was situated near the northern cliff; and to the south of it a new house had been reared for the goddess of the city to inhabit, close to the ruins of the palace of the ancient kings. It had been built before the days of Pisistratus, but it was probably he who encompassed it with a Doric colonnade. From its length this temple was known as the House of the Hundred Feet, and many of the lowest stones of the walls, still lying in their places, show us its site and shape. The triangular gables displayed what Attic sculptors of the day could achieve. Hitherto the favourite material of these sculptors had been the soft marly limestone of the Piraeus, and by a curious stroke of luck some striking specimens of such work — Zeus encountering the three-headed Typhon, Heracles destroying the Hydra—have been partly preserved, the early efforts of an art which a hundred and fifty years would bring to perfection. But now—in the second half of the sixth century—Greek sculptors have begun to work in a nobler and harder material; and on one of the pediments of the renovated temple of Athena Polias the battle of the Gods and Giants was wrought in Parian marble. Athena herself in the centre of the composition, slaying Enceladus with her spear, may still be seen and admired.

But the tyrant planned a greater work than the new sanctuary on the hill. Down below, south-eastward from the citadel, on the banks of the Ilisus, he began the building of a great Doric temple for the Olympian Zeus. He began but never finished it, nor his sons after him. So immense was the scale of his plan that Athens, even when she reached the height of her dominion and fulfilled many of the aspirations of Pisistratus, never ventured to undertake the burden of completing it. A full completion was indeed to come, though in a shape far different from the old Athenian’s plan; but not until Athens and Greece had been gathered under the wings of a power which had all Europe at its feet. The richly ornamented capitals of the few lofty pillars which still stand belong to the work of the Roman emperor, but we must remember that the generations of Athenians, with whom this history has to do, saw only plain Doric columns there, the monument of the wealth and ambition of the tyrant who had done more for their city than they cared to think.

Pisistratus was indeed scrupulous and zealous in all matters concerned with religion, and his sons more than himself. But no act of his was more fruitful in results than what he did for the worship of Dionysus. In the marshes on the south side of the Areopagus the bacchic god had an ancient sanctuary, of which the foundations have been recently uncovered; but Pisistratus built him a new house at the foot of the Acropolis, and its ruins have not yet wholly disappeared. In connexion with this temple Pisistratus instituted a new festival, called the Great Dionysia of the City, and it completely overshadowed the older feast of the Winepress (Lenaea), which still continued to be held in the first days of spring at the temple of the Marshes. The chief feature of the Dionysiac feasts was the choir of satyrs, the god’s attendants, who danced around the altar clothed in goat-skins, and sang their “goat song”. But it became usual for the leader of the dancers, who was also the composer of the song, to separate himself from his fellows and hold speech with them, assuming the character of some person connected with the events which the song celebrated, and wearing an appropriate dress. Such performances, which at the rural feasts had been arranged by private enterprise, were made an official part of the Great Dionysia, and thus taken under state protection, in the form of a “tragic” contest, two or more choruses competing for a prize. It was the work of a generation to develop these simple representations into a true drama, by differentiating the satyric element. Legends not connected with Dionysus were chosen for representation, and the dancers appeared, not in the bacchic goat-dress, but in the costume suitable for their part in the story. This performance was divided into three acts; the dancers changed their costumes for each act; and only at the end did they come forward in their true goat-guise and perform a piece which preserved the original satyric character of “tragedy.” Then their preponderant importance was by degrees diminished, and a second actor was introduced; and by a development of this kind, hidden from us in its details, the goat song of the days of Pisistratus grew into the tragedy of Aeschylus.

The popularity of the worship of Dionysus at Athens in the Dionysiac days of Pisistratus might be observed in the workshops of the potters. No subject was more favoured than Dionysiac scenes by the artists—Exekias and his fellows—who painted the black-figured jars of this period. There is another thing which the student of history may learn among the graceful vessels of the potters of Athens. On the jars of the Pisistratean age the deeds of Heracles are a favourite theme, while Theseus is little regarded. But before the golden age of vase-painting sets in, about the time of the fall of the Pisistratids, Theseus has begun to seize the popular imagination as the great Attic hero, and this is reflected in paintings on the cups of Euphronius and the other brilliant masters of the red-figured style. If we remember that Theseus was specially associated with the hill country of north Attica, which was the stronghold of the Pisistratean party, we may be tempted to infer that the glorification of Theseus was partly due to the policy of Pisistratus.

But besides caring for the due honours of the gods, the tyrant busied himself with such humbler matters as the improvement of the water-supply of Athens. West and south-west of the Acropolis, in the rocky valley between the Areopagus and the Pnyx, his water-works have recently come to light. A cistern there received the waters which an aqueduct conveyed from the upper stream of the Ilisus. It is indeed on this side of Athens, south and west of the oldest Athens of all, that the chief stone memorials of the age of Pisistratus stood, apart from what he may have built on the Acropolis itself. But he not only built; he also demolished. He pulled down the old city-wall, and for more than half a century Athens was an unwalled town.

The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age

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