The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
from men, were conceived to have dwelt in Asia in the heroic age, and proved themselves worthy foes of the Greek heroes. An obvious etymology of their name, “breastless”, suggested the belief that they used to burn off the right breast that they might the better draw the bow. In the Iliad Priam tells how he fought against their army in Phrygia; and one of the perilous tasks which are set to Bellerophon is to march against the Amazons. In a later Homeric poem, the Amazon Penthesilea appears as a dreaded adversary of the Greeks at Troy. To win the girdle of the Amazon queen was one of the labours of Heracles. All these adventures happened in Asia Minor; and, though this female folk was located in various places, its original and proper home was ultimately placed on the river Thermodon near the Greek colony of Amisus. But the Amazons attacked Greece itself. It was told that Theseus carried off their queen Antiope, and so they came and invaded Attica. There was a terrible battle in the town of Athens, and the invaders were defeated after a long struggle. At the feast of Theseus the Athenians used to sacrifice to the Amazons; there was a building called the Amazoneion in the western quarter of the city; and the episode was believed by such men as Isocrates and Plato to be as truly an historical fact as the Trojan war itself. The battles of Greeks with Amazons were a favorite subject of Grecian sculptors; and, like the Trojan war and the adventure of the golden fleece, the Amazon story fitted into the conception of an ancient and long strife between Greece and Asia.
The details of the famous legends—the labours of Heracles, the Trojan war, the voyage of the Argonauts, the tale of Cadmus, the life of Oedipus, the two sieges of Thebes by the Argive Adrastus, and all the other familiar stories—belong to mythology and lie beyond our present scope. But we have to realise that the later Greeks believed them and discussed them as sober history. Two powerful generating forces of these historic myths had been the custom of families and cities to trace their origin to a god, and the instinct of the Greeks to personify places, especially towns, rivers, and springs. Then, when men began both to become keenly conscious of a community of race and language, and to speculate upon the past, attempts were naturally made to bring the various myths of Greece into harmony; since they were true, they must be reconciled. Ultimately they were reduced into chronological systems, which were based upon genealogical reckonings by generations. Hecataeus of Miletus counted a generation as forty years; but it was more usual to reckon three generations to a hundred years. According to the scheme which finally won the widest acceptance, Troy was taken in 1184 BC, and the Dorians invaded the Peloponnesus under the leadership of the Heraclids in 1104 BC, and both these dates accord more closely than one might expect, considering the method by which they were obtained, with the general probabilities of the case.
The Expansion of Greece
SECT. 1. CAUSES AND CHARACTER OF GREEK COLONISATION
The expansion of the Greeks beyond Greece proper and the coasts of the Aegean, the plantation of Greek colonies on the shores of Thrace and the Black Sea, in Italy and Sicily, even in Spain and Gaul, began in the eighth and reached its completion in the sixth century. But it must not be regarded as a single or isolated phenomenon. It was the continuation of the earlier expansion over the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor, the details of which were forgotten by the Greeks themselves, and are consequently unknown to us.
The cause of Greek colonisation is not to be found in mere trade interests. These indeed were in most cases a motive, and in some of the settlements on the Black Sea they were perhaps a leading motive. But the great difference between Greek and Phoenician colonisation is that, while the Phoenicians aimed solely at promoting their commerce, and only a few of their settlements, notably Carthage, became more than mere trading-stations or factories, Greek colonisation satisfied other needs than desire of commercial profit. It was the expression of the adventurous spirit which has been poetically reflected in the legends of the “Sailing of the Argo” and the “Home-coming of Odysseus”— the same spirit, not to be expressed in any commercial formula, which prompted English colonisation.
Trade, of course, sometimes paved the way. Colonists followed in the paths of trade, and the merchants of Miletus, who adventured themselves in the dangerous waters of the Euxine, observed natural harbours and inviting sites for cities, and when they returned home organised parties of settlers. The adventurous, the discontented, and the needy were always to be found. But in the case of the early colonies at least, it was not over-population of the land, so much as the nature of the land-system, that drove men to emigrate. In various ways, under the family system, which was ill suited to independent and adventurous spirits, it would come about that individual members were excluded from a share in the common estate, and separated from their kin. Such lacklands were ripe for colonial enterprise. Again, the political circumstances of most Greek states in the eighth and seventh centuries favoured emigration. We have seen that at this time the aristocratic form of government generally prevailed. Sometimes a king was formally at the head, but he was really no more than the first of peers; a body of nobles were the true masters. Sometimes there was an aristocracy within an aristocracy; or a large clan, like the Bacchiads at Corinth, held the power. In all cases the distinction between the members of the ruling class and the mass of free citizens was widened and deepened. It was the tendency of the rulers to govern in their own interest and oppress the multitude, and they cared little to disguise their contempt for the mass of the people. At Mytilene things went so far that the Penthilids, who had secured the chief power, went about in the streets, armed with clubs, and knocked down citizens whom they disliked. Under these conditions there were strong inducements for men to leave their native city where they were of little account and had to endure the slights, if nothing worse, of their rulers, and to join in the foundation of a new polis where they might themselves rule. The same inducement drew nobles who did not belong to the inner oligarchical circle. In fact, political discontent was an immediate cause of Greek colonisation; and conversely it may be said that colonisation was a palladium of aristocracy. If this outlet had not existed, or if it had not suited the Hellenic temper, the aristocracies might not have lasted so long, and they wisely discerned that it was their own interest to encourage colonisation.
But while we recognise the operation of general causes we must not ignore special causes. We must, for instance, take into account the fact that Miletus and the south Ionian cities were unable to expand in Caria, as the north Ionian cities expanded in Lydia, because the Carians were too strong for them; and Lycia presented the same kind of barrier to Rhodes. Otherwise, perhaps neither Rhodes nor Miletus would have sent settlers to distant lands.
Wherever the Greek went, he retained his customs and language, and made a Greek “polis”. It was as if a bit of Greece were set down on the remote shores of the Euxine or in the far west on the wild coasts of Gaul or Iberia. The colony was a private enterprise, but the bond of kinship with the “mother-city” was carefully fostered, and though political discontent might have been the cause which drove the founders forth, yet that solemn departure for a distant land, where a new city-state, protected by the same gods, was to spring up, always sealed a reconciliation. The emigrants took fire from the public hearth of their city to light the fire on that of their new home. Intercourse between colonies and the mother-country was specially kept up at the great religious festivals of the year, and various marks of filial respect were shown by the daughter to the mother. When, as frequently befell, the colony determined herself in turn to throw off a new shoot, it was the recognised custom that she should seek the oecist or leader of the colonists from the mother-city. Thus the Megarian colony, Byzantium, when it founded its own colony, Mesembria, must have sought an oecist from Megara. The political importance of colonisation was sanctified by religion, and it was a necessary formality, whenever a settlement was to be made, to ask the approbation of the Delphic god. The most ancient oracular god of Greece was Zeus of Dodona. The Selli, his priests and “interpreters”, are mentioned in the Iliad; and in the Odyssey Dodona appears as a place to which a king of the west might go to ask the will of Zeus “from the lofty oak”, wherein the god was conceived to dwell. But the oak-shrine in the highlands of Epirus was too remote to become the chief oracle of Greece, and the central position of Delphi enabled the astute priests of the Pythian Apollo to exalt the authority