The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
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