History of Greece (Grote)/Volume I

The first idea of this History was conceived many years ago, at a time when ancient Hellas was known to the English public chiefly through the pages of Mitford; and my purpose in writing it was to rectify the erroneous statements as to matter of fact which that History contained, as well as to present the general phenomena of the Grecian world under what I thought a juster and more comprehensive point of view. My leisure, however, was not at that time equal to the execution of any large literary undertaking; nor is it until within the last three or four years that I have been able to devote to the work that continuous and exclusive labor, without which, though much may be done to illustrate detached points, no entire or complicated subject can ever be set forth in a manner worthy to meet the public eye.

Meanwhile the state of the English literary world, in reference to ancient Hellas, has been materially changed in more ways than one. If my early friend Dr. Thirlwall's History of Greece had appeared a few years sooner, I should probably never have conceived the design of the present work at all; I should certainly not have been prompted to the task by any deficiencies, such as those which I felt and regretted in Mitford. The comparison of the two authors affords, indeed, a striking proof of the progress of sound and enlarged ​views respecting the ancient world during the present generation. Having studied of course the same evidences as Dr. Thirwall, I am better enabled than others to bear testimony to the learning, the sagacity, and the candor which pervade his excellent work: and it is the more incumbent on me to give expression to this sentiment, since the particular points on which I shall have occasion to advert to it will, unavoidably, be points of dissent oftener than of coincidence.

The liberal spirit of criticism, in which Dr. Thirwall stands so much distinguished from Mitford, is his own: there are other features of superiority which belong to him conjointly with his age. For during the generation since Mitford's work, philological studies have been prosecuted in Germany with remarkable success: the stock of facts and documents, comparatively scanty, handed down from the ancient world, has been combined and illustrated in a thousand different ways: and if our witnesses cannot be multiplied, we at least have numerous interpreters to catch, repeat, amplify, and explain their broken and half-inaudible depositions. Some of the best writers in this department—Boeckh, Niebuhr, O. Müller—have been translated into our language; so that the English public has been enabled to form some idea of the new lights thrown upon many subjects of antiquity by the inestimable aid of German erudition. The poets, historians, orators, and philosophers of Greece, have thus been all rendered both more intelligible and more instructive than they were to a student in the last century; and the general picture of the Grecian world may now be conceived with a degree of fidelity, which, considering our imperfect materials, it is curious to contemplate.

It is that general picture which an historian of Greece is required first to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his readers;—a picture not merely such as to delight the imagination by brilliancy of coloring and depth of sentiment, but also suggestive and improving to the reason Not ​omitting the points of resemblance as well as of contrast with the better-known forms of modern society, he will especially study to exhibit the spontaneous movement of Grecian intellect, sometimes aided but never borrowed from without, and lighting up a small portion of a world otherwise clouded and stationary. He will develop the action of that social system, which, while insuring to the mass of freemen a degree of protection elsewhere unknown, acted as a stimulus to the creative impulses of genius, and left the superior minds sufficiently unshackled to soar above religious and political routine, to overshoot their own age, and to become the teachers of posterity.

To set forth the history of a people by whom the first spark was set to the dormant intellectual capacities of our nature,—Hellenic phenomena, as illustrative of the Hellenic mind and character,—is the task which I propose to myself in the present work not without a painful consciousness how much the deed falls short of the will, and a yet more painful conviction, that full success is rendered impossible by an obstacle which no human ability can now remedy,—the insufficiency of original evidence. For, in spite of the valuable expositions of so many able commentators, our stock of information re specting the ancient world still remains lamentably inadequate to the demands of an enlightened curiosity. We possess only what has drifted ashore from the wreck of a stranded vessel; and though this includes some of the most precious articles amongst its once abundant cargo, yet if any man will cast his eyes over the citations in Diogenes Laërtius, Athenæus, or Plutarch, or the list of names in Vossius de Historicis Græcis, he will see with grief and surprise how much larger is the proportion which, through the enslavement of the Greeks themselves, the decline of the Roman Empire, the change of religion, and the irruption of barbarian conquerors, has been irrecoverably submerged. We are thus reduced to judge of the whole Hellenic world, eminently multiform as it was, ​from a few compositions; excellent, indeed, in themselves, but bearing too exclusively the stamp of Athens. Of Thucydides and Aristotle, indeed, both as inquirers into matter of fact, and as free from narrow local feeling, it is impossible to speak too highly; but, unfortunately, that work of the latter which would have given us the most copious information regarding Grecian political life—his collection and comparison of one hundred and fifty distinct town constitutions—has not been preserved: and the brevity of Thucydides often gives us but a single word where a sentence would not have been too much, and sentences which we should be glad to see expanded into paragraphs.

Such insufficiency of original and trustworthy materials, as compared with those resources which are thought hardly sufficient for the historian of any modern kingdom, is neither to be concealed nor extenuated, however much we may lament it. I advert to the point here on more grounds than one. For it not only limits the amount of information which an historian of Greece can give to his readers,—compelling him to leave much of his picture an absolute blank,—but it also greatly spoils the execution of the remainder. The question of credibility is perpetually obtruding itself, and requiring a decision, which, whether favorable or unfavorable, always introduces more or less of controversy; and gives to those outlines, which the interest of the picture requires to be straight and vigorous, a faint and faltering character. Expressions of qualified and hesitating affirmation are repeated until the reader is sickened; while the writer himself, to whom this restraint is more painful still, is frequently tempted to break loose from the unseen spell by which a conscientious criticism binds him down,—to screw up the possible and probable into certainty, to suppress counterbalancing considerations, and to substitute a pleasing romance in place of halfknown and perplexing realities. Desiring, in the present work, to set forth all which can be ascertained, together with ​such conjectures and inferences as can be reasonably deduced from it, but nothing more,—I notice, at the outset, that faulty state of the original evidence which renders discussions of credibility, and hesitation in the language of the judge, unavoidable. Such discussions, though the reader may be assured that they will become less frequent as we advance into times better known, are tiresome enough, even with the comparatively late period which I adopt as the historical beginning; much more intolerable would they have proved, had I thought it my duty to start from the primitive terminus of Deukalion or Inachus, or from the unburied Pelasgi and Leleges, and to subject the heroic ages to a similar scrutiny. I really know nothing so disheartening or unrequited as the elaborate balancing of what is called evidence,—the comparison of infinitesimal probabilities and conjectures all uncertified,—in regard to these shadowy times and persons.

The law respecting sufficiency of evidence ought to be the same for ancient times as for modern; and the reader will find in this History an application, to the former, of criteria analogous to those which have been long recognized in the latter. Approaching, though with a certain measure of indulgence, to this standard, I begin the real history of Greece with the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B.C. To such as are accustomed to the habits once universal, and still not uncommon, in investigating the ancient world, I may appear to be striking off one thousand years from the scroll of history; but to those whose canon of evidence is derived from Mr. Hallam, M. Sismondi, or any other eminent historian of modern events, I am well assured that I shall appear lax and credulous rather than exigent or sceptical. For the truth is, that historical records, properly so called, do not begin until long after this date: nor will any man, who candidly considers the extreme paucity of attested facts for two centuries after 776 B.C., be astonished to learn that the state of Greece in 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400 B.C. etc,​—or any earlier century which it may please chronologists to include in their computed genealogies,—cannot be described to him upon anything like decent evidence. I shall hope, when I come to the lives of Socrates and Plato, to illustrate one of the most valuable of their principles,—that conscious and confessed ignorance is a better state of mind, than the fancy, without the reality, of knowledge. Meanwhile, I begin by making that confession, in reference to the real world of Greece anterior to the Olympiads; meaning the disclaimer to apply to anything like a general history,—not to exclude rigorously every individual event.

The times which I thus set apart from the region of history are discernible only through a different atmosphere,—that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks, and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art: "The curtain is the picture." What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time: the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot, by any ingenuity, be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands,—not to efface, still less to repaint it.

Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith, as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind,—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by ​comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew and partially supplanted tho old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations.

The legendary age of the Greeks receives its principal charm and dignity from the Homeric poems: to these, therefore, and to the other poems included in the ancient epic, an entire chapter is devoted, the length of which must be justified by the names of the Iliad and Odyssey. I have thought it my duty to take some notice of the Wolfian controversy as it now stands in Germany, and have even hazarded some speculations respecting the structure of the Iliad. The society and manners of the heroic age, considered as known in a general way from Homer's descriptions and allusions, are also described and criticized.

I next pass to the historical age, beginning at 776 B.C.; prefixing some remarks upon the geographical features of Greece. I try to make out, amidst obscure and scanty indications, what the state of Greece was at this period; and I indulge some cautious conjectures, founded upon the earliest verifiable facts, respecting the steps immediately antecedent by which that condition was brought about. In the present volumes, I have only been able to include the history of Sparta and the Peloponnesian Dorians, down to the age of Peisistratus and Crœsus. I had hoped to have comprised in them the entire history of Greece down to this last-mentioned period, but I find the space insufficient.

The history of Greece falls most naturally into six compartments, of which the first may be looked at as a period of preparation for the five following, which exhaust the free life of collective Hellas.

I. Period from 776 B.C. to 560 B.C., the accession of Peisistratus at Athens and of Crœsus in Lydia.

​II. From the accession of Peisistratus and Crœsus to the repulse of Xerxes from Greece.

III. From the repulse of Xerxes to the close of the Peloponnesian war and overthrow of Athens.

IV. From the close of the Peloponnesian war to the battle of Leuktra.

V. From the battle of Leuktra to that of Chæroneia.

VI. From the battle of Chaeroneia to the end of the generation of Alexander.

The five periods, from Peisistratus down to the death of Alexander and of his generation, present the acts of an historical drama capable of being recounted in perspicuous succession, and connected by a sensible thread of unity. I shall interweave in their proper places the important but outlying adventures of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks,—introducing such occasional notices of Grecian political constitutions, philosophy, poetry, and oratory, as are requisite to exhibit the many-sided activity of this people during their short but brilliant career.

After the generation of Alexander, the political action of Greece becomes cramped and degraded,—no longer interesting to the reader, or operative on the destinies of the future world. We may, indeed, name one or two incidents, especially the revolutions of Agis and Kleomenês at Sparta, which are both instructive and affecting; but as a whole, the period, between 300 b. c. and the absorption of Greece by the Romans, is of no interest in itself, and is only so far of value as it helps us to understand the preceding centuries. The dignity and value of the Greeks from that time forward be long to them only as individual philosophers, preceptors, astronomers, and mathematicians, literary men and critics, medical practioners, etc. In all these respective capacities, especially in the great schools of philosophical speculation they still constitute the light of the Roman world; though, as communities, they have lost their own orbit, and have became satellites of more powerful neighbors.

​I propose to bring down the history of the Grecian communities to the year 300 b. c., or the close of the generation which takes its name from Alexander the Great, and I hope to accomplish this in eight volumes altogether. For the next two or three volumes I have already large preparations made, and I shall publish my third (perhaps my fourth) in the course of the ensuing winter.

There are great disadvantages in the publication of one portion of a history apart from the remainder; for neither the earlier nor the later phenomena can be fully comprehended without the light which each mutually casts upon the other. But the practice has become habitual, and is indeed more than justified by the well-known inadmissibility of "long hopes" into the short span of human life. Yet I cannot but fear that my first two volumes will suffer in the estimation of many readers by coming out alone,—and that men who value the Greeks for their philosophy, their politics, and their oratory, may treat the early legends as not worth attention. And it must be confessed that the sentimental attributes of the Greek mind—its religious and poetical vein—here appear in disproportionate relief, as compared with its more vigorous and masculine capacities,—with those powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed in the forthcoming volumes. I venture, however, to forewarn the reader, that there will occur numerous circumstances in the after political life of the Greeks, which he will not comprehend unless he be initiated into the course of their legendary associations. He will not understand the frantic terror of the Athenian public during the Peloponnesian war, on the occasion of the mutilation of the statues called Hermæ, unless he enters into the way in which they connected their stability and security with the domiciliation of the gods in the soil: nor will he adequately appreciate the habit of the Spartan king on military expeditions,—when he offered his daily public sacrifices on behalf of his army and his ​country,—"always to perform this morning service immediately before sunrise, in order that he might be beforehand in obtaining the favor of the gods,"^[1] if he be not familiar with the Homeric conception of Zeus going to rest at night and awaking to rise at early dawn from the side of the " white-armed Hêrê." The occasion will, indeed, often occur for remarking how these legends illustrate and vivify the political phenomena of the succeeding times, and I have only now to urge the necessity of considering them as the beginning of a series,—not as an entire work.

London, March 5 1846.

In preparing a Second Edition of the first two volumes of my History, I have profited by the remarks and corrections of various critics, contained in Reviews, both English and foreign. I have suppressed, or rectified, some positions which had been pointed out as erroneous, or as advanced upon inadequate evidence. I have strengthened my argument in some cases where it appeared to have been imperfectly understood,—adding some new notes, partly for the purpose of enlarged illustration, partly to defend certain opinions which had been called in question. The greater number of these alterations have been made in Chapters XVI. and XXI. of Part I., and in Chapter VI. of Part II.

I trust that these three Chapters, more full of speculation, and therefore more open to criticism than any of the others, will thus appear in a more complete and satisfactory form. But I must at the same time add that they remain for the most part unchanged in substance, and that I have seen no sufficient reason to modify my main conclusions even respecting the structure of the Iliad, controverted though they have been by some of my most esteemed critics.

In regard to the character and peculiarity of Grecian legend, as broadly distinguished throughout these volumes from Grecian history, I desire to notice two valuable publications ​with which I have only become acquainted since the date of my first edition. One of these is, A Short Essay on Primæval History, by John Kenrick, M. A. (London, 1846, published just at the same time as these volumes,) which illustrates with much acute reflection the general features of legend, not only in Greece but throughout the ancient world,—see especially pages 65, 84, 92, et seq. The other work is, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Colonel Sleeman,—first made known to me through an excellent notice of my History in the Edinburgh Review for October 1846. The description given by Colonel Sleeman, of the state of mind now actually prevalent among the native population of Hindostan, presents a vivid comparison, helping the modern reader to understand and appreciate the legendary era of Greece. I have embodied in the notes of this Second Edition two or three passages from Colonel Sleeman's instructive work: but the whole of it richly deserves perusal.

Having now finished six volumes of this History, without attaining a lower point than the peace of Nikias, in the tenth year of the Peloponnesian war,—I find myself compelled to retract the expectation held out in the preface to my First Edition, that the entire work might be completed in eight volumes. Experience proves to me how impossible it is to measure beforehand the space which historical subjects will require. All I can now promise is, that the remainder of the work shall be executed with as much regard to brevity as is consistent with the paramount duty of rendering it fit for public acceptance.

London, April 3, 1849

Following the example of Dr. Thirlwall and other excellent scholars, I call the Greek deities by their real Greek names, and not by the Latin equivalents used among the Romans. For the assistance of those readers to whom the Greek names may be less familiar, I here annex a table of the one and the other.

A few words are here necessary respecting the orthography of Greek names adopted in the above table and generally throughout this history. I have approximated as nearly as I dared to the Greek letters in preference to the Latin; and on this point I venture upon an innovation which I should have little doubt of vindicating before the reason of any candid English student. For the ordinary practice of substituting, in a Greek name, the English C in place of the Greek K, is, indeed, so obviously incorrect, that ​it admits of no rational justification. Our own K, precisely and in every point, coincides with the Greek K: we have thus the means of reproducing the Greek name to the eye as well as to the ear, yet we gratuitously take the wrong letter in preference to the right. And the precedent of the Latins is here against us rather than in our favor, for their C really coincided in sound with the Greek K, whereas our C entirely departs from it, and becomes an S, before e, i, æ, œ, and y. Though our C has so far deviated in sound from the Latin C, yet there is some warrant for our continuing to use it in writing Latin names, because we thus reproduce the name to the eye, though not to the ear. But this is not the case when we employ our C to designate the Greek K, for we depart here not less from the visible than from the audible original; while we mar the unrivalled euphony of the Greek language by that multiplied sibilation which constitutes the least inviting feature in our own. Among German philologists, the K is now universally employed in writing Greek names, and I have adopted it pretty largely in this work, making exception for such names as the English reader has been so accustomed to hear with the C, that they may be considered as being almost Anglicised. I have, farther, marked the long e and the long o (η, ω) by a circumflex (Hêrê) when they occur in the last syllable or in the penultimate of a name.