Chapter IX (1)

CORINTH, SIKYON, AND MEGARA. — AGE OF THE GRECIAN DESPOTS.

The preceding volume brought down the history of Sparta to the period marked by the reign of Peisistratus at Athens; at which time she had attained her maximum of territory, was confessedly the most powerful state in Greece, and enjoyed a proportionate degree of deference from the rest. I now proceed to touch upon the three Dorian cities on and near to the Isthmus,—Corinth, Sikyôn, and Megara, as they existed at this same period.

Even amidst the scanty information which has reached us, we trace the marks of considerable maritime energy and commerce among the Corinthians, as far back as the eighth century B. C. The foundation of Korkyra and Syracuse, in the 11th Olympiad, or 734 B. C. (of which I shall speak farther in connection with Grecian colonization generally), by expeditions from Corinth, affords a good proof that they knew how to turn to account the excellent situation which connected them with the sea on both sides of Peloponnesus: and Thucydides,[1] while he notices them as the chief liberators of the sea, in early times, from pirates, also tells us that the first great improvement in ship-building,—the construction of the trireme, or ship of war, with a full deck and triple banks for the rowers,—was the fruit of Corinthian ingenuity. It was in the year 703 B. C., that the Corinthian Ameinoklês built four triremes for the Samians, the first which those islanders had ever possessed: the notice of this fact attests as well the importance attached to the new invention, as the humble scale on which the naval force in those early days was equipped. And it is a fact of not less moment, in proof of the maritime vigor of Corinth in the seventh century B. C., that the earliest naval battle known to Thucydides was one which took place between the Corinthians and the Korkyræans, B. C. 664.[2]

[1] Thucyd. i, 13.

[2] Thucyd. i, 13.

It has already been stated, in the preceding volume, that the line of Herakleid kings in Corinth subsides gradually, through a series of empty names, into the oligarchy denominated Bacchiadæ, or Bacchiads, under whom our first historical knowledge of the city begins. The persons so named were all accounted descendants of Hêraklês, and formed the governing caste in the city; intermarrying usually among themselves, and choosing from their own number an annual prytanis, or president, for the administration of affairs. Of their internal government we have no accounts, except the tale respecting Archias the founder of Syracuse,[3] one of their number, who had made himself so detested by an act of brutal violence terminating in the death of the beautiful youth Aktæôn, as to be forced to expatriate. That such a man should have been placed in the distinguished post of œkist of the colony of Syracuse, gives us no favorable idea of the Bacchiad oligarchy: we do not, however, know upon what original authority the story depends, nor can we be sure that it is accurately recounted. But Corinth, under their government, was already a powerful commercial and maritime city, as has already been stated.

[3] Plutarch, Amator. Narrat. c. 2, p. 772; Diodor. Fragm. lib.
viii, p. 26. Alexander, Ætolus (Fragm. i, 5, ed. Schneidewin),
and the Scholiast ad Apollon. Rhod. iv, 1212, seem to connect
this act of outrage with the expulsion of the Bacchiadæ from
Corinth, which did not take place until long afterwards.

Megara, the last Dorian state in this direction eastward, and conterminous with Attica at the point where the mountains called Kerāta descend to Eleusis and the Thracian plain, is affirmed to have been originally settled by the Dorians of Corinth, and to have remained for some time a dependency of that city. It is farther said to have been at first merely one of five separate villages,—Megara, Heræa, Peiræa, Kynosura, Tripodiskus,—inhabited by a kindred population, and generally on friendly terms, yet sometimes distracted by quarrels, and on those occasions carrying on war with a degree of lenity and chivalrous confidence which reverses the proverbial affirmation respecting the sanguinary character of enmities between kindred. Both these two statements are transmitted to us (we know not from what primitive source) as explanatory of certain current phrases:[4] the author of the latter cannot have agreed with the author of the former in considering the Corinthians as masters of the Megarid, because he represents them as fomenting wars among these five villages for the purpose of acquiring that territory. Whatever may be the truth respecting this alleged early subjection of Megara, we know it[5] in the historical age, and that too as early as the 14th Olympiad, only as an independent Dorian city, maintaining the integrity of its territory under its leader Orsippus, the famous Olympic runner, against some powerful enemies, probably the Corinthians. It was of no mean consideration, possessing a territory which extended across Mount Geraneia to the Corinthian gulf, on which the fortified town and port of Pêgæ, belonging to the Megarians, was situated; it was mother of early and distant colonies,—and competent, during the time of Solon, to carry on a protracted contest with the Athenians, for the possession of Salamis, wherein, although the latter were at last victorious, it was not without an intermediate period of ill-success and despair.

[4] The first account seems referred to Dêmôn (an author of about
280 B. C., and a collector of Attic archæology, or what is called
Ἀτθιδόγραφος. See Phanodêmi, Dêmônis, Clitodêmi, atque Istri,
Ἀτθίδων, Fragmenta, ed. Siebelis, Præfatio, pp. viii-xi), and is
given as the explanation of the locution—ὁ Διὸς Κόρινθος. See
Schol. ad Pindar. Nem. vii, ad finem; Schol. Aristophan. Ran.
440: the Corinthians seem to have represented their eponymous
hero as son of Zeus, though other Greeks did not believe them
(Pausan. ii, 1, 1). That the Megarians were compelled to come to
Corinth for demonstration of mourning on occasion of the decease
of any of the members of the Bacchiad oligarchy, is, perhaps, a
story copied from the regulation at Sparta regarding the Periœki
and Helots (Herod. vi, 57; Pausan. iv, 14, 3; Tyrtæus, Fragm.).
Pausanias conceives the victory of the Megarians over the
Corinthians, which he saw commemorated in the Megarian θησαυρὸς
at Olympia, as having taken place before the 1st Olympiad,
when Phorbas was life-archon at Athens: Phorbas is placed by
chronologers fifth in the series from Medon, son of Codrus
(Pausan. i, 39, 4; vi, 19, 9). The early enmity between Corinth
and Megara is alluded to in Plutarch, De Malignitate Herodoti, p.
868, c. 35.

The second story noticed in the text is given by Plutarch,
Quæstion. Græc. c. 17, p. 295, in illustration of the meaning of
the word Δορύξενος.

[5] Pausanias, i, 44, 1, and the epigram upon Orsippus in Boeckh,
Corpus Inscript. Gr. No. 1050, with Boeckh’s commentary.

Of the early history of Sikyôn, from the period when it became Dorian down to the seventh century B. C., we know nothing. Our first information respecting it, concerns the establishment of the despotism of Orthagoras, about 680-670 B. C. And it is a point deserving of notice, that all the three above-mentioned towns,—Corinth, Sikyôn, and Megara,—underwent during the course of this same century a similar change of government. In each of them a despot established himself; Orthagoras in Sikyôn; Kypselus in Corinth; Theagenês in Megara.

Unfortunately, we have too little evidence as to the state of things by which this change of government was preceded and brought about, to be able to appreciate fully its bearing. But what draws our attention to it more particularly is, that the like phenomenon seems to have occurred contemporaneously throughout a large number of cities, continental, insular, and colonial, in many different parts of the Grecian world. The period between 650 and 500 B. C., witnessed the rise and downfall of many despots and despotic dynasties, each in its own separate city. During the succeeding interval between 500 and 350 B. C., new despots, though occasionally springing up, become more rare; political dispute takes another turn, and the question is raised directly and ostensibly between the many and the few,—the people and the oligarchy. But in the still later times which follow the battle of Chæroneia, in proportion as Greece, declining in civic not less than in military spirit, is driven to the constant employment of mercenary troops, and humbled by the overruling interference of foreigners,—the despot with his standing foreign body-guard becomes again a characteristic of the time; a tendency partially counteracted, but never wholly subdued, by Aratus, and the Achæan league of the third century B. C.

It would have been instructive if we had possessed a faithful record of these changes of government in some of the more considerable of the Grecian towns; but in the absence of such evidence we can do little more than collect the brief sentences of Aristotle and others respecting the causes which produced them. For as the like change of government was common, near about the same time, to cities very different in locality, in race of inhabitants, in tastes and habits, and in wealth, it must partly have depended upon certain general causes which admit of being assigned and explained.

In the preceding volume, I tried to elucidate the heroic government of Greece, so far as it could be known from the epic poems,—a government founded (if we may employ modern phraseology) upon divine right as opposed to the sovereignty of the people, but requiring, as an essential condition, that the king shall possess force, both of body and mind, not unworthy of the exalted breed to which he belongs.[6] In this government, the authority which pervades the whole society, all resides in the king; but on important occasions it is exercised through the forms of publicity; he consults, and even discusses, with the council of chiefs or elders,—he communicates after such consultation with the assembled agora,—who hear and approve, perhaps hear and murmur, but are not understood to exercise an option or to reject. In giving an account of the Lykurgean system, I remarked that the old primitive Rhetræ, or charters of compact, indicated the existence of these same elements; a king of superhuman lineage (in this particular case two coördinate kings),—a senate of twenty-eight old men, besides the kings who sat in it,—and an ekklesia, or public assembly of citizens, convened for the purpose of approving or rejecting propositions submitted to them, with little or no liberty of discussion. The elements of the heroic government of Greece are thus found to be substantially the same as those existing in the primitive Lykurgean constitution: in both cases the predominant force residing in the kings,—and the functions of the senate, still more those of the public assembly, being comparatively narrow and restricted; in both cases the regal authority being upheld by a certain religious sentiment, which tended to exclude rivalry and to insure submission in the people up to a certain point, in spite of misconduct or deficiency in the reigning individual. Among the principal Epirotic tribes, this government subsisted down to the third century B. C.[7], though some of them had passed out of it, and were in the habit of electing annually a president out of the gens to which the king belonged. Starting from these points, common to the Grecian heroic government, and to the original Lykurgean system, we find that in the Grecian cities generally, the king is replaced by an oligarchy, consisting of a limited number of families,—while at Sparta, the kingly authority, though greatly curtailed, is never abolished. And the different turn of events at Sparta admits of being partially explained. It so happened that, for five centuries, neither of the two coördinate lines of Spartan kings was ever without some male representatives, so that the sentiment of divine right, upon which their preëminence was founded, always proceeded in an undeviating channel. That sentiment never wholly died out in the tenacious mind of Sparta, but it became sufficiently enfeebled to occasion a demand for guarantees against abuse. If the senate had been a more numerous body, composed of a few principal families, and comprising men of all ages, it might, perhaps, have extended its powers so much as to absorb those of the king: but a council of twenty-eight very old men, chosen indiscriminately from all Spartan families, was essentially an adjunct and secondary force. It was insufficient even as a restraint upon the king,—still less was it competent to become his rival; and it served indirectly even as a support to him, by preventing the formation of any other privileged order powerful enough to be an overmatch for his authority. This insufficiency on the part of the senate was one of the causes which occasioned the formation of the annually-renewed Council of Five, called the Ephors; originally a defensive board, like the Roman Tribunes, intended as a restraint upon abuse of power in the kings, but afterwards expanding into a paramount and unresponsible Executive Directory. Assisted by endless dissensions between the two coördinate kings, the ephors encroached upon their power on every side, limited them to certain special functions, and even rendered them accountable and liable to punishment, but never aspired to abolish the dignity. That which the regal authority lost in extent (to borrow the just remark of king Theopompus)[8] it gained in durability: the descendants of the twins Eurysthenês and Proklês continued in possession of their double sceptre from the earliest historical times down to the revolutions of Agis the Third, and Kleomenês the Third,—generals of the military force, growing richer and richer, and reverenced as well as influential in the state, though the directory of ephors were their superiors. And the ephors became, in time, quite as despotic, in reference to internal affairs, as the kings could ever have been before them; for the Spartan mind, deeply possessed with the feelings of command and obedience, remained comparatively insensible to the ideas of control and responsibility, and even averse to that open discussion and censure of public measures, or officers, which such ideas imply. We must recollect that the Spartan political constitution was both simplified in its character, and aided in its working, by the comprehensive range of the Lykurgean discipline, with its rigorous equal pressure upon rich and poor, which averted many of the causes elsewhere productive of sedition,—habituating the proudest and most refractory citizen to a life of undeviating obedience,—satisfying such demand as existed for system and regularity,—rendering Spartan personal habits of life much more equal than even democratical Athens could parallel; but contributing, at the same time, to engender a contempt for talkers, and a dislike of methodical and prolonged speech, which of itself sufficed to exclude all regular interference of the collective citizens, either in political or judicial affairs.

[6] See a striking passage in Plutarch. Præcept. Reipubl. Gerend.
c. 5, p. 801.

[7] Plutarch, Pyrrh. c. 5. Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 1.

[8] Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 1.

Such were the facts at Sparta; but in the rest of Greece the primitive heroic government was modified in a very different manner: the people outgrew, much more decidedly, that feeling of divine right and personal reverence which originally gave authority to the king. Willing submission ceased on the part of the people, and still more on the part of the inferior chiefs, and with it ceased the heroic royalty. Something like a system or constitution came to be demanded.

Of this discontinuance of kingship, so universal in the political march of Hellas, the prime cause is, doubtless, to be sought in the smallness and concentrated residence of each distinct Hellenic society. A single chief, perpetual and unresponsible, was noway essential for the maintenance of union. In modern Europe, for the most part, the different political societies which grew up out of the extinction of the Roman empire embraced each a considerable population and a wide extent of territory and the monarchical form presented itself as the only known means of union between the parts, the only visible and imposing symbol of a national identity. Both the military character of the Teutonic invaders, as well as the traditions of the Roman empire which they dismembered, tended towards the establishment of a monarchical chief, the abolition of whose dignity would have been looked upon as equivalent, and would really have been equivalent, to the breaking up of the nation, since the maintenance of a collective union by means of general assemblies was so burdensome, that the kings themselves vainly tried to exact it by force, and representative government was then unknown.

The history of the Middle Ages, though exhibiting constant resistance on the part of powerful subjects, frequent deposition of individual kings, and occasional changes of dynasty, contains few instances of any attempt to maintain a large political aggregate united without a king, either hereditary or elective. Even towards the close of the last century, at the period when the federal constitution of the United States of America was first formed, many reasoners regarded[9] as an impossibility the application of any other system than the monarchical to a territory of large size and population, so as to combine union of the whole with equal privileges and securities to each of the parts. And it might, perhaps, be a real impossibility among any rude people, with strong local peculiarities, difficult means of communication, and habits of representative government not yet acquired. Hence, throughout all the larger nations of mediæval and modern Europe, with few exceptions, the prevailing sentiment has been favorable to monarchy; but wherever any single city, or district, or cluster of villages, whether in the plains of Lombardy, or in the mountains of Switzerland, has acquired independence,—wherever any small fraction has severed itself from the aggregate,—the opposite sentiment has been found, and the natural tendency has been towards some modification of republican government;[10] out of which, indeed, as in Greece, a despot has often been engendered, but always through some unnatural mixture of force and fraud. The feudal system, evolved out of the disordered state of Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, always presumed a permanent suzerain, vested with large rights of a mixed personal and proprietary character over his vassals, though subject, also, to certain obligations towards them the immediate vassals of the king had subordinate vassals of their own, to whom they stood in the same relation: and in this hierarchy[11] of power, property, and territory blended together, the rights of the chief, whether king, duke, or baron, were always conceived as constituting a status apart, and neither conferred originally by the grant, nor revocable at the pleasure, of those over whom they were exercised. This view of the essential nature of political authority was a point in which the three great elements of modern European society,—the Teutonic, the Roman, and the Christian,—all concurred, though each in a different way and with different modifications; and the result was, a variety of attempts on the part of subjects to compromise with their chief, without any idea of substituting a delegated executive in his place. On particular points of these feudal monarchies there grew up, gradually, towns with a concentrated population, among whom was seen the remarkable combination of a republican feeling, demanding collective and responsible management in their own local affairs, with a necessity of union and subordination towards the great monarchical whole; and hence again arose a new force tending both to maintain the form, and to predetermine the march, of kingly government.[12] And it has been found in practice possible to attain this latter object,—to combine regal government with fixity of administration, equal law impartially executed, security to person and property, and freedom of discussion under representative forms,—in a degree which the wisest ancient Greek would have deemed hopeless.[13] Such an improvement in the practical working of this species of government, speaking always comparatively with the kings of ancient times in Syria, Egypt, Judæa, the Grecian cities, and Rome,—coupled with the increased force of all established routine, and the greater durability of all institutions and creeds which have once obtained footing throughout any wide extent of territory and people, has caused the monarchical sentiment to remain predominant in the European mind, though not without vigorous occasional dissent, throughout the increased knowledge and the enlarged political experience of the last two centuries.

[9] See this subject discussed in the admirable collection of
letters, called the Federalist, written in 1787, during the time
when the federal constitution of the United States of America was
under discussion.—Letters 9, 10, 14, by Mr. Madison.

“Il est de la nature d’une république (says Montesquieu, Esprit
des Loix, viii, 16) de n’avoir qu’un petit territoire: sans cela,
elle ne peut guère subsister.”

[10] David Hume, in his Essay xii (vol. i, p. 159, ed. 1760),
after remarking “that all kinds of government, free and despotic,
seem to have undergone in modern times (_i. e._ as compared with
ancient) a great change for the better, with regard both to
foreign and domestic management,” proceeds to say:—

“But though all kinds of government be improved in modern times,
yet monarchical government seems to have made the greatest
advances towards perfection. It may now be affirmed of civilized
monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone,
that they are a government of laws, not of men. They are found
susceptible of order, method, and constancy to a surprising
degree. Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the arts
flourish; and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like
a father among his children. There are, perhaps, and have been
for two centuries, near two hundred absolute princes, great
and small, in Europe; and allowing twenty years to each reign,
we may suppose that there have been in the whole two thousand
monarchs, or tyrants, as the Greeks would have called them; yet
of these there has not been one, not even Philip the Second of
Spain, so bad as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, who were
four in twelve amongst the Roman emperors. It must, however, be
confessed, that though monarchical governments have approached
nearer to popular ones in gentleness and stability, they are
still much inferior. Our modern education and customs instil more
humanity and moderation than the ancient, but have not as yet
been able to overcome entirely the disadvantages of that form of
government.”

[11] See the Lectures of M. Guizot, Cours d’Histoire Moderne,
Leçon 30, vol. iii, p. 187, edit. 1829.

[12] M. Augustin Thierry observes, Lettres sur l’Histoire de
France, Lettre xvi, p. 235:—

“Sans aucun souvenir de l’histoire Grecque ou Romaine, les
bourgeois des onzième et douzième siècles, soit que leur ville
fut sous la seigneurie d’un roi, d’un comte, d’un duc, d’un
évêque ou d’une abbaye, allaient droit à la république: mais
la réaction du pouvoir établi les rejetait souvent en arrière.
Du balancement de ces deux forces opposées résultait pour la
ville une sort de gouvernement mixte, et c’est ce qui arriva, en
général, dans le nord de la France, comme le prouvent les chartes
de commune.”

Even among the Italian cities, which became practically
self-governing, and produced despots as many in number and as
unprincipled in character as the Grecian (I shall touch upon this
comparison more largely hereafter), Mr. Hallam observes, that
“the sovereignty of the emperors, though not very effective, was
in theory always admitted: their name was used in public acts and
appeared upon the coin.”—View of the Middle Ages, part i, ch. 3,
p. 346, sixth edit.

See also M. Raynouard, Histoire du Droit Municipal en France,
book iii, ch. 12, vol. ii. p. 156: “Cette séparation essentielle
et fondamentale entre les actes, les agens du gouvernement—et les
actes, les agens de l’administration locale pour les affaires
locales—cette démarcation politique, dont l’empire Romain avoit
donné l’exemple, et qui concilioit le gouvernement monarchique
avec une administration populaire—continua plus ou moins
expressément sous les trois dynasties.”

M. Raynouard presses too far his theory of the continuous
preservation of the municipal powers in towns from the Roman
empire down to the third French dynasty; but into this question
it is not necessary for my purpose to enter.

[13] In reference to the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, M.
Sismondi observes, speaking of Philip della Torre, denominated
_signor_ by the people of Como, Vercelli, and Bergamo, “Dans ces
villes, non plus que dans celles que son frère s’était auparavant
assujetties, le peuple ne croyoit point renoncer à sa liberté:
il n’avoit point voulu choisir un maître, mais seulement un
protecteur contre les nobles, un capitaine des gens de guerre,
et un chef de la justice. L’expérience lui apprit trop tard, que
ces prérogatives réunies constituoient un souverain.”—Républiques
Italiennes, vol. iii, ch. 20, p. 273.

It is important to show that the monarchical institutions and monarchical tendencies prevalent throughout mediæval and modern Europe have been both generated and perpetuated by causes peculiar to those societies, whilst in Hellenic societies such causes had no place,—in order that we may approach Hellenic phenomena in the proper spirit, and with an impartial estimate of the feeling universal among Greeks towards the idea of a king. The primitive sentiment entertained towards the heroic king died out, passing first into indifference, next,—after experience of the despots,—into determined antipathy.

To an historian like Mr. Mitford, full of English ideas respecting government, this anti-monarchical feeling appears of the nature of insanity, and the Grecian communities like madmen without a keeper: while the greatest of all benefactors is the hereditary king, who conquers them from without,—the second-best is the home-despot, who seizes the acropolis and puts his fellow-citizens under coercion. There cannot be a more certain way of misinterpreting and distorting Grecian phenomena than to read them in this spirit, which reverses the maxims both of prudence and morality current in the ancient world. The hatred of kings as it stood among the Greeks, whatever may be thought about a similar feeling now, was a prëeminent virtue, flowing directly from the noblest and wisest part of their nature: it was a consequence of their deep conviction of the necessity of universal legal restraint—it was a direct expression of that regulated sociality which required the control of individual passion from every one without exception, and most of all from him to whom power was confided. The conception which the Greeks formed of an unresponsible One, or of a king who could do no wrong, may be expressed in the pregnant words of Herodotus:[14] “He subverts the customs of the country: he violates women: he puts men to death without trial.” No other conception of the probable tendencies of kingship was justified either by a general knowledge of human nature, or by political experience as it stood from Solon downward: no other feeling than abhorrence could be entertained for the character so conceived: no other than a man of unprincipled ambition would ever seek to invest himself with it.

[14] Herod. iii, 80. Νóμαιά τε κινεῖ πάτρια, καὶ βιᾶται γυναῖκας,
κτείνει τε ἀκρίτους.

Our larger political experience has taught us to modify this opinion by showing that, under the conditions of monarchy in the best governments of modern Europe, the enormities described by Herodotus do not take place,—and that it is possible, by means of representative constitutions acting under a certain force of manners, customs, and historical recollection, to obviate many of the mischiefs likely to flow from proclaiming the duty of peremptory obedience to an hereditary and unresponsible king, who cannot be changed without extra-constitutional force. But such larger observation was not open to Aristotle, the wisest as well as the most cautious of ancient theorists; nor if it had been open, could he have applied with assurance its lessons to the governments of the single cities of Greece. The theory of a constitutional king, especially as it exists in England, would have appeared to him impracticable: to establish a king who will reign without governing,—in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no effect,—exempt from all responsibility, without making use of the exemption,—receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act except within the bounds of a known law,—surrounded with all the paraphernalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king: the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen,—but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. To Aristotle, certainly, it could not have appeared otherwise than unintelligible and impracticable: not likely even in a single case,—but altogether inconceivable as a permanent system and with all the diversities of temper inherent in the successive members of an hereditary dynasty. When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsibility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions;[15] and their fear and hatred of him was measured by their reverence for a government of equal law and free speech, with the ascendency of which their whole hopes of security were associated,—in the democracy of Athens more perhaps than in any other portion of Greece. And this feeling, as it was one of the best in the Greek mind, so it was also one of the most widely spread,—a point of unanimity highly valuable amidst so many points of dissension. We cannot construe or criticize it by reference to the feelings of modern Europe, still less to the very peculiar feelings of England, respecting kingship: and it is the application, sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit, of this unsuitable standard, which renders Mr. Mitford’s appreciation of Greek politics so often incorrect and unfair.

[15] Euripides (Supplices, 429) states plainly the idea of a
τύραννος, as received in Greece the antithesis to laws:—

Οὐδὲν τυράννου δυσμενέστερον πόλει·
Ὅπου, τὸ μὲν πρώτιστον, οὔκ εἰσιν νόμοι
Κοινοὶ, κρατεῖ δ᾽ εἷς, τὸν νόμον κεκτημένος
Αὐτὸς παρ᾽ αὑτῷ.

Compare Soph. Antigon. 737. See, also, the discussion in Aristot.
Polit. iii, sect. 10 and 11, in which the rule of the king is
discussed in comparison with the government of laws; compare
also iv, 8, 2-3. The person called “a king according to law” is,
in his judgment, no king at all: Ὁ μὲν γὰρ κατὰ νόμον λεγόμενος
βασιλεὺς οὔκ ἐστιν εἶδος καθάπερ εἴπομεν βασιλείας (iii, 11, 1).

Respecting ἰσονομίη, ἰσηγορίη, παῤῥησία,—equal laws and equal
speech,—as opposed to monarchy, see Herodot. iii, 142, v. 78-92;
Thucyd. iii, 62; Demosthen. ad Leptin. c. 6, p. 461; Eurip. Ion.
671.

Of Timoleon it was stated, as a part of the grateful vote passed
after his death by the Syracusan assembly,—ὅτι τοὺς τυράννους
καταλύσας,—ἀπέδωκε ~τοὺς νόμους~ τοῖς Σικελιώταις (Plutarch.
Timoleon. c. 39).

See Karl Fried. Hermann, Griech. Staatsalterthümer, sect. 61-65.

When we try to explain the course of Grecian affairs, not from the circumstances of other societies, but from those of the Greeks themselves, we shall see good reason for the discontinuance as well as for the dislike of kingship. Had the Greek mind been as stationary and unimproving as that of the Orientals, the discontent with individual kings might have led to no other change than the deposition of a bad king in favor of one who promised to be better, without ever extending the views of the people to any higher conception than that of a personal government. But the Greek mind was of a progressive character, capable of conceiving and gradually of realizing amended social combinations. Moreover, it is in the nature of things that any government,—regal, oligarchical, or democratical,—which comprises only a single city, is far less stable than if it embraced a wider surface and a larger population: and when that semi-religious and mechanical submission, which made up for the personal deficiencies of the heroic king, became too feeble to serve as a working principle, the petty prince was in too close contact with his people, and too humbly furnished out in every way, to get up a prestige or delusion of any other kind: he had no means of overawing their imaginations by that combination of pomp, seclusion, and mystery, which Herodotus and Xenophon so well appreciate among the artifices of kingcraft.[16] As there was no new feeling upon which a perpetual chief could rest his power, so there was nothing in the circumstances of the community which rendered the maintenance of such a dignity necessary for visible and effective union:[17] in a single city, and a small circumjacent community, collective deliberation and general rules, with temporary and responsible magistrates, were practicable without difficulty.

[16] See the account of Deiokês, the first Median king, in
Herodotus, i, 98, evidently an outline drawn by Grecian
imagination: also, the Cyropædia of Xenophon, viii, 1, 40; viii,
3, 1-14; vii, 5, 37 ... οὐ τούτῳ μόνῳ ἐνόμιζε (Κῦρος) χρῆναι τοὺς
ἄρχοντας τῶν ἀρχομένων διαφέρειν τῷ βελτίονας αὐτῶν εἶναι, ἀλλὰ
καὶ καταγοητεύειν ᾤετο χρῆναι αὐτοὺς, etc.

[17] David Hume, Essay xvii, On the Rise and Progress of the Arts
and Sciences, p. 198, ed. 1760. The effects of the greater or
less extent of territory, upon the nature of the government, are
also well discussed in Destutt Tracy, Commentaire sur l’Esprit
des Loix de Montesquieu, ch. viii.

To maintain an unresponsible king, and then to contrive accompaniments which shall extract from him the benefits of responsible government, is in reality a highly complicated system, though, as has been remarked, we have become familiar with it in modern Europe: the more simple and obvious change is, to substitute one or more temporary and responsible magistrates in place of the king himself. Such was the course which affairs took in Greece. The inferior chiefs, who had originally served as council to the king, found it possible to supersede him, and to alternate the functions of administration among themselves; retaining probably the occasional convocation of the general assembly, as it had existed before, and with as little practical efficacy. Such was in substance the character of that mutation which occurred generally throughout the Grecian states, with the exception of Sparta: kingship was abolished, and an oligarchy took its place,—a council deliberating collectively, deciding general matters by the majority of voices, and selecting some individuals of their own body as temporary and accountable administrators. It was always an oligarchy which arose on the defeasance of the heroic kingdom: the age of democratical movement was yet far distant, and the condition of the people—the general body of freemen—was not immediately altered, either for better or worse, by the revolution; the small number of privileged persons, among whom the kingly attributes were distributed and put in rotation, being those nearest in rank to the king himself, perhaps members of the same large gens with him, and pretending to a common divine or heroic descent. As far as we can make out, this change seems to have taken place in the natural course of events and without violence. Sometimes the kingly lineage died out and was not replaced; sometimes, on the death of a king, his son and successor was acknowledged[18] only as archon, or perhaps set aside altogether to make room for a prytanis, or president, out of the men of rank around.

[18] Aristot. Polit. iii, 9, 7; iii, 10, 7-8.

M. Augustin Thierry remarks, in a similar spirit, that the great
political change, common to so large a portion of mediæval
Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whereby the many
different _communes_ or city constitutions were formed, was
accomplished under great varieties of manner and circumstance;
sometimes by violence, sometimes by harmonious accord.

“C’est une controverse qui doit finir, que celle des franchises
municipales obtenues par l’insurrection et des franchises
municipales accordées. Quelque face du problême qu’on envisage,
il reste bien entendu que les constitutions urbaines du xii et du
xiii siècle, comme toute espèce d’institutions politiques dans
tous les temps, ont pu s’établir à force ouverte, s’octroyer de
guerre lasse ou de plein gré, être arrachées ou sollicitées,
vendues ou données gratuitement: les grandes révolutions sociales
s’accomplissent par tous ces moyens à la fois.”—(Aug. Thierry,
Récits des Temps Mérovingiens, Préface, p. 19, 2de édit.)

At Athens, we are told that Kodrus was the last king, and that his descendants were recognized only as archons for life; after some years, the archons for life were replaced by archons for ten years, taken from the body of Eupatridæ, or nobles; subsequently, the duration of the archonship was farther shortened to one year. At Corinth, the ancient kings are said to have passed in like manner into the oligarchy of the Bacchiadæ, out of whom an annual prytanis was chosen. We are only able to make out the general fact of such a change, without knowing how it was brought about,—our first historical acquaintance with the Grecian cities beginning with these oligarchies.

Such oligarchical governments, varying in their details but analogous in general features, were common throughout the cities of Greece proper as well as of the colonies, throughout the seventh century B. C. Though they had little immediate tendency to benefit the mass of the freemen, yet when we compare them with the antecedent heroic government, they indicate an important advance,—the first adoption of a deliberate and preconceived system in the management of public affairs.[19] They exhibit the first evidences of new and important political ideas in the Greek mind,—the separation of legislative and executive powers; the former vested in a collective body, not merely deliberating but also finally deciding,—while the latter is confided to temporary individual magistrates, responsible to that body at the end of their period of office. We are first introduced to a community of citizens, according to the definition of Aristotle,—men qualified, and thinking themselves qualified, to take turns in command and obedience: the collective sovereign, called The City, is thus constituted. It is true that this first community of citizens comprised only a small proportion of the men personally free, but the ideas upon which it was founded began gradually to dawn upon the minds of all. Political power had lost its heaven-appointed character, and had become an attribute legally communicable as well as determined to certain definite ends; and the ground was thus laid for those thousand questions which agitated so many of the Grecian cities during the ensuing three centuries, partly respecting its apportionment, partly respecting its employment,—questions sometimes raised among the members of the privileged oligarchy itself, sometimes between that order as a whole and the non-privileged Many. The seeds of those popular movements, which called forth so much profound emotion, so much bitter antipathy, so much energy and talent, throughout the Grecian world, with different modifications in each particular city, may thus be traced back to that early revolution which erected the primitive oligarchy upon the ruins of the heroic kingdom.

[19] Aristot. Polit. iii, 10, 7. Ἐπεὶ δὲ (_i. e._ after the early
kings had had their day) συνέβαινε γίγνεσθαι πολλοὺς ὁμοίους πρὸς
ἀρετὴν, οὔκετι ὑπέμενον (τὴν Βασίλειαν), ἀλλ’ ~ἐζήτουν κοινόν
τι~, καὶ πολίτειαν καθίστασαν.

Κοινόν τι, _a commune_, the great object for which the
European towns in the Middle Ages, in the twelfth century,
struggled with so much energy, and ultimately obtained: a
charter of incorporation, and a qualified privilege of internal
self-government.

How these first oligarchies were administered we have no direct information; but the narrow and anti-popular interests naturally belonging to a privileged few, together with the general violence of private manners and passions, leave us no ground for presuming favorably respecting either their prudence or their good feeling; and the facts which we learn respecting the condition of Attica prior to the Solonian legislation (to be recounted in the next chapter) raise inferences all of an unfavorable character.

The first shock which they received, and by which so many of them were subverted, arose from the usurpers called Despots, who employed the prevalent discontents both as pretexts and as aids for their own personal ambition, while their very frequent success seems to imply that such discontents were wide-spread as well as serious. These despots arose out of the bosom of the oligarchies, but not all in the same manner.[20] Sometimes the executive magistrate, upon whom the oligarchy themselves had devolved important administrative powers for a certain temporary period, became unfaithful to his choosers, and acquired sufficient ascendency to retain his dignity permanently in spite of them,—perhaps even to transmit it to his son. In other places, and seemingly more often, there arose that noted character called the Demagogue, of whom historians both ancient and modern commonly draw so repulsive a picture:[21] a man of energy and ambition, sometimes even a member of the oligarchy itself, who stood forward as champion of the grievances and sufferings of the non-privileged Many, acquired their favor, and employed their strength so effectively as to put down the oligarchy by force, and constitute himself despot. A third form of despot, some presumptuous wealthy man, like Kylôn at Athens, without even the pretence of popularity, was occasionally emboldened by the success of similar adventures in other places to hire a troop of retainers and seize the acropolis; and there were examples, though rare, of a fourth variety,—the lineal descendant of the ancient kings,—who, instead of suffering himself to be restricted or placed under control by the oligarchy, found means to subjugate them, and to extort by force an ascendency as great as that which his forefathers had enjoyed by consent. To these must be added, in several Grecian states, the Æsymnête, or Dictator, a citizen formally invested with supreme and unresponsible power, placed in command of the military force, and armed with a standing body-guard, but only for a time named, and in order to deal with some urgent peril or ruinous internal dissension.[22] The person thus exalted, always enjoying a large measure of confidence, and generally a man of ability, was sometimes so successful, or made himself so essential to the community, that the term of his office was prolonged, and he became practically despot for life; or, even if the community were not disposed to concede to him this permanent ascendency, he was often strong enough to keep it against their will.

[20] The definition of a despot is given in Cornelius Nepos,
Vit. Miltiadis, c. 8: “Omnes habentur et dicuntur tyranni, qui
potestate sunt perpetuâ in eâ civitate, quæ libertate usa est:”
compare Cicero de Republicâ, ii, 26, 27; iii, 14.

The word τύραννος was said by Hippias the sophist to have
first found its way into the Greek language about the time of
Archilochus (B. C. 660): Boeckh thinks that it came from the
Lydians or Phyrgians (Comment. ad Corp. Inscrip. No. 3439).

[21] Aristot. Polit. v, 8, 2, 3, 4. Τύραννος—ἐκ προστατικῆς ῥίζης
καὶ οὐκ ἄλλοθεν ἐκβλαστάνει (Plato, Repub. viii, c. 17, p. 565).
Οὐδενὶ γὰρ δὴ ἄδηλον, ὅτι ~πᾶς~ τύραννος ἐκ δημοκόλακος φύεται
(Dionys. Halic. vi, 60): a proposition decidedly too general.

[22] Aristot. iii, 9, 5; iii, 10, 1-10; iv, 8, 2.
Αἰσυμνῆται—αὐτοκράτορες μόναρχοι ἐν τοῖς ἀρχαίοις Ἕλλησι—αἱρετὴ
τυραννίς: compare Theophrastus, fragment. περὶ Βασιλείας, and
Dionys. Hal. A. R. v, 73-74; Strabo, xiii, p. 617; and Aristot.
Fragment. Rerum Publicarum, ed. Neumann, p. 122, Κυμαίων Πολιτεία.

Such were the different modes in which the numerous Greek despots of the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. acquired their power. Though we know thus much in general terms from the brief statements of Aristotle, yet, unhappily, we have no contemporary picture of any one of these communities, so as to give us the means of appreciating the change in detail. Of those persons who, possessing inherited kingly dignity, stretched their paternal power so far as to become despots, Aristotle gives us Pheidôn of Argos as an example, whose reign has been already narrated in the preceding volume: of those who made themselves despots by means of official power previously held under an oligarchy, he names Phalaris, at Agrigentum, and the despots at Miletus and other cities of the Ionic Greeks: of those who raised themselves by becoming demagogues, he specifies Panætius in the Sicilian town of Leontini, Kypselus at Corinth, and Peisistratus at Athens;[23] of Æsymnêtes, or chosen despots, Pittakus of Mitylênê is the prominent instance. The military and aggressive demagogue, subverting an oligarchy which had degraded and ill-used him, governing as a cruel despot for several years, and at last dethroned and slain, is farther depicted by Dionysius of Halikarnassus, in the history of Aristodêmus of the Italian Cumæ.[24]

[23] Aristot. Polit. v, 8, 2, 3, 4; v, 4, 5. Aristotle refers
to one of the songs of Alkæus as his evidence respecting the
elevation of Pittakus: a very sufficient proof doubtless,—but we
may see that he had no other informants, except the poets, about
these early times.

[24] Dionys. Hal. A. R. vii, 2, 12. The reign of Aristodemus
falls about 510 B. C.

From the general statement of Thucydides as well as of Aristotle, we learn that the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. were centuries of progress for the Greek cities generally, in wealth, in power, and in population; and the numerous colonies founded during this period, of which I shall speak in a future chapter, will furnish farther illustration of such progressive tendencies. Now the changes just mentioned in the Grecian governments, imperfectly as we know them, are on the whole decided evidences of advancing citizenship. For the heroic government, with which Grecian communities begin, is the rudest and most infantine of all governments; destitute even of the pretence of system or security, incapable of being in any way foreknown, and depending only upon the accidental variations in the character of the reigning individual, who, in most cases, far from serving as a protection to the poor against the rich and great, was likely to indulge his passions in the same unrestrained way as the latter, and with still greater impunity.

The despots, who in so many towns succeeded and supplanted this oligarchical government, though they governed on principles usually narrow and selfish, and often oppressively cruel, “taking no thought—to use the emphatic words of Thucydides—except for their own body and their own family,”—yet since they were not strong enough to crush the Greek mind, imprinted upon it a painful but improving political lesson, and contributed much to enlarge the range of experience as well as to determine the subsequent cast of feeling.[25] They partly broke down the wall of distinction between the people—properly so called, the general mass of freemen—and the oligarchy; indeed, the demagogue-despots are interesting, as the first evidence of the growing importance of the people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as representing the feelings and interests of the people against the governing few, probably availing himself of some special cases of ill-usage, and taking pains to be conciliatory and generous in his own personal behavior; and when the people, by their armed aid, had enabled him to overthrow the existing rulers, they had thus the satisfaction of seeing their own chief in possession of the supreme power, but they acquired no political rights and no increased securities for themselves. What measure of positive advantage they may have reaped, beyond that of seeing their previous oppressors humiliated, we know too little to determine;[26] but even the worst of despots was more formidable to the rich than to the poor, and the latter may perhaps have gained by the change, in comparative importance, notwithstanding their share in the rigors and exactions of a government which had no other permanent foundation than naked fear.

[25] Thucyd. i, 17. Τύραννοι δὲ ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς
πόλεσι, τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ
τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα, τὰς
πόλεις ᾤκουν.

[26] Wachsmuth (Hellenische Alterthumskunde, sect. 49-51) and
Tittmann (Griechisch. Staatsverfassungen, pp. 527-533) both make
too much of the supposed friendly connection and mutual good-will
between the despot and the poorer freemen. Community of antipathy
against the old oligarchy was a bond essentially temporary,
dissolved as soon as that oligarchy was put down.

A remark made by Aristotle deserves especial notice here, as illustrating the political advance and education of the Grecian communities. He draws a marked distinction between the early demagogue of the seventh and sixth centuries, and the later demagogue, such as he himself and the generations immediately preceding had witnessed: the former was a military chief, daring and full of resource, who took arms at the head of a body of popular insurgents, put down the government by force, and made himself the master both of those whom he deposed and of those by whose aid he deposed them; while the latter was a speaker, possessed of all the talents necessary for moving an audience, but neither inclined to, nor qualified for, armed attack,—accomplishing all his purposes by pacific and constitutional methods. This valuable change,—substituting discussion and the vote of an assembly in place of an appeal to arms, and procuring for the pronounced decision of the assembly such an influence over men’s minds as to render it final and respected even by dissentients,—arose from the continued practical working of democratical institutions. I shall have occasion, at a later period of this history, to estimate the value of that unmeasured obloquy which has been heaped on the Athenian demagogues of the Peloponnesian war,—Kleôn and Hyperbolus; but, assuming the whole to be well-founded, it will not be the less true that these men were a material improvement on the earlier demagogues, such as Kypselus and Peisistratus, who employed the armed agency of the people for the purpose of subverting the established government and acquiring despotic authority for themselves. The demagogue was essentially a leader of opposition, who gained his influence by denouncing the men in real ascendency, and in actual executive functions. Now, under the early oligarchies, his opposition could be shown only by armed insurrection, and it conducted him either to personal sovereignty or to destruction; but the growth of democratical institutions insured both to him and to his political opponents full liberty of speech, and a paramount assembly to determine between them; whilst it both limited the range of his ambition, and set aside the appeal to armed force. The railing demagogue of Athens, at the time of the Peloponnesian war (even if we accept literally the representations of his worst enemies), was thus a far less mischievous and dangerous person than the fighting demagogue of the earlier centuries; and the “growth of habits of public speaking,”[27] to use Aristotle’s expression, was the cause of the difference: the opposition of the tongue was a beneficial substitute for the opposition of the sword.

[27] Aristot. Polit. v, 4, 4; 7, 3. Ἐπὶ δὲ τῶν ἀρχαίων,
ὅτε γένοιτο ὁ αὐτὸς δημαγωγὸς καὶ στρατηγὸς, εἰς τυραννίδα
μετέβαλλον· σχεδὸν γὰρ οἱ πλεῖστοι τῶν ἀρχαίων τυράννων ἐκ
δημαγωγῶν γεγόνασι. Αἴτιον δὲ τοῦ τότε μὲν γενέσθαι, νῦν δὲ μὴ,
ὅτι τότε μὲν, οἱ δημαγωγοὶ ἦσαν ἐκ τῶν στρατηγούντων· οὐ γάρ πω
δεινοὶ ἦσαν λέγειν· νῦν δὲ, τῆς ῥητορικῆς ηὐξημένης, οἱ δυνάμενοι
λέγειν δημαγωγοῦσι μὲν, δι’ ἀπειρίαν δὲ τῶν πολεμικῶν οὐκ
ἐπιτίθενται, πλὴν εἴ που βραχύ τι γέγονε τοιοῦτον.