banished man was wiped out from his family and from the worship of the family gods. He was no longer husband or father; and his wife and children were free to act as though he had never lived.

The same religious feeling ran through every relation into which the citizens of one state could be brought with those of another. Influence of Each city remained as much an isolated unit as each religion. original family of the state had ever been; and the process of consolidation never went further than the immediate neighbourhood of the great cities. But the effects of the old religion did not stop here. If it denied to all strangers the right of intermarriage, it fed the feelings of jealousy, suspicion, and dislike which the citizens of one state felt for those of other states even in times of peace, and intensified all the horrors of war. Each war was, in short, a crusade, not a struggle for the attainment of some political end. The duties of mercy and pity to the conquered were things unknown. The life of the vanquished was at the disposal of the victor who, if he did not slay him, sold him as a slave; and if terms were made with the enemy, the contract went for nothing if the religious ceremonies were neglected.

The history of every form of Aryan polity, although it exhibits the working of a more generous feeling, points unmistakeably to

Obstacles hindering

the growth of civil society.

the time when each house existed in utter loneliness and in necessary antagonism with all around it. All indeed that the state could do was to modify the rulesof the ancient family life to suit its own purposes, and to work out its own ends rather by means of compromise than by open opposition to principles which derived their sanction from religion. The Greek Phratriai and the Latin Curiae were but clubs in which a number of houses were combined. No change was made in the character of the houses themselves. All that was done was to provide a common ground on which certain families might meet to promote their secular interests, while their religion and their morality remained unchanged. This morality was the fruit chiefly of a religious belief which touched neither the heart nor the conscience. If a certain act was to be done or left undone, this was not because they had in themselves a certain sense which told them that the one was right and the other wrong, but because a wolf or a rabbit had crossed their path, or because they had heard a crow chatter, or seen the lightning flash on one side rather than on the other. Their only idea of the gods whom they worshipped, that is, of their own ancestors, was that of beings who retained their human appetitcs while they had acquired superhuman power and superhuman malignity. It was impossible that kindly affections could have any real scope among

men who breathed such a moral atmosphere as this, or that the society to which they belonged could fail to exhibit the intolerance, harshness, and cruelty of the principle which lay at the root of their family life, if not of their social order.

of the state.

By bearing in mind this origin of Hellenic polity, we shall be able to find our way with comparative ease through the complicated forms which that polity assumed at different Slow growth periods. We might indeed have thought that the constitution of the primæval Aryan family could never depart from its ancient simplicity: and of itself possibly it might never have done so. But the members of these families recognised no duties beyond the limits of their own homes; and on others who were not so strong or not so cunning they could prey without hindrance or scruple. Hence the natural inequality of mankind allowed the most powerful families to lay the foundations of an irresponsible despotism, while the weaker were brought into a condition of clientship which differed from slavery in little more than its

name.

and the

Clan.

But 30 far as these original families were actually or nearly on a level in point of power, it was possible that they might combine for the purpose of extending that power and increasing The Family it: and by the establishment of a common worship which in no way interfered with that of the family this union was at once accomplished. Thus united, the Greek houses formed a Phratria or brotherhood. But while the circle of interests was widened, the bond of union remained not less strictly religious; and each group of families had a common altar erected in honour of a common deity who was supposed to be more powerful than the gods of each separate household. The principle of combination thus introduced was capable of indefinite extension; and as the grouping of houses or families had formed the Phratria, so the union of Phratriai alone was needed to form in the tribe a religious society strictly analogous to the Phratria or the family. The societies thus formed would always have their own territory, the fields in which each family had its own tomb with the common ground which lay between their several landmarks; but the principle of these combinations was essentially not local, and thus the dependents of these houses could never acquire interest or possession in the soil on which they lived, toiled, and died. At best they might be suffered to retain a certain portion of the produce on condition of their laying the rest at the feet of the lord; and thus a perpetual burden was laid not on the land but on the tillers of it who, if they failed either to yield the amount demanded, or in any other way, might be reduced to personal slavery.

The Clan and the Tribe.

The Tribes

1

But as the worship of the family was subordinated to that of the Phratria, and that of the Phratriai to the worship of the tribe, so tribes which were locally near to each other could not fail to desire for themselves a union similar to that of the phratriai or the houses. This final union of tribes constituted the Polis or State, the society which, founded on a common religion, embraced all its members within the circle of a common law, and which was destined in the end to sweep away those distinctions of blood in which its foundations had been laid. With the formation of the state, in other words, of the individual city, the political growth of the Greek may in strictness of speech be said to have ended; and his inability to and the City. advance to any other idea of Parliament than a Primary Assembly involved a fatal hindrance to the growth of a nation. In blood and in religion the men of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta were as closely connected perhaps as the men of London, Manchester, and Liverpool; but in going to war with each other Athens, Thebes, and Sparta could not even be charged with that violation of duty which during their great civil war was urged against the southern states of the American Union. Hence the country which was called Hellas remained practically throughout its whole history a territory in which a certain number of cities inhabited by people more or less resembling each other might or might not be allied together. The theory of Greek citizenship was the same as that of the Latin city which achieved the conquest of the world; but Rome attained her power not by calling nations into existence but by numbering Italians or Gauls among her citizens by a process which would intitle Englishmen or Prussians to their rights only as possessing the freedom of the cities of London or Berlin.

This device secured to Rome universal dominion: the refusal or the failure to adopt it insured the reduction of the Hellenic land to the form of a Roman province. But whatever might be the extent of Roman or Athenian power, the character of each was the same. It was

Course of political developement in Greece

and in Rome. a power which they only could share who were citizens, and a vast body of men lay at all times beyond the circle of citizenship. The powerful families, who were able to domineer over their weaker neighbours and whose confederation was essentially religious, drew between themselves and their dependents a line of separation, to pass which was an impiety and a sacrilege. The attempts to pass it sum up the history of the political contests between the patricians of Rome and the plebeians; in other forms the same struggle marks the history of Athens, and in greater or less degree that of all the other cities of Greece.

1 A parliament in which every citizen has his place.

CHAPTER III.

THE MYTHOLOGY AND TRIBAL LEGENDS OF THE GREEKS.

General

Greek

mythical tradition.

Of all the Aryan nations, and therefore, it may be said, of all the nations of the world, none has amassed so rich and varied a store of popular tradition as the Greek. Into this magnificent storehouse of his thoughts the Greek character of gathered together all that he knew, or thought that he knew, of the heaven and the earth, of day and night, of fire and frost, of light and darkness, of the bright and the swarthy gods, of giants and nymphs and men. All were there, endowed with life and with all the feelings and the passions of men. But if this rich harvest sprung with a random or irregular growth, it was destined to be garnered up not only by the greatest of epic, lyric, and tragic poets, but by the more systematic hands of mythographers who wove the whole into a connected history from the awful confusion of Chaos, the parent of Erebos and Night, to the settlements of the Herakleids in the Peloponnesos and the founding of every Hellenic city. It follows then that this vast mass of popular tradition was not all of one kind. If in portions it expressed the religious or philosophical thought of the people, in others there were blended stories of tribal wars and heroic exploits which may have had some foundation in the world of historical fact. But all rest upon the same authority, and the achievements of Hektor, Achilleus, and Sarpêdôn are as much or aa little attested as the terrific combats of Zeus with Typhon and the Titans or the torturing of Prometheus on the crags of Cau

casus.

For him Greek ideas

of nature.

It is enough to say that for the Greek, as for the Aryan conquerors of India, the whole world of sense was alive. the trees, the clouds, the waters were all sentient beings: the dawn and the gloaming were living persons, connected with the brilliant god whose daily approach waked all things from slumber and whose departure left them in darkness repulsive as that of death. For him the blue heaven over his head was the living husband of the earth on which he seemed to descend each evening. He was Zeus, the glittering or shining god, whose bride Gaia or Ida was the teeming mother of growths awful or lovely, healthful or deadly; or he was Ouranos, the being who spreads his veil over the earth which he loves. For him the sun was Helios, the inhabitant of a house so dazzling in its splendour that no mortal might look on its glory and live; or he was Phoibos the lord of

life who sprang into light and strength in Delos or Ortygia, the land of the morning; or he was Herakles toiling along up the steep path of heaven, laden with blessings for mankind; or he was Sisyphos, the wise or crafty, doomed to roll daily to the mountain summit the stone which then rolled down again to the abyss; or Tantalos sentenced to parch into slime the waters from which he would drink, or to scorch the fruits, which were his own children, before the eyes of Zeus, the broad heaven. For him the corn came up from the living bosom of the Earth Mother, and the summer was her child, torn from her arms as Persephonê each winter and restored to her at Eleusis, the joyous trysting place, in the spring. For him the golden grape was the gift of the wine-god Dionysos, the wonderful being who, gentle at his birth as a babe, could change himself into a fierce lion and rouse his worshippers into irrepressible frenzy. But more frequently present to his thoughts were the bright inhabitants of the dawn land, the flashing-eyed maiden who springs fully armed from the cloven forehead of her sire and who has her home on the sunlit rock of brilliant and happy Athens, the queen of loveliness and grace who, as Aphroditê, rises in faultless beauty from the sea foam,—the rosy-fingered Eôs who leaves the couch of Tithonos to gladden the eyes of mortal men, the pure Artemis whose spear never misses her mark,—the shortlived Daphnê who vanishes away before the fiery breath of her lover, the beautiful Arethousa who plunges into the blue waters in her flight from the huntsman Alpheios,-the glowing Charites who tend the bath of Aphroditê or array in a robe of spotless white the form of the new-born Phoibos,-the tender Prokris who dies loving and loved, because earth has no longer a place to shelter her;—and over all these, rather oppressive in her greatness than winning in her beauty, Hêrê the majestic queen of heaven, whom Ixion woos to his ruin, bringing on himself the doom which binds him to his blazing wheel for ever and ever. With these beings of the dawn land came the harper Hermes, the babe who can soothe all cares away as he sings softly in his cradle, the Master-Thief who, when a few hours old, steals the bright cattle of the sun god, the mighty giant who in his rage can dash the branches of the forest together till they burst into flame but who, be he ever so hungry, cannot eat of the flesh which the fire has roasted. For the Greek, lastly, Hephaistos, the youngest of the gods, limping from his birth, yet terrible in his power, was the lord of earthly fire, while the spotless Hestia dwelt in the everlasting flame which gleamed on the sanctuary of each household hearth.1

1 In this brief summary I have named a few only of the beautiful

or awful beings who peopled the mythical world of the Greeks. Ex