Cuma, he is a model tyrant, chastising with scorpions where his father had scourged with whips; and a portion at least of the story of Oidipous and Iokastê was by some mythographers imported into the tradition to account for that excess of cruelty which Herodotos traced to the influence of Thrasy boulos tyrant of Miletos. This despot, he tells us,1 on receiving from Periandros a request for counsel in the general management of his affairs, gave no verbal answer to his messenger, but going into a cornfield cut off and threw away the tallest and richest of the ears of corn. Like Sextus Tarquinius at Gabii, Periandros knew that he should deal with the first men of his city as his friend had dealt with the ears of corn, and the mildness of his previous rule was followed by a savage and merciless oppression. Whatever the father had spared, now fell by the hand of his bloodthirsty son who in one day stripped of their raiment all the women of Corinth, whether free or inslaved, and burnt the dresses that their ghosts might clothe the shivering phantom of his beautiful wife Melissa the daughter of Prokles tyrant of Epidauros. Melissa had been murdered by her husband; and on hearing of the crime Prokles sent for her two sons, and having kept them for some time, bade them at parting remember who it was that had slain their mother. On the elder son the words made no impression: in the younger they awakened a feeling of ineradicable hatred for his father, whom he treated with silent contempt. The patience of Periandros was at last exhausted, and the young man was driven from his home, a heavy penalty to be paid to Apollon being denounced on all who might speak to him or give him food or shelter. Undismayed, Lykophron lived as best he might in the porticoes, where his father came to see him when he was half starved. Contrasting his present misery with the luxury which he had forfeited, Periandros prayed him to return home. The only answer of the young man was that his father was debtor to Apollon for the penalty denounced on any who might speak to him. Wearied out with his obstinacy, the tyrant sent his son to Korkyra, and then marching to Epidauros made Prokles a prisoner. But still yearning for his younger son, he sent his sister who in a speech garnished with a profusion of proverbs worthy of Sancho Panza besought him to return to Corinth. The answer was that he would never look on its walls so long as his father was there; and Periandros in his despair proposed that he should go to Korkyra while his son took his place as despot at Corinth. So great, however, was the dread or the hatred of Periandros that on hearing of the proposed arrangement the Korkyraians at once put Lykophron to death. But 2 See note 1, page 7.

1 Herod. v. 92-6..

we have other versions of the story of Melissa and the burnt garments, first in the tale that Periandros at a feast stripped the women of their golden ornaments because he had made a vow to dedicate a statue of gold at Olympia if he won the chariot race, and secondly in the statement that he obtained the gold by exacting for ten years a property tax of ten per cent. In short, from first to last, Periandros lives in a world of marvels and wonders; and the story of Arion 1 carried on the dolphin's back from the Italian seas to Tainaron is a worthy pendent of the legends of Lykophron and Melissa. We need only to note further that this rigid ruler or bloodthirsty murderer is in other legends ranked among the seven wise men of Hellas and that from this point of view he is represented as compelling his subjects to support themselves by honest industry and to make a report of their means of livelihood. The dilemma is clearly not to be solved like the quarrel of the two knights about the shield with the brazen and silver sides.

We can scarcely be said to know more of the Megarian despot Theagenes. Like Kypselos, he is represented as acting the part Theagenes of of a demagogue, and thus obtaining from the people a Megara. bodyguard which he employed after the fashion of Peisistratos at Athens. At best the traditions respecting him are uncertain and obscure; but Megara, as the mother-city of colonies so important as Byzantion in the east and Thapsos in the west, stands forth as a state fully able to hold its ground against Athens which only after a desperate struggle succeeded in wresting the island of Salamis from her dominion. Henceforth, as with Argos, her greatness belonged to the past; and it is possible that the prosperity of these cities may have been promoted by the friendship or alliance of the despots who governed them. But while the general course of developement from oligarchy to despotism, and from despotism through oligarchy to democratic rule is perfectly clear, it is strange that the history of individual despots should have come down to us in forms so fragmentary and distorted with a colouring so unreal and deceptive. That the government of these despots and oligarchs secured to their cities for the time a large amount of wealth and power, although it may have hastened their decay or their downfall, there is no reason to doubt; and with this conclusion we must be content.

1 Herod. i. 94. Myth. Ar. Nat. ii. 26, 245.

2 Herod. vi. 128.

CHAPTER VII.

THE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION OF THE GREEKS.

The greatness of the Ionic race in the prehistoric age.

In the historical ages Athens stands pre-eminent above all the states or cities whose people belonged to the Ionic stock. But before we reach these ages the glory of the Ionic name had in great part passed away. The time had been when all the Ionian tribes regarded as an honourable title the name by which the Greeks generally were known to the barbarian world of the East. But the sons of Javan on the western coasts of Asia Minor and in many of the islands of the Egean sea had fallen under the power of local despots or of the Lydian kings, and with these had been brought under the harsher yoke of the Persian monarch; and if constant oppression had not, as some said, destroyed the spirit and bravery of the Asiatic Ionians, it had so far weakened their judgement and their powers of combination and action that the Western Ionians, and more especially the Athenians, no longer cared to be distinguished by the name.' The Athenians, indeed, still delighted in being known as the men of the violet crown: 2 but they had probably forgotten that in ages not very far removed from their own they were not the foremost or the greatest of the Ionian race. In this respect the history of Athens bears no distant likeness to that of Rome, the insignificant Latin town which was destined to extend its empire first over Italy and then over the world. But in the times of the despots and the oligarchs the power of Athens was eclipsed by that of many cities which in the days of her own greatness had almost vanished from the political stage.

Pan-Ionic festival of Delos.

The prosperity of these cities belongs to that golden age of the Ionic race in which Delos was a centre of attraction not less brillant than Olympia became for all the Hellenic tribes. Here in the craggy island where Phoibos was born and to which after his daily wanderings he returned with ever fresh delight, were gathered at the end of each fourth year the noblest and the most beautiful of the children of men. Here, as he looked on the magnificent throng of women whose loveliness could nowhere be matched and of men unsurpassed for

1 Herod. i. 143.

2 Myth. Ar. Nat. i. 228. Arist. Acharn. 606.

Hymn, Apoll. 146.

4 Hence the miserable change which before the days of Perikles

4

had secluded the women of Athens had not yet taken place among the Ionians; and the Delian festival presents a pleasant contrast to that of Olympia from which women were excluded on pain of death.

splendour of form and strength of nerve, the spectator might well fancy that he gazed on beings whom age and death could never touch. Here on the sacred shore were drawn up the ships which brought thither the riches and the treasures of distant lands, and which had already made the Ionians formidable rivals even of the Phenician mariners. But in the days of Thucydides the glowing descriptions of the blind old bard of Chios were those of a time which had long since passed away. The splendour of the Delian festival had long faded before the growing popularity of the Ephesian games; and when in the days of the brilliant Pan-Athenaic celebrations of their own city the Athenians made some attempt to renew the glories of the Delian feast, the Hymn which spoke of those ancient gatherings was the only document from which Thucydides could obtain any knowledge of that time.2

At no time was the Delian festival more than a Pan-Ionic gathering. But similar restrictions had been common to those

PanHellenic festivals.

festivals which afterwards became Pan-Hellenic, just as the feasts open to the Ionic, Aiolic, or Dorian races respectively had once been strictly local celebrations of cities or villages; nor can we doubt that but for its geographical position Delos would have become the resort of a congress not less general. But the conquests of the Lydian kings first broke up the Ionic society, and their downfall left the Egean waters open to the Phenician fleets of the Persian despots; and thus the especially ennobling influences of the gathering at Delos passed for the time away. The genius of Athens had as yet been very partially called forth, and at Olympia there was neither that free mingling of men and women which is one of the redeeming features of the so-called heroic age, nor that rivalry of art and poetry in which the bard of the Delian hymn expresses so keen an interest.3 Far removed, not only as an inland city but by its position in the western corner of the Peloponnesos, from all danger of attack by Persian fleets, Olympia rose to greatness as the glory of Delos waned. In marked contrast with the shortlived prosperity of Delos, the quadrennial celebration of the Olympic festival was never interrupted until the Christian Theodosius decreed its abolition 800 years after the death of Herodotos and Thucydides.

The Delian

The so-called Homeric Hymn to Apollon combines with the poem which speaks of the Delian festival another Hymn to and a later poem in which Apollon is represented as journeying westwards, seeking a home which he cannot find either in Iolkos or the Lelantian plain, in Mykalessos or in

Apollon.

1 Hymn, ApolЛ. 148–155.

2 Thuc. iii. 104.

3 Hymn, Apoll. 167-175. enumeration of the Olympiads begins

The

with the alleged victory of Koroibos, B.C. 776. The era may be convenient as a chronological basis, but it represents no well-attested historical fact.

Thebes. At last he is advised by the nymph of the Telphousian stream to go further still until in one of the glens of Parnassos he should reach the village of Krisa. There beneath the mighty crags which beetled over it, he marked the spot on which Trophonios and Agamedes raised his shrine, and there he slew the mighty dragon, the child of Hêrê, and leaving his body to be scorched by the sun commanded that thenceforth the place should be called Pytho, the ground of the rotting. But though his temple had been reared, priests were lacking to it, and spying a Kretan ship far off on the sea, he hastened towards it and assuming the form of a dolphin brought the vessel without aid of wind or helm or sail along the Lakonian coast by Helos and Tainaron to Samê and Zakynthos, and then through the gulf which severs the Peloponnesos from the northern land to the haven of Krisa with its rich soil and its vine-clothed plain. There coming forth from the sea like a star, he guided them to their future home where their hearts failed them for its rugged nakedness. The whole land is bare and desolate,' they said; 'whence shall we get food?' 'Foolish men,' answered the god, 'stretch forth your hands and slay each day the rich offerings, for they shall come to you without stint and sparing, seeing that the sons of men shall hasten hither from all lands to learn my will. Only guard ye my temple well, for if ye deal rightly, no man shall take away your glory; but if ye speak lies and do iniquity, if ye hurt the people who come to my altar and make them go astray, then shall other men rise up in your place and ye shall be thrust out for ever.' 1

The Nemean and Isth

mian games.

But if the Hymn speaks of Pytho or Delphoi as rich in wealth of offerings and as crowded with pilgrims from all lands, it seems to draw out almost with anxious care the contrast between this rock-bound sanctuary and the broad Olympian plain with its splendid Stadion and vast racecourse. Here among the glens of Parnassos, the ear of Phoibos, it is said, can never be vexed with the tumult of beasts of burden or the stamping of war steeds; and we are thus prepared to learn that the Pythian festival was designed to call forth rather the rivalry of poets than the competition of the chariot race. It is perhaps only an accident that traditions not less rich in marvels have failed to reach us respecting the origin of the games which the Kleonaians or the Argives celebrated in the Nemean valley in honour of Zeus, or of the festival which the Corinthians kept at the isthmus in honour of Poseidon. These feasts, unlike those of Pytho and Olympia, were held every two years; but all four were

1 Hymn, Apoll. 182-554. The and Phinehas in their dealings with conduct against which they are the congregation.

warned is precisely that of Hophni

E