The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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such was Pontos. Is it too much to add to the barbarian kingdoms of the East the mighty commonwealth of the West which had once been in Greek eyes no less barbarian? It is no small part of our œcumenical story to mark how far Rome became Greek and how far Rome refused to become Greek. The facts belong to a later time; yet in some sort they form part of our present survey. The Rome which brought the Greek lands step by step, first under Roman influence, then under Roman dominion, was a Rome which had already come within the magic circle of Hellenic teaching; while keeping the essential essence of the national life untouched, while remaining truly Roman in every political institution, in every detail of law and government, she became Greek for every purpose of refined and intellectual life. Nay, Rome became, like Macedonia, a disciple that gathered in fresh disciples. Wherever Rome’s political life spread, some measure, greater or less, of Greek intellectual life spread with it.
The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intellectual dominion has formed one side of the whole modern world; the advance of Greek political power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unimportant, work of forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times, is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut out the work of earlier Greek colonization, above all in those lands of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This enables us to fix a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being. Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the West was largely done by his more famous nephew and namesake in the East. If a great part of Alexander’s conquests were but for a short time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alexander and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed Tauros, the boundary of Alexander’s first Asiatic conquests, as a far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and it has gone back at others; but its general extent is wonderfully the same. It is an extent which in both ages has been fixed by the genius of the people. Nowhere out of the old continuous Hellas does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern Europe and western Asia the Greek is the representative of European and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. The world of peninsulas and islands is the world of the Greek now, exactly as it was in the days of the Homeric Catalogue.
It is, as we held in our former course, with that Catalogue, the first written record of European politics, that our survey of Europe before the Roman Power must open. With all who can take a general grasp of history and who understand the nature of evidence, the Domesday of the Empire of Mykênê, puzzling to the mere porer over two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, commands full belief. We ruled it in our former inquiry to be the highest example of a general rule, “Credo quia impossibile.” In the Catalogue we see the people of many islands and of all Argos, grouped under the Bretwalda of Hellas, already engaged in a stage, and not the earliest stage, of the Eternal Question. Herodotus, who better knew the meaning of the world’s history than the diplomatists of modern days, could point, in a mythical shape indeed, to stages earlier still. Whether there ever was a personal Agamemnôn and a personal Odysseus matters but little; it matters far more that the keen eye of Ælfred, who knew the relation of an overlord and his vassal princes, could see the relation between Ulixes with his two kingdoms and the Casere Agamemnôn of whom he held them. That Casere, kingliest among the kingly, βασιλεύτερος in the throng of βασιλῆες, is already doing the work of a Trajan or a Frederick; he is fighting for Europe on the shores of Asia. The work of Greek colonization has begun; Crete, to be won again ages after from the Saracen, is already won from the Phœnician; Rhodes is already admitted to Hellenic fellowship, to see in after days the might of Antigonos and the might of Mahomet shattered beneath her walls. The southern coast of Asia is still untouched; Milêtos is a barbarian city; but Achilleus has won Lesbos as his own prize, and on the mainland the work is doing which was to make the coasts of the Hellespont and the Propontis a foremost outpost of Greece and Europe, the land which was to witness the first exploits of the first crusaders and to behold the Eastern Rome rise to a fresh life under the firm rule of the Emperors of Nikaia. Deem we as we will as to minuter details, as we have in the Homeric poems our first glimpse of Aryan society in peace and war, so we have in them our first record, if only in a poetic form, of one stage of the great strife which changed the barbarian peninsula of Asia into that solid home of Grecian speech and Roman law which for ages held up against the ceaseless inroads of the Arabian conquerors. To the west, to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily; Akarnania is still part of the vague Mainland, the still undefined Epeiros; Korkyra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells on both coasts; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing glimpse. The northern coast of the Ægæan is known; but that coast is not yet Hellenic; it significantly sends its warriors to fight on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all is wonder and mystery; we may as well ask whether the poet had any conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the East; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the river Ægypt; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of Tartêssos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious knowledge that the pillars of Hêraklês – if Greece had as yet heard their name – opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails.
Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It is one of the gains or losses of the wider study of history that it often teaches us to look at this and that period with different eyes from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned, from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to see Herodotus saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece, is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that process had already begun which is still not ended, the long and gloomy work