The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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himself to write the story, the History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove Finlay’s point that Milêtos had learned to groan, as thrice-betrayed Jôannina groans still, beneath the yoke of the barbarian. The periods when Greek influences had most sway over the whole world are two, one earlier, one later, than the more brilliant times of our usual studies. The earlier is the greater; for it is the time when Hellas grew and spread and made wide her borders among the nations, by her own unaided strength, the time when Hellenic colonization carried everywhere, not only Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts, but the higher boon of free Hellenic political life. In the later period Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts are spread more widely than they had ever been spread before; but Hellenic political life is no longer carried with them. The external might of Greece is wielded for her by the kings of the adopted lands; we have passed from Hellenic colonization to Macedonian conquest. In neither of those periods was the most vigorous Greek life to be found in old Greece itself; the most brilliant recorded period of old Greece is the period between the two, the period of our most usual Greek studies. But it was the most brilliant because the outer bounds of Hellas had fallen back before victorious barbarians, and because old Greece rose up in a renewed strength to avenge the wrongs of her colonies and to ward off the like bondage from herself. The Greece of the fifth century before Christ is like the Rome of the fourth century after Christ. Its warfare is essentially defensive; it seldom gains new ground; it has much ado to defend old ground. It gains victories; it wins territories; but the victories are gained over threatening invaders, the territories that are won are won back from the grasp of those invaders. The work of Kimôn, the work of Agêsilaos, answers rather to the work of Galerius and Valentinian than to the work of those conquerors of realms wholly new who made Sicily a Greek and Gaul a Roman land.
It is hard to fix on the exact moment when free and independent Hellas – for remember that wherever Hellênes dwell there is Hellas – had spread itself most widely over the Mediterranean coasts. For boundaries fluctuate, and Hellas still advanced at some points after she had begun to fall back at others. But we cannot be far wrong in picking out some time not far from the beginning of the sixth century before Christ as the most brilliant time of the free Hellênes throughout the world. Then, as Herodotus puts it, all Greeks were still free; it was in the course of the next century that some Greeks were brought under the power of barbarian masters. If some Greek colonies were still to be planted, all the fields of Greek colonization had already been opened. And in most of them the Greek cities were at the height of their power and greatness, positive and relative; they were greater than they were in after days, greater than the cities of old Greece were at the same time. It is one of the truths which it is hardest to take in, that there was a time when Milêtos and Sybaris and Akragas, rather than Athens or Sparta, were the greatest cities of the Hellenic name. The like came again at a later time, when the greatest of Greek cities were Alexandria and Antioch. That the life of Athens and Sparta was the more abiding proves that the Greek was after all more at home on the soil on which he grew to be a Greek; but the fact that, at one time the colonial, at another the Macedonian, cities altogether outshone the older and truer Hellas is a fact which should be ever borne in mind. In the great days of the Greek colonies the greater part of the Mediterranean coasts was divided between settlers from Greece and settlers from Phœnicia. In the eastern seas the Greek had the supremacy; the true life and strength of the men of Canaan had passed away from Sidon and Tyre to the Phœnician cities in the western Mediterranean, to Panormos in the great central island, to Gadeira on the Ocean, to Utica on the Libyan coast, to the New City which outshone her parents and elder sisters, to mighty Carthage, chief and in course of time mistress of her fellows. From the Ægæan islands the Phœnician had withdrawn before the Greek; even in more distant Cyprus the Greek had gained the upper hand. Far to the south, on the Libyan mainland, the fertile coast between the Egyptian and the Carthaginian had beheld the growth of Kyrênê and her sisters of the Greek Pentapolis. The Greek cities of Asia were among the most flourishing in the world; the gates of the Bosporos had been thrown open; the Pontos was no longer the Inhospitable but the Hospitable Sea; if the most abiding seat of Hellenic freedom, Cherson on her Tauric peninsula, had not already sprung into being, the path had at least been opened for her. On the western side of her own peninsula, Greece was creeping up the Hadriatic coast; setting aside later settlements, setting aside doubtful tales of earlier settlements, Akarnania was now part of the Greek mainland, Korkyra was numbered among Greek islands, Ambrakia, perhaps Epidamnos and Apollônia, had begun their course; Greek culture was spreading among the kindred nations; if narrower Hellenic feeling forbade to the Thesprotian and the Molottian any share in the Hellenic name, wider and more liberal inquirers did not deny their right. But, above all, this is the age of the greatness of the Greek folk in the lands west of Hadria, that greatness which so soon dwindled away, and which adventurous kings from Sparta and Epeiros strove in vain to restore. The Phœnician, whose settlements once studded the eastern and southern coasts of Sicily, is now driven into the north-western corner of the island; the Sicilian cities are among the foremost of the Greek name; if Syracuse is less great than she was in days to come, it is because Akragas and Gela have not yet fallen from their first greatness. In southern Italy, alone in lands out of the old home, in a peninsular land recalling the old home, Hellas spreads from sea to sea; the Greater Greece holds the land firmly with her great cities; Sybaris has reached the greatness from which she is soon to fall into utter nothingness; Taras, not yet Latin Tarentum, has begun the long life some traces of which hang about her even in our own day. As for the Greek cities in the Western Mediterranean, Massalia and her fellows, their full day of greatness, their day of widest influence over barbarian neighbours, had as yet hardly come. But it was coming; the work was begun. In that day Hellenic life is fully as vigorous and flourishing in the Western as in the Eastern lands. Continuous Hellas lies between the two, for a moment less brilliant, of less influence in the world, than the two great ranges of Greek colonization on either side of it. But when the whole Mediterranean coast might seem to be divided between the Greek and the Phœnician, two lands stand marked as having supplied no home for the settlements of either. There was the land whose day of greatness had gone by, and the land whose day of greatness was coming. By the banks of the Nile the site of Alexandria still stood unnoticed by all the wisdom of a thousand Pharaohs; the Greek was already known in Egypt as a mercenary; he had not yet come to reign as a Preserver and a Benefactor. By the banks of the Tiber, Rome, perhaps already the head of Latium, not yet aspiring to be the head of the world or the head of Italy, was biding her time; not yet herself conquering or colonizing, but strong enough, along with her valiant neighbours, to keep central Italy as an Italian land, in which neither the men of Hellas nor the men of Canaan should find a dwelling-place.
This then, from the point of view of œcumenical history, is the time which saw the full height of strictly Hellenic greatness, the greatness of Hellenic commonwealths, the greatness of states which were Greek by birth and not only Greek by adoption. Let us pass on to the next strongly marked period, the days, stretching not very much beyond a century and a half, which are undoubtedly the most brilliant days in the life of some of the greatest cities of the elder Hellas, and which have therefore often been mistaken for the whole history of the Greek people. Now, as Herodotus says, we can no longer say that all Greeks are free. In the course of the sixth century B.C. the work of Mummius and Mahomet begins; Greeks now begin to be the subjects of foreign rulers. Barbarian powers such as Greeks had never yet had to deal with have arisen in East and West. Two such powers above all have come to the front, a mighty empire in the East, a mighty commonwealth in the West, an empire and a commonwealth which for some generations were to be names of fear throughout the Hellenic world. On the one side the old barbarian powers of Asia, powers which lay beyond the range of European history, have given way to a new barbarian power which forced itself within the European range, and which we may almost say had a right to force itself. It was not against the Hittite or the Assyrian that the strife had to be waged, but against the kindred Persian. An Aryan people had been misled in their course of wandering; they had strayed into the land of morning; they now turned their faces towards the setting sun, but they turned them only when it was too late, when they had already put on the guise of the lands of their sojourn and could show themselves among their European kinsfolk in no light but that of barbarian invaders. Yet we must pay our tribute to the long abiding national life and national energy which could so often rise again in full freshness after ages of bondage. It was no mean people which could twice spring into fresh being at the preaching of a national religion. It