the Cyclades. Against Archilochus and Anacreon, Sappho and Alcaeus, Greece has nothing better to set, after the age of Hesiod, than Tyrtaeus and Theognis. Reference has already been made to the greatness of the Ionians as navigators, as colonizers and as traders. In wealth and in population, Miletus, at the epoch of the Persian conquest, must have been far ahead of any city of European Greece. Sybaris, in Magna Graecia, can have been its only rival outside Ionia. There were two respects, however, in which the comparison was in favour of the mother-country. In warfare, the superiority of the Spartan infantry was unquestioned; in politics, the Greek states showed a greater power of combination than the Ionian.
Finally, Ionia was the scene of the first conflicts with the Persian. Here were decided the first stages of a struggle which was to determine the place of Greece in the history of the world. The rise of Persia under Cyrus was, as External relations. Herodotus saw, the turning-point of Greek history. Hitherto the Greek had proved himself indispensable to the oriental monarchies with which he had been brought into contact. In Egypt the power of the Saite kings rested upon the support of their Greek mercenaries. Amasis (569–525 B.C.), who is raised to the throne as the leader of a reaction against the influence of the foreign garrison, ends by showing greater favour to the Greek soldiery and the Greek traders than all that were before him. With Lydia the relations were originally hostile; the conquest of the Greek fringe is the constant aim of Lydian policy. Greek influences, however, seem to have quickly permeated Lydia, and to have penetrated to the court. Alyattes (610–560 B.C.) marries an Ionian wife, and the succession is disputed between the son of this marriage and Croesus, whose mother was a Carian. Croesus (560–546 B.C.) secures the throne, only to become the lavish patron of Greek sanctuaries and the ally of a Greek state. The history of Hellenism had begun. It was the rise of Cyrus that closed the East to Greek enterprise and Greek influences. In Persia we find the antithesis of all that is characteristic of Greece—autocracy as opposed to liberty; a military society organized on an aristocratic basis, to an industrial society, animated by a democratic spirit; an army, whose strength lay in its cavalry, to an army, in which the foot-soldier alone counted; a morality, which assigned the chief place to veracity, to a morality which subordinated it to other virtues; a religion, which ranks among the great religions of the world, to a religion, which appeared to the most spiritual minds among the Greeks themselves both immoral and absurd. Between two such races there could be neither sympathy nor mutual understanding. In the Great Age the Greek had learned Persian wars. to despise the Persian, and the Persian to fear the Greek. In the 6th century it was the Persian who despised, and the Greek who feared. The history of the conflicts between the Ionian Greeks and the Persian empire affords a striking example of the combination of intellectual strength and political weakness in the character of a people. The causes of the failure of the Ionians to offer a successful resistance to Persia, both at the time of the conquest by Harpagus (546–545 B.C.) and in the Ionic revolt (499–494 B.C.), are not far to seek. The centrifugal forces always tended to prove the stronger in the Greek system, and nowhere were they stronger than in Ionia. The tie of their tribal union proved weaker, every time it was put to the test, than the political and commercial interests of the individual states. A league of jealous commercial rivals is certain not to stand the strain of a protracted struggle against great odds. Against the advancing power of Lydia a common resistance had not so much as been attempted. Miletus, the greatest of the Ionian towns, had received aid from Chios alone. Against Persia a common resistance was attempted. The Panionium, the centre of a religious amphictyony, became for the moment the centre of a political league. At the time of the Persian conquest Miletus held aloof. She secured favourable terms for herself, and left the rest of Ionia to its fate. In the later conflict, on the contrary, Miletus is the leader in the revolt. The issue was determined, not as Herodotus represents it, by the inherent indolence of the Ionian nature, but by the selfish policy of the leading states. In the sea-fight at Lade (494 B.C.) the decisive battle of the war, the Milesians and Chians fought with desperate courage. The day was lost thanks to the treachery of the Samian and Lesbian contingents.
The causes of the successful resistance of the Greeks to the invasions of their country, first by Datis and Artaphernes (490 B.C.), in the reign of Darius, and then by Xerxes in person (480– 479 B.C.), are more complex. Their success was partly due to a moral cause. And this was realized by the Greeks themselves. They felt (see Herod. vii. 104) that the subjects of a despot are no match for the citizens of a free state, who yield obedience to a law which is self-imposed. But the cause was not solely a moral one. Nor was the result due to the numbers and efficiency of the Athenian fleet, in the degree that the Athenians claimed (see Herod. vii. 139). The truth is that the conditions, both political and military, were far more favourable to the Greek defence in Europe than they had been in Asia. At this crisis the centripetal forces proved stronger than the centrifugal. The moral ascendancy of Sparta was the determining factor. In Sparta the Greeks had a leader whom all were ready to obey (Herod. viii. 2). But for her influence the forces of disintegration would have made themselves felt as quickly as in Ionia. Sparta was confronted with immense difficulties in conducting the defence against Xerxes. The two chief naval powers, Athens and Aegina, had to be reconciled after a long and exasperating warfare (see Aegina). After Thermopylae, the whole of northern Greece, with the exception of Athens and a few minor states, was lost to the Greek cause. The supposed interests of the Peloponnesians, who formed the greater part of the national forces, conflicted with the supposed interests of the Athenians. A more impartial view than was possible to the generation for which Herodotus wrote suggests that Sparta performed her task with intelligence and patriotism. The claims of Athens and Sparta were about equally balanced. And in spite of her great superiority in numbers,[1] the military conditions were far from favourable to Persia. A land so mountainous as Greece is was unsuited to the operations of cavalry, the most efficient arm of the service in the Persian Army, as in most oriental ones. Ignorance of local conditions, combined with the dangerous nature of the Greek coast, exposed their ships to the risk of destruction; while the composite character of the fleet, and the jealousies of its various contingents, tended to neutralize the advantage of numbers. In courage and discipline, the flower of the Persian infantry was probably little inferior to the Greek; in equipment, they were no match for the Greek panoply. Lastly, Xerxes laboured under a disadvantage, which may be illustrated by the experience of the British army in the South African War—distance from his base.
5. The Great Age (480 –338 B.C.).—The effects of the repulse of Persia were momentous in their influence upon Greece. The effects upon Elizabethan England of the defeat of the Spanish armada would afford quite an inadequate parallel. It gave the Greeks a heightened sense, both of their own national unity and of their superiority to the barbarian, while at the same time it helped to create the material conditions requisite alike for the artistic and political development of the 5th century. Other cities besides Athens were adorned with the proceeds of the spoils won from Persia, and Greek trade benefited both from the reunion of Ionia with Greece, and from the suppression of piracy in the Aegean and the Hellespont. Do these developments justify us in giving to the period, which begins with the repulse of Xerxes, and ends with the victory of Philip, the title of “the Great Age”? If the title is justified in the case of the 5th century, should the 4th century be excluded from the period? At first sight, the difference between the 4th century and the 5th may seem greater than that which exists between the 5th and the 6th. On the political side, the 5th century is an age of growth, the 4th an age of decay; on the literary side, the
- ↑ The numbers given by Herodotus (upwards of 5,000,000) are enormously exaggerated. We must divide by ten or fifteen to arrive at a probable estimate of the forces that actually crossed the Hellespont.
