Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/107

Rh aisurnnetes or dictator, as Pittacus of Mitylene. The benefits conferred on the Greek commonwealths by the tyrannies were chiefly of two kinds. (1) The tyrant often instituted new religious festivals, in which the whole body of the citizens might take part. A feeling of civic unity Was thus created, which could not exist while the nobles formed a separate caste, as exclusive in their worship as in their other privileges. (2) The court of the tyrant became a centre to which poets and artists were attracted. Such a man as Periander of Corinth (625-585) might aim at resembling an Eastern despot, but his encourage ment of liberal arts must still have given an impulse to the higher civilization of Corinth. Polycrates of Samos, the friend of Anacreon, welcomed all men of fine gifts to his court ; Pisistratus showed a like care for poetry, and for the artistic embellishment of Athens. The root of evil in the tyranny was its unlawful origin, and its consequent reliance upon force, frequently leading the tyrant to aim at keeping the citizens in a state of helplessness and mutual mistrust. But the founder of a tyranny was usually a man with some inborn qualities for command, and the baser forms of oppression were not required until he had given place to a weaker successor.

The age of the oligarchies and tyrannies coincides with the most active period of Greek colonization, which re ceived an impulse both from redundant population and from political troubles at home. The two centuries from 750 to 550 B.C. saw most of the Greek colonies founded. Sicily received settlements from both the two great branches of the Greek race. Naxos, founded by the Chalcidians of Euboea (73-5 B.C.), with Leontini and Catana, founded soon afterwards by Naxos, formed a group of Ionic communities on the eastern side of the island. Syracuse, founded by Corinth (734 B.C.), Gela, colonized by Rhodians and Cretans (690 B.C.), and Agrigentum, of which Gela was the parent city (582 B.C.), were among the chief of the Dorian commonwealths on the south-eastern and south western coasts. These Siceliot cities formed a fringe round the Siceli and Sicani of the interior; but, though in the presence of non-Hellenic populations, they never lost among themselves the sharp distinction between Dorian and Ionian (or &quot; Chalcidic &quot;), a distinction which was long the key note to the inner history of the Siceliots. The earliest of the Greek settlements in Italy was the Ionic Cumae, on the coast near Cape Misenum, a little to the north-west of Naples, It was founded by Chalcidians of Eubcea, as early, according to the tradition, as 1050 B.C. The Dorian Tarentum, a colony of Sparta, and the Achaean (^Eolic) settlements of Sybaris and Croton, dated from the latter part of the 8th century B.C. Poseidouia (Paestum) was founded by Sybaris. Locri, an /Eolic settlement near Cape Zephyrium (whence its epithet &quot; Epizephyrian &quot;), and the Ionic Rhegium, founded from Chalcis, complete the series of flourishing cities which made south-western Italy appear as a new and richer land of the Hellenes, as Megale Hellas, Magna Grcecia. The turning-point in its prosperity was the war between the two foremost of the Achaean cities, ending in the destruction of Sybaris by Croton (510 B.C.). By this event, just at the time when the lonians of Asia Minor were passing under the sway of Persia, the Greeks of Italy were rendered less able to make head against the native tribes of the peninsula. The name Megale Hellas remained, but its old significance was gone; the spirit of confident progress had been quenched.

The distinctive character of Greek colonization is seen less vividly where, as in Sicily and Italy, Greek com munities clustered together, than at those lonely outposts of Hellenic life where a single city stood in barbarian lands. Massalia (Marseilles) was founded by the lonians of Phocaja about 600 B.C., and became the parent of colonies on the east coast of Spain. If Carthage had not fulfilled the purpose for which it was founded, by serving as the jealous guardian of Phoenician commerce in the western Mediter ranean, Greek settlements would probably have multiplied on those shores as rapidly as elsewhere. Cyrene, on the African coast, was a Dorian colony (630 B.C.) from Thera, itself colonized by Sparta, and became the founder of Barca. Corcyra was colonized by Corinth about 700 B.C., and joined with the mother-city in founding settlements (among others, Epklamnus) on the coast of Epirus. The northern shores of the yEgean and the Propontis were dotted with colonies, from the group of towns planted by Chalcis in the peninsula thence called Chalcidiee, to Byzan tium, which, like Selymbria, was founded by Megara (657 B.C.). Among the colonies on the western coast of Asia Minor, Miletus was especially active in creating other settlements, particularly for purposes of commerce. Nau- cratis, in the delta of the Nile, was a trading colony from Miletus, and flourished from 550 B.C. On the southern shores of the Propontis and the Euxine, Cyzicus and Sinope (itself the parent city of Trapezus) were daughters of Miletus. Here too were the remotest of Greek settle ments, Panticapseum (Kertch in the Crimea), afterwards the capital of the Greek kings of the Bosporus : Olbia (or Borysthenes) on the adjacent mainland ; and Istria, at the mouth of the Danube. The above enumeration, though not exhaustive, will serve to mark the wide extent of the area included by Greek colonization. As the city was the Nalur highest unit in the political conception of the Greeks, so ^ ie G each colony contained within itself the essentials of a com- colon J plete political life. Its relation to the parent-city was one of filial piety, not of constitutional dependence. In so far as the cult of the gods and heroes whom it worshipped was localized in the mother-country, it was needful that a link should exist between the religious rites of the colony and those of its parent ; and this religious continuity was symbolized by the sacred fire which the founder (OIKIO-TTJS) carried with him from the public hearth to the new settle ment. For the rest, Massalia and Olbia were cities of Hellas in as full sense as Athens or Sparta. It was due to the self-sufficing character (cu/rapKeia.) of the Hellenic city as such that Hellas was not a geographical expression.

When Attica first comes into the view of history, it already forms a single state of which Athens is the capital : the kingly period is over, and, though a close oligarchy still exists, there are signs of coming change. But the hints of poetical legend, and sometimes the surer evidence of the ground itself, enable us to go further back, and to form at least a general conception of earlier chapters in the story of the land. Of the three plains on the northern shore of the Saronic gulf, those of Megara, Eleusis, and Athens, the Attic plain is that which offered the greatest advantage to settlers. It is the most spacious; it is the best watered; it holds the most central position in the district which stretches south-east from the chains of Cithaeron and Parnes to the yEgean ; it has the best seaboard for navigation and commerce ; and it contains the best site for a city. Traces of early immigrants of various stocks survived in the names of places, in worships, and in legends. Eleusis, Pineus, Phaleron, are Minyan names ; the myths and cults tell also of Carians, Leleges, Cretans, Tyrrhenians. But the chief influence which came to Attica from beyond sea must have been that of the Phoenician settlement at Salamis (Salama, the place of peace), a name which, as in the Cyprian worship of Zeus Salaminios (Baal-Salam), points to the Phoenician effort to establish friendly intercourse between alien races. Herodotus (viii. 44) distinguishes four periods in the early history of Attica, with each of which he connects an appellative. Iii the first the inhabitants were &quot; Pelasgoi called Kranaoi,&quot; in the 