Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/128

 112 HISTORY OF GREECE. danger from pirates, long after it had become tolerably assured by land : the " wet ways " have always been the last resort, of lawlessness and violence, and the JEgean, in particular, has in all times suffered more than other waters under this calamity. Aggressions of the sort here described were of course most numerous iii those earliest times when the JEgean was not yet an Hellenic sea, and when many of the Cyclades were occupied, not by Greeks, but by Karians, perhaps by Phoenicians : the number of Karian sepulchres discovered in the sacred island of Poliorketes (about 310 B. c.) : in the Itliyphallic die, addressed to him at hh entrance into Athens, robbery is treated as worthy only of JEtolians : -yap upTruffai ru TUV 7rUzf, 6e, Kal TO. irofrpu. ("Poet. Lyr. xxv. p. 453, ed. Schncid.) The robberies of powerful men, and even highway robbery generally found considerable approving sentiment in the Middle Ages. " All Europe ("observes Mr. Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ag. ch. viii. part 3, p. 247) was a scene of intestine anarchy during the Middle Ages : and though England was far less exposed to the scourge of private war than most nations on the continent, we should find, could we recover the local annals of every country, such an accumulation of petty rapine and tumult, as would almost alienate us from the liberty which served to engender it Highway robbery was from the earliest times a sort of national crime We know how long the out- laws of Shenvood lived in tradition ; men who, like some of their betters, have been permitted to redeem, by a few acts of generosity, the just ignomiuy of extensive crimes. These, indeed, were the heroes of vulgar applause ; but - when such a judge as Sir John Fortescue could exult, that more Englishmen were hanged for robbery in one year than French in seven, and that, if an Englishman be poor, and see another having riches, which may be talxnfrom him by might, he will not spare to do so, it may be perceived how thoroughly these sentiments had pervaded the public mind." The robberies habitually committed by the noblesse of France and Ger- many during the Middle Ages, so much worse than anything in England, and those of the highland chiefs even in later times, are too well known to need any references : as to France, an ample catalogue is set forth in Dulaure's Histoire de la Noblesse (Paris, 1792). The confederations of the German cities chiefly originated in the necessity of keeping the roads and rivers open for the transit of men and goods against the nobles who infesteu the high roads. Scaliger might have found a parallel to the "h)(fral of th heroic ayes in the noblesse of la Rouergue, as it stood even in the 16th century, which he thus describes: "In Comitatu Rodez pessimi sun* nobilitas ibi latrocinatur : nee possunt reprimi." (ap. Dulaure, c. 9.)