SECTION III.

THE AGE OF LAWS.

THE union of the heroes before Troy, too fragile to outlast the city for whose destruction alone they were combined, was followed by wanderings, changes, and conflicts. The time of nationality in Greece had not yet arrived; and the confusion, in which the age of the heroes began, recurred at its termination, as if to conceal the earlier before the later forms of history were disclosed. Some definite motives for future progress begin, however, to be slowly evolved. The cities increase in size and in resources; they have their traders as well as their laborers, their minstrels as well as their warriors; and the festivities of one town around the newly built temple, or on the ground hallowed of ancient days, are joined by crowds from other towns, whom the same games interest, or to whom the same sacrifices are sacred duties. Beyond the shores the sea stretches wider than of yore; it tempts the weary to migration and the restless to adventure, until its waves are spread with people rather than with single mariners. This growing enterprise abroad, and this larger life at home, were the preparations for the laws with which the Greece of old was allowed to put on its earthly immortality.

The chief interest of any history or any account of Greece will always centre in Sparta and Athens. It is vain to say that there were many other important cities from which the cultivation and the energy

of the nation, in some part, issued; the two are still preëminent in the elements described at the beginning of this chapter, as composing the character of the people and of the land. Both were continually at war; but Sparta is more distinctly marked by separation and contention, as the principles it was appointed to sustain. Both were long susceptible of desires, apparently sincere, to pursue the duties they acknowledged; but Athens is far the more distinguished for the love of beauty in its highest physical or merely intellectual forms. It is not necessary to insist upon the common distinction between the Ionic and the Doric races; for Sparta was not altogether the Doric, nor was Athens decidedly the Ionic city of Greece; 52 but the solemnity and the obstinacy of the Dorians reigned in Sparta, as much as the impatience and the mirthfulness of the Ionians prevailed in Athens. They may rather be regarded here as the countries of Lycurgus and Solon, through whose laws the liberty of the people was promoted, and in whose laws the character of the people is to be here described.

In a hollow valley and on the banks of a stream

52 The old Attic was not so widely removed from the Doric as is generally represented by those who adopt the usual formula of Ionism. And by the time the Athenian character had become Ionic, the Doric had lost its pristine virtues, and had approached half way to meet it" Hase's Ancient Greeks,

Engl. transl., p. 115. So much for Athens. Cf., moreover, Herod., I. 143. As for the Spartans, Mr. Grote remarks, that "the Lycurgean constitution impressed upon them a peculiar tendency which took them out of the general march" of the Dorians. Hist. Greece, Part II. ch. 6.

which scarce had space to flow between the mountains it separated on either side, was gathered the early settlement which bore the name of Sparta. It gave, in after years, but a cold welcome to the architecture which would have made it majestic, or to the arts which would have filled its vacant places with life and loveliness; but in the times succeeding the heroic age, it was scantier still in rude huts and in narrow lands. Above the village, as about it, the valley of the Eurotas was hemmed in by highlands; while, lower down, the mountains were farther removed, and the valley widened to a plain. These fields, contracting and expanding, together with the mountain-sides above them, formed the territory of Laconia, a rugged country, whose people seemed secure from invasion, if not from dissension and barbarity. The commotions of neighbouring races, simultaneous with strange movements throughout all Greece, were the first, it appears, to shake the Spartan valley; and at the return of the Heracleids, as the descendants of Hercules were called, to the adjoining Argos, eighty years after the Trojan war, 53 the larger part of the Peloponnesus was conquered by them and their fellow-adventurers or followers, the Dorians. Three kingdoms were established for three Heracleid brothers in Argos, Messenia, and Sparta, of which the native people were reduced, not at once, indeed, but in the course of years, to a state of dependence and servitude.

Sparta, the least important, originally, of the con

53 Thuc., I. 12. A. C. 1127 – 79 = 1043.

quests, was henceforward the city of the Dorian conquerors, who bear the name, through history, of Spartans, as exclusively as if there had been no memory of the earlier people. Immediately after the conquest, two kings of the Heracleid stock were associated in the government, to which the Dorian nobles were also admitted after the same principles that had prevailed in the age of the heroes. But a change, inevitable to a race which, like the Spartans, had won its land by force and ruled its subjects with increasing pride, at last drew near. The lower ranks began to claim a larger share of spoil and dominion than they had yet received; whilst the quarrels of the royal families and the factions amongst the nobles or higher Spartans were such, apparently, as to prevent resistance to the demands of their inferiors. At the same time, the conquered would watch with eagerness the chances which their disputes might offer to themselves; and while the Spartans were at variance with one another, they were obliged to guard against the dangers of insurrection on the part of the large number of their subjects whose memories of independence were not yet obliterated by bondage.

54

At this embittered period, about two hundred years after the conquest, one of the kings of Sparta died, leaving his wife and her unborn child in the care of his brother Lycurgus, who, as tradition re

54 A. C. 852. Clinton, Fast. same writer at A. C. 817. Ibid., Hell., Vol. I. p. 141. The legisla- and Vol. II. p. 408. tion of Lycurgus is fixed by the

55

lates, though able, had he pleased, to ascend the throne, yet waited the birth of his brother's son, whose rights were sacred in his eyes. After proclaiming the infant king, he is said to have travelled for many years in foreign lands; an account, perhaps, invented at a later time, in explanation of the extraordinary wisdom he was believed to have obtained. The day arrived when he was needed at home, amongst his own people. Their dissensions had reached a point at which it was necessary that they should be allayed, unless the Spartans would be overthrown; and he who had proved faithful to his brother was called to reconcile his countrymen and protect them against the alarms of rebellion amongst their subjects and bondsmen. We know almost nothing, not even so much as has here been repeated, with any certainty, concerning a man who was the first under heathenism to enlarge the liberties of a people, or a portion of a people, by laws which saved them as well from sedition as from tyranny. How far he accepted, how far he changed, the Dorian institutions, as they then existed, 56 is just as little to be determined; nor can we tell how much he strove to do, or how much he was able to achieve.

It is nearly in vain, therefore, to ask about the

55 Schlosser, however, gives Lycurgus but little credit for not taking possession of such a throne as the Spartan. Univ. Hist. Antiq., IV. 2, sect. 1.

56 This touches closely upon the much vexed question concerning the resemblance between the Cretan and

the Spartan laws. There were certainly several expeditions from the mainland over into Crete, and perhaps from Crete to the mainland, before the time of Lycurgus; but it is safe to remember that Crete was altogether Dorian, in its comparatively later times.