GREEKS AND BARBARIANS
by James Thomson
Published by Aeterna Classics 2018
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I THE AWAKENING
II KEEPING THE PASS
III THE ADVENTURERS
IV ELEUTHERIA
V SOPHROSYNE
VI GODS AND TITANS
VII CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC
It began in Ionia. It may in truth have been a reawakening. But if this be so (and it is entirely probable), it was after so long and deep a slumber that scarcely even dreams were remembered. The Ionians used to say that they remembered coming from Greece, long ago, about a thousand years before Christ—as we reckon it—driven from their ancient home on the Peloponnesian coast of the Corinthian Gulf by “Dorians” out of the North. They fled to Athens, which carried them in her ships across the Aegean to that middle portion of the eastern shore which came to be known as Ionia. For this reason they were in historical times accounted (by the Athenians at least) “colonists of the Athenians.” Nobody in antiquity appears seriously to have disputed this account of the Ionians. There may be considerable truth in it; and if not, the Ionians were pretty good at disputing. The Athenians belonged to that race. But if you questioned the Ionians further and asked them about their origins in prehistoric Greece, you had to be content with the Topsy-like answer that the first Ionians grew out of the ground. They were Autochthones, Earth-Children. The critical Thucydides puts it this way: he says the same stock has always inhabited Attica. People in his time could remember when old Athenian gentlemen used to wear their hair done up in a top-knot fastened by a golden pin in the form of a cicala—because the cicala also is an Earth-Child.
Of course in historical times the Ionians were Greeks. But they may not always have been Greeks. Herodotus apparently thinks they were not. He says they learned to speak Greek from their Dorian conquerors. The natural inference from this would be that they were of a different racial stock. Herodotus, however, is nearly as fond of a hypothesis as Mr. Shandy, and it is quite possible that he is here labouring an argument (which in turn may have been mere Dorian propaganda), that the only pure-blooded Hellenes were the Dorian tribes, who admittedly came on the scene much later than the Ionians. In fact the Ionians may have been simply an earlier wave of a great invasion of Greek-speakers which came to an end with the Dorians. We do not know, and Herodotus did not know. The Ionians themselves did not know. There are two possibilities. Either they were an indigenous people who became Hellenized (as Herodotus supposes), or they were a folk of Hellenic affinities who were long settled in Greece in the midst of a still earlier population. What of that? Only this, that we have suddenly discovered a great deal about this prehistoric Aegean population, above all that it had developed a civilization which seems almost too brilliant to be true. Now if the fugitives who escaped to Ionia were a fragment of this race, or even were aliens who had only imbibed a portion of its culture, the awakening which came so long after may have been in fact a reawakening.
Archæologists, digging in the sites of old Ionian cities, have discovered evidence that the early settlers possessed something of the Aegean culture. The crown and centre of that culture was the island of Crete, and there existed some dim traditions of Cretans landing in Ionia; only then it was probably not called Ionia. This, and some other considerations, have prompted the suggestion that the Ionians really came from Crete. But it seems more in accordance with the evidence to suppose that the main body of them came from Greece proper, where they had learned the “Mycenaean” culture, which was the gift of Crete. The calamitous Dorians wrecked that wonderful heritage, but for some time at least the settlers in their new “Ionian” home would remember how to fashion a pot fairly and chant their traditional lays. Then, it would seem, they all but forgot; little wonder, when you consider how dire was their plight. Yet even in that uneasy sleep into which they fell of a recrudescent barbarism the Ionians remembered something as in a dream; and it became the most beautiful dream in the world, for it is Homer.
Now let us appeal to history. The history of Ionia is a drama in little of what afterwards happened on a wider stage in Greece.
The settlers found a beautiful land with (so Herodotus, not alone, exclaims) “the best climate in the world.” Considerable rivers, given to “meandering,” carve long valleys into the hilly interior of Asia Minor and offered in their mouths safe anchorages for the toy-like ships of the ancients. It is typical Aegean country and would have no unfamiliar look to the settlers. Naturally they did not find the new land empty. It contained a native population who were called, or came to be called, by the general appellation of “Carians”—barbaric warriors with enormous helmets crowned by immense horse-hair crests, and armed with daggers and ugly-looking falchions like reaping-hooks. The newcomers fought with them, slew largely among them, made some uncertain kind of truce with them, married their women, got their interested help against the Persian when he grew powerful. But that was all. They never succeeded in making them truly Greek or completely civilized. They only mast-headed them on their hills and, if they caught one, made a slave of him. Throughout Greek history the Carians maintained a virtual independence in the highlands of Ionia, keeping their ancient speech and customs, cherishing the memory of their old-world glory when they rowed in the ships of King Minos of Crete and fought his battles, and professing no interest in the wonderful cities growing up almost or quite in view of their secluded eyries. Very strange it seems. Yet it is typical. If we think of Greek civilization as a miracle wrought in a narrow valley with sullen Carians hating it from the surrounding hills, we shall get no bad picture—for I will not call it an allegory—of the actual situation all through antiquity till Alexander came. So near was the Barbarian all the time.
The Ionians had always to struggle against being crowded into the sea by the more or less savage races of Anatolia. That vast region has always been full of strange and obscure races and fragments of races. It is so formed that the migrating peoples flooding through it were sure to lose side-eddies down its deep, misleading valleys, to stagnate there. It must, when Ionia was founded, have had a peculiarly sombre and menacing aspect. The mighty empire of the Hittites had fallen and left, so far as we can see, a turmoil of disorganized populations between the sea and the dreadful Assyrians. Here and there no doubt traces of the Hittite civilization were discernible, sculptures of a god in peasant dress—a sort of moujik-god—or of that eternal trinity of Divine Father, Son, and Mother. The wondering Greeks saw a great cliff at Sipylos fashioned like a weeping woman, and called her Niobe. They seem to have admired Carian armour and borrowed that. There was probably nothing else they could borrow from the Carians except their lands. There was a numerous people dwelling farther inland called the Lydians, who even then must have had some rudimentary civilization and who afterwards, absorbing what they could of Ionian culture, threatened the cities with slavery. Further down the coast, in the south-western corner of the peninsula, where somewhat later the Dorians settled, lived the Lycians, who had the kind of civilization which counts descent on the mother’s side and buries its dead in holes of a cliff, as sea birds lay their eggs. The northern part of the Aegean coast was occupied by Mysians, Phrygians and kindred races, who never could get themselves cultivated. They worshipped gods like Papaios, which is Papa, and Bagaios, which must be the same as Bog, which is the Russian for God.
This was the kind of world into which the fugitives were thrown. It mattered the less perhaps because their real home was the sea. Yet even the sea gave them only a temporary escape from the Barbarian. Wherever they landed they met him again on the beach. Imagine, if you will, a ship trading from the chief Ionian harbour, Miletus. Imagine her bound for the south-east coast of the Black Sea for a cargo of silver. She would pick her way by coast and island till she reached the Dardanelles. From that point onwards she was in unfriendly waters. On one side were the hills of Gallipoli (Achi Baba and the rest—we do not know their ancient names), inhabited by “Thracians” of the sort called Dolonkoi; on the other side was the country of the kindred “Phrygians.” It was likely to go hard with a Greek ship cast away on either shore. Thence through the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus into the Euxine. Then came days and days of following the long Asiatic coast, dodging the tide-races about the headlands, finding the springs of fresh water known to the older hands, pushing at night into some rock-sheltered cove, sleeping on the beach upon beds of gathered leaves. And so at last to some harbour of “Colchians,” men whose complexion and hair would make you swear they were Egyptians, circumcised men, violently contrasting with their neighbours the Phasianoi, who live in the misty valley of the romantic Phasis—large, fat, sleepy-looking men, flabby men with pasty faces, who grow flax in the marshy meadows of their languid stream. From these partially civilized peoples the Greeks would glean news of the mountain-tribes of the interior, uncanny “Chalybes,” who know where to find iron and silver in the ribs of their guarded hills, and the utter savages of the Caucasus, whose single art is printing the shapes of beasts in colours upon their clothes, and who, like the beasts, are without shame in love.
Or suppose our ship bound for the corn-bearing region behind the modern port of Odessa in South Russia. Once through the Bosphorus, she would make her course along the shore of a wide and wintry territory inhabited by red-haired, blue-eyed Thracians, a race akin to certain elements in the population of Greece itself, warlike, musical, emotional, mystical, cruel. Here and there the merchant would land for water or fresh meat—at Salmydessos, at Apollonia, at Mesembria, at Odessos, at Tomi (but we do not know when these places got their names)—till he reached the mouths of the Danube. Wherever he touched he might have the chance to hear of wild races further inland, such as the Getai, very noble savages, who believed in the immortality of men, or at least of the Getai. They were of the opinion that when one of them left this life he “went to Salmoxis.” Salmoxis, he lived in an underground house and was their god. Every four years they sent a messenger to him to tell what they wanted. Their method was this. First they told the messenger what he must ask, and then they tossed him in the air, catching him as he fell on the points of their spears. If he died, this meant a favourable answer from Salmoxis. But if the messenger did not die, then they blamed the messenger and “dispatched” another. Also they used to shoot arrows at the sun and moon, defying those luminaries and denying their godhead. These were “the most righteous of the Thracians,” according to Herodotus, who expresses and perhaps shared the sentiment, at least as old as Homer, which attributed exceptional virtue to remote and simple peoples like the Hyperboreans and the Ethiopians and the “Koumiss-Eaters,” the Hippemolgoi or Glaktophagoi. If the Getai were the most righteous of the Thracians, one rather wonders what the rest were like. These were certainly capable of nearly anything in their moments of religious frenzy. They would tear raw flesh with their teeth, sometimes (it was whispered) the living flesh of children. At certain times of the year the Thracian women went mad upon the midnight hills, worshipping Dionysus. (The wild splendour of that scene shines and shudders like one of their own torches through the Bacchae of Euripides.) The Thracians of the coast had an evil reputation as wreckers....
Beyond the Danube was “Scythia.” All that district between the river and the Crimea was from the earliest times of which we have record what it is to-day, a grain-growing country. Its capital was the “Market of the Borysthenites,” which preferred to call itself Olbia, “the City of Eldorado.” Here the merchant would find a curious population, very fair in type, great horsemen, wearing peaked caps of felt and carrying half-moon shields. In the Russian army which fought Napoleon in 1814 were Siberian archers whom the French nicknamed Les Amours. I do not venture to say that these were Scythians, but it is clear that an ancient Scythian (half naked, with his little recurved bow) must have looked rather like an overgrown barbaricCupid. At Athens it was thought comic to stage a Scythian. Only, as to that, it should be remembered that the Athenians recruited their police from Scythia, and that the human mind seems to find something inherently comic in a policeman.
The Scythians were not all savages. Some of them were skilled farmers. With these the Greek settlers intermarried, and as early as Herodotus there was a considerable half-breed population. A motley town like Olbia was the place for stories—stories of the “Nomads” who neither plough nor sow, but wander slowly over the interminable steppes with their gipsy vans in which the women and children huddle under the stretched roof of skins; stories of the Tauri, who live in the Crimea, and sacrifice the shipwrecked to their bloody idol, clubbing them on the head like seals. And their enemies when they subdue them they treat as follows. Every man cuts off a head and carries it away to his house, and then fixing it on a long pole sets it up high above the house, generally above the chimney; for they will have it that the whole house is protected by the heads up there. They live by plunder and fighting. The Neuroi, another of these Scythian tribes, were driven from their original home by “serpents,” and look as if they might be sorcerers. For the Scyths and the Greeks who live in Scythia say that once a year every man of the Neuroi turns into a wolf, but is restored to human shape after a day or two. Now when they say this they do not convince me—Herodotus—still they say it and even take an oath in saying it. But the Man-Eaters are the worst savages of all, for they follow neither rule nor law of any kind. They are nomads, and are dressed like Scyths, and have a language of their own, and are the only cannibals among those peoples. The Black-Cloaks all wear black cloaks. Hence their name. Their customs are Scythian. The great tribe of the Boudinoi have all bright blue eyes and excessively red hair. They live in a wooden town. They are aboriginal nomads and eat lice.
Beyond the Boudinoi lived a folk that were bald from birth—men and women—besides having snub noses and large chins. The bald ones lived upon wild cherries, straining the juice off thick and dark, and then licking it up or drinking it mixed with milk. They dwelt under trees, every man under his tree, on which in winter he stretched a piece of white felt to make a kind of tent. On the mountains leaped goat-footed men; and beyond the goat-footed lived men who slept away six months of the year. The Issêdones ate their dead fathers, whose skulls they afterwards gilded and honoured with sacrifices. “In other respects” they were accounted just, and the women had as much authority among them as the men. Then came the one-eyed Arimaspeans and the gold-guarding griffins....
Suppose we change the scene, and send the Milesian ship on a voyage to the African coast. What would the merchant find there? Herodotus will tell us. By the shores of the Greater Syrtis live the Nasamônes. They in summer (he tells us) leave their flocks by the seashore and go up-country to gather dates at an oasis. They catch locusts, dry them, pound them, sprinkle the dust on milk, and swallow the draught. Beyond their territory are the Garamantes “in the Wild Beast Country.” They run away when they see anybody, and do not know how to fight. West of the Nasamônes on the coast are the Makai, who dress their hair in the fashion of a cock’s comb and fight with shields of ostrich skin. Beyond the Makai live the Gindânes, whose women wear leathern anklets, putting on a new anklet for every new lover. “And each woman has many anklets.” On a promontory of this region dwell the Lotos Eaters....
The Nomads roam from oasis to oasis over a land of salt and sand. Here is found the race of Troglodytes or Cave Men, swiftest of human beings; whom the Garamantes hunt in four-horse chariots. The Troglodytes feed upon snakes and lizards and other reptiles. Their language does not sound human at all but like the squeaking of bats. At some distance from the Garamantes dwell the Atarantes, among whom nobody has a name. These, when the sun is excessively hot, curse him and cry him shame for scorching them and their land. The Atlantes, whose dwelling is under Mount Atlas and its shrouded peaks, are said to be vegetarians and to have no dreams. Beyond these stretches the unknown desert, where men live in houses built of salt, for it never rains there. Hereabouts wander a number of tribes concerning whom Herodotus remarks generally, “All these peoples paint themselves vermilion and eat monkeys.”
Well, that was the kind of world in which Greek civilization was born. Do not say I have been describing a remote barbarism. Remoteness is relative to more than space, and to the Ionians the sea was no barrier, but the contrary. They knew the whole south coast of the Black Sea, for instance, better than their own Asiatic hinterland. But even if we exclude the Black Sea and Libya as remote, where did they not at first find barbarism? In Hellas? But they had just escaped from Hellas, driven out by the wild first “Dorians,” who were steadily engaged in ruining what the Ionians in their new home were trying to save. In Mesopotamia? But between it and them lay all mountainous Anatolia crowded with diverse races, most of them savage, all of them hostile. Egypt at first and for long was closed to them by an exclusive foreign policy. The unoriginal and materialistic culture of Phoenicia was withheld (for what it was worth) by commercial rivalry. The West as yet had nothing to give. Weak in numbers, in want of everything, shut in with such neighbours, Ionia discovered in herself the force to rescue her feet from this mire, and to found our modern civilization of reason and freedom and imaginative energy.
Naturally the process took time. The first century or so must have been largely lost in the mere struggle for survival. There may even have been in some ways a retrogression—a fading out of the Mycenaean culture, the admission of “Carian” elements needing gradual assimilation. That period is historically so much of a blank to us, that when we do begin to note the signs of expansion they give us the surprise of suddenness. Miletus is all at once the leading city of the Greek world. It plants colony after colony on the Dardanelles, in the Sea of Marmara, along the shores of the Euxine. Ionia is awake while Hellas is still asleep. Ionian traders, Ionian soldiers, Ionian ships are everywhere. The men of Phokaia opened to trade the Adriatic, Etruria, Spain. In the reign of Psammetichos—the First or Second—some Ionian and Carian pirates were forced to land in Egypt. They were clad according to their fashion in panoply of bronze. An Egyptian came to the Marshes and told the king that “bronze men from the sea are wasting the plain,” having never before seen men in such armour. Now the words of the messenger were the very words of an oracle that had bidden Psammetichos seek the help of “bronze men from the sea,” so the king hired the strangers to serve in his army, and by their aid overcame his enemies. The story (which is in Herodotus) is told in a way to provoke the sceptical. But wait a moment. At Abusimbel in Upper Egypt there is a great temple, and before the temple stand colossal statues. On the legs of one of these are scratched Greek words: When King Psamatichos came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psamatichos the son of Theokles wrote this; and they went above Kertis, as far up as the river let them, and Potasimpto led the men of alien speech, and Amasis the Egyptians. Archon the son of Hamoibichos and Pelekos the son of Houdamos wrote me—this is, the inscription. Beneath are the signatures of Greek-speaking soldiers. The writers must have been Ionian mercenaries under a leader who for some reason adopted the king’s name. It is to such fellows we owe our names for Egyptian things. “Crocodile” is just the Ionian word for a lizard, and “pyramid” really means a wheaten cake. Ostriches they called “sparrows.” The British private soldier in Egypt is probably making similar jokes to-day. To return to the inscription, the “men of alien speech” commanded by Potasimpto—an Egyptian name—were probably Carians. The date of the writing cannot be later than 589 B.C. when Psammetichos II ceased to reign. The date is not so striking as the fact that these fighters (who, to put it gently, are not likely to have had the best Ionian education) could legibly write. Their spelling, I admit, is not affectedly purist; but then, spelling is a modern art.
The first great Ionian (discounting the view of some that Homer was an Ionian poet) was the greatest of all. This was Archilochus, who was born in the little island of Paros somewhere about the end of the eighth century before Christ. His poetry is all but lost, his life little more than a startling rumour. The ancients, who had him all to read, spoke of him in the same breath with Homer. He was not only so great a poet, but he was a new kind of poet. Before him men used the traditional style of the heroic epic. This Archilochus sings about himself. We hear in him a voice as personal, as poignant, as in Villon or Heine or Burns; it is a revolutionary voice. Modern literature has nothing to teach Archilochus. One can see that in the miserable scanty fragments of his astonishing poetry that have come down to us.
As for the man himself, the case against him looks pretty black. He himself is quite unabashed. But he also complains of hard luck, and there may be something in this plea. If he was a bastard, much could be forgiven him; but that theory seems to rest on a misapprehension of his meaning. His father was evidently an important man among the Parians. There does not appear to be any good reason why Archilochus should have had so bad a time of it except the reason of temperament. One great thing I do know, quoth he, how to pay back in bitter kind the man who wrongs me. He certainly did know that, but the knowledge was not going to make him popular. He never could get on with people. He hated Paros, where, one would have thought, his father’s son had a fair chance of happiness. Damn Paros—and those figs—and a life at sea. Later he accompanied a colony, led by his father, to the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast; and he did not like Thasos any more than Paros. It sticks up, he says in his vivid way, like a donkey’s backbone, wreathed in wild woods. He also grumbles that the plagues of all Hellas have run in a body to Thasos. He did not like the sea, and yet he was a good deal on it. Pulling at an oar and munching onions no doubt seemed to him a poor conception of life, but a thrilling line Let us hide the bitter gifts of the Lord Poseidon rather breathes an imaginative horror. The man is a master of this kind of sinister beauty. There were thirty that died—we overtook them with our feet—a thousand were we who slew. There you have it again. Oh yes, he had an overpowering sense of beauty, and a wonderful imagination—but also he had something else. That was just the tragedy. His genius had a twist in it which hurt himself as well as other people. He had loved a girl whom he saw playing with a branch of myrtle and a rose, in the shadow of her falling hair. He believed that she had been promised in marriage to him; but something happened, and they did not marry. It may be said for Neoboule and her father that Archilochus was not the sort they made good husbands of; and if any one is still disposed to condemn them, he may relent when he hears that the poet assailed them with a fabulous bitterness of tongue—assailed them till, according to the story, they hanged themselves. He meantime followed the call of his temperament, or of the poverty into which his temperament had brought him, and became a professional soldier. I shall be called a mercenary like a Carian, he says with a touch of what looks like bravado. What a life for a poet! I am the servant of the Lord of War, and I know the lovely guerdon of the Muses, he says superbly. His way of living is reflected in his speech. There is lust and drunkenness in it, and a kind of soldierly joviality. Wild-fig-tree of the rock feeding many crows, good-natured Pasiphile who makes strangers welcome. Pasiphile hardly needs a commentator. Nor does the half-line preserved by a grammarian (who quoted it to illustrate the dative case)—plagued with lice.
Archilochus was sent to fight the Saioi, a wild tribe of the Thracian mainland opposite Thasos. It would seem that the Greeks were defeated. At any rate, he for one ran away, abandoning his shield—to Greek sentiment an unforgivable offence. Who tells us this? Archilochus himself, adding impudently that he doesn’t care; he can easily get another shield, and meantime his skin is whole. The ancient world never quite got over the scandal of this avowal. Archilochus aggravated it by a poem to a friend in which he remarks that a man who pays much attention to charges of cowardice won’t have very many pleasures. But cowards don’t become soldiers, and don’t write humorous accounts of their misbehaviour. He was a fighter to the last. A man of Naxos killed him.
There are in the fragments of Archilochus notes of tenderness and even delicacy, notes of a singularly impressive pathos. There are indeed all notes in him, from the bawdy to the divine. It would be absurd to call him a bad man—quite as absurd as to call him a good one. He is a man. And what makes him so fascinating is just this, that for the first time in literature a man expresses himself. His extraordinary greatness is almost a secondary matter by the side of that portentous phenomenon. It was the Ionians who produced him.
Archilochus was absorbed in his own adventures, but even he must have noted the tremendous events which were changing the nations before his eyes. A fierce and numerous folk, known to the Greeks as the Cimmerians (Kimmerioi—their name survives in Crimea and Crim Tartary), broke loose or were thrust from their homes in the steppes and poured into Asia Minor, apparently through what is called the “Sangarios Gap” in Phrygia. You may see them fighting Ionians on a sarcophagus from Clazomenae which is in the British Museum. They rode bareback on half-tamed horses and slew with tremendous leaf-shaped swords. They destroyed the power of Phrygia, then the greatest in the peninsula, and King Midas, last of his race, killed himself (by drinking bull’s blood, men said). Lydia succeeded to the place and the peril of the Phrygians. She was under the rule of a new king (called “Gugu”), who made a strong fight of it, but was ultimately, about 650 b.c., defeated and slain by the half-naked riders under their king Tugdammi, who sacked the Ionian towns. The Ionians, however, made common cause with Ardys the son of Gugu or Gyges, as the Greeks called him, and along with the Lydians they beat this Tugdammi and drove away his people. Then the kings of Lydia, secure and strong and wealthy, turned their arms against Ionia, which thenceforward has to fight one long and losing battle with overmastering enemies. Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, Croesus—they all attacked her. Meantime, in the reign of Alyattes, the greatest of these monarchs, a new and far more imposing power had got itself consolidated to the east of the Lydian empire. This was the kingdom of the Medes. The rivals fought a great battle, which ended in the twilight and alarm of a total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 585 B.C. They made peace for the time, and Alyattes could proceed with the gradual reduction of the ports. But in the next generation—for all the East had been set in motion—the Medes in their turn had fallen under the authority of the kindred Persians and the great conqueror Cyrus, who in due time rushed west with his invincible footmen and his unfamiliar camels, destroyed Lydia in a moment, and contemptuously left a general to complete the conquest of Ionia.
All this time, and even under the Persian, the Ionians continued to develop and enrich the mind of the world. If science means the effort to find a rational instead of a mythological explanation of things, then the Ionians invented science. Thales of Miletus predicted that eclipse. Anaximander of Miletus held a theory about the origin of life which anticipates modern speculation. He wrote a book about it, which was probably the first example of literary prose in Greek. He also made the first map. His fellow-citizen Hecataeus invented history.... These are just some of the things the Ionians did. The rest of the Hellenes—first the colonies in Italy and Sicily, then the Athenians—caught the flame from them and kept it alive through later storms. But there was no more than time for this when the eastern cloud descended on Ionia. Athens could take up the torch. But Ionia was down.
TheThe Place of Wondering strange oriental tongues. Enclosing all this, very far away could be descried a shadowy girdle of great mountains, from the highest and most distant of which the gods of Olympus looked down upon the invasion of Greece.