Chapter 6 No.6

THE TYRANTS.-In the Heroic Age the preferred form of government was a patriarchal monarchy. The Iliad says, "The rule of many is not a good thing: let us have one ruler only,-one king,-him to whom Zeus has given the sceptre." But by the dawn of the historic period, the patriarchal monarchies of the Ach?an age had given place, in almost all the Grecian cities, to oligarchies or aristocracies.

THE OLIGARCHIES GIVE WAY TO TYRANNIES.-The nobles into whose hands the ancient royal authority thus passed were often divided among themselves, and invariably opposed by the common freemen, who, as they grew in intelligence and wealth, naturally aspired to a place in the government. The issue of long contentions was the overthrow almost everywhere of oligarchical government and the establishment of the rule of a single person.

Usually this person was one of the nobility, who held himself out as the champion of the people, and who with their help usurped the government. One who had thus seized the government was called a tyrant. By this term the Greeks did not mean one who rules harshly, but simply one who holds the supreme authority in the state illegally. Some of the Greek Tyrants were mild and beneficent rulers, though too often they were all that the name implies among us.

But the Greeks always had an inextinguishable hatred of arbitrary rule; consequently the Tyrannies were, as a rule, short-lived, rarely lasting longer than three generations. They were usually violently overthrown, and the old oligarchies re-established, or democracies set up in their place. As a rule, the Dorian cities preferred oligarchical, and the Ionian cities democratical, government. The so-called Age of the Tyrants lasted from 650 to 500 B.C.

Among the most noted of the Tyrants were the Pisistratid?, at Athens, of whom we shall speak hereafter; Periander at Corinth (625-585 B.C.), who was a most cruel ruler, yet so generous a patron of artists and literary men that he was thought worthy of a place among the Seven Sages; and Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos (535-522 B.C.), who, with that island as a stronghold, and with a fleet of a hundred war-galleys, built up a sort of maritime kingdom in the AEgean, and for the space of more than a decade enjoyed such astonishing and uninterrupted prosperity, that it was believed his sudden downfall and death-he was allured to the Asian shore by a Persian satrap, and crucified-were brought about by the envy of the gods, [Footnote: Herodotus tells how Amasis of Egypt, the friend and ally of the Tyrant, becoming alarmed at his extraordinary course of good fortune, wrote him, begging him to interrupt it and disarm the envy of the gods, by sacrificing his most valued possession. Polycrates, acting upon the advice, threw into the sea a precious ring, which he highly prized; but soon afterwards the jewel was found by his servants in a fish that a fisherman had brought to the palace as a present for Polycrates. When Amasis heard of this, he at once broke off his alliance with the Tyrant, feeling sure that he was fated to suffer some terrible reverse of fortune. The event justified his worst fears.] who the Greeks thought were apt to be jealous of over-prosperous mortals.

THE FOUNDING OF COLONIES.-The Age of the Tyrants coincides very nearly with the era of greatest activity in the founding of new colonies. Thousands, driven from their homes, like the Puritans in the time of the Stuart tyranny in England, fled over the seas, and, under the direction of the Delphian Apollo, laid upon remote and widely separated shores the basis of "Dispersed Hellas." The overcrowding of population and the Greek love of adventure also contributed to swell the number of emigrants. During this colonizing era Southern Italy became so thickly set with Greek cities as to become known as Magna Gr?cia, "Great Greece." Here were founded during the latter part of the eighth century B.C. the important Dorian city of Tarentum; the wealthy and luxurious Ach?an city of Sybaris (whence the term Sybarite, meaning a voluptuary); the Great Crotona, distinguished for its schools of philosophy and its victors in the Olympian games.

Upon the island of Sicily was planted, by the Dorian Corinth, the city of Syracuse (734 B.C.), which, before Rome had become great, waged war on equal terms with Carthage.

In the Gulf of Lyons was established about 600 B.C. the important Ionian city of Massalia (Marseilles), the radiating point of long routes of travel and trade.

On the African coast was founded the great Dorian city of Cyrene (630

B.C.), and probably about the same time was established in the Nile delta

the city of Naucratis, through which the civilization of Egypt flowed into

Greece.

The tide of emigration flowed not only to the west and south, but to the north as well. The northern shores of the ?gean and those of the Hellespont and the Propontis were fringed with colonies. The Argonautic terrors of the Black Sea were forgotten or unheeded, and even those remote shores received their emigrants. Many of the settlements in that quarter were established by the Ionian city of Miletus, which, swarming like a hive, became the mother of more than eighty colonies.

Through this wonderful colonizing movement, Greece came to hold somewhat the same place in the ancient Mediterranean world that England as a colonizer occupies in the world of today. Many of these colonies not only reflected honor upon the mother land through the just renown of their citizens, but through their singularly free, active, and progressive life, they exerted upon her a most healthful and stimulating influence.