The Historians' History of the World 03

It is on the whole, an unmistakable fact that a Greek state organisation of a very remarkable character was here called into being, and formed a combination in which old and new, foreign and native, were amalgamated; an organization which Plato judged worthy to form the groundwork for the plan of his ideal state. For here we actually have the latter’s three classes: the class equipped with the wise foresight becoming the rulers of the state; the class of “guards,” in which the virtue of courage, with exclusion from a more liberal development by means of art and science, was the object to be attained; and, finally, the industrial class, the element which provided the necessaries of life, and to which a disproportionately larger amount of arbitrary freedom was permitted; it had but to provide for the physical support of itself and the community generally. The first and third classes might have formed the state by themselves, inasmuch as they sufficiently represented the mutual relations of governing and governed. Between the two the guards, or armed element, had thrust itself in, to the increase of stability and durability. On this wise it came to pass that Crete was the first country to succeed in assigning to the Dorian race a share in the ancient community, and thus for the second time the island of Minos became a typical starting-point for the Hellenic state organisation.

The later Crete is also better known to us by the effects which proceeded from it, than in its internal condition like a heavenly body the abundance of whose light is measured by its reflection on other objects. Crete became for the Hellenes the cradle of a complicated civilisation. Thence sprang a series of men who founded the art of sculpture in the peculiar Hellenic form, and strewed its seeds in all Greek countries—for Dipœnus and Scyllis, the earliest masters in marble sculptures, derived their origin from Crete, the home of Dædalus. Other Cretans distinguished themselves as masters in the art of divination, and as singers and musicians who, educated in the service of Apollo, obtained such power over the human soul, that they were summoned by foreign states to interpose their aid in a disordered condition of the community and lay the foundations of a sound system of government. These Cretan masters, such as Thaletas and Epimenides, are not, however, sprung from the Dorian race any more than are the sculptors; the new shoots had sprouted from the old root of native culture, even if the admixture of various Greek races had essentially contributed to the impulse of new vital activity.

In spite of the fact that the population of Crete received such a reinforcement and that she had so well understood how to employ it to strengthen her states, none the less, after the time of Minos, she never again attained to a political influence extending over all her shores. The chief cause lies in the condition of the island which made the formation of a great state an impossibility. The territories of the various towns among which the Dorians were divided, Cydonia in the west, Knossos and Lyctus in the north and Gortys in the south of the island, held suspiciously aloof from one another, or were at open feud; thus the Dorian strength was squandered in the interests of petty towns. Added to this that the Dorians, when they immigrated across the sea, of course came only in small bands, and for the most part, unaccompanied by women, so that for this reason alone they could not retain their racial characteristics to the same extent as on the mainland. Finally, even in the seats of Dorian habitation across the sea, we sometimes find, that not all three races, but only one of them had settled in the same town; thus in Halicarnassus there were only Dymanes; in Cydonia, as it seems, only Hylleans. Thus a fresh dispersal and weakening of the Dorian strength must have supervened, and it is easy to understand why the continental settlements of the Dorians, especially those of the Peloponnesus, still remained the most important and the ones fraught with most consequence for history.

In the Peloponnesus, however, it was, once again, at a single point that a Dorian history of independent and far-reaching importance developed itself. And that point was Sparta.c

Greek Coin

CHAPTER VI. SPARTA AND LYCURGUS

What! are these stones, yon column’s broken shaft,

Where moss-crowned Ruin long hath sat and laughed,

These shattered steps, these walls that earthward bow,

All Sparta’s Royal Square can boast of now?

—Nicholas Michell.

[ca. 885 B.C.]

The characteristic development of Sparta depends partly on the nature of the land and partly on the relations formed there by strange conquerors.