The Historians' History of the World 03

Without being insensible either to the faults or to the misdeeds of imperial Athens, I believe that her empire was a great comparative benefit, and its extinction a great loss, to her own subjects. But still more do I believe it to have been a good, looked at with reference to Panhellenic interests. Its maintenance furnished the only possibility of keeping out foreign intervention, and leaving the destinies of Greece to depend upon native, spontaneous, untrammelled Grecian agencies. The downfall of the Athenian empire is the signal for the arms and corruption of Persia again to make themselves felt, and for the re-enslavement of the Asiatic Greeks under her tribute-officers. What is still worse, it leaves the Grecian world in a state incapable of repelling any energetic foreign attack, and open to the overruling march of “the man of Macedon” half a century afterwards. For such was the natural tendency of the Grecian world to political non-integration or disintegration, that the rise of the Athenian empire, incorporating so many states into one system, is to be regarded as a most extraordinary accident. Nothing but the genius, energy, discipline, and democracy of Athens, could have brought it about; nor even she, unless favoured and pushed on by a very peculiar train of antecedent events. But having once got it, she might perfectly well have kept it; and had she done so, the Hellenic world would have remained so organised as to be able to repel foreign intervention, either from Susa or from Pella. When we reflect how infinitely superior was the Hellenic mind to that of all surrounding nations and races; how completely its creative agency was stifled as soon as it came under the Macedonian dictation; and how much more it might perhaps have achieved, if it had enjoyed another century or half-century of freedom, under the stimulating headship of the most progressive and most intellectual of all its separate communities—we shall look with double regret on the ruin of the Athenian empire, as accelerating, without remedy, the universal ruin of Grecian independence, political action, and mental grandeur.c

FOOTNOTES

[57] This striking and deep-seated regard of the Athenians for all the forms of an established constitution, makes itself felt even by Mitford (History of Greece vol. iv. sect. v. ch. xix. p. 235).

[58] [An early form of heliograph.]

[59] [He, with others, was accused of treachery, not without cause.]

[60] [Manso, in his Sparta is so far from ascribing the downfall of Athens to the Sicilian fiasco, that he sees no connection between them. Thirlwall disagrees with this though he thinks the empire was doomed to disintegration. He says, “Syracuse was their Moscow; but if it had not been so they would have found one elsewhere.” He imputes the fall to internal discord. Mitford sees in the war less a civil strife than a contest between the oligarchical and democratical interests throughout the Grecian commonwealths, in every one of which was a party friendly to the public enemy. He says of the fight with Sicily, “Democracy here was opposed to democracy,” and he credits the fate of Athens to “the ruin, which such a government hath an eternal tendency to bring upon itself.” He rejoices that the slaves at least of the various governments had a little respite from cruelty. Cox, like Grote, sees in the crumbling of the Athenian empire, in spite of all its crimes, such a cosmic misfortune as set back the progress of the world beyond our power of estimation.]

Greek Cavalry

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter a is reserved for Editorial Matter.]

Chapter I. Land and People

b Connop Thirlwall, The History of Greece.

c John B. Bury, History of Greece.

d William Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece.

e Gustav F. Hertzberg, Geschichte der Griechen im Alterthum.

f Strabo, Γεωγραφικά.

g Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

h Pausanias, General Description of Greece.

i Herodotus, History.

Chapter II. The Mycenæan Age

b D. G. Hogarth, article on “Mycenæan Civilisation,” in the New Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

c Henry Schliemann, Mycenæ.

d C. Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt, The Mycenæan Age.

e Percy Gardner, New Chapters of Greek History.

f Wolfgang Helbig, Die Italiker in der Po-Ebene.

g Pigorini, In Atti dell’Accademia dei Lincei.

h C. Schuchhardt, Schliemann’s Excavations (translated by E. Sellers).

i Julius Beloch, Griechische Geschichte.

Chapter III. The Heroic Age