The Historians' History of the World 04

The expressive silence of these memorials was interpreted by legends which lived in the mind and the heart of the people; and so long as any inhabitants remained in a place, a guide was to be found thoroughly versed in this traditional lore. The town of Panopeus at the northern foot of Parnassus, though celebrated by Homer as a royal residence, had been reduced, when it was visited by Pausanias,f to a miserable assemblage of huts, in which the traveller could find nothing to deserve the name of a city, as it contained neither an archive, nor a gymnasium, nor a theatre, nor a market-place, nor a fountain; but the people remembered that they were not of Phocian, but of Phlegyan origin: they could show the grave which covered the vast bulk of the great Tityus, and the remnants of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the human race. Relics of like antiquity were at the same period reverently treasured in most parts of Greece. The memory of the past was still more effectually preserved by a great variety of festivals, games, public sacrifices, and other religious solemnities. After the extinction of the national independence, the battle of Platæa did not cease to be commemorated by the Feast of Liberty; as notwithstanding the absence of all political interests, the forms of deliberation were kept up in the Amphictyonic, the Achæan, Phocian, and Bœotian councils. The heroes both of the mythical and the historical age were still honoured with anniversary rites—Aratus and Demosthenes, and the slain at Marathon, no less than Ajax and Achilles, Temenus, Phoroneus, and Melampus.

The religion of the Greeks, which was so intimately associated with almost all their social pleasures and their most important affairs, had never lost its hold on the great body of the nation. We hear much of the change wrought in the state of religious feeling by the speculations of the sophists, and the later kindred philosophical schools, by the frequent examples of sacrilegious violence, by the progress of luxury, and the growing corruption of manners. But the effect seems to have been confined to a not very large circle of the higher classes. With the common people paganism continued, probably as long as it subsisted at all, to be not a mere hereditary usage, but a personal, living, breathing, and active faith. In the age of the Antonines the Attic husbandmen still believed in the potent agency of their hero Marathon, as the Arcadian herdsmen fancied that they could hear the piping of Pan on the top of Mænalus. The national misfortunes, as they led the Greeks to cling the more fondly to their recollections of the past, tended to strengthen the influence of the old religion, and rendered them the less disposed to admit a new faith which shocked their patriotic pride and dispelled many pleasing illusions, while it ran counter to all their tastes and habits, and deprived them of their principal enjoyments. Accordingly, it seems that Christianity, notwithstanding the consolations it offered for all that it took away, made very slow progress beyond the cities in which it was first planted; and its ascendency was not firmly established long before the beginning of a period in which a series of new calamities threatened the very existence of the nation.

The result of the Persian invasion in the mind of the victorious people had been a feeling of exulting self-confidence, which fostered the development of all its powers and resources. The terror of the Celtic inroad was followed by a sense of security earned in a great measure by an honourable struggle. Far different was the impression left by the irruption of Alaric, when Greece was at length delivered from his presence. The progress of the barbarians had been stopped by no resistance before they reached the utmost limits of the land. They retreated indeed before Stilicho, but not broken or discomfited, carrying off all their booty to take undisturbed possession of another, not a distant province. It was long indeed before the Greeks experienced a repetition of this calamity, but henceforth they lived in the consciousness that they were continually exposed to it. They neither had strength to defend themselves, nor could rely on their rulers for protection.