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HISTORY OF GREECE.

GREECE is a peninsula situated on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, between the Ionian and Egean Seas. As a country, it is beautifully diversified by hills and valleys, like Wales or the Highlands of Scotland. Some of the hills are so high as to be constantly covered with snow; while the low districts enjoy a mild climate, and are of extreme fertility-several of them, as Tempe and Arcadia, being spoken of with rapture by the poets of ancient times. As the country is much divided by hills and indentations of the sea, it was partitioned, from an early period, into a number of petty states, which were under separate governments, and often at war with each other. The southern part of the peninsula, anciently styled the Peloponnesus, and now the Morea, was divided into Laconia (containing Sparta), Argolis, Achaia, Arcadia, Elis, and Messenia, each of which was only about the size of a moderate English county. Middle Greece (now Livadia), to the north of the Peloponnesus, and connected with it by the Isthmus of Corinth, on which lay the city of that name, contained Attica (in which was the city of Athens), Megaris, Bocotia (in which was the city of Thebes), Phocis, Locris, Doris, Ætolia, and Acarnania. Northern Greece contained Thessaly (now the district of Jannina), Epirus (now Albania), and Macedonia (now Filiba Vilajeti), the last of which did not, however, belong to Greece till a comparatively late period.

To the east of Greece proper lay the numerous islands of the Egean Sea, otherwise denominated the Archipelago; with which may be included certain islands lying in the Mediterranean Sea in the same direction, the principal of which were Rhodes, Cyprus, and the Cyclades. To the south lay Cythera (now Cerigo) and Crete (now Candia). To the west, in the Ionian Sea, lay Corcyra (Corfu), Cephalonia, Ithaca, and others, now constituting the distinct confederacy of the Ionian Islands, under protection of Great Britain.

Besides having possession of these various districts on the mainland, and islands on both sides of the peninsula, the Greeks in the course of time acquired colonies in Sicily and Southern Italy, as well as on the coast of Asia Minor, adjacent to the islands in the Egean Sea. The principal of these Asiatic possessions was Ionia, a beautiful and fertile country, the capital of which was Ephesus.

No. 56.

In consequence of Greece having been divided into a number of petty states, each of which maintained its own political independence, the history of the country necessarily assumes the character of a number of separate narratives. The Greeks, in the different states, did not consider themselves as constituting a single nation or people, although they were in some measure united by similarity of origin, language, religion, and manners. It was not, indeed, till a comparatively late period that they had any name for the entire country; the name then assumed was Hellas. The term Grecia (Greece) was conferred by the Romans, and has since been generally employed.

EARLY HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.

The history of the Grecian states commences about 1800 years before Christ, when the Egyptians on the opposite side of the Mediterranean were in a high state of civilisation; but the portion of history which precedes 884 B.C. is understood to be fabulous, and entitled to little credit. According to the Greek poets, the original inhabitants of the country, denominated Pelasgians, were a race of savages, who lived in caves, and clothed themselves with the skins of wild beasts. Uranus, an Egyptian prince, landed in the country, and became the father of a family of giants, named Titans, who rebelled against, and dethroned him. His son Saturn, who reigned in his stead, in order to prevent the like misfortune from befalling himself, ordered all his own children to be put to death as soon as they were born. But one named Jupiter was concealed by the mother, and reared in the island of Crete, from which in time he returned, and deposed his father. The Titans, jealous of this new prince, rebelled against him, but were vanquished and expelled for ever from the country.

Jupiter divided his dominions with his brothers Neptune and Pluto. The countries which he reserved to himself he governed with great wisdom, holding his court on Mount Olympus, a hill in Thessaly, 9000 feet in height, and the loftiest in Greece. Any truth which there might be in the story of the Titans and their princes was completely disguised by the poets, and by the popular imagination. Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, were looked back to, not as mortals, but as deities; and the top of Mount Olympus was supposed to be the heavenly residence of the gods, by whom the affairs of mortals were governed. And for ages after the dawn of philosophy, these deified sons of Saturn, and numberless others connected with them, were the objects of the national worship, not only among the Greeks, but also among the Roinans.

At an uncertain but very early date an Asiatic people named the Hellenes immigrated into Greece, in some cases expelling the Pelasgi, and in others intermingling with them, so that in process of time all the inhabitants of Greece came to be called Hellenes. They were, however, divided into several tribes, the principal of which were the Dorians, olians, and Ionians, each of whom spoke a dialect differing in some respects from those made use of by the others. These dialects were named the Doric, olic, and Ionic, in reference to the tribes which used them; and a fourth, which was afterwards formed from the Ionic, was named the Attic, from its being spoken by the inhabitants of Attica.

In the year 1856 B. C., Inachus, a Phoenician adventurer, is said to have arrived in Greece at the head of a small band of his countrymen. Phoenicia, a petty state on the coast of the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor, was at this time one of a few countries, including Egypt and Assyria, in which some degree of civilisation pre

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vailed, while all the rest of the people of the earth | Amphitryon, king of Thebes, by whom the infant IIerremained in their original barbarism, like the Pelasgians before the supposed arrival of Uranus. Navigation for the purposes of commerce, and the art of writing, are said to have originated with the Phoenicians. On their arrival in Greece, Inachus and his friends founded the city of Argos, at the head of what is now called the Gulf of Napoli, in the Peloponnesus.

Three hundred years after this event (1556 B. C.), a colony, led by an Egyptian named Cecrops, arrived in Attica, and founded the celebrated city of Athens, fortifying a high rock which rose precipitously above the site afterwards occupied by the town.

Egypt is situated in the north-eastern part of Africa. It is bounded on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and is watered by the great river Nile, the periodical overflowings of which, by supplying the moisture necessary for vegetation, render the soil very fertile. From this country, which had at a very early period made considerable advances in some of the arts and sciences (see ANCIENT HISTORY), Cecrops imported much valuable knowledge to the rude inhabitants of Attica, whom he had persuaded or obliged to acknowledge him as their chief or king. He placed his rocky fastness under the protection of an Egyptian goddess, from whose Greek name, Athena (afterwards changed by the Latins into Minerva), the city which subsequently rose around the eminence was called Athens.

About the year 1493 B. C., Cadmus, a Phoenician, founded the city of Thebes in Boeotia; and among other useful things which he communicated to the Greeks, he is said to have taught them alphabetical writing, although it is certain that that art did not come into common use in Greece until several centuries after this period.

The city of Corinth, situated on the narrow isthmus which connects the Peloponnesus with the mainland of Greece, was founded in the year 1520 B. C., and from its very advantageous position on the arm of the sea to which it anciently gave a name, but which is now known as the Gulf of Lepanto, it very soon became a place of considerable commercial importance. Sparta or Lacedæmon, the celebrated capital of Laconia in the Peloponnesus, is said to have been founded about 1520 B. C. by Lelex, an Egyptian.

In the year 1485 B. C., an Egyptian named Danäus, accompanied by a party of his countrymen, arrived at Argos, the inhabitants of which must have been at that period in an exceedingly rude state, since it is said that he excited their gratitude so much by teaching them to dig wells, when the streams from which they were supplied with water were dried up with the heat, that they elected him as their king.

Fully more than a century after this period (about 1350 B.C.), Pelops, the son of a king of Phrygia, a country in Asia Minor, settled in that part of Greece which was afterwards called from him Peloponnesus, or the island of Pelops, where he married the daughter of one of the native princes, whom he afterwards succeeded on the throne. In the course of his long reign, he found means to strengthen and greatly extend his influence in Greece, by forming matrimonial alliances between various branches of his own house and the other royal families of the Peloponnesus. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, in Argolis, who was, according to the poet Homer, the commander-in-chief of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and Meneläus, king of Sparta, on account of whose wrongs that war was undertaken, were descended from this Phrygian adventurer.

Hercules, a Theban prince, was another of the descendants of Pelops. The numerous and extraordinary feats of strength and valour of Hercules excited the admiration of his contemporaries, and being afterwards exaggerated and embellished by the poets, caused him at length to be regarded as a person endowed with supernatural powers, and even to be worshipped as a god.

cules was adopted as his son. While yet a child in the cradle, he is fabled to have crushed to death two snakes which the goddess Juno had sent to destroy him. After he grew up, he performed many heroic and extraordinary actions, commonly called his labours.' Among these was his killing a dreadful lion, by clasping his arms round its neck, and so choking it.

Another of the fabled labours of Hercules was his destroying the Hydra of Lerna. This was a monstrous seven-headed serpent, which haunted the small lake of Lerna, now Molini, in Argolis, and filled with terror the inhabitants of the whole of that part of the country. Hercules dauntlessly attacked it, and struck off several of its heads with his club. But these wonderful heads were no sooner beaten off than they grew on again, so that it seemed an impossibility to kill a monster whose injuries were so quickly repaired. At last, one of the companions of Hercules having, at the hero's request, seared with a hot iron the necks of the hydra as fast as each decapitation was accomplished, it was discovered that the heads did not spring again, and Hercules was thus enabled to complete the destruction of this terrible reptile.

Another achievement of this hero, to which allusion is often made by modern writers, was the cleansing of the stables of Augéus, king of Elis, in which three hundred cattle had been kept for thirty years, without any attempt having been made during all that time to remove the accumulating filth. This much-required purification the hero accomplished by turning into the stables a river which flowed in the vicinity. Hercules also undertook an expedition for the purpose of carrying off the cattle of Geryon, king of Gades, now Cadiz, in Spain. Geryon is represented as having been a monster with three heads, and a proportionate supply of arms and legs, and to have ruled over the greater part of Spain with the utmost cruelty. He was killed by Hercules, who brought away his valuable flocks in triumph. In this expedition he is said to have formed the Strait of Gibraltar, in order to open a communication between the Mediterranean and Atlantic, by rending asunder Spain and Africa, which had until then been united. Two mountains, Calpe and Abyla (one on each side of the Strait), raised by him in the execution of this task, were called the Pillars of Hercules, and the appellation is not unfrequently made use of by authors even at the present day.

After many adventures in foreign countries, he returned to the Peloponnesus, where he took to wife a lady named Dejanira. For a while they lived happily together; but at last, believing that Hercules had become less attached to her than formerly, his consort presented him with a tunic steeped in a mixture, which she expected to operate as a charm in regaining for her his affections, but which was, in reality, a deadly poison, artfully placed in her hands by an enemy. As soon as Hercules had put on this fatal garment, he was attacked with the most excruciating pain, and being anxious to put a period as speedily as possible to his agonies, he stretched himself upon a funeral pile, and causing a friend to set it on fire, was burned to ashes. His spirit is said to have ascended to heaven in a chariot drawn by four horses, which Jupiter, the king of the gods, transmitted to earth for the purpose, and Juno, the celestial queen, gave him her daughter Hebe as his wife. Dejanira, on learning the unfortunate result of her attempt to recover her husband's love, put an end to her own life in despair.

Such are the wild fictions which have been handed down respecting Hercules, who was in reality nothing more than a Greek prince of great valour and bodily strength. Having been expelled from Mycena by a rival claimant of the throne of that state, he appears to have spent the greater part of his life in wandering over Greece at the head of a band of military followers, According to the poets, Hercules was the son of the sometimes attacking and destroying the robber chiefs god Jupiter, and of Alcmena, daughter of Electryone, and petty tyrants who at that rude and unsettled peking of Mycena. Before his birth, his mother married | riod abounded in all parts of the country, and on other

occasions engaging in predatory expeditions himself. His character bears no slight resemblance to that of the military chieftains who flourished in our own country a few hundred years ago, and who, with somewhat confused notions of right and wrong, were equally ready to succour the weak against a powerful oppressor, and to attack and plunder an enemy, or even, in many cases, an unoffending neighbour, whose numerous flocks offered a tempting booty.

Theseus was advised to cross to Attica by water. But his lofty spirit could not brook the idea of shrinking from danger, and he resolved to proceed to his destination overland. Hercules had before this time destroyed many of the robber chiefs who infested Greece, but notwithstanding all his exertions, there were numbers still remaining; and as Theseus proceeded along the coasts of the Saronic gulf, he encountered and discomfited not a few of these marauders. Among others, he is said to have destroyed a cruel chieftain named Procrustes, who had a bed on which he stretched his captives, shortening or lengthening their bodies to correspond with the size of the bed, by either barbarously cutting off a portion of their limbs, or racking them Theseus arrived safe in Athens; and Egeus, recognising him by the tokens he brought, presented him to the people as the heir to the throne.

During the lifetime of Hercules (1263 B. C.), Jason, a prince of Thessaly, made a voyage to Colchis, a country on the eastern side of the Euxine or Black Sea. His enterprise was afterwards greatly celebrated under the name of the Argonautic Expedition, from Argo, the vessel in which he sailed. This ship is gene-out, as the case might be. After many toils and perils, rally referred to by the ancients as the first that ever ventured on a long voyage. It is uncertain what was the real object of the Argonautic expedition, although it seems probable that, as Colchis was rich in mines of gold and silver, Jason and his companions, among whom were Hercules and several other persons of distinction, were actuated by a desire to rob the country of some of its valuable metals. The poets, however, tell us a different story. Phryxus and Hellé, the son and daughter of Athamus, king of Thebes, being compelled, according to the poetical account, to quit their native country to avoid the cruelty of their stepmother, mounted on the back of a winged ram with a fleece of gold, and were carried by this wonderful animal through the air towards Colchis, where an uncle of theirs, named Etes, was king. Unfortunately, as they were passing over the strait now called the Dardanelles, which connects the gean Sea with the Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, Helle became giddy, and falling into the water, was drowned. From her, says the legend, the strait was named the Hellespont, or Sea of Helle.

When Phryxus arrived in Colchis, he sacrificed his winged ram to Jupiter, in acknowledgment of divine protection, and deposited its golden fleece in the same deity's temple. He then married the daughter of Etes, but was afterwards murdered by that king, who wished to obtain possession of the golden fleece. To avenge Phryxus's death, Jason, who was his relation, undertook the expedition to Colchis, where, after performing several marvellous exploits, he not only obtained the golden fleece, but persuaded Medea, another daughter of King Etes, to become his wife, and to accompany him back to Greece.

One of the persons associated with Jason in the Argonautic expedition was Theseus, a hero almost as celebrated as Hercules himself. His father, Egéus, was king of Athens, and his mother, Æthra, was the daughter of Pittheus, king of Trozen, in Argolis. An insurrection which broke out in Attica obliged Ægeus to leave Æthra at her father's court, before Theseus was born, and to repair in haste to Athens. Before his departure, he conducted his wife to a lonely spot in the vicinity of Trozen, where there stood a large rock with a cavity in the centre. In this hollow he placed a pair of sandals and a hunting-knife, and after covering them over with a piece of marble of great weight, he addressed Æthra in the following words:-' If our child shall prove a boy, let his removal of this stone be one day the proof of his strength; when he can do this, inform him of his parentage, and send him with the tokens it covers to me in Athens.'

The fame of his warlike exploits rendered Theseus a favourite with the Athenians; and soon after his arrival among them, he took a step which greatly added to his popularity. In consequence of their want of success in a war with Minos, a celebrated king of Crete, the Athenians had been obliged to send to that sovereign an annual tribute of seven young men and as many young girls. These victims, it is probable, were, on their arrival in Crete, condemned to slavery; but the popular belief of those superstitious times was, that they were thrown into a labyrinth constructed by an ingenious person named Dædalus, where they were devoured alive by a monster called a Minotaur (taurus, a bull), one-half of whose body resembled a man, and the other a bull.

When the time came round for selecting by lot the annual victims, Theseus, observing the horror of those on whom the lot fell, and the deep sympathy which was universally felt for their unhappy fate, resolved to make a bold effort to obtain the abrogation of the cruel tribute. For that purpose he voluntarily enrolled himself as one of the victims, and was sent to Crete along with the others. On his arrival there, he was well received by Minos, who had already heard of his heroic deeds, and who admired the warmth of that patriotism which had led the Athenian prince thus to offer himself up a voluntary sacrifice for the benefit of his country.

On further acquaintance, Minos conceived so high an opinion of Theseus, that he gave him his daughter Ariadné in marriage, and relinquished his claim to the humiliating tribute which he had hitherto exacted from the Athenians. Theseus then returned to Athens, where he was received with every demonstration of public respect. Annual sacrifices and festivals were instituted in commemoration of his patriotic conduct, and the vessel in which he had made his voyage to Crete was carefully preserved for many centuries, being from time to time repaired, until at last it became a question, which was gravely discussed by the learned, whether it was or was not to be still regarded as the vessel of Theseus, after its several parts had been so frequently renewed.

Theseus succeeded his father on the Athenian throne (1234 B.c.), and by his wise regulations greatly consolidated the strength and increased the prosperity of his kingdom. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, had divided Attica into twelve districts, each of which possessed its own magistracy and judicial tribunals. As the country advanced in wealth and population, these districts became less closely connected with each other, and at the period of the accession of Theseus, they could hardly be regarded in any other light than as so many little independent communities, whose perpetual disputes kept the whole district in broils and confusion. But Theseus had influence enough with all parties to obtain their consent to the abolition of the separate jurisdicTrozen, where the young prince of Athens was nur- tions, and to the fixing of all civil and judicial authotured, lay on the western shore of the gulf which sepa-rity in the capital. He at the same time voluntarily rates the Peloponnesus from Attica. As the journey resigned into their hands a portion of his own power. to Athens by land was both circuitous and dangerous, Having divided the people into three classes-the nobles,

When Theseus had arrived at manhood, his mother, remembering the words of Ægéus, took him to the rock where the tokens were deposited, and desired him to try to lift off the mass of marble which his father had placed above them. Being a youth of uncommon strength, he accomplished this with ease, upon which thra communicated to him the rank of his father, and giving him the sandals and the hunting-knife, charged him to bear them to geus at Athens.

the artisans, and the cultivators of the soil-he intrusted | Pelops, and this successful suitor, on the death of Tynthe first of these with the administration of public darus, was raised to the Spartan throne. affairs, and the dispensation of justice, while he conferred upon every freeman or citizen, without distinction of class, a vote in the legislative assemblies. The command of the army, and the presidency of the state, he retained in his own person.

To strengthen the political union of the various districts of his kingdom by the tie of a common religion, he instituted a solemn festival, to be celebrated annually at Athens by all the inhabitants of Attica, in honour of Minerva, the tutelary deity of the city. This festival he denominated Panathenæa, or the Feast of all the Athenians, the name by which the whole of the people of Attica were thenceforth called.

The wise and liberal policy of Theseus caused Attica to advance considerably beyond the other states of Greece in prosperity and civilisation; and the ancient historian, Thucydides, informs us that the Athenians were the first of the Greeks who laid aside the military dress and arms, which till now had been constantly worn. The example of Athens was not lost on the other Grecian communities, all of which gradually adopted, to a greater or less extent, those political institutions which had conferred so many advantages upon Attica. Notwithstanding the judicious and exemplary conduct of Theseus in the early part of his reign, he appears to have afterwards allowed his restless and adventurous disposition to hurry him into many extravagances, and even crimes, by which he forfeited the respect of his people, and brought disgrace and suffering on his latter years. If we may believe the traditionary accounts, he accompanied Hercules in some of his celebrated expeditions, and assisted by Pirithoüs, a king of Thessaly, engaged in many martial and predatory adventures, conformably rather with the very imperfect morality and rude manners of the age, than with his own previous character. There reigned in Lacedæmon at this period a king named Tyndarus, who had a beautiful daughter called Helen, and according to the ancient historians, Theseus and his friend Pirithous formed the design of stealing away this young lady, and a princess of Epirus named Proserpine. They succeeded in carrying off Helen; but in their attempt to obtain Proserpine, they fell into the hands of her father, by whom Pirithous was put to death, and Theseus thrown into prison. Meanwhile, Castor and Pollux, the twin-brothers of Helen, who were afterwards deified, and whose names have been bestowed upon one of the signs of the Zodiac (Gemini), rescued their sister from the men to whom Theseus had given her in charge, and ravaged Attica in revenge for the injury they had received from its king.

At this period, in the north-western part of Asia Minor, on the shores of the Hellespont and the Egean Seas, there existed a kingdom, the capital of which was a large and well-fortified city named Troy, or Ilium. Priam, the king of Troy, had a son whose name was Paris; and this young chief, in the course of a visit to Greece, resided for a time in Sparta at the court of Menelaus, who gave the Asiatic stranger a very friendly reception. Charmed with Helen's beauty, Paris employed the opportunity afforded by a temporary absence of her husband to gain her affections, and persuade her to elope with him to Troy. It was not, according to the old poets, to his personal attractions, great as they were, that Paris owed his success on this occasion, but to the aid of the goddess of Love, whose favour he had won by assigning to her the palm of beauty, on an occasion when it was contested between her and two other female deities.

When Menelaus returned home, he was naturally wroth at finding his hospitality so ill requited; and after having in vain endeavoured, both by remonstrances and threats, to induce the Trojans to send him back his queen, he applied to the princes who had formerly been Helen's lovers, and called upon them to aid him, according to their oaths, in recovering her from her seducer. They obeyed the summons; and all Greece being indignant at the insult offered to Menelaus, a general muster of the forces of the various states took place at Aulis, a seaport town of Bocotia, preparatory to their crossing the Egcan to the Trojan shore. This is supposed to have happened in the year 1194 B.C. Of the chiefs assembled on this occasion, the most celebrated were Agamemnon, king of Mycena; Menelaus, king of Sparta; Ulysses, king of Ithaca; Nestor, king of Pylos; Achilles, son of the king of Thessaly; Ajax, of Salamis; Diomedes, of Ætolia; and Idomeneus, of Crete. Agamemnon, the brother of the injured Menelaus, was elected commander-in-chief of the confederated Greeks. According to some ancient authors, this general was barbarous enough to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, to induce the gods to send a favouring gale to the Grecian fleet when it was detained by contrary winds in the port of Aulis; but as the earliest writers respecting the Trojan war make no mention of this unnatural act, it is to be hoped that it never was performed.

The Grecian armament consisted of about 1200 vessels, with from 50 to 120 men in each, and the army which warred against Troy is supposed to have amounted altogether to about 100,000 men. The Trojans, although reinforced by auxiliary bands from Assyria, Thrace, and Asia Minor, were unable to withstand the Greeks in the open country, and they therefore soon retired

Theseus was afterwards released from imprisonment by the assistance of Hercules, and returned home; but the Athenians had become so offended with his conduct, and were so angry at his having exposed them to ill-within the walls of their city. treatment from the Lacedæmonians by his wicked attempt upon Helen, that they refused to receive him again as their sovereign. He therefore withdrew into exile, and soon after died in the island of Scyros. The Athenian people, however, never forgot the benefits he had in his wiser days conferred upon the state; and many centuries after his death, his bones, or some which were supposed to be his, were conveyed to Athens with great pomp, and a splendid temple was erected above them to his memory.

The Lacedæmonian princess who was stolen away by Theseus afterwards became the occasion of a celebrated war. The fame of her great beauty having spread far and wide, many of the princes of Greece asked her from her father Tyndarus in marriage; but he, being fearful of incurring the enmity of the rejected suitors, declined showing a preference for any of them. Assembling them all, he bound them by an oath to acquiesce in the selection which Helen herself should make, and to protect her against any attempts which might afterwards be made to carry her off from the husband of her choice. Helen gave the preference to Menelaus, a grandson of

In those early times men were unskilled in the art of reducing fortified places, and the Greeks knew of no speedier way of taking Troy than blockading it till the inhabitants should be compelled by famine to surrender. But here a new difficulty arose. No arrange ments had been made for supplying the invaders with provisions during a lengthened siege; and after they had plundered and laid waste the surrounding country, they began to be in as great danger of starvation as the besieged. The supplies which arrived from Grecce were scanty and irregular, and it became necessary to detach a part of the beleaguering forces to cultivate the plains of the Chersonesus of Thrace, in order to raise crops for the support of themselves and their brethren in arms.

The Grecian army being thus weakened, the Trojans were encouraged to make frequent sallies, in which they were led generally by the valiant IIector, Priam's eldest and noblest son. Many skirmishes took place, and innumerable deeds of individual heroism were performed, all of which led to no important result, for the opposing armies were so equally matched, that neither

At length, after a siege of no less than ten years, in the course of which some of the most distinguished leaders on both sides were slain, Troy was taken, its inhabitants slaughtered, and its edifices burnt and razed to the ground.

could obtain any decisive advantage over the other. I would appear, gave offence to the new rulers of the Peloponnesian states, and war was commenced between the Dorians and the Athenians. In the year 1070 B.C., Attica was invaded by a numerous army of the Peloponnesians, and Athens itself seemed menaced with destruction. This emergency produced a display of patriotic devotion on the part of Codrus, the Athenian king, which has rarely been paralleled in the annals of mankind, and deserves to be held in everlasting remembrance :-

According to the poets, it was by a stratagem that this famous city was at last overcome. They tell us that the Greeks constructed a wooden horse of prodigious size, in the body of which they concealed a number of armed men, and then retired towards the sea-shore, to induce the enemy to believe that the besiegers had given up the enterprise, and were about to return home. Deceived by this manoeuvre, the Trojans brought the gigantic horse into the city, and the men who had been concealed within it, stealing out in the night-time, unbarred the gates, and admitted the Grecian army within the walls. The siege of Troy forms the subject of Homer's sublime poem, the 'Iliad,' in which the real events of the war are intermingled with many fictitious and supernatural incidents.

The Greek princes discovered that their triumph over Troy was dearly paid for by their subsequent sufferings, and the disorganisation of their kingdoms at home. Ulysses, if we may believe the poets, spent ten years in wandering over seas and lands before arriving in his island of Ithaca. Others of the leaders died or were shipwrecked on their way home, and several of those who succeeded in reaching their own dominions, found their thrones occupied by usurpers, and were compelled to return to their vessels, and seek in distant lands a place of rest and security for their declining years. But the fate of Agamemnon, the renowned general of the Greeks, was the most deplorable of all. On his return to Argos, he was assassinated by his wife Clytemnestra, who had formed an attachment during his absence to another person. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, was driven into exile, but afterwards returned to Argos, and putting his mother and her accomplices to death, established himself upon the throne.

At Delphi in Phocis there was a temple of Apollo, to the priests of which the Greeks were wont to apply for information regarding future events, in the same manner as the people of comparatively recent times were accustomed to consult astrologers, soothsayers, and other artful impostors on similar questions. Now Codrus had learned that the Peloponnesians had received at Delphi a prophetical response, to the effect that they should not be victorious in the war, if they did not kill the Athenian king. Determined to save his country at the expense of his own life, Codrus disguised himself in a peasant's dress, and entering the Peloponnesian camp, provoked a quarrel with a soldier, by whom he was killed.

It was not long until the dead body was recognised to be that of the Athenian king, and the Peloponnesians, remembering the condition on which the oracle had promised them success, were afraid to continue the contest any longer, and hastily retreated into their own territories. The Athenians were filled with admiration when they heard of the noble conduct of their monarch, and in the height of their gratitude, they declared that none but Jupiter was worthy of being their king after such a prince as Codrus.

It is supposed that they were partly induced to make this declaration by finding the sons of Codrus evince an inclination to involve the country in a civil war regarding the succession to the throne. The Athenians therefore abolished royalty altogether, and appointed Medon, Codrus's eldest son, under the title of Archon, as chief magistrate of the republic for life; the office to be hereditary in his family as long as its duties should be performed to the satisfaction of the assembly of the people. And as Attica was overcrowded with the Peloponnesian refugees, these, together with a large body of Athenians, were sent into Asia Minor, under the charge of Androclus and Neleus, the younger sons of Codrus, to Eolia. The settlers founded twelve cities, some of which afterwards rose to great wealth and splendour. Ionia was the name bestowed upon the district, in reference to the Ionic stock from which the Athenians drew their descent.

About eighty years after the termination of the Trojan war, an extensive revolution took place in the affairs of Greece, in consequence of the subjugation of nearly the whole Peloponnesus by the descendants of Hercules. It has already been mentioned that that hero, who was a member of the royal family of Mycena or Argos, had been driven into exile by some more suc-plant colonies to the south of those already formed in cessful candidate for the throne of that state. After the hero's death, his children sought refuge in Doris, the king of which became subsequently so much attached to Hyllus, the eldest son of Hercules, that he constituted him the heir of his throne. Twice the Heraclidæan princes unsuccessfully attempted to establish themselves in the sovereignty of the Peloponnesus, which they claimed as their right; but on the third trial, they accomplished their object. In the year 1104 | B. C., three brothers named Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, said to have been the great-grandsons of Hyllus, invaded the Peloponnesus at the head of the Dorians, and conquered the greater part of it, with the exception of the province of Arcadia, the mountainous character of which enabled its inhabitants to defend it with success against the invaders.

Temenus obtained the kingdom of Argos, Cresphontes established himself in Messenia, and as Aristodemus had died during the war, his twin sons Eurysthenes and Procles shared between them the throne of Sparta. The thrones of Corinth and Elis were occupied by other branches of the Heraclidean family. The Dorian troops were rewarded with the lands of the conquered inhabitants, who were driven out of the Peloponnesus, or reduced to slavery. Great numbers of the Peloponnesians, who were expatriated by the Dorian invaders, passed over into Asia Minor, where they founded several colonies in a district afterwards called Eolia, from the name of the people by whom these colonies were established. Others took refuge in Attica, where the Athepians received them in a friendly manner. This, it

Several Dorian colonies in Caria, a province still farther south than Ionia, completed the range of Grecian settlements along the western coast of Asia Minor. Cyprus, Rhodes, the coast of Thrace, and the islands of the Ægean Sea, together with a considerable portion of Italy and Sicily, and even of France and Spain, were also colonised by bands of adventurers, who at various periods emigrated from Greece; so that, in process of time, the Grecian race, language, religion, institutions, and manners, instead of being confined to the comparatively small country constituting Greece proper, were diffused over a very extensive region, comprising the fairest portions of Europe and of western Asia.

While this work of colonisation was going forward, the parent states of Greece were torn with internal dissensions, and were perpetually harassing each other in wars, of which the objects and incidents are now equally uncertain. Almost all that is known of the history of the two centuries immediately following the death of Codrus is, that they were characterised by great turbulence and confusion, and that, during their lapse, many of the Grecian states and colonies followed the example of Athens by abolishing monarchy. Others did not, till a later period, become republican, and Sparta long retained the singular form of regal government established there at the accession of the twin brothers

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