The failure of the expedition led by Datis and Artaphernes, in the invasion of Attica, was poorly compensated, by their success against Eretria; the insult it had offered to the majesty of the Persian empire was sufficiently avenged by its ruin, and when the captive Eretrians were brought to Darius, he was satisfied with planting them in a part of his own domain, in the Cissian village of Ardericca. But his anger was doubly inflamed against Athens by the event of Marathon, which did not suggest to him any wholesome warning; the conclusion he drew from it was, that his power had been defied with impunity, merely because it had not been fully exerted. Now therefore he resolved that the insolent people, which had invaded his territories, violated the persons of his messengers, and driven his generals to a shameful flight, should feel the whole weight of his arm. A year had been spent in the pre-parations for the last campaign: those he now set on foot were on a vast scale, and demanded a longer time. Every nation that owned his sway was called on to contribute to the new armament much more largely than before, and to send the flower of its warriors, such as were fit to meet the Greeks in the field, as well as an extraordinary supply, according to its means, of ships or horses, provisions and stores.

Athens had been permitted to complete the conquest of Samos without hindrance; but the addition which this success made to her power rendered it only the more evident, that peace could not last much longer between her and the Peloponnesian confederacy. Her ambition, the animosity which she had excited in several of the allies of Sparta, and the jealousy of Sparta herself, had reached such a height, that it was clear the Thirty Years Truce was much more likely to be violently abridged, than to lead to a lasting settlement. Nevertheless the two leading states, as if foreseeing the ruinous consequences of their conflict, shrank from striking the first blow, as well as from forfeiting the divine favour by a breach of the treaty. Sparta, as she had been a quiet spectatress of the fall of Samos, rejected an application which was made to her by the Mitylenæans, who, if they could have reckoned on her aid, would have renounced the Athenian alliance, and would probably have engaged the whole island to join in their revolt. According to Theophrastus a sum of ten talents distributed by Pericles every year among the leading Spartans, kept them in a pacific mood. But the expectation which generally prevailed of an approaching renewal of hostilities, contributed to hasten the event. Without it the occurrences which immediately occasioned the disastrous war which we are about to relate, either would not have happened, or would have passed by without such an effect.

NOTE TO PAGE 24. ON A PRETENDED POWER OF THE AREOPAGUS.

Some readers may perhaps be surprised to find no mention made here of a prerogative, which they may have seen elsewhere attributed to the Areopagus, and which it is said to have retained even to the time of the change effected by Pericles and Ephialtes. Till that time, we have been informed by a modern historian, the Areopagus directed all issues from the public treasury. The assertion is one of those—very numerous in the work where it occurs — which have owed their success neither to the force of testimony nor of reasoning, but simply to the placid assurance with which they are advanced. We have seen indeed (Vol. II. p. 296.) an extraordinary case, in which the Areopagus seems to have assumed such a power. But if any one thinks this a sufficient proof of the general assertion, we could only reply by the old Greek jest, of the simpleton who carried a brick about as a sample of a house, or by the Roman story, of the youth who finding a fragment of a boat on the beach, was seized with the desire of building a ship. It is one of those statements which can hardly be refuted until some attempt has been made to prove them. But we may observe that the very fact of Aristotle's mentioning the report on this subject for which Plutarch cites his authority — and after all it was no more than a report, and Clidemus (Plut. Them. 10.) gave a different account of the matter — raises the strongest presumption that, if true, it was an extraordinary case.

While the Greek colonies on the coast of Asia were flourishing in freedom, commerce, wealth, arts and arms, a power was growing up by their side, which, strong in their disunion, gradually encroached on their territory, and in the end crushed their independence. Between the foot of mount Tmolus and the river Hermus, on the right bank of the torrent Pactolus, rises a lofty hill, looking down on a broad and fruitful plain, into which the vales of the Hermus and the Cayster open toward the East. This hill, steep on all sides, on one precipitous, had been from very early times the citadel of a race of kings who reigned over the surrounding region, and the city of Sardis had sprung up at its foot. The people whose capital Sardis had become in the period when Grecian history begins to be genuine and connected, were the Lydians; but their settlement in this tract was comparatively recent: for some generations after the Trojan war the Mæonians, apparently a Pelasgian tribe, occupied the same seats; and the Lydian monarchy seems to have been founded on a conquest, by which the ancient inhabitants were either expelled or subdued. This revolution however is nowhere expressly recorded: it can only be inferred from the silence of Homer as to the Lydians, from the probability that the Mæonians, as most of the other tribes that were scattered over the western side of Asia Minor before the Trojan war, were more nearly allied to the Greeks than the Lydians, and finally from the certain fact, that in the period to which the Lydian conquest of Mæonia, if admitted, must be referred, great changes frequently occurred in the population of this part of Asia.

The history of the Greek colonies is connected but partially, and in varying degrees, with that of the mother country. A complete description and enumeration of them would be foreign to our present purpose. But a general survey of them is necessary to give an adequate conception of the magnitude of the Grecian world, when, dilated beyond its original bounds, it comprised extensive tracts of coast on the seas inclosed by the three ancient continents; and a sketch of the most prominent features of their ordinary condition, and relations to their parent states, is requisite to place them in the proper light, and will contribute to illustrate the Greek character, and its habits of thinking and feeling. Some of them, however, will demand more particular notice, partly on account of the effects produced by them on the course of events in Greece, and partly on account of the impulse which they gave to the intellectual progress of their nation, and of the human race.

We pass over the doubtful legends of the colonies planted by several of the heroes on or after their return from the siege of Troy, as by Agamemnon and Calchas on the coast of Asia, by the sons of Theseus in Thrace, by Ialmenus in the Euxine, by Diomed, Philoctetes, Epeus, Menestheus, and others in Italy, and by the never-resting wanderer Ulysses in the remoter regions of the West.

The period included between the first appearance of the Hellenes in Thessaly, and the return of the Greeks from Troy, is commonly known by the name of the heroic age, or ages. The real limits of this period cannot be exactly defined. The date of the siege of Troy is only the result of a doubtful calculation; and, from what has been already said, the reader will see that it must be scarcely possible to ascertain the precise beginning of the period: but stilly so far as its traditions admit of any thing like a chronological connection, its duration may be estimated at six generations, or about two hundred years. We have already described the general character of this period, as one in which a warlike race spread from the north over the south of Greece, and founded new dynasties in a number of little states; while, partly through the impulse given to the earlier settlers by this immigration, and partly in the natural progress of society, a similar state of things arose in those parts of the country which were not immediately occupied by the invaders; so that every where a class of nobles entirely given to martial pursuits, and the principal owners of the land — whose station and character cannot perhaps be better illustrated than when compared to that of the chivalrous barons of the middle ages — became prominent above the mass of the people, which they held in various degrees of subjection.

The Trojan war, as we find it described, was not, according to any conception that may be formed of the magnitude of the expedition and the conquest, an event that necessarily produced any important effects on the condition of Greece. There is no apparent reason why, as soon as it was ended, all the surviving princes and chiefs might not have returned to their dominions, to enjoy the fruits of their victory in honourable repose, and have transmitted their sceptres in peace to their children. The Odyssey accordingly represents parts of Greece as continuing, after the war, under the rule of the heroes who fought at Troy; and we might infer from this description, that the great national struggle was followed by a period of general tranquillity. On the other hand, the poet signifies that, after the fall of Troy, the victors incurred the anger of the gods, who had before espoused their cause. The Odyssey is filled with one example of the calamities which the divine wrath brought upon the Greeks, in the person of Ulysses, king of Ithaca. Menelaus himself, though we find him in the poem reigning in great prosperity at Lacedæmon, was only permitted to reach home after a long course of wandering over distant seas and lands. Ajax, son of Oileus, perished in the waves. Agamemnon was murdered, on his return to Argos, by Ægisthus, who in his absence had seduced his wife Clytæmnestra, and who usurped the throne of the murdered king, which was not recovered before the end of several years by Orestes, the rightful heir.

We now return to the Dorians of Peloponnesus, whose history, scanty as is the information transmitted to us concerning its earlier ages, is still somewhat less obscure, and much more interesting, than that of the other Greek tribes during the same period. Our attention will for some time be fixed on the steps by which Sparta rose to a supremacy above the rest of the Dorian states, which was finally extended over the whole of Greece. This is the most momentous event of the period intervening between the Return of the Heracleids and the Persian wars. It was in part an effect of the great addition which Sparta made to her territory, by swallowing up that of her western neighbour. But this conquest may itself be regarded as a result of those peculiar institutions, which, once firmly established, decided her character and destiny to the end of her political existence, and which are in themselves one of the most interesting subjects that engage the attention of the statesman and the philosopher in the history of Greece.

Before we attempt to describe the Spartan constitution, it will be necessary to notice the different opinions that have been entertained as to its origin and its author. It has been usual, both with ancient and modern writers, to consider it as the work of a single man — as the fruit of the happy genius, or of the commanding character, of Lycurgus, who has generally been supposed to have had the merit, if not of inventing it, yet of introducing and establishing it among his countrymen.