“Here, stranger, seek no tyrant. This our state is ruled Not of one man. ’Tis free. The people year by year As kings succeed each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s poor has equal share.”

Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic and so calm, each member of every group is at once so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.”

In making such a study of this city as is demanded for turning the quick appreciation of its external charm into the more permanent possession of its underlying qualities, we must submit to some analysis of the great moments in its history and its literature.

When Athenian literature begins with Solon, in the sixth century, B. C., the Greeks have emerged from a dim antiquity. In the two preceding centuries, the mother cities of Achæan and Dorian Greece had been sending out colonists east and west, not merely in a spirit of Phœnician commercialism, but also with adventuresome, intellectual curiosity. The heroes of their earliest traditional literature sailed with them. Associations half slumbering in the popular consciousness thrilled them as they steered again over the course of the Argo or as they followed once more the later track of Odysseus to the west, and in lower Italy and Sicily reëstablished Great Hellas as an integral part of Hellenic civilization.

In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia Minor had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of the sea.

The Athenians, more than most Greeks, could boast that they were autochthonous, earth-born children of their own soil. Isocrates in his “Panegyricus” makes proudly the claim: “We dwell in the land not after expelling others, nor even finding it a desert, nor even coming as a mixed breed collected from many nations, but ... sprung from the soil and able to address our city by the same names as we give to the closest relations.” The prehistoric Greek invaders of Attica had fused with rather than driven out the former occupants, the Pelasgians or whoever they may have been. Erichthonius, Erechtheus, or Poseidon, “one form for many names,” was born of Earth but mothered on Athena, and it would have been as futile as it was impious to challenge the pedigree of the Erechtheidæ. Erechtheus-Poseidon might coil forever undisturbed beneath the sheltering shield of the Virgin-goddess. Cecrops, too, the mythical king and Attic hero, owned a perpetual ground-rent on the Acropolis and the Athenians were Cecropidæ. They were also the “Sons of Hephæstus,” who was often associated with Athena, a partnership of the heavenly wisdom with the arts and crafts. An ancient festival of the whole city, held in honour of Athena, became afterwards specialized among the artisans, under the name of Chalkeia, in honour of Hephæstus; and the god may yet win back as his own “Hephæsteum” the so-called “Theseum” on the hill above the classic market-place.

The age of the heroes merges with that of the Kings. Theseus moves, a grandiose figure, through art and literature. Thus when the “Hill party” of Pisistratus became preëminent, Theseus, the aristocrat, came into prominence in vase painting. He appears in all the forms of didactic sculpture, and the “City of Theseus,” the older Athens, is recalled again in the Roman renaissance by the Arch of Hadrian. This still offers to the modern pilgrim, on the west side facing the Acropolis, the inscription: “This is the Athens of Theseus, the old city,” and on the other, facing the Olympieum of Hadrian: “This is the City of Hadrian and not the City of Theseus.” Thus meet the old and the new, with classic Athens ignored.

To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic demesmen. All Attica was Athens. All its free inhabitants, class by class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the returning despot.

The picture of the old city of Theseus is vague to our imagination, but the Athens of Solon’s administration emerges somewhat more clearly as we take away, one after another, some of the prominent features of the later Athens that we know best. The Acropolis lacked the Propylæa, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, its barrenness being relieved by little save the “old” temple of Athena Polias. Not only the Dionysiac theatre, but even its earliest forerunner were things of the future. The drama was yet unborn. The Market-place of later centuries, adorned with statues and stoas, was represented by a simpler centre of civic life at the west end of the Acropolis, where were the public buildings of administration, the communal winepress of the Lenæum and the old Callirrhoë spring.

Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order to violate with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the question of conquering Salamis, he cried:—

The Athenians were aroused. They went with him across the narrow strait, and Salamis, the “lovely island,” thenceforward was their own, destined to serve them as refuge in their hour of greatest need. Solon used his popularity, thus acquired, in no self-seeking way. Chosen archon and virtual dictator he moulded proletariat and noble to his own noble will. Again and again his verse reënforces his pedestrian arguments. “The black earth is enslaved,” he says, and presently the mortgage stones, dotted over the farms, are mere cancelled records. Many such, of a later date, have been found. The “Penurious Man” in Theophrastus “inspects his boundary stones daily to make sure that they are in place.” Solon proudly appeals to the constituency of the future to justify his laws:—

Again, even more proudly, he says:—

The citizens, he says, by their folly and their greed would themselves destroy the city, but Athena, the Watcher, is there upon the hill:—

In the Athenian memory as well as in these vigorous elegiacs he embedded the epithet of “Guardian” (ἐπίσκοπος) that would in after days lend significance to the great bronze statue, overlooking the city and sea, and would remain after Macedon had come and gone as a semi-official title of the goddess.

Legend tells us that Solon in his old age, when the tyranny had now come, piled his armour in front of his house door—probably near the Market-place of Pisistratus—and turned from politics to a serene enjoyment of the pleasures of ear and eye and intellect to which he had, indeed, never been a stranger. His life had always been consistent with his own epigram:—

Like many of his countrymen subsequently, he combined active participation in public affairs with the character of poet and writer. In literature, as in political life, he had his preferences. Perhaps nothing more distinctly places him in the old Athens than his disapprobation of the Tragedy that was born in his later years. He is said to have taken Thespis to task for the falsehood of the drama. On the other hand the direct sincerity of lyric poetry accorded with his manner of thought. From Ælian’s variegated patch-work the story drifts down to us that to Solon, seated one day over his wine, his nephew sang one of Sappho’s songs. Solon at once commanded the boy to teach him the song, and when a bystander asked why he was so eager, he replied: “When I have learned it, then that I may die!”

To subsequent generations he seemed the embodiment of wisdom over against excess, and readers of Herodotus who were not troubled by the chronological difficulties must have especially enjoyed the story of his interview with Crœsus and his reproof of the rich king for his exultation in his wealth. The famous apothegm, “One must wait for the end before praising,” was repeated in one form or another by Simonides, Æschylus, and Sophocles. Of Solon’s own end a dramatic story is mentioned by Plutarch, although he refuses to lend it his credence: “That his ashes, after his body was burned, were scattered about the island of Salamis is a story absolutely mythical and incredible by reason of its outlandishness. It stands recorded, however, both by other noteworthy men and by Aristotle the philosopher.”

After years of varying fortune Pisistratus finally (540 or 539 B. C.) established himself as Tyrant of Athens. But tyranny at Athens was never more than an episode. The inbred spirit of freedom must be reckoned with. Pisistratus respected popular rights, and after the accession of his sons the suspicion of a tendency to introduce such measures as were acquiesced in, for example, at Corinth, brought death to the one and subsequent banishment to the other. But the result of the tyranny of Pisistratus was beneficent. Under him and his sons the city began to take on both externally and intellectually more of the characteristics which are in mind when we think of Athens. Architect, sculptor, and painter began to contribute enriching details to the Acropolis, including the first Propylæa. Engineers skilfully brought water from near and far into the old Market-place, and in front of the town spring of Callirrhoë Pisistratus built the spacious “Nine Spouts”—the Enneakrounos—where women filled their water-jars and stayed to gossip. The newer market-place, to the north of the Areopagus, was developed. A great Olympieum was begun on the site of the present columns, which date from Hadrian’s time. Gymnasium life became important and the Academy was made ready as if in anticipation of its great future. Doubtless within this lovely grove many a youth of the period might have served as a model for Aristophanes’s fifth-century picture of palæstra life in the good old times:—

A distinctive part of Pisistratus’s policy was the encouragement of country life and of agriculture. All over the Attic plain the olive orchards were cultivated, to become an important source of revenue to the Athenian state and immeasurably to enhance the charm of its environment. Herodotus recounts that a tall, handsome woman named Phye, from the hill country, had impersonated Athena come down in mortal guise and, riding in a chariot with Pisistratus, had lent divine sanction to his original coup d’état. The Attic demesmen might still more easily accept this new measure as a command transmitted from Athena who had herself first created the olive tree and taught its culture on the Acropolis:—

Aristotle, in his “Constitution of Athens,” lays great stress on the effort of Pisistratus to develop the prosperity of the farmers. He tells how Pisistratus, walking in the country and seeing one digging among the rocks, asked what sort of a crop grew there, and the man, unaware that it was the Tyrant, replied: “Such a crop of evils and pain that it were right that Pisistratus should have his tithe of them.” Pisistratus, pleased both with his industry and his free speech, relieved the farmer of his burdens. And so, Aristotle continues, he was not troubled during his reign but could secure peace and quiet and “the word was often on the lips of many that the tyranny of Pisistratus was a regular life under Kronos,” or Golden Age.

Pisistratus did much toward securing for Athens the intellectual hegemony of Greece. Whatever the Panathenæa, inherited from Theseus (or even from Erichthonius), may have been previously, the Greater Panathenaic festival was now solemnized every four years with more magnificence and became at Athens the necessary and dignified offset to the quadrennial games at Olympia and Delphi. Games, sacrifices, and amusements of varied character were added from time to time. Horse, chariot, torch, and foot races were included. Visitors came from abroad. But neither local nor intercantonal athletics gave the keynote. Rhapsodists recited Homer, and flute, cithara, and song were heard. Everything tended to focus itself upon the worship of Athena, who was the Athenian consciousness glorified and made objective.

Under Pisistratus or his sons (or, less probably, under Solon) Homer was recalled from Ionia and domiciled on the mainland. Whatever may be the details about a formal recension and publication at this time, recitations from Homer were made an integral part of the public festivals, and Athens became the clearing-house for an intellectual currency good throughout all Hellas. The name “Pan-Athenian,” passing even beyond Pan-Ionian, was to be equated with a culture that was Pan-Hellenic. This befitted the epic breadth transcending mere local traditions. “The Iliad was not composed for any king or tyrant. If it is aristocratic, its appeal is not to any given set of noble families, but to all brave men of Greek legend.” And the spirit in which this epic trust was administered tallies well with the restraint of Pisistratus in respecting, as far as possible, the laws of Solon. If there were Attic interpolations in the poems, they do not glorify his house. In the “Catalogue of the Ships” the Athenians received honourable but not excessive mention. The brief reference to the ships from Salamis, as ranged under the command of the Athenians, would seem to suggest the recent conquest of the island under Solon or even the suspicion that Solon had himself interpolated it beforehand as proof of the ancient suzerainty of Athens:—

But perhaps the easiest solution of all questions in regard to interpolations in the Homeric poems is to pin our uncritical faith to the authenticity of Lucian’s interview with Homer in Elysium: “I went up to Homer the poet, when we were both at leisure, and after making other inquiries ... I asked him further about the rejected verses, whether they were written by him. And he declared that he wrote them all!”

The greatest and most characteristically Attic contribution of the sixth century was the fostering of the drama, in connection with the worship of Dionysus. This Thracian divinity, on his journey southwards, had been welcomed in the villages of Attica, where vineyard and winepress awaited his blessing. The Pisistratidæ, who have been called “the providential defenders of the faith of Dionysus” against the aristocratic disdain felt for a peasant’s god, invited him to a new temple in the Lenæa—the Marshes—below the Acropolis, where, at the time of the winter solstice, the Feast of the Winepress once more identified the capital with the country it had outgrown. But Pisistratus went further in establishing the City Dionysia, a spring festival destined to a long life and splendid renown. Instead of private performances at rural feasts, the drama now became part of the official administration of the city. The first dated performance of a play by Thespis was in 534 B. C. This may have been on the occasion of the opening of the “orchestra,” north of the Areopagus, near the new Market-place, where the spectators henceforth found seats on wooden scaffolding until the more permanent theatre was erected south of the Acropolis. Athens was now ready for the great dramatists. The wine-god looms up as a rival to Athena, as may be seen by his ubiquity on the vase paintings and his dominant presence in the Attic calendar. “In the actual religious ritual Dionysus became of more importance at Athens than Zeus, Apollo, or even Athena.”

Thus in diverse ways does Pisistratus present a fair claim for having made Athens greater, in steady progression from the wise policies of Solon. Solon himself must often have feared an excess of luxury and splendour. No one of his generation could have dreamed of a regretful modern desire to have seen, because of its charming simplicity, “the little earlier Athens of Pisistratus.” But many a Periclean Greek may have forestalled it. Aristophanes was forever seeking for a revival of—

These were the precepts which taught Æschylus. We are apt to think of him only in his maturity, a fighter at Marathon, a seasoned warrior at Salamis, a poet of the post-Persian epoch. But his childhood fell in the time of the Pisistratidæ, and it is by no means idle to speculate on the influences which then encompassed him. The memory of Solon’s ethics and vocabulary he carried with him through life. Foreign poets also, attracted to Athens by the sons of Pisistratus, must have seemed to him important personages. Two of the “ten” lyric poets were at this time identified with the city. Anacreon, when Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, had no longer a home to offer him, was brought in triumph to Athens in a fifty-oared galley sent by Hipparchus. And Simonides of Ceos, who was to be the chief mouthpiece of liberated Greece, was well content to enjoy the patronage of the despot.

Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been assassinated earlier, at one of the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his comic stock in trade.

With the victory at Marathon Athens came of age. The struggle between Orientalism and Hellenism was just begun. Salamis and Platæa and Eurymedon were yet to be. But the Greeks with a divine improvidence discounted their ultimate success. Their twenty years of democratic education made impossible any compromise with despotism. Whatever necessary vagueness may still have existed at Athens in the attempted fusion of polytheistic tradition with the awakening conception of monotheism, there now stands forth in a law-abiding conscience the barrier of Law, clear and bold as the outline of Pentelicus above Marathon. The contemporary Athenian feeling is reflected by Æschylus in the answer of the old Persian men to Darius’s widowed queen, who has asked about the Greeks:—

At this time another country god was naturalized at Athens, a friend and comrade of Dionysus in secret mountain places, but not intruding upon him in the formalities of city worship. Pan had helped the Athenians at Marathon and had stopped the swift courier Pheidippides, sent to hurry reënforcements from Sparta, and bidden him ask his people “why they made no account of him, although he had been useful to them many times already and would be again.” The Athenians at once “dedicated a sanctuary to Pan under the brow of the Acropolis and in consequence of this message they propitiated him by yearly sacrifices and a torch race.” His cave at the northwest end of the Acropolis still exists to convince the sceptic. He lived on here, overlooking the Areopagus and Agora, to come forth, “horned, panpipe in hand, with his shaggy legs,” and greet the lady Justice sent by Zeus to investigate the charlatan philosophers of Athens in Lucian’s day. Pan gives Justice a fluent account of their frailties and is about to add certain details, when her sense of propriety cuts him short. “If I must,” says he, “tell the truth in full, without holding anything back—for I live, as you see, where I can take a bird’s-eye view—many’s the time I’ve seen scores of them, well along towards evening—” (Justice) “Stop there, Pan!”

While Pan was accumulating details of the “Private Life of the Athenians,” as they passed and repassed before his grotto, the public energy of the city was transmuted into enduring memorials above him on the calm heights of the Acropolis.