Penēus. 4. Hestiæotis. 5. The eastern coast land, Magnesia, Iolcos, on the Sinus Pagasæus, Demetrias.

D. Epirus. In historic times inhabited by Illyrian tribes not of pure Grecian blood. Principal tribes: Molossians, in whose territory was Ambracia, not far from the Ambracian gulf, and Dodōna (oracle of Zeus); Thesprotians, Pandosia on the Acheron, Chao

nians.

In Macedonia, which lay north from Thessaly, the following places are to be noted: Pydna, Pella, the royal residence since the reign of Archelaus (formerly Egae or Edessa enjoyed this distinction). On the peninsula Chalcidice: Olynthus, Potidæa, Stagirus. In Thrace: Amphipolis near the mouth of the Strymon, Philippe, Abdera, Perinthus (Heraclea), Byzantium. In the Thracian Chersonese: Sestos, opposite Abydos in Asia Minor.

Most important islands: In the Egean sea: 1, Crete (Kpýtη, Ékatóμtoλis): Cnosus (Gnōssus), and Gortyn (a); 2, Thera, a colony of Sparta, itself mother city of Cyrene in Africa (p. 49), Melos; 3, the 12 Cyclades: Paros, Naxos, to the north the small Delos (Mt. Cynthus, sanctuary of Apollo), Cythnos, Ceos, Andros, Tenos, etc. In the Saronic gulf: 4, Egîna (Alyıva); 5, Salamis. In the sea of Eubœa; 6, Euboea with the promontory of Artemisium in the north, Chalcis, Eretria. In the Thracian sea: 7, Lēmnos; 8, Samothrace; 9, Thasos. On the coast of Asia Minor from N. to S.: 10, Těnědos, not far from Ilium or Troy, in the district of Troas; 11, Lesbos: Mitylene, Methymna; 12, Chios; 13, Samos opposite the promontory of Mycale; 14, Cos; 15, Rhodes.

In the eastern part of the Mediterranean the island of Cyprus, (Kúpos), cities (originally Phoenician, afterwards Greek): Salamis (Schalem), Paphos and Amathus, centre of the worship of Aphrodite (Venus Amathusia).

In the Ionian sea from S. to N.: 1, Cythera, south of Laconia, with temple of Aphrodite; 2, Zacynthos; 3, Cephalienia, called by Homer Samos; 4, Ithaca; 5, Leucas; 6, Corcyra (Képкυра), perhaps the Scheria of Homer.

RELIGION OF THE GREEKS.1

The religion of the early Greeks was a pantheistic nature-worship, distinguished among others by the multiplicity of its deities, and their intricate gradation, as well as by the wealth of biographical detail which the imagination of the poets provided for them. The great gods, Olympic deities, were 12 in number. Male divinities: Zeus "the God," lord of the sky, and ruler of all other gods as well as of men; Poseidon, god of the sea; Apollo, probably originally the highest god of some local district, the divinity of wisdom, of healing, of music and poetry, but not until later the sun-god; Ares, god of war; Hephaestus, god of fire, and of work accomplished by the application of fire, set apart from the other gods by his lameness; Hermes, god of invention, commercial skill, cunning, bravery. Female divinities: Hera, con

1 Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World. Also Grote, Hist. of Greece, vol. I.; Curtius, Griech. Gesch. I. 543-60; 456-549 passim.

sort of Zeus; Athena, the maiden goddess sprung from the head of Zeus, the embodiment of wisdom and of housewifery; Artemis, goddess of hunting, afterwards connected with the moon, as her brother Phoebus Apollo, with the sun; Aphrodite, goddess of sensual love, probably introduced from the East; Hestia, goddess of fire, especially of the hearth-fire; Demeter, "earth-mother," presiding over agriculture. In the lower rank of gods may be mentioned: Dionysius, god of wine and drunkenness; Hades, god of the lower world, the Graces, the Muses, the Fates, the Furies, etc. The fields and forests, the ocean and the rivers were crowded with Nymphs and Hamadryads, Naiads and Nereids, while creatures of a lower order, Satyrs (among whom Pan rose to the level of a god of the second rank) and monsters (Cyclopes, Gorgons, Centaurs, etc.) abounded.

Reverence was also paid to the heroes, ideal representations of famous men, real or imaginary. Such were Cadmus (Thebes), Theseus (Athens), and Heracles, the mostly widely known of all (see p. 45).

The gods were worshipped by invocation, and by sacrifices offered in accordance with a rigid ritual at altars which could be improvised anywhere. There were, however, permanent altars for all divinities, in temples where the statue of the divinity was also enshrined. These temples were frequently erected on lofty and commanding sites, and upon their construction and decoration was lavished the highest skill in architecture and sculpture. Brilliant coloring was also employed upon the temples. Each family, tribe and race, each city, district and country had its recurring festivals of special honor to the gods (Panathenaa at Athens). Religious festivals of all Greece: Olympian (Zeus) every fifth year, in July or August, at Olympia in Elis; Pythian (Apollo), every fifth (9th) year, at Delphi; Isthmian (Neptune), every five years on the Isthmus of Corinth; Nemean, every third year, at Nemea in Argolis. These festivals were the centre of Grecian national life. Amphyctionic Council, the most important of the Amphyctionics (p. 51), a religious conference which met at Delphi, and represented the political side of the Pan-Hellenic religion. Consultation of oracles, for obtaining the counsel of the gods, especially at Delphi. Mysteries, or rites of secret religious societies, the most renowned at Eleusis. No hierarchy of priests; yet those who had charge of the sacrifices, and more especially of the oracles, often attained great influence.

Ideas of future life vague and unsatisfactory. The more advanced minds among the Greeks undoubtedly attained to the idea of the essential oneness of divinity.

GRECIAN HISTORY CAN BE DIVIDED INTO FOUR EPOCHS.

x-1104 (?). I. Mythical period down to the Thessalian and Dorian migration.

1104 (?)-500. II. Formation of the Hellenic states. Period of constitutional struggles down to the Persian wars.

500-338. III. Persian wars and internecine strife for the hegemony down to the loss of independence at the battle of Charonea. 338-146. IV. Græco-Macedonian or Hellenistic period down to the

subjugation of Greece by the Romans. Destruction of Corinth.

FIRST PERIOD.

Mythical time, down to the Thessalian and Dorian migration

2

(x-1104 ?).1

The Greeks, or as they called themselves the Hellenes ("Eλλnves), belong to the Indo-European or Aryan family.

The Greeks state that the original inhabitants of their country were the Pelasgians. The meaning of this name is much disputed. According to some scholars it denotes the band which afterwards divided into the Italians and Hellenes. Another view regards the Pelasgians and Hellenes as the same people, but holds that the latter name is applied to those tribes which, "endowed with peculiar abilities and inspired with peculiar energy, distinguished themselves above the mass of a great people, while they extended their power within the same by force of arms,' so that their name became in historic times the one generally accepted. Others, again, regard the name Pelasgian as Semitic, and so applied originally to the Phoenician inhabitants of the coast, especially to the Minya of Orchomenos, and afterwards erroneously transferred to the Illyrian aborigines of Epirus, Acadia, etc.

Dodona, in Epirus, with the oracle of Zeus, the god of the sky, was the oldest centre of the Pelasgian life and religion. Remains of Pelasgian buildings, called by the Greeks Cyclopean, are found in Tiryns in Argolis, and in Orchomenos in Baotia.

Our earliest historical information shows the Hellenes divided into various tribes. Of these the Achæans were most prominent during the heroic times, and their name was therefore used by Homer to denote the entire race. In historic times, on the contrary, the Dorians and Ionians occupy the foreground; the other tribes are then classed together under the name Eolian, and the dialects which were neither Dorian nor Ionian are known as Eolian. The following mythical genealogy seems to have been invented at a very late period, and to have originated at Delphi.

We have no authentic information about the manner of the Hellenic migration into Greece. According to one well-founded theory, a part of the immigrants, and among them the ancestors of the Dorians, forced their way over the Hellespont into the mountainous region of northern Greece, where they established themselves as shepherds and tillers of the land. Other bands, among whom were the ancestors of the Ionians, having descended from the highlands of Phry

1 According to Duncker, Hist. of Antiq., 100 years later.

2 Gräken (Græci, Tpakót) was the name given to the Greeks by the people of Italy; it was the name of a tribe in Epirus, or the Illyrian name for the Hellenes in general.

8 Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, I. 29; Hist. of Greece, N. Y. 1876, I. 41.

gia, by way of the valleys, to the coast of Asia Minor, were there transformed into a race of seamen, and gradually spread themselves over the islands of the Archipelago to the mainland of Greece.1 (The former formed the western, the latter, the eastern Greeks).

Remembrance of the fact that western Greece received its civilization from the East gave rise, at a later period, to stories about unauthentic immigrations.2

Cecrops (Kékpo), according to the original story autochthonus king of Attica, and builder of the Cecropia (Acropolis of Athens), was afterwards, in consequence of that identification of Grecian and Egyptian mythology which is illustrated by the conception of Neith, goddess of Sais, as Pallas Athena (p. 2), falsely represented as an Egyptian immigrant from Sais.

The truth seems to be that the cliffs by the Ilissus, which were called the Cecropia, formed the first fortress of the inhabitants of the region, upon which their altars and sanctuaries found protection, and around which the first beginnings of political life in Attica grouped themselves. Afterwards the Cecropia was personified under the name Cecrops. According to the legend Cecrops was succeeded by Erichthonios, the latter by Erechtheus, the two becoming soon united into one person, in whom the Erechtheion, the temple of Poseidon Erechtheus, on the Acropolis, is personified. The legend makes Erechtheus the founder of the festival of Panathenaa and conqueror of Eumolpus (i. e. sweet singer) of Eleusis, the centre of the worship of Demeter (story of her daughter Core, in the lower world Proserpina; the Eleusinian mysteries). Eleusis was united with Athens into one community. Erechtheus, according to the legend, was succeeded by Eneus, the latter by Egeus, the father of Theseus, the national hero of the Ionians (p. 45).

A later legend tells how Danaus, brother of Egyptus, came from Upper Egypt to Argos. He, too, with his fifty daughters, the Danaïdes, who, with the exception of Hypermnestra, murdered their husbands, the sons of Egyptus, and were for this crime condemned to fill the bottomless tub, belongs to the native mythology. The Danaïdes are the springs of Argos, which, in the summer time, exert themselves in vain to satisfy the soil; the water which gushes from them being dried up in the chalky earth. According to the legend the descendants of Lynceus and Hypermnestra ruled in Argos.

On the other hand the legend of the migration of the Pelopida from Lydia to Greece seems to have a historical foundation. Pelops, son of king Tantalus, who ruled the country about the Sipylus, came to Elis in Peloponnesus. His sons Atreus and Thyestes, with the help of Achæans from Phthiotis, made themselves masters of Tiryns and Mycenae, which had been founded by Perseus. Of the sons of

Atreus, Agamemnon reigned over the whole of Argolis, while Menelaus became king of Sparta and Messina. The buildings and sculptures in Mycenae, which are ascribed to the Atrida, resemble Assyrian art, and Assyrian art could have come to Greece earliest by way of Lydia.

1 Curtius, I., Griech. Gesch., I. 29 sqq.; Hist. of Greece, I. 41.

2 Cf. Duncker, Gesch. des Alth., III. (2 Auflage), 1 Kap. 4-6. Curtius, Griech. Gesch., I. 58; Hist. of Greece, I. 73.

Cadmus, the mythical founder of the Theban state, is the personification of Phoenician colonization, or at least of that civilization which Hellas had received from Phoenicia (p. 18).

The national heroes of Grecian legend.

The myth of Heracles ('Нpaкλîs, Hercules), son of Zeus and Alcmēna, grew up out of the union of various religious, historical, and ethical elements. Heracles was in the beginning an actual divinity whom tradition, in the course of time, degraded to a demi-god. In him are united the Phoenician Melkart (p. 17) and Sandon, the sungod of Asia Minor, and his heroic deeds are for the most part adaptations of the deeds ascribed to these two divinities. Heracles is at the same time the popular symbol brought by the Phoenicians to the eastern Greeks, and from them to the western Greeks, of the pioneer activity of the ancient settlements. A portion of the mass of legends connected with Heracles after his transformation into a Greek is explained by later historical relations. The Dorians adopted him as their tribal hero. Their kings called themselves his descendants, Heraclidæ; from him they derived their rights to the Peloponnesus. Hence his rights, in the legends, not only over Mycena, in opposition to Eurystheus, but also over other parts of the peninsula (Augias in Elis, Tyndareus in Sparta). The poetry of a later time, regarding Heracles as an ethical conception, presented him as the model of heroism, moral force, and renunciation, especially of willing obedience (the 12 labors at the behest of Eurystheus; the choice of Hercules).

Theseus (@noeús), son of Egeus, the descendant of Cecrops, is the family hero of the Ionians, and of the Athenians in particular. He cleared the road from Troezen, where, according to the legend, he was born, to Athens (especially the isthmus), of robbers (Periphetes, Sinnis, Sciron, Damastes or Procrustes), so that the Ionians of the Peloponnesus and of Attica thenceforward could assemble on the isthmus at the sacrifices to Poseidon. Theseus put to death the Minotaur in Crete, and rescued the Athenian youths and maidens sent as a sacrifice to him. He conquered at Marathon the wild bull which is said to have likewise come from Crete. He repulsed the Amazons who made an attack upon Athens for the purpose of avenging the rape of Antiope. These three myths express the historical fact of the liberation of Attica from the tribute which it owed to the Phoenicians of Crete and the smaller islands, who offered human sacrifices to their god Moloch. The origin of the story of the Amazons is to be found in the virgin servants of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who, at the religious ceremonies, executed dances in armor. The legend, moreover, ascribes to Theseus the union of the inhabitants of Attica into one state, and the separation of the people into the three orders: Eupatride (nobles), Comori (peasants), and Demiurgi (artizans), whereas the arrangement of the four ancient classes (Phyla): Geleontes (nobles), Hoplites (warriors), Argadeis (artizans), Ægicoreis (shepherds) was referred by the Athenians to the mythical tribal ancestor of the Ionian tribe, Ion (p. 43).