Ancient Greece - Traditional History
| Chronology of Eratosthenes | |
|---|---|
| 1753 BC | Phoronens flourished |
| 1466 | Danaus and Pelasgus flourished |
| 1433 | Deucalion flourished |
| 1383 | Ereehtheus and Dardanus flourished |
| 1333 | Azan, Aphidas, and Elatus flourished |
| 1313 | Cadmus flourished |
| 1283 | Pelops flourished |
| 1261 | Hercules was born |
| 1225 | Argonautic Expedition |
| 1209 | Death of Hercules |
| 1200 | Accession of Agamemnon |
| 1192 | Trojan War begun |
| 1183 | Troy taken |
| 1176 | Orestes flourished |
| 1124 | Aeolic Migration |
| 1104 | Return of the Herakleids |
| 1044 | Ionic Migration |
| 1015 | Smyrna founded |
| 776 BC | The First Olympiad |
In the year 1856 BC, Inachus, a Phoenician adventurer, is said to have arrived in Greece, at the head of a small band of his countrymen. Phoenicia, a small 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 civilization prevailed, while all the rest of the people of the earth remained nearly 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 hea'i of what is now called the Gulf of Napoli, in the Peloponnesus.
Three hundred years after this event (1556 BC) a colony, led by an Egyptian named Cecrops, is said to have 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. Cecrops imported much valuable knowledge to the rude inhabitants of Attica, by whom he was afterwards acknowledged as 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 rock was called Athens.
The city of Corinth, situated on the narrow isthmus which connects the Peloponnesus with the mainland of Greece, was founded in the year 1520 BC, and from its very advantageous position on the arm of the sea to which it anciently gave a name, but which is now known under the appellation of the Gulf of Lepanto, it very soon became a place of considerable commercial importance. Sparta or Lacedaemon, the celebrated capital of Laconia in the Peloponnesus, is said to have been founded about 1520 BC, by Lelex, an Egyptian.
Many of the ancient chronologers reported that in the year of the world [Anno Mundi] 2501 happened two events of great importance : Deucalion's flood, and the building of Corinth. According to Xenophon, there were no less than five deluges. The first happened under Ogyges, and lasted three months. The second, which was in the age of Hercules and Prometheus, continued but one month. During the third, which happened in the reign of another Ogyges, all Attica was laid waste by the waters. Thessaly was totally covered by the waters during the fourth, which happened in the age of Deucalion. The last was during the Trojan war, and its effects were severely felt by the inhabitants of Egypt.
The ancient Greeks had a tradition of the great cataclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenes in the period which they also assigned to Deucalion because he was regarded as the founder of their nation, and because his history is confounded with that of all the chiefs of the renewed nations. Neither Homer nor Hesiod knew any thing of the deluge of Deucalion, any more than that of Ogyges. The first author, whose works are extant, by whom mention is made of the former, is Pindar [c. 520-465 BC]. He speaks (Olymp. 9. 66.) of Deucalion as landing upon Parnassus, establishing himself in the city of Protogene (first growth or birth), and re-creating his people from stones; in a word, he relates, but confining it to a single nation only, the fable afterwards generalised by Ovid, and applied to the whole human race.
The deluge of Deucalion, so much celebrated in ancient history, is supposed by some to have happened in 1503 years BC, while Eratosthenes dated it to about 1433 BC. The impiety of mankind had irritated Jupiter, who resolved to destroy mankind, and immediately the earth exhibited a boundless scene of waters. The highest mountains were climbed up by the frightened inhabitants of the country; but this seeming place of security was soon overtopped by the rising waters, and no hope was left of escaping the universal calamity. Prometheus advised his son Deucalion to make himself a ship, and by this means he saved himself and his wife Pyrrha. The vessel was tossed about during nine successive days, and at last stopped on the top of mount Parnassus, where Deucalion remained till the waters had subsided. Pindar and Ovid make no mention of a vessel built by the advice of Prometheus; but, according to their relation, Deucalion saved his life by taking refuge on the top of Parnassus, or, according to Hyginus, of AEtna in Sicily.
According to Justin, Deucalion was not the only one who escaped from the universal calamity. Many saved their lives by ascending the. highest mountains, or trusting themselves in small vessels to the mercy of the waters. This deluge, which chiefly happened in Thessaly, according to the relation of some writers, was produced by the inundation of the waters of the river Peneus, whose regular course was slopped by an earthquake near mount Ossa and Olympus.
About eighty years after the termination of the Trojan var, about the year 1100 BC 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, called the Heraclidae. In the year 1070 BC, Attica was invaded by a large army of the Peloponnesians, and Athens itself seemed menaced with destruction.
For the early Greeks themselves, and of the less-cultured Greeks even in later ages, the whole series of legends, from the first to the last, was accepted as positive and literal history; no difference being made between-miraculous and non-miraculous, but all being alike venerable and indispensable. The story of Zeus and Danae, for example, or that of Theseus and tho Minotaur, was fully and absolutely believed by an ancient pious Greek in all its details, no less than the more plausible and commonplace legend of the return of the Herakleids. Nay, of two legends, the one miraculous and the other common in its nature, the miraculous would be believed by him more firmly, as touching his feelings more deeply. Let the student of history strive, however impossible the thing may seem, to realise this fact in all its breadth and in all its bearings.
Even in the works of the poet Hesiod, whose date is fixed as early as BC 700, and who was himself a devout collector and systematiser of Grecian legends, a certain deviation from the orthodox point of view is discernible, a certain practicalness and homeliness that distinguish him from his predecessor, the grand old Homer. But it was by the early philosophers, Thales, Xenophanes, and Pythagoras (BC 600-500), that the first decided blows were struck at the popular Grecian creed. And the historians Herodotus (BC 450)and Thucydides, received in perfect good faith the general Grecian theogony (Herodotus, for example, dated the Trojan war at about 800 years before his own time, the life of Herakles at about 100 years before that).
It was long the practice of writers of Grecian history to devote an introductory section or two to the reigns and actions of Phoroneus, Danaus, Erechtheus, Cadmus, &c.; and then, after dwelling at large on the war of Troy, to pass on to the times of Lycurgus, Solon, and Peisistratns, after which records are abundant, and the course is clear. Now, how absurd this mode of treating early Grecian history is, will appear from the fact that the human or heroic legends of the Greeks, which are thus made the basis of real history, rest on absolutely the same foundation as those divine legends relating to Zeus and his associates which the modern writer rejects—namely, on the authority of the ancient Greek traditions, and of the poets who collected them — and differ only in being more plausible in themselves, or more susceptible of adaptation to modern belief.
The human legends out of which it is sought to construct a genuine history, are, in their original form, indissolubly connected with the divine legends which it is found necessary to reject; the two classes of legends forming but one Hellenic whole. It is therefore perfectly gratuitous to accept certain persons of the pedigree — as, for example, Hercules and Phoroneus—as historical characters, and to refuse to accept the persons that lie next above them in the pedigree—as the god Dionysos and the Titan Inachos. Who shall tell at which link of the chain truth ends and fiction begins?
For some, the whole mass of legends pretending to be a narrative of events prior to the first recorded Olympiad (BC 776) is to be rejected as pure subjective fiction. To this there is to be no exception. Phoroneus and Herakles must be rejected as unhesitatingly as Zeus and Pegasus, whose claims are precisely equal; the war of Troy, or the sieges of Thebes, as unhesitatingly as the war of the Titans or the chaining of Prometheus. To attempt to chronologise the legends, or to elicit a connected history from them, is mere folly and waste of time. This is a disagreeable doctrine. The war of Troy had happened, as the Greeks believed, only four centuries or thereby before the first Olympiad. Is it likely that an event reputed thus recent was but a mere chimera? Some insist that there is a substratum of fact in the Grecian legends.
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