The achievements of the Greeks in the fine arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture and in the beauty and richness of their literature still are in many ways unrivaled. Their attainments in science, considering that they were without the telescope, the microscope, and other instruments of precision, were remarkable. They ascertained that the earth was round, that it revolved upon its axis, that it moved around the sun, and that the axis of the earth was inclined to the plane in which it revolved around the sun. Both Aristotle and Plato, however, denied this fact and taught that the sun revolved around the earth. Eratosthenes, after their time, by a brilliant geometrical demonstration approached quite nearly to the true circumference and diameter of the earth. The fact that the moon revolved around the earth was known. The diameter of the moon, the fact that it shone by reflecting the light of the sun, and its distance from the earth were fairly well determined. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a molten mass, but the ignorant were then as impervious to ideas as they are now, and he was saved from an Athenian indictment for impiety only by the exertions of the great Pericles. Aristarchus, a little later than Eratosthenes, approximated the size of the sun and its distance from the earth. The atomic theory of matter was suggested by Democritus, and the fact of gravitation was well known. Archimedes at Syracuse multiplied the uses of the screw and the lever, and showed what a practical mathematician could do in the siege of Syracuse by the Romans. The scientific writings of Aristotle were, for that age, a marvelous collection of knowledge, some of it much mistaken, but through Aristotle the Middle Ages obtained what it had for a scientific basis of thought. The world still teaches rules of grammar as the Greeks first classified and arranged the elements of language.
Once it was a received opinion that Greek development was comparatively short before it suddenly expanded into the splendid Periclean age at Athens. It was supposed that the race rapidly passed from a half-barbarous condition to a high civilization. But later investigation has proven that the Grecian, like other civilizations, represents a long sequence where the barbarism of a conquering race is grafted upon a much older and higher culture. Before Hammurabi ruled at Babylon, and perhaps a thousand years before the Hebrew tribes possessed Palestine, a portion of the Mediterranean race, closely allied to the Phenicians and Philistines of later times, had in the island of Crete attained much civilization and was carrying on a large trade with Egypt and Asia. This civilization, called Minoan, after hundreds of years, penetrated to, and became diffused on, the mainland of Greece and northward as far as Thessaly. Successive invasions of semi-civilized Achaeans and after a few centuries Ionians and Aeolians, and still later Dorians, wrecked this older civilization in the usual manner of Aryan barbarian invasions. But the preceding civilization enabled the barbarians to absorb some of that high culture and a portion of the Greeks was on the highroad toward the later accomplishment.
So far as the history of law is concerned, we need not notice the Dorians, whose leading state was Lacedaemon with its capital Sparta. They, ruling a conquered subject race reduced to serfdom, were organized in military form and maintained, in a hostile population, the barrack-room discipline of soldiers encamped amid a subject population. Their legendary lawgiver, Lycurgus, was a myth. Their customary laws and institutions are of no importance, except that they explain some of Plato’s curious reactionary tendencies in his legal writing. The Dorians who took possession of Crete had laws similar to Sparta’s. Those laws have been found engraven upon a wall at Gortyn. At Sparta was first noticed the tendency of property to accumulate in the possession of women and the looseness of female morals that seems to go with this development. The Greeks were indefatigable colonizers in almost every direction, and their various city-states in southern Italy and in Sicily, in northern Africa and as far away as Spain and southern France at Massilia, now Marseilles, had their collections of Greek laws. These laws may all be disregarded.
The story must be confined substantially to the single collection of four Ionic tribes living in villages, inhabiting the hilltops around Athens and the small surrounding territory of Attica. These people arrived from the north with the ordinary barbarian Aryan institutions and customary laws, and became a ruling class among the native inhabitants. While these invading Ionians were coalescing with the indigenous people, the Ionian and Aeolic cities on the Aegean Islands and the mainland of Asia were carrying on a great commerce as subjects of Asiatic rulers in lands that at last had come under the sway of the Great Kings, successors of the Persian Cyrus. As soon as authentic history begins, the confederacy of patriarchal kindreds forming the usual monogamous agnatic clans of Ionians in a natural course of events, absorbing an older and superior civilization at Athens, had a written language, borrowing the Phenician alphabet, and had gotten rid of a large part of the primitive Aryan conditions. The one savage trait which the Greeks never lost, and which makes Grecian history such a nightmare of wasted opportunity, is the intense zeal of the tribesman for his own tribe and his natural ingrained hatred for every other tribe. Plato in his ideal state pictured in the Laws could conceive of no other situation than a city-state under arms awaiting a treacherous attack from some neighboring city.
Passing over the legends of Theseus and succeeding kings at Athens, we come to an oligarchy of well-born (eupatrid) families who control the state. The Athenian political development took the course first of an overthrow of the oligarchs, followed by a popular government, which, as usual, reacted to a rule of tyrants, who were Pisistratus and his sons; then came an expulsion of the tyrants, after they had made Athens a leading state of Greece. The Persian wars soon afterward, with the glory of Marathon and Salamis, placed Athens at the head of Greece. The great commerce of the Ionian cities soon passed to Athens. This city, then, for over a hundred years, in spite of its misfortunes, was the chief depot of eastern commerce.
The legal development at Athens took a way hitherto untried. The Aryan Ionians, with laws unwritten and with those laws in the custody of the priests, who were represented by the patriarchal heads of the families of the well-born nobles, decided that a change in their laws was necessary. As we have seen, there were as yet but two methods of creating new law to suit changed conditions. One was by the slow way of developing new customs, the other by the announcement of laws given by some god. The Greeks had no idea of promulgating laws by means of a god, but they had accounted for their laws by mythical lawgivers who had given the laws, and they also had some general idea that the laws were of divine origin, since they were in the custody of the priestly class.
The customary laws handed down by spoken speech were in the hands of the eupatrid oligarchs, as was also the administration of the laws. This situation met the demand of the lower classes, gaining in strength, that these laws should be put into written forms so that they should be no longer the sole possession of the well-born. It was a widespread notion among the Greeks that the laws, if put into writing, became the aid and possession of the many.
With written laws, the humblest in the state
Is sure of equal justice with the great.
This same idea appeared later among the Romans. The demand was met by the Code of Draco. It also was demanded that the nobles should no longer monopolize the administration of the laws and sit in judgment in the courts. To insure this result, the obvious thing was to use what they had. This is the instinctive course of all men to patch and use the ancestral robe of custom.
The Athenians had kept the Aryan conception of the general power of the tribal assembly. In fact, the popular belief that all political power came from this assembly resulted in a general political theory that the public assembly was the source of all legislative, executive, and judicial functions. Hence it was an easy step, when it seemed necessary to revise the laws, to constitute, in accordance with the method of tradition, by the vote of the assembly, an actual lawgiver in the person of Solon. But here it should be noted that this conception of undivided political power was destined for almost two thousand years to rule enlightened mankind. That length of time was required for men to recover from this mingling in the one popular assembly, or in the one ruling force such as a king, of powers radically distinct.
In an age incapable of thoroughly sound legal analysis—and this is true of the Greeks because the race had not yet the experience necessary to find a basis for such reasoning—men had not analyzed far enough to deduce that the legislative function consists in announcing a rule of law to govern future happenings,