Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/86

The People. 65 but he was the first to collect such an abundance of materials as enabled him to reason out his conclusions, and to meet vigorously the objections of his opponents. He showed how the whole of this history had been falsified on a most essential point by the susceptibilities and exigencies of Athenian vanity ; that when through the action of Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, and Pericles, Athens, towards the middle of the fifth century, became the most brilliant city of Hellas and the head of the Ionian league, her pride could ill brook that lonians, whether of Asia Minor or the islands, whom she had well nigh reduced to the condition of subjects, should meet her lofty pretensions by flourishing in her face their just claims to be considered her elders, so that as such they could not be lightly set aside. In order to soothe a morbid jealousy, by a retrospective process which a brilliant present could not satisfy, they must needs seize upon the past, that heroic and legendary past towards which the gaze of all the Hellenic cities was fixed, each striving to find grounds that should administer to its pride, and furnish it as it were with patents of nobility. Athens must be raised to the rank of metropolis, as this was understood by the Greeks, looked up to by all the lonians as the venerable centre whence had started, to settle in many places, the founders of all those famous cities, such as Ephesus, Miletus, Clazomena^, Erythrae, Phocaea, and Chios, taking with them the sacred fire which was from henceforth to be kept burning in their Prytanea. The enforcement of this theory would thereby awaken and pledge the religious conscience of the Athenians to the maintenance of the empire, and give their city the right to exact the obedience which was due to her, as from dutiful daughters to their mother. When a nation is both more powerful and intelligent than all its rivals, when, to use a modern phrase, it rules by the sword and the pen, there is no great difficulty in assuring the success of or diffusing whatever opinions will serve its turn. Hence it came to pass that folk in the end accepted as an article of faith, that no lonians had been in Asia before certain tribes of that family — which the Dorian invasion drove out of Peloponnesus and then obliged to take refuge in Attica — had set sail for the opposite coast, and that under the leadership of the Codridae, descended from the old kings of Athens, they had colonized the regions that open into the valleys of the VOL. L F