318 ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE 



unaided, have developed a civilisation which has ever 

 since been the admiration of the most cultured of 

 mankind, and which, in some respects, no moderns can 

 equal, far less surpass. It was also developed with 

 amazing rapidity, for from the giving of laws to Athens 

 by Solon, B.C. 594, to its conquest by Philip of Macedon, 

 was but a period of little more than two hundred and 

 fifty years. The Greeks were divided into a number of 

 small States, the most celebrated of which was Attica 

 (whereof Athens was the capital), and the Peloponnesus, 

 which consisted of what is now the Morea, with Sparta 

 for its capital. 



They early sent out colonies to Cyprus, Sicily, Southern 

 Italy and the South of France (having founded there 

 the city of Marseilles) and in many parts they came in 

 hostile contact with colonies of Phoenicians, who were a 

 people yet earlier civilised, hardy and indefatigable 

 traders, from whom the Greeks seem to have learned 

 their alphabet and who had colonised before the latter. 



Those celebrated poems, the "Iliad "and the "Odyssey," 

 though they must be deemed unhistorical, are yet thought 

 to give us a tolerably faithful picture of early Greek life. 



The governments of the different Greek States, each 

 of which was the dominion of a city, at first consisted of 

 an hereditary king, a council of chiefs, and a more 

 general assembly of those who held the rights of citizen- 

 ship. In Greece itself, the kingly power gradually dis- 

 appeared to give way to an aristocratic government of 

 privileged families (descendants of the oldest inhabitants) 

 or to democracies that is, government by the citizens 

 assembled. These citizens, however, were by no means 

 the same as the inhabitants of the city, but only a wider 

 aristocracy. For in most cities there were many slaves 

 and free men who were not natives. These had no power 



