With the year B.C. 776 we come in contact with a clear marked chronology.  The Greeks themselves reckoned from that date by means of olympiads or intervals between the Olympic games.  The story becomes clear.  The autocratic little city kings, governing almost as they pleased, have everywhere been displaced by oligarchies.  The few leading nobles may name one of themselves to bear rule, but the real power lies divided among the class.  Then, with the growing prominence of the Pythian games[15] we come upon a new stage of national development.  The various cities begin to form alliances, to recognize the fact that they may be made safer and happier by a larger national life.  The sense of brotherhood begins to extend beyond the circle of personal acquaintance.

[Footnote 15:  See Pythian Games at Delphi, page 181.]

This period was one of lawmaking, of experimenting.  The traditions, the simple customs of the old kingly days, were no longer sufficient for the guidance of the larger cities, the more complicated circles of society, which were growing up.  It was no longer possible for a man who did not like his tribe to abandon it and wander elsewhere with his family and herds.  The land was too fully peopled for that.  The dissatisfied could only endure and grumble and rebel.  One system of law after another was tried and thrown aside.  The class on whom in practice a rule bore most hard, would refuse longer assent to it.  There were uprisings, tumults, bloody frays.

Sparta, at this time the most prominent of the Greek cities, evolved a code which made her in some ways the wonder of ancient days.  The state was made all-powerful; it took entire possession of the citizen, with the purpose of making him a fighter, a strong defender of himself and of his country.  His home life was almost obliterated, or, if you like, the whole city was made one huge family.  All men ate in common; youth was severely restrained; its training was all for physical hardihood.  Modern socialism, communism, have seldom ventured further in theory than the Spartans went in practice.  The result seems to have been the production of a race possessed of tremendous bodily power and courage, but of stunted intellectual growth.  The great individual minds of Greece, the thinkers, the creators, did not come from Sparta.

In Athens a different regime was meanwhile developing Hellenes of another type.  A realization of how superior the Greeks were to earlier races, of what vast strides man was making in intelligence and social organization, can in no way be better gained than by comparing the law code of the Babylonian Hammurabi with that of Solon in Athens.[16] A period of perhaps sixteen hundred years separates the two, but the difference in their mental power is wider still.

[Footnote 16:  See Solon’s Legislation, page 203, and Compilation of the Earliest Code, page 14.]