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The custom of Sparta existed also in Crete. Greek legend and history, in fact, resounds with the praises of friends. Achilles and Patroclus, Pylades and Orestes, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Solon and Peisistratus, Socrates and Alcibiades, Epaminondas and Pelopidas, these are names that recall at once all that is highest in the achievement and all that is most romantic in the passion of Greece.
Are they not such rebels as Deborah and Judith and Joan of Arc; as Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Gracchi and Brutus, William Tell, William Wallace, Simon de Montfort, Rienzi, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell, Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists?
But the chief point on which he lays stress as evincing the 'uncritical way with which men receive legends, even the legends of their own country, is the entire baselessness of the common Athenian tradition in which Harmodios and Aristogeiton were represented as the patriotic liberators of Athens from the Peisistratid tyranny.
There followed an ode composed by Sir William Jones, a translation of the Athenian song which celebrated the deeds of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton; Verdant myrtle's branchy pride Shall my thirsty blade entwine.
He was said to have put a man named Antiphon to death for answering him, when he asked what was the best kind of brass, 'That of which the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton were made. These were the two Athenians who had killed the sons of Pisistratus the tyrant, so that the jest was most offensive, but its boldness might have gained forgiveness for it.
Their works have all perished, but a copy of one of the most famous works of Critios and Nesiotes, the statue of the Tyrannicides, is to be found in the Museum of Naples. Harmodius and Aristogeiton killed, in 514 B.C., the tyrant-ruler of Athens, Hipparchus. In consequence of this Athens soon became a republic, and the names of the first rebels were held in great honor.
If Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of Greece, had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle that its analysis tends to dissipate emotion. Lancaster gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from which he selected 200 for careful study, choosing them to show different typical directions of activity.
He could remember how stirred he had been that last morning when, on riding out of the city, he had passed the famous old statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In immortal youth they stood there to prove that in Athens a tyrant had been slain by her sons.
When Aristogeiton, the informer, who made warlike speeches in the public assembly, and urged the people to action, came to be enrolled on the list for active service leaning on a stick, with his legs bandaged, Phokion, catching sight of him from the tribune where he stood, called out "Write down Aristogeiton, a cripple and a villain."
The Polemarch performs the sacrifices to Artemis the huntress and to Enyalius, and arranges the contest at the funeral of those who have fallen in war, and makes offerings to the memory of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Only private actions come before him, namely those in which resident aliens, both ordinary and privileged, and agents of foreign states are concerned.
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