In all the elaborate rebuilding of Periclean days the rock of Acropolis was pretty thoroughly scoured of ancient remains. But we still see traces of Cyclopean masonry, as at Tiryns and Mycenæ, forming what the Athenians called “the Pelasgic Wall.” To that period belong such traditional royalties as Cecrops, Erechtheus, and Pandion, possibly real names of prehistoric kings who ruled over the rock and part of the plain below, but by no means over the whole of Attica. In artistic representation these ancient worthies are rather apt to develop serpents’ tails in place of their lower limbs. As they worshipped Poseidon, we may be sure that these Cecropians or Pelasgians were a trading, seafaring people, having intercourse with Crete and their kinsmen of Caria and Ionia. Poseidon was always the common deity of the Ionian people, who looked to Athens as their head, probably because she had suffered so little infusion of Northern blood. It is not likely that Athens was ever a citadel of equal importance with Mycenæ or Cnossos in pre-Achæan days. Attica has yielded but few important relics of the Bronze Age, but, on the other hand, the Attic sites contain an unbroken series of artistic design from the earliest to the latest times.
The great legendary King of Athens was Theseus, a figure much embroidered by later mythologists because he had been made the patron hero of the Athenian democracy and the synœcist of Athens--that is, the man who made Attica into a city-state instead of a congeries of village demes. Of course that is not history. All the legends seem to admit that Theseus was originally an alien. His descendants were said to have been driven out by the Homeric King of Athens Menestheus. After the Persian wars the bones of a giant were discovered in the island of Scyros; they were at once recognised as those of Theseus, and brought with great ceremony to be reinterred at Athens.
During this Achæan period the Athenians seem to have largely deserted the sea for agriculture and olive-culture. It will be remembered that Athena’s gift to the city by which she outbid the sea-god was the olive-tree. Of course there were still fishermen on the coast, but when history begins dimly in the seventh century Athens is mainly agricultural and by no means yet a city-state. She was not yet a fully developed city-state when Sparta had long been settled in government and had already extended her hegemony over the whole Peloponnesus. By this time the Athenian kingship had dissolved into aristocracy, and the aristocrats, or Eupatridæ, were a clique of oppressive landowners whose farms were largely worked for them, as at Sparta, on the _métayer_ system, by which the tenant pays a certain proportion of the produce to the proprietor. The troubles which Solon had to face were agrarian troubles connected with boundary-stones. He reckons property in bushels of corn and oil. His enactments, or the ancient laws which pass under his name, are largely concerned with dogs and wolves and olive-culture. The only export permitted is that of olive oil. Even after Solon the local parties that divide the state are not divisions of city-dwellers, but of country folk--the shepherds of the hills, the farmers of the plain, and the fishermen of the coast. These facts emerge in despite of subsequent Athenian historians, who, to please the _amour propre_ of a democratic city, tried to make out that democracy had existed long before the tyranny of Peisistratus--in fact, as far back as Theseus, and certainly Solon. But it is fairly clear to any one discounting this tendency and reading their early traditions impartially that until the time of the tyrants Attica was by no means a true city-state, much less a democracy. Until city life was developed democracy was impossible.