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T:B.L.W£ttS't« 



f&otc pt'*zt I940 . 



Professor T.B.L. Webster 




STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 




Short Histories of 
the Literatures of 
the World : I. 

Edited by Ednmiid GoMe 



Short Histories of the 

Literatures of the World 

Editbd by EDMUND GOSSE. LL.D. 
Large crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. each ▼oliune 

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 

ByProC Gilbert Murray, M.A., LL.D., D.Litu 

FRENCH LITERATURE 

By Prof. Edward Dowdsn, D.CL., LL.D. 

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
By the Editor 

ITALIAN LITERATURE 

By Richard Garnbtt, C.B., LL.D. 

SPANISH LITERATURE 

By ProC James Fitzmauricb Kelly, F.B.A., D.Litt. 

JAPANESE LITERATURE 

By William George Aston, CM.G., D.Litt. 

BOHEMIAN LITERATURE 

By Framcis, Count LOtzow 

RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
By K. Wauszewsei 

SANSKRIT LITERATURE 

By Prof. A. A. Macdonell, M.A., Ph.D. 

ARABIC LITERATURE 

By Prof. Clement Huart 

CHINESE LITERATURE 

By Pto£ Herbert A. Giles, LL.D. 

GERMAN LITERATURE 
By Calvin Thomas 

AMERICAN LITERATURE 
By Prof. W. P. Trent 

HUNGARIAN LITERATURE 
By Dr. ZoltXn Beothy 

LATIN LITERATURE 

By Marcus Southwell Dimsdalb 

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINBBIANN 



Aii rifhii r$i9rvtd 



A History of 

ANCIENT GREEK 
LITERATURE 

BY 

GILBERT MURRAY, M.A. 




Xontion 
WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



First Impression t 1897 

New Imprtssions^ 1898, 1902, 1907, Z911, 191 7 



Copyright, London 1897, by William Heinemann 



EDITOR'S GENERAL INTRODUCTION 

The vast progress made in all departments of literary 
scholarship, and the minuteness with which knowledge 
is now subdivided, threaten to leave the general reader 
bewildered at the diversity and bulk of what is presented 
to him. The exact historian of literature concentrates 
his attention on so narrow a field that he cannot be 
expected to appeal to a wide class ; those who study 
what he writes are, or must in some measure grow to 
be, his fellow-specialists. But the more precisely each 
little area is surveyed in detail, the more necessary does 
it become for us to return at frequent intervals to an 
inspection of the general scheme of which each topo- 
graphical study is but a fragment magnified. It has 
seemed that of late the minute treatment of a multitude 
of intellectual phenomena has a little tended to obscure 
the general movement of literature in each race or 
country. In a crowd of handbooks, each of high 
authority in itself, the general trend of influence o^ 
thread of evolution may be lost. 

The absence of any collection of summaries of the 
literature of the world has led the Publisher and the 
Editor of the present series to believe that a succession 
of attractive volumes, dealing each with the history of 



EDITOR'S GENERAL INTRODUCTION 

literature in a single country, would be not less welcome 
than novel. The Editor has had the good fortune to 
interest in this project a number of scholars whose 
names guarantee a rare combination of exact knowledge 
with the power of graceful composition. He has the 
pleasure of being able to announce that this interest has 
taken a practical shape, and that already there is being 
prepared for the press a considerable series of volumes, 
most of them composed by men pre-eminently recog- 
nised for their competence in each special branch of the 
subject. If there are one or two names less generally 
familiar to the public than the rest, the Editor con- 
fidently predicts that the perusal of their volumes will 
more than justify his invitation to them to contribute. 
Great care will be taken to preserve uniformity of form 
and disposition, so as to make the volumes convenient for 
purposes of comparison, and so as to enable the literatures 
themselves to be studied in proper correlation. 

In preparing these books, the first aim will be to make 
them exactly consistent with all the latest discoveries of 
fact ; and the second, to ensure that they are agreeable 
to read. It is hoped that they will be accurate enough 
to be used in the class-room, and yet pleasant enough 
and picturesque enough to be studied by those who seek 
nothing from their books but enjoyment. An eflfort 
will be made to recall the history of literature from the 
company of sciences which have somewhat unduly borne 
her down — from philology, in particular, and from politi- 
cal history. These have their interesting and valuable 
influence upon literature, but she is independent of them, 
and is strong enough to be self-reliant. 



EDITOR'S GENERAL INTRODUCTION 

Hence, important as are the linguistic origins of 
each literature, and delightful as it may be to linger 
over the birth of language, little notice will here be 
taken of what are purely philological curiosities. We 
shall tread the ground rapidly until we reach the point 
where the infant language begins to be employed in 
saying something characteristic and eloquent. On the 
other hand, a great point will be made, it is hoped, by 
dwelling on the actions, the counter-influences, of 
literatures on one another in the course of their evolu- 
tion, and by noting what appear to be the causes 
which have led to a revival here and to a decline there. 
In short, we shall neglect no indication of change or 
development in an adult literature, and our endeavour 
will be to make each volume a well-proportioned 
biography of the intellectual life of a race, treated as a 
single entity. Literature will be interpreted as the most 
perfect utterance of the npest thought by the finest 
minds, and to the classics of each country rather than 
to its oddities and rather than to its obsolete features 
will particular attention be directed. 

EDUUND GOSSE. 



PREFACE 

To read and re-read the scanty remains now left to us 
of the Literature of Ancient Greece, is a pleasant and 
not a laborious task ; nor is that task greatly increased 
by the inclusion of the 'Scholia' or ancient commen- 
taries. But modem scholarship has been prolific in 
the making of books; and as regards this department 
of my subject, I must frankly accept the verdict passed 
by a German critic upon a historian of vastly wider 
erudition than mine, and confess that I 'stand help- 
less before the mass of my material.' To be more 
precise, I believe that in the domain of Epic, Lyric, 
and Tragic Poetry, I am fairly familiar with the re- 
searches of recent years; and I have endeavoured to 
read the more celebrated books on Prose and Comic 
Poetry. Periodical literature is notoriously haird to 
control ; but I hope that comparatively few articles of 
importance in the last twenty volumes of the Hermes^ 
the Rheinisches Museum^ the PkUologus^ and the Eng- 
lish Classical Journals, have escaped my consideration. 
More than this I have but rarely attempted. 

If under these circumstances I have nevertheless 
sat down to write a History of Greek Literature, and 
have even ventured to address myself to scholars as 
well as to the general public, my reason is that, after 



▼u 



viii PREFACE 

all, such knowledge of Greek literature as I possess 
has been of enormous value and interest to me ; that 
for the last ten'years at least, hardly a day has passed 
on which Greek poetry has not occupied a large part 
of my thoughts, hardly one deep or valuable emotion 
has come into my life which has not been either 
caused, or interpreted, or bettered by Greek poetry. 
This is doubtless part of the ordinary narrowing of 
the specialist, the one-sided sensitiveness in which he 
finds at once his sacrifice and his reward; but it is 
usually, perhaps, the thing that justifies a man in 
writing. 

I have felt it difficult in a brief and comparatively 
popular treatise to maintain a fair proportion between 
the scientific and aesthetic sides of my subject. Our 
ultimate literary judgments upon an ancient writer 
generally depend, and must depend, upon a large mass 
of philological and antiquarian argument. In treating 
Homer, for instance, it is impossible to avoid the 
Homeric Question ; and doubtless many will judge, 
in that particular case, that the Question has almost 
ousted the Poet from this book. As a rule, however, 
I have tried to conceal all the laboratory work, 
except for purposes of illustration, and to base my 
exposition or criticism on the results of it This 
explains why I have so rarely referred to other 
scholars, especially those whose works are best known 
in this country. I doubt, for instance, if the names 
of Jebb, Leaf, and Monro occur at all in the following 
pages. The same is true of such writers as Usener, 
Gomperz, Susemihl, and Blass, to whom I owe much ; 



PREFACE ix 

and even of W. Christ, from whose Gesehukte der 
GrieefaseJun Litteraiur I have taken a great deal of my 
chronology and general framework. But there are two 
teachers of whose influence I am especially conscious : 
first, Mr. T. C Snow, of St John's College, Oxford, too 
close a friend of my own for me to say more of him; 
and secondly, Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellen- 
dorff, of Gottingen, whose historical insight and singular 
gift of imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece seem 
to me to have changed the face of many departments of 
Hellenic study within the last fifteen years. 

My general method, however, has been somewhat 
personal, and independent of particular authorities. I 
have tried — at first unconsciously, afterwards of set 
purpose — to realise, as welt as I could, what sort of 
men the various Greek authors were, what they liked 
and disliked, how they earned their living and spent 
their time. Of course it b only in the Attic period, 
and perhaps in the exceptional case of Pindar, that 
such a result can be even distantly approached, unless 
history is to degenerate into fiction. But the attempt 
is helpful even where it leads to no definite result It 
saves the student from the error of conceiving 'the 
Greeks' as all much alike — a gallery of homogeneous 
figures, with the same ideals, the same standards, the 
same limitations. In reality it is their variety that makes 
them so living to us — the vast range of their interests, 
the suggestiveness and diversity of their achievements, 
together with the vivid personal energy that made the 
achievements possible. It was not by 'classic repose' 
nor yet by 'worship of the human body,' it was not 



t PREFACE 

even by the mere possession of high intellectual and 
aesthetic gifts, that they rose so irresistibly from mere 
barbarism to the height of their unique civilisation : it 
was by infinite labour and unrest, by daring and by 
su£Fering, by loyal devotion to the things they felt to 
be great ; above all, by hard and serious thinking. 

Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all 
other nations, is filled with war and diplomacy, with 
cruelty and deceit It is the inner history, the history 
of thought and feeling and character, thati is so grand. 
They had some difficulties to contend with which are 
now almost out of our path. They had practically no 
experience, but were doing everything for the first 
time; they were utterly weak in material resources, 
and their emotions, their ' desims and fears and rages^ 
were probably wilder and fierier than ours. Yet they 
produced the Athens of Pericles and of Plato. 

The conception which we modems form of these men 
certainly varies in the various generations. The ' serene 
and classical' Greek of Winckelmann and Goethe did 
good service to the world in his day, though we now 
feel him to be mainly a phantom. He has been suc- 
ceeded, especially in the works of painters and poets, 
by an aesthetic and fleshly Greek in fine raiment, an 
abstract Pagan who lives to be contrasted with an equally 
abstract early Christian or Puritan, and to be glorified or 
mishandled according to the sentiments of his critic. He 
is a phantom too, as unreal as those marble palaces in 
which he habitually takes his ease. He would pass, 
perhaps, as a ' Graeculus ' of the Decadence ; but the 
speeches Against Timarckus and Against Leocrates show 



PREFACE zi 

what an Athenian jury would have thought of him. 
There is more flesh and blood in the Greek of the 
anthropologist, the foster-brother of Kaffirs and Hairy 
Ainos. He is at least human and simple and emotional, 
and free from irrelevant trappings. His fault, of course, 
is that he is not the man we want, but only the raw 
material out of which that man was formed : a Hellene 
without the beauty, without the spiritual life, without 
the Hellenism. Many other abstract Greeks are about 
us, no one perhaps greatly better than another; yet 
each has served to correct and complement his prede- 
cessor; and in the long-run there can be little doubt 
that our conceptions have become more adequate. 
We need not take Dr. Johnson's wild verdict about the 
'savages' addressed by Demosthenes, as the basis of 
our comparison : we may take the Voyage d'Anacharsis 
of the khhi Bartelemi. That is a work of genius in 
its way, careful, imaginative, and keen-sighted; but it 
was published in 1788. Make allowance for the per- 
sonality of the writers, and how much nearer we get 
to the spirit of Greece in a casual study by Mr. Andrew 
Lang or M. Anatole France I 

A desire to make the most of my allotted space, and 
also to obtain some approach to unity of view, has led 
me to limit the scope of this book in several ways. 
Recognising that Athens is the only part of Greece of 
which we have much real knowledge, I have accepted 
her as the inevitable interpreter of the rest, and have, 
to a certain extent, tried to focus my reader's attention 
upon the Attic period, from iGschylus to Plato. I have 



zii PREFACE 

reduced my treatment of Philosophy to the narrowest 
dimensions, and, with much reluctance, have deter- 
mined to omit altogether Hippocrates and the men of 
science. Finally, I have stopped the history proper at 
the death of Demosthenes, and appended only a rapid 
and perhaps arbitrary sketch of the later literature 
down to the fall of Paganism, omitting entirely, for 
instance, even such interesting books as Theophrastus's 
Characters^ and the Treatise on the Sublime. 

In the spelling of proper names I have made no great 
effort to attain perfect consistency. I have in general 
adopted the ordinary English or Latin modifications, 
except that I have tried to guide pronunciation by leaving 
k unchanged where c would be soft, and by marking long 
syllables with a circumflex. Thus Kimon is not changed 
to Cimon, and Dem^des is distinguished from i^schines. 
I have not, however, thought it necessary to call him 
D6m&des, or to alter the aspect of a common word by 
writing D6m6t6r, Th&k^idAs. In references to ancient 
authors, my figures always apply to the most easily 
accessible edition ; my reading, of course, is that which 
I think most likely to be right in each case. All the 
authors quoted are published in cheap texts by Teubner 
or Tauchnitz or the English Universities, except in a few 
cases, which are noted as they occur. Aristotle, Plato, 
and the Orators are quoted by the pages of the standard 
editions ; in the Constitution of Athens^ which, of course, 
was not contained in the great Berlin Aristotle, I follow 
Kenyon's editio princeps. 

Philologists may be surprised at the occasional ac- 
ceptance in my translations of ancient and erroneous 



PREFACE xiii 

et3nnologies. If, in a particular passage, I translate 
fjXlfiara^ ' sun-trodden/ it is not that I think it to be a 
' contracted form/ of i^Xio^aro?, but that I believe Euri- 
pides to have thought so. 

An asterisk * after the title of a work signifies that the 
work is lost or only extant in fragments. Fragmentary 
writers are quoted, unless otherwise stated, from the 
following collections : Fragmenta Histaricorum Gracorum^ 
by Karl Miiller ; Philasophorum^hylliM\\^cYi\ Tragicorum, 
by Nauck ; Camicarmmf by Kock ; Epicorum^ by Kinkel ; 
PoiUt Lyrid Grmd^ by Bergk. These collections are 
denoted by their initial letters, F. H. G., F. P. G., and 
so on. C I. A* is the Corpus Inscriptionum Atiicarum^ 
C. I. G. the Carpus Inscr^tionum Gracarum. In a few 
cases I have used abbreviations for a proper name, as 
W. M. for Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, but not, I think, in 
any context where they are likely to be misunderstood* 



Among the friends who have helped me with criticisms 
and suggestions, I must especially express my indebted- 
ness to Mr. Gborob Macdonald, lecturer in Greek in 
this University, for much careful advice and correction 
of detail throu^out the book. 

GILBERT MURRAY. 
Glasoow, Ftknuuy 1897. 



PREFACE 

TO THE SECOND EDITION 

In revising this book for a second edition, I hope that I 
have profited in many isolated points of detail by the 
suggestions of several kindly critics both at home and 
abroad. As to the general plan of my treatise, I still 
adhere to the views expressed in the Preface to the 
First Edition. Large as the omissions are in this ** short 
history" of a great subject, and much as I feel these 
omissions myself, I can only say that they are the result 
of long and careful balancing of advantages. It is no 
want of love for post-Demosthenic literature, no want 
of interest in the process of massing and weighing the 
evidence on which my conclusions rest, and certainly 
no want of cordial admiration for the achievements of 
the present and the last generation of scholars in Great 
Britain and Ireland, that has influenced me in deter- 
mining to save space at the expense of these three 
subjects. 

I am glad, however, that, thanks to the unexpected 
amount of sympathy which has greeted my very im- 
perfect book, I have this early opportunity of adding 
a few words upon two writers who, for different reasons, 
were not properly treated in my first edition, Bacchylides 
and Herddas. The former of these had not been pub- 
lished when this book first appeared ; the latter was 



XVI PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

accidentally omitted in my brief summary of Alexandrian 
literature. 

The last of the three great papyri recently acquired 
by the British Museum and edited by Mr. F. G. Kenyon, 
is a very beautiful MS., written about the middle of the 
first century B.C. It contains twenty lyrical poems by 
Bacchylides of Keos, six practically intact, the others 
in all possible stages of mutilation. The surmise that 
some of the poems were not ' Epinikian ' has proved to 
be correct. Six of them, whatever class of lyric they 
may eventually be assigned to, have at any rate no 
reference to the Games. One or two poems, notably 
XV. and XVI., have rather the appearance of myths 
without a setting— centre-pieces ready to be fitted into 
a poem celebrating some occasion, when the occasion 
and the patron should present themselves. The possi- 
bility of such a practice is illustrated by many of 
Pindar's poems and by the Fifth of Bacchylides' own, 
in which the myth forms a separate whole and might 
be excised bodily (Ant. B to Ant. E). One is reminded 
of the loci communes composed by the professional 
orators, which we find both incorporated in speeches 
and existing separately. 

Bacchylides appeals to us, to say the least, as one 
of a most marvellous group ; he breathed the same 
air as Pindar, iGschylus and Sophocles, and, like the 
minor Elizabethans, comes to us with a certain fragrance 
not his own clinging about his garments. Yet in him- 
self too he is a real and beautiful poet. The old verdict 
of 'Longtnus,' which has been accepted as canonical 
during all the centuries when nobody could test it, 
proves to be both apt and true when confronted with 
Bacchylides' own works. He is 'not to be compared 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xvu 

with Pindar for genius/ but is nevertheless among the 
* faultless poets ' whose thoughts are ' smooth and beauti- 
fully expressed at every point.' In one sense the very 
limitations of Bacchylides increase the value of this 
discovery. We did not really know till now what a 
normal lyric poet of the fifth century was like. We 
had only Pindar to judge by, and Pindar is, and must 
always have been, utterly unnormal and inimitable. 
Bacchylides is neither. When an average Athenian 
thought of a lyrical poet, the main association in his 
mind was probably this peculiar art of twisting and 
beating language like so much metal, welding strange 
and beautiful compounds, fretting out delicate traceries 
of words and music. One may think of the variations 
rung upon ' clouds ' and ' snow ' and ' wings ' and ' sun- 
light' by the poet in Aristophanes' Birds. That poet 
taken at his best, and stripped of the atmosphere of 
caricature which enwraps him, might bear a consider- 
able resemblance to our new-found Bacchylides. 

To turn to more intimate criticism, Bacchylides was 
a nephew of Simonides and a rival of Pindar, and both 
great men have left their marks upon him. The dialect, 
the metres, the subjects, are those of Pindar. There is 
much, too, of the Pindaric habits of thought, the aver- 
sion to democracy, the religious quiescence, the per- 
functory moralising, which were probably common to 
most of the poets who served Dorian masters. But in 
place of the tense, obscure splendour which is the special 
characteristic of Pindar's mind, we have here an easy 
lucidity that betrays the Ionian and the pupil of Simo- 
nides. Bacchylides is often so ballad -like both in 
rhythm and in manner, that one can well imagine the 
fishermen singing his verses, as we are told, but can 



xviil PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

scarcely believe, that they sang Pindar's. The actual 
imitation of Pindar is sometimes strongly marked. We 
have it at its greatest in Ode V., a beautiful lyric of two 
hundred lines, narrating the parley of Heracles and 
MeleAger in Hades, and MeleAger's story of his own 
death. The description of the eagle's flight in this 
poem — '' thi ptaks of the great earth hold him not^ nor 
the rugged waves of the unwearying sea " — suggests Pindar 
at once ; so does the rapid, vivid mention of the "ghosts 
of unhappy men, driving like leaves that a keen wind tosses 
up the headlands of Ida amid the gr€unng sheep'*; and the 
loaded epithets of "proud white-^rmed rosebud-crotvnid 
Artemis** At the end of this poem one feels for a 
moment as though a new Pindar had really come back 
to us. But the ode was written for the same occasion 
as Pindar's first Olympian, and is in metre very similar 
to the second. We turn to those poems again, and the 
conclusion is irresistible : Pindar stands alone on the 
mountain tops, as he has always stood. 

Indeed the most un-Pindaric of Bacchylides' poems 
are perhaps really the most successful. Ode XVII., The 
Youths a$id Theseus, tells us the story, hitherto almost 
unknown, how Minos, when carrying his human tribute 
to the Minotaur, offered insult to one of the maidens, 
and was checked by Theseus; how the angry tyrant 
appealed to his father Zeus, and taunted his young 
captive with falsely claiming to be the son of Poseidon ; 
and how Theseus, to prove that he too was a god's son, 
sprang into the sea and was welcomed and crowned 
with a garland in the palace of the Nereids. Pindar, 
and perhaps most other Greek poets, might have shrunk 
from representing the son of Zeus in this ogreish aspect, 
or at least from making Zeus recognise and accept 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xix 

him in the midst of his enormities ; but not Pindar 
himself could have equalled the blithe and limpid fresh- 
ness, the unreflective spirit of youth, and blue waves and 
clear sea-wind, with which this poem has risen from its 
Egyptian tomb. 

Ode XVIII. is of a form unique among our remains 
of Greek literature, unless we compare with it the long 
fragment of Alcman (p. loo), and provides a link which 
has long been desired in the history of the Drama, a 
definite instance of dramatic personation in the choir- 
song. It is headed ' Theseus/ and consists of a dialogue 
between two choirs, one standing for Aigeus, King of 
Athens, and his suite, the other for some group of 
Athenians, with perhaps Medea for a central figure. 
It is a bright ballad-like poem, and has real charm apart 
from its technical interest : — 

" IVAat has come^ O King, to trouble thee ? " asks the 
first chorus. '* Is it a foreign foe ? Is it a band of robbers ? 
Surely Athens has strength to crush them, whatever they 
ber 

" A messenger from the Isthmus^' is the reply, " who 
brings tidings beyond marvel of a man of might. He has 
slain the great robber Sinis, and Kerkyon and Prokoptes, 
and made all wild and fierce men quail. I fear what the 
end may be." 

** But who is the man, and whence comes he, and in what 
guise? Does he lead a great host in weeds of war, or walhs 
he cdone in his valour? — Surely the hand of God is with 
himr 

" Two men only follow him. A sword hangs upon his 
shoulders, and two spears are in his hands ; a beaten helm 
of Laconia is about his light-brown hair ; on his breast is 
a crimson doublet and a cloak of Thessaly ; in his eyes a red 



XX PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

^eam like the fires of Lemnos. A youth he is, they j^, in 
his first spring, yet his heart is set on the joys of Ares, an 
war, and the clash of battling brass; and his feet are turned 
towards sunlight-loving Athens." 

To turn from No. 733 of the British Museum papyri 
to No. 535, the poems we find in this latter are not 
works of great bulk or of exceptional beauty. But they 
call for mention here, both because, having only been dis- 
covered in 1890, they have not been treated at all in the 
older histories of literature, and because they form by far 
the most important specimens we possess of one whole 
species of composition, the Mime. Herddas was not a 
well-known figure in literary history like Bacchylides. 
He is mentioned some four times in Uterature. The 
form of his name was uncertain : Athensus calls him 
' Her6ndas'; Pliny and Stobaeus omit the n. His works 
and his life were utter blanks to us, and our ideas of his 
date fluctuated between the sixth and third centuries ! 
The question of the n still remains unsettled, as the 
papyrus does not contain a title-page. But we can 
now make out both the country and the date of the poet. 
He bears a Doric name, but writes in Ionic. His scenes, 
when they are not in the inevitable Alexandria, are 
laid in Cos, and there is a general prominence given 
to Coan things. Cos is a Doric island, which would 
account for the poet's Doric name. His Ionic dialect 
is probably due to the literary tradition of the Mime, 
though it is worth while noticing that the admixture of 
Ionic forms in the Coan Inscriptions suggests a blending 
of Dorian and Ionian blood in the island. The home 
of Herddas, therefore, was probably Cos. His date is 
fixed by an allusion to the ' Theoi Adelphoi,' i,e. Ptolemy 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxi 

Philadelphus and his sister Arsinod, whose worship was 
established in their lifetime, about the year 268 B.c. He 
speaks of the sculptor Apelles as recently dead, which 
suits the same date. And he mentions that he had com- 
posed other sorts of poetry before his Mimes. He lived, 
therefore, in the age of Callimachus and Theocritus. 

His Mimes are all written in Scazons or 'limping 
iambics/ and depict, with little merriment and little 
caricature, scenes of daily life on its more vulgar side. 
There is great felicity of language, an appearance of 
admirably close observation, and a vein of quiet and 
unobtrusive wit, which, both in its manner and in its 
subjects, reminds one of certain French writers. The 
first Mime shows us a young married woman, M6trich6, 
receiving a visit from her old but unvenerable nurse. 
The visitor descants upon the protracted absence of 
M6trich6's husband in Egypt, and the even more pro- 
tracted desire of a certain distinguished athlete to o£Fer 
consolation. The hostess gently snubs her, and changes 
the subject M6trich6 has the further merit, unique 
among Herddas's women, of not scolding her servants. 
The shrewish vulgarity of the others reminds one 
of a bad dream, the more oppressive for its seeming 
closeness to life. 

In the second poem, a disreputable, but burly and 
amusing person brings an action at law. In the third, 
a mother takes her boy to a schoolmaster to be 
whipped. In the fourth, some women go round the 
temple of Asclepius at Cos, admiring the works of 
art, and giving o£Ferings. In the fifth, a woman in a 
fit of jealous fury sends one of her male slaves to 
receive "two thousand lashes" at the slaves' prison, 
^nd then changes her mind and calls him back, Ip 



xxii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

the ttixth, two young women have a private chat, 
chiefly about servants and clothes : their conversation 
it neither witty nor ridiculous, nor of any visible merit 
in itHelf; but it is represented with an extraordinary 
fippearance of lifelikeness. In the seventh, a woman is 
buying tilings from a leather*worker. 

Theve iieven Mimes are in good preservation. There 
Nnom to be fragments of six others. They must have 
bc^n brilliant and amusing entertainments when first 
prcKluced at Cos or Alexandria, with the satire all fresh, 
nnd the delicate shades easily visible. But the humour 
Wfti largely of an evanescent and 'topical' sort; and 
Mil the Mimes now stand, a reader will probably feel that 
they are very well done, and that he does not care to 
read them again. If he does read them again, it will 
be chiefly for their great antiquarian importance, and, 
MCondly, for the real dexterity of the writing. Herddas 
presents a graceful figure even when paying his com- 
pliments to Ptolemy, a task in which both Qdlimachus 
and Theocritus found their cunning fail. 

GILBERT MURRAY. 



Mmrtk 189& 



PREFACE 

TO THE THIRD EDITION 

The revision of a book dealing with so large a subject 
as the whole of Greek classical literature is a very 
serious piece of work, and is not much lightened by 
the smallness of the book itself. In the present reprint 
I have not attempted any general revision. Except 
for hyphens and commas I have only altered the text 
in two places (pp. 211, 288) ; D&mia and Aux6sia should 
be regarded not as sisters but as iGginetan forms of 
the Mother and Maid, and, of course, the comedies 
of Amphis and Alexis were not, as my words implied, 
written before Plato's Republic. 

Naturally, however, the last nine years have not 
passed witihout making some impression both on our 
actual knowledge of Greek literature and on my own 
tentative opinions about it. On the subject of the 
Homeric Poems I have learned much from the revised 
edition of Leafs Iliad^ from the appendix to Monroes 
Odyssey^ from Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece^ and 
from B^rard's Les Phiniciens et tOdyssie^ as well 
as from many other smaller works, among which I 
would specially mention Wilamowitz's two treatises 
on Die lonische Wanderung and Panionian {Sitzungs- 
her. der K. Preussischen Akademie^ iii. and iv., 1906) 
and Eric Bethe's lecture Homer und die Heldensage^ 



xxiv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 

Leipzig, 1902. Also the great discoveries made by 
Dr. Evans and others in Crete have] necessarily changed 
many of our conceptions of pre- Homeric Greece. 
Mycenae has fallen into its place as only one, and 
not by any means the greatest, of the pre-Hellenic 
centres; and the pre-Hellenic Age must be known 
now as JEgean rather than Mycenaean. 

The main corrections which I should now make in 
my Homeric chapter would be to emphasise more 
strongly the importance of the Race Migrations (p. 32) 
and to develop more definitely the suggestion made 
upon p. 30. It seems probable that a great deal of 
the fighting described in the lUad is not mere fiction 
but tribal history torn from its context. It related 
originally to old wars of migrant tribes in Thessaly, 
Thrace, the Peloponnese, Crete, and elsewhere. Bethe 
has shown reason to believe, first, that many of the 
Homeric heroes are personified tribes, like Israel or 
Esau ; and secondly, that they can often be discovered 
moving down Greece from north to south. He traces 
each tribal hero by his tomb or tombs, his marriages, 
and his chief enemies. Ancient deeds of glory per- 
formed under forgotten conditions in various parts of 
the i£gean world have been drawn into the attraction 
of Trojan Saga and made into incidents of the great 
war for Troy. I hope soon to have an opportunity of 
treating the whole of this subject afresh. 

In the treatment of the origins of tragedy I should 
make two main corrections. The first of these is due 
to a book which has lately shed light for Hellenists 
upon some of the most obscure and important parts 
of their subject, Miss J. E. Harrison's Prolegomena 
to the Study of Greek Religion, It seems to me to be 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxv 

almost proved that the traditional theory of tragedy 
being a ''Goat-song," though believed by the Greeks 
themselves and consequently important in its influence 
on the development of the drama, is etymologically 
a mere mistake. The word may be derived not from 
tragoSf 'a goat/ but from tragos^ 'spelt/ a grain from 
which intoxicating drink was made. 'Tragedy/ the 
song of Dionysus, would thus fall into line with his 
several titles 'Bromios/ 'Braltes,' 'Sabazios,' all de- 
rived from different intoxicants. Bratnos is barley; 
braisan and sabaja two different forms of beer. (See 
op. cit.f pp. 414-426.) 

The second correction is due to an address delivered 
to the Hellenic Society in 1905 by Profe >sor Ridgeway. 
He argued, to my mind convincingly, that one most 
important element in the origin of tragedy was the 
ritual performed in so many parts of Greece at the 
grave of an ancestor or dead hero. Those *^ tragic 
choruses which celebrated the sufferings of Adrastus'' 
(p. 204), and which were afterwards transferred to 
Dionysus, were more important than anyone realised. 
Almost every tragedy, as a matter of fact, can be 
resolved into a lament over the grave of some canon- 
ised hero or heroine, mixed with a re-enacting of his 
death. Evidence confirmatory of this suggestion crowds 
upon one in reading the tragedies. It is not only the 
funereal tone and the ever-present shadow of death, 
which seemed so hard to explain on the pure Dionysiac 
theory; there is an actual tomb present as a central 
fact of the story in the majority of tragedies. To take 
the first six tragedies of Euripides, for instance : we 
have the tomb of Alcestis, worshipped in after-days 
{Ale. \. 994-1005) ; the rites paid by the Corinthians at 



XXVI PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 

the tomb of the children of Medea [Med. 1381 and 
Scholia) ; the magical grave of Eurystheus {JHclid. 
1030-1044); the rites performed by a maiden chorus 
over the grave of Hippolytus {Hip. 1425-1430); the 
expiatory rites of the Delphians over the grave of 
Neoptolemus [Andr. 1239-1242) ; and the Kunos Stma^ 
or Cairn of Stones which hid the curse-fraught body 
of Hecuba {Hec. 1259-1273). In each case, even the 
last, the worship at the tomb seems capable of being 
the nucleus round which the whole celebration of the 
tragedy has gathered. When Artemis prophesies to 
Hippolytus that rites shall be paid at his tomb — 

** And virgin^ thoughts in music evermore 
Turn toward thee, and praise thee in the song 
Of PhaOrds far-famed love and thy great wrong^ 

the prophecy is fulfilled in the tragedy itself. How far 
the historical evidence for this theory can be made 
complete, how far it explains the Prologue and the 
Messenger in tragedy, how far the Deus ex machina 
is originally a ghost evoked from the grave, or how 
far Altars of Refuge sometimes take the place of tombs, 
are subjects which I must not discuss till Professor 
Ridgeway's full views are published. 

The rich discoveries of papyri made during the 
past decade, especially at Oxyrrhyncus, would affect 
the language of this book in some few places, were I 
writing now, but I do not think that they have re- 
vealed any noteworthy errors in it, either of statement 
or opinion. Except perhaps on one point. I was 
formerly inclined, in the absence of clear evidence on 
either side, to defend Timotheus against the sweeping 
attacks of the traditional criticism. Since his dithyramb 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxvii 

on the battle of Salamis has been discovered,^ I can 
only admit — as far as his poetry is concerned, for his 
music is still an unknown thing— that the conventional 
views appear to be thoroughly right. Timotheus's 
PersiB is really most interesting as a type of what the 
ancient Greeks considered bad taste. In a loose and 
easy lyric metre, free from the difiBculties of strophic 
responsion, he gives his description of the great battle — 
Persian nobles vomiting salt water and calling the sea 
names, oars broken and teeth knocked out, ridiculous 
captives chattering broken Greek; all this in the most 
high-flown dithyrambic language, mixed with phrases 
about the ^ emerald-tressid deip' and the * fishr-crawnedf 
marble-winged bosom of Amphitrite* A clever Ionian 
and, in his way, an artist in language, living at a time 
midway between Euripides and Plato, Timotheus did 
not know what was beautiful and what ugly, what great 
and what ignoble. His work shows much novelty 
but little originality; much slap-dash ornament, but 
none of that scrupulous and loving finish which is 
usual in ancient Greek work. He is hard-hearted, his 
thoughts are mean thoughts, and he seems to be more 
interested in his own personality than in the great 
subject of which he writes. The contrast helps one 
to understand what is meant by the word classical. 

These few remarks do not, of course, cover all the 
manifold imperfections which must impress themselves 
on the conscience of a writer attempting to deal so 
concisely with so large and difiBcult a subject. 

The lyric poets before Pindar, for instance, deserve 
a more searching study than they have yet received. 
The proper method would probably be to trace the 

1 Edited by Wilamowitx-Moellendorflf, Leipcig, 1903. 



1 



Jtxviii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 

growth of each style of poetry separately, not to take 
poet by poet. The figures of the individual poets are 
too uncertain. And their work must have consisted 
mainly not in free creation but in a reverent working- 
over of inherited material, and a constant pouring of 
new life into the traditional treatment of traditional 
subjects. Commentators on Iliad xxii. 71 fiF. are puzzled 
to find 'Homer' quoting 'Tyrtaeus.' But the pheno- 
menon ceases to be very strange when we realise that 
it is not exactly one poet quoting another, but merely 
some phrases of the traditional Ionian war-elegy finding 
their way into the traditional Ionian epic. 

In the case of Euripides, the further writings of 
Verrall, Nestle, and others, as well as my own increas- 
ing studies, have given me much to add to the account 
in this book, but, I think, nothing of any importance 
to retract. 

GILBERT MURRAY. 



New College, Oxford. 



CONTENTS 



SBAPTBX Wi 

L HOMUi: IirntODUCTOKT t • I 

n. LBSSSR HOMBUC POBM 8 ; HESIOD ; ORPHKOS • . • 44 

ni. THX DXSCSNDAim OF HOMSR, HISIOD» AND ORPHBOS . 69 

IT. THX 80NO 90 

Y. THB BBOINNING8 OF PB06B 117 

¥1. HBIODOTITS Ija 

VIL PHILOSOPHIC AMD POLITICAL UTBRATUBB TO THB DBATH 

OF 80C1ATBS §53 

▼nL THUCTDIDBS t • • • 178 

IX. THB DBAMA : INTBODUCTION • 303 

X. ASCHTL08 • • • • • 21$ 

XL 80PBOCLX8 .••••••••• Sja 

XIL BU&IPIDBS 250 

xin. coMSDT. •••.•••... 275 

XIY. PLATO ••••••••••• 294 

XY. XXNOPHON • • • 314 

XVL THB 'OXATORS' 325 

Xni. DBMOtTHBNBi AND HIS COMTBMPOBABIBf . • • • 3S3 

KTIIL THX LATBX UTXRATUXB, ALBXANDXIAM AND BOM AN . 37O 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 409 

INDEX 417 



( 



THE 

LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

I 

HOMER 

Introductory 

In attempting to understand the scope and development 
of Greek literature, our greatest difiBculty comes from the 
fragmentary and one-sided nature of our tradition. There 
has perhaps never been any society in history so near to 
the highest side of our own as the Athens of Euripides 
and Plato. The spiritual vividness and religious free- 
dom of these men, the genuineness of their culture and 
humanity, the reasoned daring of their social and politi- 
cal ideals, appeal to us almost more intimately than does 
our own eighteenth century. But between us and them 
there has passed age upon age of men who saw di£Fer- 
ently, who sought in the books that they read other 
things than truth and imaginative beauty, or who did 
not care to read books at all. Of the literature pro- 
duced by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., we possess 
about a twentieth part ; of that produced in the seventh, 
sixth, fourth, and third, not nearly so large a propor- 
tion. All that has reached us has passed a severe 

A 



2 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and far from discriminating ordeal. It has secured 
its life by never going out of fashion for long at a 
time ; by appealing steadily to the book-trade through- 
out a number of successive epochs of taste — fourth-cen- 
tury Greece, pre-Christian Alexandria, Augustan Rome, 
the great Hellenic revival of the Antonines, the narrower 
Attic revival of the later sophists. 

After the death of Julian and Libanius, one is tempted 
to think that nobody was really interested in literatiu-e 
any more ; but certain books had long been convention- 
ally established in the schools as 'classics,' and these 
continued to be read, in ever -dwindling numbers, till 
the fall of Constantinople and the Renaissance. The 
eccentricities of the tradition would form material for 
a large volume. As in Latin it has zealously preserved 
Vergil and Avianus the fabulist, so in Greek it has multi- 
plied the MSS. of Homer and of Apollonius the Kitian 
On Sprains. As in Latin it practically lost Lucretius save 
for the accident of a single MS., and entirely lost Calvus, 
so in Greek it came near to losing i£schylus, and pre- 
served the most beautiful of the Homeric hymns only 
by inadvertence. In general, it cared for nothing that 
was not either useful in daily life, like treatises on 
mechanics and medicine, or else suitable for reading in 
schools. Such writers as Sappho, Epicharmus, Demo- 
critus, Menander, Chrysippus, have left only a few dis- 
jointed fragments to show us what precious books were 
allowed to die through the mere nervelessness of Byzan- 
tium. But Rome and Alexandria in their vigour had 
already done some intentional sifting. They liked order 
and style ; they did not care to copy out the more tumul- 
tuous writers. The mystics and ascetics, the more uncom- 
promising philosophers, the ardent democrats and the 



THE TRADITION 3 

enthusiasts generally, have been for the most part sup- 
pressed. We must remember that they existed, and try 
from the remains to understand them. 



The Legendary Poets 

But the first great gaps in the tradition are of a differ- 
ent nature. An inunense amount of literature was never 
' preserved ' at all. It is generally true that in any creative 
age the living literature is neglected. It is being produced 
every day ; and why should any one trouble himself to 
have it copied on good material and put in a safe place 7 
It is only that which can no longer be had for the asking 
that rouses men's anxiety lest it cease altogether. This 
is what happened among the Greeks in tragedy, in lyric 
poetry, in oratory, and in the first great movement of 
history. The greater part of each genus was already 
extinct by the time people bethought them of preserving 
it* Especially was it the case in the earliest form of com- 
position known to our record, the hexameter epos. 

The epos, as we know it, falls into three main divisions 
according to author and subject-matter. It is a vehicle 
for the heroic saga, written by * Hom6ros ' ; for useful 
information in general, especially catalogues and genea- 
logies, written by ' Hfisiodos ' ; and thirdly, for religious 
revelation, issuing originally from the mouths of such 
figures as 'Orpheus,' 'Musaeus,' and the 'Bakides.' 
This last has disappeared, leaving but scanty traces, and 
the poems of 'Homer and Hesiod' constitute our earliest 
literary monuments. 

Ail verse embodiments of the saga are necessarily less 
old than the saga itself. And more than that, it is clear 



4 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

that our Iliad^ Odyss^^ E,rga^ and Theogony are not flie 
first, '' nor the second, nor yet the twelfth/' of such em- 
bodiments. These ostensibly primitive poems show a 
length and complexity of composition which can only 
be the result of many generations of artistic e£F6rt. 
They speak a language out of all relation to common 
speech, full of forgotten meanings and echoes of past 
states of society ; a poef s language, demonstrably built 
up and conditioned at every turn by the needs of flie 
hexameter metre. There must therefore have been 
hexameter poems before our Iliad. Further, the hexa- 
meter itself is a high and complex development many 
stages removed from the simple metres in which the 
sagas seem once to have had shape in Greece as well 
as in India, Germany, and Scandinavia. But if we need 
proof of the comparative lateness of our earliest records, 
we can find it in 'Homer' himself, when he refers to 
the wealth of poetry that was in the world before him, 
and the general feeling that by his day most great themes 
have been outworn.^ 

The personalities of the supposed authors of the 
various epics or styles of epos are utterly beyond our 
reach. There is for the most part something fantastic 
ur mytliical in them. Orpheus, for instance, as a saga- 
iigure, is of Greek creation ; as a name, he is one of the 
'Riblms,' or heroic artificers, of the Vedas, the first 
men who were made immortal. Another early bard, 
'Linos,' is the very perfection of shadowiness. The 
Greek settler or exile on Semitic coasts who listened to 
the strange oriental dirges and caught the often-recurring 
wail ' Ai'Unik ' C Woe to us '), took the words as Greek, al 

^ Eip. ^> 74 ; Ml 70 ; a, 351. The books of the Iliad are denoted bj the 
capital letters of the Greek idphabet, those of the Odytsty by the small letteis* 



THE LEGENDARY BARDS $ 

Aufov {* Woe for Linos '), and made his imaginary Linos 
into an unhappy poet or a murdered prince. Homer's 
ancestors, when tiiey are not gods and rivers, tend to 
bear names like 'Memory-son' and 'Sweet-deviser'; his 
minor connections — ^the figures among whom the lesser 
epics were apt to be divided — ^have names which are 
sometimes transparent, sometimes utterly obscure, but 
which generally agree in not being Greek names of any 
normal type. The name of his son-in-law, 'Creoph^lus/ 
suggests a comic reference to the ' Fleshpot-tribe ' of 
bards with their 'perquisites.' A poet who is much 
quoted for the saga-subjects painted on the 'Leschfi' 
or 'Conversation Hall' at Delphi, is called variously 
'Leschfis,' 'Lescheds,' and 'Leschaios'; another who 
sang of sea-faring, has a name 'Arctlnos,' derived, as no 
other Greek name is, from the Pole-star. The author 
of the Ttkgoneia^^ which ended the Odysseus-saga in a 
burst of happy marriages (see p. 48), is suitably named 
' Eugamon ' or ' Eugammon.' ^ 

As for ' Hom6ros ' himself, the word means 'hostage ' : 
it cannot be a full Greek name, though it might be 
an abbreviated 'pet name,' €,g. for ' Homfirodochos ' 
('hostage-taker'), if there were any Greek names at 
all compounded from this word. As it is, the fact we 
must start from is the existence of ' Homfiridae,' both 
as minstrels in general and as a clan. ' Homfiros ' must 
by all analogy be a primeval ancestor, invented to give 
them a family unity, as 'D6ros,' 'I6n,' and 'Hellto' 
were invented ; as even the League of the 'Amphic- 
tyones ' or ' Dwellers - round [Thermopylae] ' had to 
provide themselves with a common ancestor called 
'Amphictydn' or ' Dweller - round/ That explains 




6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

'Homiros/ but still leaves 'Homiridae' unexplained. 
It may be what it professes to be, a patronymic 
(' Homer-sons '). It is easy to imagine a state of 
society in which the Sons of the Hostages, not trusted 
to fight, would be used as bards. But it may equally 
well be some compound {ofirjf ap—) meaning 'fitters 
together/ with the termination modified into patronymic 
form when the minstrels began to be a guild and to feel 
the need of a common ancestor. 

It is true that we have many traditional 'lives' of 
the prehistoric poets, and an account of a 'contest' 
between Homer and Hesiod, our version being copied 
from one composed about 400 B.C. by the sophist Alki- 
damas, who, in his turn, was adapting some already 
existing romance. And in the poems themselves we 
have what purport to be personal reminiscences. 
Hesiod mentions his own name in the preface to the 
Theogony. In the Erga (1. 633 fiF.), he tells how his father 
emigrated from Kym6 to Ascra. The Homeric Hymn 
to Apollo ends in an appeal from the poet to the 
maidens who form his audience, to remember him, and 
" whin any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers and 
who delights them most^ to answer with one voice: ^Tis a 
blind man ; he dwells in craggy Chios ; his songs shall be 
the fairest for evermore.^ Unfortunately, these are only 
cases of personation. The rhapsode who recited those 
verses first did not mean that he was a blind Chian, and 
his songs the fairest for evermore ; he only meant that 
the poem he recited was the work of that blind Homer 
whose songs were as a matter of fact the best Indeed, 
both this passage and the preface to the Theogony are 
demonstrably later additions, and the reminiscence in the 
Erga must stand or fall with them. The real bards of 



* PERSONALITY' OF HOMER ; 

early Greece were all nameless and impersonal ; and we 
know definitely the point at which the individual author 
begins to dare to obtrude himself — the age of the lyrists 
and the Ionian researchers. These passages are not evi- 
dence of what Hesiod and Homer said of themselves ; 
they are evidence of what the tradition of the sixth 
century fabled about them. 

Can we see the origin of this tradition 7 Only 
dimly. There is certainly some historical truth in it. 
The lives and references, while varying in all else, ap- 
proach unanimity in making Homer a native of Ionia. 
They concentrate themselves on two places, Smyrna 
and Chios ; in each of these an JEoli2Ln population had 
been overlaid by an Ionian, and in Chios there was 
a special clan called 'Hom6ridae/ We shall see that 
if by the 'birth of Homer' we mean the growth of 
the Homeric poems, the tradition here is true. It is 
true also when it brings Hesiod and his father over 
from Asiatic Kym6 to Boeotia, in the sense that the 
Hesiodic poetry is essentially the Homeric form brought 
to bear on native Bceotian material. 

Thus Homer is a Chian or Smymaean for historical 
reasons ; but why is he blind 7 Partly, perhaps, we have 
here some vague memory of a primitive time when the 
able-bodied men were all warriors ; the lame but strong 
men, smiths and weapon-makers ; and the blind men, 
good for nothing else, mere singers. More essentially, 
it is the Saga herself at work. She loved to make her 
great poets and prophets blind, and then she was 
haunted by their blindness. Homer was her Demo- 
docus, **whcm the Muse greatly lovedy and gave him both 
good and evil; she took away his eyes and gave him 
sweet minstrelsy^ (0, 63, 4). It is pure romance — the 



8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

romance which creates the noble bust of Homer in 
the Naples Museum ; the romance which one feels in 
Callimachus's wonderful story of the Bathing of Pallas^ 
where it is Teiresias, the prophet, not the poet, who 
loses his earthly sight Other traits in the tradition 
have a similar origin — the contempt poured on the 
unknown beggar-man at the Marriage Feast till he 
rises and sings ; the curse of ingloriousness he lays on 
the Kymeans who rejected him ; the one epic {Cypria *) 
not up to his own standard, with which he dowered his 
daughter and made her a great heiress. 



The Homeric Poems 

If we try to find what poems were definitely regarded 
as the work of Homer at the beginning of our tradi- 
tion, the answer must be — all that were 'Homeric' or 
' heroic ' ; in other words, all that express in epos the two 
main groups of legend, centred round Troy and Thebes 
respectively. The earliest mention of Homer is by the 
poet Calltnus {ca. 660 B.C.), who refers to the Thibais^ as 
his work; the next is probably by Semonides of Amorgos 
(m. 630 B.C.), who cites as the words of ' a man of Chios ' 
a proverbial phrase which occurs in our Iliad, '* As the 
passing of leaves is, so is the passing of men'' It is possible 
that he referred to some particular Chian, and that the 
verse in our Iliad is merely a floating proverb assimilated 
by the epos ; but the probability is that he is quoting 
our passage. Simonides of Keos (556-468 B.C.), a good 
century later, speaks of ^^ Homer and Stesichorus telling 
haw MeUagros conquered all youths in spear-throwing across 
the wild Anauros'' This is not in our Iliad or Odyssey , 



WHAT POEMS WERE HOMERIC 9 

and we cannot trace the poem in which it comes. Pindar, 
a little later, mentions Homer several times. He blames 
him for exalting Odysseus — z reference to the Odyssey — 
but pardons him because he has told '' straightly by rod 
and plummet the whole prowess of Aias" ; especially, it 
would seem, his rescue of the body of Achilles, which 
was described in two lost epics, the Little Iliad^ and the 
^thiopis.^ He bids us ^^ remember Homet^s word: A 
good messenger brings honour to any dealing" — a word, as it 
chances, which our Homer never speaks ; and he men- 
tions the '' HomMd^f singers of stitched lays'' 

If iCschylus ever called his plays ^ ^* slices from the great 
banquets of Homer," the banquets he referred to must 
have been far richer than those to which we have admis- 
sion. In all his ninety plays it is hard to find more than 
seven which take their subjects from our Homer, including 
the Agamemnon and Chol^horoi^ and it would need some 
spleen to make a critic describe these two as ' slices ' from 
the Odyssey. What iEschylus meant by ' Homer ' was the 
heroic saga as a whole. It is the same with Sophocles, 
who is called ' most Homeric,' and is said by Athenaeus 
(p. 277) to ''rejoice in the epic cycle and make whole 
dramas out of it" That is, he treated those epic myths 
which Athenaeus only knew in the prose ' cycles ' or hand- 
books compiled by one Dionysius in the second century 
B.C., and by Apolloddrus in the first To Xenophanes 
(sixth century) ' Homer and Hesiod ' mean all the epic 
tradition, sagas and theogonies alike, just as they do to 
Herodotus when he says (ii. 53), that they two '' made 
the Greek religion, and distributed to the gods their titles 

* Athenseus, 347 «. 

* The others are the Achilles-triloor {Afyrmidons,* NtrtuUs^* Pkrygu *), 



10 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and honours and crafts, and described what they were 
like/' There Herodotus uses the conventional language ; 
but he has already a standard of criticism which is incon- 
sistent with it For he conceives Homer definitely as 
the author of the Iliad and Odyssey. He doubts if the 
Zo^ of the AfUrbcm^ be his, and is sure (ii. 117) that 
the Cypria * cannot be, because it contradicts the Iliad. 
This is the first trace of the tendency that ultimately 
prevailed Thucydides explicitly recognises the Iliad^ the 
Hymn to Apollo^ and the Odyssey as Homer's. Aristotle 
gives him nothing but the Iliad^ the Odyssey^ and the 
humorous epic Margttes^ Plato's quotations do not go 
beyond the Iliad and the Odyssey; and it is these two 
poems alone which were accepted as Homer's by the 
great Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus {ca. 160 B.C.), and 
which have remained * Homeric ' ever since. 

How was it that these two were originally selected as 
being ' Homer ' in some special degree ? And how was 
it that, in spite of the essential dissimilarities between 
them, they continued to hold the field together as his 
authentic work when so many other epics had been 
gradually taken from him ? It is the more surprising 
when we reflect that the di£Ferences and inconsist- 
encies between them had already been pointed out in 
Alexandrian times by the * Chorizontes ' or ' Separators,' 
Xenon and Hellantcus. 



Iliad and Odyssey : The Panathenaic 

Recitation 

A tradition comes to our aid which has been dif- 
ferently interpreted by various critics — the story of 



PISISTRATUS AND HOMER ii 

the recension by Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, in the 
middle of the sixth century. Late writers speak much of 
this recension. ** Vox totius antiquitoHs ** is the authority 
Wolf claims for it It is mentioned in varying terms by 
Cicero, Pausanias, i9£lian, Josephus ; it is referred to as a 
well-known fact in a late epigram purporting to be written 
for a statue of ** Pisistratus, great in counsel, who col* 
lected Homer, formerly sung in fragments." Cicero's 
account is that Pisistratus ''arranged in their present 
order the books of Homer, previously confused." The 
Byzantine Tzetzes — the name is only a phonetic way 
of spelling Caecius — makes the tradition ludicrous by 
various mistakes and additions ; his soberest version 
says that Pisistratus performed this task '' by the help of 
the industry of four famous and learned men — Concy- 
lus, Onomacritus of Athens, Zopyrus of Heraclea, and 
Orpheus of Crotona." Unfortunately, the learned Con- 
cylus is also called Epiconcylus, and represents almost 
certainly the 'Epic Cycle,' hri^v tcA/ekov, misread as 
a proper name! And the whole commission has a 
fabulous air, and smacks of the age of the Ptolemies 
rather than the sixth century. Also it is remarkable that 
in our fairly ample records about the Alexandrian critics, 
especially Aristarchus, there is no explicit reference to 
Pisistratus as an editor. 

It used to be maintained that this silence of the 
Alexandrians proved conclusively that the story was not 
in existence in their time. It has now been traced, in a 
less developed form, as far back as the fourth century B.c. 
It was always known that a certain Dieuchidas of Megara 
had accused Pisistratus of interpolating lines in Homer 
to the advantage of Athens — a charge evidently implying 
that the accused had special means of controlling the text. 



12 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

It was left for Wilamowitz to show that Dieuchidas was a 
writer much earlier than the Alexandrians, and to explain 
his motive.^ It is part of that general literary revenge 
which Megara took upon fallen Athens in the fourth cen- 
tury. ** Athens had not invented comedy ; it was M^ara. 
Nor tragedy either ; it was Sikyon. Athens had only fal- 
sified and interpolated I " Whether Dieuchidas accepted 
the Pisistratus recension as a fact generally believed, 
or whether he suggested it as an hypothesis, is not clear. 
It appears, however, that he could not find any un-Attic 
texts to prove his point by. When he wished to suggest 
the true reading he had to use his own ingenuity. It 
was he who invented a supposed original form for the 
interpolated passage in B, 671 ; and perhaps he who 
imagined the existence of a Spartan edition of Homer 
by Lycurgus, an uncontaminated text copied out honestly 
by good Dorians I 

The theory, then, that Pisistratus had somehow ' inter- 
polated Homer' was current before Alexandrian times. 
Why does Aristarchus not mention it? We cannot 
clearly say. It is possible that he took the fact for 
granted, as the epigram does. It is certain, at any rate, 
that Aristarchus rejected on some ground or other most 
of the lines which modern scholars describe as 'Athenian 
interpolations ' ; and that ground cannot have been a 
merely internal one, since he held the peculiar belief that 
Homer himself was an Athenian. Lastly, it is a curious 
fact that Cicero's statement about the recension by Pisis- 
stratus seems to be derived from a member of the 
Pergamene school, whose founder, Crates, stood almost 
alone in successfully resisting and opposing the authority 
of Aristarchus. It is quite possible that the latter tended 

^ Pkil Untfrs, tu. p. 24a 



RECITATION AT THE PANATHENiEA 13 

to belittle a method of explanation which was in particular 
favour with a rival school 

Dieuchidas, then, knows of Pisistratus having done to 
the poems something which gave an opportunity for 
interpolation. But most Megarian writers, according to 
Plutarch (Solan, 10), say it was Solon who made the 
interpolations ; and a widespread tradition credits Solon 
with a special law about the recitation of * Homer ' at the 
Festival of the Panathenaea. This law, again, is attributed 
to Hipparchus in the pseudo- Platonic dialogue which 
bears his name — a work not later than the third century. 
Lycurgus the orator ascribes it simply to 'our ances- 
tors,' and that is where we must leave it When a law 
was once passed at Athens, it tended to become at once 
the property of Solon, the great 'Nomothette/ If 
Pisistratus and Hipparchus dispute this particular law, 
it is partly because there are rumours of dishonest 
dealings attached to the story, partly because the tyrants 
were always associated with the Panathenaea. 

But what was the law 7 It seems clear that the recita- 
tion of Homer formed part of the festal observances, and 
probable that there was a competition. Again, we know 
that the poems were to be recited in a particular way. 
But was it i^ virofio>Sj^ ('by suggestion') — at any 
verse given ? That is almost incredible. Or was it i^ 
{nroK/f^e^a^ ('one beginning where the last left off')? 
Or, as Diogenes Laertius airily decides, did the law 
perhaps say i^ imoPdXSi^, and mean i( inrciX/^jy^m^ ? ^ 

Our evidence then amounts in the first place to this : 

^ One it tempted to add to this early evidence what Herodotus says (viL 6) 
of the banishment of Onomacritus by Hipparchus ; but he was banished for 
tra£Seklng in fidse orades, an oflRence of an entirely diflferent sort from interpo- 
lating works of literature. 



14 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

that there was a practice in Athens, dating at latest from 
early in the fifth century, by which the Homeric poems 
were recited publicly in a prescribed order ; and that flie 
origin of the practice was ascribed to a definite public 
enactment We find further, that in all non-Athenian 
literature down to Pindar, ' Homer ^ seems to be taken 
as the author of a much larger number of poems than 
we possess — ^probably of all the Trojan and Theban epics 
— ^whereas in Attic literature from the fifth century on- 
wards he is especially the author of the Iliad and the 
Odyssey, the other poems being first treated as of doubt- 
ful authorship, afterwards ignored. When we add that in 
the usage of all the authors who speak of this Panathenaic 
recitation, 'Homer' means simply, and as a matter of 
course, the lUad and the Odyssey, the conclusion inevi- 
tably suggests itself that it was these two poems alone 
which were selected for the recitation, and that it was 
the recitation which gave them their unique position of 
eminence as the 'true' Homer. 

Why were they selected ? One can see something, 
but not much. To begin with, a general comparison 
of the style of the rejected epics with that of our two 
poems suggests that the latter are far more elaborately 
' worked up ' than their brethren. They have more unity ; 
they are less like mere lays; they have more dramatic 
tension and rhetorical ornament. One poem only can 
perhaps be compared with them, the first which is quoted 
as ' Homer's ' in literature, the Thebais : * but the glory 
of Thebes was of all subjects the one which could least 
be publicly blazoned by Athenians ; Athens would reject 
such a thing even more unhesitatingly than Sikyon re- 
jected the ' Homer ' which praised Argos.^ 

> Hdt Y. 67. 



HISTORY OF THE TEXT 15 

We get thus one cardinal point in the history of the 
poems ; it remains to trace their development both be- 
fore and after. To take the later history first, our own 
traditional explanation of Homer is derived from the 
Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries 
B.C., Zenodotus of Ephesus (born 325 ?), Aristophanes of 
Byzantium (bom 257 ?), and Aristarchus of Samothrace 
(bom 215) ; especially from this last, the greatest authority 
on early poebry known to antiquity. Our information 
about him is mostly derived from an epitome of the works 
of four later scholars : Didymus On the Aristarchean Ricen* 
sum ; Aristontcus On the Signs in the Iliad and Odyssey — 
i.e. the critical signs used by Aristarchus ; Herodian On 
the Prosody and Accentuation of the Iliad^ and Nicanor On 
Homeric Punctuation. The two first named were of the 
Augustan age ; the epitome was made in the third century 
A.D. ; the MS. in which it is preserved is the famous 
Venetus A of the tenth century, containing the lUad but 
not the Odyssey. 

We can thus tell a good deal about the condition of 
Homer in the second century B.C., and can hope to 
establish with few errors a text 'according to Aristarchus,' 
a text which would approximately satisfy the best literary 
authority at the best period of Greek criticism. But we 
must go much further, unless we are to be very unworthy 
followers of Aristarchus and indifferent to the cause of 
science in literature. In the first place, if our comments 
come from Aristarchus, where does our received text 
come from ? Demonstrably not from him, but from 
the received text or vulgate of his day, in correction of 
which he issued his two editions, and on which neither 
he nor any one else has ultimately been able to exer- 
cise a really conmianding influence. Not that he 



1 6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

made violent changes; on the contrary, he seldom or 
never 'emended' by mere conjecture, and, though he 
marked many lines as spurious, he did not omit them. 
The greatest divergences which we find between Aristar- 
chus and the vulgate are not so great as those between 
the quartos and the folio of Hamlet. 

Yet we can see that he had before him a good many 
recensions which differed both from the vulgate and from 
one another. He mentions in especial three classes of 
such MSS. — ^those of individuals, showing the recension 
or notes of poets like Antimachus and Rhi&nus, or of 
scholars like Zenodotus ; those of cities, coming from 
Marseilles, Chios, Argos, Sindpe, and in general from all 
places except Athens, the city of the vulgate ; and, lastly, 
what he calls the 'vulgar' or 'popular' or 'more care- 
less ' texts, among which we may safely reckon ' that of 
the many verses ' (ij iroKwrrt'xp^). 

The quotations from Homer in pre-Alexandrian writers 
enable us to appreciate both the extent and the limits 
of this variation. They show us first that even in Athens 
the vulgate had not established itself firmly before the 
year 300 B.C. ^schines the orator, a man of much 
culture, not only asserts that the phrase ^rififi S'eV arparov 
^\J0€ occurs ' several times in the I/iad,' whereas in our 
texts it does not occur at all ; but quotes verbally passages 
from O and W with whole lines quite different And the 
third-century papyri bear the same testimony, notably 
the fragment of A in the Flinders-Petrie collection pub- 
lished in 1891 by Prof. Mahaffy, and the longer piece 
from the same book published by M. Nicole in the Revue 
de Philologie^ 1894. The former of these, for instance, 
contains the beginnings or endings of thirty-eight lines of 
A between 502 and 537. It omits one of our lines ; con- 



TEXT IN FOURTH AND THIRD CENTURIES 17 

tains four strange lines ; and has two others in a di£Ferent 
shape from that in our texts : a serious amount of diver- 
gence in such a small space. On the other hand, the 
variations seem to be merely verbal ; and the same applies 
to the rest of the papyrus evidence. There is no variation 
in matter in any fourth-century text. 

The sununing up of this evidence gives us the last two 
stages of the Homeric poems. The canonical statements 
of fact and the order of the incidents were fixed by a 
gradual process of which the cardinal point is the institu- 
tion of the Panathenaic recitations ; the wording of the 
text line by line was gradually stereotyped by continued 
processes of school repetition and private reading and 
literary study, culminating in the minute professional 
criticism of Zenodotus and his successors at the Alexan- 
drian library. 

If we go further back, it is impossible not to be struck 
by the phenomenon, that while the Homeric quotations 
in most fourth and fifth century writers, even in Aristotle, 
for instance, diflFer considerably from our text, Plato's 
quotations^ agree with it almost word for word. One 
cannot but combine with this the conclusion drawn by 
Grote in another context, that Demetrius of Phalfirum, 
when summoned by Ptolemy I. to the foundation of the 
library at Alexandria, made use of the books bequeathed 
by Plato to the Academy.* 

This analysis brings us again to the Panathenaic reci- 
tation. We have seen that its e£Fects were to establish 
the Iliad and the Odyssey as ' Homer' par excellence; to 
fix a certain order of incidents in them ; and, of course, 
to make them a public and sacred possession of Athens. 

^ Counting AleiHades IL as spurious. 
* Gfote, PlaU^ chap, yi 

B 



1 8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Let us try to see further into it When was it instituted ? 
Was there really a law at all, or only a gradual process 
which the tradition, as its habit is, has made into one 
definite act ? 

As for the date, the establishment of the custom is sure 
not to be earlier than the last person to whom it is as- 
cribed; that is, it took place not before, but probably after, 
the reign of Hipparchus. Now, to make the works of the 
great Ionian poet an integral part of the most solenm reli- 
gious celebration of Athens, is a thing which can only have 
taken place in a period of active fraternising with Ionia. 
That movement begins for Athens with the Ionian revolt ; 
before 500 B.C. she had been ashamed of her supposed 
kinsmen ; even Cleisthenes had abolished the Ionian tribe 
names. The year 499 opens the great Pan-Ionic period 
of Athenian policy, in which Athens accepts the position 
of metropolis and protectress of Ionia, absorbs Ionian 
culture, and rises to the intellectual hegemony of Greece. 
Learning and letters must have fled from Miletus at the 
turn of the sixth century B.C., as they fled from Con- 
stantinople in the fifteenth A.D., and Athens was their 
natural refuge. We shall see later the various great men 
and movements that travelled at this time from Asia to 
Athens. One typical fact is the adoption of the Ionian 
alphabet at Athens for private and literary use. 

The native Athenian alphabet was an archaic and 
awkward thing, possessing neither double consonants nor 
adequate vowel-distinctions. The Ionian was, roughly, 
that which we now use. It was not officially adopted 
in Athens till 404 — the public documents liked to pre- 
serve their archaic majesty — ^but it was in private use 
there during the Persian Wars;i that is, it came over 

^ Kirchhoff, Alphabtt^ Ed. It. p. 92. 



OFFICIAL COPYING tg 

at the time when Athens accepted and asserted her 
position as the metropolis of Ionia, and adopted the 
Ionian poetry as a part of her sacred possessions. But 
a curious difficulty suggests itself. Homer in Ionia was 
of course already written in Ionic Our tradition, how- 
ever, backed by many explicit statements of the Alex- 
andrians and by considerations of textual criticism,^ 
expressly insists that the old texts of Homer were in 
the old Attic alphabet If Homer came into the Pan- 
athenaea at the very same time as the new Ionian alphabet 
came to Athens, how was it that the people rewrote him 
from the better script into the worse ? The answer is 
not hard to find ; and it is also the answer to another 
question, which we could not solve before. Copies of 
Homer were written in official Attic, because the recita- 
tion at the Panathenaea was an official ceremony, pre- 
scribed by a legal enactment 

There was then a definite law, a symptom of the 
general Ionising movement of the first quarter of the 
fifth century. Can we see more closely what it effected ? 

It prescribed a certain order, and it started a tendency 
towards an official text It is clear that adherence to 
the words of the text was not compulsory, though 
adherence to the matter was. It seems almost certain 
that the order so imposed was not a new and arbitrary 
invention. It must have been already known and ap- 
proved at Athens; though, of course, it may have been 
only one of various orders current in the different 
Homeric centres of Ionia, and was probably not rigid 
and absolute anywhere. At any rate one thing is clear 
—this law was among the main events which ulti- 

^ See Caver't mnswer to WUamowiU, Grunt^ragm d$r Hom^rkrUik^ p. 
69ft 



K 



20 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

mately took the epos for good out of the hands of the 
rhapsodes. 

We know that the epos in Ionia was in the pos- 
session of ' Hom6ridai ' or * rhapsddoi ' ; and we have 
reason to suppose that these were organised in guilds 
or schools. We know roughly how a rhapsode set to 
work. He would choose his ' bit ' from whatever legend 
it might be, as the bards do in the Odyssey.^ He would 
have some lines of introduction — ^so much Pindar tells 
us, and the Homeric hymns or preludes show us what 
he meant — and probably some lines of finish. He 
would almost inevitably be tempted to introduce bright 
patches and episodes to make his lay as attractive as 
others. He would object to a fixed text, and utterly 
abhor the subordination of parts to whole. 

Now, our poems are full of traces of the rhapsode; 
they are developments from the recited saga, and where 
they fail in unity or consistency the recited saga is 
mostly to blame. For instance in E, the superhuman 
exploits of DiomMes throw Achilles into the shade and 
upset the plot of the I/iad. But what did that matter 
to a rhapsode who wanted a good declamation, and 
addressed an audience interested in Diomfides ? The 
Doloneia (K), placed where it is, is impossible ; it not 
only makes a night of portentous length ; it also rends in 
two a continuous narrative. In a detached recitation it 
would be admirable. To take a di£Ferent case, there 
is a passage describing a clear night, " when all the high 
peaks stand out, and the jutting promontories and glens ; 
and above the sky the infinite heaven breaks open'* This 
occurs in H, where the Trojan watch-fires are likened to 
the stars ; it occurs also in II, where the Greeks' despair 

* ^. 73 ft. 500 ft; tt, 3J6. 



TRACES OF THE RHAPSODE 3i 

is rolled back like a doud leaving the night clear. Com- 
mentators discuss in which place it is genuine. Surely, 
anywhere and everywhere. Such lovely lines, once 
heard, were a temptation to any rhapsode, and likely 
to recur wherever a good chance ofiFered. The same 
explanation applies to the multiplied similes of B, 455 fiF. 
They are not meant to be taken all together ; they are 
alternatives for the reciter to choose from. 

And even where there is no flaw in the composition, 
the formulae for connection between the incidents — 
'* Thus then did th^ fight;' '' Thus then did they pray''— 
and the openings of new subjects with phrases like 
'' Thus rose Dawn from her bed;* and the like, suggest a 
new rhapsode beginning his lay in the middle of an epic 
whole, the parts before and after being loosely taken as 
known to the audience. 

Nevertheless, the striking fact about our Homeric 
poems is not that they show some marks of the rhap- 
sode's treatment, but that they do not show more. They 
are, as they stand, not suited for the rhapsode. They 
are too long to recite as wholes, except on some grand 
and unique occasion like that which the law specially 
contemplated; too highly organised to split up easily 
into detachable lengths. It is not likely that the law 
reduced them to their present state at one blow. All 
it insisted on was to have the 'true history' in its 
proper sequence. If it permitted rhapsodes at all, it 
had to allow them a certain freedom in their choice of 
ornament It did not insist on adherence to a fixed 
wording. 

The whole history of the text in the fourth century 
illustrates this arrangement, and the fact essentially is, 
that the poems as we have them, organic and indivisible. 



.22 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

are adapted to the demands of a reading public. There 
was no reading public either in Athens or in Ionia by 
470. Anaximander wrote his words of wisdom for a 
few laborious students to learn by heart; Xenophanes 
appealed simply to the ear ; it was not till forty years 
later that Herodotus turned his recitations into book 
form for educated persons to read to themselves, and 
Euripides began to collect a library. 

This helps us to some idea of the Ionian epos as it 
lived and grew before its transplanting. It was recited, 
not read ; the incidents of the Iliad and the Odyssey 
were mostly in their present order, and doubtless the 
poems roughly of their present compass, though we 
may be sure there were Iliads without £, and Odysseys 
ending, where Aristarchus ended his, at ^ 296, omitting 
the last book and a half. Much more important, the 
Iliad did not necessarily stop at the mere funeral of 
Hector. We know of a version which ran on from 
our last line — *^ So dealt they with the burying of Hector ; 
but there came the Amazon^ daughter of Ares^ great- 
hearted slayer of men " — and which told of the love of 
Achilles for the Amazon princess, and his slaying of 
her, and probably also of his well-earned death. The 
death of Achilles is, as Goethe felt it to be, the real 
end that our Iliad implies. When the enchanted steed, 
Xanthus, and the dying Hector prophesy it, we feel that 
their words must come true or the story lose its meaning. 
And if it was any of the finer 'Sons of Homer' who 
told of that last death-grapple where it was no longer 
Kebrionte nor Patroclus, but Achilles himself, who lay 
** under the blind dust -stormy the mighty limbs flung 
mightily f and the riding of war forgotten^' the world 
must owe a grudge to those over-patriotic editors who 



THE LANGUAGE OF HOMER 23 

could not bear to let the national Epic end with a 
triumph for the Trojans. 

Of course in this Ionic Homer there were no ' Athenian 
interpolations,' no passages like the praise of Menestheus, 
the claim to Salamis, the mentions of Theseus, Procris, 
Phaedra, Ariadne, or the account of the Athenians in N, 
under the name of ' Umg-robed laniansi acting as a regi- 
ment of heavy infantry. Above all, the language, though 
far from pure, was at least very different from our vulgate 
text ; it was free from Atticisms. 



The Epic Language 

We must analyse this language and see the 'historical 
processes implied in its growth. 

An old and much-scofiFed-at division of Greek dialects 
spoke of Ionic, ^olic, Doric, and 'Epic' The first 
three denote, or mean to denote, real national distinc- 
tions ; the last is, of course, an artificial name. But the 
thing it denotes is artificial too — ^a language that no 
lonians, Dorians, or Cohans ever spoke; a Marge 
utterance,' rhythmic and emotional, like a complicated 
instrument for the expression of the heroic saga. As 
has already been remarked, it is a dialect conditioned at 
every turn by the Epic metre ; its fixed [epithets, its for- 
mulas, its turns of sentence-connection, run into hexa- 
meters of themselves. Artificial as it is in one sense, 
it makes the impression of Nature herself speaking. 
Common and random phrases — the torrents coming 
*^down from the hills on their head;" the **high West wind 
shouting ever a wine-faced sea;'* **the eastern isle where 
4iweUs E^s the Dawn-child^ amid her palaces and h^ 



24 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

dancing-groundSf and the rising places of the Sun " — these 
words in Epic Greek seem alive ; they call up not 
precisely the look or sound, but the exact emotional 
impression of morning and wind and sea. The ex- 
pressions for human feeling are almost more magical : 
the anger of '* what though his hands be as Jlre, and his 
spirit as burning iron "/ or the steadfastness of *'Bear, O 
my hearty thou hast borne yet a harder thing." 

There is thus no disparagement to the Epic dialect 
in saying that, as it stands, it is no language, but a mix- 
ture of linguistically-incongruous forms, late, early, and 
primaeval. 

There are first the Atticisms. Forms like Ti/S^, &»9, 
vuc&vre^f can only have come into the poems on Attic 
soil, and scarcely much before the year 500 B.C. At 
least, the fragments of Solon's Laws have, on the 
whole, a more archaic look. But for the purposes of 
history we must distinguish. There are first the remov- 
able Atticisms. A number of lines which begin with 
ho^ will not scan until we restore the Ionic form i^. 
That is, they are good Ionic lines, and the Attic form 
is only a mistake of the Attic copyist. But there are 
also fixed Atticisms — lines which scan as they stand, and 
refuse to scan if turned into Ionic; these are in the 
strict sense late lines ; they were composed on Attic soil 
after Athens had taken possession of the epOs. 

Again, there are 'false forms' by the hundred — 
attempts at a compromise made by an Athenian reciter 
or scribe between a strange Ionic form and his own 
natural Attic, when the latter would not suit the metre. 
The Ionic for ' seeing ' was opiovre:, the Attic op&vre^ — 
three syllables instead of four; our texts give the false 
opdcnrref — 1>. they have tortured the Attic form into font 



'ATTICISMS' AND '^OLISMS' 25 

syllables by a quaver on the ». Similarly awtiov^ is an 
attempt to make the Attic airhv^ fill the place of the 
uncontracted airiea^, and cirxerdaadai is an elongated 
fvxBTaaOai. Spelling, of course, followed pronunciation ; 
the scribe wrote what the reciter chanted. 

The historical process which these forms imply, can 
only have taken place when Athens looked nowhere 
outside herself for literary information, when there were 
no Ionic-speaking bards to correct the Attic bookseller. 
Some of them, indeed, can only have ceased to be 
absurd when the Koinf, the common literary language, 
had begun to blur the characters of the real dialects 
and to derive everything from the Attic standard. That 
is, they would date from late in the fourth century. 

But to eliminate the Attic forms takes us a very little 
way ; there is another non-Ionic element in ' Homer's ' 
language which has been always recognised, though 
variously estimated, from antiquity onwards, and which 
seems to belong to the group of dialects spoken in 
Thessaly, Lesbos, and the i£olian coast of Asia including 
the Troad. Forms like 'ArpelSao, Movadmv, /rcy for Sp, 
irlavpe; for riaaiipe^, intensitives in ipir, adjectives in -eupo^, 
and masses of verbal flexions are proved to be i£olic, as 
well as many particular words like iroXvird^fAovo^, Btpairtf^, 

There is klso another earlier set of 'false forms,' 
neither i£olic nor Ionic, but explicable only as a mixture 
of the two. iceKkriy&T€f: is no form ; it is an original i£olic 
Kmck/rfovT^ twisted as close as metre will allow it to the 
Ionic Ke/cKfjyire^ ; fjw&ra tcfjpvf, for ' shouting herald,' is 
the i£olic iirvra brought as near as metre permits to the 
Ionic ^TTVTfi^. Most significant of all is the case of 
the Digamma or Vau, a W-sound, which disappeared in 



26 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Ionic and Attic Greek, both medially (as in our Norwich^ 
Berwick) and initially (as in wkOf and the Lancashire 
'oomam). It survivedi however, in Doric inscriptionSi and 
in such of the iGolic as were not under Ionian influence, 
till the fifth and sometimes the fourth century. It is 
called in antiquity the 'i£olic letter/ Now there are 3354 
places in the poems which insist on the restoration of this 
Vau — ig. the lines will not scan without it ; 617 places, 
on the other hand, where in ancient iGolic it ought to 
stand, but is metrically inadmissible. That is, through 
the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of 
the i£olic pronunciation is preserved ; in a small part 
the Ionic asserts itself. 

These facts have been the subject of hot controversy ; 
but the only effective way to minimise their importance is 
to argue that we have no remains of iGolic of the seventh 
century, and that the apparent iGolisms may be merely 
'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the 
scattered townships on the coast of Asia massed them- 
selves into groups under the names of Idnes and Aioleis 
— an historical hypothesis which leads to difficulties. 

It is not disputed that the ^JEoMc* element is the 
older. Philology and history testify to it, and weight 
nniKt be allowed to the curious fact, that to turn the 
poouiN into i^'Iolic produces the rhymes and assonances 
rhnrdctoristic of primitive poetry in numbers far too 
Uitfo to bo the result of accident.^ And it holds as a 
^nnriul rule that when the MoYic and Ionic forms are 
ni(ititcully inditlcrcnt — f>. when the line scans equally 
woll with either — the Ionic is put ; when they are not 
liwtinnnntf then in the oldest parts of the poems the 

(•ff»ii)f Milt il^ffMm hmfiifwr^ 



EVIDENCE OF THE LANGUAGE 27 

iGolic stands and the Ionic cannot, in the later parts the 
Ionic stands and the iGolic cannot. And further, where 
the two dialects denote the same thing by entirely dif- 
ferent words, the i£olic word tends to stand in its native 
form ; e^. yJawi^ * people/ keeps its a, because the Ionic 
word was Svjfu^. For a * temple ' the Ionic V1709 stands 
everywhere, but that is just because temples are a late 
development; the oldest worship was at altars in the 
open air.^ 

There are many exceptions to these rules. Dr. Fick 
of Gottingen, who has translated all the * older parts ' of 
Homer back to a supposed original i£olic, leaving what 
will not transcribe as either late or spurious, has found 
himself obliged to be inconsistent in his method ; when 
FiSiaOai occurs without a F he sometimes counts it as 
evidence of lateness, sometimes alters it into uciaOat. In 
the same way a contraction like viK&vre^ may represent 
an i£olic vUcanei from vUafAi, or may be a staring 
Atticism. When we see further that, besides the lonisms 
which refuse to move, there are numbers of i£olisms 
which need never have been kept for any reason of 
metre, the conclusion is that the Ionising of the poems 
is not the result of a deliberate act on the part of a 
particular Ionic bard — Pick gives it boldly to Kynaethus 
of Chios — but part of that gradual semi-conscious 
modernising and re-forming to which all saga-poetry is 
subject. The same process can be traced in the various 
dialectic versions of the Nibelungenlied and the Chanson 
de Roland. A good instance of it occurs in the English 
ballad of Sir Degrevant^ where the hero ^ Agravain ' has 
not only had a D put before his name, but sometimes 
rhymes with ^retenaunce' or 'chaunce' and sometimes 

' Caner, Gmndfra^m^ p. 303. 



28 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

with * recreaunt ' or ' avaunt' It comes from an Anglo- 
Norman original, in which the Sieur iAgrivauns formed 
his accusative 



The Subject-Mattbr op Homer 

The evidence of language is uicomplete without some 
consideration of the matter of the poems. What nation- 
ality, for instance, would naturally be interested in the 
subject of the Iliad? The scene is in the Troad, on 
iGolic ground. The hero is Achilles, from iGolic Thes- 
saly. The chief Idng is Agamenmon, ancestor of the 
kings of iGolic Kym& Other heroes come from Nor- 
thern and Central Greece, from Crete and from Lycia. 
The lonians are represented only by Nestor, a hero of 
the second rank, who is not necessary to the plot 

This evidence goes to discredit the Ionian origin of the 
main thread of the lUad; but does not the same line 
of argument, if pursued further, suggest something still 
more strange — vii., a Peloponnesian origin? Agamem- 
non is king of Argos and Mycenae ; Menelaus is king of 
Sparta; Diomddes, by some little confusion, of Argos 
also ; Nestor, of Pylos in Messenia. The answer to this 
difficulty throws a most striking light on the history of 
the poems. All these heroes have been dragged down to 
the Peloponnese from homes in Northern Greece. 

Diomddes, first, has no room in Argos ; apart from the 
difficulty with Agamemnon, he is not in the genealogy^ 
and has to inherit through his mother. A slight study of 
the local worships shows what he is, an idealised i£tolian. 
He is the founder of cities in Italy ; the constant com- 
panion of Odysseus, who represents the North -West 

^ Tk«nU9m Romances^ Camden Soc, 1844, esp. p. 289. 



r ".• 



THE SUBJECT OF THE ILIAD 29 

islands. He is the son of Tydeus, who ate his enemy's 
head, and the kinsman of Agrios (^Savage') and the 
^sons of Agrios' — the mere lion-hero of the ferocious 
tribes of the North-West 

Agamemnon himself comes from the plain of Thessaly. 
He is king of Argos ; only in a few late passages, of 
Mycenae. Aristarchus long ago pointed out that ' Pelas- 
gian Argos ' in Homer means the plain of Thessaly. But 
' horse-rearing Argos ' must be the same, for Argos of the 
Peloponnese was without cavalry even in historical times. 
And a careful treatment of the word ' Argos ' shows its 
gradual expansion in the poems from the plain of 
Thessaly to Greece in general, and then its second 
localisation in the Peloponnese. Agamemnon is the 
rich king of the plain of Thessaly ; that is why he is 
from the outset connected with Achilles, the poor but 
valiant chief from the seaward mountains ; that is why 
he chooses Aulis as the place for assembling his fleet. 

Aias in the late tradition is the hero of Salamis ; but in 
the poems he has really no fixed home. He is the hero 
of the seven-fold shield, whose father is ^Shield-strap' 
(Telamon), and his son, 'Broad-buckler' (Eurysakes); 
if he has connections, we must look for them in the 
neighbourhood of his brother the Locrian, and his 
father's brother, Ph6kos, whose name suggests Phokis ; — 
though it is true that some of the legends seem to derive 
his name from ffxifcff (seal), and treat him as a seal-hero.^ 
So far we get a general conception of an original stage 
of the story in which the chiefs were all from Northern 
Greece. Where was the fighting ? 

Achilles and Agamemnon must be original ; so must 
Hector and Ilion ; so, above all, must Alexander-Paris 

^ He was dabbed to death 00 the lea-ahore; hit mother wm called 



30 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and Helen& But need Ilion be in Troia on the site 
of Hiflsarlik ? It is worth observing that the scenery 
of the similes in the oldest parts of the poems is Thes- 
salian, and not Asiatic ; that Hector (' Upholder ') is not 
connected in local legend with the historical Troy — its 
heroes are i£neas and one Dares; ^ that this JEne3S, 
though afterwards identified with a hero at Hissarlik, 
seems to be in origin the tribal hero of the i£ne&nes 
in South Thessaly, just as Teukros (' Hitter'), the archer, 
gets in later tradition connected with Ilion, and the Ilion- 
men become Teukroi ? Of course it is ultimately a myth 
that we have to deal with. The original battle for Helen 
was doubtless a strife of light and darkness in the sky, 
just as the Niblungs were cloud-men and Sigurd a sun- 
god, before they were brought down to Worms and 
Burgundy. But it looks as if the Helen-feud had its 
first earthly localisation, not in Troy, but on the southern 
frontier of those Thessalian bards who sang of it. < 

When Dr. Schliemann made his first dazzling dis- 
coveries at Mycenae and Hissarlik, he believed that he 
had identified the corpse of Agamemnon and recovered 
the actual cup from which Nestor drank, the pigeons 
still intact upon the handles. We all smile at this now ; 
but it remains a difficult task to see the real relation 
which subsists between the civilisation described in the 
Homeric poems, and the great castles and walls, the 
graves and armour and pottery, which have now been 
unearthed at so many different sites in Greece. 

Of the nine successive cities at Hissarlik, the sixth 
from the bottom corresponds closely with the civilisa- 
tion of Mycenae, a civilisation simihu* in many respects 
to that implied in the earliest parts of the Iliad. The 

^ Dwicktr, Grmctt cfaAjk euL * See Fnhot, 



MYCENiE: THE MIGRATIONS 31 

Homeric house can be illustrated by the castle of Tiryns^ 
the *' cornice of blue kyanos^*' a mystery before, is explained 
by the blue glass-like fragments found at Mycenae. The 
exhumed graves and the earliest parts of Homer agree 
in having weapons of bronze and ornaments of iron ; 
they agree substantially in their armour and their works 
of art, the inlaid daggers and shields, the lion-hunts and 
bull-hunts by men in chariots, and in the ostensible 
ignorance of writing. 

On the other hand, the similarity only holds good for 
the earliest strata of the poems, 'and not fully even for 
them. Mycenae buried her dead ; the men of the epos 
burnt theirs — a practice which probably arose during the 
Sea Migrations, when the wanderers had no safe soil to 
lay their friends in. Tiryns actually used stone tools 
to make its bronze weapons, whereas the earliest epos 
knows of iron tools; and in general we may accept 
E. Meyer's account that the bloom of the epos lies 
in a 'middle age' between the Mycenaean and the 
classical periods. 

Thus the general evidence of the subject-matter 
conspires with that of the language, to show that the 
oldest strata have been worked over from an i£olic 
into an Ionic shape; that the later parts were origin- 
ally composed in Ionia in what then passed as 'Epic' 
— that is, in the same dialect as then appeared in 
the rest of the poems, with an unconsciously stronger 
tincture of lonism; further, that the translation was 
gradual, and that the general development took cen- 
turies; and lastly, perhaps, that an all-important epoch 
in this development was formed by the great Race 
Migrations which are roughly dated about 1000 B.c. 
It seems to have been the Migrations that took the 



}9 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

tegradary war across the sea, when historical iColiaos 
found llieouelves Bating in ^e Troad against Hissarlik, 
and liked to identify thrir own enemies with those of 
their ancestors ; the Migrations, which drew down the 
Northern heroes to the Peloponnese, ^en a stream 
of Greeks from the Inachus valley met in Asia a stream 
from Thessaly. The latter contributed their heroic saga ; 
the former brought the memory of the gigantic castles 
and material splendour of Tiryns and Mycenae. 

These Migrations present a phenomenon common 
enough in history, yet one which in romantic horror 
ba£Bes a modem imagination : the vague noise of fighting 
in the North ; the silly human amusement at the troubles 
of one's old enemies over the border ; the rude awaken- 
ing; the flight of man, woman, and child; the hasty 
shipbuilding ; the flinging of life and fortune on un- 
known waters. The boats of that day were at the mercy 
of any weather. The ordinary villagers can have had 
little seamanship. They were lost on the waves in thou- 
sands. They descended on strange coasts and died by 
famine or massacre. At the best, a friendly city would 
take in the wives and children, while the men set off 
grimly to seek, through unknown and monster-peopled 
seas, some spot of clear land to rest their feet upon. 
Aristarchus put Homer at the 'Ionic Migration.' This 
must be so far true that the Migrations — both ^olic and 
Ionic — stirred depths of inward experience which found 
outlet by turning a set of ballads into the great epos, by 
creating 'Homer.' It was from this adventurous exile 
that Ionia rose ; and the bloom of Ionia must have been 
the bloom of the epos. 



ADVANCES IN CIVILISATION 33 



Criteria op Aob 

As to determining the comparative dates of various 
parts of the poemsi we have already noticed several pos- 
sible clues. Bronze weapons are earlier than iron, open- 
air altars earlier than temples, leathern armour earlier 
than metal armour, individual foot-fighting (witness 
* swift-footed Achilles ') earlier than chariot-fighting, and 
this again than riding and the employment of colunms 
of infantry. The use of * Argos ' for the plain of Thessaly 
is earlier than its vague use for Greece, and this than ite 
secondary specialisation in the Peloponnese. But all such 
clues must be followed with extreme caution. Not only 
is it always possible for a late poet to use an archaic 
formula — even Sophocles can use ;^aXx&9 for a sword — 
but also the very earliest and most essential episodes 
have often been worked over and re-embellished down 
to the latest times. The slaying of Patroclus, for in- 
stance, contains some of the latest work in Homer ; it 
was a favourite subject from the very outset, and new 
bards kept ' improving ' upon it. 

We find 'Hellas' and 'Achaia' following similar lines 
of development with Argos. They denote first Achilles's 
own district in Phthia, the home of those tribes which 
caUed their settlement in the Peloponnese ' Achaia,' and 
that in Italy 'Great Hellas.' But through most of 
the Iliad ' Achaioi ' means the Greeks in general, while 
' Hellas ' is still the special district In the Odyssey we 
find ' Hellas ' in the later universal sense, and in B we 
meet the idea ' Panhell6nes.' This is part of the expan- 
sion of the poef s geographical range : at first all the actors 

had really been * Achaioi ' or * Argeioi '; afterwards the old 

c 



$4 UTKHAivnr. or asxient greece 

nifflai 'A/Jiaioi' and 'Argeioi' contioiicd to be used to 
distvAt all tite actors, though the actnal area of &e poems 
had widened far beyond the old limits and was widening 
•till, 'rhe la^t parti of the Otfyfy ^^ q^^c familiar 
wKh Bicity and Kyrftne, and have some inklings <rf the 
ifiterif;r of Kuwia, and perhaps of the Vikings of flie far 

Another f[radual growth ts in the nuuriage-customs. 
Orij(inalty, an AriHtrjtle noticed, the Greeks simply bought 
fheir wivm; a grtcxl-kioking daughter was valuable as 
bcinf{ AK^irlfioia, ' kine-winning,' because of the price, 
(lie fllm, lier Huitors gave for her. In classical times the 
ctlnloin wan the reverse ; instead of receiving money for 
hi* daiiglitar, the father had to give a dowry with her : 
Mnd IIiR late parts of the poems use iSw> in the sense 
of 'dowry.' There are several stages between, and one 
itf the criinos of the suitors in the Odjyssey is their refusal 
t(i pay ttva. 

Another criterion of age lies in the treatment of the 
aupcrnatural. It is not only that the poems contain, as 
NdIkIc! ■ hiiH Hhown, traces of the earliest religion, ancestor- 
wtirMhip and propitiation of the dead, mixed with a later 
' Ionic ' spirit, daring and sceptical, which knows nothing 
of inyHtcricN, and uses tlic gods for rhetorical ornament, or 
wen for comic relief. There is also a marked development 
(U* ticitoiienition in the use of supernatural machinery. 
In (he ritrlicst stages a divine presence is only introduced 
whcrr there is a real mystery, where a supernatural ex- 
plunatitin is necessary to the primitive mind. If Odys 
wus, cntcrit))t the Phivacians' town at dusk, passes on 
utd on safe and imnoticed, it seems as if Athena has 

' Tlir LMnttn^Mct. ctpccUllr K- tt-96. 
• /V ** IT- iS t 



TREATMENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL 35 

tlirown a cloud over him ; if Achilles, on the very point 
of drawing his sword against his king, feels something 
within warn and check him, it seems to be a divine hand 
and voice. Later on the gods come in as mere orna- 
ments; they thwart one another; they become ordinary 
characters in the poems. The more divine interference 
we get, the later is the work, until at last we reach the posi- 
tively-marring masquerades of Athena in the Odyssey, and 
the offensive scenes of the gods fighting in E and T. Not 
that any original state of the poems can have done with- 
out the gods altogether. The gods were not created in 
Asia; they are 'Olympian,' and have their characters 
and their formal epithets from the old home of the 
Achaioi. 

The treatment of individual gods, too. has its signi- 
ficance — though a local, not a chronological one. Zeus 
and Hera meet with little respect. Iris is like the 'mal- 
apert heralds' of Euripides. Ares is frankly detested for 
a bloodthirsty Thradan coward. Aphrodite, who fights 
because of some echo in her of the Phcenician Ashtaroth, 
a really formidable warrior, is ridiculed and rebuked for 
her fighting. Only two gods are respectfully handled — 
Apollo, who, though an ally of Troy, is a figure genuinely 
divine; and Poseidon, who moves in a kind of rolUng 
splendour. The reason is not far to seek : they are the 
real gods of the Ionian. The rest are, of course, gods ; 
but they are ' other peoples' gods,' and our view of them 
depends a good deal on our view of their worshippers. 
Athena comes next in honour to the two lonians ; in the 
Odyss^ and E she outstrips them. Athens could manage 
so much, but not more : she could not m^ke the Ionian 
poetry accept her stern goddess in her real grandeur; 
Athena remained in the epos a fighting woman, treache- 



36 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

roos and bitter, though a good partisan. She will never 
be forgiven for the last betrayal of Hector. 

Great caution must be used in estimating the signifi- 
cance of repetitions and quotations. For instance, the 
disguised Odysseus liegins prophesying his return in t, 
303, with the natural appeal : — 

" Z*ut hear mtjirtt, tfgeds most high atid great. 
And brave Odysseui hearth, where lam ctme.' 

But when he says the same in f, 158, not only is the 
prophecy imprudent when he does not mean to be 
recognised, but he is also not at his own hearth at all, 
and a slight surplusage in the first line betrays the 
imitator: "Zeus, hear me brst- 9f gvds and thy kind 
board." The passage is at home in t, and not at home 
inf. 
Similarly, what we hear in k, 136, is natural :— 

" In the isle there dwell 
Kiri^ fair-tretfdt dread goddess fitil of seng? 

Kirki was essentially 'dread,' and her 'song' was magic 
incantation ; but in yk, 448, it runs :— 

" Calypso in the isle 
DwelUthJair'tress'ti, ^ead goddess fitU o/song.' 

Calypso was not specially 'dread' nor 'full of song,' 
except in imitation of Kirkd ; and, above all, to ' dwell 
fair-tress'd,' the verb and adjective thus joined, is not a 
possible Homeric manner of behaviour, as to 'dwell 
secure' or to 'lie prostrate' would be. 

In the same way the description of Tartarus in Theogmy, 
720 — " As far 'maik earth as is the heaven above" — is 
natural and original. Homer's '^As far 'neath hell as 



QUOTATION 37 

i^avat is dtr the earth " (B, i6) has the air of an imitation, 
exaggerating the language it copies. 

Yet, as a matter of fact, Calypso {Celatrix, 'She who 
hides') is probably original in the Odysseus-saga, and 
Kirk4 secondary. There were other legends where Kirki 
had an independent existence ; and she had turned the 
Argonauts into bears and tigers before she was impressed 
to turn Odysseus's companions into pigs. And the Th«o- 
got^, which is here quoted by the Iliad, itself quotes almost 
every part of both lUaii and Odyss^. The use of this 
criterion of qaotation is affected by two things — first, all 
the pass^es in question may go back to an original 
whidi is now lost, sometimes to a definite passage in a 
lost epic, sometimes -te. a mere stock-in-trade formula; 
secondly, the big epics were so long in process of active 
growth that they all had plenty of time to quote one 
another. We have mentioned the Odyssean and Hesiodic 
phrases in the slaying of Patroclus (U, 380-^480). But the 
most striking instance of all is that the Hades scene in m, 
the very latest rag of the Odyss^, gives an account of the 
Suitor-Claying which agrees not with our version, but 
with the earlier account which our version has sup- 
planted (p. 40). 

Be^des verbal imitations, we have more general refer- 
ences. For instance, the great catalogues in Homer, 
that of ships in B, of myrmidons in il, of women in X, 
are almost without question extracts from a Boeotian 
or 'Hesiodic' source. Again, much of S consists of 
abridged and incomplete stories about the Nostoi or 
Homtcomings of Agamemnon, Aias the Less, and 
Menelaus. They seem to imply a reference to some 
fuller and more detailed original — in all probability to 
the series of lays called the Nostoi, which formed 



)« UTERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

one of the rejected epics. The story in S (242 ff.) about 
Helen helping Odysseus in Troy, is definitely stated by 
Proclua — a suspected witness, it is true — to occur in the 
littU Jhad.* The succeeding one (271 ff.), makes Helen 
hostile to the Greeks, and cannot come horn the same 
source. But it also reads like an abridgment So does the 
Hlory of Bellerophon in Z : " Proitos first sent him to sU^ 
tkt Ckimaira ; ttom she was a thing dtvme and net mortal, in 
/hmt a Hon, and Mind a serpent, and in the middle a wild 
gmt, hreathing furious fire. Yet he slew her, obeying the 
signs of the gods" What signs, and bow 7 And what is 
the meaning of the strange lines 200 f . 7 " But when he, 
fyo, was hated of all the gods, then verify down the Plain qf 
Wandering alone he wandered, eating his heart, shunning 
tJu tread of men" The original poem, whatever it was, 
would have told us ; the risunU takes all the details for 
granted. 

Space does not allow more than a reference to that 
criterion of date which has actually been most used in 
the ' Higher Criticism ' — the analysis of the story. It 
might be interesting to note that the wall round the 
ships in the Iliad is a late motive ; that it is built under 
impossible circumstances; that it is sometimes there and 
sometimes not, and that it seems to return mysteriously 
after Apollo has flattened it into the ditch ; or that 
Achilles in IT speaks as if the events of I had not 
occurred ; or that Odysseus' adventures in k and yi*, and 
perhaps in (, seem to have been originally composed in 
the third person, not the first, while his supposed false 
stories in % and r seem actually to represent older 
versions of the real Odysseus-legend ; or that the poets 
of T and the following books do not seem to know that 
Athena had transformed their hero in v into a decrepit 



ANALYSIS OF STORY: SUITOR-SLAYING 39 

old man, and that he had consistently remained so to 
the end of o-. But in all such criticism the detail is the 
life. We select one point for illustration — the Suitor- 
slaying. 

In our present version Odysseus begins with the bow, 
uses up all his arrows, puts down the bow, and arms 
himself with spear and shield and helmet, which T^le- 
machus has meanwhile brought (x, 98). What were 
those fifty desperate men with their swords doing while 
he was making the change ? Nearly all critics see here 
a combination of an old Bow-fight with a later Spear- 
fight As to the former, let us start with the Feet- 
washing in T. Odysseus is speaking with Penelope ; 
she is accompanied by Eurycleia and the handmaids. 
Odysseus dare not reveal himself directly, because he 
knows that the handmaids are false. He speaks to his 
wife in hints, tells her that he has seen Odysseus, who 
is in Thesprotia, and will for certain return before that 
dying year is out I He would like to send the hand- 
maids away, but of course cannot He bethinks him 
of his old nurse Eurycleia ; and, when refreshment is 
offered him, asks that she and none other (t, 343 seq.) 
shall wash his feet She does so, and instantly (r, 392) 
recognises him by the scar I Now, in our version, the 
man of many devices is taken by surprise at this ; he 
threatens Eurycleia into silence, and nothing happens. 
The next thing of importance is that Penelope — ^she has 
just learnt on good evidence that Odysseus is alive, and 
will return immediately — suddenly determines that she 
cannot put off the suitors any longer, but brings down 
her husband's bow, and says she will forthwith marry 
the man n4io can shoot through twelve axe-heads with 
it 1 Odysseus hears her and is pleased I May it not be 



46 LiTfiRAtURfi OF ANCIENT GREECE 

that in the original story there was a reason for Pene- 
lope to bring the bow, and for Odysseus to be pleased ? 
It was a plot. He meant Eurycleia to recognise him, 
to send the maids away, and break the news to Penelope. 
Then husband and wife together arranged the trial of 
the bow. This is so far only a conjecture, but it is 
curiously confirmed by the account of the slaying given 
by the ghost of Amphimedon in c». The story he tells 
is not that of our Odyss^: it is the old Bow-slaying, 
based on a plot between husband and wife (esp. 167). 

As to the Spear-fight, there is a passage in 7, 281-298, 
which was condemned by the Alexandrians as incon- 
sistent with the rest of the story. There Odysseus 
arranges with T61emachus to have all the weapons in 
the banquet hall taken away, only two spears, two 
swords, and two shields to be left for the father and son. 
This led up to a Suitor-slaying with spears by Odysseus 
and T61emachus, which is now incorporated as the 
second part of our Suitor-slaying. Otto Seeck^ has 
tried to trace the Bow-fight and the Spear-fight (which 
was itself modified again) through all the relevant parts 
of the Odyssey. 

It is curious that in points where we can compare 
the mjrths of our poems with those expressed elsewhere 
in literature, and in fifth-century pottery, our poems 
are often, perhaps generally, the more refined and 
modern. In the Great Eoiai^ the married pair Alkinolis 
and Ar6t6 are undisguisedly brother and sister : our 
Odyssey explains elaborately that they were really only 
first cousins. When the shipwrecked Odysseus meets 
Nausicaa, he pulls a bough oflF a tree — ^what for ? To 
show that he is a suppliant, obviously : and so a fifth- 

^ QuclUn der Odyssee, 1887. 



MORAL GROWTH 4 1 

century vase represents it But our Odyss^ makes 
him use the branch as a veil to conceal his naked- 
ness I And so do the vases of the fourth century. A 
version of the slaying of Hector followed by Sophocles 
in his Niptra* made Achilles drag his enemy alive at 
his chariot wheels. That is the cruder, crueller version. 
Our poems cannot suppress the savage insult, but they 
have got rid of the torture. How and when did thb 
humanising tendency come 7 We cannot say ; but it was 
deliberately preferred and canonised when the poems 
were prepared for the sacred Athenian recitation. 

This moral growth is one of the marks of the last 
working over of the poems. It gives us the magni- 
ficent studies of Helen and Andromache, not dumb 
objects of barter and plunder, as they once were, but 
women ready to take their places in the conception of 
.^schylus. It gives us the gentle and splendid chivalry 
of the Lycians, SarpMon and Glaucus. It gives us 
the exquisite character of the swineherd Eumaeus ; his 
eager generosity towards the stranger who can tell of 
Odysseus, all the time that he keeps professing his 
incredulity; his quaint honesty in feeding himself, his 
guest, and even T£lemachus, on the young inferior pork, 
keeping the best, as far as the suitors allow, for his 
master ({> 3, 80 ; v, 49) ; auid his emotional breach of 
principle, accompanied with much apology and justi- 
fication, when the story has entirely won him : "Bring 
firth the best of the hogs I" (f, 414). Above all, it seems 
to have given us the sympathetic development of Hector. 
The oldest poem hated Hector, and rejoiced in mangling 
him, though doubtless it feared him as well, and let him 
have a better right to his name 'Man-slayer' than he 
has now, when not only Achilles, but Diomddes, Aias, 



41 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Idomeneus, and even Menelaus, have successively been 
Qiade more than a match for him. In that aspect 
Hector has lost, bat he has gained more. The pre- 
vailing sympathy of the later books is with him. The 
two most explicit moral judgments in the poems are 
against Achilles for maltreating him.* The gods keep 
his body whole, and rebuke his enemy's savagery. The 
scenes in Z, the parting with Andromache, the com- 
forting of little Astyanax frightened at his father's plume, 
the calm acceptance of a battle which must be fatal, 
and of a cause which must be lost — all these are in the 
essence of great imagination ; but the absolute master- 
piece, one of the greatest feats of skill in im^inative 
literature, is the flight of Hector in X. It is simple 
fear, undisguised ; yet you feel that the man who flies 
is a brave man. The act of staying alone outside the 
gate is much ; you can just nerve yourself to it. 
But the sickening dread of Achilles' distant oncoming 
grows as you wait, till it simply cannot be borne. The 
man must fly ; no one can blame him ; it is only one 
more drop in the cup of divine cruelty, which is to 
leave Hector dead, Troy burned, Astyanax butchered, 
and Andromache her enemy's slave. If the old poet 
went with the conqueror, and exulted in Hector's shame, 
there has come one after him who takes all his facts 
and turns them the other way ; who feels how far more 
intense the experience of the conquered always is, and 
in this case how far more noble. 

The wonder is that Achilles is not spoilt for us. Some- 
how he remains grand to the end, and one is grieved, not 
alienated, by the atrocities his grief leads him to. The last 
touch of this particular spirit is where Achilles receives 
> 4', 341 X, 395; ud ^, 176; 7,467. 



IMAGINATIVE SYMPATHY OF HOMER 43 

Priam in his tent. Each respects the other, each con- 
quers his anguish in studied courtesy ; but the name of 
Hector can scarcely be spoken, and the attendants keep 
the dead face hidden, lest at the sight of it Priam's rage 
should burst its control, "arui AckiUes slay him and sin 
t^ainst God" (tl, 585). It is the true pathos of war: 
the thing seen on both sides ; the unfathomable suf- 
fering for which no one in particular is to blame. 
Homer, because he is an 'early poet/ is sometimes 
supposed to be unsubtle, and even superficial. But is 
it not a marvel of sympathetic imagination which makes 
us feel with the flying Hector, the cruel Achilles, the 
adulterous Helen, without for an instant losing hold of 
the ideals of courage, mercifulness, and chastity 7 

This power of entering vividly into the feelings of 
both parties in a conflict is perhaps the most charac- 
teristic gift of the Greek genius ; it is the spirit in which 
Homer, ^schylus, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, 
find their kinship, and which enabled Athens to create 
the drama. 



LESSER HOMERIC POEMS; HESIOD; ORPHEUS 

The Rejected Epics 

When amid the floating masses of recited epos two 
poems were specially isolated and organised into com- 
plex unity, there remained a quantity of authorless poetry, 
originally of equal rank with the exalted two, but now 
mangled and disinherited. This rejected poetry was not 
fully organised into distinct wholes. The lays and groups 
of lays were left for each reciter to modify and to select 
from. It is an anachronism to map out a series of epics, 
to cut off Cypria^ Iliad, jEthiopis,* Little Iliad," Sack of 
Ilum^ Homeeomit^,* Odyss^, Tiltgotuia,* as so many 
separate and continuous poems composed by particular 
authors. The Cypria,* Itx instance, a great mass of 
'Epft' centring in the deeds of Paris and the Cyprian 
goddess before the war, is attributed to Homer, Creo- 
ph^lus, Cyprias, H£g£sias, and Sta^nus ; the Sack * is 
claimed by Homer, Arcttnus, Leschte, and a poet whose 
name is given as Hegias, Agias, or Augias, and his home 
as Troiz£n or Colophon. Some of these names perhaps 
belonged to real rhapsodes ; some are mere inventions. 
'Cyprias,' for instance, owes his existence to the happy 
thoughVthat in the phrase tA Kvirpui imj the second word 
might be the Doric genitive of a proper name, Kvirptm, 
and then the question of authorship would be solved. 



'CYCLES' 45 

When the oral poetry was dead, perhaps in the fourth 
century b.c., scholars began to collect the remnants of it, 
the series being, in the words of Proclus, " made com- 
plete out of the works of divers poets." But this collec- 
tion of the original ballads was never widely read, and 
soon ceased to exist Our knowledge of the rejected 
epics comes almost entirely from the handbooks of 
mythology, which collected the legendary history con- 
tained in them into groups or 'cycles.' We possess 
several stone tablets giving the epic history in a series 
of pictures.^ The best known is the Tabula tliaca, in the 
Capitoline Museum, which dates from just before our era, 
and claims to give 'the arrangement of Homer' according 
to a certain Theoddrus, One of the tables speaks of the 
'Trojan Cycle' and the 'Theban Cycle'; and we hear 
i>\ a 'Cycle of History' — of all history, it would seem — 
compiled by Dionysius of Samos* in the third or second 
century B.C. The phrase 'Epic Cycle' then denotes 
properly a body of epic history collected in a handbook. 
By an easy misapplication, it is used to denote the 
ancient poems themselves, which were only known as 
the sources of the handbooks. Athenseus, for instance, 
makes the odd mistake of calling Dionysius' 'Cycle of 
History' a 'Book about the Cycle' — 1>, Athenseus took 
the word ' cycle ' to mean the original poems.' 

Our main ostensible authority is one Proclus, apparently 
a Byzantine, from whom we derive a summary of the 
Trojan Cycle, which is given in the Venetian MS. A and 
in the works of the patriarch Photius. If what he said 
were true, it would be of great importance. But not 

Jahn-tCIdkMlis, BiJdtr-CiwwnAm. The 7bi. 77. ii In BanmefsMf'a 
See Betbe in Hirmu, i& < Alfa, tfix e, 477 d. 



46 LITERATURE iJiF MKXESTT GREECE 

only does he stut fnm a Use coBupluB of «liat the 
pocDS vcn — tfaey bad prabaUr tmwi i wl fadoR the days 
ct I^DSuiBS, o enturi g. carfier— Iw also seans to have 
reach ed his rasolbbTfiRl tiking tbe uj i nn i te of scxne 
h an dbook, of wbidi wecan oah-sardut it oAen agrees 
wofd for word with Oat of ApoOcMlAras, and Ifaen, by 
coojectnre or aOtemise, imntiii g "a^w t^ia tit LittU 
ISmd «f Usthls ^ M^fi/^,' f* ' Htn ama tkt .£tki^ 
^AfOttms tf MaUbu.' It e knawn from qoottfiiKis in 
eaitier «fitea& tfaat the in dr ndml poons covered mnch 
more gronnd than he aUovs tfaon. For iostance, the 
Lialt liimd* b^ins in Procfass with the contest of Aias 
and Odyaseos for the aims of AcbiDes, and stops at tbe 
leceptioD of tbe Wooden Horae. Bat a rondb earlier 
bepnning is suggested by the opening words of the 
poem itself which stiU sui^ i v e : " / su^g ^ IStm «md 
Dardamia, la»d ef dttemby, ftr wUtk At Bwmmm, hmd^ 
mtm of Atws, sufftnd ivm^ tkufgs;" and a later aidiiig 
tt ptDved by the quotations whidli are made from it to 
illustrate the actual sack. It is tbe origin, for instance, 
of Vergii's story about tbe warrior \rtio means to slay 
Helen, but is restrained by Venus ; cmly in tbe Lit^ Iliad 
it is Helen's beauty unaided that paralyses Henelaus. 
In general, however, Vergil, like Proclus's authority, pre- 
fer* the fuller version derived from tbe special efnc on 
the Sack by 'Arctlnus of Milthis,' while TheodOnis 
again sets aside both epics and follows the lyrical Sack 
of Stesichorus. 

Again, Proclus makes the jEthiapis* and the Sack* two 
wparate poems with a great gap between them. His 
jBthiopis* begins immediately at the end of the Iliad, 
gives the exploits of the Amazon Penthesileia and the 
>Kthiop Memnon, and ends with the contest for the 




HISTORY OF THE REJECTED EPICS 47 

arms of Achilles ; the Sack* begins after the reception 
of the Wooden Horse. The ^thiapis* has five books, 
the Sack* two; seven in all. But one of the tables treats 
them both as a single continuous poem of 9500 lines, 
which must mean at the very least ten books. On the 
other hand, Proclus makes the Homeamings,* which 
must have been a series of separate lays almost as elastic 
as the Eoiai* themselves (see p. 60), into a single poem. 
As for the date of these poems, they were worked into 
final shape much later than our Homer, and then appa- 
rently more for their historical matter than for their poetic 
value. They quote lUad, Odyssey, and Theogoity; they 
are sometimes brazen in their neglect of the digamma ; 
they are often modem and poor in their language. On 
the other hand, it is surely perverse to take their mentions 
of ancestor-worship, magic, purification, and the like, 
as endence of lateness. These are all practices of date- 
less antiquity, left unmentioned by ' Homer/ Uke many 
other subjects, from some conventional repugnance, 
whether of race, or class, or tradition. And the actual 
matter of the rejected epics is often very old. We 
have seen the relation of S to the Little Uiad.* In the 
Cypria* Alexander appears in his early glory as con- 
queror of Sidon ; there is a catalogue of Trojans ^ich 
cannot well have been copied from our meagre list in B, 
and is perhaps the source of it ; there is a story told by 
Nestor which looks like the original of part of oar Hades- 
legend in X. And as for quotations, the words " The 
purpose of Zeus was fulfilled" are certainly less natural 
where they stand in the opening of the lUad than in 
the Cypria,* where they refer to the whole design of 
relieving Earth of her burden of men by means of the 
Itojan War. We have 125 separate quotetions from the 



48 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Cypria,* which seems to have stood rather apart and 
independent in the general epic tradition. 

The Til^oneia,* too, though in its essence a mere 
sequel, making Ttlegonus, son of Odysseus and Kirkt, 
sul in search of his father, just as Tilemachus did, is 
full of genuine saga-stuff. Odysseus is repeated in his 
son, like Achilles, like Launcelot and Tristram. The 
sons of the 'Far-wanderer' are 'Far-fighter' and 'Far- 
bom,' and a third, by Calypso, is 'Far-subduer' ^Sle- 
damus). The bowman has a bowman son, and the son 
wanders because the father did. And the end of the 
TtUgoneia* is in the simplest saga-spirit. T^legonus 
unknowingly slays his father, who gives him Penelope to 
wed and protect. He takes all the characters to Kirk£ 
in the magic island ; she purifies him of blood, and 
makes TMemachus and Penelope immnrtal ; finally, the 
two young men marry their respective step-mothers, 
Odysseus apparently remaining dead. That is not late 
or refined work. 'Eugamon' (' Happy-marrier') of 
Cyrene must have seemed a grotesque figure to the 
men of the fifth century ; he was at home among those 
old saga-makers who let Heracles give Deianira to 
Hyllus, and (Edipus take on the late king's wife as part 
of the establishment. 

The critical questions suggested by the rejected epics 
are innumerable. To take one instance, how comes it 
that the Little Iliad* alone in our tradition is left in so 
thin a dress of conventional 'Epic' language that the 
^olic shows through ? One line actually gives the 
broad a and probably the double consonants of ^olic, 
vii^ fth hfv iiiaaa, \a/nrpii fi' hrirtlOLt o-eXoiu, Others 
are merely conventionalised on the surface. Possibly 
some epics continued to be sung in Lesbos in the 



THE HOMERIC HYMNS 49 

native dialect till the era of antiquarian collection in 
the fourth century B.C. or after ; and perhaps if this 
poem were ever unearthed from an Egyptian tomb, we 
should have a specimen of the loose and popular epic 
not yet elaborated by Ionic genius. Its style in general 
seems light and callous compared with the stern tragedy 
of the Milesian ^thiopis* and Sack of Ilion* 

Among the other rejected epics were poems of what 
might be called the WorldrcycU. Of these, Proclus uses 
the Theogony* and the Titan War,* of which last there 
exists one really beautiful fragment The Theban 'Ring,' 
^ich was treated by grammarians as an introduction to 
the Trojan, had an CEdipodea,* a Tkebais,* and a Lay ef 
tht Afier-bom* treating of the descendants of the Seven, 
who destroyed Thebes. The Driving forth of Amphia- 
raus,* the Taking of CEckalia* the Phocais* the Danais,* 
and many more we pass over. 



Htuns or Preludes 

It was a custom in epic poetry for the minstrel to 
* begin from a god,' generally from Zeus or the Muses.' 
This gave rise to the cultivation of the ' Pro-oimion' or 
Prelude as a separate form of art, specimens of which 
survive in the so-called Homeric ' Hymns,' the word 
l!/wm having in early Greek no religious connotation. 
The ^ortest of these preludes merely call on the god 
by bis titles, refer briefly to some of his achievements, 
and finish by a line like, "Hail to thee, Lord; and new 
i^gin my lay," or, " Beginning from thee, I zvill pass to 
another song." ■ The live longer hymris are, like Pindar's 
victory songs, illustrations of the degree to which a 
■ FfucU, Ntm. X Cf.9, 499. * See eqi. 31. 



50 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

form of art can grow beyond itself before it is felt to 
be artistically impossible. The prelude was developed as 
a thing apart until it ceased to be a prelude. 

The collection which we possess contains poems of 
diveree dates and localities, and the tradition of the 
text is singularly confused. The first 546 lines, for 
instance, are given as one hymn 'to Apollo/ But they 
comprise certainly two hymns : the first (1-178) by an 
Ionic poet, on the birth of the Ionian God in the Soating 
island of Delos ; the second by a poet of Central Greece, 
on the slaying of the great Earth-serpent, and the estab- 
lishment of ttie Dorian God at Delphu Further, these 
two divisions are not single poems, but fall into separate 
incomplete parts. Athenseus actually calls the whole 
'the hymns to Apollo.' The Ionic portion of this hymn 
is probably the earliest work in the extant collection. 
It is quoted as Homer's by Thucydides (iii. 104), and 
Aristophanes (Birds, 575), and attributed by Didymus 
the grammarian to the rhapsode Kynaethus of Chios ; 
^ich puts it, in point of antiquity, on a level with the 
rejected epics. TTie hymn to Hermes partly dates itself 
by giving seven strings to the original lyre as invented 
by that god. It must have been written when the old 
four-stringed lyre had passed, not only out of use, but 
out of memory. The beautiful fragment (vii.) on the 
capture of Dionysus by brigands looks like Attic work 
of the fifth or fourth century B.C. The Prelude to 
Pan (xix.) may be Alexandrian ; that to Ares (viii.) 
suggests the fourth century a.d. 

In spite of their bad preservation, our Hymns are 
delightful reading. That to Aphrodite, relating nothing 
but the visit of Aphrodite to Anchises shepherding his 
kine on Mount Ida, ejEpresses perhaps more exquisitely 




HYMN TO DEMETER Ji 

flian anything else in Greek literature that frank joy in 
physical life and beauty which is often supposed to be 
characteristic of Greece. The long hymn to Demeter, 
extant in only one MS., which was discovered last century 
at Moscow 'aoiong pigs and chickens,' is perhaps the 
most beautiful of all. It is interesting as an early Attic 
or Eleusinian composition. Parts are perhaps rather 
fluent and weak, but most of the poem is worthy of 
the magnificent myth on which it is founded. Take 
one piece at the opening, where Persephone "was 
playing with Okeano/ dap-breasted daughters, and pluck- 
mg flowers, roses and crocus and pretty pansies, in a soft 
meadow, and flags and hyacinth, and that great narcissus 
that Earth sent up for a snare to the rose-face maidat, doing 
service by Gods will to Him of the Many Guests. The bloom 
of it was wondetfid, a marvel fir gods undying and mortal 
men ; from the root of it there grew out a hundred heads, 
and the incensed smell of it made all the wide sky laugh 
above, and all the earth laugh and the salt swell of the sea. 
And the girl in wottder reached out both her hands to take 
the beautifid thing to play with ; then yawned the broadtrod 
ground by the Flat of Nysa, and the deathless ste^ brake 
forth, and the Cronos-bom king, He of the Many Names, 
of the Many Guests ; and He swept her away on his golden 
chariot." The dark splendour of Aiddneus, " Him of the 
Many Thralls, of the Many Guests," is in the highest spirit 
of the saga. 

Comic Pobus 

Of the Comic Poems which passed in antiquity as 
Homer's, the only extant example is the Battle of the 
Fr^s a$td Mice, rather a good parody of the ^hting 



$a LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

epic The opening is Bceotian ; the general colour of 
the poem Attic. An obvious fable — followed strangely 
enough by A. Ludwich in his large edition — gives it to 
one Pigres, a Carian chief, who (ought in the Persian 
War. The battle began because a mouse named 
Psicharpax, flying from a weasel, came to a pond to 
quench his thirst He was accosted by a frog of royal 
race, Physignathos, son of Peleus — (the hero of Mount 
Pelion has become 'Mudman,' and his son ' Puff-cheek' I) 
— who persuaded him to have a ride on his back and see 
his kingdom. Unhappily a 'Hydros' — usually a water- 
snake, here perhaps some otter-like animal — lifted its 
head above tiie water, and the frog instinctively dived. 
The mouse perished, but not unavenged. A kinsman 
saw him from the bank, and from the blood-feud 
arose a great war, in which the mice had the best of it 
At last Athena besought Zeus to prevent the annihilation 
of the frogs. He tried first thunderbolts and then crabs, 
which latter were more than the mice could stand ; they 
turned, and the war ended. 

There were many comic battle-pieces ; we hear of a 
Spider-figkt^ a Crane-fight^ a Fieldfare-poem* Some 
were in iambics, and consequently foreign to the Home- 
ric style. The most celebrated comic poem was ibeMar- 
gttes,* so called after its hero, a roaring blade (fUpyov), 
high-spirited and incompetent, whose characteristic is 
given in the immortal line — 

" Many arts Me knew, and he knew them ail badly ; " and 
again : "He was not meant by the gods for a digger or a 
ploughman, nor generally for anything sensible; he was 
deficient in all manner of wisdom." Late writers on metre 



HESIOD 53 

say the poem was in a mixture of heroic and iambic 
verse, a statement which suggests a late metrical re- 
furbishment of a traditional subject It can scarcely be 
true of the poem which Aristotle regarded as Homer's. 
Margttes must have been more amusing than Hierocles's 
' Scholasticus,' the hero of the joke-book from which so 
many of our ' Joe Millers ' are taken. Scholasticus was 
a mere fool, with nothing but a certain modesty to re- 
commend him. 

What is meant by calling these poems Homeric? 
Only that they date from a time when it was not thought 
worth while to record the author's name ; and, perhaps, 
that if you mean to recite a mock epic battle, it slightly 
improves your joke to introduce it as the work of the 
mimortal Homer. 



Hbsioo 

As the epos of romance and war was personified in 
'Homiros,' the bard of princes, so the epos of plain 
teaching was personified in the peasant poet 'Hteiodos.' 
The Hesiodic poems, indeed, contain certain pretended 
reminiscences, and one of them, the Erga, is largely made 
up of addresses to ' Persfis,' assumed to be the poef s 
erring friend — in one part, his brother. We have seen 
that the reminiscences are fictions, and presumably PersAs 
is a fiction too. If a real man had treacherously robt^ed 
Hesiod of his patrimony by means of bribes to 'man- 
devouring princes,' Hesiod would scarcely have remained 
on intimate terms with him. ' Perste ' is a lay figure for 
the didactic epos to preach at, and as such he does his 
duty. Heaod wants to pnuse industry, to condeuui the 
ways of men, and especially of judges : the figure must 



54 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

be iui tdle dog, ignorant of the world and fond of law. 
Hesiod wants to praise i^hteousness : the figure must 
show a certain light-handedness in its dealings with 
money. We have then no information of what Hesiod 
was— only a tradition of what Hesiod was supposed to be. 
He was bom at Kym£, in ^Colis; his father migrated 
to Bceotia, and settled in Ascra, a channing and fertile 
village on the slopes of Mount Helicon, which the poet 
descrtt)es as "bad w winter, ituufferabU in summer" 
Here he herded flocks on Helicon, till one day the 
Muses greeted him with the words : "Boors of the wild 
fitlds, by-vserds of shame, ncthing but belly I We know 
haw to tell many fitlse things true-seeming, but we know 
kow to speak the r^l truth when we will." This made 
Hesiod a poet. We hear nothing more of htm till his 
death, except that he once went across the channel from 
Aults to Chalkis to take part in a competition at the 
funeral games of Amphidamas, king of Eutxsa, and, al- 
though much of his advice is about nautical matters, that 
he did not enjoy the sea. He avoided Southern Greece 
because of an oracle which foretold that he should die at 
Nemea ; and so he did, at a little sanctuary near Otneon 
in Locris, which happened to bear that name. He was 
murdered and thrown into the sea by the brothers of one 
Cljrmenft or Ctimeni, who was supposed to have borne a 
son to the octogenarian poet ; but the dolphins brought 
the body to land, and a stately tomb was built for it at 
Oineon. The son was the great lyrist St£sichorus ! 

This is not even pure myth, it is myth worked up by 
ancient scholars. Yet we can perhaps get some historical 
meaning out of their figments. The whole evidence of the 
poems goes to suggest that there was a very old peasant- 
poetry in Boeotia, the direct descendant in all likelihood 




LEGEND OF HESlOiyS LIFE 51 

of the old ^olian lays of the Achaioi, from which 
' Homer ' was developed ; and that this was at some 
time enriched and invigorated by the reaction upon it 
of the fulUflown Ionian epic That is, Ionian poets must 
have settled in Bceotta and taken up the local poetry. 
Whether one of those poets was called ' Hfisiodos' is a 
question of little importance. It does not look like 
an invented name. At any rate, the Boeotian poetry 
flourished, and developed a special epic form, based on 
the Ionian ' Homer,' but with strong local traits. 

What of Hesiod's death ? We know that the Hesiodic 
poetry covered Locris as well as Boeotia ; the catalogues 
of women are especially Locrian. The Clymen£ story is 
suggested, doubtless, by a wish to provide a romantic and 
glorious ancestry for Stfisichorus. Does the rest of the 
story mean that Locris counted Hesiod as her own, and 
showed his grave ; while Bceotia said he was a Bceotian, 
and explained the grave by saying that the Locrians had 
murdered him J As for the victory at the funeral games 
of Amphidamas, it is a late insertion, and the unnamed 
rivals must be meant to include Homer. The story of a 
contest between Homer and Hesiod, in which the latter 
won, can be traced back, as we saw (p. 6), to the fifth 
century at least. 

Of Hesiod's poems we have nominally three preserved, 
but they might as well be called a dozen, so little unity 
has any one of them — the Theegony, the Works and D^s 
{Ergo), and the Shield 0/ Heracles. 

The Works and Days is a poem on ' Ergo,' or Works of 
agriculture, with an appendix on the lucky and unlucky 
Days of the month, and an intertexture of moral sen- 
t»ices addressed to Perses. It is a slow, lowly, simple 
poem ; a little rough and hard, the utteraQce pf thos^ 



56 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Muses who like to tell the truth. There is no swing in 
the verses ; they seem to come from a tired, bent man at 
the end of his day's work — a man who loves the country 
life, but would like it better if he had more food and less 
toil. There is little sentiment. The outspoken bitterness 
of the first 'Gndm£' is characteristic : "Potter is wtvtk 
with potter, and carpenter with carpenter ; aye, beggar is 
envio$ts of beggar, and mirutrel of minstrel/" So is the 
next about the judges who rob the poor man : " Foois, 
tiey know not how the haif is more than the whole, nor tkt 
great joy there is m mallow and asphodel" Mallow and 
asphodel were the food and Bowers of the poor. The 
moral sentences increase in depth in the middle of the 
poem, and show a true and rather amiable idea of duty. 
"Hardwerk is no sharru; the shame is idleness" "Help 
your ruighbour, and he will help you. A neighbour matters 
more than a kinsman" " Take fair measure, and give a 
little over the measure — if you can" "Give willingly; a 
willing gift is a pleasure" " Give is a good girl, and 
Snatch is a bad girl, a bringer of death I " " It is best to 
marry a wife; but be very careful, or your neighbours m^ 
be merry at your expense. There is no prize like a good 
wife: nothing that makes you simdder like a bad; she 
roasts you without fire, and brings you to a raw old age" 
At the end these sentences degenerate into rules of 
popular superstition — "not to put the jug on the mixing- 
bowl when drinking; that means death!" "not to sit on 
immovable things," and so on. One warning, "not to 
cross a river without washing your hands and your sins," 
approaches Orphism. 

The agricultural parts of the Erga are genuine and 
country-like. They may be regarded as the gist of the 
poem, the rest being insertions and additions. There 



THE ERGA 57 

is the story how the gods had "hidden away his life 
from man," till good Prometheus stole fire and gave 
it him. Then Zeus, to be even with him, made a shape 
like a gentle maiden, and every god gave it a separate 
charm, and Hermes last put in it the heart of a dog and 
the ways of a thief. And the gods called it Panddra, 
and gave it to Epimttheus, who accepted it on behalf 
of mankind. There is the story of the four ages : at 
least there ought to be four — gold, silver, bronze, and 
iron ; but, under the influence of Homer, the heroes 
who fought at Troy have to come in somewhere. They 
are put just after the bronze and before ourselves. We 
are iron ; and, bad as we are, are likely to get worse. 
The gods have all left us, except Aidds and Nemesis 
— those two lovely ideas which the sophist Protagoras 
made the basis of social ethics, and which we miserably 
translate into Shame and Righteous IndigTuitioH. Some 
day, Hesiod thinks, we shall drive even them away, and 
all will be lost Two passages, indeed, do suggest the 
possibility of a brighter future : all may be well when 
the Demos at last arises and punishes the sins of the 
princes (175, 260 £f.). It is interesting to compare the 
loyalty of the prosperous Ionian epos towards its primi- 
tive kings with the bitter insurgency of the Bceotian 
peasant-song against its oligarchy of nobles. 

The Erga is delightful in its descriptions of the seasons 
— a subject that touched Greek feelings down to the 
days of Longus. Take the month of Lenaion, "bad 
di^s, enough to fit^ an ox, when the north wind rides 
down from Thraa, and earth and the plants shut thtm- 
tehes up; and he fails on the forest and brings doom gnat 
oaks and pines; and all th* wood groans, and the wild beasts 
shiver and put their tails between their l^. Their hides 



58 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

an thick with fur, but tkt cold blows through them, and 
throng the bulVs hide and the goafs thick hair; but it 
cannot blow through to the gentle little girl who sits in the 
cotU^ with her mother," and so on. And how good 
the summer is, in which foolish people have made it 
SI reproach against Hesiod's poetic sensitiveness that he 
liked to sit in the shadow of a rock and have a picnic 
with milk and wine and plenty of goats' flesh. 

The Th^gony is an attempt, of course hopelessly in- 
adequate, to give a connected account of the gods, their 
origins and relationships. Some of it is more than old ; 
it is primeval. Several folk-gods occur whose names are 
found in Sanskrit, and who therefore may be imagined 
to dale from Indo-European times, though they are 
too homely to occur in the heroic epos : Hestia, Rhea, 
Orthros, Kerberos. We are dealing with most ancient 
material in the Theogony; but the langui^e, the present 
form of the poem, and perhaps the very idea of syste- 
matising the gods, are comparatively late. The £rga 702 
is quoted by Semonides (about 650 B.C.), But it is im- 
possible to date the poems. We have seen (p. 37) that 
the Theogony is quoted by the Iliad— v^here^ the Theo- 
^Vny often quotes the Iliad and Otfyssey, and at the end 
refers to the matter of several of the rejected epics. 
The text is in a bad condition ; it is often hard to see 
the connection or the sense. It almost looks as if there 
were traces of a rhapsode's notes, which could be ex- 
panded in recitation. There are remains of real, not 
merely literary, religion. Er6s (120), Love, is prominent, 
because he was specially worshipped in Thespix, Ascra's 
nearest big town. Hecat£ has a hymn (411-4.52) so 
earnest that it can only come from a local cult A 
great part of the poem, the mutilation of Ouranos, the 



THEOGONY. CATALOGUES OF WOMEN $9 

cannibalism of Cronos, only ceases to be repulsive when 
it is studied as a genuine bit of aamtge religion. To 
those of the later Greeks who took it more seriously, 
it was of course intolerable. There is real grandeur in 
the account of the Titan War, which doubtless would 
be intelligible if we had the Homeric Titan War* before 
us. And there is a great sea-feeling in the list of Nereids 

(347 ff-)- 

Tlie Theogmy ends (967-1020) with a list of the 
goddesses who lay in the arms of mortals and bore 
children like the gods. In the very last lines the poet 
turns from these — " Now, swett Muses, sing the roe* oj 
mortal women!' Of course, the Muses did sing of them, 
but the song is lost It is referred to in antiquity by 
various names — ' Tkt Cataiogue of Women,' ' The Poems 
about Women,' ' The Lists of Heroic Women'; particular 
parts of it are quoted as ' The Eoiai,' * The JJsts of the 
Daughters of Leukippos,' 'of the Daughters <f Proitos^ and 
so on. 

Why were lists of women written ? For two reasons. 
The Locrians are said to have counted their genealogies 
by the woman's side ; and if this, as it stands, is an exag- 
geration, there is good evidence, apart from Nossts and 
her fellow-poetesses, for the importance of women in 
Locris. Secondly, most royal houses in Cueece were 
descended from a god. In the days of local quasi- 
monotheistic religion this was simply managed : the local 
king came from the local god. But when geographical 
boundaries were broken down, and the number of known 
gods consequently increased, these genealogies had to be 
systematised, and sometimes amended. For instance, 
certain Thessalian kings were descended from Tyro and 
the river Entpens. This was well enough in their own 



6o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

valley; but when they came out into the world, they 
found there families descended from Poseidon, the god 
of the great sea, perhaps of all waters, and they could not 
remain content with a mere local river. In Odyssiy X we 
have the second stage of the story : the real ancestor was 
Poseidon, only he visited Tyro disguised as the river I 
The comparatively stable human ancestresses form the 
safest basis for cataloguing the shifting divine ancestors. 
There were five books in the Alexandrian edition of the 
Catalogues of Women,* the last two being what is called 
Eoiai.* This quaint title is a half-humorous plural of 
the expression f) aZt}, ' Or like,' . . . which was the form 
of transition to a new heroine, " Or like her who dwelt 
in Pkihia, with the Charite^ own loveliness, by the waters 
of Ptnius, Cyrene the fair'' There are one hundred 
and twenty - four fragments of the Catalogue * and 
twenty -six of the 'Or likes.'* If they sometimes 
contradict each other, that is natural enough, and it 
cannot be held that the Alexandrian five books had all 
the women there ever were in the Hesiodic lists. When 
once the formula ' Or Uke' was started, it was as easy to 
put a new ancestress into the list as it is, say, to invent a 
new quatrain on the model of Edward Lear's. Further- 
more, it was easy to expand a given EoU * into a story, 
and this is actually the genesis of our third Hesiodic 
poem, the Shield of Heracles, the ancestress being, of 
course, the hero's mother, Alcm^nfi. 

The Shield begins : " Or like Alcmtnt, when she fled her 
home and fatherland, and came to Thebes;" it goes on to 
the birth of Heracles, who, it proceeds to say, slew 
Kyknos, and then it tells how he slew Kyknos. In the 
arming of Heracles before the battle comes a long 
description of the shield. 



REJECTED POEMS OF HESIOD 6i 

There were rejected poems in Hesiod's case as well 
as in Homer's. The anonymous NaupaetiOf* a series ci 
expanded genealogies, is the best known of them ; but 
there were Hesiodic elements in some of the Argive and 
Corinthian collections attributed to ' Emnfilus.' His 
m£un rival rejoices in the fictitious name of Kerkdps 
{* Monkey-face ') of Miletus. The Erga is Hesiod's 
/Had, the only work unanimously left to him. The 
people of Helicon showed Pausanias, or his authority, 
a leaden tablet of the Erga without the introduc- 
tion, and told him that nothing else was the true 
Hesiod.i 

The Bridal of Keyx,* about a prince of Trachis, who 
entertained Heracles, was probably also an expanded 
EoU very like the Skieid; and the same perhaps holds of 
the Aigimios,* which seems to have narrated in two books 
the t>attle of that ancestor of the Dorians against the 
Lapitbie. The Descent to Hades* haAlhtseasiorii&hzto. 
The Melampodia* was probably an account of divers 
celebrated seers. More interesting are the scanty re- 
mains of the Advkts of Chiron* to his pupil Achilles. 
The wise Centaur recommended sacrificing to the gods 
whenever you come to a house, and thought that edu- 
cation should not begin till the age of seven. 

The Erga was known in an expanded form, Tk* 
Great Erga.* There were poems on Astrononry* and 
on Augury by Birds,* on a Journey round the World^ 
and on the Idaan Daeiyli,* who attended Zeus in Crete, 
The names help us to realise the great mass of poetry 
of the Boeotian school that was at one time in exist- 
ence. As every heroic story tended to take shape in 
a poem, so did every piece of art or knowledge or 
' Vnm. fat. 31, 4. 



62 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

ethical belief which stirred the national interest or the 
emotions of a particular poet 



Orpheus— Revelation and Mysticism 

In studying the social and the literary history of 
Greece, we are met by one striking contrast The 
social history shows us the Greeks, as the Athenians 
thought themselves, ' especially god - fearing,' or, as 
St F^ul put it, 'too superstitious.' The literature as 
preserved is entirely secular. Homer and Hesiod men- 
tion the gods constantly ; but Homer treats them as 
elements of romance, Hesiod treats them as facts to 
be catalogued. Where is the literature of religion, 
the literature which treated the gods as gods 7 It 
must have existed. The nation which had a shrine at 
every turn of its mountain paths, a religious ceremony 
for every act of daily life, spirits in every wood and 
river and spring, and heroes for every great deed or 
stirring idea, real or imagined ; which sacrificed the de- 
fence of Thermopylae rather than cut short a festival ; 
whose most enlightened city at its most sceptical time 
allowed an army to be paralysed and lost because of 
an eclipse of the moon, and went crazy because the 
time-honoured indecencies of a number of statues 
were removed without authority — that nation is not 
adequately represented by a purely secular literature. 
As a matter of fact, we can see that the religious 
writings were both early and multitudinous. 

The Vedic hymns offer an analogy. Hymns like 
them are implied by the fact that the titles of the 
Homeric gods, ixdeprftK 'AmKK»v, po&vK irorvia "Sprj, 




THE VARIOUS MYSTERIES 63 

iKOTtipiKdrao Svoktik, are obviously ancient, and are 
constructed with a view to dactylic metre. We know 
that the early oracles spoke in verse. We know that 
there were sacred hjrmns in temples, quite distinct 
from otu* secular Homeric preludes. We have evi* 
dence that the Mjrsteries at Eleusis depended in part 
on the singing of sacred music 

The Mysteries are not mentioned by Homer. That 
does not mean that they are late : it means that they are 
either too sacred or else too popular. The discoveries 
of anthropologists now enable us to see that the Eleu- 
sintan Mysteries are a form of that primitive religion, 
scarcely differentiated from ' sympathetic magic,' which 
has existed in so many diverse races. The Mysteries 
were a drama. The myth of the Mother of Com and 
the Maid, the young com who comes up from beneath 
the earth and is the giver of wealth, was represented in 
action. At the earliest time we hear of, the drama in- 
cluded a vine-god, or perhai s a tree-god in general, Dio- 
nysus. This is cora-worship nnd vegetation-worship : it 
is not only early, but primitivr. 

There were other Mysteries, Orphic or Bacchic. 
The common opinion of antiquity and the present day 
is that the Bacchic rites were introduced to (^eece from 
abroad — the god of the Thracian brought, in spite of 
opposition, into Greece. If so, he came very early. But 
it seems more likely that Dionysus is rather a new-comer 
than a foreigner : he is like the new year, the spring, the 
harvest, the vintage. He is each year, in every place, a 
stranger who comes to the land and is welcomed as a 
stranger ; at the end of his time he is expelled, exorcised, 
cut to pieces or driven away. At any rate he is early, 
and for the real religion of Greece he Is of overwhelming 



64 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

importance. A real religion is a people's religion. The 
great complex conception Dionysus-Bacchus was a 
common folk's god, or rather had united in himself an 
indefinite number of similar conceptions which were 
worshipped by conunon folk all over Greece. We hear 
of him mostly through Alexandrian and Roman sources, 
sceptical through and through, in which he is merely the 
god of wine. But this is degradation by narrowing. 
He is a wine-god ; he is a tree-god ; but above all he is 
one of the personifications of the spirit of ecstasy, the 
impulse that is above reason, that lifts man beyond 
himself, gives him power and blessedness, and lets loose 
the immortal soul from the trammels of the body. The 
same spirit, in a tamer, saner, and more artistic form, was 
absorbed in the very difiFerent conception of Apollo. 
This religion doubUess had the most diverse forms. The 
gods it worshipped varied in names and attributes as they 
varied in their centres of initiation. But the most im< 
portant aspects of it seem to have been more or less 
united in the religious revelations of ' Orpheus.' 

Most of the old rehgious poems belonged to Orpheus 
or his kinsman Musseus, as the heroic poems to Homer, 
and the didactic to Hesiod. But we know nothing of 
them before the great religious revival of the sixth 
century, associated with the name of Onomacritus. The 
old separate cults of tribe and family had been dis- 
turbed by increasing intercourse. Agglomerated in the 
Homeric theology, they lost their sanctity ; and they 
could scarcely survive Hesiod and his catalogues. Hence 
came, on the one hand, scepticism embodied in the 
Ionian philosophy, and the explanation of the world by 
natural science ; on the other hand, a deeper, more 
passionate belief. It was all very well for Thales to be 




ORPHISV CS 

nved by kaovln^ ; Hk cammon nnn cotild not look 
that way. Annd Ac rfwconraflemmts of the silli 
centmy, the tbb at coloc B atioo, the intEmal van, die 
iaQ of SjtaiB and of the batf-dnine Xinerefa, came the 
taming xmxy from dis tie to the "*■", the setting of the 
heart on snpenatnral b&ss abore Ae reach of war and 



Hence arose a great wave of religions emotion 
scarcely represented in oar tiaditioa, but affecting crerr 
oracle and popular temple from Caria to Italy. The 
mam ezpresswa of this movement was Orphtsm. It 
appears fiist as an uutbuist of persooal miiacle-woriang 
religion in connectioo with Dionysos-wtH^hip. We can 
make ont many erf the cardinal tenets. It tjelieved id 
sio and the sacerdobl purging of sin ; in the immortality 
and divinity of the lool ; in eternal reward beyond the 
grave to the ' pore ' and tbe ' impure ' — of course, none 
but the initiated beiog ultimately qmte pore ; and in the 
incarnation and suffering of Dionysos-Zagrcns. Zagrem 
was the son of Zens and the Uaiden (Kor£) ; be was 
torn asunder by Titans, who were then blasted by tbe 
thundeiboH. Man's body is made of their dead ashes, 
and his soni of the living blood (rf Zagreus. Za^eos 
was bom again of Zens and the mortal woman Semel£ ; 
lived as man, yet god ; was receit'ed into heaven and 
became ttie highest in a sense the only, god. An indi- 
vidoal worshipper erf Bacchus could develop his divine 
ade till he became himself a 'Bacchos,' his potential 
divinity realised. 

So a worshipper of Kybftbe in Phrygia became 
Kyb£bos ; and many Orphic prophets became Orpheus. 
The fabled lf<enad or^es never appear historically in 
Greece. The connection with wine was explained away 



66 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

by the elec^ and was in reality secondary. Dion^us is 
the god within, the spirit of worship and inexplicable 
joy : he appears best in communion with pure souls 
and the wild things of nature on the solitary mountains 
under the stars. 

The Orphic hymns brim over with this joy ; they are 
full of repetitions and magniloquence, and make for 
emotion. The first hymn — very late but typical — runs : 
" / call HtcaU of tJu Ways, of the Cn>ss-ioays, of tiu dark- 
ntss, oftk* Heaven tmd the Earth and the Sea; saffnm-clad 
goddess of the grave, exnlting amid the spirits of the dead, 
Perseia, lover of loneliness, Queen who holdest the Keys of the 
World, . , , 6e present at our pure service with thefiUnessof 
jtgf in thine heart." 

That hymn dates from the fourth century AJ}., and 
so do most of our complete Orphic poems. We only 
possess them in their last form, ^en the religion was 
a dying thing. But it is a remarkable fact, that there 
is no century from the fourth A.D. to the surth B.C. 
which is without some more or less celebrated Orphic 
teachers. At the height of the classical epoch, for in- 
stance, we have evidence of an Orphic spirit in Pindar, 
Empedocles, Ion of Chios, Cratlnus the comedian, 
Prodicus the philosopher, and probably in Euripides, 
Plato complains of the "crowd of books by Orpheus 
and Musseus," and inveighs against their doctrine of 
ceremonial forgiveness of sins. Besides this ' crowd ' — in 
the case of Musaeus it amounted at least to eleven sets 
of poems and numerous oracles — there were all kinds of 
less reputable prophets and purifiers. There was a type 
called ' Balds ' — any one sufficiently ' pure ' was appar- 
ently capable of becoming a Bakis — whose oracles 
were a drug in the Athenian market, Epimenides, the 



LEADERS OF ORPHISM 67 

medicine-man from Crete, who purified Athens after 
Kylon's murder, was the reputed author of ArgO' 
nautika,* Purifications,* and Orades.* Though he slept 
twenty years in a cave, he has more claim to reality 
than a similar figure, AbAris, who went round the world 
with — or, as some think, on — a golden arrow given him 
by Apollo. Ab&ris passed as pre-Homeric; but his 
reputed poems were founded on the epic of the his- 
torical Ansteas of Proconnteus about the Arunaspt, 
which contained revelations acquired in trances about 
the hyperboreans and the grifEns. Aristeas appeared 
in Sicily at the same time that he died in Proconnteus. 

These were hangers-on of Orphism ; the head centre 
seems to have been Onomacrttus. He devoted himself 
to shaping the religious policy of Pisistratus and Hip- 
parchus, and forging or editing ancient Orphic poems. 
He is never quoted as an independent author. The 
tradition dislikes him, and says that he was caught in 
the act of forging an oracle of Musaeus, and banished 
with disgrace by Hipparchus. However, it has to admit 
that he was a friend of that prince in his exile,* and it 
cannot deny that he formed one of the chief influences 
of the sixth century. 

Before the sixth century we get no definitely Orphic 
literature, but we seem to find traces of the influence, 
or perhaps of the spirit, from which it sprung. The 
curious hymn to 'Hecat£ the Only-bom' in the Tkto- 
goi^ (411 f.) cannot t>e called definitely Orphic, but it 
stands by itself in the reUgion of the Hesiodic poems. 
The few references to Dionysus in Homer have an 
'interpolated' or 'un-Homeric' look, and that which 
tells of the sin and punishment of Lycurgus implies 
> Hoodt tH. 6. . 



68 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the existence of an Orphic missionary tale.' The eteiiul 
punishment of the sinners in \ seems Orphic ; so possibly 
does the huA that the hero saw none of the blest He 
could not, because be was not initiated. The Homeric 
preludes to Ares, to Athena, and perhaps that to 
Poseidon, show some traces of the movement. Among 
the early epics the AUmadnis* dealt largely with purifi- 
cation, and contained a i»ayer to 'Zagreus, all-highest 
of all gods.' llie Corinthian epics of Eum£lus show 
a sinular strain. EumClus was of the clan Bacchiadx, 
hb EurSpia* was about Dionysus, and be treated the 
Orphic subjects of Medea and the Titan War. Several 
epics, like the Mmyas,* contained apocalyptic accounts 
of Hades. The important fact is that the mystical and 
'enthusiastic' explanation of the world was never with- 
out its apostles in Greece, though the main current of 
speculation, as directed by Athens, set steadily contrari- 
wise, in the line of getting bit by bit at the meaning of 
things through hard thinking. 



Ill 

THE DESCENDANTS OF HOMER, 
HESIOD, ORPHEUS 

Epos 

The end of the traditional epos came with the rise of the 
idea of literary property. A rhapsode like Kynaethus 
would manipulate the Homer he recited, without ever 
wanting to publish the poems as his own. Onomacritus 
would hand over his laborious theology to Orpheus with- 
out intending rather dishonesty or self-sacrifice. This 
commnnity of literary goods lasted longer in the epos 
than in the song ; but Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus had 
by the sixth and fifth centuries to nkake room for living 
poets who stood on their own feet 

Hie first epic poet in actual history is generally given 
as PiSANDBR of Can^ms, in Rhodes, author of an 
HtroMa.* Tradition gives him the hoariest antiquity, 
but be appears really to be only the Rhodian ' Homer.' 
The fra^ents themselves bear the brand of the sixth 
century, the talk of sin and the cry for purification, 
Pisander is not mentioned in classical times ; he was, 
perhaps, ' discovered ' by the romantic movement of the 
third century, as the earliest literary authority for the 
Heracles of the Twelve Labours, the Lion-skin and the 
Club.* Heracles was also the hero of the prophet and 
■ W. M. StrMu, L 66 leq. (»d cditkm). 



70 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

poet PantAsis of Halicamassus : the name is Carian, 
bnt the man was the uncle of Herodotus, and met his 
death in a rebellion against Lygdamis, the Carian 
governor of his native state. He wrote elegies as 
well as his epic. One Alexandrian critic puts Panyftsis 
next to Homer among epic poets : generally, he came 
fourth, after Hesiod and Antimachus. In Quintilian 
he appears as a mixture of the last two writers — his 
matter more interesting than Hesiod's, his arrangement 
better than that of Antimachus. The fragments are 
UD-Homeric, but strong and well written. Accident has 
preserved us three pieces somewhat in the tone of the 
contemporary sympotic elegy. One speaker praises 
drink and the drinker with great spirit ; another answers 
that the first cup is to the Charites and Hdrai and 
Dionysus, the second to Aphrodite, the third is to 
Insolence and Ruin — " and so jvm had better go home to 
your wedded wtfe," Some of the lines haunt a reader's 
memory : 

" Dimster iar», and the gnat Crttftnuut iartt 
Silvtr Apollo attd Posudon bare. 
To ttrv* a yiar, a mortal master' t thrall.' 

Choirilus of Samos was also a friend of Herodotus, 
and followed him and ^schylus in taking the Persian 
invasion for his subject and Athens for his heroine. 
We hear of him in the suite of the Spartan general 
Lysander — apparently as a domestic bard — and after- 
wards at the court of Archelaus of Macedon. His 
poem is the first 'historical' epic in our sense of the 
word : an extant fragment complains that all legendary 
subjects are exhausted. The younger Choirilus who 
celebrated Alexander and has passed into legend as 
having been paid a gold philippus a line for very bad 




ANTIMACHUS OF COLOPHON 71 

verses — the same anecdote is told of others — may have 
been this man's grandson. If he was really the author 
of the epitaph on Sardanapallus he was not a bad writer, 
though the original prose was finer: " Sardaut^alius, son 
of Anakyndaraxes, buiU AnchiaU and Tarsus in one day. 
Eat, drink, make merry; all things else are not worth — 
thtal" 

A rival of the earlier Cboirilus was Antihachds of 
Colophon, author of the Tkebais,* a learned poet a£Fecting 
to despise popularity, and in several respects an Alexan* 
drian bom before his time. Naturally, Alexandria admired 
him, counted him with Empedocles as master of 'the 
austere style,' and ranked him in general next to Homer, 
though Quintilian, in quoting the criticism, remarks that 
'next' does not always mean 'near.' A vague anecdotic 
tradition connects Antimachus and Plato. Plato sent his 
disciple Heracltdes to collect Antimachus's works, or 
else stayed in a room which Antimachus's recitation had 
emptied of other listeners ; and Antimachus said, " Plato 
to me is worth a thousand." There were literary wars 
over Antimachus in later times; and this anecdote is 
used by the friends of the learned epos, like Apollonius, 
to glorify Antimachus, while Callimachus and Duns took 
it as merely proving what they otherwise held, that Plato 
was no judge of poetry. The fragments are mostly too 
short to be of any literary interest ; the longer pieces are 
either merely grammatical or are quoted by Athenseus 
for some trivial point about wine-cups. The style strikes 
a modem ear as poor and harsh, but the harshness is 
studied, as the strange words are. He owed his real 
lune more to his elegiac romance Lydi* than to his 
epic. 

Lastly, Pausanias tells us : "A person called Phalysios 



7i Literature of ancient Greece 

rebuilt the temple of Ascl£pios in Naupaktos. He had 
a disease of the eyes and was almost blind, when the 
god sent to him Anyt£, the epic poetess, with a sealed 
tablet." Phalysios recovered, but we know no more of 
ANYTfi except that she was a native of Tegea, in Arcadia, 
and is once called 'the feminine Homer' — by Antipaler 
of Thessalonica, who has handed down to us many of 
her epigrams, and who may or may not have read her 
epics. 

The descendants of Hesiod are more varied and more 
obscure. The genealogical epos has two lines of de- 
velopment. The ordinary form went on living in divers 
parts of Greece. We hear of the Naupaktian Verses, 
the Samian, the Phocccan; but either they go without 
an author, or they are given to poets of local legend, the 
national equivalents of Hesiod — 'Carkinus'of Naupaktos, 
' EumSlus ' of Corinth, ' Asius ' > of Samos. On the other 
hand, the ' Eoi£ ' type produced the romantic or erotic 
elegy. This form of poetry in the hands of such masters 
as Mimnermus, Antimacbus, and Hermteianax, takes the 
form of lists of bygone lovers, whose children are some- 
times given and sometimes not. It is the story of the 
' Eoi^' seen from a different point of view. When we 
hear how the ' great blue wave heaven-high ' curled over 
the head of Tyro and took her to her sea-god, we think 
not of the royal pedigree, but of the wild romance of 
the story, the feeling in the heart of Entpeus or of 
Tyro. 

The didactic poetry of Hesiod developed on one side 
into the moralising or gnomic epics of Phokylidfis, the 
proverbs of the Seven Wise Men, the elegies of Solon and 
Theognis ; it even passed into the iambics of Sftmonides 

> Qui Silloi-like fngment most be by anothei man, not a SuniuL 



POETRY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 73 

of Amorgos, Archilochus, HippAnax (see p. 88). On 
another side, it gave rise to the poetry of science and 
learning. The master himself was credited with an 
AstroMomy* and a Tour of the Earth;* but such subjects 
for epos cannot generally be traced to any definite 
authors before the fourth century, and were not popular 
before the time of Aritus of Soli (ea. 276 B.C.). The first 
astronomical poet on record, Cleostiatus of Tenedos, 
who watched the stars from Mount Ida, is said to belong 
to the sixth century. The first medical poem is perhaps 
by one Periander, of the fourth. The epics on cookery, 
which we hear of in Athenaeus, were parodies rather 
than dissertations. The arch-gourmand Archestratus of 
Gela was a contemporary of Aristotle ; so was Matron. 
It was the time of the Middle Comedy, when food 
and the cooking of it were recognised as humorous 
subjects (see p. 378). 

But the main stream of didactic epos in early times 
became religious. ' Hesiod ' fell under the influence of 
'Orpheus.' Even the traditional poems were affected 
in this way. Kerkdps, the alleged ' real author ' of cer- 
tain Hesiodic poems, wrote a religious book, and is 
called a ' Pythagorean ' ; which must mean, in this early 
time, t)efore Pythagoras was bom, an Orphic Eumilus 
knew things about the under-world that he can only 
have learned from Onomacritus. Even the poem of 
Aristeas, which might be counted as a secular geo- 
graphical epos, the forerunner of the various ' Periigtsh,' 
evidently owed its interest to its miracles and theology. 

The Orphic movement worked mostly among the 
common people and dropped out of literary record; 
we only catch it where it influences philosophy. It is 
the explanation of Pythagoras, the man of learning and 



74 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

culture, vbo tarns firom the world to become high priest 
of an ascetic brotherhood based on mysticism and puri- 
fication. 

Tlie rise of a distinctly philosophical epos is im- 
mediately due to the carious spiritual relwUion of 
Xbnophanes of Colophon, a disciple of Anazimander, 
^o was driven l>y ^e Persian invasion of 546 B.C 
to earning his livelihood as a rhapsode. But he 
knew from Anaximander that what he recited was un- 
true. "Honur and Htacd fastened on the gtds ail that 
is a shame and a telmke to man, thieving and adultery 
and the cheating one of another" He made his master's 
physical Infinite into God — " there is one God most high 
over men and gods ;" "all of him sees, thinks, and hears; 
he has no parts; he is not man-iiie either in body or mind," 
"Men have made God in their own im^e; if oxen and Uons 
eonldpaint, th^y mould make gods liie oxen and lions." He 
wrote new ' true ' poetry of his own — the great doctrinal 
poem On Nature,* an epic on the historical Founding of 
Colophon,* and 2000 elegiacs on the Settlement at Elea * of 
himself and his fellow-exiles. The seventy years which 
he speaks of as having "tossed his troubled thoughts up 
and down Hellas," must have contained much hard fight- 
ing against organised opposition, of which we have an 
echo in his Satires.* He was not a great philosopher 
nor a great poet ; but the fact that in the very stronghold 
of epic tradition he preached the gospel of free philosophy 
and said boldly the things that every one was secretly 
feeling, made him a great power in Greek life and litera- 
ture. He is almost the only outspoken critic of religion 
preserved to us from Greek antiquity. The scepticism 
or indifference of later times was combined with a con- 
ventional dislike to free speech on religious matters— 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL EPOS 75 

partly as an attack on shadows, partly as mere 'bad 
taste.' 

The example of Xenophanes led his great philosophical 
disciple to put bis abstract speculations into verse form. 
Parhenides' poem On Nattirt* was in two books, the 
first on the way of Truth, the second on the way of False- 
hood. There is a mythological setting, and the poefs 
ride to the daughters of the Sun, who led him through 
the stone gates of Night and Day to the sanctuary of 
Wisdom, is quite impressive in its way. But it would all 
fiave been better in prose. 

Elf PEDOCLES of Acr^as, on the other hand, is a real 
poet, perhaps as great as his admirer Lucretius, and 
wolfing on a finer material. He was an important 
citizen, a champion of liberty against the tyrants ThCron 
and Thrasydaios. His history, like that of the kindred 
spirits, Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana, has been 
overlaid by the miraculous. He stopped the Etesian 
winds ; he drained an enormous marsh ; he recalled a 
dead woman to life ; he prophesied the hour that the 
gods would summon him, and passed away without 
dying. Hb enemies said that from sheer vanity he 
had thrown himself down Mount Etna that he might 
disappear without a trace and pass for immortal 
' How did any one know, then ? ' 'He had brass 
boots and the volcano threw one of them up I ' Saner 
tradition said that he died an exile in the Peloponnese. 
His character profoundly influenced Greek and Arabian 
thought, and many works in both languages have passed 
under his name. His system we speak of later ; but 
the thaumaturgy is the real life of the poem. Take the 
words of a banished immortal stained by sin : — 

" Thtrt is an vUerana of Fate, an anewtt tUcru of tJu 



76 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

gwb, everlasting; sealed with broad oaths; whttt ta^ beittg 
staitu his hand with sin of htart or swears an oath of de- 
ceiving, aye, though he be a Spirit, whose life is for ever, for 
thrice ten thousand years he wanders awayjrom the Blessed, 
growing, as the ages pass, through all the shapes of mortal 
things, passing from one to another of the weary ways ofltfe. 
The might of the ^ther hunts him to the Sea, the Sea vomits 
him back to the fioor if Earth, and Earth flings him to the 
fires of Helios the unwearied, and he to the whirlwinds of 
^ther. He is received of one after another, and abhorred 
efalL" 

Empedocles remembered previous lives : " T have been 
a youth and a maiden and a bush and a bird and a gl^ming 
fish in the sea." He hated the slaughter of animals for 
food : " Will ye never cease from the horror of bloodshedding? 
See ye not that ye devour your brethren, and your hearts 
fW* not of a? " But bean-eating was as bad : " Wretched, 
thricC'Wretdud, ke^ your hands from beans. It is the same 
to eat beans as to eat your father^ heads." This is no 
question of over-stimuUiting food ; beans were under 
some religious ir/vt or taboo, and impure. 



Elboy and Iambus 

The use of the word 'lyric' to denote all poetry that 
is not epic or dramatic, is modem in origin and inac- 
curate. The word implies that the poetry was sung to a 
lyre accompaniment, or, by a slight extension of meaning, 
to some accompaniment. But the epos itself was origin- 
ally sung. 'Homeri' had a lyre, 'Hesiod' either a lyre 
or a staff. And, on the other hand, the ' lyric ' elegy and 
iambus began very soon to drop their music All Greek 



POETRY ORIGINALLY SUNG 77 

poetry originates in some fonn of song, in words com- 
bined with music ; and the di£Ferent forms of poetry 
either gradually cast off their music as they required 
attention and clearness of thought, or fell more under 
the sway of music as they aimed at the expression of 
vague feeling. We can seldom say whether a given set of 
words were meant for speaking or for singing. Theognis's 
el^es seem to have been sung at banquets to a Bute 
accompaniment ; Plato, in speaking of Solon, uses some- 
times the word ' sing,' sometimes ' recite.' The two chief 
marks of song as against speech are, what we call the 
strophe or stanza, and the protracted dwelling of the 
voice on one syllable. For instance, the pentameter, 
which is made out of the hexameter by letting one long 
syllable count for two at the end of each half of the line, 
is more 'lyric' than the plain hexameter ; and the elegy, 
with its couplets of hexameters and pentameters, more 
lyric than the uniformly hexametric epos. The syncop- 
ated iambic produces one of the grandest of ^Sschylean 
song-metres, while the plain iambic trimeter is the form 
of poetry nearest to prose. 

We hear of traditional tunes in Greece only by desultory 
and unscientific accounts. The 'Skolia' or drinking- 
songs bad a very charming traditional tune for which 
no author is mentioned. Various flute-tunes, such as 
'the Many-headed,' 'the Chariot/ are attributed to a 
certain Olympus, a Phrygian, son of the satyr Marsyas, 
whose historical credit cannot be saved by calling 
him 'the younger Olympus.' The lyre-tunes go back 
mostly to Terpander of Antissa, in Lesbos, Two state- 
ments about him have a certain suggestiveness. When 
Or^dieus was torn to pieces — as a Bacchic incarnation had 
to be — by the lliracian women, his head and lyre floated 



78 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

over the sea to Terpander's island. Terpander is thus 
the developer of .£oUc or native Ck^ek harp-music. But 
he also learned, we are told, from the Cretan Chrysothe- 
mis. Now, Crete was one of the first Dorian settlements. 
So Terpander is a junction of the native string-music 
with that of the Dorian invader. All that we know 
of him, his name ' CJiamur^-truH' included, has the 
stamp of myth. He gave the lyre seven string in- 
stead of four. Seven tunes are mentioned as his inven- 
tion ; one particularly, called the 'Terpandrian Nomos,' 
is characterised by its seven divisions, instead of the 
^mple three, Beginning, Middle, and End. He won 
four musical prizes at Delphi — at a time before there 
were any contests I He is the first musical victor in the 
Cameia at Sparta. All these contests existed at first 
without fixed records, and the original victor is gener- 
ally mythical. 

The conclusion is that, as there was heroic legend, so 
there was song in most cantons of Greece before our 
earliest records. The local style varied, and music was 
generally classified on a geographical basis — ' the Phry- 
gian style,' 'the Ionian," 'the Dorian/ 'the hypo-Dorian,' 
'the hyper-Phrygian,' 'the Lesbian,' and so on. The 
division is puzzling to us because it is so crude, and 
because it implies a concrete knowledge of the parti- 
cular styles to start with. The disciples of Socrates, who 
saw every phenomenon with the eye of the moralist, 
dwell much upon the ethical values of the various divi- 
sions : the Dorian has dignity and courage, the Phry- 
gian is wild and exciting, the Lydian effeminate, the 
JE6\ian expresses turbulent chivalry. This sounds arbi- 
trary ; and it is interesting to find that while Plato 
makes the Ionic style 'effeminate and bibulous,' bis 



MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENTS 79 

disciple Heraclldes says it is ' austere and proud.' The 
Socratic tradition especially finds a moral meaning in 
the difference between string and wind instruments. 
The harp allows you to remain master of yourself, a 
free and thinking man ; the flute, pipe, or clarionette, 
or whatever corresponds to the various kinds of ' aulos,' 
puts you beside yourself, obscures reason, and is more 
fit for barbarians. As a matter of fact, the ' aulos ' was 
the favourite instrument in Sparta, Boeotia, and Delphi. 
Too stimulating for the sensitive Athenian, it fairly 
suited the Dorian palate. It would probably be milk- 
and-water to us. 

Hie local styles of music had generally corresponding 
styles of metre. Those of Lesbos and Teos, for instance, 
remained ample ; their music appeals even to an un> 
tnuned ear. The ordinary Ionic rhythms need only be 
once felt to be full of magic, the Dorian are a little 
harder, while many of the ^olian remain unintelligible 
except to the most sympathetic students. The definite 
rules, the accompaniment of rhythmic motion and con- 
stant though subordinate music, enabled the Greeks to 
produce metrical effects which the boldest and most melo- 
dious of English poets could never dream of approaching. 
There is perhaps no department of ancient achievement 
which distances us so completely as the higher lyric 
poem. We have developed music separately, and far 
surpassed the Greeks in that great isolated domain, but 
at what a gigantic sacrifice I 

The origin of the word Elegy is obscure. It may 
have been originally a dirge metre accompanied, when 
sun^ by the 'aulos.' But we meet it first in war-songs, 
and it became in course of time the special verse for 
love. 




«0 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

The oldest known elegist, CaliJnus, comes from 
Ephesus, and writes in a dialect like that used in the 
Ionic parts of Homer. His wars are partly against the 
invading Kimmerians (about 650 B,a), partly against the 
town of Magnesia. He was about contemporary with 
the great Archilochus {p. 86) ; but Calllnus speaks of 
Magnesia as still fighting, while Archilochus mentions its 
faU. TyrTjGUS of Aphidna wrote elegiac war-songs for 
the Spartans in the Second Messenian War (685-668 B.a), 
and speaks as a Dorian noble, a Spartiate. But there 
was an Aphidna in Attica as well as in Laconia ; and 
Athenian malice remodelled an old joke into the anec- 
dote that Sparta, hard pressed in the war, had sent to 
Athens for a leader, and that Athens had sent them a 
lame schoolmaster, who woke the dull creatures up, and 
led them to victory. In the same spirit, the Samians 
used to tell how they lent the men of Pri€n£ a pro- 
phetess to help them E^ainst the Carians — even a 
Samian old woman could teach the Prieneans how to 
fight 1 Tyrtseus becomes a semi-comic character in the 
hte non-Spartan tradition — for instance, in the Messe- 
nian epic of Rhiinus (third century B.C.) ; but his Doric 
name, the fact that his songs were sung in Crete as well 
as in the Peloponnes^ and the traditional honours paid 
to him at Lacedaemonian feasts, suggest that he was 
a personification of the Doric war-elegy, and that all 
authorless Doric war-songs became his property — for 
instance, the somewhat unarchaic lines quoted by the 
orator Lycurgus. The poems were, of course, originally 
in Doric; but our fragments have been worked over into 
Ionic dress,' and modernised. The collection, which 
includes some anapaestic marching-songs, comes from 

' Of, the inixtnre i ^AoxpiyiaTh) Zrd^iv SKil 




THE EARLY ELEGISTS 8i 

Alexandria, and has the special title Eunemia, ' Law and 
Order.' 

The greatest poet among the elegists is Mihnerhus of 
Colophon. He is chiefly celebrated for bis Nanno,* a 
long poem, or a collection of poems, on love or past 
lovers, called by the name of his mistress, who, like 
himself, was a flute-player. But his war fragments are 
richer than those of Tyrtseus or Calllnus, and apart 
from either love or war he has great romantic tieauty. 
For instance, the fragment : — 

" Sttrtfy tAt Sum iat ladour all Aij dayt. 
And n^vtr «a^ rtspOe, stetdi nor god, 
Sina £Mjirtl, wkost Mands art roty rays, 
Oeum forsook, ondHeavttft kigk pathway trod; 
At night aeross the sea that wondnms btd 
SiOl-hollow, btattn by H^fuUstoi hand, 
Ofwtt^^geld and gorgtotis, iears his head 
mat^woJUt^ on tht viavt,from tvds rtd strand . 
To tht EOtiofi short, where steeds and chariot are, 
ICtom m tttttd, waiting for tht mormng stay!' 

The influence of Mimnermus increased with time, and 
the plan of his Naana* remained a formative idea to 
the great elegiac movement of Alexandria and its Roman 
imitators. There is music and character in all that he 
writes, and spirit where it is wanted, as in the account 
of the taking of Smyrna. 

The shadowiness of these non-Attic poets strikes us as 
aoon as we touch the full stream of Attic tradition in 
Solon, son of Exekestides (639-559 ^•^•)- T^c tradition 
is still story rather than history, but it is there : his 
travels, his pretended madness, his dealings with the 
tyrant Pisistratus. The travels were probably, in reality, 
ordinary commercial voyages, but they made a 6ne 



S2 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

background for the favourite Greek conception of the 
Wise Wanderer. We hear, in defiance of chronology, 
how he met the richest of kings, Croesus, who showed 
all hb glory and then asked who was the 'most fortu- 
nate' man in the world. Solon named him certain 
obscure persons who had done their duty and were 
loved by their neighbours and were now safely dead. 
The words seemed meaningless at the time, but had 
their due effect afterwards— on Croesus when Cyrus was 
in the act of burning him to death ; and on Cyrus when 
he heard the story and desisted from his cruel pride. 

Solon was a soldier and statesman who had written 
love-poetry in his youth, and now turned his skill in 
verse to practical purposes, circulating political poems 
as his successors two centuries later circulated speeches 
and pamphlets. It is not clear how far this practice was 
borrowed from the great towns of Ionia, how far it was 
a growth of the specially Athenian instinct for politics. 
We possess many considerable fragments, elegiac, iambic, 
and trochaic, which are of immense interest as historical 
documents ; while as poetry they have something of the 
hardness and dulness of the practical man. The most 
interesting bits are on the war against Megara for the 
possession of Salamis, and on the ' Seisachtheia ' or ' Off- 
shaking of Burdens^* as Solon's great legislative revolu- 
tion was called. As a reforming statesman, Solon was 
beaten by the extraordinary difficulties of the time ; he 
lived to see the downfall of the constitution he had 
framed, and the rise of Pisistratus ; but something in 
his character kept him alive in the memory of Athens 
as the type of the great and good lawgiver, who might 
have been a 'Tyrannos,' but would not for righteousness' 
sake. 



THEOGNIS OF MEGARA 83 

Theognis of Megara, by far the best preserved of the 
elegists, owes his immortality to his maxims, the brief 
statements of practical philosophy which the Greeks 
called ' Gndmai ' and the Romans ' 5m/M/ur.' Some are 
merely moral — 

" Fmrtst it rigkteoMSfuss, ohJ iut is lualt^ 
And svMtttit is to win ikt htarts dtairt? 

Some are bitter — 

" Fm men earn dUat tktir kattrs, Kymat mints 
Only tnu lev* it easy to MnayJ" 

Many show the exile waiting for his revenge — 

"Drink wliilt tJuy drini^ and, tMongh Odn* ktart bepUUd, 
lut no man living eotmt tht wounds of it: 
nUre comtt « dtg for paOena, and a day 
FordttdsandJoyttoailmtnandtotMtt/' 

Theognis's doctrine is not food for babes. He is a 
Dorian noble, and a partisan of the bitterest type in a 
state renowned for its factions. He drinks freely; he 
speaks of the Demos as 'the vile' or as 'mr enemies': 
once he prays Zeus to *'pv» kim their black blood to 
drink." That was when the Demos had killed all his 
friends, and driven him to beggary and exile, and the 
proud man had to write poems for those who enter- 
tained him. We hear, for instance, of an elegy on 
some Syracusans slain in battle. Our extant remains 
are entirely personal ebullitions of feeling or monitory 
addresses, chiefly to his squire Kyrnos. Hb relations 
with Kyrnos are typical of the Dorian soldier. He takes 
to battle with him a boy, his equal in station, to whom 
he is 'Uke a father' (L 1049). He teaches him all the 
duties of Dorian chivalry — to fight, to suffer in silence, 



84 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

to stick to a friend, to keep clear of falsehood, and to 
avoid associating with 'base men,' He is pledged to 
bring the boy back safe, or die on the field himself ; 
and he is disgraced if the boy does not grow ap to be 
a worthy and noble Dorian. In the rest of his rela- 
tions with the squire, there is some sentiment which 
we cannot enter into: there were no women in the 
Dorian camps. It is the mixed gift of good and evil 
brought by the Dorian invaders to Greece, which the 
true Greek sometimes over-admired because it was so 
foreign to him — self-mastery, courage, grossness, and 
pride, effective devotion to a narrow class and an un- 
civilised ideal. Our MSS. of Theognis come from a 
collection made for educational purposes in the third 
century B.C., and show Aat state of interpolation which 
is characteristic of the schoolbook. Whole passages of 
Solon, Mimnermus, Tyrtseus, and another elegist Eu£nus, 
originally jotted on the margin for purposes of com- 
parison, have now crept into the text The order of 
the ' Gnomes ' is confused ; and we sometimes have what 
appear to be two separate versions of the same gnome, 
an original and an abbreviation. There is a certain 
blindness of frank pride and chivalry, a depth of hatred 
and love, and a sense of mystery, which make Theognis 
worthy of the name of poet. 

Hie gnomic movement receives its special expression 
in the conception of the Seven Wise Men. They pro- 
vide the necessary mythical authorship for the wide- 
spread jM-overbs and maxims — the 'Know thyself! which 
was written up on the temple at Delphi; the 'Nothing 
too much,' ' Surety; loss to fitUow^ and the like, which 
were current in people's mouths. He Wise Ones were 




GNOMIC POETRY 85 

not alwajrs very virtuous. The tyrant Periander occurs 
in some of the lists, and the quasi-tyrant Pittacus in all : 
their wisdom was chiefly of a prudential tendency. A 
pretended edition of their woite was compiled l^ the 
fourth-century (?) orator, Lobon of Argos. Riddles, as 
well as gnomes, are a form of wisdom ; and several 
ancient conundnmis are attributed to the sage KleobO- 
lus, or else to ' Kleobultna,' the woman being expl^ned 
as a daughter of the man : it seemed, perhaps, a feminine 
form of wisdom. 

The gnome is made witty by the contemporaries 
Phorylidbs of Miletus and Dbuodocus of Leros 
(about 537 B.C.). Their only remains are in the nature 
of epigrams in elegiac metre. Demodocus claims to 
be the inventor of a very fruitful jest: "This, too, is of 
Demodocus : The Chians art had; not this man good and 
that bad, but all bad, except Procles. And ex>en Promts is a 
Chian I " There are many Greek and Latin adaptations 
of that epigram before we get to Person's condemnation 
of German scholars : " All save only Hermann ; and Her- 
mann's a German 1 " The form of introduction, " This, 
too, is 0/ Phoiylides," or " 0/ Demodocus," seems to have 
served these two {xiets as the mention of Kymos 
served llieognis. It was a 'seal' which stamped the 
author's name on the work. We have under the name 
of Phokylides a poem in two hundred and thirty-nine 
hexameters, containing moral precepts, which Bemays 
has shown to be the work of an Alejtandrian Jew.' It 
begins, "First honour God, and next thy parents"; it 
speaks of the resurrection of the body, and agrees with 
Deuteronomy (xxil 6) on the taking of birds' nests. 

SbiioniD£» of Amorgos {fl. 625 B.a) owes the peculiar 
spelling of his name to grammarians who wished to 



86 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

distinguish him from his more illustrious namesake, 
Simdnides of Keos. His elegies, a history of Samoa 
among them, are lost ; but Stobseus has preserved in his 
Anthology an iambic poem on women — a counter-satire, 
apparently, to the waggon-songs in which the village 
women at certain festirals were licensed to mock their 
male acquaintances. The good woman in Semonides is 
like a bee, the attractive and extravagant like a mare, 
and 80 on. The pig-woman comes comparatively high 
in flie scale, though she is lazy and fond of food. 

There were three iambic poets regarded as 'classical' 
by the Alexandrian canon — Semonides, Archilochus, and 
Hippdnaz. But, except pos^bly the last-named, no poet 
wrote iambics exclusively ; and the intimate literary con- 
nection between, for instance, Tfaeognis, Archilochus, and 
Hesiod, shows that the metrical division is unimportant. 
Much of Solon's work might, as far as the subject or the 
spirit is concerned, have been in elegiacs or iambics in- 
differently. The iambic metres appear to have been con- 
nected with the popular and homely gods Dionysus and 
Demeter, as the stately dactylic hexameters were with 
Zeus and Apollo. The iambic is the metre nearest to 
common speech ; a Greek orator or an English news- 
paper ^ves a fair number of iambic verses to a column. 
Its service to Greek literature was to provide poetry with 
a verse for dialogue, and for the ever-widening range of 
subjects to which it gradually condescended. A Euri- 
pides, who saw poetry and meaning in every stone of a 
street, found in the current iambic trimeter a vehicle of 
expression in some ways more flexible even than prose. 
When it first appears in literature, it has a satirical 
colour. 

Archilochus of Paros {fi. 650 b.c.7} eclipsed all earlier 



IAMBIC POETRY. ARCHILOCHUS 87 

writers of the iaxnbus, and counts in tradition as the first. 
He was the ' Homer' of familiar personal poetry. This 
was partly due to a literary war in Alexandria, and partly 
to his having no rivals at his side. Still, even our scan^ 
fragments justify Quintilian's criticism : " The sentences" 
really are " strong, terse, and quivering, full of blood and 
muscle; some people feel that if his work is ever inferior 
to the very highest, it must tie the fault of his subject 
not of his genius." This has, of course, another side to 
it. Archilochus is one of those masterful men who hate to 
feel humble. He will not see the greatness of things, and 
likes subjects to which he can feel himself superior. Yet, 
apart from the satires, which are blunt bludgeon work, 
his smallest scraps have a certain fierce enigmatic beauty. 
" Oh, hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon /" is a cry 
to bury his friends' shipwrecked corpses. " In ngf spear 
is" kneaded bread, in my spear is wine oflsmarus; and I He 
upon my spear as I drini I" That is the defiant boast of 
the outlaw turned freebooter. " There were seven dead 
men trampled under foot, and we were a thousand mur- 
derers." What does that mean ? One can imagine many 
things. The few lines about love form a comment on 
Sappho. The burning, colourless passion that finds its 
expression almost entirely in physical language may be 
beautiful in a soul like hers ; but what a fierce, impossible 
thing it ts with this embittered soldier of fortune, whose 
intense sensitiveness and prodigious intellect seem some- 
times only to mark htm out as more consciously wicked 
than his fellows 1 We can make out something of his life. 
He had to leave Paros — one can imagine other reasons 
besides or before his alleged poverty — and settled on 
Thasos, " a wretched island, bare and rough as a ho^s badi 
in the sea," in company with all the worst scoundrels in 



88 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Greece. In a battie with ibe natives of the mainland he 
threw away his shield and ran, and made very good 
jokes about the incident afterwards. He was betrothed 
to CleobAK, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, 
Lycambes. LycamlKS broke o£F the engagement ; Archi- 
tochus raged blindly and indecently at father and daughter 
for the Rjt of his life. Late tradition says they hanged 
themselves. Archilochus could not stay in Paros ; the 
settlement in Thasos had failed ; so he was thrown on 
the world, sometimes supporting himself as a mercenary 
soldier, sometimes doubtless as a pirate, until he was 
killed in a t>attle against Naxos. " I am a strvattt of tiu 
lord god of war, and I know tkt lovely gift of tkt Muses" 
He could fight and he could make wonderful poetry. 
It does not appear that any further good can be said 
of him. 

Lower all round than Archilochus is HippOnax of 
Ephesus. Tradition makes him a beggar, lame and 
deformed himself, and inventor of the 'halting iambic' 
or 'scazon,' a deformed trimeter which upsets all one's 
expectations by having a spondee or trochee in the 
last foot His works were all abusive. He inveighed 
especially against the artists Bupalos and AthJnis, who 
had caricatured him ; and of course against women — 
e^., "A woman gives a man two days of pleasure: the 
day he marries her, and the day he carries o$tt her corpse" 
Early satire does not imply much wit ; it implies hard 
hitting, with words instead of sticks and stones. The 
other satirical writers of classical times, Ananius and 
Hermippus, Kerkidas and Aischrion, were apparently 
not much admired in Alexandria. 

One form of satire, the Beast Fable, was especially 
developed in collections of stories which went undN 




HIPPdNAX: '^SOP' Sp 

the name of ^SOP. He seems to be a mere story- 
^ure, like KerkAps or Kreoph^lus, invented to pro* 
vide an author for the fables. He was a foreign dave 
— ^Tbracian, Phrygian, or Ethiopian — under the same 
master as Rhoddpis, the courtesan who ruined Sappho's 
brother. He was suitably deformed ; he was murdered 
at Delphi. Delphi dealt much in the deaths or tombs 
of celebrities. It used the graves of Neoptolemus and 
Heaod to attract the sigbt-seer ; it extorted monetary 
atonement from the slayer of Apollo's inspired servant 
Archilochus. But in JEaop's case a descendant of his 
master ladmon made his murder a ground for claiming 
money from the Delphians ; so it is hard to see why 
they countenanced the story. Tradition gave .<£sop 
interviews with Crcesus and the Wise Men ; Aristo- 
phanes makes it a jocular reproach, not to have 'trodden 
well' your ^sop. He is in any case not a poet, but 
the legendary author of a particular type of story, which 
any one was at liberty to put into verse, as Socrates 
did, or to collect in prose, like Demetrius of Phaltrum. 
Our oldest collections of fables are the iambics of 
Phiedrus and the elegiacs of Avianus in Latin, and the 
scazons of Babrius in Greek, all three post-Christian. 



The Personal Sono — Sappho, Alc£us, Anacreon 

The Song proper, the Greek 'Melos,' falls into two 
divisions — ^the personal song of the poet, and the choric 
song of his band of trained dancers. There are remains 
of old popular songs with no alleged author, in various 
styles : the MiU Song— a mere singing to while away 
time — " Grind, MiU, grind i Even Pittacus grinds; Who 
is king of tht great MytUene" ; — the Spinning Song and 
the Wine-Press Song, and the SwaUow Song, with 
which the Rhodian boys went round be^ng in early 
spring. Rather higher than these were the 'Skolia,' 
songs sung at banquets or wine-parties. The form 
^ve rise to a special SkoUon-tune, with the four-line 
verse and the syllable-counting which characterises the 
Lesbian lyric. The Skolion on Haimodius and Aristo- 
geiton is the most celebrated ; but nearly all our remains 
are fine work, and the "AM, Leip^drion, false to them 
who loved thee," the song of the exiles who 6ed from 
the tyrant Pisistratus to the rock of that name, is full of 
a haunting beauty. 

The Lesbian 'Melos' cuhninates in two great names, 
Alcseus and Sappho, at the end of the seventh century.' 

' The dfttet are nncotaiiL Athen* can Kuoelr h»Te pcMCMcd Sietnm 
before the tdgn of PidMnttu. Belocli, Grmhiulu GutUthU, L 330, 



AhCMVS OF LESBOS 91 

The woman has surpassed the man, if not in poetical 
achievement, at least in her effect on the imagination 
<rf after ages. A whole host of poetesses sprang up 
in different parts of Greece after her — Corinna and 
Myitis in Bceotia, Telesilla in Argos, Praxilla in Sikyon ; 
while Erinna, writing in the fourth century, still calls 
herself a ' comrade ' of Sappho, 

Alcsus spent his life in wars, first against Athens 
for the possession of Sig£um, where, like Archilochus, 
he left his shield for the enemy to dedicate to Athena ; 
then against the democratic tyrant Melanchrds and 
his successor Myrsilos. At last the Lesbians stopped 
the civil strife by appointing Pittacus, the 'Wise Man,' 
dictator, and Alcaeus left the island for fifteen years. 
He served as a soldier of fortune in Egypt and else- 
where : his brother Antimenidas took service with 
Nebuchadnezzar, and hilled a Jewish or Egyptian giant 
in sin^e combat Eventually the poet was pardoned 
and invited home. His works filled ten books in 
Alexandria : they were all 'occasional poetry,' hymns, 
political party-songs (araffMriKa), drinking-songs, and 
love-songs. His strength seems to have lain in the 
political and personal reminiscences, the "hardships of 
travel, banishment, and war," that Horace speal^ of. 
Sappho and Alcaeus are often represented together on 
vases, and the idea of a romance between them was 
inevitable. lYadition gives a httle address of his in 
a Sapphic metre, "T'Aom violet -crowned, purt, afUy- 
smtUng Sappho" and an answer from Sappho in Alcaics 
— a delicate mutual compliment Every line of Alcaeus 
has charm. The stanza called after him is a magni- 
ficent metrical invention. His language is spontaneous 
and musical ; it seems to come straight from a heart as 



92 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

full as that of Archilochus, but much more generous. 
He is a fiery JEoMan ooble, open-handed, free-drinking, 
frank, and passionate ; and though he fought to order in 
case of need, he seems never to have written to order. 

His younger contemporary Sappho — the name is 
variously spelt ; there is authority for Psappha, Psafio, 
and even F^pha — bom at Ephesus, dwelling at Mitylene, 
shared the political fortunes of Alcseus's party. We hear 
of a husband, whose name, Kerkylas of Andros, is not 
above suspicion ; and of a daughter Klels, whose existence 
is perhaps erroneously inferred from a poem — " I have a 
fair UttU ckild, with a shape tike a golden finver, Kleis, my 
darling." She seems to have been the leader of a band 
of literary women, students and poetesses, held together 
by strong ties of intimacy and affection. It is compared 
in antiquity * to the circle of Socrates. Sappho wrote in 
the most varied styles — there are fifty different metres 
in our scanty remains of her — but all bear a strong 
impress of personal character. By the side of Alcaeus, 
one feels her to be a woman. Her dialect is more the 
native speech of Mitylene, where she lived ; his the more 
literary. His interests cover war and drinking and 
adventure and politics ; hers are all in personal feeling, 
mostiy tender and introspective. Her suggestions of 
nature — the line, "/ heard the footfall of the flowery 
spring" ; the marvellously musical comparison, "Like 
the one sweet apple very red, up high on the highest bough, 
that the apple-gatherers have forgotten ; nc, not forgotten, 
but could never reach so far" — are perhaps more definitely 
beautiful than the love-poems which have made Sappho's 
name immortal. Two of these are preserved by accident ; 
the rest of Sappho's poetry was publicly burned in 1073 
' M«idinn« Tyiin*- 



SAPPHO OF LESBOS 93 

at Rome and at Constantinople, as being too much for the 
shaky morals of the time. One must not over-estimate 
the compliments of gallantry which Sappho had in plenty : 
she vas 'the Poetess' as Homer was 'the Poet' ; she 
was 'the Tenth Muse/ 'the Pierian Bee'; the wise 
Solon wished to " learn a song of Sappho's and then die." 
Still Sappho was known and admired all over Greece 
soon after her death; and a dispassionate judgment 
must see that her love-poetry, if narrow in scope, has 
unrivalled splendour of expression for the longing that 
is too intense to have any joy in it, too serious to allow 
room for metaphor and imaginative ornament Unfor- 
tunately, the dispassionate judgment is scarcely to be 
had. Later antiquity could not get over its curiosity at 
the woman who was not a 'Hetaira' and yet published 
passutnate love-poetry. She had to be made a heroine 
ot romance. For instance, she once mentioned the Rock 
of Leucas. That was enough I It was the rock from 
^triiich certain saga-heroes had leaped to their death, and 
she must have done the same, doubtless from unrequited 
passion I Then came the deference of gallantry, the 
reckless merriment of the Attic comedy, and the defiling 
imagination of Rome, It is a little futile to discuss the 
private character of a wonian who lived two thousand 
five hundred years ago in a society of which we have 
almost no records. It is clear that Sappho was a ' respect- 
able person ' in Lesbos ; and there is no good early 
evidence to show that the Lesbian standard was low. 
Her extant poems address her women friends with a 
pasdonate intensity ; but there are dozens of questions 
to be solved twfore these poems can be used as evidence : 
Is a ^ven word-form correct 7 is Sappho speaking in her 
own person, or dramatically f what occasion are the 



94 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

verses written for ? bow far is the poem a literary exer- 
cise based on the odes written by Alcaeus to his squire 
L^ros, or by Tbeognis to Kymus ? 

No one need defend the character of Anacreon of 
Teos ; though, since he lived in good society to the age 
of e^hty-five, he cannot have been as bad as he wishes 
OS to believe. His poetry is derived from the Lesbians 
and from the Skolia of his countryman Pythermus. 
He was driven from Teos by the Persian conquest 
of 545 B,c.; he settled in Abdtra, a Teian colony in 
Thrace ; saw some fighting, in which, he carefully ex- 
plains, he disgraced himself quite as much as AIcsus and 
Archilochus ; finally, he attached himself to various royal 
persons, Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and 
Echekrates the Aleuad in Thessaly. The Alexandrians 
had five books of his elegies, epigrams, iambics, and 
songs ; we possess one satirical fragment, and a good 
number of ^ne and love songs, addressed chtefiy to his 
squire Bathyllus. They were very popular and gave rise 
to many imitations at all periods of literature ; we possess 
a series of such Anacreontea, dating from various times 
between the third century B,c. and the Renaissance. These 
poems are innocent of fraud : in one, for instance (No. i), 
Anacreon appears to the writer in a dream ^ ; in most of 
them the poet merely assumes the mask of Anacreon and 
sings his love-songs to 'a younger Bathyllus.' The 
dialect, the treatment of Erds as a frivolous fat boy, the 
personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are 
marks of a later age. Yet there can be no doubt of the 
extraordinary charm of these poems, true and false alike. 
Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid 
ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can 

■ QC ao and S9. 




ANACREON OF TEOS 95 

understand him, and he ripples into music. But the 
false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon. 
Compared with them the real Anacreon has great variety 
of theme and of metre, and even some of the stateliness 
and reserved strength of the sixth century. Very likely 
our whole conception of the man would be bi^er, were 
it not for fiie incessant imitations which have fixed him 
as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian. 

These three poets represent the personal lyric of 
Greece. In Alcaeus it embraces all sides of an adven- 
turous and perhaps patriotic life ; in Sappho it expresses 
with a burning intensity the inner life, the passions that 
are generally silent; in Anacreon it spreads out into 
light snatches of song about simple enjoyments, sensual 
and im^inative. The personal lyric never reached the 
artistic grandeur, the religious and philosophic depth 
of the choric song. It is significant of our difficulty in 
really appreciating Greek poetry, that we are usually so 
mudi more charmed by the style which all antiquity 
counted as easier and lower. 



The Choir-Sono— General 

Besides the personal lyric, there had existed in Greece 
at a time earlier than our earliest records the practice of 
celebrating important occasions by the dance and song 
of a choir. The occasion might of course be public 
or private ; it was always in early times more or less 
rehgious — a victory, a harvest, a holy day, a birth, death, 
or marriage. At the time that we first know the choir- 
song it always implies a professional poet, a band of 
professional performers, and generally a new [voduction 




96 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

— new dance, new music, new words — for each new 
occauon. Also, it is international. The great lyric poets 
are from Lesbos, Italian Locri, Rhegion, Keos, Boeotia ; 
the earliest is actually said to be a Lydian. A poet can 
even send his composition across the sea to be repre- 
sented, secure of having trained performers in another 
country who will understand the dancing and singing. 
The dialect is correspondingly international. It has 
.lEolic, ' Epic,' and Doric elements, the proportions vary- 
ing slightly in various writers. These facts sufBce to 
show that the choir-poem which we get even in Alcman, 
much more that of Simdnides, is a highly-developed pro- 
duct Our chief extant specimens, the prize-songs of 
Pindar, represent the extreme fulness of bloom upon 
which decay already presses. 

What is the history implied in this mixture of dia- 
lects 7 The iGolic is the language of song, because of 
Sappho and Alcaeus. No »nger followed them who 
was not under their spelL The ' Epic ' element comes 
from the ' Homer' which had by this time grown to be 
the common property of Greece.* The Doric element 
needs explanation. 

The poets, as we have seen, were not especially 
Dorian ; but the patrons of the pK>etry were, and so to 
a great extent was its spirit It was the essence of the 
Ionian and ^oltan culture to have set the individual 
free ; the Dorian kept him, even in poetry, subordinated 
to a larger whole, took no interest in his private feelings, 
but required him to express the emotions of the com- 
munity. The earliest choir-poets, Alcman and Tisias, 

' Wh«t this ' Homer ' dUl«ct wu in B<Botia, or LobM, Oi AigiM, we are 
not able too;. The'Eplo' element in oat ijtie renuiDihubeenlonitedud 
Atticiied jnit m the JXaJ hu been. 



THE CHOIR SONG: PATRONAGE 97 

were probably public servants, working for their re- 
spective states. That is one Dorian element in the 
dioir-song. Another is that, as soon as it ceases to 
be genuinely the performance by the community of a 
public duty, it becomes a professional entertainment for 
the pleasure of a patron who pays. The non-choral poets, 
Alcaeus, Sappho, Archilochus, wrote, to please themselves ; 
they were 'their own,' as Aristotle puts it, and did not 
become JtXXou, 'another's.' Anacreon hved at courts 
and must really have depended on patronage; bot his 
poems are ostensibly written at his own pleasure, not at 
the bidding of Polycrates. The training of a professional 
chorus, however, means expense, and expense means 
a patron who pays. Pindar and Simdnides with their 
trained bands of dancers could only exist in dependence 
on the rich oligarchies. 

The richest Ionian state, Athens, looked askance at 
this late development. Her dithyrambs and tragedies 
were not composed to the order of a man, nor exe- 
cuted by hired performers ; they were solemnly acted 
by free citizens in the service of the great Demos. Occa- 
sionally a very rich citizen might have a dithyramb 
performed for him, like a Dorian noble ; but even 
Megacles, who employed Pindar, cuts a modest and 
economical figure by the side of the ^ginetans and 
the royalties; and the custom was not common in 
Athens. Alcibiades employed Euripides for a dithy- 
ramb, but that was part of his ostentatious munifi- 
cence. The Ionian states in general were either too 
weak or too democratic to exercise much influence on 
the professional choir-song. 

The choir-song formed a special branch of literature 
mth a onity of its own, but it had no one name. Aris- 



98 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

totle often uses the special name 'dithyramb' to denote 
the whole genus ; this is a popular extension of meaning, 
influenced by the growth of the later Attic dithyramb 
in the hands of Timotheos and Philozenos. Even the 
names of the different kinds of choir-song are vague. 
When Alexandrian scholars collected the scattered works 
of Pindar or StmAnides, they needed some principle of 
arrangement and division. Thus, according to the 
subjects, we have drink-songs, marriage-songs, dirges, 
victory-songs, &c.; or, by the composition of the choirs, 
maiden-songs, boy-songs, man-songs ; or, from another 
point of view again, standing-songs, marching-songs, 
dancing-songs. Then there come individual names, 
not in any classification : a ' paean ' is a hymn to Apollo ; 
a 'dithyramb,' to Dionysus ; an 'iftlemos' is perhaps a 
lament for sickness, and not for death. The confusion 
is obvious. The collectors in part made divisions of 
their own ; much more they utilised the local names 
for local varieties of song which were not intended to 
have any reference to one another. If an 'i&lemos' 
really differed from a 'thr£nos,' and each from an 
'epik£deion,' it was only that they were all local names, 
and the style of dirge-singing happened to vary in the 
different localities. 

The dithyramb proper was a song and dance to 
Dion3rsu8, practised in the earliest times in Nazos, 
Thasos, Boeotia, Attica ; the name looks as if it were 
compounded of Ji-, ' god,' and some form of triumfihus, 
Oplafi^, 'rejoicing.' It was a wild and joyous song. 
It first appears with strophic correspondence; afterwards 
it loses this, and has no more metre than the rhapso- 
dies of Walt Whitman. It was probably accompanied 
with disguise of some sort ; the dancers represented the 



VARIETIES OF CHOIR-SONG 99 

dcBtnonic followers of Bacchus, whom we find in such 
hordes on the early Attic drinldng-vessels. We call them 
satyrs ; but a satyr is a goat-daemon, and these have the 
ears and tail of a horse, like the centaurs. The difference 
in sentiment is not great : the centaurs are all the wild 
forces that crash and speed and make music in the Thessa- 
lian forests ; the satyr is the Arcadian mountain-goat, the 
personification of the wildness, the music and mystery, 
of high mountains, the instincts that are at once above 
and below reason : his special personification is Pan, 
the Arcadian shepherd-god, who has nothing to do with 
Dionjrsus, When we are told fiiat Arlon " invented, 
taught, and named" the dithyramb in Corinth, it may 
mean that he first joined the old Dionysus-song with the 
Pan-idea ; that he disguised his choir as satyrs. Corinth, 
the junction of Arcadia and the sea-world, would be the 
natural place for such a transition to take place. Thus 
the dithyramb was a goat-song, a 'tragdidia'; and it 
is from this, Aristotle tells us, that tragedy arose. It 
is remarkable that the dithyramb, after giving birth 
to tragedy, lived along with it and survived it In 
Aristotle's time tragedy was practically dead, while its 
daughter, the new comedy, and its mother the Attic 
dithyramb, were still flouri^tng. 



THE EARLY MASTERS 

Alcman 

The name Alcuan is the Doric for Alcmson, and the 
bearer of it was a Laconian from Messoa {circa 650 B,a). 
But Athenian imagination could never assimilate the id^ 



100 IJTKRATURK OF ANCIENT GREECE 

ol » SiMuHtn being a poet In the case of TyrUeus the; 
innde the poet »n Athenian ; in that of Alcman, some 
chance words in one of his poems su^ested that he or 
his anceatora came from Lydia. Hence a romance — he 
WW a Lydtan. made a sUve of war by the wild Kimme- 
rianii, and «o)d across seas to Sparta, where his beauti- 
ful songs procured him his freedom. Alcman is very 
near the Lesbians ; he speaks freely in his own person, 
using the choir merely as an instrument ; the personal 
ring of his lo\'e-passage3 made Arch^tas (4th cent B.&) 
count him the inventor of love-poetry; he writes in a 
fresh country dialect, as Sappho does, with little literary 
varntsh ; his jwrsonal enthusiasm for the national broth 
of Sparta is like that of Carlyle for porridge. His metres 
an) clear and simple; and the fragment imitated by 
'reiinyiiun in /* Mtmoriam sliows what his poetry can 
he : " A'# mfft, fA, wiiJ swttt lAroats, voius of love, will 
ttty A'mAi ^r mt; would, would I wtr$ a (ttyl-hrd, that 
Jh*t m tk* Jl^twtr ^ tkt wav* amid tin kalcyons, with never 
« mrv M his kourt, the sm-purplt bird of ^ spring-/" 

tils longest fragment is on an Egyptian papyrus, 
found by Mariette in 1855, and containing part of a 
Iwantlfiil • I*arthenion," or choir-song for girls. It is a 
(Imniatio part-song. When we hear first that Agtdo 
among the rest of the chorus is like " a racfkorse among 
cows," and afterwards that " the hair of my amsin Agesi' 
chora ^ams like pure gold" this does not mean that the 
'boorish' poet is expressing his own frank and fickle 
preferences — would the 'cows' of the choir, in that case, 
ever have consented to sing such lines ? — it is only that 
the two divisions of the chorus are paying each other 
compliments. This poem, unlike those of the Lesbians, 
has a strophic arrangement, and is noteworthy as showing 



ALCMAN: ARION loi 

a clear tendency towards rhyme. There are similar 
traces of intentional rhyme in Homer and .£schyliis ;' 
whereas the orators and Sophocles, amid all their care 
for euphony in other respects, admit tiresome rhyming 
jangles with a freedom which can only be the result of 
unsensitiveness to that particular relation of sounds. 



AstON 

ArIon of Methymna, in Lesbos, is famous in legend as 
the inventor of the dithyramb, and for his miraculous 
preservation at sea ; some pirates forced him to ' walk the 
plank' ; but they had allowed him to make music once 
before he died, and when he sprang overboard, the dol- 
phins who had gathered to listen, carried him on their 
backs to Mount Taenarum. It is an old s^a-mottve, 
applied to Phalanthos, son of Poseidon, in Tarentum, to 
Enalos at Lesbos, and to the sea-spirits Palsemon, 
Melikertes, Glaucus, at other places. Arlon's own works 
disappeared early ; Aristophanes of Bsrzantium could not 
find any (2nd cent. B,c.), though an interesting piece of 
fourth-century dithyramb in which the singer represents 
Arton, has been handed down to us as his through a 
mistake of JE\mx. 

STfiSICHORUS 

The greatest figure in early choric poetry is that of 
TtsiAS, sumamed STfisiCHosus ('Choir-setter') of Htmera. 
The man was a West-Locrian from Matauros, but be- 
came a citizen of Htmera in the long struggles against 
Phalaris of brazen-bull celebrity. The old fable of the 
' Sift. 778 a, 78s ft 



103 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

horio making itself t slave to man in order to be 
revenged on the stag, was one of his warnings against 
the tyrant. When Phalaris triumphed, St^achorus re- 
tired to Catana ; where his octagonal grave outside the 
gate became in Roman times one of the sights of Sicily. 
Apart from such possible fragments of good tradition as 
may survive in the notorious forgeries called the iMUrs 
^ Pkaiaris, we possess only one personal fact about his 
life. He was attacked witti a disease of the eyes ; and 
the thought preyed upon his mind that this was the 
divine wrath of Helen, of whom he had spoken in the 
usual way in some poem — perhaps the HeltH* or the 
SaA ^ IKoH.* His pangs of conscience were intensified 
by historical difiBculties. It was incredible that all Troy 
should have let itself be destroyed merely to humour 
Paris. If the IVojans would not give up Helen, it must 
have been that they never had her. TIsias burst into a 
recantation or ' PalinMia,' which remained famous : 
" That iaU was ntver true I Thy foot never stepped on the 
btndud gaiUy, nor crossed to the towers of Troy." We 
cannot be sure what his own version was ; it cannot well 
have been that of Herodotus and Euripides, which makes 
Helen elope to Egypt, though not to Troy. But, at any 
rate, he satisfied Helen, and recovered his sight A very 
^milar story is told of the Icelandic Skald Thormod. 

The service that Stftsichonis did to Greek literature is 
threefold : he introduced the epic saga into the West ; he 
invented the stately narrative style of lyric ; he vivified and 
remodelled, with the same mixture of tioldness and simple 
faith as the Helen story, most of the great canonical 
legends. He is called " the lyric Homer," and described 
as " bearing the weight of the epos on his lyre." ' 
* Qafata.1. 




STESICHORUS OF HIMERA I6J 

The metres specially named * Stesichorean ' — though 
others had used them before Stdsichorus — show this 
half-epic character. They are made up of halves of the 
epic hexameter, interspersed with diort variations — 
epitrites, anapaests, or mere syncopes — ^just enough to 
break the dactylic swing, to make the verse lyrical. His 
diction suits these long stately lines ; it is not passionate, 
not very songful, but easily followed, and suitable for 
narrative. This helps to explain why so important a 
writer has left so few fragments. He was not difficult 
enough for the grammarian ; he was not line by line 
exquisite enough for the later lover of letters. The 
ancient critics, amid all their praises of St&ichonis, 
complain that he is long; the Oresteia* alone took two 
books, and doubtless the Sack ofllion* was equal to it 
His whole works in Alexandrian times filled twenty-six 
books. He had the fulness of an epic writer, not the 
vivid splendour that Pindar had taught Greece to ex- 
pect in a lyric Yet he gained an extraordinary position.* 
Simdnides, who would not over-estimate one whom he 
hoped to rival, couples him with Homer — " So sang to the 
nations Homer and Stfistchorus." In Athens of the fifth 
century he was universally known. Socrates praised him. 
Aristophanes ridiculed him. " Not to know three lines 
of Stteichorus " was a proverbial description of illiteracy.* 
There was scarcely a poet then living who was not in- 
fluenced by Stteichorus; scarcely a painter or potter 
who did not, consciously or unconsciously, represent his 
version of the great sagas. In tracing the historical 

* The coioi of Htmen bcariiiK the figaie of St&ichonu ue Utei Iban 
•41 ■.&, when he had become « legend. Cf. alio Qe. Vtrr. ii 35. 

* No teferenee, h wed to be ttwo^U, to the atioidie, andrtn^he, epode 
cfdMckuwiG. 



IU4 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

development of any myth, research almost always finds 
in Stteichonis the main bridge between the earliest re- 
mains of the story and Qie form it has in tragedy or in 
the late epos. In the Agamemnon legend, for instancy 
the concentration of the interest upon Clytaemnestra, 
which makes the story a true tragedy instead of an 
ordinary tale of blood -feud, is his; Clytsemnestra's 
dream of giving suck to a serpent is his ; the con- 
science-mad Orestes is probably his ; so are many of 
the details of the sack of Troy, among them, if the 
tradition is right, the flight of Mneas to Italy. 

Tliis is enough to show that Stteichorus was a creative 
genius of a very high order — though, of course, none of 
these stories is absolutely his own invention. Confessed 
fiction was not possible till long after St£sichorus. To 
the men of bis day all legend was true history ; if it was 
not, what would be the good of talking about it ? The 
originality lies, partly, in the boldness of faith with which 
this antique spirit examines his myths, criticising and 
freely altering details, but never suspecting for an in- 
stant that the whole myth is an invention, and that he 
himself is inventing it It is the same with Pindar. 
I^dar cannot and will not believe that Tantalus offered 
his son to the gods as food, and that Demeter ate part 
of his shoulder. Therefore he argues, not that the 
whole thing is a fable, nor yet that it is beyond our 
knowledge ; agnosticism would never satisfy him : he 
argues that Poseidon must have carried off Pelops to 
heaven to be his cup-bearer, and that during his ab- 
sence some 'envious neighbour' invented the cannibal- 
story. This is just the spirit of the Palinddia. 

But, apart from this, even where Stteichonis did not 
alter his saga-material, he shows the originality of genius 



ORIGINALITY OF STESICHORUS. IBYCUS 105 

in enlarging the field of poetry. He was the first to feel 
the essence of beauty in various legends which lived in 
humble places ; in the death of the cowherd Daphnis for 
shame at having once been false to his love (that rich 
motive for all pastoral poetry afterwards) ; in the story 
of the fair Kalyk£, who died neglected ; of the ill-starred 
Rhadina, who loved her cousin better than the tyrant 
of Corinth. This is a very great achievement It is what 
Euripides did for the world again a little later, when the 
mind of Greece, freeing itself from the stiffer Attic 
tradition, was ready to understand. 



THE MIDDLE PERIOD 

Ibycus 

IBYCUS of Rh£gion, nearly two generations later than 
Stteichorus, led a wandering life in the same regions 
of Greece, passing on to the courts of Polycrates and 
Periander. LJke Arlon, he is best known to posterity 
by a fabulous story— of his murder being avenged by 
cranes, Mbykes.' His songs for boy-choirs are specially 
praised. He is said to have shown an '.iGolo-lonic 
spirit' in songs of Dorian language and music, and 
the charming fragments full of roses and women's 
attire and spring and strange birds,^ and "bright sU^ 
less dawn awaking the nightingales," show well what 
this means. It is curious that the works of Sttei- 
chorus were sometimes attributed to him — for instance, 
the Games at PeliaJs FuneraL* Our remains of the 
two have little in common except the metre. 



106 LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE 



SihAnides 

On the day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was bom 
in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece, 
SmdNIDBS (556-468 B.C.). A man of wide culture and 
sympathies, as well as great poetic power, he was soon 
famous outside the circle of Ionian islands. Old Xeno- 
phanes, who lived in Italy, and died t>efore SimAnides 
was thirty, had already time to denounce him as a 
well-known man. He travelled widely — fiis^ it is said, 
to Western Greece, at the invitation of Stteichorus's 
compatriots ; afterwards to the coart of Hipparchus in 
Athens ; and, on his patron's assassination, to the princes 
of Thessaly. At one time he crossed to Asia; during the 
Persian War he was where he should have been — with 
the patriots. He ended his life with ^schylus, Pindar, 
Bacchylides, Epicharmus, and others, at the court of 
Hiero of Syracuse. If he was celebrated at thirty, in 
his old age he had an international position comparable 
perhaps to that of Voltaire. He was essentially o ao^, 
the wit, the poet, the friend of all the great ones of the 
earth, and their equal by his sheer force of intellect. 
His sajrings were treasured, and his poems studied with 
a verbal precision which suggests something like idolatry. 
Rumour loved to tell of his strange escape from ship- 
wreck, and from the fall of the palace roof at Crannon, 
which killed most of Scopas's guests. He was certainly a 
man of rich and many-sided character ; he was trusted by 
several tyrants and the Athenian democracy at the same 
time ; he praised Hipparchus, and admired Harmodius 
and Aristogeiton ; in his old age he was summoned to 
Sicily to reconcile the two most powerful princes in 




sim6nides of KEOS 107 

Greece, Gelo and Hiero. The charges of avarice which 
pursue his memory are probably due to his writing at 
specified terms — not for vague, tmspecified patronage, 
like file earlier poets. The old fashion was more friendUy 
and romantic, but contained an element of servitude. 
Pindar, who laments its fall, did not attempt to recur 
to it; and really Simdnides's plan was the nearest ap- 
proach theo possible to our system of the independent 
sale of brain-work to the public. Simdnides, like the 
earlier lyrists, dealt chiefly in occasional poetry — the 
occasion being now a festival, now a new baby, now the 
battle of Thermopylae— and he seems to have introduced 
the 'Epintkos,' the serious artistic poem in honour of 
victories at the games. Not that an 'Epintkos' is really 
a bare ode on a victory — on the victory, for instance, of 
Prince Skopas's mules. Such an ode would have little 
power of conferring immortality. It is a song in itself 
beautiful and interesting, into which the poet is paid to 
introduce a reference to the mules and their master. 

Simdnides wrote in many styles: we hear of Dithy- 
rambs, Hyporchimata, Dirges — all these specially ad- 
mired — Parthenia, Prosodia, Paeans, Encdnua, Epigrams. 
His religious poetry is not highly praised. If one could 
use the word 'perfect' of any work of art, It m^t 
apply to some of Smidnides's poems on the events of 
the great war — the ode on Artemistum, the epitaph on 
those who died at Thermopylae. They represent the 
extreme of Greek 'sdphrosynfi'— self-mastery, healthy- 
mindedness — severe beauty, utterly free from exaggera- 
tion or trick — plain speech, to be spoken in the presence 
of simple and eternal things : " Stranger, bear word to tlu 
Spartam that <w U* i*rt obuUent to titir eiargt." He 
is great, too, in the realm of human pity. The little 



lo8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

fragment on Dana£ adrift in the chest justifies the ad- 
miration of ancient critics for his ' un&mpassed pathos.' 
On the other htnd, be is essentially an Ionian and a man 
of tiie world, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment 
He has no splendoor, no passion, no religious depth. 
The man who had these stood on the wrong side in his 
Qoontry's Ufe-stni^e ; and Greece turned to Simdnides, 
not to Pindar, to make ttie record of its heroic dead. 

TlHOCRBOH 

The * Hwne (or Geniuses ' «4iich Hiero's court even- 
tually became must have been a far from peaceful 
r«(uge. Pindar especialty was bom to misunderstand 
and dislike SimAnides ; and though jealousy is not one 
of the vices laid to the latter's charge, he was a wit and 
could be severe. When he was attacked by a low poet 
from Rhodes, TiuOCREON, who is chiefly known by his 
indecent song of delight at the condemnation of Themis- 
todea as a traitor — " AW Timccrwm abmt makts compacts 
wM tit Mtkits ; lmmm»tti*pmfydock-tttil; tiun art other 
fiuns ttot" Simdnides answered by writing bis epitaph : 
" Hert Hts T^tmeertom of Rhodts, who ait m$uJk, drami much, 
mmd said tma^ tvil thtngT." The poef s poetry is not 
mentioned. 

Bacchylides 

Simdnides's nephew, Bacchylides, lived also at Hiero's 
court, and wrote under the influences both of his uncle 
and of Pindar, He was imitated by Horace, and ad- 
mired for his moral tone by the Emperor Julian — a large 
■hare of 'immortality' for one who is generally reckoned 
I second-class poet. And it appears that more is in store 



BACCHYLIDES 109 

for him. The British Museum has recently acquired a 
papyrus of the first century B.C., containing several epi- 
nikian odes of Bacchylides intact, as well as some fresb 
fragments. It would be an ungracious reception to a 
new-comer so illustrious in himself, to wish that he had 
been some one else — Alcffius, for instance, or Sappho or 
Stmdnides. But we may perhaps hope that the odes will 
not all be about the Games, as Pindar's are. The head- 
ings of three of them, ' Theseus,' ' lo,' and ' Idas,' seem 
to suggest a more varied prospect; but similar titles 
are sometimes found in MSS. of Pindar, and merely 
serve to indicate the myths which the particular 'Epint- 
koi' contain. The longest of the new odes is in honour 
of Hiero, and celebrates the same victory as Pindar's 
first Olympian — a poem, by the way, which has been 
thought to contain an unkind reflection upon Bacchy- 
lides. The style is said to be much simpler than Pindar's, 
though it shows the ordinary lyric fondness for strange 
compound words, such as ftrfurroFdvaava. The most 
interesting of the fragments heretofore published is in 
praise of Peace. 



the final development 

Pindar 

Pindar, "by far the chief of all the lyrists," as Quin- 
tilian calls him, was born thirty-four years after Simdni- 
des, and survived him about twenty (522-448 B.C.). He 
is the first Greek writer for whose biography we have 
real documents. Not only are a great many of his extant 
poems datable, but tradition, which loved him for his 
grammatical difficulties as well as for his genius, has pre- 



no LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

served « pretty good account of his outer circumstances. 
He vna bom at the village of Kynoskephabe, in Boeotia ; 
ho was descended from the JE^dx, a clan of conquering 
Invaders, probably 'Cadmean,' since the name 'Pindar' 
la found in Ephesus and ThCra. The country-bred Bceo- 
lian boy showed early a genius for music The lyre, 
doubtless, ho learned as a child : there was one 
SkO[>eltnus at home, an uncle of the poet^ or perhaps 
his step-father, who could teach him flute-playing. To 
learn choir-training and systematic music he had to go 
to Athens, to *Ath£noclfis and ApollodAnts.' Tradition 
Insisted on knowing something about his relation to 
the celebrities of the time. He was taught by Lasus of 
Hermioni ; beaten In competition by his country-woman 
Corlnna, though some extant lines of that poetess make 
Hgalnut the story : " /fnan not Mr gracious Myrtis, not I, 
/W toming A> timttst with Pindar, a woman horn I " And 
another anecdote only makes Corinna give him good 
advice — "to sow with tkt hand, not with the whale sack," 
when he was too profuse in his mythological ornaments. 
The earliest poem we possess {Pyth, x.), written when 
Pindar was twenty — or possibly twenty-four — was a 
commission from the Aleuadsc, the princes of PharsAIus, 
in Thessaly. lliis looks as if his reputation was made 
with astonishing rapidity. Soon afterwards we find him 
writing for the great nobles of j^gtna, patrons after his 
own heart, merchant princes of the highest Dorian 
ancestry. Then be^ns a career of pan-Hellenic cele- 
brity : he is the guest of the great families of Rhodes, 
Tenedos, Corinth, Athens ; of the great kings, Alexander 
of Macedon, ArkesiUus of Cyrene, Th&o of Acragas, 
and Hiero of Syracuse. It is as distinguished as that of 
Simdnides. though perhaps less sincerely international. 



LIFE OF PINDAR III 

Pindar in his heart liked to write for ' the real nobility,' 
the descendants of JEacua and Heracles ; his Sicilian 
kings are exceptions, bat vho could criticise a friendly 
king's claim to gentility? This ancient Dorian blood 
is evidently at the root of Pindar's view of life ; even 
the way he asserts his equality with his patrons shows 
it Stmdnides posed as the great man of letters. Pindar 
sometimes boasts of his genius, but leaves the impression 
of thinking more of his ancestry. In another thing he 
is nnlike Simdnides. Pindar was the chosen vessel of 
the priesthood in general, a votary of Rhea and Pan, and, 
above all, of the Dorian Apollo. He expounded the re- 
habilitation of traditional religion, which radiated from 
Delphi, He himself had special privileges at Delphi 
during his life, and bis ghost afterwards was invited 
yearly to feast with the god. The priests of Zeus Ammon 
in the desert had a poem of his written in golden letters 
cm their shrine. 

These facts explain, as far as it needs explanation, the 
great flaw in Pindar's life. He lived throu^ the Per«an 
War; he saw the beginning of the great period of 
Greek enlightenment and progress. In both crises he 
stood, the unreasoning servant of sacerdotal tradition 
and racial prejudice, on the side of Bceotia and Delphi. 
One might have hoped that when Thebes joined the 
Persian, this poet, the friend of statesmen and kin^ in 
many countries, the student from Athens, would have 
protested. On the contrary, though afterwards when 
the war was won he could write Nemean iv. and the 
Dithyramb for Athens, in the crisis itself he made what 
Polybins calls (iv. 31) "a most shameful and injurious 
refinal" : he wrote a poem of which two large dreamy 
lines are preserved, taUdng of peace and neutrality I It 




Krf hall- 
. is ooT 
COBBBBa. tDC JJT JBT IT pOCC UUt CHX HvOS* WO.* OC OSS 

IhiC kc W^ a port ^wrf iwnftititf rtjf. Qe Tf|i- ; tigt\ ^ m 

■■■ie; he lomd id foe "*""t ^caC ami bffwitiful 
Maps— Hendc^ AcUk^ IVijuis^ Etaoc, tfae (bngftteis 
ofCaalaaL Wbea 307 part cf hs bdorcd si^ lepeOed 
Us ^'"'•^ Kontnaes^ he ^"^'^ swzr trom i^ carcTQl 
not to tjn< w ^cirtifiii^n, catcful alio not to speak nil 
of a god. He toicd paebj and anaiiv ^special t y bis 
own. As a matter of fac^ there was no poctrr in the 
world like im, and when otiber people sng ttier jaired 
on bim, be confeases^ '£fe avas.' 

He kyved religion, and is on the emotioaal side a 
great religious poet The opening of Nemuim vi. is 
characteristic ; so is the end cA his last dated work 
(Pfth. viiL) : " Thii^ of a dt^l what art we amd what 
not? A drtam ahoiU a shadow is man ; jnt vohtn soms 
god-givtn spUndour falls, a glory of light coma ever him 
and his lift is swat. Ok, Blessed Mother ^gtna, guard 
thoit this dty in the ways cf freedom, with Zeus and Prince 
£acns and Peletts and good Telamon and Achilles I " — a 
rich depth of emotion, and then a childlike litany of 
traditional saints. His religious speculations are some- 
times far from fortunate, aa in Olympian i. ; sometimes 
they lead to slight improvements. For instance, the 
old myth said that the nymph Cordnis, loved by Phoebus, 
was stcretly false to him ; but a raven saw her, and told 
tlie god. Pindar corrects this: "the god's all -seeing 
mind" did not need the help of the raven. It is quite 



RELIGION AND IDEALS OF PiNDAR itj 

ID the spirit of the Delphic movement in religion, the de- 
fensive reformation from the inside. Pindar is a moralist : 
parenthetical preaching a his favourite form of orna- 
ment ; it comes in perfunctorily, like the verbal quibbles 
and assonances in Shakespeare. But the essence of his 
morality has not advanced much beyond Hesiod ; save 
that where Hesiod tells his peasant to work and save, 
Pindar exhorts his nobleman to seek for honour and 
be generous. His ideal is derived straight from thr 
Dorian aristocratic tradition. Yon must start by being 
well-bom and brave and strong. You must tiien do 
two things, ivori and sfienJ: work with body and soul ; 
spend time and money and force, in pursuit of iperi, 
'goodness.' And what is 'goodness'? The sum of 
the qualities of the true Dorian man, descended from 
the god-bom, labouring, fearless, unwearied fighter 
against the enemies of gods and men, Heracles. It is 
not absolutely necessary to be rich — there were poor 
Spartans ; nor good-looking — some of his prize boxers 
were probably the reverse. But honour and renown 
you must have. Eccentric commentators have even 
translated iperit as 'success in games' — which it im- 
phed, much as the ideal of a mediaeval knight implied 
success in the toumey. 

Pindar is not false to this ideal. The strange air of 
abject w(»-ldliness which he sometimes wears, comes 
not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he 
has no sense of fact The thing he loved was real 
heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional 
setting ; and when the setting was there, his own imagi- 
nation sufficed to create the heroism. He was moved 
by the holy splendour of Delphi and Olympia ; he liked 
ttie sense of distinction and remoteness from the vulgar 



114 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

friiich hung about the court of a great prince, and be 
idealised tbe merely powerful Hiero as easily as the 
really gallant Chromios. Not that be is ever conscious 
of identifying success with merit ; quite tbe reverse. 
He is deeply impressed with tbe power of envy and 
dishonest arts — the victory of the subtle Ionian Odysseus 
over tbe true JEicid Aias. It was this principle perhaps 
which helped bim to comprehend why Sundnides bad 
snch a reputation, and why a mob of Athenian sailors, 
with no physique and no landed property, should make 
such a stir in the world. 

It is a curious freak of history that has preserved us 
only his 'Epinlkoi' — songs for winners in ttie sacred 
games at Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and tbe Isthmus. Of 
all his seventeen books — " Hymns; Paeans; Dithyrambs, 
2 J Prosodia,2; Parthenia,3; Dance-songs, 2 ; Encdmia; 
Dirges; Epintkoi, 4" — the four we possess are certainly 
not the four we should have chosen. Yet there is in 
the kind of song something that suits Pindar's genius. 
For one thing, it does not really matter what he writes 
about Two of his sublimest poems are on mule-races. 
If we are little interested by the fact that Xenopbon of 
Corinth won tbe Stadium and the Five Bouts at Olympia 
in the fifth century B.C., neither are we much affected 
by the drowning of young Edward King in the seven- 
teenth A.D. Poems like Lycidas and Olympian xiii. are 
independent of tbe facts that gave rise to them. And, 
besides, one cannot help feeling in Pindar a genuine 
fondness for horses and grooms and trainers. If a 
horse from Kynoskephalae ever won a local race, the 
boy Pindar and his fellow-villagers must have talked 
over the points of that horse and tbe proceedings of 
his trainer with real affection. And whether or no the 



NATURE OF PINDAR'S GENIUS 115 

poet was paid extra for the references to Mel£sias the 
'professional/ and to the various uncles and grand- 
others of his victors, he introduces them with a great 
semblance of spontaneous interest. It looks as if he 
was one of those un-self-conscious natures who do not 
much differentiate their emotions : he feels a thrill at 
the sight of Hiero's full-dress banquet board, of a wrest- 
ling bout, or of a horse-race, just as he does at the 
thought of the labour and glory of Heracles ; and every 
thrill makes him sing. 

Pindar was really three years younger than ^schylos ; 
yet he seems a generation older than Simdnides. His 
character and habits of thought are all archaic ; so is his 
style. Like most other divisions of Greek literature, the 
lyric had been working from obscure force to lucidity. It 
had reached it in Simdnides and Bacchylides, Pindar 
throws us back to Alcman, almost He is hard even to 
read ; can any one have understood him, sung ? He tells 
us how his sweet song will " sail off from ^gina in tlu big 
ships and the littU fishing-boats" as they separate home- 
wards after the festival {Nem. v.). Yet one can scarcely 
believe that the Dorian fishermen could catch at one 
hearing much of so difficult a song. Perhaps it was only 
the tune they took, and the news of the victory. He 
was proud of his music ; and Aristoxenus, the best judge 
we have, cannot praise it too highly. Even now, though 
every wreck of the music is lost — the Messina musical 
fragment (of Pyth. i.) being spurious — one feels that 
the words need singing to make them intelligible. The 
mere meaning and emotion of Pythian iv. or Ofympian ii, 
— ^to take two opposite types — compel the words into 
a chant, varying between slow and fast, loud and 
low. The clause-endings ring like mosic: mAtrfKorw 



ii« LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

iaitav6h (Olymp. ii.) b much more than "tmgty and 
ovtrbamt" The king of the Epeans, when "ndtf tiu 
d*ep channel running deathwards, he washed — VS»taaw iiw 
vJX«i — his awn city sink " {Olymp. z. 38), remains in one's 
mind by the echoing "n^ own" of the last words ; so 
Pelops praying "by the gr^ seorsurgt — oIk h fy^^ 
alone in the darkness " — in Olyn^, i. ; so that marvellous 
trumpet-crash in Pytk. iv. {ant. 5) on the last great word 
rt/MH'. Many lovers of Pindar agree that the things that 
stay in one's mind, stay not as thoughts, but as music. 

But his worthy lovers are few. He is hard in the 
original — dialect, connection, state of mind, all are diffi- 
cult to enter into ; ordinary readers are bewildered by the 
mixture of mules and the new moon and trainers and the 
^acidse. In translations—despite the great skill of some 
of them — he is perhaps more grotesquely naked than any 
poet ; and that, as we saw above, for the usual reason, 
that he is nothing but a poet. There is little rhetoric, no 
philosophy, little human interest; only that fine bloom — 
what he calls jwtot — which comes when the most sensi- 
tive language meets the most exquisite thought, and 
which " not even a god though he worked hard " could 
keep unhurt in another tongue. 

Pindar was little influenced either by the movements 
of his own time or by previous writers. Stdsichorus 
and Homer have of course affected him. There are just 
a few notes that seem echoed from ^schylus : the 
eruption of ^tna is treated by both ; but Pindar seems 
quite by himself in his splendid description {Pyth. i,). 
It is possible that his great line Xvo-^ %t Ze^ t^Qtrot 
TVtSwis, is suggested by the Prometheus trilogy, of which 
it is the great lesson — "Everlasting Zeus set free the 
Titans." 



THE BEGINNINGS OF PROSE 

Inscriptions 

If our earliest specimens of Greek prose are inscribed on 
stone and bronze, that only means that these are durable 
materials, and have outlived the contemporary wood and 
wax and parchment At the time of the treaty between 
Elis and Henea in the sixth century, there must have 
been plenty of commercial and diplomatic correspond- 
ence; far more again, before the later treaty could be 
made between Oianth£ and Chaleion, regulating the right 
of Forcible Reprisal (crvXcu), and fixing the mild penalty 
of four drachmae for exercising that form of piracy in the 
wrong place. But it looks as if the earliest prose was 
in essence similar to these inscriptions — a record of 
plain, accurate statements of public importance, which 
could not be trusted to the play of a poef s imagination 
or the exigencies of his metre. The temples especially 
were full of such writings. There were notices about 
impiety. At lalysus, for instance, the goddess Alectrdna 
announced a fine of 10,000 drachmae for the entrance into 
her precinct of horses, mules, asses, and men in pig-skin 
shoes. There were full public statements of accounts. 
There were records of the prayers which the god had 
answered, engraved at the cost of the votary ; of the 



Ii8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

offences be had signally visited, engraved, presumably, by 
the temple authorities. In the medical temples of Cos, 
Rhodes, and Cnidus, there were, as early as the sixth 
century B.a, full notes of interesting diseases, giving the 
symptoms, the treatment, and the result There were, 
doubtless, records of prodigies and their expiations. 
There were certainly lists of priests and priestesses, 
sometimes oqianding into a kind of chronicle. 

These were public and subject to a certain check. But 
there were also more esoteric books, not exposed to the 
criticism of the vulgar. The ceremonial rules were 
sometimes published and sometimes not; the Ex£g£tai 
at Athens had secret records of omens and judgments on 
points of law or conscience ; in Delphi and other centres, 
where the tradition was rich, there were written wiro/«^ 
ftara (' memoirs ') of the stories which the servants of the 
god wished to preserve. And, of course, outside and 
beyond the official temple-worship, there was the private 
and unauthorised preacher and prophet, the holder of 
mysteries, the seller of oracles, the remitter of sins— men 
like Onomacntus, Tisamenus the lamid, Lampon, and the 
various Bakides, whose misty and romantic stories can 
frequently be traced in Herodotus. And there were also 
the noble families. Their bare genealogies were often in 
verse, in a form suitable for quoting, and easily remem- 
bered among the public. But even in the genealogies 
other branches of the same stock were apt to have con- 
tradictory versions ; and when it came to lives and deeds, 
which might be forgotten or misrepresented, the family 
did well to keep authentic records, suitably controlled, in 
its own hands. 



FICTION IN EARLY PROSE 



'Story' 

And here we meet the other tendency which goes to 
the forming of prose history, the old Lust mtm FahuUrtH, 
taking the form of interest in individuals and a wish to 
know flieir characters and their stories. The Story is a 
younger and lesser ^ster of the Saga, in some lights not 
to be distinguished from her. It is impossible to read 
our accounts of Solon, Crcesus, Demokfides, Polycrates, 
Amdsis, without feeling that we are in the realm of 
imaginative fiction. We are nearer to fact than in the 
epos ; and the fact behind is more a human fact The 
characters are not gods or heroes, they are adventurous 
prophets and sages and discrowned kings ; the original 
speaker is not the Muse, but the Ionian traveller. It 
may even be supposed that there is a certain truth in the 
characters, if in nothing else. But that is further than 
we have a right to go ; Sir John Falstaff is not psycho- 
logically true to Oldcastle the Lollard; there is no reason 
to suppose that the farcical king Amteis resembles any 
Egyptian Aahmes, or to credit the mellow wisdom of our 
Croesus to the real conqueror of Ionia. Once created, 
it is true, the character generally stays ; but that is the 
case even with the men of the epos. 

The story was early fixed as literature. The famous 
Milesian and Sybarite stories must date from the sixth 
century B.C., before Sybaris was destroyed and Miletus 
ruined. Such instances as have been preserved in late 
tiadition — 'The Widow of Ephesus' in Petronius, and 
large parts of Appuleius — are pure fiction, tales in the 
tone of Boccaccio, with imaginary characters. But 
everything points to the belief that in their first form 



130 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

they were attached to historical names like the aoecdotes 
of Herodotus ; and as a matter of fact the earliest frag- 
ment of Greek prose romance knowDf* has for its hero 
and heroine Ninus and Semiramis. 



Chroniclu 

For literature in the narrower sense, the first important 
prose histories are the chronicles {Apot) of Ionian towns, 
followed closely by those of Sicily. No set of ' Hdroi ' 
is extant, unless one may regard the Parian Marble as 
an attempted abbreviation of the ' Hdroi ' of all Hellas. 
It still remains for the student of antiquity to make out 
what data in onr tradition go back to the ancient annals 
of particular towns. Some local genealogies — many, for 
instance, in the Scholia to Apollonius — clearly do so ; so 
does that meteoric stone which fell at Aigospotamoi in 
the seventy-eighth Olympiad; and so does that "white 
swallow no smaller than a partridge " whose appearance 
in Samos has such a cloud of witnesses.* A Syracusan 
chronicle seems to be the source of the record which 
Thucydides (vi. 1-5) gives of the foundations of the 
Italian and Sicilian towns ; they are dated by the foun- 
dation of Syracuse, which is taken as the great era of the 
world not needing closer specification. The origin of 
any given chronicle is of course lost in obscurity. Like 
the epos in early times, like even the histories and com- 
mentaries and the philosophical text-books of the various 
schools in later antiquity, like the cathedrals of the Middle 

> Htrmtt, IxWL 161 £ 

* The (time ii given ia the nttiu Muble ; ths iwbUow'b wilncttei an 
Atiitotle (fr. 531), Andgonu CuTitini, Hendldei Ponticw, uid iVUu 
qvodog AlcKuider Mjnidiat. 



THE LEGENDARY CHRONICLERS isi 

Ages, the chronicles were continued and altered and ex< 
panded under a succession of editors. 

The names of the earliest chroniclers have a mythical 
ring. The Chronicle of Corinth was written by ' EomC- 
lus' himself, the Corinthian Homer; the Ephesian by 
' Creoph^lus/ the Cretan by ' Epimenides.' That of 
Miletus, commonly acknowledged to be the oldest of 
all, was the first thing written by Cadhus, when 
he had invented letters 1 He is ^led 'Cadmus ol 
Miletus,' though by birth a Phoenician, just as the 
Argive chronicler is called 'AcnsiiJlus of Argps,' though 
a native, like Hesiod, of a little village in Boeotia. His 
chronicle is said to have consisted of Hesiod turned into 
prose and 'corrected.' But even AcusiUus {'fftarJIum- 
pupW) is not misty enough to be its real author; he 
only transcribed it from the bronze tablets which his 
father fonnd buried in the earth I The Chronicle of 
Athens, afterwards worked up by many able men such 
as CleidAmus, AndrotiAn, Philochorus, has left no tradi- 
tion of its origin. A certain Mel^AOORAS, who knows 
vbj no crow has ever been seen on the Acropolis, 
seems to represent the sacred Chronicle of Eleusis, and 
thus in part that of Athens. There are many impor- 
tant fragments quoted from ' Phesbe^ DBS' : Suidas dis- 
tinguishes three of the name, from Syros, Leros, and 
Athens, respectively ; modem scholars generally allow 
two only — a seventh-century philosopher from Syros, 
and a fifth-century Athenian historian bom in Leros ; 
while a critical study of the evidence will probably 
reduce the list to one — whose chronicle began with 
the origin of the gods and contained the 'words of 
Orpheus' — a half-mythical ' Brmg-rttumn' parallel to 
* HtaHtm-pti^' of Argos. 



122 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

The first real chroniclers come from Ionia and the 
islands, thoughtful and learned men, who put into books 
both the records and the oral tradition — BlON of 
Proconntsus, who worked over Cadmus ; Dionysius of 
Miletus, perhaps the first who tempered the records 
of his unheroic Ionia with the great deeds of Persia ; 
Charon of Lampsacus, whose work must have been 
something like that of Herodotus, taking in Persian 
and Ethiopian history, details in Themistocles's life, and 
voyages beyond the pillars of Heracles ; EUG£ON of 
SunOS, Xanthus of Lydia, and many others leading up 
to the great triad, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Hellantcus. 

In the West it is a different story. A rich and tragic 
history was there, and a great imaginative literature ; but 
the two did not meet. There were no writers of history 
till after the time when the aged Herodotus went over to 
finish his days in Thurii. Then Antiochus of Syracuse 
published a record of the West reaching at least as far 
down as the year 424 b,c The problematic Hippys of 
Rhfigion may have written at the same time. The 
Westerns had, no doubt, their temple records, and pro- 
duced a great group of historians in the generation 
after Thucydides. But in the beginning of prose com- 
position it is significant that they treated literature 
before history. Theagenes of Rhigion (520 B.C.?) is 
counted as the first Homeric scholar ; we only know 
that he explained something 'allegorically' and told 
about the War of the Giants. Glaucus of Rhdgion 
wrote 'About Poets,' giving not only names and dates, 
but styles and tendencies as well, and stating what 
original authors each poet ' admired ' or followed, from 
Orpheus onward, who " admired nobody, because at 
that time there was nobody," It is this tendency, this 



PROSE IN THE EAST AND WEST 123 

interest in pure literature, which explains the rise of 
Goigias. 

If we search in Eastern Greece for critics of Homer, 
we shall find them only in the chroniclers of the towns 
which have special connection with him, like ANTlDdRUS 
of Kym£, and Dauastes of Sig£um. Nevertheless the 
higher prose literature took its rise in the East, in that 
search for knowledge in the widest sense, which the 
Ionian called Urropin, and the Athenian apparently 
^Ouwo^la, We are apt to apply to the sixth century the 
tenninology of the fourth, and to distinguish philosophy 
from history. But when Solon the philosopher "went 
over much land in search of knowledge," he was doing 
exactly the same thing as the historians Herodotus and 
Hecabeus. And when this last made a 'Table' of the 
world, with its geography and anthropology, he was 
in company with the philosophers Anaximander and 
Democritus. 'Historic' is inquiry, and 'Philosophia' 
is love of knowledge. The two cover to a great extent 
the same field — though, on the whole, philosophy aims 
more at ultimate truth and less at special facts ; and, 
what is more important, philosophy is generally the 
work of an organised school with more or less fixed or 
similar doctrines — Milesians, Pythagoreans, Eleatics — 
while the 'Historikos' is mostly a traveller and reciter 
of stories. 

A prose book in the sixth century was, except in the 
case of a text-book for a philosophic school, the result 
of the author's ' Historic ' ; it was his ' Logos,' the thing 
he had to say. Neither the l)Ook itself nor the kind of 
literature to which it belonged had any name. Hie first 
sentence served as a kind of title-page. The simplest 
form is — "AUmoffm 0/ Crvtfin st^s this" ; '* TMs is tkf 



134 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

ut^igfitrtk o/tht nuarck ofHetvdotut of HaHeamassmC 
In a more specialised ' Historic '~~" Amtwckus, Xtiufkaiu/ 
toftyfut tktst things tcffiiur about Italy" ; or without the 
auttutt's name— " Tiitf / wr aiout tko wkoU world" 
(Oemocritus) ; " TotuMig tiu distas* called H^jf, thus 
it is" (Hippocrates). And what was the man who so 
wrote 7 He was obviously Xar/aypd^, or XoTovowf;, since 
be bad made a * Logos.' He was probably ftmypA^ and 
fMiUyet i presumably ^iKiao^iK, and in the eyes of his 
admiren a vo^ iv^ip. If yon wished to quote bb name- 
less and chapterless work you had to use some descrip- 
tive phrase. As you referred to the middle part of t as 
" Homer in the Foot-washing," so you spoke of " Heca- 
tseus in Asia," or "in the parte about Asia"; "Charon in 
ttie Persian parts" ; "Anaximander about Fixed Stars," 
or "in the Description of the World." Late tradition 
often took these references for the titles of separate 
works, and made various early authors write books by 
the dozen. 

The early epos was taken as a fact in itself ; it was 
either authorless, or the work of an ima^nary and semi- 
divine author ; so was the story ; so was the chronicle ; 
so, of course, were the beginnings of speculation and 
cosmology. In the next stage a book is the work of a cor- 
poration ; a guild of poets ; a school of philosophers ; 
a sect of votaries ; a board of ofBcials. First ' Homer,' 
' iEsop,' ' Hesiod, " Orpheus,' ' Cadmus' ; next Homeridae, 
Pythagoristae, Orphics, and 'llpot MiXtjtrUti'. The close 
bond of the old Greek civic life bad to be shattered 
before an individual could rise in person and express his 
views and feelings in the sacred majesty of a book. In 
poetry Arcbilochus and others had already done it. In 
prose the epoch was made by a book of which the open- 



RISE OF THE PERSONAL AUTHOR 135 

tng words must have rung like a trumpet call io men's 
ears : " Hecaiaus o/MiUtus thus speaks. I writt as I dttm 
true, for the traditums of the Greeks seem to me maniffld 



•HISTORlft' 

HECATiEUS 

HECAT£ns was a man of high rank ; descendant of a god 
in the sixteenth generation, he had always been told, till 
the priests at Egyptian Thebes confuted htm ^; a traveller 
of a rare tjrpe, like his contemporary Skylax, who sailed 
down the Indus to the Erythrsan Sea, like Eudoxus of 
Cyzicus under Ptolemy II., in a certain degree like 
Columbus, men whose great daring was the servant of 
their greater intellect. He travelled all about tiie Medi- 
terranean coasts, in the Persian Empire, and in Egypt, 
perhaps in the Pontus and Ubya and Iberia, always 
bmpimi, 'seeking after knowledge.' We know him 
cbi^y from the criticisms and anecdotes of Herodotus, 
who differs from him about the rise of the Nile (ii. 21) and 
the existence of the river Oceanus (ii. 23), and states with 
reserve his account of the expulsion of tiie Pelasgians 
from Attica (vi. 137), but invests his general story of tiie 
man with a su^estion of greatness. 

In the first brewing of the Ionian revolt (v. 36) Miletus 
sought its Wise Man's counsel ; not, however, to follow 
it He urged them not to rebel, " tei/it^ them all the 
nations that Darius ruled and the power of him," The 
Wise Man was cold and spoke above their heads 1 Then, 
if they must revolt, he urged them to seize at once the 
■ aat IL 143. 



ia6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

treasnres of Apollo at Branchidae— the Persians would 
take them if Ifaey did not — and to build a fleet that could 
command the Mgean. The Wise Man was flecked with 
impiety 1 Aristagoras and the people preferred their own 
way, were routed everywhere, and saw the treasure fall, 
sure enough, into the hands of the enemy. One other 
counsel he gave when things seemed hopeless, urging 
Aristagoras not to fly altogether, but to fortify the island 
of Leros, hold the sea, and attempt to win Miletus ^ain. 
Hiat is, all the things which Ionia wished she had done, 
in looking back upon her bitter history, became in the 
story the neglected counsels of her great Hecataeus. 
And it was he, too, who mediated with Artaphemes for 
the sparing of the conquered towns — that, at least, 
successfully. 

Hecataeus was not a literary artist like Herodotus : he 
was a thinker and worker. His style, according to Her- 
mogenes (2nd cent A.D,), who loved the archaic, was 
"pure and clear, and in some ways singularly pleasant" ; 
yet, on the whole, the book had " much less charm than 
Herodotus — ever so much, though it was mostly myths 
and the like." One must not lay much stress on the last 
words ; history, to Hecataus, lay in the ages which we 
have now abandoned as mythical, and, while he rejected 
the Greek traditions, he often followed the Egyptian. 
But we cannot in the face of his opening words talk of 
his ' credulity,' or make him responsible for the legend 
that Oineus's bitch gave birth to a vine-stump ^ ; he may 
have mentioned the story only to ridicule it In his geo- 
graphical work he was the standard authority for many 
centuries ; and though he is not likely to have been 
quite consistent in his rationalism, he remains a great 



HECAT^US: HfiROOdRUS 1 27 

figure both in the history of literature and in the march 
of the human niind. Hecataeus represents the spirit of 
bis age as a whole, the research, the rationalism, the 
literary habit. Herodotus is the most typical illustra- 
tion of the last of these tendencies ; for the others ve 
select two of the unpreserved writers, Htroddrus and 
Hellantcus. 

HfiRODAsuS 

HSrOIM^RUS of Heraclfta, father of the sophist Bryson, 
whose dialogues are said to have influenced Plato, is 
file typical early rationalist His work was a critical 
history of the earliest records, dealing primarily with 
bis native town and its founder, Heracles, but touching, 
for instance, on the Argonauts and the Pelopidae. His 
method is one that has tost its charms for us ; but it 
meant hard thinking, and it wrought real service to 
humanity. Prometheus, bound, torn by the eagle, and 
delivered by Heracles, was really a Scythian chief near 
the river called Eagle, which, as is well known, makes 
ruinous floods. The inhabitants, thinking (as Hesiod 
thought) that floods were a punishment for the sins of 
princes, bound, i>. imprisoned, Prometheus, till Heracles, 
who is recorded to have received from Atlas " the pillars 
of earth and heaven " — f>. the foundations of astronomy, 
geography, and practical science— engineered the stream 
into a proper seaward course. Laomedon, again, was 
said to have defrauded Apollo and Poseidon of their 
reward after they had built his walls for him. That is 
the simplest matter : be took money from their temples 
for the building and did not restore it* It was per- 
» Vng, »3, »4, >« 



138 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

hxpt part of Htroddnis's method to state the common 
Itory before criticifliiig it, for we find him quoted, like 
HecstaetH, as an aathority for some of the absordest 
legends, which almost certainly he most have explained 
away. He was not an unimaginative sceptic, however : 
be went 80 far as to believe the well-authenticated tradi- 
tion that the Nemean Lion fell from the moon. This was 
because he believed that the moon was not a small light, 
but 'another earth' ; that meteorites and the like pro- 
bably feU from it ; tiiat certain insects, and, more notably, 
vultures, whose nesta, as far as he could discover, haid 
never been seen on earth, were likely to have flown down 
from there ; he perhaps added that the lion cannot pos- 
dbly have been bom in Nemea, and cannot well have 
travelled there from Mount Haemus ; that, moreover, 
the description of it does not tally with that of any 
known lion, lliis is not 'simple credulity' : given that 
he underrated the distance of the moon from us, it is a 
very excusable error in rationalism. He tried hard to 
systematise his chronology — that gigantic labour which 
no Greek Heracles ever quite accomplished ; his geo- 
graphical studies were wide and carefuV and all he did 
was subservient to a criticism of early history. How 
different it is, though not in kind inferior, to the spirit 
of Herodotus and Thucydides I 



THE EARLY 'HISTORIKOI' 

HbllanIcds 

HBLLANtCus of Lcsbos IS SO far fixed in date, that his 
Atthis* is mentioned by Thucydides (y 97X and con- 



HELLANtCUS 129 

tained a mention of the battle of Arginusx' — that is, 
it vas published shortly after 406 B.C. Hellanlcus is 
younger than Herodotus, older than Thucydides. The 
date is of interest, because the general method of 
Hellantcus's work, whatever it may have twen in detail, 
is not that of Hecataeus or H£rod6rus, or either of our 
historians, but simply that of a ruder Aristotle, He 
went straight to the local record, inscriptional or oral : 
he collected a mass of definite, authorised statements of 
bet ; forced them into order by a thorough-going system 
of chronology ; made each local history throw light on 
the others, and recorded his deductions in a business-like 
^ray. Unfortunately the material he was treating was 
unworthy of his method. The facts he collected were 
not facts ; and the order he produced was worse than the 
honest chaos which preceded it. 

He began, like so many others, by composing Ptr- 
sika;* the fragments seem to t>e earlier than Herodotus, 
and are full of ordinary Greek 'Stories.' The middle 
part of his activity went to a study of the great groups 
of legends, to what seemed to him the valuable stores of 
remote history then in danger of passing away. He 
wrote Aielika* and Troika;* the local tendencies of 
his .lEolian birthplace close to Troy explain the selection. 
The ^olian traditions led him inevitably to Thessaly, to 
the attempt at a record of the descendants of Deucalion 
(DtucaUineia *). The second richest centre of legends in 
Greece was Argos, and its traditions were almost inde- 
pendent of Thessaly. He twtook him to Argos, and not 
only wrote Argolika,* but, what was now demanded by 
his developing method, published a list of the successive 
priestesses of Hera at Argos, as the basis of a uniform 
' SdwL Ar. Xmm, 694. 730. 



130 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

system of chronology for all the hbtory of the past. It 
is perhaps throu^ Hellantcus that Tbucydides uses this 
record,^ though it was recognised in the Peloponnese 
before. Meantime, it would seem, the sophist Hippias 
had issued his epoch-maldng list of the Olympiads with 
their successive victors. Hellantcus followed him with 
a list of tiie victors in the games of Apollo Kameios at 



Hellantcus had now written a number of separate 
books. Unlike Herodotus, he gave his various sources 
nndisguised, and did not attempt to mould them all into 
a personal ' Logos ' of bb own. He seems even to have 
given the books names — ' Phordnist * as the Argive history 
was called, after the ancient king Phordneus, is a title 
pure and simple ; and ' Deucali/hieia,' * half-way between 
a description and a title. It was after this, to all appear- 
ance, that he came to Athens and wrote his celebrated 
Attkis* (ilTTwc^ avfipa^^ The Athenians of the past 
generations had been too busy making history to be able 
to write it The foreign savant did it for them. It is un- 
fortunate that his interests were more in the past than the 
present He began with Ogygos, who was king a thou- 
sand and twenty years before the first Olympiad, and 
ran mercilessly through all the generations of empty 
names requisite to fill in the gaping centuries. He had 
started from the Argive list, which was very full ; and he 
had to extend the meagre Attic list of kings by supposing 
duplicates of the same name. When he comes to the 
times that we most wish to know about — the fifty years 
after the Persian War — the method which he had 
laboriously built up for the treatment of legend, leaves 
him helpless in dealing with concrete fact "Short and 
'a.aii..i33. 



HELLANtCUS 13 1 

in his treatment of dates inexact," is the judgment passed 
upon him by Thucydides. But dates were the man's 
great ^ory I He reckoned by generations, three to a cen- 
tury, in the earliest times, by the annual archons as soon 
as they were established. Thucydides, in all probability, 
means that the system of putting the events down in a 
lump E^ainst the archon's name, was inexact compared 
with his own division of succeeding summers and winters. 
Hellanlcus was a widely-read and influential author, but 
he gets rough handling from his critics : Ephorus " puts 
him in the first rank of liars." * Apollodorus says, " He 
shows the greatest carelessness in almost every treatise " ; 
Strabo himself "would sooner believe Homer, Hesiod, 
and the tragedians." This last statement seems only to 
mean that the general tradition embodied in the poets is 
safer than the local tradition followed by Hellanlcus. 
He was an able, systematic, conscientious historian, 
though it might possibly have been better for history 
had he never existed, 
* h Toti i-XdoTfU ftvUfHw. Cf. JoMphn* & Ap. L 3 ; Sttabo, %. 451, am] 



VI 

HERODOTUS 

Herodotus, son op Lvxes op Halicasnassus 
(4S4(7H2S(?)B.c.) 

Herodotus, the father of history,^ was an exiled man 
and a professional story-teller ; not of course an 'impro- 
visatore,' but the prose correlative of a bard, a narrator 
of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign 
places. His profession was one which aimed, as Thucy- 
dides severely says, more at success in a passing enter- 
tainment than at any lasting discovery of truth ; its first 
necessity was to interest an audience. Herodotus must 
have had this power whenever he opened his lips ; but 
he seems to have risen above his profession, to have 
advanced from a series of pubUc readings to a great 
history — perhaps even to more than that. For hia work 
is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically 
very important, and spiritually tremendous ; it is also, 
more perhaps than any other known book, the expression 
of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen 
through the medium of one mind and in a particular 
perspective. The world was at that time very interesting ; 
and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of 
the most comprehensive known to human records. 
> etc i« Z«'. L I. 



HERODOTUS 1 33 

Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is 
too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain 
cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about 
him : be shares from the outset their tendency to read 
the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of 
history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human 
nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story, 
oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures ; he 
catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves 
in, and falls readily under the spell of great human in- 
fluences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the 
dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens ; yet all the 
time shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and un- 
consciously convinced of the weakness of human nature, 
the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness of its 
apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the 
s^np of this character and this profession. 

He was a native of Hahcamassus, in the far south of 
Asia Minor, a mixed state, where a Dorian strain had 
first overlaid the native Carian, and then itself yielded 
to the higher culture of Ionian neighbours, while all 
alike were subjects of Persia : a good nursery for a 
historian who was to be remarkable for his freedom 
from prejudices of race. He was bom about 484 B.C. 
amid the echoes of the great conflict. Artemisia, queen 
of Halicamassus, fought for Xerxes at Salamis, and her 
grandson Lygdamis still held the place as tyrant under 
Artaxerxes after 460. Herodotus's fiist years of man- 
hood were spent in fighting under the lead of his rela- 
tive, the poet and prophet Pany&sis, to free his city 
from the tyrant and the Persian alike. He never men- 
tions these wars in his book, but they must have marked 
his character somewhat. Panyilsis fell into the tyrant's 



134 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

hands and was put to death. Herodotus fled to Samos. 
At last, in what way we know not, Lygdamis fell and 
Herodotus returned ; but the party in power was for 
some reason hostile to him — possibly they were 'auto- 
nomists,' while he stood for the Athenian League — and 
Herodotus entered upon his life of wandering. He 
found a second home in Athens, i^ere he had a friend 
in Sophocles, and probably in Pericles and Lampon. 
He was finally provided for by a grant of citizenship 
in Thurii, the model international colony which Athens 
founded in South Italy, in 443, on the site of the twice- 
ruined Sybaris. Of his later life and travels we know 
little definite. He traveUed in Egypt as far as Elephan- 
Unt at some time when the country was in the hands 
of Persia, and of course when Persia was at peace with 
Athens — after 447, that is. He had then already finished 
his great Asiatic journey (ii. 150) past Babylon to the 
nei^bourhoods of Susa and Ecbatana. At some time 
he made a journey in the Black Sea to the mouths of 
the Ister, the Crimea, and the land of the Colchians. 
Pericles went through the Black Sea with a large fleet 
in 444 ; perhaps Herodotus had been employed before- 
hand to examine the resources of the region. Besides 
this, he went by ship to Tyre, and seems to have travelled 
down the Syrian coast to the boundary of Egypt. He 
went to Cyr£n4 and saw something of Libya. He knew 
the coast of Thrace, and traversed Greece itself in all 
directions, seeing Doddna, Acarnania, Delphi, Thebes, 
and Athens, and, in the Peloponnese, Tegea, Sparta, 
and Olympia. 

What was the object of all this travelling ; and how 
was a man who had lost his country, and presumably 
could not draw on his estate, able to pay for it 7 It is a 



LIFE OF HERODOTUS 135 

tantalising question, and the true answer would probably 
tell OS much that is now unknown about Greek life in 
the fifth century b.c. Herodotus may have travelled 
partly as a merchant ; yet he certainly speaks of mer- 
chants in an external way ; and he not only mentions — 
as is natural considering the aim of his twok — but seems 
really to have visited, places of intellectual interest 
rather than trade-centres. In one place (ii. 44} he says 
explicitly that he sailed to Tyre in order to find out a 
(act about Heracles, The truth seems to be that he was 
a professional ' Logopoios,' a maker and reciter of ' Logoi,' 
' TJktHgs to UUi just as Kynaithos, perhaps as Panyftsis, 
was a maker and reciter of ' Ep£/ ' Verses.' The anecdotic 
tradition which speaks of his public readings at Athens, 
Thebes, Corinth, and Otympia, certainty has some sub- 
stratum of truth. He travelled as the bards and the 
sophiste travelled ; like ttie Homeridx, like Pindar, like 
Hellanlcus, like Gorgias. In Greek communities he 
was sore of remunerative audiences ; beyond the Greek 
world he at least collected fresh ' Logoi.' One may get 
a little further light from the fact attested by Diyllus the 
Aristotelian (end of 4th cent. b.c.), that Herodotus was 
awarded ten talents {£26fxi) on the motion of Anytus by 
a decree of the Athenian Demos. That is not a payment 
fOT a series of readings : it is the reward of some serious 
public service. And it seems better to interpret that 
service as the systematic collection of knowledge about 
the regions that were politically important to Athens — 
Persia, Egypt, Thrace, and Scythia, to say nothing of 
states like Argos— than as the historical defence of Athens 
2&\Sa6' saviour of HtUas^ ^ Mat opening of the Pelopon- 
nesian War. Even the published book, as we have it, 
is full of information which must have been invaluable 



136 UtERATURfe OF ANClENt GREECE 

to an Athenian politician of the time of Pericles ; and 
it stands to reason that Herodotus must have had masses 
of further knowledge which he could impart to the 
Athenian ' Foreign Office/ but decidedly not publish for 
the use of all Hdlas, 

The histories of Herodotus are ordinarily divided into 
nine books, named after the nine Muses. The division 
is of course utterly post-classic ; Herodotus knew nothing 
of his ' Muses/ but simply headed his work, " This is tkt 
aecount of the rtsearck of Herodotus of Tkurii" In our 
editions it is " Htrodotus of Halicamassus," but be must 
have written "of Tkurii" by all analogy, and Aristotle 
read "of Tkurii." The Athenian or Eastern book-trade, 
appealing to a public which knew the man as a Hali- 
camassian, was naturally tempted to head its scrolls 
accordingly. It is like the case of the Anabasis, which 
appeared pseudonymously as the work of Themisto- 
gents of Syracuse (see p. 319); but it was known to 
be really Xenophon's, and the book-trade preferred to 
head it with tiie better-known name. 

The last three books of Herodotus give the history of 
the invasion of Xerxes and its repulse ; the first six form 
a sort of introduction to them, an account of the gradual 
gathering up of all the forces of the world under Persia, 
the restive kicking of Ionia against the irresistible, and 
the bursting of the storm upon Greece. The connection 
is at first loose, scarcely visible ; only as we go on we 
begin to feel the growing intensity of the theme — the 
concentration of all the powers and nations to which 
we have been gradually introduced, upon the one great 
conflict. 

Starting from the mythical and primeval enmity tw- 
tween Asia and Europe, Herodotus takes up his history 



ANALYSIS OF HERODOTUS'S HISTORIES 137 

with Croesus of Lydia, the 6rst Asiatic who enslaved 
Greek cities. The Lydian 'Logo!/ rich and imagina- 
tive, saturated with Delphic tradition, lead op to the 
conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, and the rise of Peisia to 
the empire of Asia. The past history and subjugation 
of Media and Babylon come as explanations of the 
greatness of Persia, and the story goes on to the con- 
quest of Egypt by Cambyses. Book IL is all occupied 
with the Egyptian 'Logoi.' Book III. returns to the 
narrative, Cambyses' wild reign over Egypt, the false 
Smerdis, the conspiracy and rise of I^rius, and his 
elaborate organisation of the Empire. In Book IV., 
Darius, looking for further conquests, marches against 
the Scythians, and the hand of Persia is thus first laid 
upon Europe in the north — here come the Scythian 
' Logoi' ; while meantime at the far south the queen of 
Cyr£n£ has called in the Persian army against Barca, and 
the terrible power advances over Libya as well — here 
is a place for the Libyan 'Logo!.' In Book V., while 
a division of the Scythian army is left twhind under 
Megabazos, to reduce Thrace — here come the Thracian 
' Logoi ' — Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, prompted by 
his father-in-law the ex-tyrant, harassed with debt, and 
fearing the consequences of certain military failures, 
plunges all Ionia into a desperate revolt against the 
Persian. He seeks help from the chief power of Greece, 
and from the mother-city of the lonians. Sparta refuses ; 
Athens consents. Eretria, the old ally of MUetus, goes 
with Athens ; and in the first heat of the rising the two 
strike deep into the Persian dominion and bum Sardis, 
only to beat forthwith an inevitable retreat, and to 
make their own destruction a neces^ty for Persian 
honour. Book VI. gives the steady reduction of lonia^ 



IjS LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the end of Aristagoras, the romantic and terrible 
flights of whole communities from the Persian ven- 
geance ; the hand of the king is uplifted over Greece. 
In the nmih the great Mardonius advances, persistently 
sDccessful, recovering Thrace and the islands, and 
receiving the submission of Macedonia ; in the south, 
Datis comes by sea direct upon Eretria and Athens. 
And at the same time heralds are sent to the Greek 
states demanding 'earth and water,' the token of sob- 
mission to the king's will 

Through all these books, but in VI, more than any, 
the history of the Greek states has been gathered up in 
digressions and notes, historically on a higher plane than 
the main current of the narrative in Asia. Datis lands in 
Eubcea and discharges the first part of his orders by 
sweeping Eretria from the face of the earth, then pro- 
ceeds to Marathon to fulfil the remaining part. He is 
met, not by the united Greeks, not even by the great 
Dorian cities, only by the Athenians and a band of 
heroic volunteers from Plataea— met, and by God's help, 
to man's amazement, defeated. After this the progress 
of the nairative is steady. Book VII. indeed moves 
slowly : there is the death of Darius and the succes^on 
of Xerxes ; the long massing of an invincible army, 
the preparations which 'shake Asia' for three years. 
There are the heart-searchings and waverings of various 
states, the terror, and the hardly -sustained heroism; 
the eager inquiries of men who find the plain facts to 
be vaster than their fears; the awful voice of the 
God in whom they trust at Delphi, bidding them only 
despair, fly, "maii their minds familiar with horrors." 
"Athens, who had offended the king, was lost Argos 
and other towns might buy life by submisuon, by 




HERODOTUS'S METHOD OF COMPOSITION 139 

not joining the fools who dared fight their betters." 
Then comes the rising of the greater part of Greece 
above its religion, the gathering of "them that were 
better minded" and thus at last the tremendous narrative 
of batUe. 

Much has been written about the composition of the 
histories of Herodotus. They fall apat very easily, 
they contain repetitions and contradictions in detail, 
and the references to events and places outside the 
course of the story raise problems in the mind of an 
interested reader. Bauer worked at this question on 
the hypothesis that the book was made up of separate 
'Logoi' inorganically strung together. KirchhofE held 
that the work was originally conceived as a whol^ and 
composed gradually. Books I.-UI. 119, which show 
no reference to the West, were written before 447, and 
before the author went to Thurii ; some time later he 
worked on to the end of Book IV. ; lastly, at the 
beginning of the Peloponnesian War he returned to 
Athens, and in that stirring time wrote all the second 
half of his work, Books V.-IX. He had meant to go 
much further ; but the troubles of 431 interrupted the 
work, and his death left it unfinished. Mr. Macan sup- 
poses that the last three books were the first written, 
and that the rest of the work is a proem, "composed 
of more or less independent parts, of which fl. is the 
most obvious, while the fourth book contains two other 
parts, only one degree less obvious" ; but that internal 
evidence can never decide whether any of these parts 
were composed or published independently. 

Some little seems cert^n : the last events he mentions 
are the attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., the subsequent 
invasion of Attica by the Lacedsemoniana, and the 



140 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

execution of the Spartan ambassadors to Persia in 430.* 
We know he was in Athens after 432, because he had seen 
the Propylaea finished. His book must have been fresh 
in people's memory at Athens in 425, when Aristophanes 
parodied the opening of Book 1.* Arguing from what he 
does not mention, it is probable that he was not writing 
after 424, when Nikias took Cyth£ra (vii. 235), and almost 
certain tiiat he did not know of the Sicilian expedition 
of 415 or the occupation of Dekeleia in 413. His theme 
was the deliverance of Greece and the rise of the 
Athenian Empire, and he died before that Empire began 
to totter. 

For it is clear that he did not live to finish his work. 
Kirchhoff argues that he meant to carry the story down 
to the Battle of Eurymedon, to the definite point where 
the liberated lonians swore their oath of union under 
the hegemony of Athens. That, Kirchhoff holds, is 
the real finish -of the ' M£dika ' ; not the siege of Sestos, 
which is the last event given in our narrative.* And 
does not Herodotus himself show that he intended to 
go further when he promises (vii. 213) to tell Mater' 
the cause of the feud in which the traitor Ephialtes 
was murdered, an event which occurred some time after 
476 ? Kirchhoff says, Yes ; but the conclusion is not 
convincing. The cause of the feud may have come 
long before the murder, and it is perfectly clear from a 
number of passages that Herodotus regards all events 
later than 479-8 as not in the sphere of his history. He 
dismisses them with the words, " But these things happened 
afterwards" Thus he does, it seems, reach his last date ; 
but he has not finished the revising and fitting. He leaves 

> »iL a33 ; w. 73 ; tIL 137 ; tf. tL 91. 

■ Athtamiani, 534 ft ■ Mqwr, Rk. JAw. dU. 146. 



DID HERODOTUS FINISH HIS HISTORY? 141 

unfulfilled the promise about Ephialtes; he mentions 
twice in language very similar, but not identical ^ 175 ; 
viii. 104), the fact, not worthy of such signal prominence, 
that when any untoward event threatened the city of 
Pidasos, the priestess of Athena there was Hable to grow 
a beard. More remarkable still, he refers in two places 
to what he will say in his 'As^rian Logvi' (i. 106; i. 
184), which are not to be found. The actual end of the 
work is hotly fought over. Can it, a mere anecdote about 
Cyrus, tacked on to an unimpressive miracle of Protesi- 
laos's tomb, be the close of the great life-work of an 
artist in language ? It is a question of taste. A love for 
episodes and anecdotes is Herodotus's chief weakness, 
and QiteM. literary art liked to loosen the tension at the 
end of a work, rather than to finish in a climax. 

As to the 'Assyrian Lo^,' the most notable fact is 
that Aristotle seems to have read them. In the Natural 
History (viii. 18) he says that "crook-clawed birds do 
not drink. Herodotus' did not know this, for he has 
fabled his ominous eagle drinking, in his account of the 
siege of Nineveh." That must be in the 'Assyrian 
Logoi.' * 

This clue helps us to a rough theory of the composition 
of the whole work, which may throw some l^ht on 
ancient writings in general. If Herodotus was telling 
and writing his ' Historiai ' most of his life, he must have 
had far more material than he has given us, and parts of 
that material doubtless in different forms. It is " against 
nature" to suppose that a 'Logographos' would only 
utilise a particular ' Logos' once, or never alter the form 
of it. The treatment of the Pedasus story shows how 
the anecdote unintentionally varies and gets inserted in 
' SentH8S.'H«Mi« wUdiiiliMdlypoidble. 



143 UTERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

different contexts. Ouir work clearly seems based on 
a great mass of material collected and written down in 
the course of a life-time ; and, on the other hand, It is 
certainly a unity, the diverse strands being finnly held 
and woven eventually into the main thread. This view 
makes it difficult to lay stress on references to later 
events as proving the late composition of any particular 
passage. The work as it stands is the composition of 
the man's last years, though large masses of the material 
of it may be taken, with hardly a word altered, from 
manuscripts he has had by him for lustres. 

In one important point Meyer and Bnsolt appear to 
be right, as against Mr. Macan and most Herodotean 
authorities — in placing the Egyptian 'Logoi' quite late, 
after the historian's return fromThurii, rather than before 
his first settlement there. Book II. stands very much 
apart from the rest of the work ; it shows signs of a deep 
inward impression on the mind of the writer made by 
the antiquity of Egyptian history and culture ; and, with 
all its helpless credulity on the unarmed side of Hero- 
dotus's mind, it shows a freer attitude towards the Greek 
religion than any other part. If this impression had 
been early made, it would surely have left more mark 
upon the general run of the work than is now visible, 
liiere is, however, another hypothesis quite probable : he 
may have utilised a youthful work which he intended to 
revise. Diels attributes the peculiar tone of Book II. to 
the author's close dependence upon Hecataeus; he thinks 
that the plagiarism is too strong for ordinary ancient 
practice, unless we suppose that these 'Logoi' were in- 
tended only for use in public readings, and never received 
the revi»on necessary for a permanent book-form. 

Our judgments about Herodotus are generally affected 



RELIGION OF HERODOTUS 143 

by an implied comparison, not with his precursors and 
contemporaries, nor even with his averse successors, 
which would be fair, but with one later writer of peculiar 
and almost eccentric genius, Thucydides. Thus in re- 
li^ous matters Herodotus is somethnes taken as a type 
of simple piety, even of credulity. An odd judgment 
It is true that he seldom expresses doubt on any point 
connected with the gods, while he constantly does so in 
matters of human history. He veers with alacrity away 
from dangerous subjects, takes no liberty with divine 
names, and refrains from repeating stories which he 
called 'holy.' Of course he does so ; it is a condition of 
his profession ; the rhapsode or ' Logopoios ' who acted 
otherwise, would soon have learnt 'wisdom by suffering.' 
Herodotus was not a philosopher in religion ; he has no 
theory to preach ; in this, as in every otiier department 
of intellect, it is part of his greatness to be inconsistent. 
But there were probably few high-minded Greeks on 
whom the trammels of their local worships and their 
conventional polytheism sat less hamperingly. He has 
been called a monotheist ; that of course he is not. But 
his language implies a certain background of monotheism, 
a moral God behind the nature-powers and heroes, almost 
as definitely as does that of j£schylus or even of Plato. 

Travel was a great breaker of the barriers of belief when 
the vital creeds of men were still really national, or can- 
tonal, or even parochial. It is surely a man above his 
country's polytheism who says (ii. 53) that it cannot be 
more Uian four centuries since Homer and Hesiod in- 
vented the Greek theology, and gave the gods their names, 
offices, and shapes 1 A dangerous saying for the public ; 
but he is interested in his own speculation, and has not 
bis audience before him. And we may surely combine 



144 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

this with his passing comment on the Egyptian theo- 
logies, that (ii. 3) "about the gods one man knows as 
mmJk as anoiisr." There is evident sympathy in his 
account of the Persian rehgion as opposed to the Greek : 
" Images and temples and altars it is not in their law to 
set up — nay, they count them Jbols who make suck, as 1 
fudgt, because th^ do not ktM the gods to be pian-sh<^ed, 
as the Greeks do. Their habit is to sacrifice to Zeus, going 
ufitotke tt^ of the hi^iest mountains, holding all the round 
itfthe sky to be Zeus." " Tk^ sacrifice," he goes on, "to 
sun, moon, eartk,fir§, water, and the winds" The feeling 
of that pass^e (L 131) expresses the true Greek poly- 
theism, freed from the accidents of local traditions and 
anthropomorphism. If you press Herodotus or the 
average unsacerdotal Greek, he falls back on a One 
behind the variety of nature and history ; but what 
comes to him naturally is to feel a divine element 
here, there, and everywhere, in winds and waters and 
sunlight and all that appeals to his heart — to single 
out each manifestation of it, and to worship it there 
and then. 

It is fair to lay stress on these passages rather than on 
those where Herodotus identifies various foreign deities 
with known Greek ones under the conventional names 
(Neith-Athena, Alilat-Ourania, Chem-Pan), or where, after 
a httle excursus into the truth about the life of Heracles, 
and a conclusion that there were two people of the same 
name, he prays " the gods and heroes " to take no offence 
(ii. 43). In those cases he is speaking the language of 
his audience ; and perhaps, also, the ' safe ' professional ' 
attitude has become a second nature to him. 

With prophecies and omens and the special workings 
of Providence, the case is different. He is personally 



PROPHETS AND ORACLES 145 

interested in prophets, and that for at least two good 
reasons. The age hked to make the prophets into its 
heroes of romance, its knights-errant, its troubadours. 
The mantle of Melampus had fallen in more senses than 
one on the Acamanian and Elean seers who passed 
from army to army, of whom Herodotus "might tell 
deeds most wonderful of might and amrage" (v. 72). And 
besides, as we can see from his naarked interest in 
Heracles, Pany&sis' hero, Herodotus bad not forgotten 
the prophet and patriot who had fought at his side and 
died for their common freedom in Halicamassus. 

With regard to the oracles and signs, we must always 
remember his own repeated caveat. He relates what 
he bears, be does not by any means profess always to 
believe it ; and with regard to the great series of oracles 
about the war (Book VII.), it is clear that though they 
were capable of a technical defence — what conceivable 
oracle was not ? — those who gave them would have pre- 
ferred to have them forgotten. For the rest, they go 
with the actions of providence. They greatly heighten 
the interest of the story, a point which Herodotus would 
never undervalue ; and without doubt, in looking back on 
their wonderful victories, all Greeks in their more solemn 
moments would have the feeling which Herodotus makes 
Themistocles express in the moment of triumph : " It is 
not toe who have done this!" " The gods and heroes" — a 
vague gathering up of all the divine, not really different 
from Herodotus's favourite phrases ' God ' or ' the divine 
power' — "grudged that one man should be king both of 
Eurvfie and Asia, and that a man impious and proud" (viii. 
109), What Englishman did not feel the same at the 
news of the wreck of the Armada ? What Russian, after 
the retreat from Moscow? Nay, in treating the storm 



t4« LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Aat shattered Xerxes' armada (viL 189, tgi^ though the 
Attmians had actually prayed to Boreas to send it, 
Herodotus refuses to assign it positively to that cause, 
ptunting out that the Magi were praying in the opposite 
sense for three days, at the end of which time the storm 
stopped. Herodotus's Godhead is "jealous tmd fraught 
WKft tmMt" and "falls like lighining" upon human 
liride — upon the sin, that is, of man making himself 
equal to God. Aristotle is one of the few theologians 
irtio have explained that 'jealousy' is inconsistent with 
the idea of God, and that in the true sense man should 
make himself as near God as can be. In that point 
Herodotus's deity seems to stoop ; but it is the Moral 
Tribunal of the world, and all tribunals are apt to punish 
wrong more than to reward right. It would be invidious, 
though instructive, to quote parallels from modem his- 
torians on the special workings of Providence upon the 
weather and such matters, in favour of their own parties ; 
and as for oracles, Herodotus's faith is approved by his 
standard translator and commentator at the present day, 
who shows reason to suppose that the Pythia was in- 
spired by the devil ! > 

A certain rabies against the good faith of Herodotus 
has attacked various eminent men in different ages. 
But neither Ktesias nor Manetho nor Plutarch nor Pan- 
ovsky nor Sayce has succeeded in convincing many 
persons of his bad faith. He professes to give the 
tradition, and the tradition he gives ; he states variant 
accounts with perfect openness, and criticises his 
material abundantly. He is singularly free from any 
tendency to glorify past achievements into the mira- 
culous, still more singularly free from national or local 

> Rawlimon, L 176 n. 



IS HERODOTUS FAIR-MINDED? 147 

[»«jadice. He admires freedom ; he has a vivid horror 
of tyrants. Bat there is no visible difference in his 
treatment of the oligarchic and democratic states ; and 
it is difficult to show any misrepresentation of particular 
tyrants due to the writer, though it is likely, on the whole, 
that the tradition he follows has been unfair to tiiem. 
Herodotus is not more severe than Thucydides or Plato. 
As to the Persians, he takes evident pleasure in testifying 
not only to their courage, as ^own, for instance, in 
fighting without armour against Greek hoplites, but to 
their (Rivalry, truthfnbiess, and high poUtical ot^anisa- 
tion. He is shocked at the harem system, the orien- 
tal cruelties, the slave-soldiers driven with scourges, 
the sacking of towns, where the Asiatics behaved like 
modem Turks or like Europeans in the wars of religion. 
He b severe towards the Corinthians and Thebans ; 
whose defence, however, it would be difficult to make 
convincing. To see really bow fair be is, one needs 
but to look for a moment at the sort of language such 
writers as Proude and Motley use of the average active 
Catholic, especially if he be French or Spanish. 

In the main, Herodotus is dependent for his mistakes 
upon his sources, and in all respects but one he is 
closer to the truth than his sources. He had read 
nearly all existing &«ek literature ; he not only quotes 
a great many writers, chiefly poets, but he emplojrs 
phrases, "ho poet has mentitmed" and the like, which 
imply a control of all literature. He seems for some 
reason or other to have avoided using his professional 
colleagues, Charon and Xanthus ; he mentions no 
logographer but Hecataeus. He refers in some four- 
teen passages to monuments or inscriptions, though 
he certainly did not employ them systematically. P(» 



148 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the most part, he depends on the oral statements of 
well-informed persons, both for the older history of 
Greece and for the 'Midika,' In barbarian countries 
he was largely dependent on mere dragoman-know- 
ledge, and the careless talk of the Greek quarter of the 
town. 

His frequent expressions, "t/u Libyans s^" "tiu 
CjtvmtoHs say," seem to refer either to the results of 
his own inquiries in the country referred to, or to the 
direct statement of some native. Four times we have 
a personal authority given.' "Archtas whom I met at 
PitofU" gives the story of his grandfather ; Tymnes, 
the steward of Ariapetthes, verifies some genealogies ; 
Thersander of Orchomenus, who had dined with 
Mardonius in Thebes, and Dikaios of Athens, who had 
lived in exile among the Medes together with Demar&tus 
the Spartan king, vouch respectively for two stories 
which tell at least of troubled nerves among the 
following of Mardonius. A more important source 
of knowledge lay in the archives of various families 
and corporations : sometimes, perhaps, Herodotus was 
allowed to read the actual documents ; more often, 
probably, he had to question the men who possessed 
them. That would be the case, for instance, with the 
Delphic oracle, to whose records he plainly owes an 
immense amount, especially in the earlier books. He 
draws from the traditions of the Alcmaeonidae (Pericles), 
the Philaids (Miltiades), and probably from those of 
the Persian general Harpagos. 

The weakness of these sources may be easily imagined. 
In his Spartan history Herodotus knows all about 
Lycurgus, who was of course a fixed saga-figure ; then 

> UL 55 ; ir. 76 1 Tiii 65 ; b. I& 



'SOURCES' OF HERODOTUS 149 

he knows nothing more till he comes to Leon and 
Agasicles, some three centuries later, and bursts into a 
blaze of anecdote. The non-mjrthical Spartan tradition 
only began there. The weakness of his Athenian record, 
apart from the haze of romance which it has in common 
with the rest, is due to the bitterness of Athenian feeling 
at the time when the last books were writing. When 
we hear how the Corinthians fled at Salamis; how 
the Thebans were branded on the head with the king's 
monogram, those are only the reverberations of the storm 
of 432-1 B,c. Somewhat in the same way an older war 
of passions has resulted in the condemnation, without 
defence, of Themistocles. It could not be denied that 
he had saved Hellas, that he loomed the highest man 
of the age in all eyes. But he had at the last fled to 
Persia 1 The provocation was forgotten ; the stain of 
the final treason blackened all his country's memory of 
the man ; and Herodotus depends for his story upon 
the two great houses who had hunted Themistocles to 
a traitor's end.* Partly they, partly the swing of popular 
indignation, had succeeded in fixing Themistocles in the 
story as a type of the low-bom triumphant trickster. 
It was for Ephorus to redeem his memory, till Ephorus, 
too, lost his power to speak. 

Besides the oral information which came in some 
shape or another from records, there was that which 
was merely oral, more 'alive' than the other, as Plato 
would say, and consequently tending more towards the 
mere story. This element is ubiquitous in Herodotus. 
Some of his history can be recognised as Eastern and 
Germanic folk-lore, Polycrates throwing his ring into 
the sea and having it brought back by the fish is an old 
■ BoKlt, GrUei. GtteMMt, & 619. 



ISO UTERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

friend. Amftsis and Rhampsinltus are all but (airy-tale 
bgures ; and two celebrated passages — the speech of the 
wife of Intai^ernes preferring her irreplaceable brother 
to her replaceable sons (iii. 119); the immortal Hippo- 
deides winning his bride by his prowess and high birth, 
losing her by dancing on his head, and remarking, as his 
ttet Ay, tiatiX is -all »iu t» H^lfodndes /" (vi. 126 seq.) — 
these two have been run to ground in Indian Hterature.^ 
Solon cannot have met Croesus, because the dates do 
not fit He cannot have uttered the great q>eech Hero- 
dotus gives him, for it is made up partly from Argive, 
partly from Delphic legends, legends which clustered 
in each case around certain miexplained tombs. The 
dreams that cune to lure Xerxes to his ruin, require 
more personal affidavits to substantiate them. The 
debate of the seven Persians on Monarchy, Oligarchy, 
and Democracy, though Herodotus stakes his reputa- 
tion upon it, has been too much for almost every 
believer. Conceivably Maass is right in tracing it to a 
fictitious dialogue by Protagoras. But it is idle to reject 
only what is grossly improbable, and accept without 
evidence all that may possibly be true. The greater 
part of the history of Herodotus is mixed up with pure 
popular story-making in various degrees ; the ancient 
foreign history almost irrecognisably so, the Greek his- 
tory before Marathon very deeply, while even the parts 
later than Marathon are by no means untransfigured. In 
one way, it is true, Herodotus is guilty of personal, though 
unconscious, deceptiveness ; his transitions, his ways 
of fitting one block of ' Logoi ' into another, are purely 
stylistic. He gets a transition to his Libyan ' Logoi ' by 
saying (iv. 167) that the expedition of Aryandes was 



TRANSITIONS AND ADECDOTES 151 

really directed against all Libya. There is no reason 
to think that it was. He introduces his Athenian his- 
tory by saying (i. 56) that Crcesus looked for an ally 
among the Greeks, and found that two cities stood out — 
Sparta, chief of the Dorians ; Athens, chief of the lonians ; 
but that the latt^ was crushed for the time being 
under the heel of her tyrant Pisistratus, The tyrant had 
not crushed Athens ; he was probably not then reign- 
ing ; Athens was a third-rate Ionian state. In framing 
these transitions and in getting motives for the insertion 
of anecdotes, as when he gives to Gelon Pericles's 
famous saying, " T/u ^ning is taken out of thi year" (vii. 
162), Herodotus does not expect to be pinned to 
conclusions. As Plutarch angrily puts it, he cares for 
accuracy in such points "no more than Hippocleidesl" 
For the rest, his historical faults are the inevitable con- 
sequence of his sources — the real untrustworthiness 
consisting not in error or inaccuracy here and there, 
much less in any deUberate misrepresentation, but in 
a deep unconscious romanticising of the past by men's 
own memories, and the shaping of all history into an 
exemplification of the workings of a Moral Providence. 

To his own aim be is singularly true — that "the reai 
deeds ef men shall not be forgotten, nor the wondrous works 
of Greek and barbarian lose their name" Plutarch — for 
the treatise On the Malice of Herodotus is surely Plutarch, 
if anything is— does not quarrel with him merely for 
the sake of Thebes. To Plutarch the age Herodotus 
treated is an age of giants, of sages and heroes in 
full dress, with surprising gifts for apophthegm and re- 
partee, and he sees all their deeds in a glow of adoring 
humility. He hates, he rejects their meaner side ; and 
he cannot bear the tolerant gossiping realism of HCTO- 



ISa LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

dotus. Yet it is this power of tnifiifiilness in the man» 
combined with his tragic grasp and his wide sympathy — 
this way of seeing men's hearts just as they are with 
all their greatness and their failure, that causes a critic 
who weighs his every word, to claim that "no other 
Greek writer has covered so large a world with so full 
a population of living and immortal men and women 
as Herodotus,"^ and to place his work opposite Homer's, 
** irremovably and irKplaceably " at the fountain-head of 
European prose literature. 



Vll 

PHILOSOPHIC AND POLITICAL LITERATURE 
TO THE DEATH OP SOCRATES 

Early Philosophy 

In turning abruptly from History to Philosophy, it is 
well to remembo- that we are only moving from one 
form to another of the Ionic ' Historic,' and that there 
was, and still is, a considerable Greek literature dealing 
with other subjects, Science, Medicine, Geographical 
Discovery, Punting, Sculpture, Politics, and Commerce ; 
all occupying the best powers of the Greek mind, and 
all, except Sculpture and Commerce, referred to by 
extant writers with respect and even enthusiasm. But 
the plan of this work compels us to omit them almost 
entirely, and we can only touch on Philosophy so far as 
is absolutely necessary for the understanding of literature 
in the narrower sense. 

Pbiloso[diy first meets us in Miletus, where TBAI.BS, 
son of Examias — a Carian name — sou^t as a basis for 
his scientific wcwk some doctrine of the 'Archfi,' or 
origin of the world. He ignored myths and cosmo- 
gonie% and sou^t for an original substance, which 
he found in what he called 'Moisture.' His disciple 
Anaxiuandbs preferred to describe it as the Jhntpop, 
the Infinite Undefined material, out of whidi all definite 



154 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

'things' arise by 'separation.' It is God: by its law 
all 'things' must be destroyed ^ain into that from 
which they were made; they meet with 'retribution' 
for their 'unrighteousness/ i>. their invasions of one 
another's spheres of being. The third Milesian, Anaxi- 
HENES, trying to specify what Anuimander left unclear, 
takes the Infinite to be really Vapour — ^p ; while the 
process of separation by which the various things come 
into being is really condensation due to change of 
temperature. The unity of this school lies in its con- 
ception of the question to be answered — "What is the 
worid ? " means to them, " What is the world made 
of?" — and in their assumption of a half-materialist 
hylozoism. 'Air,' for instance, is 'Mind.' The school 
spent most of its activity on scientific research, till it 
shared the destruction of its city in 494 B.C. It re- 
mained the chief source and stimulus of later philosophy. 

Altogether opposite in spirit was the great ' Thiasos ' of 
the West, founded about 530 B.C., by an exiled Samian 
oligarch, Pythagoras. Its principles seem to have 
included a religious reformation, hostile both to the 
theology of the poets and to the local cults; a moral 
reformation, reacting against the freer life and more 
complicated social conditions of the time; and a poli- 
tical reaction in support of the aristocratic principle, 
which was in danger of disappearing before the demo- 
cracies and tyrannies. In the time of its founder the 
sect marred its greatness by unusual superstition, and by 
perpetrating the great crime of the age, the destruction 
of Sybaris. Later, it did important work in mathematics 
and astronomy. 

The doctrine of the Milesians was spread over Hellas 
by the minstrel Xenophanes (see p. 74). A rhapsode 



EARLY PHILOSOPHERS 155 

had an enormous public, and stood in the central fortress 
of the poetic religion. FYom this vantage-ground Xeno- 
pbanes denounced the 'Ues' of Homer and Hesiod, and 
preached an uncompromising metaphysical monotheism. 
There was One God, not man-shaped, not having parts, 
infinite, unchanging, omnipresent, and all of him con- 
scious. He is One and the Whole. He is really, 
perhaps, Anaximander's Infinite robbed of its mobility ; 
he is so like the One of Pannenides that tradition makes 
Xenophanes that philosopher's teacher, and the fomider 
erf the Eleatic School. 

At Ephesus near Miletus, in the next generation to 
Anaximenes, the problem of the Milesians receives an 
entirely new answer, announced with strange pomp 
and. prid^ and at the same time bearing the stamp 
of genius. "AU things moot a*td nothing stays," says 
HeraclItus ; " all things fiffw" And it is this Flow that 
is the real secret of the world, the 'Arch£' : not a sub- 
stance arbitrarily chosen, but the process of change 
itself, which Heraclttus describes as 'Burning' {tt^p). 
HeracUtus writes in a vivid oracular prose ; he is 
obscure, partly from the absence of a philosophic lan- 
guage to express his thoughts, but more because of 
the prophet-like fervour of expression that is natural to 
him. It must also be remembered that in an age before 
the circulation of books a teacher had to appeal to the 
memory. He wrote in verses like Xenophanes and Par- 
menides, or in apophthegms like Heraclttus and Demo- 
critus. The process of change is twofold — a Way Up 
and a Way Down — but it is itself eternal and unchanging. 
There is Law in it ; Fate, determining the effect of every 
cause ; Justice, bringing retribution on every o£FencCi 



156 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

The 'offences' appear to be, as in Anaximander, the 
self-assertive pride of particular things claiming to Be 
when they only Become and Pass, claiming to be Them- 
selves when they are only a transition of something else 
into something else. Heraclltus speaks with a twofold 
pride — as one who has found truth, and as a noble- 
man. He would have concurred entirely in Nietzsche's 
contempt for ''shopkeepers, cows. Christians, women, 
Englishmen, and otiier democrats." The Milesians are 
as dirt to him ; so are his fellow-citizens and mankind 
generally. He condescends to mention Pythagoras, 
Xenophanes, and Hecataeus with Hesiod, as instances 
of the truth that " muck learning teaches not wisdom." 

Parmbnides of Elea amswers Heraclttus; he finds 
no solution of any difficulty in Heraclttus's flow ; there 
is nothing there but Becoming and Ceasing, and he 
wants to know what IS — in the sense, for instance, that 
2 X 2 tr 4, absolutely and eternally, though Parmenides 
would not admit our popular distinction between abstract 
and concrete. 

What is, is ; what is not, is not, ovk iari, does not exist. 
Therefore there is no Change or Becoming, because 
that would be passage from Not-being to Being, and 
there is no Not-being. Equally, there is no empty 
space; therefore no motion. Also there is only One 
Thing ; if there were more, there would have to be Not- 
being between them. He goes on to show that the One 
Thing is spherical and finite, and of course divine. It 
is matter, solid ; but it is also Thought, for " Thought 
and that of which it is thought are the same'* 

What then about the world we know, which has ob- 
viously a great many things in it ? Parmenides answers 
orientally : it is only deceit, what an Indian calls Maya. 



FIFTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 157 

How the deceit comes, bow the unchanging One can de- 
ceive, and who there is to be deceived, he does not tell 
us, though he does in the second part of his poem (see 
p. 75) give us "the Way 0/ Falsehood" explaining how the 
mirage works, and what contradictions are necessarily 
involved in a belief in it This last line of thought is 
especially followed by Parmenides's disciple Zbno, who 
develops the antinomies and inherent contradictioiis 
involved in the conceptions of Tim^ Space, and 
Number. If the doctrine of the One is bard, he argues, 
consistent belief in the Multiplicity of tbin^ is flatly 
impossible. 

Greek speculation thus reaches a point where two 
more or less consistent roads of thought have led to 
diametrically opposite conclusions — the One Unchange- 
able Being of Parmenides ; the ceaseless Becoming of 
Heraclltus. The difi&culty first emerges in the case of 
Melissus, the Samian admiral who once defeated 
Pericles ; he tried to make the One into a Milesian 
'Arch£,' but found it would not work: yoa could not 
possibly develop the one datum of pure thought into an 
account of the facts of the world. After Melissos the 
breach is more consciously felt On the one side, 
starting from Heraclltus, the Pythagoreans seek the 
Real, the thing that Is eternally, in the uncban^ng laws 
of the Flow ; that is, in proportion, in the eternal facts 
of Number, Geometry is the truth of which the par- 
ticular square, round, or triangular objects are imperfect 
and passing instances ; the laws of harmony are the 
' truth ' of music, and abstract astronomy the ' truth ' of 
the shifting stars. Thus in Number they found the real 
essence of the world, a One, eternal and unchangeable, 
which would fairly satisfy Parmenides's requirements. 



tS8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 
FVom the side of Being tiiere arose ttiree important 



EmpbooCLSS of Acngis, ^om we have treated above 
(P> 75)> assumes the ezisteiiGe not of one, but of four 
orif^nal ' Roots of Things' — Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, 
vitti mpty space about them. The roots are unchang- 
ing matter in themselves, boX moved and mixed — ^this 
is perhaps his most important contribution to philosophy 
— by non-material forces, which he describes as Love 
and Hate, or Attraction and Repulsion. 

Anaxacx>RAS of QaKOmeme, the first philosopher to 
settle permanoitly in Athens, assumed a very much 
larger numbo- of original and eternal 'tia^' or 'suds' 
(j^pff^toTM, Twiftimni), whose combination and sepaiation 
nuke the substances of the vrcw-ld. He means some- 
thing like the 'Elements' of modem Chemistry. Among 
them there is Mind, 'No3s,' which is a 'thing' like the 
rest, but subtler and finer, and able to move of itself. 
It acts in the various component parts of the world 
just as we feel it act in our own bodies. It has ' come 
and arroHgai' all the 'things.' Anaxagoras treated the 
Sun and Moon as spheres of stone and earth, the Sun 
white-hot from the speed of its movement ; both were 
enormous in size, the Sun perhaps as big as the Pelo- 
ponnese 1 He gave the right explanation of eclipses. 

The other solution offered by this period is the Atomic 
Hieory. It seems to have originated not from any 
scientific observation, but from abstract reasoning on 
Parmenidean principles. The if is a tiXiov, a Thing is 
a Solid, and anything not solid is nothing. But instead 
of the One Eternal Solid we have an immense number 
of Eternal Solids, too small to be divided any more— 
' Atomoi' (' Un-cuttables '). Parmenides's argument against 



ATTEMPTS AT SOLUTION 159 

empty space is not admitted, nor yet his demand that 
'thatwhicb is' must be round and at rest Why should it? 
As a matter of fact the things have innumerably different 
shapes and are always moving. Shape, size, and motion 
are all the qualities that they possess, and these are the 
only Natural Facts. All else is conventional or deriva- 
tive. Hie theory was originated by Leukippus of Abdtra, 
but received its chief development from bis great disciple 
Democritus, and from Epicurus. 



The Athenian Period of Philosophy 

Empedocles died about 430 B.C., and Anaxagoras was 
banished in 432. But for some years before this the 
reaction against cosmological speculation had begun. 
It was time to &nd some smaller truths for certain, 
instead of speculating ineffectually upon the great ones. 
The fifth century begins to work more steadily at parti- 
cular branches of science — at Astronomy, Mathematics, 
History, Medicine, and Zoology. 

This tendency in its turn is met and influenced by 
the great stream of the time. The issue of the Persian 
War, establishing Greek freedom and stimulating the 
sense of common nationality, had let loose all the pent- 
up force of the nation, military, social, and intellectual. 
Great towns were appearing. The population of Athens 
and the Piraeus had risen from 20,000 to about 100,000. 
Property was increasing even faster. The facilities for 
disposing of money were constantly growing ; commer- 
cial enterprises were on a larger scale and employed 
greater numbers both of free workmen and of slaves. 
Intercourse between the different cities was much com- 



l6o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

moner; and the foreign re»dents, at least in Athens 
and the progres^ve towns, were well cared for by law 
and li^tly taxed. Local protective tarifiis were practi- 
cally abolished ; the general Athenian customs at flie 
I^neus amounted only to i per cent on imports and 
exports. Compared with other periods, the time after 
the battle of Mykal£ was one of prolonged peace. The 
nation was possessed by an entha»astic belief in itself, 
in progress, and in democracy. One result of this was 
the economic movement, which gives the key to so 
much of Athenian history, the struggle of the free work- 
man to keep up his standard of living by means of his 
political ascendancy. The other is the demand of the 
Demos for the things of the intellect, answered by the 
supply of those things in a shape adapted for popular 
consumption. 

At all times the Greeks had keenly felt the value of 
personal quality in a man (iper^), and of wisdom or 
skill (ffo^la). How could these things be attained ? A 
' Hagnistfa ' could make you pure if you were defiled ; 
an ' Andrapodistfts ' could make you a slave; was there 
such a thing as a 'Sophistfis' who could make you 
wise 7 They came in answer to the demand, men of 
diverse characters and seeing ' wisdom ' in very different 
lights. Some rejected the name of ' Sophistfis ' : it 
claimed too much. Some held that wisdom might be 
taught, but not virtue : that could only be ' learned by 
practice.' Gorgias doubted if he could teach anything ; 
he only claimed to be 'a good speaker.' Protagoras 
boldly accepted the name and professed to teach irotuTudi 
ipen^, social virtue ; he preached the characteristic 
doctrine of periods of ' enlightenment," that vice comes 
from ignorance, and that education makes character. 




THE SOPHISTS IN PLATO i6i 

The Sophists were great by their lives and influence, 
more than by their writings, and even what they did 
write has almost completely perished (see p. 334). We 
hear of them now only through their opponents : from 
Aristophanes and the party of ignorance on one side, 
on the other from the tradition of the fourth century, 
opposed both in politics and in philosophy to the spirit 
of the fifth. 

If we had any definite statement of Plato's opinion 
of the great Periclean Sophists, it would probably be 
like Mr. Ruskin's opinion of Mill and Cobden, But 
we have no such statement Plato does not write his- 
tory; he writes a peculiar form of dramatic fiction, in 
which the actors have all to be, first, historical person- 
ages, and, secondly, contemporaries of the protagonist 
Socrates. When he really wishes to describe the men 
of that time, as in the Prott^gttras, he gives us the most 
delicate and realistic satire ; but very often hb thoughts 
are not with that generation at all. Some orator of 
370-360 displeases him; he expresses himself in -the 
form of a criticism by Socrates on Lysias, He proposes 
to confute his own philosophical opponents ; and down 
go all Antisthenes's paradoz-mongering and Aristippus's 
new-fangled anarchism of thought to the credit of the 
ancient Protagoras. 

In these cases we can discover the real author of the 
doctrine attacked. Sometimes the doctrine itself seems 
to be Plato's invention. Suppose, for instance, Plato 
seeks to show that morality has a basis in reason or that 
tiie wicked are always unhappy, he is bound to make 
some one uphold the opposite view. And suppose he 
thinks — controversialists often do — that the opposite view 
would be more logical if held in an extreme and shame- 



r6a LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

lets form ; bis only resource is to make his puppe^ either 
mth cynical coolness or in blind rage, proceed to tiie 
necessary extremes, and be there confounded. And 
who is the puppet to be ? Somebody, if possible, who 
is not too notoriously incongruous to the part ; whose 
supposed tenets may vaguely he thought to imply some- 
thing analogous to the infamous sentiments which have 
to be defended. 

Thrasymachus of ChalkMon is made in RepuAUc t. to 
advocate absolute injustice, to maintain that law and 
morality are devices of the weak for paralysing the free 
action of the strong. It b very improbable that this re- 
spectable democratic professor held such a view : in 
politics be was for the middle class; and in 411 he 
pleaded for moderation. He went out of his way to 
attack the current type of successful injustice, Arche- 
l&us of Macedon. He was celebrated as a sentimental 
speaker ; he says in an extant fragment that the success 
of the unrighteous is enough to make a man doubt the 
existence of divine providence. Plato's fiction is, in fact, 
too improbable ; no wonder he has to make the puppet 
lose its temper before it will act 

This is the chief crime which has made Thrasymachus 
the typical " corrupt and avaricious sophist" ; the other 
is that, being a professional lecturer, he refused to 
lecture gratuitously and in public to Socrates and his 
young biends — whose notorious object was to confute 
whatever he might say. 

What Aristophanes says of the Sophists is of course 
mere gibing ; happily he attacks Socrates too, so we 
know what his charges are worth. What the Socratics 
tell us — and they are our chief informants — is coloured 
by that great article of their faith, the ideal One Righteous 



INDIVIDUAL SOPHISTS 163 

Man murdered by a wicked world : nobody is to 
stand near Socrates. Socrates himself only tells us 
that the philosophy of the Sophists would not bear his 
criticism any more than the sculpture of Pheidias or 
the statesmanship of Pericles. They were human ; 
perhaps compared to him they were conventional ; 
and their real fault in his eyes was the spirit they 
had in common — the spirit of enlightened, progressive, 
democratic, over-confident Athens in the morning of 
her greatness. 

Their main mission was to teach, to clear up the mind 
of Greece, to put an end to bad myths and unproven 
cosmogonies, to turn thought into fruitful paths. Many 
of them were eminent as original thinkers : Gorgias re- 
duced Eleaticism to absurdity ; Protagoras cleared the 
air by his doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. The 
many sophists to whom 'wisdom' meant knowledge of 
nature, are known to us chiefly by the Hippocratic writ- 
ings, and through the definite advances made at this time 
in the various sciences, especially Medicine, Astronomy, 
Geometry, and Mechanics. Cos, Abd£ra, and Syracuse 
could have told us much about them ; Athens, our only 
informant, was thinking of other things at the time — of 
social and himian problems. In this department Prota- 
goras gave a philosophic basis to Democracy. The mass 
of mankind possesses the sense of justice and the sense 
of shame — the exceptions are wild beasts, to be extermi- 
nated — and it is these two qualities rather than intel- 
lectual powers that are the roots of social conduct. 
Alkidamas, a disciple of Gorgias, is the only man recorded 
as having in practical politics proposed tiie abolition of 
slavery ; in speculation, of course, many did so. Anti- 
phon the sophist represents, perhaps alone, the sophistic 



I64 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

view that a wife is a ' second self ' and more than any 
friend. 

In history, Hippias laid the foundations of a national 
system of chronology by publishing the list of Olym- 
pian victors. ' The whole science of language rests on 
the foundations laid by such men as Prodicus and 
Protagoras : the former insisting on the accurate dis- 
crimination of apparent synonyms; the latter showing 
that language is not a divine and impeccable thing, 
but a human growth with conventions and anomalies. 
As to morals in general, most of the Sophists were 
essentially preachers, like Hippias and Prodicus ; others, 
like Gorgias, were pure artists. The whole movement 
was moral as well as intellectual, and was singularly free 
from the corruption and lawlessness which accompanied, 
for example, the Italian Renaissance. The main fact 
about the Sophists is that they were set to educate the 
nation, and they did it. The character of the ordinary 
fourth - century Greek, his humanity, sense of justice, 
courage, and ethical imagination, were raised to some- 
thing like the level of the leading minds of the fifth 
century, and far above that of any population within a 
thousand years of him. After all, the Sophists are the 
spiritual and intellectual representatives of the age of 
Pericles ; let those who revile them create such an 
age again. 

Occasional Writings 

The real origin of Attic prose literature is not to be 
found in the florid art of Gorgias, nor yet in the technical 
rhetoric of Teisias, where Aristotle rather mechanically 
leeks it : it lies in the political speeches and pamphlets 



ION AND STESIMBROTUS 165 

of Athens herself. If we look for a decisive moment 
by which to date it, we may fix upon the transference 
of the Federation Treasure from Delos in 454 B.C., the 
most typical of all the events which made Athens not 
only the Treasury, Mint, and Supreme Court, but 
the ordinary legal and commercial centre of Eastern 
Hellas. The movement of the time brought an im- 
mense amount of legal and judicial work to Athens, 
and filled the hands of those who could speak and 
write ; it attracted able men from all parts of the 
Empire ; it gave the Attic dialect a paramount and 
international validity. Athens herself wrote little during 
the prime of the Empire ; she governed, and left it for 
the subject allies to devote to literature the energies 
which had no legitimate outlet in politics. 

Ion of Chios (l>efore 490-423 B.C.) is an instance. He 
was an aristocrat, a friend of Kimdn and King ArchidAmus, 
and he probably fought in the allied forces against Eidn 
in 470. But there was no career for him except in letters. 
He wrote tragedies, of course in Attic, with great success ; 
and it is pleasant to see (frag. 63) that he could openly 
express enthusiastic admiration of Sparta to an Athenian 
audience without any known disa^^eable result He 
wrote a Founding of Chios* and some books on Pytha- 
gorean philosophy. What we most regret is his Ixiok 
of Memoirs, telling in a frank, easy style of the Passmg 
Visits* (Ev^iilai) to his island of various notable 
foreigners. The long fragment about Sophocles is in- 
teresting ; though the idea it gives of contemporary wit 
and grace is on the whole as Uttle pleasing to our taste 
as the jests of the court of Queen Elizabeth. 

An utterly different person was Stesihbrotus of 
Tbasos, a man with a pen and some education, and in 



l66 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

place of character a settted bitterness gainst everything 
that represented the Empire. He was like that malcontent 
islander whom Isocrates answers in his Patugyriau, a 
representative of the Oligarchic and Particularist party 
in the allied states, the aristocrats and dependents of aria- 
tocrats, whose influence and property were lost through 
the Athenian predominance, and to whom the Demo- 
cracy and the Empire were alike anathema. Yet he 
came to Athens like every one else, like those 'dozens 
of Thasians' mentioned by Heg£mon the satirist : 

" CloM-tkom, Hot evtr niet, vhom ihitr Want ikips on Atpadtt, 
Damt^td md damagit^ moH, to pr^tst bad WMi in Athens? 

Stesimbrotus lectured successfully as a sophist ; wrote 
on Homer and on current politics. At last he was able 
to relieve bis feelings by a perfect masterpiece of libel, 
Upon TkemistocUs, Thugidida, and Pericles.* The first and 
last were his especial arch-fiends; the son of Mel^sias, 
being Pericles's oppranent, probably came off with the 
same mild treatment as Kimdn, who, "although an abject 
boor, ignorant of every art and science, had at least the merit 
ofbeingno ortUor and possessing the rudiments of honesty ; 
he might almost have been a Peloponnesian ! " If Stesim- 
brotus were not such an infamous liar, one would have 
much sympathy for him. As it is, the only thing to be 
urged in his favour is that he did not, as is commonly 
supposed, combine his rascality with sanctimoniousness. 
His book on the The Mysteries* must have been an 
attack. The mysteries were a purely and characteris- 
tically Athenian possession, to which, as Isocrates says, 
they only admitted other Greeks out of generosity ; and 
Stesimbrotus would have falsified his whole position if 
he had praised them. The man is a sort of intransigeant 
ultramontane journalist, wearing rather a modern look 



THE 'OLD OLIGARCH' i«7 

among hb contemporaries, a man of birth, ability, and 
learning, shut out by political exigencies from the due 
use of his gifts. 

Similar to Stesimbrotus in general political views, vastly 
removed from him in spirit, is the 'Old Oligarch,' 
whose priceless study of the Athenian constitution is 
preserved to us by the happy accident of the publisher 
taking it for Xenophon's. It is not only unlike 
Xenophon's style and way of thinking, but it demon- 
strably belongs to the first Athenian Empire, before the 
Sicilian catastrophe. It is, in fact, the earliest piece of 
Attic prose preserved to us, and represents almost alone 
the practic^ Athenian style of writing, before literature 
was affected by Gorgias or the orators. It is familiar, 
terse, vivid ; it follows the free grammar of conversa- 
tion, with disconnected sentences and frequent changes 
of number and person. It leaves, like some parts of 
Aristotle, a certain impression of naked, unphrased 
^ou^t The Old Oligarch has a clear conception of 
the meaning of Athenian democracy, and admitting for 
the moment that he and his friends are the ' Noble and 
Good,' while the masses are the 'Base and Vile,' he 
sees straight and clear, and speaks without unfairness. 
"/ dislitt tke kind of amstitution, because in choosing it 
tikey have definitely chosen to make the Viie better off than 
the Noble. This I dislike. But granted that this is their 
intention, I will show that th^ construe the spirit of their 
amstitution well, and manage their affairs in general well, 
in points where the Greeks think them most at fault" 
There is even a kind of justice in the arrangement ; "fin- 
it is the masses that row the ships, and the ships that have 
made the En^re." They do not follow the advice of the 
Good men — no ; " the first Vile man who likes, stands up 



tift Literature op ancient Greece 

and sptaks to the Asstmbfy" and, as a fact, " doa someJutw 
find out what ii to his interest and that of the masses. 
Ignorance plus Vileness plus Loyalty is a safar combination 
m an adviser of the Demos than Wisdom plus Virtue plus 
Disaffection." As for the undue licence allowed to slaves 
and resident aliens, it is true that you cannot strike them, 
and they will not move out of your way ; but the reason 
is that neither in dress nor in face is the true Athenian 
commoner at all distinguishable from a slave, and he 
is afraid of being hit by mistake I 

The writer goes over the constitution in detail without 
finding a serious Saw: everything is so ordered — the 
elective offices, the arrangements with the allies, the 
laws about comedy and about the public buildings — 
as to secure the omnipotence of the Demos. For in- 
stance, the system of making the allies come to Athens 
for their lawsuits is oppressive, and sometimes keeps 
litigants waiting as long as a year before their cases 
can be heard. But it provides the pay of the jury- 
courts 1 It enables the Demos to keep an eye on the 
internal affairs of the whole Empire and see that 
the 'Good' do not get the upper hand anywhere. It 
makes the allies realise that the 'Mob' is really their 
master, and not the rich admirals and trierarchs whom 
they see representing Athens abroad. Then it brings 
taxes ; it means constant employment for the heralds, 
and t>risk trade for the lodging-house keepers and the 
cabmen and those who have a slave to hire out. if 
only we had a hundred pages of such material as this 
instead of thirteen, our understanding of Athenian history 
would be a more concrete thing than it is. 

It is hard to see the exact aim of the Old Oligarch. 
He discusses coolly the prospect of a revolution. No 



POLITICAL WRITINGS 169 

half-measures are of the least use ; and to strike a death- 
blow at the Democracy is desperately hard. There are 
not enough malcontents ; the Demos has not been unjust 
enough. On the whole, a land invasion is the only hope ; 
if Athens were an island she would be invulnerable. 

The work reads like the address of an Athenian aristo* 
crat to the aristocrats of the Empire, defending Athens at 
the expense of the Demos. ' We aristocrats sympathise 
with you ; your grievances are not the results of de- 
liberate oppression or of the inherent perversity of the 
Athenians, they are the natural outcome of the demo- 
cratic system. If a chance comes for a revolution, we 
shall take it ; at present it would be madness.' 

Critias the 'Tyrant' wrote Constitution^; his style, 
to judge from the fragments, was like our Oligarch's, 
and he is quoted as using the peculiar word htaBued^tv m 
the exact sense in which it occurs here. The spirit of 
this tract indeed is quite foreign to the restless slave of 
ambition whom we know in the Critias of 404. Never- 
theless, the Critias who objected to action in the revolu- 
tion of 411, who proposed the recall of Alcibiades, and 
the banishment of the corpse of Pluynichus, may perhaps 
lead us back to a moderate and not too youthful Critias 
of 417-414, the date given to our Oligarch by MUller- 
StrUbing and Bergk. 

Among the other political writings of this time were 
Antiphon's celebrated Defence* Critias's Lives * and 
Pamphlets,* Thrasymachus's explanation of the Consti- 
tution of our Fathers,* and a history of the events of 411 
which serves as the basis of Aristotle's account in his 
Constitution of Athens. It contained a glorification of 
Theramenes's action, and a bold theory that the revolu- 
tion he aimed at was really the .restoration of the true 



I70 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

constitution of Draco. It can scarcely have been by 
Theramenes himself, since it shows no special hostili^ 
to Critias and the Oligarchical extremists. The same 
pamphleteering spirit infected even Paiisanias, the exiled 
Spartan king and led him to attack Lysander and the 
Ephors under the cover of a Life ofLycurgus.* 



Socrates, son of Sophroniscus from ALdPEzfi 
(468-399 B.C.) 

Among the Sophists of the fifth century is one who 
scarcely deserves that name, or, indeed, any other which 
classes him with his fellows : a man strangely detached ; 
living in a world apart from other men a life of incessant 
moral and intellectual search ; in that region most rich to 
give and hungry to receive sympathy, elsewhere dead to 
the feelings and conventions of common society. It is this 
which makes the most earnest of men a centre of merri- 
ment, a jester and a willing butt. He analyses life so 
gravely and nakedly that it makes men laugh, as when 
he gropes his way to the conclusion that a certain fiery 
orator's aim in life is " fti make many people angry at the 
same timer The same simpleness of nature led him 
to ask extraordinary questions ; to press insistently for 
answers ; to dance alone in his house for the sake of 
exercise; to talk without disguise of his most intimate 
feelings. He was odd in appearance too ; stout, weather- 
stained, ill-clad, barefooted for the most part, deep-eyed, 
and almost fierce in expression ; subject to long fits of 
brooding, sometimes silent for days, generally a persistent 
and stimulating talker, sometimes amazingly eloquent ; 
a man who saw through and through otfier men, left 
them paralysed, Alcibiades said, and feeling 'like very 



LIFE OF SOCRATES 171 

slaves'; sometimes inimitably humorous, sometimes in- 
explicably solemn ; only, always original and utterly un- 
self-conscious. 

The parentage of Socrates was a joke. He was the son 
of a midwife and a stone-mason; evidently not a success- 
ful stone-mason, or his wife would not have continued 
her profession. He could not manage such little property 
as he had, and was apt to drop into destitution without 
minding it. He had no profession. If he ever learned 
sculpture, he did not practise it He took no fees for 
teadiing ; indeed he could not see that be taught any- 
thing. He sometimes, for no visible reason, refused, 
sometimes accepted, presents from his rich friends. 
Naturally he drove his wife, Xanthippi, a woman of 
higher station, to despair ; he was reputed henpecked. 
In the centre of education he was ill educated ; in a hot- 
bed of pohtical aspirations he was averse to politics. He 
never bevelled ; he did not care for any fine art ; he 
knew poetry well, but insisted on treating it as bald 
prose. In his military service he showed iron courage, 
though he had a way of falling into profound reveries, 
which might have led to unpleasant results. In his later 
years, when we first know him, he is notorious for bis 
utter indifference to bodily pleasures or pains. But we 
have evidence to show that this was not always so ; that 
the old man who scarcely knew whether it was freezing 
or whether he had breakfasted, who could drink all night 
without noticing it, had passed a stormy and passionate 
youth. Spintharus, the father of Aristoxcnus, one of the 
few non-disciples who knew him in his early days, says 
that Socrates was a man of terrible passions, his anger 
ungovernable and his bodily desires violent, "though," 
he adds, "he never did anything unfair." 



172 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Socrates's positive doctrines amounted to little : he clung 
to a paradoxical belief that Virtue is Knowledge ; a view 
refuted before him by Euripides, and after him by Aris- 
totle — in its ordinary senses at least: to him, of course, 
it meant something not ordinary. He had no accom- 
plishments, and did not as a rale care to acquire them ; 
fliough, when it occurred to him, late in life, to learn 
music, he went straight to a school and learned among the 
boys. He was working incessantly at a problem which 
be never really could frame to himself, which mankind 
never has been able to frame. He felt that the great truth 
he wanted must be visible everywhere, tf we knew how 
to look for it It is not more knowledge Qiat we want ; 
only the conscious realising of what is in us. Accept- 
ing the jest at bis mother's profession, he described his 
process of questioning as assisting at the birth of truth 
from spirits in travail. 

Along with this faith in a real truth inside man, 
Socrates possessed a genius for destructive criticism. 
Often unfair in his method, always deeply honest in 
his purpose, he groped with deadly effect for the funda- 
mental beliefs and principles of any philosopher, poli- 
tician, artist, or man of the world, who consented to 
meet him in discussion. Of course the discussions 
were oral; Athens had not yet reached the time for 
pamphlet criticism, and Socrates could not write a con- 
nected discourse. He objected to books, as he did to 
long speeches, on the ground that he could not follow 
them and wanted to ask questions at every sentence. 

Socrates was never understood ; it seems as if, for 
all his insistence on the need of self-consciousness, he 
never understood himself. The most utterly divergent 
schools of thought claimed to be his followers. His 



TEACHING OF SOCRATES 173 

friends Eucltdes at Megara, and Phasdo at Elis, seem 
to have found in him chiefly dialectic — abstract logic 
and metaphysics, based on Eleaticism. Two others, 
jGschines and ApoUoddrus, found the essence of the 
man in his external way of life (see p-34o). Antisthenes, 
the founder of the Cynic school, believed that he followed 
Socrates in proclaiming the equal nullity of riches, fame, 
friendship, and everything in the world except Virtue. 
Virtue was the knowledge of right living; all other 
knowledge was worthless, nay, impossible. Equally 
contemptuous of theoretic knowledge, equally restricted 
to the pursuit of right living, another Socratic, Aristippus 
of Cyr£n£, identified Right Living with the piirsuit of 
every momentary pleasure ; which, again, he held to 
be the only way of life psychologically pos^ble. If 
one can attempt to say briefly what side of Socrates 
was developed by Plato, 'it was perhaps in part his 
negative criticism, leading to the scepticism of the 
later Academics ; and in part his mystical side, the 
side that was eventuaUy carried to such excess by the 
Neo-Platonists of the fourth century A.D. Socrates was 
subject to an auditory hallucination : a Divine Sign used 
to 'speak' to him in warning when he was about to 
act amiss. 

But the most fundamental likeness between Plato and 
Socrates seems to lie in a different point — in their con- 
ception of Love. The great link that bound Socrates 
to his fellows, the secret, perhaps, of the affection and 
worship with which so many dissimilar men regarded 
him, was this passionate unsatisfied emotion to which 
he could give no other name. The Pericleans were 
'lovers' of Athens. Socrates Moved' what he called 
Beauty or Truth or Goodness ; and, through this far- 




174 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

off cause of all Love, loved his disciples and all who 
were working towards the same end. Plato realises 
ttiis to the full. Socrates perhaps had only glimpses of 
it ; but it is clear that that intense vibrating personal 
affection between man and man, which gives most 
modern readers a cold turn in reading the Platonic dia- 
logues, is in its seed a part of Socrates. It is remark- 
able, considering the possibilities of Greek life at the 
time, that this 'Erds' gave rise to no scandal against 
Socrates, not even at his trial.^ In Plato's case it 
showed Itself to be a little imprudent ; Aristotle's mag- 
nificent conception of Friendship is best explained when 
we see that it is the Platonic Love under a cooler and 
safer name. 

What was the source of Socrates's immense influence 
over all later philosophy, since in actual philosophic 
achievement he is not so great as Protagoras, not com- 
parable with Democritus ? It was largely the daemonic, 
semi-inspired character of the man. Externally, it was 
the fact of his detachment from all existing bodies and 
institutions, so that in their wreck, when Protagoras, 
Pericles, Gorgias fell, he was left standing alone and un- 
discredited. And, secondly, it was the great fact that he 
sealed his mission with his blood. He had enough of 
the prophet in him to feel that it was well for him to 
die ; that it was impossible to unsay a word of what he 
believed, or to make any promise he did not personally 
approve. Of course the Platonic Apology is fiction, but 
there is evidence to show that Socrates's indifference, 
or rather superiority, to life and death is true in fact 
The world was not then familiarised with religious per- 
secutions, and did not know how many people are ready 

* He ipe«k* qtdte paiitivd)> on the point ; Xen. Symp. nii 31 K 



DEATH OF SOCRATES 175 

to bear martyrdom for what they believe. But there is 
one point about Socrates which is unlike the religious 
martyr : Socrates died for no supposed crown of glory, 
had no particular revelation in which he held a fanatical 
belief. He died in a calm, deliberate conviction, that 
Truth is really more precious than Life, and not only 
Truth but even the unsuccessful search for it The trial 
has been greatly discussed both now and in antiquity. 
The Socratics, like .£schines and Antisthenes, poured 
out the vials of their wrath in literature. Plato wrote 
iheApoUgy and the Gorgias; Lyaas the orator stepped 
in wiUi a defence of Socrates in speech form ; Polycrates 
the sophist dared to justify — probably not as a mere 
Jeu tftsprit — the decision of tiie court; Isocrates fell 
upon him with caustic politeness in the BusMs, and 
Xenophon with a certain clumsy convincingness in the 
Memorabilia. 

The chief point to realise is that the accusers were 
not villains, nor the judges necessarily 'lice' as H. 
Aurelius tersely puts it Socrates bad always been 
surrounded by young men of leisure, drawn mainly 
from tbe richer and more dissolute classes. He had 
in a sense 'corrupted' them: they had felt the de- 
structive side of his moral teaching, and failed to grasp 
his real aim. His political influence was markedly 
sceptical He was no oligarch ; his oldest apostie 
Chairephon fought beside Thrasyb&lus at Ph^l^ ; but 
he bad analsrsed and destroyed the sacred [ninciple of 
Democracy as well as every other convention. The 
city had barely recovered from the bloody reign of 
his two close disciples Critias and Charmides ; could 
never recover from the treason of his 'twloved' Alci- 
biades. The religious terrors of the people were 




176 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

keenly awake — confusedly occupied with oligarchic plots, 
religious sins, and divine vengeance. 

Of his accusers, the poet Mel£tus was probably a bnatic, 
who objected to the Divine Sign. He was a weak man ; 
he had been intimidated by the Thirty into executing an 
illegal arrest at their orders — the same arrest, according to 
the legend of the Socratics, which Socrates had refused 
to perfonn. Lyc6n seems to have been an average re- 
spectable politician ; the Socratics have nothing against 
him except that he was once the master's professed friend. 
These men could hardly have got a conviction against 
Socrates in the ordinary condition of public feeling ; 
but now they were supported by Anytus. A little later 
in the same year, when Melitus attempted another pro- 
secution for impiety against Andokides, in opposition 
to Anytus, he failed to get a fifth of the votes. Anytus 
was one of the heroes of the Restored Democracy, one 
of the best of that generous band. As an outlaw at 
Ph^li he had saved the Uves of bitter oligarchs who 
had fallen into the hands of his men. When victorious 
he was one of the authors of the amnesty. He left the 
men who held his confiscated property undisturbed in 
enjoyment of it 

He had had relations with Socrates before. He was 
a tanner, a plain well-to-do tradesman, himself ; but he 
had set his heart on the future of his only son, and was 
prepared to make for that object any sacrifice except 
that which was asked. The son wished to follow Soc- 
rates. He herded with young aristocrats of doubtful 
principles and suspected loyalty ; he refused to go into 
his father's business. Socrates, not tactfully, had pleaded 
his cause. Had Socrates had his way, or Anytus his, 
all might have been welL As it was, the young man 



SOCRATES AND ANYTUS 



177 



was left rebellious and hankering ; when his father be- 
came an outlaw for freedom's sake, be stayed in the city 
with Socrates and the tyrants ; he became ultimately a 
hopeless drunkard. As the old tradesman fought his way 
back through the bloody streets of the Pirieus, he thought 
how the same satyr-foced sophist was still in Athens, as 
happy under the tyrants as under the constitution, always 
gibing and probing, and discussing ambiguous subjects 
with his ruined son. It needed little to convince him 
that here was a centre of pestilence to be uprooted. 
The death of Socrates is a true tragedy. Both men 
were noble, both ready to die for their beliefs; it is 
only the nobler and greater who has been in the end 
triumphant 



VIU 

THUCYDIDES 

At the time when the old Herodotus was putting the 
finish to his history in Athens, a new epoch of struggle 
was opening for Greece and demanding a writer. The 
world of Herodotus was complete, satisfying. Persia 
was tamed ; the seas under one law ; freedom and 
order won — " Equal laws, equal speech, democracy." 
The culture which, next to freedom, was what Herodotus 
cared for most, was realised on a very wide scale : he 
lived in a great city where every citizen could read and 
write, where everybody was Seti^ and ^Xc(«aAo?. There 
had never been, not even in the forced atmosphere of 
tyrants' courts, such a gathering of poets and learned 
men as there was in this simply-living and hard-working 
city. There was a new kind of poetry, natural only to 
this soil, so strangely true and deep and arresting, that 
it made other poetry seem like words. And the city 
which bad done all this — the fighting, the organising, the 
imaginative creating alike — was the metropolis of his 
own Ionia, she whom he could show to be the saviour 
of Hellas, whom even the Theban had hailed, " shining, 
vioUt'crvzimed City of Song, great Athens, bulwark oj 
Helios, walls divine." ^ That greeting of Pindar's struck 
the keynote of the Athenians' own feeling. Again and 

^ Piod. fn^. 7& 



THE PERICLEAN IDEAL 179 

again the echoes ci it come back ; as late as 424 B.C. 
the word 'violet-crowned' could make an audience sit 
erect and eager, and even a judicious use of the ad- 
jective ' shining ' by a foreign ambassador could do diplo- 
matic wonders.^ 

It was a passionate romantic patriotism. In the best 
men the love for their personified city was inextricably 
united with a devotion to all the aims that they felt to be 
highest — Freedom, Law, Reason, and what the Greeks 
called 'the beautiful.' Theirs was a peerless city, and 
they made for her those overweening claims that a man 
only makes for his ideal or for one be loves. Pericles 
used that word : called himself her 'lover' {ipaoj^) — the 
word is keener and fresher in Greek than in English — 
and gathered about him a band of similar spirits, united 
lovers of an immortal mistress. This was why they 
adorned her so fondly. Other Greek states had made 
great buildings for the gods. The Athenians of fbis age 
were the first to lavish such immense effort on buildings 
like the Propylsea, the Docks, the Odeon, sacred only 
to Athens. Can Herodotus have quite sympathised with 
this ? He cannot at least — who can understand another 
man's passion ? — have liked the ultimate claim, definitely 
repeated to an indignant world, that the matchless city 
should be absolute queen of her ' allies,' a wise and bene- 
ficent tyrant, owring no duties except to protect and lead 
Hellas, and to beat off the barbarian.' 

There was a great gulf between Herodotus and the 
younger generation in the circle of Pericles, the gulf of 
flie sophistic culture. The men who had heard Anaxa- 

> At. Bf. tja9, '*'*■ 637. 

* TIiDC. iL 63, Periclei ; much Bare (trot^r ifleiwanli, iii, 37, Cleon t 
V. 89, ftt Helot ; tL 85, Eaphfaiiii ; tf. i 114, Corinthiaai. 



i8o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

goras, Protagoras, and Hippocrates, differed largely in 
beliefs, in aims, in interests; but they bad tbe all- 
important common principle, that thought must be clear, 
and that Reason holds the real keys of the world. 
Among the generation influenced by these teachers 
was a young man of anti-Periclean family, who never- 
theless profoundly admired Pericles and had assimilated 
much of his spirit ; who was perhaps conscious of a 
commanding intellect, who had few illusions, who hated 
haziness, who was also one of the band of Lovers. He 
compared his Athens with Homer's Mycenae or Troy ; 
he compared her with the old rude Athens which had 
beaten the Persians. He threw tbe whole spirit of the 
' Enlightenment ' into his study of ancient history. He 
stripped the shimmer from the old greatnesses, and found 
that in hard daylight his own mistress was the grandest 
and fairest He saw^-doubtless all the Periclean circle 
saw — that war was coming, a bigger war perhaps 
than any upon record, a war all but certain to estab- 
lish on the rock the permanent supremacy of Athens. 
Thucydides determined to watch that war from the 
start, mark every step, trace every cause, hide nothing and 
exaggerate nothing— do all that Herodotus had not done 
or tried to do. But he meant to do more than study it ; 
he would help to win it. He was a man of position and 
a distinguished soldier. He had Thracian blood, a nor- 
thern fighting strain, in his veins, as well as some kinship 
with the great Kimdn and Miltiades. The plague of 430 
came near to crushing his ambitions once for all, but he 
was one of the few who were sick and recovered. The 
war had lasted eight years before he got his real oppor- 
tunity. He was elected general in 423 B.C., second in 
command, and sent to Chalctdici. It was close to his 



THUCYDIDES AT AMPHIPOLIS i8i 

own country, where he had some hereditary chieftain- 
ship among the Thiaciana, and it was at that moment the 
very centre of the war. The Spartan Brasidas, in the 
flash of his enormous prestige, was in the heart of the 
Athenian dependencies. A defeat would annihilate 
him, as be had no base to retire upon ; and the 
conqueror of Brasidas would be the first military name 
in Greece. 

No one can tell exactly what happened. The two 
towns in especial danger were Amphipolis and Bi6n 
on the Strymdn. The mere presence of the Athenian 
ships might sufBce to save these two towns, but could 
do little to hurt Brasidas. Whereas, if only Thucydides 
could raise the Thracian tribes, Brasidas might be all 
but annihilated. That is what the Amphipolttans seem 
to have expected; and that is perhaps why, when 
Brasidas, starting unexpectedly and marching all day 
and all night through driving snow, stormed the 
bridge of the Strymdn in the winter dawn and 
appeared under the wails of Amphipolis, Thucydides 
was half a day's sail away near Thasos, opposite his 
centre of influence in Thrace. His colleague Eucles 
was in Amphipolis, and the town could easily have held 
out But Brasidas had his agents inside; his terms 
were more than moderate, and there had always been 
an anti-Athenian party. When the first seven ships 
from Thasos raced into the river at dusk, Amphipolis 
was lost, and so was Thucydides's great opportunity. 
He threw himself into Eidn, had the barren satisfac- 
tion of beating Brasidas twice back from the walls ; 
then — all we know is given in his own words (v. 26) — 
"It btfeU to me to bt an exile from my eouttlry for twenty 
fears after my command at ATnfh^elitT 



I83 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Who can possibly tell the rights of the case?* We 
know only that Athens was a rude taskmaster to her 
generals. We cannot even say what the sentence was. 
He may have been banished ; he may have been con- 
demned to death, and fled ; he may have fled for fear 
of the trial. We do not know where he Uved. The 
ancient Life says, at his estate at Scapte H^l£ in Thrace ; 
but that was in Athenian territory, and no place for 
an exile. It is certain that he returned to Athens after 
the end of the war. He says himself that he was 
often with the Lacedaemonian authorities. He seems 
to have been at the battle of Mantinea, and possibly 
in Syracuse. We know nothing even of his death, 
which probably occurred before the eruption of Etna 
in 396. His grave was in Athens among those of 
Kimon's family; but 'Zopyrus,' confirmed by 'Cra- 
tippus ' — ^whoever they are — say that it had an ' ikrion ' 
— whatever that is — ^upon i^ which was a sign that the 
grave did not contain the body. 

If we knew more of Cratippus we should be able to 
add much to our life of lliucydides. The traditional 
lives, one by Marcelltnus (5th cent A.D.), one anonymous, 
are a mass of conflicting legends, conjectures, and de- 
ductions. He wept at hearing Herodotus read, and 
received the old man's blessing ; he married a Thracian 
heiress ; he was exiled by Cleon ; he saX under a plane- 
tree writing his histories ; he drove all the ^ginetans out 
of their island by his usury ; he was murdered in three 
places, and died by disease in another. Dionysius of 
Halicamassus says in so many words {pp. 143, 144) that 
Cratippus was Thucydides's contemporary. If that were 

' The CMC k^init Thucfdid«s ii well given b; Gtotc (vi 191 ff-h «Ik> 

■occpti Uu-ceUIniu'i (toiy tlut Geon mi hii accuier. 



THE ' LIVES ' OF THUCYDIDES 183 

true it woald rehabilitate the credit of the tradition, but 
the evidence is crushing against it. Recent criticism of 
the Life is all based on an article in Htrmts xii., where 
Wilamowitz reduces the conventional structure to its 
base in the facts given incidentally by Thucydides him- 
self //kt the e^cistence of a tomb of "Thucydides, son 
of Olorus, of the deme Halim&s," among the Kimonian 
graves in Athens ; and then rebuilds from the frag- 
ments one small wigwam which he considers safe — the 
conclusion, namely, that Praxiphanes, a disciple of 
Theophrastus and a first-rate authority, had said that 
Thucydides, together with certain poets, lived at the court 
of Archelaua of Macedon. The argument is supported 
by Thucydides's own remarks (ii. 100} about that king 
improving the country in the way of organisation and 
road-making "mort than all the eight kingi before htm 
tcgether." But it has led irresistibly to a further con- 
clusion.^ Not only did Praxiphanes say this, but we 
can find where he said it : it was in his dialogue AbotU 
History.* That spoils all. The scenes in dialogues 
are, even in Plato's hands, admittedly unhistoric ; after 
Plato's death they are the merest imaginary conversa- 
tions ; so that our one wigwam collapses almost as soon 
as it is built One comer of it only remains. 

The dialogue, in discussing the merits of history and 
poetry — ^Aristotle had pronounced poetry to be the 
'more philosophic' — pits Thucydides, the truthful his- 
torian, alone against Eve poets of different kinds ; and 
we can probably guess what the decision was, from the 
fragmentary sentence which states that "in his lifetime 
Thucydides was mostly UHhnown, but valued b^ond price 
by posterity." 




1 84 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

That, then, is one new fact about Tbucydides, and it 
is like the others. His personal hopes were blighted 
in 423 ; his political and public ideals slowly broken 
from 414 to 404. And the man's greatness comes out 
in the way in which he remains faithful to his ideal of 
history. He records with the same slow unsparing detail, 
the same convincing truthfulness, all the triumphs and 
disasters — his own failure and exile, the awful story of 
Syracuse, the horrors of the ' Staseis^' the moral poison 
of the war-spirit throughout Greece, even the inward 
humiliations and exacerbated tyranny of her who was 
to have been the Philosopher-Princess among nations. 

Our conception, 'the Peloponnesian War,' we owe 
to Thucydides. There are in it three distinct wars and 
eight years of unreal peace. The peace after the first 
war was followed by an alliance, and it looked as if 
the next disturbance in the air of Hellas would find 
Athens and Sparta arrayed as allies against some Theban 
or Argive coalition. Thucydides was still working at 
his record of the Ten Years' War when fresh hostilities 
broke out in Sicily, and he turned his eyes to them. 
The first war is practically complete in our book. The 
Sicilian Expedition (vi., vii.) is practically finished, too, 
in itself, though not fully brought into its place in the 
rest of the history. It has a separate introduction ; it 
explains who Alcibiades is, as though he had not been 
mentioned before ; it repeats episodes from the account 
of the Ten Years' War, or refers to it as to a separate 
book. As the Sicilian War drew on, Thucydides realised 
what perhaps few men could see at the time, the real 
oneness of the whole series of events. He collected 
the materials for the time of peace and partly shaped 
them into history (v. 26 to end) ; he collected most of the 



COMPOSITION OF HIS HISTORY 



US 



material for the tinal Delcelcan or Ionian War (viii.). He 
has a second prologue (v. 26) : " Tke Mint Tittcydides of 
Athens has written these, too, in order, as each thing fell, 
fy summers and winters, until the Laeedamonians and allies 
broke the empire of the Athenians and took the Lot^ Walls 
and the Piraus." Those words must have been hard to 
write. 

He never reached the end. It is characteristic both 
of the man and of a certain side of Athenian culture, 
that he turned away from his main task of narrative to 
develop the style of his work as pure literature. Instead 
of finishing the chronicle of the war, he worked over 
his reports of the arguments people had used, or the 
policies various parties had followed, into elaborate and 
direct speeches. Prose style at the time had its highest 
development in tiie form of rhetoric ; and that turn of 
mind, always characteristic of Greece, which delighted 
in understanding both sides of a question, and would 
not rest till it knew every seeming wrongdoer's apology, 
was especially strong. The speeches are Thucydides's 
highest literary efiEorts. In some cases they seem to 
be historical in substance, and even to a certain extent 
in phrasing ; the letter of Nikias has the look of reality 
(viL II ff.), and perhaps also the speech of Diodotus 
(iii. 42). Sometimes the speech b historical, but the 
occasion is changed. One great Funeral Oration of 
Pericles was made after his campaign at Samos ; ' he 
may have made one also in the first year of the war, 
when there were perhaps hardly fifty Athenians to bury. 
More probably Thucydides has transferred the great 
speech to a time when he could use it in his history.' 

> Kt.SIM. 13OSS31, uu^aij Clnl.Ar.a8. 



i86 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Sometimes the speakers are vaguely ^ven in the pluial 
— *thi Corintkians said' — that is, the political situation 
is put in the fonn of a speech or speeches showing 
vividly the way in which different parties conceived it 
A notable instance is the imaginary dialogue between 
the Athenians and the Melians, showing dramaticaUy 
and with a deep, though perhaps over-coloured, char- 
acterisation the attitude of mind in which the war-party 
at Athens then faced their problems. 

This is at first sight an odd innovation to be intro- 
duced by the great realist in history. He warns us 
frankly, however. It was hard for him or his informants 
to remember exactly what the various speakers had said. 
He has therefore given the speeches which he thought 
the situation demanded, keeping as close as might be to 
the actual words used (i. 22). It is a hazy description. 
He himself would not have Itked it in Herodotus ; and 
the practice was a fatal legacy to two thousand years 
of history-writing after him. But in his own case we 
have seen why he did it, and there is little doubt that 
he has done it with extraordinary effect There is 
perhaps nothing in literature like his power of half 
personifying a nation and lighting op the big lines of 
its character. The most obvious cases are actual de- 
scriptions, such as the contrast between Athens and 
Sparta drawn by the Corinthians in I., or the picture 
of Athens by Pericles in II.; but there is dramatic 
personation as well, and one feels the nationality of 
various anonymous speakers as one feels the personal 
character of Nikias or Sthenelaldas or Alcibiades. It 
would be hard to find a clearer or more convincing 
account of conflicting policies than that given in th$ 
speeches at the beginning of the war. 



THE SPEECHES IN THUCYDIDES 187 

Of courae we should have preferred 2 verbatim re- 
port ; and of course lliucydides's practice wants a 
Tbucydides to justify it But if we compare these 
speeciies with the passages in Vlll. where he has given 
us the same kind of matter in indirect form, one in- 
clines to think that the artificial and fictitious speech 
is the clearer and more ultimately adequate. The fact 
is that in his ideal of history Tbucydides was almost 
as far from Polybtus as from Herodotus. Careful* 
ness and truth, of course, come absolutely bnt, u 
with Polybius. "Of th« things done in th* war" (ai 
distinguished from the speeches) "/ kavt not thought 
fit to vnitt from casual information nor aeeonUng to ai^ 
notion of n^ oam. Parts I saw myulf; for ths rut, 
■which I learned from others, I inquired to the fulnui 
of 00' power about every detail. The truth was hard 
to find, because eye-^witneises of the tamo evtntt Ipeke 
differently as their memories or their tympathitt varied. 
The book will perh^t seem dull to listen to, because there 
is no myth in it. But if those who wish to leeh at the 
truth about what happened in the war, and the pasMagee 
like it which are sure according to man's nature to recur 
in the future, judge my work to be uetfitl, I shall be content. 
What I have written is a thing to possess and keep alwt^s, 
not a performance fiir passing entertainment," 

He seeks trufli as diligently and relcnlleMly u a 
modem antiquaiy who has no object for conceal* 
ment or exaggeration. But his aim is a different one. 
He is not going to provide material for his readers 
to work upon. He is going to do the whole work him* 
self— to be the one judge of truth, and at such to give 
his results in arti^ and final form, no evidence 
produced and no source quoted. A significant point, 



I88 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

perhaps, is his use of documents on the one hand and 
speeches on the other. Speaking roughly, one may 
say that in the finished parts of his work tfiere are no 
documents; in the unfinished there are no speeches. 
With regard to the speeches the case is clear. Nearly 
all bear the marks of being written after the end of 
the war. The unfinished Eighth Book has not a single 
speech ; the unfinished part of Book V. only the Melian 
Dialogue. 

With the documents there is more room for doubt ; 
but the point is of great inner ugntficance. Of the nine 
documents embodied verbatim in the text, three are in 
tiie notoriously unfinished Eighth Book; three are in 
that part of Book V. which deals with the interval ol 
peace; three — a Truce, a Peace, and an Alliance, between 
Athens and Sparta — belong to the finish of the Ten 
Years' War. Now, it can be made out that these last 
three come from Attic, not Spartan, originals ; that they 
were not accessible to the exile till his return in 403, 
and that such information as he had of them through 
third persons was not correct Where they stand in 
the text they are tnorganic. The narrative has been 
written without knowledge of them; in one case it 
contradicts them. The Truce shows that a separate 
truce had been made between Athens and Troezen, 
not mentioned in the text The Peace differs from 
the narrative about Pteleon and Sermylia, and im- 
plies that Athens had recovered the towns in Chalci- 
dic£. The Alliance does not contain any clause binding 
Athens and Sparta to make no separate alhance except 
by mutual consent, though the surrounding narrative 
both implies and states that it did (v. 39, 46), Thucy- 
dides's documents have all been added to ttie text after 



THUCYDIDES'S USE OF DOCUMENTS 189 

403, and imply a new and more ambitious aim for bis 
history. When he wrote the Ten Years' War he gave 
no documents — not the peace of 445, nor the treaties 
with Rhegion and Leontini in 433, nor even that with 
Corc^ra. The same with his Sicilian War ; there is not 
even the treaty with Egesta. 

He began his history as a true ' chronicle of the war by 
summers and winters.' He enlarged it to an attempt at 
a full and philosophic history of Athens in her diplomatic 
and imperial relations. When he was cut off from 
documents he saw their value, and when the opportunity 
came back, embodied them in his history as they stood 
recorded on the stones. The great political speeches 
were not recorded ; he knew that they expressed the 
inner meaning of the time, and he did his best to re- 
member or recreate them. 

Here again his work is unfinished. He has only nine 
documents in all, and the collection seems to a certain 
extent fortuitous. Three of them, more interesting than 
important, are mere abortive and apparently secret 
treaties between Sparta and Persia. He must have 
got these through some private channel, perhaps from 
the same source — Kirchhoff thinks, Alcibiades — as the 
Argive and Spartan documents in Book V. Many more 
documents would have been needed to make up his 
ideal history ; and many more of the dissertations and 
digressions, the explanations of internal policy and social 
cluuige, which are now almost confined to the first two 
books and the introduction to Book VI. Even the 
documents which he has got, have not, as we have 
seen, been fully utilised. There were still some small 
errors in the narrative, which documentary evidence 
could help him to correct There were some con^der- 




190 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECK 

able omissions. His account of the tribute is obscure 
for vant of detaiL He says Th£ra was not in the 
Empire in 432, and does not explain how she came to 
be paying tribute in 426.* He says little about treaties 
and proposals of peace, little of 6nance, little of Athenian 
political development or military organisation. There is 
not so much * background,' to use Mr. Forbes's word, 
to his history as to that of Herodotus. But the com- 
parative fulness of Book I. in such matters is perhaps 
an indication of what the rest would eventually have 
become. 

Thucydides's style as it stands in our texts is an extra- 
ordinary phenomenon. Undeniably a great style, terse, 
restrained, vind, and leaving the impression of a power- 
ful intellect Undeniably also an artificial style, obscure 
amid its vividness, archaisttc and poetic in vocabulary, 
and apt to run into verbal Sourishes which seem to have 
little thought behind them. Part of this is explicable 
enough. He writes an artificial semi-Ionic dialect, {tv 
for fierii, i^v for Hv, vpdwm for vpdnw. The literary 
tradition explains that. Literature in Greek has always 
a tendency to shape itself a language of its own. He is 
overladen with antitheses, he instinctively sees things 
in pairs; so do Gorgias and Antiphon. He b fond 
of distinguishing between synonyms ; that is the effect 
of Prodicus. He is always inverting the order of his 
words, throwing separate details into violent relief, 
which makes it hard to see the whole chain of 
thought. This is evidently part of the man's peculiar 
nature. He does it far more than Antiphon and Gorgias, 
more even than Sophocles. His own nature, too, is 
responsible for the crowding of matter and thought that 



TEXT OF THUCYDIDES 191 

one feels in reading him — the new idea, the new logical 
distinction, pressing in before the old one is comfortably 
disposed of. Heisbjnatarc'SemfigriHstoHsnH' (Qiaxi- 
tilian). A certain freedom in grammar is common to 
all Greek, probably to all really thoughtful and vivid, 
writers : abstract singular nouns with plural verbs, slight 
anacolutha, intelligible compressions of speech. But what 
is not explicable in Thucydides is that he should have 
fallen into the intermittent orgies of ungrammatical and 
unnatural language, the disconcerting trails of comment 
and explanation, which occur on every third page. 

Not explicable if true; but is it true? The answers 
arise in a storm. "No; our text is utterly corrupt" 
"It is convicted of gross mistakes by contemporary 
inscriptions. It is full of glosses. It has been filled 
with cross-references and explanatory interpolations 
during its long use as a school-book." "Intentional 
forgers in iate times have been at it" (Cobet, Ruther- 
ford). "One of them was 'blood-thirsty,' and one talked 
* like a cniin 7 " (Miiller-Strubing). " Nay, the work itself 
being notoriously unfinished, it was edited after the 
author's death by another " (Wilamowitz) ; or by various 
others, who interpolated so freely, and found the MSS. 
in such a state of confusion, that the "unity of author- 
ship is as hopelessly lost in the Thucydidean question 
as in the Homeric" (Schwartz). 

Against this onslaught, it is not surprising that the 
average scholar has taken refuge tn deafness, or looked 
on with sympathetic hope while Herbst does his mag- 
nificent gladiator-work in defence of everything that he 
believed in the happy sixties — the time, as he says plain- 
tively, when he felt, in opening his Thucydides, that 
he was "resting in Abraham's bosom." It is not sur- 




192 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

prising that conservative editors have even adopted the 
extraordinary theory — merely in defence against the de- 
velopment theories of Ullri^, Kirchhoff, and Cwiklinsid 
— that Thucydides did not write a word between 432 
and 404, and then apparently did the whole book at a 
sitting. 

This is not the place to discuss the text, except in 
the broadest manner, and for the sake of its signifi- 
cance in the history of literature and in our conception 
of Thucydides. In the first place, the general line of 
Cobet followed by Rutherford, that the text is largely 
defaced by adscripts and glosses, and that Thucydides, 
a trained stylist at a time when style was much studied, 
did not, in a work which took twenty-nine years' writing, 
mix long passages of masterly expression with short 
ones of what looks like gibberish — thus much seems 
morally certain. The mere comparison of the existing 
MSS. and the study of Thucydides's manner show it 
But that takes us very little way. Dr. Rutheriord's 
valuable edition of Book IV., attempting to carry these 
results to a logical conclusion, has produced a text 
which hardly a dozen scholars in Europe would accept. 
We can see that the ori^al wording has been tampered 
with ; we can see to a certain extent the lines of the 
tampering. We cannot from that restore the original. 

But we have some concrete facts by which to estimate 
our tradition. We have part of the original text of one 
of Thucydides's documents extant on an Attic stone.* We 
have some significant quotations in the late geographer 
Stephen of Byzantium. 

The inscription, according to Kirchhoff, taking the 
twenty-five lines alone, but allowing for restorations, 

> The tieity, Thnc t. 47 = C I. A. iv. 46 ib 



EXTERNAL EVIDENCE ABOUT THE TEXT 193 

shows our Tbucydides text to be wrong in thirty-two 
small points of detail ; or not counting repetitions!, in 
twenty ; not counting conjectural restorations of the 
stone, in thirteen. The details are in spelling, in the 
order of the words, in the use of different prepositions 
or verb-forms, or in the omission of formal phrases. 
There is no difference in meaning. There is evidence 
to make it practically certain that Thucydides copied 
from an Athenian original verbally identical with our 
original — almost certain that he took his copy from our 
very stone. 

Now, dismissing the desperate theory that Thucydides 
was consciously improving the style of his document 
(Herbst), the errors in our text will naturally be attri- 
buted to divers and various of the many scribes who 
have mediated between Thucydides and us. In that 
case our text is a seriously-damaged article. To save 
the vulgate some have sacrificed Thucydides. ' He did 
not care for verbal accuracy. He liv«i before the age 
of precision in literary matters.' Very nrobable ; but 
a suicidal defence. For if Thucydides, the pupil of 
the Sophists, did not care for verbal accuracy in his 
documents, is it likely that the contemporary journey- 
man scritie cared for verbal accuracy in copying him ? 

The evidence of Stephen is difiFerent, but points in 
the same direction. Our text of Thucydides gives 
foreign proper names in a more or less consistently 
Atticised form, and it has been thought the height of 
pedantry to suspect them. Stephen in five places 
where he quotes Thucydides in his Geography spells 
the names in the correct and ancient way,^ which of 




194 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

course he cannot have known by his own wits. In 
another passage (iii. 105), where our text says that 
Olpas, a place on the extreme border of Acamania 
towards Amphilochia, was " th* commtm tribtmal of tht 
Aearmamams" Stephen quotes it as "^ i^ Acarttaiuams 
tmd An^Ai/ockiams," which is just what its position 
demands. 

The upshot of this is that all criticism of Thucydides 
must recognise the demonstrable imperfection of onr 
text For instance, in the well-known Mitylensean 
story, when the Assembly has condemned the whole 
military population to deafii in a moment of passion, 
repented the same day, and, by the tremendous exertion 
of the galley-rowers who bore the reprieve, saved them, 
it proceeds to condemn and execute the ringleaders of 
the rebellion, " tMose most guilty'' " Thty numdered ratJk£r 
man tAam 1000 " (iii. 50) ! Is that number remotely 
credible ? lliere is nothing in which MSS. are so 
utterly untrustworthy as figures, the Greek numeral 
system lending itself so easily to enormous mistakes. 
The ringleaders were in Athens at the time. It was a 
deliberate execution of prisoners, not a hot-blooded 
massacre ; and nobody, either in Tjucydides or for 
centuries after him, takes the least notice of it 1 Dio- 
ddrus, with his Thucydides before him, makes Hermo- 
crates of Syracuse deliver a speech upon all the crimes 
of Athens ; he tells of many smaller things ; he tells 
of the cruel decision of the first Assembly and of the 
enormity which the Athenians thought of committing — 
and omits to mention that they executed 1000 of their 
subjects in cold blood. It is clear that Dioddrus did 
not read our story. It all rests on the absolute cor- 
rectness of the figure a ; and our editors cry aloud and 



EXAMPLES OF PROBABLE CORRUPTION 195 

cut themselves with knives rather than admit that the cf 
can possibly be wrong I * 

In the same way, in i. 51 our text can be checked 
by a contemporary inscription.' The stone agrees 
exactly with Thucydides in the names of the first 
set of generals mentioned; in the second it gives 
"Glaukon (Metage)nte and Drakonti(dfis)." Our text 
gives "Glaukon, son of La^ros; Andokidis, son of Le^ 
goras" — ^that is, Andokidds the orator. Is this a mere 
mistake of the historian's ? Not necessarily. Suppose 
the owner of some copy in which there was a blot or a 
tear was not sure of the form 'Leagros'; "Ledgoras," 
he would reflect, " is a real name ; Andokidte was son 
of a Le6goras," Hence enters the uninvited orator and 
ousts the two real but illegible names. Something of 
that sort is fir more likely than such a mistake on the 
part of Thucydides. 

In a passage at the end of Book I. where the narra- 
tive is easy and the style plain, the scholiast observes that 
"here the lion laughs." The lion would laugh more often 
and more pleasantly if we could only see his real expres- 
sion undistorted by the accidents of tradition. 

To return from this inevitable digression, we see easily 
how Thucvdides was naturally in some antagonism to 
Herodotus's whole method of viewing things, lliucy- 
dides had no supernatural actors in bis narrative. He sees 
no suggestion — how could he in the wrecked world that 
lay before him ? — of the working of a Divine Providence. 
His spirit is fositif; he does not speak of things he 
knows nothing about He is a little sardonic about 

1 MtUlcf •Stifltniig of eoone thinki the pMuge *n interpolation. Tbncy- 
didei lued the decwllc qruem ol nomeiali, not that of the Attic IntcriptloiM, 
■ C L A. 179. 



196 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

oracles, which of course filled the air at the time. He 
instances their safe ambiguity (ii. 17, 54), and mentions 
as a curiosity the only one he had ever known to come 
definitely true (v, 26), He speaks little of persons. He 
realises the influence of a great man such as Pericles, a 
mere demagogue such as Cleon, an unscrupulous genius 
such as Alcibiades. Living in a psychological age, he 
studies these men's characters and modes of thought, 
studies them sometimes with vivid dramatic personation, 
in the speeches and elsewhere ; but it is only the mind, 
never the manner or the matter, that he cares for, and he 
never condescends to gossip. He cares for great move- 
ments and organised forces. He believes above all thin^ 
in reason, bratn-^ower, intelligence. 

There is another point in which he is irritated by Hero- 
dotus. He himself was a practical and highly-trained 
soldier. Herodotus was a man of letters who knew no- 
thing of war except for some small Ionian skirmishing in 
his youth. Herodotus speaks of the 'regiment of Pttan£,' 
showing that he thought Spartan regiments were raised 
by localities ; it makes Thucydides angry that a professed 
historian should not know better than that' Except in 
topography, which is always difficult before the era of 
maps, Thucydides is very clear and pointed in his 
military matters ; and it is interesting to observe that 
he lays his hand on almost all the weaknesses of Greek 
military organisation which were gradually made clear 
by experience in the times after him. In the Pelopon- 
nesian War the whole strength of the land army was 
in the heavy infantry. Thucydides shows the helpless- 
ness of such an army against adequate light infantry.* 
Iphicrates and Xenophon learned the lesson. He shows 
'lao;^. Hdt U. $3. ■ lit 101 ) h. 39. 



THUCYDIDES AS A HISTORIAN 197 

the effect of the Syracusan superiority in cavalry, both 
for scouting and foraging and in actual engagements. 
It was cavalry that won Chseronea for Philip, and the 
empire of Darius for Alexander. He points out, too, the 
weakest spot of all in Greek strategy, the hampering of 
the general's action in the field by excessive control at 
home. The Sicilian Expedition was lost, not by Nikias, 
but by the Athenian Assembly ; or if Nikias also made 
grave errors, they were largely due to the state of para- 
lysing subjection in which he was kept by that absent 
body. The Roman Senate, composed so largely of mili- 
tary men, was as sympathetic to its generals' failures as it 
was to their extortions. The Athenian Assembly was 
largely affected by the private soldier and the man, who, 
though liable to serve, was in reality no soldier at all. 
Sparta was almost as bad for a different reason. Only an 
exceptional position like that of Brasidas in ChalcidicA, 
or Agis at Dekeleia, enabled a general to act with real 
freedom,^ though even Agis was materially hindered by 
jealousy. Here ^ain we see one of the secrets of the 
power of Philip and Alexander. 

Like most thoughtful soldiers — Bauer* quotes parallels 
from Moltke and others — Thucydides is consistently 
impressed with the uncertainty of war, the impossibility 
of foreseeing everything, or of knowing in a battle what 
exactly is being done. He does not judge men, as the 
stupid do, by their success. He had personal reasons, 
of course, for not doing so in military matters ; but this 
principle, one of the greatest marks of the real thinker, 
is with him all through his work. Pericles was convinced 
from the facts before him that Athens would win the 
war ; and she lost it Pericles was profound and correct 

> TiiL 5, Agb. ■ PkiMtgmi, l 401. 



19* LtTERATXRE OF AMCIENT GREECE 

io his reckoning, but he coold not foresee the plague, nor 
be re^MMisible for the abandonment of his policy after 
his death. It is verf reniaitable, indeed, how Thacydides 
nercr eiqiresses a persooal jodgment which could be de- 
duced from the facts be has given. He only speaks when 
he thinks ttie facts likdy to be misinterpreted. Cleon's 
nndettaUng (iv. 28) to cifitnre SphacUria in less than 
tvtxtty days was fulfilled. It was nevertheless an insane 
boast, says Thuc>'dides. At 0ie end of the Sicilian Ex- 
pe<fitton, we are full of admiration bx Demosthenes ; 
our pity for Nikias is mingtcd with iiritation, and even 
contempt Thucydides sobers us : "O/ otf tkt Gretks ej 
■tr tim*, ht tt»st dt s tmtd s» wtutnMt mm tmd, /or k* 
iifMt « tkt f4ry»rwMmt tf mli tk*i was temmUd virhu" 
(vu. t^V Gencfoiks praise ; but the man's limitations 
arv gi^'t'n — **W/ Aat tpos ammtiJ virtme." We should 
nc%'er have diso.'>%~«Ted this about Nikias from the mere 
historA'. But Thucydid«s knew the man ; is perfectly, 
Alm^vit criicKy, i>ank about him ; and that is Thucy- 
dides's final juilgment. It is the same with Antiphon. 
He is a sinister tigurf : he was re^ionsible for a reign 
of terror. But Thuo-dides, who knew him, admired 
him, while he deliberately recorded the full measure 
of his offences. M.»cchia\^i's praise of Caesar Borgia 
sug^ts itself. Antiphon's opcnj was perhaps rather 
like Borgia's Virti, and MacchiavtUi had a great ideal 
for Italy, something like that of Thucydides for Athens. 
Or one might think of Philippe de Commines' praise 
of Louis XI. But Thucydides, though in intellect not 
unlike these two, is a much bigger man than De Corn- 
mines, a much saner and fuller man than Macchiavelli, 
and a much nobler man than either. He is very chary 
of moral judgments, but surely it needs some blindness 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THUCYDIDES 199 

in a reader not to feel the implication of a very earnest 
moral standard all through. It has been said that he 
attributes only selfish motives even to his best actors, 
a wish for glory to Brasidas, a desire to escape pmiish- 
ment to Demosthenes. But he seldom mentions per- 
sonal motives at all, and when such motives do force 
their way into history they are not generally unselfish. 
He certainly takes a high standard of patriotism for 
granted. One would not be surprised, however, to 
learn that Thucydides's speculative ethics found a diffi< 
culty in the conception of a strictly ' unselfish ' action. 

Of course Thucydides is human ; he need not always 
be right. For instance, the 'Archaeologia,' or introduc- 
tion to ancient history in Book I., is one of the most 
striking parts of his whole work. For historical imagi- 
nation, for breadth of insight, it is probably without a 
parallel in literature before the time of the Encyclop^ 
distes ; and in method it is superior even to them. 
Nevertheless it is clear that Thucydides does not really 
understand Myth. He treats it merely as distorted 
history, when it often has no relation to hbtory. Given 
Pelops and Ion and Hellto, his account is luminous ; 
but he is still in the stage of treating these conceptions 
as real men. 

Of course in the 'Archaeologia' there is no room for 
party spirit ; but even where there is, the essential 
fairness and coolness of the writer's mind remain un- 
broken. He is often attacked at the present day. But 
the main facts — that most antiquity took him as a type of 
fair-mindedness, while some thought him philo-Spartan 
and some philo-Athenian ; that Plato and Aristotle cen- 
sored him for being too democratic, while his modem 
opponents complain that he is not democratic enough — 



idO UTERATUftE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

speak volumes. His own politics are clearly moderate. 
"Ilie time when Athenian political affairs pleased him 
best, he tells us — not counting, presumably, the excep- 
tional 'Greatest- Man-Rule' of Pericles — ^was during the 
first months of the Restored Constitution in 411. It was 
** a fair o>mbinaHoH tf tht rights of tkt Few and tktMm^"^ 
He seems to be a man with strong personal opinions, and 
a genius for putting them aside while writing narrative. 
His reference to '« certain' Hyperbolus {viii. 73) — ^when 
Hyperbolus had been for SQme time the most prominent 
politician in Athens — is explicable when one realises that 
his history was addressed to the whole Greek world, which 
neither knew nor cared about Athenian internal politics. 
The contemptuous condemnation of the man which fol- 
lows, is written under the influence of the spirit current 
in Athens at the end of the century. His tone about 
Cleon is certainly suggestive of personal feeling. But the 
second introduction of him' is obviously due to some 
oversight either of author or scribe ; and the astound- 
ing sentence in iv. 28, 5, becomes reasonable when 
we realise that "tkt Athenians" who "would sooner be 
rid of Cleon than capture Sphacttria" are obviously 
the then majority of the Assembly, the party of Nikias. 
After all, his account of Cleon is the least unfavotmible 
that we possess ; and if it is harsh, we should rememtwr 
that Thucydides was under a special obligation to show 
that Cleon is not Pericles. 

It must be borne in mind that Thucydides returned 
to Athens in 403 like a ghost from the tomb, a remnant 
of the old circle of Pericles. He moved among men 
who were strangers to him. His spirit was one which 
had practically died out of Athens nearly a generatiOD 
> Ttii. 97 ; <^ a 65. s, ind UL 8a, 8. ■ i*.ii=iiL3& 



RETURN OF THUCYDIDES TO ATHENS 201 

before, and the memory of it vanished under the strain 
and bloodshed and misery of the last fifteen years. The 
policy of Pericles, the idea of the Empire, the Demo- 
cracy itself, was utterly, hopelessly discredited in the 
circles where Thucydides naturally moved. The thinkers 
of the day took the line of the oligarchical writers, 
the line of Aristotle afterwards. Athenian history was 
the 'succession of demagogues,' Aristeides, Ephialtes, 
Pericles, Cleon, Cleophfln, CalUcrates — "and from that 
Hmt on in succession ail who wert reeufy for the greatest 
extremes in general recklessness, and in pandering to the 
people for their immediate advantagt!''^ The Democracy, 
in a moderate and modified form, had to be accepted; 
but it was, as Alcibiades had pronounced it, 'feUy am- 
fessed,'* and its leaders were all so many self-seeking 
adventurers. 'Pericles — why, look at Stesimbrotus 
and the comedies of that day — he was just as biad 
as the worst of them ; and Aristeides the Just, we 
could tell some queer stories about him I' The men 
of the early fourth century are living among ruins, 
among shattered hopes, discredited ideals, blunted and 
bewildered aims. The best of them' "has seen the 
madness of the muitiiude. He knows that no politician is 
righteous, nor is there any champion of Justice at whose 
side he may fight and be saved." In public life he would 
be "a man fallen among vnid beasts." It is better that 
he " retires under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying 
wind and the storm of dust and sleet go by." Testifying 
solitarily among these is the old returned exile of the 
time of Pericles. His life is over now, without dis- 
tinction, his Athens ruined beyond recognition, the old 
mistress of his Cove dead and buried. But he keeps 

' Aj. Alk. PU. ixviiL ■ Thac vL 89. * FUto, R^ 496 D. 



30S LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

firm the memory of his real city and his leader — the 
man whom they called a demagogae because be was 
too great for them to understand ; who never took a 
^ft from any man ; who dwelt in austere sofffc ma cy ; 
who, if he had only lived, or his counsels been followed, 
would have saved and realised the great Athens that 
was now gone from the earth. Other men of fbt day 
wrote pamphlets and arguments. Thucydides has not 
the heart to argue. He has studied the earlier and Uie 
mythical times, and prepared that marvellous introdoc- 
tion. He has massed all the history of his own days 
as no man ever had massed history before. He knows 
ten times more than any of these writers, and he means 
to know more still liefore he gives out his book. Above 
atl, he is going to let the truth speak for itself. No man 
shall be able to contradict him, no man show that he 
is ever unfair. And he will clothe all his story in words 
like the old words of Gorgias, Prodicus, Anttphon, and 
Pericles himself. He will wake the great voices of the 
past to speak to this degenerate world. 

Hia death came first The book was unHnished. 
Even as it stood it was obsolete before it was pub- 
lished. As a chronicle it was continued by Xenophon, 
and as a manifesto on human vanity by Theopompus ; 
but the style and the spirit of it passed over the heads 
of the fourth century. Some two hundred years later, 
indeed, he began to be recognised among the learned 
as the great truthful historian. But within fifty years 
of his death Ephorus had rewritten, expanded, popu- 
larised, and superseded Iiim, and left him to wait for 
the time of the archaistic revival of the old Greek litera- 
ture in the days of Augustus Caesar. 



JX 

THE DRAMA 

Introduction 

Looking at the Drama of Sophocles as a finished 
product, without con^dering its historical growth, we 
are constantly offended by what seem to be inexphcable 
pieces of conventionalism. From some conventional 
elements, indeed, it is singularly free. There are one 
or two traditional ficeUes — oracles, for instance, and 
exposure of children ; but on the whole the play of 
incident and character is as true as it is unostentatious. 
There is no sham heroism, no impossible villainy, no 
maudlin sentiment. There is singular boldness and 
variety of plot, and there is perfect freedom from 
those pairs of lovers who have been our tyrants since 
modem drama began. 

One group of alleged conventions may be at once 
set aside. We must for the present refuse to listen to 
those who talk to us of masks and buskins and top-knots 
and sacerdotal dress, repeat to us the coarse half- 
knowledge of Pollux and Lucian, show us the grotesques 
of South Italy and the plasterer's work of Pompeian 
degradation, compile from them an incorrect account 
of the half-dead Hellenistic or Roman stage — the stage 
that competed with the amphitheatre — and bid us 
construct an idea of the drama of Euripides oat of 



204 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the ghastly farrago. It is one of the immediate duties 
of archaeological research to set us right again where 
archaeological text-books have set us so miserably 
wrong. 

Still our undoubted literary tradition does contain 
strong elements of conventionalism. The characters 
are all saga-people ; * they all speak in verse ; they tend 
to speak at equal length, and they almost never intermpt 
escept at the end of a line. Last and worst, there is 
eternally present a chorus of twelve or fifteen homo- 
geneous persons — maidens, matrons, elders, captives, or 
the like — ^whose main duty is to minimise the inconve- 
nience of their presence during the action, and to dance 
and sing in a conventional Doric dialect during the inter- 
vals. The explanation of this is, of course, historical. 

We have seen above (p. 99) how the Silenus-choir 
of the Centaur-like followers of Dionysus was merged 
into the Satyr-choir of wOd mountain-goats in the 
soite of the Arcadian mountain-god Pan. 'Tragos' is 
a goat; 'tragikos chores' a goat-choir; and 'tragdidia' 
a goat-song. The meaning of the word only changed 
because the thing it denoted changed. Tragedy de- 
veloped from the Dorian goat-choirs of the Northern 
Peloponnese— those of Arton at Corinth, and of the 
precursors of Prattnas at Phlius, and those which the 
tyrant Cleisthenes suppressed at Sikyon for "celebrating 
the sufferings of Adrastus." ' 

' The bat known eiCFplxim is the Anlheta' (not Fhroer) of AgKthoD. 
AgithoQ leEt Athens (sbout 407) at the age of forty, when he had already won 
a position inferior only to that of Sophocles and Euripidei, bat before hit in- 
dividual originalitr and bit Socntic or Platooic tptrit had a permaoent eSect 
on the drama. Aiiitophanet had assailed him Tebcmenlly in the Thesma- 
fktriatma and Gtiyladti *— a testimony to his ' advanced ' *pirit in art. 
■ Hdl. v. fj. See rretace. 



ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY 205 

Of course, other inflaences may also have helped. 
There was a mimetic element in the earliest popular 
poetry, and we hear of 'drAmena' (things performed) 
— the word lies very near 'dnima' (performance) — in 
many religious cults. The birth of Zeus was acted 
in Crete ; his marriage with Hera, in Samos, Crete, and 
Argos. There were sacred puppets, 'Daidala,' at Platsea. 
The * Crane-Dance ' of Delos showed Theseus saving the 
children from the Labyrinth; and even the mysteries 
at Eleusis and elsewhere made their revelations more to 
mortal eyes by spectacle than to mortal ears by definite 
statement 

The first step in the transformation of the goat-choir 
took place on Attic soil, when the song poetry of the 
Dorian met the speech poetry of Ionia. A wide-spread 
tradition tells us that Thespis of the village Icaria was the 
first poet who, " to rest his dancers and vary the enter- 
tainment," came forward personally at intervals and 
recited to the public a speech in trochaic tetrameters, 
like those metrical harangues which Solon had declaimed 
in the market-place.* His first victory was in 534 b.c. 
His successors were Choirilus and a foreigner who 
performed in Attica, Pratlnas of Phlius. 

The choir were still satyrs at this stage. What was the 
poet? Probably he represented the hero of the play, 
the legendary king or god. An old saying, not under- 
stood afterwards, speaks of the time " when Choirilus was 
a king among satyrs." But if the poet represented one 
character, why should he not represent more ? If he 

' Aiiitotle doei not mendon Tha^ ; and the pMndo-Platonic diilogoe 
Miim M71 expreMly thtit tnged; did not itut, " u people lnugine," with 
Tbecpjt, DM Td with Fhijidchtn, bat wu much older. See HiUer in XA, 
Mm. xulx. 311. 



2o6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

came on first, say, as the King Lycurgus, let him change 
his dress daring the next song and re-enter as the priest 
whom Lycurgus has scorned; next time he may be a 
messenger annomicing the tyrant's death. All that is 
needed is a place to dress in. A section of the round 
dancing-floor ('orchestra') is cut off ; a booth or *skttU' 
is erected, and the front of it made [vesentable. 
Normally it becomes a palace with three doors for the 
actor-poet to go in and out of. Meantime ttie character 
of the dancing is somewhat altered, because there is no 
longer a ring lo dance in ; the old ring-dance or ' cyclic 
chorus ' has turned into the ' square ' chorus of tragedy. 

Of course, the choir can change costume too : 
Pratlnas once had a choir representing Dymanian 
dancing girls. But that was a more serious business, 
and seems to have required a rather curious intermediate 
stage. There are titles of plays, such as Tke Huntsmen- 
Satyrs^ Herald- Satyrs* Wrestler- Satyrs.* Does not 
this imply* something like the Macau a Soldier, 
Maecus an Innkt^er, of the Italian 'Atellana:,' like 
Tke Devil a Monk in English ? The actor does not 
represent a soldier simply : he represents the old stage 
buffoon Maecus pretending to be a soldier. The choir 
are not heralds ; they are satyrs masquerading as sucl.. 
It is the natural end of this kind of entertainment to 
have the disguise torn off, and the satyrs, or Maecus, 
or the Devil, revealed in their true characters. In 
practice the tragic choirs were allowed three changes 
of costume before they appeared as satyrs confessed. 
That is, to use the language of a later time, each per- 
formance was a 'tetralogy' — three 'tragedies' (' little 
myths,' Aristotle calls them by comparison with the 

I W. M. ArvUa, i. p. SS. 



THE STAGE AND THE ACTORS 207 

longer plays of his own day), followed by a satyric 
drama. The practice did not die till the middle period 
of Euripides, His Cycles is the one satyr-play extant, 
while his AUttsHs is a real drama acted as a concluding 
piece to three tragedies. 

The Greek word for actor, 'hypocrites,' means 'an- 
swerer.' The poet was really the actor ; but if he 
wanted to develop his solitary declamation into dia- 
logue, he needed some one to answer him. The chorus 
was normally divided into two parts, as the system of 
strophe and antistrophe testifies. The poet perhaps took 
for answerers the leaders of these two parts. At any 
rate, 'three actors' are regularly found in the fully- 
developed tragedy. The old round choir consisted 
of fifty dancers and a poet : the full tragic company 
of forty-eight dancers, two 'answerers,' and a poet. 
That was all that the so-called 'cHorfgus' — the rich 
citizen who undertook the expenses of the perform- 
ance — was ever bound to supply; and munificent as 
this functionary often was in other respects, his 'para- 
chor/gtmala,' or gifts of supererogation, never took the 
form of a fourth actor in the proper sense. Nor did 
he provide four changes of costume for the whole forty- 
eight dancers; they appeared twelve at a time in the 
four plays of the tetralogy. The tradition sa.y% loosely 
that Thespis had one actor, ^schylus two, and Sophocles 
three, though sometimes it is i£schylus who introduced 
the third. As a matter of fact, it was the state, not the 
poet, which gave fixed prizes to the actors, and settled 
the general conduct of the Dionysus Feast Accordingly, 
when we find an ancient critic attributing particular 
scenic changes to particular poets, this as a rule only 
means that the changes app^red to him to occur for 



aoC UTERATL1RE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

dw first Dsoe in their <mrfcs. A mntOated inscription ^ 
seems K' £iT« as die date of some important altera- 
tion or ratificalioo of stage arrangements. It admitted 
CraMdv to 0>e jTeit Dk>n>'sij ; it perhaps established 
the ' ihree actors' pertupf raised the tragic chorus from 
tweh-e to tifteen. xvd perhaps made the palace-front 
scene a permjuiencr. The poets tended naturally to 
retire from acting. .CsdiThis ceased in his later life. 
Sophocles is said to have found his voice too weak. 
The profession of actor most have been established 
b^ore 450 R.C.. when v« first find the victorious 
actors mentioned o&cially along with the poet and the 
' chor^gus.' 

The chorus was the main substance of the tragedy. 
Two niaiu processes were needed to make a complete 
pCTfomioiioe : the 'chor-fj^is' 'provided a chorus,' the 
poet * tuught the cltonis ' — those were the difficult things. 
The mere composition was a matter of detail, which any 
good poet was reaviy to do for >'Oa. All the technical 
terms are formed with reference to the chorus. The 
' prologue ' is all that comes before their entrance ; an 
'episodion* is the 'entry to' the chorus of any fresh 
character : the close of the play is an ' exodus,' tiecause 
they then depart But the chorus was doomed to 
dwindle as tragedy grew. Dialogue is the essence of 
drama ; and the dialogue soon became, in Aristotle's 
phrase, 'the protagonist.' We can see it developing 
e\'en in oar scant)- remains. It moves from declaimed 
pi'tetry to dramatic speech ; it grows less grand and 
stiff, more npid and conversational. It also increases 
in extent. In the St^fiuaUi of .lEschylus (before 
470 B.C.) the chorus are really the heroines of the 

' C. t A^ ii. 971. 



MUSIC IN TRAGEDY 209 

play. They are sin^g for two-thirds of it They are 
present from the first line to the last In the PhUoctltii 
of Sophocles {409 B.c) they are personally unimportant, 
they do not appear till the play is well in train, and 
their songs fill about one-sixth of the whole. This is 
one reason why the later plays are so much longer than 
the earlier : they were quicker to act. 

There was, however, another influence affecting the 
musical side of tragedy in a very different manner. The 
singing gradually ceased to be entirely in the hands of 
the chorus. The historical fact is that with the rise 
of the Athenian Democracy the chorus ceased to be 
professional. It consisted of free burghers who under- 
took the performance of the public religious dances as 
one of their privileges or duties.* The consequence 
was that the diuictng became less elaborate. The metres 
and the singing had to be within the capabilities of the 
average musical man. But meanvrhile the general in- 
terest in music was growing deeper, and the public 
taste more exacting in its demands. The average choir- 
song lost its bold on the cultivated Athenian of the war 
time. If he was to have music, let him have something 
more subtle and moving than that something more like 
the living music of the dithyramb, which was now 
increasingly elaborate and professional. So while be- 
tween .£schylus and the later plays of Sophocles the 
musical side of the drama is steadily falling back, 
between the earlier and later plays of Euripides it is 
growing again. But it is no longer the mu»c of the 
chorus. Euripides used 'answerers' who were also 
trained singers; he abounds in 'monodies' or solos. 
In the Medea (431 &C.) the lyrical part is about a fifth 

* R^. Atk. I 13. 



*iO LrTERATVRE OF AXCIEXT GREECE 

<rf Ac wbrJe ; E ±e /<■ (4Z4 &£.) it b 001^ fail^ liat 
(be atcooBts and part-Kxigi ■— ■^"*' ■> UC as nndi 
aetm as fiie dnr-scn^ In €x Grata (411S Bjc) the 
tolo porb are dim tBxs as kicg as Ac cfaoral poots^ 
One a p^reat ao eg doa to diis ink icaBy iDodndes 
it* mrafffng Tlie f^uoi^oae at fix very blest pl^i^ 
has a brge diocal clmirm and do mnnnrfiw . Why f 
Becattse wbra Exaipid^ wrote it he had "•^* ■*— ' to 
Macedonia, and tppaxvatij had not taken fail opetadic 
ation with him Ma^^wlnwei had no diamA ; bat it had 
a Itvii^ dituyiamb with processional pexionnei^ and it 
was tfiejr who nng in ttie AfloottfL 

This u p ward movement of the satTr-song was doe to 
variotts causes — to the spiritnal crises that ennoUed the 
Athenian people ; to the need for some new fbnn of art 
to replace the dying epos as 2 vehicle for the heroic 
■aga; to the demand made by Dionysus-worship for 
Ihat intensity of emotion which is ahnost of necessity 
tragic. The expropriated satyrs were consigned, with 
their quaint old-world buffoonery, to a private comer at 
the end of the three tragedies, and the comic element 
was left to develop itself in a separate form of art. 

To ui in our reflective moods comedy and tragedy 
seem only two ndes of the same thing, the division 
between them scarcely tangible ; and so thought the 
Athens of Menander. But historically they are of 
different pedigree. Tragedy springs from the artistic 
and professional choir-song; comedy, from the mum- 
ming of rustics at vintage and harvest feasts. "Tragedy 
arose from the dithjrramb," says Aristotle ; " comedy, 
from the phallic performances." These were celebrated 
in honour of the spirits of ftiictificatioD and increase 
in man, beast, or herb, which were worshipped under 



ORIGINS OF COMEDY an 

various names in different parts of Greece. It was 
Dionysus at Acharnae, in lUiodes, and in Delos. It 
was D&mia and Auxteia in Mgina ; Demeter and Kori 
in some parts of Attica ; Pan in the Northern Pelopon- 
nese. It is always a shock to the modem imagination 
to come upon the public establishment of such mon- 
strously indecent performances among a people so far 
more simple and less self-indulgent than ourselves. 
But, apart from possible elements of unconscious 
hypocrisy on our own part, there are many things 
to be borne in mind. In dealing with those elements 
in human nature which are more permanent than re- 
spectable, the characteristic Greek method was frank 
recognition and regulation. A pent-up force becomes 
dangerous ; let all natural impulses be given free play in 
such ways and on such occasions as will do least damage. 
There were the strictest laws against the abuse of these 
festivals, against violence, against the undue participation 
of the young ; but there was, roughly speaking, no shame 
and no secrecy. We have, unfortunately, lost Aristotle's 
philosophy ot comedy. It was in the missing part of the 
Poetics. But when he explains the moral basis of tragedy 
as being " to purge our minds of thdr vague impulsu of 
pity and terror " by a strong bout of these emotions ; 
when he justifies 'tumultuous' music as affording a 
'purgation' of the wild emotional element in our 
nature which might else break out in what he calls 
* enthousiasmos' : it is easy to see that the licences in 
comedy might be supposed to effect a more obvious 
and necessary purgation.^ Besides this, we must not 

I The definitian in frv 3> VaUen, njt thb diiectljr : "^S^ utd ytKm 
•M to be to po^ed bjr comedy." Bat It the lAttAt pMnge % {enniiie quoU- 
tton, or b it nllia « dcdnctloii of ArtetoUe't view* ? 



213 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

forget that there was always present in Greece an 
active protest against these performances ; that even 
absolute asceticism was never without its apostles ; 
and, lastly, that where religion gives sanctity to a bad 
custom it palsies the powers of the saner intellect 
Without a doubt many a modest and homely priestess 
of Dionysus must have tielieved in the beneficial effects 
both here and hereafter of these »icient and symbolical 
processions. 

One of the characteristics of the proces^os was 
*parrhisia' ('free speech'); and it remained the proud 
privilege of comedy. You mocked and insulted freely 
on the day of special licence any of those persons to 
iriiom fear or good manners kept you silent in ordinary 
life. In some of the processions this privilege was speci- 
ally panted to women. As soon as comedy began to be 
seriously treated, the central point of it lay in a song, 
written and learned, in which the choir, acting merely 
as the mouthpiece of the poet, addressed the public on 
'topical' subjects. This became the 'parabasis' of the 
full-grown comedy. For the rest, the germ of comedy is 
a troop of mummers at the feast of Dionysus or some 
similar god, who march with flute and pipe, sing a 
phallic song, and amuse the onlookers with improvised 
buffoonery. They are unpaid, unauthorised. It was not 
till about 465 B.C. that public recognition was given to 
the 'kdmoi' or revel-bands, and 'kemSuiia' allowed tc 
stand by the ade of 'tragdidia' It came first at the 
Lenasa, afterwards at other Dionysiac festivals. But it 
was not till the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that 
two gifted young writers, Eupolis and Aristophanes, 
eventually gave the Old Comedy an artistic form, wove 
the isolated bits of farce into a plot, and more or less 



DEVELOPMENT OF COMEDY si 3 

abolished or justified the phallic element.* After that 
comedy develops even more rapidly than tragedy. The 
chorus takes a more real and lifelike part in the action ; 
its inherent absurdity does much less harm, and it dis- 
appears more rapidly. The last work of Aristophanes 
is almost without chorus, and marks the intermediate 
development known as the Middle Comedy, tamer than 
the Old, not so perfect as the New. Then comes, in 
weaker hands, alas I and brains less ' daemonic,' the 
realisation of the strivings of Euripides, the triumph of 
the dramatic principle, the art that is neither tragic nor 
comic but both at once, which aims self-consciously at 
being " the imitation of life, the mirror of human inter- 
course, the ezpresaon of reality."' This form of art 
once established lasted for centuries. It began shortly 
after 400 B.C., when public poverty joined with artistic 
feeling in securing the abolition of the costly chorus, 
and when the free libel of public persons had, after 
long struggles and reactions, become finally recognised 
as offensive. It reached its zenith with Menander and 
Philemon about 300 B.C. ; while inscriptions of various 
dates about 160 ha'.e recently taught us that even at 
that time hve original comedies a year were still ex- 
pected at the great Dionysia, besides the reproduc- 
tion of old ones. It is a curious irony of fortune 
that has utterly obliterated, save for a large store 
of 'fragments' and a few coarse Latin adaptations, 
the whole of this exceptionally rich department of 
ancient literature. 

> AtxdUied in tbe Clutdt, JMtified in the Lytiitr^a. 
■ Cic. A Slfi^, It. Ill qaodng m Peripatetic (f). 



SI4 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 
Phrynichus, son ov Polyphradmom {JL 494 ac) 

The least shadowy among the [H«-i£schylean drama* 
tists is Phrynichus. TVaditioo gives ns the names of 
nine of his plays, and tells as that he used the trochaic 
tetrameter in his dialogue^ and introduced women's 
parts. We hear that he made a [day on the Capttre 
tf MUttMs; * that a fine was put on him for doing so, 
and notice issued that the subject must not be treated 
a^un. The fall of Miletus was a national grief, and 
perhaps a disgrace ; at any rate, it involved party politics 
of too extreme a sort Phrynichus had better fortune 
with his other play from contempoiary history, the 
Pkcmissm;* its chorus representing the wives of Xerxes' 
Phccnician sailors, and its opening scene the kin^s 
council-chamber, with the elders waiting for news of 
the great war. He won the prize that time, and probably 
had for 'chorCgus' Tbemistocles himself, the real, though 
of course unmentioned, hero of the piece. It is the 
lyrics that we most regret to have lost, the quaint 
obsolete songs still hummed in the days of the Pelo- 
ponnesian War by the tough old survivors of Marathon, 
who went about at unearthly hours of the morning — 
" Lights in their hands, old nmaic on thtir ^i. 
Wild ktmey and the East and loveHntss^ * 

A certain grace and tenderness suggested by our remains 
of Phrynichus enable us to realise how much .tEschylus's 
grand style is due to his own character rather than to the 
conditions of the art in his time ; though it remains true 
that the Persian War did for tragedy what the Migrations 
seem to have done for Homer, and that Phrynichus and 
^schylus are both of them ' men of Marathon,' 
' Ariitoph. f^MO. 



iESCHYLUS 

^SCHYLUS, SON OP EUPHORION, PROU ElEUSIS 
(525-456 B.C.) 

iCscHYLUB was by birth an EupatrJd, of the old 
nobility. He came from Eleusis, the seat not only of 
the Demeter Mysteries, but also of a special worship 
of Dionysus-Zagreus, and close to Thespis's own deme 
Icaria. We hear that he began writing young ; but he 
was called away from his plays, in 490, to fight at 
Marathon, where his brother Kynigeinis met a heroic 
death, and he won bis first victory in the middle of the 
nine years of peace which followed (484), Four years 
later he joined in the general exodus to the ships and 
Salamis, leaving the stones of Athens for the barbarians 
to do their will upon. These were years in which 
tragedies and big thoughts might shape themselves in 
men's minds. They were not years for much actual 
writing and play-acting. In 476 iEschylus seems to 
have twen at the wars in Thrace ; we have echoes of 
them in the Lycurgus* Trilogy and in the Perset (esp, 
866). Soon after that again he was in Syracuse, perhaps 
on a diplomatic mission, and wrote his Womtn o/Etna,* 
in honour of the town of that name which Hiero had 
just founded (476-475) on the slopes of the mountain. 
From 484 onwards he was probably the chief figure 



3i6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

in Attic letters ; though his old rtvitls Prattnas and 
Phrynichus, and their respective sons Aristias and 
Polyphradmon, among others, doubtless won priaes 
over his head from time to time, and, for all we know, 
deserved them. The earliest play we possess is tlie 
Smfpiiant-Wonum ; the earliest of known date is the 
Parser, which won the first prize in 472. 

In 470 be was again in Syracuse, and again the 
reason is not stated, though we bear that be repro- 
duced the Ptrsa there. In 468 he was beaten for the 
first time by the young Sophocles. The next year he 
was again victor with the Sevm ^gaimst Thdns. We 
do not know the year of his great Pronutkaa Trilogy, 
but it and the Lykurgeia * seem to have come after this. 
His last victory of all was the Oresteia (Agamemnon, 
Cko^futrvi, and Eumentdes) in 458, He was again in 
Sicily after this — the little men of the Decadence sug- 
gest that he was jealous of Sophocles's victory of ten 
years backt — and died suddenly at Gela in 456. His 
plays went in and out of fashion at Athens, and a 
certain party liked to use him chiefiy as a stick for 
beating Euripides; but a special law was passed after 
his death for the reproduction of his tragedies, and he 
had settled into his definite place as a classic before the 
time of Plato. The celebrated bronze statue of him was 
made for the stone theatre built by Lycurgus about 330. 

The epitaph he is said to have written for his tomb 
at Gela is characteristic ; no word of his poetry ; only 
two lines, after the necessary details of name and birth- 
place, telling how the "grove of Marathon can bear witness 
to his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Med* who felt 
it." It is very possible that the actual facing of death 
on that first great day remained with him as the supreme 



LIFE OF jESCHYLUS: EARLY PLAYS 217 

moment of bis lif^ and that his poetry had failed to 
satisfy him. It often leaves that impression, even at 
its most splendid heights. 

Of the ninety plays vGschylns wrote, we possess seven. 
The earliest on internal grounds, is the St^pliant- Womtn 
— a most quaint and beautiful work, like one of those 
archaic statues which stand with limbs stiff and coun- 
tenance smiling and stony. The subject too, is of 
the primitive type, more suited for a cantata than for 
a play. The suppliants are the fifty daughters of 
Danaus, who have fied to Aigos to avoid marrying 
their cousins, the fifty sons of ^gyptus. Their horror 
is evidence of a time when the marriage of first cousins 
was counted incestuous. They appeal for protection 
to Pelasgus, king of Argos, who refers the question 
to the Demos. The Demos accepts the suppliants, 
and the proud Egyptian herald is defied. The other 
plays of the trilogy had more action. In the Makers 
of the BrUe-Bed,* the sons of ^gyptus follow the 
Danaids, conquer Danaus in battle, and insist on the 
marriage. Danaus, preferring murder to incest, com- 
mands his daughters to stab their husbands on their 
bridal night ; all do so except Hypermfistra, who is 
put on trial in the Daaaides* for marriage with a 
cousin and for filial disobedience, and is acquitted 
by the help of Aptirodite. Our play seems to have 
t)een acted on the old round dancing-fioor, with a 
platform in the middle, and images round it. There 
is no palace front ; and the permanent number of fifty 
in the chorus throughout the trilogy suggests the idea 
that the old round choir may have been still undivided. 

The Persa (472) was the second piece of a trilogy. 
The first had the name of Pktmus,* the blind prophet 



Its LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

of tfw Aigoomttt k^end, wtw probably prophesied tome* 
tiling about the greater conflict betiraeo Europe and 
Asia, of which tiiat eipedition was a type The third 
was GitMots;* bat there were two pieces of that name, 
aDd die plot is not certain. The Ptrsa itself is modelled 
on the P ke nit t m * of Mirynichas : the opening words 
of the two are almost identical^ and the scene in both 
is in the council-chamber of Snsa, though in the 
Ptnm it afterwards dianges to the tomb of Darius. 
The Ptnm has not much plot4nterest in the ordinary 
sense; but the heavy brooding of the first scenes, 
the awful Bashes of truth, tiie evocation of the old 
blameless King Darius, who had made no Peruans 
weep, and his stem prophecy of the whole disaster to 
come, all have the germ of high dramatic power : one 
feels the impression made hy "tk* mamy arms and many 
tk^, and tkd swtif ^ tJu Jtariots of Syria," both in the 
choir>song5 and in the leaping splendour of the de- 
scriptions of battle. The external position of the Ptrsa 
as the first account of a great piece of history by a 
great poet who had himself helped to make the history, 
renders it perhaps unique in literature ; and its beauty 
is worthy of its eminence. 

The Snm againit Tkthts fame third in the trilogy 
after the Lmns* and the (Edifus? One old version 
of the saga allowed CEdipus to put away locasta after 
the discovery of their relationship, and marry Eury- 
ganeia ; there was no self-blinding, and the children 
were Euryganeia's, But ^schylus takes the story in 
the more gruesome form that we all know. The Seven 
^ves the siege of Thebes by the exiled Polynelkes, the 
battle, and mutual slaying of the two brothers. It was 
greatly admired in antiquity — "a play full of Arts, 



THE SEVEN. THE PROMETHEIA 219 

that made tvery im* who saw it wish forthwith to U 
a * fiery foe,' " as Aristophanes puts it (Xana, 1002). 
The war atmosphere is conviociog, the characters plain 
and strong. Yet, in spite of a certain brilliance and 
force, the Seven is perhaps among iGschylean plays 
the one that bears least the stamp of commanding 
genius. It is like the good work of a lesser man. 

Very different is the Promttheus, a work of the same 
period of transition as the Seven, and implying the 
use of three actors in the prologue, as the Seven 
probably does in the 'exodus.' The trilogy seems 
to have consisted of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus 
Fned,* and Prometheus the Pire'Carrier* The subject 
is Titanic; it needs a vast and 'winged' imagination. 
But it has produced in the hands of j£schylus and 
of Shelley two of the greatest of mankind's dramatic 
poems, Prometheus is the champion of man against 
the Tyrant Power that sways the world. He has 
saved man from the destruction Zeus meant for him, 
taught him the arts of civilisation, and, type of all 
else, given him fire, which was formerly a divine 
thing stored in heaven. For this rebellious love of 
mankind he is nailed to a storm-riven rock of the 
Caucasus; but he is not conquered, for, in the first 
place, he is immortal, and besides he knows a secret 
on .which the future of heaven and earth depends. 
Zeus tries by threats and tortures to break him, but 
Prometheus wiU not forsake mankind. And the 
daughters of Ocean, who have gathered to comfort 
him, will not forsake Prometheus. They face the 
same blasting fire, and sink with htm into the abyss. 
There is action at the beginning and end of the pkiy; 
the middle part, representing, apparently, centuries 



2*0 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

rather than dasrs, is taken up with long narratives of 
Prometheus to the Oceanides, with the fruitless inter- 
cession of Oceanus himself, and the strange entry of 
another victim of Zeus, the half-mad Moon-maiden lo, 
driven by the gadfly, and haunted by the ghost of the 
hundred-eyed Argos. The chorus of the Pronutkats 
is perhaps in character and dramatic fitness the most 
t>eautiful and satisfying known to us on the Greek 
st^e. Tlie songs give an expression of Wdtschnurx 
for which it would be hard to find a parallel before 
the present century. The whole earth is in travail as 
Prometheus suffers : " There is a cry in the waves of the 
tea as they /all together, and groaning in the deep ; a wail 
comes up from the cavern realms of Death, and the springs 
of the holy rivers sob with the anguish of pity" In 
another place the note is more personal: "Nay, thine 
was a hopeless sacrifice, O beloved; ^eak — what help shall 
there be, and where? What succour from things of a day? 
Didst thou not see the little-doing, strengthless, dream-like, 
wherein the bUnd race of man is fettered? Never, never 
shall mortal counsels outpass the great Harmony of Zeus I" 
Zeus is irresistible : those who obey him have peace 
and happiness such as the Ocean-Daughters once had 
themselves. Yet they feel that it is better to rebel. 

There is perhaps no piece of lost literature that has 
been more ardently longed for than the Prometheus 
Freed,* What reconciliation was possible ? One can see 
that Zeus is ultimately justified in many things. For 
instance, the apparently aimless persecution of lo leads 
to great results, among them the birth of Heracles, who 
is another saviour of mankind and the actual deliverer 
of Prometheus. Again, it seems that Prometheus does 
not intend to overthrow the ' New Tyrant,' as Shelley's 



THE ORESTEIA »2i 

Prometheus does. He had deliberately helped him 
against the old blind forces, Kronos and the Titans ; 
but he means, so to speak, to wring a constitution out 
of him, and so save mankind. But it needs another 
i£schylus to loose that knot in a way worthy of the first 
We have some external facts about the second play. 
It opened when Prometheus came back to the light 
after thirty thousand years; the chorus was of Titans. 
The last play, the Firt-CarrUr^ seems to have explained 
the institution of the Festival of Prometheus at Athens. 
Such 'origins' formed a common motive for drama. 

The Oresteia represents the highest achievement of 
^schylus, and probably of all Greek drama. It has 
all the splendour of langu^e and the lyrical magic of 
the early plays, the old, almost superhuman grandeur 
of outline, while it is as sharp and deep in character- 
drawing, as keenly dramatic, as the finest work of 
Sophocles. The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon, 
where the doomed prophetess, whom none may believ^ 
sees the vision of her own death and the king's, await* 
ing her in the palace, is simply appalling on the stage, 
while in private study many a scholar will testify to 
its eternal freshness. The first play deals with the 
murder of Agamemnon on bis triumphant return from 
Troy by a wife deeply sinned against and deeply sin- 
ning. The Cho^horoi {'Libation-Bearers') gives the 
retribution. Orestes, a child at the time of his father's 
death, has grown up in exile ; he returns secretly to 
execute the blood-feud on ^Ggisthus, and, by special 
command of ApoUo, to slay also his mother. 

The Cho^horoi is in some ways the most complex 
of the drunas of <^:schylus. There is a recognition 
scene (see p. 359), impossible in detail, but grand and 




242 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

moving ; there is a definite plot by which the ministers 
of vengeance enter the palace ; there is great boldness 
of drawing in all the characters down to the pathetic 
and ludicrous old nurse ; there is the haunting shadow 
of madness looming over Orestes from the outset, and 
deepening through the hours that the matricide is be- 
fore him and the awful voice of Apollo in his ears, 
and he struggles helplessly between two horrors, up 
to the moment when bis mother's curses take visible 
form to him, and he flies from the grey snake-locked 
htces. 

The EumeHtdes is dramatic in its opening, merely 
spectacular in its close. There ts a certain grandeur 
in the trial scene where Orestes is accused by the 
Curse-Spirits, defended by Apollo, and acquitted by 
the voice of Athena. The gods, however, are brought 
too close to us, and the foundation of the Areopagus 
has not for us tiie religious reality it had for .^schylus. 
But the thing that most disappoints us, the gradual 
slackening of the interest till the 'pity and terror' 
melt away in gentle artistic pleasure, was, as every 
choric ode and most tragedies testify, one of the 
essential principles of Greek art. Shakespeare was with 
the Greeks. He ends his tragedies by quiet scenes 
among minor characters, and his sonnets with a calm 
generalising couplet We end our plays with a point, 
and our sonnets with the weightiest line. 

The general spirit of ^schylus has been much mis- 
understood, owing to the external circumstance that his 
life came at the beginning of an age of rapid progress. 
The pioneer of 490 is mistaken for a reactionary of 404. 
^schylus is in thought generally a precursor of the 



THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF iESCHYLUS 223 

sophistic movement, as Euripides is the outcome of it 
He is an enthusiastic democrat of the early type. Listen 
to the paeans about freedom in the Perste. That is the 
very spirit recorded by Herodotus as having made 
Athens rise from a commonplace Ionian state to be 
the model and the leader of Hellas. And the Ptrsa is 
not isolated. The king in the SuppUants is almost 
grotesquely constitutional ; the Prometheus abounds in 
protesb against despotism that breathe the true 
Athenian spirit ; a large part of the A^memmm is a 
merciless condemnation of the ideal of the conquering 
monarch. In the Eumenides, it is true, ^schylus defi- 
nitely glorifies the Areopagus at a time when Ephi- 
altes and Pencles were removing most of its jurisdiction. 
He was no opponent of Pericles, who was his 'chor4gus,' 
at least once ; ^ but he was one of the men of 490. To 
that generation, as Aristotle's ConstUutitm has taught us, 
the Areopagus was the incarnation of free Athens in 
battle against Persia ; to the men of 460 it was an obso- 
lete and anomalous body. 

As to the religious orthodoxy of ..Cschylus, it appears 
certain that he was prosecuted for having divulged or 
otherwise offended against the mysteries, which suggests 
that he was obnoxious to the orthodox party. We may 
possibly accept the story, stated expressly by Clement, 
and implied by Aristotle (iiii a), that he escaped by 
proving that he had not been initiated, and consequently 
had nothing to divulge. For a distinguished Eleusinian 
not to have been initiated — if credible at all— would 
imply something like an anti-sacerdotal bias. Certainly 
he seems to have held no priesthoods himself, as Sopho- 
cles and Pindar did ; and his historical position may 
•CLA.97I. 



314 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

well have been that of those patriots who could not 
forgive or forget the poltroonery of Delphi before the 
war (see p. 138). However this may be, he is in reli^ons 
thought generally the precursor of Euripides. He stands 
indeed at a stage where it still seems possible to reconcile 
the main scheme of traditional theology with morality 
and reason. Euripides has reached a further point, 
where the disagreement is seen to be beyond healing. 
Not to speak of the Promtthetis, which is certainly sub- 
versive, though in detail hard to interpret, the man who 
speaks of the cry ut the robbed birds being heard by 
" some Apollo, some Pan or Zeus " {Ag. 55) ; who prays 
to " Ztus, wMer he be " (160) ; who avows " then is no 
power I can find^ theu^ t sink my plummet through ail 
being, except only Zeus, if I would in very truth cast off 
this aimless burden of n^ heart" — is a long way from 
Pindaric polytheism, rie tries more definitely to grope 
his way to Zeus as a Spirit of Reason, as opposed to the 
blind Titan forms of Hestodic legend. "Lo, there was one 
great of yore, swollen with strength and lust of battle, yet it 
shall not even be said of him that once he was I And ke 
who came thereafter met His conqueror, and is gone. Call 
thou on Zeus by names of Victory. ■ . . Zeus, who made 
for Man the road to Thought, who stahlished ' Leam by 
Suffering' to be an abiding Law!" That is not written in 
the revelations of Delphi or Eleusis ; it is true human 
thought grappling with mysteries. It involves a practi- 
cal discarding of polytheism in the ordinary sense, and 
a conception — metaphorical, perhaps, but suggestive of 
real belief— of a series of ruling spirits in the government 
of the world — a long strife of diverse Natural Powers, 
culminating in a present universal order based on reason, 
like the political order which ^schylus had seen estab- 



RELIGIOUS AND MORAL IDEAS 22$ 

lished by Athenian law. Compare it with the passage in 
Euripides (Tro. 884) :— 

" Bau eflhi world and iftr th* world mtkrotud, 
Wkoitr tkou art, UnJtnown and hard 0/ iurmu§, 
CauM-chMn of Things or Maris own Reason, Cod, 
Jgivt tlut worship, who by nmstUss paths 
(^justict Uadtst all thai irtathtt and dial" 

That is the same spirit in a further stage : further, first 
because it is clearer, and because of the upsetting alter- 
native in the third line ; but mos^ because in the actual 
drama the one rag of orthodoxy which the passage 
contains is convicted as an illusion I The Justice for 
which thanks are given conspicuously fails : tiie 'noise- 
less paths ' lead to a very wilderness of wrong — at least, 
as far as we mortals can see. 

The only orthodox Greek writer preserved to us is 
Pindar. Sophocles held a priesthood and built a chapel, 
but the temper of his age was touched with rationalism, 
and the sympathetic man was apt unconsciously to 
reflect it 

About the positive ideas, reli^ous and moral, implied 
in the plajrs of j£schylus, too much has been written 
already; it is difEcult to avoid overstatement in criti- 
cism of the kind, and the critics have generally been 
historians of philosophy rather than lovers of Greek 
poetry. One may perhaps make out rather more 
strongly in ^schylus than in other writers three 
characteristic wajrs of looking at life. His tragedies 
come, as perhaps all great tragedies do, from some 
'Hubris,' some self-assertion of a strong wilt, in the 
way of intellect or emotion or passion, against stronger 
outside forces, circumstances or laws or gods. iGschylus 
was essentially the man to feel the impassable bars 




326 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

against which human nature battles; and ttie over- 
throw of the Great King was the one thought ttiat 
was in every Greek mind at the time. Thus the peri) 
of human 'Hubris' and the 'jealousy of God' — £<. 
the tad that man's will aims further than his power 
can reach — is one rather conspicuous principle in 
^schylus. 

Another is a conviction of the inevitableness of things ; 
not fatalism, nor any approach to it, in the vulgar 
sense, but a reflection that is borne in on most people 
in considering any grave calamity, that it is the natural 
consequence of many things that have happened before. 
The crimes in iGschylus are hereditary in two senses. 
In the great saga-houses of Thebes and Mycen» there 
was actually what we should call a taint of criminal 
madness— it is brought out most explicitly in Euripides's 
Electra. Orestes was the son of a murderess and a 
man who had dealt much in blood (iroXvcr^wf). His 
ancestors had been proud and turbulent chieftains, 
whose passions led them easily into crime. But the 
crime is hereditary in itself also. The one wild blow 
brings and always has brought the blow back, "the 
ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth 
wrong." This, most people will admit, is a plain fact ; 
of course the poet puts it in a mystical or symbolical 
form. The old blood remains fresh on the ground, 
crying for other blood to blot it ouL The deed of 
wrong begets children in its own likeness. Tht first 
sin produces an 'ArS,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods 
over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and 
perhaps the race of the sinner. How far this is meta- 
phor, how far actual belief, is a problem that we cannot 
at present answer. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF .fiSCHYLUS 2*7 

This chain of thought leads inevitably to the question, 
What is the end of the wrong eternally avenged and 
regenerated 7 There may of course be no end but 
the extinction of the race, as in the Tkeban Trilogy; 
but there may come a point where at last Law or Justice 
can come in and pronounce a final and satisfying word. 
Reconciliation is the end of the Oresteia, the Prometheia, 
the Danaid Trilogy. And here, too, we get a reflection 
of the age in which ^schylus hved, the assertion over 
lawless places of Athenian civilisation and justice. 

In looking over the plays and fragments as a whole, 
one notices various marks both of the age and of the 
individual. It is characteristic of both that j£schylus 
wrote satyr-plays so much, and, it would seem, so well. 
These Titanic minds — iEschylus and HeracUtus among 
Greeks; men like Victor Hugo and Carlyle among our- 
selves — are apt to be self-pleasing and weird in their 
humour. One of the really elemental jokes of ^schylus 
is in the Prometheus FirekindUr* a satyr-play, where 
fire is first brought into the world, and the wild satyrs 
go mad with love for its beauty, and bum their beards 
in kissing it 1 The thing is made more commonplace, 
though of course more comic, in the Sophoclean satyr- 
play Helen's Marriage* where they go similarly mad 
about Helen. A definite mark of the age is the large 
number of dramas that take their names from the chorus, 
which was still the chief part of the play — Bassara,* 
EdAni,* Danauies,* &c. Another is the poefs fondness 
for geographical disquisitions. Herodotus had not yet 
written, and we know what a land of wonder the brther 
parts of the world still were in his time. To the Athens 
of ^schylus the geographical interest was partly of this 
imaginative sort ; in part it came from the impulse given 



itH UTtS£ATt,-R£ OF ASCTiy: GR££CE 

by ffcc rbe <if Adieas to w j yjgH. n efeacOTCTT and trade 
»4vefrt4irc. Of our extsot pb^^ tfae /*mnc£bau is foil of 
mere dccbmations oo s^a-geographr ; tbe Ptnm comes 
next, Iben tbe SitfifUtmts ; aod eveo die Agmmammom 
bw the account of the beacon stations. Gfasou ^ tit 
Sm,* Niobt,* and probably the Mysiams,* were fall of 
the ume thing. The impulse did not bst in Greek 
tragedy. Sophocles has his weU-known burst of Hero- 
dotean quotation, and he likes geographical epithets as a 
form of ornament, but he keeps his interest in 'historic' 
within due limits. Euripides, so keenly aUve to all 
other branches of knowledge, is quite indifferent to this. 
In the choice of subjects i£schylua has a certain pre- 
iDifltOP (or tiomething superhuman or unearthly, which 
t-oiitbtuCN ottriotislv with this geographical interest The 
)Sv»t^\fwf lk>|iiiiK with the words : " Le, we are come to 
f%* *vt»rktxt twjfif .»^ tA* world, to where the Stytkiarts 
ni4«Mb«, .t«r mntmUMir dtsviatioH." That is the region 
\\lii>ii> .Vm-IivIuh is At home, and his 'large utterance' 
ttitlmrtl rtiid iiuhAUtpcrcd. Many of his lost plays move 
m tliitt it>it1ni which Sophocles only speaks of, among 

" t'ittUttpMkti>ftk*wcrid^b4yondails«ai, 
W*ll-jpringi o/mghs amdgUmm of efmud Aeinien, 
Th* otd garden of tlu Suit.' ' 

It is the scene of the Daughters of the Sun* treating of 
the fall of Phaethon ; of the Soul- Weighing* where Zem 
balances the fates of Hector and Achilles; of the/.t£m ■• 
of the Memnon;* and the numerous plays on Dionysiac 
subjects show the same spirit. 

It is partly the infancy of the art and partly the in- 
tensity of ^schylus's genius that makes him often choose 
subjects that have apparently no plot at all, like ouf 
' Soph. in^. 87a 



WHAT ..ESCHYLUS THINKS ABOUT 339 

Sufpliants and Persa. He simply represents a situation, 
steeps himself in it, and lights it up with the splendour 
of his lyrics. Euripides tried that experiment too, in 
the Suppliants and Heradeida, for instance. Sophocles 
seems never to have risked it, except perhaps in the 
Demanding of Helen? It is curious that ^scbylus, unlike 
his successors, abstained entirely from the local legends. 
Perhaps it was that he felt the subjects to be poor, and 
that the realities of the Persian War had blotted out all 
less vivid things from the horizon of his patriotism. 

It is interesting to compare the fragments of the three 
tragedians : fragments are generally ' gnomi^' and tend 
to show the l>ent of a writer's mind. Sophocles used 
gnomes but little. Reflection and generalisation did not 
interest him, though he has something to say about the 
power of wealth (frag. 85) and of words (frag. 192) and 
of wicked women (frag. 187). Euripides notoriously 
generalises about everything in heaven and earth. He 
is mostly terse and very simple — so simple that an un- 
sympathetic reader misses the point 

" Lffut dMs not v*x Ot man who btgs Us tftad' {fn%. 333). 

" 7%« thSn/ri that must 6* an so strangily grtat' (frag. 733). 

" Who knovMth ifwt quick 6t vtrify dtod, 
Andottr datAttfi tothtmAaiimt»km* pass^Ufffnig.tiV). 
Sometimes, as in the opening speeches of Phaedra and 
Medea, he treats subtly a point in psychology. He has 
much to say about wealth and slavery and power of 
speech, ^schylus simply never thinks about such 
things. He has some great lines on love (frag. 44), but 
his typical gnome is like that in the Nit^ ; * — 

" Lo, ont god cravts no ^L Thou shall not bend him 
By much drink-^ving and burnt sacriJUt. 
Ht hath no altar, ktarisneth to no song, 
Andfidr Ptrsmasion stand^hfiwjrom Diatk.' 



ajo LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

It does " somehow spoil one's taste for twittering' And 
so, above all, do his great dramatic speeches, so ruggedly 
grand that at first sight one is often blind to the keen 
pqrchology of passion in them — ^for instance, tiiat in 
which Clytsemestra gives public welcome to her has- 
band. She does not know whether he has been told 
of ha unfaithfulness ; she does know that she is utterly 
friendless, that the man whom she dreaded in her 
dreams is returned, and that the last hour for one or 
other of them has come. She tries, like one near to 
death, to leave some statement of her case. She is near 
breaking down more than once ; but she gathers courage 
aa she speaks, and ends in the recklessness of nervous 
exaltation : — 

" F^f*aum »f Atx»t, amdyt gatMtrtd Eldtrs, 

I skmll m»t ktid it liamt in t/kt midst of you 

7> mtttftmk tiU lovt yt wtll itiow bynu within mg, 

7ibr« tWMW « ft'MW witn tdlfiarfad*i and dies. 

WhottMt*msptmkt Don any ktart but ntiiu 

A'mw tin Itmg kurdtn oftlu lift I ban 

WkiU k» MUX umdtr Ttvyt A lently momait 

Stt iM « diMtmti kMut, MO maitt arm tuar 

7> /mm «»— 6>4, 'tit a tonng to makt oni wtadl 

Voictt if Wfrmtk ring tvtr in htr tars : 

N0W, ktisevmit Norn, 'Us a messenger : 

Amdntry t»U worst tidings than the last. 

Ami mt4tis trits loud agmut Ou walls tMat hold her I 

tf M the miounds thai chtmnelltd rumour bare 

litve rtaehed this King's Jbsh — mhy, 'tit all a net, 

A toil of riddled meshes/ Diedhethen 

II 'ith all the deaths that awded in meifs mouths. 
Then is he net same Gtryom, trifle-lived, 
Thrm-beditd, monstrous, to be slain and slain 

Till nwy lift he pielUdf . . . Beliheye have leld him 
Of my demtk-thirtt—Hu rofe above the Umtel, 
And hew a^ tut me downT True.- 'twas those veieet, 
Tki vrath and hotrod surging in mine ears. 



SPEECH OF CLYT^MESTRA a 

Ow child, tin, is not here ; I would kt wen : 

Orata, k* who holds tkt hostages 

For thee and me. Yet nowise marvel at it. 

Our warjriend Strophios keeps him, who spoke much 

Of blows nigh poised to fall, — Ihy daily peril. 

And malty plots a traitorous folk might weave, 

lonee being weak, manlike, to spurn the fallen. 

But I— the stormy rivers of my grief 

An qutnchednow at the spring, and no drop left. 

My late-eoMched eyes are seared with many a bi^U, 

Weeping th* beacon fis^ thai burned for thee 

For goer answerless. And did sleep come, 

A gnafs thin song would shout mt in my drtasns. 

And start mt up seeing thee all girt with terrors 

Close-crowded, and too long for one nights sleep/ 

Andnow 'tis all past / Now with heart at peace 

I hail Mr King, my waich~dog of the fold. 

My skips one cabU ofkope, my pillar firm 

Where all else reels, my father's one-iom heir. 

My land scarce sien at sea when hope was dead. 

My ke^py sunrise after nights of storm. 

My living well-spring in the wilderness / 

Oh, itisjoy, the watting-time ispast/ 

Thus, fCing, I greet thee home. No god need grudge — 

Sun we have suffered in time past enough — 

This one dtgfs triumph. Light thee, sweet my husband, 

From this high seat; yet set not on bare earth 

Thy foot, gr^t King, the fool that trampUd Tivy I 

Ho, thralls, why tarry ye, whose task is set 

To carpel Ike Kings way T Bring priceless a 

Let ail kis path be red, and fustics guide him. 

Who tern his deeds, at last, unhopedfor, home/' 



SOPHOCLES 

SOPUOCLBS, SON OP SOPHILLOS, FROM COLONUS 

(496-406 B.C.) 

Sophocles is formed by the legend into a figure ol 
ideal serenity and success. His life lay through the 
period of his country's highest prosperity. He was 
too young to suffer much in the flight of 480, and he 
died just before Athens fell. He was rich, pious, good- 
looking, good-tempered, pleasure -loving, witty, "with 
such charm of character that he was loved by every- 
body wherever he went." He held almost ihe only 
two sources of income which did not suffer from the 
war — the manufacture of weapons, and the state-paid 
drama. He won a prodigious number of first prizes — 
twenty as against the five of Euripides. The fifteen of 
iCschylus were gained in times of less competition. He 
dabbled in public life, and, though of mediocre practi- 
cal ability, was elected to the highest offices of the 
state. He was always comfortable in Athens, and had 
no temptation to console himself in foreign courts as 
his colleagues did. We may add to this that he was 
an artist of the ' faultless ' type, showing but few 
traces of the 'divine discontent.' His father was a 
rich armourer, and a full citizen — not a ' Metoecus' like 
Kephalus (p. 337). Sophocles learned music from Lam- 



CAREER OF SOPHOCLES 23$ 

pros, and we hear of htm at the age of sixteen leading 
a choir as harper in the thanksgiving for Salamis. His 
&rst victory was in 468, when he was ei^t and twenty. 
The play was perhaps the Triptoltmus^^ If so, it was 
a success to the patriotic drama on its first appearance ; 
for Triptolemus was a local hero with no r^ place in 
the Homeric legend.' Our account of the victory is 
embroidered by a strange anecdote: there were such 
hot factions in the theatre that the archon suddenly 
set aside the regular five judges, and called on the ten 
generals, who bad just returned from campaigning, to 
provide a fresh board. Hie first defeat of ^schylus 
by a younger generation which knew not Marathon 
and Salamis, would produce the same bitterness as 
was felt in modem Greece and Italy against the first 
Prime Ministers who had not fou^t in the wars of 
independence. 

One of SophocWs very earliest plays was probably 
the Women Washing? The scene, Nausicaa and her 
maidens on the sea-shore, seems meant for the old 
dancing-floor before the palace front had become a 
fixed tradition ; and the poet himself acted Nausicaa, 
which he can only have done in youth. His figure in 
middle life was fu* from girlish, as even the idealised 
statue shows. The earliest dated play is the Antigone ; 
it was produced immediately before the author's ap- 
pointment as admiral in the Samian War of 440, and 
constituted in the opinion of wits his chif^ claim 
to that office. The poet Ion, who met him at Chios, 
descrities him as "merry and clever over his cups,' 
and charming in conversation ; of public afbirs he 

■ ran. HiA IM. 18, «S. 

* Tbe Ifymm U Utm H ii h no efidenoe to the oontnry. 



»$4 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

"understood about as much as the average educated 
Athenian." In 443 he had been ' Helltaotamias ' 
(Treasurer of the Empire) with no bad results. His 
^une and popularity must have carried real weight, or 
he would not have been one of ten Commissioners 
(' Probouloi ') appointed after the defeat of the Sicilian 
Expedition in 413. And it is significant that, when he 
was prosecuted along with his colleagues for agreeing to 
the Oligarchical Constitution of 411, he was acquitted on 
the naTve defence that he " had really no choice I " 

An authorless anecdote speaks of some family diffi- 
culties at the end of his life, attributing them to his con- 
nection with an 'hetaira' named Thedris. His legitimate 
son lophon tried to get a warrant for administering 
the family estate, on the ground of his father's inca- 
pacity. Sophocles read to the jury an ode from the 
(Edipus at Coldnus, which he was then writing, and was 
held to have proved thereby his general sanity 1 The 
story smacks of the comic stage ; and the references 
to the poet at the time of hts death, especially by 
Aristophanes in the Frogs, and Phrynichus, son of 
Eunomides, in the Musts,* preclude the likelihood of any 
serious trouble having occurred shortly before. He died 
in 406, a few months after his great colleague Euripides, 
in whose honour he introduced his last chorus in mourn- 
ing and without the usual garlands.' His tomb lay on 
the road to Dekeleia, and we hear that he was worshipped 
as a hero under the name of ' DexiAn ' (' Receiver '), on 
the curious ground that he had in some sense 'received ' 
the god Asclipius into his house. He was a priest of 
the Asclepian hero Alcon, and bad built a chapel to 

' Al the 'pr»-agt»' or introdoctoiT pageant At the actual feail locfa 
ly have bea ' impietj.' 



DEVELOPMENT OF SOPHOCLES'S GENIUS 335 

'The Revealer' — Minfltes, identified with Heracles; 
but the real reason for his own worship becomes clear 
when we find in another connection that he had 
founded a 'Thiasos of the Muses,' a sort of theatrical 
club for the artists of Dionysus. He thus became 
technically a ' Hero - Founder/ like Plato and Epi- 
curus, and doubtless was honoured with incense and 
an ode on his birthday. He was 'Dexidn' perhaps as 
the original ' host' 

Sophocles was writing pretty continuonsly for sixty 
years, and an interesting citation in Plutarch * purports 
to give his own account of his development That the 
words are really his own is rather mudi to believe ; but 
the terms used show the criticism to be very ancient. 
Unfortunately the pass^^e is corrupt He began by 
hanng some relation — is it ' imitation ' or is it ' revolt ' 7 
— towards the 'm^niloquence of -Eschylus' ; next came 
'his own 'stern' and artificial period of style' ;' thirdly, 
he reached more ease and simplicity, and seems to have 
satisfied himself. Bergk finds a trace of the '^schylean 
period' in some of the fragments; and it is a curious 
fact that ancient critics found in the psendo-Euripidean 
Rktsus a 'Sophoclean character.' It is not like the 
Sophocles of our tate plays, but does suggest a fourth- 
century imitation of .i£schylus. One form of the ' arti- 
ficial ' tendency — it m^t as well he translated ' technical ' 
or ' professional ' — ^is expressed in the scenic changes with 
which Sophocles is particularly associated ; though, of 
course, it must \x borne in mind that the actual ad- 
mission of 'three actors and scene-painting'* to the 

> D»Fr^A Virt.1. 

* nuvi* Ml aBTidnx'*^ Huphf li nil; QmA for the later aiT v fc. 

• At. Am: 4. 



236 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

sacred precinct must have been due to a public enact- 
ment, and not to the private innovation of a poet 

Perhaps the most important change due to Sophocles 
himself took place in what the Greeks called the 
'economy' of the drama. He used up all his myth 
material in one well-constructed and complex play, and 
consequently produced three separate plasrs at a time 
instead of a continuous trilogy.' Bu^ in general, Sopho- 
cles worked as a conscious artist improving details, 
demanding more and smoother tools, and making up, 
by skilful construction, tactful scenic airangemen^ and 
entire avoidance of exaggeration or grotesqueness, for 
his inability to walk quite so near the heavens as his 
great predecessor. The 'stern and artificial' period is 
best represented by the Electra. The EUctra is 'arti- 
ficial' in a good sense, through its skill of plot, its 
clear characterisation, its uniform good writing. It is 
also artificial in a bad sense. For instance, in the 
messenger's speech, where all that is wanted is a false 
report of Orestes's death, the poet chooses to insert a 
brilliant, lengthy, and quite undramatic description of 
the Pythian Games. It is also 'stern.' .iEschylus in 
the CkoSphoroi had felt vividly the horror of his plot : 
he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a 
storm of confused, torturing, half - religious emotion; 
the climax is, of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes 
falls into madness after it In the EUctra this element 
is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms ; Orestes 
shows no sign of madness; the climax is formed, not 
by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the 
hardest bit of work, the slaying of i£gisthus 1 .£schylus 

' It wu hli eontmnporaiy Aiistuchui of Tege* who fint " n«4e pkfi of 
theif preMDl length " (SuidM). 



THE ELECTRA 237 

had kept Electra and Ctytseniestra apart: here we 
see them freely in the hard anloveliness of their daily 
wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilder- 
ment that closes the Cho^horoi—" What is the end of 
ail this spiiiing of blood for Aidod?"—^e Electra closes 
with an expression of entire satisfaction. It is this 
spirit that makes the Electra, brilliant as it ts, so typi- 
cally uncharming. The explanation may partly lie in 
some natural taste for severity and dislike of sentiment 
in Sophocles ; it seems certainly also to be connected 
with his archaism. His language is arcbaisttc throagh 
and through ; and it seems as if his conceptions were. 

All three tragedians have treated the Electra-saga, 
and treated it in characteristically difiFerent ways. The 
realistic spirit of Euripides's Electra is obvious to every one 
— the wolfish Pelopidse, the noble peasant, the harrow- 
ing scene of remorse and mutual reproach between the 
murderers. But the truth is that ^schylus has tried 
to realise his subject too. He takes the old bloody 
saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different 
from Homer's, though quite as grand. His Orestes 
speaks and feels as ^schylus himself would. It is only 
Sophocles who takes the saga exactly as be finds it He 
knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about 
their consciences : they killed in the fine old ruthless 
way. He does not try to make them real to himself at 
the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos. 
The same objectiveness of treatment appears in another 
characteristic of Sophocles — the stress he lays on mere 
physical horror in the (Edipus, on physical pain in the 
Trachima and the PhUoctttes. It is the spirit of the oldest, 
most savage epos.' 

> ^ p. 41 Ml the Ififtra.* 



238 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Something of the same sort keeps him safe in the 
limits of convention. A poet who is uncompromisingly 
earnest in his realism, or unreserved in his imagination, 
is apt to jar upon his audience or to make them laugh. 
Sophocles avoids these dangers. He accepts throughout 
the traditional conception of heroes and saga-people. 
The various bits of criticism ascribed to him — " I draw 
men as they ought to be drawn ; Euripides draws them 
as they are" ; "i£schylus did the right thing, but with- 
out knowing it" — all imply the 'academic' standpoint. 
Sophocles is the one Gre^ writer who is 'classical' in 
the vulgar sense — ahnost in the same sense as Vergil 
and Milton. Even his exquisite diction, which is such 
a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his pre* 
decessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist 
j^schylus's superhuman speech seems like natural super- 
human speech. It is just the language that Prometheus 
would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might 
talk in their great moments. But neither Prometheus 
nor CEdipus nor Electra, nor any one but in Attic poet 
of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes 
them. It is this characteristic which has established 
Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, 
but in general for critics and grammarians ; while the 
poets have been left to admire ^schylus, who " wrote 
in a state of intoxication," and Euripides, who broke 
himself against the bars both of life and of poetry. 

The same limitation comes out curiously in points 
where his plays touch on speculation. For one thing, 
his piety makes him, as the scholiast quaintly puts it,' 
"quite helpless in representing blasphemy." Contrast, 
for instance, the similar passages in the Antigone (1. 1043) 

' Blictra, 831. 



LIMITATIONS OF SOPHOCLES 239 

and the Herades of Euripides (1. 1232). In the HenuUs, 
the hero rebubes Theseus for lifting him from bis despair 
and unveiling bis hice ; be will pollute the sunlight I 
That is not a metaphor, but a real piece of superstition. 
Theseas replies that a mortal cannot pollute the eter- 
nally pure element Later he asks Heracles for his 
hand. " It is tlootfy," cne& HerzcXts ; " it wiU ht/ea y&u 
vfitk tuy crimtl" "Ltt mt cla^ it," answers Theseus, 
"tmd/*ar not." Now, Sophocles knew of these ideas — 
that the belief in a physical pollution of blood is a de- 
lusion, and that a man cannot, if be tries, make the sun 
impure ; but to him they reeked of scepticism— or else 
of prosiness. He uses them as blasphemy in the mouth 
of the offending Creon 1 No impulse to reason or analyse 
was allowed to disturb his solemn emotional effects. 
Another typical difference between the two poets is in 
their treatment of the incest of CEklipus. Sophocles is 
always harping on it and ringing the changes on the 
hero's relationships, but never thinks it out Contrast 
with his horrified rhetoric, the treatment of the same 
subject at the end of Euripides's Pkeenissa, the beautiful 
affection retained by the blind man for locasta, his con- 
fidence that she at any rate would have gone into exile 
at his side uncomplaining, his tender Jewell to her 
dead body. What was the respectable burgher to say 
to such a thing ? It was defrauding him of his right to 
condemn and abominate locasta. No wonder Sophocles 
won four times as many prizes as Euripides 1 A natural 
concomitant of this lack of speculative freedom is a 
certain blontness of moral imagination which leads, for 
instance, to one itmctnnl defect in the <Edifius Tyrannus. 
That piece is a marvel of construction : every detail 
follows naturally, and yet every detail depends on the 



240 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

characters being nactly what they were, and makes us 
understand them. The one flaw, perhaps, is in Teiresias, 
That aged prophet comes to the Idng absolutely deter- 
mined not to tell the secret which he has kept for sixteen 
years, and then tells it — why 7 From uncontrollable 
anger, because the king insults him. An ^ed prophet 
who does that is a disgrace to his profession ; bat 
Sophocles does not seem to feel it 

Sophocles is thus subject to a certain conventional 
idealism. He lacks the elemental fire of jSschylus, the 
speculative courage and subtle sympathy of Euripides. 
All else that can be said of him must be unmixed 
admiration. Plot, characters, atmosphere are all digni- 
fied and ' Homeric ' ; his analysis, as far as it goes, is 
wonderfully sure and true ; his language is a marvel of 
subtle power ; the music he gets from the iambic trimeter 
by his weak endings and varied pauses is incomparable ; > 
his lyrics are uniformly skilful and fine, though they 
sometimes leave an impression of laboured workman- 
ship ; if they have not the irresistible songfulness of 
.£schylu8 and Euripides, they are safe from the rho- 
domontade of the one, and the inapposite garrulity of 
the other. And it is true that Sophocles shows at times 
one hi^ power which but few of the world's poets share 
with him. He feels, as Wordsworth does, the majesty 
of order and well-being ; sees the greatness of God, as it 
were, in the untroubled things of life. Few hands but 
his could have shaped the great ode in the Antigone 
upon the Rise of Man, or the description in the Ajax 
of the 'Give and Take' in nature. And even in the 

' W. M. HeracUt, \. p. 31. It b Ionic ttyl« : wedc ending elinont mt the 
end of Che Tcne (like Aduuoa of Eretna), iiit)» for ^pi*, ihonening of ». laog 
vowel w diphthong bdiwe another ToweL 



The OEDIPUS tyrannus 341 

famous verdict of despair which he pronounces upon 
Ufe in the second ^dipus^ there is a certain depth 
of calm feeUng, unfretted by any movement of mere 
intellect, which at times makes the subtlest and boldest 
work of Euripides seem 'young man's poetry' by 
comparison. 

Utteriy dissimilar as the two dramatists ar^ the con- 
struction of the CEdipus Tyrannus reminds one strongly 
of Ibsen's later plays. From the very first scene the 
action moves straight and undistracted towards the 
catastrophe. The intwest turns, not on what the char- 
acters do, but on their finding out what they have done. 
And one of the strongest scenes is made by the hus- 
band and wife deliberately and painfully confessing to 
one another certain dark passages of their lives, which 
they had hitherto kept concealed. The plot has the 
immense advantage of providing a deed in the past — 
the involuntary parricide and incest — which explains the 
hero's self-horror without making him lose our sympa- 
thies. And, as a matter of fact, the character of CEdipus, 
his determination to have truth at any cost, his utter 
disregard of his own sufferings, is heroic in itself, and 
comes naturally from the plot. locasta was difficult 
to treat : the mere fact of her being twice as old as 
her husband was an awkwardness ; but there is a stately 
sadness, a power of quiet authority, and a certain stem 
grey outlook on life, which seem to belong to a woman 
of hard experiences. Of course there are gross im- 
probabihties about the original saga, but, as Aristotle 
observes, they fall outside the action of the play. In 
the action everything is natural except the very end. 
Why did CEdipus put out his eyes ? locasta realised 

1 AiU^mu, 333 ff AJax, 669 fF. (Zi^Mu CW., I3II C 

Q 



U^ LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

ttut she must die, and hanged herself. CEdipus him- 
self meant to slay her if she had not anticipated him. 
Why did he not follow her ? Any free composition 
would have nude him do so ; but Sophocles was 
bound to the saga, and the saga was perfectly certain 
that CEdipus was alive and blind a long time after- 
wards. Euripides avoided the awkwardness in an 
ingenious way. In his CEdifius*^ the hero is over- 
powered and blinded by the retainers when he has 
murdered locasta and is seeking to murder bis children 
and himself. As a mere piece of technique, the (Ed^us 
of Sophocles deserves the position given to it by 
Aristotie, as the typical example of the highest Greek 
tragedy. There is deep truth of emotion and high 
thought ; there is wonderful power of language, grasp 
of character, and imagination ; and for pure dramatic 
strength and skill, there are few things in any drama 
so inexpressibly tragic as the silent exit of locasta, when 
she alone sees the end that is coming. 

The Ajax — called by the grammarians Ajax At« 
Samrgt-Bearer, in distinction to another Ajax the Loc- 
rioH* — is a stiff and very early play. It is only in the 
prologue and in the last scene that it has three actors, 
and it does not really know how to use them, as they 
are used, for instance, in the EUctra and the Ant^one, 
Ajax, being defeated by Odysseus in the contest for 
the arms of Achilles, nursed his wrath till Athena 
sent him mad. He tried to attack Odysseus and the 
Atrida in their tents, and, like Don Quixote, fell on 
some sheep and oxen instead. He comes to his mind 
again, goes out to a solitary place by the sea, and 
falls upon his sword. All the last five hundred lines 

' Fng. ;4T, whicb SMmi miipUced in Nauck. 



THE AJAX. THE ANTIGONE 243 

are occupied with the question of his burial, his great 
enemy Odysseus being eventually the nian who pre- 
vails on the angry generals to do him honour. The 
finest things in the play are the hero's speeches in his 
disgrace, and the portraiture of his concubine, the 
enslaved princess Tecmessa, whom he despises, and 
who is really superior to him in courage and strength 
of character, as well as in^ unselfishness. It is difficult 
to believe that the Ajax is uniform as we have it 
Not only does the metrical technique vary in different 
parts, but both the subtly-drawn Tecmessa and the 
fiendish Athena seem to come from the influence of 
Euripides ; while other points of late style, such as 
the abuse of heralds, and the representation of Mene- 
laus as the wicked Spartan, combine with the dis- 
proportionate length of the burial discussion to suggest 
that there has been some late retouching of this very 
old play. 

The Antigone is perhaps the most celebrated drama 
in Greek Uterature. The plot is built on the eternally- 
interesting idea of martyrdom, the devotion to a higher 
unseen law, resulting in revolt against and destruction 
by the lower visible law. Polyneikes has been slain 
fighting against his usurping brother Eteocles and 
against his country; and Creon — the name merely 
means 'ruler,' which accounts for its commonness for 
the official kings of the saga — commands that he be 
cast out to the dogs and birds as a traitor. Any one 
who attempts to bury him shall su£Fer instant death. 
His sister Antigone determines to bury him ; the other 
sister, Ism£n£, hesitates and shrinks. Antigone is dis- 
covered, refuses to make any kind of submission, and i« 
condemned. Ismtaft tries to share her soffering ; bor 



244 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

lover Haemon, son of Creon, intercedes for her : both 
in vain. Haemon forces his way into the tomb where 
she has been immured alive, finds her dead, and slays 
himself. 

Apart from the beauty of detail, especially in the 
language, one of the marks of daring genius in this 
play is Antigone's vagueness about the motive or prin- 
ciple of her action : it is because her guilty brother's 
cause was just ; because death is enough to wipe away 
all offences ; because it is not her nature to join in 
hating, though she is ready to join in loving (1. 523) ; 
because an unburied corpse offends the gods ; because 
her own heart is really with the dead, and she wishes 
to go to her own. In one passage she explains, in a 
helpless and pathetically false way, that she only buries 
him because he is her brother ; she would not have 
buried her husband or son ! It is absolutely true to 
life in a high sense; like Beatrice Cenci, she "cannot 
argue : she can only feel" And another wonderful touch 
is Antigone's inabilitj' to see the glory of her death : 
she is only a weak girl cruelly punished for a thing 
which she was bound to do. She thinks the almost re- 
ligious admiration of the elders is mockery (1. 839). 

Creon also is subtly drawn. He is not a monster, 
though he has to act as one. He has staked his whole 
authority upon hb edict. Finding it disobeyed, he has 
taken a position from which it is almost impossible to 
retreat Then it appears that his niece is the culprit 
It is hard for him to eat up his words forthwith; and 
she gives him no faintest excuse for doing so. She 
defies him openly with a deep dispassionate contempt. 
Ism6n6, bold in the face of a real crisis, joins her sister ; 
his own son Haemon, at first moderate, becomes pre- 



THE ANTIGONE 245 

sently violent and insubordinate. Creon seems to be 
searching for a loophole to escape, subject only to the 
determination of an obstinate autocrat not to unsay 
what he has said. After Hsemon leaves him, he cries 
desperately that he sticks to his decision. Both the 
maidens must die I " Both," say the chorus — "you never 
spoke of Ismhtil" "Did T not?" he answers, with 
visible relief — "no, no; it was only Antigone I" And 
even on her he will not do the irreparable. With the 
obvious wish to leave himself breathing time, he orders 
her to be shut in a cave without food or water "tiU 
she learns wisdom" When he repents, of course, it is 
too late. 

There are several similarities between this, perhaps 
the sublimest, and the Electro, perhaps the least sub- 
lime, of Sophocles's plays. The strong and the weak 
sister stand in exactly similar contrast ; indeed in the 
passages where Antigone defies Creon and where she 
rejects Ismfini's claim to share her martyrdom, we seem 
to have a ring of the old ' harshness.' There are marks 
of early date also. The question Tin A»Sp&v ; — " JVhat 
man hati dared?" — when the real sinner is of course 
a woman, is a piece of well-worn dramatic effect which 
the Attic stage soon grew out of. The love of anti- 
thesis, always present in Sophocles, is dominant in the 
Antigone — " Two brothers fy two hands on one dt^ slain " / 
or finer : 

** A af good chter, thou Uvutj but my lift 
For tkt dtM^s sake tkut mmiiy days it dead." 

The claims of the dead form, in fact, a note common 
to this play and the Electro, They repeat the protest 
already uttered by j£schylus in the Cho^hervif agi" 
treating wrong done merely as it affects the cc 



246 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

of the living. The love-motive in H:emon is not likely 
to be due to Sophocles's invention ; it is unlike his 
spirit, and he makes little use of it, much less than 
Euripides did in his lost Anti^iu.* The idea would 
naturally come from Mimnermus or one of the erotic 



The TraMnug and the Philoctttes show clearly the 
influence of Euripides. The former deals with the 
death of Heracles by the coat of burning poison which 
his enemy the centaur Nessus has given to the hero's 
wife Diianlra, professing that it is a love -charm. 
Dtiantra finds that Heracles is untrue to her, and that 
an unhappy princess whom he has sent as captive of 
war to her house is really the object for whom he 
made the war. She bethinks her of the love-charm 
and sends it, and the burly demi-god dies raging. 
The Dorian hero, a common figure in satyr-plays, had 
never been admitted to tragedy till Euripides's Heracles, 
where he appears as the lusty conquering warrior, jovial 
and impulsive, with httle nobleness of soul to fall back 
upon. There are some definite imitations of the 
HeracUs in the Trachinia, apart from the Eunpidean 
prologue and the subtly dramatic situation between 
Dftianlra and her husband's unwilling mistress. One 
would like to know if there can be any connection 
between the writing of this play and the history con- 
tained in Antiphon's speech On Poisoning (p. 335). 

The Pkiloctiies (409 B.c.) is markedly a character-play. 
The hero, once the companion of Heracles, and now 
owner of his unerring t>ow, had been bitten by a noxious 
snake. The festering wound seemed about to breed a 
pestilence, and the Greeks left the sick man marooned 
on Lemnos. Long years afterwards an oracle reveals 



THE LATE PLAYS OF SOPHOCLES 247 

that the bow, and Pbiloctttes with it, must come to 
Troy, if the town is to be taken. It is all but im- 
possible to approach the injured man ; but Odysseus, 
the great contriver, agrees to try i^ and tabes with 
him the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus. Odyssetis him- 
self is known to Philoctites; so he keeps in the back- 
ground, and puts Neoptolemus forward to entrap the 
man on board his ship by ingenious lies. The young 
soldier reluctantly consents. He wins entirely the 
confidence of the old broken-hearted solitary ; every- 
thing is in train for the kidnapping, when a spasm of 
agony from the incurable wound comes on Philoct£tes. 
Neoptolemus does his best to tend him, and cannot 
face his victim's gratitude. At the last moment be 
confesses the truth. Philoctites has taken him for 
his single friend ; he is really a too! in the hand 
of his cruellest enemy. A profoundly tragic situation, 
lit up by the most thrilling beauty of verse ; it ends 
in Euripidean style by Heracles appearing as a Divine 
Reconciler " ex machinft " (see p. 268). 

The CEdipus at Coldnus is a play of the patriotic- 
archaeologttal type, of which our earliest example is 
the Htracleida of Euripides. It turns on the alleged 
possession by Attica of the grave of CEdipus — evidently 
only ' alleged,' and that not in early tradition, for we 
find in the play that no such supposed grave was 
visible. When <£dipus is an old man, and has, as it 
were, worn out the virulence of the curse upon him 
by his long innocent wanderings with his daughter 
Antigone, news is brought to him from Thebes by 
Ism£n£ of a new oracle. His body is to keep ito 
'hagos' or taboo — the power of the supematurally 
pure or supematurally polluted — and will be a divine 



248 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

bulwark to the country possessing it. Consequently 
the Thebans intend to capture him, keep turn close 
to their border till he dies, and then keep control 
of his grave. CEdipus meantime has reached Col6nus, 
in Attica, the seat of the ' Semnai/ ' Dread Goddesses,' 
where he knows that he is doomed to die. Theseus 
accepts him as a citizen, and he passes mysteriously 
away. This is the only play in which Sophocles has 
practically dispensed with a plot, and it is interesting 
to see that the experiment produces some of his 
very highest work. The poetry leaves an impression 
of superiority to ordinary technique, of contentment 
with its own large and reflective splendour. But 
the time was past when a mere situation could by 
imaginative intensity be made to fill a whole play. 
Sophocles has to insert ' epeisodia ' of Creon and 
Polyneikes, and to make the first exciting by a futile 
attempt to kidnap the princesses, the second by the 
utterance of the father's curse. The real appeal of 
the play is to the burning, half - desperate patriotism 
of the end of the War Time. The glory of Athens, 
the beauty of the spring and the nightingales at Co!6- 
nus, the holy Acropolis which can never be conquered, 
represent the modern ideals of that patriotism : the 
legendary root of it is given in the figure of Theseus, 
the law-abiding, humane, and religious king ; in the 
eternal reward won by the bold generosity of Athens ; 
in the rejection of Argos and the malediction laid 
for ever on turbulent and cruel Thebes. The piece 
is reported to be effective on the stage. Certainly 
the spiritual majesty of CEdipus at the end is among 
the great things of Greek poetry ; and the rather 
harsh contrast which it forms with the rage of the 



THE (EDIPUS AT COLONUS 249 

curse-scene, could perhaps be made grand by sympa- 
thetic actii^. 

The play is said by the ' didascaliae ' * to have been 
produced after the poef s death by his grandson of the 
same name. The verse, however, seems decidedly earlier 
than that of the Pkiloc$iUs (409), and the political allu- 
sions have led to various unconvincing theories about its 
composition at earher dates. Prof. U Campbell's (411) 
is perhaps the most probable. 

Though not one of the most characteristic of the 
poefs plays, it is perhaps the most intimate and per- 
sonal of them ; and it would be hard to find a more 
typical piece of Sophoclean writing than the beautiful 
lines of CBdipus to Theseus : 

" Pair Aigntf soH, only le gods in MtavtH 
Comts no old agt nor dtaih tfa^tktngj 
AU *lst is lurmeiltd by ottr masttr Tinu. 
TlUtart/fs strtngthfadtsandmaMJucd'sgiotyfddtt, 
Faith dUs, and tmfailh blottowa tit* a/kwtr. 
And who shall fiftd in tht eptn strtets 0/ men 
Or s*er»lplae*t of hit own ktarts love 
Om wind Mow inu/ortvtrt' 




XII 

EURIPIDES 

Euripides, son op Mhbsarchidss or Mnesarchds, 
PROU Phlya (ca. 480-406 B.C.) 

We possess eighteen plays from the hand of Euripides, 
as against seven each from the other two tragedians ; 
and we have more material for knowledge about him 
than about any other Greek poet, yet he remains, per- 
haps, the most problematic figure in ancient literature. 
He was essentially representative of his age, yet appa- 
rently in hostility to it ; almost a failure on the stage — 
he won only four ' first prizes in fifty years of production — 
yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece. His contem- 
porary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured 
them with personal problems ; as malignant, because he 
made them see truths they wished not to see ; as blas- 
phemous and foul-minded, because he made demands 
on their religious and spiritual natures which they could 
neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether 
he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic 
or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical 
— Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They 
only knew that he made them angry and that they could 
not help listening to him. Doubtless they realised that 
he had little sense of humour and made a good butt ; 

■ The fifth wM after hli doth, 



THE TRADITIONAL LIFE 151 

and perhaps, on the other hand, they felt that he really 
was what they called him in mockery, 'wise.' At any 
rate, after the great disaster of Syracuse he was the 
man they came to, to write the epi^ph on the hopes of 
Athens. 

The tradition, so gentle to Sophocles, raves against 
Euripides. " He was a morose cynic, privately vicious 
for all his severe exterior." " He did not write his plays ; 
they were done by his slaves and casual acquaintances." 
" His father was a fraudulent bankrupt ; his mother a 
greengroceress, and her greens bad. His wife was called 
Choirilfi (' Sow '), and acted up to her name ; he divorced 
her, and his second wife was no better." It delights in 
passages between the two tragedians in which the poverty- 
stricken misanthrope is crushed by the good Sophocles, 
who took to his cups and their l>earers like a man, and 
did not profess to be better than his neighbours. 

A few of these stories can be disproved ; some are 
grossly improbable; most are merely unsupported by 
evidence. It can be made out that the poefs father, 
Mnesarchides, was of an old middle-class family owning 
land and holding an hereditary office in the local 
Apollo-worship at I^Iya, His mother, Kleito the '^I'een- 
groceress,' was of noble family. Our evidence su^ests 
that her relation towards her son was one of exceptional 
intimacy and influence ; and motherly love certainly 
forms a strong element in his dramas. Of Euripides's 
wife we only know that her name was not ChoiriI£, but 
Melit£, and that Aristophanes in 411 could find no ill 
to say of her. Of his three sons, we hear that Mnesar- 
chus was a merchant, Mnesilochus an actor, Euripides 
apparently a professional playwright ; he brought out 
the Iphigmta, Baaha^ and AUmttm* after his father's 



J5» LnTRATURT OF ASCZSST GREZXX 

6txh. Tfe poet fined, «o Phfi^sdurs B^v as hs cnni 
aWe at SatanriB^ aod m o ci e d =. a cxre tacirg die xa, 
«1iidi vat sfaovn «o a]ccis& dowa to Pear's tni^ He 
noidcd aooeXT and pob&c life — as m n cfa , dtzt i% as an 
AAenbn ci< duff day cooki aToid dxm. He Kncd id 
fte army. He lad at le»t ooce to periionn a'lititrgr' 
of tome sort, pcrti a p B finisg out a tniane; he was a 
'Pnnana»'o< lla^wm, an office viiidi rrsrtnWrd Aat 
ot a alodem consal, and i i i wiv ed some real political 
work. These e apcai^ ge posts most faane come to htm 
early in his life ; he was reduced to poverty, Gke all flic 
landed proprietors, towards the end erf the war. For the 
rest, he was Ae first Greek -vAo odlected a library, 
flie writer aod thinker, not the man of a£birs. 

At one time, indeed, we find him taking at least an 
indirect part in politics. Aboot 420, at the end of the 
Ten Year^ War, he wrote a play with a definite ' tend- 
ency/ The Suppliants not only advocates peace with 
Sparta — that was the case with the Crapkontes* and the 
Ertchtheta * as well — it also advocates alliance with 
Argos, and proclaims the need in Athens of "a gtturai 
young and ncbU" " A general young and noble " was at 
that moment coming to the front, and especially press- 
ing forward the Argive alliance — ^Alcibiades. Next year 
he was appearing at Olympia with that train of four- 
horse chariots which made such a noise in Greece, and 
winning the Olympian victory for which Euripides wrote 
a Pindaric ode- This lets us see that the philosophic 
|ioct, like Socrates and most other people, had his period 
of Alcibiades-worship. We do not know how long it 
lasted. Euripides was for peace, and Alcibiades for 
war ; and by the time of the Sicilian Expedition, it 
would seem, Euripides had lost faith in the 'daemonic' 



THE GREAT CHANGE IN EURIPIDES 3$$ 

leader. The Tr^iades (415 B.C.?) starts by describing 
a great fleet sailing triumphantly to sea, unconscious of 
the shadow of blood-guiltiness that rests upon it, and 
the gods who plot its destruction as it goes. 

The plays from this time on, all through the last agony 
of the war, are written in fever, and throw a strong 
though distorting light on the character of the man 
behind them. His innermost impulses betray them- 
selves at the expense of his art, and he seems to be bent 
on lacerating his own ideals. Patriotism, for instance, 
had always been a strong feeling in Euripides. In 427 
we had the joyous self-confident patriotism of the 
HtradeidtB, the spirit of a younger Pericles. E^lier 
still there had been the mere sentimental patriotism of 
the Hippolytus (428 B.C.) Later came the Erechtheus,* 
Theseus,* Suppliants (421 ac). But in the last plays 
the spirit has changed. Dying Athens is not mentioned, 
but her death-struggle and her sins are constantiy 
haunting us ; the joy of battle is mostly gone, the horror 
of war is l^t Well might old jEschylus pray, **God 
grant I may sack no city I " if the reality of conquest is 
what it appears in the later plays of Euripides, The 
conquerors there are as miserable as the conquered ; 
only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked. 

Another motive which was always present in him, and 
now becomes predominant, is a certain mistrust of the 
state and all its ways — the doctrine explicitly preached 
to the present generation by Tolstoi. The curse of life 
is its political and social complication. The free individual 
may do great wrongs, but he has a heart somewhere ; it 
is only the servant of his country, the tool of the * compact 
majority,' who cannot afford one. Odysseus in the 
Tr6iades and Paiamidts* (415 B.C,) has got beyond even 



J54 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the Odyaseas of tiie Heaiha (424 f), vfaere ttw type is 
first sketched clearly. He s not posooalty Uood-tfairsty, 
but be is obUged to pat the iDterest of tiie Achaioi 
before evefything. The most disagreeable consequences 
are to be iq>pFehended if he does not lie, morder, and 
betray I It is the same wifli Mendans in the Onstes, 
and, above aD, witii Agamemnon in flie IfUgada m 
AmUs. They are so placed that ordinary social con- 
siderations seem to make justice and honour impossible. 

Another note irtiich marks the last years of the war is a 
tendency to dwell on the extreme possibilities of revenge. 
-It was an old theme xA Euripides — the Mtdea bad tau^t 
it in 431 — but he now saw all about him instances of the 
role that by wronging people beyond a certain point you 
make them into devils. It is this motive which gives unity 
to the Heoiba, the gradual absorption of the queen's whole 
nature into one infinite thirst for vengeance ; which 
answers the scholiast's complaint about tiie Orates, that 
"everybody in it is bad." Another deepening sentiment 
in Euripides is his aversion to the old tales that call 
themselves heroic. His Electro was enough to degrade 
for ever the blood-feud of the Atridae. Read after it 
what any other poet says on the subject, Sophocles or 
^schylus or Homer, and the conviction forces itself 
upon you : " It was not like this ; it was just what 
Euripides says it was. And a hoXjo^vla, a ' craft-murder,' 
is not a beautiful thing after all." 

It is at this last period of his life at Athens that we 
really have in some part the Euripides of the legend — 
the man at variance with his kind, utterly sceptical, but 
oppooed to most of the philosophers, contemptuous of 
the rich, furious against the extreme democracy,' hating 

' Or. 87o-93a 



NOTES OF EURIPIDES'S LAST PERIOD 255 

all the ways of men, commanding attention by sheer 
force of brain-power. He was baited incessantly by a 
rabble of comic writers, and of course by the great pack 
of the orthodox and the vulgar. He was beaten. After 
producing the Orestes in 408, he left Athens for the court 
of Archelaus of Macedon. We hear that he went "be- 
cause of the malicious exultation of almost everybody," 
though we have no knowledge of what the exultation 
was grounded on. In Macedon he found peace, and 
[H-obably some congenial society. Agathon the tragedian 
and Timotheus the musician were there, both old friends 
of his, and the painter Zeuxis, and probably Thucydides. 
Doubtless the barbarism underneath the smooth surface 
of the Macedonian court, must sometimes have let itself 
appear. The story of Euripides being killed by the 
king's hounds is disproved by the silence of Aristo- 
phanes ; but it must have produced a curious effect 
on the Athenian when one of the courtiers, who had 
addressed him rudely, was promptly delivered up to him 
to be scourged I He died about eighteen months after 
reaching Macedon; but the peace and comfort of his 
new surroundings had already left their mark upon his 
work. There is a singular freshness and beauty in the 
two plays, Baccka and IfhigeHta in Aulis, which he left 
unfinished at his death ; and the former at any rate has 
traces of Macedonian scenery (565 ff.). Of ^k Arckektus,* 
which he wrote in his hosf s honour, but few fragments 
survive. 

Not that in the last period of Euripides's work at Athens 
his gloom is unmixed. There is nothing that better illus- 
trates the man's character than the bright patches in 
these latest plays, and the particular forms taken by his 
still-surviving ideals. In his contempt for society and 



256 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

statecraft his iconoclastic spirit towards the all-admired 
Homeric demi-gods, his sympathy with the dumb and 
uninterpreted generally, he finds his heroism in quiet 
beings uncontaminated by the world. The hero of the 
EUeira is the Working Peasant, true-hearted, honourable, 
tactful, and of course as humbly conscious of his in- 
feriority to all the savage chieftains about him as they 
are confident of their superiority to him. But, above 
all, Euripides retains his old belief in the infinite possi- 
biUties of the untried girl. To take only the complete 
plays, we have a virgin-martyr for heroine in the Hetv- 
dmda, Hecuba, Ipkigenta in AuUs; we have echoes of her 
in the TrAiades and the Suppliants. She is always a real 
character and always diEFerent One pole perhaps is in 
the Triiades, where the power to see something beyond 
this coil of trouble, the second sight of a pure spirit, gets 
its climax in Cassandra, The other, the more human 
side, comes out in the Ipkigenta. The young girl, when 
she first finds that she has t>een trapped to her death, 
breaks down, and pleads helplessly, like a child, not to 
be hurt; then when the first blinding shock is past, when 
she has communed with herself, when she finds that 
Achilles is ready to fight and die for her, she rises to 
the height of glad martyrdom for Hellas' sake. The 
life of one Achilles is worth that of a thousand mere 
women, such as she 1 That is her feeling at the moment 
when she has risen incomparably beyond every one in 
the play and made even her own vain young hero 
humble. Aristotle — such are the pitfalls in the way of 
human critics — takes her as a type of inconsistency ! • 

An element of brightness comes also in the purely 
romantic plays of the last years, the Helena and Andro- 
meda,* One is reminded of the Birds {p. 286). Euripides 

' Foetid, n^. xr. 



BRIGHTER SIDE OF LAST PERIOD aS7 

call be happy if he turns entirely away from vpdffiOTa, 
from affaires, from the things that weighed on all Athens. 
The Helena is a light play with a clear atmosphere and 
beautiful songs; Helen and Menelaus are both innocent. 
The Andramaia* was apparently the one simple un- 
clouded love-story that Euripides wrote. It was very 
celebrated. Lucian has a pleasant story of the tragedy- 
fever which fell upon the people of Abd£ra : bow they 
went about declaiming iambics, " and especially sang the 
solos in the Andromeda and went through the great 
speech of Perseus, one after another, till the city was full 
of seven-day-old tragedians, pale and haggard, crying 
aloud, ' O Love, high monard over gods and men,' and 
so on." The Andromeda* opened (without a prologue?) 
giving the heroine chained on the cliff, and watching 
for the first glimmer of dawn with the words, " O holy 
Night, how long is the wheeling of thy chariot I" Some 
little fragments help us to see the romantic beauty of the 
play as a whole : the appeal of the chorus to the echo 
of the sea-cliffs "by Ai4is that dwelleth in caves"; and 
the words of Andromeda to her lover and deliverer ; 
" Takt me, ttrafiger,ftr Odfu htM^mddtn, 
Or wjft or slavt." 
The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides 
had never struck before ; and the note of superhuman 
mystery, of sea-cliff and monsters and magic, not since 
the Phalthon* 

This, of course, is the Euripides of the end of the 
war, when his antagonisms had become more pro- 
nounced. But from his first appearance in 455 with 
the Daughters of Peltas,* the man must have impressed 
people as unlike anything they had known before. He 
showed himself at once as tiie poet of the Sophistic 



258 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Movement, of the Enlightenment; as the aposUe of 
clearness of expression, who states everything that he 
has to say expUcitly and without bombast His language 
was so much admired in the generations after his death 
that it is spoilt for us. It strikes us as hackneyed and 
undistinguished, because we are familiar with various 
commonplace fellows who imitated it, from Isocratea 
to Theodore Prodromus, He probably showed even 
in the Daughters of PtHas* his power to see poetry 
everywhere. His philosophical bent was certainly fxxe- 
shadowed in lines like "in God thtrt is no it^ustkt" 
(frag. 606) ; his quick sjrmpathy with passion of every 
sort, in the choice of the woman Medea for his chief 
figure. 

But the most typical of the early plays, and the one 
which most impressed his contemporaries, was the 
Ttlephus* (438 B.C.). It has a great number of the 
late characteristics in a half -developed state, overlaid 
with a certain externality and youthfulness. It is worth 
while to keep the Ttlephus* constantly in view in tracing 
the gradual progress of Euripides's character and method. 
The wounded king of Mysia knows that nothing but the 
spear of Achilles, which wounded him, can cure him ; 
the Greeks are all bis enemies ; be travels through 
Greece, lame from his wound, and disguised as a 
be^ar ; speaks in the gathering of hostile generals, 
is struck for his insolence, but carries his point; finally, 
he is admitted as a suppliant by Clytsemestra, snatches 
up the baby Orestes, reveals himself, threatens to dash 
out the baby's brains if any of the enemies who 
surround him move a step, makes his terms, and is 
healed. The extraordinarily cool and resourceful hero 
— he recalls those whom we meet in Hugo and Dumas 



TECHNIQUE OF EURIPIDES 259 

— was new to the stage, and fascinating. There was 
originality, too, in his treatment of 'anagnfirisis' or 
'recognition' as a dramatic climax — the overturning 
of a situation by the discovery tvA^ some person really 
is — the revelation, in this case, that the lame beggar is 
T£lephus, This favourite Euripidean effect had become 
by Aristotle's time a common and even norma) way of 
bringing on the catastrophe. Of our extant plays, the 
Ion, Eltctra, Helena, Iphigenta in Tauris cont^n 're- 
cognitions.' A celebrated instance among the lost plays 
was in the Cresphontes.' That hero, son of the murdered 
king of Messenia, had escaped from the usurper Poly-, 
phontes, and was being reared in secret. His mother, 
Meropd, was in the tyrant's power. He comes back to 
save her, gains access to Polyphontes by pretending that 
he has slain Cresphontes, and asks for a reward. Merop£ 
hears that a stranger is in the house claiming a rewvd 
for having murdered her son. She sends quickly to her 
son's refuge and finds that he has disappeared. In 
despair she takes an axe and goes to where the boy 
sleeps. At the last instant, while she is just speaking the 
words, "Infernal Hades, this is mine offering to thee" her 
husband's old slav^ who holds the light for her, re- 
cognises the youth, and rushes in to intercept the blow. 
Even in Plutarch's time this stage effect had not lost its 
power. 

Apart from the technical 'recognition,' the TtUpkus* 
gave the first sign of a movement towards melodra- 
matic situations, the tendency which culminates in the 
Orestes. That play opens some days after the slaying 
of Clytaemestra and Aigisthus. Orestes and Electra are 
besieged in the castle by the populace, and the Assembly 
is at the moment discussing their doom. Orestes is ill 



26o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and mad ; Electra wasted with watching and nursing. 
If she saves him, the two will probably be stoned. 
News comes of safety. Menelaus, their father's brother, 
has sailed into the harbour with Helen. Helen comes 
to the castle, and Menelaus's veterans guard the entrances. 
Orestes gradually recovers his mind ; it seems as if he and 
his sister were saved. But Menelaus is the natural heir 
to the kingdom after Orestes ; and he has always dis- 
approved of deeds of violence ; he will not thwart the 
wiU of the people ; and cannot offend his father-in-law 
T3mdareu3, who claims vengeance for Clytcemestra. In 
short, he means to let the brother and sister be stoned. 
Scenes of vivid contrast and strain succeed one another, 
till the two see that all is lost The blood-madness 
comes on Orestes. He gets possession of his sword 
and turns upon Helen and Hermione. To take one 
touch from many : to escape stoning, Electra and 
Orestes are resolved to die. She begs him to kill her. 
He turns from her : " My mothet's blood is enough. I 
will not kill thee. Die as best thou mayest*' 

The TiUpkus* was in these several respects the typical 
play of Euripides's early period, but it strikes one as a 
young play. The realism, for instance, was probably not 
of the subtle type we find in the Electra. The great mark 
of it was the disguised beggar's costume, which threw 
stage convention to the winds. In the Achamians of 
Aristophanes the hero has to make a speech for his life, 
and applies to Euripides for some ' tragic rags ' which will 
move the compassion of his hearers. He knows just the 
rags that will suit him, but cannot remember the name 
of the man who wore them. " The old unhappy Oineus 
appeared in rags," says Euripides. "It was not Oineus; 
some one mw^ wreicheder." " The bUnd Phoenix perhaps ?" 



MELODRAMA REALISM 261 

*'0k, muck, muck wreUhtder than Pheenixl" "PossiMf 
you mean PMoctltes the beggamum?" " No, a far woru 
beggar than Philoctttes." "The cri^le BelUrephon ?" 
"No, not BeUerophon; though my man was a cripple too, 
and a beggar and a great speaker." " / know; Tllephu* 
of Mysiaf—Bty, fetch Ttlephu^s be^ar-dothes ; they are 
Jtist above ThyesteJs rags, between them and Ino's''^ 

It is difficult, too, to make out any subtlety or delicacy 
of situation in the Ttl^hus,* such as we have ten years 
after, for instance, in the Hippofytus (11. 900-1100), when 
Hippolytus returns to find his father standing over 
Phaedra's body, and reading the tablet which contains 
her accusation against him. He does not know the 
contents of the tablet, but he can guess well enough 
why Phaedra died. He is inevitably unnatural in 
manner, and his constraint inevitably looks like guilt 
That is one subtlety; and there is another a moment 
afterwards, where Hippoljrtus is on his defence, and 
has sworn not to tdl the one thing ttiat will save 
him. His speeches get lamer and more difficult. At 
least twice it seems as if he is at the point of giving 
way — ^why should he not ? The oath was forced from 
htm by a trick, and he had rejected it at the time: 
"My tongue hath sworn; there is no bond upon ngi heart." 
Nevertheless he keeps silence, as he promised; appeals 
desperately to the gods, and goes forth convicted-* 

"Hiere is another subtlety of Euripidean technique in 
the Hippolytus, and one which is generally misunder- 
stood. The main difficulty to the playwright ts to carry 

> Aeh. 418 t 

* Thne mi m dmilu icene in Melatt^fit A$ Wilt,* iriwre MeUalppe hw 
to plead for the life of ha own KcreUr-traro children, Mjing ereijlhiiv bnt 
the truth ; eren hintiiig that ' nme damtel ' waj have bone them and hidden 



262 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the audience with Phaedra on the wave of pas^on which 
leads to her murderous slander. It can only be done at 
the expense of Hippolytus, and it is hard to make a true 
and generous man do right and be odious for doing 
so. The long speech of Hippolytus (11. 6i6 ff.) manages 
it At his exit the spectator is for the moment furious^ 
and goes whole-heartedly with Phaedra. 

It was in 431, before the Hippolytus, but seven years 
after the Tll^ktu* that Euripides first dealt vnth the 
motive of baffled or tragic love, idiich he afterwards 
made peculiarly his own. The Medea is, perhaps, the 
most artistically flawless of his plays; though, oddly 
enough, it was a failure when first acted. The bar- 
barian princess has been brought from her home by 
Jason, and then deserted, that he may marry the 
daughter of the king of Corinth. She feigns resigna- 
tion ; sends to the bride " a gift more beautiful than 
any now among men, which has come from the fiery 
palaces of her ancestor the sun." It is really a robe of 
burning poison. The bride dies in torture. Medea 
murders her children for the sake of the pain it will 
be to their father, and flies. 

This is the twginning of the wonderful women-studies 
by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his con- 
temporaries. They called him a hater of women ; and 
Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for 
revenge against him (see p. 288). Of course he was 
really the reverse. He loved and studied and ex- 
pressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and 
Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, how- 
ever, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. 
Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia, Afirope, 
Clytaemestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than 



THE WOMEN OF EURIPIDES 263 

those of the angelic or devoted type — Alcestis, who 
died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, 
who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of 
virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like 
Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealise any man, and does 
idealise women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus 
in the PhoenisstB^ but his martyrdom is a masculine 
business-like performance — he gets rid of his prosaic 
father by a pretext about travelling-money (11. 990 ff.)— 
without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the' 
virgins. And again, Euripides will not allow us to dis- 
like even his worst women. No one can help siding 
with Medea ; and many of us love Phaedra — even when 
she has lied an innocent man's life away. 

It is a step from this championship of women to the 
other thing that roused fury against Euripides — his 
interest in the sex question in all its forms. There 
are plays based on questions of marriage-breaking, like 
the Hippolytus and Sthenebaia* — in which the heroine 
acted to Bellerophon as Potiphar^s wife to Joseph. There 
was one, the Chrysippus^ in condemnation of that rela- 
tion between men and boys which the age regarded 
as a peccadillo, and which Euripides only allowed to 
the Cyclops. There was another, the j£olus^'^ which 
made a problem out of the old innocent myth of the 
Wind-god with his twelve sons and twelve daughters 
married together and living in the isle of the Winds. 
It is Macareus in this play who makes the famous plea : 
'' WJuU thing is shanufid if a maris heart feels it no 
shame?*' But more important than the special dramas 
is the constant endeavour of this poet to bring his ex- 
periences into relation with those of people whom he 
is trying to understand, especially those of the two 



a64 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

alent classes, women and slaves. In the sweat of 
battle, perhaps when he was wounded, he had said to 
himself, " This must be Uke child-bearing, but not half so 
badt"'^ No wonder the general public did not know 
what to do with him 1 And how were they to stand 
the man who was so severe on the pleasures of the 
world, and yet did not mind his heroes being bastards 7 
Nay, he made the priestess Aug£, whose vow of virginity 
had been violated, and who was addressed in terms of 
appropriate horror by the virgin warrior Athena, answer 
her blasphemously : 

"Arms black with rotted blood 
And dead wuifi wreekt^t or* net faul lo tkti— 
Nay, thtst thou lovtst: only Augfi bob* 
Frists thee viitk shanu I * 

And so with slavery : quite apart from such plays as 
the ArcheUms* and Alexander^ which seem to have 
dealt specially with it, one feels that Euripides's thought 
was constantly occupied with the fact that certain people 
serve and belong to certain others, and are by no means 
always inferior to them. 

Towards religion his attitude is hard to define. Dr. 
Verrall entitles his keen-sighted study of this subject, 
Eur^ndes the Rationalist ; and it is clear that the plays 
abound in marks of hostility towards the authoritative 
polytheism of Delphi, and even to the beliefs of the 
average Athenian. And further, it is quite true that in the 
generation which condemned Protagoras and Socrates, 
and went mad about the Herms, the open expression of 
freethinking views was not quite safe for a private in- 
dividual in the market-place ; very much less so for the 
poet of an officially accepted drama of Dionysus, on the 



THE GODS IN EURIPIDES 265 

feast-day and in the sacred precinct Any view of 
Euripides which implies that he had 3 serious artistic 
foith in his "gods from the m£chan£" — a form of super- 
stition too gross even for the ordinary public — is practi- 
cally out of court His age held him for a notorious 
freethinker, and his stage gods are almost confessedly 
fictitious. Yet it is a curious fact that Euripides is 
constantly denouncing the inadequacy of mere rational- 
ism. There is no contrast more common in his plays 
than that between real wisdom and mere knowledge or 
cleverness ; and the context generally suggests that the 
cleverness in question includes what people now call 
'shallow atheism.' He speaks more against the iro^l 
than with them. It seems/ in fact, that here, as in flie 
rest of his mental attitude, he is a solitary rebel. 

He is seldom frankly and outspokenly sceptical; when 
he is so, it is always on moral grounds. No strew can 
be laid on mere dramatic expreisions like the famoUK 
" TA^ are not, or* noH" of Bcllerophon {frHjt, 186), 
or ttie blasphemies of Ixion, or the comte «tbel<tffl of the 
Cyclops. There is more real chiriwiter In tb« xmimiiifm 
which imply a kind of antithelimt. In Hie fltihniftfHm,* 
for instance (frag, jii), the hero, (wwlM«ni4 Ml llw 
unjust ordering of things, atlemtHn Ut retwdi JfMW afifl 
have his doubts set at reft, whereupfffi /mm IftwM hllM 
with a thunderbolt. He Mce tliat Ite U ifwfff ^^ MMt 
condemned, yet he cannot trnfUmAf m»iAt^m\ ioffwtfr 
He speaks to his heart ; 

Thy dMf tfitd ta ilu ilfttHffr, MtM fMn» Mfi 
For tlum that Itvtd tfut iwfc n» vMuthttt" 

One cannot take theee Utr tluc ^nitfit ui^Am^ ii«ifltiHwfi|«, 
bat the fact that audi Ibuu^ii* wtnt m UUt min4 ^ 



*66 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

One of ttie rare "*«*»"'•" of a plain 
t is in die Htrmda (U. 1341 ff.): 



AndrndmrnA^tflmtai^mimtutt^' 

These words seem deartj to r epre s ent the poet himself, 
not the qnite nnpbilosophic hero irtio ntten flwm. 
They read like ttie firm 9etf-jiisti6cation of a man 
attacked for frerthinking. That was written about 432, 
before the time of bitterness. For the most par^ EarifH- 
des is tax from frank aa fiwse sabjects. The majority of 
the plays diaw no conclusions, but only suggest premisses. 
They state the reli^ous traditions very plainly, and leave 
the audience to jndge if it believes in them or approves 
of them. His work left on his contemporaries, and, if 
intelligently read, leaves on us, an impression of uneasy, 
half-disguised hostility to the supernatural element which 
plays so large a part in it It is a tendency which makes 
havoc in his art Plays like the Ion, the EUOra, the 
IphigtHta M Tauris, the Orestes, have something jairing 
and incomprehensible about them, which we cannot 
dispose of by lightly calling Euripides a 'botcher,' or 
by saying, what is known to be untrue in history, that 
he was the poet of the 'ochlocracy' and played to 
the mob. 

For one thing, we must start by recognising and trying 
to understand two pieces of technique which are specially 
the invention or characteristic of Euripides, the Pro- 
logue and the Deus ex maehinA. The Prologue is easily 
explained. There were no playbills, and it was well to 



PROLOGUE AND 'DEUS EX MACHINA' 267 

let the audience know what saga the play was to treat. 
The need was the more iM*essing if a poet was apt, like 
Euripides, to choose little-known legends or unusual 
versions of those that were well known. The Prologue 
was invented to meet this need. But, once there, it 
su^ested further advantages. It practically took the 
place of an explanatory first act Euripides uses it to 
state the exact situation in which he means to pick up 
his characters ; the Orestes and the Medea, for instance, 
gain greatly from their prologues. They are able to begin 
straight at the centre of interest It must of course be 
fully recognised that our existing prologues have been 
interpolated and tampered with. Euripides held the 
stage all over the Hellenistic world for centuries after 
his death, and was often played to barbarian audiences 
who wanted everything explained from the beginning. 
Thus the proline of the Electra, to take a striking 
example, narrates things that every Athenian knew from 
his infoncy. But the Prologue in itself is a genuine 
Euripidean instrument 

If we overcome our dislike for the Prologue, we are 
still offended by the way in which Euripides ends his 
plays. Of his seventeen genuine extant tragedies, ten 
close with the appearance of a god in the clouds, com- 
manding, explaining, prophesying. The seven which 
do not end with a god, end with a pro[^ecy or some- 
thing equivalent — some scene which directs attention 
away from the present action to the future results. That 
is, the subject of the play is really a long chain of events ; 
the poet fixes on some portion of it-~the action of one 
day, generally speaking — and treats it as a piece of vivid 
concrete life, led up to by a merely narrative introduc- 
tion, and melting away into a merely narrative close. 



368 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

The method is to our taste quite undramatiCy but it is 
explicable enough : it falls in with the tendency of Grade 
art to finish, not with a climax, but with a lessening of 
strain. 

There is a growth visible in this method of ending. In 
the earliest group of our extant plays, thera is^ with flie 
merely apparent exception of the Hippofytus (see p. 270X 
no dius ex nuufUnd. From about 420 to 414 the god 
appears, prophesies, or pronounces judgment^ but does 
not disturb the action ; in the * troubled period ' he pro- 
duces what is technically called a ' peripeteia,' a violent 
reversal of the course of events.^ Now, if Pindar had 
done this, we might have said that his superstition was 
rather gross, but we could have accepted it When it is 
done by a man notorious for his bold religious speculation, 
a reputed atheist, and no seeker of popularity, then it 
becomes a problem. Let any one who does not feel the 
(lifliculty, read the Onstes. Is it credible that Euripides 
believed that the story ended or could end as he makes 
it ; that he did not see that his detu makes the whole 
grand traf^edy into nonsense 7 Dr. Verrall finds the solu- 
tion of this knot in a bold theory that Euripides, writing 
habitually as a freethinker, under circumstances in which 
outspokenness was impossible, deliberately disguised his 
meaning by adding to his real play a sham prologue and 
epilogue*, Huitible for popular consumption, but known 
by those in the poet's confidence to have no bearing on 
his real intent. The difliculties in this view are obvious. 

* (I) No dim 9X maehind: Alcestis (438), Cyclops, M$dia (431), BirutMda 
(417), Hiraehs (4aa), and H§euha (434?); also THiades (415) and Phtadum 
(410). (a) Dim with mere propheqr or the like : Andr9mache{j^ii^ Suppttas 
(4a I), /m, EUctm (413 ?). (3) Dim with * peripeteia ' : Iphig^ in Tamris 
(413), IMitm (41a), Ontta (408). IpA^gimta in Aulis and Baeehm doabt- 
ftil I probablj * peripeteia ' in each. 



THE DISCORDANT NOTE IN EURIPIDES 369 

It is safer to confine ourselves to admitting that, as a 
thinker, Euripides was from the outset out of sympathy 
with the material in which he had to work. He did not 
believe the saga, be did not quite admire or like it; 
but he had to make his plays out of it In his happier 
moods this dissonance does not appear — as in the Medea 
or H^pofytus ; sometimes it appears and leaves us 
troubled, but is overcome by the general beauty of 
treatment That is the case with the AUestts, where the 
heroine's devotion suggests at once to Euripides, as it 
does to us, the extreme selfishness of the husband who 
let her die for htm. Sophocles would have slurred or ex- 
plained away this unpleasantness. Euripides introduces 
a long and exquisitely hard-bitting scene merely for the 
purpose of rubbing it in {Ak. 614 f.). In a third stage 
the dissonance runs riot : he builds up his drama only 
to demolish it What can one make of the Ion? "A 
patriotic play celebrating Ion, the Attic bero, the semi- 
divine son of Creusa and Apollo." That is so. But is 
it really a celebration or an exposure ? The old story 
of the divine lover, the exposed child, the god saving his 
offspring — the thing Pindar can treat with such reverence 
and purity — is turned naked to the li^t " If the thing 
happened," says Euripides — "and you all insist that it 
did — it was like this." He ^ves us the brutal selfishness 
of Phoebus, the self-contempt of the injured giri, and at 
last the goading of her to the verge of a horrible murder. 
If that were all the play has to say, it would be better ; but 
it is not all. It is inextricably and marringly mixed with 
a great deal of ordinary poetic beauty, and the pkiy ends 
in a perfunctory and unreal justification of Apollo, in 
which the culprit does not present himself, and his repre- 
sentative, Athena, does not seem to be telling the exact 



tjo UTERATCRC OF ASOSSX GREECE 

tratb I la ttm pom^ a* ia odMn^ the ovo'-c 
MfcacM o< Zmipiie^* miad led 1 
jttid fiade modi trf 1 
buiart. 

There am two pbys one earlj and one taa^ in vfaicii 
tbe dtviae ricmftit it treated with more coassttacff 
and, it woald Mem, witb some real ea q rea a ion o( the 
poett thought— the H^polytMt and the Baedtm. The 
Love-goddeM in the {onDer(428 BX.)ts a Fact of Nature 
penonified ; her action is destrnctiTe, not (L 20) per- 
Mmallf vindictive ; her bodily presence in the stiangdy- 
tcrrible ipeedi which forms tbe prologue, is evidentily 
mere symbolism, representing thoughts that are as much 
at home in a modern mind as in an ancieat Hippo* 
lytus is a latnt in his rejection of the Cyprian and 
hia cleaving to the virgin Artemis ; it is absurd to 
talk of his ' impiety.' Yet it is one of the poef s rooted 
convictions that an absolute devotion to some one 
principle— (he 'All or nothing' of Brand, the 'Truth' 
of (ircgcrs Werle — leads to havoc. Ilie havoc may 
be, on the whole, the best thing : it is clear that Hippo- 
lytuH * lived well,' that his action was niitJm ; but it did, 
as a matter of fact, produce malediction and suicide 
and murder. Very similar is the unseen Artemis of 
the end, so beautiful and bo superhumanly heartless. 
'II1C frush virginity in nature, the spirit of wild meadows 
and waters and sunrise, is not to be disturtied because 
martyrs clioosc tu die for it. 

Tlio Baaha is a play difficult to interpret For 
excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing 
like it in ancient literature. The plot is as simple as 
it is daring. The god Dionysus is disowned by his 
own kiiulrcd, and punishes tliem. There comes to 



INNER RELIGION OF EURIPIDES 371 

'Hiebes a 'Bacchos' — an incaroatioa, it would seem, 
of tbe god himself — preaching the new worship. The 
daughters of Cadmus refuse to accept his spirit ; he 
exerts it upon them in strength amounting to madness, 
and they range the hills glorifying him. The old 
Cadmus and the prophet Teiresias recognise him at 
once as God ; the unearthly joy fills them, and they 
feel themselves young again. The king Pentheus is 
the great obstacle. He takes his stand on reason and 
order: he will not recognise the 'mad' divinity. But 
Pentheus is the wrong man for such a protest ; possibly 
he had himself once been mad — at least that seems to 
be the meaning of 1. 359, and is natural in a Bacchic 
legend — and he acts not calmly, but with fury. He 
insults and imprisons the god, who bears all gently 
and fearlessly, with the magic of latent power. Tlie 
prison walls fall, and Dionysus comes straight to the 
king to convince him again. Miracles have been done 
by the Maenads on Cithasrou, and Dionysus is ready 
to show more ; will Pentheus wait and see ? Pentheus 
refuses, and threatens the 'Bacchos' with death; the 
god changes his tone (I. Sio). In a scene of weird 
power and audacity, he slowly controls — one would fain 
say ' hypnotises ' — Pentheus : makes him consent to don 
the dress of a Maenad, to carry the thyrsus, to perform 
all the acts of worship. The doomed man is led forth to 
Cithseroo to watch from ambush the secret worship of 
the Bacchanals, and is torn to pieces by them. The mad 
daughters of Cadmus enter, Agavt bearing in triumph 
her son's head, which she takes for a lion's head, and 
singing a joy-song which seems like the very essence 
of Dionystac madness expressed in music. The story 
is well known how this play was acted at the Parthian 



17J LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

OBpital after the defeat of Crassus at Carrhss. llie actor 
iriio represented Agav£, entered bearing' the actual head 
of Crassus; and the soldier who had really slain Crassiu 
broke out in the audience, clamouring for the ghastly 
trophy. That was what semi-Hellenised savages made 
o\A oi \ht BaaAa I 

What does it all mean ? To say that it is a reactionary 
manifesto in fovour of orthodoxy, is a view which hardly 
merits refutation. If Dionysus is a personal god at all, 
he is a devil. Yet the point of the play is clearly to 
make us understand him. He and his Usenads are 
made beautiful ; tiiey are generally allowed the last 
word (except 1. 1348); and the swift lonic-a-minore songs 
have, apart from their mere beauty, a certain spiritual 
loftiness. Pentheus is not a 'sympathetic' martyr. And 
there is even a certain tone of polemic against 'mere 
rationalism ' which has every appearance of coming 
from the poet himself.* The play seems to represent 
no voUt-fact on the part of the old free-lance in thought, 
but rather a summing up of his position. He had 
always denounced common superstition ; he had always 
been averse to dogmatic rationalism. The lesson of 
the Baccka is that of the Hippofytus in a stronger form. 
Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are 
in the world things not of reason, but both below and 
above it ; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, 
which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to 
be the precious elements in life. These things are 
Gods or forms of God : not hibulous immortal men, 
but 'Things which Are,' things utterly non-human and 
non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to 
shreds without a break in their own serenity. It is a 

* See, *^., Brnhn't Introdnctkn. 



REALIST AND MYSTIC 273 

religion that most people have to set themselves in some 
relation to ; the religion that Tolstoi preaches against, 
that people like I^ley and Bentham tried to abolish, 
that Plato denounced and followed. Euripides has got 
to it in this fonn through his own peculiar character, 
through the mixture in him of unshrinking realism 
with unshrinking imaginativeness ; but one must re- 
member that he wrote much about Orphism in its 
ascetic and mystic side, and devoted to it one complete 
play, ihtCrttans.* 

In the end, perhaps, this two-sidedness remains as 
the cardinal fact about Euripides ; he is a merciless 
realist; he is the greatest master of imaginative music 
ever born in Attica. He analyses, probes, discusses, 
and shrinks from no sordidness ; then he turns right 
away from the world and escapes " to the caverns 
that the Sun's feet tread" "^ or similar places, where 
things are all beautiful and interesting, melancholy 
perhaps, like the tears of the sisters of Phaethon, but 
not squalid or unhappy. Some mysticism was always 
in him from the time of the Hippolytus (1. 192): " What- 
ever far-off state there may be that is dearer to man than 
lift, Darkness has it in her arms and hides it in doud. 
We are love-sick for this nameless thing that glitters here 
on the earth, becattse no man has tasted another life, because 
the things under us are unrevealed, and we float upon a 
stream of legend'' There is not one play of Euripides 
in which a critic cannot find serious flaws and offences ; 
though it is true, perhaps, that the worse the critic, the 
more he will find. Euripides was not essentially an 
artist He was a man of extraordinary brain-power, 

* Bip. 733. The cftTem in qnotico wu hi the moon. Cf. Apollonim, 
drg. iiL 1113, and Plntaicb Ott th* Ft* m tki Mmh, % 39, tfym. Dtm, fj. 



2^4 UTERATURE OF ANCIENT GRE£C£ 

dramatic craf^ subtlety, sympathy, courage, imagination ; 
he tnied too close into the world and took tbin^ too 
rebelliously to produce calm and successful poetry. Yet 
many will feel as Philteion did : "If I own arteim 
Oat Hu Aad had eemsamumu, I wadd lumg n^a^ U stt 
Bmr^ides." 



XIU 



Before Aristophanes 



Ancient comedy, a derelopment from the mamming 
of the vintage and harvest feasts, took artistic form in 
the two great centres of commercial and popular life, 
Sjrracuse and Athens. The Sicilian comedy seems to 
have come first Eficharmus is said to have fiourished 
in 486. He was a native of Cos, who migrated first to 
Sicilian Megara, and then to Syracuse. His remains are 
singularly scanty compared with his reputation, and it 
is hard to form a clear idea of him. He was a comedy- 
writer and a philosopher, apparently of a Pythagorean 
type. His comedies are partly burlesques of heroic sub- 
jects, Uke the Cyd^s,* Bustris,* Promdtkeus,* resembling 
the satyric dramas of Athens, and such comedies as 
the Odyssls* and C^r^tus* of Cratlnus. Others, like the 
Rustie* and the Sigkt-Sters,* were mimes, representing 
scenes from ordinary life. In this field he had a 
rival, SOPHRON, who wrote 'Feminine Mimes' and 
'Masculine Mimes,' and has left us such titles as the 
Tunt^-Fisher,* the Messenger,* the Seamstresses,* the 
Motker-tH-Law.* A third style of composition followed 
by Epicharmus was semi-philosophical, like the discus- 
sion between 'Logos' and 'Logkia,' Male and Female 
Reason, or whatever the words mean. And he wrote 



276 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

one strictly philosoidiical poem, Oh Nattire.* We hear 
that the comedies were rapid and bustling; but, of 
course, the remnants that have survived owe their life 
merely to some literary quality, whether pithiness of 
thought or grammatical oddity. His description of a 
parasite — the thing existed in his time, though not the 
word — is excellent.^ It is interesting to find him using 
puns of the most undu^ised type, as where one 
speaker describes Zeus as HSkom y'iptmw umAm, and 
the other hears 'fipaimp as "/ifuwait, and supposes that 
the god fed his guest on a crane. A typi(^ piece of 
conversation is the following : ' "A After tkt sacrijici 
etmu a fmstf and after Hu ftast a drinkmg-party. B. That 
seems nice. A. And t^ter the drinkmg-party a revel, after 
Ike revel a swinery, after tke swinery a smnmons, qfier 
the summons a condemnation, and <0er the condemnation 
fetters and stocks and a fine." The other side of the 
man is represented by his philosophical sayings: "Mind 
katk sight and Mind kath hearing; all things else are 
det^ and blind " ; " Ckaracter is destiny to man " ; or, 
one of the most frequently-quoted lines of antiquity, 
"Be sober, and remember to disbelieve: tkese are the sinews 
of the nUnd." The metre of Epicharmus is curiously 
loose ; it su^ests the style of a hundred years later, 
but his verlx^ and unfinished diction marks the early 
craftsman. He often reminds one of Lucilins and 
Plautus. 

The Attic comedy was developed on different lines, 

and, from about 460 B.C. onwards, followed in the steps 

of tragedy. The ground-form seems to be a twofold 

division, with the 'parabasis' between. First comes a 

> p. 33S, Lotcni, L*t*n, tte. * Fr. im»rt. 44. 



SICILIAN AND ATTIC COMEDY 277 

general explanation of the supposed situation and the 
meaning of the disguises; then the 'parabasis,' the 
'coming-forward' of the whole choir as , the author's 
representative, to speak in hts name about current 
topics of interest ; then a loose string of farcical 
scenes, illustrating, in no particular order or method, 
the situation as reached in the first part The end is 
a *c6mos' or revel, in which the performers go o£f 
rejoicing. For instance, in our earliest surviving 
comedy, the Achamians of Aristophanes, the first part, 
which has become genuinely dramatic by this time, 
explains how the hero contrives to make a private peace 
with the Peloponnesians ; then comes the 'parabasis'; 
then a series of disconnected scenes showing the fun 
that he and his family hav^ and the imhappy plight of 
all the people about them. 

Of the oldest comic writers — Chionides, Ecphantides, 
Magnes — we know little. The first important name is 
CraiInus, who carried on against Pericles — " the squiU- 
headed God Almighty" '*the child of Cronos and Double- 
dealing" — the same sort of war which was waged by 
Aristophanes against Cleon. Critics considered him in- 
comparable in force, but too bitter, Aristophanes often 
refers to him : he was " like a mountain-torrent, swe^ing 
doom houses and trees and people who stood in his wtty" 
He was an initiated Orphic, who had eaten the flesh of 
the bull Bacchus,' and also a devotee of Bacchus in the 
modem sense. In the Kni^ts (424 B.C.) his younger 
rival alluded to him pityingly as a fine fellow quite mined 
by drink. The reference roused the old toper. Next 
year he brought out \ii& Pyttne* (' Wine-Fla^ ')^ a kind 
of outspoken satire on himself, in which his wife Comedy 

> Or ii «o called in j«tt. Ai. Prtp, 357. See Hmu, Orfiutu, p. 106. 



S7t UTERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE 

redeems him from the clutches of the designing Pyttne. 
He won the first prize, and Aristophanes was last on the 
list. But a wreck he was after all, and was dead by 431. 
One of his actors — he emplojred three — was Crate% lAo 
wrote with some success, and has the distinction of having 
first produced dnmken men on the stage. 

pHERBKRATBS, who WOO his fiist victoiy in 437, was a 
praisewcvthy but tiresome writer, to judge by hb very 
numerous fragments. He had better plots than his ctm- 
temporaries, and approached the manner of the later 
comedy. He treats social subjects, such as the impu- 
dence of slaves and the ways of 'hetairai'; he has a 
violent attack on Timotheus and the new style of music. 
He also shows signs of the tendency which is so strong 
in Aristophanes, to make plays about imaginary r^ons 
of bliss ; in his Miners^ for instance, a golden age is 
found going on somewhere deep in or under the earth, 
and in his Ant-Mm* there was probably something 
similar. We only know of one political drama by him 
— an attack on Alcibiades, 

Eupous is the most highly praised of the contem- 
poraries of Aristophanes. His characteristic was yipiiit 
■charm' or 'grace,' as contrasted with the force and 
bitterness of Cratlnus, and the mixture of the two in 
Aristophanes. These three formed the canon of comic 
writers in Alexandria. It is said that the death of 
Eupolis in battle at the Hellespont was tiie occasion 
of exemption from military service being granted to 
professional poets. His political tendencies were so far 
similar to those of Aristophanes that the two collaborated 
in the most savage piece of comedy extant, the Km^Us, 
and accused one another of pl^iarism afterwards. That 
play was directed against Cleon, In the MarikAs* 



FIFTH-CENTURY COMEDY 279 

Eupolis wrote against Hyperbolus ; in the Dhnoi* he 
spoke well of Pericles as an orator (&ag. 94), but this 
was after his death and probably did not mean much. 
In reviling Cleon it was well to praise Pericles, just as 
in reviling Hyperbolus it was well to pniise Cleon. 
Comedy was an ultra-democratic institution, as fiie Old 
Oligarch remarked, yet all the comic writers have an 
aristocratic bias. TI^ is partly because their province 
was satire, not praise : if they were satisfied with the 
course of politics, they wrote about something else which 
they were not satisfied with. Partly, perhaps, it is 
that they shared the bias of the men of culture. But 
Eupolis was more liberal than Aristophanes. Aristo- 
phanes does not seem ever to have violently attacked 
rich people.* Eupolis wrote his Flatterers* against 
' Money-bag Callias ' and his train, and hb Baptai* or 
i?^t»^j* against Alcibiades. The latter piece represented 
one of those mystical and enthusiastic worships which 
were so prominent at the time, that of a goddess named 
Cotytto. Baptism was one of the rites ; and so was 
secrecy, unfortunately for the reputation of those con- 
cerned. The Greek layman attributed the worst possible 
motives to any one who made a secret of his religious 
observances or prayed in a low voice. 

Phrynichus, son of Eunomides, who won his first 
prize in 439, and Plato, of whom we know no piece 
cert^ly earlier than 405, bridge the transition to the 
comedy of manners, which arose in the fourth century. 
The Solitary* of Phrynichus is an instance of a piece 
which was a failure because it was produced some twenty 
years before the public were ready for it We have no 
purely political play iroxn Phrynlchns; from Plato we 

> Aldbiadei had Ukn at Uie Ume of the TV^hMw.* 



38o LITTRATURE OF AROERT GKEECE 

have a HyperMms* a Qig^itpw,* and one oiled tfie 
Alliance^* df^almg wi& die allrgrrf cuuapii^i cy of 
I'hiezx, and Aicibiade^ to get H;pcrfaoIia 



AkfftTOFHANES, 90H OF PHIIlPPCn% VBOH KTDJfTKEICAiOtf 

(a3(. 450 BX. Id oi. 585 ac) 

By far the most successful of tfie wrilen ol flie old 
comedy was Aristophanes ; and tiboi^ he bad oertam 
external advantages over Cratfams^ and enjoyed a moch 
longer active life than Eupolis^ be sccmsy by a oooh 
pari<9on of the fragments of all tbe mtteis of this fionn 
of literature, to have deserved bis %ntrrrm. He beld 
land in >Ef;tna« There is no reason to doubt bis foD 
Atlirtiirin citizenship, though some lines oi Enpolis 
{f^'^H,- ^^7)^ complaining of the success of foreigners, 
have l)ern supposed to refer to him. He probably 
l)C^an writing very young. At least he explains diat 
he h;i(l to produce his first piece, the DaUidis^ ('Men of 
(ffii77.lrtoii ') under the name of his older friend the actor 
CalliHtraftis ; partly because he was too young for some- 
W\\\\^ or ()th(T — perhaps too young to have much chance 
of obfaitiin^ a chorus from the archon ; partly because, 
llioitj^h he had written the play, he had not enough 
cxprrinice to train the chorus. This manner of produc- 
tion became almost a habit with him. He produced the 
IhiiUUh^^ lUthylonianSf'^ AchamianSf Birds^ and Lysistrata 
luulcr the name of Callistratus ; the Wasps^ Ampfuardus* 
aiul hn)gs under that of Phil6nides. That is, these 
two persons had the trouble of teaching the chorus, 
aiul the pleasure of receiving the state payment for 
the production. They also had their names proclaimed 



HRST APPEARANCES OF ARISTOPHANES 281 

as authors, thoi^h every one knew that they were oot 
so. Whatever monetary arrangement the poet eventu> 
ally made, this process meant the payment of money 
for the saving of trouble; and, taken tn conjunction 
with his land in i£gtna, and his general dislike for tiie 
poor, it warrants os in supposing that Aristophanes was a 
rich man. He had the prejudices and also the courage of 
the independent gentleman. His first piece {437 B,C.) 
was an attack on the higher education of the time, 
which the satirist of course, represented as immoral 
in tendency. The main character was the father of 
two sons, one virtuous and old-fashioned, the other 
vicious and new-fashioned. The young poet obtained 
the second prize, and was delighted.* Next year (426) 
he made a violent attack, with the vigour but not the 
caution of the Old Oligarch, on the ^tem of the 
Democratic Empire. The play was called the Beify- 
lomotts;* the chorus consisted of the allies represented 
as slaves working on the trendmill for their master 
Demos. The poet chose for the production of this 
play the midsummer Dionysia when the representa- 
tives of the allies were all present in Athens. He suc- 
ceeded in making a scandal, and was prosecuted by 
Cleon, apparently for treason. We do not know what 
the verdict was. In the Ackamians, Aristophanes makes 
a kind of apology for his indiscretion, and remarks that 
he had had such a rolling in dirt as all but killed him. 
He afterwards reserved his extreme home-truths for the 
festival of the Leniea, in early spring, before the season 
for foreigners in Athens, 

The Achamians was acted at the Lensea of 425 ; it is 

the oldest comedy [observed, and a very good one (see 

p. 277). It is political in its main purpose, and is directed 

' <:-!«i., SJ9. 



283 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

against Cleon and Lamachus, as representing the war 
party ; but the poet handles his f onnidable enemy with 
a certain cautioa ; while, on the other hand, he goes out 
(rf his way to attack Euripides (p. 260), whom he had 
doubtless already made responsible for the 'corrup- 
tion of the age' in the Dattalis.* We do not know 
of any personal cause of enmity between the two men ; 
but it is a feet that, in a degree bx surpassing the other 
comic writers, Aristophanes can never get Euripides 
out of his head. One might be content with the feet 
that Euripides was just the man to see how vulgar and 
unreal most of the comedian's views were, and that 
Aristophanes was acute enough to see that he saw it 
But it remains a curious thing that Aristophanes, in the 
first place, imifetes Euripides to a noteworthy extent — 
so much so that Cratlnus invented a word 'Euripid- 
aristophanize ' to descritw the style of the two ; and, 
secondly, he must, to judge from his parodies, have 
read and re-read Euripides till he knew him practically 
by heart 

In 424 Aristophanes had his real fling. The situation 
assumed in the Knights is that a crusty old man called 
Demos has fallen wholly into the power of his rascally 
Paphlagonian slave ; his two home-bred slaves get hold 
of an oracle of B^ds, ordaining that Demos shall be 
governed in turn by four 'mongers' or 'chandlers' — 
tiie word is an improvised coinage — each doomed to 
yield to some one lower than himself. The 'hemp- 
chandler' has had his day, and the 'sheep-chandler'; 
now there is the Paphlagonian ' leather-chandler,' who 
shall in due time pcld to — ^what 7 A ' black-pudding 
chandler 1' "Lord Poseidon, what a trade!" shouts the 
delighted house-slave, and at the critical instant there 



'ACHARNIANS.' 'KNIGHTS' 383 

appears an abnormally characteristic costermonger 
with a tray of black-puddings. The two conspirators 
rouse the man to his great destiny. The rest of the 
play is a wild stru^le between the Paphlagonian and 
the black-pudding man, in which the former is routed 
at his own favourite pursuits — lying, perjury, stealing, 
and the art of 'cheek.' The Papfal^onian, of course^ 
is Cleon, who owned a tannery ; the two slaves are 
Nikias and Demosthenes; the previous 'chandlers' 
were apparently Lysicles and Eucrates. But the poet 
tells us that, in the first place, he could get no actor 
to take the part of Cleon, and, secondly, that when he 
took the part himself the mask-painters refused to make 
a mask representing Cleon. The play is a perfect marvel 
of rollicking and reckless abuse. Yet it is wonderfully 
funny, and at the end, where there is a kind of trans- 
formation scene, the black-pudding man becoming a good 
genius, and Demos recovering his senses, there is some 
doquent and rather noble patriotism. The attack is 
not exactly venomous nor even damaging. It can have 
done very little to spoil Cleon's chances of election to 
any post he desired. It is a hearty deluge of mud 
in return for the prosecution of 426. Such a play, if 
once accepted by &e archon, and not interrupted by 
a popular tumult, was likely to win frantic applause; as a 
matter of f ac^ the Knights won the first prize. 

The next year there was a reaction. The CUuds, 
attacking the new culture as typified in Socrates, was 
beaten, both by the Wine-Flask * of the ' wreck ' 
Crattnus, and by the Connus* of Ameipsias. Aristo- 
phanes complains of this defeat' in a second ver^on 
of the play, which has alone come down to us. He 

• Cbttdi, 'panfaui*.' 



384 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

considered it the best thing be had ever written. Be- 
sides the 'parabasis,' two scenes in our Clouds are stated 
not to have occurred in the original play — the dialogue 
between the Just Cause and the Unjust Cause, and tiie 
rather effective close where Socrates's house is burnt. 
The present play is manifestly unfinished and does 
not hang together, but the interest taken by posterify 
in the main character has made it perhaps the most 
celebrated of all Aristophanes's works. The situation— 
an old man wishing to learn from a sophist the best way 
to avoid paying his debts — is not really a very happy 
one ; and, in spite (rf fbe exquisite style which Aristo- 
phanes always has at command, and the humour of 
particular situationa, the play is rather tame. Socrates 
must have done something to attract public notice at 
this time, since he was also the hero of the Conaus,* 
Ameipsias described him as a poor, hungry, ragged 
devil, who 'insulted the bootmakers' by his tuked feet, 
but nevertheless 'never deigned to flatter.' That cari- 
cature is nearer to the original than is the sophist of the 
Clouds, who combines various traits of the real Socrates 
with all the things he most emphatically disowned — the 
atheism of Diagoras, the grammar of Protagoras, the 
astronomy and physics of Diogenes of ApoUonia. How- 
ever, the portrait is probably about as true to life as 
those of Cleon, Agathon, or Cleonymus, and considerably 
less ill-natured. 

In 422 Aristophanes returned again from the move- 
ment of thought to ordinary politics. The Wa^s is a 
satire on the love of the Athenians for »tting in the 
jury courts and trying cases. It must have been a 
fascinating occupation to many minds : there was intel- 
lectual interest in it, and the charm of conscious power. 



'CLOUDS.' 'WASPS.' 'PEACE' 285 

But it is hard to believe that too many difficulties were 
settled by 'Justice/ and too few by force, even in the 
last quarter of the fifth century. Nor is it necessary to 
conclude that Aristophanes would really have liked a 
return to the more primitive methods which the growth 
of Athenian law had superseded. The Wa^s probably^ 
won the first prize. Ite political tendency is visible in 
the names of the insane old judge Phtlocleon and his 
mser son Bdelycleon — 'Love-Cleon ' and 'Loathe-CIeon ' 
respectivdy. And the sham trial got up for the enter- 
tainment of Philocleon is a riddle not hard to read : the 
dog Labes is vezatiously prosecuted by a dt^ (' Ku6n ') 
from Kydathenaion for stealing a cheese, just as the 
general Laches had been prosecuted by Cleon from 
Kydathenaion for extortion. The various ways in which 
Philocleon's feelings are worked upon, his bursts of in- 
dignation and of pity, look like a good parody of the 
proceedings of an impulsive Athenian jury. Racine's 
celebrated adaptation, Les Plaideurs, does not quite make 
up by its superior construction for its loss of 'go' and 
naturalness. The institutions of the Wasps are essentially 
those of its own age. 

In 421 Aristophanes produced the Peace, a nchauffi 
of the Aehamians, brilliantly redeemed by the parody 
of Euripides's BelUrophott* with which it opens. The 
hero does not possess a Pegasus, as Bellerophon did, 
but he fattens up a big Mount Etna beetle— the huge 
beast that one sees rolling balls in the sandy parts of 
Greece and Italy — and Eies to heaven upon it, to the 
acute annoyance of his servants and daughters, T^e 
P^iee won the second prize. 

After 421 comes a gap of seven years in our records. 
>11w 'Hrpoibaia'iiconBpt (y, LeoinXA. Mm; noiU. 



2t6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

We may guess that the Old Age,* in which some old men 
were rejuvenated, was produced in the interval, and also 
the AmpAiardus,* in which some one goes to 'dream 
a dream' in the temple of the hero at Ordpus. The 
same subject is satirised in the Pluius many years after 
{cf. also p. 328). The next play in our tradition is Aristo- 
{dianes's unquestioned masterpiece, the Birds (414 B.C.). 
It has perhaps more fun, certainly more sustained in- 
terest, and more exquisite imagination and lyric beauty, 
than any of his other works. It is a revelation of the 
extraordinary heights to which the old comedy with 
all its grotesqueness could rise. The underlying motive 
is the familiar desire to escape from the worry of 
reality, into some region of a quite different sort Two 
Athenians, Peithetairus ('Persuader*) and Euelptdis 
(' Hopefulson '), having realised the fact that T£reus was 
a king of Athens before he was turned into a hoopoe 
and became king of the Birds — a fact established beyond 
doubt by Sophocles and other highly-respected poets — 
determine to find him ou^ and to form a great Bird- 
commonwealth. Peithetairus is a splendid character, 
adapting himself to every situation and converting 
every opponent He rouses the melancholy T6reus ; 
convinces the startled and angry Birds ; gets wings 
made ; establishes a constitution, public buildings, and 
defences ; receives and rejects multitudes of applicants 
for citizenship, admitting, for instance, a lyric-poet and 
a 'father-beater,' who seems to be the ancient equivalent 
for a wife-beater, but drawing the line at a prophet »" 
inspector, and a man of science. Meantime tiie new 
city has blocked the communication of the gods with 
Earth, and cut oflF their supplies of incense. TTieir 
messenger Iris is arrested for trespassing on the Birds' 



THE BIRDS a8; 

territor7, and Peithetairus nukes the poor girl cry 1 At 
last the gods have to propose terms. Bat a deserter 
has come to Peithetairus t>eforehand : it is Prometheus^ 
the enemy of Zeus, hiding from ' Them Above ' under 
a large umbrella — how much further can cheery pro- 
faxdty go ? — and bringing information about the weak- 
ness of the gods. When the embassy comes, it consists 
of one wise man, Poseidon ; one stupid man, who is 
seduced by the promise of a good dinner, Heracles ; and 
one absolute fool, Triballos, who cannot talk intelligibly, 
and does not know what he is voting for. Zeos restores 
to the Birds the sceptre of the world, and gives to 
Peitheturus the hand of his beautiful dau^ter Ba^leta 
(' Sovereign^ ')^ and 'Cloudcuckootown' is established 
for ever. A lesser man would have felt bound to bring 
it to grief ; but the rules of comedy really forbade such 
an ending, and Aristophanes is never afraid of his own 
fancies. There is very little political allusion in the 
play. Aristophanes's party were probably at the time 
content if they could prevent Athens from sending rein- 
forcements to Sicily and savii^ the army that was 
during these very months rotting under the walls of 
Syracuse. The whole play is a refusal to think about 
such troublous a&irs. It was beaten by Amnpsias's 
RtwUen,* but seems to have made some impression, 
as Archippus soon after wrote his Fiskts* in imitation 
of it 

The next two plays of our tradition are written under 
the shadow of the oligarchy of 411. Politics are not 
safe, and Aristophanes tries to make up for them by 
daring indecency. The Lysistrata might be a very fine 
play ; the heroine is a real character, a Idnd of female 
Peithetairus, with more high principle and less sense of 



2S8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 



The mam idea — the women strike id a bodj 
aad refoK to have any dealing witfa men until peace is 
made — was capable of any land of treatment ; and flie 
canons thing is fliat Aristoidianea^ while pro f e ssin g to 
lidicule the women, is all throng oo ttieir side. Tlie 
jokea made by the soperior sex at the c ip euae of the 
inferior — to ^ve ttiem flieir Roman names— are seldom 
remarkable either for generosity or for lefinement And 
it is onr anUiOf's pleasant faumoor to accuse everybody 
of every vice he can ttiink of at the moment Yet with 
the sii^le exception diat he credits women with an 
inordinate fondness for mne-parties — the eqnivalenl^ it 
would aeem, erf afternoon tea — he makes ttiem, on Qw 
^ihotef perceptibly mrav sensible and more ' sympatiietic ' 
than his men. Of conrse the emancipation of women 
was one of the ideas of the time. Aristophanes wrote 
two plays on the subject, and that before Plato had made 
his famous pronouncement, or the Cynics started their 
women-preachers. Two other comedians, Amphis and 
Alexis, followed his lead. It was an instinct in Aristo- 
phanes to notice and superficially to assimilate most of 
the advanced thought of his time ; if he had gone 
deeper, he would have taken things seriously and spoilt 
his work. He always turns back before he has under- 
stood too much, and ujes his half-knowledge and partial 
sympathy to improve his mocking. 

The Thtsmi^horiamtsa, written in the same year and 
under the same difBculties, is a very clever play. The 
women assembled at the feast of Thesmophoria, to 
which no men were admitted, take counsel together how 
to have revenge on Euripides for representing such 
'horrid' women in his tragedies. Euripides knows of 
the plan, and persuades his father-in-law to go to the 



LYSISTRATA. THESMOPHORIAZUSiE 289 

meeting in disguise and speak in his defence. The in< 
truder is discovered and handed over to a policeman ; 
he eventually escapes b; his son-in-law's help. Euripides 
hums fn^ments of his own plays behind the scenes, and 
the prisoner hums answering fragments under the poUce- 
man's nose, till the plot is arranged. The play was acted 
twice in slightly different versions. 

In the next few years we have the Lemniem Womm,* 
about the newly-established worship of Bendis at the 
Pirxus; the Girftadis,* which seems to have been 
similar in plot to the Fro^; and the Phanissce,* in mere 
parody — a new departure this — of Euripides's tragedy of 
that name. We have also a play directed against Alci- 
biades, the TriphaUs.* It dealt certainly with his private 
life, and possibly vrith his public action. If so, it is the 
last echo of the pohtical drama of the fifth century, a 
[»x>duction for which the world has never again possessed 
sufficient ' parrhteia ' — * firee-spokenness.' 

The death of Euripides in 406 gave Aristophanes the 
idea of founding a whole play, the Frogs, on the contrast 
between the poetry of his childhood and that which was 
called new — though, as a matter of fac^ this latter was 
passing swiftly out of existence, .i^^schylus and Euripides 
were dead, Sophocles dying ; Agathon had retired to 
Macedonia. The patron-god of the drama, Dionysus, 
finds life intolerable with such miserable poets as now 
are left him. He resolves to go to Hades and fetch 
Euripides back. When he gets there — his adventures 
on the way, disguised as Heracles, but very unworthy 
of the lion's skin, are among the best bits of fun in 
Aristophanes — he finds that after all Euripides is not 
alone. j^Eschylus is there too ; and the position becomes 
delicate. The two were already disputing about the 



ago LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

place of hoDOur when he came. The death of Sophocles 
must have occurred when the play was half written : he 
has to be mentioned, but is represented as having no 
wish to return to earth ; while Dionysus himself a£Fect5 
to be anxious to see what sort of work lophon will do 
without his father's help. His poetry is not criticised 
or parodied. On the arrival of Dionysus, there follows 
a long contest t}etween the two poets. It seems a 
pedantic subject, and it is certainly wonderful that an 
Athenian audience can have sat listening and laughing 
for hours to a piece of literary criticism in the form of a 
play. But the bet remains that the play makes even a 
modem reader laugh aloud as he reads. As to the judg- 
ments passed on the two poets, one may roughly say 
that the parodies are admirable, the analytical criticism 
childish.' Aristophanes feels all the points with singular 
sensitiveness, but he does not know how to name them 
or expound them, as, for instance, Aristotle did. The 
choice is hard to make : " / tktHk the one <iever, but 1 
4Hjoy the other," says Dionysus. Eventually he leaves the 
decision to his momentary feelings and chooses i£schylus. 
It would be quite wrong to look on the play as a mere 
attack on Euripides. Tlie case would be parallel if we 
could imagine some modem writer like the late Mr, 
Calverley, a writer of comedy and parody with a keen 
and classic literary taste, sending Dionysus to call Brown- 
ing back to us, and deciding in the end that he would 
sooner have Keats. 

There comes another great gap before we mee^ in 
392, the poorest of Aristophanes's plays, the EccUsias^a 
or ' Women in Parliament.' It reads at first like a parody 
of the scheme for communism and abolition of the 
^ tht nuuiG^ ciiticwiir which i$ plcDtifuI, of coune putei over our betidi. 



FROGS. ECCLESIAZUS^ PLUTUS 39 1 

family given by Plato in R^iMic V. The dates will 
not allow this; but it is, of course, quite likely that 
Plato had expressed some such views in lectures or 
conversatton before he put them in writing. The 
schemes are far from identicaL In Plato the sexes are 
equal ; in Aristophanes the men are dish*anchi5ed. The 
marriage system is entirely different The communism 
and the simplification of life might be sympathetic paro- 
dies of Plato, but Aristophanes will not have the severe 
training or the militaiy saints at any price. The 
EccUsioMdia has a larger subject than the merely 
political Lysistrata, but it is a much tamer play. 

The Plutus (388 B,c.) is the last play of Aristophanes 
preserved, and is very difiFerent from the rest It may 
almost be called a play without personalities, without 
politics, without parat>asts ; that b, it twlongs practically 
not to the old but to the middle comedy — tiie transi- 
tion to the pure comedy of manners. It is, indeed, 
still founded on a sort of 'hypothesis/ like the Birds 
or the Ackamians. Plutus ('Wealth'} is a blind god; 
if we could catch him and get his eyesight restored 
by a competent oculist or a miracle-working temple, 
what a state of things it would be I The main lines 
of the play form merely the working out of this 
idea. But the new traits appear in many details; 
we have the comic slave, impudent, rascally, but 
indispensable, who plays such an important part in 
Menander and Terence, and we have character-draw- 
ing for its own sake in the hero's friend Blepsid£mus. 
We hear of two later plays called Aiolosikon* and 
CScalus,* which Aristophanes gave to his son Ardrds 
to make his d^but with. Sikon is a cook's name ; so, 
presumably, the first represented the old Wind-god 



202 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

acting in that capacity. The second, like so many of 
the new comedy plays, contained a story, not comic bat 
romantic, with a seduction and a recognition. 

Aristophanes is beyond doubt a very great writer. 
The wisdom of his politics, the general value of bis 
view of life, and, above all, the 'Sittliche Emst' which 
his admirers find in his treatment of his opponents' 
alleged vices, may well be questioned. Ye^ admitting 
that he often opposed what was best in his ag^ or 
advocated it on the lowest grounds ; admitting that his 
slanders are beyond description, and that as a rule he 
only attacks the poor, and the leaders of the poor — 
nevertheless he does it all with such exuberant hi^ 
spirits, such an air of its all beii^ nonsense tc^ether, 
such insight and swiftness, such incomparable direct- 
ness and charm of style, ttiat even if some Archelaus 
bad handed him over to Euripides to scourge, he 
would probably have escaped his well-earned whipping. 
His most characteristic quality, perhaps, is his combina- 
tion of the wildest and broadest farce on the one hand, 
with the most exquisite lyric beauty on the other. Of 
course the actual lyrics are loose and casual in work- 
manship ; it argues mere inexperience in writing lyric 
verse for a critic seriously to compare them in this 
respect with the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides. 
But the genius is there, if the hard work is not 

As a dramatist, Aristophanes is careless about construc- 
tion ; but he has so much 'go ' and lifting power that he 
makes the most absurd situations credible. He has a 
real gift for imposing on his audience's credulity. His 
indecency comes partly, no doubt, from that peculiarly 
Greek narveU, which is the result of simple and un- 
affected living ; partly it has no excuse to urge except 



T"« 



APPRECIATION OF ARISTOPHANES »9$ 

that it is not deliberately vicious (and ^ p. 211). It is 
instructive to know that Plato liked Aristophanes. Of 
course their politics ^eed ; bat if there is any truth 
in the anecdote ' that Plato made Dionysius of Syracuse 
read the Knights in order to see what Athenian political 
life was like, it was merely the free-speaking that he 
wished to illustrate. The comedian's speech in the Sym- 
posium shows the inner bond which united these two ^eat 
princes of imagination. But only his own age could really 
stand Aristophanes. The next century wanted more 
refinement and character-work, more plot and sentiment 
and sobriety. It got what it wanted in Menander. 
The Alexandrians indeed had enough of the genuine 
antiquarian spirit to love the old comedy. It was full of 
information about bygone things, it was hard, it belonged 
thoroughly to the past; they studied Aristophanes 
more than any poet except Homer. Bat later ages 
found him too wild and strong and breezy. Plutarch's 
interesting criticism of him as compared with Menander 
is like an invalid's description of a high west wind. 
At the present day he seems to share with Homer and 
i£schylus and Theocritus the power of appealing directly 
to the interest and sympathy of almost every reader. 
>raii n. in Duebtwi'i SchtlU. 




XIV 

PLATO 

Plato, son of Abiston, from Koll^cs (427-347 b.c.) 

Descended by his father's ade from Codnis, the last 
king of Attica, throu^ his mother from Solon ; a cousin 
of Critias and nephew of Charmides; an accomplished 
gymnast and wrestler, a facile and witty writer; with 
a gift for occasional poems and an ambition towards 
tragedy, with an unusually profound training in music, 
mathematics, and letters, as well as a dash of Heraclitean 
philosophy ; Plato must have seemed in his first youth a 
type of the brilliant young Athenian aristocrat. He might 
have aspired to a career like that of Alcibiades, but his 
traditions and preferences made him turn away from legiti- 
mate political action. He despised the masses, and was 
not going to flatter them. He went in sympathies, if not 
in action, with his relatives along the road dimly pointed 
by the Old Oligarch — the road of definite conspiracy with 
help from abroad. When he first met Socrates he was 
twenty, and not a philosopher. He was one of the 
fashionable youths who gathered about that old sage to 
enjoy the process of having their wits sharpened, and 
their dignified acquaintances turned into ridicule. These 
young men were socially isolated as well as exclusive. 
They avoided the Ecclesia, where oligarchism was not 
admitted ; their views were as a rule too 'advanced' for 



HIHES 29S 

official exposition on the stage. They mostly read their 
tragedies to one another. 

Plato amused his friends with a new kind of literature, 
the mime. It was a form which seems to t>e intro- 
ducing itself among ourselves at the present moment 
— the close study of little social scenes and conversa- 
tions, seen mostly in the humorous aspect The two 
great mime-writers^ Epicharmus and Sophron, had by 
this time made their way from Sicily to all the cul- 
tured circles of Greece, Plato's own efforts were in 
prose, like Sophron's, though we hear that be slept 
with the poems of Epicharmus under bis pillow. A 
mass of material lay ready to hand — one Tisamenus of 
Teos had perhaps already utilised it — in the conversa- 
tions of Socrates with the divers philosophers and digni- 
taries. Plato's earliest dialogue * seems to be preserved. 
In the Lachts Socrates is formally introduced to the 
reader as a person able, in spite of his unpromising 
appearance, to discuss all manner of subjects. Two 
fathers, who are thinking of having their sons trained 
by a certain semt-quackish fencing-master, ask the great 
generals Laches and Nikias to see one of his perform- 
ances and advise them. Socrates b called into the 
discussion, and after some pleasant character-drawing 
it is made evident that the two generals have no notion 
what courage is, nor consequently what a soldier ought 
to be. The Greater Hippias is more outspokenly humo- 

* I follow mainlr the lingniitJc tedi u givcD in C Rhtet's itatiitiMl 
tabid. The chief objecdoni lo tU> metltod ue — (i) tbe(Uli*tici>Tenot jet 
mffidentlr compieheniive uid delicate ; (1) It 1* diffictilt to allow for the fiut, 
which it both aRcatcd by tiaditioa and independently demonstiable, that 
Plato med to work over hit psbliihed dialopies. Bat I do not expect the 
reaalti «f Campbell, IMttenboger, Scham, Gompen, Blan, Ritlec, to bt 



ipA UTERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECfi 

rons. Socrates applies to the sophist to know what 
'the beaatiful' (to mX^v) is ; he has a 'friend' at home 
'with a big stick' who asks him questions of this s(Mt, 
and will not let him sleep of nights till he answers them. 
The point of the dialogue lies in the utter incapacity of 
Hippias, for all his wide infonnation and practical 
ability, to grasp an abstract idea, and in his gradoal 
di^ust at the coarse langu^e and outrageous conduct 
which Socrates imputes to the imaginary friend. 

A change in the manner of these mimes comes with 
the events of 404-403 b.c. We could be sure even without 
the testimony of Letter VII. that Plato must have looked 
with eager expectation at the attempt of the Thirty to 
"stay but for a moment the pride of the accursed 
Demos," * and introduce a genuine aristocracy ; he must 
have been bitterly disappointed when their excesses 
"made the Demos seem gold in comparison" His two 
kinsmen fell in the streets fighting against their country- 
men J their names were universally execrated by the 
Athens of the Restoration. Plato had loved Charmides, 
and chooses a characteristic imaginative way to defend 
his memory. The Thirty were guilty of t^pm — ' pride,' 
' intemperance/ whatever we call it Admitted ; what is 
their excuse ? That they never knew any more than any 
one else what trto^ooin^ ('soberness,' 'healthy-minded- 
nes3 *) was. Plato goes back from the slain traitor Char- 
mides to the Charmides of 430 ; a boy full of promise 
and of all the ordinary qualities that men praise — nobly 
bom, very handsome, docile, modest, eager to learn. 
Socrates affects to treat htm for a headache ; but you 
cannot treat the head without the body, nor the body 
without the soul. Is his soul in health ? Has he 

> Alleged qillBph of Cridu. 



!■- 



404 AND 399 497 

cit^pocSvtt f In the result, of course, it appears that 
no one knows what this health of soul is. Charmides 
seems to be full of vtt^poawtt ; his friends are sure of 
it ; but his hold must be precarious of a thing which he 
does not really know. " Tie sorrow of it is to tkUtk how 
you, being so fair in shape, and besides that so sober in soul, 
wiU perhaps have no help in Ufefrom thai Soberness." He 
determines to come to Socrates and try with him to 
learn the real nature of it Critias agrees ; but Critias 
himself is an influence as well as Socrates, and "when 
Critias intends to mahe some attempt and is in the mood for 
vioUnee, no man living tan withstand him," 

In 399 came the event which shadowed all Plato's 
life, the execution of Socrates. We do not know what 
he did at the time ; the Phetdo says that " Plato was 
mtiay through sickness," but that may be merely due 
to the artistic convention which did not allow the 
writer himself to appear in his work. For us Socrates's 
death means an outburst of passionate and fiery writing 
from Plato, and an almost complete disappearance of 
the light-hearted mockery of his earlier dialogues. Hb 
style was practically at its perfection hy 399 : the 
linguistic t^ts seem to show that he bad already com- 
posed his skit on Rhetorical Showpieces, the Menexenus; 
his masterpiece of mere dramatic work, the Protagoras, 
with its nine characters, its full scenic bac^round, its 
subtle appreciation of different points of view ; the 
Euthydimus, with its broadly-comic satire on the Eristic 
sophists; and the Cratybu, which discusses the nature 
of language in as serious a spirit as could be expected 
before the subject had become a matter of science. 

The Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Phado, are all 
directly inspired by Socrates's death. Hie firs^ the only 



398 UTERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE 

philosophical work of Plato that is not a dialogue, pnr- 
portB to be Socrate^s defence at his trial, but is, in 
fact, neither a speech for a real court nor an answer 
to a legal accuaatioo, but a glorification of a g^tat 
man's whole character in file face of later Atiienian 
rumoura. It cannot have been written for some yeais 
after 399. The Cri^ is in the same spirit ; it tells how 
Crito had arranged for Socrates to escape from prison, 
and how Socrates would not evade or d^bey the laws. 
The Eutkypkro is a slight sketch, framed on the usual 
plan : people were ready to put Socr?.tes to death iar 
impiety, when no one r^y knew what piety was. The 
Pkesdo gives the last hours in prison, the discourse on the 
immortality of the soul, and the drinking of the poison. 
It is realistic in every detail, but the realism is softened 
partly by the essential nobleness of the actors, partly 
by an artistic device which Plato loved in the middle 
period of his work : the conversation is not given 
directly, it is related by Phaedo, who had been present, 
to one Echecrates of Phlius, some years after, and far 
from Athens. "There is nothing in any tragedy ancient 
or modem," says the late Master of Balliol, "nothing 
in poetry or history (with one exception), like the last 
hours of Socrates in Plato." Very characteristic is the 
lack of dogmatism or certainty : one argument after 
another is brought up, followed intently, and then, to 
the general despair, found wanting ; that which is ulti- 
mately left unanswered is of a metaphysical character, 
like the Kantian position that the SeU, not being in 
Time, cannot be destroyed in Time. 'Soul' is that by 
which things live; when things die, it is by being 
separated from Soul : therefore Soul itself cannot be 
conceived dead. It is an argument that carries conviction 



PLATO ON THE DEATH OF SOCRATES 299 

to minds of a particular quality in speculative moments. 
The ordinary human comment upon it is given by Plato 
in that last moment of intolerable strain, when Pbsdo 
veils his face, and Crito starts to his feet, and "ApolU- 
dSrus, who had never ceased weeing all the time, burst 
out in a loud and angry ay which broke dovm everyone 
but Socrates" 

As for the GorgiaSf It seems to fulfil a prophecy put 
into the mouth of Socrates in the Apology; "You have 
killed tne because you thought to escape from giving an 
account of your lives. But you will be disappointed. There 
are others to amvictyou, accusers whom I held back when yon 
knew it not; tk^ will be harsher inasmuch as they are 
younger, and you will wince the more." The Gorgias is full 
of the sting of recent suffering. It begins by an inquiry 
into the nature of Rhetoric ; it ends as an indictment of 
all 'rhltores' and politicians and the whole public life of 
Athens. Rhetoric is to real statesmanship as cookery is 
to medicine ; it is one of the arts of pleasing or 'flattery.' 
There are two conceivable types of statesman : the true 
counsellor, who will oppose the sovereign when he goes 
wrong ; and the false, who will make it bis business from 
childhood to drink in the spirit of the sovereign, to 
understand instinctively all his likes and dislikes. He 
will be the tyrant's favourite, or the great popular leader, 
according to circumstances, but always and every- 
where a mere flatterer, bad and miserable. "He will kill 
your true counsellor, anyhow," retorts Callicles, the advo- 
cate of evil, "if he gives trot^lel" "As ^ I did not 
know that," answers Socrates — "^ua a bad man can kilt a 
good I" Callicles admits that all existing politicians are 
of the worse type, imitators of the sovereign, but holds 
that Themistocles and Kim6n and Pericles were true 



300 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

statesmen. "AU flattertrSf eoeks, confutumers, tavtrm- 
hirers I" answers Socrates; "Whom have they made 
better? They have filled the dty ttnih harbours, doAs^ 
walls, tributes, and such trash, instead of tempetvtue and 
righietmsness f" They have made the city bloated and 
sick; when the crisis comes, the city will know bow 
it has been deceived, and tear in pieces its present 
flatterers] The dialogue breaks into four main theses: 
It is worse to do than to suffer wrong ; it is better to 
be punished for wrong done than not to be punished ; 
we do not what we will, but what we desire ; to be, 
and not to seem, is the end of life. It is characteristic 
of Plato that anger against the world never makes him 
cynical, but the reverse : he meets his griefs by harder 
thinking and more determined faith in his highest 
moral ideal. He speaks in the Phado of men who are 
made misanthropic by disappointments ; "It is bad that, 
to hate your fellow-men; but it is worse to hate Reason 
and the Ideal." He fell, like Carlyle, and perhaps like 
Shakespeare, into the first error ; he never came near the 
second. 

The next dialogue, Meno, on the old question "whether 
Goodness is Teachable," still bears the stamp of Socrates's 
death in the introduction of Anytus and the rather cruel 
references to his son (see above, p. 176). But pure 
speculation predominates, especially the theory of Ideas, 
which was already prominent in the Phado. The Lysis, 
on Friendship, is an unimportant work ; Plato could 
only treat that subject under the deeper name of Love. 
This he does in two dialogues which stand apart, even in 
Plato, for a certain glamour that is all their own. The 
Phadrus comes later ; the Symposium marks the close 
of this present period. If the claim were advanced that 




THE SYMPOSIUM 301 

the Symposium was absolutely the highest work of prose 
fiction ever composed, most perfect in power, beauty, 
imaginative truth, it would l>e hard to deny it ; nor b 
it easy to controvert the metaphysician who holds it 
to be the deepest word yet spoken upon the nature 
of Love ; but in it, as in almost all Plato, there is no 
enjoyment for him who has not to some extent learnt 
* Htllenisch nt tmpfitiden' We will only notice one 
point in its composition ; it is the last echo of 399. 
The spirit of the CharmieUs has come back, in a stronger 
fonn ; we reach all the splendour of the Symposium only 
by crossing the gulf of many deaths, by ignoring so- 
called facts, by seeing through eyes to which the tfiings 
of the world have strange proportions. Of the characters, 
some are as little known to us as Callicles was ; of the 
res^ Agathon, the triumphant poet, the idol of Athens, 
who gives the banquet in honour of his first tragic vic- 
tory, has died long since, disappointed and a semi<exile, 
in Macedon ; Phaednis has turned false to philosophy 
— 'lost,' as Plato says in another place; Socrates has 
been executed as a criminal ; Alcibiades shot to death 
by barbarian assassins, Aristophanes had been, in Plato's 
belief, one of the deadliest of Socrates's accusers. It is 
a tribute to that Periclean Athens which Plato loves to 
blacken, that he always goes back to it to find his ideal 
meetings and memories, llie Symposium seems like 
one of those "gUmpses of the outside of the sky" in the 
PJuedrus, which the soul catches before its bodily birth, 
and which it is always dimly stru^ling to recover. We 
get back to it through that ApoUodftrus whose sobs 
broke the argument of the Pkado; he is nicknamed 
'the Madman' now, a solitary man, savage against all 
the world except Socrates. It is he who tells Glaucon, 



302 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Plato's brother, the story of the Banquet Not that he 
was there himself; it was long before his time, as it 
was before Glaucon's; but he heard it from AristodCmus, 
"a UttU unshod man " who had followed Socrates. So, by 
indirect memories, we reach the Banquet- We hear the 
various accounts of the origin and meaning of Love, at 
last that learnt by Socrates from the Mantinean prophetess 
Diotlma. Love is the child of Poverty and Power {vipov) ; 
the object of Love is not Beauty but Eternity, though 
it is only in that which is beautiful that Love can bear 
fruit. The lover begins by loving some one beautiful 
person ; then he feels bodily beauty everywhere, then 
**beauHfiti souls and deeds and habits," till at last he 
can open his eyta to " the grtat ocean of the heauHfui" in 
which he finds his real life. The passion of his original 
earthly love is not by any means dulled, it persists in 
intensity to the end, when at last he sees that ultimate 
cause of all the sea of beautiful things, Perfect Beauty, 
never becoming nor ceasing, waxing nor waning; "it 
is not like any face or hands or bodily thing; it is not 
word nor thought; it is not in something else, neither 
living thing, nor earth nor heaven; only by itself in its 
own way in one form it for ever Is (awro laiff ahrh luff 
avTov fuivoei&h aeX Sv)." If a man can see that, he has 
his life, and nothing in the worid can ever matter to him. 
Suddenly at this point comes a beating on the door, 
and enters Alcibiades, revelling, "with many crowns in 
his hair" ; we have his absorption into the Banquet, and 
his speech in praise of Socrates, the brave, wise, sinless. 
Then — we hear — came a second and louder noise, an 
inroad of cold night air and unknown drunken revellers. 
Most of the guests slipped away. Aristod£mus, who was 
waiting for Socrates, drew back and fell asleep, till he 




PLATO'S FIRST VISIT TO SICILY 303 

woke in grey dawn to find the feast over, only Socrates 
still unchanged, discoursing to Agathon and Aristophanes. 
Aristod&nus was weary and could not follow the whole 
argument ; he only knew that it showed how comedy 
and tragedy are the same thing. 

But by this time new influences were at work in 
Plato's development On his master's death be had 
retired with other Socratics to Megara, where the whole- 
hearted protection of Eucleides laid the seeds in Plato's 
mind of a life-long respect and friendliness towards the 
barren M^aric dialectics. The Got^as can scarcely 
have been written in Athens. We hear vaguely of 
travels in Egypt and Cyrene. But Plato seems to have 
returned home before 388 B,c., when he made his first 
foteful expedition to Sicily. Most of Sicily was at this 
time a centralised military despotism in the hands of 
Dionysius I., whose l>rother-in-law, Dion, was an enthu- 
siastic admirer of Plato. It was partly this friend, partly 
the Pythagorean schools, and partly interest in the great 
volcano, which drew Plato to Syracuse ; and he probably 
considered that any tyrant's court was as fit a place for a 
philosopher as democratic Athens. But he was more a 
son of his age and country than he ever admitted. He 
could not forgo the Athenian's privil^e of wappiicia 
(free speech), and he used it in the Athenian manner^ on 
politics. The old autocrat put him in irons, and made 
a present of him — so the legend runs — to the Spartan 
ambassador Pollis. Pollis sold him as a slave in jCglna, 
where one Annikeris of C3n'ene — a foUower of Aristippus 
apparently, heaping coals of fire on the anti-Hedonisfs 
head — bought him into freedom, and refused to accept 
repayment from Plato's friends; who, since the sub- 



304 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

McripHota bad been already collected, devoted the money 
to boTuig tbe pbilosopher a house and garden to teach 
in, about twenty minotes' walk from Attiens, near the 
gymnaaiam sacred to the hero Acadtania. This was in 
387, at least two yeais t>efore the Sjvi^anum. But every 
detail in this story varies, and our oldest evidence, the 
Sevefitk Lttter, ^es nothing b^ond tbe fact of a dis- 
appotntii^ visit 

The founding of tbe school was a return to the habit 
of the older philosopherB. The Academy was technically 
a ' Tkiatot,' or religious organisation, for the worship of 
the Muses, with officers, a constitution, and landed pro- 
perty. The head was elected ; mathematics, astronomy, 
and various sciences were taught, as well as p^osophy. 
The lecturers overflowed from the 'Scholarch's' modest 
house and library into the garden and public gym- 
nasium; it was only later that they acquired adequate 
buildings. Women students attended as well as men. 
Tbe institution preserved its unity, and regularly burned 
incense to Plato as 'hero-founder' upon his birthday, 
amid the most complete changes of tendency and doc- 
trine, till it was despoiled and abolished by Justinian in 
529 A.D. as a stronghold of Paganism. The early fourth 
century was a great period for school-founding, Anti- 
sthenes had begun his lectures in Kynosarges, the gym- 
nasium of the base-bom, soon after Socrates's death. 
Isocrates had followed with his system of general culture 
about 390 B,c. The next generation saw the establish- 
ment of the Lyceum or Peripatos by Aristotle, the Stoa 
by Zeno, and the Garden by Epicurus. 

Whatever the date of the founding of tbe Academy, 
after the Symposium there appears, on internal evidence, 
to be a marked int«val in Plato's literary work. The 



PLATO AS 'SCHOLARCH' 305 

next two dialogues, Parvumdes and Tkeatitus, bear the 
stamp of the recognised philosophical ' Scholarch.' Hie 
former is unmixed metaphjrsics : a critical examination, 
first, of the kind of Being possessed by what Plato calls 
'Ideas'— our 'General Conceptions'; and, secondly, of 
the Absolute Being of Parmentdes. The attacks on 
the authenticity of this dialogue are merely due to the 
difficulty which critics have found in fitting it into any 
consistent theory of Plato's philosophy ; it is impossible 
that the author of the ParmenuUs can have held that 
crude 'Theory of Ideas' which Aristotle has taught us 
to regard as Platonic The Themtltus condescends to a 
dramatic introduction : Eucleides has just been to the 
Piraeus to meet Thestfitus, who is returning, dangerously 
wounded and ill, from the Corinthian War, when he meets 
Terpsion, and they talk of the celebrated meeting long ago 
between Theset£tus and Socrates. But the introduction 
has become an external thing, and the dialogue itself is 
severe reasoning upon the Theory of Knowledge. Plato 
remarks that he has purposely left out the tiresome 
repetitions of 'he said' and 'I said'; that is, he has taken 
away the scenery and atmosphere, and left the thought 
more bare. 

The next dialogue of this period is apparently the 
Phrndfus; the evidence is as conclusive as such evidence 
can ever be. The technical terms which Plato coined, 
the ways of avoiding hiatus, the Uttle mannerisms which 
mark his later style, are palpably present in the Phadrus, 
The statistics will not allow it to be eadier than 375. 
On the other hand, it not only leaves an impression of 
imaginative and exuberant youthfulness, but it demon- 
strably bears some close relation to Isocrates's speech 
AffUMSt the Sophists, which was written about 390, at 




3o6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the opening of his schooL We cannot teU which was 
originally the provocation and which the answer ; con- 
trover^al writings in antiqui^ were generally worked 
over and over till each side had answered the other to 
its own satisfaction. But the tone of mutual criticism is 
clear, and the Phadrus ends with a supposed message 
to Isocrates from the master, 'Isocrates is young yet' 
— ^that is, of course, at the imaginary date of the con- 
versation — ' and is too jQne material to be a mere orator ; 
if he will turn to philosophy, he has the genius for it' 
" Take that mMSsage from tm, Pkathms, to Isocrates wkem 
I love." If this is 'polemic,' it is not living polemic ; it 
is the tone of an old friend letting bygones be bygones, 
and agreeing to respect a di£Ference of opinion. The 
probability is that we have the Phadrus tn a late revi- 
sion. The first publication was perhaps the occasion of 
IsDcrates's outburst; our Phadrus is rewritten fifteen 
years later, answering gently various points of criticism, 
and ending with this palpable olive-brandi. 

During these years Plato was working out his most 
elaborate effort, the R^ublic He used for the intro- 
duction a little dialogue in the early humorous style, 
'on Righteousness,' between Socrates and Thrasymachus, 
This is now Book I. of the Republic; the rest is by the 
language-tests uniform, and the various theories for 
dividing the long work into 'strata' are so far dis- 
countenanced. The main subject of this great unity 
is SuauotTwv — what Righteousness is, and whether there 
is any reason to be righteous rather than unrighteous. 
This leads to the discussion and elaboration of a righteous 
community; not, as a modem would expect, because 
Justice is a relation t)etween one man and another-— 
Plato emphatically insists that it b something in the 




THE 'REPUBLIC 307 

Individual's own character — but because it is easier to see 
things on a large scale. We must not here attempt any 
analysis of this masterpiece of sustained argument, of ob- 
servation, wit, imagination, and inspired eloquence. To 
say that it involves SociaUsm and Communism, the equal- 
ising of the sexes, the abolition of marriage, the crushing 
of commerce, the devotion of the whole resources of the 
state to education, a casual and unemphasised abolition 
of slavery, and an element of despotism in the hands of 
a class of soldier-saints — such a description results in 
caricature. The spirit of the Republic can naturally only 
be got from itself, and only then by the help of much 
study of the Greek mind, or else real power of imaginative 
sympathy. M yields as little to skimming as do most of 
the great living works of the past 

Plato's gifts of thought and expression are at their 
highest in the RtpuhUc, but several of the notes of his 
later years are b^inning to be heard — the predominant 
political interest; the hankering after a reformed and 
docile Dionysins ; the growing bitterness of the poet- 
philosopher against the siren who seems to keep him 
from Truth. Plato speaks of poetry as Mr. Ruskin speaks 
of literary form. " I show men their plain duty ; and 
they reply that my style is charming I " ' Poetry is utter 
delusion. It is not Truth nor a shadow of Truth : it is 
the third remove, the copy of a shadow, worthless ; and 
yet it can intoxicate people, and make them mad with 
delight ! It must be banished utterly from the righteous 
city.' Aristotle and the rest of us, who are not in peril 
from our excess of imagination, who have not spent 
years in working passionately towards an ideal of Truth 
for which poetry is always offering us a mirage, will very 
properly deplore Plato's want of appreciation. Wc 



308 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

try to excuse him by saying that when he spoke of 
poetry he was thinking of Chaerimon, and the sons 
of Carkinus. But he was not. It is real poetry, it is 
Homer and j^schylus and himself that he turns against; 
and he would have been disloyal to his philosophy if he 
had done otherwise. Plato had based his life on the 
belief that hard thinking can lead men to salvation ; 
that Truth and the .Good somehow in the end coincide. 
He meant to work towards that end, come what might ; 
and if Poetry interfered, he must throw Poetry over- 
board. After the R^ublie she has almost gone ; the 
Sephistes, PoiUiau, Laws, know little of her, and even 
the m3rths become more abstract and didactic, except, 
possibly, that of Atlantis in the Critias. 

It is curious that Plato does not include his myths 
in his condemnation of poetry, ^nce it was as poetry 
that he originaUy justified them. A divine vision in 
the Phado commissions Socrates just before his death 
to ' practise poetry ' {(xovuuc^) ; the oracle from Delphi 
in the Apology proclaims Socrates the wisest of men, 
because he knows his own ignorance. Both vision 
and oracle are apparently fictions : they are Plato's way 
of claiming a divine sanction for his two-sided Socrates, 
the inspired Questioner and the inspired Story-teller.* 

It is in later life also that Plato turns seriously to 
politics. A younger generation of philosophers was 
then growing up, the future Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, 
who turned utterly away from the State, and devoted 
themselves to the individual soul. Once Plato was 
ready to preach some such doctrine himself: he had 
begun life in reaction against the great political 
period. But he was, after all, a child of Periclean 
■ Scbcni, Stnn. ub. 597. 



!■- 



^mm^ 



PLATO AND POETRY J09 

Athens, and the deliberate indifference of the ri^ng 
schools must have struck him as a failure in duty. 
Three-fourths of his later writings are about politics, 
and the ruling aspiration of his outer life is the con- 
version of Dionysius II. This latter thought makes 
its first definite appearance in that 'tkird wave' which 
is to make the Republic possible (p. 473) — the demand 
that either philosophers shall be kings, or those who 
are now kings take to philosophy ; and the insistence 
there upon the tyrant's inevitable wretchedness may 
have been partly meant for a personal exhortation. 
For some twenty years the great old man clung to his 
hope of making a philosopher-king out of that vicious 
dilettante I The spirit of illusion which he had ' expelled 
with a pitch-fork* from his writings, had returned the 
more fiercely into his life. 

Dion had called him a second time to Sicily in 367, 
immediately on the succession of Dionysius II,, and 
he went The result was a brief outburst of philosophic 
enthusiasm in the court of Syracuse ; the air was choked, 
we are told, with the sand used by the various geometers 
for their diagrams. Then came coolness, quarrels, Dion's 
banishment, and Plato's disappointed return. But, of 
course, a young prince might forget himself and then 
repent ; mi^t listen to evil counsellors, and afterwards 
see his error. Plato was ready, on receiving another 
invitation in 361, "yet again ft> fathom dtadfy Charybdis," 
as Letter VII. Homerically puts it. He failed to recon- 
cile the king with Dion, and only escaped with his 
life through the help of the Pythagorean community at 
Tarentum. Dion resorted to unphilosophic methods ; 
drove Dionysius from the throne in 357, and died by 
assassination in 354. In the Fourth Book of the Laws, 




310 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Plato cmild still write (709 f.) : "Gtvemtatyramt-govtmtd 
titf lo fimt tmr ammmuity from ; la tkt tyrant bt yamgf 
dodU,hrmi€^ttii^eraU^mmdiofarf9rtmmaUastohav€9ihis 
sidt m trm tkinitr and butgher" That is just at liie ead 
of tibe 6nt half of tiie long worik: the Laws most tune 
taken yean in writing and there is a demonstrable 
change of stjde after Book IV. In tiie second half we 
have nothing man of Plato's hopes for a kingdom of 
this world, unless we connect with Oiem that sad passage 
iriiere he faces and accepts a doctrine that he would 
have denied with his last breath ten years before — that 
there is, after all, an Evil Worid-Soul 1 (p. 896). The 
other writii^ of the late period are pure philosophy. 
The Sepkistts and PeHttcms are sequels to the T/ueetttms; 
they follow in method the unattractive 'dichotomy' of 
the Pamumidts. The Sepkistes is a demonstration of the 
reality of Not-Being, the region in which the Sophist, 
who essentially Is-Not whatever he professes to be, has 
his existence. The PhtUbus, an inquiry into the Good 
— it is neither Knowledge nor Pleasure, but has more 
analogy to Knowledge — is remarkable for conducting its 
metaphysics without making use of the so-called Theory 
of Ideas ; its basis is the union of Finite and Infinite, of 
Plurality and Unity. It appears from the statistics of 
l<mguage to have been composed at the same time as the 
first half of the Laws. 

The Timmus, on the origin of the world, and the 
Critias, on that of human society, go with the second 
half of the Laws. The Timaus is either the most 
definitely futile, or the least understood of Plato's specu- 
lations ; an attempt to construct the physical world out 
of abstract geometrical elements, instead of the atoms of 
Democritus. The Critias fragment treats of the glory 



PUVTO'S LATEST WORK 311 

and downfall of the isl« Atlantis, an ideal type of mere 
material strength and wealth, \rith marked resemblances 
to Athens. There was to have been another dialogue, 
Hermoeratts, in this series, but it was never written. 
Plato died, leaving the Laws unrevised — still on the 
wax, tradition says, for Philip of Opus to transcribe and 
edit — and the Critias broken in the midst of a sentence. 

Plato bad failed in the main efforts of his life. He 
wa^ indeed, almost worshipped by a large part of the 
&eek world ; his greatness was felt not only by philo- 
sophers, but by the leading generals and statesmen. 
The Cyrenaics might be annoyed by his loftiness ; the 
Cynics might rage at him for a false Socratic, a rich 
man's philosopher speculating at ease in his garden, 
instead of making his home with the disinherited and 
crying in the streets against sin. But at the end of his 
lifetime he was almost atxive the reach of attack. Even 
comedy is gentle towards him ; and the slanders of the 
next generation are only the rebound gainst previous 
exa^erations of praise. It is significant of the vu^ir 
conception of him, that rumour made him the son ol 
Apollo, and wrapped him in Apolline myths ; of the 
philosophic feeling, that Aristotle — no sentimentalist 
certainly, and no uncompromising disciple — built him 
an altar and a shrine. 

But the world was going wrong in Plato's eyes : 
those who praised, did not obey ; those who wor- 
shipped, controverted him. He lud set out expecting 
to find some key to the world — some principle that 
would enable him to operate with all mental concepts 
as one does with the concepts of mathematics. It is 
the knowledge of this principle which is to make the 
'Rulers' of the Lows and the R^ubUc infallible and 



jia LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

despotic. Plato himself knew that he had not fonnd 
it The future was for the men who had mcxc mere 
grit and less self-criticism. Aristippus could teach and 
act unshrinking hedonism ; Democritus could organise 
science and form a definite dogmatic materialism; 
Antisthenes could revile the world — ar^ learning, 
honour included — without misgiving. These were the 
authors of the great consistent schools. Platonism had 
no form of its own. Plato's nephew and successor, 
Speusippus, merely worshipped his uncle, and thought 
all detailed knowledge impossible till one could know 
everything; Aristotie developed his own system, prac- 
tical, profound, encyclopasdic, but utterly apart and 
an-Platonic ; HeracUdes ran to death his master's spirit 
of fiction and mysticism, and became a kind of reproach 
to his memory. 

But it is just this inconclusiveness of Plato's thought 
that has made it immortal. We get in him not a system 
but a spirit, and a spirit that no discoveries can super- 
sede. It is a mistake to think of Plato as a dreamer ; 
he was keen and even satirical in his insight But he 
rises beyond his own satire, and, except in the Gorgias 
period, cares always more for the beauty he can detect 
in things than for the evil. It is equally a mistake to 
idealise htm as a sort of Apolline hero, radiant and un- 
troubled, or to take that triumphant head of the Indian 
Bacchus to be his likeness. He was known for his 
stoop and his searching eyes ; the Letters speak often 
of illness ; and Plato's whole tone towards his time is 
like Carlyle's or Mr. Ruskin's. He is the greatest master 
of Greek prose style, perhaps of prose style altogether, 
that ever lived. The ancient critics, over-sensitive to 
oratory, put Demosthenes on a par with him or above 



GREATNESS OF PLATO 313 

him. Dionydns's criticism (see pp. 325, 326) actually 
takes tiie sbam speech of the Menexenus to compare with 
that On tfu Crown I But Plato's range b longer; he 
has more delicacy and depth, and a. wider imaginative 
horizon than was possible to the practical statesman 
and pleader. You feel in reading him, tha^ in spite 
of all the overstatements and eccentricities into which 
his temperament leads him, you stand in the presence of 
a mind for which no subtlety is too difficult, no specula- 
tive or moral air too rarefied. The accusations against 
him come to nothing. His work in the world was to 
think and write, and he did both assiduously at a uniform 
level of loftiness. Little call was made upon him for 
action in the ordinary sense ; when a call did come, as 
in Dion's case, he responded with quixotic devotion. 
But if a man's life can be valued by what he thinks 
and what he lives for, Plato must rank among the 
saints of human history. His whole being lay ^v rj* 
«aX^ ; and there is perhaps no man of whom one can 
feel more certainly that his eyes were set on something 
not to be stated in terms of worldly success, and that 
he would without hesitation have gone through fire for 
the sake of it> 

^ Ailea4J^aiitkUttin,tatkimmtttjti4giJtmittmmmtrUt. liihat, 
firmitamee. Oat ^ it piviaify gtmtim (m fK CAnttf, oiiJtkatyB. it am 
tarfy (Ml^iiatMH fivm gtmitu maUriaL TTU ttndmtji If njut oB atitimt 
littin aijarpria \ut, t^., Btrtlui't pr^ati t» Rpitfl^rapki Grmei) it a wurt 
rmttttnfT^m tJu 0U PMalatit t» 



XENOPHON 

Xemopb(m, stm or (^tllcs^ ntou Ebchia 
(434-354 »C) 

Amomg Socrate^s near companioos woe two yonng 
cwjlijiiien of abont the same age; both of aristo- 
cratic 3"*^ fffiii -*T ^^ m iTyM* traditioii^ irtiidi seiionsly 
hampered any political ambition they mi^t entertain, 
and neither quite contented to be a mere man of letteis. 
Plato stayed on id Athens, learning music, mathematics, 
rhetoric, philosophy ; performing his military duties ; 
writing and burning love-poems ; making efforts at 
Euripidean tragedy. Xenofhon went to seek his for- 
tune abroad. 

The story goes that Socrates, on first meeting Xeno- 
phon in his boyhood, stopped him with bis stick and 
asked abruptly where various marketable articles were 
to be had. llie boy knew, and answered politely, 
till Socrates proceeded : " And where can you get men 
(caXol KOffoBol {beaux et bans) ? " — that untranslatable 
conception which includes the 'fine fellow' and the 
'good man.' The boy was confused; did not know. 
"Then follow me," said the philosopher. The legend 
is well fitted. Xenophon was never a philosopher, but 
he was a typical taihifs nar/aBot : a healthy-minded man, 
religious through and through ; a good sportsman and 




XENOPHON'S GREAT ADVENTURE 315 

soldier ; a good husband and father ; with no specula- 
tive power, and no disposition to criticise current beliefe 
about the gods or the laws, though ready enough to 
preach and philosophise mildly on all less dangerous 
topics. 

He is said to have been strikingly handsome, and he 
had in him a dash of romance. A Boeotian friend, 
Proxenus, had been engaged by the satrap Cynis, 
brother to the Great King, to lead a force of Greek 
mercenaries on an inland march towards Cilicia. The 
aim of the expedition was not divulged, but the pay 
was high, and there was every opportunity for adventure. 
Proxenus offered to take Xenophon with him. Xeno- 
phon would not actually take service under Cyrus, who 
had so recently been his country's enemy, but obtained 
an introduction to the prince, and followed him as an 
independent cavalier. The rest of the story is well 
known. The troops marched on and on, wondering 
and fearing about the real object of their march. At 
last it was beyond concealment that they were assailing 
the Great King. Some fled ; most felt themselves com- 
mitted, and went forward. They fought the King at 
Cunaxa ; Cyrus was killed. The Greeks were gradually 
isolated and surrounded. Their five commanders, in- 
cluding Xenophon's gentle friend Proxenu^ the Spartan 
martinet Clearchus, the unscrupulous ThessaUan Mendn, 
were inveigled into a parley, seized, and murdered. The 
troops were left leaderiess in the heart of an enemy's 
country, over a thousand miles from Greek soil. Xeno- 
phon saved them. In the night of dismay that followed 
the murder of the generals, be summoned the remain- 
ing leaders, degraded the one petty officer who advised 
submission — a half-Lydian creature, who wore ear-rin^ I 




$i6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

—had new generab elected, himself one of them, and 
directed the march, fighting and flying, towards the 
unexplored Northern mountains. There was scarcely 
a day or night without adventure, till the memorable 
afternoon of January 27, 400 B.C., when they caught 
sight of the sea near Sindpi ; and not much peace of 
mind for Xenophon till he banded his army over to 
the Spartan Harmost Thibron in the March of 399. 

It was a brilliant and heroic achievement True, the 
difficulties were not so great as they seemed ; t<x this 
march itself was the first sign to Europe of that internal 
weakness of the Oriental Empires whidi was laid baie by 
Alexander, Pompey, Lucullus, and the various conquerors 
of India. But Xenophon's cheery courage, his compara- 
tively high intellect and culture, his transparent honour, 
his religious simplicity, combined with great skiU in 
managing men and a genuine gift for improvising tactics 
to meet an emergency, enabled him to perform an 
exploit which many an abler soldier might have at- 
tempted in vain. He was not ultimately successful as a 
amdotture. His Ten Thousand, proud as he is of their 
achievements afterwards, must have contained some of 
the roughest dare-devils in Greece ; and Xenophon, like 
Proxenus, treated them too much like gentlemen. Old 
Clearchus, knout in hand and curse on lips, never lighten- 
ing from his gloom except when there was killing about, 
was the real man to manage them permanently. 

For Xenophon the 'Anabasis' was a glory and 2L,faux 
pas. He found 3 halo of romance about his head, and 
his occupation gone. He remembered that Socrates had 
never liked the expedition ; that the god at Delphi had 
not been fairly consulted ; and he consoled himself with 
the reflection that if he had been more pushing he would 



RESULTS OF THE ANABASIS 317 

have been more prosperous. His family soothsayer had 
told him so. The expedition had left in him some half- 
confessed feeling that he was an apj(uc^ ^p, <> vaan 
bom to command. He wrote a long romance, the 
CyiypMieia, or training of Cyrus, about this ideal ofyxuAv 
&v^p, in which a slight substratum of the history of Cyrus 
the Great was joined with traits drawn from the younger 
Cyrus and from Xenophon's own conception of what he 
would like to be. That was later. At this time he more 
than once had dreams of founding a colony in Asia, and 
being a philosophic soldier-king. Failing that, he wanted 
to have a castle or two near the Hellespont, and act as an 
independent champion of Hellas agiunst the barbarian. 
But nobody else wished t^ and Xenophon would not 
push or intrigue. He drifted. He could not return to 
Athens, which was then engaged in putting his master 
to death, and would probably meet him with a charge 
of high treason. Besides, there were no adventures for- 
ward in Athens ; they were all in Asia. Meanwhile the 
Knight-Errant of Hellas was in the position of a fili- 
buster at the head of some eight thousand ruffians under 
no particular allegiance. Some of them, he found, were 
discussing the price of his assassination with the Harmost 
Thibron, who naturally was disinclined to tolerate an 
independent Athenian in possession of such great and 
amb^ous powers. The bom Ruler might have done 
otherwise. Xenophon handed over his army and took 
service under the Spartans, then allies of Athens, against 
Persia, 

It was weary work being bandied from 'harmost' to 
'harmost,' never trusted in any position of real power. 
However, he married happUy, had good friends in the 
Chersonnese, and tried to be resigned. At length in 



3i8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

396 came a geoeral of a better sort, the Spsrian king 
Agteilia^ commissioned to wage a more decisive war 
a^inst Artazertes, Xenophon joined his staff, and the 
two became warm friends. But fortune was capricious. 
In 395 Athens made an alliance with Artaxerxes ; in 394 
she declared war on Sparta, and condemned Xenophon 
for 'Laconism,' an offence like the old ' Medism,' involv- 
ing banishment and confiscation of goods. If Xenophon 
had drifted before, he had now no choice. He formally 
entered the Spartan service, returned to Greece with 
AgCsilius, and was actually with him, thou^ perhaps as 
a non-combatant, when he defeated the Thebo-Athenian 
alliance at Coronea. 

Xenophon was now barely forty-one, but his active 
life was over. The Spartans gave him an estate at 
SkillAs, near Elis, and perhaps employed him as their 
political agent. He spent the next twenty years in 
retirement, a cultured country gentleman ; writing a 
good deal, hunting zealously, and training his two 
tmlliant sons, Gryllus and Diodorus — the 'Dioscuri,' as 
they were called — to be like their father, patterns of the 
chivalry of the day. The main object of Xenophon's 
later life was probably to get the sentence of banishment 
removed, and save these sons from growing up without 
a country. He was successful at last When Athens re- 
joined the Spartan alliance the ' Laconist ' ceased to be a 
traitor, and his sons were admitted into his old regiment ; 
and when Gryllus fell at Mantinea,all Greece poured poems 
and epitaphs upon him. At that time Xenophon was no 
longer in the Spartan service. He had been expelled from 
SkillAs by an Elean rising in 370, and Sed to spend the 
rest of his life in the safe neutrality of Corinth. 

Of the literary fruits of his retirement, the most im- 



RETIREMENT AND LITERARY WORK 319 

portant and the best written is undoubtedly bis record 
of the Afiabasis. It also seems to be one of the earliest, 
though some passages — such as v. 3. 9, where he refers 
to his past employments at Skillfls — ^have been added 
much later. Autobiographical writing was almost un- 
known at Ae time; but the publication was partly forced 
on Xenophon by the misrepresentations of his action 
CQirent in Athens, and perhaps especially by the record 
of the expedition already published by Sophainetus of 
Stymph&lus. We read in Xenophon that Sophainetus 
was the oldest of the ofScers ; that he had once almost 
refused to obey Xenophon's command to cross a certain 
dangerous gully ; that he was fined ten minae for some 
failure in duty.^ That is Xenophon's account of him. 
No doubt his account of Xenophon required answering. 
But why did Xenophon publi^ his lx>ok under an as- 
sumed name, and refer to it himself in the HeUeniea as 
the work of ' Tfumistegmes of Syracuse'? It is not a 
serious attempt at disguise. The whole style of writing 
shows that the 'Xenophon of Athens,' referred to tn 
the third person, is really the writer of the book. The 
explanation suggests itself, that the ' pseudonymity ' was a 
technical precaution against possible oiMco^ovrlb dictated 
by Xenophon's legal position. He was ^In/to; — an out- 
lawed exile. He was forbidden X^w tuH ypd^tv, 'to 
speak or write,' in the legal sense of the words, in Attica. 
He could hold no property. What was the position of a 
book written by such a man ? Was it liable to be bwnt 
like those of Protagoras 7 Or could the bookseller be 
proceeded against? It may well have been prudent, 
for the sake of formal legali^, to have the book passing 
under some safer name. 




wlmky it is a trah^ frank vock in wliicli flbe writer at 
kart wccccds in not •pniKng a mcMt fhrilKng sfeofj. 

To toacfa briefly on his odier woda. When Socrates 
was aftarkifid and misondentDod, when Plato and flie 
odier Sociatics defended him, Xenophon, too, felt called 
upon to write his Memoirs cf Socrates. His remarkable 
memory stood him in good stead. He gives a Socrates 
^liiom his avenge contemporary would have recognised 
as true to life. Plato, fired by his own speculative ideas, 
had inevitably altered Socrates. Xenophon's ideas were 
a smaller and more docile body : he seldom misrepre- 
sents except where he misunderstood. In the later 
editions of the Memorabilia he inserts a detailed refuta- 
tion of the charges made by 'the Accuser/ as he calls 
PolycrateSy against Socrates's memory ; and he seems 




XENOPHON-S SOCRATIC WRITINGS 321 

to allow his own imagination more play. When Plato 
wrote the Apology, Xenophon found some gaps which 
it did not fill. He made inquiries, and published a 
little note of his own On the Apology of Socrates^ 
When Plato wrote the Symposium, Xenophon was not 
entirely satisfied with the imaginative impres»on left 
by that stupendous masterpiece. He corrected it by 
a Symposium of his own, equally imaginary — for he 
was a child when the supposed banquet took place — 
but far more matter-of-fiu:t, an entert^ning work of 
high antiquarian value. 

Another appendix to Xenophon's Socratic writings, 
the OiAonomikos, where Socrates gives advice about the 
management of a household and the duties of husband 
and wife, makes a certain special appeal to modem sym- 
pathies. The wife is charming — rattier like Thackeray's 
heroines, though more capable of education — and the 
little dialogue, taken together with the corresponding 
parts of the Memorabilia and Cyn^tedeia, forms almost 
the only instance in this period of Attic thought of the 
modern 'bourgeois' ideal of good ordinary women and 
commonplace happy marriages. Antiphon the sophist, 
who seeois at first sight to write in the same spirit, is 
really more consciously philosophical. 

The Hiero is a non-Socratic dialogue on government 
between the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides. The 
A^sil&us is an eulogy on Xenophon's royal friend, made 
up largely of fr^ments of the Hellenica, and showing a 
certain Isocratean tendency in language. 

Xenophon's longest work, the Hellenica, falls into two 
parts, separated by date and by style. Books I. and II. 
are obviously a continuation of Thucydides to the end of 

^ Od it* genninenev, we SdMn^ lotroducUoD to Plslo'i Afirleai, 



322 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the Peloponnesian War. Books III.-V1I. contain the 
annals of Greece to the battle of Mantinea, ending with 
the sentence : " So far I have written ; what came afttr 
will perhaps be another's study!' The first part, though 
far below Thucydides in accuracy, in grasp, in unity of 
view, and in style, is noticeably above the rest of the 
work. The H^lmica, though often bright and clear in 
detail, forms a weak history. Outside his personal ex- 
perience, Xenophon is at sea. The chronology is foulty; 
there is little understanding of the series of events as a 
whole ; there is no appreciation of Epaminondas. The 
fact that the history is the work of an able man ^th 
large experience and exceptional opportunities for getting 
information, helps us to appreciate the extraordinary 
genius of Thucydides. 

We possess a tract on the Constitution of Lacedamon^ 
an essay on Athenian Finances, a Manual for a Cavalry 
Commander, and another for a Cavalry Private, and a 
tract on Hunting with Hounds, bearing the name of 
Xenophon. The last is suspected on grounds of style, 
but may be a youthful work. The genuineness of the 
Finances depends partly upon chronological questions 
not yet definitely settled : it is an interesting book, and 
seems to be written in support of the peace policy 
of Eubfilus. The cavalry manuals do not raise one's 
opinions of Greek military discipline, and are less 
systematic than the Manual for Resisting a Siege by 
Xenophon's Arcadian contemporary, ^NEAS TACTICUS. 

The Cyropixdeia is not a historical romance ; if it were, 

Xenophon would be one of the great originators of 

literary forms : it is a treatment of the Ideal Ruler and 

the Best Form of Government, in the shape of a history 

' For ^1^ Cottslitutiett ej AiUm, see above, p. 167. 



HELLENICA AND MINOR WORKS 343 

of Cyrus the Great, in which truth is subordinated to 
edification.^ The form is one followed by certain of the 
Sophists. Xenophon perhaps took it from Prodicus 
in preference to the usual Socratic expedient of an 
imaginary dialogue. The work was greatly admired in 
antiquity and in the last century. The style is more 
Bnished than in any of Xenophon's other works. The 
Oriental colour is well kept up. The incidents contain 
masses of striking tragic material, which only fail to be 
effective because modem taste insists on more working 
up than Xenophon wilt consent to give. The political 
ideal which forms the main object of the book, is happily 
described by Croiset as " a Versailles of Louis XIV. revised 
and corrected by F^nelon." It was actually intended — 
if we may trust the authority of the Latin grammarian, 
Aulus Gellius — as a counterblast to Plato's Republic f 

Xenophon was an amateur in literature, as he was in 
war, in history, in philosophy, in politics, in field-sports. 
He was susceptible to every inffuence which did not 
morally offend him. His style is simple, but unevenly 
so. He sometimes indulges in a little fine writing ; the 
eulogy on Agteil&us tries to avoid hiatus, and shows 
the influence of Isocrates ; the speeches in his histories, 
and the whole conception of the HdUnica, show the in- 
fluence of Thucydides. The influence of Plato leads 
Xenophon into a system of imitation and correction which 
is almost absurd. His language has the same receptivity. 
It shows that colloquial and democratic absence of 
exclusiveness which excited the contempt of the Old 
Oligarch;' it is affected by old-fashioned country 

' Coiitnut,'^.,thehiitoricA]Bcc<iuDtofCyn»'EdealhiD HdLi. 314, and the 
tomuitic one in Cyrap. viti. 7. 
• Rifi. Alh. a. 8. 



XVI 

THE 'ORATORS' 

General Introduction 

Most students of Greek literature, however sensitive to 
the transcendent value of the poets and historians, find a 
difficulty in admiring or rea^ng Lysias, Isocrates, and 
Is<eus. The disappointment is partly justified; Greek 
orators are not so much to the world as Greek poets are. 
But it is partly the result of a misunderstanding. We 
expect to find what we call 'oratory' in them, to declaim 
them as we would Burke and Grattan and Bossuet ; and we 
discover that, with a few exceptions, the thing cannot be 
done. Demosthenes indeed is overpoweringly eloquent, 
and when he disappoints the average modern, it is merely 
because the modern likes more flamboyance and gush, 
and cannot take points quickly enough. But many a 
man must rise in despair from the earlier orators, wonder- 
ing what art or charm it can be that has preserved for two 
thousand years Lysias Against the Com-Deaiers or Isseus 
On the Estate of Cleonyitms. 

The truth is that we look upon these writers as orators 
because we are at the mercy of our tradition. Our tradi- 
tion comes partly from the Ronsans, who based all their 
culture on oratory ; partly from the style-worship of the 
late Greek schools. The typical school critic is Diony- 
sius of Halicamassus ; he was a professional teacher of 




:i.r 












;iBru.- i:i; a: 



inia^n. r>ii: wii: nr ::".i;'s<; ir ar^^;r.£ r«ui 
ichnuiu-^ Ht cr[ii::!st? Tnurydiasf the hia- 
i int pniii-is.ipne: iynzn-.Si tn: pubbrisi. 
-uit .aw■^'^T Lysia? Uit wrrE-^t-daT psrsnaafr 
r.in r-ii*ii-il ■ uii .vimi sama-paia: — zhi.: 
;■.. na; al li:? Hit sTudin sTr-i: ani -ju;::-! 

..■ K~i:;;-: TPsnn voiumar n: hisr.i-T with a 
..:-._ r:. sT\f:. It ht :iwr pr:>viDrt he » ar. 

:i. ri: sssir ihinis R-ni::t, we ar n^: m*, 
.• r.-.."^ Ar.-T^?' Uiar we ikt. He spsai- 
: r..,:-r: .-^ :::; As;..:ir i: ;.iii and ii.T-ji snr]e. 

:_ ..: 1 :,, r,.;? crp: :ni: the pJ2?e r: ■^e 
;:■-: -.ni;. .nr rraditi.i: ri.^. ihm- 7>t^'itc:fz 



VALUE OF THE 'ORATORS' 347 

style is that of the plain clear-headed man, who tells his 
story and draws his deductions so honestly, that his 
adversary's version is sure to seem artificial and knavish. 
Within his limits Lysias is a perfect stylist ; but he is a 
man of little imaginative range, and he addresses a jury. 
He does not develop a normal literary prose. IsjBUS, a 
lawyer of great knowledge and a powerful arguer, is still 
furttier from this end. Isocratbs achieves it. The essay- 
writing of his school — men broadly trained in letters, 
philosophy, and history, and accustomed to deal with 
large questions in a liberal, pan-Hellenic spirit — forms in 
one sense the final perfection of ancient prose, in another 
the ruin of what was most characteristically Attic or 
indeed Hellenic It is smooth, self-restrained, correct, 
euphonious, impersonal. It is the first Greek prose that 
is capable of being tedious. It has lasted on from that 
day to this, and is the t}asis of prose style in Latin and 
in modem languages. It has sacrificed the characteristic 
charms of Greek expression, the individuality, the close 
relation between thought and language, the naturalness 
of mind which sees every fact naked and states every 
thought in its lowest terms. Isocrates's infiuence was 
paramount in all belles lettres ; scientific work and oratory 
proper went on their way little afiFected by him. 

Secondly, the orators have great historical value. 
They all come from Athens, and all lived in the century 
between 420 and 320 B.C. Other periods and towns were 
either lacking in the combination of culture and freedom 
necessary to produce political oratory, or else, as hap- 
pened with Syracuse, they have been neglected by our 
tradition. The Attic orators are our chief 'source' 
for Attic law, and they introduce us to the police- 
court population of a great city — the lawyers, the 



ti? UTERATtRE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

jajges, Ifae Dc'er-do-veels, fiie swindler^ and the '5^0- 
phantti,' or Texatkns acctsen trying to win blackmail 
or po&txa] ojstal bv disc(K«ring decent people's pecca- 
dJOcKS. The Adwnao reowds are less nauseous than 
most, oving to die mfldneSB of the hw and the com- 
Fara ^ Tc absence of atrocioas crime. The most painf ol 
fetfore is die racking of siave-witnesses ; tfaou^ even 
bore extreme ciii dty vas forbidden, and any injury 
dooe to the siai^ tempmaiy or pennanent, had to be 
paid fcr- Atbc tortnrc wookl probably have seemed 
chikf s ptay to tbe rxk-masters erf Rome and modem 
Europe. Happily also tbe owners seem more often than 
not to reluse to aDow examination of this sort, even to 
tbe prqudke of tbeir causes. All kinds of argumentative 
points are made in connection with the worth or worth- 
lessness of such e%'idence, and tbe motives of the 
inaster in allowing or refusing it. Perhaps the strangest 
is where a Ltigant demands the torture of a female 
sla\e in order to suggest that his opponent is in love 
with her nhen he refuses. 

But the orators have a much broader value than this. 
The actual words of Demosthenes, and even of Isocrates, 
on a political crisis, form a more definitely Brst-hand 
document than the best Uterary hbtory. They give us 
in a p.'dpable form the actual methods, ideals, political 
and moral standards of the early fourth century — or, 
rather, they will do so when fully worked over and 
understood. There are side-lights on religion, as in 
the case (Lysias, vii.) of the man accused of uprooting 
a sacred olive stump from his field, and that of 
Euxenippus (Hypertdes, iii.) and his illegal dream. A 
certain hill at Ordpus was alleged by some religious 
authority to belong to the god Ascl£pius, and one 



HISTORY IN THE 'ORATORS* 319 

Euxenippus was commissioned to sleep in a temple 
and report his dream. His dream apparently was in 
favour of the god. The politician Polyeuctus made a 
motion in accordance with it ; but the Assembly over- 
ruled the dream, decided that the motion was illegal, 
and fined Polyeuctus twenty-five drachmse. In pardon- 
able irritation he turned on the dreamer, and prose- 
cuted him for reporting to the Assembly "things not 
in the public interest" 

There are innumerable side-lights on politics, espe- 
cially in Lysias as to the attitude of parties after the 
revolution of 404. To take one instance, his short 
speech Agaimt tht Com-DeaUrs throws a vivid light 
on the economic condition of the time and the influence 
of the great guild of wholesale importers. The demo- 
cratic leader Anytus was corn-warden of the Piraeus in 
the year of scarcity 388. In a praiseworthy attempt to 
keep the price down, he had apparently authorised the 
retail corn-dealers of the Pirseus to form a 'ring' against 
the importers, and buy the whole stock cheap. The 
dealers did so; but 'rings' in com were expressly 
forbidden in Attic law, and the importers took action. 
They were too powerful to be defied ; they could at 
any time create an artificial famine. And we find the 
great democratic advocate making the best of a bad 
business by sacrificing the unhappy dealers and trying 
to screen Anytus 1 

Thirdly, it would be affected to deny to Greek oratory 
a permanent value on the grounds of beauty. The 
Philippics, the Olynthiacs, and the De Corona have some- 
thing of that air of eternal grandeur which only belongs 
to the highest imaginative work. Hypertdes, ^Eschines, 
Andocides are striking writers in their diflFerent styles. 




zisi-^in= s VTK 3iit 31 X '3<miltttiL We are a^ to be 
ncueti Tm Zjtsrs md :ik: ae mtJas jh raenjik. 11167 

iQ^n "itc iv-uii^ ss}*^ _Ji::r^. voci srcimrfr Ac ?Kwr< 
B .rassxcn .xkqI^ fiBTT vnaf x unmsDeos va^ or ncn 
smacaoisy scocati. iae rnTtfam cf ±e arn i mcc. Tlief 
-i-sl ct -T TK jniiErC— -T iT^x Toes. sad. Jacw tsocntes 

n^ ^f .::ai:rL:t :s; r-ie rur ire .' ja K yaj u- cccQcsiplates 

I 3«r:cut.u: pv'ucuui sctaccc. xoich iid act bst ten 

-rvnr -*>-.»■' ,-r rw -aeCLT^cJics. a nt -'ni - jia Iiia Dioaraus, 
-T ar> iJa AJctiamas irni Jcrj-iB. ElK«pt in [focrates, 
wJlEc s» » rKisUG-il^ ussSt s x crccsscr md not an 
rrorr. w inc. =w j ir rs i c ccn:-:T-:Scc zbcct oratory to 
S: rM ja-TTf n xE»r.«:t zires ii 31 ^sctiem — that a true 
3C«etCL sbrcic "r« ^uiie sxasnrcnf. irii ±a: prepared or 
prottssicist -TinLX'nr u? -riirsc t.T sar-isn. U .fschines 
Ha-i E; ..jajK 1=. i^Tsrri rhr:ts; free: Einncstienes, it is 
no more :ca= 1 pc»;sc-jl jvLrnr-iir. »v?al<i do at the pre- 
aent day. The («xns at acoen: prose niiich seem most 
artificiil to a modem EsgLshnnn are coooected with 
Ancer.t Itienture was written to be read aloud, 
i reading alood pn^ the cine to the rules about 



PROSE STYLE IN THE 'ORATORS* 331 

rhythm and hiatus, just as it explains many details in the 
system of punctuation— for instance, the dzsh below the 
line which warns you beforehand of the approach of the 
end of the sentence. We are but little sensible to rhythm 
and less to hiatus or the clashing of two vowel-sounds 
without a dividing consonant ; we are keenly alive to 
rhyme. The Greeks generally did not notice rhyme, but 
felt rhythm strongly, and abhorred hiatus. In poetry 
hiatus was absolutely forbidden. In careful prose it was 
avoided in varying degrees by most writers after about 
3S0 B,c Isocrates is credited with introducing the fashion. 
He was followed by all the historians and philosophers 
and writers of ieiies Uttres, and even, in their old age, by 
Plato and Xenophon.^ The orators who ' published ' 
generally felt bound to preserve the prevailing habit. 
In the real debates of the Assembly, of course, such 
refinement would scarcely be either attainable or notice- 
able, but a published speech bad to have its literary 
polish. A written speedi, however, was an exceptional 
thing. The ordinary orators — Callistratus, Thrasybulus, 
Leodamas — were content simply to speak. Even 
Demosthenes must have spoken ten times as much as 
he wrote. 

The speeches we possess are roughly of three kinds. 
First, there are the bought speeches preserved by the 
client for whom they were written : such are the seven 

' There ii indeed lome doobt sboDl thu Bvoid«oce of hiatus. Ouc eulieat 
[Kpfii give texts which sdmit hiatni freeljr. The fnneral ipMch of Hypertdra, 
foe inttance, kboaods in hu«b inttancei, and the pre-Alexandriin pttpjii ot 
Plato have more histitt thui oni ordinal^ USS. Doei thii mean that the 
Aleiaodcian tcholait delibentelf doctoied theii classical texts and remored 
hiitns? Oi dots it mean that our pte-AIeaandrian lemains are generaUy In. 
Bceniate ? The fonner view most be dismiued as Sally impooible, thoD^ 
thcie aic wome difficnlties in the latter. 




:r::3LZ or i3CiE:rr creecx 




ur l*a^sximis J £= i> Ac cad) b not a 
■^ nv -srv-iss- nacsat lie aermnarfs soc 

-iTv»-i.-.rv^ ™.:«axKr. it psmsanac i^nz «f zn appeal to 

fM 4.'-.i.-«v. t i Jtetsaa ;t in? ..^Be. «itfaoiit vfaich 
V ,-,•»■:.■ s.'a'OPV het i?-*^ SBJfiJv = .Ai±>3K. It was the 
^anv ^ilf !h' -• ^ siv-?^h-'^ -''■ i*r Cyimm. .fscfaines 
h»r i->i r.ri .-ast ant ne reg m aca ar ; ia se^'de^esice be 

:» .si!«!-..v, ;. Tv.-K«-i anc niiirr«wr icrsaaa at his speech, 
t) T.-<:.'>-^r^. ^.-11^l2^ vtivcU'. bf baf nffised at Ibe actual 
?-;«. "h- .-inT^fl'-r r»-m.-^b;TDe&, -rfio al tbe time 
Sa,- ctiTv-s:: !'n:\-f.'.- .v-ss?-:: wrfcin^;. to rrriae a:xi publish 
» ■■» -,-i'. \\-*i: ,i: ,-nr pniocal ^>escbe«^ howcrer, 
viv-> B- "V "-• <. •/--:.i^ and ■~'iuitM>UL^ seao to have 
Xv ,-iv-ii;s)V-- J.- a.-?c.vaEt; & iira*; p.-ibcy; and it 
v .,Nt,-»v^:V\ :h;.: r>i)hii*.ahi->r, is almo?I always the 
iX roniescended to by tbe 



,>cv-:sr! 



REASONS FOR PUBLISHING SPEECHES 333 

There remain a few cases where the object of publi- 
cation was merely literary or educational. The alleged 
remains of Gorgias, two speeches of Alkidamas, and 
two of Isocrates are 'mere literature.' The tetralogies 
of Antiphon are educational exercises with a political 
object. The great Epideictic 'Logoi' — 'speeches of 
display' — really deserve a better name. They express 
the drift of the pan-Hellenic sentiment of the time, and 
are only unpractical in the sense that internationalism 
has no executive power. Gorgias, in his Olympiacus'* of 
408, urged a definite pan-Hellenic policy against Persia. 
Lysias in 388 compromised the Athenian Democracy by 
a generous but wild onslaught on Dionysius of Syra- 
cuse. Two Olympiads later Isocrates gave the world a 
masterpiece of political criticism, the Panegyriats. The 
funeral speeches which were delivered yearly on those 
slain in war, were religious sermons of a somewhat formal 
type, and were seldom published. Our only genuine 
example has a practical interest as giving Hyperldes's 
defence of his war policy in 323. And doubtless the 
lost Funeral Speech of Demosthenes contained a similar 
justification of Chaeronea. 

The publication of a speech, then, depended chiefly on 
practical considerations, very little on the artistic value 
of the speech itself. The preservation of what was 
published was very largely a matter of accident. The 
movement for preserving and collecting books may be 
roughly dated from the founding of Aristotle's sdiool 
in 335 B.C. The Peripatetics formed the beginning of 
the scholarly or Alexandrian movement in antiquity. 
They sought out remarkable books as they sought out 
facts of history and nature, to catalogue and understand 
them. And tiiough it is not probable that Aristotle 



ZW ASCmyr rzayirx- 

. "fH^ 'Kn^encT kc bid set 
Hie 

£ not lUCMlj 



A zaaTcx £a :< ii-ceta^ a i giii — it a ppeals in 
~2c£j=3 cc CajSAcsA. ri^ ax := bis contonporary 
OKcTsrss — g^rre* =? ts:^ Arijc orators >k«r txttJUmit: 
A^trpccc, AzaAxacifs. Lt^^ss. Isocra:^^, Iscos. Lycurgus, 
.-EiCE-iies, HTpertota. I>csxJ=£:eai~, Deinarcfaos. Arbi- 
tianr as i: is, ths t^ cecermined vha: oraiois should 
be read 'jx edracational porposes rrom tbe Brst cmtury 
onward, and has, of course, coatroUed our tradition. 
Outside of it ttc posess only one important fragment by 
Alkidamas, on " The Sofkists, or Tkote who anmpase WriiUn 
Spetcka,'' and some rather suspicious jtmx d'e^rii — 
speeches of Odytsou by the same Alkidamas, of Ajax and 
Odysseus by Antisthenes the cynic, a Praise of Helen and 
a speech of Palamides by Gorgias. The genuineness 
of these ts on the whole probable, but they have Httle 
more than an antiquarian value. Happily some speeches 
by otlier writers have been preserved by being errone- 
ously ascribed to one of the canonical ten. In the 
Demosthenic collection, for instance, the accusation of 



ANTIPHON 335 

Neiera is the work of some able and well-informed 
Athenian, and the speech On the Halonnese is perhaps 
by H£g£sippus. 

Of Antiphon little is known beyond the narrative of 
Thucydides mentioned above (p. 198). He had wOTked 
all his life preparing for the revolution of 411. He led 
it and died for it, and made what Thucydides considered 
the greatest speech in the world in defence of his action 
in promoting it. We possess three real speeches of 
Antiphon, and three tetralogies. These latter are exer- 
cises in speech-craft, and show us the champion of the 
oppressed aristocrats training his friends for legal prac- 
tice, as Thucydides tells us he did. He takes an imagi- 
nary case, with as Uttle positive or detailed evidence as 
possible, and gives us two skeleton speeches — they are 
not more — for the accusation, and two for the defence. 
Considering the difficulty of the game, it is well played. 
The arguments are necessarily inconclusive and often 
sophistical, but they could not be otherwise when real 
evidence was against the rules. Minute legal argument 
is also debarred. In fact the law contemplated in the 
tetralogies is not Attic, but a kind of common-sense 
system. It may be that Antiphon, like many of his 
party, was really trying to train the aristocrats of the 
subject states more than his compatriots. The real 
speeches are all on murder cases, the finest being the 
defence of Euxitheus (?) the Mitylenean on the charge 
of having murdered his shipmate Herddes. The first 
speech, On a Charge of Poisoning, deals with a singularly 
tragic story. A slave-girl was about to be sold by a 
rufiianly master, with whom she was in love ; a woman 
who wished to be rid of her own husband, induced the 
girl to give the two men, at a dinner which they had 




336 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

together in a Pineus tavem, something which the 
alleged to be a love-philtre. Both men died The 
^1 confessed forthwith, and was executed ; proceedings 
now being taken against the real culprit 

Andocides, son of Ledgoras, of the family of die 
Sacred Heralds, comes to us as a tough, enterprising 
man, embittered by persecution. In the extraordinary 
panic which followed the mutilation of the figures ot 
Hermes in 415, Andocides was among the three hundred 
persons denounced by the informer Diocleides, and, un- 
like most of the rest, was in a sense privy to the outrage. 
It was merely a freak on the part of some young sceptics 
in his own club, who probably thought the Hennas both 
ridiculous and indecent To stop the general panic 
and prevent possible executions of the innocent, he 
gave information under a promise of indemnity. It is 
one of those acts which are never quite forgiven. In 
spite of the indemnity, he was driven into banishment 
by a special decree excluding from public and sacred 
places " those who had committed impiety and confessed 
it" His next twelve years were spent in adventurous 
trading, and were ruled by a constant effort to prociu-e 
his return. The first attempt was in 411, after he 
had obtained rights of timber-cutting from Archelaus 
of Macedon, and sold the timber at cost price to the 
Athenian fleet He was promptly re-expelled. The 
second return was the occasion of the speech AdtnU 
Returning- Home, and took place after 410, when he had 
used his influence at Cyprus to have corn-ships sent to 
relieve the scarcity at Athens. He returned finally with 
Thucydides and all the other exiles, political and crimi- 
nal, after the amnesty in 403 (see p. 338). He spent his 
money lavishly on public objects, and escaped prosecu- 



ANDOCIDES. LYSIAS }}7 

tion till 399, when the notorious Melfttus, among others, 
charged him with impiety, raking up the old scandal 
of 415, and accusing him further of living profaned the 
Mysteries. Andocides was acquitted. His speech has 
its name from the accusation, but its main object is 
really to give the speaker's own version of that youthful 
act for which he had been so long persecuted. The 
third speech, advocating the peace with Lacedsemon 
in 390, failed in its purpose, and was apparently pub- 
lished afterwards as a justification of the writer's policy. 

Lysias was a Syracusan, bom probably about 450, 
though his extant work lies entirely between 403 and 
380. His father Kephalus, known to us from the 
charming portrait in Plato's Rtpudlu, was invited to 
Athens by Pericles. He owned several houses and a 
large shield-factory in the Piraeus. Lysias went to 
Thurit at the age of fifteen, and had his first oppor- 
tunity of suffering for the Athenian Democracy in 412, 
after the defeat of the Sicilian Eicpedition. Expelled 
from South Italy, he returned to Athens, and continued 
his father's business in partnership with his brother 
Polemarchus. He composed speeches for amusement, 
and possibly gave lectures on rhetoric We hear that 
he was not successful as a teacher compared with 
Theoddrus and Isocrates ; which is not surprising if 
either the Eroticus attributed to him by Plato in the 
Phadrus, or the Epitt^kius extant in his remains, is a 
genuine type of his epideicttc style. 

In 404 things changed with Lysias. The Thirty Tyrants 
took to plundering the rich ' Metoikoi' or resident aliens. 
The two brothers were arrested. Lysias escaped, Pole- 
marchus was put to death, and what could be found 
of the property was confiscated. Evidently not all ; for 



338 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Lysias, throwing himself with vigour into the demo- 
cratic cause, was able to supply the army with 200 
shields, 2000 drachmae in money, and lai^e indirect 
assistance as well. On the return of the Demos, Lysias 
was accepted as a full citizen on the proposal of Thiasy> 
baius himself. He made bis one extant 'DAmigoria' 
or Parliamentary speech (34) in protest against tiie 
proposal of one Phormisius to limit the franchise to 
house or land holders.' Phormisius's policy would 
have been that of Thucydides, Isocrates, Theramenes, 
and, of course, that of Plato and Aristotle. But Lysias 
was an unabashed 'ochlocrat,' He was at this time 
poor, and his citizenship was shown to be illegal almost 
as soon as it was granted. It was annulled on the 
motion of Archtnus, a democrat who had fought with 
Thrasyblllus but favoured the moderates. Lysias was 
debarred from direct political ambition, but repaired 
his fortunes and worked well for his party by ceaseless 
activity in the law-courts. On the expulsion of the 
tyrants in 403, when the various factions were ignorant 
of their comparative strength and tired of strife, an 
amnesty had been passed, including all except the actual 
tyrants, and allowing even these either to leave the 
country unmolested, or to be tried individually on their 
personal acts. When the extreme democrats realised 
their strength, they regretted this amnesty, and some 
of the chief speeches of Lysias are attempts to make it 
nugatory. Thus in the speech Against Eratosthenes, who 
had twen one of the tyrants, but claimed to be tried, 
according to the amnesty, for his personal acts only, 
Lysias insists on the solidarity of the whole body of 
tyrants. The man had been implicated in the arrest 

' (J^ W. M. ArisltlUs u»il AHitn, iL 316. 



POLITICS OF LYSIAS 



339 



of Polemarchus, though not ui his condemnation to 
death. There was nothing else against him, and he seems 
to have been acquitted. 

The speech Against Agor&tus takes a curious ground 
about the amnesty. Agor&tus had practised as an in- 
former in 405 and 404, and falsely claimed the reward 
for slaying Phrynichus. This shows, argues Ljrsias, that 
he was a democrat. The amnesty was only made by the 
Demos with the oligarchs, and does not apply between 
two democrats I In a similar partisan spirit Lysias 
persecutes the younger Alcibiades. His offence was that 
he served in the cavalry instead of the heavy inbntry. 
He claims that he had special permission, and it would 
be hard to imagine a more venial ofFence. But the 
father's memory stank in the nostrils of the radicals, 
and the act savoured of aristocratic assumption. Ly^as 
indicts htm in two separate speeches — first, for desertion, 
and secondly, for failure to serve in the army, invoking 
the severest possible penalty 1 After these speeches, and 
that Against the Corn-Dealers, and the markedly unfair 
special pleading Against Euandros, it is difficult to reject 
other documents in the Lysian collection on the ground 
of their 'sycophantic tone.' 

Lysias is especially praised in antiquity for his power 
of entering into the character of every different client 
and making his speech sound 'natural,' not bought. 
His catholicity of sympathy may even seem unscrupu- 
lous, but it has limits. He cannot really conceive an 
honest oligarch. When be has to wptak for on^ as in 
25, he makes him frankly cynical : " / used to be an 
oligarch because it suited my interests; now it suits me to ie 
a dmaocrat. Every one acts on the tamt principle. The 
in^ortant point is that I kave not broitn the law" 




340 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

He speaks well for the clients of the moderate 
party, like Mantitheos, who had trouble from sycophants, 
and especially well against the hunger for confiscation 
of property which marked the worst type of extremist 
(i8, 19). The speech For the Incapable Man, a cripple 
pauper whose right to state relief had been disputed, is 
good-natured and democratic. The pauper cannot have 
paid for the speech ; and, even if some one else- did, the 
care taken with it shows real sympathy. On the whole, 
considering that we have thirty-four more or less com- 
plete speeches of Lysias — the ancients had 425, of which 
233 were thought genuine 1 — and some considerable 
fragments; considering, too, that he was a professional 
lawyer writing steadily for some twenty-five years — he 
comes out of his severe ordeal rather well. It is no 
wonder that Plato disliked him. He w^ a type of the 
adroit practical man. He was an intemperate democrat 
Above all, he had handled the Socratic Machines (frag, i) 
very roughly. That philosopher had tried to live as a 
moneyless sage like his master, his simple needs sup- 
ported by the willing gifts of friends and disciples. 
Unfortunately he fell on hard times. His friends did not 
appreciate his gospel ; his neighbours fled from their 
houses to avoid him. At last they prosecuted him for 
debt, and the unfortunate priest of poverty had to marry 
the septuagenarian widow of a pomatum-sellerj and run 
the business himself ! The jest may have been pleasing 
to the court; but not to Plato. And still less can he have 
liked the turbulent success of the Olympian oration, when 
Lysias took his revenge for the enslavement of his native 
city by calling Hellas to unite and sail against Dionysius 
— which Hellas never thought of attempting— and inciting 
the crowd to burn and pillage the tents of the tyrant's lega- 



CHARACTER OF LYSIAS. IS^US 



341 



tion, which the crowd proceeded to do. The act must 
have lowered Athens in the eyes of Greece. It is valu- 
able to us as showing that there was a real Lysias capable 
of passion and indiscretion beneath that cloak of infinite 
tact and good temper, and "remoteness from the possi- 
bility of making a mistake," which is preserved to us in 
the speeches. 

Is^us of Chalkis was, like Lysias, a foreigner, but, 
unlike him, accepted frankly his exclusion from political 
life. We possess ten complete speeches of his, and large 
fragments of two more. All are about inheritances, and 
all effective ; though the ancient judgment is true, which 
says that while Lysias preserves an air of candour when 
his processes are most questionable, Isaeus hammers so 
minutely at his arguments that he generally rouses dis- 
trust His extant speeches fall between 390 and 340 B.C. 



ISOCRATES, SON OF THEODORUS, FROU ERCHIA 
(436-338 B.C.). 

IsocRATES's century of life reaches through the most 
eventful century of Greek history, from Pericles to 
Alexander. He was the son of a rich flute-maker, and 
held the views of the cultivated middle class. He was 
m close relation with the great orator and statesman 
of the moderates, Theramenes, and hb successor Archt- 
nus, the disfranchiser of Lysias. He was an enthusiast 
for education. He heard Protagoras, Prodicus, and 
Socrates. In his old age he speaks with pride of his 
school-days, and in a sense he spent all his life in school 
as learner and teacher. He never looked to a public 
career. His views were unpopular. He was 8 




343 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and sensitive ; even in later life his shyness was an 
amusement to his pupils. However, towards the end 
of the war, when his father was dead, and every one 
alike in straits for money, Isocrates had to support 
himself by his wits. As soon as peace was made 
and he was free to leave Athens, he went to 
Thessaly and learaed from the great Gorgias — a singular 
step for a poor man, if we accept the current 
myth of the 'grasping sophists.' But doubtless the old 
man was ready to help a promising pupil without 
a fee. 

He was back in Athens by 400, a professional speech- 
writer and teacher of rhetoric. The latter profession 
cannot have paid under the circumstances, but the 
former did. Aristotle says that the booksellers in his 
time had ' rolls and rolls ' of legal speeches bearing the 
name of Isocrates. He himself disliked and ignored 
this period of 'doll-making' in contrast to the 'noble 
sculpture' of his later life,' and his pupils sometimes 
denied its existence altogether. It was at Chios, not 
Athens, that he &rst set up a formal school of rhetoric, 
probably in 393, when, in consequence of Conon's 
victories, Chios returned to the Athenian alliance. 
Conon was a friend of Isocrates, and may have given 
him some administrative post there. The island had 
long been famous for its good laws and peaceful life. 
Speech-writing for courts of law was obviously not 
permissible in an administrator ; even for an Athenian 
politician it was considered questionable. But there 
could be no objection to his teaching rhetoric if he 
wished. Isocrates had nine pupils in Chios, and founded 
his reputation as a singularly gifted teacher. When 

' Pioojr*. Itttr. 18, Anlid. %, 



•PHILOSOPHY' OF ISOCRATES 343 

he returned to Athens (391 ?) he did no more law- 
court work. He established a school, not of mere 
rhetoric, but of what he called philosophy, 

He is at great pains to explain himself, both in the 
fragment Against the Sophists, which formed a sort of 
prospectus of his system, and afterwards in the elaborate 
defence of his life and pursuits, which goes by the name 
of the Speech on the Exchange of Property. His philo- 
sophy is not what is sometimes so called — paradoxical 
metaphysics, barren logomachies, or that absolutely 
certain knowledge a priori about all the world, which 
certain persons offer for sale at extremely reasonable 
prices, but which nobody ever seems to possess. Nor, 
again, is it the mere knack of composing speeches for 
the law-courts, like Lysias, or of making improvisations, 
like Alkidamas. Isocrates means by philosophy what 
Protagoras and Gorgias meant— a practical culture of 
the whole mind, strengthening the character, forming 
a power of 'generally right judgment,' and developing 
to the highest degree the highest of human powers, 
Language. He requires in his would-be ' philosopher' a 
broad amateur knowledge of many subjects — of history, 
of dialectics and mathematics, of the present political 
condition of all Greece, and of literature. He is far 
more philosophic and cultured than the averse orator, 
far more practical and sensible than the philosophers. 
It is a source of lifelong annoyance to him that t>oth 
philosophers and practical men despise his middle 
course, and that the general public refuses to under- 
stand him. Plato in two passages criticises the pov^iA" 
very lucidly. In the Phadrus (see abov* 
expresses his sympathy with laocr 
with the ordinary speech-writen. 



344 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

the Euthydlmus^ Crito mentions the criticisms of a 
certain nameless person upon Socrates : — " What sort 
of man was the critic?" — "Not a philosopher, not a 
speaker." Crito doubts if he has ever been into a law- 
court; but he understands the art of speech, and writes 
wonderfully. — "Ah" answers Socrates, "he is what Pro- 
diats used to call a Boundary Stone, half philosopher and 
half practical statesman. The Boundary Stones Mietn 
themselves toie the wisest pe^le in the world; butproboMy 
are not so. For practical statesmanship mt^ be the rigkt 
thing, or philosophy may be the right thing, or conceivaily 
both nu^ be good, though different. But in none of these 
cases can that which is half one and half the other be 
superior to both. Perhaps in our frixnds QKS both are 
positively bad?" The likeness to Isocrates is beyond dis- 
pute. Isocrates had an easy reply : both practical man 
and philosopher are one-sided ; the one wants culture and 
breadth of imagination, the other loses his hold of con- 
crete life. As a matter of fact his answer was his success. 
His school became the University of Greece. It satisfied 
a wide-spread desire for culture on the part of men who 
did not mean to become professional mathematicians or 
philosophers in the stricter sense. The leading names of 
the next generation come chiefly from the school of Iso- 
crates — the statesmen Timotheus and Leddamas, the tragic 
poet Theodectes, the historians Ephorus and Theopompus, 
the orators Isebus, Lycurgus, ^schines, Hyperldes, and 
some hundred more. The Alexandrian scholar Hermippos 
wrote a book on The Disciples of Isocrates. 

' Though the genera] «ta.tistic» of the Euthydtmui show it to be & veij 
early wo'k, the epilogue is obviously sepambte in composition frotn the rest, 
and, as a matter of fact, conlains some slight marks of lateness (ix**""r ^porf- 
gtut Tp&yiia, and perhaps Brrdit), and none of earliness. 



POLITICAL WRITINGS OF ISOCRATES 345 

Soon after opening the school he probably wrote the 
two slight displays in the style of Gorgias, which have 
come down to us — the paradoxical Praise of Bustris, in 
which he champions the Socratics, and the &ne Heleni, 
in which he speaks sharply of alt philosophers. The 
passage (54-58) of the HeUiU on Beauty and Chastity 
is almost Platonic, as profound as it is eloquent. The 
Panegyricus, an address written for the ' Panftgyris,' or 
General Gathering of all Hellas at the himdredth 
Olympiad, 380 B.C., is Isocrates's masterpiece. Quite 
apart from its dignity of form, it shows the author as 
a publicist of the highest power. It combines a clear 
review of the recent history and present condition of 
Greece with an admirable justification of Athens, and 
an appeal to the sympathies of Greece in favour of 
renewing the Sea Federation. It is not, mdeed, quite 
impartially pan - Hellenic The comparison of the 
Spartan and Athenian rule was inevitable, and the tone 
of |§ 122-132 cannot have pleased the Peloponnese; 
but in maritime Greece the appeal was irresistible. 
Two years afterwards, his own Chios leading the way, 
seventy cities joined the Athenian alliance, and Isocrates 
accompanied the general Timotheus on a two years' 
commission to organise the terms of the federation in 
the different islands and coast towns. It was probably 
at this time that he formed his friendship with Euagoras, 
king of Salamis in Cyprus, who bad been fighting 
almost single-handed against Persia for eight years. 
Cyprus was the frontier where Greek and Oriental toBi, 
Every step gained by Euagoras was an advance of 
culture and humanity ; every step lost meant the re- 
establishment of barbarous laws and bloody supersti- 
tions. The sight kindled a lasting fervour in tw 




346 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

In 374 Euagoras was conquered and assas^ated; his 
son Nicocles succeeded him. Isocrates has left us an 
* Exhortation to Nieocla,' summoning him with tact and 
enthusiasm to discharge the high duties of an Hellenic 
king ; a ' NicocUs,' or an address from that king to 
his subjects demanding their co-operation and loyal 
obedience ; and an EncSmioa oh Etu^gvras — the first, it is 
said, ever written upon a character of current history. 

Meantime the political situation in Greece proper 
had changed. The league of Athens and Thebes against 
Sparta had enabled Thebes to resume more than her 
old power, while it involved Athens in heavy expense. 
The anti-Theban sentiment in Athens, always strong, 
became gradually unmanageable. One crisis seems to 
have come in 373, when the Thetians surprised and 
destroyed Plataea, The little town was nominally in 
alliance with Thebes, but it was notoriously disaffected ; 
so the act was capable of different interpretations. The 
remnant of the Platceans Sed to Athens and asked to be 
restored to their country. Such a step on the part of 
Athens would have implied a declaration of war against 
Thebes and an alliance with Sparta. The Plataicus of 
Isocrates is a glowing plea for the Plataean cause, a pam- 
phlet in the usual speech form. The chief real speakers 
on the occasion were Callistratus for Platsea-Sparta, and 
the great Epaminondas for Thebes. In 366 Isocrates 
strikes again on the same side. Thebes, in 'her Leuctric 
pride'— as Theopompus seems to have called it — had 
established the independence of Messenia, and insisted 
on the recognition of this independence as a condition 
of peace. Most of the Spartan allies were by this time 
anxious for peace on any terms. The liberation of the 
much-wronged province did not hurt them, and it had 



ISOCRATES AND SPARTA 347 

roused the enthusiasm of Greece in general, voiced by 
Alktdamas in his Messiniacus.* But Sparta could never 
acquiesce in giving up the richest third of her territory, 
3nd seeing her old subjects and enemies established at 
her doors. She let the allies make peace alone ; and 
Isocrates, in what purports to be a speech of the 
Spartan king ArchidAmus, supports her cause. It was 
an invidious cause to plead. Principle is really against 
Isocrates, but he makes a strong case both in practical 
expediency and in sentiment The speech is full of 
what the Greeks called '€thos' (character). It has a 
Spartan ring, especially when Archid&mus faces the 
last alternative. They can leave Sparta, ship the non- 
combatants to Sicily or elsewhere, and t)ecome again 
what they originally were — a camp, not a city, a home- 
less veteran army of desperate men which no Theban 
coalition will care to face (71-79). 

This time, again, Isocrates saw his policy accepted and 
his country in alliance with Sparta. But meanwhile 
his greater hopes for Athens had been disappointed. 
The other cities of the Maritime League were sus- 
picious of her, and the hegemony involved intoler- 
able financial burdens to herself. Isocrates had seen 
Euagoras, and formed more definitely his political 
ideal — peace for Hellas, the abolition of piracy on the 
seas, the lil}eiation of the Greek cities in Asia, the 
opening of the East to emigration, and the 8[K-ead of 
Helienism over the world. As early as 367 he had 
sent a public letter to Dionysius of Syracuse, who had 
just saved Western Hellas from the Etruscans and 
Carthaginians, inviting him to come East and free the 
Greek cities from Persia. Dionyaus died the next 
year, and Isocrates continued 'bA|iBa^^ft^ib^ lie 



348 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

could from the Maritime League. In 357 the league 
broke up in open war, which only ended in the aban- 
donment by Athens of all her claims. She sank to 
the level of an ordinary large Greek town, and, under 
the guidance of EubQlus, devoted her energies to 
financial retrenchment and the maintenance of peace. 
Isocrates was one of the few men who saw what the 
policy meant — a final renunciation of the burden of 
empire. In the treatise On the Peaee, he pleads for 
the autonomy of the allies, and actually uses some of 
the arguments of that anti-Athenian party in the islands 
which he had confuted in the Panegyricus. 

About the same time, in the Areopagiticus, he preaches 
the home policy of the moderates, of Phokion and 
Aristotle — a return to the habits of old Athens, to the 
Trarptos TToKneUi, which he associates with the Areo- 
pagus. In its more obvious aspect, the speech is a 
manifesto in support of Eubdlus, like Xenophon's 
Finances. But it is at the same time an interesting 
illustration of the moral sensitiveness and self-distrust 
of the age — the feeling which leads Demosthenes to 
denounce all Hellas, and Den:i4des to remark that the 
Virgin of Marathon is now an old woman, with no 
thought beyond slippers, gruel, and dressing-gown! 
It was just before the end of the Social War that 
Isocrates turned to ArchidSmus of Sparta with the 
same invitation as he had addressed before to Diony- 
sius. Who else could so well lead the crusade against 
barbarism ? Ag^siUus, his father, had made the at- 
tempt, and won great glory. He had failed because 
he had been interrupted, and because he had tried to 
reinstate exiles of his own party in their cities. Archi- 
damus should confine himself to the one great task of 



IDEAL OF ISOCRATES 349 

liberating alt Greeks in Asia, and not set Greek against 
Greek. Isocrates was eighty years of age now (356), 
and most of his writing is subject to a certain peevish 
garrulity, of which he seems himself to be conscious ; 
but bis political insight remains singularly deep and 
unprejudiced. He clings always to his essential idea, 
and he changes the external clothing of it dexterously. 
He has already abandoned the hope of Athenian 
hegemony. He has relaxed — perhaps with less reluc- 
tance than he professes* — his faith in constitutional 
government When Archidftmus failed him he turned 
towards Philip of Macedon. He saw as well as 
Demosthenes, that Philip was the rising power ; ' but 
he did not therefore count him an enemy. He had 
made up his mind long ago that the empire was a 
delusion to Athens, and must not be fought for. He 
strove to keep on good terms with Philip, to use per- 
sonal friendship in mitigation of public war. It is 
hard to read without emotion his PkiUfpus, an address 
to Philip immediately after the first peace in 346. He 
had loyally kept from treating with his country's enemy 
during the war. Mow he speaks with perfect frank- 
ness, and yet with tact He tells Philip of his past 
hopes of a leader for Greece, of Jason of Pherae, 
Dionysius, Archid&mus. None of these had such an 
opportunity as Philip now has. He must choose the 
nobler ambition, not the lower. He most first re- 
concile Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, then make 
himself tli^ champion of liberty and humanity, the 
leader of free Hellas, and benefactor of the world. 
We must not imagine that this was mere dreaming on 
the part of Isocrates. The aims he had in view were 

> Antf. J6 L 




3 so LITERATURE OK ANCIENT GREECE 

perfectly real, and proved, in fact, to be nearer the 
eventual outcome than those of any contemporary. The 
evils he sought to remove were practical — the financial 
distress, the over-population, the hordes of mercenaries, 
and the pirates, who, excepting for the brief supre- 
macies of Athens and Rhodes, and perhaps of Venice, 
have scourged the Eastern Mediterranean from the times 
of Homer to the present century. 

But Athens was intent on her last fatal war, and was 
not going to palter with her enemy. Isocrates fell into 
extreme unpopularity. It is remarkable that even in that 
suspicious time no enemy ever hinted that he was bribed. 
They only called him an unpatriotic sophist, a perverter 
of the statesmen who had been his pupils. Against these 
attacks we have two answers : the Panathenmcus — com- 
posed for the Panathen^a of 342, but not finished in 
time — a confused rSckauffi of the patriotism of the 
Panegyricus, to which the author no longer really held ; 
and the speech On the Exchange of Properly, mentioned 
above, defending his private activity as a teacher. 

One letter more, and the long life breaks. The battle 
of Chaeronea in 338 dazed the outworn old man. It 
was the triumph of his prophecies ; it made his great 
scheme possible. Yet if was too much to bear. His 
country lay in the dust. His champion of united Hellas 
was rumoured to be sitting drunk on the battle-field 
among the heroic dead. Isocrates did the last service 
he could to his country and the world. Philip was 
absolute victor. No one knew what his attitude would 
be to the conquered. There is no word of baseness in 
Isocrates's letter. He does not congratulate Philip on 
his victory ; he only assumes his good intentions to- 
wards Greece, and urges him, now that Hellas is at his 



INFLUENCE OF ISOCRATES 351 

feet, to take the great task upon him at last. He saw 
neither the fulfilment nor the disappointment. Did he 
commit suicide ? Late tradition says so — Dionysius, 
Pausanias, Philostratus, Lucian, pseudo-Plutarch, and 
the Lift, in unison. At any rate, it is certain that nine 
days — ^Aristotle says five days — after Chaeronea, Isocrates 
was dead. 

His seven legal speeches are able, and free from 
chicanery, but they are too 'full-dress' and they do not 
bite. His tetters to the sons of Jason, to Timotheus, 
and the rulers of Mityl£n£, show the real infiuence which 
this secluded teacher possessed ; and one inclined to 
accuse him of servility to his royal correspondents will 
do well to read the letter of his enemy (Speusippus ?), 
numbered 30 in the Socratic collection. 

We have noticed briefly his relation with Plato.^ With 
Aristotle it was something the same. The pupils of the 
two men developed eventually a violent feud ; the 
masters respected one another. Plato moved mostly 
in a different sphere from the teacher of style ; but 
Aristotle taught rhetoric himself, and is said, in justify- 
ing his enterprise, to have parodied a line of Euripides, 
"Base to sit dumi, and let barbarians ^>eai," by substitut- 
ing 'Isocrates' for 'barbarians.' The strictly scientific 
method of the Rketoru: implies, of course, a criticism of 
the half-scientific, half-empirical method of Isocrates. 
But if Aristotle criticises, he also follows. Not only did 
his first great work, the Exhortation to Philosophy,* defi- 
nitely prefer the Isocratic model to the Platonic, but 
whenever in his later life he strives after style, it is style 
according to Isocrates. Also, among previous teachers 
of rhetoric, Isocrates, though not philosophical enough 

' I Gtumot tUDk tlut the < bold-boded tioker ' of R^. -A. b ItoentM. 



352 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

for Aristotle, was far the most philosophical. In this 
department, as in every other, he followed the moderate 
course — he avoided the folly of extremes, or fell between 
two stools, as one may prefer to phrase it In a sense 
his cardinal fault lies in this double-mindedness. Is 
he a stylist, or is he a political thinker 7 Is he really 
advising his country, or is he giving a model exercise 
to his school ? The criticism b not quite fair. It would 
apply to every orator and stylist, to Grattan, Burke, 
Cicero, Demosthenes himself. Perhaps the real reason 
for that curious weariness and irritation which Isociates 
generally produces, is partly the intolerance of our own 
age to formal correctness of the easy and obvious sort 
The eighteenth century has done that business for us, 
and it interests us no longer. Partly it is the real and 
definite lack in Isocrates of the higher kind of inspi- 
ration. He is conceited. He likes a smooth, sensible 
prose better than Homer. He does not understand 
poetry, and does not approve of music. It is sins of 
this kind that mankind ultimately cannot forgive, because 
they are offences against the eternal element in our life. 
As to religion in the more definite sense, Isocrates is 
an interesting type ; a moderate as usual, eminently 
pious, but never superstitious, using religion effectively 
as an element in his eloquence, and revealing to a close 
inspection that profound unconscious absence of belief 
in anything — in providence, in Zeus himself, in philo- 
sophy, in principle — which is one of the privileges of 
the moderate and practical moralist. Yet he was a good^ 
and sagacious man, an immense force in L'teratnr^ ^ffmlt 
one of the most successful teachers that ever lived* -'^B 



DEMOSTHENES AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 
Demosthenes, son of Demosthenes, from 

PaIANIA (383-322 B.C.) 

Demosthenes lost his father when a boy of seven. His 
three guardians made away with his property and failed 
to provide for his mother. It was she that brought 
him up, a delicate, awkward, and passionate boy, indus- 
trious and unathletic Doubtless the two brooded on 
their wrongs ; and as soon as Demosthenes was legally 
competent he brought actions against the guardians. 
They were men of position, connected with the mode- 
rate party then in power. They may possibly have 
had some real defence, but, instead of using it, they 
tried to browbeat and puzzle the boy by counter-actions 
and chicanery. When at last he won his case, there 
was not much property left to recover. The chief 
results to him were a certain practical skill in law 
and in speaking, enhanced, it is said, by the lessons 
of Isaeas; a certain mistrust of dignitaries, and a con- 
tempt for etiquette. The sordidness, also, of the long 
quarrel about money offended him. He was by nature 
lavish ; he always gave largely in charity, helped poor 
citizens to dower their daughters, and ransomed prisoners 
of war. On this occasion he spent his damages on 
fitting out a ttifcme-HMie of the costliest public services 





354 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

that Athens demanded of her rich citizens; then he 
settled down to poverty as a speech-writer, and perb^n 
as a teacher. He succeeded at once io his profession, 
though his hesitating and awkn-ard delivery interfeied 
with his own speaking. His practice was of the blu- 
est kind. He did not desd with 'hetaira' suits like 
Hypertdes, and he steadily avoided 'sykophantic' pro- 
secutions, though he botti wrote and spoke for the 
Opposition in cases of political interest. 

His first personal appearance was perhaps in 355, 
Against LepUtus^ who had proposed to abolish public 
grants of immunity from taxation. It was a prodeot 
financial step, and hard to attadt ; but these gnub 
were generally rewards for exceptional diplomatic ser- 
vices, and formed an important element in the forward 
policy advocated by the Opposition. 

Eubfilus had taken office after the Social War of 
357, when the time called for retrenchment and retreat 
His financial policy was an unexampled success ; but it 
meant the resignation of the Empire, and perhaps worse. 
He had inherited a desultory war with Philip, in which 
Athens had everything against her. Philip was step 
by step seizing the Athenian possessions on the shores 
of Thrace. Eubfllus, since public opinion did not allow 
him to make peace, replied by a weak blockade of the 
Macedonian coast and occasional incursions. The hotter 
heads among the Opposition demanded an army of 30,000 
mercenaries to march upon Pella forthwith. This was 
folly. Demosthenes's own policy was to press the war 
vigorously until some marked advantage could Ik gained 
on which to make a favourable treaty. 

But Philip did not yet fill the whole horizon. In the 
speech For the Rkodians {?35i or 353 B.C.) Demosthenes 
' Pnib&blr Leptlaei iliee Clais. XfvUw, Feb. iSg& 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN 350 B.C 35s 

urges Athens to help a democratic rising in Rhodes, 
in the hope of recovering part of her lost influence in 
the j^gean. EubQlus was against intervention. In the 
speech For Megalopolis (?353 B.C.) Demosthenes merely 
objects to taking a definite side in favour of Sparta. It 
would have been impossible at the time to give active 
help to Megalopolis ; though perhaps it would have 
prevented one of the most fatal combinations of the 
ensuing years, the reliance of the anti-Spartan parts 
of the Peloponnese upon Philip's support. In 352 
Philip had attempted to pass Thermopylae into Lower 
Greece ; EubOlus, for once vigorous, had checked him. 
But the danger had become obvious and acute, and 
Demosthenes urges it in the First Philippic. The king 
retired northwards and laid siege to Olynthus. Athens 
knew the immense value of that place, and acted 
energetically ; but the great diplomat paralysed her by 
stirring up a revolt in Eubcea at the critical moment. 
Demosthenes, in his three Olynthiacs, presses unhesitat- 
ingly for the relief of Olynthus. The government took 
the common-sense or unsanguine view, that Euboe.i, 
being nearer, must be saved first, Euboea was saved ; 
but Olynthus fell, and Athens was unable to continue 
the war. When Philocrates introduced proposals of 
peace, Demosthenes supported him, and was given a 
place on the commission of ten sent to treat with 
Philip for terms. He was isolated among the com* 
missioners. The most important of these, after Philo- 
crates, was iEscHiNES of Kothflkids {389-314 B.C.). 
He was a man of high culture and birtii, though the 
distresses of the war compelled all his family to earn 
their own livelihood. His father turned schoolmv 
his mother did religious work in connection w 



356 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Mysteries, ^schines himself had been an actor, a 
profession which carried no slur, and a clerk in the 
public service. He was a hater of demagogues and a 
follower of EubAlus. The three speeches of his which 
we possess are all connected with Demosthenes and 
with this embassy. 

The negotiations were long. Eventually a treaty was 
agreed to, containing at least two dangerous ambiguities : 
it included Athens aitd her allies, and it left each party in 
possession of what it actually held at the time. Now 
Athens was anxious about two powers, which were 
allies in a sense, but not subject allies — Kersobleptes, 
king of a buffer state in Thrace, and the Phokians, any 
attack on whom would bring Philip into the heart of 
Greece. Philip's envoys refused to allow any specific 
mention of these allies in the treaty ; the Athenian com- 
missioners were left to use their diplomacy upon the 
king himself. And as to the time of the conclusion of 
the treaty, Athens was bound to peace from the day she 
took the oaths. Would Philip admit that he was equally 
bound, or would he go on with his operations till he 
had taken the oaths himself ? Philocrates and ^schines 
considered it best to assume the king's good faith as a 
matter of course, and to conduct their mission according 
to the ordinary diplomatic routine. Demosthenes pressed 
for extreme haste. He insisted that they should not 
wait for Philip at his capital, but seek him out wherever 
he might be. When the commissioners' passports did 
not arrive, he dragged them into Macedonia without 
passports. However, do what he might, long delays 
occurred ; and, by the time Philip met the ambassadors, 
he had crushed Kersobleptes and satisfactorily rounded 
his eastern frontier. Demosthenes made an open breach 



EFFECTS OF PEACE OF PHILOCRATES 357 

both with his colleagues and with the king : he refused 
the customary diplomatic presents, which Philip gave on 
an exceptionally gorgeous scale ; he absented himself 
from the ofi&cial banquet ; he attempted to return home 
separately. When he reached Athens he moved that 
the usual ambassador's crown should be withheld from 
himself and his colleagues. 

Before the end of the month Philip had passed 
Thermopylae, conquered Phokis, and got himself recog- 
nised as a member of the Amphictyonic League with a 
right to interfere in the politics of Central Greece. The 
same year (346) he presided at the Pythian Games. 
The first impulse at Athens was to declare the peace 
broken ; but that would have been suicidal, as Demos- 
thenes shows in his speech On the Peace after the settle- 
ment Still indignation was hot against the ambassadors, 
and their opponents became active in the law-courts. 
Demosthenes associated himself with one Timarchus in 
prosecuting iEschines (or misconduct as ambassador. 
iSschines was in great danger, and retorted by a sharp 
counter-action against Timarchus,* who, though now a 
leading and tolerably respected politician, had passed an 
immoral youth. In modem times it would perhaps only 
have caused a damaging scandal. In Athens it deprived 
him of all public rights. Tlie unfortunate man collapsed 
without a word, and MadbmtB was safe, though it went 
less well with his friends. Philocrates fled from trial and 
was condemned. His accuser w.is HyI'ERJdes, son of 
Glaukippus, an orator considered only second to Demos- 
thenes in power and superior to bum io charm. He was 
an extremist in politics. In private life his wit and his 
loose ways made htm a favourite tone for comedy. The 



3S8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

traditional Life is a mere hash of hostile anecdotes, and 
a current jest accused him of trying to influence a jury 
by partially undressing a certain PhrynA in court His 
works were absolutely lost till this century, when large 
parts of five speeches — not eloquent, but surpassing even 
Lysias in coolness and humour, and a frank dislike of 
humbug — have been recovered in papyri from Upper 
Egypt. 

Demosthenes himself was engaged in preparing for 
the future war and trying to counteract Philip's intrigues 
in the Peloponnese (Phil. II.). It was a pity that in 344 
he revived the old action against ^schines {On Mis- 
tonduct of Ambassadors). The speeches of both orators 
are preserved, ^schines appears at his best in them, 
Demosthenes perhnps at his worst. His attack was in- 
temperate, and his prejudice led him to combine and 
colour his facts unfairly. He could have shown that 
iSschines was a poor diplomat; but, in spite of bis politi- 
cal ascendency, he could not make the jury believe that 
he was a corrupt one. ^schines was acquitted, and 
Demosthenes was not yet secure enough of his power 
to dispense with publishing his speeches. 

We possess one {On the Ckersonnese) in which he 
defends the irregularities of his general Diopeithes on 
Philip's frontier ; and another {Pkil. III^ in which he 
issues to all Greece an arraignment of Philip's treacherous 
diplomacy. Most of Demosthenes's public speeches have 
the same absence of what we call rhetoric, the same great 
self-forgetfulness. But something that was once narrow 
in his patriotism is now gone, and there is a sense of im- 
minent tragedy and a stern music of diction which makes 
the Third Philippic unlike anything else in literature. 
War was declared in 340, and at first Athens was sue- 



BEFORE CHARONEA 359 

cessful. It was a stroke of religious intrigue that turned 
tbe day. The Locrians were induced to accuse Athens 
of impiety before the Amphictyonic council. Impiety 
was in Greece, like heresy afterwards, an offence of 
which most people were guilty if you pressed the 
inquiry. The Athenians had irregularly consecrated 
some Theban shields. But the Locrians themselves 
had profanely occupied the sacred territory of Kirrha. 
^/Eschines, who was the Athenian representative, con- 
trived to divert the warlike bigotry of the council against 
the Locrians. He is very proud of his achievement. 
But either turn served Philip equally well : he only 
desired a sacred war of some sort, in order that the 
Amphictyons, who were without an army, might summon 
him into Greece as defender of religion. Once inside 
Thermopylae, he threw off the mask. Demosthenes 
obtained at the last moment what he had so long sought, 
an alliance between Athens and Thebes ; but the Mace- 
donian generalship was too good, and the coalition of 
Greece lay under Philip's feet at Chaaronea in 338. 

Athens received the blow with her usual heroism. 
Lycurgus the treasurer was overwhelmed with volun- 
tary offerings for the defence fund, and the walls were 
manned for a fight to the death. But that was not 
Philip's wish. He sent Demfldes the orator, who had 
been made captive in the battle, to say that he would 
receive proposals for peace. The friends of Hacedon, 
Phokion, .'Eschines, and DeraSdes, were ihc ambassa- 
dors, and Athens was admitted on easy terms into the 
alliance which Philip formed as the basis oC bis march 
against Persia. Then came a war of tbe law-courts, 
the Macedonian party straining e very oefve to get rid 
of the war clement. Hyp« 



36o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

first excitement of the defeat, to arm and liberate all 
slaves. This was unconstitutional, and he was prose- 
cuted by Aristogeiton. His simple confession: ** It 
was the battle of Ckaronea that spoke, not t . . . The arms 
of Macron took awt^ my sight" — was enough to secure 
his acquittaL A desperate onslaught was made against 
Demosthenes ; Aristogeiton, Sosicles, Phitocrates, Dion- 
das, and Melanthus, among others, prosecuted him. But 
the city was true to him. Some of the accusers failed to 
get a fifth of the votes, and he was chosen to make the 
funeral speech over those slain at Chseronea.^ Then came 
the strange counter-campaign of Lycusgus against the 
Macedonian party. The man was a kind of Gate. Of 
unassailable reputation himself, he had a fury for ex- 
tirpating all that was corrupt and unpatriotic, and his 
standard was intolerably high. The only speech of his 
preserved to us is Against Leocrates, a person whose 
crime was that he had left the city after Chaeronea, 
instead of staying to fight and suffer. The penalty de- 
manded for this slight lack of patriotism was death, and 
the votes were actually equal. 

TTiis shows the temper of the city ; but resistance to 
Macedon was for the time impossible. Athens was 
content with an opportunist coalition directed by 
Demosthenes and Demddes. On Philip's murder a 
rising was contemplated, but checked by Alexander's 
promptitude. Soon after, on a rumour that Alexander 
had been slain in Illyria, Thebes rebelled, and Demos- 
thenes carried a motion for joining her. Army and 
fleet were prepared, money despatched to Thebes, and 
an embassy sent to the Great King for Persian aid, when 
Alexander returned, razed Thebes to the ground, and 

' The extant speech is spurioui. 



AFTER CH^RONEA 361 

demanded the persons of ten leaders of the war party 
at Athens, Demosthenes among them. Dem&des, the 
mediator after Chseronea, acted the same part now, 
Alexander was appeased by the condemnation of the 
general Chand£mus ; the other proclaimed persons were 
spared (335 B.C.). 

These repeated failures made Demosthenes cautious. 
He drew closer to the patient opportunism of Demfldes 
and gradually alienated the extreme war party. This 
gave his old enemies the opening for their most elabo- 
rate attack. It was indirect and insidious in more ways 
than one. A certain Ctesiphon — celebrated, according 
to ^schines, as being the only man who lauded at 
Demosthenes's jokes — had proposed soon after Chaero- 
nea to crown Demosthenes in the theatre of Dionysus 
in recognition of his public services. i£schines had 
in the same year indicted Ctesiphon for illegality, but 
for some reason the trial did not take place till 330. 
The speech Against Ctesiphon rests on three charges : 
it was illegal to crown an official during his term of 
office, and Demosthenes held two offices at the time; 
secondly, it was against precedent to give crowns in 
the theatre; thirdly, Demosthenes was a bad citizen 
and ought not to be crowned. Obviously, if the third 
point was to be considered at all, the other two sank 
into insignificance. The action was a set challenge to 
Demosthenes, and he came forward as counsel for 
Ctesiphon (On the Crown), to meet it by a full exposition 
of his political life. 

But here comes the insidiousness of ^schines's attack. 
In the real points at issue between the two policies 
the country was overwhelmingly on the side of De- 
mosthenes. The burning question was whether the 




362 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Demosthenes of the last eight years was true to the 
Demosthenes of the Philippics, ^schines knows that 
the issue of the trial lies with Hypertdes and the radical 
war party, and he plays openly for their support He 
emphasises Demosthenes's connection with tiie Peace 
in the first part of his life. He has the audacity to 
accuse him of having neglected three opportunities of 
rising against Alexander in the last part I It was well 
enough for Alexander's personal friend and tried sap- 
porter to use such accusations. Demosthenes could 
only answer them by an open profession of treason, 
which would doubtless have won his case, and have 
sent him prisoner to Macedon. He does not answer 
them. He leaves the war party to make its judgment 
in silence on the question whether he can have been 
false to the cause of his whole life, whether the tone 
in which he speaks of Chseronea is like that of a 
repentant rebel. It was enough. .£schines failed to 
get a fifth of the votes, and left Athens permanently 
discredited. He set up a school in Rhodes, and it is 
said that Demosthenes supplied him with money when 
he was in distress. 

But the hostile coalition was not long delayed. In 
324 Harpalus, Alexander's treasurer, decamped with a 
fieet and 720 talents — full materials for an effective 
rebellion. He sought admission at Athens, and the 
extremists were eager to receive him. But the time 
was in other ways inopportune, and Demosthenes 
preferred a subtler game. He carefully avoided any 
open breach of allegiance to Alexander. He insisted 
that Harpalus should dismiss his fleet, and only a^eed 
to receive him as a private refugee. When Alexander 
demanded his surrender, Demosthenes was able to 



CTESIPHON. HARPALUS 363 

refuse as a matter of personal honour, without seriously 
compromising his relations with the king. The Mace- 
donians insisted that Harpalus should be detained, 
and the treasure stored in the Parthenon in trust for 
Alexander. Demosthenes agreed to both proposals, and 
moved them in the Assembly himself. What happened 
next is not known, but Harpalus suddenly escaped, 
and the Macedonians insisted on having the treasure 
counted. It was found to be less than half the original 
sum. That it was going in secret preparations for war, 
they could have little doubt. They would have liked a 
state trial and some instant executions. E>emosthenes 
managed to get the question entrusted to the Areopagus, 
and the report deferred. It had to come at last. The 
Areopagus made no statement of the uses to which 
the money was applied, but gave a list of the persons 
guilty of appropriating it, Demosthenes at the head. 
His intrigue had failed, and he had given the friends 
of Macedon their chance. He was prosecuted by 
Hypertdes on the one side, Deinarchus on the other. 
The latter, a Corinthian by birth, rose into fame by 
this process, and nothing has survived of him except 
the three speeches relating to it Dionysius calls him 
a 'barley Demosthenes,' whatever that may mean — the 
suggestion is probably ' beer ' as opposed to ' wine ' — 
and his tone in this speech is one of brutal exultation. 
Very different, suspiciously difiFerent, is Hyperides, who 
not only says nothing to make a permanent breach, but 
even calls attention to Demosthenes's great position, to 
the unsolved problem of what he meant to do with the 
money, to the possibility that his lips are in some way 
sealed. For his own part, Hypertdes talks frank treason 
with a coolness which well bears out the stories of his 




364 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

courage. Demosthenes was convicted, and condemned 
to a fine of fifty talents Unable to pay such an enor- 
mous sum, he withdrew to Troizfin. 

Nine months after, Alexander died and Greece rose. 
Demosthenes joined his accuser Hypertdes in a mission 
to rouse the Peloponnese, and was reinstated at Athens 
amid the wildest enthusiasm. The war opened weU. 
The extant Funeral Speech of Hypertdes was pronounced 
after the first year of it. In 322 came the defeat at Cran- 
non. The Macedonian general Antipater demanded the 
persons of Demosthenes and Hyperldes. Old DemAdes, 
unable to mediate any more, now found himself drawing 
up the decree sentencing his colleague to death. Demos- 
thenes had taken refuge in the temple of Poseidon at 
Calauda, where he was arrested, and took poison. 
HypcrJdes is said to have been tortured, a statement 
which would be incredible but for the fiood of crime 
and cruelty which the abolition of liberty, and the in- 
troduction of Northern and Asiatic barbarism, let loose 
upon the Greek world in the next centuries. 

Demosthenes has never quite escaped from the stormy 
atmosphere in which he lived. The man's own intensity 
is infectious, and he has a way of forcing himself into 
living politics. The Alexandrian schools were mon- 
archical, and thought ill of him. To Grote he was 
the champion of freedom and democracy. To Niebuhr 
(1804), Philip was Napoleon, and Demosthenes the ideal 
protest against him. Since 1870, now that monarchical 
militarism has changed its quarters, German scholars^ 
seem oppressed by the likeness between Demosthenes 
and Gambetta, and denounce the policy of 'la revanche'; 

' F.^. RohiTnoser, Weidner, and even Bcloch and Holm. Tbe technical 
critics an Spengel and Blass. 




POLICY AND METHODS OF DEMOSTHENES 365 

one of them is reminded also of ' the agitator Gladstone.' 
In another way the technical critics have injured the 
orator's reputation by analysing his methods of arrange- 
ment and rhythm, and showing that he avoids the con- 
course of more than two short syllables. There is a naif 
barbarism in many of us which holds that great pains 
taken over the details of a literary work imply insincerity. 

It is not for us to discuss the worth of his policy. It 
depends partly on historical problems, partly on the 
value we attach to liberty and culture, and the exact 
point of weakness at which we hold a man bound to 
accept and make the best of servitude to a moral inferior. 
Athens, when she had suffered the utmost, and when 
the case for submission had been stated most strongly, 
decided that it was well to have fought and failed. 

As for his methods, the foolish tendency to take his 
political speeches as statements of historical fact, has 
produced a natural reaction, in which critics pounce 
fiercely upon the most venial inaccuracies. Holm, for 
instance, finds " three signal falsehoods " in " that master- 
piece of sophistry, the third Philippic" : viz., the state- 
ment that when Philip took certain towns he had already 
sworn the truce — whereas really he had only made the 
other side swear it ; the suggestion that Philip's rapid 
movements were due to his using light-armed troops — 
which is true, but seems to ignore his heavy phalanx ; 
and the charge that he came to the Phokians ' as an ally,' 
when in truth he bad left his intentions designedly 
ambiguous. The critic who complains of such misstate- 
ments as these, must have somewhat Arcadian notions 
of political controversy. 

Demosthenes is guilty, without doubt, of breaches of 
etiquette and convention. He proaemt-H his fellow- 




366 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

ambassadors. He appeared in festal attire on hearing 
of Philip's assassination, though he bad just lost his 
only daughter. In the prelude to the last war, Philip's 
action was often the more correct, as was that of 
another Philip in dealing with William of Orange. In 
Demosthenes's private speech-writing we are struck by 
one odd change of front In 350 he wrote for Phormio 
against Apolloddrus in a matter of the great Bank 
with which they were both connected, and won his 
case. Next year he wrote for ApoIlod6rus, prosecuting 
one of his own previous witnesses, Stephanus, for perjury, 
and making a violent attack on Phormio's character. 
The probability is that Demosthenes had made dis- 
coveries about his previous client which caused him to 
regret that he had ever supported him — among them, 
perhaps, the discovery that Stephanus was giving false 
evidence. The only external fact tiearing on the problem 
is the coincidence that in the same year ApolIod6rus, at 
some personal risk, proposed the measure on which 
Demosthenes had set his h-jrt — the use of the Festival 
Fund for war purposes — and that he remained aftenwards 
attached to Demosthenes. TL ' Midias case is a clear 
instance of the subordinaf:c.i of private dignity to public 
interest. Mtdtas was a close friend of EubQlus, and had 
both persecuted and assaulted Demosthenes when he 
was Chor^gus at the great Dionysia. Demosthenes pre- 
pared to take action, and wrote the vehement speech 
which we possess {Against Mtdtas), in which he declares 
that nothing will satisfy him but the utmost rigour of 
the law. But meantime there arose the negotiations for 
the peace of 346, and Demosthenes had to act in concert 
with Eubfllus. He accepted an apology and compensa- 
tion, and let the matter drop. 




THE SPIRIT OF THE TIME 367 

We must never forget in reading Demosthenes and 
iSschines, that we are dealing with an impetuous 
Southern nation in the agony of its last struggle. The 
politenesses and small generosities of politics are not 
there. There is no ornamental duelling. The men 
fight with naked swords, and mean business. Demos- 
thenes thought of bis opponents, not as statesmen 
who made bad blunders, but as perjured traitors who 
were selling Greece to a barbarian. They thought 
him, not, indeed, a traitor — that was impossible — but a 
malignant and insane person who prevented a peaceful 
settlement of any issue. The words ' treason ' and ' bribe ' 
were bandied freely about; but there is hardly any 
proved case of treason, and none of bribery, unless the 
Harpalus case can by a stretch of language be called so. 
There are no treasury scandals in Athens at this time. 
There is no legal disorder. There is a singular absence 
of municipal corruption. The Athenians whom Demos- 
thenes reproaches with self-indulgence, were living at 
a strain of self-sacrifice and effort which few civilised 
communities could bear. The wide suspicion of bribery 
was caused chiefly by the bewilderment of Athens at 
finding herself in the presence of an enemy far her 
superior both in material force and in diplomacy. Why 
was she so incomprehensibly worsted in wars, where she 
won most of the battles 7 Why were her acutest states- 
men invariably outwitted by a semi-barbarous king 7 
Somet>ody must be betraying her! Demosthenes on 
this point loses all his balance of mind. He lives in a 
world peopled by imaginary traitors. We hear how he 
rushed at one Antiphon in the streets, and seized him 
with his own hands. Happily the jurors did not lose 
their sanity. There were almost no convictions. It was 




368 LITERATURE OF ANaEKT GREECE 

icry sinular in Italy befbce and after 1848. Peopleiriiose 
potriotisni vas beroic vent about aoCTwmg one anotiter 
of treason. The men of 404, 338, and even 262, will not 
easily find ttieir soperiois in devotion and 5elf-5acrifio& 

Another unpleasant result of this sn^Mcion and hatred 
is the viralence of abnse wiA which the speakers erf 
the time attack their enemies. Not; indeed, in public 
speeches. In ttiose of Demosthenes no opponent is 
even mentioaed. But in the law-courts, ^lich some- 
times gave the finishing stroke to a political campaign^ 
die attacks on character are savage. The modem 
analogue is the raking up of more or less irrelevant 
scandals against both witnesses and principals in cases 
at law, which custom allows to barristers of Uie highest 
chaiacter. The attack on .i£schines in the De Corona 
is exceptional. Demosthenes had a real and natural 
hatred for the man. But he would never have dragged 
in his father and mother and his education, if .£schines 
had not always prided himself on these particular things 
— be was distinctly the social superior of Demosthenes, 
and a man of high culture— and treated Demosthenes 
as the vulgar demagogue. E\-en thus, probably Demos- 
thenes repented of his witticisms about the old lady's 
private initiations and 'revivals.' It is to be wished 
that scholars would repent of their habit of reading 
unsavoury meanings into words which do not possess 
them. 

Demosthenes can never be judged apart from his 
circumstances. He is no saint and no correct medio- 
crity. He is a man of genius and something of a hero; 
a fanatic, too, no doubt, and always a politician. He 
represents his country in that combination of intellectual 
subtlety and practical driving power with fervid idealism, 



APPRECIATION OF DEMOSTHENES 369 

that union of passion with art, and that invariable in- 
sistence on the moral side of actions, on the Just and 
the Noble, that characterises most of the great spirits 
of Greek literature. To say with Quintilian that Demos- 
thenes was a ' bad man,' is like saying the same of Burke 
or even of Isaiah. It implies either that noble words and 
thoughts are not nobility, or else, what is hardly more 
plausible, that the greatest expressions of soul in litera- 
ture can be produced artificially by a dodge. Two 
sentences of Demosthenes ring in the ears of those 
who care for him, as typical of the man: "Never, 
never, Athenian!, can injustice and oath-breaking and 
falsehood mate a strong power. They hold out for once 
and Jbr a little; they blossom largely in hopes, belike; 
but time finds them out and thty wither where they stand. 
As a house and a ship must be strongest at the lowest parts, 
so must the bases and foundations of a polity be true and 
honest; which they are not in the diplomatic gains of 



"It cannot be, Athenians, that you did wrong when you 
took upon you the battle for the freedom and safety of all. 
No, by »'*'' fathers who first nut the Mede at Marathon, by 
the footmen of Platcea, by the sailors of Salamis and Arte- 
misium, by all the brave men lying in our national sepul- 
chres — whom the city has interred with honour, ^schines, 
all alike, not only the successful or the victorious / " ' 
> (^fnlh, a. 10. ■ Cmvn, 308. 




THE LATER LITERATURE, ALEXANDRIAN 
AND ROMAN 



Frou the Death of Demosthenes to the 
Battle of Actium 

AuoNG the many stereotyped compliments which we 
are in the habit of paying to Greek literature, we are 
apt to forget its singular length of life. From the 
prehistoric origins of the epos to Paul the Silentiary 
and Mus<eus in the sixth century after Christ there is 
not an age devoid of delightful and more or less original 
poetry. From Hecatseus to the fall of Byzantium there 
is an almost uninterrupted roll of historians, and in one 
sense it might be held that history did not £nd its 
best expression till the appearance of Polybius in the 
second century B.C. Philosophy is even more obviously 
rich in late times ; and many will hold that if the great- 
est individual thinkers of Greece are mostly earlier than 
Plato, the greatest achievements of speculation are not 
attained before the times of Epictdtus and Plotlnus. 
The hterature of learning and science only begins at the 
point where the present book leaves off. It may even 
he said thai the greatest factor in imaginative literature, 
Love, has been kept out of its rights all through the 



END OF FREE HELLENISM 371 

Attic period, and that Mimnermus and Sappho have to 
wait for Theocritus to find their true successor. 

Yet the death of Demosthenes marks a great dividing 
line. Before it Greek literature is a production abso- 
lutely unique ; after it, it is an ordinary first-rate litera- 
ture, like Roman or French or Italian. Of course it is 
impossible to draw a strict line between creation and 
adaptation ; but, in the ordinary sense of the words, 
the death of Demosthenes forms a period before which 
Greek poets, writers, thinkers, and statesmen were really 
creating, were producing things of which there was no 
model in the world ; after which they were only adapt- 
ing and finishing, [M-oducing things like other things 
which already existed. 

That is one great division ; the other is similar to 
it We have seen how the crash of 404 B.C. stunned 
the hopes of Athens, dulled her foith in her own mis- 
sion and in human progress generally. Chaaronea and 
Crannon stamped out such sparks as remained. Athens 
and intellectual Greece were brought face to face with 
the apparent fact that Providence sides with the big 
battalions, that material force is ultimately supreme. 
Free political life was over. Political speculation was of 
no use, because the military despots who held the world 
were not likely to listen to it Even Aristotle, who had 
been Alexander's tutor, and was on friendly terms with 
him, treats him and his conquests and his system as 
utterly out of relation to any rational constitution of - 
society. The events of the next two centuries deepened 
this impression, and political aspirations as a motive in 
life and literature came to an end for Greece. Of course 
many ages and peoples have done very well without 
any freedom in public action or speech or thought 



373 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

But these things were in the heart fibres of the Greek 
race, and it pined when deprived of them. 

The middle ages and the East made up for their 
absence of public interests by enthusiastic religious faith. 
But this solace likewise was denied the later Greek. 
The traditional religion was moribund among educated 
men in the fifth century ; after the fourth it was hardly 
worth attacking. People knew it was nonsense, but 
considered it valuable for the vulgar ; and, above all, 
they asked each thinker if he had anything to put in 
its place. Much of the intellect of the fourth century 
a thrown into answering this demand. On the one 
hand we find Athens full of strange ^ths, revived or 
imported or invented; superstition is a serious fact in 
life. One could guess it from the intense earnestness 
of Epicurus on the subject, or from the fact that both 
Antiphanes and Menander wrote comedies upon TAe 
Superstitious Man. But the extant inscriptions are 
direct eiridence. On the other hand came the great 
philosophical systems. Three of these were especially 
religious, resembling the sixth century rather than the 
fifth. The Cynics cared only for virtue and the rela- 
tion of the soul to God ; the world and its learning 
and its honours were as dross to them. The Stoics and 
Epicureans, so far apart at first sight, were very similar 
in their ultimate aim. What they really cared about was 
ethics — the practical question how a man should order 
his life. Both indeed gave themselves to some science 
— the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to logic and 
rhetoric — but only as a means to an end. The Stoic 
tried to win men's hearts and convictions by sheer 
subtlety of abstract argument and dazzling sublimity of 
thought and expression. The Epicurean was deter- 



FOURTH. CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 373 

mined to make Humanity go its way without cringing to 
capricious gods and without sacrificing Free-Will. He 
condensed bts gospel into four maxims: "God is not 
to be feared; death cannot be felt; the Good can be 
won ; all that we dread can be borne and conquered." 

Two great systems remained, more intellectual and less 
emotional : the Academy, which, after the death of its 
founder and Speusippus, tinned from paradoxical meta- 
physics in the direction of a critical and sceptical eclec- 
ticism ; and the Lyceum or Peripatos, whose organisa- 
tion of knowledge formed the greatest intellectual feat of 
the age. Its founder, Aristoteles of Stagtros, in Chal- 
cidice (384-322 B.C.), stands in character, as well as in 
date, midway between the Athenian philosopher and the 
Alexandrian savant. He came to Athens at the age of 
seventeen, and stayed for twenty years. But he had 
grown up under the shadow of Macedon, his father 
having been physician to Amyntas H,; he had no 
democratic sympathies, and the turmoil of Athenian 
politics was unmeaning to him. In his first published 
work, a letter in the style of Isocrates, he declared for 
the ' contemplative life ' as opposed to the practical, 
and remained true to his principles all his days.^ Plato 
was his chief philosophical teacher ; but he was an 
omnivorous lover of knowledge, and spent his energies 
not only on the history of previous philosophy, on the 
mathematical researches of Eudoxus and the mysticism 
of the Pythagoreans, but on such detailed studies as the 
compilation of the Didascaliae (see p. 249) and the mor- 
phological structure of gourds. His relations with his 
master are illustrated by the celebrated sentence in the 
Ethics about Plato and Truth ; "Both being dear, I am 



374 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

bound U> prefer Tr^ttk." A more fervid or less original 
disciple, Spensippus, bx instance, would not have treated 
tfae two as antithetic On Plato's death in 347, Speu- 
sippus was chosen head of tfae Academy ; and Aristotle 
found it tactful to leave Athens, accompanied by Xeno- 
crate% who afterwards succeeded Speustppus. He q>ent 
three years at Assos, in Mysia, and manied Pythias, the 
niece of the dynast there, under romantic circumstances, 
having somehow rescued her during a revolt. It was in 
343 t^t be was invited to Pella by Philip, and became 
tu'.or to the young Alexander, then aged seventeen. 

Nothing is known of those lessons. One fears there 
was little in common between tfae would-be rival of 
Achilles and the great expounder of tfae ' contemplative 
life,' except the mere possession of transcendent abili- 
ties. Aristotle's real friend seems to have been Philip. 
He had perhaps caught something of that desire for a 
converted prince which played such tricks with Plato 
and Isocrates. He had made attempts on two small 
potentates before Philip — Themison of Cyprus, and his 
wife's uncle, Hermeias, A year after Philip's death, 
Aristotle returned to Athens, and Alexander marched 
against the Persian Empire. Aristotle had always dis- 
approved of the plan of conquering the Bast. It was 
not 'contemplative.' And even his secondary piece of 
advice, that the conqueror should be a ' leader ' to the 
Greeks and a ' master ' to the barbarians, was rejected 
by Alexander, who ostentatiously refused to make any 
difference between them. There was a private difficulty, 
too, of a worse kind : one CalUsthenes, whom Aristotle 
left as spiritual adviser in his stead, was afterwards im- 
plicated in a supposed conspiracy and put to death. 
But there was no open quarrel. It was probably at this 



ARISTOTLE 375 

lime (335) that Aristotle founded his school of philosophy 
in a building with a ' peripatos ' or covered walk, near the 
grove of Apollo Lykeios, just outside Athens. It was an 
institution in some respects less near to the Academy than 
to the Alexandrian libraries, and, like them, was probably 
helped by royal generosity. Aristotle's omnivorous learn- 
ing and genius for organisation had their full scope. He 
surrounded himself with fellow - students — avfupiXoffo^ 
ovvre^ — directed them to various special collections and 
researches ; admitted differences of opinion in them, and 
exercised the right of free criticism himself ; and so built 
that gigantic structure of organised and reasoned know- 
ledge which has been the marvel of succeeding ages. 

Aristotle's writings were divided by the later Peripa- 
tetics into i^torepiKoX and aKpoa/tarucoi \6yot — ^works for 
publication and lecture materials. His reputation in 
antiquity was based entirely on the former class, espe- 
cially on the semi-popular dialogues; and it is a curious 
freak of history that, with the possible exception of the 
Constitution of Athtns, not one work of this whole class 
is now preserved. In our Aristotle we have no finished 
and personal works of art like the dialogues of Plato. 
We have only vtroiivrntara — the notes and memoranda 
of the school. That explains the allusive and elliptical 
style, the anecdotes and examples, which are suggested 
but not stated ; it also explains the repetitions and 
overlappings and occasional contradictions. Divers of 
the avfuftikocotftowTti have contributed matter, and the 
lectures have been repeated and worked over by various 
' scholarchs.' Aristotle's Rhetoric, for instance, was based 
on the collections of his disciple Theodectes, and ex- 
panded again by his successor Theophrastus. The 
Posies count as Aristotle; the Botany and Mineralogy, 




j,*r> LriTRArVRE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

.£» nttMphrxsCis : bnc budi men were obmitsly con- 
os3«i -n bodL In tbe ElUa there aie dear traces 
or tbree jervsie OeaAers — the master himself, Endimus, 
.uni jnvtber. Tb« JRA^Mrns and Logic must have bad 
their :ir.vn ^pninlacice Iine$ hid by Aristotie's oHginal 
spvoiIaCoos. The Potties seem to ^ve bis personal 
repiv bj die cEuiIenge which Ptito had thrown to " some 
ooM aoC a ptwt. but a friend (rf poetry, to give in plain 
prvKe" stnne josttlicitioa of the senseless thing.* ^t in 
^ ot dtese wwts there are additioos and cwimients by 
udMr ttHkibS^ tn political science the school collected 
jod actilysed 15S diJierent exiting constitutions. Aris- 
tode buiKelt did Athens and ^nrta; but be published 
bus jprat theoretic treat&e cm /WttiKr b^we his collectors 
hiii :wir:y Oiicrhed their work. 

Kirty ytr-ic* iftw Ansrotle's deitfa the 'Peripatos' had 
t'evvcie .in icsjgmiicAnt insdnition, and the master's 
wv; L^j;'* wci; but Ii:t;e read till the taste for them revived 
in the Kotudn j-ehod- For one thing, much of his work 
WAS ot rtie ;'ioat?tfr order, the kind that is quickly super- 
seded, becau^ i; has pa\-ed the way by which others may 
jwivjiice. .^gxii. o-^iiiised research requires money, 
ii\il the \-urious -d^adochi,' or successors of Alexander, 
ktpt their eiidowui«its for their own capitals. Above 
all, the aitu oi unt\-eri.d knowledge was seen — nay, was 
[■'ro%"ed by Aristotle's own experience — to be beyond 
humait (x^wers. The great organisations of Alexandria 
vi-ere glad to spend upon one isolated subject, such as 
ancient hterature or mechanics, more labour and money 
than the Lj-ceum could command in its search for 
Encyclopaedic wisdom. Even a great 'poljTnath' like 
Eratosthenes is far from Aristotle. 
' Rif. O07. 



NEW CENTRES OF LITERATURE 377 

Athens remained the headquarters of philosophy; but 
[iterature in the ordinary sense was gradually attracted 
to places where it could hnd high salaries and repose. 
Even in the great period, poets had collected in the 
courts of Hiero at Syracuse and Archelaus at Pella. 
The real superiority of Athens to such retreats was 
the freedom which it allowed in thought and speech, 
and the close sympathy and community of culture 
between the writer and his public; and, moreover, 
through most of the fifth century Athens must have 
been the safest and most orderly place of residence 
in the world. It was less so in the fourth century. 
There was more safety in the capitals of the great 
monarchs, behind Una upon line of trained armies. 
Pella was safe ; so was Antiocb ; so, after the expul- 
sion of the Gauls, was Pergamus ; so, above all, was 
Alexandria. And as for the sympathetic public, it was 
ceasing to exist anywhere. It was always incumbent 
on a writer to be cultured, and the standard of culture 
had by this time become uncomfortably high. Books 
were increasingly written for those who had read all the 
existing books, and were scarcely intelligible to those 
who had not The poet of the third century — nay, even 
a man Uke Antimachus long before — only expected to be 
read by people of his own sort, people with enough 
leisure and learning to follow easily his ways of thought. 

One form of pure literature. Comedy, was faithful to 
its birthplace. The Athenian lightness of wit, freedom 
of speech, and dramatic spirit could not bear trans- 
planting. The Middle and New Comedy represented, 
probably, the most spontaneous and creative work of 
their age in the domain of pure literature. The division 
between the two periods is not well marked. The Middle 



378 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Comedy 13 dated roughly from 400 to the death of Alex- 
ander, in 336, and is characterised by a love of parody 
and the ridicule of poets and myths. The New, as we 
have said above, extended its sphere to all the subjects 
of ordinary hfe. The plots are well constructed, and 
often convincing. The reigns of the ' diadochi ' formed a 
time full of adventure and intrigue, and real life supplied 
the stage with soldiers of fortune, kidnapped maidens, 
successful adventurers, and startling changes of fate, as 
well as with parasites and ' hetairai.' The diction, too, 
has an air of reality. It is a language based on life, 
and keeping ctoso to life, utterly remote from the arti- 
ficial beauty of the contemporary epics and elegies. 
It aims at being 'urbane and pure' as well as witty; 
but it is not highly studied. Antiphanes and Alexis, 
of the Middle Comedy, wrote over two hundred plays 
each ; Menander and Philemon, over two hundred be- 
tween them. Much is said about the low moral tone of 
the New Comedy — on the whole, unjustly. The general 
sympathies of the poets are healthy enough ; only they 
shrink from all high notes, and they do perhaps fail to see 
the dramatic and imaginative value of the noblest sides 
of life. Menander himself was a close friend of Epicurus, 
and shocked people by ' praising ple;isure.' The talent 
and energy devoted to descriptions of eating and drinking 
in the Middle Comedy are sometimes cited as a symp- 
tom of the grossness of the age. But a feast was one 
of the traditional elements in comedy ; how could a 
'kdmOidia' go without its 'kdmos'? Our evidence, 
too, is misleading, because it comes chieBy from the 
Banqtiet-PkUosophers of Athenaeus, a book which specially 
ransacked antiquity for quotations and anecdotes upon 
convivial subjects. And, above all, it is well to remember 



NEW COMEDY 379 

that the Middle Comedy began in years of dearth, and 
all literature shows us how half-starved men gloat upon 
imaginary banquets. There is as much suffering as 
JDllification behind some of these long lists of fishes 
and entries. 

Romantic and adventurous love formed a prominent 
motive in the plots of the New Comedy, and such love, 
under the conditions of the time, was generally found 
among troubled circumstances and damaged characters. 
In satirical pieces the heroine herself is often a 'hetaira.' 
In a great many more she is rescued from the clutches 
of 'hetairai' and their associates. In a few, it would 
seem, she has 'a past/ but is nevertheless allowed to 
be 'sympathetic' In one or two, like the Amastris of 
Diphilus, she is a virtuous, or at least a respectable, 
princess, and the play itself is really a historic drama. 
Certainly the sentimental interest was usually greater 
than the comic. 

Philemon ultimately went to Alexandria, and Machon 
lived there ; but they were exceptions. Menander him- 
self stayed always in Athens. Our conception of the man 
is drawn as much from his ^unous statue, and from the 
imaginary letters written in his name by the sophist 
Alkiphron (about 200 A.D.), as from his own numerous 
but insignificant fragments. Very skilful the letters are, 
and make one fond of the cultured, critical, easy-natured 
man, loving nothing much except literature and repose 
and his independence, and refusing to live at the Alex- 
andrian court for any salary, or to write down to the 
public in order to win as many prizes as Philemon. 

The same adventurous love interest which pervaded 
comedy also raised the elegiac and epic poetry of the 



38o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE - 

time to its highest imaginative achievements. The late 
Greek elegy was not only a thing of singular beauty, it 
was also a great Uteraiy in&tience ; and Callimachus, 
Euphorion, and PhilStas are the chief inspirers of the 
long-lived Roman elegy. Phil^tas, a younger contem- 
porary of Demosthenes, is perhaps the first typical 
Alexandrian elegist ; a pale student wasted in body, 
who "would have been blown away if he bad not 
worn leaden soles to his boots"; a Homeric critic; 
tutor to Ptolemy II. and to Theocritus ; a writer of 
love elegies, which he called by the name of his own 
beloved 'Bittis,' and of an idyll about Odysseus and 
Polym£l£. He and Ascl&piades, whose graceful love- 
verses are well represented in the Anthology, were the 
only poets of this age whom Theocritus frankly con- 
fessed to be his superiors. A friend of PbilStas, HgrmS- 
StANAX, has left us one long fragment, giving little more 
than a list of bygone lovers, which will have startled 
many readers of Athenaeus by a certain echoing and 
misty charm. Callimachus, librarian, archaeologist, 
critic, and poet, was perhaps the most infiuential per- 
sonality in literature between Plato and Cicero. He 
realised and expressed what his age wanted, and what 
it was able to achieve. The creative time had gone ; 
it was impossible to write like Homer or Hestod or 
^schylus ; they suited their epoch, we must suit ours, 
and not make ourselves ridiculous by attempting to 
rival them on their own ground. What we can do is to 
write short unambitious poems, polished and perfected 
in every line. The actual remains of Callimachus are dis- 
appointing, save for a few fine epigrams, and the elegy on 
the Bathing of Pallas. For the rest, a certain wit and 
coldness, a certain obviousness in reaching effects, spoil 



ALEXANDRIAN ELEGY AND EPOS 381 

the poetry of the great critic ; and after ages, on the 
whole, will care more for the unsuccessful rebel, Apollo- 
nius, who refused to accept his veto. 

Apollonius attempted an epic in the old style, long, 
rather ambitious, absolutely simple in construction, and 
unepigrammatic in language. That was the kind of poetry 
he liked, and he meant to write it himself. The Argo- 
nau/rVafailed in Alexandria,and Apollonius left the country 
for Rhodes, where he worked up a second version of his 
poem. He had a small band of admirers in his lifetime ; 
but taste in general followed Callimachus in favour of the 
brief and brilliant style. Even Catullus and Propertius 
were Callimacheans. It was for Vergil to conquer the 
world with a poem in Apolloniiis's spirit, with much of its 
structure and language borrowed line by line from him. 
Of course Vergil had in a sense a 'call' to write the 
national epic of his country, whereas no one had called 
upon Apollonius to celebrate the Argonauts ; and this in 
itself gives Vei^il a superior interest. But the Medea and 
Jason of the Argonautica are at once more interesting and 
more natural than their copies, the Dido and ^Eneas of the 
Mneid. The wild love of the witch-maiden sits curiously 
on the queen and organiser of industrial Carthage ; and 
the two qualities which form an essential part of Jason 
— the weakness which makes him a traitor, and the 
deliberate gentleness which contrasts him with Medea 
— seem incongruous in the father of Rome. There are 
perhaps two passages which might tie selected as specially 
characteristic of Alexandrian poetry. One would be the 
protest of Callimachus : ^ " Great is the sweep of the river 
of Assyria ; but it bears many scourings of earth on the flood 
of it, and much driftwood to the sea. Afollo's bees draw not 
■ Call. H]mn Aftlb, 107 & 



382 LITERATURE OF ANCEINT GREECE 

tktir water everywhere : a little dew from, a koly fount, the 
highest bloom of the flowery The other would be Medea's 
answer when Jason proposes to plead for mercy with her 
fether AiMes, and to make covenant for her hand, as 
Theseus once sued for Ariadne from Minos : — 

" Speak tut of ruth nor pact. They dwell net here. 
Ailtn ttept HC bond, nor hwws neffar. 
Nor walkt with nun as Minos waiked of old; 
And I am no Greek princess pntlt-sonUd. 
— One only thing : ■when thott art saved and free. 
Think of Medea, and I will think of thee 
A Iways, though ail forbid. And be there heard 
Some voice frmn far away, or tome wi/dbird 
Come crying on the dety torn forgot. 
Or nuy the storm-winds hear, and spttm me not, 
A nd lift me in their arms throng wastes of shy 
To face thee in thy falsenta, and once cry, 
' / saved thee.' Yea, a-sudden at thy halt 
And hearthstone may I stand tahen those days fall. 

Apollonius is, of course, subject to the vices of his 
age. He has long picture-like descriptions, he has a 
tiresome amount of pseudo- Homeric language, he 
has passages about the toilette of Aphrodite and the 
archery of Eros which might have been written by 
Ovid or Cowley. But there is a genuine originality 
and power of personal observation and feeling in him ; 
witness the similes about the Oriental child-wife whose 
husband is killed, the wool-worker bending over the fire 
for light as she labours before sunrise, the wild thoughts 
that toss in Medea's heart hke the reflected light dancing 
from troubled water, the weird reaping of the Earth- 
children in the fire of sunset — which force us to admit that 
in him Greece found expression for things that had been 
mute ever before. And for romantic love on the higher 
side he is without a peer even in the age of Theocritus. 



APOLLONIUS. THEOCRITUS 383 

Theocritus is perhaps the most universally attractive 
of all Greek poets. It is common to find young students 
who prefer him to Homer, and most people are con- 
scious of a certain delighted surprise when they first 
make his acquaintance. In his own sweet and lowly 
domain he is absolute monarch ; one might almost 
say that there is hardly anything beautiful in the pas- 
toral poetry of the world that does not come horn 
Theocritus. His first idyll, the Birgr on Daphnis, has 
perhaps had a greater numtier of celebrated imitations 
than any poem of its length in existence — from Bion's 
Adonis, Moschus's Bim, Vergil's Dafknis, to our own 
Lycidas, Adonaii, and Tkyrsis. 

That habit of retrospect, that yearning over the past, 
. which pervades all the poetry, though not the scientific 
work, of Alexandria, is peculiarly marked in Theocritus. 
There are poems in plenty at>out the present ; there are 
even poems about the future, and the hopes which the 
poet reposes in his patrons. But the present is rather 
ugly and the future unreal. The true beauty of Theo- 
critus's world lies in the country life of the past. The 
Sicilian peasants of his own day, it has been well remarked, 
were already far on the road to becoming the agricultural 
slave population of the Roman Empire, "that most 
miserable of all proletariats." Yet even long afterwards, 
under the oppression of Verres, they were known for 
their cheerfulness and songfulness ; and it is probable 
that the rustic bards whom we meet in Theocritus are 
not mere figments of the imagination. It was in the old 
Sicilian poetry of Stteichorus that the type first appeared. 
The Sicilian villager, like the Provencal, the Roumanian, 
and the Highlander, seems to have taken verse-making 
and singing as part of the ordinary business of life. 




384 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

There is such unity of style and atmosphere in Theo- 
critus that one easily overlooks the great variety of his 
subjects. We call his poems ' Idylls,' and expect them 
to be ' idyllic' But in origin the word e^vXXuii' is merely 
the diminutive of eMos, ' form ' or ' style ' ; and our use of 
the name appears to come from the practice of heading 
these pastoral poems with the musical direction eiSv^JMw 
fiovieo>Mcov, or atimXuAi', 'cow-herd style,' or 'goat-herd 
style,' or whatever the case might require. Only ten of 
the thirty-two Idylls of Theocritus which have come down 
to us are strictly about pastoral life, real or idealised; 
six are epic, two are written for 'occasions,' two are 
addresses to patrons, six are definite love-poems, and four 
are realistic studies of common life. The most famous 
of these last is the Addntaziisa (Id. xv.), a mime describ- 
ing the mild adventures of two middle-class Syracusan 
women, Gorgo and Praxinoa, at the great feast of 
Adonis celebrated at Alexandria by Ptolemy II. The 
piece is sometimes acted in Paris, and has some real 
beauty amid its humorous but almost unpleasant close- 
ness to life. There is not so much beauty in the pre- 
ceding mime (xiv.) with its brief sketch of the kind of 
thing that drives young men to enlist for foreign service ; 
but there is perhaps even more depth and truth, and, we 
must add, more closely-studied vulgarity. The second 
Idyll, narrating the unhappy love of Simastha and her 
heart-broken sorceries, is hard to classify : it is realistic, 
beautiful, tragic, strangely humorous, and utterly unfor- 
gettable. It does for the heart of life what the ordinary 
mime does for the surface ; and, in spite of several 
conscious imitations, has remained a unique masterpiece 
in literature. Three poems appear to express the poet's 
personal feelings ; they are addressed to his squire, and 



PASTORAL POETRY 385 

represent, perhaps, in their serious and gentle idealism, 
the highest level reached by that species of emotion. It 
is one of these (Id. xxix.) that formulates the oft-repeated 
sentiment about the place of love or deep friendship 
in life : 

" A tingU nest built in a titbit tree, 
WlUrt HO wild trawling thing slutll ever elimh.' 

The appeals to Hiero and Ptolemy are as good as such 
appeals are entitled to be ; and the little epics, reminding 
one in form of the expanded Eoiai^ are never without 
passages of exquisite charm and freshness in the midst of 
a certain general frigidity. The two occasional poems, 
one describing a country walk in Cos upon a day of 
fruit-gathering, the other accompanying a present of a 
distaff to the wife of the poet's friend, Nikias, are not only 
gems in themselves, but leave the fragrance of a lovable 
chsracter behind them. 

The other bucolic poets, BlON and MoscHUS, are 
confessed imitators of Theocritus. Bion was a younger 
contemporary of his model, and probably wrote his 
Dirgt of Adonis for the particular festival referred to in 
the Addnia^a. The Dirge is a magnificent piece of 
work in its way; florid, unreal, monotonous, almost 
oriental in its passionate and extravagant imagery, it 
exactly suits the subject for which it was composed. 
There is very likely no genuine emotion whatever at the 
back of it ; but it carries the <Tnagination by storm, and 
was calculated to leave such persons as Gorgo and 
Praxithea in floods of tears, Moschus represents him- 
self as a pupil of Bion ; and is said to have been a friend 
of Arisfarchus, though his style suggests the product of 
a later time. It is as ornate as that of a Silver-^e 




$86 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

Roman, and as full of those little phrases that smack 
of the Gradus and suggest self-satisfaction — Bion is "tit 
Dorian Orpheus," Homer is "that sweet mouth of CaUiept:' 
Yet his bad manner cannot hide his inborn gifts. Among 
the innumerable echoes of the Greek pastoral which are 
still ringing in the ears of modem Europe, a good many 
come from Moschus's Lament for Bion; for instance, 
Matthew Arnold's dream, to 

"Mait U^ up via Joy tkt htamUous head 
Of Prostrpitu, amoitg wkot* erownid Aarr 
Ariftev/trtfirit epaud on Sicilitm airj 
AndfiuU hitJHmd, lOu Orph*U3,from tJU diad* 

The other great mark of the Alexandrian epos and 
elegy, besides the tove interest, was the learned interest 
There were numerous archseological poems. RhiXnus 
wrote on the Messenian Wars, making a kind of Wallace 
out of Aristoraenes. Callimachus wrote four elegiac 
books of Aitia or 'Origins,' and an antiquarian epos 
' Hecaltl centring upon Theseus and the Bull of 
Marathon, but admitting many digressions. There were 
still more philosophical poems. ArAtus of Soli wrote 
on Pktxnomena or 'Things Seen in the Sky,' with an 
appendix on the signs of the weather ; Nicander, on 
natural history, and on poisons and antidotes, as welt 
as on the origins and legends of various cities. Neither 
of these two poets appeals much to our own age, which 
prefers its science pure, untempered with make-believe. 
The extraordinary influence and reputation enjoyed by 
ArStus in antiquity appear to be due to the fact that he 
succeeded in annexing, so to speak, as his private pro- 
perty, one of the great emotions of mankind. In the 
centuries following him it almost seems as if no cultured 
man was capable of looking long at the stars without 




LEARNING AND RESEARCH 387 

murmuring a line from the Pkanemena. The greatest 
man of learning of the whole Ptolemaic age, Eratos- 
thenes, kept his geography and chronology, and his 
works on the Old Comedy, to a prose fonn. His 
little epos about the death and avenging of Hesiod, and 
his elegy Erigoni, are on legendary and what we should 
call ' poetical 'subjects. 

In Prose, learning and research set the prevailing tone. 
The marches of Alexander had thrown open an immense 
stretch of the world to Greek science, and the voyages 
of bis admiral Nearchus, and of men like Polemon and 
Pytheas, completely altered ancient geography. Our 
chief handbooks are a Tour o/tke World and a PeripiAs 
or 'Voyage-round' various coasts, current under the 
names of Skymnus and Skylax respectively. Hie scien- 
tific organisation of geography was carried out by men 
like Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, involving the inven> 
tion of systems for calculating latitude and longitude, and 
the use of trigonometry. Mathematics, pure and applied, 
were developed by a great number of distinguished men, 
including Euclid, in the time of Ptolemy I., and Archi- 
ufiDES, who died in 212. Mechanics — the machines 
being largely of wood, and the motive power generally 
water or mere gravitation, though in some cases steam — 
flourished both for military purposes and for ordinary 
uses of life. There is a curious passage in the extant 
works of HSro, describing a marionette-machine, which 
only required setting at the beginning to perform un- 
aided a fotu--act tragedy, including a shipwreck and a 
conflagration. 

Learning was very especially applied to literature. 
There were two great libraries in Alexandria — the first 
by the museum and the palace ; the second, both in age 



388 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and importance, near the temple of Serftpis. They were 
projected by the first Ptolemy with the help of Dfimfr- 
trius of Phalirum, actually organised by the second 
(Pbitedelphus) ; and they formed the centre of culture 
for the next centuries. Zenodotus, Callimachos, Eratos- 
thenes, Aristophanes of Bsrzantium, and Ariatarchus were 
the first five librarians ; what institution has ever had such 
a row of giants at its head ? The most immediate work 
of these libraries was to collect and preserve books; 
every ship visiting Alexandria was searched for them, 
and neither money nor intrigue was spared in acquiring 
them. The next task was to form a catalogtu ratsemnd- — 
the work mainly of Callimachus, in 120 volumes ;* the 
next, to separate the genuine works from the spurious, 
and to explain the di£Bcult and obsolete writers. The 
other kings of the time formed libraries too, that of the 
Attalids at Pergamus being the most famous. Pergamus 
was a greater centre of art than even Alexandria, but 
in literature proper it was at a disadvantage. It had 
started too late, when Alexandria had snapped up most 
of the unique tiooks. It had no papyrus. The plant 
only grew in Egypt, and the Ptolemies forbade the 
export of it ; so that Pergamus was reduced to using 
the costly material which bears its name, ' parch- 
ment.' In criticism generally Pergamus was allied 
with the Stoic schools ; and devoted itself to inter- 
preting, often fancifully enough, the spirit rather than 
the letter of its ancient writers, and protesting against 
the dictatorship of Aristarchus and the worship of exact 
knowledge. 

One of the first fields for the spirit of research and 
' niram rfi* h ritf raiMf tuAani/rdrrur col dr nrfy^fw. 




FOURTH-CENTURY HISTORIANS 389 

learning was naturally the record of the past. Soon 
after the death of Thucydides, and before that of 
Xenophon, the Greek physician Ct£sias, who was 
attached to Artaxerxes, wrote Persian and Indian his- 
tory and a ' PeriplOs,' with a view, partly of correcting 
the errors of Herodotus, partly, it is to be feared, of 
improving upon his stories. He was more important 
as a source of romance than as a historian. The 
Sicilian general PHtLtSTUS wrote in banishment a 
history of his own times ; he made Thucydides bis 
model, but is said to have flattered Dionysius II. in 
the hope of being restored. He was killed in Dion's 
rising in 357. 

The characteristic of the historians of the later 
fourth century is that tbey are not practical statesmen 
and soldiers, but professional students. Two disciples 
of Isocrates stand at the head of the list Ephosus 
of Kym£ wrote a universal history reaching from 
the Dorian Migration to the year 340. He was a 
collector and a critic, not a researcher ; he used 
previous writers freely and sometimes verbally ; but 
he rejected the earliest periods as mythical, and 
corrected his sources by comparing them. Being an 
Isocratean, he laid great stress both on style and on 
edification. Polybius says his descriptions of battles 
are 'simply ridiculous'; but Polybius says much the 
same of tdl civilians. A large part of Ephonis has 
been more or less transcribed in the extant history of 
Dioddrus Siculus. 

The other Isocratean who wrote history was a more 
interesting man, Theopoupus (bom 380). He was a 
Chian, and had the islander's prejudice against the 
Athenian Empire, while other circumstances prejudiced 




350 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

him stiD moce against die militarT despots. His two 
great works were fftPrwicu, in twdrc, and Pkii^pica, io 
fiftT-«^bt boob. LAe odwr verbose men, be Hked to 
preach silence and smplicity. He was possiblj a pn>> 
fesscd membo- of ttie Cynic sect; at any latev be was 
a hater of the world, and a desptscr of the greaL He 
believed that all the evils of Greece were doe to her 
' thrtt ktaJs,' Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and that kin^ 
and statesmen and ' leaders of fiie people ' were gener- 
ally the scorn of society. He b praised for his skill 
in seeing secret causes and motives — chiefly bad ones 
— behind the veils of diplomacy, and bis style is almost 
onirersally admired. The so-called Looglnus, 0» tkt 
Smi&iu, qootes his description of the entry (rf the Great 
King into Egypt, beginning with magnificent tents and 
chariots, ending nnth bundles of shoe-leather and pickled 
meats. The critic complains of bathos ; but the passage 
reads like the intentional bathos of satire. His military 
descriptions fail to please Polybius, and it is hard to 
excuse the long speeches he puts into the mouth of 
generals tn action. 

The Sicilian TiHjEUS was a historian of the same 
tendency, a pure student, ignorant of real warfare, who 
wrote the history of his own island in thirty-eight books. 
He, too, took a severe view, not only of kings and 
diplomats, but also of other historians ; * but he pos- 
sessed the peculiar merit of having thoroughly mastered 
his sources, including inscriptions and monuments, and 
even Carthaginian and Phoenician archives. Polybius 
also praises the accuracy of his chronology. 

Turning aside from special histories like the Attitis 
of Philochorus and the Samtan Chronicle of DQris, we 

' tUfiCa hii DickiMiiie 'Xnrf^iot, Diod. Sic 5. i, and Atb. 373. 



HISTORY. POLYBIUS Jfti 

find the old rationalism of Heroddrus revived in a 
quasi-historical shape by EuhShbrus and his follower 
PALfPHATUS. They reduced myth and religion to 
common-sense by the principle that the so-called gods 
were all mortal men who had been worshipped after death 
by the superstition or gratitude of their fellow-creatures. 
£uh£merus had the great triumph of finding in Crete 
what he believed to be a tomb with the inscription, ZAv 
Kpovov ('Zeus, son of Cronos'). And we find an inter- 
esting product of the international spirit of the time — 
the spirit which was to produce the Septuagint and the 
works of Philo — in the histories of Bte^teus, priest of 
Bel in Babylon, and Manetho, priest of SerApis in 
Alexandria. 

But the greatest of the later Greek historians is, 
without question, Polybius of Megalopolis (about 205- 
123 B.C). His father, Lycortas, was general of the 
AcJiseans, and the first iortj years of the historian's life 
were spent in military and diplomatic work for the 
league, especially in its resistance to Rome. In t66 he 
was sent to Rome as a hostage, and for sixteen years he 
was kept there, becoming a close friend of the Scipios. 
He followed the younger Africanus on most of his 
expeditions, and saw the fall of Numantia and of 
Carthage. In hts last years he was the principal 
mediator between Rome and Greece, possessing the 
confidence of both sides, and combining in a singular 
degree the patriotism of the old Achiean cavalryman 
with a disinterested and thorough - going admiration 
for Rome, His history started from 264 B.C., where 
Timaeus ended, and led up to his own days in the 
first two books ; then it expanded into a universal 
histoT7, ^ving the rise of Rome, step by step, down 



392 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

to the destruction of Carthage and the final loss of 
Greek independence. As a philosophic historian, a 
student of causes and principles, of natural and geo- 
graphical conditions, of customs and prices, above all 
of political constitutions, he is not equalled even hy 
Thucydides. He combines the care and broadness i^ 
view of a philosophic modem writer with the practical 
experience of an ancient historian. Only the first five 
books of his history are extant in a complete form ; the 
next thirteen, in extracts. As for the style of Polybius, 
Dionysius classes htm among the writers "whom no 
human being can expect to finish." That is natural 
in the professional Atticist, who could not forgive 
Polybius for writing the current common Greek of 
his time. But it is odd that modern scholars, especi- 
ally if they have read the Atticist historians and Poly- 
bius close together, should echo the rhetor's protest 
against the strong living speech of the man of affairs. 
Polybius does not leave the same impression of per- 
sonal genius as Thucydides ; but he is always interest- 
ing, accurate, deep -thinking, and clear-sighted. He 
has one or two prejudices, no doubt — against Cleo- 
menes for instance, and against the ^tolians. But 
how he sees into the minds and feels the aims of 
almost all the great men he mentions 1 His Aritus 
and his Scipio are among the most living characters 
of history; and his Hannibal is not Livy's theatrical 
villain, but a Semite of genius, seen straight and 
humanly. Polybius was prosaic in temperament ; he 
was harsh in criticising other historians. But, apart from 
his mere scientific achievement, he has that combina- 
tion of moral and intellectual nobleness which enables 
a consistent patriot to do justice to his country's 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE 393 

enemies, a beaten soldier to think more of the truth 
than of his own hindered glory. How different from 
the splendid but jaundiced genius of Tacitus, or the 
mere belUs Uttrts ot the Isocratean Liv; 1 



The Rohan and Byzantine Periods 

The establishment of the Roman Empire shifted the 
centre of gravity in Europe, and threw upon the Greek 
intellect a subordinate and somewhat narrowing task. 
Greece became essentially the paid teacher of the Roman 
world. In the East, indeed, the great Hellenistic civili- 
sation founded by Alexander remained to some extent 
self-sufficing and independent of Rome ; and in the East, 
Greek literature retained much creative power and original 
impulse. But our remains of the first two centuries A.D, 
consist chiefly of the books that were read in Rome ; and 
for the most part the Western world was calling so loud 
for the Greeks to come and educate her that they foi^ot 
everything else in Ibis mission. The original poets al- 
most cease. Babrius, the fabulist, is no poet ; Oppian's 
poem on fish is seldom very interesting. Only the senti- 
mental elegy, now contracted into epigrams about eight 
lines long, really fiourishes, MeleAoer of Gadara wrote 
spontaneously; he was scholar and educator enough to 
form the collection from which our Palatine Anthology 
has been gradually built up ; but he was also a real 
and exquisite poet in a somewhat limited domain. His 
numerous tittle love-poems are full of sweetness, and 
there is great tenderness in his elegies on death. Yet 
even in Meleiger signs of the age are not wanting. 



394 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

lltere is something faint in bis emotioo, something coo- 
tracted and over-refined in his range (rf ioferests. And 
a certain lack of spring and nimbleness amid all his 
grace of diction and versification seems sometimes to 
betray the foreigner. One suspects that, at home in 
Gadara, Greek was only his second language, and that 
he had talked Aramaic out of school Perhaps his most 
ingenious work is the Proem to the Anthology, describing 
that metaphorical Garland : 

"WhtmuUe ma^ Heomt imfgiU AmyO, 
WiUJbgtj tmd Mam mai^,-iiBn wUttj 
And 5q^U0 Jfcw, imt rotn.' 

Antipateb of Sidon was nearly equal to him ; Crina- 
GORAS is always good to read. And, as a matter of 
fact, there was work of this kind produced, much of it 
beautiful, much of it offensively corrupt, right on to the 
days of Palladas in the fifth century, of AOAthias and 
Paul the Silenttary in the sixth. 

One cardinal ol>stacle to poetry in imperial times was 
the non-correspondence between metrical rules and real 
pronunciation. j£schylus and Sophocles had based their 
poetry on metre, on long and short syllables, because that 
was what they heard in the words they spoke. Aristo- 
phanes of Byzantium (257-180 ii.c.) noticed, besides the 
divisions of long and short, a certain musical pitch in the 
words of an Attic sentence, and invented the system of 
accents for the instruction of foreigners in pronunciation. 
It is hard to realise the exact phonetic value of this ' pitch- 
accent ' ; but it is certain that it did not a£Fect poetry 
or even attract the notice of the ear in classical times, 
and that as late as the second century B.C. it was some- 
thing quite different from what we call accent, to wit, 



POETRY UNDER ROBIAN EMPIRE 395 

stress-accent But in the fourth century after Christ 
the poet NONNUS, an Egyptian Greek from PanopoUs, 
in his Ditmynaca, begins suddenly to reckon with accent 
Dividing his hexameters into halves at the csesura, he 
insists that in the second half the accent siaU not isM on 
the ante-penultimate syllable ; while in the first half 
before the caesura he mostly insists that it skaU fall 
on tiie ante-penultimate. The accent must by his time 
have become a stress-accent, and the ingenious man is 
attempting to serve two masters. A verse like 

t^pauiiv Irfrtft&otiTOf 
durr&o'tu Ath^ fSpipi 

is in metre a good hexameter; by accent it is next 
door to 

" A captain bold of Hdliikx, 
Who lived in country qulrten " — 

that is to say, to the so-called ' politic ' verses scanned by 
accent, which were normal in Byzantine times, and were 
used by the vulgar even in the fourth century. Quintus 
of Smyrna, an epic poet preceding Nonnus, does not 
observe these rules about accent ; but Colufhus, Try- 
phiodonis, and Musasus do. The Dumysiaea made an 
epoch. 

In prose there is much history and geography .ind 
sophistic literature &om the age of Augustus on. IX v 
d6rus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicamassus, Josephus the 
Jew are followed by the Xenophon of the decadence, 
Arrian ; by Appian, Dion Cassius, and Herodian. Arsian 
wrote an Analiasis of Alexander, like Xenophon's Anabasis 
of Cyrus, and devoted himself to expounding Epictitus 
a great deal better than Xenophon expounded Socrates ; 
this besides tactics and geography. Above all, Plutarch 



396 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

(46-130 A,D.) wrote his immortal Lives, perhaps the most 
widely and permanently attractive work by one author 
known to the world, and the scarcely less interesting 
mass of treatises which are quoted under the general 
name of Moralia. He was do scientific historian, and 
the value of his statements depends entirely on the 
authorities he chances to follow; but he had a gift of 
sympathy, and a power of seeing what was interesting. 
As a thinker he is perhaps over-anxious to edify, and 
has his obvious limitations ; but he is one of the most 
tactful and charming writers, aod one of the most lovable 
characters, in antiquity. 

In pure literature or ' sophistic ' we have many names, 
Dion Chrysostomus, Herddes Atticus, and Aristldes are 
mere stylists, and that only in the sense that they can 
write very fair stuff in a language remarkably resembling 
that of Demosthenes or Plato. The Philostrati are more 
interesting, t>oth as a peculiarly gifted family, and for 
the subjects of their work. There were four of them. 
Of the first we have only a dialogue about Nero and the 
Corinthian Canal. Of the second we have the admirable 
Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Neo-Pythagorean saint 
and philosopher who maintained a short-lived concur- 
rence with the founder of Christianity; also a treatise 
on Gymnastic, and some love-letters. Of the third and 
fourth we have a peculiar series of ' Eikones' (Pictures), 
descriptions of works of art in elaborate poetical prose. 
They are curious and very skilful as literature, and are 
valued by archaeologists as giving evidence about real 
paintings. The description of pictures was a recognised 
form of sophistic, which flourished especially at the 
revival of art under the Antonines, and lasted on to the 
days of Longus and Achilles Tatius. 



PLUTARCH AND LUCIAN 397 

Among the Sophists we must class the oft-quoted 
Athen^us, a native of Naucratls, in Egypt, who wrote 
his Banquet-Philosophers, in fifteen books, about the end of 
the second century. The guests are all learned men of 
the time of Marcus Aiirelius, and the book gives their 
conversation. An extraordinary conversation it is. They 
discuss every dish and every accessory of banqueting in a 
spirit compounded of ' Notes and Queries ' and an anti- 
quarian encyclopaedia. All that there is to know about 
wine vessels, dances, cooking utensils, eels, the weak- 
nesses of philosophers, and the witticisms of notorious 
' hetairaj,' is collected and tabulated with due care. What- 
ever sources Athenaeus used, he must have been a man 
of enormous reading and a certain sense of humour ; and 
the book, misleading as its devotion to convivial subjects 
makes it, forms a valuable instrument for the study of 
antiquities. 

The greatest of the second-century Sophists was 
LuciAN. He and Plutarch are the only writers of the 
period who possess a real importance to the world, who 
talk as no one else can talk, and who continue to attract 
readers on their own merits. Luctan has been compared 
to Erasmus in general cast of mind. He is learned, 
keen-eyed, before all things humorous ; too anxious for 
honesty, too critical, and too littie inspired, to be carried 
into the main currents of his time. He lived through 
the great reformation and literary revival of Marcus, but 
he seems not to have shared in it He read philosophy 
deeply and widely, but always as an outsider and with 
an amused interest in its eccentricities. To judge from 
the amount of personal apologia in his writings, he seems 
to have sufiFered much from personal attacks, especially 
on the part of the Cynics, whose combination of dirt, 



398 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

igaorance, and saintliness especially offended him. He 
was intended by his father for a sculptor, but broke away 
into literature. He began as a rhetorical sophist of the 
ordinary sort, then found his real vocation in satirical 
dialogues, modelled on Plato in point of style, but with 
the comic element outweighing the philosophicaL In 
the last years of his life he accepted a government office 
in Egypt, and resumed his rhetorical efforts. He is an 
important figure, both as representing a view of life which 
has a certain permanent value for all ages, and also as 
a sign of the independent vigour of Eastern Hellenism 
when it escaped from its state patron^e or rebelled against 
its educational duties. 

In philosophy, which is apt to be allied with educa- 
tion, and which consequently flourished under the early 
Empire, there is a large and valuable literature extant 
There are two great philosophic doctors. Galen was 
a learned and bright, though painfully voluminous, 
writer, as well as a physician, in the time of M. Aurelius. 
Sextus EmpiriCUS, a contemporary of Caligula, was a 
member of the Sceptic school ; his two sets of books 
Against the Mathemattci, or professors of general learn- 
ing, and Against the Dogmatid, or sectarian philo- 
sophers, are full of strong thought and interesting 
material. There are two philosophical geographers — 
Strabo in the Augustan age, Ptolemy in the time of 
Marcus. The former was strongest on the practical and 
historical side, while Ptolemy's works on geography 
and on astronomy are the most capable and scientific 
that have come down to us from ancient times. An- 
other 'geographus,' Pausanias, who wrote his Tour 
9/ Greece (H^i^itk 'EWdSot), in ten books, under the 




ROMAN PHILOSOPHY 399 

Antonines, seems to have travelled for pleasure, and 
then, after he had come home, compiled an account 
of what he had seen, or ought to have seen, out of some 
book or books at least three hundred years old I That 
is the only way to explain his odd habit of not mention- 
ing even the most conspicuous monuments erected after 
150 B.C Nay, his modem critics assure us that some- 
times when he says '/ was told' or '/ myself saw,' he 
is only quoting his old traveller without changing the 
person of the verb. This is damaging to Pausanias per- 
sonally, but it increases the value of his guide-book; 
which, if often inaccurate and unsystematic, is a most 
rich and ancient source of information, quite unique in 
value both to archKoIogists and to students of custom 
and religion. It was Pausanias, for instance, who 
directed Schliemann to Mycenae, 

In philosophy proper, the profes«onal Stoic is best 
represented to us in the Lectures and the Handbook of 
EPiCTfiTUS, a Phrygian slave by origin, and a cripple, 
who obtained his freedom and became a lecturer at 
Rome. Expelled thence, in 94 A.D., by Domitian's 
notorious edict against the philosophers, he settled at 
Nicopolis, in Epinis, where he hved to enjoy the 
friendship of Trajan, and, it is said, also of Hadrian 
(117-138 A.D.). EpictMus illustrates the difiFerence of 
this age from that of Plato or even of Chrysippus, 
in that he practically abandons all speculation, and 
confines himself to dogmatic practical ethics. He 
accepts, indeed, and hands on the s[>eculative basis 
of morality as laid down by the earlier Stoics, but his 
real strength is in preaching and edification. He 
called his school a " ktaUng-plaa for diseased souls," 
Such a profession is slightly repellent ; but the breadth 




400 LTTERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

and coaadencsi ol ttw teacbo'B oooceptioos, liis sab- 
huiitj of tbou^i^ and hia bnnioqr, win die affectioo of 
most Tcaden. Yet p i ctui eaqoe as the external circiim- 
itances of EiMCtttos an, they are dhniTu'd by comparison 
witfa those which make the figw« of Uakccs Ackeuds 
90 uniquely fa«^^nating , And the dear, strong style of 
tfie profesBOoal lect u r e r doca not attain that extraoidi- 
nary power ai appeal irtiicb underlies the emperor's 
aiAwaid CtmmmHJi^p with Himt*^. ^nSti Marcos, 
M with to many great sooh, everytbing depends on 
whether you love him or not If tibe &i5t ttiree chapters 
win you, every word be writes seems predous ; but 
many people, not necessarily narrow-minded or vicions 
in taste, will find the irtwle book dreary and un- 
meaning. It would be hard to deny, however, that 
the ethical teaching of the old Stoa, as expounded by 
these two men, is one of the very highest, the most 
spiritual, and the most rational ever reached by the 
human intellect Marcus died in i8o; the great philo- 
sopher of the next century was bom in 204, PlotTnus, 
the chief of the Neo-Platonists. Though he professes 
for the most part merely to interpret Plato, he is 
probably the boldest thinker, and his philosophy the 
most complete and comprehensive system, of Roman 
times. His doctrine is an uncompromising idealism : 
the world all comes from one Original Force, which 
first differentiates itself into Mind, i^. into the duality 
of Thought and Being. Nature is the result of Thoughts 
contemplating themselves, and the facts of nature, again, 
are her self-contemplations. There is a religious ele- 
ment in this system which was developed, first by the 
master's biographer and editor, Porphjrry, and then by 
lamblichus, into what ultimately became a reasoned 



THE END OF PHILOSOPHY 401 

system of paganism intended to stand against the 
polemics of the Christians. 

It is usual to leave these last out of the accounts of 
Greek literature. Their intimate dependence, indeed, 
on ancient Greek speculation and habits of thought 
is obvious upon the most casual reading. But tiie 
connection, if treated at all, needs to be traced in 
detail ; and there is a certain sense in which the death 
and failure of the Emperor JuuAN marks an epoch, 
amounting almost to the final extinction of ancient 
culture and untheological ideals. The career of that 
extraordinary man was well matched with a character 
which would appear theatrical but for its almost excessive 
frankness and sincerity, and which seems to typify the 
ancient heroic spirit struggling helplessly in the toils of 
the decadence. He seeks to be a philosopher, and ends in 
mysticism. He champions enlightenment, and becomes 
almost more superstitious than the fanatics with whom 
he wars. He fires his soldiers ;ind dependents with 
the love of justice and temperance and strict discipline, 
and then debauches them by continual sacrifices to the 
gods. He preaches toleration on the house-tops, and 
men answer him by a new persecution. The prince of 
saintly life, who spends bis nights in prayer and medi- 
tation, who lives like a pauper tiecause he has given 
np all his privy purse to the relief of distress in the 
provinces, and who seems to find his only real con- 
solation in blindly following always the very highest 
and noblest course abstractly possible, regardless of 
practical considerations, is curiously near to some of 
tiiose wild Christian anchorites to whom he so strongly 
objected. There was something very great and true 



402 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

wbidi Julian was striving towards and imperfectly 
graqnng all through his life, which be mi^t, in a 
sense, have attained pennanently in happier ages. He 
was a great and humane general, an able and nnselfidi 
statennan. But there is fever in his ideals; diere is a 
horror of conscious weakness in hts great attetI^rts. 
It is the feehng that besets all the Greek mind in its 
decadence. Roman decadence tends to exaggeration, 
vainglory, excess of ornament ; Greek decadence is 
humble and weary. "/ pm^ that I mof fulfil yemr 
kefes," writes Julisui to Tbemistius, "but I fiar I siaB 
fail. The promis* you make aiout me to yomn^ and 
othert is too large. Long ago I had fimdes of emulate 
Alexander and Marau and other great and good mem ; 
and a shrinking used to come over me and a strong tbrad 
of knowing that I was utterly lacking in the courage of 
the one, and could never even approach the perfect virtue 
of the other. Thai was what induced me to be a student. 
I thought with relief of the 'Attic Essays,' and thought it 
right to go on repeating them to you my friends, as a man 
with a heavy burden lightens his trouble by singing. And 
now your letter has increased the old fear, and shown the 
strug^e to be Tnuch, muck harder, when you talk to me of 
the post to which God has called me." 

One form of literature, indeed, contemporary with 
Julian, and equally condemned by him and by his chief - 
opponents, shows a curious combination of decay and 
new life, the Romance. The two earliest traces of prose 
romance extant are epitomes. There is perhaps no spon- 
taneous hction in the Love Stories of Parthenius, an 
Alexandrian who taught Vergil, and collected these myths 
for the use of Roman poets who liked to introduce 
mythical names without reading the original authorities. 



THE ROMANCE 403 

But the work may have looked different before it was 
epitomised. There is real invention in the work of 
one Antonius Diogenes about Tht Incredible Wonders 
beyond ThuU, He lived before Lucian, who parodies 
him. The book was full of adventures, and included 
a visit to the moon; but, to judge from the epitome, it 
repeated itself badly, and the characters seem to have 
been mere puppets. One particular effect, the hero or 
heroine or botti being .taken for ghosts, seems especially 
to have fascinated the author. There is some skill in the 
elaborate and indirect massing of the imaginary sources 
from which the story is derived. Romance was popular 
in the third century, which has left us the complete 
story of HabroconUs and Antkeia by Xenophon of 
Ephesus. The two best Greek novelists are with little 
doubt LOMOns and HELioodRUS: the former for mere 
literary and poetic quality ; the latter for plot and 
grouping and effective power of narrative. Helio- 
ddrus writes like the opener of a new movement. He 
is healthy, exuberant, full of zest and self-confidence. 
His novel is good reading even in our own age, which 
has reached such exceptional skill in the technique of 
novel-writing. Yon feel that he may well be, what as a 
matter of fact he was, the forerunner of a long array of 
notable writers, and one of the founders of an exception- 
ally prolific and durable form of literature. It is said 
that Helioddrus was a Christian and bishop of Salontca, 
and that the synod of his province called upon him either 
to bum his book or to resign his bishopric, whereupon 
the good man did the btter. The story rests on weak 
evidence, but it would be like the Helioddrus that we 
know. Longus is very different — an unsangutne man 
and a pagan. Not that his morals are low : tt needs an 




404 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 

unintelligent reader or a morbid translator to find harm 
in his History of De^hnis and Chloe. But a feeling of 
discour^ement pervades all his work, a wish to shot 
out the world, to shrink from ambitions and problems, 
to live for innocent and unstrenuous things. He re- 
minds one of a tired Theocritus writing in prose. Some 
of the later novelists, like Achilles Tatius and Chariton, 
wrote romances which, judged by vulgar standards, 
will rank above that of Longus. The; are stronger, 
better constructed, more exciting ; some of them are 
immoral. But there is no such poet as Longus among 
them. 

He is the last man, unless the present writer's know- 
ledge is at fault, who lives for mere Beauty with the 
old whole-hearted devotion, as PlotJnus lived for specu- 
lative Truth, as Julian for the "great city of gods and 
men." Of these three ideals, to which, beyond all others, 
Greece had opened the eyes of mankind, that of Political 
Freedom and Justice had long been relegated from prac- 
tical life to the realm of thought, and those who had 
power paid no heed to it The search for Truth was 
finally made hopeless when the world, mistrusting 
Reason, weary of argument and wonder, flung itself 
passionately under the spell of a system of authoritative 
Revelation, which claimed a censorship over all Truth, 
and stamped free questioning as sin. And who was to 
preach the old Beauty, earnest and frank and innocent, 
to generations which had long ceased to see it or to 
care for it ? The intellect of Greece died ultimately of 
that long discouragement which works upon nations like 
slow poison. She ceased to do her mission because her 
mission had ceased to bear fruit. And the last great 
pagans, men like Plottnus, Longus, and Julian, pn>< 



' gOtterdXmmerung ' 



405 



nounce their own doom and plead for their own pardon, 
when they refuse to strike new notes or to try the ring 
of their own voices, content to rouse mere echoes of 
that old call to Truth, to Beauty, to Political Freedom 
and Justice, with which Greece had awakened the world 
long ago, when tiie morning was before her, and her 
wings were stromg. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 




CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

-Before the Seventh Century all the Dates 
are uerely l^genoary, and the poets mainly 

fabulous. 



II.— Bei^rb Marathon. 

■chuiliarkpi»d>a»fUa( to kbtndUloMi >«•»/( nW^iwUek kfaadil 
II tlH atiit laittMh TiUi or, wtua Ihi dit* sf birth k ■skniwB, u KBa jik 
wUcii ha dfatincwiilMrt hiat^ Tk* gwgniphlcri hh ii w J«a drnxtm 
vilMr'i piMa of aclMtj ; wtwn lb* Urdi^Ka b ASknnt, h k ailiUd in In^ 



OBO 


■ iimww,ni^»aii . . 




yti <«Ss-668]. 




'TerpwdH.' LyricM . . 


. LetbM . . 


VktorlDC>citM,67& 


fifa 


OUinM, EtcgUm . . 


. Eplmu. 




6SO 


AlcDiui,CbacicM. . . 


. LM^lmon. 








. Puw. 






PiMader, Epicm . . . 


. Cunira . 


BatJccp.6» 


630 




. ColophciL 








. AmoiBoi. 




630 


Ailcm, Clnricin . . . 


. iMbM 




«00 


Akco*, hjiiaa . . . 


. LedMM . . 


B.Uboth[»Th.F.fiftr 




S»pplw,Lrri« . . . 


. Lobo* . . 


ranUter. 




Solon, Poeta Politiciu . 


. Atbeai. 






SlMkhorui.Choricai. . 


. Hinenu 




S90 


TbMk>, Phil«opha. . . 


. UUetu. . 


ObMrred ccUpM ai 
«mins«5. 


S70 




. HOetn. 




sfc 


Bion. Hiitoticot . . . 










. LrdiiL 




S50 




. HiMu. 




S40 


AnacreoQ, Lrilcw . . 


. To». . . 


Went to Abd«rm MS- 




Ibrew. Chocien* . . . 


. RhcBinm. 








. LCM 





CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



PboerUdea, Qnoaiem 
HippoDAx, hmttoi* . 
y*""!*-"— . Foeta Philo- 



Tbeqd*, TngieM . . . 
$30 FjFllUlgMM, FfaUoMpfaM 

Theagtoei, KUoikH . 



Dhwrmt, Hwkidew 
Aknueoo, PhUoMphat . 
Jio Onomaentoi, PoeU Oiphiou . 
Zdpjim, Poeta Ocpbicui 
Owmn, Hl rt oric M . . 
EogKtm, HiftoriciM . . 



SOO 



T[«£leu 



Choirilui, Tngicnt ■ . 

Hencliiui, Phikaophat . 

Hetodcmu, Hiitoricui . 

494 Phiyoicliai, Tngkui. . 



BphetM. 
ColopiboDi 



, Atbent . . 1 Conpeted agtioi 
(Phliui) . t i«K)irl>»> 499. 



Pint tragic vktocy. 



IIL— Thb Attic Perkhx 

490 Batlie of MacaUwB, 

Pindar, jytA. 7. 
489 pANVAsiii, Epicii% HaUeamuKU. 
486 Pindar, /^lA. 3. 

4S5. HiPFVs, Hiitoiicni, Rheeinm <f>ba1iMU^ 
484 Epichakmds, Comicni, S]n«cn«e (Cot). 

j£scHyi.us, Tragieui, Alheni ; b. 535, d. 456. I'uM fi 

Pindar, Oij-M. 10 and 1 1. 
480 PiNDAi, Choricui, Thebca; b. 5SI, d. 448. 

Fiodar, /slim. 7, 
477 ForroadoD of Delian CoaStdtnej. 

476 Pbrynichttt, Pfutniiia. 
475 Parmenidis, Pacta Philotopbkut, EIm, 
471 Pbdar. D^. t and 13 ; .Cscbrlui, Ptf», 
470 Bacchvlidu, Cboricus, .Sidtf. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

468 Hndar, <»fm. 6. The fint rietoiy at Sofihodai. 
466 PiDdu, Pftk. 4 ud 5. 
Coujc, Klictai, Sidlr. 
4G4 Pindar, O^nt. ■} •nd 13. 
460 CuiOKiDn, CnmLnw, Atheafc 



Ahaxaookas, PhUowpliiu, Atbeni (Q 

BxTBON, SopUitet, Hatadea. 
458 Mukiin, OreMMa. 
456 FiikUr, Ofym. 9. 

SorBOcm, TiagicH, Atbeoa t b. 496, 4. 4a& 
4S5 BniFUea, AfiaAn 
4J9 Pfaidu, Ojrx. 4 uxl S- 
451 Ion, 'nagicB^ Oilak 
450 GoKOUS, SophUta, T-Bwirinl. 

SmiMBKOTDS, So^Unca, Tbant. 

Cbatu, CoadcM, Athena. 



44S CxATiinn, Comkaa, AthenL 
445 HuMiprui, Cooiicda, Atheoi. 

EuplDOCLas, Poeta Philoanphlmi, AsrtEciitnM. 
444 Hbiadotub, HlrtcdcBa, Halkanuuam; b. 484, d. 43S(?V 
443 Herodotni px* to ThttriL 

443 FuxTAOOua, Sopliitfea, Abdoa; b. 483(?),d,4il* 
440 Sophodea, Antigim (or 44a ?V 

Antivhom, Oiator, Atbeu. 

AurHKLAUi, FUloiophoi, AUmia. 

BuxinDU, Tra^coa, AOwaa } b. 480^ d. 406. 

HiuatD^ FhOoaophna, Saniaa. 

SoFHXOH, Himognphas, Syiaauc 
438 Faitbeooa dedicated. 

Eariindea, Alt4tHt (with Cranw, Abmtitm, Ttl^ut). 
435 LbukiptoIi ThDoMplma, MUetn or Abdenu 
43a r«tinM.i» defeat CoKjtttaa, inppofted bjr AthenUni, b a 

ElMldiaa and Aqwia praaecnted for imptety. Alao Anaxagocaa. 
4|1 PelopaoDcdan Wai. 

brfpUM, JMMa (with Dktyt, PkOecUtu). 
4I> HniioM pihIUaa laat part of hi* Uitoi7. 




413 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

Thdcydidks, Hutaficu, Athem. 
HiPFOCKATis, Uolicni, Cof. 

419 Phkynicuds, Comicui, Athen*. 

SoCKATXS, Fhiloaophni, Alheni ; b. 46S, d. 399. 
438 Euripidei, Eifip^fylus. 
437 GcHjia* comet to Athens u chief enroy oT LeoatU 

Ariitopbuw*, Dmitala. 
436 Aiiilophutei, Batfl»m«m. 

415 DtOOBHBS, PbUiMophiii, Apollooia in Ciew. 
AriitophaBCi, Atitwmam. 

<^iire of Sphactcria. 
404 DuooKAS, Phaoaophoi, Helok 
Aratophane^ JTnigiUi. 

413 Antiocbd^ Hiitarlcai, Stmcum. 

Iliaqrdide* lone* Atbou. 

Ariitophaiwi, Oaudi (lU editV 
433 Aiiitophanei, Waifi. 
411 Peace of NiUa*. 

Eupolii, Flatttrtri. 

420 Dakastes, HUtoricuf, Sigeum. 
Thsasymachus, Rhetor, Cbalccdoc. 
Deuociitus, Philoiophiu, Abdera. 
GLAQCtis, Hiitoricaa, Rhegiinn. 

419 PKODictis, Sophiitei, Ceo*. 

417 Old Oligaich on C»mtittiHan of Athaa. 

Aotiphon, Or. 5, 0» Ik* Mwdtr »f Htrvdts. 

416 Agathoh, Trajjcos, Atheot ; b. 447, d. 40a 

415 Mutilation of the Hctoue. Expedition to Skitj. 

Euripides, TVoadts. 
EUFOUS, Comicus, Alheni. 
Hbcbuon, Comicus, Atheox (Tliatot). 
Alkidakas, Khetor, Elea. 
Ckitias, Politiciu, Athem. 

414 Aristophanbs, Comiou, Athens ; b. 45a d. 385 ; Birdt. 
413 Atheniui fleet destroyed at Syracuse. 

Euripides. Electro. 
411 Lyiiai conies to Athen). 

Euripidet, HtUntf Andramtda. 
4 1 1 Aiistophanea, Lysitirata, Tkamopkariaaau, 

GoTeniineDt of the Four Hundred. 
410 Lysias 20, Far Polyilralus, 
409 Sophocln, Phitocutes. 
408 Euripides, Ortslii. 

Aristopbanet, Plu/us (lit edit). 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 413 

406 TiHOTHBUS, DithTTunbdcni, Athent (Miletoi). 
40J Plato, Comico*, Aibeni. 

Ariitophuic^ Ftvp. Earijudes, Bncika (?). 
404 T^iuiiij of the Thiit;. 

AuxipsiAS, Comicm, Athent. 

Ahtikachus, E^ncQi, Colophm. 

Choiulds, Epieo*, Suxw. 
403 Demcxamcf reriored. 

Lynu, Or, la, Agaiml Eratathaut ; Or. 34, Ff th* CittHtntUm. 
403 Lrnu, Or. si, Drftmt »» a Ckargt if TaJring BrUn. 
401 Expedition </ Crni* the Tonnger. 

IjHU, Or, 35, Dtfaut *m a CAor^ ^ Sakimg I* AMitk Ikt 

Sophocles, (Sdiput ai Cobiuu (produced by the poet*! pciidMD). 

Thucjdides'i History published. 

SoPHAiNrrus, HiitorioH, Stymptutliu 
400 £SCKINU, Fhilotopfans, Sphetln b Attic*. 

Ctbsias, Hitloricos, Coidos. 

Stkattcs, Comicm, Albeni. 
399 Andoddes, On (At liysttriet. 
Death of Soentet 

Ei;cLBiDES, Fhilowphui, M^m, 
395 ISOCRATKS, Orator, Alheai ; b. 436, d. 338, 

Pkiustub, Hiiloncus, Syracnie. 

pRiLOZENns, Dithynmbicui, Athens (Cythera) ; b. 435, d. 38a 

POLTCKATts, Sophiite*, Alhem. 

Xknaxchds, Miraognphu, Sidly. 
394 Xknofhom, Hiatoticiu, Attica ; b. 434, d. 354. 

Isoctatet, Or. 30, Againit UckiUi; Or. 19, MgiiMiau; Or. 17, 7V« 



\j3B% Walla c^ Athena reatoied by Conon. 
391 Ariitophanei, SaUtiaatta. 
391 Iiocrates, Ot. 13, Jfakui tin St^tvb. 
390 Ttxat, Ot. $, Oh tAt Eitaa ^ Dua^gtrntt. 

Trmdo, Philoiophtif, Athene 
3S8 Ly^as, Or. 33, Ofymfiaaa. 

Aiiitophanet, Plutia. 
387 P1.ATO, Philowiphni, Athens ; b. 437, d. 347. 
380 Edbdlus, Comicns, Atdok 

Isocrale*, f^mtgjricm, 
378 Athens head of a new Naval Confederal. 

374 Isoctates, Oi. a, Ep. te Nutciu. 
373 Isoctates. Or. 14, Plaiaiaii. 
3TI Battle of Lcnetia. 



414 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

370 ISi«US, Orator, Athens. 

Anaxandrides, Comicus, Athens (Caminii). 

MviLAS, Tmcticas, Stymphalns. 
569 IsKOS, Ot.% Onthi EstaU 0/ AUfpkiluu 
367 Aristotle oomes to Athens. 
366 Antisthknbs, PhUosophus, Athens. 

Aristifpus, Philosophus, Cyrene. 

Isocimtes, Or. 6, ArcAidamus, 
365 Antiphanbs, Comicus, Athens (a foreigner) ; b. 404, d. 33a 
364 Issras, Ot.6, OntAs Estati tf PhilocUmon. 
363 Demosthenes, Or. ay and 28, Against Aphobus. 
36a Battle of Mantinea. Death of Epaminondas. 

Demosthenes, Or. 30 and 31, Against Onetor I and IJ. 
360 Ltcurgus, Orator, Athens ; b. 396 (?), d. 323. , 

Hyperides, Against Autocles, I 

359 Isocrates, Letter VL, T0 the Childrm ofjasmu 

357 Social War b^[ins. 1 

355 End of Second Athenian Empire. ' 

Isocrates, Or. 8, On the Pmu; Or. 7, Ar§»pagHUmu I 

354 Eubulus in power at Athens. I 

Demosthenes, Or. \^^ On the Navy Boards; Or. ao, Against L eptim s * | 

Albxis, Comicus, Athens (Thorii) ; b. 394, d. 288. 
353 Isocrates, Ot, i^ On the Antidesis, 
352 Demosthenes, Or. 16, On behalf af the Megalepdilant. 

Thbodectes, Tragicns, Athens (PhaseUs). { 

Thbopompus, Historicus, Chios. *^ 

351 Demosthenes, Or. 4, Against Philip /. 
349 Demosthenes, Or. i and 2, Olyntkiacs I. and II. 
347 Death of Plato. Speosippus at the Academy. 

346 Peace of Philocrates. 

345 iCscHiNBS, Orator, Athens ; b. 389, d. 314. 1 

i^Bschines, Against Timarchus. . ' 

344 Dbmosthbnbs, Orator, Athens ; b. 383, d. 322. 

Ephorus, Historicus, Kyme. 

Aristotlb, Philosophus, Stagirus. 
343 Demosthenes, Or. 19. iEschines, Or. 2 {Falsa Legatie\ 
342 Hegesippus (?), About Halonmsus, 

341 Demosthenes, Or. 8, On the Chersonnese; Or. 9, Against Philip III, 
340 War with Philip. 

Anaximbnbs, Rhetor, Athens. 

Dbmadbs, Orator, Athens. 

Hypbrxdbs, Orator, Athens ; d. 32a. 
339 Isocrates, Or. la, Panathenaicus, I 

Xenocrates at the Academy. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 415 

338 Battle <rfChEtaneL 

336 Philip uMMinited. Aleundei the Great incceedfc 

334 Ariitotle teichc* «t the LTCetim m AthcM. 

Aluuidet MtB oa[ for Pena. 
330 DemortheDei, Oi. iS, On tid Crtmn, 
ftdiinei. Or. 3, Againit CtutpiaH. 
lifcatgat, Against LtteraUt, 
334 DiIitASCHn^ Onira, Atbeai {Corinth) ; b, 361 1 Or. I, AgtUmH Dtitus- 

titMt; Or. a, Agmtiut AritttgiUut, 
3*3 Epicmn* coma to Athena. 

Death of Aleaander, Lamian War. 

Death of Demoathenei, HTperide*, utd Aristotlft 
311 Aleundei'* Empiie dirided among Ua Generals 







If 
> 



i 




INDEX 



AituUmy, 304 
Addllei Tatisi, 404 

Moiea* Tmcticni, 312 
■*«*»«, 171 3SS f- 
Achikio, 88 
MailtjVm, 9, 907, 108, II 

Agal}iiu,39i 
Anthon, 304 note, 3BI 




Apollooini of Tjru^ 396 

AiatmonUl, 71 386 
ArdMttntat, 73 
Atduloehof, 73, Sc^ 87 t 
Archimedei, 387 
ArchlppDi, a87 
Artkim, 148, t8S C, 390 
' Arcthmi,' 5, 44 
Aiktt, 99. loi 
AiHtardnH, i(\ 15, U, 388 
Aiitteu, 67, 73 
AriMUi,ii6 
AriMldM,396 
Aibtippo^ 173, 31a 



Aniaiiu, 88 
Anuagoni, 158 
Aiu^Dttadcir 153 f* 

Andoddci, 33&t 
Andtotkm I at 
Antidorni^ KnM, 133 
Andattdnu of Calo[AoD, ifi, 71 C 
And paUl of Sidon, 394 ( 
AntMcbni of Syncnie, taa 
ADliphuMs, 378 
Andphoo. 163, 169, 335 t 
AndMhcDci, 173. 30*. 334 
Antonioi Diogeoet, 403 
Anjrte, 73, 394 
AnjtM, 13s, 176 C, 3»9 
Apidlodorui, enmmvUn, 46 
Apotlodonu, Socntk; 173 
ApoUomtu of Rhodes, 71, 381 L 



ArittoplMiics of BTWttinm, 15, 3 



35'. 373-376 
Annn,395 

AKlepMdei,3fo 
Aiini,7i 



AtaUigr^dki, 128, 130, 390 

Babmidi, 89, 303 

BMcfaylid««, to8 C 

Brt»,3r« 

BetaMH^39i 

Moo, [MMotal poet, 385 



Cadhds, III 
CalliniMhai, 71, 380 f., 38S 

ffllinnj , So 

CUli*tntiu, 380 
CuUniu, 73 

1.308 

2D 




4i8 



Chkudei, •» 

Cboiiilm, qJc poeb, 70 1 

-— t»pc poet, aos 

■ CffntMUto,' 10 

Cboni, 95 I., 304 L 

QeideiDiu, I at 

C'leobulini, 85 

Qeobulaa, 85 

Cleoitnliu, 73 

Colnthui, 395 

Cam^. 110 f., 175-393. 377-379 

Connni, 109 f. 

Cnt<% 378 

Cimtiini% 37s, an 

Ckatippni, iSa 

Creopbjdnt, 111 

CiiiuisorM, 394 

CiitbA. i«9 

Cledu,38g 

Dahastes of Sigeum, 113 

Ddnuchus, 363 
iJemadei, J jQ f 
Democritus. 159, 310. 311 
Demmiocua, 85 
Demo&lhencs, 353-369 
Oftu tx mariina, 366 I. 
Didymus, 15 

Dieuchidas oi Mcgaii, II 
Diodorus Si cuius. 39 J 
DioD Cusiu«, 395 
Dion Chcyiostomus, 396 
Dionyiius, lyihgrsphiu, 9, 45 

of Hilicanussus, 313. 315, 395 

of Miletus, 112 

Ditt^tta'Wfrtkip, 65 f., lio 
Diphilos, 379 
DttkyranUi, 98 f. 
Diyllui, Peripaletic, J35 
Durii, 71, 390 

ECFHANTIDBS, 17^ 

EmpedoclM, 75, 158 
EphoruE, 149, 3S9 
Epic 'ij'i/H,'45 
Epichannus, 37J f., 395 
Epicietus, 399 
Epicurus, 304 



Eudemus, PeripaWtic, 37fi 

EugiEon, 111 

Eugamon of Cyiene, J 

Euhimeruj, 391 

Eumelui,68, ^^t., lH 

Euphorion, 3S0 

Eopolii, 111, 17s t 

Eoiiidda, 309, 110^ 335, 319, 950^4 

Galxm, 398 
GUoeai, in 
Gorgiiu, 160, 163, 334 



Hdiodanit, 403 

HclUnicDI, 138 1 

HencUde* of Pontiu, 313 

Henclitoi, 155 L 

HennraianHi, ^^, 380 

Hcnnippns, SS 

Hcrmogene;, 136 

Hero, mechanician, 387 

Herodes Alticoi, 396 

Herodian, S, 395 

Hfrodoros, 3? f. 

lleiodolus, 9, 115, 131-153, 196 

Hesiod, 3, 6. 53-61 

Hiatta, 331, luU 

Hippiu, 164 

llipponu, 73, 88 

llippj-s, laj 

'HisKirit,' 113 t 

Homer. 3-SI 

Hyperides. 357 t 

Iaublichus, 400 

IbTCUS, 105 

Itiscriplietu.HJ f., 147, 191, 195, )o8 

loD, 165, 333 

lophon. 334 

Iiseoi, 34 (, 353 

Ifocritei, 304, 337, 34I-3SJ 

JOSBPHUS, 395 
Jnliui, 401 




Kerkot*. 73 
Kymethni, 37 

Lmcths.44 
LenUpMU, 159 

lKiboii,85 
Loo^ni, 390 

Loom, 397 



Machon, 379 
M«giie»,i77 
Muielho, 391 
NUicelUnai, iSa 
Mvctn Auretini, 400 
MitTon, 73 
Meldger, 393 £ 
MeleugoTu, HI 
Meletnd 176 
Meliniu, 157 



0^«a,393 



t^ 



nuuuiM, 394 
Pura^ p. 133 
Papyri, 16, 100, loq, 38* 
Fannolides, 75, 156 f. 
Putheniiis, 403 
Pani the Silentluy, 394 
Pwuftniu, 398 
PeritDdcT, 73 
PtuEdo, 173 
PluBdnu, 89 
Pherecrttes, 178 



&•' 



|Wo.39i 
nnadiani, isi, 390 
PbilooidMa sSo 
* mi t i » t * ^ ' Mj, IS3. 3«3 



PhokjIidMt 7a. 8s 

Phirnidini, 914, 179 

I^MM, 8, 13, 104, 10^116, 178 

PiMmdet of Ounirai. 69 

PiMo, 17, 64 7>. IM, 173. »«-3'3 

Plato, MKMcw, 979 

Plotinin, 400 

PIutMch, isi.a3S.«93.395t 

Poljlnni, 187, 389, 391 i 

Poljkratei, 17s, 330 

Poljrphndmon, 316 

PoilHtjpfy, 400 

Pi»uiMi,30^ ao6 

Prazipliuie^ 183 



Prolaeoni, 150, itio^ i^ C 
Ptolemr./«<!ri^Miu, 398 
PTth«Bom.73l, 154 

Qoiimn <rf'Sin]FnM, 39s 

Rbamodu, ti 



% 



Fbilemon, 213, 37S 



Rhluuu, 16, 

Sapfko, 93 ( 9S 

Semonidet of Aini>rfM, 8, 5I; 72, Sj f. 

Sextu Empuicm, yA 

Simonida of K«ot, 8, 106-108 

5W»«,77.90 

S)crlM,3a7 

SlTmnai, 387 

Socrales, 170-177. »». 308, 314, 3J0 

Soloo, 11 f., 73. 8t f. 

Sc^hKnetat, 319 

S^UtO, 160-164 

Sofltoclet, 309, 119, 131-149 

So^Hon, 375, 195 

Spmrippat, 31a, 373 

SidnthMVi, 171 

Staduni, 44 

Stepbeo of j^votiniii, 191, 193 

StcHcbom, H, toi-tos 

Stoimbrottif, 16$ t 



4*0 

•amy,' ii» 



*»-;3i 

■.3S3t 



344 



mophmbu^ 375 1 
ThMiMiaipn^ 389 1 

TlmwrimSiit, 16s, 169, 316 
Thwjnlldei, to^ 178-309 

It* 






Win Hen, Serco, J*, tit, 

XAMTBOf, Iia 

Xnophuo, 9, at, 74. 154 



XcnopboD, 17c U4-3a4 



'^fiS" 



403 



Zeoo, 157.304 ^ 
Zawdolm, 15,388 
Xopjtat, 11 



r 



•vT'-t 



r A 



i 




3 6105 038 830 9S2 



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