ANCIIMT nm
AND SICILY
THK STORY OF CIVILIZATION: PART II
THE LIFE
OF GREECE
history of Greek civilization frow th& bcgin~
$s and of civilization in the Near East frow the
death of Alexander^ to the Rowan conquest; with an
introduction on the prehistoric culture of Cntft*.
By Will Durant
SIMON AND SCIIUvSTER
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AM, Rr<t'H PS' RF.STHVFII
winding the fh'Jv a\ lepftHtiiCtittii
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TO MY FRIEND
CITY
Preface
MY purpose is to record and contemplate the origin, growth, maturity,
and decline of Greek civilization from the oldest remains of Crete
and Troy to the conquest of Greece by Rome. I wish to see and feel this
complex culture riot only in the subtle and impersonal rhythm of its rise and
fall, but in the rich variety of its vital elements: its ways of drawing a living
from the land, and of organizing industry and trade; its experiments with
monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, dictatorship, and revolution; its man-
ners and morals, its religious practices and beliefs; its education of children,
and its regulation of the sexes and the family; its homes and temples, markets
and theaters and athletic fields; its poetry and drama, its painting, sculpture,
architecture, and music; its sciences and inventions, its superstitions and
philosophies. I wish to see and feel these elements not in their theoretical
and scholastic isolation, but in their living interplay as the simultaneous
movements of one great cultural organism, with a hundred organs and a
hundred million cells, but with one body and one soul.
Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that
does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry,
history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics,
poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepti-
cism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cyni-
cism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cul-
tural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or
evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks. All the problems that disturb
us today the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the eman-
cipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the
established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and
government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the
conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural sup-
ports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the
revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the
rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy
and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East
and the West all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and
PREFACE
turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that
does not illuminate our own.
We shall try to see the life of Greece both in the mutual interplay of its
cultural elements, and in the immense five-act drama of its rise and fall. We
shall begin with Crete and its lately resurrected civilization, because appar-
ently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culture of
Mycenae and Tiryns which slowly transformed the immigrating Achaeans
and the invading Dorians into civilized Greeks; and we shall study for a
moment the virile world of warriors and lovers, pirates and troubadours,
that has come down to us on the rushing river of Homer's verse. We shall
watch the rise of Sparta and Athens under Lycurgus and Solon, and shall
trace the colonizing spread of the fertile Greeks through all the isles of the
Aegean, the coasts of Western Asia and the Black Sea, of Africa and Italy,
Sicily, France, and Spain. We shall see democracy fighting for its life at
Marathon, stimulated by its victory, organizing itself under Pericles, and
flowering into the richest culture in history; we shall linger with pleasure
over the spectacle of the human mind liberating itself from superstition, cre-
ating new sciences, rationalizing medicine, secularizing history, and reach-
ing unprecedented peaks in poetry and drama, philosophy, oratory, history,
and art; and we shall record with melancholy the suicidal end of the Golden
Age in the Peloponnesian War. We shall contemplate the gallant effort of
disordered Athens to recover from the blow of her defeat; even her decline
will be illustrious with the genius of Plato and Aristotle, Apelles and Prax-
iteles, Philip and Demosthenes, Diogenes and Alexander. Then, in the wake
of Alexander's generals, we shall see Greek civilization, too powerful for its
little peninsula, bursting its narrow bounds, and overflowing again into Asia,
Africa, and Italy; teaching the cult of the body and the intellect to the
mystical Orient, reviving the glories of Egypt in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and
enriching Rhodes with trade and art; developing geometry with Euclid at
Alexandria and Archimedes at Syracuse; formulating in Zeno and Epicurus
the most lasting philosophies in history; carving the Aphrodite of Melos, the
Laocoon, the Victory of Samothrace, and the Altar of Pergamum; striving
and failing to organize its politics into honesty, unity, and peace; sinking
ever deeper into the chaos of civil and class war; exhausted in soil and loins
and spirit; surrendering to the autocracy, quietism, and mysticism of the
Orient; and at last almost welcoming those conquering Romans through
whom dying Greece would bequeath to Europe her sciences, her philoso-
phies, her letters, and her arts as the living cultural basis of our modern
world.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Mr. Wallace Brock-
way for his scholarly help at every stage
of this work; to Miss Mary Kaufman,
Miss Ethel Durant, and Mr. Louis Du-
rant for aid in classifying the material;
to Miss Regina Sands for her expert
preparation of the manuscript; and to
my wife for her patient encouragement
and quiet inspiration.
I am deeply indebted to Sir Gilbert
Murray and to his publishers, the Ox-
ford University Press, for permission to
quote from his translations of Greek
drama. These translations have enriched
English literature.
I am also indebted to the Oxford Uni-
versity Press for permission to quote
from its excdkntOxfordBook of Greek
Verse in Translation,
Notes
ON THE USE OF THIS BOOK
1. This book, while forming the second part of the author's Story of Civili-
zation, has been written as an independent unit, complete in itself. The next
volume will probably appear in 1943 under the title of Caesar md Christ
a history of Roman civilization and of early Christianity.
2. To bring the book into smaller compass, reduced type (like this) has been used
for technical or recondite material. Indented passages in reduced type are quo-
tations.
3. The raised numbers in the text refer to the Notes at the end of the vol-
ume. Hiatuses in the numbering of the notes are due to last minute curtail-
ments.
4. The chronological table given at the beginning of each period is designed
to free the text as far as possible from minor dates and royal trivialities. All
dates are B.C. unless otherwise stated or evident.
5. The maps at the beginning and the end of the book show nearly all the
places referred to in the text. The glossary defines all unfamiliar foreign
words used, except when these are explained where they occur. The starred
titles in the bibliography may serve as a guide to further reading. The index
pronounces ancient names, and gives dates of birth and death where known.
6. Greek words have been transliterated into our alphabet according to the
rules formulated by the Journal of Hellenic Studies; certain inconsistencies
in these rules must be forgiven as concessions to custom; e.g., Hieron, but
Plato (n); Hippodameia, but Alexandr(e)ia.
7. In pronouncing Greek words not established in English usage, a should
be sounded as in father, e as in neigh, i as in machine, o as in bone, u as in
June, y like French u or German u, ai and ei like ai in aisle, ou as in route,
c as in car, ch as in chorus, g as in go, z like dz in adze.
Table of Contents
BOOKI: AEGEAN PRELUDE: 3 500-1000 B.C.
Chronological Table 2
Chapter I. CRETE 3
i. The Mediterranean 3
ii. The Rediscovery of Crete.... 5 2. Society 10
in. The Reconstruction of a 3. Religion. 13
Civilization 8 4. Culture 14
i. Men and "Women 8 iv. The Fall of Cnossus 20
Chapter II. BEFORE AGAMEMNON 24
i. Schliemann 24 in. Mycenaean Civilization 30
ii. In the Palaces of the Kings.... 27 iv. Troy 33
Chapter III. THE HEROIC AGE 37
i. The Achaeans 37
ii. The Heroic Legends 38 4. The Arts 52
in. Homeric Civilization 44 5. The State 53
1. Labor 44 iv. The Siege of Troy 55
2. Morals 47 v. The Home-Coming 59
3. The Sexes 50 vi. The Dorian Conquest.... 62
BOOK n: THE RISE OF GREECE: 1000-480 B.C.
Chronological Table 66
Chapter IV. SPARTA 67
i. The Environment of Greece 67
ii. Argos 70
in. Laconia 72 5. The Spartan Code 81
1. The Expansion of Sparta.. 73 6. An Estimate of Sparta 86
2. Sparta's Golden Age 74 iv. Forgotten States 88
3-Lycurgus 77 v. Corinth 89
4. The Lacedaemonian vi. Megara 92
Constitution 79 vn. Aegina and Epidaurus 95
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter V. ATHENS 98
i. Hesiod's Boeotia 98 2. Athens under the
n. Delphi 104 Oligarchs 109
in. The Lesser States 105 3. The Solonian Revolution.. 1 12
iv. Attica 107 4. The Dictatorship of
i. The Background of Peisistratus 119
Athens 107 5. The Establishment of
Democracy 123
Chapter VI. THE GREAT MIGRATION 127
i. Causes and Ways 127 2. Polycrates of Samos 141
ii. The Ionian Cyclades 129 3. Heracleitus of Ephesus 143
ni. The Dorian Overflow 133 4. Anacreon of Teos 148
iv. The Ionian Dodecapolis 134 5. Chios, Smyrna, Phocaea....i5o
i. Miletus and the Birth of v. Sappho of Lesbos 151
Greek Philosophy 134 vi. The Northern Empire 156
Chapter VII. THE GREEKS IN THE WEST 159
i. The Sybarites 159 iv. From Italy to Spain 168
ii. Pythagoras of Crotona 161 v. Sicily 169
in. Xenophanes of Elea 167 vi. The Greeks in Africa 173
Chapter VIII. THE GODS OF GREECE 175
i. The Sources of Poly theism.. 1 75 iv. Worship 192
ii. An Inventory of the Gods.... 1 77 v. Superstitions 195
1. The Lesser Deities 177 vi. Oracles 197
2. The Olympians 180 vii. Festivals 199
m. Mysteries 188 vra. Religion and Morals 200
Chapter IX. THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 203
I. Individualism of the State 203 2. Sculpture 221
ii. Letters 204 3. Architecture 223
in. Literature 207 4. Music and the Dance 226
rv. Games 211 5. The Beginnings of the
v. Arts 217 Drama 230
i. Vases 218 vi. Retrospect 233
Chapter X. THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 234
i. Marathon 234 m. Xerxes 237
ii. AristidesandThemistocles.,..236 iv. Salamis 239
xii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOKIH: THE GOLDEN AGE: 480-3996.0.
Chronological Table 244
Chapter XL PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 245
i. The Rise of Athens 245
ii. Pericles 248 2. Law 257
in. Athenian Democracy 254 3. Justice 259
i. Deliberation 254 4. Administration 263
Chapter XII. WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 268
i. Land and Food 268 iv. Freemen and Slaves 276
n. Industry 270 v. The War of the
m. Trade and Finance 272 Classes 280
Chapter XIII. THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 287
i. Childhood 287
ii. Education 288 vn. Greek Friendship 301
in. Externals 291 vra. Love and Marriage 302
iv. Morals 293 ix. Woman 305
v. Character 296 x. The Home 307
vi. Premarital Relations 299 XL Old Age 310
Chapter XIV. THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 313
i. The Ornamentation of Life..3i3 iv. The Builders 327
ii. The Rise of Painting 315 i. The Progress of
m. The Masters of Sculpture 318 Architecture 327
1. Methods 318 2. The Reconstruction of
2. Schools 321 Athens 329
3-Pheidias 324 3. The Parthenon 332
Chapter XV. THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 337
I. The Mathematicians 337
ii. Anaxagoras 339 in. Hippocrates 342
Chapter XVI. THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 3 49
i. The Idealists 349 v. Socrates 364
ii. The Materialists 352 i. The Mask of Silenus 364
in. Empedocles 355 2. Portrait of a Gadfly 367
iv. The Sophists 358 3. The Philosophy of
Socrates 370
Chapter XVII. THE LITERATURE OF THE GOLDEN AGE 374
i. Pindar 374 v. Euripides 400
n. The Dionysian Theater 377 i.The Plays 400
m. Aeschylus 383 2. The Dramatist 411
iv. Sophocles 391 3. The Philosopher 413
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter XVII continued
2. Aristophanes and the
4. The Exile 417 Radicals 424
vi. Aristophanes 420 3. The Artist and the
i. Aristophanes and the Thinker 428
War 420 vn. The Historians 430
Chapter XVIII. THE SUICIDE OF GREECE 437
T. The Greek World in the iv. Alcibiades 443
Age of Pericles 437 v. The Sicilian Adventure 445
ii. How the Great War Began..439 vi. The Triumph of
in. From the Plague to the Sparta 448
Peace 441 VIL The Death of Socrates 452
BOOK IV
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF GREEK FREEDOM
399- 3 22 B.C.
Chronological Table 458
Chapter XIX. PHILIP 459
i. The Spartan Empire 459 iv. The Rise of Syracuse 470
ii. Epaminondas 461 v. The Advance of Mace-
m. The Second Athenian donia 475
Empire 463 vi. Demosthenes 478
Chapter XX. LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY 482
i. The Orators 482 iv. Apelles 491
ii. Isocrates 485 v. Praxiteles 494
in. Xenophon 488 vi. Scopas and Lysippus 497
Chapter XXI. THE ZENITH OF PHILOSOPHY 500
i. The Scientists 500 4. The Moralist 517
ii. The Socratic Schools 503 5. The Utopian 519
1. Aristippus 503 6. The Lawmaker 522
2. Diogenes 505 iv. Aristotle 524
in. Plato 509 i. Wander- Years 524
1. The Teacher 509 2. The Scientist 526
2. The Artist 513 3. The Philosopher 531
3. The Metaphysician 515 4. The Statesman 534
Chapter XXII. ALEXANDER 538
i. The Soul of a Conqueror 538 in. The Death of a God 547
n. The Paths of Glory 542 iv. The End of an Age 552
xiv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOKV: THE HELLENISTIC DISPERSION: 322-146 B.C.
Chronological Table $^
Chapter XXIII. GREECE AND MACEDON 557
i. The Struggle for Power 557 iv. Revolution in Sparta 568
ii. The Struggle for Wealth 561, v. The Ascendancy of
m. The Morals of Decay 565 Rhodes 570
Chapter XXIV. HELLENISM AND THE ORIENT 572
i. The Seleucid Empire 572 in. Pergamurn 578
ii. Seleucid Civilization 574 iv. Hellenism and the Jews 579
Chapter XXV. EGYPT AND THE WEST 585
i. The Kings' Register 585 in. Alexandria 592
n. Socialism under the iv. Revolt 596
Ptolemies 587 v. Sunset in Sicily 598
Chapter XXVI. BOOKS 600
i. Libraries and Scholars 600
11. The Books of the Jews 603 iv. Theocritus 608
in. Menander 606 v. Polybius 612
Chapter XXVII. THE ART OF THE DISPERSION 616
I. A Miscellany 616 in. Sculpture 621
n. Painting 618 iv. Commentary 625
Chapter XXVIII. THE CLIMAX OF GREEK SCIENCE 627
i. Euclid and Apollonius 627 Eratosthenes 634
ii. Archimedes 628 iv. Theophrastus, Herophilus,
3ii. Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Erasistratus 637
Chapter XXIX. THE SURRENDER OF PHILOSOPHY 640
i. The Skeptical Attack 640 m. The Stoic Compromise 650
ii. The Epicurean Escape 644 iv. The Return to Religion 657
Chapter XXX. THE COMING OF ROME 659
I. Pyrrhus 659
n. Rome the Liberator 66 1 in. Rome the Conqueror 664
EPILOGUE: OUR GREEK HERITAGE 667
Glossary of Foreign Words 672
Bibliography 673
Notes 680
Pronouncing and Biographical Index 709
XV
List of Illustrations
(Illustration Section follows page 334)
Cover design: Hygiaea, Goddess of Health
FIG. i. Hygiaea, Goddess of Health
FIG. 2. The Cup-Bearer
FIG. 3. The "Snake Goddess"
FIG. 4. Wall Fresco and "Throne of Minos"
FIG. 5. A Cup from Vaphio
FIG. 6. Mask of "Agamemnon"
FIG. 7. Warrior, from temple of Aphaea at Aegina
FIG. 8. Theater of Epidauras
FIG. 9. Temple of Poseidon
FIG. 10. A Krater Vase, with Athena and Heracles
FIG. ii. The Portland Vase
FIG. 12. The Francois Vase
FIG. 13. A Kore, or Maiden
FIG. 14. The "Choiseul-Goufrier Apollo"
FIG. 15. Pericles
FIG. 1 6. Epicurus
FIG. 17. Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes
FIG. 1 8. "Birth of Aphrodite"
FIG. 19. "Ludovisi Throne," right base
FIG. 20. "Ludovisi Throne," left base
FIG. 21. The Diadumenos
FIG. 22. Apollo Sauroctonos
FIG. 23. The Discus Thrower
FIG. 24. The "Dreaming Athena"
FIG. 25. The Rape of the Lapith Bride
FIG. 26. Stela of Damasistrate
FIG. 27. Heracles and Atlas
FIG. 28. Nike Fixing Her Sandal
FIG. 29. Propylaea and temple of Nike Apreros
FIG. 30. The Charioteer of Delphi
FIG. 31. A Caryatid from the Erechtheum
FIG. 32. The Parthenon
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. 33. Goddesses and "Iris"
FIG. 34. "Cecrops and Daughter"
FIG. 35. Horsemen, from the West Frieze of the Parthenon
FIG. 36. Sophocles
FIG. 37. Demosthenes
FIG. 38. A Tanagra Statuette
FIG. 39. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
FIG. 40. Relief from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
FIG. 41. The "Aphrodite of Cnidus"
FIG. 42. The Nike of Paeonius
FIG. 43. The Hermes of Praxiteles
FIG. 44. Head or Praxiteles' Hermes
FIG. 45. The Doryphoros of Polycleitus
FIG. 46. Head of Meleager
FIG. 47. Head of a Girl
FIG. 48. The Apoxyomenos
FIG. 49. The Raging (or Dancing) Maenad
FIG. 50. A Daughter of Niobe
FIG. 51. The Aphrodite of Gyrene
FIG. 52. The Demeter of Cnidus
FIG. 53. Altar of Zeus at Pergamum
FIG. 54. Frieze from the Altar of Zeus at Pergarnum
FIG. 55, The Battle of Issus
FIG. 56. The Laocoon
FIG. 57. The Farnese Bull
FIG. 58. The "Alexander" Sarcophagus
FIG. 59. The Aphrodite of Melos
FIG. 60. The Venus de' Medici
FIG. 6 1. The "Victory of Samothrace"
FIG. 62. Hellenistic Portrait Head
FIG. 63. The "Old Market Woman"
FIG. 64. The Prize Fighter
Maps of the Hellenistic World, Ancient Greece and the Aegean, and
Ancient Italy and Sicily will be found on the inside covers.
AEGEAN PRELUDE
350O-IOOO B.C
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK I
NOTES: All dates are approximate. Individuals are placed at their time of flourishing, which
is assumed to be about forty years after their birth; their dates of birth and death, where
possible, are given in the index. Dates of rulers are for their reigns. A question mark before
an entry indicates a date given only by Greek tradition.
B.C. 9000: Neolithic Age in Crete
3400-3000: Early Mmoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I
3400-2100: Neolithic Age in Thessaly
3400-1200. Bronze Age in Crete
3000-2600: Early Mmoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II
3000: Copper mined in Cyprus
2870: First known settlement at Troy
2600-2350: Early Mmoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III
2350-2100: Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I
2200-1200: Bronze Age in Cyprus
2100-1950: Middle Mmoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II; first series of Cretan palaces
2100-1600: Chalcolithic Age in Thessaly
1950-1600: Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III
1900: Destruction of first series of Cretan palaces
1600-1500: Late Mmoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, I; second series of
Cretan palaces
1600-1200: Bronze Age in Thessaly
1582: ? Foundation of Athens by Cecrops
1500-1400: Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, II
1450-1400: Destruction of second series of Cretan palaces
1433: ? Deucalion and the Flood
1400-1200: Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, III; palaces of Tiryns
and Mycenae
1313: ? Foundation of Thebes by Cadmus
1300-1100: Age of Achaean domination in Greece
1283: ? Coming of Pelops into Elis
1261-1209: ? Heracles
1250: Theseus at Athens; Oedipus at Thebes; Minos and Daedalus at
Cnossus
1250-1183: "Sixth city" of Troy; age of the Homeric heroes
1225: ? Voyage of the Argonauts
1213: ? "War of the Seven against Thebes
1200: ? Accession of Agamemnon
1192-1183: ? Siege of Troy
1176: ? Accession of Orestes
1104: ? Dorian invasion of Greect>
CHAPTER I
Crete
I. THE MEDITERRANEAN
j\S we enter the fairest of all waters, leaving behind us the Atlantic and
JL.L Gibraltar, we pass at once into the arena of Greek history. "Like
frogs around a pond," said Plato, "we have settled down upon the shores
of this sea." 1 Even on these distant coasts the Greeks founded precarious,
barbarian-bound colonies many centuries before Christ: at Hemeroscopium
and Ampurias in Spain, at Marseilles and Nice in France, and almost every-
where in southern Italy and Sicily. Greek colonists established prosperous
towns at Gyrene m northern Africa, and at Naucratis in the delta of the
Nile; their restless enterprise stirred the islands of the Aegean and the coasts
of Asia Minor then as in our century; all along the Dardanelles and the Sea
of Marmora and the Black Sea they built towns and cities for their far-
venturing trade. Mainland Greece was but a small part of the ancient Greek
world.
Why was it that the second group of historic civilizations took form on
the Mediterranean, as the first had grown up along the rivers of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India, as the third would flourish on the Atlantic, and as
the fourth may appear on the shores of the Pacific? Was it the better climate
of the lands washed by the Mediterranean? There, then as now, 2 winter
rains nourished the earth, and moderate frosts stimulated men; there, almost
all the year round, one might live an open-air life under a warm but not
enervating sun. And yet the surface of the Mediterranean coasts and islands
is nowhere so rich as the alluvial valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Tigris,
the Euphrates, or the Nile; the summer's drought may begin too soon or last
too long; and everywhere a rocky basis lurks under the thin crust of the
dusty earth. The temperate north and the tropic south are both more fertile
than these historic lands where patient peasants, weary of coaxing the soil,
more and more abandoned tillage to grow olives and the vine. And at any
moment, along one or another of a hundred faults, earthquakes might split
the ground beneath men's feet, and frighten them into a fitful piety. Climate
did not draw civilization to Greece; probably it has never made a civiliza-
tion anywhere.
4 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. I
What drew men into the Aegean was its islands. The islands were beauti-
ful; even a worried mariner must have been moved by the changing colors
of those shadowed hills that rose like temples out of the reflecting sea. To-
day there are few sights lovelier on the globe; and sailing the Aegean, one
begins to understand why the men who peopled those coasts and isles came
to love them almost more than life, and, like Socrates, thought exile bitterer
than death. But further, the mariner was pleased to find that these island
jewels were strewn in all directions, and at such short intervals that his ship,
whether going between east and west or between north and south, would
never be more than forty miles from land. And since the islands, like the
mainland ranges, were the mountaintops of a once continuous territory that
had been gradually submerged by a pertinacious sea, 8 some welcome peak
always greeted the outlook's eye, and served as a beacon to ships that had as
yet no compass to guide them. Again, the movements of wind and water
conspired to help the sailor reach his goal. A strong central current flowed
from the Black Sea into the Aegean, and countercurrents flowed northward
along the coasts; while the northeasterly etesian winds blew regularly in the
summer to help back to their southern ports the ships that had gone to fetch
grain, fish, and furs from the Euxine Sea.* Fog was rare in the Mediter-
ranean, and the unfailing sunshine so varied the coastal winds that at almost
any harbor, from spring to autumn, one might be carried out by a morning,
and brought back by an evening, breeze.
In these propitious waters the acquisitive Phoenicians and the amphibious
Greeks developed the art and science of navigation. Here they built ships
for the most part larger or faster, and yet more easily handled, than any
that had yet sailed the Mediterranean. Slowly, despite pirates and harassing
uncertainties, the water routes from Europe and Africa into Asia through
Cyprus, Sidon, and Tyre, or through the Aegean and the Black Sea became
cheaper than the long land routes, arduous and perilous, that had carried so
much of the commerce of Egypt and the Near East. Trade took new lines,
multiplied new populations, and created new wealth. Egypt, then Meso-
potamia, then Persia withered; Phoenicia deposited an empire of cities along
the African coast, in Sicily, and in Spain; and Greece blossomed like a
watered rose.
* The Greeks called the Mediterranean Ho Pontos, the Passage or Road, and euphemisti-
cally termed the Black Sea Ho Pontos Euxeinosthe Sea Kindly to Guests perhaps because it
welcomed ships from the south with adverse currents and winds. The broad rivers that fed
it, and the frequent mists that reduced its rate of evaporation, kept the Black Sea at a higher
level than the Mediterranean, and caused a powerful current to rush through the narrow
Bosporus (Ox-ford) and the Hellespont into the Aegean. The Sea of Marmora was the
Propontis, Before the Sea,
CHAP. l)
II. THE REDISCOVERY OF CRETE
"There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich
land, begirt with water; and therein are many men past counting, and ninety
cities."* When Homer sang these lines, perhaps in the ninth century before
our era,* Greece had almost forgotten, though the poet had not, that the
island whose wealth seemed to him even then so great had once been
wealthier still; that it had held sway with a powerful fleet over most of the
Aegean and part of mainland Greece; and that it had developed, a thousand
years before the siege of Troy, one of the most artistic civilizations in his-
tory. Probably it was this Aegean culture as ancient to him as he is to us
that Homer recalled when he spoke of a Golden Age in which men had
been more civilized, and life more refined, than in his own disordered time.
The rediscovery of that lost civilization is one of the major achievements
of modern archeology. Here was an island twenty times larger than the
largest of the Cyclades, pleasant in climate, varied in the products of its
fields and once richly wooded hills, and strategically placed, for trade or
war, midway between Phoenicia and Italy, between Egypt and Greece.
Aristotle had pointed out how excellent this situation was, and how "it had
enabled Minos to acquire the empire of the Aegean." 5 But the story of
Minos, accepted as fact by all classical writers, was rejected as legend by
modern scholars; and until sixty years ago it was the custom to suppose, with
Grote, that the history of civilization in the Aegean had begun with the
Dorian invasion, or the Olympic games. Then in A.D. 1878 a Cretan mer-
chant, appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos, unearthed some strange
antiquities on a hillside south of Candia.f The great Schliemann, who had
but lately resurrected Mycenae and Troy, visited the site in 1886, an-
nounced his conviction that it covered the remains of the ancient Cnossus,
and opened negotiations with the owner of the land so that excavations
might begin at once. But the owner haggled and tried to cheat; and Schlie-
mann, who had been a merchant before becoming an archeologist, with-
drew in anger, losing a golden chance to add another civilization to history.
A few years later he died. 6
In 1893 a British archeologist, Dr. Arthur Evans, bought in Athens a
number of milkstones from Greek women who had worn them as amulets.
He was curious about the hieroglyphics engraved upon them, which no
scholar could read. Tracing the stones to Crete, he secured passage thither,
* All dates in this volume are B.C. unless otherwise stated or obviously A.D,
t The modern capital, now officially renamed Heracleurn.
6 THELIFEOFGREECE ( CHAP. I
and wandered about the island picking up examples of what he believed to
be ancient Cretan writing. In 1895 he purchased a part, and in 1900 the re-
mainder, of the site that Schliemann and the French School at Athens had
identified with Cnossus; and in nine weeks of that spring, digging feverishly
with one hundred and fifty men, he exhumed the richest treasure of modern
historical research the palace of Minos. Nothing yet known from an-
tiquity could equal the vastness of this complicated structure, to all appear-
ances identical with the almost endless Labyrinth so famous in old Greek
tales of Minos, Daedalus, Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. In these and
other ruins, as if to confirm Evans' intuition, thousands of seals and clay
tablets were found, bearing characters like those that had set him upon the
trail. The fires that had destroyed the palaces of Cnossus had preserved
these tablets, whose undeciphered pictographs and scripts still conceal the
early story of the Aegean.*
Students from many countries now hurried to Crete. While Evans was
working at Cnossus, a group of resolute Italians Halbherr, Pernier, Savig-
noni, Paribeni unearthed at Hagia Triada (Holy Trinity) a sarcophagus
painted with illuminating scenes from Cretan life, and uncovered at Phaestus
a palace only less extensive than that of the Cnossus kings. Meanwhile two
Americans, Seager and Mrs. Hawes, made discoveries at Vasiliki, Mochlos,
and Gournia; the BritishHogarth, Bosanquet, Dawkins, Myres explored
Palaikastro, Psychro, and Zakro; the Cretans themselves became interested,
and Xanthoudidis and Hatzidakis dug up ancient residences, grottoes, and
tombs at Arkalochori, Tylissus, Koumasa, and Chamaizi. Half the nations
of Europe united under the flag of science in the very generation in which
their statesmen were preparing for war.
How was all this material to be classified these palaces, paintings, statues,
seals, vases, metals, tablets, and reliefs? to what period of the past were they
to be assigned? Precariously, but with increasing corroboration as research
went on and knowledge grew, Evans dated the relics according to the depth
of their strata, the gradation of styles in the pottery, and the agreement of
Cretan finds, in form or motive, with like objects exhumed in lands or deposits
whose chronology was approximately known. Digging down patiently beneath
Cnossus, he found himself stopped, some forty-three feet below the surface, by
the virgin rock. The lower half of the excavated area was occupied by remains
characteristic of the Neolithic Age primitive forms of handmade pottery with
simple linear ornament, spindle whorls for spinning and weaving, fat-buttocked
* Evans labored brilliantly at Cnossus for many years, was knighted for his discoveries, and
completed, in 1936, his monumental four-volume report, The Palace of Minos.
CHAP. l) CRETE 7
goddesses of painted steatite or clay, tools and weapons of polished stone, but
nothing in copper or bronze.* Classifying the pottery, and correlating the
remains with those of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Evans divided the post-
neolithic and prehistoric culture of Crete into three ages Early, Middle, and
Late Minoan and each of these into three periods.t
The first or lowest appearance of copper in the strata represents for us,
through a kind of archeological shorthand, the slow rise of a new civilization
out of the neolithic stage. By the end of the Early Minoan Age the Cretans
learn to mix copper with tin, and the Bronze Age begins. In Middle Minoan
I the earliest palaces occur: the princes of Cnossus, Phaestus, and Mallia
build for themselves luxurious dwellings with countless rooms, spacious
storehouses, specialized workshops, altars and temples, and great drainage
conduits that startle the arrogant Occidental eye. Pottery takes on a many-
colored brilliance, walls are enlivened with charming frescoes, and a form of
linear script evolves out of the hieroglyphics of the preceding age. Then,
at the close of Middle Minoan II, some strange catastrophe writes its cynical
record into the strata; the palace of Cnossus is laid low as if by a convulsion
of the earth, or perhaps by an attack from Phaestus, whose palace for a time
is spared. But a little later a like destruction falls upon Phaestus, Mochlos,
Gournia, Palaikastro, and many other cities in the island; the pottery is
covered with ashes, the great jars in the storerooms are filled with debris.
Middle Minoan III is a period of comparative stagnation, in which, per-
haps, the southeastern Mediterranean world is long disordered by the
Hyksos conquest of Egypt.
In the late Minoan Age everything begins again. Humanity, patient
under every cataclysm, renews its hope, takes courage, and builds once
more. New and finer palaces rise at Cnossus, Phaestus, Tylissus, Hagia
Triada, and Gournia. The lordly spread, the five-storied height, the luxuri-
ous decoration of these princely residences suggest such wealth as Greece
would not know till Pericles. Theaters are erected in the palace courts, and
gladiatorial spectacles of men and women in deadly combat with animals
amuse gentlemen and ladies whose aristocratic faces, quietly alert, still live
* Since the earliest layer of copper implements at Cnossus may be dated, by correlation
with the remains of neighboring cultures, about 3400 B.C., i.e., about 5300 years ago, and since
the neolithic strata at Cnossus occupy some fifty-five per cent of the total depth from surface
to rock, Evans calculated that the Neolithic Age in Crete had lasted at least 4500 years before
the coming of metals approximately from 8000 to 3400. Such calculations of time from
depth of strata are, of course, highly problematical; the rate of deposition may change from
age to age. Allowance has been made for a slower rate after the abandonment of Cnossus as
an urban site in the fourteenth century B.C. 7 No paleolithic remains have been found in Crete.
t For the approximate duration of these epochs cf. the Chronological Table on p. 2.
8 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. I
for us on the bright frescoes of the resurrected walls. Wants are multiplied,
tastes are refined, literature flourishes-, a thousand industries graciously per-
mit the poor to prosper by supplying comforts and delicacies to the rich.
The halls of the Idng are noisy with scribes taking inventories of goods dis-
tributed or received; with artists making statuary, paintings, pottery, or re-
liefs; with high officials conducting conferences, hearing judicial appeals, or
dispatching papers stamped with their finely wrought seals; while wasp-
waisted princes and jeweled duchesses, alluringly decollete, crowd to a
royal feast served on tables shining with bronze and gold. The sixteenth and
fifteenth centuries before our era are the zenith of Aegean civilization, the
classic and golden age of Crete.
III. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A CIVILIZATION
If now we try to restore this buried culture from the relics that remain-
playing Cuvier to the scattered bones of Crete let us remember that we are
engaging upon a hazardous kind of historical television, in which imagina-
tion must supply the living continuity in the gaps of static and fragmentary
material artificially moving but long since dead. Crete will remain inwardly
unknown until its secretive tablets find their Champollion.
1. Men and Women
As we see them self -pictured in their art, the Cretans curiously resemble
the double ax so prominent in their religious symbolism. Male and female
alike have torsos narrowing pathologically to an ultramodern waist. Nearly
all are short in stature, slight and supple of build, graceful in movement,
athletically trim. Their skin is white at birth. The ladies, who court the
shade, have fair complexions conventionally pale; but the men, pursuing
wealth under the sun, are so tanned and ruddy that the Greeks will call them
(as well as the Phoenicians) Phomikesiht Purple Ones, Redskins. The
head is rather long than broad, the features are sharp and refined, the hair
and eyes are brilliantly dark, as in the Italians of today; these Cretans are
apparently a branch of the "Mediterranean race."* The men as well as the
women wear their hair partly in coils on the head or the neck, partly in ring-
* Current anthropology divides post-neolithic Europeans into three types, respectively pre-
ponderating in north, central, and southern Europe: (i) "Nordic" man-long-headed, tall,
and fair of skin and eyes and hair; (2) "Alpine" man broad-headed, of medium height, with
eyes tending to gray and hair to brown; and (3) "Mediterranean" man long-headed, short,
and dark. No people is exclusively any of these "races."
CHAP. l) CRETE 9
lets on the brow, partly in tresses falling upon the shoulders or the breast.
The women add ribbons for their curls, while the men, to keep their faces
clean, provide themselves with a variety of razors, even in the grave. 10
The dress is as strange as the figures. On their heads most often bare
the men have turbans or tam-o'-shanters, the women magnificent hats of our
early twentieth-century style. The feet are usually free of covering; but
the upper classes may bind them in white leather shoes, which among
women may be daintily embroidered at the edges, with colored beads on
the straps. Ordinarily the male has no clothing above the waist; there he
wears a short skirt or waistcloth, occasionally with a codpiece for modesty.
The skirt may be slit at the side in workingmen; in dignitaries and ceremo-
nies it reaches in both sexes to the ground. Occasionally the men wear
drawers, and in winter a long outer garment of wool or skins. The clothing
is tightly laced about the middle, for men as well as women are resolved to be
or seem triangularly slim. 11 To rival the men at this point, the women of
the later periods resort to stiff corsets, which gather their skirts snugly
around their hips, and lift their bare breasts to the sun. It is a pretty custom
among the Cretans that the female bosom should be uncovered, or revealed
by a diaphanous chemise ; u no one seems to take offense. The bodice is
laced below the bust, opens in a careless circle, and then, in a gesture of
charming reserve, may close in a Medici collar at the neck. The sleeves are
short, sometimes puffed. The skirt, adorned with flounces and gay tints,
widens out spaciously from the hips, stiffened presumably with metal ribs
or horizontal hoops. There are in the arrangement and design of Cretan
feminine dress a warm harmony of colors, a grace of line, a delicacy of taste,
that suggest a rich and luxurious civilization, already old in arts and wiles.
In these matters the Cretans had no influence upon the Greeks; only in
modern capitals have their styles triumphed. Even staid archeologists have
given the name La Parisienne to the portrait of a Cretan lady with pro-
fulgent bosom, shapely neck, sensual mouth, impudent nose, and a persua-
sive, provocative charm; she sits saucily before us today as part of a frieze
in which high personages gaze upon some spectacle that we shall never see."
The men of Crete are evidently grateful for the grace and adventure
that women give to life, for they provide them with costly means of en-
hancing their loveliness. The remains are rich in jewelry of many kinds:
hairpins of copper and gold, stickpins adorned with golden animals or flow-
ers, or heads of crystal or quartz; rings or spirals of filigree gold mingling
with the hair, fillets or diadems of precious metal binding it; rings and
pendants hanging from the ear, plaques and beads and chains on the breast,
IO THELIFEOFGREECE ( CHAP. I
bands and bracelets on the arm, finger rings of silver, steatite, agate, car-
nelian, amethyst, or gold. The men keep some of the jewelry for them-
selves: if they are poor they carry necklaces and bracelets of common
stones; if they can afford it they flaunt great rings engraved with scenes of
battle or the chase. The famous Cupbearer wears on the biceps of his left
arm a broad band of precious metal, and on the wrist a bangle inlaid with
agate. Everywhere in Cretan life man expresses his vainest and noblest
passion the zeal to beautify.
This use of man to signify all humanity reveals the prejudice of a patri-
archal age, and hardly suits the almost matriarchal life of ancient Crete. For
the Minoan woman does not put up with any Oriental seclusion, any purdah
or harem; there is no sign of her being limited to certain quarters of the
house, or to the home. She works there, doubtless, as some women do even
today; she weaves clothing and baskets, grinds grain, and bakes bread. But
also she labors with men in the fields and the potteries, she mingles freely
with them in the crowds, she takes the front seat at the theater and the
games, she sweeps through Cretan society with the air of a great lady
bored with adoration; and when her nation creates its gods it is more often
in her likeness than in man's. Sober students, secretly and forgivably
enamored of the mother image in their hearts, bow down before her relics,
and marvel at her domination. 1 *
2. Society
Hypothetical^ we picture Crete as at first an island divided by its moun-
tains among petty jealous clans which live in independent villages under
their own chiefs, and fight, after the manner of men, innumerable territorial
wars. Then a resolute leader appears who unites several clans into a
kingdom, and builds his fortress palace at Cnossus, Phacstus, Tylissus, or
some other town. The wars become less frequent, more widespread, and
more efficient in killing; at last the cities fight for the entire island, and
Cnossus wins. The victor organizes a navy, dominates the Aegean, sup-
presses piracy, exacts tribute, builds palaces, and patronizes the arts, like an
early Pericles. 10 It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it
is to maintain it without slaves.*
The power of the king, as echoed in the ruins, is based upon force, rc-
* The usually cautious and accurate Thucydides writes: "The first person known to us by
tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now
called the Hellenic Sea, and ruled over the Cyclades. . . . He did his best to put down piracy
in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use." 30
CHAP. l) CRETE II
ligion, and law. To make obedience easier he suborns the gods to his use:
his priests explain to the people that he is descended from Velchanos, and
has received from this deity the laws that he decrees; and every nine years,
if he is competent or generous, they reanoint him with the divine authority.
To symbolize his power the monarch, anticipating Rome and France,
adopts the (double) ax and the fleur-de-lis. To administer the state he em-
ploys (as the litter of tablets suggests) a staff of ministers, bureaucrats, and
scribes. He taxes in kind, and stores in giant jars his revenues of grain, oil,
and wine; and out of this treasury, in kind, he pays his men. From his throne
in the palace, or his judgment seat in the royal villa, he settles in person such
litigation as has run the gauntlet of his appointed courts; and so great is his
reputation as a magistrate that when he dies he becomes in Hades, Homer
assures us, the inescapable judge of the dead. 21 We call him Minos, but we
do not know his name; probably the word is a title, like Pharaoh or Caesar,
and covers a multitude of kings.
At its height this civilization is surprisingly urban. The Iliad speaks of
Crete's "ninety cities," and the Greeks who conquer them are astonished
at their teeming populations; even today the student stands in awe before
the ruined mazes of paved and guttered streets, intersecting lanes, and count-
less shops or houses crowding about some center of trade or government in
all the huddled gregariousness of timid and talkative men. It is not only
Cnossus that is great, with palaces so vast that imagination perhaps exag-
gerates the town that must have been the chief source and beneficiary of
their wealth. Across the island, on the southern shore, is Phaestus, from
whose harbor, Homer tells us, "the dark-prowed ships are borne to Egypt
by the force of the wind and the wave." 23 The southbound trade of Minoan
Crete pours out here, swelled by goods from northern merchants who ship
their cargoes overland to avoid a long detour by perilous seas. Phaestus
becomes a Cretan Piraeus, in love with commerce rather than with art. And
yet the palace of its prince is a majestic edifice, reached by a flight of steps
forty-five feet wide; its halls and courts compare with those at Cnossus ; its
central court is a paved quadrangle of ten thousand square feet; its megaron,
or reception room, is three thousand square feet in area, larger even than
the great Hall of the Double Ax in the northern capital.
Two miles northwest is Hagia Triada, in whose "royal villa" (as archeo-
logical imagination calls it) the Prince of Phaestus seeks refuge from the
summer heat. The eastern end of the island, in Minoan days, is rich in small
towns: ports like Zakro or Mochlos, villages like Praesus or Pseira, resi-
dential quarters like Palaikastro, manufacturing centers like Gournia. The
12 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. I
main street in Palaikastro is well paved, well drained, and lined with spa-
cious homes; one of these has twenty-three rooms on the surviving floor.
Gournia boasts of avenues paved with gypsum, of homes built with mortar-
less stone, of a blacksmith's shop with extant forge, of a carpenter shop with
a kit of tools, of small factories noisy with metalworking, shoemaking, vase-
making, oil refining, or textile industry; the modern workmen who excavate
it, and gather up its tripods, jars, pottery, ovens, lamps, knives, mortars,
polishers, hooks, pins, daggers, and swords, marvel at its varied products
and equipment, and call it he mechanike polis "the town of machinery." 83
By our standards the minor streets are narrow, mere alleys in the style of a
semitropical Orient that fears the sun; and the rectangular houses, of wood
or brick or stone, are for the most part confined to a single floor. Yet some
Middle Minoan plaques exhumed at Cnossus show us homes of two, three,
even five stories, with a cubicle attic or turret here and there; on the upper
floors, in these pictured houses, are windows with red panes of unknown
material. Double doors, swinging on posts apparently of cypress wood,
open from the ground-floor rooms upon a shaded court. Stairways lead to
the upper floors and the roof, where the Cretan sleeps when the nights are
very warm. If he spends the evening indoors he lights his room by burning
oil, according to his income, in lamps of clay, steatite, gypsum, marble, or
bronze.**
We know a trifle or two about the games he plays. At home he likes a
form of chess, for he has bequeathed to us, in the ruins of the Cnossus palace,
a magnificent gaming board with frame of ivory, squares of silver and gold,
and a border of seventy-two daisies in precious metal and stone. In the fields
he takes with zest and audacity to the chase, guided by half -wild cats and
slender thoroughbred hounds. In the towns he patronizes pugilists, and on
his vases and reliefs he represents for us a variety of contests, in which light-
weights spar with bare hands and kicking feet, rniddlewcights with plumed
helmets batter each other manfully, and heavyweights, coddled with
helmets, cheekpieces, and long padded gloves, fight till one falls exhausted
to the ground and the other stands above him in the conscious grandeur
of victory. 25
But the Cretan's greatest thrill comes when he wins his way into the
crowd that fills the amphitheater on a holiday to see men and women face
death against huge charging bulls. Time and again he pictures the stages of
this lusty sport: the daring hunter capturing the bull by jumping astride its
neck as it laps up water from a pool; the professional tamer twisting the
animal's head until it learns some measure of tolerance for the acrobat's
annoying tricks; the skilled performer, slim and agile, meeting the bull in
CHAP. l) CRETE 13
the arena, grasping its horns, leaping into the air, somersaulting over its back,
and landing feet first on the ground in the arms of a female companion who
lends her grace to the scene. 28 Even in Minoan Crete this is already an an-
cient art; a clay cylinder from Cappadocia, ascribed to 2400 B.C., shows a
bull-grappling sport as vigorous and dangerous as in these frescoes. 27 For a
moment our oversimplifying intellects catch a glimpse of the contradictory
complexity of man as we perceive that this game of blood-lust and courage,
still popular today, is as old as civilization.
3. Religion
The Cretan may be brutal, but he is certainly religious, with a thoroughly
human mixture of fetishism and superstition, idealism and reverence. He wor-
ships mountains, caves, stones, the number 3, trees and pillars, sun and moon,
goats and snakes, doves and bulls; hardly anything escapes his theology. He
conceives the air as filled with spirits genial or devilish, and hands down to
Greece a sylvan-ethereal population of dryads, sileni, and nymphs. He does
not directly adore the phallic emblem, but he venerates with awe the genera-
tive vitality of the bull and the snake. 28 Since his death rate is high he pays devout
homage to fertility, and when he rises to the notion of a human divinity he pic-
tures a mother goddess with generous mammae and sublime flanks, with rep-
tiles creeping up around her arms and breasts, coiled in her hair, or rearing
themselves proudly from her head. He sees in her the basic fact of nature
that man's greatest enemy, death, is overcome by woman's mysterious power,
reproduction; and he identifies this power with deity. The mother goddess
represents for him the source of all life, in plants and animals as well as in men;
if he surrounds her image with fauna and flora it is because these exist through
her creative fertility, and therefore serve as her symbols and her emanations.
Occasionally she appears holding in her arms her divine child Velchanos, whom
she has borne in a mountain cave. 20 Contemplating this ancient image, we see
through it Isis and Horus, Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and
Adonis, and feel the unity of prehistoric culture, and the continuity of religious
ideas and symbols, in the Mediterranean world.
The Cretan Zeus, as the Greeks call Velchanos, is subordinate to his mother
in the affections of the Cretans. But he grows in importance. He becomes the
personification of the fertilizing rain, of the moisture that in this religion, as in
the philosophy of Thales, underlies all things. He dies, and his sepulcher is
shown from generation to generation on Mt. louktas, where the majestic profile
of his face can still be seen by the imaginative traveler; he rises from the grave
as a symbol of reviving vegetation, and the Kouretes priests celebrate with
dances and clashing shields his glorious resurrection. 80 Sometimes, as a god of
fertility, he is conceived as incarnate in the sacred bull; it is as a bull that he
14 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. I
mutes in Cretan myth with Minos' wife Pasiphae, and begets by her the mon-
strous Minos-bull, or Minotaur.
To appease these deities the Cretan uses a lavish rite of prayer and sacrifice,
symbol and ceremony, administered usually by women priests, sometimes by
officials of the state. To ward off demons he burns incense; to arouse a negli-
gent divinity he sounds the conch, plays the flute or the lyre, and sings, in
chorus, hymns of adoration. To promote the growth of orchards and the fields,
he waters trees and plants in solemn ritual; or his priestesses in nude frenzy
shake down the ripe burden of the trees; or his women in festal procession carry
fruits and flowers as hints and tribute to the goddess, who is borne in state in
a palanquin. He has apparently no temple, but raises altars in the palace court,
in sacred groves or grottoes, and on mountaintops. He adorns these sanctu-
aries with tables of libation and sacrifice, a medley of idols, and "horns of con-
secration" perhaps representative of the sacred bull. He is profuse with holy
symbols, which he seems to worship along with the gods whom they signify:
first the shield, presumably as the emblem of his goddess in her warrior form;
then the cross in both its Greek and its Roman shapes, and as the swastika cut
upon the forehead of a bull or the thigh of a goddess, or carved upon seals, or
raised in marble in the palace of the king; above all, the double ax, as an instru-
ment of sacrifice magically enriched with the virtue of the blood that it sheds,
or as a holy weapon unerringly guided by the god, or even as a sign of Zeus
the Thunderer cleaving the sky with his bolts. 31
Finally he offers a modest care and worship to his dead. He buries them iu
clay coffins or massive jars, for if they are unburied they may return. To keep
them content below the ground he deposits with them modest portions of food,
articles for their toilette, and clay figurines of women to tend or console them
through all eternity. Sometimes, with the sly economy of an incipient skeptic,
he substitutes clay animals in the grave in place of actual food. If he buries a
king or a noble or a rich trader he surrenders to the corpse a part of the precious
plate or jewelry that it once possessed; with touching sympathy he buries a set
of chess with a good player, a clay orchestra with a musician, a boat with one
who loved the sea. Periodically he returns to the grave to offer a sustaining
sacrifice of food to the dead. He hopes that in some secret Elysium, or Islands
of the Blest, the just god Rhadamanthus, son of Zeus Velchanos, will receive
die purified soul, and give it the happiness and the peace that slip so elusively
through the fingers in this earthly quest.
4. Culture
The most troublesome aspect of the Cretan is his language. When, after the
Dorian invasion, he uses the Greek alphabet, it is for a speech completely alien
CHAP. I) CRETE 15
to what we know as Greek, and more akin in sound to the Egyptian, Cypriote,
Hittite, and Anatolian dialects of the Near East. In the earliest age he confines
himself to hieroglyphics; about 1800 B.C. he begins to shorten these into a linear
script of some ninety syllabic signs; two centuries later he contrives another
script, whose characters often resemble those of the Phoenician alphabet; per-
haps it is from him, as well as from the Egyptians and the Semites, that the
Phoenicians gather together those letters they will scatter throughout the Med-
iterranean to become the unassuming, omnipresent instrument of Western civ-
ilization. Even the common Cretan composes, and like some privy councilor,
leaves on the walls of Hagia Triada the passing inspirations of his muse. At
Phaestus we find a kind of prehistoric printing: the hieroglyphs of a great disk
unearthed there from Middle Minoan III strata are impressed upon the clay
by stamps, one for each pictograph; but here, to add to our befuddlement, the
characters are apparently not Cretan but foreign; perhaps the disk is an impor-
tation from the East. 82
The clay tablets upon which the Cretan writes may some day reveal to us
his accomplishments in science. He has some astronomy, for he is famed as a
navigator, and tradition hands down to Dorian Crete the ancient Minoan cal-
endar. The Egyptians acknowledge their indebtedness to him for certain medi-
cal prescriptions, and the Greeks borrow from him, as the words suggest, such
aromatic and medicinal herbs as mint (mintha), wormwood (apsinthon), and an
ideal drug (daukos) reputed to cure obesity without disturbing gluttony. 88 But
we must not mistake our guessing for history.
Though the Cretan's literature is a sealed book to us, we may at least contem-
plate the ruins of his theaters. At Phaestus, about 2000, he builds ten tiers of
stone seats, running some eighty feet along a wall overlooking a flagged court;
at Cnossus he raises, again in stone, eighteen tiers thirty-three feet long, and,
at right angles to them, six tiers from eighteen to fifty feet in length. These
court theaters, seating four or five hundred persons, are the most ancient play-
houses known to us older by fifteen hundred years than the Theater of Diony-
sus. We do not know what took place on those stages; frescoes picture audiences
viewing a spectacle, but we cannot tell what it is that they see. Very likely it is
some combination of music and dance. A painting from Cnossus preserves a
group of aristocratic ladies, surrounded by their gallants, watching a dance by
gaily petticoated girls in an olive grove; another represents a Dancing Woman
with flying tresses and extended arms; others show us rustic folk dances, or the
wild dance of priests, priestesses, and worshipers before an idol or a sacred tree.
Homer describes the "dancing-floor which once, in broad Cnossus, Daedalus
made for Ariadne of the lovely hair; there youths and seductive maidens join
hands in the dance . . . and a divine bard sets the time to the sound of the lyre." 84
The seven-stringed lyre, ascribed by the Greeks to the inventiveness of Ter*
16 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. I
pander, is represented on a sarcophagus at Hagia Triada a thousand years before
Terpander's birth. There, too, is the double flute, with two pipes, eight holes,
and fourteen notes, precisely as in classical Greece. Carved on a gem, a woman
blows a trumpet made from an enormous conch, and on a vase we see the
sistrum beating time for the dancers' feet.
The same youthful freshness and lighthearted grace that animate his dances
and his games enliven the Cretan's work in the arts. He has not left us, aside
from his architecture, any accomplishments of massive grandeur or exalted
style; like the Japanese of samurai days he delights rather in the refinement of
the lesser and more intimate arts, the adornment of objects daily used, the
patient perfecting of little things. As in every aristocratic civilization, he
accepts conventions in the form and subject of his work, avoids extravagant
novelties, and learns to be free even within the limitations of reserve and taste.
He excels in pottery, gern cutting, bezel carving, and reliefs, for here his micro-
scopic skill finds every stimulus and opportunity. He is at home in the working
of silver and gold, sets all the precious stones, and makes a rich diversity of
jewels. Upon the seals that he cuts to serve as official signatures, commercial
labels, or business forms, he engraves in delicate detail so much of the life and
scenery of Crete that from them alone we might picture his civilization. He
hammers bronze into basins, ewers, daggers, and swords ornamented with floral
and animal designs, and inlaid with gold and silver, ivory and rare stones. At
Gournia he has left us, despite the thieves of thirty centuries, a silver cup of
finished artistry; and here and there he has molded for us rhytons, or drinking
horns, rising out of human or animal heads that to this day seem to hold the
breath of life.
As a potter he tries every form, and reaches distinction in nearly all of them.
He makes vases, dishes, cups, chalices, lamps, jars, animals, and gods. At first,
in Early Minoan, he is content to shape the vessel with his hands along lines
bequeathed to him from the Neolithic Age, to paint it with a glaze of brown
or black, and to trust the fire to mottle the color into haphazard tints. In
Middle Minoan he has learned the use of the wheel, and rises to the height of
his skill. He makes a glaze rivaling the consistency and delicacy of porcelain;
he scatters recklessly black and brown, white and red, orange and yellow, crim-
son and vermilion, and mingles them happily into novel shades; he fines down
the clay with such confident thoroughness that in his most perfect product the
graceful and brightly colored "eggshell" wares found in the cave of Kamares
on Mt. Ida's slopes he has dared to thin the walls of the vessel to a millimeter's
thickness, and to pour out upon it all the motifs of his rich imagination. From
2100 to 1950 is the apogee of the Cretan potter; he signs his name to his work,
and his trade-mark is sought throughout the Mediterranean. In the Late Minoan
Age he brings to full development the technique of faience, and forms the
CHAP. l) CRETE 17
brilliant paste into decorative plaques, vases of turquoise blue, polychrome god-
desses, and marine reliefs so realistic that Evans mistook an enamel crab for a
fossil. 30 Now the artist falls in love with nature, and delights to represent on
his vessels the liveliest animals, the gaudiest fish, the most delicate flowers, and
the most graceful plants. It is in Late Minoan I that he creates his surviving
masterpieces, the Boxers' Vase and the Harvesters' Vase: in the one he presents
us crudely with every aspect and attitude of the pugilistic game, adding a zone
of scenes from the bull-leaper's life; in the other he follows with fond fidelity
a procession probably of peasants marching and singing in some harvest fes-
tival. Then the great tradition of Cretan pottery grows weak with age, and the
art declines; reserve and taste are forgotten, decoration overruns the vase in
bizarre irregularity and excess, the courage for slow conception and patient
execution breaks down, and a lazy carelessness called freedom replaces the
finesse and finish of the Kamares age. It is a forgivable decay, the unavoidable
death of an old and exhausted art, which will lie in refreshing sleep for a thou-
sand years, and be reborn in the perfection of the Attic vase.
Sculpture is a minor art in Crete, and except in bas-relief and the story of
Daedalus, seldom graduates from the statuette. Many of these little figures are
stereotyped crudities seemingly produced by rote; one is a delightful snapshot in
ivory of an athlete plunging through the air; another is a handsome head that
has lost its body on the way down the centuries. The best of them excels
in anatomical precision and in vividness of action anything that we know from
Greece before Myron's time. The strangest is the Snake Goddess of the Boston
Museum a sturdy figure of ivory and gold, half mammae and half snakes; here
at last the Cretan artist treats the human form with some amplitude and success.
But when he essays a larger scale he falls back for the most part upon animals,
and confines himself to painted reliefs, as in the bull's head in the Heracleum
Museum; in this startling relic the fixed wild eyes, the snorting nostrils, the
gasping mouth, and the trembling tongue achieve a power that Greece itself
will never surpass.
Nothing else in ancient Crete is quite so attractive as its painting. The sculp-
ture is negligible, the pottery is fragmentary, the architecture is in ruins; but
this frailest of all the arts, easy victim of indifferent time, has left us legible and
admirable masterpieces from an age so old that it slipped quite out of the mem-
ory of that classic Greece of whose painting, by contrast so recent, not one
original remains. In Crete the earthquakes or the wars that overturned the
palaces preserved here and there a frescoed wall; and wandering by them we
molt forty centuries and meet the men who decorated the rooms of the Minoan
kings. As far back as 2500 they make wall coatings of pure lime, and conceive
the idea of painting in fresco upon the wet surface, wielding the brush so
rapidly that the colors sink into the stucco before the surface dries. Into the
18 THELIFEOFGREECE ( CHAP. I
dark halls of the palaces they bring the bright beauty of the open fields; they
make plaster sprout lilies, tulips, narcissi, and sweet marjoram; no one viewing
these scenes could ever again suppose that nature was discovered by Rousseau.
In the museum at Heracleum the Saffron Picker is as eager to pluck the crocus
as when his creator painted him in Middle Minoan days; his waist is absurdly
thin, his body seems much too long for his legs; and yet his head is perfect, the
colors are soft and warm, the flowers still fresh after four thousand years. At
Hagia Triada the painter brightens a sarcophagus with spiral scrolls and queer,
almost Nubian figures engrossed in some religious ritual; better yet, he adorns
a wall with waving foliage, and then places in the midst of it, darkly but vividly,
a stout, tense cat preparing to spring unseen upon a proud bird preening its
plumage in the sun. In Late Minoan the Cretan painter is at the top of his
stride; every wall tempts him, every plutocrat calls him; he decorates not merely
the royal residences but the homes of nobles and burghers with all the lavish-
ness of Pompeii. Soon, however, success and a surfeit of commissions spoil him;
he is too anxious to be finished to quite touch perfection; he scatters quantity
about him, repeats his flowers monotonously, paints his men impossibly, con-
tents himself with sketching outlines, and falls into the lassitude of an art that
knows that it has passed its zenith and must die. But never before, except per-
haps in Egypt, has painting looked so freshly at the face of nature.
All the arts come together to build the Cretan palaces. Political power,
commercial mastery, wealth and luxury, accumulated refinement and taste
commandeer the architect, the builder, the artisan, the sculptor, the potter,
the metalworker, the woodworker, and the painter to fuse their skills in pro-
ducing an assemblage of royal chambers, administrative offices, court
theaters, and arenas, to serve as the center and summit of Cretan life. They
build in the twenty-first century, and the twentieth sees their work de-
stroyed; they build again in the seventeenth, not only the palace of Minos
but many other splendid edifices at Cnossus, and in half a hundred other
cities in the thriving island. It is one of the great ages in architectural
history.
The creators of the Cnossus palace are limited in both materials and men.
Crete is poor in metal and quite devoid of marble; therefore they build with
limestone and gypsum, and use wood for entablatures, roofs, and all columns
above the basement floor. They cut the stone blocks so sharply that they
can put them together without mortar. Around a central court of twenty
thousand square feet they raise to three or four stories, with spacious stair-
ways of stone, a rambling maze of roomsguardhouses, workshops, wine
press, storerooms, administrative offices, servants' quarters, anterooms, re-
ception rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, chapel, dungeon, throne room, and a
CHAP. I) CRETE 19
"Hall of the Double Ax"; adding near by the conveniences of a theater, a
royal villa, and a cemetery. On the lowest floor they plant massive square
pillars of stone; on the upper floors they use circular columns of cypress,
tapering strangely downward, to support the ceilings upon smooth round
capitals, or to form shady porticoes at the side. Safe in the interior against
a gracefully decorated wall they set a stone seat, simply but skillfully
carved, which eager diggers will call the throne of Minos, and on which
every tourist will modestly seat himself and be for a moment some inches a
king. This sprawling palace in all likelihood is the famous Labyrinth, or
sanctuary of the Double Ax (labrys) , attributed by the ancients to Daedalus,
and destined to give its name in aftertime to any maze of rooms, or words,
or ears.* 30
As if to please the modern spirit, more interested in plumbing than in
poetry, the builders of Cnossus install in the palace a system of drainage
superior to anything else of its kind in antiquity. They collect in stone con-
duits the water that flows down from the hills or falls from the sky, direct it
through shafts to the bathrooms t and latrines, and lead off the waste in
terra-cotta pipes of the latest style each section six inches in diameter and
thirty inches long, equipped with a trap to catch the sediment, tapering at
one end to fit into the next section, and bound to this firmly with a necking
of cement. 88 Possibly they include an apparatus for supplying running hot
water to the household of the king.f 50
To the complex interiors the artists of Cnossus add the most delicate
decorations. Some of the rooms they adorn with vases and statuettes, some
with paintings or reliefs, some with huge stone amphorae or massive urns,
some with objects in ivory, faience or bronze. Around one wall they run a
limestone frieze with pretty triglyphs and half rosettes; around another a
panel of spirals and frets on a surface painted to simulate marble; around
another they carve in high relief and living detail the contests of man and
bull. Through the halls and chambers the Minoan painter spreads all the
glories of his cheerful art: here, caught chattering in a drawing room, are
Ladies in Blue, with classic features, shapely arms, and cozy breasts; here
* The ascription of rooms is, of course, highly conjectural. It should be added that nearly
all the exhumed decorations of the palace have been removed to the museum at Heracleum or
elsewhere, while much of what remains in site has been tastelessly restored.
t It is no longer agreed that the square depressions found in the floors of some rooms were
baths; they have no outlets, and are made of gypsum, which water would gradually dissolve. 87
rj: Mosso found similar drainage pipes in the villa at Hagia Triada. "One day, after a heavy
downpour of rain, I was interested to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the
water flow from the sewers, through which a man could walk upright. I doubt if there Is sa>v
other instance of a drainage system acting after four thousand years."*
2O THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. I
are fields of lotus, or lilies, or olive spray; here are Ladies at the Opera, and
dolphins swimming motionlessly in the sea. Here, above all, is the lordly
Cupbearer, erect and strong, carrying some precious ointment in a slim blue
vase; his face is chiseled by breeding as well as by art; his hair descends in a
thick braid upon his brown shoulders; his ears, his neck, his arm, and his
waist sparkle with jewelry, and his costly robe is embroidered with a grace-
ful quatrefoil design; obviously he is no slave, but some aristocratic youth
proudly privileged to serve the king. Only a civilization long familiar with
order and wealth, leisure and taste, could demand or create such luxury and
such ornament.
IV. THE FALL OF CNOSSUS
When in retrospect we seek the origin of this brilliant culture, we find
ourselves vacillating between Asia and Egypt. On the one hand, the Cretans
seem kin in language, race, and religion to the Indo-European peoples of
Asia Minor; there, too, clay tablets were used for writing, and the shekel
was the standard of measurement; there, in Caria, was the cult of Zeus
Labrandeus, i.e., Zeus of the Double Ax (labrys) ; there men worshiped the
pillar, the bull, and the dove; there, in Phrygia, was the great Cybele, so
much like the mother goddess of Crete that the Greeks called the latter
Rhea Cybele, and considered the two divinities one. 108 And yet the signs of
Egyptian influence in Crete abound in every age. The two cultures are at
first so much alike that some scholars presume a wave of Egyptian emigra-
tion to Crete in the troubled days of Menes. 11 The stone vases of Mochlos
and the copper weapons of Early Minoan I are strikingly like those found
in Proto-Dynastic tombs; the double ax appears as an amulet in Egypt, and
even a "Priest of the Double Ax"; the weights and measures, though Asiatic
in value, are Egyptian in form; the methods used in the glyptic arts, in
faience, and in painting are so similar in the two lands that Spongier reduced
Cretan civilization to a mere branch of the Egyptian. 43
We shall not follow him, for it will not do, in our search for the continu-
ity of civilization, to surrender the individuality of the parts. The Cretan
quality is distinct; no other people in antiquity has quite this flavor of
minute refinement, this concentrated elegance in life and art. Let us believe
that in its racial origins the Cretan culture was Asiatic, in many of its arts
Egyptian; in essence and total it remained unique. Perhaps it belonged to
a complex of civilization common to all the Eastern Mediterranean, in
which each nation inherited kindred arts, beliefs, and ways from a wide-
spread neolithic culture parent to them all. From that common civilization
CHAP. l) CRETE 21
Crete borrowed in her youth, to it she contributed in her maturity. Her
rule forged an order in the isles, and her merchants found entry at every
port. Then her wares and her arts pervaded the Cyclades, overran Cyprus,
reached to Caria and Palestine, 43 moved north through Asia Minor and its
islands to Troy, reached west through Italy and Sicily to Spain,** penetrated
the mainland of Greece even to Thessaly, and passed through Mycenae and
Tiryns into the heritage of Greece. In the history of civilization Crete was
the first link in the European chain.
We do not know which of the many roads to decay Crete chose; perhaps
she took them all. Her once famous forests of cypress and cedar vanished;
today two thirds of the island are a stony waste, incapable of holding the
winter rains/ 5 Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population
control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as
wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the
vitality of the race, and weakened its will to live or to defend itself; a nation
is born stoic and dies epicurean. Possibly the collapse of Egypt after the
death of Ikhnaton disrupted Creto-Egyptian trade, and diminished the
riches of the Minoan kings. Crete had no great internal resources; her
prosperity required commerce, and markets for her industries; like modern
England she had become dangerously dependent upon control of the seas.
Perhaps internal wars decimated the island's manhood, and left it disunited
against foreign attack. Perhaps an earthquake shook the palaces into ruins,
or some angry revolution avenged in a year of terror the accumulated
oppressions of centuries.
About 1450 the palace of Phaestus was again destroyed, that of Hagia
Triada was burned down, the homes of the rich burghers of Tylissus dis-
appeared. During the next fifty years Cnossus seems to have enjoyed the
zenith of her fortune, and a supremacy unquestioned throughout the
Aegean. Then, about 1400, the palace of Cnossus itself went up in flames.
Everywhere in the ruins Evans found signs of uncontrollable fire charred
beams and pillars, blackened walls, and clay tablets hardened against time's
tooth by the conflagration's heat. So thorough was the destruction, and so
complete the removal of metal even from rooms covered and protected by
debris, that many students suspect invasion and conquest rather than earth-
quake.* 40 In any case, the catastrophe was sudden; the workshops of artists
*If archeological chronology would permit the deferment of this conflagration to the
neighborhood of 1250 it would be convenient to interpret the tragedy as an incident in the
Achaean conquest of the Aegean preliminary to the siege of Troy.
22 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. I
and artisans give every indication of having been in full activity when death
arrived. About the same time Gournia, Pseira, Zakro, and Palaikastro were
leveled to the ground.
We must not suppose that Cretan civilization vanished overnight. Palaces
were built again, but more modestly, and for a generation or two the pro-
ducts of Crete continued to dominate Aegean art. About the middle of the
thirteenth century we come at last upon a specific Cretan personality that
King Minos of whom Greek tradition told so many frightening tales. His
brides were annoyed at the abundance of serpents and scorpions in his seed;
but by some secret device his wife Pasiphae eluded these, 47 and safely bore
him many children, among them Phaedra (wife of Theseus and lover of
Hippolytus) and the fair-haired Ariadne. Minos having offended Poseidon,
the god afflicted Pasiphae with a mad passion for a divine bull. Daedalus
pitied her, and through his contrivance she conceived the terrible Minotaur.
Minos imprisoned the animal in the Labyrinth which Daedalus had built at
his command, but appeased it periodically with human sacrifice." 18
Pleasanter even in its tragedy is the legend of Daedalus, for it opens one
of the proudest epics of human history. Greek story represented him as
an Athenian Leonardo who, envious of his nephew's skill, slew him in a
moment of temperament, and was banished forever from Greece. He found
refuge at Minos' court, astonished him with mechanical inventions and
novelties, and became chief artist and engineer to the king. He was a great
sculptor, and fable used his name to personify the graduation of statuary
from stiff, dead figures to vivid portraits of possible men; the creatures made
by him, we are informed, were so lifelike that they stood up and walked
away unless they were chained to their pedestals. 40 But Minos was peeved
when he learned of Daedalus' connivance with Pasiphae's amours, and con-
fined Kim and his son Icarus in the maze of the Labyrinth. Daedalus
fashioned wings for himself and Icarus, and by their aid they leaped across
the walls and soared over the Mediterranean. Disdaining his father's coun-
sel, proud Icarus flew too closely to the sun; the hot rays melted the wax on
his wings, and he was lost in the sea, pointing a moral and adorning a tale.
Daedalus, empty-hearted, flew on to Sicily, and stirred that island to civiliza-
tion by bringing to it the industrial and artistic culture of Crete.*"
* Pausanias, father of all Baedekers, credits Daedalus with several statues, mostly of wood,
and a marble relief of Ariadne dancing, as all extant in the second century A.D. 61 The Greeks
never doubted the reality of Daedalus, and the experience of Schliemann warns us to be
skeptical even of our skepticism. Old traditions have a way of being easily rejected by one
generation, of scholars, and laboriously confirmed by the next.
CHAP.l) CRETE 2$
More tragic still is the story of Theseus and Ariadne. Minos, victorious
in a war against youthful Athens, exacted from that city, every ninth year,
a tribute of seven girls and seven young men, to be devoured by the
Minotaur. On the coming of the third occasion for this national humiliation
the handsome Theseus his father King Aegeus reluctantly consenting had
himself chosen as one of the seven youths, for he was resolved to slay the
Minotaur and end the recurrent sacrifice. Ariadne pitied the princely
Athenian, loved him, gave him a magic sword, and taught him the simple
trick of unraveling thread from his arm as he penetrated the Labyrinth.
Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back to Ariadne, and took
her with him on his flight from Crete. On the isle of Naxos he married her
as he had promised, but while she slept he and his companions sailed treachn
erously away.* 52
With Ariadne and Minos, Crete disappears from history till the coming
of Lycurgus to the island, presumably in the seventh century. There are
indications that the Achaeans reached it in their long raid of Greece in the
fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, and Dorian conquerors settled there
towards the end of the second millennium before Christ. Here, said many
Cretans and some Greeks, 63 Lycurgus, and in less degree Solon, had found
the model for their laws. In Crete as in Sparta, after the island had come
under Dorian sway, the ruling class led a life of at least outward simplicity
and restraint; the boys were brought up in the army, and the adult males ate
together in public mess halls; the state was ruled by a senate of elders, and
was administered by ten kosmoi or orderers, corresponding to the ephors
of Sparta and the archons of Athens." It is difficult to say whether Crete
taught Sparta, or Sparta Crete; perhaps both states were the parallel results
of similar conditions the precarious life of an alien military aristocracy
amid a native and hostile population of serfs. The comparatively enlight-
ened law code of Gortyna, discovered on the walls of that Cretan town in
A.D. 1884, belongs apparently to the early fifth century; in an earlier form
it may have influenced the legislators of Greece. In the sixth century
Thaletas of Crete taught choral music at Sparta, and the Cretan sculptors
Dipoenus and Scyllis instructed the artists of Argos and Sicyon. By a
hundred channels the old civilization emptied itself out into the new.
* The Athenians counted all this as history. They treasured for centuries, by continually
repairing it, the ship in which Theseus had sailed to Crete, and used it as a sacred vessel in
sending envoys annually to the feast of Apollo at Delos.
CHAPTER II
Before Agamemnon
I. SCHLIEMANN
IN the year 1822 a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade-
work of archeology into one of the romances of the century. His father
had a passion for ancient history, and brought him up on Homer's stories
of the siege of Troy and Odysseus' wanderings. "With great grief I heard
from him that Troy had been so completely destroyed that it had disap-
peared without leaving any trace of its existence." 1 At the age of eight,
having given the matter mature consideration, Heinrich Schliemann an-
nounced his intention to devote his life to the rediscovery of the lost city.
At the age of ten he presented to his father a Latin essay on the Trojan War.
In 1836 he left school with an education too advanced for his means, and
became a grocer's apprentice. In 1841 he shipped from Hamburg as cabin
boy on a steamer bound for South America. Twelve days out the vessel
foundered; the crew was tossed about in a small boat for nine hours, and
was thrown by the tide upon the shores of Holland. Heinrich became a
clerk, and earned a hundred and fifty dollars a year; he spent half of this on
books, and lived on the other half and his dreams. 3 His intelligence and
application had their natural results; at twenty-five he was an independent
merchant with interests on three continents; at thirty-six he felt that he had
enough money, retired from commerce, and gave all his time to archeology.
"In the midst of the bustle of business I had never forgotten Troy, or the
agreement I had made with my father to excavate it.'"
In his travels as a merchant he had made it a practice to learn the language
of each country he traded with, and to write in that language the current
pages of his diary.* By this method he learned English, French, Dutch,
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and Arabic. Now
he went to Greece, studied the language as a living speech, and was soon
CHAP. Il) BEFORE AGAMEMNON 25
able to read both ancient and modern Greek as fluently as German.*
Henceforth, he declared, "I should find it impossible to live anywhere but
on classical soil." Since his Russian wife refused to leave Russia, he adver-
tised for a Greek wife, laid down precise specifications for the position, and
at the age of forty-seven chose a bride of nineteen from among the photo-
graphs he received. He married her almost at sight, and unwittingly in the
ancient style of purchase; her parents charged him for her a price com-
mensurate with their conception of his fortune. When his new wife bore
him children he reluctantly consented to baptize them, but solemnized the
ceremony by laying a copy of the Iliad upon their heads and reading a
hundred hexameters aloud. He named them Andromache and Agamemnon,
called his servants Telamon and Pelops, and christened his Athenian home
Bellerophon. 7 He was an old man mad about Homer.
In 1870 he went to the Troad the northwest corner of Asia Minor
and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam's
Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik. After a year of negotiations
he secured permission from the Turkish Government to explore the site;
he engaged eighty laborers, and set to work. His wife, who loved him for
his eccentricities, shared his toil in the earth from sunrise to sunset. All
winter long an icy gale from the north drove a blinding dust into their
eyes, and swept with such violence through the cracks of their frail cottage
that no lamp could be kept lit in the evening. Despite the fire in the hearth
the water froze nearly every night. "We had nothing to keep us warm
except our enthusiasm for the great work of discovering Troy." 8
A year passed before they were rewarded. Then, blow by blow, a work-
man's pick exposed a large copper vessel, and this, opened, revealed an
astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in silver and gold. The
canny Schliemann hid the find in his wife's shawl, dismissed his workmen
to an unexpected siesta, hurried to his hut, locked the door, spread out the
precious things on the table, linked each one fondly with some passage in
* "In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary," Schliemann writes, "I procured a
modern Greek translation of Paul et Virginie, and read it through, comparing every word
with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one
half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all,
or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary. ... Of
the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious
time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight
years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them
write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the
method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong. ... I learned ancient Greek
as I would have learned a living language.""
26 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. H
Homer, adorned his wife with an ancient diadem, and sent messages to his
friends in Europe that he had unearthed "the Treasury of Priam." No one
would believe him; some critics charged him with having placed the objects
where he found them; and at the same time the Sublime Porte sued him for
taking gold from Turkish soil. But scholars like Virchow, Dorpfeld, and
Burnouf came to the site, verified Schliemann's reports, and carried on the
work with him until one buried Troy after another was uncovered, and the
problem was no longer whether Troy had existed, but which of the nine
Troys exhumed had been the Ilios of the Iliad.
In 1876 Schliemann resolved to confirm the epic from another direction -
to show that Agamemnon too was real. Guided by Pausanias' classic de-
scription of Greece,* he sank thirty-four shafts at Mycenae in the eastern
Peloponnesus. Turkish officials interrupted the work by claiming half of
the material that he had found at Troy. Unwilling to let the precious
"Treasury of Priam" lie unseen in Turkey, Schliemann clandestinely dis-
patched the objects to the State Museum at Berlin, paid the Porte five times
more damages than were required of him, and resumed his digging at
Mycenae. Again he was rewarded; and when he saw his workers carrying
up to him skeletons, pottery, jewelry, and golden masks, he telegraphed
joyfully to the King of Greece that he had discovered the tombs of Atreus
and Agamemnon. 10 In 1884 he moved on to Tiryns and, guided again by
Pausanias, unearthed the great palace and cyclopean walls that Homer had
described. 11
Seldom had any man done so much for archeology. He had the faults
of his virtues, for his enthusiasm drove him into a reckless haste that de-
stroyed or confused many exhumed objects in order to reach at once the
goal that he sought; and the epics that had inspired his labors misled him
into thinking that he had discovered Priam's hoard at Troy, and the tomb
of Agamemnon at Mycenae. The world of scholarship doubted his reports,
and the museums of England, Russia, and France long refused to accept as
genuine the relics that he had found. He consoled himself with vigorous
self -appreciation, and went on digging courageously until disease struck
him down. In his last days he hesitated whether to pray to the God of
Christianity or to the Zeus of classic Greece. "To Agamemnon Schliemann,
best beloved of sons, greeting!" he writes. "I am very glad that you are
going to study Plutarch, and have finished Xenophon ... I pray Zeus the
Father and Pallas Athene that they will grant you a hundred returns of the
* Pausanias traveled through Greece about A.D. i<5o, and described it in his Periegesis, of
Tour.
CHAP. Il) BEFORE AGAMEMNON 2J
day in health and happiness." 12 He died in 1890, worn out by climatic
hardships, scholastic hostility, and the incessant fever of his dream.
Like Columbus he had discovered a world stranger than the one he
sought. These jewels were older by many centuries than Priam and
Hecuba; these graves were not the tombs of the Atridae, but the ruins of
an Aegean civilization, on the Greek mainland, as ancient as the Minoan
Age in Crete. Unknowingly Schliemann had proved Horace's famous line
vixemnt -fortes ante Agamemnona"t\\Qi& lived many brave men before
Agamemnon."* Year by year, as Dorpfeld and Muller, Tsountas and
Stamatakis, Waldstein and Wace dug more widely into the Peloponnesus,
and still others explored Attica and the islands, Euboea and Boeotia, Phocis
and Thessaly, the soil of Greece gave up the ghostly relics of a culture
before history. Here too men had been lifted from barbarism to civilization
by the passage from nomadic hunting to settled agriculture, by the replace-
ment of stone tools with copper and bronze, by the conveniences of writ-
ing and the stimulus of trade. Civilization is always older than we think;
and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who
also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose
names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.
II. IN THE PALACES OF THE KINGS
On a long low hill five miles east of Argos and a mile north of the sea,
stood, in the fourteenth century before our era, the fortress-palace of
Tiryns. Today one reaches its ruins by a pleasant ride from Argos or
Nauplia, and finds them half lost amid quiet fields of corn and wheat. Then,
after a little climb up prehistoric stone steps, the traveler stands before the
cyclopean walls built, said Greek tradition, for the Argive prince Proetus,
two centuries before the Trojan War.f Even then the town itself was old,
* Towards the end of his life Dorpfeld and Virchow almost convinced him that he had
found the remains not of Agamemnon but of a far earlier generation. After many heartaches
Schliemann took the matter good-naturedly. "What?" he exclaimed, "so this is not Agamem-
non's body, these are not his ornaments? All right, let's call him Schulze"; and thereafter
they always spoke of "Schulze." 13
t The Greeks gave the name Cyclopean to such structures as in their mythical fancy could
have been built only by giants like the one-eyed Titans called Cyclopes (Round-Eyes), who
labored at the forges of Hephaestus in the volcanoes of the Mediterranean. Architecturally
the term implied large unmortared stones, unhewn or roughly cut, and filled in at the joints
with pebbles laid in clay. Tradition added that Proetus had imported celebrated masons,
called Cyclopes, from Lycia.
%8 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. II
having been founded, said ancient memory, by the hero Tiryns, son of
Argus of the hundred eyes, in the infancy of the world." Proteus, the story
went on, gave the palace to Perseus, who ruled Tiryns with the dusky
Andromeda as his queen.
The walls that protected the citadel rose from twenty-five to fifty feet
in height, and were so thick that at several places they contained spacious
galleries, vaulted and arched with immense overlapping horizontal slabs.
Many of the stones still in place measure six feet in length by three in
breadth and depth; the smallest of them, said Pausanias, "could hardly be
moved by a pair of mules." 15 Within the walls, behind a propylon or gate-
way that set a style for many an acropolis, lay a broad paved court bounded
with colonnades; and around this, as at Cnossus, was a medley of rooms
gathered about the megaron a hall of state thirteen hundred square feet
in area, with a pavement of painted cement, and a ceiling supported by four
columns enclosing a hearth. Here, in contrast to merry Crete, was estab-
lished a lasting principle of Greek architecture the separation of the
women's quarters, or gynaeceum, from the chambers of the men. The
king's room and the queen's room were built side by side, but, so far as the
remains reveal, they were eremitically sealed against intercommunication.
Of this palace-castle Schliemann found only the ground plan, the column
bases, and portions of the wall. At the foot of the hill were the remnants of
stone or brick houses and bridges, and some fragments of archaic pottery;
there, in prehistoric days, the town of Tiryns huddled for protection below
the palace walls. We must picture the life of Bronze Age Greece as moving
insecurely around and within such feudal fortresses.
Ten miles farther north, perhaps in the fourteenth century before Christ,
Perseus (if we wish to believe Pausanias 10 ) built Mycenae the greatest
capital of prehistoric Greece. Here too, around a forbidding citadel, a
town of several villages grew, housing a busy population of peasants, mer-
chants, artisans, and slaves, who had the happiness of eluding history. Six
hundred years later Homer called Mycenae "a well-built city, broad-
avenued and abounding in gold." 17 Despite a hundred despoiling genera-
tions some parts of these also cyclopean walls survive, to attest the imme-
morial cheapness of labor and uneasiness of kings. In a corner of the wall
is the famous Lion Gate, where, carved upon a stone triangle over a massive
lintel, two royal beasts, now worn and headless, dumbly stand guard over
a grandeur that is gone. On the acropolis beyond are the ruins of the
palace. Again, as at Tiryns and Cnossus, we can trace the divisions of throne
room, altar room, storerooms, bathroom, and reception rooms. Here once
CHAP.Il) BEFORE AGAMEMNON 29
were painted floors, columned porticoes, frescoed walls, and majestic flights
of stairs.
Near the Lion Gate, in a narrow area enclosed by a ring of erect stone
slabs, Schliemann's workers dug up nineteen skeletons, and relics so rich
that one could forgive the great amateur for seeing in these shafts the burial
chambers of the children of Atreus. Had not Pausanias described the royal
graves as "in the ruins of Mycenae"? 1 " Here were male skulls with crowns
of gold, and golden masks on the bones of the face; here were osseous ladies
with golden diadems on what had been their heads; here were painted vases,
bronze caldrons, a silver rhyton, beads of amber and amethyst, objects of
alabaster, ivory, or faience, heavily ornamented daggers and swords, a gam-
ing board like that at Cnossus, and almost anything in gold seals and rings,
pins and studs, cups and beads, bracelets and breastplates, vessels of toilette,
even clothing embroidered with thin plates of gold. 10 These were assuredly
royal jewels, royal bones.
In the hillside opposite the acropolis Schliemann and others discovered
nine tombs altogether different from these "shaft graves." Leaving the road
that comes down from the citadel, one enters at the right a corridor lined
with walls of large, well-cut stones. At the end is a plain portal, once
adorned with slim cylindrical columns of green marble, now in the British
Museum; above it is a simple lintel of two stones, one extending thirty feet
and weighing 1 1 3 tons. Within, the traveler finds himself under a dome,
or tholos, fifty feet high and as many wide; the walls are built of sawn blocks
reinforced with decorative bronze rosettes; each stratum of stones overlaps
the one beneath, until the uppermost layer closes the top. This strange
structure, Schliemann thought, was the tomb of Agamemnon, and a smaller
tholos near by, discovered by his wife, was at once described as the tomb of
Clytaemnestra. All the "beehive" tombs at Mycenae were found empty;
thieves had anticipated the archeologists by several centuries.
These gloomy ruins are the reminders of a civilization as ancient to
Pericles as Charlemagne to ourselves. Current opinion dates the shaft graves
near to 1600 B.C. (some four hundred years before the traditional age of
Agamemnon), and the beehive tombs about 1450; but prehistoric chronol-
ogy is not a precision tool. We do not know how this civilization began,
nor what people it was that built towns not only at Mycenae and Tiryns
but at Sparta, Amyclae, Aegina, Eleusis, Chaeronea, Orchomenos, and
Delphi. Probably, like most nations, it was already composite in stock and
heritage; Greece was as diverse in blood before the Dorian invasion (i 100
B.C.) as England before the Norman Conquest. So far as we can guess, the
30 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. H
Mycenaeans were akin to the Phrygians and Carians of Asia Minor, and to
the Minoans of Crete. 20 The lions of Mycenae have a Mesopotamian coun-
tenance; this ancient motif probably came through Assyria and Phrygia to
Greece. 20 " Greek tradition called the Mycenaeans "Pelasgi" (possibly mean-
ing People of the Seapelagos} , and pictured them as coming down from
Thrace and Thessaly into Attica and the Peloponnesus in a past so distant
that the Greeks termed them auto chthonoi aborigines. Herodotus ac-
cepted this account, and ascribed the Olympian gods to a Pelasgic origin,
but he "could not say with any certainty what the language of the Pelasgi
was." 21 No more can we.
Doubtless these autochthonoi were themselves late-comers into a land
that had suffered cultivation since neolithic days; there are no aborigines. In
their turn they too were overrun; for in the later years of Mycenaean his-
tory, towards 1600, we find many indications of a cultural-commercial, if
not a military-political, conquest of the Peloponnesus by the products or
emigrants of Crete. 23 The palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae, except for the
gynaeceum, were designed and decorated in the Minoan manner; Cretan
vases and styles reached into Aegina, Chalcis, and Thebes; Mycenaean
ladies and goddesses adopted the charming fashions of Crete, and the art
revealed in the later shaft graves is unmistakably Minoan. 23 Apparently it
was this stimulating contact with a higher culture that lifted Mycenae to the
peak of its civilization.
III. MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION
The remains of this culture are too fragmentary to give us a picture as dis-
tinct as those that take form in the ruins of Crete or the poetry of Homer. Life
on the mainland was a little nearer to the hunting stage than in Crete, The bones
of deer, wild boars, goats, sheep, hares, oxen, and pigs among the Mycenaean
leavingsnot to speak of fishbones and marine shells indicate an appetite al-
ready Homeric, and unfriendly to the Cretan waist. Here and there the relics
reveal the strange contemporaneity of "ancient" and "modern" modes obsidian
arrowheads lying beside a hollow bronze drill apparently used in boring dowel
holes into stones. 24
Industry was less advanced than in Crete; there are no signs on the mainland
of such industrial centers as Gournia. Trade grew slowly, for the seas were
troubled with pirates, including the Mycenaeans; the kings of Mycenae and
Tiryns had Cretan artists engrave for them, on their vases and rings, a proud
record of their achievements in piracy , K To protect themselves against other
CHAP.Il) BEFORE AGAMEMNON 3!
pirates they built their cities inland, far enough from the sea to guard against
sudden attack, close enough to take readily to their ships. Lying on the road
from the Argolic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth, Tiryns and Mycenae were
well situated both to plunder traders with feudal tolls, and to set out occasion-
ally on buccaneering raids. Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae
learned that piracy-like its civilized offspring, tariff dues-can strangle com-
merce and internationalize poverty; it reformed, and allowed piracy to subside
into trade. By 1400 its mercantile fleet was strong enough to defy the sea power
of Crete; it refused to ship its Africa-bound goods across the island, but sent
them directly to Egypt; possibly this was the cause, or result, of a war that ended
in the destruction of the Cretan citadels.
The wealth that grew from this trade was not accompanied by any com-
mensurate culture visible in the remains. Greek tradition credited the Pelasgians
with having learned the alphabet from Phoenician traders. At Tiryns and
Thebes some jars have been found bearing unintelligible characters, but no clay
tablets, or inscriptions, or documents have been discovered; probably when
Mycenae decided to be literate it used perishable writing materials, as the
Cretans did in their final period; and nothing has been preserved. In art the
Mycenaeans followed Cretan models, and so faithfully that archeology suspects
them of importing their major artists from Crete. But after Cretan art declined,
painting flourished vigorously on the mainland. The decorative designs of
borders and cornices are of the first order, and persist into classic Greece, while
the surviving frescoes indicate a keen feeling for moving life. The Ladies in the
Box are splendid dowagers, who might adorn any opera promenade today and
be in full fashion of coiffure and gowns; they are more alive than the stiffly
conscious Ladies in the Chariot, who are out for an afternoon drive in the park.
Better still is the Boar Hunt, a fresco from Tiryns: the boar and the flowers
are unconvincingly conventional, the incredibly pink hounds are disfigured with
stylized spots of scarlet, black, or blue, and the hind quarters of the plunging
boar taper away into the likeness of some high-heeled maiden falling from her
palace bower; nevertheless the chase is real, the boar is desperate, the dogs are
in fast flight through the air, and man, the most sentimental and terrible of all
beasts of prey, stands ready with his murderous spear. 28 One may suspect from
such samples the active and physical life of the Mycenaeans, the proud beauty
of their women, the vivid adornment of their palaces.
The highest art of Mycenae was in metals. Here the mainland equaled Crete,
and dared to use its own forms and decoration. If Schliemann did not quite
find the bones of Agamemnon, he found their weight in silver and gold: jewelry
of many kinds, in spendthrift quantities; stud buttons worthy of any king;
intaglios alive with scenes of hunting, war, or piracy; and a cow's head in shining
silver, with horns and frontal rosette of gold at any moment one expects from
3& THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. II
it the plaintive mooing to which Schliemann, never at a loss for explanations,
traced the name Mycenae (Mukenai). 27 The finest of these metal relics from
Tiryns and Mycenae are two bronze daggers inlaid with electron and burnished
gold, and elegantly engraved with wildcats chasing ducks, and lions pursuing
leopards or fighting men. 29 Most peculiar of all the remains are the golden masks,
apparently laid over the faces of dead royalty. One mask 80 looks for all the world
like the face of a cat-, however, the gallant Schliemann ascribed it not to Clyi-
taemnestra but to Agamemnon.
The unquestioned masterpieces of Mycenaean art were found neither at
Tiryns nor at Mycenae but in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta, where a minor
prince once emulated the magnificence of the northern kings. Here, amid
another treasure of jewelry, were two thin cups of beaten gold, simply formed
and yet worked with the loving patience of all great art. The craftsmanship is
so like the best Minoan that most students are inclined to attribute these cups
to some Cretan Cellini; but it would be a pity to deprive the Mycenaean cul-
ture of its most perfect memorials. The subject the snaring and taming of a
bull seems characteristically Cretan; and yet the frequency with which such
scenes are engraved upon Mycenaean rings and seals or painted upon the
palace walls shows that the bull sport was as popular on the mainland as on
the island. On one of the cups the bull is caught in a net of heavy rope; his
mouth and nostrils gape with breathless anger and fatigue as he struggles to
get free and imprisons himself the more; while on the other side a second bull
gallops off in terror, and a third charges at a cowboy who catches it bravely
by the horns. On the companion cup the captured bull is being led away;
as we turn the vessel around we see him already reconciled to the restraints of
civilization, and engaged, as Evans puts it, in "amorous conversation" with a
cow. 81 Many centuries were to pass before such skillful work would appear
again in Greece.
The Mycenaean himself, as well as most of his art, is found in the tombs; for
he folded and buried his dead in uncomfortable jars, and seldom cremated them
as the Heroic Age would do. Apparently he believed in a future life, for many
objects of use and value were placed in the graves. For the rest Mycenaean
religion, so far as it reveals itself to us, gives every evidence of Cretan origin
or kinship. Here as in Crete are the double ax, the sacred pillar, the holy dove,
and the cult of a mother goddess associated with a young male deity, presumably
her son; and here again are attendant divinities in the form of snakes. Through
all the transformations of religion known to us in Greece the mother goddess
has remained. After the Cretan Rhea came Demeter, the Mater Dolorosa of the
Greeks; after Demeter the Virgin Mother of God. Today, standing on the
ruins of Mycenae, one sees, in the little village below, a modest Christian church.
Grandeur is gone; simplicity and consolation remain. Civilizations come and
CHAP. Il) BEFOREAGAMEMNON 33
go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every
desolation.
After the fall of Cnossus Mycenae prospered as never before; the rising
wealth of the "Shaft Grave Dynasty" raised great palaces upon the hills of
Mycenae and Tiryns. Mycenaean art took on a character of its own, and
captured the markets of the Aegean. Now the commerce of the mainland
princes reached eastward into Cyprus and Syria, southward through the
Cyclades to Egypt, westward through Italy to Spain, northward through
Boeotia and Thessaly to the Danube; and found itself balked only at Troy.
Like Rome absorbing and disseminating the civilization of Hellas, so
Mycenae, won by the culture of dying Crete, spread the Mycenaean phase
of that culture throughout the Mediterranean world.
IV. TROY
Between the Greek mainland and Crete 220 islands dot the Aegean, forming
a circle around Delos, and therefore called the Cyclades. Most of them are
rugged and barren, precarious mountain survivals of a land half drowned in the
sea; but some were rich enough in marble or metal to be already busy and
civilized, as the world goes, long before Greek history comes into our view.
In 1 896 the British School of Athens dug into the soil of Melos at Phylakopi
and found tools, weapons, and pottery remarkably akin, age by age, to the
Minoan; and a like research in other islands has built up a prehistoric picture
of the Cyclades conforming in time and character, though never comparable
in artistic excellence, with the bioscope of Crete. The Cyclades were cramped
for land, totaling less than a thousand square miles among them, and proved,
like classic Greece, incapable of uniting under one political power. By the sev-
enteenth century B.C. the little isles had passed in government and art, even,
here and there, in language and writing, under Cretan domination. Then, in
the final period (1400-1200), the imports from Crete fell away, and the islands
increasingly took their pottery and their styles from Mycenae.
Moving eastward into the Sporades (Scattered) Islands, we find in Rhodes
another prehistoric culture of the simpler Aegean type. In Cyprus the rich
deposits of copper that gave the island its name brought it a measure of wealth
throughout the Bronze Age (3400-1200), but its wares* remained crude and
undistinguished before the coming of Cretan influence. Its population, pre-
dominantly Asiatic, used a syllabic script akin to the Minoan, and worshiped a
* Sedulously collected by General di Cesnola, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York.
34 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. II
goddess apparently descended from the Semitic Ishtar, and destined to become
the Aphrodite of the Greeks, 83 After 1600 the metal industry of the island
developed rapidly; the mines, owned by the royal government, exported copper
to Egypt, Crete, and Greece; the foundry at Enkonii made famous daggers,
and the potters sold their globular bowls from Egypt to Troy. The forests were
cut into timber, and cypress from Cyprus began to compete with the cedars
of Lebanon. In the thirteenth century Mycenaean colonists founded the col-
onies that were to become the Greek cities of Paphos, sacred to Aphrodite, and
Citium, birthplace of the Stoic Zeno, and Cyprian Salarnis, where Solon paused
in his wanderings to replace chaos with law.
From Cyprus Mycenaean trade and influence crossed to Syria and Caria,
and thence, as well as by other "rowing-stones," they moved up the coasts
and islands of Asia until they reached Troy. There, on a hill separated by
three miles from the sea, Schliemann and Dorpfeld found nine cities, super-
imposed each upon its predecessor, as if Troy had had nine lives.
(i) In the lowest strata were the remains of a neolithic village coming
down to 3000 B.C. Here were walls of rough stones, mortared with mud;
clay whorls, bits of worked ivory, tools of obsidian, and pieces of hand-
polished black pottery. (2) Above this lay the ruins of the Second City,
which Schliemann believed to have been Homer's Troy. Its enclosing
walls, like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, were of cyclopean stones; at in-
tervals there were fortresses, and at the corners great double gates, of which
two are well preserved. Some houses survive to a height of four feet, their
walls built of brick and wood upon a stone foundation. The red-painted
pottery, wheel-turned but crude, indicates a life span for this city from
approximately 2400 to 1900. Bronze has replaced stone for tools and
weapons, and jewelry abounds; but the statuettes arc unprepossessingiy
primitive. The Second City was apparently destroyed by fire; signs of con-
flagration are numerous, and persuaded Schliemann that this was the work
of Agamemnon's Greeks.
(3-5) Above the "Burnt City" are the relics of three successive hamlets,
small and poor, and negligible in archeological content. (6) About 1600
another city rose on the historic hill. Through the passionate haste of his
work, Schliemann mixed the objects of this stratum with those of the
second, and dismissed the Sixth City as an unimportant "Lydian settle-
ment." 53 But Dorpfeld, continuing the excavations after Schliemann's
death, and for a time with Schliemann's money , s * revealed a town consider-
ably larger than the Second, ornate with substantial buildings in dressed
stone, and enclosed by a thirty-foot wall of whose four gates three remain.
CHAP.HJ BEFORE AGAMEMNON 35
Jn the ruins were monochrome vases of finer workmanship than before,
vessels like the "Minyan" ware of Orchomenos, and potsherds so like those
found at Mycenae that Dorpfeld considered them to be importations from
that city, and therefore contemporary with the Shaft Grave Dynasty
(1400-1200). On these and other shifting grounds current opinion iden-
tifies the Sixth City with Homer's Troy,* 85 and assigns to it the "Treasury
of Priam" that Schliemann thought he had found in the Second City six
bracelets, two goblets, two diadems, a fillet, sixty earrings, and 8700 other
pieces, all in gold. 30 The Sixth City too, we are assured, perished by fire,
shortly after 1200. Greek historians traditionally assigned the siege of Troy
to 1194-1184 B.c.f
Who were the Trojans? An Egyptian papyrus mentions certain "Dar-
denui" as among the allies of the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh (1287) ; it
is likely that these were the ancestors of the "Dardenoi" who in Homer's
terminology are one with the Trojans. 37 Probably these Dardani were of
Balkan origin, crossed the Hellespont in the sixteenth century with the
kindred Phrygians, and settled in the lower valley of the Scamander. 83
Herodotus, however, identified the Trojans with the Teucrians, and the
Teucrians, according to Strabo, were Cretans who settled in the Troad,|
perhaps after the fall of Cnossus. 40 Both Crete and the Troad had a sacred
Mt. Ida, the "many-fountained Ida" of Homer and Tennyson. Presumably
the region was subject at various times to political and ethnic influences
from the Hittite hinterland. All in all, the excavations indicate a civilization
partly Minoan, partly Mycenaean, partly Asiatic, partly Danubian. Homer
represents the Trojans as speaking the same language and worshiping the
same gods as the Greeks; but later Hellenic imagination preferred to think
of Troy as an Asiatic city, and of the famous siege as the first known episode
in an endless contest between Semite and Aryan, East and West.* 1
More significant than the racial complexion of its people was the strategic
* Dr. Carl Blegen, field director of the University of Cincinnati excavations at Troy
(193 if), believes that these have shown that Troy VI was destroyed about 1300, probably by
earthquake, and that upon its ruins rose the Seventh City, which he calls Priam's Troy.
Dorpfeld prefers to call this Troy VIb. Cf. Journal of Hellenic Studies, LVI, 156.
t (7) Troy VII was a small unfortified settlement, which occupied the site till (8) Alex-
ander the Great, in 334, built upon it Troy VIII in homage to Homer. (9) About the begin-
ning of the Christian era the Romans built Novum Ilium, or New Troy, which survived till
the fifth century A.D.
$ The name Troy was traced by Greek tradition to the eponymous hero Tros, father of
flus, father of Laomedon, father of Priam. 80 Hence the variant names of the city Tracts, Ilios,
llion, Ilium. An eponymous hero, or eponym, is a probably legendary person to whom a
social or political group attributes its origin and name. The Dardani, for example, believed
or pretended that they were descended from Dardanus, son of Zeus; so the Dorians traced
tnemselves to Dorus, the lonians to Ion. etc.
36 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. II
position of Troy near the entrance to the Hellespont and the rich lands
about the Black Sea. Throughout history that narrow passage has been the
battleground of empires; the siege of Troy was the Gallipoli adventure of
1 194 B.C. The plain was moderately fertile, and precious metals lay in the
soil to the east; but this alone would hardly account for the wealth of Troy,
and the tenacious attack of the Greeks. The city was admirably placed to
levy tolls upon vessels wishing to pass through the Hellespont, while it was
too far inland to be conveniently assailed from the sea: M perhaps it was this,
and not Helen's face, that launched a thousand ships upon Ilium. On a like-
lier theory the southward current and winds in the strait persuaded mer-
chants to unload their cargoes at Troy and ship them overland into the
interior; from the charges exacted for this service Troy may have derived
its wealth and power/ 3 In any case the city's trade grew rapidly, as may be
judged from the varied provenance of its remains. From the lower Aegean
came copper, olive oil, wine, and pottery; from the Danube and Thrace
came pottery, amber, horses, and swords; from distant China came so great
a rarity as jade/* In return Troy brought from the interior, and exported,
timber, silver, gold, and wild asses. Seated proudly behind their walls, the
"horse-taming Trojans" dominated the Troad, and taxed its trade on land
and sea.
The picture that we derive from the Iliad of Priam and his household is
one of Biblical grandeur and patriarchal benevolence. The King is polyg-
amous, not as a diversion but as a royal responsibility to continue his high
breed abundantly; bis sons are monogamous, and as well behaved as the
fictitious Victorians excepting, of course, the gay Paris, who is as innocent
of morals as Alcibiades. Hector, Helenus, and Troilus are more likable than
the vacillating Agamemnon, the treacherous Odysseus, and the petulant
Achilles; Andromache and Polyxena are as charming as Helen and Iphi-
genia; and Hecuba is a shade better than Clytaemnestra. All in all, the
Trojans, as pictured by their enemies, seem to us less deceitful, more de-
voted, better gentlemen, than the Greeks who conquered them. The con-
querors themselves felt this in later days; Homer had many a kind word to
say for the Trojans, and Sappho and Euripides left no doubt as to where
their sympathies and admiration lay. It was a pity that these noble Dardans
stood in the way of an expanding Greece which, despite its multitude of
faults, would in the end bring to this and every other region of the Mediter-
ranean a higher civilization than they had ever known.
CHAPTER III
The Heroic Age
I. THEACHAEANS
MODEST Hittite tablets from Boghaz Keui, of approximately 1325
B.C., speak of the "Ahhijava" as a people equal in power to thf
Hittites themselves. An Egyptian record towards 1221 B.C. mentions the
"Akaiwasha" as joining other "Peoples of the Sea" in a Libyan invasion of
Egypt, and describes them as a roving band "righting to fill their bellies." 1
In Homer the Achaeans are, specifically, a Greek-speaking people of south-
ern Thessaly; 2 often, however, because they had become the most powerful
of the Greek tribes, Homer uses their name for all the Greeks at Troy.
Greek historians and poets of the classic age called the Achaeans, like the
Pelasgians, autochthonous native to Greece as far back as memory could
recall; and they assumed without hesitation that the Achaean culture de-
scribed in Homer was one with that which has here been termed Myce-
naean. Schliemann accepted this identification, and for a brief while the
world of scholarship agreed with him.
In 1901 an unusually iconoclastic Englishman, Sir William Ridgeway, 8
upset this happy confidence by pointing out that though Achaean civiliza-
tion agreed with the Mycenaean in many ways, it differed in vital particu-
lars, (i) Iron is practically unknown to the Mycenaeans; the Achaeans are
familiar with it. (2) The dead in Homer are cremated; in Tiryns and
Mycenae they are buried, implying a different conception of the afterlife.
(3) The Achaean gods are the Olympians, of whom no trace has been found
in the culture of Mycenae. (4) The Achaeans use long swords, round
shields, and safety-pin brooches; no objects of such form appear in the
varied Mycenaean remains. (5) There are considerable dissimilarities in
coiffure and dress. Ridgeway concluded that the Mycenaeans were Pelas-
gians, and spoke Greek; that the Achaeans were blond "Celts," or Central
Europeans, who came down through Epirus and Thessaly from 2000 on-
ward, brought with them the worship of Zeus, invaded the Peloponnesus
about 1400, adopted Greek speech and many Greek ways, and established
37
38 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
themselves as feudal chieftains ruling from their fortress-palaces a sub-
jugated Pelasgian population.
The theory is illuminating, even if it must be substantially modified.
Greek literature says nothing of an Achaean invasion; and it would not be
wise to hang a rejection of so unanimous a tradition upon a gradual in-
crease in the use of iron, a change in modes of burial or coiffure, a lengthen-
ing of swords or rounding of shields, or even a safety pin. It is more likely
that the Achaeans, as all classic writers supposed, were a Greek tribe that,
in its natural multiplication, expanded from Thessaly into the Peloponnesus
during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, mingled their blood with the
Pelasgo-Mycenaeans there, and, towards 1250 B.C., became the ruling
class.* Probably it was they who gave Greek to the Pelasgians, instead of
receiving it from them. In such place names as Corinth and Tiryns, Parnas-
sus and Olympia,* we may have echoes of a Creto-Pelasgo-Mycenaean
tongue. 5 In the same manner, presumably, the Achaeans superimposed their
mountain and sky gods upon the "chthonic" or subterranean deities of the
earlier population. For the rest there is no sharp line of separation between
the Mycenaean culture and that later phase of it, the Achaean, which we
find in Homer; the two ways of life seem to have mingled and melted into
one. Slowly, as the amalgamation proceeded, Aegean civilization passed
away, dying in the defeat of Troy, and Greek civilization began.
II. THE HEROIC LEGENDS
The legends of the Heroic Age suggest both the origins and the destinies
of the Achaeans. We must not ignore these stories; for though a sanguinary
fancy enlivens them, they may contain more history than we suppose; and
they are so bound up with Greek poetry, drama, and art that we should be
it a loss to understand these without them.f
* And in such Greek words as sesamon (sesame), kyparissos (cypress), hyssopos (hyssop),
oinos (wine) , sandalon (sandal) , chalkos (copper) , thalassa (seo.),molybdos (lead) , zephyros
(zephyr), kybernao (steer), sphongos (sponge), loos (people), labyrinthis, dithyrambos,
khharis (zither), syrinx (flute) , and paian (paean).
t "Perseus . . . Heracles . . . Minos, Theseus, Jason ... it has been common in modern times
to regard these and the other heroes of this age ... as purely mythical creations. The later
Greeks, in criticizing the records of theii past, had no doubt that they were historical per-
sons who actually ruled in Argos and other kingdoms; and after a period of extreme skepti-
cism many modern critics have begun to revert to the Greek view as that which explains the
evidence most satisfactorily The heroes of the tales, like the geographical scenes in which
they moved, are real." Cambridge Ancient History, II, 478. We shall assume that the major
legends are true in essence, imaginative in detail.
CHAP. Ill) THE HEROIC AGE 39
Hittite inscriptions mention an Atarissyas as King of the Ahhijavas in the
thirteenth century B.C.; he is probably Atreus, King of the Achaeans." In
Greek story Zeus begat Tantalus, King of Phrygia,* who begat Pelops, who
begat Atreus, who begat Agamemnon. Pelops, being exiled, came to Elis
in the western Peloponnesus about 1283, an ^ determined to marry Hip-
podameia, daughter of Oenomaus, Elis' king. The east pediment of the
great temple of Zeus at Olympia still tells us the story of their courtship.
The King made a practice to test his daughter's suitors by competing with
them in a chariot race: if the suitor won he would receive Hippodameia;
if he lost he was put to death. Several suitors had tried, and had lost both
race and life. To reduce the risks Pelops bribed the King's charioteer,
Myrtilus, to remove the linchpins from the royal chariot, and promised
to share the kingdom with him if their plan succeeded. In the contest that
ensued the King's chariot broke down, and he was killed. Pelops married
Hippodameia and ruled Elis, but instead of sharing the kingdom with
Myrtilus he threw Myrtilus into the sea. As Myrtilus sank he laid an
ominous curse upon Pelops and all his descendants.
Pelops' daughter married Sthenelus, son of Perseus and King of Argos;
the throne passed down to their son Emystheus, and, after the latter's death,
to his uncle Atreus. Atreus' sons Agamemnon and Menelaus married
Clytaemnestra and Helen, daughters of King Tyndareus of Lacedaemon;
and when Atreus and Tyndareus died, Agamemnon and Menelaus between
them ruled all the eastern Peloponnesus from their respective capitals at
Mycenae and Sparta. The Peloponnesus, or Island of Pelops, came to be
called after their grandfather, whose descendants had quite forgotten the
curse of Myrtilus.
Meanwhile the remainder of Greece was also busy with heroes, usually
founding cities. In the fifteenth century before our era, said Greek tradi-
tion, the iniquity of the human race provoked Zeus to overwhelm it with a
flood, from which one man, Deucalion, and his wife Pyrrha, alone were
saved, in an ark or chest that came to rest on Mt. Parnassus. From Deuca-
lion's son Hellen had come all the Greek tribes, and their united name,
Hellenes. Hellen was grandfather of Achaeus and Ion, who begot the
* Tantalus angered the gods by divulging their secrets, stealing their nectar and ambrosia,
and offering them his son Pelops, boiled and sliced. Zeus put Pelops together again, and
punished Tantalus, in Hades, with a raging thirst; Tantalus was placed in the midst of a lake
whose waters receded whenever he tried to drink of them; over his head branches rich in
fruit were hung, which withdrew when he sought to reach them; a great rock was suspended
above him, which at every moment threatened to fall and crush him.'
40 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. Ill
Achaean and Ionian tribes, which, after many wanderings, peopled re-
spectively the Peloponnesus and Attica. One of Ion's descendants, Cecrops,
with the help of the goddess Athena, founded (on a site whose acropolis
had already been settled by Pelasgians) the city that was named after her,
Athens. 8 It was he, said the story, that gave civilization to Attica, instituted
marriage, abolished bloody sacrifices, and taught his subjects to worship the
Olympian gods Zeus and Athena above the rest.
The descendants of Cecrops ruled Athens as kings. The fourth in line
was Erechtheus, to whom the city, honoring him as a god, would later
dedicate one of its loveliest temples. His grandson, Theseus, about 1250,
merged the twelve demes or villages of Attica into one political unity, whose
citizens, wherever they lived, were to be called Athenians; perhaps it was
because of this historic synoikismos, or municipal cohabitation, that Athens,
like Thebes and Mycenae, had a plural name. It was Theseus who brought
order and power to Athens, ended the sacrifice of her children to Minos,
and gave her people security on the roads by slaying the highwayman
Procrustes, who had liked to stretch or cut the legs of his captives to make
them fit his bed. After Theseus' death Athens worshiped him, too, as a god.
As late as 476, in the skeptical age of Pericles, the city brought the bones of
Theseus from Scyros and deposited them as sacred relics in the temple of
Theseus.
To the north, in Boeotia, a rival capital had equally stirring traditions,
destined to become the very substance of Greek drama in the classic age.
Late in the fourteenth century B.C. the Phoenician or Cretan or Egyptian
prince Cadmus founded the city of Thebes at the meeting of the roads that
cross Greece from east to west and from north to south, taught its people
letters, and slew the dragon (perhaps an ancient phrase for an infecting
or infesting organism) that hindered the settlers from using the waters of
the Areian spring. From the dragon's teeth, which Cadmus sowed in the
earth, sprang armed men who, like the Greeks of history, attacked one
another until only five survived; these five, said Thebes, were the founders
of her royal families. The government established itself on a hill citadel
called the Cadmeia, where in our own time a "palace of Cadmus" has been
unearthed.* There, after Cadmus, reigned his son Polydorus, his grand-
son Labdacus, and his great-grandson Laius, whose son Oedipus, as all the
world knows, slew his father and married his mother. When Oedipus died
* Assigned to 1400-1200 B.C. It contained fragments of writing in undeciphered characters,
probably of Cretan lineage.
CHAP. Ill) THEHEROICAGE 4*
his sons quarreled over the scepter, as is the habit of princes. Eteodes
drove out Polynices, who persuaded Adrastus, King of Argos, to attempt
his restoration. Adrastus tried (ca. 1213), in the famous war of the Seven
(Allies) against Thebes, and again sixteen years later in the war of the
Epigoni, or sons of the Seven. This time both Eteocles and Polynices were
killed, and Thebes was burned to the ground.
Among the Theban aristocrats was one Amphitryon, who had a charm-
ing wife, Alcmene. Her Zeus visited while Amphitryon was gone to the
wars; and Heracles (Hercules) was their son.* Hera, who did not relish
these jovial condescensions, sent two serpents to destroy the babe in the
cradle; but the boy grasped one in each hand and strangled them both;
therefore he was called Heracles, as having won glory through Hera.
Linus, oldest name in the history of music, tried to teach the youth how to
play and sing; but Heracles did not care for music, and slew Linus with the
lyre. When he grew up a clumsy, bibulous, gluttonous, kindly giant he
undertook to kill a lion that was ravaging the flocks of Amphitryon and
Thespius. The latter, King of Thespiae, offered his home and his fifty
daughters to Heracles, who rose to the occasion manfully . M He slew the
lion, and wore its skin as his garb. He married Megara, daughter of Creon
of Thebes, and tried to settle down; but Hera sent a madness upon him, and
unwittingly he killed his own children. He consulted the oracle at Delphi,
and was instructed to go and live at Tiryns and serve Eurystheus, the
Argive king, for twelve years; after which he would become an immortal
god. He obeyed, and carried out for Eurystheus his famous twelve labors, t
Released by the king, Heracles returned to Thebes. He performed many
* "Zeus," says Diodorus, "made that night three times its normal length; and by the magni-
tude of the time expended on the procreation he presaged the exceptional might of the
child." 8
f He strangled the lion that troubled the flocks at Nemea; he destroyed the many-headed
hydra that ravaged Lerna; he captured a fleet stag and carried it to Eurystheus; he caught a
wild boar from Mt. Eurymanthus and carried it to Eurystheus; in one day he cleansed all the
stables of Augeas' three thousand oxen by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus into the
stalls and paused long enough in Elis to establish the Olympic games; he destroyed the
murderous Stymphalian birds of Arcadia; he captured the mad bull that was devastating
Crete, and carried it on his shoulders to Eurystheus; he caught and tamed the man-eating
horses of Diomedes; he slew nearly all the Amazons; he set up two confronting promontories
as the "Pillars of Hercules" at the mouth of the Mediterranean, captured the oxen of Geryon
and brought them through Gaul, across the Alps, through Italy, and across the sea to
Eurystheus; he found the apples of the Hesperides, and for a while held up the earth for
Adas; he descended into Hades, and delivered Theseus and Ascalaphus from torment. The
Hesperides, daughters of Atlas, had been entrusted by Hera with the golden apples given her
by Gaea (Earth) at her wedding with Zeus. The apples were guarded by a dragon, and con-
ferred semidivine qualities upon those who ate them.
42 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. Ill
other exploits; he joined the Argonauts, sacked Troy, helped the gods to
win their battle against the giants, freed Prometheus, brought Alcestis back
to life, and, now and then, killed his own friends by accident. After his
death he was worshiped as hero and god; and since he had had countless
loves, many tribes claimed him as their progenitor.*
His sons made their home at Trachis in Thessaly; but Eurystheus, fear-
ing lest they depose him in revenge for the unnecessary labors that he had
laid upon their father, ordered the Trachinian king to exile them from
Greece. The Heracleidae (i.e., children of Heracles) found refuge in
Athens; Eurystheus sent an army to attack them, but they defeated and
killed him. When Atreus came against them with another force, Hyllus,
one of the sons, offered to fight any of Atreus' men in single combat, on
condition that if he won, the Heracleidae should receive the kingdom of
Mycenae; if he lost, the Heracleidae would depart and not return for fifty
years, after which time their children were to receive Mycenae. 13 He lost,
and led his partisans into exile. Fifty years later a new generation of Hera-
cleidae returned; it was they, not the Dorians, said Greek tradition, who,
being resisted in their claims, conquered the Peloponnesus, and put an end
to the Heroic Age.
If the tale of Pelops and his descendants suggests the Asia Minor origin
of the Achaeans, the theme of their destiny is struck in the story of the
Argonauts. Like so many of the legends that served as both the historical
tradition and the popular fiction of the Greeks, it is an excellent narrative,
with all the elements of adventure, exploration, war, love, mystery, and
death woven into a fabric so rich that after the dramatists of Athens had
almost worn it bare it was rewoven into a very passable epic, in Hellenistic
days, by Apollonius of Rhodes. It begins in Boeotian Orchomenos on the
harsh note of human sacrifice, like Agamemnon's tragedy. Finding his land
stricken with famine, King Athamas proposed to offer his son Phrixus to
the gods. Phrixus learned of the plan and escaped from Orchomenos with
his sister Helle, riding with her through the air on a ram with a golden
fleece. But the ram was unsteady, and Helle fell off and was drowned in
the strait which after her was called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached land
* This amazing "culture hero," Diodorus thought, was a primitive engineer, a prehistoric
Empedocles; the legends told about him meant that he had cleansed the springs, cleaved
mountains, changed the courses of rivers, reclaimed waste areas, rid the woods of dangerous
beasts, and made Greece a habitable land. u In another aspect Heracles is the beloved son of
god who suffers for mankind, raises the dead to life, descends into Hades, and then ascends
into heaven.
CHAP. Ill) THEHEROICAGE 43
and found his way to Colchis, at the farther end of the Black Sea; there he
sacrificed the ram and hung up its fleece as an offering to Ares, god of war.
Aietes, King of Colchis, set a sleepless dragon to watch the fleece, for an
oracle had said that he should die if a stranger carried it off; and to better
assure himself he decreed that all strangers coming to Colchis should be
put to death. His daughter Medea, who loved strange men and ways, pitied
the wayfarers who entered Colchis, and helped them to escape. Her father
ordered her to be confined; but she fled to a sacred precinct near the sea,
and lived there in bitter brooding till Jason found her wandering on the
shore.
Some twenty years before (Greek chronologists said about 1245),
Pelias, son of Poseidon, had usurped the throne of Aeson, King of lolcus
in Thessaly. Aeson's infant son Jason had been hidden by friends, and had
grown up in the woods to great strength and courage. One day he ap-
peared in the market place, dressed in a leopard skin and armed with two
spears, and demanded his kingdom. But he was simple as well as strong,
and Pelias persuaded him to undertake a heavy task as the price of the
throne to recover the Golden Fleece. So Jason built the great ship Argo
(the Swift), and called to the adventure the bravest spirits in Greece.
Heracles came, with his beloved companion Hylas; and Peleus, father of
Achilles; Theseus, Meleager, Orpheus, and the fleet-footed maiden Atal-
anta. As the vessel entered the Hellespont it was halted, seemingly by some
force from Troy, for Heracles left the expedition to sack the city and kill
its King Laomedon, and all his sons but Priam.
When, after many tribulations, the Argonauts reached their goal, they
were warned by Medea of the death that awaited all strangers in Colchis.
But Jason persisted; and Medea agreed to help him gain the Fleece if he
would take her to Thessaly and keep her as his wife until he died. He
pledged himself to her, captured the Fleece with her aid, and fled back to
his ship with her and his men. Many of them were wounded, but Medea
quickly healed them with roots and herbs. When Jason reached lolcus he
again asked for the kingdom, and Pelias again delayed. Then Medea, by
the arts of a sorceress, deceived the daughters of Pelias into boiling him
to death. Frightened by her magic powers, the people drove her and
Jason from lolcus, and debarred him forever from the throne. 18 The rest
belongs to Euripides.
A myth is often a bit of popular wisdom personified in poetic figures, as
the story of Eden suggests the disillusionment of knowledge and the liabili-
44 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. Ill
ties of love; legend is often a fragment of history swelling with new fictions
as it rolls down the years. It is probable that in the generation before the
historic siege of Troy the Greeks had tried to force their way through the
Hellespont and open the Black Sea to colonization and trade; the story of
the Argonauts may be the dramatized memory of that commercial explora-
tion; and the "golden fleece" may refer to the woolen skins or cloths an-
ciently used in northern Asia Minor to catch particles of gold carried down
by the streams." A Greek settlement was actually made, about this time,
on the island of Lemnos, not far from the Hellespont. The Black Sea proved
inhospitable despite its propitiating name, and the fortress of Troy rose
again after Heracles' visitation to discourage adventures in the strait. But
the Greeks did not forget; they would come again, a thousand ships in-
stead of one; and on the plain of Ilion the Achaeans would destroy them-
selves to free the Hellespont.
III. HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
How shall we reconstruct the life of Achaean Greece (1300-1 100 B.C.)
out of the poetry of its legends? Our chief reliance must be upon Homer,
who may never have existed, and whose epics are younger by at least three
centuries than the Achaean Age. It is true that archeology has surprised
the archeologists by making realities of Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, Cnossus,
and other cities described in the Iliad, and by exhuming a Mycenaean
civilization strangely akin to that which spontaneously takes form between
the lines of Homer; so that our inclination today is to accept as real the
central characters of his fascinating tales. None the less, it is impossible to
say how far the poems reflect the age in which the poet lived, rather than
the age of which he writes. We shall merely ask, then, what did Greek
tradition, as gathered together in Homer, conceive the Homeric Age to be?
In any case we shall have a picture of Hellas in buoyant transit from the
Aegean culture to the civilization of historic Greece.
/. Labor
The Achaeans (i.e., the Greeks of the Heroic Age) impress us as less civ-
ilized than the Mycenaeans who preceded them, and more civilized than the
Dorians who followed them. They are above all physical the men tall and
powerful, the women ravishingly lovely in an unusually literal sense. Like the
Romans a thousand years after them, the Achaeans look down upon literary
CHAP. Ill) THEHEROIGAGE 45
culture as effeminate degeneration; they use writing under protest, and the
only literature they know is the martial lay and unwritten song of the trouba-
dour. If we believe Homer we must suppose that Zeus had realized in Achaean
society the aspiration of the American poet who wrote that if he were God he
would make all men strong, and all women beautiful, and would then himself
become a man. Homeric Greece is kcdUgynaikoFit is a dream of fair women.
The men too are handsome, with their long hair and their brave beards; the
greatest gift that a man can give is to cut off his hair and lay it as an offering
upon the funeral pyre of his friend. 16 Nakedness is not yet cultivated; both
sexes cover the body with a quadrangular garment folded over the shoulders,
tied with a clasp pin, and reaching nearly to the knees; the women may add g
veil or a girdle, and the men a loincloth which, as dignity increases, will evolve
into drawers and trousers. The well to do go in for costly robes, such as that
which Priam brings humbly to Achilles in ransom for his son." The men are
barelegged, the women bare-armed; both wear shoes or sandals outdoors, but
are usually barefoot within. Both sexes wear jewelry, and the women and
Paris anoint the body with "rose-scented oil." 18
How do these men and women live? Homer shows them to us tilling the soil,
sniffing with pleasure the freshly turned dark earth, running their eyes with
pride along the furrows they have ploughed so straight, winnowing the wheat,
irrigating the fields, and banking up the streams against the winter floods; 19 he
makes us feel the despair of the peasant whose months of toil are washed out
by "the torrent at the full that in swift course shatters the dykes, neither can
the long line of mounds hold it in, nor the walls of the fruitful orchards stay
its sudden coming." 20 The land is hard to farm, for much of it is mountain, or
swamp, or deeply wooded hill; the villages are visited by wild beasts, and hunt-
ing is a necessity before it becomes a sport. The rich are great stockbreeders,
raising cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses; one Erichthonius keeps three thou-
sand brood mares with their foals. 21 The poor eat fish and grain, occasionally
vegetables; warriors and the rich rely upon great portions of roast meat; they
breakfast on meat and wine. Odysseus and his swineherd eat, between them,
a small roast pig for luncheon, and a third of a five-year-old hog for dinner. 23
They have honey instead of sugar, meat fat instead of butter; instead of bread
they eat cakes of grain, baked large and thin on a plate of iron or a hot stone.
The diners do not recline, as the Athenians will do, but sit on chairs; not at
a central table but along the walls, with little tables between the seats. There
are no forks, spoons, or napkins, and only such knives as the guests may carry;
eating is managed with the fingers. 38 The staple drink, even among the poor
and among children, is diluted wine.
The land is owned by the family or the clan, not by the individual; the father
administers and controls it, but he rsmnot sell it.* 4 In the Iliad great tracts are
46" THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP, ill
called the King's Commons or Demesne (temenos] ; in effect it belongs to the
community, and in its fields any man may pasture his flocks. In the Odyssey
these common lands are being divided, and sold to or appropriated by rich
or strong individuals; the commons disappears in ancient Greece precisely as in
modern England. 28
The soil might yield metal as well as food; but the Achaeans neglect to mine
the earth, and are content to import copper and tin, silver and gold, and a
strange new luxury, iron. A shapeless mass of iron is offered as a precious prize
at the games held in honor of Patroclus, 2 " it will make, says Achilles, many an
agricultural implement. He says nothing of weapons, which are still of bronze."
The Odyssey describes the tempering of iron,* but that epic probably belongs
to a later age than the Iliad.
The smith at his forge and the potter at his wheel work in their shops; other
Homeric craftsmensaddlers, masons, carpenters, cabinetmakers go to work
at the home that has ordered their product. They do not produce for a market,
for sale or profit; they work long hours, but leisurely, without the sting and
stimulus of visible competition. 20 The family itself provides most of its needs;
everyone in it labors with his hands; even the master of the house, even the
local king, like Odysseus, makes bed and chairs for his home, boots and saddles
for himself; and unlike the later Greeks he prides himself on his manual skill.
Penelope, Helen, and Andromache, as well as their servant women, are busy
with spinning, weaving, embroidery, and household cares; Helen seems lovelier
when she displays her needlework to Telemachus 30 than when she walks in
beauty on the battlements of Troy.
The craftsmen are freemen, never slaves as in classic Greece. Peasants may
in emergency be conscripted to labor for the king, but we do not hear of serfs
bound to the soil. Slaves are not numerous, nor is their position degraded; they
are mostly female domestics, and occupy a position in effect as high as that of
household servants today, except that they are bought and sold for long terms
instead of for precariously brief engagements. On occasion they are brutally
treated; normally they are accepted as members of the family, are cared for in
illness or depression or old age, and may develop a humane relation of affection
with master or mistress. Nausicaa helps her bondwomen to wash the family
linen in the stream, plays ball with them, and altogether treats them as com-
panions. 81 If a slave woman bears a son to her master, the child is usually free. 8 "
Any man, however, may become a slave, through capture in battle or in piratical
raids. This is the bitterest aspect of Achaean life.
Homeric society is rural and local; even the "cities" are mere villages nestling
against hilltop citadels. Communication is by messenger or herald, or, over
* "When a smith tempers in cold water a great ax or an adze, it gives off a hissing; this is
what gives iron its strength." 48
CHAP.IIl) THE HEROIC AGE 47
long distances, by signal fires flashing from peak to peak. 88 Overland traffic is
made difficult and dangerous by roadless mountains and swamps and bridgeless
streams. The carpenter makes carts with four wheels boasting of spokes and
wooden tires; even so most goods are carried by mules or men. Trade by sea is
easier, despite pirates and storms; natural harbors are numerous, and only on the
perilous four-day trip from Crete to Egypt does the ship lose sight of land. Usu-
ally the boat is beached at night, and crew and passengers sleep on trusty land.
In this age the Phoenicians are still better merchants and mariners than the
Greeks. The Greeks revenge themselves by despising trade, and preferring
piracy.
The Homeric Greeks have no money, but use, as media for exchange, ingots
of iron, bronze, or gold; the ox or cow is taken as a standard of value. A gold
ingot of fifty-seven pounds is called a talent (talanton, weight). 34 Much barter
remains. Wealth is computed realistically in goods, especially cattle, rather than
in pieces of metal or paper that may lose or alter their value at any moment
through a change in the economic theology of men. There are rich and poor
in Homer as in life; society is a rumbling cart that travels an uneven road; and
no matter how carefully the cart is constituted, some of the varied objects in
it will sink to the bottom, and others will rise to the top; the potter has not
made all the vessels of the same earth, or strength, or fragility. Already in the
second book of the Iliad we hear the sound of the class war; and as Thersites
flies oratorically at Agamemnon we recognize an early variation on a persistent
theme. 85
2. Morals
As we read Homer the impression forms that we are in the presence of
a society more lawless and primitive than that of Cnossus or Mycenae.
The Achaean culture is a step backward, a transition between, the brilliant
Aegean civilization and the Dark Age that will follow the Dorian conquest.
Homeric life is poor in art, rich in action; it is unmeditative, buoyant, swift;
it is too young and strong to bother much about manners or philosophy.
Probably we misjudge it by seeing it in the violent crisis or disorderly
aftermath of war.
There are, it is true, many tender qualities and scenes. Even the warriors
are generous and affectionate; between parent and child there is a love as
profound as it is silent. Odysseus kisses the heads and shoulders of the
members of his family when, after their long separation, they recognize
him; and in like manner they kiss him. 88 Helen and Menelaus weep wher
they learn that this noble lad, Telemachus, is the son of the lost Odyssey
who fought so valiantly for them. 37 Agamemnon himself is capable of tcni
48 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. Ill
so abundant that they remind Homer of a stream pouring over rocks. 88
Friendships are firm among the heroes, though possibly a degree of sexual
inversion enters into the almost neurotic attachment of Achilles to Patroclus,
especially to Patroclus dead. Hospitality is lavish, for "from Zeus are all
strangers and beggars." 30 Maids bathe the foot or the body of the guest,
anoint him with unguents, and may give him fresh garments; he receives
food and lodging if he needs them, and perhaps a gift. 10 "Lo," says "fair-
cheeked Helen," as she places a costly robe in Telemachus' hands, "I too
give thee this gift, dear child, a remembrance of the hands of Helen, against
the day of thy longed-for marriage, for thy bride to wear." 11 It is a picture
that reveals to us the human tenderness and fine feeling that in the Iliad
must hide themselves under the panoply of war.
Even war does not thwart the Greek passion for games. Children and
adults engage in skillful and difficult contests, apparently with fairness and
good humor; Penelope's suitors play draughts, and throw the disk or jave-
lin; the Phaeacian hosts of Odysseus play at quoits, and a strange medley
of ball and dance.* When the dead Patroclus has been cremated, according
to Achaean custom, games are played that set a precedent for Olympia
foot races, disk-throwing, javelin-throwing, archery, wrestling, chariot
races, and single combat fully armed; all in excellent spirit, except that only
the ruling class may enter, and only the gods may cheat." 8
The other side of the picture is less pleasing. As a prize for the chariot
race Achilles offers "a woman skilled in fair handiwork"; and on the
funeral pyre horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, and human beings arc sacrificed to
keep the dead Patroclus well tended and fed." Achilles treats Priarn with
fine courtesy, but only after dragging Hector's body in mangled ignominy
around the pyre. To the Achaean male, human life is cheap; to take it is
no serious matter; a moment's pleasure can replace it. When a town is
captured the men are killed or sold into slavery; the women are taken as
concubines if they are attractive, as slaves if they are not. Piracy is still a
respected occupation; even kings organize marauding expeditions, plunder
towns and villages, and enslave their population; "Indeed," says Thucyd-
ides, "this came to be the main source of livelihood among the early Hel-
* "Then Alcmous ordered Halias and Laodamas to dance, by themselves, for never did
any one dare join himself with them. They took in their hands the fine ball, purple-dyed . . .
and played. The first, bending his body right back, would hurl the ball towards the shadowy
crowds, while the other in his turn would spring high into the air and catch it gracefully
before his feet touched the ground. Then, after they had made full trial of tossing the ball
high, they began passing it back and forth between them, all die while they danced upon the
fruitful earth."" v
CHAP.IIl) THE HEROIC AGE 49
lenes, no disgrace being yet attached to such an occupation," 46 but some
glory; very much as, in our times, great nations may conquer and subjugate
defenseless peoples without loss of dignity or righteousness. Odysseus is in-
sulted when he is asked is he a merchant, "mindful of the gains of his
greed"; 40 but he tells with pride how, on his return from Troy, his provisions
having run low, he sacked the city of Ismarus and stored his ships with
food; or how he ascended the river Aegyptus "to pillage the splendid fields,
to carry off the women and little children, and to kill the men."* 7 No city
is safe from sudden and unprovoked attack.
To this lighthearted relish for robbery and slaughter the Achaeans add
an unabashed mendacity. Odysseus can hardly speak without lying, or
act without treachery. Having captured the Trojan scout Dolon, he and
Diomed promise him life if he will give them the information they require;
he does, and they kill him/ 8 It is true that the other Achaeans do not quite
equal Odysseus in dishonesty, but not because they would not; they envy
and admire him, and look up to him as a model character; the poet who
pictures him considers him a hero in every respect; even the goddess Ath-
ena praises him for his lying, and counts this among the special charms for
which she loves him. "Cunning must he be and knavish," she tells him,
smiling, and stroking him with her hand, "who would go beyond thee in
all manner of guile, aye, though it were a god that met thee. Bold man,
crafty in counsel, insatiate in deceit, not even in thine own land, it seems,
wast thou to cease from guile and deceitful tales, which thou lovest from
the bottom of thine heart."* 1
In truth we ourselves are drawn to this heroic Munchausen of the ancient
world. We discover some likable traits in him, and in the hardy and subtle
people to which he belongs. He is a gentle father, and in his own kingdom
a just ruler, who "wrought no wrong in deed or word to any man in the
land." "Never again," says his swineherd, "shall I find a master so kind,
how far soever I go, not though I come again to the house of my father
and mother!" 60 We envy Odysseus his "form like unto the immortals,"
his frame so athletic that though nearing fifty he throws the disk farther
than any of the Phaeacian youths; we admire his "steadfast heart," his "wis-
dom like to Jove's" ; n and our sympathy goes out to him when, in his
despair of ever seeing again "the smoke leaping up from his own land," he
yearns to die, or when, in the midst of his perils and sufferings, he steels
himself with words that old Socrates loved to quote: "Be patient now, my
soul; thou hast endured still worse than this."" He is a man of iron in body
and mind, yet every inch human, and therefore forgivable.
50 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
The secret of the matter is that the Achaean's standard of judgment is
as different from ours as the virtues of war differ from those of peace. He
lives in a disordered, harassed, hungry world, where every man must be
his own policeman, ready with arrow and spear, and a capacity for look-
ing calmly at flowing blood. "A ravening belly," as Odysseus explains,
"no man can hide. . . . Because of it are the benched ships made ready that
bear evil to foeman over the unresting sea." 53 Since the Achaean knows
little security at home, he respects none abroad; every weakling is fair play;
the supreme virtue, in his view, is a brave and ruthless intelligence. Virtue
is literally virtus, manliness, arete, the quality of Ares or Mars. The good
man is not one that is gentle and forbearing, faithful and sober, industrious
and honest; he is simply one who fights bravely and well. A bad man is
not one that drinks too much, lies, murders, and betrays; he is one that is
cowardly, stupid, or weak. There were Nietzscheans long before Nietzsche,
long before Thrasymachus, in the lusty immaturity of the European
world.
3. Sexes
Achaean society is a patriarchal despotism tempered with the beauty and
anger of woman, and the fierce tenderness of parental love.* Theoretically
the father is supreme: he may take as many concubines as he likes, t he may
off er them to his guests, he may expose his children on the niountaintops to
die, or slaughter them on the altars of the thirsty gods. Such paternal omnip-
otence does not necessarily imply a brutal society, but only one in which
the organization of the state has not yet gone far enough to preserve so-
cial order; and in which the family, to create such order, needs the powers
that will later be appropriated by the state in a nationalization of the right
to kill. As social organization advances, paternal authority and family unity
decrease, freedom and individualism grow. In practice the Achaean male
is usually reasonable, listens patiently to domestic eloquence, and is devoted
to his children.
Within the patriarchal framework the position of woman is far higher
in Homeric than it will be in Periclean Greece. In the legends and the
* There are vestiges of an earlier and "matriarchal" condition: before Cecrops, said
Athenian tradition, "children did not know their own father" i.e., presumably, descent was
reckoned through the mother; and even in Homeric days many of the gods especially wor-
shiped by Greek cities were goddesses-Hera at Argos, Athena at Athens, Demeter anc?
Persephone at Eleusis-with no visible subordination to any male deity."
t Theseus had so many wives that an historian drew up a learned catalogue of them. 1 *
CHAP. Ill) THE HEROIC AGE JI
epics she plays a leading role, from Pelops' courtship of Hippodameia to
Iphigenia's gentleness and Electra's hate. The gynaeceum does not confine
her, nor does the home; she moves freely among men and women alike,
and occasionally shares in the serious discourse ot the men, as Helen does
with Menelaus and Telemachus. When the Achaean leaders wish to fire
the imagination of their people against Troy they appeal not to political
or racial or religious ideas, but to the sentiment for woman's beauty; the
loveliness of Helen must put a pretty face upon a war for land and trade.
Without woman the Homeric hero would be a clumsy boor, with nothing
to live for or die for; she teaches him something of courtesy, idealism, and
softer ways.
Marriage is by purchase, usually in oxen or their equivalent, paid by the
suitor to the father of the girl; the poet speaks of "cattle-bringing maidens.'"*
The purchase is reciprocal, for the father usually gives the bride a substan-
tial dowry. The ceremony is familial and religious, with much eating,
dancing, and loose-tongued merriment. "Beneath a blaze of torches they led
the brides from their chambers through the city, and loud rose the bridal
song. The young men whirled in the dance, and high among them did
sound the flute and the lyre"; 07 so changeless are the essentials of our life.
Once married, the woman becomes mistress in her home, and is honored
in proportion to her children. Love in the truest sense, as a profound mutual
tenderness and solicitude, comes to the Greeks, as to the French, after
marriage rather than before; it is not the spark thrown off by the contact
or nearness of two bodies, but the fruit of long association in the cares and
industries of the home. The Homeric wife is as faithful as her husband is
not. There are three adulteresses in Homer Clytaemnestra, Helen, and
Aphrodite; but they do injustice to the mortal average, if not to the divine.
Formed out of this background, the Homeric family (barring the enor-
mities of legends that play no part in Homer) is a wholesome and pleasing
institution, rich in fine women and loyal children. The women function not
only as mothers but as workers; they grind the grain, card the wool, spin,
weave, and embroider; they do Httle sewing, since garments are mostly
without seams; and cooking is normally left to men. Amid these labors
they bear and rear children, heal their hurts, pacify their quarrels, and
teach them the manners, morals, and traditions of the tribe. There is no
formal education, apparently no teaching of letters, no spelling, no gram-
mar, no books; it is a boy's Utopia. The girl is taught the arts of the home,
the boy those of the chase and war; he learns to fish and swim, to till the
fields, set snares, handle animals, aim the arrow and the lance, and take
52 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
care of himself in all the emergencies of a half-lawless life. When the
oldest boy grows up to manhood he becomes, in the absence of his father 1 ,
the responsible head of the family. When he marries he brings his bride
to his father's home, and the rhythm of the generations is renewed. The
individual members of the family change with time, but the family is the
lasting unit, surviving perhaps for centuries, and forging in the turbulent
crucible of the home the order and character without which all government
is in vain.
4. The Arts
The Achaeans leave to merchants and lowly scribes the art of writing, which
has presumably been handed down to them from Mycenaean Greece; they pre-
fer blood to ink and flesh to clay. In all of Homer there is but one reference to
writing, 68 and there in a characteristic context; a folded tablet is given to a mes-
senger, directing the recipient to kill the messenger. If the Achaeans have time
for literature it is only when war and marauding allow a peaceful interlude; the
king or prince gathers his retainers about him for a feast, and some wandering
minstrel, stringing the lyre, recounts in simple verse the exploits of ancestral
heroes; this is, for the Achaeans, both poetry and history. Homer, perhaps
wishing like Pheidias to engrave his own portrait upon his work, tells how
Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, calls for such song in entertaining Odysseus.
"Summon hither the divine minstrel, Demodocus; for to him above all others
has the god granted skill in song. . . . Then the herald drew near, leading the
good minstrel, whom the Muse loved above all other men, and gave him both
good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet
song."" 9
The only art except his own that interests Homer is toreutics-the hammer-
ing of metals into plastic forms. He says nothing of painting or sculpture, but
calls up all his inspiration to describe the scenes inlaid or damascened upon
Achilles' shield, or raised in relief upon Odysseus' brooch. He speaks briefly
but illuminatingly about architecture. The common dwelling in Homer is
apparently of sun-dried brick with a footing of stone; the floor is ordinarily of
beaten earth, and is cleaned by scraping; the roof is of reeds overlaid with clay,
and slopes only enough to carry off the rain. The doors are single or double,
and may have bolts or keys. 60 In the better dwellings the interior walls arc of
painted stucco, with ornamental border or frieze, and are hung with weapons,
shields, and tapestries. There is no kitchen, no chimney, no windows; an open-
ing in the roof of the central hall lets out some of the smoke that may rise from
the hearth; the rest finds its way through the door, or settles in soot on the walls.
Rich establishments have a bathroom; others content themselves with a tub.
CHAP. Ill) THE HEROIC AGE 53
The furniture is of heavy wood, often artistically carved and finished; Icmalms
fashions for Penelope an armchair set with ivory and precious metals; and
Odysseus makes for himself and his wife a massive bedstead designed to last
for a century.
It is characteristic of the age that its architecture ignores temples and spends
itself upon palaces, just as Periclean architecture will neglect palaces and lavish
itself upon temples. We hear of the "sumptuous home of Paris, which that
prince had built with the aid of the most cunning architects in Troy"; 61 of King
Alcinous' great mansion, with walls of bronze, frieze of blue-glass paste, doors
of silver and gold, and other features that may belong rather to poetry than to
architecture; we hear something of Agamemnon's royal residence at Mycenae,
and a great deal about Odysseus' palace at Ithaca. This has a front court, paved
in part with stone, surrounded by a palisade or plastered wall, and adorned
with trees, stalls for horses, and a heap of steaming dung on which Odysseus'
dog Argos makes his bed in the sun.* A large pillared porch leads to the house;
here the slaves sleep and often the visitors. Within, an anteroom opens upon
a central hall supported by pillars, and sometimes lighted not only by the open-
ing in the roof, but by a narrow clerestory or open space between the archi-
trave and the eaves. At night braziers burning on tall stands give an unsteady
illumination. In the center of the hall is the hearth, around whose sacred fire
the family gathers in the evening for warmth and good cheer, and debates the
ways of neighbors, the willfulness of children, and the vicissitudes of states.
5. The State
How are these passionate and vigorous Achaeans ruled? In peace by
the family, in crisis by the clan. The clan is a group (genos, literally a
genus) of persons acknowledging a common ancestor and a common chief-
tain. The citadel of the chieftain is the origin and center of the city; there,
as his force subsides into usage and law, clan after clan gathers, and makes
a political as well as a kinship community. When the chieftain desires some
united action from his clan or city, he summons its free males to a public
assembly, and submits to them a proposal which they may accept or reject,
but which only the most important members of the group may propose
to change. In this village assembly the one democratic element in an
essentially feudal and aristocratic society skilled speakers who can sway
the people are valuable to the state; already, in old Nestor, whose voice
"flows sweeter than honey from his tongue," 83 and in wily Odysseus, whose
words fall "like snowflakes upon the people," 83 we have the beginnings of
* Argos dies of joy on recognizing his master after twenty years' separation.
54 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. II>
that stream of eloquence which will reach greater heights in Greece than
in any other civilization, and will finally submerge it in ruin.
When all the clans must act at once the chieftains follow the lead of the
strongest of their number as king, and report to him with their armies of
freemen and attendant slaves. Those chieftains who are nearest to the
king in residence and respect are called the King's Companions; they wili
be called that again in Philip's Macedonia and in Alexander's camp. In their
boule, or council, the nobles exercise full freedom of speech, and address
the king as merely and temporarily first among equals. Out of these insti-
tutionspublic assembly, council of nobles, and king will come, in a hun-
dred varieties and under a thousand shibboleths and phrases, the constitu-
tions of the modem Western world.
The powers of the king are narrowly limited and very wide. They are
limited in space, for his kingdom is small. They are limited in time, for
he may be deposed by the Council, or by a right which the Achaeans read-
ily recognize the right of the stronger. Otherwise his rule is hereditary,
and has only the vaguest boundaries. He is above all a military commander,
solicitous for his army, without which he might be found in the wrong.
He sees to it that it is well equipped, well fed, well trained; that it has poi-
soned arrows," lances, helmets, greaves, spears, breastplates, shields, and
chariots. So long as the army defends him he is the government legisla-
ture, executive, judiciary. He is the high priest of the state religion, and
sacrifices for the people. His decrees are the laws, and his decisions are
final; there is as yet no word for law." Below him the Council may sit occa-
sionally to judge grave disputes; then, as if to set a precedent for all courts,
it asks for precedents, and decides accordingly. Precedent dominates law
because precedent is custom, and custom is the jealous older brother of law.
Trials of any kind, however, are rare in Homeric society; there are hardly
any public agencies of justice; each family must defend and revenge itself.
Violence abounds.
To support his establishment the king does not levy taxes; he receives,
now and then, "gifts" from his subjects. But he would be a poor king if
he depended upon such presents. His chief income is derived, presumably,
from tolls on the plunder that his soldiers and his ships gather on land or
sea. Perhaps that is why, late in the thirteenth century, the Achaeans are
found in Egypt and Crete; in Egypt as unsuccessful buccaneers, in Crete
as passing conquerors. Then, suddenly, we hear of them inflaming their
people with a tale of humiliating rape, collecting all the forces of all the
tribes, equipping a hundred thousand men t and sailing in a vast and mi-
CHAP.IIl) THE HEROIC AGE 55
paralleled armada of a thousand ships to try their fortunes against the spear-
head of Asia on the plains and hill of Troy.
IV. THE SIEGE OF TROY
Was there such a siege? We only know that every Greek historian, and
every Greek poet, and almost every temple record or legend in Greece,
took it for granted; that archeology has placed the ruined city, generously
multiplied, before our eyes; and that today, as until the last century, the
story and its heroes are accepted as in essence real. 68 An Egyptian inscrip-
tion of Rameses III reports that "the isles were restless" toward 1 196 B.C.; 67
and Pliny alludes to a Rameses "in whose time Troy fell." 88 The great
Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes, on the basis of traditional genealogies
collated late in the sixth century before Christ by the geographer-historian
Hecataeus, calculated the date of the siege as 1 194 B.C.
The ancient Persians and Phoenicians agreed with the Greeks in tracing
the great war to four abductions of beautiful women. The Egyptians, they
said, stole lo from Argos, the Greeks stole Europa from Phoenicia, and
Medea from Colchis; did not a just balancing of the scales require that
Paris should abduct Helen? * co Stesichorus in his penitent years, and after
him Herodotus and Euripides, refused to admit that Helen had gone to
Troy; she had only gone to Egypt, under constraint, and had merely waited
there a dozen years for Menelaus to come and find her; besides, asked
Herodotus, who could believe that the Trojans would fight ten years for
one woman? Euripides attributed the expedition to excess population in
Greece, and the consequent urge to expansion; 70 so old are the youngest
excuses of the will to power.
Nevertheless it is possible that some such story was used to make the
adventure digestible for the common Greek; men must have phrases if they
are to give their lives. Whatever may have been the face and shibboleth of
the war, its cause and essence lay, almost beyond doubt, in the struggle of
two groups of powers for possession of the Hellespont and the rich lands
lying about the Black Sea. All Greece and all western Asia saw it as a
decisive conflict; the little nations of Greece came to the aid of Agamemnon,
and the peoples of Asia Minor sent repeated reinforcements to Troy. If
was the beginning of a struggle that would be renewed at Marathon and
* Helen, it need hardly be said, was the daughter of Zeus, who, in the form of a swan
seduced Leda, wife of Sparta's King Tyndareus.
$6 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
Salamis, at Issus and Arbela, at Tours and Granada, at Lepanto and
Vienna. . . .
Of the events and aftermath of the war we can relate only what the
poets and dramatists of Greece have told us; we accept this as rather litera-
ture than history, but all the more for that reason a part of the story of
civilization; we know that war is ugly, and that the Iliad is beautiful. Art
(to vary Aristotle) may make even terror beautiful and so purify it by
giving it significance and form. Not that the form of the Iliad is perfect;
the structure is loose, the narrative is sometimes contradictory or obscure,
the conclusion does not conclude; nevertheless the perfection of the parts
atones for the disorder of the whole, and with all its minor faults the story
becomes one of the great dramas of literature, perhaps of history.
(i) * At the opening of the poem the Greeks have already besieged Troy for
nine years in vain; they are despondent, homesick, and decimated with disease.
They had been delayed at Aulis by sickness and a windless sea; and Agamem-
non had embittered Clytaemnestra, and prepared his own fate, by sacrificing
their daughter Iphigenia for a breeze. On the way up the coast the Greeks had
stopped here and there to replenish their supplies of food and concubines; Aga-
memnon had taken the fair Chryseis, Achilles the fair Briseis. A soothsayer
now declares that Apollo is withholding success from the Greeks because Aga-
memnon has violated the daughter of Apollo's priest, Chryses. The King
restores Chryseis to her father, but, to console himself and point a tale, he com-
pels Briseis to leave Achilles and take Chryseis' place in the royal tent. Achilles
convokes a general assembly, and denounces Agamemnon with a wrath that
provides the first word and the recurring theme of the Iliad. He vows that
neither he nor his soldiers will any longer stir a hand to help the Greeks.
(n) We pass in review the ships and tribes of the assembled force, and (in)
see bluff Menelaus engaging Paris in single combat to decide the war. The two
armies sit down in civilized truce; Priam joins Agamemnon in solemn sacrifice
to the gods. Menelaus overcomes Paris, but Aphrodite snatches the lad safely
away in a cloud and deposits him, miraculously powdered and perfumed, upon
his marriage bed. Helen bids him return to the fight, but he counterproposcs
that they "give the hour to dalliance." The lady, flattered by desire, yields,
(iv) Agamemnon declares Menelaus victor, and the war is apparently ended;
but the gods, in imitative council on Olympus, demand more blood. Zeus votes
for peace, but withdraws his vote in terrified retreat when Hera, his spouse,
directs her speech upon him. She suggests that if Zeus will agree to the destruc-
tion of Troy she will allow him to raze Mycenae, Argos, and Sparta to the
* Parenthetical numbers indicate books of the Iliad.
CHAP. Ill) THE HEROIC AGE
57
ground. The war is renewed; many a man falls pierced by arrow, lance, or
sword, and "darkness enfolds his eyes."
(v) The gods join in the merry slicing game; Ares, the awful god of war, is
hurt by Diomed's spear, "utters a cry as of nine thousand men," and runs off
to complain to Zeus, (vi) In a pretty interlude the Trojan leader Hector, before
rejoining the battle, bids good-by to his wife Andromache. "Love," she whis-
pers to him, "thy stout heart will be thy death; nor hast thou pity of thy child
or me, who shall soon be a widow. My father and rny mother and my brothers
all are slain; but, Hector, thou art father to me and mother, and thou art the
husband of my youth. Have pity, then, and stay here in the tower." "Full well
I know," he answers, "that Troy will fall, and I foresee the sorrow of my breth-
ren and the King; for them I grieve not; but to think of thee a slave in Argos
unmans me almost. Yet, even so, I will not shirk the fight." 11 His infant son
Astyanax, destined shortly to be flung over the walls to death by the victorious
Greeks, screams in fright at Hector's waving plumes, and the hero removes his
helmet that he may laugh, weep, and pray over the wondering child. Then he
strides down the causeway to the battle, and (vn) engages Ajax, King of Salamis,
in single combat. They fight bravely, and separate at nightfall with exchange
of praise and gifts a flower of courtesy floating on a sea of blood, (vin) After
a day of Trojan victories Hector bids his warriors rest.
Thus made harangue to them Hector; and roaring the Trojans ap-
plauded.
Then from the yoke loosed their war-steeds sweating, and each by
his chariot
Tethered his horses with thongs. And then they brought from the
city,
Hastily, oxen and goodly sheep; and wine honey-hearted
Gave them, . . . and corn from the houses.
Firewood they gathered withal; and then from the plain to the
heavens
Rose on the winds the sweet savor. And these by the highways
of battle
Hopeful sat through the night, and many their watchfires burning.
Even as when in the sky the stars shine out round the night-orb,
Wondrous to see, and the winds are laid, and the peaks and the
headlands
Tower to the view, and the glades come out, and the glorious heaven
Stretches itself to its widest, and sparkle the stars multitudinous,
Gladdening the heart of the toil-wearied shepherd-even as count>
less
$8 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. Ill
'Twixt the black ships and the river of Xanthus glittered the watch-
fires
Built by the horse-taming Trojans by Ilium.
Meanwhile the war-wearied horses, champing spelt and white barley,
Close by their chariots, waited the coming of fair-throned Dawn,
(ix) Nestor, King of Elian Pylus, advises Agamemnon to restore Briseis to
Achilles; he agrees, and promises Achilles half of Greece if he will rejoin the
siege; but Achilles continues to pout, (x) Odysseus and Diomed make a two-
man sally upon the Trojan camp at night, and slay a dozen chieftains, (xi)
Agamemnon leads his army valiantly, is wounded, and retires. Odysseus, sur-
rounded, fights like a lion; Ajax and Menelaus cleave a path to him, and save
him for a bitter life, (xii-xm) When the Trojans advance to the walls that the
Greeks have built about their camp (xiv) Hera is so disturbed that she resolves
to rescue the Greeks. Oiled, perfumed, ravishingly gowned, and bound with
Aphrodite's aphrodisiac girdle, she seduces Zeus to a divine slumber while
Poseidon helps the Greeks to drive the Trojans back, (xv) Advantage fluc-
tuates; the Trojans reach the Greek ships, and the poet rises to a height of
fervid narrative as the Greeks fight desperately in a retreat that must, mean death.
(xvi) Patroclus, beloved of Achilles, wins his permission to lead Achilles'
troops against Troy; Hector slays him, and (xvn) fights Ajax fiercely over the
body of the youth, (xvm) Hearing of Patroclus' death, Achilles at last resolves
to fight. His goddess-mother Thetis persuades the divine smithy, Hephaestus,
to forge for him new arms and a mighty shield, (xix) Achilles is reconciled
with Agamemnon, (xx) engages Aeneas, and is about to kill him when Poseidon
rescues him for Virgil's purposes, (xxi) Achilles slaughters a host of Trojans,
and sends them to Hades with long genealogical speeches. The gods take up
the fight: Athena lays Ares low with a stone, and when Aphrodite, going for
a soldier, tries to save him, Athena knocks her down with a blow upon her
fair breast. Hera cuffs the ears of Artemis; Poseidon and Apollo content them-
selves with words, (xxn) All Trojans but Hector fly from Achilles; Priam and
Hecuba counsel Hector to stay behind the walls, but he refuses. Then sud-
denly, as Achilles advances upon him, Hector takes to his heels. Achilles pur-
sues him three times around the walls of Troy; Hector makes a stand, and is
killed.
(xxm) In the subsiding finale of the drama Patroclus is cremated with ornate
ritual. Achilles sacrifices to him many cattle, twelve captured Trojans, and his
own long hair. The Greeks honor Patroclus with games, and (xxiv) Achilles
drags the corpse of Hector behind his chariot three times around the pyre.
Priam comes in state and sorrow to beg for the remains of his son. Achilles
CHAP. Hi) THE HEROIC AGE 59
relents, grants a truce of twelve days, and allows the aged king to take the
cleansed and anointed body back to Troy.
V. THE HOME-COMING
Here the great poem suddenly ends, as if the poet had used up his share
of a common story, and must leave the rest to another minstrel's lay. We
are told by the later literature how Paris, standing beside the battle, slew
Achilles with an arrow that pierced his vulnerable heel, and how Troy fell
at last through the stratagem of the wooden horse.
The victors themselves were vanquished by their victory, and returned
in weary sadness to their longed-for homes. Many of them were ship-
wrecked, and some of these, stranded on alien shores, founded Greek col-
onies in Asia, the Aegean, and Italy. 73 Menelaus, who had vowed that he
would kill Helen, fell in love with her anew when the "goddess among
women" came to him in the calm majesty of her loveliness; gladly he took
her back to be his queen again in Sparta. When Agamemnon reached
Mycenae he "clasped his land and kissed it, and many were the hot tears
that streamed from his eyes." 74 But during his long absence Clytaemnestra
had taken his cousin Aegisthus for husband and king; and when Agamem-
non entered the palace they slew him.
Sadder still was the home-coming of Odysseus; and here probably an-
other Homer has told the tale in a poem less powerful and heroic, gentler
and pleasanter, than the Iliad* Odysseus, says the Odyssey, is shipwrecked
on the island of Ogygia, a fairyland Tahiti, whose goddess-queen Calypso
holds him as her lover for eight years while secretly he pines for his wife
Penelope and his son Telemachus, who pine for him at Ithaca.
(i) Athena persuades Zeus to bid Calypso let Odysseus depart. The goddess
flies to Telemachus, and hears with sympathy the youth's simple tale: how
the princes of Ithaca and its vassal isles are paying court to Penelope, seeking
through her the throne, and how meanwhile they live gaily in Odysseus' palace,
and consume his substance, (n) Telemachus bids the suitors disperse, but they
laugh at his youth. Secretly he embarks upon the sea in search of his father,
while Penelope, mourning now for both husband and son, holds off the suitors
* Very probably the narrative in this instance has less basis in history than the Iliad. The
legend of the long-wandering mariner or warrior, whose wife cannot recognize him on his
return, is apparently older than the story of Troy, and appears in almost every literature. 75
Odysseus is the Sinuhe, the Sinbad, the Robinson Crusoe, the Enoch Arden of the Greeks.
The geography of the ooem is a mystery that still exercises leisurety minds.
60 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. Ill
by promising to wed one of them when she has completed her web of which
she unweaves at night as much as she has woven by day. (in) Telemachus visits
Nestor at Pylus and (iv) Menelaus at Sparta, but neither can tell him where
to find his father. The poet paints an attractive picture of Helen settled and
subdued, but still divinely beautiful; she has long since been forgiven her sins,
and remarks that when Troy fell she had grown tired of the city anyway.*
(v) Now for the first time Odysseus enters the tale. "Sitting on the shore"
of Calypso's isle, "his eyes were dry of tears, and his sweet life ebbed away, as
he longed mournfully for his return. By night indeed he would sleep by
Calypso's side perforce in the hollow caves, unwilling beside the willing nymph,
but by day he would sit on the rocks and the sands, rocking his soul with tears
and groans, and looking over the unresting sea." 78 Calypso, having detained him
one night more, bids him make a raft and set out alone.
(vi) After many struggles with the ocean, Odysseus lands in the mythical
country of Phaeacia (possibly Corcyra-Corfu), and is found by the maiden
Nausicaa, who leads him to the palace of her father, King Alcinous. The lass
falls in love with the strong-limbed, strong-hearted hero, and confides to her
companions: "Listen, my white-armed maidens. . . . Erewhile this man seemed
to me uncomely, but now he is like the gods that keep wide heaven. Would
that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it might
please him here to abide." 78 (vii-vm) Odysseus makes so good an impression
that Alcinous offers him Nausicaa's hand. Odysseus excuses himself, but is glad
to tell the story of his return from Troy.
(DC) His ships (he tells the King) were borne off their course to the land
of the Lotus-Eaters, who gave his men such honey-sweet lotus fruit that many
forgot their homes and their longing, and Odysseus had to force them back
to their ships. There they sailed to the land of the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants
who lived without law or labor on an island abounding in wild grain and fruit.
Caught in a cave by the Cyclop Polyphemus, who ate several of his men,
Odysseus saved the remnant by lulling the monster to sleep with wine, and
then burning out his single eye. (x) The wanderers took again to the sea, and
came to the land of the Laestrygonians; but these, too, were cannibals, and only
Odysseus' ship escaped them. He and his mates reached next the isle of Aenea,
where the lovely and treacherous goddess Circe lured most of them into her
cave with song, drugged them, and turned them into swine. Odysseus was
about to slay her when he changed his mind and accepted her love. He and
his comrades, now restored to human form, remained with Circe a full year.
* After her death, said Greek tradition, she was worshiped as a goddess. It was a common
belief in Greece that those who spoke ill of her were punished by the gods; even Homer's
blindness, it was hinted, came upon him because he had lent his song to the calumnious notion
that Helen had eloped to Troy, instead of being snatched off to Egypt against her will. 77
CHAP. Ill) THE HEROIC AGE 6l
(xi) Setting sail again, they came to a land perpetually dark, which proved to
be the entrance to Hades; there Odysseus talked with the shades of Agamem-
non, Achilles, and his mother, (xn) Resuming their voyage, they passed the
island of the Sirens, against whose seductive strains Odysseus protected his men
by putting wax into their ears. In the straits (Messina") of Scylla and Charyb-
dis his ship was wrecked, and he alone survived, to live for eight long years
on Calypso's isle.
(xm) Alcinous is so moved with sympathy by Odysseus' tale that he bids
his men row Odysseus to Ithaca, but to blindfold him lest he learn and reveal
the location of their happy land. On Ithaca the goddess Athena guides the
wanderer to the hut of his old swineherd Eumaeus, who (xiv), though not
recognizing him, receives him with Gargantuan hospitality, (xv) When Telem-
achus is led by the goddess to the same hut Odysseus (xvi) makes himself
known to his son, and both "wail aloud vehemently." He unfolds to Telem-
achus a plan for slaying all the suitors, (xvn-xvm) In the guise of a beggar
he enters his palace, sees the wooers feasting at his expense, and rages inwardly
when he hears that they lie with his maidservants at night even while court-
ing Penelope by day. (xix-xx) He is insulted and injured by the suitors, but
he defends himself with vigor and patience, (xxi) By this time the wooers have
discovered the trick of Penelope's web, and have forced her to finish it. She
agrees to marry whichever of them can string Odysseus' great bowwhich
hangs on the wall and shoot an arrow through the openings of twelve axes
ranged in line. They all try, and all fail. Odysseus asks for a chance, and suc-
ceeds, (xxn) Then with a wrath that frightens everyone, he casts off his dis-
guise, turns his arrows upon the suitors, and, with the help of Telemachus,
Eumaeus, and Athena, slays them all. (xxm) He finds it hard to convince
Penelope that he is Odysseus; it is difficult to surrender twenty suitors for one
husband, (xxiv) He meets the attack of the suitors' sons, pacifies them, and
re-establishes his kingdom.
Meanwhile in Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was pursuing
its course. Orestes, son of Agamemnon, grown to manhood and aroused
by his bitter sister Electra, avenged their father by murdering their mother
and her paramour. After many years of madness and wandering Orestes
ascended the throne of Argos-Mycenae (ca. 1176 B.C.) and later added
Sparta to his kingdom.* But from his accession the house of Pelops began
to decline. Perhaps the decline had begun with Agamemnon, and that
* Sir Arthur Evans has found, in a Mycenaean tomb in Boeotia, engravings representing a
young man attacking a sphinx, and a youth killing an older man and a woman. He believes
that these refer to Oedipus and Orestes; and as he ascribes these engravings to ca. 1450 B.O,
he argues for a date for Oedipus and Orestes some two centuries earlier than the epoch tenta=
tively assigned to these characters in the text. 80
62 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
vacillating chieftain had used war as a means of uniting a realm that was
already falling to pieces. But his victory completed his ruin. For few
of his chieftains ever returned, and the kingdoms of many others had lost
all loyalty to them. By the end of the age that had opened with the siege
of Troy the Achaean power was spent, the blood of Pelops was exhausted.
The people waited patiently for a saner dynasty.
VI. THE DORIAN CONQUEST
About the year 1104 B - c - a new wave of immigration or invasion came
down upon Greece from the restlessly expanding north. Through Illyria
and Thessaly, across the Corinthian Gulf at Naupactus, and over the Isthmus
at Corinth, a warlike people, tall, roundheaded, letterless, slipped or
marched or poured into the Peloponnesus, mastered it, and almost com-
pletely destroyed Mycenaean civilization. We guess at their origin and
their route, but we know their character and their effect. They were still
in the herding and hunting stage; now and then they stopped to till the
soil, but their main reliance was upon their cattle, whose need for new
pasturage kept the tribes ever on the move. One thing they had in un-
heard-of quantity iron. They were the emissaries of the Hallstatt* cul-
ture to Greece; and the hard metal of their swords and souls gave them a
merciless supremacy over Achaeans and Cretans who still used bronze to
kill. Probably from both west and east, from Elis and Megara, they came
down upon the separate little kingdoms of the Peloponnesus, put the ruling
classes to the sword, and turned the Mycenaean remnant into helot-serfs.
Mycenae and Tiryns went up in flames, and for some centuries Argos be-
came the capital of Pelops' isle. On the Isthmus the invaders seized a com-
manding peak the Acrocorinthus and built around it the Dorian city of
Corinth. 80a The surviving Achaeans fled, some of them into the mountains
of the northern Peloponnesus, some into Attica, some overseas to the islands
and coasts of Asia. The conquerors followed them into Attica, but were
repulsed; they followed them to Crete, 81 and made final the destruction of
Cnossus; they captured and colonized Melos, Thera, Cos, Cnidus, and
Rhodes. Throughout the Peloponnesus and Crete, where the Mycenaean
culture had most flourished, the devastation was most complete.
This terminal catastrophe in the prehistory of Aegean civilization is what
modern historians know as the Dorian conquest, and what Greek tradi-
* A town in Austria whose iron remains have given its name to the first period of the
Iron Age in Europe.
CHAP. Ill) THEHEROICAGE 63
tion called the Return of the Heracleidae. For the victors were not con-
tent to record their triumph as a conquest of a civilized people by bar-
barians; they protested that what had really happened was that the de-
scendants of Heracles, resisted in their just re-entry into the Peloponnesus,
had taken it by heroic force. We do not know how much of this is his-
tory, and how much is diplomatic mythology designed to transform a
bloody conquest into a divine right. It is difficult to believe that the Dorians
were such excellent liars in the very youth of the world. Perhaps, as dis-
putants will never allow, both stories were true: the Dorians were con-
querors from the north, led by the scions of Heracles.
Whatever the form of the conquest, its result was a long and bitter inter-
ruption in the development of Greece. Political order was disturbed for
centuries; every man, feeling unsafe, carried arms; increasing violence dis-
rupted agriculture and trade on land, and commerce on the seas. War
flourished, poverty deepened and spread. Life became unsettled as families
wandered from country to country seeking security and peace. 82 Hesiod
called this the Age of Iron, and mourned its debasement from the finer
ages that had preceded it; many Greeks believed that "the discovery of
iron had been to the hurt of man." 83 The arts languished, painting was
neglected, statuary contented itself with figurines; and pottery, forgetting
the lively naturalism of Mycenae and Crete, degenerated into a lifeless
"Geometrical Style" that dominated Greek ceramics for centuries.
But not all was lost. Despite the resolution of the invading Dorians to
keep their blood free from admixture with that of the subject population
despite the racial antipathies between Dorian and Ionian that were to
incarnadine all Greece there went on, rapidly outside of Laconia, slowly
within, a mingling of the new stocks with the old; and perhaps the addi-
tion of the vigorous seed of Achaeans and Dorians with that of the more
ancient and volatile peoples of southern Greece served as a powerful bio-
logical stimulant. The final result, after centuries of mingling, was a new
and diverse people, in whose blood "Mediterranean," "Alpine," "Nordic,"
and Asiatic elements were disturbingly fused.
Nor was Mycenaean culture entirely destroyed. Certain elements of the
Aegean heritage-instrumentalities of social order and government, ele-
ments of craftsmanship and technology, modes and routes of trade, forms
and objects of worship," ceramic and toreutic skills, the art of fresco paint-
ing, decorative motives and architectural forms maintained a half-stifled
existence through centuries of violence and chaos. Cretan institutions, the
Greeks believed, passed down into Sparta; 88 and the Achaean assembly
64 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. Ill
remained the essential structure of even democratic Greece. The Myce-
naean megaron probably provided the ground plan of the Doric temple, 80 to
which the Dorian spirit would add freedom, symmetry, and strength. The
artistic tradition, slowly reviving, lifted Corinth, Sicyon, and Argos to an
early Renaissance, and made even dour Sparta, for a while, smile with art
and song; it nourished lyric poetry through all this historyless Dark Age-,
it followed Pelasgian, Achaean, Ionian, Minyan exiles in their flight-migra-
tion to the Aegean and Asia, and helped the colonial cities to leap ahead of
their mother states in literature and art. And when the exiles came to the
islands and Ionia they found the remains of Aegean civilization ready to
their hands. There, in old towns a little less disordered than on the Con-
tinent, the Age of Bronze had kept something of its ancient craft and
brilliance; and there on Asiatic soil would come the first reawakening of
Greece.
In the end the contact of five cultures Cretan, Mycenaean, Achaean,
Dorian, Oriental brought new youth to a civilization that had begun to
die, that had grown coarse on the mainland through war and plunder, and
effeminate in Crete through the luxury of its genius. The mixture of races
and ways took centuries to win even a moderate stability, but it contributed
to produce the unparalleled variety, flexibility, and subtlety of Greek
thought and life. Instead of thinking of Greek culture as a flame that shone
suddenly and miraculously amid a dark sea of barbarism, we must conceive
of it as the slow and turbid creation of a people almost too richly endowed
in blood and memories, and surrounded, challenged, and instructed by war-
like hordes, powerful empires, and ancient civilizations.
THE RISE OF GREECE
1000-480 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK II
NOTES: All dates before 480, except 776, are uncertain. A place name without other
description indicates the traditional date of its first Greek settlement.
B.C. B.C.
1 100-850: Aeolian and Ionian migrations 580:
1000: Temple of Hera at Olympia 576:
840: Probable period of Homer 570:
776: First (?) Olympic Games
770: Sinope and Cumae
757-6: Cyzicus and Trapezus 566:
752: First decennial archons 561-60:
750-650: Greeks settle Thracian peninsula 560-46:
750-594: Age of the aristocracies 558:
750: Probable period of Hesiod
735: Naxos (Sicily) 550:
734: Corcyra and Syracuse
730-29: Rhegium, Leontini, Catana 546-27:
725-05: First Messenian War 545:
725: Coinage in Lydia and Ionia 544:
721: Sybaris; 710, Crotona
705: Taras; 700, Poseidonia; beginnings 540:
of Greek architecture in stone 535-15 :
683: Fkst annual archons at Athens
680: Pheidon dictator at Argos; earliest
state coinage in Greece 534:
676: Orthagoras dictator at Sicyon
670: Terpander of Lesbos, poet and 530:
musician; Archilochus of Paros, 529-00:
poet; Homeric hymns to Apollo
and Demeter 527-10:
660: Laws of Zaleucus at Locri 520:
658: Byzantium; 654, Lampsacus 517:
655-25: Cypselus dictator at Corinth 514:
651: Selinus; 650, Abdera and Olbia
648: Himera; Myron dictator at Sicyon 511:
640-31: Second Messenian War; Tyrtaeus, 510:
poet, at Sparta 507:
630: Laws of Lycurgus at Sparta (?)
630: Cyrene; 615, Abydos 500:
625-585: Periander dictator at Corinth 499:
620: Laws of Draco at Athens 497:
615: Thrasybulus dictator at Miletus 494:
610: Laws of Charondas at Catana 493:
600: Naucratis; Massalia (Marseilles); 490:
Cleisthenes dictator at Sicyon,
Pittacus at Mytilene; Sappho and 489:
Alcaeus, poets of Lesbos; Thales
of Miletus, philosopher; Alcman, 488-72:
poet, at Sparta; rise of sculpture 487:
595: First Sacred War 485-78:
594: Laws of Solon at Athens 485:
590: Age of the Seven Wise Men; rise
of the Amphictyonic League and 482 :
Orphism; second Temple of 480:
Artemis at Ephesus
582: First Pythian and Isthmian games;
the Acropolis statues and the 479:
"Apollos"
Acragas; Aesop of Samos, fabulist
First Nemean games
Phalaris dictator at Acragas; Ste-
sichorus of Himera, poet; Anaxi-
mander of Miletus, philosopher
First Panathenaic games
First dictatorship of Peisistratus
Croesus of Lydia subjugates Ionia
Carthage conquers Sicily and Cor-
sica
Emporium (Spain); 535, Elea
(Italy)
Second dictatorship of Peisistratus
Persia subjugates Ionia
Anaximenes of Miletus, philoso-
pher
Hipponax of Ephesus, poet
Polycrates dictator of Samos;
Theodorus of Samos, artist; Anac-
reon of Teos, poet
Thespis establishes drama at
Athens
Theognis of Megara, poet
Pythagoras, philosopher, at Cro-
tona
Hippias dictator at Athens
Olympieum begun at Athens
Simonides of Ceos, poet
Conspiracy of Harmodius and
Aristogeiton
Phrynichus of Athens, dramatist
Destruction of Sybaris by Crotona
Cleisthenes extends democracy at
Athens
Hecataeus of Miletus, geographer
Ionia revolts; Aeschylus' first play
Ionian Greeks burn Sardis
Persians defeat lonians at Lade
Themistocles archon at Athens
Marathon; temple of Aphaea at
Aegina
Aristides archon; trial of Mil-
tiades
Theron dictator at Acragas
First selection of archons by lot
Gelon dictator at Syracuse
Epicharmus establishes comedy at
Syracuse
Ostracism of Aristides
Battles of Artemisium, Thermo-
pylae, Salamis, and Himera;
Ageladas of Argos, sculptor
Battles of Plataea and Mycale
CHAPTER IV
Sparta
I. THE ENVIRONMENT OF GREECE
E~T us take an atlas of the classic world* and find our way among the neigh-
bors of ancient Greece. By Greece, or Hellas, we shall mean all lands oc-
cupied, in antiquity, by peoples speaking Greek.
We begin where many invaders entered over the hills and through the val-
leys of Epiras. Here the ancestors of the Greeks must have tarried many a
year, for they set up at Dodona a shrine to their thundering sky-god Zeus; as
late as the fifth century the Greeks consulted the oracle there, and read the
divine will in the clangor of caldrons or the rustling leaves of the sacred oak. 1
Through southern Epirus flowed the river Acheron, amid ravines so dark and
deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell. In Homer's
day the Epirots were largely Greek in speech and ways; but then new waves
of barbarism came down upon them from the north, and dissuaded them from
civilization.
Farther up the Adriatic lay Illyria, sparsely settled with untamed herdsmen
who sold cattle and slaves for salt. 2 On this coast, at Epidamnus (the Roman
Dyrrachium, now Durazzo), Caesar disembarked his troops in pursuit of Pom-
pey. Across the Adriatic the expanding Greeks snatched the lower coasts from
the native tribes, and gave civilization to Italy. (In the end those native tribes
would sweep back upon them, and one tribe, almost barbarous till Alexander's
time, would swallow them up, along with their motherland, in an unprecedented
empire.) Beyond the Alps ranged the Gauls, who were to prove very friendly
to the Greek city of Massalia (Marseilles); and at the western end of the
Mediterranean lay Spain, already half civilized and fully exploited by the
Phoenicians and Carthaginians when, about 550, the Greeks established their
timid colony at Emporium (Ampurias). On the coast of Africa, menacingly
opposite Sicily, was imperial Carthage, founded by Dido and the Phoenicians,
tradition said, in 813; no mere village, but a city of 700,000 population, monopo-
lizing the commerce of the western Mediterranean, dominating Utica, Hippo,
and three hundred other towns in Africa, and controlling prosperous lands,
mines, and colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. This fabulously wealthy
metropolis was fated to lead the Oriental thrust against Greece in the west,
as Persia would lead it in the east.
* Or the maps inside the covers of this book.
67
68 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IT
Farther east on the African coast lay the prosperous Greek city of Gyrene,
against a dark Libyan hinterland. Then Egypt. It was the belief of most Greeks
that many elements of their civilization had come to them from Egypt; their
legends ascribed the foundation of several Greek cities to men who, like Cadmus
and Danaus, had come from Egypt, or had brought Egyptian culture to Greece
by way of Phoenicia or Crete. 3 Under the Saite kings (663-525) Egyptian
commerce and art revived, and the ports of the Nile were for the first time
opened to Greek trade. From the seventh century onward many famous Greeks
Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, Plato, and Dernocritus may serve as examples-
visited Egypt, and were much impressed by the fullness and antiquity of its
culture. Here were no barbarians, but men who had had a mature civilization,
and highly developed arts, two thousand years before the fall of Troy. "You
Greeks," said an Egyptian priest to Solon, "are mere children, talkative and
vain, and knowing nothing of the past."* When Hecataeus of Miletus boasted
to the Egyptian priests that he could trace his ancestry through fifteen gen-
erations to a god, they quietly showed him, in their sanctuaries, the statues of
345 high priests, each the son of the preceding, making 345 generations since
the gods had reigned on earth. 6 From the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, irs
the belief of Greek scholars like Herodotus and Plutarch, came the Orphic
doctrine of a judgment after death, and the resurrection ritual of Demeter and
Persephone at Eleusis. 6 Probably in Egypt, Thales of Miletus learned geometry,
and Rhoecus and Theodoras of Samos picked up the art of hollow casting in
bronze; in Egypt the Greeks acquired new skills in pottery, textiles, metalwork-
ing, and ivory; 7 there, as well as from the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Hittites,
Greek sculptors took the style of their early statues flat-faced, slant-eyed,
closefisted, straight-limbed, stiff;* in the colonnades of Sakkara and Beni-Hasan,
as well as in the remains of Mycenaean Greece, Greek architects found part
of their inspiration for the fluted column and the Doric style. 8 And as Greece
in its youth learned humbly from Egypt, so, when it was exhausted, it died,
one might say, in the arms of Egypt; at Alexandria it merged its philosophies,
its rites, and its gods with those of Egypt and Judea, in order that they might
find a resurrected life in Rome and Christianity.
Second only to Egypt's was the influence of Phoenicia. The enterprising
merchants of Tyre and Sidon acted like a circulating medium in the transmis-
sion of culture, and stimulated every Mediterranean region with the sciences,
techniques, arts, and cults of Egypt and the Near East. They excelled and
perhaps instructed the Greeks in the building of ships; they taught them better
methods in metalworking, textiles, and dyes; 8 they played a part, with Crete
and Asia Minor, in passing on to Greece the Semitic form of the alphabet that
had been developed in Egypt, Crete, and Syria. Farther east, Babylonia gave
Cf. the seated Chares from Miletus in the British Museum, or the Head of Cleobis by
Pojymedes in the museum at Delphi.
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 69
to the Greeks its system of weights and measures, 10 its water clock and sun-
dial, 11 its monetary units of obol, mina, and talent," its astronomical principles,
instruments, records, and calculations, its sexagesimal system of dividing the
year, the circle, and the four right angles that are subtended by a circle at its
center, into 360 parts, each of the 360 degrees into 60 minutes, and each of the
minutes into 60 seconds; it was presumably his acquaintance with Egyptian and
Babylonian astronomy that enabled Thales to predict an eclipse of the sun."
Probably from Babylonia came Hesiod's notion of Chaos as the origin of all
things; and the story of Ishtar and Tammuz is suspiciously like those of Aphro"
dite and Adonis, Demeter and Persephone.
Near the eastern end of the commercial complex that united the classic world
lay the final enemy of Greece. In some ways though fewthe civilization of
Persia was superior to that of contemporary Hellas; it produced a type of gentle-
man finer than the Greek in every respect except that of intellectual keenness
and education, and a system of imperial administration that easily excelled the
clumsy hegemonies of Athens and Sparta, and lacked only the Greek passion
for liberty.Frorn Assyria the Ionian Greeks took a measure of skill in animal
statuary, a certain thickness of figure and flatness of drapery in their early sculp-
ture, many decorative motives in friezes and moldings, and occasionally a style
of relief, as in the lovely stela of Aristion. 1 * Lydia maintained intimate relations
with Ionia, and its brilliant capital, Sardis, was a clearinghouse for the traffic
in goods and ideas between Mesopotamia and the Greek cities on the coast.
The necessities of an extensive trade stimulated banking, and caused the Lydian
government, about 680, to issue a state-guaranteed coinage. This boon to trade
was soon imitated and improved by the Greeks, and had effects as momentous
and interminable as those that came from the introduction of the alphabet.
The influence of Phrygia was older and subtler. Its mother goddess, Cybele,
entered directly and deviously into Greek religion, and its orgiastic flute music
became that "Phrygian mode" so popular among the populace, and so dis-
turbing to the moralists, of Greece. From Phrygia this wild music crossed the
Hellespont into Thrace, and served the rites of Dionysus. The god of wine was
the chief gift of Thrace to Greece; but one Thracian city, Hellenized Abdera,
sought to even the balance by giving Greece three philosophers Leucippus,
Democritus and Protagoras. It was from Thrace that the cult of the Muses
passed down into Hellas; and the half -legendary founders of Greek music-
Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris-were Thracian singers and bards.
From Thrace we move southward into Macedonia, and our cultural circum-
vallation of Greece is complete. It is a picturesque land, with a soil once rich
in minerals, plains fertile in grain and fruit, and mountains disciplining a hardy
stock that was destined to conquer Greece. The mountaineers and peasants
were of mixed race, predominantly Illyrian and Thracian; perhaps they were
70 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IV
akin to the Dorians who conquered the Peloponnesus. The ruling aristocracy
claimed Hellenic lineage (from Heracles himself), and spoke a dialect of Greek.
The earlier capital, Edessa, stood on a vast plateau between the plains that
stretched to Epirus and the ranges that reached to the Aegean. Farther east lay
Pella, capital-to-be of Philip and Alexander; and near the sea was Pydna, where
the Romans would conquer the conquering Macedonians, and win the right
to transmit Greek civilization to the Western world.
This, then, was the environment of Greece: civilizations like Egypt.
Crete, and Mesopotamia that gave it those elements of technology, science,
and art which it would transform into the brightest picture in history;
empires like Persia and Carthage that would feel the challenge of Greek
commerce, and would unite in a war to crush Greece between them into
a harmless vassalage; and, in the north, warlike hordes recklessly breeding,
restlessly marching, who would sooner or later pour down over the moun-
tain barriers and do what the Dorians had done break through what
Cicero was to call the Greek border woven on the barbarian robe, 15 and
destroy a civilization that they could not understand. Hardly any of these
surrounding nations cared for what to the Greeks was the very essence of
life liberty to be, to think, to speak, and to do. Every one of these peoples
except the Phoenicians lived under despots, surrendered their souls to super-
stition, and had small experience of the stimulus of freedom or the life of
reason. That was why the Greeks called them all, too indiscriminately,
bar bar oi, barbarians; a barbarian was a man content to believe without rea-
son and to live without liberty. In the end the two conceptions of life
the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West would fight for
the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as 1
under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick; but mysticism would always return.
The alternate victories of these complementary philosophies in the vast
pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civiliza-
Within this circle of nations little Greece expanded until its progeny
peopled nearly every Mediterranean shore. For the gaunt hand that
stretched its skeletal fingers southward into the sea was but a small part of
the Greece whose history concerns us. In the course of their development
the irrepressible Hellenes spread into every isle of the Aegean, into Crete,
Rhodes, and Cyprus, into Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia
Minor, into the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, into the shores and
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 7!
peninsulas of the north Aegean, into Italy, Gaul, Spain, Sicily, and northern
Africa. In all these regions they built city-states, independent a,nd diverse,
and yet Greek; they spoke the Greek tongue, worshiped Greek gods, read
and wrote Greek literature, contributed to Greek science and philosophy,
and practiced democracy in the Greek aristocratic way. They did not
leave Greece behind them when they migrated from their motherland, they
carried it with them, even the very soil of it, wherever they went. For
nearly a thousand years they made the Mediterranean a Greek lake, and the
center of the world.
The most discouraging task faced by the historian of classic civilization
is that of weaving into one pattern and story these scattered members of the
body of Greece.* We shall attempt it by the pleasant method of a tour:
with a map at our elbow and no expenditure but of the imagination, we
shall pass from city to city of the Greek world, and observe in each center
the life of the people before the Persian war the modes of economy and
government, the activities of scientists and philosophers, the achievements
of poetry, and the creations of art.f The plan has many faults: the geo-
graphical sequence will not quite agree with the historical; we shall be
leaping from century to century as well as from isle to isle; and we shall
find ourselves talking with Thales and Anaximander before listening to
Homer and Hesiod. But it will do us no harm to see the irreverent Iliad
against its actual background of Ionian skepticism, or to hear Hesiod's doui
plaints after visiting the Aeolian colonies from which his harassed father
came. When at last we reach Athens we shall know in some measure the
rich variety of the civilization that it inherited, and which it preserved so
bravely at Marathon.
If we begin at Argos, where the victorious Dorians established their govern-
ment, we find ourselves in a scene characteristically Greek: a not too fertile
plain, a small and huddled city of little brick-and-plaster houses, a temple on
the acropolis, an open-air theater on the slope of the hill, a modest palace here
and there, narrow alleys and unpaved streets, and in the distance the inviting
and merciless sea. For Hellas is composed of mountains and ocean; majestic
scenery is so usual there that the Greeks, though moved and inspired by it,
seldom mention it in their books. The winter is wet and cold, the summer hot
and dry; sowing is in our autumn, reaping is in our spring; rain is a heavenly
* "To write the history of Greece at almost any period without dissipating the interest is a
task of immense difficulty . . . because there is no constant unity or fixed center to which the
actions and aims of the numerous states can be subordinated or related." Bury, Ancient
Greek Historians, p. 22.
f To avoid returning too often to the same scene, the architectural history of minor cities
will be carried in these chapters (Book n) down to the death of Alexander (323).
72 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
blessing, and Zeus the Rain Maker is god of gods. The rivers are short and
shallow, torrents for a winter spell, dry smooth pebbles in the summer heat.
There were a hundred cities like Argos in the gamut of Greece, a thousand
like it but smaller; each of them jealously sovereign, separated from the rest
by Greek pugnacity, or dangerous waters, or roadless hills.
The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the
hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flourishing to an Egyptian, Danaus, who
came at the head of a band of "Danaae" and taught the natives to irrigate their
fields with wells. Such eponyms are not to be scorned; the Greeks preferred
to end with myth that infinite regress which we must end with mystery. Under
Temenus, one of the returning Heracleidae, Argos grew into the most power-
ful city of Greece, bringing Tiryns, Mycenae, and all Argolis under its sway.
Towards 680 the government was seized by one of those tyrannoi, or dictators,
who for the next two centuries became the fashion in the larger cities of Greece.
Presumably Pheidon, like his fellow dictators, led the rising merchant class-
allied in a passing marriage of convenience with the commoners against a land-
owning aristocracy. When Aegina was threatened by Epidaurus and Athens
Pheidon went to its rescue and took it for himself. He adopted probably from
the Phoenicians the Babylonian system of weights and measures, and the
Lydian plan of a currency guaranteed by the state; he established his mint on
Aegina, and the Aeginetan "tortoises" (coins marked with the island's symbol)
became the first official coinage in continental Greece. 18
Pheidon's enlightened despotism opened a period of prosperity that brought
many arts to Argolis. In the sixth century the musicians of Argos were the
most famous in Hellas; 17 Lasus of Hermione won high place among the lyric
poets of his time, and taught his skill to Pindar; the foundations were laid of that
Argive school of sculpture which was to give Polycleitus and its canon to
Greece; drama found a home here, in a theater with twenty thousand seats;
and architects raised a majestic temple to Hera, beloved and especially wor-
shiped by Argos as the goddess-bride who renewed her virginity every year. 18
But the degeneration of Pheidon's descendants the nemesis of monarchy and
a long series of wars with Sparta weakened Argos, and forced it at last to yield
to the Lacedaemonians the leadership of the Peloponnesus. Today it is a quiet
town, lost amid its surrounding fields; remembering vaguely the glories of its
past, and proud that in all its long history it has never been abandoned.
III. LACONIA
South of Argos, and away from the sea, rise the peaks of the Parnon
range. They are beautiful, but still more pleasing to the eye is the Eurotas
River that runs between them and the taller, darker, snow-tipped range
of Taygetus on the west. In that seismic valley lay Homer's "hollow
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 73
Lacedaemon," a plain so guarded by mountains that Sparta, its capital,
needed no walls. At its zenith Sparta ("The Scattered") was a union of
five villages, totaling some seventy thousand population. Today it is a
hamlet of four thousand souls; and hardly anything remains, even in the
modest museum, of the city that once ruled and ruined Greece.
1. The Expansion of Sparta
From that natural citadel the Dorians dominated and enslaved the south-
ern Peloponnesus. To these long-haired northerners, hardened by moun-
tains and habituated to war, there seemed no alternative in life but con-
quest or slavery; war was their business, by which they made what seemed
to them an honest living; the non-Dorian natives, weakened by agriculture
and peace, were in obvious need of masters. So the kings of Sparta, who
claimed a continuous lineage from the Heracleidae of 1104, first subjected
the indigenous population of Laconia, and then attacked Messenia. That
land, in the southwestern corner of the Peloponnesus, was relatively level
and fertile, and was tilled by pacific tribes. We may read in Pausanias how
the Messenian king, Aristodemus, consulted the oracle at Delphi for ways
to defeat the Spartans; how Apollo bade him offer in sacrifice to the gods
a virgin of his own royal race; how he put to death his own daughter, and
lost the war. M (Perhaps he had been mistaken about his daughter.) Twff
generations later the brave Aristomenes led the Messenians in heroic revolt
For nine years their cities bore up under attack and siege; but in the end
the Spartans had their way. The Messenians were subjected to an annual
tax of half their crops, and thousands of them were led away to join the
Helot serfs.
The picture that we are to form of Laconian society before Lycurgus
has, like some ancient paintings, three levels. Above is a master class of
Dorians, living for the most part in Sparta on the produce of fields owned
by them in the country and tilled for them by Helots. Socially between,
geographically surrounding, the masters and the Helots were the Perioeci
("Dwellers Around") : freemen living in a hundred villages in the moun-
tains or on the outskirts of Laconia, or engaged in trade or industry in the
towns; subject to taxation and military service, but having no share in
the government, and no right of intermarriage with the ruling class. Low-
est and most numerous of all were the Helots, so named, according to
Strabo, from the town of Helus, whose people had been among the first
to be enslaved by the Spartans. 30 By simple conquest of the non-Dorian
population or by importing prisoners of war, Sparta had made Laconia a
74 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IV
land of some 224,000 Helots, 120,000 Perioeci, and 32,000 men, women,
and children of the citizen class.* 21
The Helot had all the liberties of a medieval serf. He could marry as
he pleased, breed without forethought, work the land in his own way, and
live in a village with his neighbors, undisturbed by the absentee owner of
his lot, so long as he remitted regularly to this owner the rental fixed by the
government. He was bound to the soil, but neither he nor the land could
be sold. In some cases he was a domestic servant in the town. He was
expected to attend his master in war, and, when called upon, to fight for
the state; if he fought well he might receive his freedom,. His economic
condition was not normally worse than that of the village peasantry in the
rest of Greece outside of Attica, or the unskilled laborer in a modern city.
He had the consolations of his own dwelling, varied work, and the quiet
friendliness of trees and fields. But he was continually subject to martial
law, and to secret supervision by a secret police, by whom he might at any
moment be killed without cause or trial.**
In Laconia, as elsewhere, the simple paid tribute to the clever; this is a
custom with a venerable past and a promising future. In most civilizations
this distribution of the goods of life is brought about by the normally
peaceful operation of the price system: the clever persuade us to pay more
for the less readily duplicable luxuries and services that they offer us than
the simple can manage to secure for the more easily replaceable necessaries
that they produce. But in Laconia the concentration of wealth was effected
by irritatingly visible means, and left among the Helots a volcanic dis-
content that in almost every year of Spartan history threatened to upset
the state with revolution.
2. Sparta's Golden Age
In that dim past before Lycurgus came, Sparta was a Greek city like the
rest, and blossomed out in song and art as it would never do after him.
Music above all was popular there, and rivaled man's antiquity; for as far
back as we can delve we find the Greeks singing. In Sparta, so frequently
at war, music took a martial turn the strong and simple "Doric mode";
and not only were other styles discouraged, but any deviation from this
Doric style was punishable by law. Even Terpander, though he had quelled
a sedition by his songs, was fined by the ephors, and his lyre nailed mute
to the wall, because to suit his voice, he had dared to add another string
* These figures, of course, are conjectural, being based upon a few hints and many assump-
tions.
CHAP. IV) SPARTA 75
to the instrument; and in a later generation Timotheus, who had expanded
Terpander's seven strings to eleven, was not allowed to compete at Sparta
until the ephors had removed from his lyre the scandalously extra strings. 83
Sparta, like England, had great composers when she imported them.
Towards 670, supposedly at the behest of the Delphic oracle, Ter^ander
was brought in from Lesbos to prepare a contest in choral singing at the
festival of the Carneia. Likewise Thaletas was summoned from Crete about
620; and soon after came Tyrtaeus, Alcman, and Polymnestus. Their
labors went mostly to composing patriotic music and training choruses to
sing it. Music was seldom taught to individual Spartans; 5 * as in revolution-
ary Russia, the communal spirit was so strong that music took a corporate
form, and group competed with group in magnificent festivals of song and
dance. Such choral singing gave the Spartans another opportunity for dis-
cipline and mass formations, for every voice was subject to the leader. At
the feast of the Hyacinthia King Agesilaus sang obediently in the place
and time assigned to him by the choral master; and at the festival of the
Gymnopedia the whole body of Spartans, of every age and sex, joined in
massive exercises of harmonious dance and antistrophal song. Such occa-
sions must have provided a powerful stimulus and outlet to the patriotic
sentiment.
Terpander (i.e., "Delighter of Men") was one of those brilliant poet-
musicians who inaugurated the great age of Lesbos in the generation before
Sappho. Tradition ascribed to him the invention of scolia or drinking
songs, and the expansion of the lyre from four to seven strings; but the
heptachord, as we have seen, was as old as Minos, and presumably men
had sung the glories of wine in the forgotten adolescence of the world.
Certainly he made a name for himself at Lesbos as a kitharoedosi.e., a com-
poser and singer of musical lyrics. Having killed a man in a brawl, he was
exiled, and found it convenient to accept an invitation from Sparta. There,
it seems, he lived the remainder of his days, teaching music and training
choruses. We are told that he ended his life at a drinking party: while he
was singing perhaps that extra note which he had added at the top of the
scale one of his auditors threw a fig at him; which, entering his mouth
and his windpipe, choked him to death in the very ecstasy of song. 88
Tyrtaeus continued Terpander's work at Sparta during the Second Mes-
senian War. He came from Aphidna possibly in Lacedaemon, probably
in Attica; certainly the Athenians had an old joke about the Spartans, that
when the latter were losing the Second War they were saved by a lame
Attic schoolmaster, whose songs of battle woke up the dull Spartans, and
stirred them to victory. 88 Apparently he sang his own songs to the flute
7 6 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
m public assembly, seeking to transform martial death into enviable glory.
"It is a fine thing," says one of his surviving fragments, "for a brave man
to die in the front rank of those who fight for their country. . . . Let each
one, standing squarely on his feet, rooted to the ground and biting his lips,
keep firm. . . . Foot to foot, shield to shield, waving plumes mingling and
helmets clashing, let the warriors press breast to breast, each sword and
spear-point meeting in the shock of battle." 27 Tyrtaeus, said the Spartan
King Leonidas, "was an adept in tickling the souls of youth." 28
Alcman sang in the same generation, as friend and rival of Tyrtaeus, but
in a more varied and earthly strain. He came from far-off Lydia, and some
said that he was a slave; nevertheless the Lacedaemonians welcomed him,
not having yet learned the xenelasia, or hatred of foreigners, which was to
become part of the Lycurgean code. The later Spartans would have been
scandalized at his eulogies of love and food, and his roster of Laconia's noble
wines. Tradition ranked him as the grossest eater of antiquity, and as an
insatiable pursuer of women. One of his songs told how fortunate he was
that he had not remained in Sardis, where he might have become an emas-
culate priest of Cybele, but had come to Sparta, where he could love in
freedom his golden-haired mistress Megalostrata. 29 He begins for us that
dynasty of amorous poets which culminates in Anacreon, and he heads
the list of the "Nine Lyric Poets" chosen by Alexandrian critics as the best
of ancient Greece.* He could write hymns and paeans as well as songs of
wine and love, and the Spartans liked especially the parthenia, or maiden
songs, which he composed for choruses of girls. A fragment now and then
reveals that power of imaginative feeling which is the heart of poetry:
Asleep lie mountain-top and mountain-gully, shoulder also and
ravine; the creeping things that come from the dark earth, the beasts
that lie upon the hillside, the generation of the bees, the monsters
in the depths of the purple sea; all lie asleep, and with them the
tribes of the winging birds.t 30
aeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides
;ly similar this is-as if one feeling united two poets across twenty-five cen-
e's "Wanderer's Night-Song": J
Uber alien Gipfeln O'er all the hill-tops
1st Ruh, Is quiet now,
In alien Wipfeln In all the tree-tops
Sparest du Hearest them
Kaum einen Hauch; Hardly a breath;
Die vogelein schweigen im Walde. The birds are asleep in the tree*
Warte nur, balde Wait; soon like these
Ruhest du auch. a Thou. too. shalt rest."
* Alcman, Alcaeus, Sa
t How strangely
turies to Goethe's
CHAP. IV) SPARTA 77
We may judge from these poets that the Spartans were not always Spar-
tans, and that in the century before Lycurgus they relished poetry and the
arts as keenly as any of the Greeks. The choral ode became so closely
associated with them that when the Athenian dramatists wrote choral lyrics
for their plays they used the Doric dialect, though they wrote the dialogue
in the Attic speech. It is hard to say what other arts flourished in Lace-
daemon in those halcyon days, for even the Spartans neglected to preserve
or record them. Laconian pottery and bronze were famous in the seventh
century, and the minor arts produced many refinements for the life of
the fortunate few. But this little Renaissance was ended by the Messenian
Wars. The conquered land was divided among the Spartans, and the
number of serfs was almost doubled. How could thirty thousand citizens
keep in lasting subjection four times their number of Perioeci, and seven
times their number of Helots? It could be done only by abandoning the
pursuit and patronage of the arts, and turning every Spartan into a soldier
ready at any moment to suppress rebellion or wage war. The constitution
of Lycurgus achieved this end, but at the cost of withdrawing Sparta, in
every sense but the political, from the history of civilization.
3. Lycurgus
Greek historians from Herodotus onward took it for granted that Lycur-
gus was the author of the Spartan code, just as they accepted as historical
the siege of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon. And as modern scholar-
ship for a century denied the existence of Troy and Agamemnon, so today
it hesitates to admit the reality of Lycurgus. The dates assigned to him
vary from 900 to 600 B.C.; and how could one man take out of his head the
most unpleasant and astonishing body of legislation in all history, and
impose it in a few years not only upon a subject population but even upon
a self-willed and warlike ruling class? 33 Nevertheless it would be pre--
surnptuous to reject on such theoretical grounds a tradition accepted by
all Greek historians. The seventh century was peculiarly an age of per-
sonal legislators Zaleucus at Locris (ca. 660), Draco at Athens (620),
and Charondas at Sicilian Catana (ca. 610) not to speak of Josiah's dis-
covery of the Mosaic code in the Temple at Jerusalem (ca. 621). Prob-
ably we have in these instances not so much a body of personal legislation
as a set of customs harmonized and clarified into specific laws, and named,
for convenience's sake, from the man who codified them and in most cases
78 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IV
gave them a written form.* We shall record the tradition, while remem-
bering that it has in all likelihood personified and foreshortened a process
of change, from, custom to law, that required many authors and many-
years.
According to Herodotus, 34 Lycurgus, uncle and guardian of the Spartan
King Charilaus, received from the oracle at Delphi certain rhetra, or edicts,
which were described by some as the laws of Lycurgus themselves, or by
others as a divine sanction for the laws that he proposed. Apparently the
legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish new ones, the
safest procedure would be to present their proposals as commands of the
god; it was not the first time that a state had laid its foundations in the sky.
Tradition further relates that Lycurgus traveled in Crete, admired its insti-
tutions, and resolved to introduce some of them into Laconia. 35 The kings
and most of the nobles grudgingly accepted his reforms as indispensable
to their own security; but a young aristocrat, Alcander, resisted violently,
and struck out one of the legislator's eyes. Plutarch tells the story with his
usual simplicity and charm:
Lycurgus, so far from being daunted or discouraged by this acci-
dent, stopped short, and showed his disfigured face, and eye beaten
out, to his countrymen. They, dismayed and ashamed at the sight,
delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished. . . . Lycurgus, hav-
ing thanked them, dismissed them all, excepting only Alcander; and
taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything
severely to him, but . . . bade Alcander to wait upon him at table.
The young man, who was of an ingenuous temper, without murmur-
ing did as he was commanded; and being thus admitted to live with
Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gen-
tleness and calmness of temper, an extraordinary sobriety and an
indefatigable industry; and so, from being an enemy, became one
of his most zealous admirers, and told his friends and relations that
he was not that morose and ill-natured man they had taken him for,
but the one mild and gentle character of the world." 8
Having completed his legislation, Lycurgus (says a probably legendary
coda to his story) pledged the citizens not to change the laws till his return.
Then he went to Delphi, retired into seclusion, and starved himself to death,
"thinking it a statesman's duty to make his very death, if possible, an act
of service to the state." 87
* Lycurgus, however, was believed to have forbidden the writing of his laws.
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 79
4. The Lacedaemonian Constitution
When we attempt to specify the reforms of Lycurgus the tradition be-
comes contradictory and confused. It is difficult to say which elements
of the Spartan code preceded Lycurgus, which were created by him or
his generation, and which were added after him. Plutarch and Polybius 88
assure us that Lycurgus redistributed the land of Laconia into thirty thou-
sand equal shares among the citizens; Thucydides 89 implies that there was
no such distribution. Perhaps old properties were left untouched, while
the newly conquered land was equally divided. Like Cleisthenes of Sicyon
and Cleisthenes of Athens, Lycurgus (viz., the authors of the Lycurgean
constitution) abolished the kinship organization of Laconian society, and
replaced it with geographical divisions; in this way the power of the old
families was broken, and a wider aristocracy was formed. To prevent the
displacement of this landowning oligarchy by such mercantile classes as
were gaining leadership in Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Megara, and Athens,
Lycurgus forbade the citizens to engage in industry or trade, prohibited
the use or importation of silver or gold, and decreed that only iron should
be used as currency. He was resolved that the Spartans (i.e., the landown-
ing citizens) should be left free for government and war.
It was a boast of ancient conservatives" that the Lycurgean constitution
endured so long because the three forms of government monarchy, aris-
tocracy, and democracy were united in it, and in such proportions that
each element neutralized the others against excess. Sparta's monarchy was
really a duarchy, since it had concurrently two kings, descending from
the invading Heraclids. Possibly this strange institution was a compromise
between two related and therefore rival houses, or a device to secure
without absolutism the psychological uses of royalty in maintaining social
order and national prestige. Their powers were limited: they performed
the sacrifices of the state religion, headed the judiciary, and commanded
the army in war. In all matters they were subordinate to the Senate; and
after Plataea they lost more and more of their authority to the ephors.
The aristocratic and predominant element of the constitution resided in
the Senate, or gerousia, literally and actually a group of old men; normally
citizens under sixty were considered too immature for its deliberations.
Plutarch gives their number as twenty-eight, and tells an incredible story
of their election. When a vacancy occurred candidates were required to
pass silently and in turn before the Assembly; and he who was greeted
with the loudest and longest shouts was pronounced elected." Perhaps this
So THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IV
was thought to be a realistic and economical abbreviation of the fuller
democratic process. We do not know which of the citizens were eligible
to such election; presumably they were the homoioi, or equals, who owned
the soil of Laconia, had served in the army, and brought their quota of
tood to the public mess.* 3 The Senate originated legislation, acted as a
supreme court in capital crimes, and formulated public policy.
The Assembly, or apella, was Sparta's concession to democracy. Appar-
ently all male citizens were admitted to it upon reaching 1 the age of thirty;
some eight thousand males were eligible in a population of 376,000. It met
on each day of the full moon. All matters of great public moment were
submitted to it, nor could any law be passed without its consent. Few
laws, however, were ever added to the Lycurgean constitution; and these
the Assembly might accept or reject, but not discuss or amend. It was
essentially the old Homeric public meeting, listening in awe to the council
of chiefs and elders, or to the army-commanding kings. Theoretically sov-
ereignty resided in the apella; but an amendment made to the constitution
after Lycurgus empowered the Senate, if it judged that the Assembly had
decided "crookedly," to reverse the decision.* 3 When an advanced thinker
asked Lycurgus to establish a democracy Lycurgus replied, "Begin, my
friend, by setting it up in your own family.""
Cicero compared the five ephors (i.e., overseers) to the Roman tribunes,
since they were chosen annually by the Assembly; but they corresponded
more to the Roman consuls, as wielding an administrative power checked
only by the protests of the Senate. The ephorate existed before Lycurgus,
and yet is not mentioned in such reports of his legislation as have reached
us. By the middle of the sixth century the ephors had become equal in
authority to the kings; after the Persian War they were practically supreme.
They received embassies, decided disputes at law, commanded the armies,
and directed, absolved, or punished the kings.
The enforcement of the government's decrees was entrusted to the army
and the police. It was the custom of the ephors to arm certain of the
younger Spartans as a special and secret police (the krypteia) , with the right
to spy upon the people, and, in the case of Helots, to kill at their discretion.* 8
This institution was used at unexpected times, even to do away with Helots
who, though they had served the state bravely in war, were feared by the
masters as able and therefore dangerous men. After eight years of the
Peloponnesian War, says the impartial Thucydides,
the Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their
number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 8l
the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object
being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their free-
dom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel.
As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned
themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new free-
dom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them,
and no one ever knew how each of them perished. 18
The power and pride of Sparta was above all in its army, for in the
courage, discipline, and skill of these troops it found its security and its
ideal. Every citizen was trained for war, and was liable to military service
from his twentieth to his sixtieth year. Out of this severe training came
the hoplites of Sparta those close-set companies of heavy-armed, spear-
hurling citizen infantry that were the terror even of the Athenians, and
remained practically undefeated until Epaminondas overcame them at
Leuctra. Around this army Sparta formed its moral code: to be good was
to be strong and brave; to die in battle was the highest honor and happi-
ness; to survive defeat was a disgrace that even the soldier's mother could
hardly forgive. "Return with your shield or on it," was the Spartan
mother's farewell to her soldier son. Flight with the heavy shield was
impossible.
5. The Spartan Code
To train men to an ideal so unwelcome to the flesh it was necessary to
take them at birth and form them by the most rigorous discipline. The
first step was a ruthless eugenics: not only must every child face the
father's right to infanticide, but it must also be brought before a state
council of inspectors; and any child that appeared defective was thrown
from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below/ 7 A further
elimination probably resulted from the Spartan habit of inuring their
infants to discomfort and exposure. 48 Men and women were warned to
consider the health and character of those whom they thought of marry-
ing; even a king, Archidamus, was fined for marrying a diminutive wife.* 8
Husbands were encouraged to lend their wives to exceptional men, so that
fine children might be multiplied; husbands disabled by age or illness were
expected to invite young men to help them breed a vigorous family.
Lycurgus, says Plutarch, ridiculed jealousy and sexual monopoly, and called
it "absurd that people should be so solicitous for their dogs and horses
as to exert interest and pay money to procure fine breeding, and yet keep
82 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
their wives shut up, to be made mothers only by themselves, who might
be foolish, infirm, or diseased." In the general opinion of antiquity the
Spartan males were stronger and handsomer, their women healthier and
lovelier, than the other Greeks. 80
Probably more of this result was due to training than to eugenic birth.
Thucydides makes King Archidamus say: "There is little difference" (at
birth,, presumably) "between man and man, but the superiority lies with
him who is reared in the severest school." 51 At the age of seven the Spartan
boy was taken from his family and brought up by the state; he was en-
rolled in what was at once a military regiment and a scholastic class, under
a paidonomos, or manager of boys. In each class the ablest and bravest
boy was made captain; the rest were instructed to obey him, to submit to
the punishments he might impose upon them, and to strive to match or
better him in achievement and discipline. The aim was not, as at Athens,
athletic form and skill, but martial courage and worth. Games were played
in the nude, under the eyes of elders and lovers of either sex. The older
men made it their concern to provoke quarrels among the boys, individu-
ally and in groups, so that vigor and fortitude might be tested and trained;
and any moment of cowardice brought many days of disgrace. To bear
pain, hardship, and misfortune silently was required of all. Every year, at
the altar of Artemis Orthia, some chosen youths were scourged till their
blood stained the stones. 83 At twelve the boy was deprived of undercloth-
ing, and was allowed but one garment throughout the year. He did not
bathe frequently, like the lads of Athens, for water and unguents made
the body soft, while cold air and clean soil made it hard and resistant.
Winter and summer he slept in the open, on a bed of rushes broken from
the Eurotas' banks. Until he was thirty he lived with his company in bar-
racks, and knew none of the comforts of home.
He was taught reading and writing, but barely enough to make him
literate; books found few buyers in Sparta, 58 and it was easy to keep up with
the publishers. Lycurgus, said Plutarch, wished children to learn his laws
not by writing but by oral transmission and youthful practice under care-
ful guidance and example; it was safer, he thought, to make men good by
unconscious habituation than to rely upon theoretical persuasion; a proper
education would be the best government. But such education would have
to be moral rather than mental; character was more important than intel-
lect. The young Spartan was trained to sobriety, and some Helots were
compelled to drink to excess in order that the youth might see how foolish
drunkenness can be.* 4 He was taught, in preparation for war, to forage
CHAP. IV) SPARTA 83
in the fields and find his own food, or starve; to steal in such cases was per-
missible, but to be detected was a crime punishable by flogging. 56 If he
behaved well he was allowed to attend the public mess of the citizens, and
was expected to listen carefully there so that he might become acquainted
with the problems of the state, and learn the art of genial conversation.
At the age of thirty, if he had survived with honor the hardships of youth,
he was admitted to the full rights and responsibilities of a citizen, and sat
down to dine with his elders.
The girl, though left to be brought up at home, was also subject to regu-
lation by the state. She was to engage in vigorous games running, wres-
tling, throwing the quoit, casting the dart in order that she might become
strong and healthy for easy and perfect motherhood. She should go naked
in public dances and processions, even in the presence of young men, so
that she might be stimulated to proper care of her body, and her defects
might be discovered and removed. "Nor was there anything shameful in
the nakedness of the young women," says the highly moral Plutarch; "mod-
esty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded." While they danced
they sang songs of praise for those that had been brave in war, and heaped
contumely upon those that had given way. Mental education was not
wasted upon the Spartan girl.
As to love, the young man was permitted to indulge in it without preju-
dice of gender. Nearly every lad had a lover among the older men; from
this lover he expected further education, and in return he offered affection
and obedience. Often this exchange grew into a passionate friendship that
stimulated both youth and man to bravery in war. B6 Young men were
allowed considerable freedom before marriage, so that prostitution was
rare, and hetairai here found no encouragement. 67 In all of Lacedaemon we
hear of only one temple to Aphrodite, and there the goddess was repre-
sented as veiled, armed with a sword, and bearing fetters on her feet, as if
to symbolize the foolishness of marrying for love, the subordination of
love to war, and the strict control of marriage by the state.
The state specified the best age of marriage as thirty for men and twenty
for women. Celibacy in Sparta was a crime; bachelors were excluded from
the franchise, and from the sight of public processions in which young men
and women danced in the nude. According to Plutarch the bachelors them-
selves were compelled to march in public, naked even in winter, singing a
song to the effect that they were justly suffering this punishment for hav-
ing disobeyed the laws. Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon
at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled.
84 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
Those who married and had no children were only less completely dis-
graced; and it was understood that men who were not fathers were not
entitled to the respect that the youth of Sparta religiously paid to their
elders/ 8
Marriages were usually arranged by the parents, without purchase; but
after this agreement the bridegroom was expected to carry off the bride by
force, and she was expected to resist; the word for marriage was harpadzein,
to seize. 69 If such arrangements left some adults still unmarried, several men
might be pushed into a dark room with an equal number of girls, and be
left to pick their life mates in the darkness; 60 the Spartans thought that such
choosing would not be blinder than love. It was usual for the bride to stay
with her parents for a while; the bridegroom remained in his barracks, and
visited his wife only clandestinely; "in this relation," says Plutarch, "they
lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives
before even they saw their faces by daylight." When they were ready for
parentage custom allowed them to set up a home. Love came after mar-
riage rather than before, and marital aif ection appears to have been as strong
in Sparta as in any other civilization. 01 The Spartans boasted that there was
no adultery among them, and they may have been right, for there was
much freedom before marriage, and many husbands could be persuaded
to share their wives, especially with brothers. 03 Divorce was rare. The
Spartan general Lysander was punished because he left his wife and wished
to marry a prettier one. 68
All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other
Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high
Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear
society. Spartan women, says Plutarch," "were bold and masculine, over-
bearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most im-
portant subjects." They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the
ourse of time so great was their influence over men nearly half the real
wealth of Sparta was in their hands. 06 They lived a life of luxury and liberty
at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple
fare in the public mess.
For every Spartan male, by a characteristic ordinance of the constitution,
was required from his thirtieth to his sixtieth year to eat his main meal
daily in a public dining hall, where the food was simple in quality and
slightly but deliberately inadequate in amount. In this way, says Plutarch,
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 85
the legislator thought to harden them to the privations of war, and to keep
them from the degeneration of peace; they "should not spend their lives
at home, laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves
up to the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten them in corners
like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their' very bodies,
which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, would stand in need of long
sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work, and, in a word, of as much care
and attendance as if they were continually sick." M To supply the food for
this public meal each citizen was required to contribute to his dining club,
periodically, stated quantities of corn and other provisions; if he failed
in this his citizenship was forfeited.
Normally, in the earlier centuries of the code, the simplicity and asceti^
cism to which Spartan youth was trained persisted into later years. Fat-
men were a rarity in Lacedaemon; there was no law regulating the size of
the stomach, but if a man's belly swelled indecently he might be publicly
reproved by the government, or banished from Laconia. 67 There was little
of the drinking and the revelry that flourished in Athens. Differences of
wealth were real, but hidden; rich and poor wore the same simple dress
a woolen peplos, or shirt, that hung straight from the shoulders without
pretense to beauty or form. The accumulation of movable riches was diffi-
cult; to lay up a hundred dollars' worth of iron currency required a large
closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. 68 Human greed
remained, however, and found an outlet in official corruption. Senators,
ephors, envoys, generals, and kings were alike purchasable, at prices befit-
ting their dignity. 68 When an ambassador from Samos displayed his gold
plate at Sparta, King Cleomenes I had him recalled lest the citizens be spoiled
by alien example. 70
The Spartan system, fearful of such contamination, was inhospitable
beyond precedent. Foreigners were rarely welcomed. Usually they were
made to understand that their visits must be brief; if they stayed too long
they were escorted to the frontier by the police. The Spartans themselves
were forbidden to go abroad without permission of the government, and
to dull their curiosity they were trained to a haughty exclusiveness that
would not dream that other nations could teach them anything. 71 The sys-
tem had to be ungracious in order to protect itself; a breath from that
excluded world of freedom, luxury, letters, and arts might topple ovei
this strange and artificial society, in which two thirds of the people were
serfs, and all the masters were slaves.
86 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. IV
6. An Estimate of Sparta
What type of man, and what kind of civilization, did this code produce?
First of all, a man of strong body, at home with hardship and privation.
A luxury-loving Sybarite remarked of the Spartans that "it was no com-
mendable thing in them to be so ready to die in the wars, since by that
they were freed from much hard labor and miserable living." 72 Health was
one of the cardinal virtues in Sparta, and sickness was a crime; Plato's heart
must have been gladdened to find a land so free from medicine and democ-
racy. And here was courage; only the Roman would equal the Spartan's
record for fearlessness and victory. When the Spartans surrendered at
Sphacteria, Greece could hardly believe it; it was unheard of that Spartans
should not fight to the last man; even their common soldiers, on many
occasions, killed themselves rather than survive defeat. 73 When the news
of the Spartan disaster at Leuctra so overwhelming that in effect it put an
end to Sparta's history was brought to the ephors as they presided over
the Gymnopedia games, the magistrates said nothing, but merely added,
to the roster of the holy dead whom the gamies honored, the names of the
newly slain. Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adver-
sityqualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed were
taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.
If it be a virtue to obey the laws, the Spartan was virtuous beyond most
men. "Though the Lacedaemonians are free," the ex-king Demaratus
told Xerxes, "yet they are not free in all things; for over them is set law
as a master, whom they fear much more than thy people fear thee." 7 * Sel-
domprobably never again except in Rome and medieval Jewry has a peo-
ple been so strengthened by reverence for its laws. Under the Lycurgean
constitution Sparta, for at least two centuries, became always stronger.
Though it failed to conquer Argos or Arcadia, it persuaded all the Pelo-
ponnesus except Argos and Achaea to accept its leadership in a Peloponne-
sian League that for almost two hundred years (560-380) kept the peace in
Pelops' isle. All Greece admired Sparta's army and government, and
looked to it for aid in deposing burdensome tyrannies. Xenophon tells
of "the astonishment with which I first noted the unique position of Sparta
among the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, and at the
same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was
puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the
peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased." 76 Like
Plato and Plutarch, Xenophon was never tired of praising Spartan ways.
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 87
Here it was, of course, that Plato found the outlines of his Utopia, a little
blurred by a strange indifference to Ideas. Weary and fearful of the vul-
garity and chaos of democracy, many Greek thinkers took refuge in an
idolatry of Spartan order and law.
They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it.
They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the
Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom
they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, that the
Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor
of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the
things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flour-
ished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more
poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550.* Only choral dance and
music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individ-
ual could be lost in the mass. Excluded from commerce with the world,
barred from travel, ignorant of the science, the literature, and the philoso-
phy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excel-
lent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman. Greek travelers
marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously con-
fined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a cour-
age and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in
purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day's ride away, the Athe-
nians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization
broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager
for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, inno-
vating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast
that would color and almost delineate Greek history.
In the end Sparta's narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of
soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim;
at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that
Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and
made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she
fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the
scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar sur-
vives to declare that here there once lived Greeks.
* Gitiadas adorned a temple of Athena with excellently wrought bronze plates; Bathycles
of Magnesia built the stately throne of Apollo at Amyclae; and Theodoras of Samos built for
Sparta a famous town hall. After that Spartan art, even by imported artists, is hardly heard
of any more.
88 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. IV
IV. FORGOTTEN STATES
Northward from Sparta the valley of the Eurotas reaches across the
frontier of Laconia into die massed mountains of Arcadia. They would
be more beautiful if they were not so dangerous. They have not welcomed
the narrow roads cut out of their rock slopes, and seem to threaten gloom-
ily all disturbers of these Arcadian retreats. No wonder the conquering
Dorians and Spartans were both baffled here, and left Arcadia, like Elis
and Achaea, to the Achaean and Pelasgian stocks. Now and then the trav-
eler comes upon a plain or a plateau, and finds flourishing new towns like
Tripolis, or the remains of ancient cities like Orchomenos, Megalopolis,
Tegea, and Mantinea, where Epaminondas won both victory and death.
But for the most part it is a land of scattered peasants and shepherds, living
precariously with their flocks in these grudging hills; and though after
Marathon the cities awoke to civilization and art, they hardly enter the
story before the Persian War. Here in these perpendicular forests once
roamed the great god Pan.
In southern Arcadia the Eurotas almost meets a yet more famous river.
Swiftly the Alpheus wears its way through the Parrhasian range, meanders
leisurely into the plains of Elis, and leads the traveler to Olympia. The
Elians, Pausanias tells us, 78 were of Aeolic or Peksgic origin, and came
from Aetolia across the bay. Their first king, Aethlius, was father of that
Endymion whose beauty so allured the moon that she closed his eyes in
a perpetual sleep, sinned at leisure, and had by him half a hundred daugh-
ters. Here, where the Alpheus joins the Cladeus flowing from the north,
was the holy city of the Greek world, so sacred that war seldom disturbed
it, and the Elians had the boon of a history in which battles were replaced
by games. In the angle of the merging streams was the Altis, or hallowed
precinct, of Olympian Zeus. Wave after wave of invaders stopped here
to worship him; periodically, in later days, their delegates returned to be-
seech his help and enrich his fane; from generation to generation the tem-
ples of Zeus and Hera grew in wealth and renown, until the greatest archi-
tects and sculptors of Greece were brought together, after the triumph
over Persia, to restore and adorn them in lavish gratitude. The shrine of
Hera went back to 1000 B.C.; its rains are the oldest temple remains in
Greece. Fragments of thirty-six columns and twenty Doric capitals sur-
vive to show how often and how variously the pillars were replaced. Orig-
inally, no doubt, they were of wood; and one shaft of oak still stood when
Pausanias came there, notebook in hand, in the days of the Antonines.
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 89
From Olympia one passes by the site of the ancient capital, Elis, into Achaea.
Hither some of the Achaeans fled when the Dorians took Argos and Mycenae.
Like Arcadia it is a land of mountains, along whose slopes patient shepherds
drive their flocks up or down as the seasons change. On the western coast is
the still-thriving port of Patras, of whose women Pausanias said that they were
"twice as numerous as the men, and devoted to Aphrodite if any women
are." 77 Other cities huddled against the hills along the Corinthian Gulf-Aegium,
Helice, Aegira, Pellene now almost forgotten, but once alive with men,
women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.
V. CORINTH
A few more mountains, and the traveler re-enters, in Sicyon, the area of
Dorian settlement. Here, in 676, one Orthagoras taught the world a trick
of politics that aftercenturies would use. He explained to the peasants that
they were of Pelasgic or Achaean stock, while the landowning aristocracy that
exploited them was descended from Dorian invaders; he appealed to the racial
pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself
dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.*
Under his able successors, Myron and Cleisthenes, these classes made Sicyon
a semi-industrial city, famous for its shoes and its pottery, though still named
from the cucumbers that it grew.
Farther east is the city that should have been, by all geographic and
economic omens, the richest and most cultured center in Greece. For
Corinth, on the isthmus, had an enviable position. It could lock the land
door to or upon the Peloponnesus; it could serve and mulct the overland
trade between northern and southern Greece; and it had harbors and ship-
ping on both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. Between these seas it
built a lucrative Diolcos ("a slipping through") a wooden tramway along
which ships were drawn on rollers over four miles of land.f Its fortress
was the impregnable Acrocorinthus, a mountain peak two thousand feet
high, watered by its own inexhaustible spring. Strabo has described for us
the stirring sight from the citadel, with the city spread out on two bright
* So in 1789 Camille Desmoulins, from his cafe rostra, urged the Gauls to overthrow their
German (Frankish) aristocracy.
t The Diolcos was a grateful alternative to merchants who distrusted the rough waters off
Cape Malea on the sea route to the western Mediterranean. The tramway was sturdy enough
to carry the usual trading vessel of Greek times; indeed, Augustus transported his fleet over
the Diolcos in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium, and a Greek
squadron was similarly carried over as late as A.D. 883. 7S Periander planned in his day to cut
the canal that now joins the two gulfs, but his engineers found it too great a task. 78
$JO THELIFEOF GREECE ( CHAP. IV
terraces below, the open-air theater, the great public baths, the colonnaded
market place, the gleaming temples, and the protective walls that reached
to the port of Lechaeum on the northern gulf. At the very summit of the
mount, as if to symbolize a major industry of the city, was a temple to
Aphrodite. 80
Corinth had a history stretching back to Mycenaean times; even in
Homer's day it was famous for its wealth. 81 After the Dorian conquest
kings ruled it, then an aristocracy dominated by the family of the Bacchia-
dae. But here, too, as in Argos. Sicyon, Megara, Athens, Lesbos, Miletus,
Samps, Sicily, and wherever Greek trade flourished, the business class, by
revolution or intrigue, captured political power; this is the real meaning
of the outbreak of "tyrannies" or dictatorships in seventh-century Greece.
About 655 Cypselus seized the government. Having promised Zeus the
entire wealth of Corinth if he succeeded, he laid a ten per cent tax on all
property each year, and gave the proceeds to the temple, until, after a
decade, he has fulfilled his vow, while leaving the city as rich as before. 88
His popular and intelligent rule, through thirty years, laid the basis of
Corinthian prosperity. 83
His ruthless son, Periander, in one of the longest dictatorships in Greek
history (625-585), established order and discipline, checked exploitation,
encouraged business, patronized literature and art, and made Corinth for
a time the foremost city in Greece. He stimulated trade by establishing a
state coinage, 84 and promoted industry by lowering taxes. He solved a
crisis of unemployment by undertaking great public works, and establishing
colonies abroad. He protected small businessmen from the competition
of large firms by limiting the number of slaves that might be employed by
one man, and forbidding their further importation. 86 He relieved the
wealthy of their surplus gold by compelling them to contribute to a colos-
sal golden statue as an ornament for the city; he invited the rich women
of Corinth to a festival, stripped them of their costly robes and jewels, and
sent them home with half their beauty nationalized. His enemies were
numerous and powerful; he dared not go out without a heavy guard, and
his fear and seclusion made him morose and cruel. To protect himself
against revolt he acted on the cryptic advice of his fellow dictator Thrasy-
bulus of Miletus, that he should periodically cut down the tallest ears of
corn in the field.* 88 His concubines preyed upon him with accusations of
his wife, until in a temper he threw her downstairs; she was pregnant, and
died of the shock. He burnt the concubines alive, and banished to Corcyra
* Cf. the periodical "purges" in Communist Russia, 1935-38.
CHAP.IV) SPARTA pi
his son Lycophron, who so grieved for his mother that he would not
speak to his father. When the Corcyreans put Lycophron to death Per-
iander seized three hundred youths of their noblest families and sent them
to King Alyattes of Lydia, that they might be made eunuchs; but the
ships that bore them touched at Samos, and the Samians, braving Periander's
anger, freed them. The dictator lived to a ripe old age, and after his death
was numbered by some among the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece. 87
A generation after him the Spartans overthrew the dictatorship at Cor-
inth and set up an aristocracy not because Sparta loved liberty, but be-
cause she favored landowners against the business classes. Nevertheless it
was upon trade that the wealth of Corinth was based, helped now and
then by the devotees of Aphrodite, and the Panhellenic Isthmian games.
Courtesans were so numerous in the city that the Greeks often used cor-
inthiazomai as signifying harlotry. 88 It was a common matter in Corinth
to dedicate to Aphrodite's temple women who served her as prostitutes,
and brought their fees to the priests. One Xenophon (not the leader of
the Ten Thousand) promises the goddess fty hetairai, or courtesans, if
she will help him to victory in the Olympic games; and the pious Pindar,
celebrating this triumph, refers to the vow without flinching. 89 "The Tem-
ple of Aphrodite," says Strabo, 00 "was so rich that it owned more than a
thousand temple slaves, courtesans whom both men and women had
dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these
women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance,
the ship captains freely squandered their money here." The city was
grateful, and looked upon these "hospitable ladies" as public benefactors.
"It is an ancient custom at Corinth," says an early author quoted by Athen-
aeus, 01 "whenever the city addresses any supplication to Aphrodite ... to
employ as many courtesans as possible to join in the supplication." The
courtesans had a religious festival of their own, the Aphrodisia, which they
celebrated with piety and pomp. M St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the
Corinthians, 03 denounced these women, who still in his time plied there
their ancient trade.
In 480 Corinth had a population of fifty thousand citizens and sixty thou-
sand slaves an unusually high proportion of freemen to slaves.* 1 The
quest for pleasure and gold absorbed all classes, and left little energy for
literature and art. We hear of a poet Eumelus in the eighth century, but
Corinthian names seldom grace Greek letters. Periander welcomed poets
at his court, and brought Arion from Lesbos to organize music in Corinth.
In the eighth century the pottery and bronzes of Corinth were famous;
92 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
in the sixth her vase painters were at the top of their profession in Greece.
Pausanias tells of a great cedar chest, in which Cypselus hid from the
Bacchiadae, and upon which artists carved elegant reliefs, with inlays of
ivory and gold. 05 Probably it was in the age of Periander that Corinth
raised to Apollo a Doric temple famous for its seven monolithic columns,
five of which still stand to suggest that Corinth may have loved beauty in
more forms than one. Perhaps tim'e and chance were ungrateful to the city,
and her annals fell to be written by men of other loyalties. The past would
be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.
VI. MEGARA
Megara loved gold as much as Corinth did, and like her thrived on com-
merce; it had, however, a great poet, in whose verses the ancient city lives as
if its revolutions were one with our own. Standing at the very entrance
to the Peloponnesus, with a port on either gulf, it was in a position to bar-
gain with armies and levy tolls upon trade; to which it added a busy tex-
tile industry manned with men and women who, in the honest phraseology
of the day, were called slaves. The city flourished best in the seventh and
sixth centuries, when it disputed the commerce of the isthmus with Cor-
inth; it was then that it sent out, as trading posts, colonies as fax-flung as
Byzantium on the Bosporus and Megara Hyblaea in Sicily. Wealth
mounted, but the clever gathered it so narrowly into their hands that the
mass of the people, destitute serfs amid plenty, 00 listened readily to men
who promised them a better life. About 630 Theagenes, having decided
to become dictator, praised the poor and denounced the rich, led a starv-
ing mob into the pastures of the wealthy breeders, had himself voted a
bodyguard, increased it, and with it overthrew the government. 07 For a
generation Theagenes ruled Megara, freed the serfs, humbled the mighty,
and patronized the arts. Towards 600 the rich deposed him in turn; but a
third revolution restored the democracy, which confiscated the property
of leading aristocrats, commandeered rich homes, abolished debts, and
passed a decree requiring the wealthy to refund the interest that had been
paid them by their debtors. 98
Theognis lived through these revolutions, and described them in bitter
poems that might be the voice of our class war today. He was, he tells
us (for he is our sole authority on this subject) , a member of an ancient and
noble family. He must have grown up in comfortable circumstances, for
he was guide, philosopher, and lover to a youth named Cyrnus, who be-
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 93
came one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. He gives Cyrnus much
advice, and asks merely love in return. Like all lovers he complains of
short measure, and his finest extant poem reminds Cyrnus that he will
achieve immortality only through Theognis' poetry:
Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly
Over the boundless ocean and the earth;
Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,
The comrade of their banquet and their mirth.
Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound
Upon the silver flute's melodious breath;
And when thou goest darkling underground
Down to the lamentable house of death,
Oh, yet not then from honor shalt thou cease,
But wander, an imperishable name,
Cyrnus, about the seas and shores of Greece,
Crossing from isle to isle the barren main.
Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride,
Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,
And men to come, while earth and sun abide,
Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.
Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return
Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.
He warns Cyrnus that the injustices of the aristocracy may provoke
revolution:
Our state is pregnant, shortly to produce
A rude avenger of prolonged abuse.
The commons hitherto seem sober-minded,
But their superiors are corrupt and blinded.
The rule of noble spirits, brave and high,
Never endangered peace and harmony.
The supercilious, arrogant pretense
Of feeble minds, weakness and insolence;
Justice and truth and law wrested aside
By crafty shifts of avarice and pride;
These are our ruin, Cyrnus! never dream
(Tranquil and undisturbed as it may seem)
Of future peace or safety to the state;
Bloodshed and strife will follow soon or late.
* The ascription of this poem, and of those quoted below, to certain periods in Theognis'
life is hypothetical.
94 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
The revolution came; Theognis was among the men exiled by the tri-
umphant democracy, and his property was confiscated. He left his wife
and children with friends, and wandered from state to state Euboea,
Thebes, Sparta, Sicily; at first welcomed and fed for his poetry, then
lapsing into a bitter and unaccustomed poverty. Out of his resentment he
addresses to Zeus the questions which Job would ask of Yahweh:
Blessed, almighty Jove! with deep amaze
I view the world, and marvel at thy ways. . . .
How can you reconcile it to your sense
Of right and wrong, thus loosely to dispense
Your bounties on the wicked and the good 15
How can your laws be known or understood^ 101
He becomes bitter against the leaders of the democracy, and prays to
this inscrutable Zeus for the boon of drinking their blood. 102 In the first
known use of this metaphor he likens the state of Megara to a ship whose
pilot has been replaced by disorderly and unskilled mariners. 103 He argues
that some men are by nature abler than others, and that therefore aristoc-
racy in some form is inevitable; already men had discovered that majorities
never rule. He uses hoi agathoi, the good, as synonymous with the aristo-
crats, and hoi kakoi, the bad, base, worthless, as signifying the common
people. 104 These native differences, he thinks, are ineradicable; "no amount
of teaching will make a bad man good," 105 though he may merely mean
here that no training can turn a commoner into an aristocrat. Like all good
conservatives he is strong for eugenics: the evils of the world are due not
to the greed of the "good" but to their misalliances and their infertility. 108
He plots with Cyrnus another counterrevolution; he argues that even if
one has taken a vow of loyalty to the new government it is permissible
to assassinate a tyrant; and he pledges himself to work with his friends
until they have taken full vengeance upon their foes. Nevertheless, after
many years of exile and loneliness, he bribes an official to let him return to
Megara. 107 He is revolted at his own duplicity, and writes lines of despair
that hundreds of Greeks would quote:
Not to be born, never to see the sun-
No worldly blessing is a greater one!
And the next best ^'s speedily to die,
And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie. 108
In the end we find him back in Megara, old and broken, and promising,
for safety's sake, never again to write of politics. He consoles himself with
CHAP.IV) SPARTA 95
wine and a loyal wife, 108 and does his best to learn at last the lesson that
everything natural is forgivable.
Learn, Cyrnus, learn to bear an easy mind;
Accommodate your humor to mankind
And human nature; take it as you find.
A mixture of ingredients good and bad-
Such are we all, the best that can be had.
The best are found defective, and the rest,
For common use, are equal to the best.
Suppose it had been otherwise decreed,
How could the business of the world proceed? 110
VII. AEGINA AND EPIDAURUS
Across the bay from Megara and Corinth earthquake had raised, or left, one
of their earliest rivals in industry and trade the island of Aegina. There, in
Mycenaean times, a prosperous city developed, whose graves gave up much
gold." 1 The conquering Dorians found the land too barren for tillage, but
admirably placed for commerce. When the Persians came the island knew-
only an aristocracy of tradesmen, eager to sell the excellent vases and bronzes
produced in their shops for the slaves whom they imported in great number
to work in their factories, or for sale to the cities of Greece. Aristotle, about
350, calculated that Aegina had a population of half a million, of whom 470,000
were slaves." 3 Here the first Greek coins were made, and the Aeginetan weights
and measures remained standard in Greece till its conquest by Rome.
That such a commercial community could graduate from wealth to art was
revealed when, in 1811, a traveler discovered in a heap of rubbish the vigorous
and finely carved figures that once adorned the pediment of the temple of
Aphaea. Of the temple itself twenty-two Doric columns stand, still bearing
their architrave. Probably the Aeginetans built it shortly before the Persian
War; for though its architecture is classic, its statuary show* many traces of
the archaic, semi-Oriental style. Possibly, however, it was raised after Salamis;
for the statuary, which represents Aeginetans overcoming Trojans, may sym-
bolize the perennial conflict between Greece and the Orient, and the recent
victory won by the Greek fleet under the very brows of Aegina at Salamis.
To that fleet the little island contributed thirty ships; and one of these, after
the victory, was awarded by the Greeks the first prize for bravery.
A pleasant boat ride takes the traveler from Aegina to Epidaurus, now a
village of five hundred souls, but once among the most famous cities of
96 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IV
Greece. For hereor rather ten miles out in a narrow gorge among the
loftiest mountains of the Argolic peninsula was the chief home of Ascle-
pius, the hero-god of healing. "O Asclepius!" Apollo himself had said
through his oracle at Delphi, "thou who art born a great joy to all mortals,
whom lovely Coronis bare to me, the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus."" 8
Asclepius cured so many people even raising a man from the dead that
Pluto, god of Hades, complained to Zeus that hardly anyone was dying
any more; and Zeus, who would hardly know what to do with the human
race if it were not for death, destroyed Asclepius with a thunderbolt."*
But the people, first in Thessaly, then in Greece, worshiped him as a savior
god. At Epidaurus they raised to him the greatest of his temples, and there
the physician-priests who from him were called Asclepiads established a
sanitarium known throughout Hellas for its success in treating disease. Epi-
daurus became a Greek Lourdes; pilgrims flocked to it from every part
of the Mediterranean world, seeking what to the Greeks seemed the great-
est boon of all health. They slept in the temple, submitted hopefully to the
regimen prescribed, and recorded their cures, which they believed to be
miraculous, on stone tablets that still lie here and there among the ruins of
the sacred grove. It was out of the fees and gifts of these patients that Epi-
daurus built its theater, and the stadium whose seats and goals still lie in
the lap of the neighboring hills, and the lovely tholos a circular, colon-
naded building whose surviving fragments, preserved in the little museum,
are among the most exquisitely carved marbles in Greece. Today such
patients go to Tenos in the Cyclades, where the priests of the Greek Church
heal them" 8 as those of Asclepius healed their forerunners two thousand
five hundred years ago. And the gloomy peak where once the people of
Epidaurus sacrificed to Zeus and Hera is now the sacred mount of St. Elias.
The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.
What the student looks for most eagerly at Epidaurus is not the leveled
ruins of the Asclepium. The land is well wooded here, and he does not see
the perfect theater that he is seeking until a turn in the road spreads it out
against the mountainside in a gigantic fan of stone. Polycleitus the Younger
built it in the fourth century before our era, but even to this day it is almost
completely preserved. As the traveler stands in the center of the orchestra,
or dancing place a spacious circle paved with stone and sees before him
fourteen thousand seats in rising tiers, so admirably designed that every
seat directly faces him; as his glance follows the radiating aisles that rise in
swift straight lines from the stage to the trees of the mountain slope above;
as he speaks quietly to his friends on the farthest, highest seats, two hun-
CHAP. IV) SPARTA 97
died feet away, and perceives that his every word is understood: then he
visions Epidaurus in the days of its prosperity, sees in his mind's eye the
crowds coming out in gay freedom from shrine and city to hear Euripides,
and feels, more than he can ever express, the vibrant, plein-air life of ancient
Greece.
CHAPTER V
Athens
i. HESIOD'S BOEOTIA
EAST of Megara the road divides-south to Athens, north to Thebes.
Northward the route is mountainous, and draws the traveler up to
the heights of Mt. Cithaeron. Far to the west Parnassus is visible. Ahead,
across lesser heights and far below, is the fertile Boeotian plain. At the foot
of the hill lies Plataea, where 100,000 Greeks annihilated 300,000 Persians.
A little to the west is Leuctra, where Epaminondas won his first great vic-
tory over the Spartans. Again a little west rises Mt. Helicon, home of the
Muses and Keats's "blushful Hippocrene" that famous fountain^ the
Horse's Spring, which, we are assured, gushed forth when the hoof of the
winged steed Pegasus struck the earth as he leaped toward heaven. 1 Directly
north is Thespiae, always at odds with Thebes; and close by is the fountain
in whose waters Narcissus contemplated his shadow or, another story
said, that of the dead sister whom he loved. 3
In the little town of Ascra, near Thespiae, lived and toiled the poet
Hesiod, second only to Homer in the affection of the classic Greeks. Tra-
dition gave 846 and 777 as the dates of his birth and death; some modern
scholars bring him down to 650;" probably he lived a century earlier than
that.* He was born at Aeolian Cyme in Asia Minor; but his father, tired
of poverty there, migrated to Ascra, which Hesiod describes as "miserable
in winter, insufferable in summer, and never good" 5 like most of the places
in which men live. As Hesiod, farm hand and shepherd boy, followed his
flocks up and down the slopes of Helicon he dreamed that the Muses
breathed into his body the soul of poetry. So he wrote and sang, and won
prizes in musical contests," even, some said, from Homer himself 7
Loving like any young Greek the marvels of mythology, he composed*
a Theogony, or Genealogy of the Gods, of which we have a thousand halt-
ing lines, giving those dynasties and families of deities which are as vital
to religion as the pedigrees of kings are to history. First he sang of the
* So all classical antiquity believed except some Boeotian literati of the second century
AJ>., who questioned Hesiod's authorship. 8
9 8
CHAP. V) ATHENS 99
Muses themselves, because they were, so to speak, his neighbors on Heli-
con, and in his youthful imagination he could almost see them "dancing
with delicate feet" on the mountainside, and "bathing their soft skins" in
the Hippocrene. 8 Then he described not so much the creation as the pro-
creation of the world how god begot god until Olympus overflowed. In
the beginning was Chaos; "and next broad-bosomed Earth, ever secure
seat of all the immortals"; in Greek religion the gods live on the earth or
within it, and are always close to men. Next came Tartarus, god of the nether
world; and after him Eros, or Love, "fairest of the gods." 10 Chaos begot
Darkness and Night, which begot Ether and Day; Earth begot Mountains
and Heaven, and Heaven and Earth, mating, begot Oceanus, the Sea. We
capitalize these names, but in Hesiod's Greek there were no capitals, and
for all we know he meant merely that in the beginning was chaos, and
then the earth, and the inners of the earth, and night and day and the sea,
and desire begetting all things; perhaps Hesiod was a philosopher touched
by the Muses and personifying abstractions into poetry; Empedocles would
use the same tricks a century or two later in Sicily. 11 From such a theology
it would be but a step to the natural philosophy of the lonians.
Hesiod's mythology revels in monsters and blood, and is not averse to
theological pornography. Out of the mating of Heaven (Uranus) and
Earth (Ge or Gaea) came a race of Titans, some with fifty heads and a
hundred hands. Uranus liked them not, and condemned them to gloomy
Tartarus. But Earth resenting this, proposed to them that they should kill
their father. One of the Titans, Cronus, undertook the task. Then "huge
Ge rejoiced, and hid him in ambush; in his hand she placed a sickle with
jagged teeth, and suggested to him all the stratagem. Then came vast
Heaven, bringing Night [Erebus] with him, and, eager for love, brooded
around Earth, and lay stretched on all sides." Thereupon Cronus mutilated
his father, and threw the flesh into the sea. From the drops of blood that
fell upon the earth came the Furies; from the foam that formed around the
flesh as it floated on the waters rose Aphrodite.* 35 The Titans captured
Olympus, deposed Heaven-Uranus, and raised Cronus to the throne.
Cronus married his sister Rhea, but Earth and Heaven, his parents, having
predicted that he would be deposed by one of his sons, Cronus swallowed
them all except Zeus, whom Rhea bore secretly in Crete. When Zeus grew
up he deposed Cronus in turn, forced him to disgorge his children, and
plunged the Titans back into the bowels of the earth."
Such, according to Hesiod, were the births and ways of the gods. Here,
* From aphros, foam. The final syllable is of uncertain derivation.
IOO THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
too, is the tale of Prometheus, Far-Seer and Fire-Bringer; here, in tedious
abundance, are some of the divine adulteries that enabled so many Greeks,
like Mayflower Americans, to trace their pedigrees to the gods one would
never have guessed that adultery could be so dull. We do not know how
far these myths were the popular outgrowth of a primitive and almost sav-
age culture, and how far they are due to Hesiod; few of them are men-
tioned in the healthy pages of Homer. It is possible that some measure of
the disrepute into which these tales brought the Olympians in days of
philosophical criticism and moral development is to be ascribed to the
gloomy fancy of Ascra's bard.
In the only poem universally conceded to Hesiod he descends from
Olympus to the plains, and writes a vigorous georgic of the farmer's life.
The Works and Days takes the form of a long reproof and counsel to the
poet's brother Perseus, who is so strangely pictured that he may be only a
literary device. "Now will I speak to thee with good intent, thou exceed-
ing foolish Perseus." 14 This Perseus, we are told, has cheated Hesiod of
Hesiod's inheritance; and now the poet, in the first of known sermons on
the dignity of labor, tells him how much wiser honesty and toil are than
vice and luxurious ease. "Behold, thou mayest choose vice easily, even in
heaps; for the path is plain, and she dwells very near. But before excellence
the immortal gods have placed the sweat of toil; long and steep is the road
that leads to her, and rough it is at first; but when you reach the height
then truly is it easy, though so hard before." 15 So the poet lays down rules
for diligent husbandry, and the proper days for plowing, planting, and
reaping, in rough saws that Virgil would polish into perfect verse. He
warns Perseus against drinking heavily in summer, or dressing lightly in
winter. He draws a chilly picture of winter in Boeotia the "keenly pierc-
ing air that flays the steers," the seas and rivers tossed about by the north-
ern wind, the moaning forests and crashing pines, the beasts "shunning the
white snow" and huddling fearfully in their folds and stalls. 10 How cozy
then is a well-built cottage, the lasting reward of courageous and prudent
toil! There the domestic tasks go on despite the storm; then a wife is a
helpmate indeed, and repays a man for the many tribulations she has
caused him.
Hesiod cannot quite make up his mind about helpmates. He must have
been a bachelor or a widower, for no man with a living wife would have
spoken so acridly of woman. It is true that at the end of our fragment of
the Theogony the poet begins a chivalrous Catalogue of Women, recount-
ing the legends of those days when heroines were as numerous as men, and
CHAP.V) ATHENS IOI
most of the gods were goddesses. But in both of his major works he tells
with bitter relish how all human ills were brought to man by the beautiful
Pandora. Angered by Prometheus' theft of fire from Heaven, Zeus bids the
gods mold woman as a Greek gift for man. He
bade Hephaestus with all speed mix earth with water, and endue it
with man's voice and strength, and to liken in countenance to im-
mortal goddesses the fair, lovely beauty of a maiden. Then he bade
Athena teach her how to weave the highly wrought web, and golden
Aphrodite to shed around her head grace, and painful desire, and
cares that waste the limbs; but to endue her with a dog-like mind
and tricky manners he charged the messenger Hermes. . . . They
obeyed Zeus . . . and the herald of the gods placed within her a
winning voice; and this woman he called Pandora, because all who
dwelt in Olympian mansions bestowed on her a gift, a mischief to
inventive men. 17
Zeus presents Pandora to Epimetheus, who, tttough he has been warned
by his brother Prometheus not to accept gifts from the gods, feels that he
may j yield to beauty this once. Now Prometheus has left with Epimetheus
a mysterious box, with instructions that it should under no circumstances
be opened. Pandora, overcome with curiosity, opens the box, whereupon
ten thousand evils fly out of it and begin to plague the life of man, while
Hope alone remains. From Pandora, says Hesiod, "is the race of tender
women; from her is a pernicious race; and tribes of women, a great hurt,
dwell with men, helpmates not of consuming poverty but of surfeit. . . .
So to mortal men Zeus gave women as an evil." u
But alas, says our vacillating poet, celibacy is as bad as marriage; a lonely
old age is a miserable thing, and the property of a childless man reverts
at his death to the clan. So, after all, a man had better marry though not
before thirty; and he had better have children though not more than one,
lest the property be divided.
When full matureness crowns thy manhood's pride,
Lead to thy mansion the consenting bride;
Thrice ten thy sum of years the nuptial prime,
Nor fall far short, nor far exceed the time . . .
A virgin choose, that morals chaste imprest
By this wise love may stamp her yielding breast.
Some known and neighboring damsel be thy prize;
And wary bend around thy cautious eyes,
Lest bv a choice imprudent thou be found
102 THELIFEOF GREECE (CHAP. V
The merry mock of all the dwellers round.
No better lot has Providence assigned
Than a fair woman with a virtuous mind;
Nor can a worse befall than when thy fate
Allots a worthless, feast-continuing mate.
She with no touch of mere material flame
Shall burn to tinder thy care-wasted frame;
Shall send a fire thy vigorous bones within
And age unripe in bloom of years begin. 10
Before this Fall of Man, says Hesiod, the human race lived through
many happy centuries on the earth. First the gods, in the days of Cronus
(Virgil's Saturnia regna), had made a Golden Race of men, who were
themselves as gods, living without toil or care; of its own accord the earth
bore ample food for them, and nourished their rich flocks; they spent
many a day in joyous festival, and never aged; and when at last death came
to them, it was like a painless and dreamless sleep. But then the gods, with
divine whimsicality, made a Silver Race, far inferior to the first; these indi-
viduals took a century to grow up, lived through a brief maturity of suf-
fering, and died. Zeus made then a Brazen Race, men with limbs and
weapons and houses of brass, who fought so many wars with one another
that "black Death seized them and they quitted the bright sunlight." Zeus
tried again and made the Heroic Race, which fought at Thebes and Troy;
when these men died "they dwelt with carefree spirit in the Isles of the
Blest." Last and worst came the Iron Race, mean and corrupt, poor and
disorderly, toiling by day and wretched by night; sons dishonoring parents,
impious and stingy to the gods, lazy and factious, warring among them-
selves, taking and giving bribes, distrusting and maligning one another, and
grinding the faces of the poor; "Would," cries Hesiod, "that I had not been
born in this age, but either before or after it! " Soon, he hopes, Zeus will
bury this Iron Race under the earth. 30
Such is the theology of history with which Hesiod explains the poverty
and injustice of his time. These ills he knew by sight and touch; but the
past, which the poets had filled with heroes and gods, must have been
nobler and lovelier than this; surely men had not always been as poor and
harassed and petty as the peasants whom he knew in Boeotia. He does not
realize how deeply the faults of his class enter into his own outlook,
how narrow and earthly, almost commercial, are his views of life and
labor, women and men. What a fall this is from the picture of human
CHAP.V) ATHENS 10^
affairs in Homer, as a scene of crime and terror, but also of grandeur and
nobility! Homer was a poet, and knew that one touch of beauty redeems
a multitude of sins; Hesiod was a peasant who grudged the cost of a wife,
and grumbled at the impudence of women who dared to sit at the same
table with their husbands. 21 Hesiod, with rough candor, shows us the ugly
basement of early Greek society the hard poverty of serfs and small
farmers upon whose toil rested all the splendor and war sport of the aris-
tocracy and the kings. Homer sang of heroes and princes for lords and
ladies; Hesiod knew no princes, but sang his lays of common men, and
pitched his tune accordingly. In his verses we hear the rumblings of those
peasant revolts that would produce in Attica the reforms of Solon and the
dictatorship of Peisistratus.*
In Boeotia, as in the Peloponnese, the land was owned by absentee nobles
who dwelt in or near the towns. The most prosperous of the cities were
built around Lake Copais, now dry but once supplying a complex system
of irrigation tunnels and canals. Late in the Homeric Age this tempting
region was invaded by peoples who took their name from that Mt. Boeon,
in Epirus, near which they had had their home. They captured Chaeronea
(near which Philip was to put an end to Greek liberty), Thebes, their
future capital, and finally the old Minyan capital, Orchomenos. These
and other towns, in classic days, joined under the leadership of Thebes
in a Boeotian Confederacy, whose common affairs were managed by annu-
ally chosen boeotarchs, and whose peoples celebrated together at Coronea
the festival of Panboeotia.
It was the custom of the Athenians to laugh at the Boeotians as dull-
witted, and to attribute this obtuseness to heavy eating and a moist and
foggy climate very much as the French used to diagnose the English.
There may have been some truth in this, for the Boeotians play an unpre-
possessing part in Greek history. Thebes, for example, aided the Persian
invaders, and was a thorn in the side of Athens for centuries. But in the
other side of the scales we place the brave and loyal Plataeans, plodding
Hesiod and soaring Pindar, the noble Epaminondas and the completely
lovable Plutarch. We must beware of seeing Athens" rivals only through
Athens' eyes.
* History knows nothing of Hesiod's death. Legend tells how, at the age of eighty, he
seduced the maiden Clymene; how her brother killed him and threw his body into the sea;
and how Clymene bore as his son the lyric poet Stesichorus who, however, was born in
Sicily. 23
IO4 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
From Plutarch's city, Chaeronea, one passes at the continuous risk of his
life over a dozen mountains into Phocis, to reach, on the very slope of
Parnassus, the sacred city of Delphi. A thousand feet below is the Crisaean
plain, bright with the silver leaves of ten thousand olive trees; five hundred
feet farther down is an inlet of the Corinthian Gulf; ships move with the
stately, silent slowness of distance over waters deceptively motionless. Be-
yond are other ranges, clothed for a moment in royal purple by the setting
sun. At a turn in the road is the Castalian Spring, framed in a gorge of per-
pendicular cliffs; from the heights, legend said (adding another fable to
his own), the citizens of Delphi hurled the wandering Aesop; over them,
says history, Philomelus the Phocian drove the defeated Locrians in the
Second Sacred War.* 23 Above are the twin peaks of Parnassus, where the
Muses dwelt when they tired of Helicon. Greeks who climbed a hundred
tortuous miles to stand on this mountainside poised on a ledge between
mist-shrouded heights and a sunlit sea, and surrounded on every side with
beauty or terror could hardly doubt that beneath these rocks lived some
awful god. Time and again earthquake had rumbled here, frightening away
the plundering Persians, and a century later the plundering Phocians, and
a century later the plundering Gauls; it was the god protecting his shrine.
As far back as Greek tradition could reach, worshipers had gathered here
to find in the winds among the gorges, or the gases escaping from the earth,
the voice and will of deity. The great stone that nearly closed the cleft
from which the gases came was, to the Greeks, the center of Greece, and
therefore the omphalos, as they called it, the umbilicus or very navel of
the world.
Over that navel they built their altars, in older days to Ge, Mother Earth,
later to her bright conqueror Apollo. Once a terrible serpent had guarded
the gorge, holding it against men; Phoebus had slain him with an arrow,
and, as the Pythian Apollo, had become the idol of the shrine. There,
when an earlier temple was destroyed by fire (548), the rich Alcmaconids,
aristocrats exiled from Athens, rebuilt it with funds subscribed by all
Greece and augmented by their own; they gave it a fagade of marble, sur-
* Twice the Greeks waged Sacred Wars over the perquisites of Apollo's temple: once in
595-85, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exacting of greedy tolls by the people of
neighboring Cirrha from pilgrims passing to Delphi through their port; and again m 356-46,
when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured
Delphi and appropriated the temple funds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi
and the establishment of the jfyttuaK gasies; the second led to she A^cedooiaa conquest of
Greece.
CHAP.V) ATHENS I<>5
rounded it with a Doric peristyle, and supported it with Ionic colonnades
within; seldom had Greece seen so magnificent a shrine. A Sacred Way
wound up the slope to the sanctuary, adorned at every step with statues,
porticoes, and "treasuries" miniature temples built in the sacred precincts
(at Olympia, Delphi, or Delos) by Greek cities as repositories for their
funds, or as their individual tributes to the god. A hundred years before
the battle of Marathon, Corinth and Sicyon raised such treasuries at Del-
phi; later, Athens, Thebes, and Gyrene rivaled them, Cnidus and Siphnos
surpassed them. Amid them all, as a reminder that Greek drama was a
part of Greek religion, a theater was built into the face of Parnassus. Far
above all the rest was a stadium, where Greece practiced its favorite wor-
ship of health, courage, beauty, and youth.
Imagination pictures the scene in the days of Apollo's festival fervent
pilgrims crowding the road to the sacred city, filling noisily the inns and
tents thrown up to shelter them, passing curiously and skeptically among
the booths where subtle traders displayed their wares, mounting in religious
procession or hopeful pilgrimage to Apollo's temple, laying before it their
offering or sacrifice, chanting their hymns or saying their prayers, sitting
awed in the theater, and plodding up half a thousand trying steps to wit-
ness the Pythian games or gaze in wonder at mountains and sea. Life once
passed this way in all its eagerness.
III. THE LESSER STATES
In the western mainlands of Greece life was content to be rural and subdued
throughout Greek history and is so today. In Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania, and
Aeniania men were too close to primitive realities, too far from the quickening
currents of communication and trade, to have time or skill for literature,
philosophy, or art; even the gymnasium and the theater, so dear to Attica,
found no home here; and the temples were artless village shrines stirring no
national sentiment. At long intervals modest towns arose, like Amphissa in
Locris, or Aetolian Naupactus, or little Calydon, where once Meleager had
hunted the boar with Atalanta.* On the west coast near Calydon is the modern
Mesolongion, or Missolonghi, where Marco Bozzaris fought and Byron died.
* A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, son of Calydon's King
Oeneus, organized a hunt for it, with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason,
and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta
shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home,
agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put
to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides
given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and lost the race. Of Meleager's
secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne's Atalanta
in Calydon,
106 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
Between Acarnania and Aetolia runs the greatest river of Hellas the Ache-
Jous, which the imaginative Greeks worshiped as a god, and appeased with
prayer and sacrifice. Near its sources in Epirus rises the Spercheus, along
whose banks in the little state of Aeniania once lived the pre-Homeric Achaeans,
and a small tribe called Hellenes, whose name, by the whims of usage, was
adopted by all the Greeks. Towards the east lay Thermopylae, called "Hot
Gates" because of its warm sulphur springs and its narrow strategic pass, from
north to south, between mountains and the Malic Gulf. Then over Mt. Othrys
and through Achaea Phthiotis one descends into the great plains of Thessaly.
Here at Pharsalus Caesar's weary troops wiped out the forces of Pompey.
Nowhere else in Greece were the crops so rich as in Thessaly, or the horses
so spirited, or the arts so poor. Rivers ran from all directions into the Peneus,
making a fertile alluvial soil from the southern boundary of the state to the
foot of the northern ranges. Through these mountains the Peneus slashes its
way across Thessaly to the Thracian Sea. Between the peaks of Ossa and Olym-
pus it carves the Vale of Ternpe (i.e., a cutting), where for four miles the angry
river is hemmed in by precipitous cliffs rising a thousand feet above the stream.
Along the great rivers were many cities Pherae, Crannon, Tricca, Larisa,
Gyrton, Elatea ruled by feudal barons living on the toil of serfs. Here, in
the extreme north, is Mt. Olympus, tallest of Greek peaks, and home of the
Olympian gods. On its northern and eastern slopes lay Pieria, where the Muses
had dwelt before they moved to Helicon.* Southward, and along the gulf, ran
Magnesia, piling up mountains from Ossa to Pelion.
Beginning a few miles across the strait from Magnesia, the great island of
Euboea stretches its length along the shores of the mainland between inner
gulfs and outer Aegean, and pivots itself on a peninsula at Chalcis that almost
binds it to Boeotia. The island's backbone is a range that continues Olympus,
Ossa, Pelion, and Othrys, and ends in the Cyclades. Its coastal plains were rich
enough to lure lonians from Attica in the days of the Dorian invasion, and to
lead to its conquest by Athens in 506 on the plea that Athens, if blockaded at
the Piraeus, would starve without Euboean grain. Neighboring deposits of
copper and iron and banks of murex shells gave Chalcis its wealth and its name;
for a time it was the chief center of the metallurgical industry in Greece, mak-
ing unrivaled swords and excellent vases of bronze. The trade of the island,
helped by one of the first Greek coinages, passed out from Chalcis, enriched
its citizens, and led them to found commercial colonies in Thrace, Italy, and
Sicily. The Euboean system of weights and measures became almost universal
in Greece; and the alphabet of Chalcis, given to Rome by the Euboean colony
* Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope's philosophical doggerel:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not die Pierian spring.**
CHAP. V) ATHENS 10^
of Italian Cumae, became through Latin the alphabet of modern Europe. A
few miles to the south of Chalcis was its ancient rival, Eretria. There Menede-
mus, a pupil of Plato, established a school of philosophy, but for the rest neither
Eretria nor Chalcis wrote its name very distinctly into the record of Greek
thought or art.
From Chalcis a bridge, lineal descendant of the wooden span built in 41 1 B.C.,
leads the traveler across the Euripus strait back into Boeotia. A few miles south
on the Boeotian coast lay the little town of Aulis, where Agamemnon sacrificed
his daughter to the gods. In this region once lived an insignificant tribe, the
Graii, who joined the Euboeans in sending a colony to Cumae, near Naples;
from them the Romans gave to all the Hellenes whom they encountered the
name Graici, Greeks; and from that circumstance all the world came to know
Hellas by a term which its own inhabitants never applied to themselves. 25 Far-
ther south is Tanagra, whose poetess Corinna won the prize from Pindar about
500 B.C., and whose potters, in the fifth and fourth centuries, would make the
most famous statuettes in history. Five miles south again and we are in Attica.
From the peaks of the Parnes range we can make out the hills of Athens.
1. The Background of Athens
The very atmosphere seems different clean, sharp, and bright; each
year here has three hundred sunny days. We are at once reminded of
Cicero's comment on "Athens' clear air, which is said to have contributed
to the keenness of the Attic mind." 20 Rain falls in Attica in autumn and
winter, but seldom in summer. Fog and mist are rare. Snow falls about
once a year in Athens, four or five times a year on the surrounding moun-
taintops. 27 The summers are hot, though dry and tolerable; and in the low-
lands, in ancient days, malarial swamps detracted from the healthiness of
the air. 28 The soil of Attica is poor; nearly everywhere the basic rock lies
close to the surface, and makes agriculture a heartbreaking struggle for the
simplest goods of life.* Only adventurous trade, and the patient culture
of the olive and the grape, made civilization possible in Attica.
It is all the more surprising that on this arid peninsula so many towns
should have appeared. They are everywhere: at every harbor along the
coast, in every valley among the hills. An active and enterprising people
* "Attica," says Thucydides (i, i), "because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very
remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion."
IO8 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
bad settled Attica in or before neolithic days, and had hospitably received
and intermarried with lonians a mixture of Pelasgo-Mycenaeans arad
Achaeans a8a fleeing from Boeotia and the Peloponnesus in the face of the
northern migrations and invasions. Here was no conquering alien race
exploiting a native population, but a complex Mediterranean stock, of
medium stature and dark features, directly inheriting the blood and cul-
ture of the old Helladic civilization, proudly conscious of its indigenous
quality, 20 and excluding from its national sanctuary, the Acropolis, those
half -barbarian upstarts, the Dorians. 30
Relationships of blood gave them their social organization. Each family
belonged to a tribe, whose members claimed the same divine heroic ances-
tor, worshiped the same deity, joined in the same religious ceremony,
had a common archon (governor) and treasurer, owned together certain
communal lands, enjoyed among themselves the rights of intermarriage
and bequest, accepted obligations of mutual aid, vengeance, and defense,
and slept at last in the tribal burial place. Each of the four tribes of Attica
was composed of three phratries or brotherhoods, each phratry of thirty
clans or gentes (gene} , and each clan, as nearly as possible, of thirty heads
of families. 31 This kinship classification of Attic society lent itself not only
to military organization and mobilization, but to so clannish an aristocracy
of old families that Cleisthenes had to redistribute the tribes before he could
establish democracy.
Each town or village was probably in origin the home of a clan, and some-
times took its name from the clan, or from the god or hero whom it wor-
shiped, as in the case of Athens. The traveler entering Attica from eastern
Boeotia would come first to Oropus, and receive no very favorable impres-
sion; for Oropus was a frontier town, as terrifying to the tourist as any
such today. "Oropus," says Dicaearchus (?) about 300 B.C., "is a nest of
hucksters. The greed of the customhouse officials here is unsurpassed, their
roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and
truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the decent members
of the community on the head." 8 * From Oropus southward one moved
through a close succession of towns: Rharnnus, Aphidna, Deceleia (a strate-
gic point in the Peloponnesian War), Acharnae (home of Aristophanes 1
pugnacious pacifist Dicaeopolis) , Marathon, and Brauron in whose great
temple stood that statue of Artemis which Orestes and Iphigenia had
brought from the Tauric Chersonese, and where, every four years, as much
of Attica as could come joined in the piety and debauchery of the Brauronia,
or feast of Artemis. 88 Then Prasiae and Thoricus; then the silver-mining
region of Laurium, so vital in the economic and military history of Athens;
GHAP.V) ATHENS ICp
then, at the very point of the peninsula, Sunium, on whose cliffs a lovely
temple rose as a guide to mariners and their hopeful offering to the incal-
culable Poseidon. Then up the western coast (for Attica is half coast, and
its very name is from aktike, coastland) past Anaphlystus to the isle of
Salamis,* home of Ajax and Euripides; then to Eleusis, sacred to Demeter
and her mysteries; and then back to the Piraeus. Into this sheltered port,
neglected before Themistocles revealed its possibilities, ships were to bring
the goods of all the Mediterranean world for the use and pleasure of Athens.
The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of har-
bors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness
won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial em-
pire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periclean
age.
2. Athens under the Oligarchs
These towns of Attica were not only the background but the mem-
bers of Athens. We have seen how, according to Greek belief, Theseus
with a benevolent "synoecism" had brought the people of Attica into one
political organization, with one capital, f Five miles from the Piraeus, and
in a nest of hills Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes Athens grew around
the old Mycenaean acropolis; and all the landowners of Attica were its
citizens. The oldest families, and those with the largest holdings, wielded
the balance of power; they had tolerated the kingship when disorder threat-
ened, but when quiet and stability returned they reasserted their feudal
domination of the central government. After King Codrus had died in
heroic self -sacrifice against the invading Dorians, J they announced (so the
story went) that no one was good enough to succeed him, and replaced
the long with an archon chosen for life. In 752 they limited the tenure'- of
the archonship to ten years, and in 683 to one. On the latter occasion they
divided the powers of the office among nine archons: an archon eponymos,
who gave his name to the year as a means of dating events; an archon bctsileus,
who bore the name of king but was merely head of the state religion; a
polemarchos, or military commander; and six thesmothetai, or lawmakers,
As in Sparta and Rome, so in Athens the overthrow of the monarchy repre-
sented not a victory for the commons, or any intentional advance towards
* Probably named by the Phoenicians from shalam, peace; cf. Salem. 84
t Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century B.C.; but the union of Attica under
Athens could hardly have been completed before 700, since the "Homeric" Hymn to
Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still having its own king. 36
$ A possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to 1068 B.C.
110 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
democracy, but a recapture of mastery by a feudal aristocracy one more
swing of the pendulum in the historical alternation between localized and
centralized authority. By this piecemeal revolution the royal office was
shorn of all its powers, and its holder was confined to the functions of a
priest. The word king remained in the Athenian constitution to the end
of its ancient history, but the reality was never restored. Institutions may
with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left
unchanged.
The Eupatrid oligarchs i.e., the well-born ruling few continued to
govern Attica for almost five centuries. Under their rule the population
was divided into three political ranks: the hippes, or knights, who owned
horses* and could serve as cavalry; the zeugitai, who owned a yoke of
oxen and could equip themselves to fight as hoplites or heavy-armed troops;
and the thetes, hired laborers who fought as light-armed infantry. Only the
first two were accounted citizens; and only the knights could serve as
archons, judges, or priests. After completing their term of office the
archons, if no scandal had tarnished them, became automatically and for
life members of the boule or Council that met in the cool of the evening
on the Areopagus, or Ares' hill, chose the archons, and ruled the state.
Even under the monarchy this Senate of the Areopagus had limited the
authority of the king; now, under the oligarchy, it was as supreme as its
counterpart in Rome. 80
Economically the population fell again into three groups. At the top
were the Eupatrids, who lived in relative luxury in the towns while slaves
and hired men tilled their holdings in the country, or merchants made
profits for them on their loans. Next in wealth were the demiourgoi, or pub-
lic workmen i.e., professional men, craftsmen, traders, and free laborers.
As colonization opened up new markets, and coinage liberated trade, the
rising power of this class became the explosive force that under Solon and
Peisistratus won for it a share in the government, and under Cleisthenes
and Pericles raised it to the zenith of its influence. Most of the laborers
were freemen; slaves were as yet in the minority, even in the lower
classes. 37 Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peas-
ants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of money-
lenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a
bit of the earth.
Some of these peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had
been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their
* The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliert, and
English cavaliers.
CHAP.V) ATHENS III
holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective
ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing
away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously indi-
vidual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious,
many peasants sold their lands-despite the fine and disfrandiisement that
punished such sales-and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders
or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of owner-
ship, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or "share-crop-
pers" who kept a part of the produce as their pay. 38 Still others struggled
on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest,
were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their
creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage
was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the
mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab
announcing this ownership. 30 Small holdings became smaller, free peasants
fewer, great holdings greater. "A few proprietors," says Aristotle, "owned
all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable
to be sold as slaves," even into foreign parts, "on failure to pay their rent"
or their debts. 40 Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coin-
age, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept
the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured arti-
cles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and
rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers,
and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica became so great
that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer
mouths would have to be fed. tt
Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were
reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with
slaves/ 2 Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it
deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of
bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen. The landowners, jealous
of the growing wealth of the merchant class, sold abroad the corn that
their tenants needed for food, and at last, under the law of debt, sold the
Athenians themselves. 43
For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these
evils. About 620 this thesmoihete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to cod-
ify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would
restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his
code were a moderate extension, among the newly rich, of eligibility to
the archonship, and the replacement of feud vengeance with law: here-
112 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
after the Senate of the Areopagus was to try all cases of homicide. The last
was a basic and progressive change; but to enforce it, indeed to persuade
vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own re-
venge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his
legislation had been superseded by Solon's he was remembered for his
punishments rather than for his laws. Draco's code congealed the cruel
customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of
slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and
though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full
control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws
and issues affecting their interests/ 4 The owners of property were pro-
tected more zealously than ever before; petty theft, even idleness, was
punished in the case of citizens with disfranchisement, in the case of others
with death. * iE
As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor
against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revo-
lution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, in-
equality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty
of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The con-
centration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal.
"The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor," says Plutarch,
"had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous
condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed
possible but a despotic power." 48 The poor, finding their situation worse
with each year the government and the army in the hands of their mas-
ters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them 17 began to
talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth/ 8 The
rich, unable any longer to collect the debts legally due them, and angry
at the challenge to their savings and their property, invoked ancient laws/"
and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed
to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all
civilization.
3. The Solomon Revolution
It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often re-
peated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, with-
out any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade
the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos
* "Those that stole a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed
sacrilege or murder." Plutarch, Solon,
CHAP.V) ATHENS 113
but established a new and more generous political and economic order for
the entire remainder of Athens' independent career. Solon's peaceful revo-
lution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.
His father was a Eupatrid of purest blood, related to the descendants of
King Codrus and, indeed, tracing his origin to Poseidon himself. His
mother \vas cousin to the mother of Peisistratus, the dictator who would
first violate and then consolidate the Solonian constitution. In his youth
Solon participated lustily in the life of his time: he wrote poetry, sang the
joys of "Greek friendship," 50 and, like another Tyrtaeus, stirred the peo-
ple with his verses to conquer Salamis. 51 In middle age his morals improved
in inverse ratio to his poetry; his stanzas became dull, and his counsel excel-
lent. "Many undeserving men are rich," he tells us, "while their betters are
poor. But we will not exchange what we are for what they have, since the
one gift abides while the other passes from man to man." The riches of the
rich "are no greater than his whose only possessions are stomach, lungs and
feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of lad or maid;
and an existence ever in harmony with the changing seasons of life." 52
Once, when a sedition occurred in Athens, he remained neutral, luckily
before his own reputed legislation making such caution a crime. 53 But he did
not hesitate to denounce the methods by which the wealthy had reduced
the masses to a desperate penury."
If we may believe Plutarch, Solon's father "ruined his estate in doing
benefits and kindnesses to other men." Solon took to trade, and became
a successful merchant with far-flung interests that gave him wide experi-
ence and travel. His practice was as good as his preaching, for he ac-
quired among all classes an exceptional reputation for integrity. He was
still relatively young forty-four or forty-five when, in 594, representa-
tives of the middle classes asked him to accept election nominally as archon
eponymos, but with dictatorial powers to soothe the social war, establish
a new constitution, and restore stability to the state. The upper classes,
trusting to the conservatism of a moneyed man, reluctantly consented.
His first measures were simple but drastic economic reforms. He disap-
pointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land;
such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and
the rapid return of inequality. But by his famous Seisachtheia, or Removal
of Burdens, Solon canceled, says Aristotle, "all existing debts, whether
owing to private persons or to the state";* 66 and at one blow cleared Attic
lands of all mortgages. All persons enslaved or attached for debt were
* Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in which personal servitude was not
involved,"*
114 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
released; those sold into servitude abroad were reclaimed and freed; and
such enslavement was forbidden for the future. It was characteristic of
humanity that certain of Solon's friends, getting wind of his intention to
cancel debts, bought on mortgage large tracts of land, and later retained
these without paying the mortgages; this, Aristotle tells us with a rare
twinkle in his style, was the origin of many fortunes, that were later "sup-
posed to be of immemorial antiquity." 57 Solon was under suspicion of
having connived at this and of having profited by it, until it was discovered
that as a heavy creditor he himself had lost by his law. 08 The rich protested
unanswerably that such legislation was confiscation; but within a decade
opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Attica from
revolution. 50
Of another Solonian reform it is difficult to speak with clearness or cer-
tainty. Solon, says Aristotle, "superseded the Pheidonian measures" that
is, the Aeginetan coinage theretofore used in Attica "by the Euboic sys-
tem on a larger scale, and made the mina,* which had contained seventy
drachmas, now contain a hundred." 00 According to Plutarch's fuller ac-
count, Solon "made the mina, which before passed for seventy-three drach-
mas, go for a hundred, so that, though the number of pieces in a payment
was equal, the value was less; which proved a considerable benefit to those
that were to discharge great debts, and no loss to the creditors." 01 Only the
genial and generous Plutarch could devise a- form of inflation that would
relieve debtors without hurting creditors except that doubtless in some
cases half a loaf is better than none.f
More lasting than these economic reforms were those historic decrees
that created the Solonian constitution. Solon prefaced them with an act
of amnesty freeing or restoring all persons who had been jailed or ban-
ished for political offenses short of trying to usurp the government. He
went on to repeal, directly or by implication, most of Draco's legislation;
the law concerning murder remained. 61 It was in itself a revolution that the
laws of Solon were applied without distinction to all freemen; rich and
* For the value of Athenian coins, see below, Chap. XII, sect. in.
t Grote and many others interpreted Plutarch's statement to mean that Solon had depre-
ciated the currency by twenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who,
themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mortgage returns upon which they had
depended for meeting their obligations. 02 Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a
second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class, it
helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants whose mortgages had
already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished
merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with
the Peloponnesus, another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of
Ionia, where the Euboic standard was in common use. 83
CHAP.V) ATHENS 115
poor were now subject to the same restraints and the same penalties. Rec-
ognizing that his reforms had been made possible by the support of the
mercantile and industrial classes and signified their accession to a substan-
tial share in the government, Solon divided the free population of Attica
into four groups according to their wealth: first, the pentacosiomedimni,
or five-hundred-bushel men, whose annual income reached five hundred
measures of produce, or the equivalent thereof;* second, the hippes, whose
income was between three and five hundred measures; third, the zeugitai,
with incomes between two and three hundred measures; and fourth, the
thetes, all other freemen. Honors and taxes were determined by the same
rating, and the one could not be enjoyed without paying the other; fur-
thermore, the first class was taxed on twelve times, the second class on
ten times, the third class on only five times, the amount of its annual in-
come; the property tax was in effect a graduated income tax. 65 The fourth
class was exempt from direct taxation. Only the first class was eligible to
the archonship or to military commands; the second class was eligible to
lower offices and to the cavalry; the third was privileged to join the heavy-
armed infantry; the fourth was expected to provide the common soldiers
of the state. This peculiar classification weakened the kinship organiza-
tion upon which the oligarchy had rested its power, and established the
new principle of "timocracy" government by honor or prestige as frankly
determined by taxable wealth. A similar "plutocracy" prevailed, through-
out the sixth and part of the fifth century, in most of the Greek colonies.
At the head of the new government Solon's code left the old Senate
of the Areopagus, a little shorn of its exclusiveness and powers, open
now to all members of the first class, but still with supreme authority over
the conduct of the people and the officers of the state. 08 Next below it he
created a new bouk, a Council of Four Hundred, to which each of the
four tribes elected a hundred members; this Council selected, censored, and
prepared all business that could be brought before the Assembly. Beneath
this oligarchic superstructure, ingratiating to the strong, Solon, perhaps
with good will aforethought, placed fundamentally democratic institutions.
The old ekklesia of Homer's day was brought back to life, and all citizens
were invited to join in its deliberations. This Assembly annually elected,
from among the five-hundred-bushel men, the archons who heretofore had
been appointed by the Areopagus; it could at any time question these ofh-
cers, impeach them, punish them; and when their terms expired it scruti-
* A medimnuszbout one and a half bushels was considered equivalent to one drachma
in money.
Il6 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. V
nized their official conduct during the year, and could debar them, if it
chose, from their usual graduation into the Senate. More important still,
though it did not seem so, was the admission of the lowest class of the citi-
zens to full parity with the higher classes in being eligible to selection by
lot to the heliaea~a body of six thousand jurors that formed the various
courts before which all matters except murder and treason were tried, and
to which appeal could be made from any action of the magistrates. "Some
believe," says Aristotle, "that Solon intentionally introduced obscurity
into his laws, to enable the commons to use their judicial power for their
own political aggrandizement"; for since, as Plutarch adds, "their differ-
ences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all
their causes to the judges, who were in a manner masters of the laws." 07
This power of appeal to popular courts was to prove the wedge and citadel
of Athenian democracy.
To this basic legislation, the most important in Athenian history, Solon
added a miscellany of laws aimed at the less fundamental problems of the
time. First he legalized that individualization of property which custom
had already decreed. If a man had sons he was to divide his property among
them at his death; if he died childless he might bequeath to anyone the
property that in such cases had heretofore reverted automatically to the
clan. 08 With Solon begins, in Athens, the right and law of wills. Himself
a businessman, Solon sought to stimulate commerce and industry by open-
ing citizenship to all aliens who had a skilled trade and came with their
families to reside permanently at Athens. He forbade the export of any
produce of the soil except olive oil, hoping to turn men from growing sur-
plus crops to practicing an industry. He enacted a law that no son should
be obliged to support a father who had not taught him some specific trade. 08
To Solon not to the later Athenians the crafts had their own rich honor
and dignity.
Even into the dangerous realm of morals and manners Solon offered
laws. Persistent idleness was made a crime, and no man who lived a life
of debauchery was permitted to address the Assembly. He legalized and
taxed prostitution, established public brothels licensed and supervised by
the state, and erected a temple to Aphrodite Pandernos from the revenues,
"Hail to you, Solon!" sang a contemporary Lecky. "You bought public
women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city
that is full of vigorous young men who, in the absence of your wise insti-
tution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the bet-
ter women." 71 He enacted the un-Draconian penalty of a hundred drachmas
CHAP.V) ATHENS 117
for the violation of a free woman, but anyone who caught an adulterer in
the act was allowed to kill him there and then. He limited the size of
dowries, wishing that marriages should be contracted by the affection of
mates and for the rearing of children; and with childlike trustfulness he
forbade women to extend their wardrobes beyond three suits. He was
asked to legislate against bachelors, but refused, saying that, after all, "a
wife is a heavy load to carry." 72 He made it a crime to speak evil of the
dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public offices, or
at the games; but even he could not tie the busy tongue of Athens, in which,
as with us, gossip and slander seemed essential to democracy. He laid it down
that those who remained neutral in seditions should lose their citizenship,
for he felt that the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state. He
condemned pompous ceremonies, expensive sacrifices, or lengthy lamen-
tations at funerals, and limited the goods that might be buried with the
dead. He established the wholesome law a source of Athenian bravery
for generations that the sons of those who died in war should be brought
up and educated at the expense of the government.
To all of his laws Solon attached penalties, milder than Draco's but still
severe; and he empowered any citizen to bring action against any person
whom he might consider guilty of crime. That his laws might be the bet-
ter known and obeyed he wrote them down in the court of the archon
basileus upon wooden rollers or prisms that could be turned and read.
Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he made no claim that
a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper
of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent
dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was "a very fair spot, but there
was no way down from it.'" 8 Radicals criticized him for failing to estab-
lish equality of possessions and power; conservatives denounced him for
admitting the commons to the franchise and the courts; even his friend
Anacharsis, the whimsical Scythian sage, laughed at the new constitution,
saying that now the wise would plead and the fools would decide. Besides,
added Anacharsis, no lasting justice can be established for men, since the
strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the
law is a spider's web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape.
Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections
of his code; asked had he given the Athenians the best laws, he answered,
"No, but the best that they could receive" 7 * the best that the conflicting
groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded conjointly
to accept. He followed the mean and preserved the state; he was a good
Il8 THELIFEOF GREECE (CHAP. V
pupil of Aristotle before the Stagirite was born. Tradition attributed to
him the motto that was inscribed upon the temple of Apollo at Delphi
meden agan, nothing in excess; 75 and all Greeks agreed in placing him among
the Seven Wise Men.
The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation.
Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dic-
tatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later,
that the laws of Solon were still in force at Athens. 70 Legally his work
marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and
the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what
made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, "When the people
obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws." 77 To his legislation Attica
owed the liberation of its farmers from serfdom, and the establishment of a
peasant proprietor class whose ownership of the soil made the little armies
of Athens suffice to preserve her liberties for many generations. When,
at the close of the Peloponnesian War, it was proposed to limit the fran-
chise to freeholders, only five thousand adult freemen in all Attica failed
to satisfy this requirement. At the same time trade and industry were
freed from political disabilities and financial inconveniences, and began that
vigorous development which was to make Athens the commercial leader
of the Mediterranean. The new aristocracy of wealth put a premium upon
intelligence rather than birth, stimulated science and education, and pre-
pared, materially and mentally, for the cultural achievements of the Golden
Age.
In 572, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two
years, Solon retired from office into private life; and having bound Athens,
through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years, 70
he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now,
apparently, that he made his famous remark "I grow old while always
learning." 80 At Heliopolis, says Plutarch, he studied Egyptian history and
thought under the tutelage of the priests; from them, it is said, he heard
of the sunken continent Atlantis, whose tale he told in an unfinished epic
which two centuries later would fascinate the imaginative Plato. From
Egypt he sailed to Cyprus and made laws for the city that in his honor
changed its name to Soli.* Herodotus 81 and Plutarch describe with miracu-
lous memory his chat at Sardis with Croesus, the Lydian king: how this
* Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia-the town whose preservation
of old Greek speech into Alexander's day led to the word solecism.
CHAP.V) ATHENS Up
paragon of wealth, having arrayed himself in all his paraphernalia, asked
Solon did he not account him, Croesus, a happy man; and how Solon, with
Greek audacity, replied:
The gods, O King, have given the Greeks all other gifts in mod-
erate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely,
not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous
misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent
upon our present enjoyment, or to admire any man's happiness that
may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future
has yet to come, with every possible variety of fortune; and him
only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end do
we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of
life and hazard we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and
proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring. 82
This admirable exposition of what the Greek dramatists mean by hybris
insolent prosperity has the ring of Plutarch's eclectic wisdom; we can
only say that it is better phrased than Herodotus' report, and that both
accounts belong, presumably, to the realm of imaginary conversations. Cer-
tainly both Solon and Croesus, in the manner of their deaths, justified the
skepticism of this homily. Croesus was dethroned by Cyrus in 546, and
(if we may rephrase Herodotus with Dante) knew the bitterness of re-
membering, in his misery, the happy time of his splendor, and the stern
warning of the Greek. And Solon, returning to Athens to die, saw in his
last years the overthrow of his constitution, the establishment of a dictator-
ship, and the apparent frustration of all his work.
4. The Dictatorship of Peisistratus
The conflicting groups which he had dominated for a generation had
resumed, upon his departure from Athens, the natural play of politics and
intrigue. As in the passionate days of the French Revolution, three parties
struggled for power: the "Shore," led by the merchants of the ports, who
favored Solon; the "Plain," led by the rich landowners, who hated Solon;
and the "Mountain," a combination of peasants and town laborers who
still fought for a redistribution of the land. Like Pericles a century later,
Peisistratus, though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, manners and tastes,
accepted the leadership of the commons. At a meeting of the Assembly
he displayed a wound, claiming that it had been inflicted upon him by
120 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
the enemies of the people, and asked for a bodyguard. Solon protested;
knowing the subtlety of his cousin, he suspected that the wound had been
self-inflicted, and that the bodyguard would open the way to a dictator-
ship. "Ye men of Athens," he warned them, "I am wiser than some of you,
and braver than others: wiser than those of you who do not perceive
the treachery of Peisistratus, and braver than those who are aware of it, but
out of fear hold their peace." 83 Nevertheless the Assembly voted that
Peisistratus should be allowed a force of fifty men. Peisistratus collected
four hundred men instead of fifty, seized the Acropolis, and declared a dic-
tatorship. Solon, having published to the Athenians his opinion that "each
man of you, individually, walketh with the tread of a fox, but collectively
ye are geese," 84 placed his arms and shield outside his door as a symbol of
resigning his interest in politics, and devoted his last days to poetry.
The wealthy forces of the Shore and the Plain united for a moment and
expelled the dictator (556). But Peisistratus secretly made his peace with
the Shore, and, probably with their connivance, re-entered Athens under
circumstances that seemed to corroborate Solon's judgment of the collec-
tive intelligence. A tall and beautiful woman, arrayed in the armor and
costume of the city's goddess Athena, and seated proudly in a chariot, led
the forces of Peisistratus into the city, while heralds announced that the
patron deity of Athens was herself restoring him to power (550). "The
people of the city, fully persuaded," says Herodotus, "that the woman
was the veritable goddess, prostrated themselves before her, and received
Peisistratus back." 85 The leaders of the Shore turned against him again
and drove him into a second exile (549) ; but in 546 Peisistratus once more
returned, defeated the troops sent out against him, and this time main-
tained his dictatorship for nineteen years, during which the wisdom of
his policies almost redeemed the picturesque unscrupulousness of his means.
The character of Peisistratus was a rare union of culture and intellect,
administrative vigor and personal charm. He could fight ruthlessly, and
readily forgive; he could move in the foremost currents of the thought
of his time, and govern without the intellectual's vacillation of purpose and
timidity of execution. Fie was mild of manner, humane in his decisions,
and generous to all. "His administration," says Aristotle, "was temperate,
and showed the statesman rather than the tyrant." 80 He made few reprisals
upon regenerate enemies, but he banished irreconcilable opponents, and
distributed their estates among the poor. He improved the army and built
up the fleet as security against external attack; but he kept Athens out of
war, and maintained at home, in a city so recently disturbed by class hos-
CHAP.V) ATHENS 121
tility, such order and content that it was common to say that he had
brought back the Golden Age of Cronus' reign.
He surprised everyone by making little change of detail in the Solonian
constitution. Like Augustus he knew how to adorn and support dictator-
ship with democratic concessions and forms. Archons were elected as
usual, and the Assembly and the popular courts, the Council of Four Hun-
dred and the Senate of the Areopagus met and functioned as before, except
that the suggestions of Peisistratus found a very favorable hearing. When
a citizen accused him of murder he appeared before the Senate and offered
to submit to trial, but the complainant decided not to press the charge.
Year by year the people, in inverse proportion to their wealth, became
reconciled to his rule; soon they were proud of him, at last fond of him.
Probably Athens had needed, after Solon, just such a man as Peisistratus:
one with sufficient iron in his blood to beat the disorder of Athenian life
into a strong and steady form, and to establish by initial compulsion those
habits of order and law which are to a society what the bony structure
is to an animal its shape and strength, though not its creative life. When,
after a generation, the dictatorship was removed, these habits of order and
the framework of Solon's constitution remained as a heritage for democ-
racy. Peisistratus, perhaps not knowing it, had come not to destroy the
law but to fulfill it.
His economic policies carried on that emancipation of the people which
Solon had begun. He settled the agrarian question by dividing among the
poor the lands that belonged to the state, as well as those of banished aris-
tocrats; thousands of dangerously idle Athenians were settled upon the
soil; and for centuries afterward we hear of no serious agrarian discontent
in Attica. 87 He gave employment to the needy by undertaking extensive
public works, building a system of aqueducts and roads, and raising great
temples to the gods. He encouraged the mining of silver at Laurium, and
issued a new and independent coinage. To finance these undertakings he
laid a ten per cent tax upon all agricultural products; later he seems to have
reduced this to 5 per cent. 88 He planted strategic colonies on the Dar-
danelles, and made commercial treaties with many states. Under his rule
trade flourished, and wealth grew not among a few only, but in the com-
munity as a whole. The poor were made less poor, the rich not less rich.
That concentration of wealth which had nearly torn the city into civil
war was brought under control, and the spread of comfort and oppor-
tunity laid the economic bases of Athenian democracy.
Under Peisistratus and his sons Athens was physically and mentally trans-
122 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
formed. Till their time it had been a second-rate city in the Greek world,
lagging behind Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene, and Syracuse in wealth and cul-
ture, in vitality of life and mind. Now new buildings of stone and marble
reflected the radiance of the day; the old temple of Athena on the Acropo-
lis was beautified with a Doric peristyle; and work was begun on that tem-
ple of Olympian Zeus whose stately Corinthian columns, even in their
ruins, brighten the road from Athens to her port. By establishing the Pana-
thenaic games and giving them a Panhellenic character, Peisistratus brought
to his city not honor only, but the stimulus of foreign faces, competition,
and ways; under his rule the Panathenaea became the great national fes-
tival, whose impressive ceremonial still moves on the frieze of the Par-
thenon. To his court, by public works and private beneficence, Peisistratus
attracted sculptors, architects, and poets; in his palace was collected one
of the earliest libraries of Greece. A committee appointed by him gave
to the Iliad and the Odyssey the form in which we know them. Under his
administration and encouragement Thespis and others lifted drama from
a mummers' mimicry to a form of art ready to be filled out by the great
triumvirate of the Athenian stage.
The "tyranny" of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the
commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal
rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the mid-
dle class in temporary alliance with the poor.* Such dictatorships were
brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inabil-
ity of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor,
like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political
freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich
from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing
the rich by violence or votes. Hence the road to power in Greek commer-
cial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and
come to an understanding with the middle classes. 80 Arrived at power,
the dictator abolished debts, or confiscated large estates, taxed the rich to
finance public works, or otherwise redistributed the overconcentrated
wealth; and while attaching the masses to himself through such measures,
he secured the support of the business community by promoting trade with
state coinage and commercial treaties, and by raising the social prestige of
the bourgeoisie. Forced to depend upon popularity instead of hereditary
* The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a
fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (Gk. tyrrls}. Apparently it was
applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.
CHAP.V) ATHENS 123
power, the dictatorships for the most part kept out of war, supported reli-
gion, maintained order, promoted morality, favored the higher status of
women, encouraged the arts, and lavished revenues upon the beautification
of their cities. And they did all these things, in many cases, while pre-
serving the forms and procedures of popular government, so that even
under despotism the people learned the ways of liberty. When the dictator-
ship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dic-
tatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of
freemen a reality as well as a form.
5. The Establishment of Democracy
When Peisistratus died, in 527, he left his power to his sons; his wisdom
had survived every test except that of parental love. Hippias gave promise
of being a wise ruler, and for thirteen years continued the policies of his
father. Hipparchus, his younger brother, was harmlessly, though expen-
sively, devoted to love and poetry; it was at his invitation that Anacreon
and Simonides came to Athens. The Athenians were not quite pleased
to see the leadership of the state pass down without their consent to the
young Peisistratids, and began to realize that the dictatorship had given
them everything but the stimulus of freedom. Nevertheless Athens was
prosperous, and the quiet reign of Hippias might have gone on to a peace-
ful close had it not been for the unsmooth course of true Greek love.
Aristogeiton, a man of middle age, had won the love of the young
Harmodius, then, says Thucydides, 00 "in the flower of youthful beauty."
But Hipparchus, equally careless of gender, also solicited the lad's love.
When Aristogeiton heard of this he resolved to kill Hipparchus and at the
same time, in self -protection, to overthrow the tyranny. Harmodius and
others joined him in the conspiracy (514). They murdered Hipparchus as
he was arranging the Panathenaic procession, but Hippias eluded them
and had them slain. To complicate the tale a courtesan Leaena, mistress
of Harmodius, died bravely under torture, having refused to betray the
surviving conspirators; if we may believe Greek tradition, she bit off her
tongue and spat it in the face of her torturers to make sure that she would
not answer their questions. 01
Though the people lent no visible support to this revolt, Hippias was
frightened by it into replacing his hitherto mild rule with a regime of sup-
pression, espionage, and terror. The Athenians, strengthened by a gen-
eration of prosperity, could afford now to demand the luxury of liberty;
124 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
gradually, as the dictatorship grew harsher, the cry for freedom grew
louder; and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had conspired for love and
passion rather than for democracy,* were transformed by popular imagina-
tion into the martyrs of liberty. Off in Delphi the Alcmaeonids, who had
been re-exiled by Peisistratus, saw their opportunity, raised an army, and
marched upon Athens with the announced intention of deposing Hippias.
At the same time they bribed the Pythian oracle to tell all Spartans who
consulted her that Sparta must overthrow the tyranny at Athens. Hippias
successfully resisted the forces of the Alcmaeonids; but when a Lacedae-
monian army joined them he withdrew to the Areopagus. Seeking the
security of his children in the event of his own death, he sent them 1 secretly
out of Athens; but they were captured by the invaders, and Hippias, as
the price of their safety, consented to abdication and exile (510). The
Alcmaeonids, led by the courageous Cleisthenes,f entered Athens in tri-
umph; and on their heels came the banished aristocrats, prepared to cele-
brate the return of their property and their power.
In the election that ensued, Isagoras, representing the aristocracy, was
chosen to be chief archon. Cleisthenes, one of the defeated candidates,
aroused the people to revolt, overthrew Isagoras, and set up a popular
dictatorship. The Spartans again invaded Athens, seeking to restore Isa-
goras; but the Athenians resisted so tenaciously that the Spartans retired,
and Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid aristocrat, proceeded to establish democ-
racy (507).
His first reform struck at the very framework of Attic aristocracy
those four tribes and 360 clans whose leadership, by centuries of tradi-
tion, was in the hands of the oldest and richest families. Cleisthenes abol-
ished this kinship classification, and replaced it with a territorial division into
ten tribes, each composed of a (varying) number of demes. To prevent
the formation of geographical or occupational blocs, such as the old parties
of Mountain, Shore, and Plain, each tribe was to be composed of an equal
number of demes, or districts, from the city, from the coast, and from the
interior. To offset the sanctity that religion had given to the old division,
religious ceremonies were instituted for each new tribe or deme, and a
famous ancient hero of the locality was made its deity or patron saint.
Freemen of foreign origin, who had rarely been admitted to the franchise
under the aristocratic determination of citizenship by descent, now auto-
* One would not be surprised to learn that they represented a resentful aristocracy, like
Brutus and Cassius in Rome. Brutus, too, became the hero of a revolution, after eighteen cen-
turies had obscured his history.
t Grandson of Cleisthenes, dictator of Sicyon-
CHAP.V) ATHENS 125
matically became citizens of the demes in which they lived. At one stroke
the roll of voters was almost doubled, and democracy secured a new sup-
port and a broader base.
Each of the new tribes was entitled to name one of the ten strategoi,
or generals, who now joined the polemarch in command of the army;
and each tribe elected fifty members of the new Council of 501 which now
replaced Solon's Council of Four Hundred and assumed the most vital
powers of the Areopagus. These councilors were chosen for a year's term,
not by election but by lot, from the list of all citizens who had reached
the age of thirty and had not already served two terms. In this strange
inauguration of representative government both the aristocratic principle
of birth and the plutocratic principle of wealth were overridden by the new
device of the lot, which gave every citizen an equal chance not only to
vote, but to hold office in the most influential branch of the government.
For the Council so elected determined all matters and proposals to be
submitted for approval or rejection to the Assembly, reserved to itself
various judicial powers, exercised wide administrative functions, and super-
vised all officials of the state.
The Assembly was enlarged by the access of new citizens, so that a full
meeting of its membership would have meant an attendance of approxi-
mately thirty thousand men. All these were eligible for service in the hel-
iaea, or courts; but the fourth class, or thetes, were still, as under Solon,
ineligible to individual office. The powers of the Assembly were enlarged
by the institution of ostracism, which Cleisthenes seems to have added
as a protection for the young democracy. At any time, by a majority of
votes written secretly upon potsherds (ostraka) , the Assembly, in a quorum
of six thousand members, might send into exile for ten years any man who
in its judgment had become a danger to the state. In this way ambitious
leaders would be stimulated to conduct themselves with circumspection
and moderation, and men suspected of conspiracy could be disposed of
without the law's delay. The procedure required that the Assembly should
be asked, "Is there any man among you whom you think vitally dangerous
to the state? If so, whom? " The Assembly might then vote to ostracize any
one citizen not excepting the mover of the motion.* Such exile involved
no confiscation of property, and no disgrace; it was merely democracy's
way of cutting off the "tallest ears of corn." 02 Nor did the Assembly abuse
its power. In the ninety years between the introduction of ostracism and its
disuse at Athens, only ten persons were banished by it from Attica.
* A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.
*2<5 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. V
One of these, we are told, was Cleisthenes himself. But in truth we do
not know his later history; it was absorbed and lost in the brilliance of his
work. Beginning with a thoroughly unconstitutional revolt, he had estab-
lished, in the face of the most powerful families in Attica, a democratic con-
stitution that continued in operation, with only minor changes, to the end
of Athenian liberty. The democracy was not complete; it applied only to
freemen, and still placed a modest property limitation upon eligibility to
individual office.* But it gave all legislative, executive, and judicial power
to an Assembly and a Court composed of the citizens, to magistrates ap-
pointed by and responsible to the Assembly, and to a Council for whose
members all citizens might vote, and in whose supreme authority, by the
operation of the lot, at least one third of them actually shared for at least
a year of their lives. Never before had the world seen so liberal a fran-
chise, or so wide a spread of political power.
The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sov-
ereignty. They realized that they had undertaken a difficult enterprise, but
they advanced to it with courage and pride, and, for a time, with unwonted
self-restraint. From that moment they knew the zest of freedom in action,
speech, and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece
in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war. They learned to re-
spect anew a law that was their own considered will, and to love with
unprecedented passion a state that was their unity, their power, and their
fulfillment. When the greatest empire of the age decided to destroy these
scattered cities called Greece, or to lay them under tribute to the Great
King, it forgot that in Attica it would be opposed by men who owned the
soil that they tilled, and who ruled the state that governed them. It was for-
tunate for Greece, and for Europe, that Cleisthenes completed his work,
and Solon's, twelve years before Marathon.
* A property qualification was placed upon the franchise in the earlier stages of American
and French democracy.
CHAPTER VI
The Great Migration
I. CAUSES AND WAYS
IN carrying the story of Sparta and Athens down to the eve of Mara-
thon we have sacrificed the unity of time to the unity of place. It is
true that the cities of the mainland were older than the Greek settlements
in the Aegean and Ionia, and that these cities, in many cases, sent out the
colonies whose life we must now describe. But, by a confusing inversion
of normal sequences, several of those colonies became greater than their
mother cities, and preceded them in the development of wealth and art. The
real creators of Greek culture were not the Greeks of what we now call
Greece, but those who fled before the conquering Dorians, fought des-
perately for a foothold on foreign shores, and there, out of their Myce-
naean memories and their amazing energy, made the art and science, the
philosophy and poetry that, long before Marathon, placed them in the
forefront of the Western world. Greek civilization was inherited by the
parent cities from their children.
There is nothing more vital in the history of the Greeks than their rapid
spread throughout the Mediterranean.* They had been nomadic before
Homer, and all the Balkan peninsula had seemed fluid with this movement,
but the successive Greek waves that broke upon the Aegean isles and the
western coasts of Asia were stirred up above all by the Dorian invasion.
From every part of Hellas men went out in search of homes and liberty
beyond the grasp of the enslaving conquerors. Political faction and family
feud in the older states contributed to the migration; the defeated some-
times chose exile, and the victors gave every encouragement to their exodus.
Some of the Greek survivors of the Trojan War stayed in Asia; others,
through shipwreck or adventure, settled in the islands of the Aegean; some,
reaching home after a perilous journey, found their thrones or their wives
occupied, and returned to their ships to build new homes and fortunes
abroad. 2 In mainland Greece, as in modern Europe, colonization proved
a blessing in varied ways: it provided outlets for surplus population and
* Cf. Pater: "Perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire history o"f
Greece its early colonization." 1
127
128 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
adventurous spirits, and safety valves against agrarian discontent; it estab-
lished foreign markets for domestic products, and strategic depots for the
import of food and minerals. In the end it created a commercial empire
whose thriving interchange of .goods, arts, ways, and thoughts made pos-
sible the complex culture of Greece.
The migration followed five main linesAeolian, Ionian,, Dorian, Enxine,
Italian. The earliest began in the northern states of the mainland, which
were the first to feel the brunt of the invasions from the north and the west.
From Thessaly, Phthiotis, Boeotia, and Aetolia, throughout the twelfth
and eleventh centuries, a stream of immigrants moved slowly across the
Aegean to the region about Troy, and founded there the twelve cities of
the Aeolian League. The second line took its start in the Peloponnesus,
whence thousands of Mycenaeans and Achaeans fled on the "Return of the
Heraclids." Some of them settled in Attica, some in Euboea; many of them
moved out into the Cyclades, ventured across the Aegean, and established
in western Asia Minor the twelve cities of the Ionian Dodecapolis. The
third line was followed by Dorians who overflowed the Peloponnesus into
the Cyclades, conquered Crete and Cyrene, and set up a Dorian Hexapolis
around the island of Rhodes. The fourth line, starting anywhere in Greece,
settled the coast of Thrace, and built a hundred cities on the shores of the
Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine Sea. The fifth line moved west-
ward to what the Greeks called the Ionian Isles, thence across to Italy and
Sicily, and finally to Gaul and Spain.
Only a sympathetic imagination or a keen recollection of our own
colonial history can visualize the difficulties that were surmounted in this
century-long migration. It was an adventure of high moment to leave the
land consecrated by the graves of one's ancestors and guarded by one's
hereditary deities, and go forth into strange regions unprotected, pre-
sumably, by the gods of Greece. Therefore the colonists took with them
a handful of earth from their native state to strew upon the alien soil, and
solemnly carried fire from the public altar of their mother city to light the
civic fire at the hearth of their new settlement. The chosen site was on or
near a shore, where ships the second home of half the Greeks might serve
as a refuge from attack by land; better still if it were a coastal plain pro-
tected by mountains that provided a barrier in the rear, an acropolis for
defense in the town, and a promontory-sheltered harbor in the sea; best
of all if such a haven could be found on some commercial route, or by a
river mouth that received the products of the interior for export or ex-
change; then prosperity was only a matter of time, Good sites were nearly
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION I2p
always occupied, and had to be conquered by stratagem or force; the
Greeks, in such matters, recognized no morals loftier than our own. In
some cases the conquerors reduced the prior inhabitants to slavery, with
all the irony of pilgrims seeking freedom; more often they made friends
of the natives by bringing them Greek gifts, charming them with a su-
perior culture, courting their women, and adopting their gods; the colonial
Greeks did not bother about purity of race, 3 and could always find in their
teeming pantheon some deity sufficiently like the local divinity to facilitate
a religious entente. Above all, the colonists offered the products of the
Greek handicrafts to the natives, secured grain, cattle, or minerals in return,
and exported these throughout the Mediterranean preferably to the me-
tropolis, or mother city, from which the settlers had come, and to which
they retained for centuries a certain filial piety.
One by one these colonies took form, until Greece was no longer the
narrow peninsula of Homeric days, but a strangely loose association of
independent cities scattered from Africa to Thrace and from Gibraltar to
the eastern end of the Black Sea. It was an epochal performance for the
women of Greece; we shall not always find them so ready to have children.
Through these busy centers of vitality and intelligence the Greeks spread
into all of southern Europe the seeds of that subtle and precarious luxury
called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history
no meaning.
II. THE IONIAN CYCLADES
Sailing south from the Piraeus along the Attic coast, and bearing east
around Sunium's templed promontory, the traveler reaches the little isle
of Ceos, where, if we may believe the incredible on the authority of Strabo
and Plutarch, "there was once a law that appears to have commanded those
who were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might
be sufficient for the rest," and "there was no memory of a case of adultery
or seduction over a period of seven hundred years." 4
Perhaps that is why her greatest poet exiled himself from Ceos after
reaching middle age; lie might have found it difficult to attain, at home,
the eighty-seven years that Greek tradition gives him. All the Hellenic
world knew Simonides at thirty, and when he died, in 469, he was by
common consent the most brilliant writer of his time. His fame as poet
and singer won him an invitation from Hipparchus, codictator of Athens,
13 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VI
at whose court he found it possible to live in amity with another poet,
Anacreon. He survived the war with Persia, and was chosen again and
again to write epitaphs for memorials of the honored dead. In his old age
he lived at the court of Hieron I, dictator of Syracuse; and his repute was
then so high that in 475 he made peace in the field between Hieron and
Theron, dictator of Acragas, as hostilities were about to begin. 6 Plutarch,
in his perennially pertinent essay on "Should Old Men Govern?" tells us
that Simonides continued to win the prize for lyric poetry and choral
song into very old age. When finally he consented to die he was buried
at Acragas with the honors of a king.
He was a personality as well as a poet, and the Greeks denounced and
loved him for his vices and eccentricities. He had a passion for money,
and his muse was dumb in the absence of gold. He was the first to write
poetry for pay, on the ground that poets had as much right to eat as anyone
else; but the practice was new to Greece, and Aristophanes echoed the
resentment of the public when he said that Simonides "would go to sea on
a hurdle to earn a groat." 8 He prided himself on having invented a system of
mnemonics, which Cicero adopted gratefully; 7 its essential principle lay
in arranging the things to be remembered into some logical classification
and sequence, so that each item would naturally lead to the next. He was
a wit, and his sharp repartees passed like a mental currency among the
cities of Greece; but in his old age he remarked that he had often repented
of speaking, but never of holding his tongue. 8
We are surprised to find, in the extant fragments of a poet so widely
acclaimed and so liberally rewarded, that indispersible gloom which broods
over so much of Greek literature after Homer in whose days men were
too active to be pessimists, and too violent to be bored.
Few and evil are the days of our life; but everlasting will be our
sleep beneath the earth. . . . Small is the strength of man, and in-
vincible are his errors; grief treads upon the heels of grief through
his short life; and death, whom no man escapes, hangs over him at
last; to this come good and bad alike. . . . Nothing human is ever-
lasting. Well said the bard of Chios that the life of man is even as
that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope
is strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and
the heart of man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never
grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools
are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of our
youth and our life."
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 13!
No hope of Blessed Isles comforts Simonides, and the divinities of Olympus,
like those of Christianity in some modern verse, have become instruments
of poetry rather than consolations of the soul. When Hieron challenged
him to define the nature and attributes of God he asked for a day's time
to prepare his answer, and the next day begged for two days more, and
on each occasion doubled the period that he required for thought. When
at last Hieron demanded an explanation, Simonides replied that the longer
he pondered the matter the more obscure it became. 10
Out of Ceos came not only Simonides, but his nephew and lyric succes-
sor Bacchylides, and, in Alexandrian days, the great anatomist Erasistratus.
We cannot say so much for Seriphos, or Andros, or Tenos, or Myconos,
or Sicinos, or los. On Syros lived Pherecydes (ca. 550), who was reputed
to have taught Pythagoras, and to have been the first philosopher to write
in prose. On Delos, said Greek story, Apollo himself had been born. So
sacred was the island as his sanctuary that both death and birth were for-
bidden within its borders; those about to give birth or to die were hurriedly
conveyed from its shores; and all known graves were emptied that the
island might be purified. 11 There, after the repulse of the Persians, Athens
and her Ionian allies would keep the treasure of the Delian Confederacy;
there, every fourth year, the lonians met in pious but convivial assemblage
to celebrate the festival of the handsome god. A seventh-century hymn
describes the "women with fine girdles," 15 the eager merchants busy at their
booths, the crowds lining the road to watch the sacred procession; the
tense ritual and solemn sacrifice in the temple; the joyous dances and choral
hymns of Delian and Athenian maidens chosen for their comeliness as well
as their song; the athletic and musical contests, and the plays in the thea-
ter under the open sky. Annually the Athenians sent an embassy to Delos
to celebrate Apollo's birthday; and no criminal might be executed in Ath-
ens until this embassy's return. Hence the long interval, so fortunate for
literature and philosophy, between the conviction of Socrates and his exe-
cution.
Naxos is the largest, as Delos is almost the smallest, of the Cyclades. It
was famous for its wine and its marble, and became rich enough, in the
sixth century, to have its own navy and its own school of sculpture. South-
east of Naxos lies Amorgos, home of the unamiable Semonides, whose
ungallant satire on women has been carefully preserved by man-written
history.* To the west lies Paros, almost composed of marble; its citizens
* Semonides compares women now to foxes, asses, pigs, and the changeful sea, and swears
that no husband has ever passed through a day without some word of censure from his
wife."
132 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP.VI
made their homes of it, and Praxiteles found there the translucent stone
which he would carve and polish into the warmth and texture of human
flesh. On this island, about the end of the eighth century, Archilochus was
born, son of a slave woman, but one of the greatest lyric singers of Greece.
A soldier's fortune led him north to Thasos where, in a battle with the
natives, he found his heels more valuable than his shield; he took to the
one and abandoned the other, and lived to turn many a merry quip about
his flight. Back in Paros he fell in love with Neobule, daughter of the rich
Lycambes. He describes her as a modest lass with tresses falling over her
shoulders, and sighs, as so many centuries have sighed, "only to touch her
hand." 14 But Lycambes, admiring the poet's verses more than his income,
put an end to the affair; whereupon Archilochus aimed at him and Neobule
and her sister such barbs of satiric verse that all three of them, legend as-
sures us, hanged themselves. Archilochus turned his back sourly upon the
"figs and fishes" of Paros, and became again a soldier of fortune. Finally,
his heels having failed him, he was killed in battle against the Naxians.
We learn from his poems that he was a man of rough speech to both
friends and foes, with a disappointed lover's penchant for adultery. 15 We
picture him as an inspired pirate, a melodious buccaneer coarse in prose
and polished in verse; taking the iambic meter already popular in folk songs
and fashioning it into short and stinging lines of six feet; this was the
"iambic trimeter" that would become the classic medium of Greek tragedy.
He experimented gaily with dactylic hexameters, trochaic tetrameters, and
a dozen other meters,* and gave to Greek poetry the metrical forms that
it would keep to the end. Only a few broken lines survive, and we must
accept the word of the ancients that he was the most popular of all Greek
poets after Homer. Horace loved to imitate his technical diversities; and
the great Hellenistic critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, when asked which
of Archilochus' poems he liked best, voiced in two words the feeling of
Greece when he answered, "The longest." 10
A morning's sail west of Paros is Siphnos, famous for its mines of silver
and gold. These were owned by the people through their government.
The yield was so rich that the island could set up at Delphi the Siphnian
Treasury with its placid caryatides, erect many another monument, and yet
distribute a substantial balance among the citizens at the end of every
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 133
year. 17 In 524 a band of freebooters from Samos landed on the island and
exacted a tribute of a hundred talents the equivalent of $600,000 today.
The rest of Greece accepted this heroic robbery with the equanimity and
fortitude with which men are accustomed to bear the misfortunes of their
friends.
III. THE DORIAN OVERFLOW
The Dorians, too, colonized the Cyclades, and tamed their warlike spirits
to terrace the mountain slopes patiently, that the parsimonious ram might
be held and coaxed to nourish their crops and vines. In Melos they took over
from their Bronze Age predecessors the quarrying of obsidian, and made the
island so prosperous that the Athenians, as we shall see, spared no pains to
Melos to win its support in the struggle with Sparta. Here, in 1820, was found
that Aphrodite of Melos* which is now the most famous statue in the Western
world.
Moving east and then south, the Dorians conquered Thera and Crete, and
from Thera sent a further colony to Gyrene. A few of them settled in Cyprus,
where, from the eleventh century, a small colony of Arcadian Greeks had
struggled for mastery against the old Phoenician dynasties. It was one of these
Phoenician kinglets, Pygmalion, of whom legend told how he so admired an
ivory Aphrodite carved by his hands that he fell in love with it, begged the
goddess to give it life, and married his creation when the goddess complied. 18
The coming of iron probably lessened the demand for Cyprian copper, and
left the island off the main line of Greek economic advance. The cutting of
the timber by the natives to burn the copper ore, by the Phoenicians for ships
and by the Greeks for agricultural clearings, slowly transformed Cyprus into
the hot and half-barren derelict that it is today. The art of the island, like
its population, was in the Greek period a medley of Egyptian, Phoenician, and
Hellenic influences, and never attained a homogeneous character of its own.t
The Dorians were but a minority of the Greek population in Cyprus; but
in Rhodes and the southern Sporades and on the adjoining mainland they
became the ruling class. Rhodes prospered in the centuries between Homer
and Marathon, though its zenith would not come till the Hellenistic age. On a
promontory jutting out from Asia, Dorian settlers developed the city of Cnidus,
* Or, as we know it, from the Roman name of the goddess and the Italian name of the
island, the Venus de Milo.
fCf. Case XIII of the Cesnola Collection of Cyprian Antiquities in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. A bilingual tablet unearthed by British scholars in 1868 enabled
them to decipher Cypriote writing as a dialect of Greek expressed by syllabic signs; but the
results have not added anything of interest to universal history.
134 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP.\1
well situated to be a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus
would be born, and the historian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who
was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient tem-
ples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Museum.
Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of
Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born
here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the coast, was Hali-
carnassus, birthplace of Herodotus and royal seat, in Hellenistic days, of the
Carian King Mausolus and his fond Artemisia. This city, with Cos and Cnidus
and the chief towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Camirus, and lalysus) formed the
Dorian Hexapolis, or Six Cities, of Asia Minor weak rivals, for a time, of the
Twelve Cities of Ionia.
IV. THE IONIAN DODECAPOLIS
1. Miletus and the Birth of Greek Philosophy
Running northwest of Caria for some ninety miles was the strip of moun-
tainous coastland, twenty to thirty miles wide, anciently known as Ionia.
Here, said Herodotus, "the air and climate are the most beautiful in the
whole world." 10 Its cities lay for the most part at the mouths of rivers, or
at the ends of roads, that carried the goods of the hinterland down to
the Mediterranean for shipment everywhere.
Miletus, southernmost of the Ionian Twelve, was in the sixth century the
richest city of the Greek world. The site had been inhabited by Carians
from Minoan days; and when, about 1000 B.C., the lonians came there from
Attica, they found the old Aegean culture, though in a decadent form,
waiting to serve as the advanced starting point of their civilization. They
brought no women with them to Miletus, but merely killed the native
males and married the widows; 20 the fusion of cultures began with a fusion
of blood. Like most of the Ionian cities, Miletus submitted at first to kings
who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to
"tyrants" representing the middle class. Under the dictator Thrasybulus,
at the beginning of the sixth century, industry and trade reached their peak,
and the growing wealth of Miletus flowered forth in literature, philosophy,
and art. Wool was brought down from the rich pasture lands of the
interior, and turned into clothing in the textile mills of the city. Taking
a lesson from the Phoenicians and gradually bettering their instruction,
Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, the
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 135
Propontis, and the Euxine. Miletus alone had eighty such colonies, sixty
of them in the north. From Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, Trapezus, and
Dioscurias, Miletus drew flax, timber, fruit, and metals, and paid for these
with the products of her handicrafts. The wealth and luxury of the city
became a proverb and a scandal throughout Greece. Milesian merchants,
overflowing with profits, lent money to enterprises far and wide, and to
the municipality itself. They were the Medici of the Ionian Renaissance.
It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two
of its most characteristic gifts to the world science and philosophy. The
crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of
rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought;
superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins. Here in Miletus, as
later in Athens, were men from a hundred scattered states; mentally active
through competitive commerce, and freed from the bondage of tradition
by long absences from their native altars and homes. Milesians themselves
traveled to distant cities, and had their eyes opened by the civilizations of
Lydia, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; in this way, among others, Egyp-
tian geometry and Babylonian astronomy entered the Greek mind. Trade
and mathematics, foreign commerce and geography, navigation and astron-
omy, developed hand in hand. Meanwhile wealth had created leisure;
an aristocracy of culture was growing up in which freedom of thought
was tolerated because only a small minority could read. No powerful
priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men's thinking; even the
Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the
Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form; and in that final form their
mythology was to bear the imprint of Ionian skepticism and scandalous
merriment. Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought
rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.*
Nevertheless the new plant, mutation though it was, had its roots and
ancestry. The hoary wisdom of Egyptian priests and Persian Magi, per-
haps even of Hindu seers, the sacerdotal science of the Chaldeans, the
poetically personified cosmogony of Hesiod, were mingled with the natu-
ral realism of Phoenician and Greek merchants to produce Ionian philoso-
phy. Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate,
as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to
incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference
between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democ-
* Similar movements, however, appeared in India and China in this sixth century B.C.
l$6 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP.VI
racy. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve
this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is
the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.
Since life proceeds by heredity as well as by variation, by stabilizing cus-
tom as well as by experimental innovation, it was to be expected that the
religious roots of philosophy would form as well as feed it, and there should
remain in it, to the very end, a vigorous element of theology. Two cur-
rents run side by side in the history of Greek philosophy: one naturalistic,
the other mystical. The latter stemmed from Pythagoras, and ran through
Parmenides, Heracleitus, Plato, and Cleanthes to Plotinus and St. Paul; the
other had its first world figure in Thales, and passed down through Anaxi-
mander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Hippocrates, and Democritus to Epicurus
and Lucretius. Now and then some great spirit Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus
Aurelius merged the two currents in an attempt to do justice to the un-
formulable complexity of life. But even in these men the dominant strain,
characteristic of Greek thought, was the love and pursuit of reason.
Thales was bom about 640, probably at Miletus, reputedly of Phoeni-
cian parentage, 21 and derived much of his education from Egypt and the
Near East; here, as if personified, we see the transit of culture from East
to West. He appears to have engaged in business only so far as to provide
himself with the ordinary goods of life; everyone knows the story of his
successful speculation in oil presses.* For the rest he gave himself to study,
with the absorbed devotion suggested by the tale of his falling into a ditch
while watching the stars. Despite his solitude, he interested himself in the
affairs of his city, knew the dictator Thrasybulus intimately, and advo-
cated the federation of the Ionian states for united defense against Lydia
and Persia. 23
To him tradition unanimously ascribed the introduction of mathematical
and astronomical science into Greece. Antiquity told how, in Egypt, he
calculated the heights of the pyramids by measuring their shadows when
a man's shadow equaled his height. Returning to Ionia, Thales pursued the
fascinatingly logical study of geometry as a deductive science, and demon-
* Let Aristotle tell the story: "They say that Thales, perceiving by his skill in astrology
(astronomy) that there would be great plenty of olives that year, while it was yet winter
hired at a low price all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios, there being no one to bid against
him. But when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once
let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of money by that means, con-
vinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it." 22
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 137
strated several of the theorems later collected by Euclid.* As these theorems
founded Greek geometry, so his studies of astronomy established that sci-
ence for Western civilization, and disentangled it from its Oriental asso-
ciations with astrology. He made several minor observations, and startled
all Ionia by successfully predicting an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585
B.C., 25 probably on the basis of Egyptian records and Babylonian calcula-
tions. For the rest his theory of the universe was not appreciably superior
to the current cosmology of the Egyptians and the Jews. The world, he
thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the
earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere.
We are reminded of Goethe's remark that a man's vices (or errors) are
common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.
As some Greek myths made Oceanus the father of all creation, 28 so
Thales made water the first principle of all things, their original form and
their final destiny. Perhaps, says Aristotle, he had come to this opinion
from observing "that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that . . .
the seeds of everything have a moist nature; . . . and that from which every-
thing is generated is always its first principle." 27 Or perhaps he believed
that water was the most primitive or fundamental of the three forms gas,
liquid, solid into which, theoretically, all substances may be changed.
The significance of his thought lay not in reducing all things to water, but
in reducing all things to one; here was the first monism in recorded history.
Aristotle describes Thales' view as materialistic; but Thales adds that
every particle of the world is alive, that matter and life are inseparable and
one, that there is an immortal "soul" in plants and metals as well as in
animals and men; the vital power changes form, but never dies. 28 Thales
was wont to say that there is no essential difference between living and
dead. When someone sought to nettle him by asking why, then, he chose
life instead of death, he answered, "Because there, is no difference." 29
In his old age he received by common consent the title of sophos, or sage;
and when Greece came to name its Seven Wise Men it placed Thales first.
Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm,
"To know thyself." Asked what was very easy, he answered, "To give
advice." To the question, what is God? he replied, "That which has
neither beginning nor end." Asked how men might live most virtuously
* That a circle is bisected by its diameter; that the angles at the base of any isosceles tri-
angle are "similar" (i.e., equal) ; that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle; that the op-
posite angles formed by two intersecting straight lines are equal; that two triangles having
two angles and one side respectively equal are themselves equal.*
138 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
and justly, he answered, "If we never do ourselves what we blame in
others." 80 He died, says Diogenes Laertius, 31 "while present as a spectator
at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness,
for he was very old."
Thales, says Strabo, 82 was the first of those who wrote on physiologist
i.e., on the science of nature (physis) , or on the principle of being and 1 de-
velopment in things. His work was vigorously advanced by his pupil
Anaximander, who, though he lived from 611 to 549 B.C., expounded a
philosophy surprisingly like that which Herbert Spencer, trembling before
his own originality, published in A.D. 1860. The first principle, says Anaxi-
mander, was a vast Indefinite-Infinite (apeiron) , a boundless mass possessing
no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied
realities of the universe.* This animate and eternal but impersonal and
unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander 's system; it is the unvary-
ing and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many
of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School
that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born
new worlds in endless succession, and to it in endless succession they return
as they evolve and die. In the primordial Infinite all opposites are con-
tainedhot and cold, moist and dry, liquid and solid and gas . . . ; in devel-
opment these potential qualities become actual, and make diverse and definite
things; in dissolution these opposed qualities are again resolved into the
Infinite. (A source for Heracleitus as well as for Spencer.) In this rise
and fall of worlds the various elements struggle with one another, and
encroach upon each other as hostile opposites. For this opposition they
pay with dissolution; "Things perish into those from which they have been
born."
Anaximander, though he too can be guilty of astronomic bizarferies for-
givable in an age without instruments, advanced on Thales by conceiving
the earth as a cylinder freely suspended in the center of the universe, and
sustained only by being equidistant from all things. 31 The sun, moon, and
stars, he thought, moved in circles around the earth. To illustrate all this
Anaximander, probably on Babylonian models, constructed at Sparta a
gnomon, or sundial, on which he showed the movement of the planets, the
* Cf. Spencer's definition of evolution as substantially a change from "indefinite, incoherent
homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity." 33
GHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 139
obliquity of the ecliptic,* and the succession of solstices, equinoxes, and
seasons." 6 With the collaboration of his fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, he
established geography as a science by drawing apparently upon a tablet
of brass the first known map of the inhabited world, t
In its earliest form, said Anaximander, the earth was in a fluid state;
external heat dried some of it into land, and evaporated some of it into
clouds; while the variations of heat in the atmosphere so formed caused
the motions of the winds. Living organisms arose by gradual stages from
the original moisture; land animals were at first fishes, and only with the
drying of the earth did they acquire their present shape. Man too was once
a fish; he could not at his earliest appearance have been born as now, for
he would have been too helpless to secure his food, and would have been
destroyed. 88
A slighter figure is Anaximander's pupil Anaximenes, whose first prin-
ciple was air. All other elements are produced from air by rarefaction,
which gives fire, or by condensation, which forms progressively wind,
cloud, water, earth, and stone. As the soul, which is air, holds us together,
so the air, or fneuma., of the world is its pervasive spirit, breath, or God. 87
Here was an idea that would ride out all the storms of Greek philosophy,
and find a haven in Stoicism and Christianity.
This heyday of Miletus produced not only the earliest philosophy, but
the earliest prose, and the first historiography, in Greece. | Poetry seems
natural to a nation's adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowl-
edge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field,
wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism
to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imag-
ination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, "prosaic" affairs;
it is the emblem of a nation's maturity, and the epitaph of its youth. Up
to this time (600) nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic form; edu-
cation had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early
philosophers, like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, gave their
this circl
obliqi. .
orbit around the sun.
U1U1L UJ-UUllU U1C OU11.
f The Egyptians had drawn maps, but of limited districts.
$ The wise reader will always supply the word known after such words as earliest and
first.
140 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
systems a poetic dress. Just as science was at first a form of philosophy,
struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable,
so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from
mythology, animism, and metaphor.
It was therefore an event when Pherecydes and Anaximander expounded
their doctrines in prose. Other men of the age, whom the Greeks called logo-
graphoixtason writers, prose writers began to chronicle in the new medium
the annals of their states; so Cadmus (550) wrote a chronicle of Miletus, Eu-
gaeon wrote of Samos, Xanthus wrote of Lydia. Towards the end of the cen-
tury Hecataeus of Miletus advanced both history and geography in epochal
works the Historiai, or Inquiries, and the Ges -periodos, or Circuit of the Earth.
The latter divided the known planet into two continents, Europe and Asia,
and included Egypt in Asia; if (as many doubt) the existing fragments are
genuine, it was especially informative about Egypt, and provided a rich field
for unacknowledged poaching by Herodotus. The Histories began with a
skeptical blast: "I write what I consider to be the truth; for the traditions of
the Greeks seem to me many and ridiculous." Hecataeus accepted Homer as
history, and swallowed some tales with his eyes shut; nevertheless he made an
honest effort to distinguish fact from myth, to trace real genealogies, and to ar-
rive at a credible history of the Greeks. Greek historiography was old when the
"Father of History" was born.
To Hecataeus and the other logo graph oi who appeared in this age in most
of the cities and colonies of Hellas, historia* meant any inquiry into the facts
of any matter, and was applied to science and philosophy as well as to historiog-
raphy in the modern sense. The term had a skeptical connotation in Ionia;
it signified that the miracle stories of gods and demigod heroes were to be
replaced with secular records of events, and rational interpretations of causes
and effects. In Hecataeus the process begins; in Herodotus it advances; in
Thucydides it is complete.
The poverty of Greek prose before Herodotus is bound up with the
conquest and impoverishment of Miletus in the very generation in which
prose literature began. Internal decay followed the custom of history in
smoothing the path of the conqueror. The growth of wealth and luxury
made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed anti-
quated and absurd; it became a byword among the Greeks that "once upon
a time the Milesians were brave." 88 Competition for the goods of the earth
* From histor or istor, knowing; a euphonism for id-tor, from the root id in eidenat, to
know; cf. our wit and wisdom. Story is a shortened form of history.
CHAP. VI) THE GREAT MIGRATION 14!
became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giv-
ing scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak. The rich, support-
ing an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor,
who wanted a democracy. The poor secured control of the government,
expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on thresh-
ing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death. The
rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with
pitch, and then burnt them alive. 30 De nobis fabula narrabitur. When, about
560, Croesus began to subject to Lydian rule the Greek coast of Asia from
Cnidus to the Hellespont, Miletus saved its independence by refusing to
help her sister states. But in 546 Cyrus conquered Lydia, and without
much difficulty absorbed the faction-torn cities of Ionia into the Persian
Empire. The great age of Miletus was over. Science and philosophy, in
the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom
is a harbinger of death.
2. Poly crates of Samos
Across the bay from Miletus, near the outlets of the Maeander, stood the
modest town of Myus, and the more famous city of Priene. There, in the
sixth century, lived Bias, one of the Seven Wise Men. As Hermippus said,
the Seven Wise Men were seventeen; for different Greeks made different
lists of them, most frequently agreeing upon Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus
of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth, Cmlon of Sparta, and Cleobolus of Lin-
dus in Rhodes. Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as
Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally re-
spects economic enterprise. The heroes of Greece were not saints, or
artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not
theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the
world. The sayings of these men became proverbial among the Greeks,
and were in some cases inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Peo-
ple liked to quote, for example, the remarks of Bias that the most unfor-
tunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; that men
ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and
a short time; and that "wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling
from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession." 40
West of Priene lay Samos, second largest of Ionia's isles. The capital
stood on the southeastern shore; and as one entered the well-protected har-
I4 2 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VI
bor, passing the famous red ships of the Samian fleet, the city rose as if in
tiers on the hill: first the wharves and shops, then the homes, then the
fortress-acropolis and the great temple of Hera; and behind these a succes-
sion of ranges and peaks rising to a height of five thousand feet. It was a
sight to stir the patriotism of every Samian soul.
The zenith of Samos came in the third quarter of the sixth century, under
Polycrates. The revenues from the busy port enabled the dictator to end
a dangerous period of unemployment by a program, of public works that
called forth the admiration of Herodotus. The greatest of these under-
takings was a tunnel that carried the city's water supply 4500 feet through
a mountain; we catch some idea of Greek ability in mathematics and engi-
neering when we learn that the two bores, begun at opposite ends, met in
the center with an error of eighteen feet in direction and nine in height.* 11
Samos had been a cultured center long before Polycrates. Here, about
590, the fabulous Aesop had been the Phrygian slave of the Greek ladmon.
An unconfirmed tradition tells how ladmon freed him, how Aesop traveled
widely, met Solon, lived at the court of Croesus, embezzled the money
that Croesus had commissioned him to distribute at Delphi, and met a vio-
lent death at the hands of the outraged Delphians.^ His fables, largely
taken from Eastern sources, were well known at Athens in the classic age;
Socrates, says Plutarch, put them into verse/ 3 Though their form was
Oriental, their philosophy was characteristically Greek. "Sweet are the
beauties of Nature, the earth and sea, the stars, and the orbs of sun and
moon. But all the rest is fear and pain," M especially if one embezzles. We
can still meet him in the Vatican, where a cup from the Periclean age rep-
resents him with half -bald head and Vandyke beard, listening profitably to
a merry f ox
The great Pythagoras was born in Samos, but left it in 529 to live at Cro~
tona in Italy. Anacreon came from Teos to sing Polycrates' charms and
to tutor his son. The greatest figure at the court was the artist Theodoras,
the Leonardo of Samos, Jack-of-all-trades and master of most. The Greeks
ascribed to him, perhaps as a cloture on research, the invention of the level,
the square, and the lathe; 10 he was a skilled engraver of gems, a metalworker,
stoneworker, woodworker, sculptor, and architect. He took part in de-
signing the second temple of Artemis at Ephesus, built a vast skias } or
pavilion, for Sparta's public assemblies, helped to introduce clay modeling
* Similar enterprises today make both ends meet with an error of only a few inches, of
none.
CHAP. VI) THE GREAT MIGRATION 143
into Greece, and shared with Rhoecus the honor of bringing from Egypt
or Assyria to Samos the hollow casting of bronze. 47 Before Theodoras the
Greeks had made crude bronze statues by riveting plates of the metal to a
"bridge" of wood;* 8 now they were prepared to produce such masterpieces
in bronze as the Charioteer of Delphi and the Discus Thrower of Myron,
Samos was famous also for its pottery; Pliny recommends it to us by
telling us that the priests of Cybele would use nothing but Samian potsherds
in depriving themselves of their manhood. 1 "*
3. Heracleitus of Ephesus
Across the Caystrian Gulf from Samos stood Ionia's most famous city
Ephesus. Founded about 1000 by colonists from Athens, it prospered by
tapping the trade of both the Cayster and the Maeander. Its population, its
religion, and its art contained a strong Eastern element; the Artemis wor-
shiped there began and ended as an Oriental goddess of motherhood and
fertility. Her renowned temple had many deaths, and almost as many
resurrections. On the site of an ancient altar twice built and twice de-
stroyed, the first temple was erected about 600, and was probably the
earliest important edifice in the Ionic style. The second temple was raised
about 540, partly through the generosity of Croesus; Paeonius of Ephesus,
Theodoras of Samos, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine, shared in de-
signing it. It was the largest Greek temple that had yet been built, and
was ranked without dispute among the Seven Wonders of the World.*
The city was known not only for its temple but for its poets, its philoso-
phers, and its expensively gowned women. 61 Here, as early as 690 B.C., lived
Callinus, the earliest known elegiac poet of Greece. Far greater and uglier
was Hipponax, who, towards 550, composed poems so coarse in subject,
obscure in language, pointed in wit, and refined in metrical style, that all
Greece began to talk about him, and all Ephesus to hate him. He was short
and thin, lame and deformed, and completely disagreeable. Woman, he
tells us, in one of his surviving fragments, brings two days of happiness to
a man "one when he marries her, the other when he buries her." 53 He
was a ruthless satirist, and lampooned every notable in Ephesus from the
"The other six were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos at Alexandria, the
Colossus of Rhodes, the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus,
and the Pyramids. Pliny describes the second temple as 425 feet long by 225 feet wide, with
127 columns sixty feet in height several of them adorned or disfigured with reliefs. 50 Com-
pleted in 420 B.C. after more than a century of labor, it vas destroyed by fire in 356.
144 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VI
lowest criminal to the highest priest of the temple. When two sculptors,
Bupalus and Athenis, exhibited an elegant caricature of him he attacked
them with such corrosive verse that some of it has proved more durable
than their stone, and sharper than the teeth of time. "Hold my coat," says
a typically polished morsel; "I shall hit Bupalus in the eye. I am ambidex-
trous, and I never miss my aim." 53 Tradition said that Hipponax died by
suicide; but perhaps this was only a universal wish.
The most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus the Obscure. Born
about 530, he belonged to a noble family, and thought that democracy was
a mistake. "There are many bad but few good," he said ( 1 1 1*)> and "one
man to me is as ten thousand if he be the best" (113). But even aristocrats
did not please him, nor women, nor scholars. "Abundant learning," he
wrote with genial particularity, "does not form the mind; if it did it would
have instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus" (16).
"For the only real wisdom is to know that idea which by itself will govern
everything on every occasion" (19). So he went off, like a Chinese sage,
to live in the mountains and brood over the one idea that would explain
all things. Disdaining to expound his conclusions in words intelligible to
common men, and seeking in obscurity of life and speech some safety
from individuality-destroying parties and mobs, he expressed his views in
pithy and enigmatical apophthegms On Nature, which he deposited in the
temple of Artemis for the mystification of posterity.
Heracleitus has been represented in modern literature as building his
philosophy around the notion of change; but the extant fragments hardly
support this interpretation. Like most philosophers he longed to find the
One behind the Many, some mind-steadying unity and order amid the
chaotic flux and multiplicity of the world. "All things are one," he said,
as passionately as Parmenides ( i ) ; the problem of philosophy was, what is
this one? Heracleitus answered, Fire. Perhaps he was influenced by the
Persian worship of fire; probably, as we may judge from his identification
of Fire with Soul and God, he used the term symbolically as well as liter-
ally, to mean energy as well as fire; the fragments permit no certainty.
"This world . . . was made neither by a god nor by man, but it ever was,
and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in
measures going out" (20). Everything is a form of Fire, either in Fire's
"downward path" through progressive condensation into moisture, water,
*The parenthetical numbers refer to the fragments of Heracleitus as numbered by
Bywater.
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 145
and earth; or in its "upward path" from earth to water to moisture to
Fire.* 54
Though he finds a consoling constancy in the Eternal Fire, Heracleitus
is troubled by its endless transformations; and the second nucleus of his
thought is the eternity and ubiquity of change. He finds nothing static
in the universe, the mind, or the soul. Nothing is, everything becomes; no
condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is
ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be. Here is a new
emphasis in philosophy: Heracleitus does not merely ask, like Thales, what
things are, but, like Anaximander, Lucretius, and Spencer, how they be-
came what they are; and he suggests, like Aristotle, that a study of the sec-
ond question is the best approach to the first. The extant apophthegms do
not contain the famous formula, panta rei, ouden me7iei"all things flow,
nothing abides"; but antiquity is unanimous in attributing it to Heracleitus. 58
"You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flow-
ing on to you" (41) ; "we are and we are not" (81) ; here, as in Hegel, the
universe is a vast Becoming. Multiplicity, variety, change are as real as
unity, identity, being; the Many are as real as the One. BT The Many are the
One; every change is a passage of things towards or from the condition of
Fire. The One is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change.
Hence Heracleitus passes to the third element in his philosophy the
unity of opposites, the interdependence of contraries, the harmony of
strife. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit
and hunger" (36). "Good and bad are the same; goodness and badness
are one" (57-8); "life and death are the same; so are waking and sleeping,
youth and age" (78) . All these contraries are stages in a fluctuating move-
ment, moments of the ever-changing Fire; each member in an opposing
pair is necessary to the meaning and existence of the other; reality is the
tension and interplay, the alternation and exchange, the unity and har-
* Possibly Heracleitus had in mind a nebular hypothesis: the world begins as fire (or heat
or energy) , it becomes gas or moisture, which is precipitated as water, whose chemical residue,
after evaporation, forms the solids of the earth. 55 Water and earth (liquid and solid) are two
stages of one process, two forms of one reality (25) . "All things are exchanged for Fire, and
Fire for all things" (22). All change is a "pathway down or up," a passage from one to
another form now more, now less, condensed of energy or Fire. "The path upwards and
downwards is one and the same" (69) ; rarefaction and condensation are movements in an
eternal oscillation of change; all things are formed on the downward and condensing or on
the upward and rarefying pathway of reality from Fire and back to Fire; all forms are modes
of one underlying energy. In Spinoza's language: Fire or energy is the eternal and omni-
oresent substance, or basic principle; condensation and rarefaction (the downward and up-
ward paths) are its attributes; its modes or specific forms are the visible things of the worl^
146 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VI
mony, of opposites. "They understand not how that which is at variance
with itself agrees with itself. There sits attunement of opposite tensions,
like that of the bow and the harp" (45). As the tension of the string,
loosened or drawn taut, creates the harmony of vibrations called music
or a note, so the alternation and strife of opposites creates the essence
and meaning and harmony of life and change. In the struggle of organism
with organism, of man with man, of man with woman, of generation with
generation, of class with class, of nation with nation, of idea with idea, of
creed with creed, the warring opposites are the warp and woof on the
loom of life, working at cross-purposes to produce the unseen unity and
hidden concord of the whole. "From things that differ comes the fairest
attunement" (46) ; any lover will understand.
All three of these principles fire, change, and the tension unity of con-
trariesenter into Heracleitus' conception of soul and God. He smiles at
men who "seek in vain to purify themselves from blood-guiltiness by de-
filing themselves with blood" (130), or who "offer prayers to these statues
here as if one should try to converse with houses; such men know noth-
ing of the real nature of gods" (126). Nor will he admit personal im-
mortality; man too, like everything else, is a changeful and fitful flame,
"kindled and put out like a light in the night" (77) . Even so, man is Fire;
the soul or vital principle is part of the eternal energy in all things; and
as such it never dies. Death and birth are arbitrary points taken in the
current of things by the human analyzing mind; but from the impartial
standpoint of the universe they are merely phases in the endless change of
forms. At every instant some part of us dies while the whole lives; at every
second one of us dies while Life lives. Death is a beginning as well as, an
ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts,
even our morals, are prejudices, and represent our interests as parts or
groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. "To God all
things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong
and some right" (61).
As the soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life,
so God is the everlasting Fire, the indestructible energy of the world. He
is the unity binding all opposites, the harmony of all tensions, the sum and
meaning of all strife. This Divine Fire, like life (for the two are every-
where and one), is always altering its form, always passing upward or
downward on the ladder of change, always consuming and remaking
things; indeed, some distant day, "Fire will judge and convict all things"
(26), destroy them, and make way for new forms, in a Last Judgment
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 147
or cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the operations of the Undying Fire
are not without sense and order; if we could understand the world as a
whole we should see in it a vast impersonal wisdom, a Logos or Reason or
Word (65); and we should try to mold our lives into accord with this
way of Nature, this law of the universe, this wisdom or orderly energy
which is God (91). "It is wise to hearken not to me, but to the Word"
( i ) , to seek and follow the infinite reason of the whole.
When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his
thought energy, change, the unity of opposites, and the reason of the
whole he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason,
wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon;
"in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same
things and always beginning afresh" (72-3). The mutual necessity of con-
traries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering
of life. "For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is diseas'e
that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest" (104).
He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world (43); without
this tension of opposites there would be no "attunement," no weaving of
the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it
is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function in-
dispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age) .
The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be
separated from the worse, and may generate the highest. "Strife is the
father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and
some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free" (44) . In the
end, "strife is justice" (62); the competition of individuals, groups, species,
institutions, and empires constitutes nature's supreme court, from whose
verdict there is no appeal.
All in all, the philosophy of Heracleitus, concentrated for us now in 1 30
fragments, is among the major products of the Greek mind. The theory
of the Divine Fire passed down into Stoicism; the notion of a final con-
flagration was transmitted through Stoicism to Christianity; the Logos, or
reason in nature, became in Philo and Christian theology the Divine Word,
the personified wisdom with which or through whom God creates and
governs all things; in some measure it prepared for the early modern view
of natural law. Virtue as obedience to nature became a catchword of
Stoicism; the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel; the idea of
change came back into its own with Bergson. The conception of strife
and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, an&
14$ THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
Nietzsche who carries on, after twenty-four centuries, the war of Hera-
cleitus against democracy.
We know almost nothing of Heracleitus' life; and of his death we have
only an unsupported story in Diogenes Laertius, which may illustrate the
prosaic ends to which our poetry may return:
And at last becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to spend
his time walking about the mountains, feeding on grasses and plants;
and in consequence of these habits he was attacked by the dropsy,
and so he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle,
whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather.
And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable
for oxen, and covered himself with cow dung, hoping to cause the
wet to evaporate from him by the warmth that this produced. And
as he did himself no good in this way, he died, having lived seventy
years. 58
4. Anacreon of Teas
Colophon, a few miles north of Ephesus, derived its name, presumably,
from the hill on whose slope it rose.* Xenophanes the anticlerical, born
among them about 576, described the Colophonians as "richly clothed in
purple garments, proud of their luxuriously dressed hair wet with costly
and sweet-smelling oils"; vanity has a long history. 00 Here, and perhaps at
Smyrna, the poet Mimnermus (610) sang, for a people already infected
with the languid pessimism of the East, his melancholy odes of fleeting
youth and love. He lost his heart to Nanno, the girl who accompanied his
songs with the plaintive obbligato of the flute; and when she rejected his
love (perhaps on the ground that a poet married is a poet dead), he im-
mortalized her with a sheaf of delicate elegiac verse.
We blossom like the leaves that come in Spring,
What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth's gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know;
But always at the goal dark spirits stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death, within her hand. 111
* Gk. kolophon, hill; cf. Latin collis, Eng. hill. Because the cavalry of the city was famous
for giving the "finishing touch" to a defeated force, the word kolophon became in Greek a
synonym for the final stroke, and passed into our language as a publisher's symbol, originally
placed at the end of a book."
CHAP.Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 149
A more famous poet lived a century later in the near-by town of Teos.
Anacreon wandered much, but in Teos he was born (563) and died (478).
Many a court sought him, for among his contemporaries only Simonides
rivaled him in fame. We find him joining a band of emigrants to Thracian
Abdera, serving as soldier for a campaign or two, abandoning his shield in
the poetic fashion of the time, and thereafter content to brandish a pen;
spending some years at the court of Poly crates in Samos; brought thence
in official state, on a fifty-oared galley, to grace the palace of Hipparchus
in Athens; and at last, after the Persian War, returning to Teos to ease
his declining years with song and drink. He paid for his excesses by living
to a great age, and died at eighty-five, we are told, of a grape pit sticking
in his throat. 83
Alexandria knew five books of Anacreon, but only disordered couplets
remain. His subjects were wine, women, and boys; his manner was one
of polished banter in tripping iambics. No topic seemed impure in his
impeccable diction, or gross in his delicate verse. Instead of the vulgar
virulence of Hipponax, or the trembling intensity of Sappho, Anacreon
offered the urbane chatter of a court poet who would play Horace to any
Augustus that pleased his fancy and paid for his wine. Athenaeus thinks
that his tipsy songs and changeful loves were a pose; 63 perhaps Anacreon
hid his fidelities that he might be interesting to women, and concealed his
sobriety to augment his fame. A choice legend tells how, in his cups, he
stumbled against a child and abused it with harsh words, and how, in his
age, he fell in love with this lad and did penance with doting praise."* His
Eros was ambidextrous, and reached impartially for either sex; but in his
later years he gallantly gave the preference to women, "Lo, now," says
a pretty fragment, "golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball, and
calls me forth to play with a motley-slippered maid. But she hails from
lofty Lesbos, and so finds fault with my white hair, and goes a-searching
for other prey." 06 A wit of a later age wrote for Anacreon's grave a reveal-
ing epitaph:
All-enchanting nurse of the wine, O Vine, grow lush and long
above the tomb of Anacreon. So shall the tippling friend of neat
liquor, who thrummed in night-long revel the lute of a lover of lads,
yet sport above his buried head the glorious cluster of some teem-
ing bough, and be wet evermore with the dew whose delicious scent
was the breath of his mild old mouth." 1
150 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP.VI
5. Chios, Smyrna, Phocaea
From Teos the mainland staggers westward in vacillating bays and promon-
tories until, across ten miles of sea, the traveler reaches Chios. Here, amid
groves of figs and olives, and Anacreontic vines, Homer may have spent his
youth. Wine making was a major industry in Chios, and used many slaves;
in 43 1 the island had 30,000 freemen, 100,000 slaves. 67 Chios became a clearing-
house for slaves; slave dealers bought the families of insolvent debtors from
their creditors, and purchased boys to make eunuchs of them for the palaces
of Lydia and Persia. 08 In the sixth century Drimachus led his fellow slaves in
revolt, defeated all armies sent against him, established himself in a mountain
fastness, levied toll upon the richer citizens by discriminating robbery, offered
them "protection" for a consideration after our own fashion, terrified them
into dealing more justly with their slaves, gave his voluntarily severed head to
his friends so that they might claim the reward that had been promised for it,
and was worshiped for centuries afterward as the patron deity of slaves:" 9 here'
is an excellent epic for some Spartacus of the pen. Art and literature flourished
amid the wealth and bondage of Chios; here the Homeridae, a guild and succes-
sion of bards, had their seat; here Ion the dramatist and Theopompus the his-
torian would be born; here Glaucus (tradition said) discovered, about 560, the
technique of welding iron; here Archermus and his sons, Bupalus and Athenis,
made the finest statuary in sixth-century Greece.
Returning to the mainland, the traveler passes by the sites of Erythrae and
Clazomenae birthplace of Pericles' teacher and friend, Anaxagoras. Farther
east, on a well-sheltered inlet, is Smyrna. Settled by Aeolians as far back as
10 1 5* it was changed by immigration and conquest into an Ionian city. Already
famous in the days of Achilles, sacked by Alyattes of Lydia about 600 B.C.,
destroyed again and again, and recently by the Greeks in A.D. 1924, Smyrna,
rivaling Damascus in age, has known all the vicissitudes of history.* The re-
mains of the ancient town suggest its rich and varied life; a gymnasium, an
'acropolis, a stadium, and a theater have been dug out of the earth. The avenues"
were broad and well paved; temples and palaces adorned them; the main
street, called Golden, was famous throughout Greece.
The northernmost of Ionia's cities was Phocaea, still functioning as Folda.
The river Hermus connected it almost with Sardis itself, and gave it a lucrative
advantage in the commerce of the Greeks with Lydia. Phocaean merchants
undertook distant voyages in the search for markets; it was they who brought
Greek culture to Corsica, and founded Marseilles.
* Today, under the name of Ismir (this and Smyrna are probably connected with the
ancient trade in myrrh), it is the second city of Turkey in population, and the largest in
Asia Minor.
CHAP. Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION l$l
Such were the Twelve Cities of Ionia, seen superficially as if in an hour's
flight through space and time. Though they were too competitive and
jealous to form a union for mutual defense, their citizens acknowledged
some solidarity of background and interest, and met periodically on the
promontory of Mycale near Priene, in the great festival of the Panionium.
Thales begged them to form a sympolity in which every adult male would
be a citizen both of his city and of a Panionian union; but commercial
rivalries were too strong, and led rather to internecine wars than to politi-
cal unity. Hence, when the Persian attack came (546-5), the alliance im-
provised for defense proved rootlessly weak, and the Ionian cities came
under the power of the Great King. Nevertheless this spirit of independ-
ence and rivalry gave to the Ionian communities the stimulus of competi-
tion and the zest of liberty. It was under these conditions that Ionia devel-
oped science, philosophy, history, and the Ionic capital, while at the same
time it produced so many poets that the sixth century in Hellas seems
almost as fertile as the fifth. When Ionia fell her cities bequeathed their
culture to the Athens that had fought to save them, and transmitted to it
the intellectual leadership of Greece.
V. SAPPHO OF LESBOS
Above the Ionian Dodecapolis lay the twelve cities of mainland Aeolis,
settled by Aeolians and Achaeans from northern Greece soon after the fall
of Troy had opened Asia Minor to Greek immigration. Most of these
cities were small, and played a modest role in history; but the Aeolian isle
of Lesbos rivaled the Ionian centers in wealth, refinement, and literary
genius. Its volcanic soil made the island a very garden of orchards
and vines. Of its five cities Mytilene was the greatest, almost as rich,
through its commerce, as Miletus, Samos, and Ephesus. Towards the end
of the seventh century a coalition of the mercantile classes with the poorer
citizens overthrew the landed aristocracy, and made the brave, rough Pit-
tacus dictator for ten years, with powers like those of his friend and fellow
Wise Man, Solon. The aristocracy conspired to recapture power, but
Pittacus foiled them and exiled their leaders, including Alcaeus and Sappho,
first from Mytilene and then from Lesbos itself.
Alcaeus was a roistering firebrand who mingled politics with poetry
and made every other lyric raise the tocsin of revolt. Of aristocratic birth,
he attacked Pittacus with a lusty scurrility that merited the crown of ban-
ishment. He molded his own poetic forms, to which posterity gave the
152 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
name "alcaics"; and every stanza, we are told, had melody and charm. For
a while he sang of war, and described his home as hung with martial tro-
phies and accouterments; 71 however, when his own chance for heroism
came he threw away his shield, fled like Archilochus, and complimented
himself lyrically on the valor of his discretion. Occasionally he sang of
love, but dearest to his pen was the wine for which Lesbos was as famous
as for its poetry. Nun chre methusthen, he advises us: mine bibamus, let
us drink deeply; in summer to cool our thirst, in autumn to put a bright
color upon death, in winter to warm our blood, in spring to celebrate
nature's resurrection.
The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heaven
A storm is driven,
And on the running water-brooks the cold
Lays icy hold.
Then up! beat down the winter, make the fire
Blaze higher and higher;
Mix wine as sweet as honey of the bee
Abundantly;
Then drink, with comfortable wool around
Your temples bound.
We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wear
With wasting care;
For grief will profit us no whit, my friend,
Nor nothing mend;
But this is our best medicine, with wine fraught
To cast out thought. 72
It was his misfortune though he bore it with lighthearted unconscious-
nessto have among his contemporaries the most famous of Greek women.
Even in her lifetime all Greece honored Sappho. "One evening over the
wine," says Stobaeus, "Execestides, the nephew of Solon, sang a song of
Sappho's which his uncle liked so much that he bade the boy teach it to
him; and when one of the company asked, 'What for?' he answered, 'I
want to learn it and die!' " TO Socrates, perhaps hoping for similar lenience,
called her "The Beautiful," and Plato wrote about her an ecstatic epigram:
Some say there are Nine Muses. Flow careless they are!
Behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the Tenth! *
"Sappho was a marvelous woman," said Strabo; "for in all the time of which
we have record I do not know of any woman who could rival her even
CHAP. VI ) THE GREAT MIGRATION 153
in a slight degree in the matter of poetry." 76 As the ancients meant Homer
when they said "the Poet," so all the Greek world knew whom men
signified when they spoke of "the Poetess."
Psappha, as she called herself in her soft Aeolic dialect, was born at
Eresus, on Lesbos, about 612; but her family moved to Mytilene when
she was still a child. In 593 she was among the conspiring aristocrats whom
Pittacus banished to the town of Pyrrha; already at nineteen she was play-
ing a part in public life through politics or poetry. She was not known
for beauty: her figure was small and frail, her hair and eyes and skin were
darker than the Greeks desired; 76 but she had the charm of daintiness, deli-
cacy, refinement, and a brilliant mind that was not too sophisticated to
conceal her tenderness. "My heart," she says, "is like that of a child." 77 We
know from her verses that' 1 she was of a passionate nature, one whose words,
says Plutarch, "were mingled with flames" j 78 a certain sensuous quality gave
body to the enthusiasms of her mind. Atthis, her favorite pupil, spoke of her
as dressed in saffron and purple, and garlanded with flowers. She must
have been attractive in her minuscule way, for Alcaeus, exiled with her
to Pyrrha, soon sent her an invitation to romance. "Violet-crowned, pure,
sweet-smiling Sappho, I want to say something to you, but shame prevents
me." Her answer was less ambiguous than his proposal: "If thy wishes
were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base,
shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy just de-
sires." 70 The poet sang her praises in odes and serenades, but we hear of
no further intimacy between them.
Perhaps they were separated by Sappho's second exile. Pittacus, fear-
ing her maturing pen, banished her now to Sicily, probably in the year
591, when one would have thought her still a harmless girl. About this time
she married a rich merchant of Andros; some years later she writes: "I have
a little daughter, like a golden flower, my darling Cleis, for whom I would
not take all Lydia, nor lovely Lesbos." 80 She could afford to reject the
wealth of Lydia, having inherited that of her husband on his early death.
After five years of exile she returned to Lesbos, and became a leader of the
island's society and intellect. We catch the glamour of luxury in one of her
surviving fragments: "But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me
brightness and beauty belong to the desire of the sun." a She became deeply
attached to her young brother Charaxus, and was vexed to her finger tips
when, on one of his mercantile journeys to Egypt, he fell in love with the
courtesan Doricha, and, ignoring his sister's entreaties, married her. 88
Meanwhile Sappho too had felt the fire. Eager for an active life, she
154 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
had opened a school for young women, to whom she taught poetry, music,
and dancing; it was the first "finishing school" in history. She called her
students not pupils but hetairai companions; the word had not yet ac-
quired a promiscuous connotation. Husbandless, Sappho fell in love with
one after another of these girls. "Love," says one fragment, "has shaken
my mind as a down-rushing wind that falls upon the oak-trees." 83 "I loved
you, Atthis, long ago," says another fragment, "when my own girlhood was
still all flowers, and you seemed to me an awkward little child." But then
Atthis accepted the attentions of a youth from Mytilene, and Sappho ex-
pressed her jealousy with unmeasured passion in a poem preserved by
Longinus and translated haltingly into "sapphic" meter by John Adding-
ton Symonds:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,
Laughing love's low laughter. Oh, this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, rny tongue is broken, and through and through me,
'Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling.
Nothing see mine eyes, and a voice of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.* 84
Atthis' parents removed her from the school; and a letter ascribed to
Sappho gives what may be her account of the parting.
She (Atthis? ) wept full sore to leave me behind, and said: "Alas,
how sad our lot! Sappho, I swear 'tis against my will I leave you."
And I answered her: "Go your way rejoicing, but remember me,
for you know how I doted upon you. And if you remember not,
oh, then I will remind you of what you forget, how dear and beau-
tiful was the life we led together. For with many a garland of violets
* Swinburne has given us a better example of the meter, and described Sappho's love, in a
profoundly beautiful poem called "Sapphics" ("All the night came not upon my eyelids"), in
Poems and Ballads,
CHAP. Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 155
and sweet roses mingled you have decked your flowing locks by my
side, and with many a woven necklet, made of a hundred blossoms,
your dainty throat; and with unguent in plenty, both precious and
royal, have you anointed your fair young skin in my bosom. And
no hill was there, nor holy place, nor water-brook, whither we did
not go; nor ever did the teeming noises of the early spring fill any
wood with the medley-song of the nightingales but you wandered
thither with me." 85
After which, in the same manuscript, comes the bitter cry, "I shall never
see Attliis again, and indeed I might as well be dead." This surely is the
authentic voice of love, rising to a height of sincerity and beauty beyond
good and evil.
The later scholars of antiquity debated whether these poems were ex-
pressions of "Lesbian love," or merely exercises of poetic fancy and im-
personation. It is enough for us that they are poetry of the first order,
tense with feeling, vivid with imagery, and perfect in speech and form.
A fragment speaks of "the footfall of the flowering spring"; another of
"Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment"; another compares the
unattainable love to "the sweet apple that reddens on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough, which the gatherers missed, nay missed not,
but could not reach so far." 80 Sappho wrote of other topics than love,
and used, even for our extant remains, half a hundred meters; and she her-
self set her poems to music for the harp. Her verse was collected into nine
books, of some twelve thousand lines; six hundred lines survive, seldom
continuous. In the year 1073 of our era the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus
was publicly burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and
Rome. 87 Then, in 1897, Grenfell and Hunt discovered, at Oxyrhynchus in
the Fayum, coffins of papier-mache, in whose making certain scraps of old
books had been used; and on these scraps were some poems of Sappho. 88
Male posterity avenged itself upon her by handing down or inventing
the tale of how she died of unrequited love for a man. A passage in Suidas ji
tells how "the courtesan Sappho" usually identified with the poetess-
leaped to death from a cliff on the island of Leucas because Phaon the
sailor would not return her love. Menander, Strabo, and others refer to
the story, and Ovid recounts it in loving detail; 90 but it has many earmarks
of legend, and must be left hovering nebulously between, fiction and fact.
In her later years, tradition said, Sappho had relearned the love of men.
Among the Egyptian morsels is her touching reply to a proposal of mar-
156 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP.V1
riage: "If my breasts were still capable of giving suck, and my womb
were able to bear children, then to another marriage-bed not with trembling
feet would I come. But now on my skin age has brought many lines, and
Love hastens not to me with his gift of pain" and she advises her suitor
to seek a younger wife. 01 In truth we do not know when she died, or how;
we know only that she left behind her a vivid memory of passion, poetry,
and grace; and that she shone even above Alcaeus as the most melodious
singer of her time. Gently, in a final fragment, she reproves those who
would not admit that her song was finished:
You dishonor the good gifts of the Muses, my children, when
you say, "We will crown you, dear Sappho, best player of the clear,
sweet lyre." Know you not that my skin is all wrinkled with age,
and my hair is turned from black to white? . . . Surely as starry
Night follows rose-armed Dawn and brings darkness to the ends of
the earth, so Death tracketh everything living, and catcheth it in the
end. 83
VI. THE NORTHERN EMPIRE
North of Lesbos is little Tenedos, whose women were accounted by some
ancient travelers to be the most beautiful in Greece. 08 Then one follows the
adventurous Hellenes into the northern Sporades: to Imbros, and Lemnos, and
Samothrace. The Milesians, seeking to control the Hellespont, founded, about
560, the still-living town of Abydos on its south shore;* here Leander and
Byron swam the straits, and Xerxes' army crossed to Europe on a bridge of
boats. Farther eastward the Phocaeans settled Lampsacus, birthplace of Epi-
curus. Within the Propontis lay two groups of islands: the Proconnesus, rich
in the marble that gave the Propontis its current name, the Sea of Marmora;
and the Arctonnesus, on whose southernmost tip the Milesians established in
757 the great port of Cyzicus. Along the coast rose one Greek city after an-
other: Panormus, Dascylium, Apameia, Cius, Astacus, Chalcedon. Up through
the Bosporus the Greeks advanced, hungry for metals, grain, and trade, found-
ing Chrysopolis (now Scutari) and Nicopolis "city of victory." Then they
made their way along the southern shore of the Black Sea, depositing towns
at Heracleia, Pontica, Tieum, and Sinope a city splendidly adorned, says
Strabo, 04 with gymnasium, agora, and shady colonnades; Diogenes the Cynic
was not above being born here. Then Amisus, Oenoe, Tripolis, and Trapezus
(Trebizond, Trabzon) where Xenophon's Ten Thousand shouted with joy
at the sight of the longed-for sea. The opening up of this region to Greek
* Nearly all the cities mentioned in this chapter are still in existence, though under altered
CHAP. Vl) THE GREAT MIGRATION 157
colonization, perhaps by Jason, later by the lonians, gave the mother cities the
same outlet for surplus population and trade, the same resources in food, silver,
and gold, that the discovery of America gave to Europe at the beginning of
modem times. 86
Following the eastern shores of the Euxine northward into Medea's Colchis,
the Greeks founded Phasis and Diosctirias, and Theodosia and Panticapaeum
in the Crimea. Near the mouths of the Bug and the Dnieper they established
the city of Olbia (Nikolaev) ; at the mouth of the Dniester, the town of Tyras;
and on the Danube, Troesmis. Then, moving southward along the west shore
of the Black Sea, they built the cities of Istrus (Constanta, Kustenje), Tomi
(where Ovid died), Odessus (Varna), and Apollonia (Burgas). The histori-
cally sensitive traveler stands appalled at the antiquity of these living towns; but
today's residents, engrossed in the tasks of their own generation, are undis-
turbed by the depth of the centuries that lie silent beneath them.
Then again at the Bosporus the Megarians, about 660, built Byzantium*
yesterday Constantinople, now Istanbul. Even before Pericles this strategic
port was becoming what Napoleon would call it at the Peace of Tilsit the key
to Europe; in the third century B.C. Polybius described its maritime position as
"more favorable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the
world known to us." 07 Byzantium grew rich by exacting tolls from passing ves-
sels, and exporting to the Greek world the grain of southern Russia ("Scythia")
and the Balkans, and the fish that were netted with shameful ease as they
crowded through the narrow straits. It was its curving form, and the wealth
derived from this fishing industry, that gave the city its later name, the "Golden
Horn." Under Pericles Athens dominated Byzantine polities, levied tolls there
to fill her treasury in time of emergency, and regulated the export of grain from
the Black Sea as a contraband of war. 68
Along the northern or Thracian shore of the Propontis the Greeks built towns
at Selymbria, Perinthus (Eregli), Bisanthe, Callipolis (Gallipoli), and Sestus.
Later settlements were established on the southwestern coast of Thrace at Aph-
rodisias, Aenus, and Abdera where Leucippus and Democritus would pro-
pound the philosophy of atomistic materialism. Off the coast of Thrace lay
the island of Thasos, "bare and ugly as a donkey's back in the sea," Archilochus
described k, OD but so rich in gold mines that their proceeds paid all the expenses
of the government. On or near the eastern coast of Macedonia Greek gold-
seekers, chiefly Athenians, founded Neapolis and Amphipolis whose capture
by Philip would lead to the war in which Athens was to lose her liberty. Other
Greeks, mostly from Chalcis and Eretria, conquered and named the three-fin-
gered peninsula of Chalcidice, and by 700 had established thirty towns there,
* The name was probably taken from Byzas, a native king. M
158 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VI
several of them destined to play a role in Greek history: Stageirus (birthplace
of Aristotle) , Scione, Mende, Potidaea, Acanthus, Cleonae, Torone, and Olyn-
thus captured by Philip in 348 and known to us now through the oratory
of Demosthenes. Recent excavations at Olynthus have unearthed a town of
considerable extent, with many houses of two stories and some of twenty-five
rooms. In the time of Philip Olynthus appears to have had 60,000 inhabitants;
we may judge from this figure for a minor city the abounding fertility and
energetic expansion of the pre-Periclean Greeks.
Finally, between Chalcidice and Euboea, Ionian migrants peopled the Eu-
boean Isles Gerontia, Polyaegos, Icos, Peparethos, Scandile, Scyros. The orbit
of empire in east and north had come full turn, the circuit was complete; Greek
enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia
Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, and Thrace into a busy net-
work of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics,
literature, religion, philosophy, science, art, eloquence, chicanery, and venery.
It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, and build a bridge
between ancient Hellas and the modern world.
CHAPTER VII
The Greeks in the West
I. THE SYBARITES
SKIRTING Sunium again, our ship of fancy, sailing westward, finds
Cythera, island haunt of Aphrodite, and therefore the goal of Wat-
teau's Embarkation* There, about A.D. 160, Pausanias saw "the most holy
and ancient of all the temples that the Greeks have built to Aphrodite"; 1 and
there, in 1887, Schliemann dug its ruins out of the earth. 3 Cythera was the
southernmost of the Ionian Islands that bordered the west coast of Greece,
and so named because Ionian immigrants settled them; Zacynthos, Cephal-
lenia, Ithaca, Leucas, Paxos, and Corcyra made the rest. Schliemann thought
that Ithaca was the island of Odysseus, and vainly sought under its soil
some confirmation of Homer's tale; 3 but Dorpfeld believed that Odysseus"
home was on rocky Leucas. From the cliffs of Leucas, as an annual sacri-
fice to Apollo, the ancient Leucadians, says Strabo, were in the habit of
hurling a human victim; but being men as well as theologians, they merci-
fully attached to him powerful birds whose wings might break his fall:'
probably the story of Sappho's leap is bound up with memories of this
rite. Corinthian colonists occupied Corcyra (Corfu) about 734 B.C., and
soon became so strong that they defeated Corinth's navy and established
their independence. From Corcyra some Greek adventurers sailed up the
Adriatic as far as Venice; some made small settlements on the Dalmatian
coast and in the valley of the Po; B others crossed at last through fifty miles
of stormy water to the heel of Italy.
They found a magnificent shore line, curved into natural harbors and
backed by a fertile hinterland that had been almost neglected by the
aborigines. 8 The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region
by the ruthless law of colonial expansion that natural resources unex-
ploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attrac-
tion, some other people to exploit them and pour them into the commerce
and usage of the world. From Brentesium (Brindisi) the newcomers,
chiefly Dorian, traversed the heel of the peninsula to establish a major city
* Watteau's painting, Embarkation for Cythera, symbolized the spirit of the upper classes
in eighteenth-century France, which had shed just enough theology to be epicurean.
1 59
l6o THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VII
at Taras the Roman Tarentum (Taranto) .* There they grew olives, raised
horses, manufactured pottery, built ships, netted fish, and gathered mus-
sels to make a purple dye more highly valued than the Phoenician. 8 As in
most of the Greek colonies, the government began as an oligarchy of land-
owners, passed under dictators financed by the middle class, and enjoyed
vigorous and turbulent intervals of democracy. Here the romantic Pyrrhus
would land, in 281 B.C., and undertake to play Alexander to the West.
Across the Tarentine Gulf a new wave of immigrants, mostly Achaeans,
founded the cities of Sybaris and Crotona. The murderous jealousy of
these kindred states illustrates the creative energy and destructive passions
of the Greeks. Trade between eastern Greece and western Italy had a
choice of two routes, one by water, the other in part by land. Ships fol-
lowing the water route touched at Crotona, and exchanged many goods
there; thence they passed to Rhegium, paid tolls, and moved cautiously
through pirate-ridden seas and the swirling currents of the Messina Straits
to Elea and Cumae the northernmost Greek settlement in Italy. To avoid
these tolls and perils, and a hundred extra miles of rowing and sailing, mer-
chants who chose the other route unloaded their cargoes at Sybaris, car-
ried them overland some thirty miles to the western coast at Laus, and
reshipped them to Poseidonia, whence they were marketed into the in-
terior of Italy.
Strategically situated on this line of trade, Sybaris prospered until it had
(if we may believe Diodorus Siculus ) 300,000 population and such wealth
as few Greek cities could match. Sybarite became a synonym for epicurean.
All physical labor was performed by slaves or serfs while the citizens,
dressed in costly robes, took their ease in luxurious homes and consumed
exotic delicacies.'!" Men whose work was noisy, such as carpenters and
smiths, were forbidden to practice their crafts within the confines of the
city. Some of the roads in the richer districts were covered with awnings
as a protection against heat and rain. 11 Alcisthenes of Sybaris, says Aris-
totle, had a robe of such precious stuffs that Dionysius I of Syracuse later
sold it for 1 20 talents ($720,000) . w Smyndyrides of Sybaris, visiting Sicyon
to sue for the hand of Cleisthenes' daughter, brought with him a thousand
* The traditional dates for the founding of the Greek cities in the West arc given in the
hronological Table. These dates were taken by Thucydides from the old logographer
Antiochus of Syracuse; they are highly uncertain, and Mahaffy believed that the Sicilian
'
foundations came later than those in Italy. Thucydides' chronology, however, has still many
supporters. 7
t Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets Athenaeus reports were
allowed to patent them for a year. M Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.
CHAP. VIl) THE GREEKS IN THE WEST l6l
All went well with Sybaris until it slipped into war with its neighbor
Crotona (510). We are unreliably informed that the Sybarites marched
out to battle with an army of 300,000 men. 15 The Crotoniates, we are fur-
ther assured, threw this force into confusion by playing the tunes to which
the Sybarites had taught their horses to dance. 19 The horses danced, the
Sybarites were slaughtered, and their city was so conscientiously sacked
and burned that it disappeared from history in a day. When, sixty-five
years later, Herodotus and other Athenians established near the site the
new colony of Thurii, they found hardly a trace of what had been the
proudest community in Greece.
II. PYTHAGORAS OF CROTONA
Crotona lasted longer; founded about 710 B.C., it is, as Crotone, still
noisy with industry and trade. It had the only natural harbor between Taras
and Sicily, and could not forgive those ships that discharged their cargoes
at Sybaris. Enough trade remained to give the citizens a comfortable pros-
perity, while a wholesome defeat in war, a long economic depression, -
brisk climate, and a certain Dorico-Puritan mood in the population con-
spired to keep them vigorous despite their wealth. Here grew famous ath-
letes like Milo, and the greatest school of medicine in Magna Grecia.*
Perhaps it was its reputation as a health resort that drew Pythagoras to
Crotona. The name means "mouthpiece of the Pythian" oracle at Delphi;
many of his followers considered him to be Apollo himself, and some laid
claim to having caught a flash of his golden thigh. 17 Tradition assigned his
birth to Samos about 580, spoke of his studious youth, and gave him thirty
years of travel. "Of all men," says Heracleitus, who praised parsimoni-
ously, "Pythagoras was the most assiduous inquirer." 18 He visited, we are
told, Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Chaldea, India, and Gaul, and came back
with an admirable motto for tourists: "When you are traveling abroad
look not back at your own borders" ; u prejudices should be checked at
every port of entry. More surely he visited Egypt, where he studied with
the priests and learned much astronomy and geometry, and perhaps a lit-
tle nonsense. Returning to Samos and finding that the dictatorship of
Polycrates interfered with his own, he migrated to Crotona, being now
over fifty years of age.
There he set up as a teacher; and his imposing presence, his varied learn-,
ing, and his willingness to receive women as well as men into his school,
*The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy.
l62 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VII
soon brought him several hundred students. Two centuries before Plato
he laid down the principle of equal opportunity for both sexes, and did not
merely preach it but practiced it. Nevertheless he recognized natural dif-
ferences of function; he gave his women pupils considerable training in
philosophy and literature, but he had them instructed as well in maternal
and domestic arts, so that the "Pythagorean women" were honored by
antiquity as the highest feminine type that Greece ever produced. 23
For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost
turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by
a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradi-
tion is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while
they lived in the Pythagorean community. 58 They were not to eat flesh,
or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water was recommended
a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition
of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the trans-
migration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors. Probably
there were dispensations, now and then, from the letter of these rules;
English historians in particular find it incredible that the wrestler Milo,
who was a Pythagorean, had become the strongest man in Greece without
the help of beef "though the calf that became a bull in his arms* managed
well enough on grass. The members were forbidden to kill any animal
that does not injure man, or to destroy a cultivated tree. They were to
dress simply and behave modestly, "never yielding to laughter, and yet
not looking stern." They were not to swear by the gods, for "every man
ought so to live as to be worthy of belief without an oath." They were
not to offer victims in sacrifice, but they might worship at altars that were
unstained with blood. At the close of each day they were to ask them-
selves what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected,
what good they had done. 85
Pythagoras himself, unless he was an excellent actor, followed these rules
more rigorously than any student. Certainly his mode of life won for
him such respect and authority among his pupils that no one grumbled
at his pedagogical dictatorship, and autos ephai-pse dixit u liQ himself has
said it" became their formula for a final decision in almost any field of con-
duct or theory. We are told, with touching reverence, that the Master
never drank wine by day, and lived for the most part on bread and honey,
with vegetables as dessert; that his robe was always white and spotless;
* Cf. Chap. IX, sect, iv, below.
CHAP. VII) THE GREEKS IN THE WEST 163
that he was never known to eat too much, or to make love; that he never
indulged in laughter, or jests, or stories; that he never chastised any one,
not even a slave. 28 Timon of Athens thought him "a juggler of solemn
speech, engaged in fishing for men"; 27 but among his most devoted followers
were his wife Theano and his daughter Damo, who had facilities for com-
paring his philosophy with his life. To Damo, says Diogenes Laertius, "he
entrusted his Commentaries, and charged her to divulge them to no person
out of the house. And she, though she might have sold his discourses for
much money, would not abandon them, for she thought obedience to her
father's injunctions more valuable than gold; and that, too, though she was
a woman." 38
Initiation into the Pythagorean society required, in addition to purifica-
tion of the body by abstinence and self-control, a purification of the mind
by scientific study. The new pupil was expected to preserve for five years
the "Pythagorean silence" i.e., presumably, to accept instruction without
questions or argument before being accounted a full member, or being
permitted to "see" (study under?) Pythagoras. 28 The scholars were ac-
cordingly divided into exoterici, or outer students, and esoterici, or inner
members, who were entitled to the secret wisdom of the Master himself.
Four subjects composed the curriculum: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
and music. Mathematics came first;* not as the practical science that the
Egyptians had made it, but as an abstract theory of quantities, and an ideal
logical training in which thinking would be compelled to order and clarity
by the test of rigorous deduction and visible proof. Geometry now defi-
nitely received the form of axiom, theorem, and demonstration; each step
in the sequence of propositions raised the student to a new platform, as the
Pythagoreans put it, from which he might view more widely the secret
structure of the world. 31 Pythagoras himself, according to Greek tradition,
discovered many theorems: above all, that the sum of the angles within
any triangle equals two right angles, and that the square of the hypotenuse
of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two
sides. Apollodorus tells us that when the Master discovered this theorem
he sacrificed a hecatomb a hundred animals in thanksgiving; 32 but this
would have been scandalously un-Pythagorean.
From geometry, inverting the modern order, Pythagoras passed to arith-
* The Pythagoreans appear to have been the first to use the word mathematike with the
meaning of mathematics; before them it had been applied to the learning (mathema) of any-
thing. 80
164 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VII
metic not as a practical art of reckoning, but as the abstract theory of
numbers. The school seems to have made the first classification of num-
bers into odd or even, prime or factorable; 33 it formulated the theory
of proportion, and through this and the "application of areas" created a
geometrical algebra. 8 * Perhaps it was the study of proportion that led
Pythagoras to reduce music to number. One day, as he passed a black-
smith's shop, his ear was attracted by the apparently regular musical inter-
vals of the sounds that came from the anvil. Finding that the hammers were
of different weights, he concluded that tones depend upon numerical ratios.
In one of the few experiments which we hear of in classical science, he took
two strings of equal thickness and equal tension, and discovered that if
one was twice as long as the other they sounded an octave when he plucked
them; if one was half again the length of the other they gave a fifth (do,
sol} ; if one was a third longer than the other they gave a fourth (do, fa) ;""
in this way every musical interval could be mathematically calculated and
expressed. Since all bodies moving in space produce sounds, whose pitch
depends upon the size and speed of the body, then each planet in its orbit
about the earth (argued Pythagoras) makes a sound proportioned to its
rapidity of translation, which in turn rises with its distance from the earth;
and these diverse notes constitute a harmony or "music of the spheres,"
which we never hear because we hear it all the time. 88
The universe, said Pythagoras, is a living sphere, whose center is the
earth. The earth too is a sphere, revolving, like the planets, from west to
east. The earth, indeed the whole universe, is divided into five zones-
arctic, antarctic, summer, winter, and equatorial. More or less of the moon
is visible to us according to the degree in which that half of it which is
facing the sun is also turned toward the earth. Eclipses of the moon are
caused by the interposition of the earth, or some other body, between the
moon and the sun. 87 Pythagoras, says Diogenes Laertius, "was the first
person to call the earth round, and to give the name of kosmos to the
world." 88
Having with these contributions to mathematics and astronomy done
more than any other man to establish science in Europe, Pythagoras pro-
ceeded to philosophy. The very word is apparently one of his creations.
He rejected the term sophia, or wisdom, as pretentious, and described his
own pursuit of understanding as philosophic t}\t Jove of wisdom. 80 In the
sixth century philosopher and Pythagorean were synonyms." Whereas
Thales and the other Milesians had sought the first principle of all things
CHAP. VIl) THE GREEKS IN THE WEST l6$
in matter, Pythagoras sought it in form. Having discovered numerically
regular relations and sequences in music, and having postulated them in the
planets, he made the philosopher's leap at unity by announcing that such
numerically regular relations and sequences existed everywhere, and that
the essential factor in everything was number. Just as Spinoza would argue*
that there were two worlds one the people's world of things perceived
by sense, the other the philosopher's world of laws and constancies per-
ceived by reason and that only the second world was permanently real;
so Pythagoras felt that the only basic and lasting aspects of anything were
the numerical relationships of its parts. f Perhaps health was a proper mathe-
matical relationship, or proportion, in the parts or elements of the body.
Perhaps even the soul was number.
At this point the mysticism in Pythagoras, nurtured in Egypt and the
Near East, disported itself freely. The soul, he believed, is divided into
three parts: feeling, intuition, and reason. Feeling is centered in the heart,
intuition and reason in the brain. Feeling and intuition belong to animals as
well as men;{ reason belongs to man alone, and is immortal. 42 After death
the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth
and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only
by a completely virtuous life. Pythagoras amused, or perhaps edified, his
followers by telling them that he had been in one incarnation a courtesan, in
another the hero Euphorbus; he could remember quite distinctly his adven-
tures at the siege of Troy, and recognized, in a temple at Argos, the armor
that he had worn in that ancient life. 43 Hearing the yelp of a beaten dog, he
went at once to the rescue of the animal, saying that he distinguished in its
cries the voice of a dead friend/* We catch again a glimpse of the trade in
ideas that bound sixth-century Greece, Africa, and Asia when we reflect
that this idea of metempsychosis was at one and the same time capturing
the imagination of India, of the Orphic cult in Greece, and of a philo-
sophical school in Italy.
We feel the hot breath of Hindu pessimism mingling, in the ethics of
* In the fragment "On the Improvement of the Intellect."
t Science tries to reduce all phenomena to quantitative, mathematical, verifiable statements;
chemistry describes all things in terms of symbols and figures, arranges the elements mathe-
matically in a periodic law, and reduces them to an intra-atomic arithmetic of electrons;
astronomy becomes celestial mathematics, and physicists seek a mathematical formula to
cover the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; some thinkers of our time
have tried to express philosophy itself in mathematical form.
j: We should note, in passing, that Pythagoras, slightly anticipating Pasteur, denied spon-
taneous generation, and taught that all animals are born from other animals through "seeds.""
1 66 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VII
Pythagoras, with the clear, bright air of Plato. The purpose of life in the
Pythagorean system is to gain release from reincarnation; the method is
through virtue; and virtue is a harmony of the soul within itself and with
God. Sometimes this harmony can be artificially induced, and the Pytha-
goreans, like Greek priests and doctors, used music to heal nervous disorders.
More often harmony comes to the soul through wisdom, a quiet under-
standing of underlying truths; for such wisdom teaches a man modesty,
measure, and the golden mean. The opposite way the way of discord, ex-
cess, and sin leads by inevitable fate to tragedy and punishment; justice is a
"square number," and sooner or later every wrong will be "squared" with
an equivalent penalty. 45 Here in germ are the moral philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle.
Pythagorean politics is Plato's philosophy realized before its conception.
According to the common tradition of antiquity the school of Pythagoras
was a communistic aristocracy: men and women pooling their goods, edu-
cated together, trained to virtue and high thinking by mathematics, music,
and philosophy, and offering themselves as the guardian rulers of the state.
Indeed it was Pythagoras' effort to make his society the actual government
of his city that brought ruin upon himself and his followers. The initiates
entered so actively into politics, and took so decidedly the aristocratic side,
that the democratic or popular party of Crotona, in an ecstasy of rage,
burned down the house in which the Pythagoreans were gathered, killed
several of them, and drove the rest out of the city. Pythagoras himself, in
one account, was captured and slain when, in his flight, he refused to tread
upon a field of beans; another story lets him escape to Metapontum, where
he abstained from food for forty days and perhaps feeling that eighty years
were enoughstarved himself to death."
His influence was lasting; even today he is a potent name. His society
survived for three centuries in scattered groups throughout Greece, pro-
ducing scientists like Philolaus of Thebes and statesmen like Archytas,
dictator of Taras and friend of Plato. Wordsworth, in his most famous
ode, was an unconscious Pythagorean. Plato himself was enthralled by the
vague figure of Pythagoras. At every turn he takes from him in his scon?,
of democracy, his yearning for a communistic aristocracy of philosopher-
rulers, his conception of virtue as harmony, his theories of the nature and
destiny of the soul, his love of geometry, and his addiction to the mysticism
of number. All in all, Pythagoras was the founder, so far as we know them,
of both science and philosophy in Europe an achievement sufficient for any
CHAP.VIl) THE GREEKS IN THE WEST i6j
HI. XENOPHANES OF ELEA
West of Crotona lies the site of ancient Locri. The colony was founded,
says Aristotle, by runaway slaves, adulterers, and thieves from Locris in main-
land Greece; but perhaps Aristotle had an Old World disdain for the New.
Suffering disorder from the defects of their qualities, the colonists applied to
the oracle at Delphi for advice, and were told to get themselves laws. Pos-
sibly Zaleucus had instructed the oracle, for about 664 he gave to Locri
ordinances which, as he said, Athena had dictated to him in a dream. This
was the first written code of laws in the history of Greece, though not the
first to be handed down by the gods. The Locrians liked it so well that they
required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope
around his neck, so that, if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum
of public inconvenience.*"
Rounding the toe of Italy northward, the traveler reaches flourishing Reggio,
founded by the Messenians about 730 under the name of Rhegion, and known
to the Romans as Rhegium. Slipping through the Straits of Messina probably
the "Scylla and Charybdis" of the Odyssey one comes to where Laus stood-,,
and then to ancient Hyele, the Roman Velia, known to history as Elea because
Plato wrote it so, and because only its philosophers are remembered. There
Xenophanes of Colophon came about 510, and founded the Eleatic School.
He was a personality as unique as his favorite foe, Pythagoras. A man of
dauntless energy and reckless initiative, he wandered for sixty-seven years, he
tells us/ 8 "up and down the land of Hellas," making observations and enemies
everywhere. He wrote and recited philosophical poems, denounced Homer
for his impious ribaldry, laughed at superstition, found a port in Elea, and
obstinately completed a century before he died.'' 9 Homer and Hesiod, sang
Xenophanes, "have ascribed to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a dis-
grace among men thieving, adultery, and fraud." 50 But he himself was not a
pillar of orthodoxy.
There never was, nor ever will be, any man who knows with cer-
tainty the things about the gods. . . . Mortals fancy that gods are born,
and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if
oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as mea
do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their
own likeness; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen.
Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give
* The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and
Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived
its utility.
l68 THELIFEOF GREECE (CHAP. VII
theirs blue eyes and red hair. . . . There is one god, supreme among
gods and men; resembling mortals neither in form nor in mind. The
whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears.
Without toil he rules all things by the power of his mind. 61
This god, says Diogenes Laertius, 8 " was identified by Xenophanes with the
universe. All things, even men, taught the philosopher, are derived from earth
and water by natural laws. 58 Water once covered nearly all the earth, for
marine fossils are found far inland and on mountaintops; and at some future
time water will probably cover the whole earth again." Nevertheless all change
in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the
flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality
of God.
From this starting point Xenophanes' disciple, Parmenides of Elea, proceeded
to that idealistic philosophy which was in turn to mold the thought of Plato
and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.
IV. FROM ITALY TO SPAIN
Twenty miles north of Elea lay the city of Poseidonia the Roman Paestum
-founded by colonists from Sybaris as the main Italian terminus of Milesian
trade. Today one reaches it by a pleasant ride from Naples through Salerno.
Suddenly, by the roadside, amid a deserted field, three temples appear, majes-
tic even in their desolation. For the river, by blocking its own mouth here
with centuries of silt, has long since turned this once healthy valley into a
swamp, and even the reckless race that tills the slopes of Vesuvius has fled
in despair from these malarial plains. Fragments of the ancient walls remain;
but better preserved, as if by solitude, are the shrines that the Greeks raised,
in modest limestone but almost perfect form, to the gods of the corn and the
sea. The oldest of the buildings, lately called the "Basilica," was more likely
a temple to Poseidon; men who owed their living to the fruit and commerce
of the Mediterranean dedicated it to him towards the middle of this amazing
sixth century B.C., which created great art, literature, and philosophy from Italy
to Shantung. The inner as well as the outer colonnades remain, and attest the
columnar passion of the Greeks. The following generation built a smaller tem-
ple, also Dorically simple and strong; we call it the "temple of Ceres," but we
do not know what god sniffed the savor of its offerings. A yet later generation,
just before or after the Persian War, 55 erected the greatest and best-proportioned
of the three temples, probably also to Poseidon fittingly enough, since from
its porticoes one gazes into the inviting face of the treacherous sea. Again
almost everything is columns: a powerful and complete Doric peristyle with-
CHAP. VIl) THE GREEKS IN THE WEST 169
out, and, within, a two-storied colonnade that once upheld a roof. Here is one
of the most impressive sights in Italy; it seems incredible that this temple, better
preserved than anything built by the Romans, was the work of Greeks almost
five centuries before Christ. We can imagine something of the beauty and
vitality of a community that had both the resources and the taste to raise such
centers for its religious life; and then we can conjure up less inadequately the
splendor of richer and vaster cities like Miletus, Samos, Ephesus, Crotona,
Sybaris, and Syracuse.
Slightly north of where Naples stands today adventurers from Chalcis, Ere-
tria, Euboean Cyme, and Graia founded, about 750, the great port of Cumae,
oldest of Greek towns in the West. Taking the products of eastern Greece
and selling them in central Italy, Cumae rapidly acquired wealth, colonized
and controlled Rhegium, obtained command of the Straits of Messina, and
excluded from them, or subjected to heavy tolls, the vessels of cities not leagued
with it in trade. 68 Spreading southward, the Cumaeans founded Dicaearchia
which became the Roman port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli) and Neapolis, or New
City, our Naples, From these colonies Greek ideas as well as goods passed into
the crude young city of Rome, and northward into Etruria. At Cumae the
Romans picked up several Greek gods Apollo and Heracles especially and
bought for more than they were worth the scrolls in which the Cumaean Sibyl
the aged priestess of Apollo had toretold the future of Rome.
Near the beginning of the sixth century the Phocaeans of Ionia landed on
the southern shore of France, founded Massalia (Marseilles), and carried Greek
products up the Rhone and its branches as far as Aries and Nimes. They made
friends and wives of the natives, introduced the olive and the vine as gifts to
France, and so familiarized southern Gaul with Greek civilization that Rome
found it easy to spread its kindred culture there in Caesar's time. Ranging along
the coast to the east, the Phocaeans established Antipolis (Antibes), Nicaea
(Nice), and Monoecus (Monaco). Westward they ventured into Spain and
built the towns of Rhodae (Rosas), Emporium (Ampurias), Hemeroscopium,
and Maenaca (near Malaga). The Greeks in Spain flourished for a while by
exploiting the silver mines of Tartessus; but in 535 the Carthaginians and
Etruscans combined their forces to destroy the Phocaean fleet, and from that
time Greek power in the western Mediterranean waned.
V. SICILY
We have left not quite to the last the richest of all the regions colonized
by the Greeks. To Sicily nature had given what she had withheld from
continental Greece an apparently inexhaustible soil fertilized by rain and
170 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. VII
lava, and producing so much wheat and corn that Sicily was thought to be
if not the birthplace at least a favorite haunt of Demeter herself. Here were
orchards, vineyards, olive groves, heavy with fruit; honey as succulent as
Hymettus', and flowers blooming in their turn from the beginning to the
end of the year. Grassy plains pastured sheep and cattle, endless timber
grew in the hills, and the fish in the surrounding waters reproduced faster
than Sicily could eat them.
A neolithic culture had flourished here in the third millennium before
Christ, a bronze culture in the second; even in Minoan days trade had bound
the island with Crete and Greece. 67 Towards the end of the second millen-
nium three waves of immigration broke upon Sicilian shores: the Sicans
came from Spain, the Elymi from Asia Minor, the Sicels from Italy. 58 About
800 the Phoenicians established themselves at Motya and Panormus (Paler-
mo) in the west. From 735 on* the Greeks poured in, and in quick succes-
sion founded Naxos, Syracuse, Leontini, Messana (Messina) , Catana, Gela,
Himera, Selinus, and Acragas. In all these cases the natives were driven
from the coast by force of arms. Most of them retired to till the mountain-
ous interior, some became slaves to the invaders, so many others inter-
married with the conquerors that Greek blood, character, and morals in
Sicily took on a perceptible native tint of passion and sensuality. 69 The
Hellenes never quite conquered the island; the Phoenicians and Carthagin-
ians remained predominant on the west coast, and for five hundred years
periodic war marked the struggle of Greek and Semite, Europe and Africa,
for the possession of Sicily. After thirteen centuries of domination by Rome
that contest would be resumed, in the Middle Ages, between Norman and
Saracen.
Catana was distinguished for its laws, the Lipari Islands for their communism,
Himera for its poet, Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas for their temples, Syracuse
for its power and wealth. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, a full gen-
eration before Solon, became a model for many cities in Sicily and Italy, and
served to create public order and sexual morality in communities unprotected
by ancient mores and sacred precedents. A man might divorce his wife, or a
wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone
younger than the divorced mate. 00 Charondas, according to a typically Greek
tale, forbade the citizens to enter the assembly while armed. One day, how-
ever, he himself came to the public meeting forgetfully wearing his sword.
When a voter reproached him for breaking his own law he answered, "I will
rather confirm it," and slew himself.* 1
* Or perhaps a generation later; cf. note to p. 160 above.
CHAP. VIl) THEGREEKSINTHEWEST 1JI
If we wish to visualize the difficulties of life in colonies carved out by violent
conquest we need only contemplate the curious communism of the Lipari
i.e., the Glorious Islands, which lie to the north of eastern Sicily. Here, about
580, some adventurers from Cnidus organized a pirate's paradise. Preying upon
the commerce about the Straits, they brought the booty to their island lairs
and shared it with exemplary equality. The land was owned by the com-
munity, a part of the population was assigned to till it, and the products were
distributed in like shares to all the citizens. In time, however, individualism
reasserted itself: the land was divided into plots individually owned, and life
resumed the uneven tenor of its competitive way.
On the northern coast of Sicily lay Himera, destined to be the Plataea of the
West. There Stesichorus, "Maker of Choruses," at a time when the Greeks
were tiring of epics, recast into the form of choral lyrics the legends of the
race, and gave even to Helen and Achilles the passing novelty of "modern
dress." As if to bridge the gap between the dying epic and the future novel,
Stesichorus composed love stories in verse; in one of these a pure and timid
lass dies of unrequited love, in the style of Provengal madrigals or Victorian
fiction. At the same time he opened a pathway for Theocritus by writing a
pastoral poem on the death of the shepherd Daphnis, whose love for Chloe was
to be the main business of the Greek novel in the Roman age. Stesichorus had
his own romance, and with no less a lady than Helen herself. Having lost his
sight, he attributed this calamity to his having handed down the tale of Helen's
infidelity; to atone to her (for she was now a goddess) he composed a "pal-
inode," or second song, assuring the world that Helen had been kidnaped by
force, had never yielded to Paris, had never gone to Troy, but had waited
intact in Egypt until Menelaus came to rescue her. In his old age the poet
warned Himera against giving dictatorial power to Phalaris of Acragas.* Being
unheeded, he moved to Catana, where his monumental tomb was one of the
sights of Roman Sicily.
West of Himera lay Segesta, of which nothing remains but a peristyle of
unfinished Doric columns weirdly rising amid surrounding weeds. To find
Sicilian architecture at its best we must cross the island southward to the
once great cities of Selinus and Acragas. During its tragic tenure of life from
its establishment in 65 1 to its destruction by Carthaginians in 409, Selinus raised
to the silent gods seven Doric temples, immense in size but of imperfect work-
manship, covered with painted plaster and decorated with crude reliefs. The
demon of earthquake destroyed these temples at a date unknown, and little
survives of them but broken columns and capitals sprawling on the ground.
* He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag
into its pasturage, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if
the horse would allow him to bestride it javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was
frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.
172 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VII
Acragas, the Roman Agrigentum, was in the sixth century the largest and
richest city in Sicily. We picture it rising from its busy wharves through a
noisy market place to the homes on the slope of the hill, and the stately acrop-
olis whose shrines almost lifted their worshipers to the sky. Here, as in most
of the Greek colonies, the landowning aristocracy yielded power to a dictator-
ship representing chiefly the middle class. In 570 Phalaris seized the government,
and secured immortality by roasting his enemies in a brazen bull; he was par-
ticularly pleased by a contrivance that made the agonized cries of his victims
sound through a mechanism of pipes like the bellowing of the animal. 03 Never-
theless it was to him and a later dictator, Theron, that the city owed the politi-
cal order and stability that permitted its economic development. The mer-
chants of Acragas, like those of Selinus, Crotona, and Sybaris, became the
American millionaires of their time, upon whom the lesser plutocrats of older
Greece looked with secret envy and compensatory scorn; the new world, said
the old, was interested in size and show, but had no taste or artistry. The
temple of Zeus at Acragas unquestionably sought size, for Polybius describes it
as "second to none in Greece in dimensions and design"; 03 we cannot directly
judge its beauty, for wars and earthquakes destroyed it. A generation later,
in the age of Pericles, Acragas raised more modest structures. One of them,
the temple of Concord, survives almost completely, and of the temple of Hera
there remains an impressive colonnade; enough in either case to show that
Greek taste was not confined to Athens, and that even the commercial west
had learned that "size is not development." In Acragas the great Empedocles
would be born; and perhaps it was there, and not in Etna's crater, that he
would die.
Syracuse began as it is today a village huddled on the promontory of
Ortygia. As far back as the eighth century Corinth had sent colonists,
armed with righteousness and superior weapons, to seize the little peninsula,
which was then perhaps an island. They built or widened the connection
with the mainland of Sicily, and drove most of the Sicels into the interior.
They multiplied with all the rapidity of a vigorous people on a resource-full
soil; in time their city became the largest in Greece, with a circumference
of fourteen miles and a population of half a million souls. An aristocracy of
landholders was overthrown about 495 by a revolt of the unfranchised plebs
in alliance with the enslaved Sicels. The new democracy, if we may believe
Aristotle, 64 proved incapable of establishing an orderly society, and in 485
Gelon of Gela, by a program of enlightened treachery, set up a dictatorship.
Like many of his kind he was as able as he was unscrupulous. Scorning all
moral codes and political restraints, he transformed Ortygia into an im-
pregnable fortress for his government, conquered Naxos, Leontini, and
CHAP. VIl) THEGREEKSINTHEWEST 173
Messana, and taxed all eastern Sicily to make Syracuse the most beautiful of
Greek capitals. "In this way," says Herodotus, sadly, "Gelon became a
great king."* 65
He redeemed himself, and became the idolized Napoleon of Sicily when,
as Xerxes' fleet moved upon Athens, the Carthaginians sent an armada only
less numerous than the Persian to wrest the island paradise from the Greeks.
The fate of Sicily was joined with that of Greece when in the same month-
tradition said on the same day Gelon faced Hamilcar at Himera, and
Themistocles confronted Xerxes at Salamis.
VI. THE GREEKS IN AFRICA
The Carthaginians had reason to be disturbed, for even on the north coast of
Africa the Greeks had established cities and were capturing trade. As early as
630 the Dorians of Thera had sent a numerous colony to Cyrene, midway
between Carthage and Egypt. There, on the desert's edge, they found good
soil, with rain so abundant that the natives spoke of the site as the place
where there was a hole in the sky. The Greeks used part of the land for pas-
turage, and exported wool and hides; they grew from the silphium plant a
spice that all Greece was eager to buy; they sold Greek products to Africa,
and developed their own handicrafts to such a point that Cyrenaic vases ranked
among the best. The city used its wealth intelligently, and adorned itself with
great gardens, temples, statuary, and gymnasiums. Here the first famous epi-
curean philosopher, Aristippus, was born, and here, after much wandering, he
returned to found the Cyrenaic School.
Within Egypt itself, normally hostile to any foreign settlement, the Greeks
gained a foothold, at last an empire. About 650 the Milesians opened a "factory,"
or trading post, at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile. Pharaoh Psam-
tik I tolerated them because they made good mercenaries, while their commerce
provided rich prey for his collectors of customs revenues.* 7 Ahmose II gave
them a large measure of self-government. Naucratis became almost an indus-
trial city, with manufactures of pottery, terra cotta, and faience; still more it
became an emporium of trade, bringing in Greek oil and wine, and sending"
out Egyptian wheat, linen, and wool, African ivory, frankincense, and gold.
Gradually, amid these exchanges, Egyptian lore and techniques in religion,
* "Gelon of Syracuse," says Lucian, "had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out him-
self for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a
foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his
wife and scolded her for never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him
of it; she put in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any
other man, she had supposed all men were like that." 08 He was disarmed.
174 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VII
architecture, sculpture, and science flowed into Greece, while in return Greek
words and ways entered Egypt, and paved the way for Greek domination in
the Alexandrian age.
If in imagination we take a merchant vessel from Naucratis to Athens,
our tour of the Greek world will be complete. It was necessary that we
should make this long circuit in order that we might see and feel the extent
and variety of Hellenic civilization. Aristotle described the constitutional
history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each con-
tributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece.
In the colonies, rather than on the mainland, were born Greek poetry and
prose, mathematics and metaphysics, oratory and history. Without them,
and the thousand absorbing tentacles which they stretched out into the old
world, Greek civilization, the most precious product in history, might never
have been. Through them the cultures of Egypt and the Orient passed into
Greece, and Greek culture spread slowly into Asia, Africa, and Europe.
CHAPTER VIII
The Gods of Greece
I. THE SOURCES OF POLYTHEISM
"\ 71 7"^EN we look for unifying elements in the civilization of these scat-
V V tered cities we find essentially five: a common language, with local
dialects; a common intellectual life, in which only major figures in literature,
philosophy, and science are known far beyond their political frontiers; a
common passion for athletics, finding outlet in municipal and interstate
games; a love of beauty locally expressed in forms of art common to all the
Greek communities; and a partly common religious ritual and belief.
Religion divided the cities as much as it united them. Under the polite
and general worship of the remote Olympians lay the intenser cults of local
deities and powers who served no vassalage to Zeus. Tribal and political
separatism nourished polytheism, and made monotheism impossible. In the
early days every family had its own god; to him the divine fire burned un-
extinguished at the hearth, and to him offerings of food and wine were made
before every meal. This holy communion, or sharing of food with the god,
was the basic and primary act of religion in the home. Birth, marriage, and
death were sanctified into sacraments by ancient ritual before the sacred
fire; and in this way religion suffused a mystic poetry and a stabilizing
solemnity over the elemental events of human life. In like manner the gene,
the phratry, the tribe, and the city had each its special god. Athens wor-
shiped Athena, Eleusis Demeter, Sarnos Hera, Ephesus Artemis, Poseidonia
Poseidon. The center and summit of the city was the shrine of the city god;
participation in the worship of the god was the sign, the privilege, and the
requisite of citizenship. When the city marched out to war it carried the
form and emblem of its god in the forefront of the troops, and no im-
portant step was taken without consulting him through divination. In re-
turn he fought for the city, and sometimes seemed to appear at the head or
above the spears of the soldiers; victory was the conquest not only of a city
by a city but of a god by a god. The city, like the family or the tribe, kept
always burning, at a public altar in the prytaneum or town hall, a sacred fire
symbolizing the mystically potent and persistent life of the city's founders
175
176 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIII
and heroes; and periodically the citizens partook of a common meal before
this fire. Just as in the family the father was also the priest, so in the
Greek city the chief magistrate or archon was the high priest of the state
religion, and all his powers and actions were sanctified by the god. By this
conscription of the supernatural, man was tamed from a hunter into a
citizen.
Liberated by local independence, the religious imagination of Greece
produced a luxuriant mythology and a populous pantheon. Every object
or force of earth or sky, every blessing and every terror, every quality-
even the vicesof mankind was personified as a deity, usually in human
form; no other religion has ever been so anthropomorphic as the Greek.
Every craft, profession, and art had its divinity, or, as we should say, its
patron saint; and in addition there were demons, harpies, furies, fairies,
gorgons, sirens, nymphs, almost as numerous as the mortals of the earth.
The old question is religion created by priests? is here settled; it is in-
credible that any conspiracy of primitive theologians should have begotten
such a plethora of gods. It must have been a boon to have so many deities,
so many fascinating legends, sacred shrines, and solemn or joyous festivals.
Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all
the contradictory currents of the world. Even today, in Mediterranean
Christianity, it is not God who is worshiped, so much as the saints; it is
polytheism that sheds over the simple life the inspiring poetry of consola-
tory myth, and gives to the humble soul the aid and comfort that it would
not venture to expect from a Supreme Being unapproachably awful and
remote.
Each of the gods had a mythos, or story, attached to him, which ac-
counted for his place in the city's life, or for the ritual that honored him.
These myths, rising spontaneously out of the lore of the place and the
people, or out of the inventions and embellishments of rhapsodists, became
at once the faith and the philosophy, the literature and the history of thei
early Greek; from them came the subjects that adorned Greek vases, and
suggested to artists countless paintings, statues, and reliefs. Despite the
achievements of philosophy and the attempts of a few to preach a mono-
theistic creed, the people continued to the end of Hellenic civilization to
create myths, and even gods. Men like Heracleitus might allegorize the
myths, or like Plato adapt them, or like Xenophanes denounce them; but
when Pausanias toured Greece five centuries after Plato he found still alive
among the people the legends that had warmed the heart of the Homeric
age. The mythopoetic, theopoetic process is natural, and goes on today as
CHAP. VIII) 1HEGODSOF GREECE 177
always; there is a birth rate as well as a death rate of the gods; deity is like
energy, and its quantity remains, through all vicissitudes of form, approxi-
mately unchanged from generation to generation.
II. AN INVENTORY OF THE GODS
1. The Lesser Deities
We shall force some order and clarity upon this swarm of gods if we arti-
ficially divide them into seven groups; sky-gods, earth-gods, fertility-gods, ani-
mal gods, subterranean gods, ancestor or hero gods, and Olympians. "The names
of all of them," as Hesiod said, "it were troublesome for a mortal man to tell." 1
(1) Originally, so far as we can make out, the great god of the invading
Greeks, as of the Vedic Hindus, was the noble and various sky itself; it was
probably this sky-god who with progressing anthropomorphism became Uranus,
or Heaven, and then the "cloud-compelling," rain-making, thunder-herding
Zeus. 3 In a land surfeited with sunshine and hungry for rain, the sun, Helios, was
only a minor deity. Agamemnon prayed to him, 3 and the Spartans sacrified
horses to him to draw his flaming chariot through the skies;* the Rhodians, in
Hellenistic days, honored Helios as their chief divinity, flung annually into the
sea four horses and a chariot for his use, and dedicated to him the famous
Colossus;* and Anaxagoras almost lost his life, even in Periclean Athens, for say-
ing that the sun was not a god, but only a ball of fire. Generally, however, there
was little worship of the sun in classic Greece; still less of the moon (Selene) ;
least of all, of the planets or the stars.
(2) The earth, not the heavens, was the home of most Greek gods. And first
the earth itself was the goddess Ge or Gaea, patient and bountiful mother, preg-
nant through the embrace of raining Uranus, the sky. A thousand lesser deities
dwelt on the earth, in its waters, or in its surrounding air: spirits of sacred trees,
especially the oak; Nereids, Naiads, Oceanids, in rivers, lakes, or the sea; gods
gushing forth as wells or springs, or flowing as stately streams like the Maeander
or the Spercheus; gods of the wind, like Boreas, Zephyr, Notus, and Eurus, with
their master Aeolus; or the great god Pan, the horned, cloven-footed, sensual,
smiling Nourisher, god of shepherds and flocks, of woods and the wild life lurk-
ing in them, he whose magic flute could be heard in every brook and dell, whose
startling cry brought panic to any careless herd, and whose attendants were
* Phaethon (the Brilliant) , son of Helios, begged for the thrill of driving the sun's chariot
across the heavens. He drove it recklessly, nearly set the world on fire, was struck by light-
ning, and fell into the sea. Perhaps the Greeks meant this tale, like that of Icarus, to serve as
a sermon to youth.
178 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
merry fauns and satyrs, and those old satyrs called sileni, half goat and half
Socrates. Everywhere in nature there were gods; the air was so crowded with
spirits of good or evil that, said an unknown poet, "There is not one empty chink
into which you could push the spike of a blade of corn." 6
(3) The most mysterious and potent force in nature being reproduction, it
was natural that the Greeks, like other ancient peoples, should worship the prin-
ciple and emblems of fertility in man and woman along with their worship of
fertility in the soil. The phallus, as symbol of reproduction, appears in the rites
of Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, even of the chaste Artemis. In classical sculp-
ture and painting this emblem recurs with scandalous frequency. Even the
Great Dionysia, the religious festival at which the Greek drama was played, was
introduced by phallic processions, to which Athenian colonies piously sent
phalli. 7 Doubtless such festivals lent themselves to much lusty humor, as one
may judge from Aristophanes; but all in all the humor was healthy, and perhaps
served the purpose of stimulating Eros and promoting the birth rate. 8
The more vulgar side of this fertility cult was expressed in the Hellenistic and
Roman periods by the worship of Priapus, born of an amour between Dionysus
and Aphrodite, and popular with vase painters and the mural artists of Pompeii.
A lovelier variation of the reproductive theme was the veneration of goddesses
representing motherhood. Arcadia, Argos, Eleusis, Athens, Ephesus, and other
localities gave their greatest devotion to feminine deities, often husbandless; such
goddesses presumably reflect a primitive matrilinear age before the coming of
marriage; 8 the enthronement of Zeus as Father God over all gods represents the
victory of the patriarchal principle.* The probable priority of women in agri-
culture may have helped to give form to the greatest of these mother deities,
Demeter, goddess of the corn or the tilled earth. One of the most beautiful of
Greek myths, skillfully narrated in the Hymn to Demeter once attributed to
Homer, tells how Demeter's daughter Persephone, while gathering flowers, was
kidnaped by Pluto, god of the underworld, and snatched down to Hades. The
sorrowing mother searched for her everywhere, found her, and persuaded Pluto
to let Persephone live on the earth nine months in every year a pretty symbol
for the annual death and rebirth of the soil. Because the people of Eleusis be-
friended the disguised Demeter as she "sat by the way, grieved in her inmost
heart," she taught them and Attica the secret of agriculture, and sent Triptole-
mus, son of Eleusis' king, to spread the art among mankind. Essentially it was
the same myth as that of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz and Ishtar in Baby-
lonia, Astarte and Adonis in Syria, Cybele and Attis in Phrygia. The cult of
motherhood survived through classical times to take new life in the worship of
Mary the Mother of God.
* Note the absence of mother goddesses in such strongly patriarchal societies as Judea,
, Islam, and Protestant Christendom.
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 179
(4) Certain animals, in early Greece, were honored as semideities. Greek
religion was too anthropomorphic, in its sculptural age, to admit the divine
menageries that we find in Egypt and India; but a vestige of a less classical past
appears in the frequent association of an animal with a god. The bull was sacred
because of its strength and potency; it was often an associate, disguise, or symbol
of Zeus and Dionysus, and perhaps preceded them as a god. 10 In like manner the
"cow-eyed Hera" may once have been a sacred cow. n The pig too was holy
because of its fertility; it was associated with the gentle Demeter; at one of her
festivals, the Thesmophoria, the sacrifice was ostensibly of a pig, possibly to it. u
At the feast of the Diasia the sacrifice was nominally to Zeus, really to a sub-
terranean snake that was now dignified with his name. 13 Whether the snake was
holy as supposedly deathless, or as a symbol of reproductive power, we find it
passing down as a deity from the snake-goddess of Crete into fifth-century
Athens; in the temple of Athena, on the Acropolis, a sacred serpent dwelt to
whom, each month, a honey cake was offered in appeasing sacrifice. In Greek
art a snake is often seen about the figures of Hermes, Apollo, and Asclepius; 1B
under the shield of Pheidias' Athene Parthenos was wreathed a mighty serpent;
the Farnese Athena is half covered with snakes. 10 The snake was often used as a
symbol or form of the guardian deity of temple or home; 17 perhaps because it
prowled about tombs it was believed to be the soul of the dead. 18 The Pythian
games are thought to have been celebrated, at first, in honor of the dead python
of Delphi.
(5) The most terrible of the gods were under the earth. In caves and clefts
and like nether chambers dwelt those chthonian or earthly deities whom the
Greeks worshiped not by day with loving adoration, but at night with apotro-
paic rites of riddance and fear. These vague nonhuman powers were the real
autochthonoi of Greece, older than the Hellenes, older perhaps than the Myce-
naeans, who probably transmitted them to Greece; if we could trace them to
their origin we might find that they were the vengeful spirits of the animals
that had been driven into the forests or under the soil by the advance and multi-
plication of men. The greatest of these subterranean deities was called Zeus
Chthonios; but Zeus here meant merely god. 1 " Or he was called Zeus Meilichios,
the Benevolent God; but here again the words were deceptive and propitiatory,
for this god was a fearful snake. Brother to Zeus was Hades, lord of the under-
world that took his name. To placate him the Greeks called him Pluto, the giver
of abundance, for he had it in his power to bless or blight the roots of all things
that grew in the soil.* Still more ghostly and terrible was Hecate, an evil spirit
that came up from the lower world and brought misfortune, through her evil
* Plutus, god of wealth, was a form of Pluto. In early Greece wealth took chiefly the form
of corn either growing in the earth or stored in the earth in \ars, in either case under Pluto's
protection."
l8o THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
eye, to all whom she visited. The less learned Greeks sacrificed puppies to
keep her away. a
(6) Before the classical age the dead were regarded as spirits capable of good
and evil to men, and were appeased with offerings and prayer. They were not
quite gods, but the primitive Greek family, like the Chinese, honored its dead
beyond any deity. 22 In classical Greece these vague ghosts were more dreaded
than loved, and were propitiated with aversion rituals, as in the festival of
Anthesteria. The worship of heroes was an extension of the cult of the dead.
Great, noble, or beautiful men or women could be raised by the gods to im-
mortal life and become minor deities. So the people of Olympia offered annual
sacrifice to Hippodameia; Cassandra was worshiped at Laconian Leuctra, Helen
at Sparta, Oedipus at Colonus. Or a god might descend into the body of a
mortal, and transform him with divinity; or the god might cohabit with a mortal
and beget a hero-god, as Zeus with Alcmena begot Heracles. Many cities,
groups, even professions, traced their origin to some god-born hero; so the
physicians of Greece looked back to Asclepius. The god was once a dead man,
ancestor, or hero; the temple was originally a tomb; the church is still in most
lands a shelter for relics of the sacred dead. In general the Greeks made less
distinction between men and gods than we do; many of their gods were as
human, except in birth, as our saints, and as close to their worshipers; and though
they were called Immortals, some of them, like Dionysus, could die.
2. The Olympians
All these were the less famous, though not necessarily the less honored,
gods of Greece. How is it that we hear so little of them in Homer, and so
much of the Olympians? Probably because the gods of Olympus entered
with the Achaeans and Dorians, overlaid the Mycenaean and chthonian
deities, and conquered them as their worshipers were conquered. We see
the change in action at Dodona and Delphi, where the older god of the
earth, Gaea, was displaced in the one case by Zeus, in the other by Apollo.
The defeated gods were not wiped out; they remained, so to speak, as sub-
ject deities, hiding bitterly underground, but still revered by the common
people, while the victorious Olympians received on their mountaintop the
worship of the aristocracy; hence Homer, who composed for the elite, says
almost nothing of the nether gods. Homer, Hesiod, and the sculptors
helped the political ascendancy of the conquerors to spread the cult of the
Olympians. Sometimes the minor gods were combined or absorbed into the
greater figures, or became their attendants or satellites, very much as minor
states were now and then attached or subjected to greater ones; so the satyrs
CHAP.Vm) THE GODS OF GREECE \Sl
and sileni were given to Dionysus, the sea nymphs to Poseidon, the moun-
tain and forest sprites to Artemis. The more savage rites and myths faded
out; the chaos of a demon-haunted earth yielded to a semiorderly divine
government that reflected the growing political stability of the Greek
world.
At the head of this new regime was the majestic and patriarchal Zeus. He
was not first in time; Uranus and Cronus, as we have seen, preceded him;
but they and the Titans, like Lucifer's hosts, were overthrown.* Zeus and
his brothers cast lots to divide the world amongst them; Zeus won the sky,
Poseidon the sea, Hades the bowels of the earth. There is no creation in
this mythology: the world existed before the gods, and the gods do not
make man out of the slime but beget him by union among themselves, or
with their mortal offspring; God is literally the Father in the theology of
the Greeks. Nor are the Olympians omnipotent or omniscient; each limits
the other, or even opposes the other; any one of them, especially Zeus, can
be deceived. Nevertheless they acknowledge his suzerainty, and crowd his
court like the retainers of a feudal lord; and though he consults them on
occasion, and now and then yields his preference to theirs, 23 he frequently
puts them in their place. 2 * He begins as a sky-and-mountain-god, provider
of the indispensable rain.t Like Yahweh he is, among his earlier forms, a
god of war; he debates with himself whether to end the siege of Troy or
"make the war more bloody," and decides for the latter course. 26 Gradually
he becomes the calm and mighty ruler of gods and men, bestriding Olympus
in bearded dignity. He is the head and source of the moral order of the
world; he punishes filial neglect, guards family property, sanctions oaths,
pursues perjurers, and protects boundaries, hearths, suppliants, and guests.
At last he is the serene dispenser of judgment whom Pheidias carves for
Olympia.
His one failing is the youthful readiness with which he falls in love. Not
having created women, he admires them as wonderful beings, bearing even
to the gods the inestimable gifts of beauty and tenderness; and he finds it
beyond him to resist them. Hesiod draws up a long list of the divine amours
and their glorious offspring. 27 His first mate is Dione, but he leaves her in
* This straggle between Zeus and his aides against the Titans became for the Greeks a
symbol of the conquest of barbarism and brute strength by civilization and reason, and
offered a frequent subject for art.
t The name Zeus is probably akin to the Latin dies, our day, and may come from an Indo-
European root di, meaning to shine. Jupiter is Zeti-pater, Zeus the father; hence the geni-
tive Dios. Today the haunts and peaks once sacred to Zeus are named, or dedicated to, St.
Ellas, the raip-gaving sainf of the Greek Church.*
l82 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIII
Epirus when he moves to Thessalian Olympus. There his first wife is
Metis, goddess of measure, mind, wisdom. Gossip says that her children
will dethrone him; therefore he swallows her, absorbs her qualities, and be-
comes himself the god of wisdom. Metis is delivered of Athena within him,
and his head has to be cut open that Athena may be born. Lonely for loveli-
ness, he takes Themis for his mate, and begets by her the twelve Hours;
then he takes Eurynome, and begets the three Graces; then Mnemosyne, and
engenders the nine Muses; then Leto, and fathers Apollo and Artemis; then
his sister Demeter, and has Persephone; finally, having sown his wild oats,
he weds his sister Hera, makes her Queen of Olympus, and receives from
her Hebe, Ares, Hephaestus, and Eileithyia. But he does not get along well
with Hera. She is as old a god as he, and more honored in many states; she
is the patron deity of matrimony and motherhood, protectress of the mar-
riage tie; she is prim and grave and virtuous, and frowns upon his escapades;
moreover, she is an excellent shrew. He thinks of beating her, 28 but finds it
easier to console himself with new amours. His first mortal mate is Niobe;
his last is Alcmena, who is descended from Niobe in the sixteenth genera-
tion.* He loves also, with Greek impartiality, the handsome Ganymede,
and snatches him up to be his cupbearer on Olympus.
It was natural that so fertile a father should have some distinguished chil-
dren. When Athena was born in full development and armament from the
head of Zeus she provided the literature of the world with one of its most
hackneyed similes. She was an appropriate goddess for Athens, consoling
its maids with her proud virginity, inspiring its men with martial ardor, and
symbolizing for Pericles the wisdom that belonged to her as the daughter of
Metis and Zeus. When Pallas the Titan tried to make love to her she slew
him, and added his name to hers as a warning to other suitors. To her
Athens dedicated its loveliest temple and its most splendid festival.
More widely worshiped than Athena was her comely brother Apollo,
bright deity of the sun, patron of music, poetry, and art, founder of cities,
maker of laws, god of healing and father of Asclepius, "far-darting" archer
and god of war, successor to Gaea and Phoebef at Delphi as the holiest
oracle of Greece. As god of the growing crops he received tithe offerings
at harvest time, and in return he radiated his golden warmth and light from
Delos and Delphi to enrich the soil. Everywhere he was associated with
order, measure, and beauty; and whereas in other cults there were strange
* It should be added, in justice to the dead, that these adventures were probably invented
by the poets, or by tribes anxious to trace their lineage to the greatest of the gods.
tFrom Phoebe he took the name Phoebus, "inspired."
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 183
elements of fear and superstition, in the worship of Apollo, and in his great
festivals at Delphi and Delos, the dominant note was the rejoicing of a
brilliant people in a god of health and wisdom, reason and song.
Happy, too, was his sister Artemis (Diana) , maiden goddess of the chase,
so absorbed in the ways of animals and the pleasures of the woods that she
had no time for the love of men. She was the goddess of wild nature, of
meadows, forests, hills, and the sacred bough. As Apollo was the ideal
of Greek youth, so Artemis was the model of Greek girlhood strong,
athletic, graceful, chaste; and yet again she was the patroness of women in
childbirth, who prayed to her to ease their pains. At Ephesus she kept her
Asiatic character as a goddess of motherhood and fertility. In this way the
ideas of virgin and mother became confused in her worship; and the Chris-
tian Church found it wise, in the fifth century of our era, to attach the rem-
nants of this cult to Mary, and to transform the mid- August harvest festival
of Artemis into the feast of the Assumption.* 9 In such ways the old is pre-
served in the new, and everything changes except the essence. History,
like life, must be continuous or die; character and institutions may be
altered, but slowly; a serious interruption of their development throws them
into national amnesia and insanity.
A thoroughly human figure in this pantheon was the master craftsman of
Olympus, that lame Hephaestus whom the Romans knew as Vulcan. At
first he seems a pitiful and ridiculous figure, this insulted and injured Quasi-
modo of the skies; but in the end our sympathies are with him rather than
with the clever and unscrupulous gods who maltreat him. Perhaps in early
days, before he became so human, he had been the leaping spirit of the fire
and the forge. In the Homeric theogony he is the son of Zeus and Hera;
but other myths assure us that Hera, jealous of Zeus's unaided delivery of
Athena, gave birth to Hephaestus without the aid of any male. Seeing him
to be ugly and weak, she cast him down from Olympus. He found his way
back, and built for the gods the many mansions in which they dwelt.
Though his mother had dealt so cruelly with him, he showed her all kind-
ness and respect, and defended her so zealously in one of her quarrels with
Zeus that the great Olympian seized him by the leg and hurled him down to
the earth. A whole day Hephaestus fell; at last he landed on the island of
Lemnos, and hurt his ankle; certainly thereafter (before that, says Homer)
he was painfully lame. Again he found his way back to Olympus. In his
resounding workshops he built a mighty anvil with twenty huge bellows,
made the shield and armor of Achilles, statues that moved of their own
accord, and other very wonderful things. The Greeks worshiped him as
184 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
the god of all metal trades, then of all handicrafts, and pictured the vol-
canoes as the chimneys of his subterranean forges. It was his misfortune
that he married Aphrodite, for it is difficult for beauty to be virtuous.
Learning of her affair with Ares, Hephaestus fashioned a trap that fell upon
the lovers as they loved; and then the limping deity had his lame revenge
by bringing his fellow gods to look in laughter upon the bound divinities
of love and war. But to Hermes, Homer tells us, Apollo said:
"Hermes, son of Zeus . . . wouldst thou in sooth be willing, even
though ensnared with strong bonds, to lie on a couch by the side
of golden Aphrodite?" Then the messenger answered him: "Would
that this might befall, Lord Apollo, that thrice as many bonds
inextricable might clasp me about, and that ye gods aye, and all the
goddesses, too might be looking on, but that I might sleep by the
side of golden Aphrodite." 30
Ares (Mars) was never distinguished for intelligence or subtlety; his
business was war, and even the charms of Aphrodite could not give him
the thrill that came to him from lusty and natural killing. Homer calls him
"the curse of men," and tells with pleasure how Athena laid him low with a
stone; "he covered, as he lay, seven acres of the field." 31 Hermes (Mercury)
is more interesting. In origin he is a stone, and from the cult of sacred
stones his worship is derived; the stages of his evolution are still visible.
Then he is the tall stone placed upon graves, or he is the daimon, or spirit,
in this stone. Then he is the boundary stone or its god, marking and guard-
ing a field; and because his function there is also to promote fertility, the
phallus becomes one of his symbols. Then he is the herm or pillar with
carved head, uncarved body, and prominent male member which was
placed before all respectable houses in Athens;"" we shall see how the mutila-
tion of these hermae on the eve of the expedition against Syracuse provided
the proximate cause for the ruin of Alcibiades and Athens. Again he is the
god of wayfarers and the protector of heralds; their characteristic staif, or
caduceus, is one of his favorite insignia. As god of travelers he becomes a
god of luck, trade, cunning, and gain, therefore an inventor and guarantor
of measures and scales, a patron saint of perjurers, embezzlers, and thieves. 81
He is himself a herald, bearing the billets and decrees of Olympus from god
to god or man, and he moves on winged sandals with the speed of an angry
wind. His running-about gives him a lithe and graceful form, and prepares
him for Praxiteles. As a swift and vigorous youth he is the patron saint of
athletes, and his shamelessly virile image has a place in every palaestra." As
CHAP.VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE l8f
herald he is the god of eloquence; as celestial interpreter he is the first of a
long hermeneutical line. One of the "Homeric" Hymns tells how, in his
youth, he stretched strings across a tortoise shell, and so invented the lyre.
Finally it comes his turn uo appease Aphrodite; and their offspring, we are
told, 85 is a delicate hermaphrodite, sharing their charms and named from
their names.
It was characteristic of Greece that in addition to deities of chastity, vir-
ginity, and motherhood it should have a goddess of beauty and love. Doubt-
less in her Near-Eastern origins, and in Cyprus her half -Oriental home,
Aphrodite was first of all a mother goddess-, to the end of her tenure she
remained associated with reproduction and fertility in the whole realm of
plant, animal, and human life. But as civilization developed, and increasing
security obviated the need for a high birth rate, the esthetic sense was left
free to see other values in woman than those of multiplication, and to make
Aphrodite not only the embodiment of the ideal of beauty, but the deity
of all heterosexual pleasure. 1 he Greeks worshiped her in many forms: as
Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly, the goddess of chaste or sacred love; as
Aphrodite Pandemos, the Popular, the goddess of profane love in all its
modes; and even as Aphrodite Kallipygos, the Venus of the Lovely Nates. 88
At Athens and Corinth the courtesans built temples to her as their patron
saint. At the beginning of April various cities in Greece celebrated her
great festival, the Aphrodisia; and on that occasion, for those who cared to
take part, sexual freedom was the order of the day. 87 She was the love
goddess of the sensual and passionate south, ancient rival of Artemis, the
love goddess of the cold and hunting north. Mythology, almost as ironic as
history, made her the wife of the crippled Hephaestus, but she consoled
herself with Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, Dionysus, and many a mortal like
Anchises and Adonis.* To her, in competition with Hera and Athena, Paris
awarded the golden apple as the prize of beauty. But perhaps she was never
really beautiful until Praxiteles reconceived her, and gave her the loveliness
for which Greece could forgive all her sins.
* The myth of Adonis is one more variation on the vegetation theme the annual death
and resurrection of the soil. This handsome youth was desired by both Aphrodite and
Persephone, the goddesses of love and of death. Ares, jealous of Adonis' success with
Aphrodite, disguised himself as a wild boar and killed him. The anemone was born of
Adonis' blood, and rivers of poetry from Aphrodite's grief. Zeus persuaded the goddesses
to divide Adonis' time and attentions by leaving him for half a year with Persephone in
Hades, and restoring him for half a year to earthly life and love. In Phoenicia, Cyprus, and
Athens the death of the boy was commemorated in the festival of the Adonia; women carried
images of the Lord (for such was the meaning of his name), loudly bewailed his death, and
^iumphantly celebrated his resurrection. 88
l86 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIII
To the legitimate or illegitimate children of Zeus we must add, as major
Olympians, his sister Hestia, goddess of the hearth, and his unruly brother
Poseidon. This Greek Neptune, secure in his watery realms, considered
himself fully the equal of Zeus. Even landlocked nations worshiped him,
for he commanded not only the sea but the rivers and the springs; it was
he who guided the mysterious subterranean streams, and made earthquakes
with tidal waves. 89 To him Greek mariners prayed, and raised appeasing
temples on perilous promontories.
Subordinate deities were numerous even on Olympus, for there was no
end to personifications. There was Hestia (the Roman Vesta) , goddess of
the hearth and its sacred fire. There was Iris, the rainbow, sometimes
messenger for Zeus; Hebe, goddess of youth; Eileithyia, who helped women
in childbirth; Dike or Justice; Tyche, Chance; and Eros, Love, whom
Hesiod made the creator of the world, whom Sappho called "a limb-dis-
solving, bitter-sweet, impracticable wild beast." 10 There was Hymeneus,
the Marriage Song; Hypnos, Sleep; Oneiros, Dream; Geras, Old Age; Lethe,
Oblivion; Thanatos, Death, and others beyond naming. There were nine
Muses to inspire artists and poets: Clio for history, Euterpe for lyric poetry
accompanied by the flute, Thalia for comic drama and idyllic poetry,
Melpomene for tragedy, Terpsichore for choral dance and song, Erato for
love verse and mimicry; Polymnia for hymns, Urania for astronomy, Cal-
liope for epic poetry. There were three Graces, and their twelve attendants,
the Hours. There was Nemesis, who meted out good and evil to men, and
visited with disaster all who were guilty of hybris insolence in prosperity.
There were the terrible Erinnyes, the Furies who left no wrong un-
revenged; the Greeks with deprecating euphemism called them Well-
Wishers, Eumenides. And finally there were the Moirai, the Fates or
Allotters who regulated inevitably the affairs of life, and ruled, some said,
both" gods and men. In that conception Greek religion found its limit, and
flowed over into science and law.
We have left for the last the most troublesome, the most popular, the
most difficult to classify, of all the Greek gods. Only late in his career was
Dionysus received into Olympus. In Thrace, which gave him as a Greek
gift to Greece, he was the god of liquor brewed from barley, and was
known as Sabazius; in Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and
guardian of the vine; he began as a goddess of fertility, became a god of
intoxication, and ended as a son of god dying to save mankind. Many figures
and legends were mingled to make his myth. The Greeks thought of him a?
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 187
Zagreus, "the horned child" borne to Zeus by his daughter Persephone.
He was the best beloved of his father, and was seated beside him on the
throne of heaven. When the jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill him,
Zeus, to disguise him, changed him into a goat, then a bull; in this form,
nevertheless, the Titans captured him, cut his body into pieces, and boiled
them in a caldron. Athena, like another Trelawney, saved the heart, and
carried it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Semele, who, impregnated with it, gave to
the god a second birth under the name of Dionysus.*
Mourning for Dionysus' death, and joyful celebration of his resurrection,
formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In
springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went
up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without
restraint, and like our less religious bacchanalians, considered him witless
who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession, led by
Maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus; they listened tensely to the
story they knew so well, of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their
god; and as they drank and danced they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds
were loosed. The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon
a goat, a bull, sometimes a man (seeing in them incarnations of the god) ; to
tear the live victim to pieces in commemoration of Dionysus' dismember-
ment; then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in a sacred communion
whereby, as they thought, the god would enter them and possess their souls.
In that divine enthusiasm! they were convinced that they and the god be-
came one in a mystic and triumphant union; they took his name, called
themselves, after one of his titles, Bacchoi, and knew that now they would
never die. Or they termed their state an ecstasis, a going out of their souls
to meet and be one with Dionysus; thus they felt freed from the burden
of the flesh, they acquired divine insight, they were able to prophesy, they
were gods. Such was the passionate cult that came down from Thrace into
Greece like a medieval epidemic of religion, dragging one region after
another from the cold and clear Olympians of the state worship into a faith
and ritual that satisfied the craving for excitement and release, the longing
for enthusiasm and possession, mysticism and mystery. The priests of
* Diodorus Siculus, as early as 50 B.C., interpreted the tale as a vegetation myth. Zagreus,
the vine, is a child of Demeter, the earth, fertilized by Zeus, the rain. The vine, like the god,
is cut (pruned) to give it new life; and the juice of the grape is boiled to make wine. Each
year, under nourishing rains, the vine is reborn." Herodotus found so many resemblances
between the myths of Dionysus and Osiris that he identified the two gods in one of the first
essays in comparative religion."
fFrom entheos, "a god within"; "enthusiasm" originally meant possession by a god.
l88 THE LIFE OP GREECE (CHAP. VIII
Delphi and the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance, but
failed; all they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olympus, Hellenize
and humanize him, give him an official festival, and turn the revelry of his
worshipers from the mad ecstasy of wine among the hills into the stately
processions, the robust songs, and the noble drama of the Great Dionysia.
For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo
yielded to Dionysus' heir and conqueror, Christ.
III. MYSTERIES
There were essentially three elements and stages in Greek religion: chthonian,
Olympian, and mystic. The first was probably of Pelasgo-Mycenaean origin,
the second probably Achaeo-Dorian, the third Egypto-Asiatic. The first wor-
shiped subterranean, the second celestial, the third resurrected, gods. The
first was most popular among the poor, the second among the well to do, the
third in the lower middle class. The first predominated before the Homeric
age, the second in it, the third after it. By the time of the Periclean Enlight-
enment the most vigorous element in Greek religion was the mystery. In the
Greek sense a mystery was a secret ceremony in which sacred symbols were
revealed, symbolic rites were performed, and only initiates were the wor-
shipers. Usually the rites represented or commemorated, in semidramatic form,
the suffering, death, and resurrection of a god, pointed back to old vegetation
themes and magic, and promised the initiate a personal immortality.
Many places in Greece celebrated such mystic rites, but no other place in
this respect could rival Eleusis. The mysteries there were of pre-Achaean
origin, and appear to have been originally an autumn festival of plowing and
sowing.* 5 A myth explained how Demeter, rewarding the people of Attica for
their kindness to her in her wanderings, established at Eleusis her greatest tem-
ple, which was destroyed and rebuilt many times during the history of Greece.
Under Solon, Peisistratus, and Pericles the festival of Demeter at Eleusis was
adopted by Athens, and raised to higher elaboration and pomp. In the Lesser
Mysteries, held near Athens in the spring, candidates for initiation underwent
a preliminary purification by self -immersion in the waters of the Ilissus. In Sep-
tember the candidates and others walked in grave but happy pilgrimage for
fourteen miles along the Sacred Way to Eleusis, bearing at their head the
image of the chthonian deity lacchus. The procession arrived at Eleusis under
torchlight, and solemnly placed the image in the temple; after which the day
was ended with sacred dances and songs.
The Greater Mysteries lasted four days more. Those who had been purified
with bathing and fasting were now admitted to the lesser rites; those who had
CHAP. VIIl) THEGODSOFGREECE 189
received such rites a year before were taken into the Hall of Initiation, where
the secret ceremony was performed. The mystai, or initiates, broke their fast
by participating in a holy communion in memory of Demeter, drinking a holy
mixture of meal and water, and eating sacred cakes. What mystic ritual was
then performed we do not know; the secret was well kept throughout antiquity,
under penalty of death; even the pious Aeschylus narrowly escaped condem-
nation for certain lines that might have given the secret away. The ceremony
was in any case a symbolic play, and had a part in generating the Dionysian
drama. Very probably the theme was the rape of Persephone by Pluto, the
sorrowful wandering of Demeter, the return of the Maiden to earth, and the
revelation of agriculture to Attica. The summary of the ceremony was the
mystic marriage of a priest representing Zeus with a priestess impersonating
Demeter. These symbolic nuptials bore fruit with magic speed, for it was soon
followed, we are told, by a solemn announcement that "Our Lady has borne
a holy boy"; and a reaped ear of corn was exhibited as symbolizing the fruit
of Demeter's labor the bounty of the fields. The worshipers were then led
by dim torchlight into dark subterranean caverns symbolizing Hades, and,
again, to an upper chamber brilliant with light, representing, it appears, the
abode of the blessed; and they were now shown, in solemn exaltation, the holy
objects, relics, or icons that till that moment had been concealed. In this
ecstasy of revelation, we are assured, they felt the unity of God, and the
oneness of God and the soul; they were lifted up out of the delusion of
individuality, and knew the peace of absorption into deity.**
In the age of Peisistratus the mysteries of Dionysus entered into the Eleu-
sinian liturgy by a religious infection: the god lacchus was identified with
Dionysus as the son of Persephone, and the legend of Dionysus Zagreus was
superimposed upon the myth of Demeter. 415 But through all forms the basic
idea of the mysteries remained the same: as the seed is born again, so may the
dead have renewed life; and not merely the dreary, shadowy existence of Hades,
but a life of happiness and peace. When almost everything else in Greek
religion had passed away, this consoling hope, reunited in Alexandria with that
Egyptian belief in immortality from which the Greek had been derived, gave
to Christianity the weapon with which to conquer the Western world.
In the seventh century there came into Hellas, from Egypt, Thrace, and
Thessaly, another mystic cult, even more important in Greek history than
the mysteries of Eleusis. At its source we find, in the age of the Argonauts,
the obscure but fascinating figure of Orpheus, a Thracian who "in culture,
music, and poetry," says Diodorus, "far surpassed all men of whom we have
a record." 48 Very probably he existed, though all that we now know of
him bears the marks of myth. He is pictured as a gentle spirit, tender, medi-
igo THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
tative, affectionate; sometimes a musician, sometimes a reforming ascetic
priest of Dionysus. He played the lyre so well, and sang to it so melodi-
ously, that those who heard him almost began to worship him as a god;
wild animals became tame at his voice, and trees and rocks left their places
to follow the sound of his harp. He married the fair Eurydice, and almost
went mad when death took her. He plunged into Hades, charmed Perseph-
one with his lyre, and was allowed to lead Eurydice up to life again on
condition that he should not look back upon her until the surface of the
earth was reached. At the last barrier anxiety overcame him lest she should
no longer be following; he looked back, only to see her snatched down once
more into the nether world. Thracian women, resenting his unwillingness
to console himself with them, tore him to pieces in one of their Dionysian
revels; Zeus atoned for them by placing the lyre of Orpheus as a constella-
tion among the stars. The severed head, still singing, was buried at Lesbos
in a cleft that became the site of a popular oracle; there, we are told, the
nightingales sang with especial tenderness."
In later days it was claimed that he had left behind him many sacred
songs; and perhaps it was so. At the behest of Hipparchus, says Greek
tradition, a scholar named Onomacritus, about 520, edited these as the
Homeric lays had been edited a generation before. In the sixth century,
or earlier, these hymns had acquired a sacred character as divinely inspired,
and formed the basis of a mystical cult related to that of Dionysus but far
superior to it in doctrine, ritual, and moral influence. The creed was essen-
tially an affirmation of the passion (suffering), death, and resurrection of
the divine son Dionysus Zagreus, and the resurrection of all men into a
future of reward and punishment. Since the Titans, who had slain Diony-
sus, were believed to have been the ancestors of man, a taint of original sin
rested upon all humanity; and in punishment for this the soul was enclosed
in the body as in a prison or a tomb. But man might console himself by
knowing that the Titans had eaten Dionysus, and that therefore every man
harbored, in his soul, a particle of indestructible divinity. In a mystic sacra-
ment of communion the Orphic worshipers ate the raw flesh of a bull as a
symbol of Dionysus to commemorate the slaying and eating of the god,
and to absorb the divine essence anew/ 8
After death, said Orphic theology, the soul goes down to Hades, and
must face judgment by the gods of the underworld; the Orphic hymns and
ritual, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, instructed the faithful in the
art of preparing for this comprehensive and final examination. If the ver-
dict was guilty there would be severe punishment. One form of the doctrine
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE Ipl
conceived this punishment as eternal, 46 and transmitted to later theology the
notion of hell. Another form adopted the idea of transmigration: the soul
was reborn again and again into lives happier or bitterer than before accord-
ing to the purity or impurity of its former existence; and this wheel of
rebirth would turn until complete purity was achieved, and the soul was
admitted to the Islands of the Blest. 60 Another variant offered hope that
the punishment in Hades might be ended through penances performed in
advance by the individual, or, after his death, by his friends. In this way
a doctrine of purgatory and indulgences arose; and Plato describes with
almost the anger of a Luther the peddling of such indulgences in the Athens
of the fourth century B.C.:
Mendicant prophets go to rich men's doors and persuade them
that they have a power committed to them of making atonement for
their sins or those of their fathers by sacrifices or charms. . . . And
they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus . . .
according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only
individuals but whole cities that expiations and atonements may be
made by sacrifices and amusements [ceremonies?] which fill a vacant
hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead. The
latter [ceremonies] they call mysteries, and these redeem us from
the Pains of Hell; but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits
us. 61
Nevertheless there were in Orphism idealistic trends that culminated in
the morals and monasticism of Christianity. The reckless looseness of the
Olympians was replaced by a strict code of conduct, and the mighty Zeus
was slowly dethroned by the gentle figure of Orpheus, even as Yahweh was
to be dethroned by Christ. A conception of sin and conscience, a dualistic
view of the body as evil and of the soul as divine, entered into Greek
thought; the subjugation of the flesh became a main purpose of religion, as
a condition of the release for the soul. The brotherhood of Orphic initiates
had no ecclesiastical organization and no separate life; but they were dis-
tinguished by the wearing of white garments, the avoidance of flesh food,
and a degree of asceticism not usually associated with Hellenic ways. They
represented, in several aspects, a Puritan Reformation in the history of
Greece. Their rites encroached more and more upon the public worship
of the Olympian gods.
The influence of the sect was extensive and enduring. Perhaps it was
here that the Pythagoreans took their diet, their dress, and their theory of
Ip2 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP VIII
transmigration; it is worthy of note that the oldest Orphic documents now
extant were found in southern Italy . ra Plato, though he rejected much in
Orphism, accepted its opposition of body and soul, its puritan tendency,
its hope of immortality. Part of the pantheism and asceticism of Stoicism
may be traced to an Orphic origin. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria pos-
sessed a large collection of Orphic writings, and based upon them much
of their theology and their mysticism. The doctrines of hell, purgatory, and
heaven, of the body versus the soul, of the divine son slain and reborn, as
well as the sacramental eating of the body and blood and divinity of the
god, directly or deviously influenced Christianity, which was itself a mys-
tery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release. The
basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cult are alive and flourishing amongst
us today.
IV. WORSHIP
Greek ritual was as varied as the kinds of deities that it honored. The
chthonian gods received a gloomy ritual of appeasement and riddance, the
Olympians a joyful ritual of welcome and praise. Neither form of cere-
mony required a clergyman: the father acted as priest for the family, the
chief magistrate for the state. Life in Greece was not as secular as it hasS
been described; religion played a major part in it everywhere, and each
government protected the official cult as vital to social order and political
stability. But whereas in Egypt and the Near East the priesthood dominated
the state, in Greece the state dominated the priesthood, took the leader-
ship of religion, and reduced the clergy to minor functionaries in the tem-
ples. The property of the temples, in real estate, money, and slaves, was
audited and administered by officials of the state." 3 There were no sem-
inaries for the training of priests; anyone could be quietly chosen or ap-
pointed priest if he knew the rites of the god; and in many places the office
was let out to the highest bidder. 54 There was no hierarchy of priestly caste;
the priests of one temple or state had usually no association with those of
another ." There was no church, no orthodoxy, no rigid creed; religion con-
sisted not in professing certain beliefs, but in joining in the official ritual; 88
any man might have his own creed provided that he did not openly deny
or blaspheme the city's gods. In Greece church and state were one.
The place of worship could be the domestic hearth, the municipal hearth
in the city hall, some cleft in the earth for a chthonian deity, some temple
for an Olympian god. The precincts of the temple were sacred and
CHAP. VIII ) THE GODS OF GREECE 193
inviolable; here the worshipers met, and here all pursued persons, even if
tainted with serious crime, could find sanctuary. The temple was not for
the congregation but for the god; there, in his home, his statue was erected,
and a light burned before it which was not allowed to die. Often the peo-
ple identified the god with the statue; they washed, dressed, and tended
the image carefully, and sometimes scolded it for negligence; they told
how, at various times, the statue had sweated, or wept, or closed its eyes. 67
In the temple records a history was kept of the festivals of the god, and
of the major events in the life of the city or group that worshiped him;
this was the source and first form of Greek historiography.
The ceremony consisted of procession, chants, sacrifice, prayer, and
sometimes a sacred meal. Magic and masquerade, tableaux and dramatic
representations might be part of the procession. In most cases the basic
ritual was prescribed by custom, and every movement of it, every word
of the hymns and prayers, was preserved in a book kept sacred by the
family or the state; rarely was any syllable or action altered, or any rhythm;
the god might not like or comprehend the novelty. The living speech
changed, the ritual speech remained as before; in time the worshipers ceased
to understand the words they used, 68 but the thrill of antiquity supplied the
place of understanding. Often the ceremony outlasted even the memory
of the cause that had prompted it; then new myths were invented to explain
its establishment: the myth or creed might change, but not the ritual. Music
was essential to the whole process, for without music religion would be
difficult; music generates religion as much as religion generates music. Out
of the temple and processional chants came poetry, and the meters that
later adorned the robust profanity of Archilochus, the reckless passion of
Sappho, and the scandalous delicacies of Anacreon.
Having reached the altar usually in front of the temple the worshipers
sought with sacrifice and prayer to avert the wrath or win the aid of their
god. As individuals they might offer almost anything of value statues, re-
liefs, furniture, weapons, caldrons, tripods, garments, pottery; when the
gods could make no use of such articles the priests could. Armies might
offer part of their spoils, as Xenophon's Ten Thousand did in their retreat.""
Groups would offer the fruits of the field, the vines or the trees; more often
an animal appetizing to the god; sometimes, on occasions of great need, a
human being. Agamemnon offered Iphigenia for a wind; Achilles slaugh-
tered twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus; 60 human victims were
hurled from the cliffs of Cyprus and Leucas to satiate Apollo; others were
presented to Dionysus in Chios and Tenedos; Themistocles is said to have
194 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIH
sacrificed Persian captives to Dionysus at the battle of Salamis; 01 the Spar-
tans celebrated the festival of Artemis Orthia by flogging youths, some-
times to death, at her altar; 02 in Arcadia Zeus received human sacrifice till
the second century A.D.; 03 at Massalia, in time of pestilence, one of the poorer
citizens was fed at public expense, clad in holy garments, decorated with
sacred boughs, and cast over a cliff to death with prayers that he might
bear punishment for all the sins of his people. * In Athens it was the cus-
tom, in famine, plague, or other crisis, to offer to the gods, in ritual mimicry
or in actual fact, one or more scapegoats for the purification of the city;
and a similar rite, mimic or literal, was annually performed at the festival
of the Thargelia.* 05 In the course of time human sacrifice was mitigated
by restricting its victims to condemned criminals, and dulling their senses
with wine; finally it was replaced by the sacrifice of an animal. When, on
the night before the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.), the Boeotian leader Pe-
lopidas had a dream that seemed to demand a human sacrifice at the altar
as the price of victory, some of his councilors advised it, but others pro-
tested against it, saying "that such a barbarous and impious obligation could
not be pleasing to any Supreme Beings; that typhons and giants did not
preside over the world, but the general father of gods and mortals; that it
was absurd to imagine any divinities and powers delighting in slaughter
and sacrifice of men." 08
Animal sacrifice, then, was a major step in the development of civilization.
The beasts who bore the brunt of this advance in Greece were the bull,
the sheep, and the pig. Before any battle the rival armies sent up sacrifices
in proportion to their desired victory; before any assembly in Athens the
meeting place was purified by the sacrifice of a pig. The piety of the peo-
ple, however, broke down at the crucial point: only the bones and a little
flesh, wrapped in fat, went to the god; the rest was kept for the priests and
the worshipers. To excuse themselves the Greeks told how, in the days
of the giants, Prometheus had wrapped the edible portions of the sacri-
ficial animal in skin, and the bones in fat, and had asked Zeus to choose
which he preferred. Zeus had "with both hands" chosen the fat. It was
true that Zeus was enraged upon finding that he had been deceived; but he
had made his choice, and must abide by it forever. 00 Only in sacrifice to
the chthonian gods was everything surrendered to the deity, and the entire
animal burnt to ashes in a holocaust; the divinities of the lower world were
* These victims in Athens were called pharmakoi, which meant originally magicians;
ploarmakon meant a magic spell or formula, then a healing drug. 06 The question whether the
pharmakoi were really slain is in dispute; but there is little doubt that the sacrifice was
originally literal." 7
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 195
more feared than those of Olympus. No common meal followed a chthonic
sacrifice, for that might tempt the god to come and join the feast. But
after sacrifice to the Olympians the worshipers, not in awed atonement to
the god but in joyous communion with him, consumed the consecrated
victim; the magic formulas pronounced over it had, they hoped, imbued it
with the life and power of the god, which would now pass mystically into
his communicants. In like manner wine was poured upon the sacrifice, and
then into the cups of the worshipers, who drank, so to speak, with the
gods. 70 In the thiasoi, or fraternities, into which so many trade and social
groups in Athens were organized, this idea of divine communion in a com-
mon religious meal formed the binding tie."
Animal sacrifice continued throughout Greece until ended by Chris-
tianity, 72 which wisely substituted for it the spiritual and symbolical sacri-
fice of the Mass. In some measure prayer too became a substitute for
sacrifice; it was a clever amendment that commuted offerings of blood into
litanies of praise. In this gentler way man, subject to chance and tragedy at
every step, consoled and strengthened himself by calling to his aid the
mysterious powers of the world.
V. SUPERSTITIONS
Between these upper and nether poles of Greek religion, the Olympian and
the subterranean, surged an ocean of magic, superstition, and sorcery; behind
and below the geniuses whom we shall celebrate were masses of people poor
and simple, to whom religion was a mesh of fears rather than a ladder of hope.
It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle stories of Theseus
rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into
wine: 73 such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable
poetry with which imagination brightens the common life. One could even
pass over the anxiety of Athens to secure the bones of Theseus, and of Sparta to
bring back from Tegea the bones of Orestes; 74 the miraculous power officially
attributed to these relics may well have been part of the technique of rule.
What oppressed the pious Greek was the cloud of spirits that surrounded him,
ready and able, he believed, to spy upon him, interfere with him, and do him
evil. These demons were always seeking to enter into him; he had to be on
his guard against them at all times, and to perform magical ceremonies to dis-
perse them.
This superstition verged on science, and in some measure forecast our germ
theory of disease. All sickness, to the Greek, meant possession by an alien
l<)6 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIII
spirit; to touch a sick person was to contract his uncleanliness or "possession";
our bacilli and bacteria are the currently fashionable forms of what the Greeks
called keres or little demons. 75 So a dead person was "unclean"; the keres had
gotten him once for all. When the Greek left a house where a corpse lay, he
sprinkled himself with water, from a vessel placed for such purposes at the
door, to drive away from himself the spirit that had conquered the dead man.
This conception was extended to many realms where even our bacteriophobia
would hardly apply it. Sexual intercourse rendered a person unclean; so did
birth, childbirth, and homicide (even if unintentional). Madness was posses-
sion by an alien spirit; the madman was "beside himself." In all these cases a
ceremony of purification was considered necessary. Periodically homes, tem-
ples, camps, even whole cities were purified, and very much as we disinfect
them by water, smoke, or fire. 77 A bowl of clean water stood at the entrance
to every temple, so that those who came to worship might cleanse themselves, 78
perhaps by a suggestive symbolism. The priest was an expert in purification; he
could exorcise spirits by striking bronze vessels, by incantations, magic, and
prayer; even the intentional homicide might, by adequate ritual, be purified. 70
Repentance was not indispensable in such cases; all that was needed was to get
rid of the evil possessive demons; religion was not so much a matter of morals as
a technique of manipulating spirits. Nevertheless the multiplication of taboos
and purificatory rites produced in the religious Greek a state of mind surpris-
ingly akin to the Puritan sense of sin. The notion that the Greeks were immune
to the ideas of conscience and sin will hardly survive a reading of Pindar and
Aeschylus.
Out of this belief in an enveloping atmosphere of spirits came a thousand
superstitions, which Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, summarized in one
f>f his Characters:
Superstitiousness would seem to be a sort of cowardice with re-
spect to the divine. . . . Your Superstitious Man will not sally forth
for the day till he have washed his hands and sprinkled himself at the
Nine Springs, and put a bit of bay-leaf from a temple in his mouth.
And if a cat cross his path he will not proceed on his way till some
one else be gone by, or he have cast three stones across the street.
Should he espy a snake in his house, if it be one of the red sort he
will call upon Dionysus; if it be a sacred snake he will build a shrine
then and there. When he passes one of the smooth stones set up at
crossroads he anoints it with oil from his flask, and will not go his
ways till he have knelt down and worshiped it. If a mouse gnaw a
bag of his meal, he will off to the wizard and ask what he must do;
and if the advice be, "Send the bag to the cobblers to be patched,"
he neglects the advice and frees himself of the ill by rites of aversion.
CHAP.VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 197
... If he catches sight of a madman or an epileptic, he shudders and
spits into his bosom. 80
The simpler Greeks believed, or taught their children to believe, in a great
variety of bogies. Whole cities were disturbed, at short intervals, by "portents"
or strange occurrences, like deformed births of animals or men. 81 The belief in
unlucky days was so widespread that on such days no marriage might take
place, no assembly might be held, no courts might meet, no enterprise might
begin. A sneeze, a stumble, might be reason for abandoning a trip or an under-*
taking; a minor eclipse could stop or turn back armies, and bring great wars
to a disastrous end. Again, there were persons gifted with the power of
effective cursing: an angered parent, a neglected beggar might lay upon one
a curse that would ruin one's life. Some persons possessed magic arts; they
could mix love philters or aphrodisiacs, and could by secret drugs reduce a
man to impotence or a woman to sterility. 83 Plato did not consider his Laws
complete without an enactment against those who injure or slay by magic arts. 88
Witches are not medieval inventions; note Euripides' Medea, and Theocritus'
Simaetha. Superstition is one of the most stable of social phenomena; it re-
mains almost unchanged through centuries and civilizations, not only in its
bases but even in its formulas.
VI. ORACLES
In a world so crowded with supernatural powers, the events of life seemed
to depend upon the will of demons and gods. To discover that will the
curious Greeks consulted soothsayers and oracles, who divined the future
by reading the stars, interpreting dreams, examining the entrails of animals,
or observing the flight of birds. Professional soothsayers hired tKemselves
out to families, armies, and states; 8 * Nicias, before setting out upon the
expedition to Sicily, engaged a troop of sacrificers, augurs, diviners; 86 and
though not all generals were as pious as this great slaveowner, nearly all
were as superstitious. Men and women appeared who claimed inspiration
and clairvoyance; in Ionia particularly certain women called Sibyls (i.e.,
the Will of God) issued oracles believed by millions of Greeks. 83 From
Erythrae the Sibyl Herophila was said to have wandered through Greece
to Cumae in Italy, where she became the most famous of her kind, and lived,
we are told, a thousand years. Athens, like Rome, had a collection of
ancient oracles, and the government maintained in the prytaneum men
skilled in their interpretation. 87
Public oracles were set up at many temples in all parts of Greece; but
the most famous and honored were in early days the oracle of Zeus at
198 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. VIII
Dodona, and in the historical period that of Apollo at Delphi. "Barbarians"
as well as Greeks consulted this oracle; even Rome sent messengers to ask
or suggest the will of the god. Since the power of divination was supposed
to belong particularly to the intuitive sex, three priestesses, each at least
half a century old, were trained to consult Apollo through the medium of
a trance. From a hollow in the earth below the temple came a peculiar
gas, ascribed to the eternal decomposition of the python that Apollo had
slain there; the officiating priestess, called Pythia, took her seat on a high
tripod over this cleft, inhaled the divine stench, chewed narcotic laurel
leaves, fell into delirium and convulsions, and, thus inspired, uttered in-
coherent words which the priests translated to the people. Very often the
final reply admitted of diverse, even contrary, interpretations, so that the
infallibility of the oracle was maintained whatever the event. 88 Possibly the
priests were no less puppets than the priestesses; sometimes they accepted
bribes; 80 and in most cases the voice of the oracle harmonized melodiously
with the dominant influence in Greece. 00 Nevertheless, where external pow-
ers did not constrain them, the priests taught valuable lessons of moderation
and political wisdom to the Greeks. Though they condoned human sac-
rifice even after the moral sense of Greece had begun to revolt against it,
and made no protest against the immoralities of Olympus, they aided the
establishment of law, encouraged the manumission of slaves, and bought
many slaves in order to give them liberty. 01 They were not in advance
of Greek thought, but they did not hinder it by doctrinal intolerance. They
gave a helpful supernatural sanction to necessary Greek policies, and pro-
vided some degree of international conscience and moral unity for the scat-
tered cities of Greece.
Out of this unifying influence came the oldest known confederation of
Greek states. The Amphictyonic League was originally the religious alli-
ance of the peoples "dwelling around" the sanctuary of Demeter near Ther-
mopylae. The chief constituent states were Thessaly, Magnesia, Phthiotis,
Doris, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea, and Achaea. They met semiannually, in
spring at Delphi, in autumn at Thermopylae. They bound themselves never
to destroy one another's cities, never to allow the water supply of any
member city to be shut off, never to plunder or permit to be plundered
the treasury of Apollo at Delphi, and to attack any nation that violated
these pledges. Here was the outline of a League of Nations; an outline
whose completion was prevented by the natural fluctuations of wealth and
power among states, and the inherent rivalries of men and groups. Thessaly
formed a bloc of vassal states, and permanently dominated the League."
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE Jpp
Other amphictyonies were established; Athens, for example, belonged to
the Amphictyony of Calauria; and the rival leagues, while promoting peace
within their membership, became against other groups vast instruments of
intrigue and war.
VII. FESTIVALS
If it could not end war Greek religion succeeded in alleviating the routine
of economic life with numerous festivals. "How many victims offered to
the gods!" cried Aristophanes; "how many temples, statues . . . sacred pro-
cessions! At every moment of the year we see religious feasts and gar-
landed victims" of sacrifice. 03 The rich paid the cost, the state provided the
theorika, or divine funds, to pay to the populace the price of admission to
the games or plays that distinguished the holyday.
The calendar at Athens was essentially a religious calendar, and many months
were named from their religious festivals. In the first month, Hecatombaion
(July- August), came the Cronia (corresponding to the Roman Saturnalia),
when masters and slaves sat down together to a joyful feast; in the same month,
every fourth year, occurred the Panathenaea, when, after four days of varied
contests and games, the entire citizenship formed a solemn and colorful pro-
cession to carry to the priestess of Athena the sacred peplos, a gorgeously
embroidered robe which was to be placed upon the image of the city's god-
dess; this, as all the world knows, was the theme that Pheidias chose for the
frieze of the Parthenon. In the second month, Metageitnion, came the Meta-
geitnia, a minor festival in honor of Apollo. In the third month, Boedromion,
Athens sallied forth to Eleusis for the Greater Mysteries. The fourth month,
Pyanepsion, celebrated the Pyanepsia, the Oscophoria, and the Thesmophoria;
in this the women of Athens honored Demeter Thesmophoros (the Lawgiver)
with a strange chthonian ritual, parading phallic emblems, exchanging obsceni-
ties, and symbolically going down to Hades and returning, apparently as magi-
cal ceremonies to promote fertility in the soil and man. * Only the month of
Maimakterion had no festival.
In the month of Poseideon Athens held the Italoa, a feast of first fruits; in
Gamelion the Lenaea, in honor of Dionysus. In Anthesterion came three
important celebrations: the Lesser or preparatory Mysteries; the Diasia, or sac-
rifice to Zeus Meilichios; and, above all, the Anthesteria, or Feast of Flowers.
In this three-day spring festival to Dionysus wine flowed freely, and every-
body was more or less drunk; 86 there was a competition in wine drinking, and
the streets were alive with revelry. The king-archon's wife rode on a car be-
side the image of Dionysus, and was married to it in the temple as a symbol
200 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
of the union of the god with Athens. Beneath this jolly ritual ran a somber
undertone of fear and propitiation of the dead; the living ate a solemn meal in
commemoration of their ancestors, and left for them pots full of food and
drink. At the end of the feast the people chased the spirits of the departed
from the house with a formula of exorcism: "Out of the door with you, souls!
Anthesteria is over" words that became a proverbial phrase for dismissing
importunate beggars.*
In the ninth month, Elaphebolion, carne the Great Dionysia, established by
Peisistratus in 534; in that year Thespis inaugurated the drama at Athens as
part of the festival. It was the end of March, spring was in the air, the sea was
navigable, merchants and visitors crowded the city and swelled the attendance
at the ceremonies and the plays. All business was suspended, all courts were
closed; prisoners were released to let them share in the festivities. Athenians
of every age and class, brilliantly attired, took part in the procession that brought
the statue of Dionysus from Eleutherae and placed it in his theater. The rich
drove chariots, the poor marched on foot; a long train of animals followed
as destined gifts for the gods. Choruses from the towns of Attica joined or
competed in song and dance. In the tenth month, Munychion, Athens cele-
brated the Munychia, and Attica, every fifth year, celebrated the Brauronia
in honor of Artemis. In Thargelion occurred the Thargelia, or feast of the
grain harvest. In the twelfth month, Skirophorion, came the festivals of Skiro-
phoria, Arretophoria, Dipolia, and Bouphonia. Not all these feasts were annual;
but even for a four-year period they represented a grateful relief from daily toil.
Other states had similar holidays; and in the countryside every sowing and
every harvest was greeted with festal conviviality. Greater than all these were
the Panhellenic festivals, the panegyreis, or universal gatherings. There were
the Panionia on Mycale, the feast of Apollo at Delos, the Pythian festival at
Delphi, the Isthmian at Corinth, the Nemean near Argos, the Olympic in
Elis. These were the occasions of interstate games, but basically they were
holydays. It was the good fortune of Greece to have a religion human enough
in later days humane enough to associate itself joyfully and creatively with
art, poetry, music, and games, even, at last, with morality.
VIII. RELIGION AND MORALS
At first sight Greek religion does not seem to have been a major influ-
ence for morality. It was in origin a system of magic rather than of ethics,
and remained so, in large measure, to the end; correct ritual received more
* In many parts of Europe the people still believe that the ghosts of the dead return to
earth yearly, and must be entertained in a "Feast of All Souls." 98
CHAP. VIIl) THE GODS OF GREECE 201
emphasis than good conduct, and the gods themselves, on Olympus or on
earth, had not been exemplars of honesty, chastity, or gentleness. Even
the Eleusinian Mysteries, though they offered supernatural hopes, made
salvation depend upon ritual purifications rather than upon nobility of life.
"Pataikion the thief," said the sarcastic Diogenes, "will have a better
fate after his death than Agesilaus or Epaminondas, for Pataikion has been
initiated at Eleusis." 97
Nevertheless, in the more vital moral relations Greek religion came
subtly to the aid of the race and the state. The purification ritual, however
external in form, served as a stimulating symbol of moral hygiene. The
gods gave a general, if vague and inconstant, support to virtue; they
frowned upon wickedness, revenged themselves upon pride, protected the
stranger and the suppliant, and lent their terror to the sanctity of oaths,
Dike, we are told, punished every wrong, and the awful Eumenides pur-
sued the murderer, like Orestes, to madness or death. The central acts and
institutions of human life birth, marriage, the family, the clan, the state-
received a sacramental dignity from religion, and were rescued from the
chaos of hasty desire. Through the worship or honoring of the dead, the
generations were bound together in a stabilizing continuity of obligations,
so that the family was not merely a couple and their children, or even a
patriarchal assemblage of parents, children, and grandchildren, but a holy
union and sequence of blood and fire stretching far into the past and the
future, and holding the dead, the living, and the unborn in a sacred unity
stronger than any state. Religion not only made the procreation of children
a solemn duty to the dead, but encouraged it through the fear of the child-
less man that no posterity would inter him or tend his grave. So long as
this religion kept its influence, the Greek people reproduced themselves
vigorously, and as plentifully among the best as among the worst; and in
this way, with the help of a merciless natural selection, the strength and
quality of the race were maintained. Religion and patriotism were bound
together in a thousand impressive rites; the god or goddess most revered in
public ceremony represented the apotheosis of the city; every law, every
meeting of the assembly or the courts, every major enterprise of the army
or the government, every school and university, every economic or politi-
cal association, was surrounded with religious ceremony and invocation. In
all these ways Greek religion was used as a defense by the community and
the race against the natural egoism of the individual man.
Art, literature, and philosophy first strengthened this influence, and then
weakened it. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles poured their own ethical
202 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. VIII
fervor or insight into the Olympian creed, and Pheidias ennobled the gods
with beauty and majesty; Pythagoras and Plato associated philosophy with
religion, and supported the doctrine of immortality as a stimulus to morals.
But Protagoras doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides
ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it,
destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece.
CHAPTER IX
The Common Culture of Early Greece
I. THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE STATE
THE two rival zeniths of European culture ancient Hellas and Renais-
sance Italyrested upon no larger political organization than the city-
state. Geographical conditions presumably contributed to this result in
Greece. Everywhere mountains or water intervened; bridges were rare
and roads were poor; and though the sea was an open highway, it bound
the city with its commercial associates rather than with its geographical
neighbors. But geography does not altogether explain the city-state. There
was as much separatism between Thebes and Plataea, on the same Boeotian
plain, as between Thebes and Sparta; more between Sybaris and Crotona
on the same Italian shore than between Sybaris and Syracuse. Diversity of
economic and political interest kept the cities apart; they fought one an-
other for distant markets or grain, or formed rival alliances for control
of the sea. Distinctions of origin helped to divide them; the Greeks consid-
ered themselves to be all of one race, 1 but their tribal divisions Aeolian,
Ionian, Achaean, Dorian were keenly felt, and Athens and Sparta disliked
each other with an ethnological virulence worthy of our own age. Differ-
ences of religion strengthened, as they were strengthened by, political divi-
sions. Out of the unique cults of locality and clan came distinct festivals
and calendars, distinct customs and laws, distinct tribunals, even distinct
frontiers; for the boundary stones limited the realm of the god as well as
of the community; cujus regio, ejus religio. These and many other factors
united to produce the Greek city-state.
It was not a new administrative form: we have seen that there were city-
states in Sumeria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Crete hundreds or thousands
of years before Homer or Pericles. Historically the city-state was the vil-
lage community in a higher stage of fusion or development a common
market, meeting ground, and judgment seat for men tilling the same hin-
terland, belonging to the same stock, and worshiping the same god. Po-
litically it was to the Greek the best available compromise between those
two hostile and fluctuating components of human society order and lib-
203
204 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
erty; a smaller community would have been insecure, a larger one tyran-
nical. Ideallyin the aspirations of philosophers Greece was to consist
of sovereign city-states co-operating in a Pythagorean harmony. Aristotle
conceived the state as an association of freemen acknowledging one gov-
ernment and capable of meeting in one assembly; a state with more than
ten thousand citizens, he thought, would be impracticable. In the Greek
language one word polls sufficed for both city and state.
All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many
a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense
it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues,
was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the
end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the
city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant
assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and
gods, was Greece stimulated, by competition and emulation, to live human
life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society
had ever known. Even in our own times, with all our vitality and variety,
our mechanisms and powers, is there any community of like population or
extent that pours into the stream of civilization such a profusion of gifts
as flowed from the chaotic liberty of the Greeks?
II. LETTERS
Nevertheless there were common factors in the life of these watchfully
separatist states. As far back as the thirteenth century B.C. we find one lan-
guage throughout the Greek peninsula. It belonged to the "Indo-European"
group, like Persian and Sanskrit, Slavonic and Latin, German and English;
thousands of words denoting the primary relations or objects of life have com-
mon roots in these tongues, and suggest not only the predispersion antiquity
of the things denoted, but the kinship or association of the peoples who used
them in the dawn of history.* It is true that the Greek language was diversi-
fied into dialects Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic; but these were mutually intelli-
gible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or
common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken
by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a
noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious; as irregular as any vital speech, but
lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and dis-
* Cf. in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit dam (as) (house),
Greek domes. Latin domus, English tim-ber; dvaras, thyra, fores, door; venas, (f)oinos,
e; nous, naus, navis, nave; akshas, axon, axis, axle; iugam, zygon, iugum, yoke, etc.
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 205
tinctions of meaning, subtle philosophical conceptions, and every variety of
literary excellence from the "many-billowed surge" of Homer's verse to the
placid flow of Plato's prose.*
Greek tradition attributed the introduction of writing into Greece to Phoe-
nicians in the fourteenth century B.C., and we know nothing to the contrary.
The oldest Greek inscriptions, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries,
show a close resemblance to the Semitic characters on the ninth-century Moabite
stone. 3 These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left;
sixth-century inscriptions (e.g., at Gortyna) were made alternately from right
to left and from left to right; later inscriptions are from left to right through-
out, and certain letters are turned around accordingly, as 2 and 3 to B and E.
The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor modifications ;f
but the Greeks made several basic changes. Above all, they added vowels,
which the Semites had omitted; certain Semitic characters denoting consonants
or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and u. Later the lonians added
the long vowels eta. (long e} and o-megci (long or double 0). Ten different
Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states;
in Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe,
where it survives today; in Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae
to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the
long Q and o, but, unlike the Ionian, retained the Phoenician vau as a con-
sonant (a v with approximately the sound of ou) ; hence the Athenians called
wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we
call it wine. Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and
ourselves; Ionia abandoned it, content with k. Ionia represented L as A, Chalcis
as L ; Rome straightened up the latter form and gave it to Europe. The lonians
used P for R, but in Greek Italy the P sprouted a tail, and became R.*
The earliest uses of writing in Greece were probably commercial or religious;
apparently priestly charms and chants are the mother of poetry, and bills of
lading are the father of prose. Writing split into two varieties: the formal for
literary or epigraphic purposes, the cursive for ordinary use. There were no
accents, no spaces between words, no punctuation points; 6 but a change of
topic was marked off by a horizontal dividing stroke called the paragraphos
i.e., a sign "written on the side." The materials used to receive writing were
various: at first, if we may believe Pliny, leaves or the bark of trees; 6 for inscrip-
* We do not know how ancient Greek was pronounced. 3 The accents that trouble us so
much were seldom used by the classical Greeks, but were inserted into ancient texts by
Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century B.C. These accents should be ignored ii\
reading Greek poetry.
fCf. Greek alpha, Phoenician aleph (bull); beta, beth (tent); gamma, gimel (camel);
delta, dcileth (door) ; e-psilon, he (window) ; seta* zain (lance) -, beta, kheth (paling) ; iota
yod (hand), eta
206 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. EX
tions, stone, bronze, or lead; for ordinary writing, clay tablets as in Mesopo-
tamia;* then wooden tablets covered with wax, which were popular, in retro-
spect, with schoolboys; 7 for more permanent purposes papyrus, which the
Phoenicians brought from Egypt, and (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods)
parchment, made from the skins or membranes of goats or sheep. A metal
stylus was used on wax tablets; on papyrus or parchment a reed dipped in ink.
Wax writing was erased with the flat butt of the stylus, ink with a sponge; so
the poet Martial sent a sponge with his poems to his friend, so that they might
be wiped out with a stroke. 8 Many a critic will mourn the passing of this
courtesy.
In no field have the old words so regularly come down to us as in that of
writing. Paper,, of course, is papyrus, and once again, in the cycle of fashion,
the substance is a compressed plant. A line of writing was a stichos or row;
the Latins called it a versus or verse i.e., a turning back. The text was written
in columns upon a strip of papyrus or parchment from twenty to thirty feet
long, wound about a stick. Such a roll was called a bibles, from the Phoenician
city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called
btblion; our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls.t When a roll formed part
of a larger work it was called a tomos, or cutting. The first sheet of a roll was
called the protokolloni.e., the first sheet glued to the stick. The edges J of the
roll were smoothed with pumice and sometimes colored; if the author could
afford the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be wrapped
in a diphthera (membrane) , or, as the Latins called it, a vellum. Since a large
roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were
usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied
not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part. These divisions were
seldom made by the author; later editors divided the Histories of Herodotus
into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato's Re-
public into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was
costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in
the classic world; it was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now
to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment; most know!*
edge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to
the next; most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who
learned through the ear. There was no reading public in Greece before the
seventh century; there were no Greek libraries till those collected by Polycrates
*Graphein, which we translate to twite, originally meant to engrave.
t The Latins called a roll v&lumen wound up.
Latin frontes, whence our -frontispiece,
Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is
seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a view to easy breathing in
the reader, and a rhythmic sound in the words. Probably our descendants will be ear-
minded again.
CHAP.IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 207
and Peisistratus in the sixth. 8 In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries
of Euripides and the archon Eucleides; in the fourth, of Aristotle's. We know
of no public library before Alexandria's, none in Athens till Hadrian. 10 Perhaps
the Greeks of Pericles' day were so great because they did not have to read
many books, or any long one.
III. LITERATURE
Literature, like religion, divided and united Greece. The poets sang in
their local dialects, and often of their native scenes; but all Hellas listened
to the more eloquent voices, and stirred them now and then to broader
themes. Time and prejudice have destroyed too much of this early poetry
to let us feel its wealth and scope, its reputed vigor of utterance and finish
of form; but as we move through the isles or cities of sixth-century Greece
our wonder rises at the abundance and excellence of Greek literature be-
fore the Periclean age. The lyric poetry reflected an aristocratic society in
which feeling, thought, and morals were free so long as they observed the
amenities of breeding; this style of urbane and polished verse tended to
disappear under the democracy. It had a rich variety of structure and
meter, but seldom shackled itself with rhyme; poetry meant to the Greeks,
feeling imaginatively and rhythmically expressed.*
While the lyric singers tuned their lyres to love and war, the wander-
ing bards, in great men's halls, recited in epic measures the heroic deeds
of the race. Guilds of "rhapsodes"t built up through generations a cycle
of lays centering around the sieges of Thebes and Troy and the homing
of the warriors. Song was socialized among these minstrels; each stitched
his story together from earlier fragments, and none pretended to have com-
posed a whole sequence of these tales. In Chios a clan of such rhapsodes
called themselves Homeridae, and claimed descent from a poet Homer
who, they said, was the author of the epics that they recited throughout
eastern Greece. 11 Perhaps this blind bard was but an eponym, the imag-
inary ancestor of a tribe or group, like Hellen, Dorus, or Ion. 13 The Greeks
of the sixth century attributed to Homer not only the Iliad and the Odyssey
but all the other epics then existing. The Homeric poems are the oldest
epics known to us; but their very excellence, as well as their many refer-
ences to earlier bards, suggest that the surviving epics stand at the end of a
long line of development from simple lays to lengthy "stitched" songs. In
* Rhyme was mostly confined to oracles and religious prophecies,
t From raptein, to ? titch together, and aide, a song.
2O8 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IS
sixth-century Athens possibly under Solon, 13 probably under Peisistratus
a governmental commission selected or collated the Iliad and the Odyssey
from the epic literature of the preceding centuries, assigned them to Homer,
and edited perhaps wove them into substantially their present shape. 14
It is one of the miracles of literature that poems so complex in origin
achieved in the end so artistic a result. It is quite true that both in language
and in structure the Iliad falls considerably this side of perfection: that
Aeolian and Ionic forms are mingled as if by some polyglot Smyrnan, and
that the meter requires now one dialect and now the other; that the plot is
marred by inconsistencies, changes of plan and emphasis, and contradic-
tions of character; that the same heroes are killed two or three times over
in the course of the tale; that the original theme the wrath of Achilles and
its resultsis interrupted and obscured by a hundred episodes apparently
taken from other lays and sewn into the epic at every seam. Nevertheless,
in its larger aspects the story is one, the language is powerful and vivid, the
poem is all in all "the greatest that ever sounded on the lips of men." 15 Such
an epic could have been begun only in the active and exuberant youth of
the Greeks, and could have been completed only in their artistic maturity.
Its characters are nearly all warriors or their women; even the philosophers,
like Nestor, put up an enviably good fight. These individuals are intimately
and sympathetically conceived; and perhaps the finest tiling in all Greek
literature is the unbiased manner in which we are made to feel now with
Hector and now with Achilles. In his tent Achilles is a thoroughly unheroic
and unlikable figure, complaining to his mother that his luck does not befit
his semidivinity, and that Agamemnon has stolen his plum, the unhappy
Briseis; letting the Greeks die by the thousands while he eats and pouts
and sleeps in his ship or his tent; sending Patroclus unaided to death, and
then rending the air with unmanly lamentations. When finally he goes
into battle he is not stirred by patriotism but mad with grief over the loss
of his friend. In his rage he loses all decency, and sinks to savage cruelty
with both Lycaon and Hector. In truth he is an undeveloped mind, un-
settled and uncontrolled, and overshadowed with prophecies of death.
"Nay, friend," he says to the fallen Lycaon, who sues for mercy, "die like
another! What wouldst thou vainly weeping? Patroclus died, who was far
better than thou. Look upon me! Am I not beautiful and tall, and sprung
of a good father, and a goddess the mother that bare me? Yet, lo, Death
is over me, and the mighty hand of Doom. There cometh a dawn of day,
a noon or an evening, and a hand that I know not shall lay me dead." 11 '
So he stabs the unresisting Lycaon through the neck, flings the body into
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLT? GREECE 209
the river, and makes one of those grandiose speeches that adorn the slaugh-
ter in the Iliad, and laid the foundation for oratory among the Greeks.
Half of Hellas worshiped Achilles for centuries as a god; 17 we accept him,
and forgive him, as a child. At the worst he is one of the supreme creations
of the poetic mind.
What carries us along through the Iliad when we do not have to study
or translate it is not merely these characterizations, so numerous and diverse,
nor merely the flow and turmoil of the tale, but the rushing splendor of the
verse. It must be admitted that Homer repeats as well as nods; it is part
of his plan to recall as in refrain certain epithets and lines; so he sings with
fond repetition, of Emos d'erigeneia. phane rhododactylos Eos "when ap-
peared the morning's daughter, rosy-fingered Dawn." 18 But if these are
flaws they are lost in the brilliance of the language, and the wealth of similes
that now and then, amid the shock of war, calm us with the quiet beauty
of peaceful fields. "As when flies in swarming myriads haunt the herds-
man's stalls in spring time, when new milk has filled the pails in such vast
multitudes mustered the long-haired Greeks upon the plain." 19 Or
As when, among
The deep dells of an arid mountain-side,
A great fire burns its way, and the thick wood
Before it is consumed, and shifting winds
Hither and thither sweep the flames so ranged
Achilles in his fury through the field
From side to side, and everywhere o'ertook
His victims, and the earth ran dark with blood. 30
The Odyssey is so different from all this that from the outset one suspects
its separate authorship. Even some of the Alexandrian scholars suggested
this, and all the critical authority of Aristarchus was required to hush the
dispute. 31 The Odyssey agrees with the Iliad in certain standard phrases
"owl-eyed Athena," "long-haired Greeks," "wine-dark sea," "rosy-fingered
Dawn" which may have been taken from the same hoard and poetical
tradition into which the authors of the Iliad had dipped their pens. But the
Odyssey contains an array of words apparently brought into use after the
Iliad was composed. 22 In the second epic we hear frequently of iron, where
the earlier one spoke of bronze; we hear of writing, of private property in
land, of freedmen and emancipation none of which are mentioned in the
Iliad; the very gods and their functions are different. 83 The meter is the
same dactylic hexameter^ as in all the Greek epics; but the style and spirit
2IO THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
and substance are so far from the Iliad that if one author wrote both poems
he was a paragon of complexity and a master of all moods. The new poet
is more literary and philosophical, less violent and warlike, than the old;
more self-conscious and meditative, leisurely and civilized; so gentle, in-
deed, that Bentley thought the Odyssey had been composed for the special
benefit of women. 2 *
Whether here too we have poets rather than a poet is harder to say
than in the case of the Iliad. There are signs of suture, but the stitching
seems more skillful than in the older epic; the plot, though devious, turns
out in the end to be remarkably consistent, worthy almost of contemporary
fictioneers. From the beginning the conclusion is foreshadowed, every
episode advances it, and its coming binds all the books into a whole. Prob-
ably the epic was built upon pre-existing lays, as in the case of the Iliad;
but the work of unification is far more complete. We may conclude with
a high degree of diffidence that the Odyssey is a century younger than the
Iliad j and is predominantly the work of one man.
The characters are less vigorously and vividly conceived than in the
Iliad. Penelope is shadowy, and never quite emerges from behind her loom
except in the end, when a moment of doubt, perhaps of regret, flits through
her mind at the return of her master. Helen is clearer, and unique; here
the launcher of a thousand ships and the cause of ten thousand deaths is
still "a goddess among women," maturely lovely in her middle age, gentler
and quieter than before, but as proud as ever, and taking gracefully for
granted all the attentions that hedge in a queen. 25 Nausicaa is a pretty essay
in the male understanding of women; we hardly expected so delicate and
romantic a picture from a Greek. Telemachus is uncertainly drawn, in-
fected with hesitation as by some Hamlet touch; but Odysseus is the most
complete and complex portrait in Greek poetry. All in all, the Odyssey is
a fascinating novel in engaging verse, full of tender sentiment and adven-
turous surprise; more interesting, to an unwarlike and aging soul, than the
majestic and bloody Iliad.
These poems sole survivors of a long succession of epics became the
most precious element in the literary heritage of Greece. "Homer" was
die staple of Greek education, the repository of Greek myth, the source
-of a thousand dramas, the foundation of moral training, and strangest of
all the very Bible of orthodox theology. It was Homer and Hesiod, said
Herodotus (probably with some hyperbole) , who gave definite and human
form to the Olympians, and order to the hierarchy of heaven. 38 There is
much that is magnificent in Homer's gods, and we come to like them for
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 211
their failings; but scholars have long since detected in the poets who pic-
tured them a rollicking skepticism hardly befitting a national Bible. These
deities quarrel like relatives, fornicate like fleas, and share with mankind
what seemed to Alexander the stigmata of mortality the need for love and
sleep; they do everything human but hunger and die. Not one of them
could bear comparison with Odysseus in intelligence, with Hector in hero-
ism, with Andromache in tenderness, or with Nestor in dignity. Only a
poet of the sixth century, versed in Ionian doubt, could have made such
farcelings of the gods. 27 It is one of the humors of history that these epics,
in which the Olympians have essentially the function of comic relief, were
reverenced throughout Hellas as props of respectable morality and belief.
Eventually the anomaly proved explosive; the humor destroyed the belief,
and the moral development of men rebelled against the superseded morals
of the gods.
Religion failed to unify Greece, but athletics periodically succeeded.
Men went to Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea not so much to honor
the gods for these could be honored anywhere as to witness the heroic
contests of chosen athletes, and the ecumenical assemblage of varied Greeks.
Alexander, who could see Greece from without, considered Olympia the
capital of the Greek world.
Here under the rubric of athletics we find the real religion of the Greeks
the worship of health, beauty, and strength. "To be in health," said
Simonides, "is the best thing for man; the next best, to be of form and nature
beautiful; the third, to enjoy wealth gotten without fraud; and the fourth,
to be in youth's bloom among friends." 373 "There is no greater glory for a
man as long as he lives," said the Odyssey "than that which he wins by his
own hands and feet." Perhaps it was necessary for an aristocratic people,
living among slaves more numerous than themselves and frequently called
upon to defend their soil against more populous nations, to keep in good
condition. Ancient war depended upon physical vigor and skill, and these
were the original aim of the contests that filled Hellas with the noise of
their fame. We must not think of the average Greek as a student and lover
of Aeschylus or Plato; rather, like the typical Briton or American, he was
interested in sport, and his favored athletes were his earthly gods.
Greek games were private, local, municipal, and Panhellenic. Even the
fragmentary remains of antiquity reveal an interesting range of sports-
212 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
A relief in the Athens Museum shows on one side a wrestling match, on
another a hockey game. 28 Swimming, bareback riding, throwing or dodging
missiles while mounted, were not so much sports as general accomplish-
ments of all citizens. Hunting became a sport when it ceased to be a neces-
sity. Ball games were as varied then as now, and as popular; at Sparta the
terms ballplayer and youth were synonyms. Special rooms were built in
the palaestra for games of ball; these rooms were called sphairisteria, and
the teachers were sphairistai. On another relief we see men bouncing a
ball against the floor or the wall, and striking it back with the flat of the
hand; 80 we do not know whether the players did this in turn as in modern
handball. One ball game resembled Canadian lacrosse, being a form of
hockey played with racquets. Pollux, writing in the second century of our
era, describes it in almost modern terms:
Certain youths, divided into two equal groups, leave in a level
place which they have prepared and measured a ball made of
leather, about the size of an apple. They rash at it, as if it were a
prize lying between them, from their fixed starting-points. Each
of them has in his right hand a racquet (rhabdon) . . . ending in a
sort of flat bend whose center is woven with gut strings . . . plaited
like a net. Each side strives to be the first to drive the ball to the op-
posite end of the ground from that allotted to them.*
The same author pictures a game in which one team tries to throw a ball
over or through an opposed group, "until one side drives the other back
over their goal line." Antiphanes, in an imperfect fragment from the
fourth century B.C., describes a "star": "When he got the ball he de-
lighted to give it to one player while dodging another; he knocked it away
from one and urged on another with noisy cries. Outside, a long pass, be-
yond him, overhead, a short pass "*
From these private sports came local and incidental games, as after the
death of a hero like Patroclus, or the successful issue of some great enter-
prise, like the march of Xenophon's Ten Thousand to the sea. Then came
municipal games, in which the contestants represented various localities and
groups within one city-state. Almost but not quite international were the
quadrennial Panathenaic games, established by Peisistratus in 566; here the
entries were mostly from Attica, but outsiders were welcomed. Besides
the usual athletic events there were chariot races, a torch race, a rowing
race, musical competitions for voice, harp, lyre, and flute, dances, and
recitations, chiefly from Homer. Each of the ten divisions of Attica was
CHAP. EX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 21?
represented by twenty-four men chosen for their health, vigor, and good
looks; and a prize was awarded to the most impressive twenty-four for "fine
manhood." 33
Since athletics were necessary for war, and yet would die without com-
petitions, the cities of Greece, to provide the highest stimulus, arranged
Panhellenic games. The oldest of these were organized as a regular quad-
rennial event at Olympia in 776 B.C. the first definite date in Greek history.
Originally confined to Eleans, within a century they were drawing entries
from all Greece; by 476 the list of victors ranged from Sinope to Marseilles.
The feast of Zeus became an international holyday; a truce was proclaimed
to all wars in Greece for the month of the festival, and fines were levied
by the Eleans upon any Greek state in whose territory a traveler to the
games suffered molestation. Philip of Macedon humbly paid a fine because
some of his soldiers had robbed an Athenian en route to Olympia.
We picture the pilgrims and athletes starting out from distant cities, a
month ahead of time, to come together at the games. It was a fair as well
as a festival; the plain was covered not only with the tents that sheltered
the visitors from the July heat, but with the booths where a thousand con-
cessionaires exposed for sale everything from wine and fruit to horses and
statuary, while acrobats and conjurors performed their tricks for the crowd.
Some juggled balls in the air, others performed marvels of agility and skill,
others ate fire or swallowed swords: modes of amusement, like forms of
superstition, enjoy a reverend antiquity. Famous orators like Gorgias.,
famous sophists like Hippias, perhaps famous writers like Herodotus, de-
livered addresses or recitations from the porticoes of the temple of Zeus.
It was a special holiday for men, since married women were not allowed
to attend the festival; these had their own games at the feast of Hera.
Menander summed up such a scene in five words: "crowd, market, acro-
bats, amusements, thieves." 31
Only freeborn Greeks were allowed to compete in the Olympic games.
The athletes (from athlos, a contest) were selected by local and municipal
elimination trials, after which they submitted for ten months to rigorous
training under professional -paidotribd (literally, youth rubbers) and gym-
nastai. Arrived at Olympia, they were examined by the officials, and took
an oath to observe all the rules. Irregularities were rare; we hear of
Eupolis bribing other boxers to lose to him, 85 but the penalty and dishonor
attached to such offenses were discouragingly great. When everything
was ready the athletes were led into the stadium; as they entered, a herald
announced their names and the cities that had entered them. All the con-
214 THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. IX
testants, whatever their age or rank, were naked; occasionally a girdle
might be worn at the loins. 30 Of the stadium itself nothing remains but the
narrow stone slabs toed by the runners at the starting point. The 45,000
spectators kept their places in the stadium all day long, suffering from in-
sects, heat, and thirst; hats were forbidden, the water was bad, and flies
and mosquitoes infested the place as they do today. Sacrifices were offered
at frequent intervals to Zeus Averter of Flies. 87
The most important events were grouped together as the pentathlon, or
five contests. To promote all-around development in the athlete each entry
in any of these events was required to compete in all of them; to secure
the victory it was necessary to win three contests out of the five. The
first was a broad jump; the athlete held weights like dumbbells in his hands,
and leaped from a standing start. Ancient writers assure us that some
jumpers spanned fifty feet; 38 but it is not necessary to believe everything
that we read. The second event was throwing the discus, a circular plate
of metal or stone weighing about twelve pounds; the best throws are said
to have covered a hundred feet. 38 The third contest was in hurling the
javelin or spear, with the aid of a leather thong attached to the center of
the shaft. The fourth and principal event of the group was the stadium
sprint i.e., for the length of the stadium, usually some two hundred yards.
The fifth contest was wrestling. It was a highly popular form of competi-
tion in Greece, for the very name palaistra was taken from it, and many
a story was told of its champions.
Boxing was an ancient game, almost visibly handed down from Minoan
Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The boxers practiced with punching balls
hung on a level with the head and filled with fig seeds, meal, or sand. In
the classic age of Greece (i.e., the fifth and fourth centuries), they wore
"soft gloves" of oxhide dressed with fat and reaching almost to the elbow.
Blows were confined to the head, but there was no rule against hitting a man
who was down. There were no rests or rounds; the boxers fought till one
surrendered or succumbed. They were not classified by weight; any man
of any weight might enter the lists. Hence weight was an asset, and boxing
degenerated in Greece from a competition in skill into a contest in brawn.
In the course of time, as brutality increased, boxing and wrestling were
combined into a new contest called the pankration, or game of all powers.
In this everything but biting and eye-gouging was permitted, even to a
kick in the stomach/ Three heroes whose names have come down to us
won by breaking the fingers of their opponents;" another struck so fero-
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 215
ciously with straight extended fingers and strong sharp nails that he pierced
the flesh of his adversary and dragged out his bowels/ 3 Milo of Crotona
was a more amiable pugilist. He had developed his strength, we are told,
by carrying a calf every day of its life until it was a full-grown bull. Peo-
ple loved him for his tricks: he would hold a pomegranate so fast in his
fist that no one could get it from him, and yet the fruit was uninjured; he
would stand on an oiled quoit and resist all efforts to dislodge him; he
would tie a cord around his forehead and burst the cord by holding his
breath and so forcing blood to his head. In the end he was destroyed by
his virtues. "For he chanced," says Pausanias, "on a withered tree, into
which some wedges had been driven to separate the wood, and he took
it into his head to keep the wood apart with his hands. But the wedges
slipped out, he was imprisoned in the tree, and became a prey to the
wolves." 43
In addition to the pentathlon sprint, there were other foot races at the
games. One was for four hundred yards, another for twenty-four stadia,
or 2 % miles; a third was an armed race, in which each runner carried a
heavy shield. We have no knowledge of the records made in these races;
the stadium differed in length in different cities, and the Greeks had no
instruments for measuring small intervals of time. Stories tell of a Greek
runner who could outdistance a hare; of another who raced a horse from
Coronea to Thebes (some twenty miles) and beat it; and of how Pheidip-
pides ran from Athens to Sparta 150 miles in two days" and, at the cost
of his life, brought to Athens the news of the victory at Marathon, twenty-
four miles away. But there were no "marathon races" in Greece.
In the plain below the stadium Olympia built a special hippodrome for
horse races. Women as well as men might enter their horses, and, as now,
the prize went to the owner and not to the jockey, though the horse was
sometimes rewarded with a statue. 46 The culminating events of the games
were the chariot races, with two or four horses running abreast. Often ten
four-horse chariots competed together; and as each had to negotiate twenty-
three turns around the posts at the ends of the course, accidents were the
chief thrill of the game; in one race with forty starters a single chariot fin-
ished. We may imagine the tense excitement of the spectators at these
contests, their wordy arguments about their favorites, their emotional aban-
donment as the survivors rounded the last turn.
When the toils of five days were over the victors received their rewards.
Each bound a woolen fillet about his head, and upon this the judges placed
2 Id THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
a crown of wild olive, while a herald announced the name and city of the
winner. This laurel wreath was the only prize given at the Olympic games,
and yet it was the most eagerly contested distinction in Greece. So im-
portant were the games that not even the Persian invasion stopped them;
and while a handful of Greeks withstood Xerxes' army at Thermopylae the
customary thousands watched Theagenes of Thasos, on the very day of
the battle, win the pancratiast's crown. "Good heavens!" exclaimed a Per-
sian to his general; "what manner of men are these against whom you have
brought us to fight? men who contend with one another not for money
but for honor!" 40 He, or the Greek inventor of the tale, did the Greeks
too much credit, and not merely because the Greeks should on that day
have been at Thermopylae rather than at Olympia. Though the direct prize
at the games was little, the indirect rewards were great. Many cities voted
substantial sums to the victors on their return from their triumphs; some
cities made them generals; and the crowd idolized them so openly that
jealous philosophers complained/ 7 Poets like Simonides and Pindar were
engaged by the victor or his patrons to write odes in his honor, which were
sung by choruses of boys in the procession that welcomed him home;
sculptors were paid to perpetuate him in bronze or stone; and sometimes
he was given free sustenance in the city hall. We may judge the cost of
this item when we learn, on questionable authority, that Milo ate a four-
year-old heifer, and Theagenes an ox, in a day. 18
The sixth century saw the peak of the splendor and popularity of ath-
letics in Greece. In 582 the Amphictyonic League established the Pythian
games in honor of Apollo at Delphi; in the same year the Isthmian games
were instituted at Corinth in honor of Poseidon; six years later the Nemean
games were inaugurated to celebrate the Nemean Zeus; and all three occa-
sions became Panhellenic festivals. Together with the Olympic games they
formed a periodos, or cycle, and the great ambition of a Greek athlete was
to win the crown at all of them. In the Pythian games contests in music
and poetry were added to the physical competitions; and indeed such musi-
cal tilts had been celebrated at Delphi long before the establishment of the
athletic games. The original event was a hymn in honor of Apollo's vic-
tory over the Delphic python; in 582 contests were added in singing, and
in playing the lyre and the flute. Similar musical contests were held at
Corinth, Nemea, Delos, and elsewhere; for the Greeks believed that by
frequent public competitions they could stimulate not only the ability of
the performer but the taste of the public as well The principle was ap-
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 2 17
plied to almost every art to pottery, poetry, sculpture, painting, choral
singing, oratory, and drama. 40 In this way and others the games had a pro-
found influence upon art and literature, and even upon the writing of his-
tory; for the chief method of reckoning time, in later Greek historiography,
was by Olympiads, designated by the name of the victor in the one-stadium
foot race. The physical perfection of the all-around athlete in the sixth
century generated that ideal of statuary which reached its fullness in Myron
and Polycleitus. The nude contests and games in the palaestra and at the
festivals gave the sculptor unequaled opportunities to study the human
body in every natural form and pose; the nation unwittingly became mod-
els to its artists, and Greek athletics united with Greek religion to generate
Greek art.
Now that we come at last to the most perfect products of Greek civ-
ilization we find ourselves tragically limited in the quantity of the remains.
The devastation caused in Greek literature by time and bigotry and mental
fashions is negligible compared with the destruction of Greek art. One
classic bronze survives the Charioteer of Delphi; one classic marble statue
the Hermes of Praxiteles; not one temple not even the Theseum has
come down to us in the form and color that it had for ancient Greece.
Greek work in textiles, in wood, in ivory, silver 1 , or gold, is nearly all gone;
the material was too perishable or too precious to escape vandalism and
time. We must reconstruct the ship from a few planks of the wreckage.
The sources of Greek art were the impulses to representation and deco-
ration, the anthropomorphic quality of Greek religion, and the athletic
character and ideal. The early Greek, like other primitives, when he out-
grew the custom of sacrificing living beings to accompany and serve the
dead, buried carved or painted figures as substitutes. Later he placed images
of his ancestors in his home; or he dedicated in the temple likenesses of
himself, or of those whom he loved, as votive figurines that might magically
win for their models the protection of the god. Minoan religion, Myce-
naean religion, even the chthonic cults of Greece, were too vague and im-
personal, sometimes too horrible and grotesque, to lend themselves to
esthetic form; but the frank humanity of the Olympian gods, and their
need of temple homes for their earthly stays, opened a wide road for sculp-
ture, architecture, and a hundred ancillary arts. No other religion pos-
sibly excepting Catholicism has so stimulated and influenced literature and
2l8 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
art: almost every book or play, statue or building or vase, that has come
down to us from ancient Greece touches upon religion in subject, purpose,
or inspiration.
But inspiration alone would not have made Greek art great. There was
needed a technical excellence rising out of cultural contacts and the trans-
mission and development of crafts; indeed art to the Greek was a form
of handicraft, and the artist grew so naturally out of the artisan that Greece
never quite distinguished them. There was needed a knowledge of the
human body, as in its healthy development the norm of proportion, sym-
taetry, and beauty; there was needed a sensuous, passionate love of beauty,
that would hold no toil too great that might give to the living moment
of loveliness a lasting form. The women of Sparta placed in their sleeping
chambers figures of Apollo, Narcissus, Hyacinthus, or some other hand-
some deity, in order that they might bear beautiful children. 50 Cypselus
established a beauty contest among women far back in the seventh cen-
tury; and according to Athenaeus this periodical competition continued
down to the Christian era. 51 In some places, says Theophrastus, "there are
contests between the women in respect of modesty and good manage-
ment . . . ; and also there are contests about beauty, as for instance ... in
Tenedos and Lesbos. " BS
L Vases
There was a pretty legend in Greece that the first cup was molded upon
Helen's breast. 53 If so, the mold was lost in the Dorian invasion, for what pot-
tery has come down to us from early Greece does not remind us of Helen.
The invasion must have profoundly disturbed the arts, impoverishing crafts-
men, scattering schools, and ending for a time the transmission of technology;
for Greek vases after the invasion begin again with primitive simplicity and
crudity, as if Crete had never lifted pottery into an art.
Probably the rough mood of the Dorian conquerors, using what survived of
Minoan-Mycenaean techniques, produced that Geometric style which domi-
nates the oldest Greek pottery after the Homeric age. Flowers, scenery, and
plants, so luxuriant in Cretan ornament, were swept away, and the stern spirit
that made the glory of the Doric temple contrived the passing ruin of Greek
pottery. The gigantic jars that characterize this period made small pretense to
beauty; they were designed to store wine or oil or grain rather than to interest a
ceramic connoisseur. The decoration was almost all by repeated triangles,
circles, chains, checkers, lozenges, swastikas, or simple parallel horizontal lines;
even the human figures that intervened were geometrical torsos were triangles,
thighs and legs were cones. This lazy style of ornament spread through Greece,
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 2Ip
and determined the form of the Dipylon vases* at Athens; but on these enor-
mous containers (usually made to receive the human dead) black silhouettes of
mourners, chariots, and animals were drawn, however awkwardly, between the
pattern's lines. Towards the end of the eighth century more life entered into
the painting of Greek pottery; two colors were used for the ground, curves re-
placed straight lines, palmettes and lotuses, prancing horses and hunted lions
took form upon the clay, and the ornate Oriental succeeded the bare Geometric
style.
An age of busy experimentation followed. Miletus flooded the market with
its red vases, Samos with its alabasters, Lesbos with its black wares, Rhodes
with its whites, Clazomenae with its grays, and Naucratis exported faience and
translucent glass. Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chalcis
for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate "Proto-Corinthian"
scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind
of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities; one or another of them
found purchasers in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of
Russia, Italy, and Gaul. In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning;
its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of
incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms. But about
550 the masters of the Ceramicus the potters' quarter on the outskirts of Ath-
enscame to the front, threw oif Oriental influence, and captured with their
Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and
Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens
or were born there; a great school and tradition formed as through many gen-
erations son succeeded father in the art; and the making of fine pottery became
one of the great industries, finally one of the conceded monopolies, of Attica.
The vases themselves, now and then, bear pictures of the potter's shop, the
master working with his apprentices, or watchfully supervising the various
processes: mixing the pigments and the clay, molding the form, painting the
ground, engraving the picture, firing the cup, and feeling the happiness of those
who see beauty taking form under their hands. More than a hundred of these
Attic potters are known to us; but time has broken up their masterpieces, and
they are only names. Here on a drinking cup are the proud words, Nikosthenes
me poiesen "Nicosthenes made me." 688 A greater than he was Execias, whose
majestic amphora is in the Vatican; he was one of many artists encouraged by
patronage and peace under the Peisistratids. From the hands of Clitias and Ergo-
timus came, about 560, the famous Francois vase, found in Etruria by a French-
man of that name, and now treasured in the Archeological Museum at Florence
a great mixing bowl covered with row upon row of figures and scenes from
Greek mythology. 51 These men were the outstanding masters of the Black-
* So called because they were found chiefly near the Double Gate of the city at the
Ceramicus.
22O THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. l
Figure style in sixth-century Attica. We need not exaggerate the excellence of
their work; it cannot compare, either in conception or in execution, with the best
Work of the T'ang or Sung Chinese. But the Greek had a different aim from
the Oriental: Jie sought not color but line, not ornament but form. The figures
on the Greek vases are conventional, stylized, improbably magnificent in the
shoulders and thin in the legs; and as this continued through the classic age, we
must assume that the Greek potter never dreamed of realistic accuracy. He
was writing poetry, not prose, speaking to the imagination rather than the eye.
He limited himself in materials and pigments: he took the fine red clay of the
Ceramicus, quieted its color with yellow, carefully engraved the figures, and
filled out the silhouettes with brilliant black glaze. He transformed the earth
into a profusion of vessels that wedded beauty and use: hydria, amphora,
oenochoe, kylix, krater, lekythos i.e., water jug, two-handled jar, wine bowl,
drinking cup, mixing bowl, and unguent flask. He conceived the experiments,
created the subjects, and developed the techniques that were taken up by
bronzeworkers, sculptors, and painters; he made the first essays in foreshort-
ening, perspective, chiaroscuro, and modeling; 65 he paved the way for statuary
by molding terra-cotta figures in a thousand themes and forms. He freed his
own art from Dorian geometry and Oriental excess, and made the human figure
the source and center of its life.
Towards the last quarter of the sixth century the Athenian potter tired of
black figures on a red ground, inverted the formula, and created that Red-
Figure style which ruled the markets of the Mediterranean for two hundred
years. The figures were still stiff and angular, the body in profile with the
eyes in full view; but even within these limits there was a new freedom, a wider
scope, of conception and execution. He sketched the figures upon the clay with
a light point, drew them in greater detail with a pen, filled in the background
with black, and added minor touches with colored glaze. Here, too, some of
the masters made lasting names. One amphora is signed, "Painted by Euthym-
ides, son of Pollias, as never Euphronius" M which was to challenge Euphro-
nius to equal it. Nevertheless this Euphronius is still rated as the greatest potter
of his age; to him, some think, belongs the great krater on which Heracles
wrestles with Antaeus. To his contemporary Sosias is attributed one of the
most famous of Greek vases, whereon Achilles binds the wounded arm of
Patroclus; every detail is lovingly carried out, and the silent pain of the young
warrior has survived the centuries. To these men, and now nameless others,
we owe such masterpieces as the cup in whose interior we see Dawn mourn-
ing over her dead son, and the hydria, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at
New York, that shows a Greek soldier, perhaps Achilles, plunging his lance
into a fair and not breastless Amazon. It was before such a vase as one of these
that John Keats stood enthralled one day, until its "wild ecstasy" and "mad
pursuit" fired his brain with an ode greater than any Grecian urn.
CHAP. IX ) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 221
2. Sculpture
The Greek settlement of western Asia, and the opening of Egypt to Greek
trade towards 660 B.C., allowed Near Eastern and Egyptian forms and methods
of statuary to enter Ionia and European Greece. About 580 two Cretan sculp-
tors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, accepted commissions at Sicyon and Argos, and
left behind them there not only statues but pupils; from this period dates a
vigorous school of sculpture in the Peloponnese. The art had many purposes:
it commemorated the dead first with simple pillars, then with herms whose
head alone was carved, then with forms completely chiseled in the round, or
with funeral-stelae reliefs; it made statues of victorious athletes, first as types,
later as individuals; and it was encouraged by the lively imagination of Greek
faith to make countless images of the gods.
Until the sixth century its material was most frequently wood. We hear a
great deal of the chest of Cypselus, dictator of Corinth. According to Pau-
sanias, it was made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and gold, and adorned with corn-
plicated carvings. As wealth increased, wooden statues might be covered, in
whole or part, by precious materials; indeed it was thus that Pheidias made
his chryselephantine (i.e., gold and ivory) statues of Athene Parthenos and
the Olympian Zeus. Bronze rivaled stone as sculptural material to the end of
classical art. Few ancient bronzes have survived the temptation to melt them
down, but we may judge from the perhaps too ministerial Charioteer of the
Delphi Museum (ca. 490) how near to perfection the art of hollow casting
had been carried since Rhoecus and Theodoras of Samos had introduced it
into Greece. The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides
(Harmodius and Aristogeiton), was cast in bronze by Antenor at Athens shortly
after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the
sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and
chisel; but once they had learned the art they almost denuded Naxos and Paros
of marble. In the archaic period (1100-490) the figures were often painted;
but towards the end of that age it was found that a better effect could be
secured, in representing the delicate skin of women, by leaving the polished
marble without artificial tint.
The Greeks of Ionia were the first to discover the uses of drapery as a sculp-
tural element. Egypt and the Near East had left the clothing rigid a vast
stone apron nullifying the living form; but in sixth-century Greece the sculp-
tors introduced folds into the drapery, and used the garment to reveal that
ultimate source and norm of beauty, the healthy human body. Nevertheless
the Egypto-Asiatic influence remained so strong that in most archaic Greek
sculpture the figure is heavy, graceless, and stiff; the legs are strained even, in
repose; the arms hang helpless at the sides; the eyes have the almond form, and
222 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
occasionally an Oriental slant; the face is stereotyped, immobile, passionless.
Greek statuary, in this period, accepted the Egyptian rule of frontality i.e.,
the figure was made to be seen only from the front, and so rigidly bisymmetri-
cal that a vertical line would pass through the nose, mouth, navel, and genitals
with never a right or left deviation, and no flexure of either motion or rest.
Perhaps convention was responsible for this dull rigidity: the law of the Greek
games forbade a victor to set up a portrait statue of himself unless he had won
all contests in the pentathlon; only then, the Greeks argued, would he achieve
the harmonious physical development that would merit individual modeling. 67
For this reason, and perhaps because, as in Egypt, religious convention before
the fifth century governed the representation of the gods, the Greek sculptor
confined himself to a few poses and types, and devoted himself to their mastery.
Two types above all won his study: the youth, or kouros, nearly nude, slightly
advancing the left leg, with arms at the side or partly extended, fists closed,
countenance quiet and stern; and the kore, or maiden, carefully coiffured, mod-
estly posed and draped, one hand gathering up the robe, the other offering
some gift to the gods. History till lately called the kourol "Apollos," but they
were more probably athletes or funerary monuments. The most famous of
the type is the Apollo of Tenea; the largest, the Apollo of Sunium; the most
pretentious, the Throne of Apollo at Amyclae, near Sparta. One of the finest
is the small Strangford Apollo in the British Museum; finer still is the Choiseul-
Gouffier Apollo, a Roman copy of an early fifth-century original. 68 To at least
the male eye the korai are more pleasing: their bodies are gracefully slender,
their faces are softened with a Mona Lisa smile, their drapery begins to escape
the stiffness of convention; some of them, like those in the Athens Museum
would be called masterpieces in any other land; 59 one of them, which we may
call the Kore of Chios,* is a masterpiece even in Greece. In them the sensuous
Ionian touch breaks through the Egyptian immobility and Dorian austerity of
the "Apollos." Archermus of Chios created another type, or followed lost
models, in the Nike, or Victory, of Delos; out of this would come the lovely
Nike of Paeonius at Olympia, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and, in
Christian art, the winged figures of cherubim. 00 Near Miletus unknown sculp-
tors carved a series of draped and seated females for the temple of the Branchi-
dae, figures powerful but crude, dignified but ponderous, profound but dead.t
Sculpture in relief was so old that a pretty legend could undertake to de-
scribe its origin. A lass of Corinth drew upon a wall the outline of the shadow
that the lamplight cast of her lover's head. Her father Butades, a potter, filled
in the outline with clay, pressed the form to hardness, took it down, and baked
* No. 682 in the National Museum at Athens.
f Now in the British Museum; there are copies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
The Branchidae were the hereditary priests of the temple.
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 32^
it; so> Pliny assures us, bas-relief was born. 51 The art became even more im-
portant than sculpture in the adornment of temples and graves. Already in
520 Aristocles made a funeral relief of Aristion, which is one of the many
treasures of the Athens Museum.
Since reliefs were nearly always painted, sculpture, relief, and painting were
allied arts, usually handmaids to architecture; and most artists were skilled in
all four forms. Temple moldings, friezes, metopes, and pediment backgrounds
were usually painted, while the main structure was ordinarily left in the natural
color of the stone. Of painting as a separate art we have only negligible remains
from Greece; but we know through passages in the poets that panel painting,
with colors mixed in melted wax, was already practiced in the days of Anacre-
on." 2 Painting was the last great art to develop in Greece, and the last to die.
All in all, the sixth century failed to rise, in any Greek art except architecture,
to the boldness of conception or the perfection of form attained in the same
age by Greek philosophy and poetry. Perhaps artistic patronage was slow to
develop in an aristocracy still rural and poor, or in a business class too young
to have graduated from wealth to taste. Nevertheless the age of the dictators
was a period of stimulation and improvement in every Greek art above all,
under Peisistratus and Hippias in Athens. Towards the end of this period
the old rigidity of sculpture began to thaw, the rule of frontality was broken
down; legs began to move, arms to leave the side, hands to open up, faces to
take on feeling and character, bodies to bend in a variety of poses revealing new
studies in anatomy and action. This revolution in sculpture, this animation of
stone with life, became a major event in Greek history; the escape from fron-
tality was one of the signal accomplishments of Greece. Egyptian and Oriental
influences were set aside, and Greek art became Greek.
3. Architecture
The science of building recovered slowly from the Dorian invasion, and
redeemed beyond its deserts the Dorian name. Across the Dark Age from
Agamemnon to Terpander, the Mycenaean megaron transmitted the essentials
of its structure to Greece; the rectangular shape of the building, the use of
columns within and without, the circular shaft and simple square capital, the
triglyphs and metopes of the entablature, were all preserved in the greatest
achievement of Greek art, the Doric style. But whereas Mycenaean architecture
was apparently secular, devoted to palaces and homes, classical Greek archi-
tecture was almost entirely religious. The royal megaron was transformed into
a civic temple as monarchy waned and religion and democracy united the affec-
tions of Greece in honoring the personified city in its god.
224 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IX
The earliest Greek temples were of wood or brick, as befitted the poverty
of the Dark Age. When stone became the orthodox material of temple build-
ing the architectural features remained as set by timber construction; the
rectangular naos or temple proper, the circular shafts, the "master-beam" archi-
traves, the beam-end triglyphs, the gabled roof, confessed the wooden origin
of their form; even the first Ionic spiral was apparently a floral figure painted
upon a block of wood. 63 The use of stone increased as Greek wealth and travel
grew; the transition was most rapid after the opening of Egypt to Greek trade
about 660 B.C. Limestone was the favored material of the new styles before the
sixth century; marble came in towards 580, at first for decorative portions, then
for facades, finally for the entire temple from base to tiles.
Three "orders" of architecture were developed in Greece: the Doric, the
Ionic, and, in the fourth century, the Corinthian. Since the interior of the
temple was reserved for the god and his ministrants, and worship was held
outside, all three orders devoted themselves to making the exterior impressively
beautiful. They began at the ground, usually in some elevated place, with the
stereobate two or three layers of foundation stone in receding steps. From the
uppermost layer, or stylobate, rose directly, without individual base, the Doric
column "fluted" with shallow, sharp-edged grooves, and widening perceptibly
at the middle in what the Greeks called entasis, or stretching. Furthermore, the
Doric column tapered slightly towards the top, thereby emulating the tree,
and successfully contradicting the Minoan-Mycenaean style. (An undiminished
shaft worse yet, one that tapers downward seems top-heavy and graceless to
the eye, while the wider base heightens that sense of stability which all archi-
tecture should convey. Perhaps, however, the Doric column is too heavy, too
thick in proportion to its height, too stolidly engrossed in sturdiness and
strength.) Upon the Doric column sat its simple and powerful capital: a "neck-
ing" or circular band, a cushionlike echinus, and, topmost, a square abacus to
spread the supporting thrust of the pillar beneath the architrave.
While the Dorians were developing this style from the megaron, modified
probably by acquaintance with the Egyptian "proto-Doric" colonnades of Der-
el-Bahri and Beni-Hasan, the Ionian Greeks were altering the same fundamental
form under Asiatic influence. In the resultant Ionic order a slender column rose
upon an individual base, and began at the bottom, as it ended at the top, with
a narrow fillet or band; its height was usually greater, and its diameter smaller,
than in the Doric shaft; the upward tapering was scarcely perceptible; the
flutings were deep, semicircular grooves separated by flat edges. The Ionic
capital was composed of a narrow echinus, a still narrower abacus, and between
them almost concealing them emerged the twin spirals of a volute, like an
infolded scroll a graceful element adapted from Hittite, Assyrian, and other
Oriental forms. 64 These characteristics, together with the elaborate adornment
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 225
of the entablature, described not only a style but a people; they represented
in stone the Ionian expressiveness, suppleness, sentiment, elegance, and love of
delicate detail, even as the Doric order conveyed the proud reserve, the massive
strength, the severe simplicity of the Dorian; the sculpture, literature, music,
manners, and dress of the rival groups differed in harmony with their archi-
tectural styles. Dorian architecture is mathematics, Ionian architecture is poetry,
both seeking the durability of stone; the one is "Nordic," the other Oriental;
together they constitute the masculine and feminine themes in a basically har-
monious form.
Greek architecture distinguished itself by developing the column into an ele-
ment of beauty as well as a structural support. The essential function of the
external colonnade was to uphold the eaves, and to relieve the walls of the
naos, or inner temple, from the outward thrust of the gabled roof. Above the
columns rose the entablature i.e., the superstructure of the edifice. Here again,
as in the supporting elements, Greek architecture sought a clear differentiation,
and yet an articulated connection, of the members. The architrave the great
stone that connected the capitals was in the Doric order plain, or carried a
simple painted molding; in Ionic it was composed of three layers, each project-
ing below, and was topped with a marble cornice segmented with a confusing
variety of ornamental details. Since the sloping beams that made the frame-
work of the roof in the Doric style came down, and were secured, between
two horizontal beams at the eaves, the united ends of the three beams formed
at first in wood, then imitatively in stone a triglyph or triply divided surface.
Between each triglyph and the next a space was left as an open window when
the roof was of wood or of terra-cotta tiles; when translucent marble tiles
were used these metopes, or "seeing-between" places, were filled in with mar-
ble slabs carved in low relief. In the Ionic style a band or frieze of reliefs might
run around the upper outer walls of the naos or cella; in the fifth century both
forms of relief metopes and frieze were often used in the same building, as
in the Parthenon. In the pediments the triangles formed by the gabled roof
in front and rear the sculptor found his greatest opportunity; the figures here
might be drawn out in high relief and enlarged for view from below; and the
cramped corners, or tympana, tested the subtlest skill. Finally, the roof itself
might be a work of art, with brilliantly colored tiles and decorative rain-dis-
posing acroteria, or pinnacle figures, rising from the angles of the pediments.
All in all, there was probably a surplus of sculpture on the Greek temple, be-
tween the columns, along the walls, or within the edifice. The painter also
was involved: the temple was colored in whole or in part, along with its statues,
moldings, and reliefs. Perhaps we do the Greeks too much honor today, when
time has worn the paint from their temples and divinities, and ferrous strains
have lent to the marble natural and incalculable hues that set off the brilliance
226 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
of the stone under the clear Greek sky. Some day even contemporary art may
become beautiful.
The two rival styles achieved grandeur in the sixth century, and perfection
in the fifth. Geographically they divided Greece unevenly: Ionic prevailed in
Asia and the Aegean, Doric on the mainland and in the west. The salient
achievements of sixth-century Ionic were the temples of Artemis at Ephesus,
of Hera at Samos, and of the Branchidae near Miletus; but only ruins survive
of Ionic architecture before Marathon. The finest extant buildings from the sixth
century are the older temples of Paestum and Sicily, all in the Doric style.
The ground plan remains of the great temple built at Delphi, between 548 and
512, from the designs of the Corinthian Spintharus; it was destroyed by earth-
quake in 373, was rebuilt on the same plan, and in that form still stood when
Pausanias made his tour of Greece. Athenian architecture of the period was
almost wholly Doric: in this style Peisistratus began, about 530, the gigantic
temple of the Olympian Zeus, on the plain at the foot of the Acropolis. After
the Persian conquest of Ionia in 546, hundreds of Ionian artists migrated to
Attica, and introduced or developed the Ionic style in Athens. By the end of
the century Athenian architects were using both orders, and had laid all the
technical groundwork for the Periclean age.
4. Music and the Dance
The word mousike among the Greeks meant originally any devotion to
any Muse. Plato's Academy was called a Museion or Museum i.e., a place
dedicated to the Muses and the many cultural pursuits which they patron-
ized; the Museum at Alexandria was a university of literary and scientific
activity, not a collection of museum pieces. In the narrower and modern
sense music was at least as popular among the Greeks as it is among our-
selves today. In Arca4ia all freemen studied music to the age of thirty;
everyone knew some instrument; and to be unable to sing was accounted
a disgrace. 65 Lyric poetry was so named because, in Greece, it was com-
posed to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, the harp, or the flute.
The poet usually wrote the music as well as the words, and sang his own
songs; to be a lyric poet in ancient Greece was far more difficult than to
compose, as poets do today, verses for silent and solitary reading. Before
the sixth century there was hardly any Greek literature divorced from
music. Education and letters, as well as religion and war, were bound up
with music: martial airs played an important part in military training, and
nearly all instruction of the memory was through verse. By the eighth
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 227
century Greek music was already old, with hundreds of varieties and forms.
The instruments were simple, and were based, like our vaster armory
of sound, upon percussion, wind, or strings. The first class were not popu-
lar. The flute was favored at Athens until Alcibiades, laughing at his music
master's inflated cheeks, refused to play so ridiculous an instrument, and
set a fashion against it among Athenian youth. (Besides, said the Athenians,
the Boeotians surpassed them with the flute, which branded the art as a
vulgar one. 6 ") The simple flute, or aulos, was a tube of cane or bored wood
with a detachable mouthpiece and from two to seven finger holes into
which movable stopples might be inserted to modify the pitch. Some play-
ers used the double flute a "masculine" or bass flute in the right hand and
a "feminine" or treble flute in the left, both held to the mouth by a strap
around the cheeks, and played in simple harmony. By attaching the flute
to a distensible bag the Greeks made a bagpipe; by uniting several gradu-
ated flutes they made a syrinx, or Pipe of Pan; by extending and opening
the end, and closing the finger holes, they made a salpinx, or trumpet. 67
Flute music, says Pausanias, 88 was usually gloomy, and was always used
in dirges or elegies; but the auletridaithe, flute-playing geisha girls of
Greece do not seem to have purveyed gloom. String music was confined
to plucking the strings with finger or plectrum; bowing was unknown. 50
The lyre, phorminx, or kithara were essentially alike four or more strings
of sheep gut stretched over a bridge across a resonant body of metal or tor-
toise shell. The kithara was a small harp, used for accompanying narrative
poetry; the lyre was like a guitar, and was chosen to accompany lyric
poetry and songs.
The Greeks told many strange tales of how the gods Hermes, Apollo,
Athena had invented these instruments; how Apollo had pitted his lyre
against the pipes and flutes of Marsyas (a priest of the Phrygian goddess
Cybele), had won unfairly, as Marsyas thought by adding his voice to
the instrument, and had topped the performance by having poor Marsyas
flayed alive: so legend personified the conquest of the flute by the lyre.
Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or devel-
oped the musical art: of Olympus, Marsyas* pupil, who, towards 730, in-
vented the enharmonic scale;* of Linus, Heracles' teacher, who invented
Greek musical notation and established some of the "modes"; 70 of Orpheus,
Thracian priest of Dionysus; and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that "song
* A scale employing quarter tones; e.g., E E' F A B B' C E-where the accent indicates a
quarter tone above the preceding note.
228 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. IX
is a sweet thing to mortals." 71 These tales reflect the probable fact that
Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.* 7 '
Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs
foi Dionysus, paeans for Apollo, hymns for any god; there were enkomia, or
songs of praise, for rich men, and epintkia, or songs of victory, for athletes;
there were symposiaka, skolia, erotika, hymenaioi, elegiai, and threnoi for din-
ing, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying; herdsmen had their
hukolika, reapers their lityerses, vinedressers their epttenia, spinners their iouloi,
weavers their elinoi. 1 " And then as now, presumably, the man in the market or
the club, the lady in the home and the woman of the streets, sang songs not quite
as learned as Simonides'; vulgar music and polite music have come down dis-
tantly together through the centuries.
The highest form of music, in the belief and practice of the Greeks, was
choral singing; to this they gave the philosophical depth, the structural com-
plexity, the emotional range, which in modern music tend to find place in the
concerto or the symphony. Any festival a harvest, a victory, a marriage, a holy-
daymight be celebrated with a chorus; and now and then cities and groups
would organize great contests in choral song. The performance was in most
cases prepared far in advance: a composer was appointed to write the words
and music, a rich man was persuaded to pay the expense, professional singers
* The music of Hellas was played in a variety of scales far more numerous and complex
than ours. Our diatonic scale makes no smaller division than the half tone, and twelve half
tones constitute our octave; the Greeks used quarter tones, and had forty-five scales of eigh-
teen notes apiece. 78 These scales were in three groups: the diatonic scales, based upon the
tetrackord E D C B; the chromatic, upon E C# C B; and the enharmonic, upon E C Cb B.
From the Greek scales, by simplification, came those of medieval church music, and, through
these, our own.
Within the diatonic tetrachord seven modes (harmoniai) were produced by tuning the
strings to alter the position of the semitones in the octave. The most important modes were
the Dorian (E F G A B C D E), martial and grave though in a minor key; the Lydian
(C D E F G A B C) , tender and plaintive though in a major key; and the Phrygian (D E F
GAB CD), minor in key, and orgiastically passionate and wild. 74 It is amusing to read of
the violent controversies concerning the musical, ethical, and medical effects, restorative or
disastrous, which the Greeks chiefly the philosophers ascribed to these half-tone variations.
Dorian music, we are told, made men brave and dignified, the Lydian made them sentimental
and weak, the Phrygian made them excited and headstrong. Plato saw effeminate luxury and
gross immorality as the offspring of most music, and wished to banish all instrumental per-
formances from his ideal state. Aristotle would have had all youths trained in the Dorian
mode. 76 Theophrastus had a good word to say even for the Phrygian mode; serious diseases,
he tells us, can be made painless by playing a Phrygian air near the affected part. 76
Greek musical notation used not ovals and stems on a staff of lines, but the letters of the
alphabet, varied by inversion or transversion, augmented by dots and dashes to make sixty-
four signs, and placed above the words of the song. A few scraps of such notation have
come down to console us for the loss of the rest; they indicate melodies akin rather to
Oriental than to European strains, and would be more bearable to the Hindus, the Chinese, or
the Japanese than to our dull Occidental ears, untrained to quarter tones.
CHAP.IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 229
were engaged, and the chorus was carefully trained. All the singers sang the
same note, as in the music of the Greek Church today; there was no "part song"
except that in later centuries the accompaniment was played a fifth above or
below the voice, or ran counter to it; this is as near as the Greeks seem to have
come to harmony and counterpoint. 78
The dance in its highest development was woven into one art with choral
singing, just as many forms and terms of modern music were once associated
with the dance;* and dancing rivaled music in age and popularity among the
Greeks. Lucian, unable to trace its earthly beginnings, sought the origins of
the dance in the regular motions of the stars. 80 Homer tells us not only of the
dancing floor made by Daedalus for Ariadne, but of an expert dancer among
the Greek warriors at Troy, Meriones, who, dancing while he fought, could
never be found by any lance. 81 Plato described orchesis, or dancing, as "the
instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body" which is
rather a description of certain modern languages; Aristotle better defined the
dance as "an imitation of actions, characters, and passions by means of postures
and rhythmical movements." 83 Socrates himself danced, and praised the art as
giving health to every part of the body; 88 he meant, of course, Greek dancing.
For the Greek dance was quite different from ours. Though in some of
its forms it may have served as a sexual stimulant, it rarely brought men into
physical contact with women. It was an artistic exercise rather than a walking
embrace, and, like the Oriental dance, it used arms and hands as much as legs
and feet. 81 Its forms were as varied as the types of poetry and song; ancient
authorities listed two hundred. 85 There were religious dances, as among the
Dionysiac devotees; there were athletic dances, like Sparta's Gymnopedia, or
Festival of Naked Youth; there were martial dances, like the Pyrrhic, taught to
children as part of military drill; there was the stately hyporchema, a choral
hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced
while the other danced or sang; there were folk dances for every major event
of life and every season or festival of the year. And as for everything else,
there were dance contests, usually involving choral song.
All these arts lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and the dance-
were closely allied in early Greece, and formed in many ways one art.
As tame went on, and already in the seventh century, specialization and
professionalism set in. The rhapsodes abandoned song for recitation, and
separated narrative verse from music. 88 Archilochus sang his lyrics without
accompaniment, 87 and began that long degeneration which at last reduced
* The word foot, as meaning part of a verse, owes its origin to the dance that accompanied
the song; 79 orchestra, to the Greek, meant a dancing platform, usually in front of the stage.
230 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IX
poetry to a fallen angel silent and confined. The choral dance broke up
into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing; for, as Lucian
put it, "The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suf-
fered for it." 88 In like manner there appeared musicians who played
without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and
rapid execution of quarter tones. 89 Some famous musicians, then as now,
engrossed the receipts; Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent
($6000) each time that he performed. 00 The common player, doubtless,
lived from hand to mouth, for the musician, like other artists, belongs to a
profession that has had the honor of starving in every generation.
The highest repute went to those who, like Terpander, Arion, Alcman,
or Stesichorus, were skilled in all forms, and wove choral song, instrumental
music, and the dance into a complex and harmonious whole probably more
profoundly beautiful and satisfying than the operas and orchestras of today.
The most famous of these masters was Arion. About him the Greeks told
the tale how, on a voyage from Taras to Corinth, the sailors stole his money,
and then gave him a choice between being stabbed to death or drowned.
Having sung a final song, he dived into the sea, and was carried on the back
of a dolphin (perhaps his harp) to the shore. It was he who, chiefly at
Corinth and towards the close of the seventh century, transformed the
inebriated singers of impromptu Dionysiac dithyrambs into a sober
and trained "cycle" chorus of fifty voices, singing in strophe and antis-
trophe, with arias and recitatives as in our oratorios. The theme was usu-
ally the suffering and death of Dionysus; and in honor of the god's tradi-
tional attendants the chorus was dressed in goatlike satyr guise. Out of this,
in fact and name, came the tragic theater of the Greeks.
5. The Beginnings of the Drama
The sixth century, already distinguished in so many fields and lands,
crowned its accomplishments by laying the foundations of the drama. It
was one of the creative moments in history; never before, so far as we
know, had men passed from pantomime or ritual to the spoken and secular
play.
Comedy, says Aristotle, 91 developed "out of those who led the phallic
procession." A company of people carrying sacred phalli, and singing
dithyrambs to Dionysus, or hymns to some other vegetation god, consti-
tuted, in Greek terminology, a komos, or revel. Sex was essential, for the
culmination of the ritual was a symbolic marriage aimed at the magic stim-
ulation of the soil; 92 hence in early Greek comedy, as in most modern com-
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 231
edies and novels, marriage and presumptive procreation form the proper
ending of the tale. The comic drama of Greece remained till Menander
obscene because its origin was frankly phallic; it was in its beginnings a
joyous celebration of reproductive powers, and sexual restraints were in
some measure removed. It was a day's moratorium on morals; free speech
(parrhasia) was then particularly free; 83 and many of the paraders, dressed
in Dionysian satyr style, wore a goat's tail and a large artificial phallus of
red leather as part of their costume. This garb became traditional on the
comic stage; it was a matter of sacred custom, religiously observed in
Aristophanes; indeed, the phallus continued to be the inseparable emblem
of the clown until the fifth century of our era in the West, and the last
century of the Byzantine Empire in the East. 9 * Along with the phallus,
in the Old Comedy, went the licentious kordax dance. 05
Strange to say, it was in Sicily that the rustic vegetation revel was first
transformed into the comic drama. About 560 one Susarion of Megara
Hyblaea, near Syracuse, developed the processional mirth into brief plays
of rough satire and comedy. 96 From Sicily the new art passed into the
Peloponnesus and then into Attica; comedies were performed in the vil-
lages by traveling players or local amateurs. A century passed before the
authorities to quote Aristotle's phrase 87 treated the comic drama seriously
enough to give it (465 B.C.) a chorus for representation at an official fes-
tival.
Tragedy tragoidia, or the goat song arose in like manner from the
mimic representations, in dancing and singing, of satyrlike Dionysian rev-
elers dressed in the costume of goats. 98 These satyr plays remained till
Euripides an essential part of the Dionysian drama; each composer of a
tragic trilogy was expected to make a concession to ancient custom by
offering, as the fourth part of his presentation, a satyr play in honor of
Dionysus. "Being a development of the satyr play," says Aristotle, 99 "it
was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to
its full dignity." Doubtless other seeds matured in the birth of tragedy;
perhaps it took something from the ritual worship and appeasement of the
dead. 100 But essentially its source lay in mimetic religious ceremonies like
the representation, in Crete, of the birth of Zeus, or, in Argos and Samos,
his symbolic marriage with Hera, or, in Eleusis and elsewhere, the sacred
mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, or, above all, in the Peloponnesus
and Attica, the mourning and rejoicing over the death and resurrection of
Dionysus. Such representations were called dromena things performed;
drama is a kindred word, and means, as it should, an action. At Sicyon
tragic choruses, till the days of the dictator Cleisthenes, commemorated,
232 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. IX
we are told, the "sufferings of Adrastus," the ancient king. At Icaria,
where Thespis grew up, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus; perhaps the
"goat song" from which tragedy derived its name was a chant sung over
the dismembered symbol or embodiment of the drunken god. 101 The Greek
drama, like ours, grew out of religious ritual.
Hence the Athenian drama, tragic and comic, was performed as part
of the festival of Dionysus, under the presidency of his priests, in a theater
named after him, by players called "the Dionysian artists." The statue of
Dionysus was brought to the theater and so placed before the stage that
he might enjoy the spectacle. The performance was preceded by the sac-
rifice of an animal to the god. The theater was endowed with the sanctity
of a temple, and offenses committed there were punished severely as sac-
rileges rather than as merely crimes. Just as tragedy held the place of
honor on the stage at the City Dionysia, so comedy held the foreground
at the festival of the Lenaea; but this festival too was Dionysian. Perhaps
originally the theme, as in the drama of the Mass, was the passion and
death of the god; gradually the poets were allowed to substitute the suffer-
ings and death of a hero in Greek myth. It may even be that in its early
forms the drama was a magic ritual, designed to avert the tragedies it por-
trayed, and to purge the audience of evils, in a more than Aristotelian sense,
by representing these as borne and finished with by proxy. 103 In part it was
this religious basis that kept Greek tragedy on a higher plane than that
of the Elizabethan stage.
The chorus as developed for mimetic action by Arion and others became
the foundation of dramatic structure, and remained an essential part of
Greek tragedy until the later plays of Euripides. The earlier dramatists
were called dancers because they made their plays chiefly a matter of choral
dancing, and were actually teachers of dancing. 103 Only one thing was
needed to turn these choral representations into dramas, and that was the
opposition of an actor, in dialogue and action, to the chorus. This inspira-
tion came to one of these dancing instructors and chorus trainers, Thespis
of Icaria a town close to the Peloponnesian Megara, where the rites of
Dionysus were popular, and not far from Eleusis, where the ritual drama
of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus Zagreus was annually performed.
Helped no doubt by the egoism that propels the world, Thespis separated
himself from the chorus, gave himself individual recitative lines, developed
the notion of opposition and conflict, and offered the drama in its stricter
sense to history. He played various roles with such verisimilitude that when
his troupe performed at Athens, Solon was shocked at what seemed to him
a kind of public deceit, and denounced this newfangled art as immoral 10 * a
CHAP. IX) THE COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE 233
charge that it has heard in every century. Peisistratus was more imagina-
tive, and encouraged the competitive performance of dramas at the Diony-
sian festival. In 534 Thespis won the victory in such a contest. The new
form developed so rapidly that Choerilus, only a generation later, produced
1 60 plays. When, fifty years after Thespis, Aeschylus and Athens returned
victorious from the battle of Salamis, the stage was set for the great age in
the history of the Greek drama.
VI. RETROSPECT
Looking back upon the multifarious civilization whose peaks have been
sketched in the foregoing pages, we begin to understand what the Greeks
were fighting for at Marathon. We picture the Aegean as a beehive of busy,
quarrelsome, alert, inventive Greeks, establishing themselves obstinately in
every port, developing their economy from tillage to industry and trade,
and already creating great literature, philosophy, and art. It is amazing
how quickly and widely this new culture matured, laying in the sixth cen-
tury all the foundations for the achievements of the fifth. It was a civiliza-
tion in certain respects finer than that of the Periclean period superior in
epic and lyric poetry, enlivened and adorned by the greater freedom and
mental activity of women, and in some ways better governed than in the
later and more democratic age. But even of democracy the bases had been
prepared; by the end of the century the dictatorships had taught Greece
enough order to make possible Greek liberty.
The realization of self-government was something new in the world;
life without kings had not yet been dared by any great society. Out of
this proud sense of independence, individual and collective, came a power-
ful stimulus to every enterprise of the Greeks; it was their liberty that
inspired them to incredible accomplishments in arts and letters, in science
and philosophy It is true that a large part of the people, then as always,
harbored and loved superstitions, mysteries, and myths; men must be con-
soled. Despite this, Greek life had become unprecedentedly secular; poli-
tics, law, literature, and speculation had one by one been separated and
liberated from ecclesiastical power. Philosophy had begun to build a nat-
uralistic interpretation of the world and man, of body and soul. Science,
almost unknown before, had made its first bold formulations; the elements
of Euclid were established; clarity and order and honesty of thought had
become the ideal of a saving minority of men. A heroic effort of flesh and
spirit rescued these achievements, and the promise they held, from the dead
hand of alien despotism and the darkness of the Mysteries, and won for
European civilization the trying privilege of freedom.
CHAPTER X
The Struggle for Freedom
I. MARATHON
%( 1[ N the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes," says Herodotus,
JL "Greece suffered more sorrows than in twenty generations before." 1
The Greek nation had to pay the penalty of its development; spreading
everywhere, it was bound sooner or later to come into conflict with a major
power. Using water as their highway, the Hellenes had opened up a trade
route that extended from the eastern coast of Spain to the farthest ports of
the Black Sea. This European water route Greco-Italian-Sicilian com-
peted more and more with the Oriental land and water route Indo-Perso-
Phoenician; and thereby arose a lasting and bitter rivalry in which war, by
all human precedents, was inevitable, and in which the battles of Lade,
Marathon, Plataea, Himera, Mycale, the Eurymedon, the Granicus, Issus,
Arbela, Cannae, and Zama were merely incidents. The European system
won against the Oriental partly because transport by water is cheaper
than transport by land, and partly because it is almost a law of history that
the rugged, warlike north conquers the easygoing, art-creating south.
In the year 512 Darius I of Persia crossed the Bosporus, invaded Scythia,
and, marching westward, conquered Thrace and Macedon. When he re-
turned to his capitals he had enlarged his realm to embrace Persia, Afghanis-
tan, northern India, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, northern Arabia, Egypt,
Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, the eastern Aegean, Thrace, and
Macedonia; the greatest empire that the world has yet seen had overex-
tended itself to include and awaken its future conqueror. Only one im-
portant nation remained outside this vast system of government and trade,
and that was Greece. By 510 Darius had hardly heard of it outside Ionia.
"The Athenians," he asked "who are they?" 3 About 506 the dictator
Hippias, deposed by revolution at Athens, fled to the Persian satrap at
Sardis, begged for help in regaining his power, and offered, in that event,
to hold Attica under the Persian dominion.
To this temptation there was added in 500 a timely provocation. The
Greek cities of Asia Minor, under Persian rule for half a century, suddenly
dismissed their satraps and declared their independence, Aristagoras of
CHAP. X) THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 235
Miletus went to Sparta to enlist its aid, without success; he passed on to
Athens, mother city of many Ionian towns, and pleaded so well that the
Athenians sent a fleet of twenty ships to support the revolt. Meanwhile
the lonians were acting with a chaotic vigor characteristic of the Greeks;
each rebel city raised its own troops, but kept them under separate com-
mand; and the Milesian army, led with more bravery than wisdom, marched
upon Sardis and burned the great city to the ground. The Ionian Confed-
eracy organized a united fleet, but the Samian contingent secretly made
terms with the Persian satrap, and when, in 494, the Persian navy met the
Ionian at Lade, in one of the major sea battles of history, the half hundred
ships of the Samians sailed away without fighting, and many other con-
tingents followed their example. 3 The defeat of the lonians was com-
plete, and Ionian civilization never quite recovered from this physical and
spiritual disaster. The Persians laid siege to Miletus, captured it, killed the
males, enslaved the women and children, and so completely plundered
the city that Miletus became from that day a minor town. Persian rule was
re-established throughout Ionia, and Darius, resentful of Athenian inter-
ference, resolved to conquer Greece. Little Athens, as the result of her
generous assistance to her daughter cities, found herself face to face with
an empire literally a hundred times greater than Attica,
In the year 491 a Persian fleet of six hundred ships under Datis struck
across the Aegean from Sarnos, stopped on the way to subdue the Cyclades,
and reached the coast of Euboea with 200,000 men. Euboea submitted after
a brief struggle, and the Persians crossed the bay to Attica. They pitched
their camp near Marathon, because Hippias had advised them that in that
plain they could use their cavalry, in which they were overwhelmingly
superior to the Greeks. 1
All Greece was in turmoil at the news. The Persian arms' had never yet
been defeated, the advance of the Empire had never yet been stopped;
how could a nation so weak, so scattered, so unused to unity, hold back
this wave of Oriental conquest? The northern Greek states were loath
to resist so monstrous a power; Sparta hesitatingly prepared, but allowed
superstition to delay its mobilization; little Plataea acted quickly, and sent
a large proportion of its citizens by forced marches to Marathon. At
Athens Miltiades freed and enlisted slaves as well as freemen, and led them
over the mountains to the battlefield. When the rival armies met, the
Greeks had some twenty thousand men, the Persians probably one hundred
thousand. 5 The Persians were brave, but they were accustomed to indi-
vidual fighting, and were not trained for the mass defense and attack of
236 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. X
the Greeks. The Greeks united discipline with courage, and though they
committed the folly of dividing the command among ten generals, each
supreme for a day, they were saved by the example of Aristides, who
yielded his leadership to Miltiades." Under this blunt soldier's vigorous
strategy the small Greek force routed the Persian horde in what was not
only one of the decisive battles, but also one of the most incredible vic-
tories, of history. If we may accept Greek testimony on such a matter,
6,400 Persians, but only 192 Greeks, fell at Marathon. After the battle
was over the Spartans arrived, mourned their tardiness, and praised the
victors.
II. ARISTIDES AND THEMISTOCLES
The strange mixture of nobility and cruelty, idealism and cynicism, in
Greek character and history was illustrated by the subsequent careers of
Miltiades and Aristides. Inflated by the praise of all Greece, Miltiades
asked the Athenians to equip a fleet of seventy ships, to be under his un-
checked command. When the ships were ready Miltiades led them to
Paros, and demanded of its citizens one hundred talents ($600,000) on
pain of wholesale death. The Athenians recalled him and fined him fifty
talents; but Miltiades died soon after, and the fine was paid by his son
Cimon, the future rival of Pericles. 8
The man who had yielded place to him at Marathon survived the pit-
falls of success. Aristides was in life and manners a Spartan at Athens.
His quiet, staid character, his modest simplicity and undiscourageable hon-
esty won him the title of the Just; and when, in a drama of Aeschylus',
the passage occurred
For not at seeming just, but being so,
He aims; and from his depth of soil below
Harvests of wise and prudent counsels grow-
all the audience turned to look at Aristides, as the living embodiment of the
poet's lines." When the Greeks captured the camp of the Persians at Mara-
thon, and found great wealth in their tents, Aristides was left in charge
of it, and "neither took anything for himself, nor suffered others to do
it"; w and when, after the war, the allies of Athens were induced to con-
tribute annually to the treasury of Delos as a fund for common defense,
Aristides was chosen by them to fix their payments, and none protested
his decisions. Nevertheless, he was more admired than popular. Though
CHAP. X) THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 237
a close friend of Cleisthenes, who had so extended democracy, he was of
the opinion that democracy had gone far enough, and that any further
empowerment of the Assembly would lead to administrative corruption
and public disorder. He exposed malfeasance wherever he found it, and
made many enemies. The democratic party, led by Themistocles, used
Cleisthenes' recently established device of ostracism to get rid of him, and
in 482 the only man in Athenian history that was at once famous and hon-
est was exiled at the height of his career. All the world knows though
again it may be only a fable how Aristides inscribed his own name on the
ostracon for a letterless citizen who did not know him, but who, with the
resentment of mediocrity for excellence, was tired of hearing him called
the Just. When Aristides learned of the decision he expressed the hope
that Athens would never have occasion to remember him. n
The historian is constrained to admit that the public men of Athens were
properly equipped with the unscrupulousness that sometimes enters into
statesmanship. As much as Alcibiades at a later age, Themistocles was a
very flame of ability; "he has a claim on our admiration quite extraordinary
and unparalleled," says the always moderate Thucydides. 12 Like Miltiades,
he saved Athens, but could not save himself; he could defeat a great em-
pire, but not his own lust for power. "He received reluctantly and care-
lessly," says Plutarch, "instructions given him to improve his manners and
behavior, or to teach him any pleasing or graceful accomplishment; but
whatever was said to improve him in sagacity, or in the management of
affairs, he would give attention to beyond his years, confident in his nat-
ural capacity for such things." 13 It was Athens' misfortune that both
Themistocles and Aristides fell in love with the same girl, Stesilaus of Ceos,
and that their animosity outlived the beauty that had aroused it. 11 Neverthe-
less it was Themistocles whose foresight and energy prepared for, and
carried through, the victory of Salamis the most crucial battle in Greek
history. As far back as 493 he had planned and begun a new harbor for
Athens at the Piraeus; now, in 482, he persuaded the Athenians to forego
a distribution of money due them from the proceeds of the silver mines at
Laurium, and to devote the sum to the building of a hundred triremes.
Without this fleet there could have been no resistance to Xerxes.
III. XERXES
Darius I died in 485, and was succeeded by Xerxes I. Both father and
sun were men of ability and culture, and it would be an error to think ot
238 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. X
the Greco-Persian War as a contest between civilization and barbarism.
When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta
to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put
the heralds to death. Troubled by portents, Sparta now repented of this
violation of international custom, and asked for two citizens to go to
Persia and surrender themselves to any punishment that the Great King
might exact in retribution. Sperthias and Bulis, both of old and wealthy
families, volunteered, made their way to Xerxes, and offered to die in
atonement for the killing of Darius' messengers. Xerxes, says Herodotus, 18
"answered with true greatness of soul that he would not act like the
Lacedaemonians, who, by killing the heralds, had broken the laws which
all men held in common. As he had blamed such conduct in them, he
would never be guilty of it himself."
Xerxes prepared leisurely but thoroughly for the second Persian attack
upon Greece. For four years he collected troops and materials from all
the provinces of his realm; and when, in 481, he at last set forth, his army
was probably the largest ever assembled in history before our own cen-
tury. Herodotus reckoned it, without moderation, at 2,641,000 fighting
men, and an equal number of engineers, slaves, merchants, provisioners,
and prostitutes; he tells us, with perhaps a twinkle in his eye, that when
Xerxes' army drank water whole rivers ran dry. 19 It was, naturally and
fatally, a highly heterogeneous force. There were Persians, Medes, Baby-
lonians, Afghans, Indians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Sacae, Assyrians, Armenians,
Colchians, Scyths, Paeonians, Mysians, Paphlagonians, Phrygians, Thra-
cians, Thessalians, Locrians, Boeotians, Aeolians, lonians, Lydians, Carians,
Cilicians, Cypriotes, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabians, Egyptians, Ethiopians,
Libyans, and many more. There were footmen, cavalrymen, chariots, ele-
phants, and a fleet of transports and fighting triremes numbering, accord-
ing to Herodotus, 1207 ships in all. When Greek spies were caught in the
camp, and a general ordered their execution, Xerxes countermanded the
order, spared the men, had them conducted through his forces, and then
set them free, trusting that when they had reported to Athens and Sparta
the extent of his preparations, the remainder of Greece would hasten to
surrender. 17
In the spring of 480 the great host reached the Hellespont, where
Egyptian and Phoenician engineers had built a bridge that was among the
most admired mechanical achievements of antiquity. If again we may fol-
low Herodotus, 674 ships of trireme or penteconter size were distributed
in two rows athwart the strait, each vessel facing the current, and moored
CHAP. X) THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 239
with a heavy anchor. Then the builders stretched cables of flax or papyrus
over each row of ships from bank to bank, bound the cables to every ship,
and made them taut with capstans on the shore. Trees were cut and sawn
into planks, and these, laid across the cables, were fastened to them and
to one another. The planks were covered with brushwood, and this with
earth, and the whole was trodden down to resemble a road. A bulwark
was erected on each side of the causeway high enough to keep animals from
taking fright at sight of the sea. 38 Nevertheless many of the beasts, and
some of the soldiers, had to be driven by the lash to trust themselves to
the bridge. It stood the burden well, and in seven days and nights the
entire host had passed over it successfully. A native of the region, seeing
the spectacle, concluded that Xerxes was Zeus, and asked why the master
of gods and men had taken so much trouble to conquer little Greece when
he might have destroyed the presumptuous nation with one thunderbolt. 1 *
The army marched overland through Thrace and down into Macedonia
and Thessaly, while the Persian fleet, hugging the coasts, avoided the
storms of the Aegean by passing southward through a canal dug by forced
labor across the isthmus at Mt. Athos to the length of a mile and a quarter.
Wherever the army ate two meals, we are told, the city that fed it was
utterly ruined; Thasos spent four hundred silver talents approximately a
million dollars in playing host to Xerxes for a day. 20 The northern Greeks T
even to the Attic frontier, surrendered to fear or bribery, and allowed their
troops to be added to Xerxes' millions. Only Plataea and Thespiae, in the
north, prepared to fight.
IV. SALAMIS
How can we imagine, today, the terror and desperation of the south-
ern Greeks at the approach of this polyglot avalanche? Resistance seemed
insane; the loyal states could not muster one tenth of Xerxes' force. For
once Athens and Sparta worked together with single mind and heart.
Delegates were sped to every city in the Peloponnesus to beg for troops
or supplies; most of the states co-operated; Argos refused, and never lived
down her disgrace. Athens fitted out a fleet that sailed north to meet the
Persian armada, and Sparta dispatched a small force under King Leonidas
to halt Xerxes for a while at Thermopylae. The two navies met at Arte-
misium, off the northern coast of Euboea. When the Greek admirals saw
the overwhelming number of the enemy's vessels they were of a mind to
withdraw. The Euboeans, fearing a descent of the Persians upon their
*4 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. X
shores, sent to Themistocles, commander of the Athenian contingent, a
bribe of thirty talents ($180,000) on condition that he persuade the Greek
leaders to fight; he succeeded by sharing the bribe. 21 With characteristic
subtlety Themistocles had sailors inscribe upon the rocks messages to the
Greeks in the Persian fleet begging them to desert, or in any case not to
fight against their motherland; he hoped that if the lonians saw these words
they would be moved by them, and that if Xerxes saw and understood
them, the King would not dare to use Hellenes in the battle. All day the
rival fleets fought, until night put an end to the engagement before either
side could win; the Greeks then retired to Artemisium, the Persians to
Aphetae. Considering the inequality of numbers, the Greeks justifiably
looked upon the battle as a victory. When news came of the disaster at
Thermopylae the surviving Greek fleet sailed south to Salamis, to provide
a refuge for Athens.
Meanwhile Leonidas, despite the most heroic resistance in history, had
been overwhelmed at the "Hot Gates," not so much by the bravery of the
Persians as by the treachery of Hellenes. Certain Greeks from Trachis not
only betrayed to Xerxes the secret of the indirect route over the moun-
tains, but led the Persian force by that approach to attack the Spartans in
the rear. Leonidas and his three hundred elders (for he had chosen only
fathers of sons to go with him, lest any Spartan family should be extin-
guished) died almost to the last man. Of the two Spartan survivors one
fell at Plataea, the other hanged himself for shame. 22 The Greek historians
assure us that the Persians lost 20,000, the Greeks 300.^ Over the tomb of
the latter heroes was placed the most famous of Greek epitaphs: "Go,
stranger, and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here in obedience to their
laws." 34
When the Athenians learned that no barrier now remained between
Athens and the Persians, proclamation was made that every Athenian should
save his family as best he could. Some fled to Aegina, some to Salamis, some
to Troezen; some of the men were enlisted to fill up the crews of the fleet
that was returning from Artemisium. Plutarch paints 28 a touching picture
of how the tame animals of the city followed their masters to the shore, and
howled when the overladen vessels drew off without them; one dog, be-
longing to Pericles' father, Xanthippus, leaped into the sea and swam
alongside his ship to Salamis, where it died of exhaustion. 26 We may judge
of the excitement and passion of those days when we learn that an Athenian
who, in the Assembly, advised surrender, was killed there and then, and
CHAP. X) THESTRUGGLEFORFREEDOM 241
that a crowd of women went to his house and stoned his wife and children
to death. 37 When Xerxes arrived he found the city almost deserted, and
gave it over to pillage and fire.
Soon afterward the Persian fleet, twelve hundred strong, entered the
Bay of Salamis. Against it were ranged three hundred Greek triremes,
still under divided command. The majority of the admirals were op-
posed to risking an engagement. Resolved to force action upon the Greeks,
Themistocles resorted to a stratagem that would have cost him his life
had the Persians won. He sent a trusted slave to Xerxes to tell him that the
Greeks were intending to sail away during the night, and that the Per-
sians could prevent this only by surrounding the Greek fleet. Xerxes ac-
cepted the advice, and on the next morning, with every escape blocked, the
Greeks were compelled to give fight. Xerxes, seated in state at the foot of
Mt. Aegaleus, on the Attic shore across from Salamis, watched the action,
and noted the names of those of his men who fought with especial bravery.
The superior tactics and seamanship of the Hellenes, and the confusion of
tongues, minds, and superfluous ships among the Orientals, finally decided
the issue in favor of Greece. According to Diodorus the invaders lost two
hundred vessels, the defenders forty; but we do not have the Persian side of
the story. Few of the Greeks, even from the lost ships, died; for being
all excellent swimmers, they swam to land when their boats foundered. 28
The remnant of the Persian fleet fled to the Hellespont, and the subtle
Themistocles sent his slave again to Xerxes to say that he had dissuaded the
Greeks from pursuit. Xerxes left 300,000 men under command of Mar-
donius, and with the rest of his troops marched back in humiliation to
Sardis, a large part of his force dying of pestilence and dysentery on the
way.
In the same year as Salamis possibly, as the Greeks would have it, on the
same day (September 23, 480 B.C.) the Greeks of Sicily fought the Car-
thaginians at Himera. We do not know that the Phoenicians of Africa were
acting in concert with those who supported Xerxes and so largely manned
his fleet; perhaps it was only a coincidence that Greece found itself as-
saulted in east and west at once. 29 In the traditional account Hamilcar, the
Carthaginian admiral, arrived at Panormus with 3000 ships and 300,000
troops; he proceeded thence to lay siege to Himera, where he was met by
Gelon of Syracuse with 55,000 men. After the fashion of Punic generals,
Hamilcar stood aside from the battle, and burned sacrificial victims to his
gods as the contest raged; when his defeat became evident he threw him-
2 4 2 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. X
self into the fire. A tomb was erected to him on the site; and there his
grandson Himilcon, seventy years afterwards, slaughtered 3000 Greek cap-
tives in revenge. 30
A year later (August, 479) the liberation of Greece was completed by
almost simultaneous engagements on land and sea. Mardonius' army, liv-
ing leisurely on the country, had pitched its camp near Plataea on the
Boeotian plain. There, after two weeks of waiting for propitious omens, a
Greek force of 1 10,000 men, led by the Spartan king Pausanias, joined issue
with them in the greatest land battle of the war. The non-Persians in the
invading force had no heart for the conflict, and took to flight as soon as
the Persian contingent, which bore the point of the attack, began to waver.
The Greeks won so overwhelming a victory that (according to their his-
torians) they lost but 159 men, while of the Persian force 260,000 were
slain.* On the same day, the Greeks aver, a Greek squadron met a Persian
flotilla off the coast of Mycale, the central meeting place of all Ionia.
The Persian fleet was destroyed, the Ionian cities were freed from Persian
rule, and control of the Hellespont and the Bosporus was won by the
Greeks as they had won it from Troy seven hundred years before.
The Greco-Persian War was the most momentous conflict in European
history, for it made Europe possible. It won for Western civilization the
opportunity to develop its own economic life unburdened with alien trib-
ute or taxation and its own political institutions, free from the dictation of
Oriental kings. It won for Greece a clear road for the first great experi-
ment in liberty; it preserved the Greek mind for three centuries from the
enervating mysticism of the East, and secured for Greek enterprise full
freedom of the sea. The Athenian fleet that remained after Salamis now
opened every port in the Mediterranean to Greek trade, and the commer-
cial expansion that ensued provided the wealth that financed the leisure
and culture of Periclean Athens. The victory of little Hellas against such
odds stimulated the pride and lifted up the spirit of its people; out of very
gratitude they felt called upon to do unprecedented things. After cen-
turies of preparation and sacrifice Greece entered upon its Golden Age.
* These figures from Herodotus 81 are presumably an outburst of patriotic imagination.
Plutarch, trying to be impartial, raises the Greek loss to 1360, and Diodorus Siculus, though
always generous with numbers, lowers the Persian loss to loo.ooo; 8 " but even Plutarch and
Diodorus were Greeks.
BOOKDI
THE GOLDEN AGE
480-399 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK IE
NOTE: Where no city is named for a person, "of Athens" is understood.
B.C.
478: Pindar of Thebes, poet
478-67: Hieron I dictator at Syracuse
478: Pythagoras of Rhegium, sculptor
477: Delian Confederacy founded
472: Polygnotus, painter; Aeschylus'
Persae
469: Birth of Socrates
468: Cimon defeats Persians at the
Eurymedon; first contest between
Aeschylus and Sophocles
467: Bacchylides of Ceos, poet; Aeschy-
lus' Seven against Thebes
464-54: Helot revolt; siege of Ithome
463-31: Public career of Pericles
462: Ephialtes limits the Areopagus; pay
for jurors; Anaxagoras at Athens
461: Cimon ostracized; Ephialtes killed
460: Empedocles of Acragas, philosopher;
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound
459-54: Athenian expedition to Egypt fails
458: Aeschylus' Oresteia; the Long Walls
456. Temple of Zeus at Olympia; Pae-
onius of Mende, sculptor
454: Delian treasury removed to Athens
450: Zeno of Elea, philosopher, Hippoc-
rates of Chios, mathematician;
Callimachus develops the Corinthi-
an order; Philolaus of Thebes, as-
tronomer
448: Peace of Callias with Persia
447-31. The Parthenon
445: Leucippus of Abdera, philosopher
443: Herodotus of Hahcarnassus, his-
torian, joins colonists founding
Thurii (Italy); Gorgias of Leon-
tini, Sophist
442: Sophocles' Antigone; Myron of
Eleutherae, sculptor
440: Protagoras of Abdera, Sophist
438: Pheidias' Athene Parthenos; Eurip-
ides' Alcestis
437: ThePropylaea
435-34: War between Corinth and Corcyra
433: Alliance of Athens and Corcyra
432: Revolt of Potidaea; trials of Aspasia,
Pheidias, and Anaxagoras
431-04: Peloponnesian War
431-24: Euripides' Medea, Andromache, and
Hecuba; Sophocles' Electro.
430: Plague at Athens; trial of Pericles
429: Death of Pericles; Cleon in power;
Sophocles' Oedipus the King
^28: Revolt of Mytilene; Euripides' Hip-
polytus; death of Anaxagoras
B.C.
427: Embassy of Gorgias at Athens;
Prodicus and Hippias, Sophists
425: Siege of Sphactena; Aristophanes'
Acharnians
424. Brasidas takes Amphipolis; exile of
Thucydides, historian; Aristopha-
nes' Knights
423: Aristophanes' Clouds; Zeuxis of He-
raclea and Parrhasius of Ephesus,
painters
422: Aristophanes' Wasps; death of Cleon
and Brasidas
421: Peace of Nicias; Aristophanes' Peace
420: Hippocrates of Cos, physician; De-
mocritus of Abdera, philosopher;
Polycleitus of Sicyon, sculptor
420-04: The Erechtheum
419: Lysias, orator
418: Spartan victory at Mantinea; Eurip-
ides' Ion
416: Massacre at Melos; Euripides' Elec-
<r(?)
415-13: Athenian expedition to Syracuse
415: Mutilation of the Hermae; disgrace
of Alcibiades; Euripides' Trojan
Women
414: Siege of Syracuse; Aristophanes'
Birds
413: Athenian defeat at Syracuse; Eurip-
ides' Iphigenia in Tcturis
412: Euripides' Helen and Andromeda.
411: Revolt of the Four Hundred; Aris-
tophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmo-
phoriazusae
410: Restoration of the democrary; vic-
tory of Alcibiades at Cyzicus
408: Timotheus of Miletus, poet and
musician; Euripides' Orestes
406: Athenian victory at Arginusae; deaths
of Euripides and Sophocles; Eurip-
ides' Bacchae and Iphigenia in
Aulis
405-367: Dionysius I dictator at Syracuse
405: Spartan victory at Aegospotami;
Aristophanes' Frogs
404: End of the Peloponnesian War; rule
of the Thirty at Athens
403 : Restoration of the democracy
401: Defeat of Cyrus II at Cunaxa; retreat
of Xenophon's Ten Thousand;
Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus
399: Trial and death of Socrates
CHAPTER XI
Pericles and the Democratic
Experiment
I. THE RISE OF ATHENS
* C 'T^HE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the
JL death of Aristotle," wrote Shelley, 1 "is undoubtedly, whether con-
sidered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon
the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history
of the world." Athens dominated this period because she had won the
allegiance and the contributions of most Aegean cities by her leadership
in saving Greece; and because, when the war was over, Ionia was impov-
erished and Sparta was disordered by demobilization, earthquake, and in-
surrection, while the fleet that Themistocles had created now rivaled with
the conquests of commerce its victories at Artemisium and Salamis.
Not that the war was quite over: intermittently the struggle between
Greece and Persia continued from the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus to the
overthrow of Darius III by Alexander. The Persians were expelled from
Ionia in 479, from the Black Sea in 478, from Thrace in 475; and in 468
a Greek fleet under Cimon of Athens decisively defeated the Persians on
land and sea at the mouth of the Eurymedon.* The Greek cities of Asia
and the Aegean, for their protection against Persia, now (477) organized
under Athenian leadership the Delian Confederacy, and contributed to a
common fund in the temple of Apollo on Delos. Since Athens donated
ships instead of money, it soon exercised, through its sea power, an effective
control over its allies; and rapidly the Confederacy of equals was trans-
formed into an Athenian Empire.
In this policy of imperial aggrandizement all the major statesmen of
Athens even the virtuous Aristides and later the impeccable Pericles-
joined with the unscrupulous Themistocles. No other man had deserved
so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he
to be repaid for it. When the Greek leaders met to give first and second
* A river in Pamphylia, in southern Asia Minor.
245
246 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XI
awards to those men who had most ably defended Greece in the war, each
of them voted for himself first, and for Themistocles second. It was he
who set the course of Greek history by persuading Athens that the road
to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so much as
by trade. He negotiated with Persia, and sought to end the strife between
the old and the young empire in order that unimpeded commerce with Asia
might bring prosperity to Athens. Under his prodding the men, even the
women and children, of Athens raised a wall around the city, and another
around the ports at the Piraeus and Munychia; under his lead, carried for-
ward by Pericles, great quays, warehouses, and exchanges were erected at
the Piraeus, providing every convenience for maritime trade. He knew
that these policies would arouse the jealousy of Sparta, and might lead to
war between the rival states; but he was stirred on by his vision of Athens'
development, and his confidence in the Athenian fleet.
His aims were as magnificent as his means were venal. He used the navy
to force tribute from the Cyclades, on the ground that they had yielded
too quickly to the Persians, and had lent Xerxes their troops; and he appears
to have accepted bribes to let some cities off. 2 For like considerations he
arranged the recall of exiles, sometimes keeping the money, says Timocreon,
though he had failed to obtain the recall. 3 When Aristides was placed in
charge of the public revenue he found that his predecessors had embezzled
public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.* Toward 47 1 the Athe-
nians, fearing his unmoral intellect, passed a vote of ostracism upon him,
and he sought a new home in Argos. Shortly thereafter the Spartans found
documents apparently implicating Themistocles, in the secret correspond-
ence of their regent Pausanias, whom they had starved to death for enter-
ing into traitorous negotiations with Persia. Happy to destroy her ablest
enemy, Sparta revealed these papers to Athens, which at once sent out an
order for Themistocles' arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge
there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and thence sailed secretly to Asia,
where he claimed from Xerxes' successor some reward for restraining the
Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles'
promise to help him subjugate Greece, 6 Artaxerxes I received him into his
counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance.
Before Themistocles could carry out the schemes that never let him rest
he died at Magnesia in 449 B.C., at the age of sixty-five, admired and disliked
by all the Mediterranean world.
After the passing of Themistocles and Aristides the leadership of the
democratic faction at Athens descended to Ephialtes, and that of the oli-
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 247
garchic or conservative faction to Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon had most
of the virtues that Themistocles lacked, but none of the subtlety that abil-
ity must depend upon for political success. Unhappy amid the intrigues of
the city, he secured command of the fleet, and consolidated the liberties
of Greece by his victory at the Eurymedon. Returning to Athens in glory,
he at once lost his popularity by advising a reconciliation with Sparta. He
won the Assembly's reluctant consent to lead an Athenian force to the aid
of the Spartans against their revolted Helots at Ithome; but the Spartans
suspected the Athenians even when bringing gifts, and so clearly distrusted
Cimon's soldiers that these returned to Athens in anger, and Cimon was
disgraced. In 46 1 he was ostracized at the instigation of Pericles, and the
oligarchic party was so demoralized by his fall that for two generations
the government remained in the hands of the democrats. Four years later
Pericles, repentant (or, rumor said, enamored of Cimon's sister Elpinice),
secured his recall, and Cimon died with honors in a naval campaign in
Cyprus.
The leader of the democratic party at this time was a man of whom we
know strangely little, and yet his activity was a turning point in the his-
tory of Athens. Ephialtes was poor but incorruptible, and did not long
survive the animosities of Athenian politics. The popular faction had been
strengthened by the war, for in that crisis all class divisions among freemen
had for a moment been forgotten, and the saving victory at Salamis had
been won not by the army which was dominated by the aristocrats but
by the navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens and controlled by
the mercantile middle class. The oligarchic party sought to maintain its
privileges by making the conservative Areopagus the supreme authority in
the state. Ephialtes replied by a bitter attack upon this ancient senate.*
He impeached several of its members for malfeasance, had some of them
put to death, 7 and persuaded the Assembly to vote the almost complete
abolition of the powers that the Areopagus still retained. The conservative
Aristotle later approved this radical policy, on the ground that "the trans-
fer to the commons of the judicial functions that had belonged to the
Senate appears to have been an advantage, for corruption finds an easier
* Grote's statement, written about 1850, of the case against the Areopagus recalls certain
criticisms of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937. "The Areopagus, standing
alone in the enjoyment of a life-tenure, appears to have exercised an undefined and extensive
control which long continuance had gradually consecrated. It was invested with a kind of
religious respect. . . . The Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly,
taking care that none of the proceedings . . . should be such as to infringe the established laws
of the country- These were powers immense, undefined, not derived from any formal grant
of the people." 6
248 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XI
material in a small number than in a large one," 8 But the conservatives
of the time did not see the issue so calmly. Ephialtes, having been found
unpurchasable, was assassinated in 461 by an agent of the oligarchy ,* and
the perilous task of leading the democratic party passed down to the aris-
tocratic Pericles.
II. PERICLES
The man who acted as commander in chief of all the physical and spir-
itual forces of Athens during her greatest age was born some three years
before Marathon. His father, Xanthippus, had fought at Salamis, had led
the Athenian fleet in the battle of Mycale, and had recaptured the Helles-
pont for Greece. Pericles' mother, Agariste, was a granddaughter of the
reformer Cleisthenes; on her side, therefore, he belonged to the ancient
family of the Alcmaeonids. "His mother being near her time," says Plu-
tarch, "fancied in a dream that she was brought to bed of a lion, and a few
days after was delivered of Pericles in other respects perfectly formed,
only his head was somewhat longish and out of proportion"; 10 his critics
were to have much fun with this very dolicocephalic head. The most
famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music,
and Pythocleides in music and literature; he heard the lectures of Zeno the
Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher
Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture
of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian
civilization economic, military, literary, artistic, and philosophical. He
was, so far as we know, the most complete man that Greece produced.
Seeing that the oligarchic party was out of step with the time, he at-
tached himself early in life to the party of the demos i.e., the free popu-
lation of Athens; then, as even in Jefferson's day in America, the word
"people" carried certain proprietary reservations. He approached politics
in general, and each situation in it, with careful preparation, neglecting no
aspect of education, speaking seldom and briefly, and praying to the gods
that he might never utter a word that was not to the point. Even the comic
poets, who disliked him, spoke of him as "the Olympian," who wielded
the thunder and lightning of such eloquence as Athens had never heard
before; and yet by all accounts his speech was unimpassioned, and ap-
pealed to enlightened minds. His influence was due not only to his intelli-
gence but to his probity; he was capable of using bribery to secure state
ends, but was himself "manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT *49
superior to all considerations of money"; 11 and whereas Themistocles had
entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added noth-
ing to his patrimony by his political career. 13 It showed the good sense of
the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467
and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one
of their ten strategoi or commanders; and this relative permanence of office
not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to
raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence
in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of
democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship.
The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in
the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisive-
ness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually re-
newed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again
the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most perma-
nently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat
enjoying popular support. Greek civilization was at its best when democ-
racy had grown sufficiently to give it variety and vigor, and aristocracy
survived sufficiently to give it order and taste.
The reforms of Pericles substantially extended the authority of the peo-
ple. Though the power of the heliaea had grown under Solon, Cleisthenes,
and Ephialtes, the lack of payment for jury service had given the well to
do a predominating influence in these courts. Pericles introduced (45 1 ) a
fee of two obols (34 cents), later raised to three, for a day's duty as juror,
an amount equivalent in each case to half a day's earnings of an average
Athenian of the time. 13 The notion that these modest sums weakened the
fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously,
for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would
long since have been destroyed. Pericles seems also to have established
a small remuneration for military service. He crowned this scandalous
generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annu-
ally as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals;
he excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a
luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate
the mind of the whole electorate. It must be confessed, however, that
Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch conservatives all were agreed that these
pittances injured the Athenian character. 14
Continuing the work of Ephialtes, Pericles transferred to the popular
courts the various judicial powers that had been possessed by the archons
2JO THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
and magistrates, so that from this time the archonship was more of a
bureaucratic or administrative office than one that carried the power of
forming policies, deciding cases, or issuing commands. In 457 eligibility to
the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was ex-
tended to the third class, or zeugitti; soon thereafter, without any legal
form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the
office by romancing about their income; and the importance of the thetes
in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud. 18
Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried
through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate off-
spring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage
was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure
aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate
births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material
rewards of citizenship and empire. Pericles himself would soon have rea-
son to regret this exclusive legislation.
Since any form of government seems good that brings prosperity, and
even the best seems bad that hinders it, Pericles, having consolidated his
political position, turned to economic statesmanship. He sought to reduce
the pressure of population upon the narrow resources of Attica by estab-
lishing colonies of poor Athenian citizens upon foreign soil. To give work
to the idle, 18 he made the state an employer on a scale unprecedented in
Greece: ships were added to the fleet, arsenals were built, and a great
corn exchange was erected at the Piraeus. To protect Athens effectively
from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the
unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for con-
structing eight miles of "Long Walls," as they were to be called, connect-
ing Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum; the effect was to make the city
and its ports one fortified enclosure, open in wartime only to the sea
on which the Athenian fleet was supreme. In the hostility with which un-
walled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic
party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the
Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrection, to
put down the democracy; in this event the oligarchs pledged themselves
to level the Long Walls. The Spartans agreed, and dispatched an army
which defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457); but the oligarchs failed
to make their revolution. The Spartans returned to the Peloponnesus emp-
ty-handed, dourly awaiting a better opportunity to overcome the flourish-
ing rival that was taking from them their traditional leadership of Greece.
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 25!
Pericles rejected the temptation to retaliate upon Sparta, and instead,
devoted his energies now to the beautification of Athens. Hoping to make
his city the cultural center of Hellas, and to rebuild the ancient shrines
which the Persians had destroyed on a scale and with a splendor that would
lift up trie soul of every citizen, he devised a plan for using all the genius
of Athens' artists, and the labor of her remaining unemployed, in a bold
program for the architectural adornment of the Acropolis. "It was his
desire and design," says Plutarch, "that the undisciplined mechanic multi-
tude . . . should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should
not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this
end he brought in these vast projects of construction." 17 To finance the
undertaking he proposed that the treasury accumulated by the Delian
Confederacy should be removed from Delos, where it lay idle and in-
secure, and that such part of it as was not needed for common defense
should be used to beautify what seemed to Pericles the legitimate capital
of a beneficent empire.
The transference of the Delian treasury to Athens was quite acceptable
to the Athenians, even to the oligarchs. But the voters were loath to spend
any substantial part of the fund in adorning their city whether through
some qualm of conscience, or through a secret hope that the money might
be appropriated more directly to their needs and enjoyment. The oli-
garchic leaders played upon this feeling so cleverly that when the matter
neared a vote in the Assembly the defeat of Pericles' plan seemed certain.
Plutarch tells a delightful story of how the subtle leader turned the tide.
" 'Very well,' said Pericles; 'let the cost of these buildings go not to your
account but to mine; and let the inscription upon them stand in my name.'
When they heard him say this, whether it were out of a surprise to see
the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works,
they cried aloud, bidding him spend on ... and spare no cost till all were
finished."
While the work proceeded, and Pericles' especial protection and sup-
port were given to Pheidias, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and the other artists who
labored to realize his dreams, he lent his patronage also to literature and
philosophy; and whereas in the other Greek cities of this period the strife
of parties consumed much of the energy of the citizens, and literature
languished, in Athens the stimulus of growing wealth and democratic free-
dom was combined with wise and cultured leadership to produce the Golden
Age. When Pericles, Aspasia, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and Socrates attended
a play by Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens could see visibly
l$l THELIFEOF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
the zenith and unity of the life of Greecestatesmanship, art, science,
philosophy, literature, religion, and morals living no separate career as in
the pages of chroniclers, but woven into one many-colored fabric of a
nation's history.
The affections of Pericles wavered between art and philosophy, and he
might have found it hard to say whether he loved Pheidias or Anaxagoras
the more; perhaps he turned to Aspasia as a compromise between beauty
and wisdom. For Anaxagoras he entertained, we are told, "an extraor-
dinary esteem and admiration." 18 It was the philosopher, says Plato, 19 who
deepened Pericles into statesmanship; from long intercourse with Anaxag-
oras, Plutarch believes, Pericles derived "not merely elevation of purpose
and dignity of language, raised far above the base and dishonest buffoon-
eries of mob eloquence, but, besides this, a composure of countenance, and
a serenity and calmness in all his movements, which no occurrence whilst
he was speaking could disturb." When Anaxagoras was old, and Pericles
was absorbed in public affairs, the statesman for a time let the philosopher
drop out of his life; but later, hearing that Anaxagoras was starving, Pericles
hastened to his relief, and accepted humbly his rebuke, that "those who
have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil." 20
It seems hardly credible, and yet on second thought most natural, that
the stern "Olympian" should have been keenly susceptible to the charms
of woman; his self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the
toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for
feminine tenderness. He had been many years married when he met
Aspasia. She belonged to she was helping to create the type of hetaira
that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life: a woman rejecting
the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring
to live in unlicensed unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she
might enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and par-
ticipate with them in their cultural interests. We have no testimony to
Aspasia's beauty, though ancient writers speak of her "small, high-arched
foot," "her silvery voice," and her golden hair. a Aristophanes, an unscrupu-
lous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who
had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some
of her girls into Athens; and the great comedian delicately suggests that
the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipitated the Peloponnesian
War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge
her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel. 22 But Aris-
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 253
tophanes was not an historian, and may be trusted only where he himself
is not concerned.
Arriving in Athens about 450, Aspasia opened a school of rhetoric and
philosophy, and boldly encouraged the public emergence and higher edu-
cation of women. Many girls of good family came to her classes, and some
husbands brought their wives to study with her. 23 Men also attended her
lectures, among them Pericles and Socrates, and probably Anaxagoras,
Euripides, Alcibiades, and Pheidias. Socrates said that he had learned from
her the art of eloquence, 21 and some ancient gossips would have it that the
statesman inherited her from the philosopher. 25 Pericles now found it
admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He of-
fered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed; she took a
third husband, 28 while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law
of 45 1 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth; any
child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian
citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never
leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing
his fortune to the son that she bore him. From that time onward he fore-
went all social life outside his home, seldom going anywhere except to the
agora or the council hall; the people of Athens began to complain of his
aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment
salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesman-
ship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates mar-
veled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral ora-
tion that Pericles delivered after the first casualties of the Peloponnesian
War. 27 Aspasia became the uncrowned queen of Athens, setting fashion's
tone, and giving to the women of the city an exciting example of mental
and moral freedom.
The conservatives were shocked at all this, and turned it to their pur-
poses. They denounced Pericles for leading Greeks out to war against
Greeks, as in Aegina and Samos; they accused him of squandering public
funds; finally, through the mouths of irresponsible comic dramatists abus-
ing the free speech that prevailed under his rule, they charged him with
turning his home into a house of ill fame, and having relations with the
wife of his son. 28 Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial,
they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for em-
bezzling, as they alleged, some of the gold assigned to him for his chrysele-
phantine Athena, and apparently succeeded in convicting him; they in-
254 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XI
dieted Anaxagoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on
Pericles' advice, fled into exile; they brought against Aspasia a like writ
of impiety (graphe asebeias}, complaining that she had shown disrespect
for the gods of Greece. 29 The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a
Deianeira who had ruined Pericles,* and called her, in plain Greek, a concu-
bine; one of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, ac-
cused her of serving as Pericles' procuress, and of bringing freeborn women
to him for his pleasure. 50 At her trial, which took place before a court of
fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his elo-
quence, even to tears; and the case was dismissed. From that moment (432)
Pericles began to lose his hold upon the Athenian people; and when, three
years later, death came to him, he was already a broken man.
III. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
1. Deliberation
These strange indictments suffice to show how real was the limited de-
mocracy that functioned under the supposed dictatorship of Pericles. We
must study this democracy carefully, for it is one of the outstanding experi-
ments in the history of government. It is limited, first, by the fact that only
a small minority of the people can read. It is limited physically by the
difficulty of reaching Athens from the remoter towns of Attica. The
franchise is restricted to those sons, of two free Athenian parents, who
have reached the age of twenty-one; and only they and their families
enjoy civil rights, or directly bear the military and fiscal burdens of
the state. Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens
out of an Attic population of 315,000, political power, in the days of
Pericles, is formally equal; each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and
isegoria equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citi-
zen is a man who not only votes, but takes his turn, by Jot and rote, as mag-
istrate or judge; he must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any
time. No one who is subject to another, or who has to labor in order to
live, can have the time or the capacity for these services; and therefore the
manual worker seems to most Athenians unfit for citizenship, though, with
human inconsistency they admit the peasant proprietor. All of the 1 15,000
* Deianira, wife of Heracles, caused his death by presenting him with a poisoned robe.
Cf. Sophocles' Trachinicm Women.
GHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 255
slaves of Attica, all women, nearly all workingmen, all of the 28,500 "met^
ics" or resident aliens,* and consequently a great part of the trading class,
are excluded from the franchise, f
The voters are not gathered into parties, but are loosely divided into fol-
lowers of the oligarchic or the democratic factions according as they oppose
or favor the extension of the franchise, the dominance of the Assembly, and
the governmental succor of the poor at the expense of the rich. The active
members of each faction are organized into clubs called hetalreiai, com-
panionships. There are clubs of all kinds in Periclean Athens religious
clubs, kinship clubs, military clubs, workers' clubs, actors' clubs, political
clubs, and clubs honestly devoted to eating and drinking. The strongest
of all are the oligarchic clubs, whose members are sworn to mutual aid in
politics and law, and are bound by a common passionate hostility to those
lower enfranchised ranks that press upon the toes of the landed aristocracy
and the moneyed merchant class. 81 Against them stand the relatively demo-
cratic party of small businessmen, of citizens who have become wage work-
ers, and of those who man the merchant ships and the Athenian fleet; these
groups resent the luxuries and privileges of the rich, and raise up to leader-
ship in Athens such men as Cleon the tanner, Lysicles the sheep dealer,
Eucrates the tow seller, Cleophon the harp manufacturer, and Hyperbolus
the lampmaker. Pericles holds them off for a generation by a subtle mix-
ture of democracy and aristocracy; but when he dies they inherit the gov-
ernment and thoroughly enjoy its perquisites. From Solon to the Roman
conquest this bitter conflict of oligarchs and democrats is waged with ora-
tory, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war.
Every voter is of right a member of the basic governing body the
ekkksia, or Assembly; there is at this level no representative government.
Since transportation is difficult over the hills of Attica, only a fraction of
the eligible members ever attend any one meeting; there are rarely more
than two or three thousand. Those citizens who live in Athens or at the
Piraeus come by a kind of geographical determinism to dominate the As-
sembly; in this way the democrats gain ascendancy over the conservatives,
who are for the most part scattered among the farms and estates of Attica.
The Assembly meets four times a month, on important occasions in the
agora, in the Theater of Dionysus, or at the Piraeus, ordinarily in a semi-
circular place called the Pnyx on the slope of a hill west of the Areopagus;
* The Greek word, metoikoi, means "sharing the home."
t The figures are from Gomme, A. W., The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth
Centuries B.C., pp. 21, 26, 47. They are frankly conjectural. The total figure includes the
wives and minor children of the citizens.
2 5 6 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
in all these cases the members sit on benches under the open sky, and the
sitting begins at dawn. Each session opens with the sacrifice of a pig to
Zeus. It is usual to adjourn at once in case of a storm, earthquake, or
eclipse, for these are accounted signs of divine disapproval. New legislation
may be proposed only at the first session of each month, and the member
who off ers it is held responsible for the result of its adoption; if these are
seriously evil another member may within a year of the vote invoke upon
him the graphe paranoTWon, or writ of illegality, and have him fined, dis-
franchised, or put to death; this is Athens' way of discouraging hasty legis-
lation. By another form of the same writ a new proposal may be checked
by a demand that before its enactment one of the courts shall pass upon
its constitutionality i.e., its agreement with existing law. 32 Again, before
considering a bill, the Assembly is required to submit it to the Council of
Five Hundred for preliminary examination, very much as a bill in the
American Congress, before discussion of it on the floor, is referred to a
committee presumed to have especial knowledge and competence in the
matter involved. The Council may not reject a proposal outright; it may
only report it, with or without a recommendation.
Ordinarily the presiding officer opens the Assembly by presenting a
probouleuma, or reported bill. Those who wish to speak are heard in the
order of their age; but anyone may be disqualified from addressing the
Assembly if it can be shown that he is not a landowner, or is not legally
married, or has neglected his duties to his parents, or has offended public
morals, or has evaded a military obligation, or has thrown away his shield
in battle, or owes taxes or other money to the state. 38 Only trained orators
avail themselves of the right to speak, for the Assembly is a difficult audi-
ence. It laughs at mispronunciations, protests aloud at digressions, expresses
its approval with shouts, whistling, and clapping of hands, and, if it strongly
disapproves, makes such a din that the speaker is compelled to leave the
bema, or rostrum. 3 * Each speaker is allowed a given time, whose lapse is
measured by a clepsydra or water clock. 88 Voting is by a show of hands
unless some individual is directly and specially affected by the proposal,
in which case a secret ballot is taken. The vote may confirm, amend, or
override the Council's report on a bill, and the decision of the Assembly
is final. Decrees for immediate action, as distinct from laws, may be en-
acted more expeditiously than new legislation; but such decrees may with
equal expedition be canceled, and do not enter into the body of Athenian
law.
Above the Assembly in dignity, inferior to it in power, is the boule, or
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 257
Council. Originally an upper house, it has by the time of Pericles been
reduced in effect to a legislative committee of the ekklesia. Its members
are chosen by lot and rote from the register of the citizens, fifty for each
of the ten tribes; they serve for a year only, and receive, in the fourth cen-
tury, five obols per day. Since each councilor is disqualified for re-election
until all other eligible citizens have had a chance to serve, every citizen,
in the normal course of events, sits on the boule for at least one term during
his life. It meets in the bouleuterion, or council hall, south of the agora,
and its ordinary sessions are public. Its functions are legislative, executive,
and consultative: it examines and reformulates the bills proposed to the
Assembly; it supervises the conduct and accounts of the religious and ad-
ministrative officials of the city; it controls public finances, enterprises, and
buildings; it issues executive decrees when action is called for and the As-
sembly is not in session; and, subject to later revision by the Assembly, it
controls the foreign affairs of the state.
To perform these varied tasks the Council divides itself into ten prytanies,
or committees, each of fifty members; and each prytany presides over the
Council and the Assembly for a month of thirty-six days. Every morn-
ing the presiding prytany chooses one of its members to serve as chairman
of itself and the Council for the day; this position, the highest in the state,
is therefore open by lot and turn to any citizen; Athens has three hun-
dred presidents every year. The lot determines at the last moment which
prytany, and which member of it, shall preside over the Council during the
month or the day; by this device the corrupt Athenians hope to reduce
the corruption of justice to the lowest point attainable by human charac-
ter. The acting prytany prepares the agenda, convokes the Council, and
formulates the conclusions reached during the day. In this way, through
Assembly, Council, and prytany, the democracy of Athens carries out
its legislative functions. As for the Areopagus, its powers are in the fifth
century restricted to trying cases of arson, willful violence, poisoning, or
premeditated murder. Slowly the law of Greece has been changed "from
status to contract," from the whim of one man, or the edict of a narrow
class, into the deliberate agreement of free citizens.
2. Law
The earliest Greeks appear to have conceived of law as sacred custom,
divinely sanctioned and revealed; themis* meant to them both these customs and
* I.e., what is laid down, from ti-themi, I place; cf. our doom in its early sense of law, and
the Russian duma.
258 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
a goddess who (like India's Rita or China's Tao or Tien) embodied the moral
order and harmony of the world. Law was a part of theology, and the oldest
Greek laws of property were mingled with liturgical regulations in the ancient
temple codes. 38 Perhaps as old as such religious law were the rules established by
the decrees of tribal chieftains or kings, which began as force and ended, in time,
as sanctities.
The second phase of Greek legal history was the collection and co-ordination
of these holy customs by lawgivers (thesmotheteti) like Zaleucus, Charondas,
Draco, Solon; when such men put their new codes into writing, the thesmoi,
or sacred usages, became nomoi, or man-made laws.* In these codes' law freed
itself from religion, and became increasingly secular; the intention of the agent
entered more fully into judgment of the act; family liability was replaced by
individual responsibility, and private revenge gave way to statutory punishment
by the state. 87
The third step in Greek legal development was the accumulative growth of
a body of law. When a Periclean Greek speaks of the law of Athens he means
the codes of Draco and Solon, and the measures that have been passed and not
repealed by the Assembly or the Council. If a new law contravenes an old
one, the repeal of the latter is prerequisite; but scrutiny is seldom complete,
and two statutes are often found in ludicrous contradiction. In periods of excep-
tional legal confusion a committee of nomothetai, or law determiners, is chosen
by lot from the popular courts to decide which laws shall be retained; in such
cases advocates are appointed to defend the old laws against those who propose
to repeal them. Under the supervision of these nomothetai the laws of Athens,
phrased in simple and intelligible language, are cut upon stone slabs in the
King's Porch; and thereafter no magistrate is allowed to decide a case by an
unwritten law.
Athenian law makes no distinction between a civil and a criminal code, except
that it reserves murder cases for the Areopagus, and in civil suits leaves the
complainant to enforce the court's decree himself, going to his aid only if he
meets with resistance. 38 Murder is infrequent, for it is branded as a sacrilege as
well as a crime, and the dread of feud revenge remains if the law fails to act.
Under certain conditions direct retaliation is still tolerated in the fifth century;
when a husband finds his mother, wife, concubine, sister, or daughter in illicit
relations he is entitled to kill the male offender at once. 30 Whether a killing is
intentional or not it has to be expiated as a pollution of the city's soil, and the
rites of purification are painfully rigid and complex. If the victim has granted
pardon before dying, no action can be brought against the killer." Beneath the
* In Periclean Athens the name thesmothetai was given to the six minor archons who
recorded, interpreted, and enforced the laws; in Aristotle's day they presided over the
popular courts.
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 259
Areopagus are three tribunals for homicide cases, according to the class and
origin of the victim, and according as the act was intentional, or excusable, or
not. A fourth tribunal holds court at Phreattys on the coast, and tries those
who, while exiled for unpremeditated homicide, are now charged with another
and premeditated murder; being polluted by the first crime, they are not allowed
to touch Attic soil, and their defense is conducted from a boat near the shore.
The law of property is uncompromisingly severe. Contracts are rigorously
enforced; all jurors are required to swear that they "will not vote for an
abolition of private debts, or for a distribution of the lands or houses belong-
ing to Athenians"; and every year the head archon, on taking office, has procla-
mation made by a herald that "what each possesses he shall remain possessor
and absolute master thereof." 41 The right of bequest is still narrowly limited.
Where there are male children the old religious conception of property, as
bound up with a given family line and the care of ancestral spirits, demands that
the estate should automatically pass to the sons; the father owns the property
only in trust for the family dead, living, and to be born. Whereas in Sparta (as
in England) the patrimony is indivisible and goes to the eldest son, in Athens
(very much as in France) it is apportioned among the male heirs, the oldest
receiving a moderately larger share than the others.* 3 As early as Hesiod we
find the peasant limiting his family in Gallic fashion, lest his estate be ruinously
divided among many sons.* 3 The husband's property never descends to the
widow; all that remains to her is her dowry. Wills are as complex in Pericles'
day as in our own, and are couched in much the same terms as now." In this
as in other matters Greek legislation is the basis of that Roman law which in turn
has provided the legal foundations of Western society.
3. Justice
Democracy reaches the judiciary last of all; and the greatest reform ac-
complished by Ephialtes and Pericles is the transfer of judicial powers from
the Areopagus and the archons to the heliaea. The establishment of these
popular courts gives to Athens what trial by jury will win for modern
Europe. The heliaea* is composed of six thousand dicasts, or jurors, annu-
ally drawn by lot from the register of the citizens; these six thousand are
distributed into ten dicasteries, or panels, of approximately five hundred
each, leaving a surplus for vacancies and emergencies. Minor and local
cases are settled by thirty judges who periodically visit the demes or coun-
ties of Attica. Since no juror may serve more than a year at a time, and
* Strictly, heliaea is the name of the place where the courts met, and was so called (from
helios, sun) because the sessions were held in the open air.
260 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
eligibility is determined by rotation, every citizen, in the average of chance,
becomes a juror every third year. He does not have to serve, but the
payment of two later three obols per day obtains an attendance of two
or three hundred jurors for each panel. Important cases, like that of
Socrates, may be tried before vast dicasteries of twelve hundred men. To
reduce corruption to a minimum, the panel before which a case is to be
tried is determined by lot at the last minute; and as most trials last but a
day we do not hear much of bribery in the courts; even the Athenians find
it difficult to bribe in a moment three hundred men.
Despite expedition, the courts of Athens, like courts the world over, are usu-
ally behind their calendar, for the Athenians itch to litigate. To cool this
fever public arbitrators are chosen by lot from the roster of citizens who have
reached their sixtieth year; the parties to a dispute submit their complaint and
defense to one of these, again chosen by lot at the last minute; and each party
pays him a small fee. If he fails to reconcile them he gives his judgment,
solemnized by an oath. Either party may then appeal to the courts, but these
usually refuse to hear minor cases that have not been submitted to arbitration.
When a case is accepted for trial the plea is entered or sworn to, the witnesses
make their depositions and swear to them, and all these statements are presented
to the court in written form. They are sealed in a special box, and at a later
date they are opened and examined, and judgment is given, by a panel chosen
by lot. There is no public prosecutor; the government relies upon private citi-
zens to accuse before the courts anyone guilty of serious offenses against morals,
religion, or the state. Hence arises a class of "sycophants," who make such
charges a regular practice, and develop their profession into an art of black-
mail; in the fourth century they earn a good living by bringing or, better,
threatening to bring actions against rich men, believing that a popular court
will be loath to acquit those who can pay substantial fines.* The expenses of
the courts are mostly covered by fines imposed upon convicted men. Plaintiffs
who fail to substantiate their charges are also fined; and if they receive less
than a fifth of the jurors' votes they are subject to a lashing, or to a penalty of
a thousand drachmas ($ rooo) . Each party in a trial usually acts as his own lawyer,
and has to make in person the first presentation of his case. But as the com-
plexity of procedure rises, and litigants detect in the jurors a certain sensitivity
to eloquence, the practice grows of engaging a rhetor or orator, versed in the
law, to support the complaint or defense, or to prepare, in his client's name and
* Crito, rich friend of Socrates, complained that it was difficult for one who wished to mind
his own business to live at Athens. "For at this very time," he said, "there are people bring-
ing actions against me, not because they have suffered any wrongs from me, but because they
think that I would rather pay them a sum of money than have the trouble of law proceed-
ings." i *
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 26l
character, a speech that the client may read to the court. From these special
rhetor-pleaders comes the lawyer. His antiquity in Greece appears from a
remark in Diogenes Laertius that Bias, Wise Man of Priene, was an eloquent
pleader of causes, who always reserved his talents for the just side. Some of
these lawyers are attached to the courts as exegetai, or interpreters; for many
of the jurors have no more legal knowledge than the parties to the case.
Evidence is ordinarily presented in writing, but the witness must appear and
swear to its accuracy when the grammateuSy or clerk of the court, reads it to
the jurors. There is no cross-examination. Perjury is so frequent that cases are
sometimes decided in the face of explicit sworn evidence. The testimony of
women and minors is accepted only in murder trials; that of slaves is admitted
only when drawn from them by torture; it is taken for granted that without
torture they will lie. It is a barbarous aspect of Greek law, destined to be out-
done in Roman prisons and Inquisition chambers, and perhaps rivaled in the
secret rooms of police courts in our time. Torture, in Pericles' day, is forbidden
in the case of citizens. Many masters decline to let their slaves be used as wit-
nesses, even when their case may depend upon such testimony; and any per-
manent injury done to a slave by torture must be made good by those who
inflicted it. 46
Penalties take the form of flogging, fines, disfranchisement, branding, con^
fiscation, exile, and death; imprisonment is seldom used as a punishment. It is a
principle of Greek law that a slave should be punished in his body, but a free-
man in his property. A vase painting shows a slave hung up by his arms and
legs, and mercilessly lashed/ 7 Fines are the usual penalty for citizens, and are
assessed on a scale that opens the democracy to the charge of fattening its purse
through unjust condemnations. On the other hand a convicted person and his
accuser are in many cases allowed to name the fine or punishment that they
think just; and the court then chooses between the suggested penalties. Mur-
der, sacrilege, treason, and some offenses that seem minor to us are punished
with both confiscation and death; but a prospective death penalty may usually
be avoided before trial by voluntary exile and the abandonment of property.
If the accused disdains flight, and is a citizen, death is inflicted as painlessly as
possible by administering hemlock, which gradually benumbs the body from
the feet upward, killing when it reaches the heart. In the case of slaves the
death penalty may be effected by a brutal cudgeling.* 8 Sometimes the con-
demned, before or after death, may be hurled over a cliff into a pit called the
barathron. When a sentence of death is laid upon a murderer it is carried out
by the public executioner in the presence of the relatives of the victim, as a
concession to the old custom and spirit of revenge.
The Athenian code is not as enlightened as we might expect, and advances
only moderately upon Hammurabi's. Its basic defect is the limitation of legal
262 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI
rights to freemen constituting hardly a seventh of the population. Even free
women and children are excluded from the proud isonomia of the citizens;
metics, foreigners, and slaves can bring suit only through a patron citizen.
Sycophantic blackmail, frequent torture of slaves, capital punishment for minor
offenses, personal abuse in forensic debate, the diffusion and weakening of
judicial responsibility, the susceptibility of jurors to oratorical displays, their in-
ability to temper present passions with a knowledge of the past or a wise calcula-
tion of the futurethese are black marks against a system of law envied
throughout Greece for its comparative mildness and integrity, and sufficiently
dependable and practical to give to Athenian life and property that orderly pro-
tection which is so necessary for economic activity and moral growth. One test of
Athenian law is the reverence that nearly every citizen feels for it: the law is
for him the very soul of his city, the essence of its beneficence and strength.
The best judgment of the Athenian code is the readiness with which other Greek
states adopt a large part of it. "Everyone would admit," says Isocrates, "that
our laws have been the source of very many and very great benefits to the life
of humanity." 19 Here for the first time in history is a government of laws and
not of men.
Athenian law prevails throughout the Athenian Empire of two million souls
while that Empire endures; but for the rest Greece never achieves a common
system of jurisprudence. International law makes as sorry a picture in fifth-
century Athens as in the world today. Nevertheless external trade requires
some legal code, and commercial treaties (symbola) are described by Demos-
thenes as so numerous in his time that the laws governing commercial disputes
"are everywhere identical." 50 These treatises establish consular representation,
guarantee the execution of contracts, and make the judgments given in one
signatory nation valid in the others. 61 This, however, does not put an end to
piracy, which breaks out whenever the dominant fleet is weakened, or relaxes
its watchfulness. Eternal vigilance is the price of order as well as of liberty;
and lawlessness stalks like a wolf about every settled realm, seeking some point
of weakness which may give it entry. The right of a city to lead foraging
expeditions upon the persons and property of other cities is accepted by some
Greek states so long as no treaty specifically forbids it. 62 Religion succeeds in
making temples inviolable unless used as military bases; it protects heralds and
pilgrims to Panhellenic festivals; it requires a formal declaration of war before
hostilities, and the granting of a truce, when asked, for the return and burial
of the dead in battle. Poisoned weapons are avoided by general custom, and
prisoners are usually exchanged or ransomed at the recognized tariff of two
rninas later one mina ($100) each;" otherwise war is nearly as brutal among
the Greeks as in modern Christendom. Treaties are numerous, and are solemn-
ized with pious oaths; but they are almost always broken. Alliances are fre-
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 263
quent, and sometimes generate lasting leagues, like the Delphic Amphictyony
in the sixth century and the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues in the third. Occa-
sionally two cities exchange the courtesy of isopoliteia, by which each gives to
the other's freemen the rights of citizenship. International arbitration may be
arranged, but the decisions arrived at in such cases are as often as not rejected
or ignored. Towards foreigners the Greek feels no moral obligation, and no
legal one except by treaty; they are barbaroi*not quite "barbarians," but out-
sidersaliens speaking outlandish tongues. Only in the Stoic philosophers of the
cosmopolitan Hellenistic era will Greece rise to the conception of a moral code
embracing all mankind.
4. Administration
As early as 487, perhaps earlier, the method of election in the choice
of archons is replaced by lot; some way must be found to keep the rich
from buying, or the knaves from smiling, their way into office. To render
the selection less than wholly accidental, all those upon whom the lot falls
are subjected, before taking up their duties, to a rigorous dokimasia, or
character examination, conducted by the Council or the courts. The can-
didate must show Athenian parentage on both sides, freedom from physi-
cal defect and scandal, the pious honoring of his ancestors, the perform-
ance of his military assignments, and the full payment of his taxes; his whole
life is on this occasion exposed to challenge by any citizen, and the pros-
pect of such a scrutiny presumably frightens the most worthless from the
sortition. If he passes this test the archon swears an oath that he will prop-
erly perform the obligations of his office, and will dedicate to the gods a
golden statue of life-size if he should accept presents or bribes. 64 The fact
that chance is allowed to play so large a part in the naming of the nine
archons suggests the diminution which the office has suffered since Solon's
day; its functions are now in the nature of administrative routine. The
archon basileus, whose name preserves the empty title of king, has become
merely the chief religious official of the city. Nine times yearly the archon
is required to obtain a vote of confidence from the Assembly; his actions
and judgments may be appealed to the boule or the heliaea; and any citizen
may indict him for malfeasance. At the end of his term all his official acts,
accounts, and documents are reviewed by a board of logistai responsible to
* The word is cousin to the Sanskrit barbara and the Latin balbus, both of which mean
stammering; cf. our babble. The Greeks implied by barbaros rather strangeness of speech
than lack of civilization, and used barbarismos precisely as we, following them, use barbarism
to mean an alien or quasi-alien distortion of a nation's idiom.
264 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XI
the Council; and severe penalties, even death, may avenge serious miscon-
duct. If the archon escapes these democratic dragons he becomes, at the
end of his year of office, a member of the Areopagus- but this, in the fifth
century, is a well-nigh empty honor, since that body has lost nearly all
its powers.
The archons are but one of many committees which, under the direction
and scrutiny of the Assembly, the Council, and the courts, administer the
affairs of the city. Aristotle names twenty-five such groups, and estimates
the number of municipal officials at seven hundred. Nearly all of these
are chosen annually by lot; and since no man may be a member of the same
committee twice, every citizen may expect to be a city dignitary for at
least one year of his life. Athens does not believe in government by ex-
perts.
More importance is attached to military than to civil office. The ten
strategoi, or commanders, though they too are appointed for a year only,
and are at all times subject to examination and recall, are chosen not by
lot but by open election in the Assembly. Here ability, not popularity, is
the road to preferment; and the ekklesia of the fourth century shows its
good sense by choosing Phocion general forty-five times, despite the fact
that he is the most unpopular man in Athens and makes no secret of his
scorn for the crowd. The functions of the strategoi expand with the growth
of international relations, so that in the later fifth century they not only
manage the army and the navy, but conduct negotiations with foreign
states, and control the revenues and expenditures of the city. The com-
mander in chief, or strategos autokrator, is therefore the most powerful man
in the government; and since he may be re-elected year after year, he can
give to the state a continuity of purpose which its constitution might other-
wise render impossible. Through this office Pericles makes Athens for a
generation a democratic monarchy, so that Thucydides can say of the
Athenian polity that though it is a democracy in name it is really govern-
ment by the greatest of the citizens.
The army is identical with the electorate; every citizen must serve, and
is subject, until the age of sixty, to conscription in any war. But Athenian
life is not militarized; after a period of youthful training there is little of
martial drill, no strutting of uniforms, no interference of soldiery with the
civilian population. In active service the army consists of light-armed in-
fantry, chiefly the poorer citizens, carrying slings or spears; the heavy-
armed infantry, or hoplites, those prosperous citizens who can afford armor,
shield, and javelin; and the cavalry of rich men, clad in armor and helmet,
CHAP.Xl) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 265
and equipped with lance and sword. The Greeks excel the Asiatics in mili-
tary discipline, and perhaps owe their achievements to a striking combina-
tion of loyal obedience on the battlefield with vigorous independence in
civil affairs. Nevertheless there is no science of war among them, no definite
principles of tactics on strategy, before Epaminondas and Philip. Cities are
usually walled, and defense is among the Greeks as among ourselves
more effective than offense; otherwise man might have no civilization to
record. Siege armies bring up great beams suspended by chains, and, draw-
ing the beams back, drive them forward against the wall; this is as far as
siege machinery develops before Archimedes. As for the navy, it is kept
up by choosing, each year, four hundred trierarchs, rich men whose privi-
lege it is to recruit a crew, equip a trireme with materials supplied by the
state, pay for its building and launching, and keep it in repair; in this way
Athens supports in peacetime a fleet of some sixty ships. 65
The maintenance of the army and the navy constitutes the chief expen-
diture of the state. Revenues come from traffic tolls, harbor dues, a two
per cent tariff on imports and exports, a twelve-drachma annual poll tax
on metics, a half-drachma tax on freedmen and slaves, a tax on prostitutes,
a sales tax, licenses, fines, confiscations, and the imperial tribute. The tax
on farm produce, which financed Athens under Peisistratus, is abandoned
by the democracy as derogatory to the dignity of agriculture. Most taxes
are farmed out to publicans, who collect them for the state and pocket a
share as their profit. Considerable income is derived from state ownership
of mineral resources. In emergencies the city resorts to a capital levy, the
rate rising with the amount of property owned; by this method, for exam-
ple, the Athenians in 428 raise two hundred talents ($1,200,000) for the
siege of Mytilene. Rich men are also invited to undertake certain leiturgiai,
i.e., public services, such as equipping embassies, fitting out ships for the
fleet, or paying for plays, musical contests, and games. These "liturgies"
are voluntarily undertaken by some of the wealthy, and are forced by pub-
lic opinion upon others. To add to the discomfort of the well to do, any
citizen assigned to a liturgy may compel any other to take it from him,
or exchange fortunes with him, if he can prove the other to be richer than
himself. As the democratic faction grows in power it finds ever more
numerous occasions and reasons for using this device; and in return the
financiers, merchants, manufacturers, and landed proprietors of Attica
study the arts of concealment and obstruction, and meditate revolution.
Excluding such gifts and levies, the total internal revenue of Athens in
the time of Pericles amounts to some four hundred talents ($2,400,000) 3
266 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XI
year; to which is added six hundred talents of contributions from subjects
and allies. This income is spent without any budget, or advance estimate
and allocation of funds. Under Pericles' thrifty management, and despite
his unprecedented expenditures, the treasury shows a growing surplus,
which in 440 stands at 9700 talents ($58,200,000); a pretty sum for any
city in any age, and quite extraordinary in Greece, where few states in
the Peloponnesus none have any surplus at all. 6a In cities that have such
a reserve it is deposited, usually, in the temple of the city's god at Athens,
after 434, in the Parthenon. The state claims the right to use not only this
surplus, but, as well, the gold in the statues which it raises to its god; in
the case of Pheidias' Athene Parthenon this amounts to forty talents ($240,-
ooo ) , and is so affixed as to be removable . w In the temple the city keeps also
its "theoric fund," from which it makes the payments annually due the
citizens for attendance at the sacred plays and games.
Such is Athenian democracy the narrowest and fullest in history: nar-
rowest in the number of those who share its privileges, fullest in the direct-
ness and equality with which all the citizens control legislation, and
administer public affairs. The faults of the system will appear vividly as its
history unfolds; indeed, they are already noised about in Aristophanes. The
irresponsibility of an Assembly that may without check of precedent or
revision vote its momentary passion on one day, and on the next day its
passionate regret, punishing then not itself but those who have misled it;
the limitation of legislative authority to those who can attend the ekklesia;
the encouragement of demagogues and the wasteful ostracism of able men;
the filling of offices by lot and rotation, changing the personnel yearly and
creating a chaos of government; the disorderliness of faction perpetually
disturbing the guidance and administration of the state these are vital de-
fects, for which Athens will pay the full penalty to Sparta, Philip, Alexan-
der, and Rome.
But every government is imperfect, irksome, and mortal; we have no
reason to believe that monarchy or aristocracy would govern Athens bet-
ter, or longer preserve it; and perhaps only this chaotic democracy can
release the energy that will lift Athens to one of the peaks of history. Never
before or since has political life, within the circle of citizenship, been so
intense or so creative. This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least
a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens,
the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of
evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and
CHAP. XI ) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT 267
experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; "the
city," says Simonides, "is the teacher of the man." 58 For these reasons, it
may be, the Athenians can appreciate, and thereby call into existence, Aes-
chylus and Euripides, Socrates and Plato; the audience at the theater has
been formed in the Assembly and the courts, and is ready to receive the
best. This aristocratic democracy is no laissez-faire state, no mere watch-
man of property and order; it finances the Greek drama, and builds the
Parthenon; it makes itself responsible for the welfare and development of
its people, and opens up to them the opportunity ou monon ton zen, alia
toil eu zen "not only to live, but to live well." History can afford to for-
give it all its sins.
CHAPTER XII
Work and Wealth in Athens
I. LAND AND FOOD
AT the base of this democracy and this culture lies the production and
jfjL distribution of wealth. Some men can govern states, seek truth, make
music, carve statues, paint pictures, write books, teach children, or serve
the gods because others toil to grow food, weave clothing, build dwellings,
mine the earth, make useful things, transport goods, exchange them, or
finance their production or their movement. Everywhere this is the foun-
dation.
Supporting all society is the peasant, the poorest and most necessary of
men. In Attica he has at least the franchise; only citizens are permitted to
own land, and nearly all peasants own the soil that they till. Clan control
of the land has disappeared, and private ownership is solidly established.
As in modern France and America, this great class of small proprietors is a
steadying conservative force in a democracy where the propertyless city
dwellers are always driving toward reform. The ancient war between the
country and the city between those who want high returns for agricul-
ture and low prices for manufactured goods, and those who want low
prices for food and high wages or profits in industry is especially con-
scious and lively in Attica. Whereas industry and trade are accounted
plebeian and degrading by the Athenian citizen, the pursuits of husbandry
are honored as the groundwork of national economy, personal character,
and military power; and the freemen of the countryside tend to look down
upon the denizens of the city as either weakling parasites or degraded
slaves. 1
The soil is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cul-
tivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall,
and rapid erosion by winter floods. The peasants of Attica shirk no toil
for themselves or their handful of slaves to remedy this dry humor of the
gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the
channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus
of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty
fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve
268
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 269
their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain
its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and
fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste; 3 the gardens and
groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by
a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by brick-
lined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River. 3 Different soils are mixed
to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed
in to nourish the earth. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and planting are
crowded into the brief days of the fall; the grain harvest comes at the end
of May, and the rainless summer is the season of preparation and rest. With
all this care Attica produces only 675,000 bushels of grain yearly hardly
enough to supply a quarter of its population. Without imported food
Periclean Athens would starve; hence the urge to imperialism, and the
necessity for a powerful fleet.
The countryside tries to atone for its parsimonious grain by generous
harvests of olives and grapes. Hillsides are terraced and watered, and asses
are encouraged to make the vine more fruitful by gnawing off the twigs.*
Olive trees cover many a landscape in Periclean Greece, but it is Peisistratus
and Solon who deserve the credit for introducing them. The olive tree
takes sixteen years to come to fruit, forty years to reach perfection; with-
out the subsidies of Peisistratus it might never have grown on Attic soil;
and the devastation of the olive orchards in the Peloponnesian War will
play a part in the decline of Athens. To the Greek the olive has many
uses: one pressing gives oil for eating, a second, oil for anointing, a third,
oil for illumination; and the remainder is used as fuel. 6 It becomes Attica's
richest crop, so valuable that the state assumes a monopoly of its export, and
pays with it and wine for the grain that it must import.
It forbids altogether the export of figs, for these are a main source of
health and energy in Greece. The fig tree grows well even in arid soil;
its spreading roots gather whatever moisture the earth will yield, and its
stinted foliage offers scant surface for evaporation. Furthermore, the hus-
bandman learns from the East the secret of caprification: he hangs branches
of the wild male goat fig (caprificus) among the boughs of the female cul-
tivated tree, and relies upon gall wasps to carry the fertilizing pollen of the
male into the fruit of the female, which then bears richer and sweeter figs.
These products of the soil cereals, olive oil, figs, grapes, and wine are
the staples of diet in Attica. Cattle rearing is negligible as a source of food;
horses are bred for racing, sheep for wool, goats for milk, asses, mules, cows,
and oxen for transport, but chiefly pigs for food; and bees are kept as pro-
27 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
viders of honey for a sugarless world. Meat is a luxury; the poor have it
only on feast days; the heroic banquets of Homeric days have disappeared.
Fish is both a commonplace and a delicacy; the poor man buys it salted and
dried; the rich man celebrates with fresh shark meat and eels. 6 Cereals
take the form of porridge, flat loaves, or cakes, often mixed with honey.
Bread and cake are seldom baked at home, but are bought from women
peddlers or in market stalls. Eggs are added, and vegetables particularly
beans, peas, cabbage, lentils, lettuce, onions, and garlic. Fruits are few;
oranges and lemons are unknown. Nuts are common, and condiments
abound. Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the in-
terior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a "salting," and a good one is "worth
his salt." Nearly everything is cooked and dressed with olive oil, which
makes an excellent substitute for petroleum. Butter is hard to keep in
Mediterranean lands, and olive oil takes its place. Honey, sweetmeats, and
cheese provide dessert; cheesecakes are so fancied that many classic treatises
are devoted to their esoteric art. 7 Water is the usual drink, but everyone
has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or
stimulants. Snow and ice are kept in the ground to cool wine in the hot
months. 8 Beer is known but scorned in Periclean days. All in all, the Greek
is a moderate eater, and contents himself with two meals daily. "Yet there
are many," says Hippocrates, "who, if accustomed to it, can easily bear
three full meals a day." 8
II. INDUSTRY
Out of the earth come minerals and fuels as well as food. Lighting is provided
by graceful lamps or torches burning refined olive oil, or resin or by candles.
Heat is derived from dry wood or charcoal, burning in portable braziers. The
cutting of trees for fuel and building denudes the woods and hills near the towns;
already in the fifth century timber for houses, furniture, and ships is imported.
There is no coal.
Greek mining is not for fuels but for minerals. The soil of Attica is rich in
marble, iron, zinc, silver, and lead. The mines at Laurium, near the southern
tip of the peninsula, are in the phrase of Aeschylus "a fountain running silver""
for Athens; they are a main support of the government, which retains all sub-
soil rights, and leases the mines to private operators for a talent ($6000) fee
and one twenty-fourth of the product yearly. 11 In 483 a prospector discovers
the first really profitable veins at Laurium, and a silver rush takes place to the
region of the mines. Only citizens are allowed to lease the properties, and only
slaves perform the work. The pious Nicias, whose superstition will help to
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 2JI
ruin Athens, makes $170 a day by leasing a thousand slaves to the mine oper-
ators at a rental of one obol (17 cents) each per day; many an Athenian
fortune is made in this way, or by lending money to the enterprise. The slaves
in the mine number some twenty thousand, and include the superintendents
and engineers. They work in ten-hour shifts, and the operations continue
without interruption, night and day. If the slave rests he feels the foreman's
lash; if he tries to escape he is attached to his work by iron shackles; if he runs
away and is captured his forehead is branded with a hot iron. 12 The galleries
are but three feet high and two feet wide; the slaves, with pick or chisel and
hammer, work on their knees, their stomachs, or their backs. 13 The broken ore
is carried out in baskets or bags handed from man to man, for the galleries are
too narrow to let two men pass each other conveniently. The profits are enor-
mous: in 483 the share received by the government is a hundred talents ($600,-
ooo ) a windfall that builds a fleet for Athens and saves Greece at Salamis. Even
for others than the slaves there is evil in this as well as good; the Athenian
treasury becomes dependent upon the mines, and when, in the Peloponnesian
War, the Spartans capture Laurium the whole economy of Athens is upset.
The exhaustion of the veins in the fourth century co-operates with many other
factors in Athenian decay. For Attica has no other precious metal in her soil.
Metallurgy advances with mining. The ore at Laurium is crushed in huge
mortars with a heavy iron pestle worked by slave power; then it goes to mills
where it is ground between revolving stones of hard trachyte; then it is sized
by screening; the material that passes through the screen is sent to an ore
washer, where jets of water are discharged from cisterns upon inclined rec-
tangular tables of stone covered with a smooth thin coat of hard cement; the
current is turned at sharp angles, where pockets snare the metal particles. The
collected metal is thrown into small smelting furnaces equipped with blowers
to raise the heat; at the bottom of each furnace are openings through which
the molten metal is drawn. Lead is separated from the silver by heating the
molten metal on cupels of porous material and exposing it to the air; by this
simple process the lead is converted into litharge, and the silver is freed. The
processes of smelting and refining are competently performed, for the silver
coins of Athens are ninety-eight per cent pure. Laurium pays the price of the
wealth it produces, as mining always pays the price for metal industry; plants
and men wither and die from the furnace fumes, and the vicinity of the works
becomes a scene of dusty desolation. 1 *
Other industries are not so toilsome. Attica has many of them now, small in
scale but remarkably specialized. It quarries marble and other stones, it makes
a thousand shapes of pottery, it dresses hides in great tanneries Eke those owned
by Cleon, rival of Pericles, and Anytus, accuser of Socrates; it has wagon-
makers, shipbuilders, saddlers, harness makers, shoe manufacturers; there are
saddlers who make only bridles, and shoemakers who make only men's or
272 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
women's shoes. 15 In the building trades are carpenters, molders, stonecutters,
metalworkers, painters, veneerers. There are blacksmiths, swordmakers, shield-
makers, lampmakers, lyre tuners, millers, bakers, sausage men, fishmongers
everything necessary to an economic life busy and varied, but not mechanized
or monotonous. Common textiles are still for the most part produced in the
home; there the women weave and mend the ordinary clothing and bedding
of the family, some carding the wool, some at the spinning wheel, some at the
loom, some bent over an embroidery frame. Special fabrics come from work-
shops, or from abroad fine linens from Egypt, Amorgos, and Tarentum, dyed
woolens from Syracuse, blankets from Corinth, carpets from the Near East and
Carthage, colorful coverlets from Cyprus; and the women of Cos, late in the
fourth century, learn the art of unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm and
weaving the filaments into silk. 18 In some homes the women become so highly
skilled in textile arts that they produce more than their families can use; they
sell the surplus at first to consumers, then to middlemen; they employ helpers,
freedmen or slaves; and in this way a domestic industry develops as a step to a
factory system.
Such a system begins to take form in the age of Pericles. Pericles himself,
like Alcibiades, owns a factory." No machinery is available, but slaves can be
had in abundance; it is because muscle power is cheap that there is no incentive
to develop machinery. The ergasteria of Athens are rather workshops than
factories; the largest of them, Cephalus' shield factory, has 120 workmen,
Timarchus' shoe factory has ten, Demosthenes' cabinet factory twenty, his
armor factory thirty." At first these shops produce only to order; later they
manufacture for the market, and finally for export; and the spread and abun-
dance of coinage, replacing barter, facilitates their operations. There are no
corporations; each factory is an independent unit, owned by one or two
men; and the owner often works beside his slaves. There are no patents; crafts
are handed down from father to son, or are learned by apprentices; the
Athenians are exempted by law from caring for the old age of parents who
have failed to teach them a trade. 19 Hours are long but work is leisurely;
master and man labor from dawn to twilight, with a siesta at summer noons.
There are no vacations, but there are some sixty workless holydays every year.
III. TRADE AND FINANCE
When an individual, a family, or a city creates a surplus, and wishes to
exchange it, trade begins. The first difficulty here is that transport is costly,
for roads are poor, and the sea is a snare. The finest road is the Sacred Way
from Athens to Eleusis; but this is mere dirt, and is often too narrow to let
vehicles pass. The bridges are precarious causeways formed by earthen
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 273
dikes, which as likely as not have been washed away by floods. The usual
draft animal is the ox, who is too philosophical to enrich the trader that de-
pends upon him for transport; wagons are fragile, and always break down,
or get bogged in the mud; it is better to pack the goods on the back of a
mule, for he goes a trifle faster, and does not take up so much of the road.
There is no postal service in Greece, even for the governments; they are con-
tent with runners, and private correspondence must wait the chance of using
these. Important news can be flashed by fire beacons from hill to hill, or
sent by carrier pigeons. 20 There are inns here and there on the road, but
they are favored by robbers and vermin; even the god Dionysus, in Aris-
tophanes, inquires of Heracles for "the eating-houses and hostels where
there are the fewest bugs." a
Sea transport is cheaper, especially if voyages are limited, as most of them
are, to the calm summer months. Passenger tariffs are low: for two drach-
mas ($2) a family can secure passage from the Piraeus to Egypt or the
Black Sea, 22 but ships do not cater to passengers, being made to carry goods
or wage war or do either at need. The main motive power is wind upon
a sail, but slaves ply the oars when the wind is contrary or dead. The small-
est seagoing merchant vessels are triaconters with thirty oars, all on one
level; the penteconter has fifty. Back about 700 the Corinthians launched
the first trireme, with a crew of two hundred men plying three banks or
tiers of oars; by the fifth century such ships, beautiful with their long and
lofty prows, have grown to 256 tons, carry seven thousand bushels of
grain, and become the talk of the Mediterranean by making eight miles an
hour. 23
The second problem of trade is to find a reliable medium of exchange.
Every city has its own system of weights and measures, and its own indi-
vidual coinage; at every one of a hundred frontiers one must transvalue
all values skeptically, for every Greek government except the Athenian
cheats by debasing its coins. 24 "In most cities," says an anonymous Greek,
"merchants are compelled to ship goods for the return journey, for they
cannot get money that is of any use to them elsewhere." 25 Some cities mint
coins of electrum a compound of silver and gold and rival one another in
getting as little gold as possible into the mixture. The Athenian govern-
ment, from Solon onward, helps Athenian trade powerfully by establishing
a reliable coinage, stamped with the owl of Athena; "taking owls to Athens"
is the Greek equivalent of "carrying coals to Newcastle." 28 Because Athens,
through all her vicissitudes, refuses to depreciate her silver drachmas, these
"owls" are accepted gladly throughout the Mediterranean world, and tend
274 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XII
to displace local currencies in the Aegean. Gold at this stage is still an
article of merchandise, sold by weight, rather than a vehicle of trade;
Athens mints it only in rare emergencies, usually in a ration to silver of 14
to i. 27 The smallest Athenian coins are of copper; eight of these make an
obol a coin of iron or bronze, named from its resemblance to nails or spits
(obeliskoi) . Six obols make a drachma, i.e., a handful; two drachmas make
a gold stater; one hundred drachmas make a mina; sixty minas make a tal-
ent. A drachma in the first half of the fifth century buys a bushel of grain,
as a dollar does in twentieth-century America.* 28 There is no paper money
in Athens, no government bonds, no joint-stock corporations, no stock
exchange.
But there are banks. They have a hard struggle to get a footing, for those
who have no need for loans denounce interest as a crime, and the philoso-
phers agree with them. The average fifth-century Athenian is a hoarder;
if he has savings he prefers to hide them rather than entrust them to the
banks. Some men lend money on mortgages, at 1 6 to 1 8 per cent; some
lend it, without interest, to their friends; some deposit their money in tem-
ple treasuries. The temples serve as banks, and lend to individuals and
states at a moderate interest; the temple of Apollo at Delphi is in some
measure an international bank for all Greece. There are no private loans
to governments, but occasionally one state lends to another. Meanwhile
the money-changer at his table (trapeza) begins in the fifth century to re-
ceive money on deposit, and to lend it to merchants at interest rates that
vary from 12 to 30 per cent according to the risk; in this way he becomes
a banker, though to the end of ancient Greece he keeps his early name of
trapezite, the man at the table. He takes his methods from the Near East,
improves them, and passes them on to Rome, which hands them down to
modern Europe. Soon after the Persian War Themistocles deposits sev-
enty talents ($420,000) with the Corinthian banker Philostephanus, very
much as political adventurers feather foreign nests for themselves today;
this is the earliest known allusion to secular nontemple banking. Towards
the end of the century Antisthenes and Archestratus establish what will
become, under Pasion, the most famous of all private Greek banks. Through
such trapezitai money circulates more freely and rapidly, and so does more
work, than before; and the facilities that they offer stimulate creatively the
expansion of Athenian trade.
* In this volume an obol is reckoned as equivalent in buying power to 17 cents in United
States currency in 1938, a drachma as $i, a talent as $6000. These equivalents are only
approximate, for prices rose throughout Greek history; cf. section V of this chapter.
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 275
Trade, not industry or finance, is the soul of Athenian economy. Though
many producers still sell directly to the consumer, a growing number of
them require the intermediary of the market, whose function it is to buy
and store goods until the consumer is ready to purchase them. In this
way a class of retailers arises, who peddle their wares through the streets,
or in the wake of armies, or at festivals or fairs, or offer them for sale in
shops or stalls in the agora or elsewhere in the town. To the shops come
freemen or metics or slaves to haggle with tradesmen and buy for the
home. One of the severest disabilities suffered by the "free" women of
Athens is that custom does not allow them to shop. 89
Foreign commerce advances even faster than domestic trade, for the
Greek states have learned the advantages of an international division of
labor, and each specializes in some product; the shieldmaker, for example,
no longer goes from city to city at the call of those who need him, but
makes his shields in his shop and sends them out to the markets of the classic
world. In one century Athens moves from household economy wherein
each household makes nearly all that it needs to urban economy wherein
each town makes nearly all that it needs to international economy where
each state is dependent upon imports, and must make exports to pay for
them. The Athenian fleet for two generations keeps the Aegean clear of
pirates, and from 480 to 430 commerce thrives as it never will again until
Pompey suppresses piracy in 67 B.C. The docks, warehouses, markets,
and banks of the Piraeus oiler every facility for trade; soon the busy
port becomes the chief center of distribution and reshipment for the
commerce between the East and the West. "The articles which it is
difficult to get, one here, one there, from the rest of the world," says
Isocrates, "all these it is easy to buy in Athens." 30 "The magnitude of our
city," says Thucydides, "draws the produce of the world into our harbor,
so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury
as those of his own." 31 From the Piraeus merchants carry the wine, oil,
wool, minerals, marble, pottery, arms, luxuries, books, and works of art
produced by the fields and shops of Attica; to the Piraeus they bring grain
from the Byzantium, Syria, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily, fruit and cheese from
Sicily and Phoenicia, meat from Phoenicia and Italy, fish from the Black
Sea, nuts from Paphlagonia, copper from Cyprus, tin from England, iron
from the Pontic coast, gold from Thasos and Thrace, timber from Thrace
and Cyprus, embroideries from the Near East, wools, fiax, and dyes from
Phoenicia, spices from Cyrene, swords from Chalcis, glass from Egypt,
tiles from Corinth, beds from Chios and Miletus, boots and bronzes from
2j6 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
Etruria, ivory from Ethiopia, perfumes and ointments from Arabia, slaves
from Lydia, Syria, and Scythia. The colonies serve not only as markets,
but as shipping agents to send Athenian goods into the interior; and though
the cities of Ionia decay in the fifth century because the trade that once
passed there is diverted to the Propontis and Caria during and after the
Persian War,, Italy and Sicily replace them as outlets for the surplus prod-
ucts and population of mainland Greece. We may estimate the amount
of Aegean commerce from the return of 1200 talents from a 5 per cent
tax laid in 413 upon the imports and exports of the cities in the Athenian
Empire, indicating a trade of $144,000,000 a year.
The danger lurking in this prosperity is the growing dependence of
Athens upon imported grain; hence her insistence upon controlling the
Hellespont and the Black Sea, her persistent colonizing of the coasts and
isles on the way to the straits, and her disastrous expeditions to Egypt in
459 and to Sicily in 415. It is this dependence that persuades Athens to
transform the Confederacy of Delos into an empire; and when, in 405,
the Spartans destroy the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the starvation
and surrender of Athens are inevitable results. Nevertheless it is this trade
that makes Athens rich, and provides, with the imperial tribute, the sinews
of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods
to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective,
and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down
ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural
aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile
civilization. Here in Athens East and West meet, and jar each other from
their ruts. Old myths lose their grasp on the souls of men, leisure rises,
inquiry is supported, science and philosophy grow. Athens becomes the
most intensely alive city of her time.
IV. FREEMEN AND SLAVES
Who does all this work? In the countryside it is done by citizens, their
families, and free hired men; in Athens it is done partly by citizens, partly
by freedmen, more by metics, mostly by slaves. The shopkeepers, artisans,
merchants, and bankers come almost entirely from the voteless classes. The
burgher looks down upon manual labor, and does as little of it as he may.
To work for a livelihood is considered ignoble; even the professional prac-
tice or teaching of music, sculpture, or painting is accounted by many
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 277
Greeks "a mean occupation."* Hear blunt Xenophon, who speaks, how-
ever, as a proud member of the knightly class:
The base mechanic arts, so called ... are held in ill repute by civ-
ilized communities, and not unreasonably; seeing they are the ruin
of the bodies of all concerned in them, workers and overseers alike,
who are forced to remain in sitting postures or to hug the gloom,
or else to crouch whole days confronting a furnace. Hand in hand
with physical enervation follows apace an enfeebling of soul, while
the demand which these base mechanic arts make on the time of those
employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of
friendship and the state. 83
Trade is similarly scorned; to the aristocratic or philosophical Greek it is
merely money-making at the expense of others; it aims not to create goods
but to buy them cheap and sell them dear; no respectable citizen will engage
in it, though he may quietly invest in it and profit from it so long as he
lets others do the work. A freeman, says the Greek, must be free from
economic tasks; he must get slaves or others to attend to his material con-
cerns, even, if he can, to take care of his property and his fortune; only
by such liberation can he find time for government, war, literature, and
philosophy. Without a leisure class there can be, in the Greek view, no
standards of taste, no encouragement of the arts, no civilization. No man
who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
Most of the functions associated in history with the middle class are in
Athens performed by metics freemen of foreign birth who, though in-
eligible to citizenship, have fixed their domicile in Athens. For the most
part they are professional men, merchants, contractors, manufacturers,
managers, tradesmen, craftsmen, artists, who, in the course of thek wan-
dering, have found in Athens the economic liberty, opportunity, and stim-
ulus which to them is far more vital than the vote. The most important
industrial undertakings, outside of mining, are owned by metics; the ceram-
ic industry is theirs completely; and wherever middlemen can squeeze
themselves in between producer and consumer they are to be found. The
law harasses them and protects them. It taxes them like citizens, lays
"liturgies" upon them, exacts military service from them, and adds a poll
tax for good measure; it forbids them to own land or to marry into the
family of a citizen; it excludes them from its religious organization, and
* Plutarch, Pericles. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 272, and Ferguson, Greek
Imperialism, 61, feel that the Athenian disdain for manual labor has been exaggerated; but
c Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work^ 160,
278 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XII
from direct appeal to its courts. But it welcomes them into its economic
life, appreciates their industry and skill, enforces their contracts, gives them
religious freedom, and guards their wealth against violent revolution. Some
of them flaunt their riches vulgarly, but some of them, too, work quietly
in science, literature, and the arts, practice law or medicine, and create
schools of rhetoric and philosophy. In the fourth century they will pro-
vide the authors and subject of the comic drama, and in the third they
will set the cosmopolitan tone of Hellenistic society. They itch for citi-
zenship, but they love Athens proudly, and contribute painfully to finance
her defense against her enemies. Through them, chiefly, the fleet is main-
tained, the empire is supported, and the commercial supremacy of Athens
is preserved.
Mingled with the metics in political disabilities and economic oppor-
tunities are the freedmen those who once were slaves. For though it is
inconvenient to liberate a slave, since usually he must be replaced by an-
other, yet the promise of freedom is an economical stimulus to a young
slave; and many Greeks, as death approaches, reward their most loyal
slaves with manumission. The slave may be freed through ransoming by
relatives or friends, as in the case of Plato; or the state, indemnifying his
owner, may free him for service in war; or he himself may save his obols
until he can buy his liberty. Like the metic, the freedman engages 1 in in-
dustry, trade, or finance; at the lowest he may do for pay the work of a
slave, at the top he may become a magnate of industry. Mylias manages
Demosthenes' armor factory; Pasion and Phormio become the richest
bankers in Athens. The freedman is especially valued as an executive, for
no one is more severe with slaves than the man who has come up from
slavery, 83 and has known only oppression all the days of his life.
Beneath these three classes citizens, metics, and freedmen are the 115,-
ooo slaves of Attica.* They are recruited from unransomed prisoners of
war, victims of slave raids, infants rescued from exposure, wastrels, and
criminals. Few of them in Greece are Greeks. The Hellene looks upon
foreigners as natural slaves, since they so readily give absolute obediencr.
to a king, and he does not account the servitude of such men to Greeks as
*The figure is Gomme's, I.e. Possibly the number was much greater: Suidas, on the
authority of a speech uncertainly attributed to Hypereides in 338, gives the number of adult
male slaves alone as I5o,ooo; 3 * and according to the unreliable Athenaeus the census of Attica
by Demetrius Phalereus about 317 gave 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and freedmen, and
400,000 slaves. Timaeus about 300 reckoned the slaves of Corinth at 460,000, and Aristotle,
about 340, those of Aegina at 47o,ooo. 36 Perhaps these high figures are due to including slaves
transiently offered for sale in the slave marts of Corinth, Aegina, and Athens.
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS ^79
unreasonable. But he balks at the enslavement of a Greek, and seldom
stoops to it. Greek traders buy slaves as they would merchandise, and
offer them for sale at Chios, Delos, Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and wherever
else they can find purchasers. The slave dealers at Athens are among the
richest of the metics. In Delos it is not unusual for a thousand slaves to
be sold in a day; Cimon, after the battle of the Eurymedon, puts 20,000
prisoners on the slave market. 30 At Athens there is a mart where slaves
stand ready for naked inspection and bargaining purchase at any time.
They cost from half a mina to ten minas ($50 to $1000). They may be
bought for direct use, or for investment; men and women in Athens find it
profitable to buy slaves and rent them to homes, factories, or mines; the
return is as high as 33 per cent. 37 Even the poorest citizen has a slave or
two; Aeschines, to prove his poverty, complains that his family has only
seven; rich homes may have fifty. 88 The Athenian government employs
a number of slaves as clerks, attendants, minor officials, or policemen; many
of these receive their clothing and a daily "allowance" of half a drachma,
and are permitted to live where they please.
In the countryside the slaves are few, and are chiefly women servants
in the home; in northern Greece and most of the Peloponnesus serfdom
makes slavery superfluous. In Corinth, Megara, and Athens slaves do most
of the manual labor, and women slaves most of the domestic toil; but
slaves do also a great part of the clerical, and some of the executive work,
in industry, commerce, and finance. Most skilled labor is performed by
freemen, freedmen or metics; and there are no learned slaves as there will
be in the Hellenistic period and in Rome. The slave is seldom allowed to
bring up children of his own, for it is cheaper to buy a slave than to rear
one. If the slave misbehaves he is whipped; if he testifies he is tortured;
when he is struck by a freeman he must not defend himself. But if he
is subjected to great cruelty he may flee to a temple, and then his master
must sell him. In no case may his master kill him. So long as he labors
he has more security than many who in other civilizations are not called
slaves; when he is ill, or old, or there is no work for him to do, his master
does not throw him upon public relief, but continues to take care of him.
If he is loyal he is treated like a faithful servant, almost like a member of
the family. He is often allowed to go into business, provided he will pay
his owner a part of his earnings. He is free from taxation and from mili-
tary service. Nothing in his costume distinguishes him, in fifth-century
Athens, from the freeman; indeed the "Old Oligarch" who about 425
writes a pamphlet on The Polity of the Athenians complains that the slave
280 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
does not make way for citizens on the street, that he talks freely, and acts
in every detail as if he were the equal of the citizen. 30 Athens is known for
mildness to her slaves; it is a common judgment that slaves are better off in
democratic Athens than poor freemen in oligarchic states/ Slave revolts,
though feared, are rare in Attica. 41
Nevertheless the Athenian conscience is disturbed by the existence of
slavery, and the philosophers who defend it reveal almost as clearly as those
who denounce it that the moral development of the nation has outrun its
institutions. Plato condemns the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but
for the rest accepts slavery on the ground that some people have under-
privileged minds. 12 Aristotle looks upon the slave as an animate tool, and
thinks that slavery will continue in some form until all menial work can
be done by self-operating machines. 43 The average Greek, though kind to
his slaves, has no notion of how a cultured society can get along without
slavery; to abolish slavery, he feels, it would be necessary to abolish Athens.
Others are more radical. The Cynic philosophers condemn slavery out-
right; their successors, the Stoics, will condemn it more politely; Euripides
again and again stirs his audiences by sympathetic pictures of war-captured
slaves; and the sophist Alcidamas goes about Greece preaching, unmolested,
the doctrine of Rousseau almost in the words of Rousseau: "God has sent
all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave. " M But
slavery goes on.
V. THE WAR OF THE CLASSES
The exploitation of man by man is less severe in Athens and Thebes than
in Sparta or Rome, but it is adequate to the purpose. There are no castes
among the freemen in Athens, and a man may by resolute ability rise to any-
thing but citizenship; hence, in part, the fever and turbulence of Athenian
life. There is no tense class distinction between employer and employee
except in the mines; usually the master works beside his men, and personal
acquaintance dulls the edge of exploitation. The wage of nearly all arti-
sans, of whatever class, is a drachma for each actual day of work; 45 but un-
skilled workers may get as low as three obols (50 cents) a day.* 8 Piecework
tends to replace timework as the factory system develops; and wages begin
to vary more widely. A contractor may hire slaves from their owner for
a rental of one to four obols a day/ 7 We may estimate the buying power
of these wages by comparing Greek prices with our own. In 414 a house
and estate in Attica cost twelve hundred drachmas; a medimnus, or i %
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 28l
bushels, of barley costs a drachma in the sixth century, two at the close of
the fifth, three in the fourth, five in the time of Alexander; a sheep costs
a drachma in Solon's day, ten to twenty at the end of the fifth century; 48 in
Athens as elsewhere currency tends to increase faster than goods, and prices
rise. At the close of the fourth century prices are five times as high as at the
opening of the sixth; they double from 480 to 404, and again from 404
to 3 30."
A single man lives comfortably on 120 drachmas ($120) a month; 60 we
may judge from this the condition of the worker who earns thirty drachmas
per month, and has a family. It is true that the state comes to his relief in
times of great stress, and then distributes corn at a nominal price. But he
observes that the goddess of liberty is no friend to the goddess of equality,
and that under the free laws of Athens the strong grow stronger, the rich
richer, while the poor remain poor.* 51 Individualism stimulates the able,
and degrades the simple; it creates wealth magnificently, and concentrates
it dangerously. In Athens, as in other states, cleverness gets all that it can,
and mediocrity gets the rest. The landowner profits from the rising value
of his land; the merchant does his best, despite a hundred laws, to secure
corners and monopolies; the speculator reaps, through the high rate of
interest on loans, the lion's share of the proceeds of industry and trade.
Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human
possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic
ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth, becomes conscious of his
poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states.
Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in
all the Greek states, the war of class with class.
In Attica it begins with the conflict between the new rich and the landed
aristocracy. The ancient families still love the soil, and live for the greater
part on their estates. Division of the patrimony through many generations
has made the average holding small 53 (the rich Alcibiades has only seventy
acres) , and the squire in most cases labors personally on the soil, or in the
management of his property. But though the aristocrat is not rich, he is
proud; he adds his father's name to his own as a title of nobility, and he
remains aloof as long as he can from the mercantile bourgeoisie which is
capturing the wealth of Athens' growing trade. His wife, however, cries
for a city home and the varied life and opportunities of the metropolis; his
* The great fortunes of Greek antiquity were of course modest in amount by modern
standards. Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, is said to have had two hundred talents
($1,200,000) ; Nicias, one hundred. 53
282 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XI?
daughters wish to live in Athens and snare rich husbands; his sons hope to
find hetairai there and to give gay parties in the style of the nowueaux riches.
As the aristocrat cannot compete in luxury with the merchants and manu-
facturers, he accepts them, or their children, as sons-in-law or daughters-
in-law; they are anxious to climb, and willing to pay. The upshot is a union
of the rich in land with the rich in money, and the formation of an upper
class of oligarchs, envied and hated by the poor, angry at the excesses and
extravagance of democracy, and fearful of revolution.
It is the insolence of the new wealth that brings on the second phase of
the class warthe struggle of the poorer citizens against the rich. Many
of the bourgeoisie flaunt their wealth like Alcibiades, but few others can
so charm the "mechanic multitude" by dramatic audacity and elegance of
person or speech. Young men conscious of ability and frustrated with
poverty translate their personal need for opportunity and place into a gen-
eral gospel of revolt; and intellectuals eager for new ideas and the applause
of the oppressed formulate for them the aims of their rebellion. 64 They call
not for the socialization of industry and trade but for the abolition of debts
and the redistribution of the land among the citizens; for the radical move-
ment in fifth-century Athens is confined to the poorer voters, and never
dreams, at this stage, of liberating the slaves, or letting the metics in on
the reallotrnent of the soil. The leaders talk of a golden past in which all
men were equal in possessions, but they do not wish to be taken too literally
when they speak of restoring that paradise. It is an aristocratic communism
that they have in mind not a nationalization of the land by the state, but
an equal sharing of it by the citizens. They point out how unreal is the
equality of the franchise in the face of mounting economic inequality; but
they are resolved to use the political power of the poorer citizenry to per-
suade the Assembly to sluice into the pockets of the needy by fines litur-
gies, confiscations, and public works 65 some of the concentrated wealth of
the rich. 58 And to give a lead to future rebels they adopt red as the sym-
bolic color of their revolt. 67
In the face of this threat the rich band themselves in secret organizations
pledged to take common action against what Plato, despite his communism,
will call the "monstrous beast" of the aroused and hungry mob. 68 The free
workers also organize have at least since Solon organized themselves into
clubs (eranoi, thiasoi) of stonemasons, marble cutters, woodworkers, ivory-
workers, potters, fishermen, actors, etc.; Socrates is a member of a sculptor's
thiasos.** But these groups are not so much trade-unions as mutual benefit
* The sculptors and architects of Greece formed a guild of builders, with their own re'
ligious mysteries, and became the forerunners of the Freemasons of later Europe. 60
CHAP.XII) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 283
societies: they come together in meeting places called synods or synagogues,
have banquets and games, and worship a patron deity; they make payments
to sick members, and contract collectively for specific enterprises; but they
do not enter visibly into the Athenian class war. The battle is fought on
the fields of literature and politics. Pamphleteers like the "Old Oligarch"
issue denunciations or defenses of democracy. The comic poets, since their
plays require rich men to finance their production, are on the side of the
drachmas, and pour ridicule upon the radical leaders and their Utopias. In
the Ecclesiazuscte (392) Aristophanes introduces us to the lady communist
Praxagora, who makes an oration as follows:
I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in
common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall
we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not
ground enough to be buried in. ... I intend that there shall only be
one and the same condition of life for all. ... I shall begin by making
land, money, everything that is private property, common to all
Women shall belong to all men in common. 61
"But who," asks Blepyrus, "will do the work?" "The slaves," is tier reply,
in another comedy, the Plutus (408), Aristophanes allows Poverty, who
is threatened with extinction, to defend herself as the necessary goad to
human toil and enterprise:
I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and your safety depends
upon me alone. . . . Who would wish to hammer iron, build ships,
sew, turn, cut up leather, bake bricks, bleach linen, tan hides, or
break up the soil with the plow and garner the gifts of Demeter if
he could live in idleness and free from all this work? ... If your sys-
tem [communism] is applied . . . you will not be able to sleep in a
bed, for no more will ever be manufactured; nor on carpets, for
who would weave them if he had gold? 83
The reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles are the first achievement of the
democratic revolt. Pericles is a man of judgment and moderation; he does
not wish to destroy the rich but to preserve them and their enterprise by
easing the condition of the poor; but after his death (429) the democracy
becomes so radical that the oligarchic party conspires again with Sparta,
and makes in 411, and once more in 404, a rich man's revolution. Never-
theless, because wealth is great in Athens and trickles down to many, and
because fear of a slave uprising gives the citizenry pause, the class war in
Athens is milder, and sooner reaches a working compromise, than in Greek
states where the middle class is not strong enough to mediate between rich
284 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
and poor. At Samos, in 412, the radicals seize the government, execute
two hundred aristocrats, banish four hundred more, divide up the lands
and houses among themselves, 63 and develop another society like that which
they have overthrown. At Leontini, in 422, the commoners expel the
oligarchs, but soon afterward take to flight. At Corcyra, in 427, the oli-
garchs assassinate sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats seize
the government, imprison four hundred aristocrats, try fifty of them before
a kind of Committee of Public Safety, and execute all fifty at once; seeing
which a considerable number of the surviving prisoners slay one another,
others kill themselves, and the rest are walled up in the temple in which
they have sought sanctuary, and are starved to death. Thucydides describes
the class war in Greece in a timeless passage:
During seven days the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering
those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies;
and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down
the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by
their debtors because of the monies owed to them. Death thus raged
in every shape, and as usually happens at such times, there was no
length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their
fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it.
. . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places
where it arrived last, from having heard what had been done before,
carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions
. . . and the atrocity of their reprisals. . . . Corcyra gave the first
example of these crimes ... of the revenge exacted by the governed
who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed, aught
but violence from their rulers when their hour came; of the iniqui-
tous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed pov-
erty, and ardently coveted their neighbors' goods; and the savage and
pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the straggle not
in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their passions. . . .
In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities,
human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master,
gladly sho\ved itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for jus-
tice, and the enemy of all superiority. , . . Reckless audacity came
now to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation,
specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unman-
liness; ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability
to act on any. . . .
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from
greed and ambition. . . . The leaders in the cities, each provided
CHAP. XIl) WORK AND WEALTH IN ATHENS 285
with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of the
political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aris-
tocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which
they pretended to cherish; and, recoiling from no means in their
struggle for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses. . . . Reli-
gion was in honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases
to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. . . . The ancient sim-
plicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down, and
disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no
man trusted his fellow. . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of the
citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the
quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape. . . . The
whole Hellenic world was convulsed. 6 *
Athens survives this turbulence because every Athenian is at heart an
individualist, and loves private property; and because the Athenian govern-
ment finds a practicable medium between socialism and individualism in a
moderate regulation of business and wealth. The state is not afraid to regu-
late: it sets a limit upon the size of dowries, the cost of funerals, and the
dress of women; 65 it taxes and supervises trade, enforces fair weights and
measures and honest quality so far as the ingenuity of human rascality per-
mits; 66 it limits the export of food, and enacts sharp laws to govern and
chasten the practices of merchants and tradesmen. It watches the grain
trade carefully, and legislates severely against corners even to the death
penalty by forbidding the purchase of more than seventy-five bushels of
wheat at a time; it interdicts loans on outgoing cargoes unless the return
shipment is to bring grain to the Piraeus; it requires that all corn loaded by
vessels owned in Athens shall be brought to the Piraeus; and it prohibits
the export of more than a third of any corn cargo that reaches that port. 67
By keeping a reserve of grain in state-owned storehouses, and pouring this
upon the market when prices rise too rapidly, Athens sees to it that the
price of bread shall never be exorbitant, that millionaires shall not be cre-
ated out of the hunger of the people, and that no Athenian shall starve. 68 The
state regulates wealth through taxation and liturgies, and persuades or com-
pels rich men to supply funds for the fleet, the drama, and the theoric pay-
ments that enable the poor to attend the plays and the games. For the rest
Athens protects freedom of trade, private property, and the opportunity
to profit, deeming them the necessary implements of human liberty, and
the most powerful stimuli to industry, commerce, and prosperity.
Under this system of economic individualism tempered with socialistic
286 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XII
regulation, wealth accumulates in Athens, and spreads sufficiently to pre-
vent a radical revolution; to the end of ancient Athens private property-
remains secure. The number of citizens with a comfortable income doubles
between 480 and 43 1; 09 the public revenue grows, public expenditures rise,
and yet the treasury is full beyond any precedent in Greek history. The
economic basis of Athenian freedom, enterprise, art, and thought is firmly
laid, and will bear without strain every extravagance of the Golden Age
except the war by which all Greece will be ruined.
CHAPTER XIII
The Morals and Manners
of the Athenians
I. CHILDHOOD
EVERY Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces
of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness.
Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for
prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanti-
cide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing frag-
mentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either
as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom
allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every
daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from
the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those
who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware
vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon
be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a
rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship
and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy people. The philoso-
phers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the
exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents; 1
and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide. 3 The Hippo-
cratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion,
but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes
her.* 3
On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into
the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and
a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but
since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repe-
tition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xeno-
phons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity
the father's name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou
* We have no evidence of contraceptive devices among the Greeks.*
287
288 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
Cimon son of Miltiades or Diodorus Siculus Diodorus of Sicily; or the prob-
lem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like CallifnedonThe, Crab. 5
Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully be exposed,
and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in
every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he,
Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is
ruled by their child. 8 Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a ten-
der parental love:
I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in
our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has be-
reaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my
child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father's
grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother's breast. 7
The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will
survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child's
grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades. 8 Babies
have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls,
boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children
on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin
tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman's buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred
merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden
Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into
a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the
center. As children approach the "age of reason" seven or eightthey take
up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali) , the highest
throw, six, being counted the best. 8 The games of the young are as old as the
sins of their fathers.
II. EDUCATION
Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose
supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universi-
ties, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools, 10 but
Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the
best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which
freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not
to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school;
we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen
or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do. n The schools have no desks
but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 289
the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fash-
ions, are adorned \vith statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly
furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well
as intellect, using a sandal.* 12
The curriculum has three divisions writing, music, and gymnastics; eager
modernists will add, in Aristotle's day, drawing and painting. 14 Writing includes
reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to
play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and
musical form. 18 No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less
a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother
tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and
no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use
the bow and the sling.
The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to
"domestic science." Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics.
They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to
spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A
few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respect-
able ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them
into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by pro-
fessional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philoso-
phy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the
gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre-
Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge
high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be
able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.
When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special atten-
tion to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war.
Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap,
wrestle, hunt, drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon
the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner y geron child,
youth, man, elder) , and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens' soldier youth,
the epheboi.t Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are
trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat
together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night
and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city,
meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance;
* In one of the pictures at Pompeii, probably copied from the Greek, we see a pupil sup-
ported upon the shoulders of another, and held at his heels by a third, while the teacher flogs
him."
fThis institution, however, cannot yet be traced back beyond 336 B.C.
290 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
they have archons, strategoi, and judges. 18 For the first year they are schooled
with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhet-
oric. 17 At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted
for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and
disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred,
with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the
oath of the young men of Athens:
I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man
next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the
state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many.
I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger
and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time
to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and what-
ever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt
to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel hirn both
alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith. 18
The epheboi are assigned a special place at die theater, and play a prominent
role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men
that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they
exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch
race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque
event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mile road; the race is run at night, and the
way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of
the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty-
one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental
authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.
Such is the education eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the
street that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of
physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with
freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any
in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers
debate the goals and methods of education whether the teacher should aim
chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical
ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the
highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the
educated are superior to the untutored he answers, "as broken horses are to
the unbroken"; and Aristotle to the same question replies, "as the living are
to the dead." At least, adds Aristippus, "If the pupil derives no other good,
he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another." 1 *
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 29 1
III. EXTERNALS
The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium height,
vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias' horsemen. The
ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified
loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but
the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost
Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no
more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but they do
not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their figures a little
short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their
shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing,
and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere.* 20
The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much
admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde,
or to conceal the grayness of age. 22 Both sexes use oils to help the growth
of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some
men, add perfumes to the oil. 23 Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the
hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth
century the women vary their coiffure by knotting the hair low on the
nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around the neck
and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons,
and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead. 3 * After Marathon the men
begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches
and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a
mustache without a beard. The beard is neatly trimmed, usually to a point.
The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he
manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation;
when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style. 2 " The
barber has his shop, which is a center for the "wineless symposia" (as
Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often
works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when
one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have
his hair cut the king answers, "In silence." 26 The women also shave here
and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.
Perfumes made from flowers, with a base of oil are numbered in the
* Plutarch tells a pretty story of how an epidemic of suicide among the women of Miletus
was suddenly and completely ended by an ordinance decreeing that self -slain women should
be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial. 21
292 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIII
hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them. 27 Every
lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers,
combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are
painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with
lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or
kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and
gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles,
freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours
in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is em-
ployed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are ap-
plied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face
and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the
throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and f eet. 88 Against
this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A
character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: "If you
go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration
makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair
touches your face it is blanched by the white lead." 28 Women remain the
same, because men do.
Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe
once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali
into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable
homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually
filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the
house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal
nozzle in the shape of an animal's head, and falls upon the floor of a small
shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden. 80 Most people,
unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape
it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus' Apoxyomenos. The
Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of
indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom
sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed
factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed
under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every part
of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of
wrestling or a bath of sunshine.
Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped
about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor
detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 293
garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos,
or robe, both made of wool. If the weather requires it these may be cov-
ered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys) , suspended like them
from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please
us in Greek statuaiy. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women,
rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and
dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may
bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground
that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray;* 1
the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot
sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes
wear a cap and nothing else. 88 Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usu-
ally of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes,
says Dicaearchus, "wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare
feet." 355 Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and
no one bothers with stockings. 84
Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with j ewelry. Men wear at
least one ring; Aristotle wears several. 86 The walking sticks of the men
may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, dia-
dems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and some-
times jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most
mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth
is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens for-
bids women to take more than three dresses on a journey. 38 Women smile
at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know
that to most men and to some women dress makes the woman; and their
behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand cen-
IV. MORALS
The Athenians of the fifth century are not exemplars of morality; the
progress of the intellect has loosened many of them from their ethical tra-
ditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have
a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any
but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream
of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class;
in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the
comedies of Aristophanes there are no manners at all, and in public oratory
294 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters
the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished "barbarians" of
Egypt or Persia or Babylon. Salutation is cordial but simple; there is no
bowing, for that seems to the proud citizens a vestige of monarchy; hand-
shaking is reserved for oaths or solemn farewells; usually the greeting is
merely Oba/re "Rejoice" followed, as elsewhere, by some brilliant re-
mark about the weather. 37
Hospitality has lessened since Homeric days, for travel is a little more
secure than then, and inns provide food and shelter for transients; even so
it remains an outstanding virtue of the Athenians. Strangers are welcomed
though without introduction; if they come with letters from a common
friend, they receive bed and board, and sometimes parting gifts. An in-
vited guest is always privileged to bring an uninvited guest with him.
This freedom of entry gives rise in time to a class of parasites parasitoi
a word originally applied to the clergy who ate the "corn left over" from
the temple supplies. The well to do are generous givers in both public
and private philanthropy; the practice as well as the word is Greek. Giai-
itycharitaS) or love is also present; there are many institutions for the
care of strangers, the sick, the poor, and the old. 38 The government provides
pensions for wounded soldiers, and brings up war orphans at the expense
of the state; in the fourth century it will make payments to disabled work-
men. 30 In periods of drought, war, or other crisis, the state pays two obols
(34 cents) a day to the needy, in addition to the regular fees for attendance
at the Assembly, the courts, and the plays. There are the normal scandals;
a speech of Lysias concerns a man who, though on public relief, has rich
men for his friends, earns money by his handicraft, and rides horses for
recreation. 40
The Greek might admit that honesty is the best policy, but he tries every-
thing else first. The chorus in Sophocles' Philoctetes expresses the tender-
est sympathy for the wounded and deserted soldier, and then takes advan-
tage of his slumber to counsel Neoptolemus to betray him, steal his weapons,
and leave him to his fate. Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers
adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the gov-
ernment inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measur-
ing weights,* * and He at every opportunity; the sausages, for example, are
accused of being dogs." A comic dramatist calls the fishmongers "assas-
sins"; a gentler poet calls them "burglars." 43 The politicians are not much
better; there is hardly a man in Athenian public life that is not charged with
crookedness;" an honest man like Aristides is considered exciting news, al-
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 295
most a monstrosity; even Diogenes' daytime lantern does not find another.
Thucydides reports that men are more anxious to be called clever than
honest, and suspect honesty of simplicity." It is an easy matter to find
Greeks who will betray their country: "At no time," says Pausanias, "was
Greece wanting in people afflicted with this itch for treason."* 5 Bribery is
a popular way to political advancement, criminal impunity, diplomatic ac-
complishments; Pericles has large sums voted to him for secret uses, pre-
sumably for lubricating international negotiations. Morality is strictly
tribal; Xenophon, in a treatise on education, frankly advises lying and rob-
bery in dealing with the enemies of one's country/ 8 The Athenian envoys
at Sparta in 432 defend their empire in plain terms: "It has always been the
law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger ... no one has ever
allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance
of gaining anything by might" 47 though this passage, and the supposed
speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos,* 8 may be exercises of Thucydides'
philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain
Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional
ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would
be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machia-
velli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stirner not saying how fair that
would be. That something of this superiority to morals is an active in-
gredient in the Greek character appears in the readiness with which the
Spartans agree with the Athenians on these mooted points of morals. When
the Lacedaemonian Phoebidas, despite a treaty of peace, treacherously
seizes upon the citadel of Thebes, and the Spartan King Agesilaus is ques-
tioned about the justice of this action, he replies: "Inquire only if it is
useful; for whenever an action is useful to our country it is right." Time
and again truces are violated, solemn promises are broken, envoys are
slain. 48 Perhaps, however, the Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct
but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what
we practice.
Custom and religion among the Greeks exercise a very modest restraint
upon the victor in war. It is a regular matter, even in civil wars, to sack
the conquered city, to finish off the wounded, to slaughter or enslave all
unransomed prisoners and all captured noncombatants, to burn down the
houses, the fruit trees, and the crops, to exterminate the live stock, and to
destroy the seed for future sowings. 80 At the opening of the Peloponnesian
War the Spartans butcher as enemies all Greeks whom they find on the
sea, whether allies of Athens or neutrals; 131 at the battle of Aegospotami,
296 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
which closes the war, the Spartans put to death three thousand Athenian
prisoners 52 almost the selected best of Athens' depleted citizenry. War of
some kind of city against city or of class against class is a normal condi-
tion in Hellas. In this way the Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns
upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battles, and in the course
of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history con-
sumes itself in a prolonged national suicide.
V. CHARACTER
If we are still attracted to these reckless disputants it is because they
cover the nakedness of their sins with an exhilarating vigor of enterprise
and intellect. The nearness of the sea, the opportunities of trade, the free-
dom of economic and political lif e form the Athenian to an unprecedented
excitability and resilience of temper and thought, a very fever of mind and
sense. What a change from the Orient to Europe, from the drowsy
southern regions to these intermediate states where winter is cold enough
to invigorate without dulling, and summer warm enough to liberate with-
out enfeebling body and soul! Here is faith in life and man, a zest of living
never rivaled again until the Renaissance.
Out of this stimulating milieu comes courage, and an impulsiveness all
the world away from the sophrosyne self-control which the philosophers
vainly preach, or the Olympian serenity which young Winckelmann and
old Goethe will foist upon the passionate and restless Greeks. A nation's
ideals are usually a disguise, and are not to be taken as history. Courage and
temperance andreia, or manliness, and the meden agan, or "nothing in ex-
cess" of the Delphic inscription are the rival mottoes of the Greek; he
realizes the one frequently enough, but the other only in his peasants,
philosophers, and saints. The average Athenian is a sensualist, but with
a good conscience; he sees no sin in the pleasures of sense, and finds in
them the readiest answer to the pessimism that darkens his meditative inter-
vals. He loves wine, and is not ashamed to get drunk now and then; he
loves women, in an almost innocently physical way, easily forgives him-
self for promiscuity, and does not look upon a lapse from virtue as an
irremediable disaster. Nevertheless he dilutes two parts of wine with three
of water, and considers repeated drunkenness an offense against good taste.
Though he seldom practices moderation he sincerely worships it, and for-
mulates more clearly than any other people in history the ideal of self-
mastery.
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 297
The Athenians are too brilliant to be good, and scorn stupidity more
than they abominate vice. They are not all sages, and we must not pic-
ture their woman as all lovely Nausicaas or stately Helens, or their men as
combining the courage of Ajax with Nestor's wisdom; history has remem-
bered the geniuses of Greece and has ignored her fools (except Nicias) ;
even our age may seem great when most of us are forgotten, and only
our mountain peaks have escaped the obscurity of time. Discounting the
pathos of distance, the average Athenian remains as subtle as an Oriental,
as enamored of novelty as an American; endlessly curious and perpetually
mobile; always preaching a Parmenidean calm and always tossed upon a
Heracleitean sea. No people ever had a livelier fancy, or a readier tongue.
Clear thought and clear expression seem divine things to the Athenian; he
has no patience with learned obfuscation, and looks upon informed and
intelligent conversation as the highest sport of civilization. The secret of
the exuberance of Greek life and thought lies in this, that to the Greek,
man is the measure of all things. The educated Athenian is in love with
reason, and seldom doubts its ability to chart the universe. The desire to
know and understand is his noblest passion, and as immoderate as the rest.
Later he will discover the limits of reason and human effort, and by a nat-
ural reaction will fall into a pessimism strangely discordant with the char-
acteristic buoyancy of his spirit. Even in the century of his exuberance
the thought of his profoundest men who are not his philosophers but his
dramatists will be clouded over with the elusive brevity of delight and
the patient pertinacity of death.
As inquisitiveness generates the science of Greece, so acquisitiveness es-
tablishes and dominates its economy. "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men,"
says Plato, with the exaggeration usual in moralists, "and never for a mo-
ment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions;
on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended." 53 The Athenians are
competitive animals, and stimulate one another with nearly ruthless rivalry.
They are shrewd, and give the Semites a close run in cunning and strata-
gem; they are every bit as stiff-necked as the Biblical Hebrews, as pug-
nacious, obstinate, and proud. They bargain virulently in buying and sell-
ing, argue every point in conversation, and, when they cannot make war
upon other countries, quarrel among themselves. They are not given to
sentiment, and disapprove of Euripides' tears. They are kind to animals
and cruel to men: they regularly use torture upon unaccused slaves, and
sleep heartily, to all appearances, after slaughtering a cityful of noncom-
batants. Nevertheless they are generous to the poor or the disabled; and
298 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIII
when the Assembly learns that the granddaughter of Aristogeiton the
tyrannicide is living in destitution on Lemnos, it provides funds to bring
her to Athens and to give her a dowry and a husband. The oppressed and
hunted of other cities find a sympathetic refuge in Athens.
In truth the Greek does not think of character in our terms. He aspires
neither to the conscience of the good bourgeois, nor to the sense of honor
of the aristocrat. To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in
health, strength, beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought. Virtue is
arete, manlyliterally and originally, martial-excellence (Ares, Mars) ; pre-
cisely what the Romans called vir-tus, man-liness. The Athenian ideal man
is the kalokagathos, who combines beauty and justice in a gracious art of
living that frankly values ability, fame, wealth, and friends as well as vir-
tue and humanity; as with Goethe, self-development is everything. Along
with this conception goes a degree of vanity whose candor is hardly to our
taste: the Greeks never tire of admiring themselves, and announce at every
turn their superiority to other warriors, writers, artists, peoples. If we
wish to understand the Greeks as against the Romans we must think of
the French vs. the English; if we wish to feel the Spartan spirit as opposed
to the Athenian we must think of the Germans vs. the French.
All the qualities of the Athenians come together to make their city-state.
Here is the creation and summation of their vigor and courage, their
brilliance and loquacity, their unruliness and acquisitiveness, their vanity
and patriotism, their worship of beauty and freedom. They are rich in
passions but poor in prejudices. Now and then they tolerate religious in-
tolerance, not as a check upon thought but as a weapon in partisan politics,
and as a bound to moral experimentation; otherwise they insist upon a
degree of liberty that seems fantastically chaotic to their Oriental visitors.
But because they are free, because, ultimately, every office is open to
every citizen, and each is ruled and ruler in turn, they give half their lives
to their state. Home is where they sleep; they live in the market place, in
the Assembly, in the Council, in the courts, in the great festivals, athletic
contests, and dramatic spectacles that glorify their* city and its gods. They
recognize the right of the state to conscript their persons and their wealth
for its needs. They forgive its exactions because it gives more opportunity
for human development than man has ever known before; they fight for it
fiercely because it is the mother and guardian of their liberties. "Thus," says
Herodotus, "did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough,
not from this instance only but from many examples, that freedom is an
excellent thing; since even the Athenians, who,, while they continued un-
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 299
der the rule of dictators, were not a whit more valiant than any of their
neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the
first of all." 51
VI. PREMARITAL RELATIONS
In morality, as in alphabet, measures, weights, coinage, costume, music, as-
tronomy, and mystic cults, classic Athens seems more Oriental than European.
The physical basis of love is accepted frankly by both sexes; the love philters
that anxious ladies brew for negligent men have no merely Platonic aim. Pre-
marital chastity is required of respectable women, but among unmarried men
after the ephebic period there are few moral restraints upon desire. The great
festivals, though religious in origin, are used as safety valves for the natural
promiscuity of humanity; sexual license on such occasions is condoned in the
belief that monogamy may be more easily achieved during the balance of the
year. No stigma is attached in Athens to the occasional intercourse of young
men with courtesans; even married men may patronize them without any
greater moral penalty than a scolding at home and a slightly tarnished repu-
tation in the city. 88 Athens officially recognizes prostitution, and levies a tax
upon its practitioners. 60
With a career so open to talent, harlotry becomes in Athens, as in most other
cities of Greece, a well-plied profession with many specialties. The lowest
order of them, the pornai, live chiefly at the Piraeus, in common brothels
marked for the convenience of the public with the phallic symbol of Priapus.
An obol secures admission to these houses, where the girls, so lightly clad that
they are called gymnai (naked), allow their prospective purchasers to examine
them like dogs in a kennel. A man may strike a bargain for any period of time,
and may arrange with the madam of the house to take a girl to live with him
for a week, a month, or a year; sometimes a girl is hired out in this way to two
or more men, distributing her time among them according to their means. 61
Higher than these girls in the affection of the Athenians are the auletrides, or
flute-players, who, like the geisha of Japan, assist at "stag" entertainments, pro-
vide music and gaiety, perform dances artistic or lascivious, and then, if prop-
erly induced, mingle with the guests and spend the night with them. 63 A few
old courtesans may stave off destitution by developing training schools for
such flute girls, and teaching them the science of cosmetic adornment, personal
transfiguration, musical entertainment, and amorous dalliance. Tradition hands
down carefully from one generation of courtesans to another, like a precious
heritage, the arts of inspiring love by judicious display, holding it by coy re-
fusal, and making it pay." Nevertheless some of the auletrides, if we may take
Lucian's word for it from a later age, have tender hearts, know real affection,
JOO THELIFEOFGREECE (CHAP. XIII
and ruin themselves, Camille-like, for thek lovers' sakes. The honest courtesan
is an ancient theme hoary with the dignity of age.
The highest class of Greek courtesans is composed of the hetairai literally,
companions. Unlike the pornai, who are mostly of Oriental birth, the hetairai
are usually women of the citizen class, who have fallen from the respectability
or fled from the seclusion required of Athenian maids and matrons. They live
independently, and entertain at thek own homes the lovers whom they lure.
Though they are mostly brunettes by nature, they dye their hair yellow in
the belief that Athenians prefer blondes; and they distinguish themselves, appar-
ently under legal compulsion, by wearing flowery robes. 81 By occasional read-
ing, or attending lectures, some of them acquire a modest education, and amuse
their cultured patrons with learned conversation. Thais, Diotima, Thargelia,
and Leontium, as well as Aspasia, are celebrated as philosophical disputants, and
sometimes for their polished literary style. 65 Many of them are renowned for
their wit, and Athenian literature has an anthology of hetairai epigrams. 68
Though all courtesans are denied civil rights, and are forbidden to enter any
temple but that of their own goddess, Aphrodite Pandemos, a select minority
of the hetairai enjoy a high standing in male society at Athens; no man is
ashamed to be seen with these; philosophers contend for their favors; and an
historian chronicles their history as piously as Plutarch. 87
In such ways a number of them achieve a certain scholastic immortality.
There is Clepsydra, so named because she accepts and dismisses her lovers by
the hourglass; Thargelia, who, as the Mata Hari of her time, serves the Per-
sians as a spy by sleeping with as many as possible of the statesmen of Athens; 68
Theoris, who consoles the old age of Sophocles, and Archippe, who succeeds
her about the ninth decade of the dramatist's life; 69 Archeanassa, who amuses
Plato, 70 and Danae and Leontium, who teach Epicurus the philosophy of
pleasure; Themistonoe, who practices her art until she has lost her last tooth and
her last lock of hair; and the businesslike Gnathaena, who, having spent much
time in the training of her daughter, demands a thousand drachmas ($1000) as
the price of the young lady's company for a night. 71 The beauty of Phryne is
the talk of fourth-century Athens, since she never appears in public except
completely veiled, but, at the Eleusinian festival, and again on the feast of
the Poseidonia, disrobes in the sight of all, lets down her hair, and goes to
bathe in the sea. 73 For a time she loves and inspires Praxiteles, and poses for
his Aphrodites; from her, too, Apelles takes his Aphrodite Anady omened So
rich is Phryne from her loves that she offers to rebuild the walls of Thebes if
the Thebans will inscribe her name on the structure, which they stubbornly
refuse to do. Perhaps she asks too large an honorarium from Euthias; he re-
venges himself by indicting her on a charge of impiety. But a member of the
court is one of her clients, and Hypereides, the orator, is her devoted lover;
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OP THE ATHENIANS 30!
Hypereides defends her not only with eloquence but by opening her tunic
and revealing her bosom to the court. The judges look upon her beauty, and
vindicate her piety. 74
Lais of Corinth, says Athenaeus, "appears to have been superior in beauty to
any woman that had ever been seen." 75 As many cities as claimed Homer dis-
pute the honor of having witnessed her birth. Sculptors and painters beg her
to pose for them, but she is coy. The great Myron, in his old age, persuades
her; when she disrobes he forgets his white hair and beard, and offers her all
his possessions for one night; whereupon she smiles, shrugs her rounded shoul-
ders, and leaves him statueless. The next morning, burning with readolescence,
he has his hair trimmed, and his beard cut off; he puts on a scarlet robe and a
golden girdle, a chain of gold around his neck and rings on all his fingers. He
colors his cheeks with rouge, and perfumes his garments and his flesh. He
seeks out Lais, and announces that he loves her. "My poor friend," she re-
plied, seeing through his metamorphosis, "you are asking me what I refused to
your father yesterday." 79 She lays up a great fortune, but does not 'refuse her-
self to poor but comely lovers; she restores the ugly Demosthenes to virtue by
asking ten thousand drachmas for an evening, 77 and from the well-to-do Aris-
tippus she earns such sums as scandalize his servant; 78 but to the penniless
Diogenes she gives herself for a pittance, being pleased to have philosophers
at her feet. She spends her wealth generously upon temples, public buildings,
and friends, and finally returns, after the custom of her kind, to the poverty of
her youth. She plies her trade patiently to the end; and when she dies she is
honored with a splendid tomb as the greatest conqueror that the Greeks have
ever known. 79
VII. GREEK FRIENDSHIP
Stranger than this strange entente between prostitution and philosophy is
the placid acceptance of sexual inversion. The chief rivals of the hetairai are
the boys of Athens; and the courtesans, scandalized to the very depths of their
pockets, never tire of denouncing the immorality of homosexual love. Mer-
chants import handsome lads to be sold to the highest bidder, who will use
them first as concubines and later as slaves; 80 and only a negligible minority of
males think it amiss that the effeminate young aristocrats of the city should
arouse and assuage the ardor of aging men. In this matter of genders Sparta
is as careless as Athens; when Alcman wishes to compliment some girls he calls
them his "female boy-friends." 81 Athenian law disfranchises those who receive
homosexual attentions, 82 but public opinion tolerates the practice humorously;
in Sparta and Crete no stigma of any kind is attached to it; 88 in Thebes it is
accepted as a valuable source of military organization and bravery. The great-
est heroes in the fond remembrance of Athens are Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
3O2 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
tyrannicides and lovers; the most popular in Athens in his day is Alcibiades,
who boasts of the men who love him; as late as Aristotle "Greek lovers" plight
their troth at the tomb of lolaus, comrade of Heracles; 81 and Aristippus de-
scribes Xenophon, leader of armies and hardheaded man of the world, as infat-
uated with young Clemias. 85 The attachment of a man to a boy, or of a boy to
a boy, shows in Greece all the symptoms of romantic love passion, piety,
ecstasy, jealousy, serenading, brooding, moaning, and sleeplessness. 80 When
Plato, in the Phaedrus, talks of human love, he means homosexual love; and the
disputants in his Symposium agree on one point that love between man and
man is nobler and more spiritual than love between man and woman. 37 A simi-
lar inversion appears among the women, occasionally among the finest, as in
Sappho, frequently among the courtesans; the auletrides love one another more
passionately than they love their patrons, and the porntia are hothouses of
Lesbian romance. 88
How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle
attributes it to fear of overpopulation, 89 and this may account for part of the
phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both
homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After
the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in
which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in com-
panionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their
formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender
sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium, 'and
palaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only ,the
male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until
Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home;
the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and
men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to
acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory;
from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and
rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daugh-
ters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimu-
lation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and
Enlightenment France.
VIII. LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of
marriage. We find little of it in Homer, where Agamemnon and Achilles
frankly think of Chryseis and Briseis, even of the discouraging Cassandra,
in terms of physical desire. Nausicaa, however, is a warning against too
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 303
broad a generalization, and legends as old as Homer tell of Heracles and
lola, of Orpheus and Eurydice. The lyric poets, again, talk abundantly of
love, commonly in the sense of amorous appetite; stories like that which
Stesichorus tells of a maiden dying for love 80 are exceptional; but when
Theano, wife of Pythagoras, speaks of love as "the sickness of a long-
ing soul," 81 we feel the authentic note of romantic rut. As refinement
grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes
more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between
desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of
hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles
we hear of "Love" who "rules at will the gods,"* 83 and in Euripides many
a passage proclaims Eros' power. The later dramatists often describe a
youth desperately enamored of a girl. 83 Aristotle suggests the real quality
of romantic adoration when he remarks that "lovers look at the eyes of the
beloved, in which modesty dwells." 84
Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to
matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of "posses-
sion" or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a
fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate. 83 Normally marriage is arranged
by the parents as in always classic France, or by professional matchmakers, 89
with an eye not to love but to dowries. The father is expected to provide
for his daughter a marriage portion of money, clothing, jewelry, and per-
haps slaves. 87 This remains to its end the property of the wife, and reverts
to her in case of a separation from her husband a consideration that dis-
courages divorce by the male. Without a dowry a girl has little chance of
marriage; therefore where the father cannot give it to her the relatives
combine to provide it. Marriage by purchase, so frequent in Homeric days,
has by this means been inverted in Periclean Greece: in effect, as Euripides'
Medea complains, 98 the woman has to buy her master. The Greek, then,
marries not for love, nor because he enjoys matrimony (for he prates end-
lessly about its tribulations) , but to continue himself and the state through a
wife suitably dowered, and children who will ward off the evil fate of
an untended soul. Even with these inducements he avoids wedlock as long
*C. Antigone, j8iL:
When Love disputes His prey he seeks
He carries his battles! Over the billow,
Love, he loots Pastoral haunts he preys among.
The rich of their chattels! Gods are deathless, and they
By delicate cheeks Cannot elude his whim;
On maiden's pillow And oh, amid us whose life's a day,
Watches he all the night-time long; Mad is the heart that broodeth him! Ma
304 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
as he can. The letter of the law forbids him to remain single, but the law
is not always enforced in Periclean days; and after him the number of
bachelors mounts until it becomes one of the basic problems of Athens. 89
There are so many ways of being amused in Greece! Those men who
yield marry late, usually near thirty, and then insist upon brides not much
older than fifteen. 100 'To mate a youth with a young wife is ill," says a
character in Euripides; "for a man's strength endures, while the bloorn of
beauty quickly leaves the woman's form." 101
A choice having been made, and the dowry agreed upon, a solemn be-
trothal takes place in the home of the girl's father; there must be witnesses,
but her own presence is not necessary. Without such a formal betrothal
no union is valid in Athenian law; it is considered to be the first act in the
complex rite of marriage. The second act, which follows in a few days, is
a feast in the house of the girl, Before coming to it the bride and bride-
groom, in their separate homes, bathe in ceremonial purification. At the
feast the men of both families sit on one side of the room, the women
on the other; a wedding cake is eaten, and much wine is drunk. Then the
bridegroom escorts his veiled and white-robed bride whose face he may
not yet have seen into a carriage, and takes her to his father's dwelling
amid a procession of friends and flute-playing girls, who light the way
with torches and raise the hymeneal chant. Arrived, he carries the girl
over the threshold, as if in semblance of capture. The parents of the youth
greet the girl, and receive her with religious ceremony into the circle of
the family and the worship of its gods; no priest, however, takes any part
in the ritual. The guests then escort the couple to their room with an
epithalamion, or marriage-chamber song, and linger boisterously at the
door until the bridegroom announces to them that the marriage has been
consummated.
Besides his wife a man may take a concubine. "We have courtesans for
the sake of pleasure," says Demosthenes, "concubines for the daily health
of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful
guardians of our homes": 102 here in one startling sentence is the Greek view
of woman in the classic age. Draco's laws permit concubinage; and after
the Sicilian expedition of 415, when the roll of citizens has been depleted
by war and many girls cannot find husbands, the law explicitly allows
double marriages; Socrates and Euripides are among those who assume this
patriotic obligation. 108 The wife usually accepts concubinage with Oriental
patience, knowing that the "second wife," when her charms wear off, will
become in effect a household slave, and that only the offspring of the first
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 305
wife are accounted legitimate. Adultery leads to divorce only when com-
mitted by the wife; the husband in such case is spoken of as "carrying
horns" (keroesses}, and custom requires him to send his wife away. 1M The
law makes adultery by woman, or by a man with a married woman, pun-
ishable with death, but the Greeks are too lenient to concupiscence to en-
force this statute. The injured husband is usually left to deal with the
adulterer as he will and can sometimes killing him in ftagrmte delicto,
sometimes sending a slave to beat him, sometimes contenting himself with
a money indemnity. 105
For the man divorce is simple; he may dismiss his wife at any time, with-
out stating the cause. Barrenness is accepted as sufficient reason for divorcing
a wife, since the purpose of marriage is to have children. If the man is sterile,
law permits, and public opinion recommends, the reinforcement of the
husband by a relative; the child born of such a union is considered to be
the son of the husband, and must tend his departed soul. The wife may
not at will leave her husband, but she may ask the archons for a divorce
on the ground of the cruelty or excesses of her mate. 108 Divorce is also al-
lowed by mutual consent, usually expressed in a formal declaration to the
archon. In case of separation, even where the husband has been guilty
of adultery, the children remain with the man. 107 All in all, in the matter of
sex relations, Athenian custom and law are thoroughly man-made, and
represent an Oriental retrogression from the society of Egypt, Crete, and
the Homeric Age.
IX. WOMAN
As surprising as anything else in this civilization is the fact that it is
brilliant without the aid or stimulus of women. With their help the Heroic
Age achieved splendor, the age of the dictators a lyric radiance; then, al-
most overnight, married women vanish from the history of the Greeks,
as if to confute the supposed correlation between the level of civilization
and the status of woman. In Herodotus woman is everywhere; in Thucyd-
ides she is nowhere to be seen. From Semonides of Amorgos to Lucian,
Greek literature is offensively repetitious about the faults of women; and
towards the close of it even the kindly Plutarch repeats Thucydides: 108
"The name of a decent woman, like her person, should be shut up in the
house." 108
This seclusion of woman does not exist among the Dorians; presumably
it comes from the Near East to Ionia, and from Ionia to Attica; it is part
306 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIII
of the tradition of Asia. Perhaps the disappearance of inheritance through
the mother, the rise of the middle classes, and the enthronement of the
commercial view of life enter into the change: men come to judge women
in terms of utility, and find them especially useful in the home. The
Oriental nature of Greek marriage goes with this Attic purdah; the bride
is cut off from her kin, goes to live almost as a menial in another home,
and worships other gods. She cannot make contracts, or incur debts be-
yond a trifling sum; she cannot bring actions at law; and Solon legislates
that anything done under the influence of woman shall have no validity
at law. 110 When her husband dies she does not inherit his property. Even
physiological error enters into her legal subjection; for just as primitive
ignorance of the male role in reproduction tended to exalt woman, so the
male is exalted by the theory popular in classic Greece that the generative
power belongs only to man, the woman being merely the carrier and
nurse of the child. 111 The older age of the man contributes to the subordina-
tion of the wife; he is twice her years when he marries her, and can in some
degree mold her mind to his own philosophy. Doubtless the male knows
too well the license allowed to his sex in Athens to risk his wife or daugh-
ter at large; he chooses to be free at the cost of her seclusion. She may, if
properly veiled and attended, visit her relatives or intimates, and may take
part in the religious celebrations, including attendance at the plays; but for
the rest she is expected to stay at home, and not allow herself to be seen
at a window. Most of her life is spent in the women's quarters at the rear
of the house; no male visitor is ever admitted there, nor does she appear
when men visit her husband.
In the home she is honored and obeyed in everything that does not con-
travene the patriarchal authority of her mate. She keeps the house, or
superintends its management; she cooks the meals, cards and spins the wool,
makes the clothing and bedding for the family. Her education is almost
confined to household arts, for the Athenian believes with Euripides that a
woman is handicapped by intellect. 112 The result is that the respectable
women of Athens are more modest, more "charming" to men, than their
like in Sparta, but less interesting and mature, incapable of being com-
rades to husbands whose minds have been filled and sharpened by a free
and varied life. The women of sixth-century Greece contributed signifi-
cantly to Greek literature; the women of Periclean Athens contribute
nothing.
Toward the end of the period a movement arises for the emancipation
of woman. Euripides defends the sex with brave speeches and timid innu-
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 307
endoes; Aristophanes makes fun of them with boisterous indecency. The
women go to the heart of the matter and begin to compete with the
hetairai in making themselves as attractive as the progress of chemistry
will permit. "What sensible thing are we women capable of doing?" asks
Cleonica in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. "We do nothing but sit around with
our paint and lipstick and transparent gowns, and all the rest of it." 113 From
411 onward female roles become more prominent in Athenian drama, and
reveal the growing escape of women from the solitude to which they have
been confined.
Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making
her subjection largely unreal. The greater eagerness of the male gives
woman an advantage in Greece as elsewhere. "Sir," says Samuel Johnson,
"nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot aiford to
give her more.' m4 Sometimes this natural sovereignty is enhanced by a
substantial dowry, or an industrious tongue, or uxorious affection; more
often it is the result of beauty, or the bearing and rearing of fine children,
or the slow fusion of souls in the crucible of a common experience and
task. An age that can portray such gentle characters as Antigone, Alcestis,
Iphigenia, and Andromache, and such heroines as Hecuba, Cassandra, and
Medea, could not be unaware of the highest and the deepest in woman.
The average Athenian loves his wife, and will not always try to conceal it;
the funeral stelae reveal surprisingly the tenderness of mate for mate, and
of parents for children, in the intimacy of the home. The Greek Anthol-
ogy is vivid with erotic verse, but it contains also many a touching epigram
to a beloved comrade. "In this stone," says one epitaph, "Marathonis laid
Nicopolis, and bedewed the marble chest with tears. But it was of no
avail. What profit hath a man whose wife is gone, and who is left solitary
on earth? " m
X. THE HOME
The Greek family, like the Indo-European household in general, is composed
of the father, the mother, sometimes a "second wife," their unmarried daugh-
ters, their sons, their slaves, and their sons' wives and children and slaves. It
remains to the end the strongest institution in Greek civilization, for both in
agriculture and in industry it is the unit and instrument of economic produc-
tion. The power of the father in Attica is extensive, but much narrower than
in Rome. He can expose the newborn child, sell the labor of his minor sons
and unwedded daughters, give his daughters in marriage, and, under certain
conditions, appoint another husband for his widow. 11 * But he cannot, in Athe-
308 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIII
nian law, sell the persons of his children; and each son, on marrying, escapes
from parental authority, sets up his own home, and becomes an independent
member of the gene.
The Greek house is unpretentious. The exterior is seldom more than a stout
blank wall with a narrow doorway, dumb witnesses to the insecurity of Greek
life. The material is sometimes stucco, usually sun-baked brick. In the city the
houses are crowded together in narrow streets; often they rise to two stories,
occasionally they are tenements housing several families; but nearly every citi-
zen owns an individual home. Dwellings in Athens are small till Alcibiades sets
a fashion of magnificence; there is a democratic taboo, reinforced by aristo-
cratic precaution, against display; and the Athenian, living for the most part in
the open air, does not endow the home with the significance and affection that
it receives in colder zones. A rich house may have a colonnaded porch facing
the street, but this is highly exceptional. Windows are a luxury, and are con-
fined to the upper story; they have no panes, but may be closed with shutters,
or screened with lattices against the sun. The entrance door is ordinarily made
of double leaves, turning upon vertical pivots running into the threshold and
the lintel. On the door of many well-to-do houses is a metal knocker, often in
the form of a ring in a lion's mouth. 117 The entrance hallway, except in the
poorer dwellings, leads into an aule, or uncovered court, commonly paved with
stones. Around the court may run a columned portico; in the center may be
an altar, or a cistern, or both, perhaps also adorned with columns, and paved
with a mosaic floor. Light and air come to the house chiefly through this
court, for upon it open nearly all the rooms; to pass from one room to another
it is usually necessary to enter the portico or the court. In the shade and
privacy of the court and the portico much of the family's life is lived, and much
of its work is done.
Gardens are rare in the city, and are confined to small areas in the court or
behind the house. Country gardens are more spacious and numerous; but the
scarcity of rain in summer, and the cost of irrigation, make gardens a luxury
in Attica. The average Greek has no Rousseauan sensitivity to nature; his moun-
tains are still too troublesome to be beautiful, though his poets, despite its
dangers, intone many paeans to the sea. He is not sentimental about nature, so
much as animistically imaginative; he peoples the woods and streams of his
country with gods and sprites, and thinks of nature as not a landscape but a
Valhalla; he names his mountains and rivers from the divinities that inhabit them;
and instead of painting nature directly he draws or carves symbolic images of
the deities that in his poetic theology give it life. Not till Alexander's armies
bring back Persian ways and gold will the Greek build himself a pleasure gar-
den or "paradise." Nevertheless, flowers are loved in Greece as much as any-
where, and gardens and florists supply them all the year round. Flower girls
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 309
peddle roses, violets, hyacinths, narcissi, irises, myrtles, lilacs, crocuses, and
anemones from house to house. Women wear flowers in their hair, dandies
wear them behind the ear; and on festal occasions both sexes may come forth
with flower garlands, lei-like, around the neck. us
The interior of the house is simple. Among the poor the floors are of hard-
ened earth; as income rises this basis may be covered with plaster, or paved with
flat stones or with small round stones set in cement, as in the Near East im-
rnemorially; and all this may be covered with reed mats or rugs. The brick
walls are plastered and whitewashed. Heating, which is needed for only three
months of the year, is furnished by a brazier whose smoke has to find a way out
through the door to the court. Decoration is minimal; but at the end of the
fifth century the homes of the rich may have pillared halls, walls paneled with
marble or painted imitations of it, mural paintings and tapestries, and ceiling
arabesques. Furniture is scanty in the average home some chairs, some chests,
a few tables, a bed. Cushions take the place of upholstery on chairs, but the
seats of the rich may be carefully carved, and inlaid with silver, tortoise, or
ivory. Chests serve as both closets and chairs. Tables are small, and usually
three-legged, whence their name trapezai; they are brought in and removed with
the food, and are hardly used for 'other purposes; writing is done upon the
knee. Couches and beds are favorite objects for adornment, being often inlaid
or elaborately carved. Leather thongs stretched across the bedstead serve as a
spring; there are mattresses and pillows, and embroidered covers, and com-
monly a raised headrest. Lamps may be hung from the ceiling, or placed upon
stands, or take the form of torches elegantly wrought.
The kitchen is equipped with a great variety of iron, bronze, and earthen-
ware vessels; glass is a rare luxury, not made in Greece. Cooking is done over
an open fire; stoves are a Hellenistic innovation. Athenian meals are simple,
like the Spartan and unlike the Boeotian, Corinthian, or Sicilian; but when hon-
ored guests are expected it is customary to engage a professional cook, who
is always male. Cooking is a highly developed art, with many texts and heroes;
some Greek cooks are as widely known as the latest victor in the Olympic
games. To eat alone is considered barbarous, and table manners are looked
upon as an index of a civilization's development. Women and boys sit at meals
before small tables; men recline on couches, two on each. The family eats to-
gether when alone; if male guests come, the women of the family retire to
the gynaeceum. Attendants remove the sandals or wash the feet of the guests
before the latter recline, and offer them water to cleanse their hands; some-
times they anoint the heads of the guests with fragrant oils. There are no
knives or forks, but there are spoons; solid food is eaten with the fingers. Dur-
ing the meal the fingers are cleaned with scraps or crumbs of bread; after it
with water. Before dessert the attendants fill the cup of each guest from a
3 ro THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIII
krater, or mixing bowl, in which wine has been diluted with water. Plates are
of earthenware; silver plate appears as the fifth century ends. Epicures grow
in number in the fourth century; one Pithyllus has coverings made for his
tongue and fingers so that he may eat food as hot as he likes. 118 There are a few
vegetarians, whose guests make the usual jokes and complaints; one diner flees
from a vegetarian feast for fear that he will be offered hay for dessert."
Drinking is as important as eating. After the deipnon, or dinner, comes the
symposion, or drinking together. At Sparta as well as at Athens there are
drinking clubs whose members become so attached to one another that such
organizations become potent political instruments. The procedure at banquets
is complicated, and philosophers like Xenocrates and Aristotle think it desirable
to set down laws for them. 121 The floor, upon which uneaten material has been
thrown, is swept clean after the meal; perfumes are passed around, and much
wine. The guests may then dance, not in pairs or with the other sex (for
usually only males are invited), but in groups; or they may play games like
kottabos;* or they may match poems, witticisms, or riddles, or watch profes-
sional performers like the female acrobat in Xenophon's Symposium, who tosses
twelve hoops at once and then dances somersaults through a hoop "set all
around with upright swords." 1 * Flute girls may appear, play, sing, dance, and
love as arranged for. Educated Athenians prefer, now and then, a symposium
of conversation, conducted in an orderly manner by a symposiarch chosen by
a throw of the dice to act as chairman. The guests take care not to break up
the talk into small groups, which usually means small talk; they keep the con-
versation general, and listen, as courteously as their vivacity will permit, to each
man in turn. So elegant a discourse as that which Plato offers us is doubtless the
product of his brilliant imagination; but probably Athens has known dialogues
as lively as his, perhaps profounder; and in any case it is Athenian society that
suggests and provides the background. In that exciting atmosphere of free wits
the Athenian mind is formed.
XL OLD AGE
Old age is feared and mourned beyond wont by the life-loving Greeks. Even
here, however, it has its consolations; for as the used-up body is returned like
worn currency to the mint, it has the solace of seeing, before it is consumed,
the fresh new life through which it cheats mortality. It is true that Greek his-
tory reveals cases of selfish carelessness or coarse insolence towards the old.
Athenian society, commercial, individualistic, and innovating, tends to be un-
kind to old age; respect for years goes with a religious and conservative society
* This consisted in throwing liquid from a cup so that it would strike some small object
placed at a distance.
CHAP. XIIl) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 3!!
like Sparta's, while democracy, loosening all bonds with freedom, puts the
accent on youth, and favors the new against the old. Athenian history offers
several instances of children taking over their parents' property without proof
of imbecility in the elders; 1 " 3 but Sophocles rescues himself from such an action
simply by reading to the court some passages from his latest play. Athenian
law commands that sons shall support their infirm or aged parents ; m and public
opinion, which is always more fearful than the law, enjoins modesty and respect
in the behavior of the young towards the old. Plato takes it for granted that
a well-bred youth will be silent in the presence of his seniors unless he is asked
to speak, 125 There are in the literature many pictures of modest adolescence, as
in the earlier dialogues of Plato or the Symposium of Xenophon; and there are
touching stories of filial devotion, like that of Orestes to Agamemnon, and of
Antigone to Oedipus.
When death comes, every precaution is taken that the soul of the departed
shall be spared all avoidable suffering. The body must be buried or burned;
else the soul will wander restlessly about the world, and will revenge itself
upon its negligent posterity; it may, for example, reappear as a ghost, and bring
disease or disaster to plants and men. Cremation is more popular in the Heroic
Age, burial in the classic. Burial was Mycenaean, and will survive into Chris-
tianity; cremation apparently entered Greece with the Achaeans and the Dorians,
whose nomad habits made impossible the proper care of graves. One or the
other is so obligatory among Athenians that the victorious generals at Argi-
nusae are put to death for allowing a severe storm to deter them from recover-
ing and burying their dead.
Greek burial customs carry on old ways into the future. The corpse is
bathed, anointed with perfumes, crowned with flowers, and dressed in the fin-
est garments that the family can afford. An obol is placed between the teeth
to pay Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries the dead across the Styx to
Hades.* The body is placed in a coffin of pottery or wood; to "have one foot
in the coffin" is already a proverb in Greece. 138 Mourning is elaborate: black
garments are worn, and the hair, or part of it, is shorn as a gift for the dead.
On the third day the corpse is carried on a bier in procession through the
streets, while the women weep and beat their breasts; professional wailers or
dirge singers may be hired for the occasion. Upon the sod of the covered
grave wine is poured to slake the dead soul's thirst, and animals may be sacrificed
for its food. The mourners lay wreaths of flowers or cypress upon the tomb, 127
and then return home to the funeral feast. Since the departed soul is believed
to be present at this feast, sacred custom requires that "of the dead nothing but
good" shall be spoken; 138 this is the source of an ancient saw, and perhaps of
the unfailing lauds of our epitaphs. Periodically the children visit the graves
* It was the custom among the Greeks to carry small change In the mouth.
312 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIII
of their ancestors, and offer them food and drink. After the battle of Plataea,
where the Greeks of many cities have fallen, the Plataeans pledge themselves
to provide for all the dead an annual repast; and six centuries later, in the days
of Plutarch, this promise will still be performed.
After death the soul, separated from the body, dwells as an insubstantial
shade in Hades. In Homer only spirits guilty of exceptional or sacrilegious
offense suffer punishment there; all the rest, saints and sinners alike, share an
equal fate of endless prowling about dark Pluto's realm. In the course of Greek
history a belief arises, among the poorer classes, in Hades as a place of expiation
for sins; Aeschylus pictures Zeus as judging the dead there and punishing the
guilty, though no word is said about rewarding the good. 129 Only rarely do
we find mention of the Blessed Isles, or the Elysian Fields, as heavens of eternal
happiness for a few heroic souls. The thought of the gloomy fate awaiting
nearly all the dead darkens Greek literature, and makes Greek life less bright
and cheerful than is fitting under such a sun.
CHAPTER XIV
I
The Art of Periclean Greece
I. THE ORNAMENTATION OF LIFE
T is beautiful," says a character in Xenophon's Econo?mcs,
to see the footgear ranged in a row according to its kind; beautiful
to see garments sorted according to their use, and coverlets; beau-
tiful to see glass vases and tableware so sorted; and beautiful, too,
despite the jeers of the witless and flippant, to see cooking-pots
arranged with sense and symmetry. Yes, all things without excep-
tion, because of symmetry, will appear more beautiful when placed
in order. All these utensils will then seem to form a choir; the
center which they unite to form will create a beauty that will be
enhanced by the distance of the other objects in the group. 1
This passage from a general reveals the scope, simplicity, and strength
of the esthetic sense in Greece. The feeling for form and rhythm, for
precision and clarity, for proportion and order, is the central fact in Greek
culture; it enters into the shape and ornament of every bowl and vase,
of every statue and painting, of every temple and tomb, of every poem
and drama, of all Greek work in science and philosophy. Greek art Is rea-
son made manifest: Greek painting is the logic of line, Greek sculpture is
a worship of symmetry, Greek architecture is a marble geometry. There
is no extravagance of emotion in Periclean art, no bizarrerie of form, no
striving for novelty through the abnormal or unusual;* the purpose is not to
represent the indiscriminate irrelevancy of the real, but to catch the il-
luminating essence of things, and to portray the ideal possibilities of men.
The pursuit of wealth, beauty, and knowledge so absorbed the Athenians
that they had no time for goodness. "I swear by all the gods," says one
of Xenophon's banqueters, "that I would not choose the power of the
Persian king in preference to beauty." 3
The Greek, whatever the romanticists of less virile ages may have fancied
of him, was no effeminate esthete, no flower of ecstasy murmuring mys-
* fhilokcdoumen me? e"+eleias, says Thucydides' Pericles: "We love beauty without ex-
travagance." 8
313
314 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIV
teries of art for art's sake; he thought of art as subordinate to life, and of
living as the greatest art of all; he had a healthy utilitarian bias against any
beauty that could not be used; the useful, the beautiful, and the good were
almost as closely bound together in his thought as in the Socratic philoso-
phy.* In his view art was rst of all an adornment of the ways and means
of life: he wanted his pots and pans, his lamps and chests and tables and
beds and chairs to be at once serviceable and beautiful, and never too ele-
gant to be strong. Having a vivid "sense of the state," he identified him-
self with the power and glory of his city, and employed a thousand artists
to embellish its public places, ennoble its festivals, and commemorate its
history. Above all, he wished to honor or propitiate the gods, to express
his gratitude to them for life or victory; he offered votive images, lavished
his resources upon his temples, and engaged statuaries to give to his gods
or his dead an enduring similitude in stone. Hence Greek art belonged
not to a museum, where men might go to contemplate it in a rare moment
of esthetic conscience, but to the actual interests and enterprises of the
people; its "Apollos" were not dead marbles in a gallery, but the likenesses
of beloved deities; its temples no mere curiosities for tourists, but the homes
of living gods. The artist, in this society, was not an insolvent recluse in
a studio, working in a language alien to the common citizen; he was an
artisan toiling with laborers of all degrees in a public and intelligible task.
Athens brought together, from all the Greek world, a greater concourse of
artists, as well as of philosophers and poets, than any other city except
Renaissance Rome; and these men, competing in fervent rivalry and co-
operating under enlightened statesmanship, realized in fair measure the
vision of Pericles.
Art begins at home, and with the person; men paint themselves before they
paint pictures, and adorn their bodies before building homes. Jewelry, like
cosmetics, is as old as history. The Greek was an expert cutter and engraver
of gems. He used simple tools of bronze plain and tubular drills, a wheel, and
a polishing mixture of emery powder and oil; 5 yet his work was so delicate and
minute that a microscope was probably required in executing the details, and
is certainly needed in following them. 8 Coins were not especially pretty at
Athens, where the grim owl ruled the mint. Elis led aE the mainland in this
field, and towards the close of the fifth century Syracuse issued a dekadrachma
that has never been surpassed in numismatic art. In metalwork the masters of
Chalcis maintained their leadership; every Mediterranean city sought their iron,
copper, and silver wares. Greek mirrors were more pleasing than mirrors by
* "Among the ancients," said Stendhal, "the beautiful is only the high relief of the useful."*
CHAP.XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 315
their nature can frequently be; for though one might not see the clearest of
reflections in the polished bronze, the mirrors themselves were of varied and
attractive shapes, often elaborately engraved, and upheld by figures of heroes,
fair women, or gods.
The potters carried on the forms and methods of the sixth century, with
their traditional banter and rivalry. Sometimes they burnt into the vase a word
of love for a boy; even Pheidias followed this custom when he carved upon
the finger of his Zeus the words, "Pantarkes is fair." 7 In the first half of the
fifth century the red-figure style reached its apex in the Achilles and Penthesilea,
vase, the Aesop and the Fox cup in the Vatican, and the Berlin Museum Orpheus
among the Thracians. More beautiful still were the white lekythoi of the mid-
century; these slender flasks were dedicated to the dead, and were usually
buried with them, or thrown upon the pyre to let their fragrant oils mingle with
the flames. The vase painters ventured into individuality, and sometimes fired the
clay with subjects that would have startled the staid masters of the Archaic
age; one vase allows Athenian youths to embrace courtesans shamelessly; an-
other shows men vomiting as they come from a banquet; other vases do what
they can for sex education. 8 The heroes of Periclean vase painting Brygus,
Sotades, and Meidias abandoned the old myths, and chose scenes from the life
of their times, delighting above all in the graceful movement of woman and
the natural play of the child. They drew more faithfully than their prede-
cessors: they showed the body in three-quarters view as well as in profile; they
produced light and shade by using thin or thick solutions of the glaze; they
modeled the figures to show contours and depth, and the folds of feminine
drapery. Corinth and Sicilian Gela were also centers of fine vase painting in
this age, but no one questioned the superiority of the Athenians. It was not
the competition of other potters that overcame the artists of the Ceramicus; it
was the rise of a rival art of decoration. The vase painters tried to meet the
attack by imitating the themes and styles of the muralists; but the taste of the
age went against them, and slowly, as the fourth century advanced, pottery
resigned itself to being more and more an industry, less and less an art.
II. THE RISE OF PAINTING
Four stages vaguely divide the history of Greek painting. In the sixth cen-
tury it is chiefly ceramic, devoted to the adornment of vases; in the fifth it is
chiefly architectural, giving color to public buildings and statues; in the fourth
it hovers between the domestic and the individual, decorating dwellings and
making portraits; in the Hellenistic Age it is chiefly individual, producing easel
pictures for private purchasers. Greek painting begins as an offshoot of draw-
ing, and remains to the end a matter essentially of drawing and design. In its
3i6 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
development it uses three methods: fresco, or painting upon wet plaster; tem-
pera, or painting upon wet cloth or boards with colors mixed with the white
of eggs; and encaustic, which mixed the colors with melted wax; this is as near
as antiquity cornes to painting in oils. Pliny, whose will to believe sometimes
rivals that "of Herodotus, assures us that the art of painting was already so ad-
vanced in the eighth century that Candaules, King of Lydia, paid its weight in
gold for a picture by Bularchus;" but all beginnings are mysteries. We may
judge the high repute of painting in Greece from the fact that Pliny gives it
more space than to sculpture; and apparently the great paintings of the classic
and Hellenistic periods were as much discussed by the critics, and as highly
regarded by the people, as the most distinguished specimens of architecture or
statuary. 10
Polygnotus of Thasos was as famous in fifth-century Greece as Ictinus or
Pheidias. We find him in Athens about 472; perhaps it was the rich Cimon
who procured him commissions to adorn several public buildings with murals.*
Upon the Stoa, which thereafter was called Poecile, or the Painted Portico, and
which, three centuries later, would give its name to the philosophy of Zeno,
Polygnotus depicted the Sack of Troynot the bloody massacre of the night of
victory, but the somber silence of the morning after, with the victors quieted by
the ruin around them, and the defeated lying calm in death. On the walls of
the temple of the Dioscuri he painted the Rape of the Leucippidae, and set a
precedent for his art by portraying the women in transparent drapery. The
Amphictyonic Council was not shocked; it invited Polygnotus to Delphi, where,
in the Lesche, or Lounge, he painted Odysseus in Hades, and another Sack of
Troy. All these were vast frescoes, almost empty of landscape or background,
but so crowded with individualized figures that many assistants were needed to
fill in with color the master's carefully drawn designs. The Lesche mural of
Troy showed Menelaus' crew about to spread sail for the return to Greece; in
the center sat Helen; and though many other women were in the picture, all
appeared to be gazing at her beauty. In a corner stood Andromache, with
Astyanax at her breast; in another a little boy clung to an altar in fear; and in
the distance a horse rolled around on the sandy beach. 12 Here, half a century
before Euripides, was all the drama of The Trojan Women. Polygnotus refused
to take pay for these pictures, but gave them to Athens and Delphi out of the
generosity of confident strength. All Hellas acclaimed him: Athens conferred
citizenship upon him, and the Amphictyonic Council arranged that wherever
he went in Greece he should be (as Socrates wished to be) maintained at the
public expensed All that remains of him is a little pigment on a wall at Delphi
to remind us that artistic immortality is a moment in geological time.
*He repaid Cimon by making love to his sister Elpinice, and painting her portrait as
Laodicea among the women of Troy. a
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 317
About 470 Delphi and Corinth established quadrennial contests in paint-
ing as part of the Pythian and Isthmian games. The art was now sufficiently
advanced to enable Panaenus, brother (or nephew) of Pheidias, to make
recognizable portraits of the Athenian and Persian generals in his Battle of
Marathon. But it still placed all figures in one plane, and made them of one
stature; it indicated distance not by a progressive diminution of size and
a modeling with light and shade, but by covering more of the lower half
of the farther figures with the curves that represented the ground. Towards
440 a vital step forward was taken. Agatharchus, employed by Aeschylus
and Sophocles to paint scenery for their plays, perceived the connection
between light and shade and distance, and wrote a treatise on perspective
as a means of creating theatrical illusion. Anaxagoras and Democritus took
up the idea from the scientific angle, and at the end of the century Apollo-
dorus of Athens won the name of skiagraphos^ or shadow painter, because
he made pictures in chiaroscuro i.e., in light and shade; hence Pliny spoke
of him as "the first to paint objects as they really appeared." 14
Greek painters never made full use of these discoveries; just as Solon
frowned upon the theatrical art as a deception, so the artists seem to have
thought it against their honor, or beneath their dignity, to give to a plane
surface the appearance of three dimensions. Nevertheless it was through
perspective and chiaroscuro that Zeuxis, pupil of Apollodorus, made him-
self the supreme figure in fifth-century painting. He came from Heracleia
(Pontica? ) to Athens about 424; and even amid the noise of war his coming
was considered an event. He was a "character," bold and conceited, and he
painted with a swashbuckling brush. At the Olympic games he strutted
about in a checkered tunic on which his name was embroidered in gold; he
could afford it, since he had already acquired "a vast amount of wealth"
from his paintings. 15 But he worked with the honest care of a great artist,
and when Agatharchus boasted of his own speed of execution, Zeuxis said
quietly, "I take a long time." 16 He gave away many of his masterpieces, on
the ground that no price could do them justice; and cities and kings were
happy to receive them.
He had only one rival in his generation Parrhasius of Ephesus, almost as
great and quite as vain. Parrhasius wore a golden crown on his head, called
himself "the prince of painters," and said that in him the art had reached per-
fection. 17 He did it all in lusty good humor, singing as he painted. 18 Gossip
said that he had bought a slave and tortured him to study facial expression in
pain for a picture of Prometheus; 19 but people tell many stories about artists.
Like Zeuxis he was a realist; his Runner was portrayed with such verisimili-
518 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP XIV
tude that those who beheld it expected the perspiration to fall from the pic-
ture, and the athlete to drop from exhaustion. He drew an immense mural
of The People of Athens, representing them as implacable and merciful,
proud and humble, fierce and timid, fickle and generous and so faithfully
that the Athenian public, we are informed, realized for the first time its own
complex and contradictory character. 30
A great rivalry brought him into public competition with Zeuxis. The
latter painted some grapes so naturally that birds tried to eat them. The
judges were enthusiastic about the picture, and Zeuxis, confident of victory,
bade Parrhasius draw aside the curtain that concealed the Ephesian's paint-
ing. But the curtain proved to be a part of the picture, and Zeuxis, hav-
ing himself been deceived, handsomely acknowledged his defeat. Zeuxis
suffered no loss of reputation. At Crotona he agreed to paint a Helen for
the temple of Lacinian Hera, on condition that the five loveliest women of
the city should pose in the nude for him, so that he might select from each
her fairest feature, and combine them all in a second goddess of beauty. 21
Penelope, too, found new life under his brush; but he admired more his
portrait of an athlete, and wrote under it that men would find it easier to
criticize him than to equal him. All Greece enjoyed his conceit, and talked
about him as much as of any dramatist, statesmen, or general. Only the
prize fighters outdid his fame.
HI. THE MASTERS OF SCULPTURE
L Methods
None the less painting remained slightly alien to the Greek genius, which
loved form more than color, and made even the painting of the classic age
(if we may judge it from hearsay) a statuesque study in line and design
rather than a sensuous seizure of the colors of life. The Hellene delighted
rather in sculpture: he filled his home, his temples, and his graves with terra-
cotta statuettes, worshiped his gods with images of stone, and marked the
tombs of his departed with stelae reliefs that are among the commonest and
most moving products of Greek art. The artisans of the stelae were simple
workers who carved by rote, and repeated a thousand times the familiar
theme of the quiet parting, with clasped hands, of the living from the dead.
But the theme itself is noble enough to bear repetition, for it shows classic
restraint at its best, and teaches even a romantic soul that feeling speaks
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 319
with most power when it lowers its voice. These slabs show us the dead
most often in some characteristic occupation of life a child playing with a
hoop, a girl carrying a jar, a warrior proud in his armor, a young woman
admiring her jewels, a boy reading a book while his dog lies content but
watchful under his chair. Death in these stelae is made natural, and there-
fore forgivable.
More complex, and supreme in their kind, are the sculptural reliefs of this
age. In one of them Orpheus bids a lingering farewell to Eurydice, whom
Hermes has reclaimed for the nether world; 22 in another Demeter gives to Trip-
tolemus the golden grain by which he is to establish agriculture in Greece;
here some of the coloring still adheres to the stone, and suggests the warmth
and brilliance of Greek relief in the Golden Age. 23 Still more beautiful is The
Birth of Aphrodite, carved on one side of the "Ludovisi Throne"* by an un-
known sculptor of presumably Ionian training. Two goddesses are raising
Aphrodite from the sea; her thin wet garment clings to her form and reveals
it in all the splendor of maturity; the head is semi-Asiatic, but the drapery of
the attendant deities, and the soft grace of their pose, bear the stamp of the
sensitive Greek eye and hand. On another side of the "throne" a nude girl
plays the double flute. On a third side a veiled woman prepares her lamp for
the evening; perhaps the face and garments here are even nearer to perfection
than on the central piece.
The advance of the fifth-century sculptor upon his forebears is impressive.
Frontality is abandoned, foreshortening deepens perspective, stillness gives
place to movement, rigidity to life. Indeed, when Greek statuary breaks
through the old conventions and shows man in action, it is an artistic revolu-
tion; rarely before, in Egypt or the Near East, or in pre-Marathon Greece,
has any sculpture in the round been caught in action. These developments
owe much to the freshened vitality and buoyancy of Greek life after
Salamis, and more to the patient study of motile anatomy by master and
apprentice through many generations. "Is it not by modeling your works
on living beings," asks Socrates, sculptor and philosopher, "that you make
your statues appear alive? . . . And as our different attitudes cause the play
of certain muscles of our body, upwards or downwards, so that some are
contracted and some stretched, some wrung and some relaxed, is it not by
expressing these efforts that you give greater truth and verisimilitude to
your works?" 24 The Periclean sculptor is interested in every feature of the
* A block of marble discovered in Rome in 1887 when the Villa Ludovisi was torn down.
The original is in the Museo delle Terme in Rome; there is a good copy in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
320 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIV
body-in the abdomen as much as the face, in the marvelous play of the
elastic flesh over the moving framework of the bones, in the swelling of
muscles, tendons, and veins, in the endless wonders of the structure and
action of hands and ears and feet; and he is fascinated by the difficulty of
molding the extremities. He does not often use models to pose for him in a
studio; for the most part he is content to watch the men stripped and active
in the palaestra or on the athletic field, and the women solemnly marching
in the religious processions, or naturally absorbed in their domestic tasks.
It is for this reason, and not through modesty, that he centers his studies of
anatomy upon the male, and in his portraits of women substitutes the re-
finements of drapery for anatomical detail-though he makes the drapery as
transparent as he dares. Tired of the stiff skirts of Egypt and archaic Greece
he loves to show feminine robes agitated by a breeze, for here again he
catches the quality of motion and lif e.
He uses almost any workable material that comes to his hand wood,
ivory, bone, terra cotta, limestone, marble, silver, gold; sometimes, as in the
chryselephantine statues of Pheidias, he uses gold on the raiment and ivory
for the flesh. In the Peloponnesus bronze is the sculptor's favorite material,
for he admires its dark tints as well adapted to represent the bodies of men
tanned by nudity under the sun; and not knowing the rapacity of man he
dreams that it is more durable than stone. In Ionia and Attica he prefers
marble; its difficulty stimulates him, its firmness lets him chisel it safely, its
translucent smoothness seems designed to convey the rosy color and deli-
cate texture of a woman's skin. Near Athens the sculptor discovers the
marble of Mr. Pentelicus, and observes how its iron content mellows with
time and weather into a vein of gold glowing through the stone; and with
the obstinate patience that is half of genius he slowly carves the quarries
into living statuary. When he works in bronze the fifth-century sculptor
uses the method of hollow casting by the process of tire perdu, or lost wax:
i.e., he makes a model in plaster or clay, overlaps it with a thin coat of wax,
covers it all with a mold of plaster or clay perforated at many points, and
places the figure in a furnace whose heat melts the wax, which runs out
through the holes; then he pours molten bronze into the mold at the top till
the metal fills all the space before occupied by the wax; he cools the figure,
removes the outer mold, and files and polishes, lacquers or paints or gilds,
the bronze into the final form. If he prefers marble he begins with the un-
shaped block, unaided by any system of pointing;* he works freehand, and
* A method of indicating the depth to which, at various points, a block of sculptural ma-
terial is to be cut by a carver before the artist takes it in hand. This process came into use in
Hellenistic Greece. 25
CHAP.XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE $21
for the most part guides himself by the eye instead of by instruments; 26 blow
by blow he removes the superfluous until the perfection that he has con-
ceived takes shape in the stone, and, in Aristotle's phrase, matter becomes
form.
His subjects range from gods to animals, but they must all be physically
admirable; he has no use for weaklings, for intellectuals, for abnormal types,
or for old women or men. He does well with the horse, but indifferently
with other animals. He does better with women, and some of his anony-
mous masterpieces, like the meditative young lady holding her robe on her
breast in the Athens Museum, achieve a quiet loveliness that does not lend
itself to words. He is at his best with athletes, for these he admires without
stint, and can observe without hindrance; now and then he exaggerates their
prowess, and crosses their abdomens with incredible muscles; but despite
this fault he can cast bronzes like that found in the sea near Anticythera,
and alternatively named an Ephebos, or a Perseus whose hand once held
Medusa's snake-haired head. Sometimes he catches a youth or a girl ab-
sorbed in some simple and spontaneous action, like the boy drawing a thorn
from his foot.* But his country's mythology is still the leading inspiration
of his art. That terrible conflict between philosophy and religion which
runs through the thought of the fifth century does not show yet on the
monuments; here the gods are still supreme; and if they are dying they are
nobly transmuted into the poetry of art. Does the sculptor who shapes in
bronze the powerful Zeus of Artemisiumt really believe that he is model-
ing the Law of the World? Does the artist who carves the gentle and sor-
rowful Dionysus of the Delphi Museum know, in the depths of his inarticu-
late understanding, that Dionysus has been shot down by the arrows of
philosophy, and that the traditional features of Dionysus' successor, Christ,
are already previsioned in this head?
2. Schools
If Greek sculpture achieved so much in the fifth century, it was in part
because each sculptor belonged to a school, and had his place in a long
lineage of masters and pupils carrying on the skills of their art, checking the
extravagances of independent individualities, encouraging their specific
abilities, disciplining them with a sturdy grounding in the technology and
achievements of the past, and forming them, through this interplay of talent
* In the Capitoline Museum, Rome; probably a copy of a fifth-century Greek original.
322 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
and law, into a greater art than often comes to genius isolated and unruled.
Great artists are more frequently the culmination of a tradition than its
overthrow; and though rebels are the necessary variants in the natural his-
tory of art, it is only when their new line has been steadied with heredity
and chastened with time that it generates supreme personalities.
Five schools performed this function in Periclean Greece: those of
Rhegium, Sicyon, Argos, Aegina, and Attica. About 496 another Pythago-
ras of Samos settled at Rhegium, cast a Philoctetes that won him Mediter-
ranean fame, and put into the faces of his statues such signs of passion, pain,
and age as shocked all Greek sculptors till those of the Hellenistic period
decided to imitate him. At Sicyon Canachus and his brother Aristocles car-
ried on the work begun a century earlier by Dipoenus and Scyllis of Crete.
Gallon and Onatas brought distinction to Aegina by their skill with bronze;
perhaps it was they who made the Aegina pediments. At Argos Ageladas
organized the transmission of sculptural technique in a school that reached
its apex in Polycleitus.
Coming from Sicyon, Polycleitus made himself popular in Argos by de-
signing for its temple of Hera, about 422, a gold and ivory statue of the
matron goddess, which the age ranked second only to the chryselephantine
immensities of Pheidias.* At Ephesus he joined in a competition with
Pheidias, Cresilas, and Phradmon to make an Amazon for the temple of
Artemis; the four artists were made judges of the result; each, the story
goes, named his own work best, Polycleitus' second best; and the prize was
given to the Sicyonian.f 27 But Polycleitus loved athletes more than women
or gods. In the famous Diadumenos (of which the best surviving copy is in
the Athens Museum) he chose for representation that moment in which the
victor binds about his head the fillet over which the judges are to place the
laurel wreath. The chest and abdomen are too muscular for belief, but the
body is vividly posed upon one foot, and the features are a definition of
classic regularity. Regularity was the fetish of Polycleitus; it was his life
aim to find and establish a canon or rule for the correct proportion of every
part in a statue; he was the Pythagoras of sculpture, seeking a divine mathe-
matics of symmetry and form. The dimensions of any part of a perfect
body, he thought, should bear a given ratio to the dimensions of any one
part, say the index finger. The Polycleitan canon called for a round head,
broad shoulders, stocky torso, wide hips, and short legs, making all in all a
* We have perhaps an echo of its majesty in the noble head of Juno in the British Museum,
reputed to be a copy from Polycleitus.
t Perhaps an Amazon in the Vatican is a Roman copy of this work.
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 323
figure rather of strength than of grace. The sculptor was so fond of his
canon that he wrote a treatise to expound it, and molded a statue to illustrate
it. Probably this was the Doryphoros, or Spear Bearer, of which the Naples
Museum has a Roman copy; here again is the brachycephalic head, the
powerful shoulders, the short trunk, the corrugated musculature overflow-
ing the groin. Lovelier is the Westmacott Ephebos of the British Museum,
where the lad has feelings as well as muscles, and seems lost in a gentle medi-
tation on something else than his own strength. Through these figures the
canon of Polycleitus became for a time a law to the sculptors of the Pelopon-
nesus; it influenced even Pheidias, and ruled till Praxiteles overthrew it with
that rival canon of tall, slim elegance which survived through Rome into
the statuary of Christian Europe.
Myron mediated between the Peloponnesian and the Attic schools. Born
at Eleutherae, living at Athens, and (says Pliny 28 ) studying for a while with
Ageladas, he learned to unite Peloponnesian masculinity with Ionian grace.
What he added to all the schools was motion: he saw the athlete not, like
Polycleitus, before or after the contest, but in it; and realized his vision so
well in bronze that no other sculptor in history has rivaled him in portray-
ing the male body in action. About 470 he cast the most famous of athletic
statues the Discobolos or Discus Thrower* The wonder of the male
frame is here complete: the body carefully studied in all those movements
of muscle, tendon, and bone that are involved in the action; the legs and
arms and trunk bent to give the fullest force to the throw; the face not dis-
torted with effort, but calm in the confidence of ability; the head not heavy
or brutal, but that of a man of blood and refinement, who could write books
if he would condescend. This chef-d'oeuvre was only one of Myron's
achievements; his contemporaries valued it, but ranked even more highly
his Athena and Marsyas^ and his Ladas. Athena here is too lovely for the
purpose; no one could guess that this demure virgin is watching with calm
content the flaying of the defeated flutist. Myron's Marsyas is George
Bernard Shaw caught in an unseemly but eloquent pose; he has played for
the last time, and is about to die; but he will not die without a speech. Ladas
was an athlete who succumbed to the exhaustion of victory; Myron por-
trayed him so realistically that an old Greek, seeing the statue, cried out:
"Like as thou wert in life, O Ladas, breathing forth thy panting soul, such
* The Museo delle Terme has the torso of a fine marble copy by a Roman artist. The
Munich Antiquarium has a late copy in bronze; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a copy
uniting the Vatican torso with the head from the Palazzo Lancelot*!.
t There is a good copy of the Lateran copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
324 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
hath Myron wrought thee in bronze, stamping on all thy body thine eager-
ness for the victor's crown." And of Myron's Heifer the Greeks said that
it could do everything but moo/ 8
The Attic or Athenian school added to the Peloponnesians and to Myron
what woman gives to man beauty, tenderness, delicacy, and grace; and
because in doing this it still retained a masculine element of strength, it
reached a height that sculpture may never attain again. Calamis was still a
little archaic, and Nesiotes and Critius, in casting a second group of Tyran-
nicides, did not free themselves from the rigid simplicity of the sixth cen-
tury; Lucian warns orators not to behave like such lifeless figures. But
when, about 423, Paeonius of Thracian Mende, after studying sculpture at
Athens, made for the Messenians a Nike, or Victory, he touched heights of
grace and loveliness that no Greek would reach again until Praxiteles; and
not even Praxiteles would surpass the flow of this drapery, or the ecstasy of
this motion.*
3. Pheidias
From 447 to 438 Pheidias and his aides were absorbed in carving the
statues and reliefs of the Parthenon. As Plato was first a dramatist and then
became a dramatic philosopher, so Pheidias was first a painter and then be-
came a pictorial sculptor. He was the son of a painter, and studied for a
while under Polygnotus; from him, presumably, he learned design and com-
position, and the grouping of figures for a total effect; from him, it may be,
he acquired that "grand style" which made him the greatest sculptor in
Greece. But painting did not satisfy him; he needed more dimensions. He
took up sculpture, and perhaps studied the bronze technique of Ageladas.
Patiently he made himself master of every branch of his art.
He was already an old man when, about 438, he formed his Athene
Tarthenos, for he depicted himself on its shield as aged and bald, and not
unacquainted with grief. No one expected him to carve with his own hands
the hundreds of figures that filled the metopes, frieze, and pediments of the
Parthenon; it was enough that he superintended all Periclean building, and
designed the sculptural ornament; he left it to his pupils, above all to
Alcamenes, to execute the plans. He himself, however, made three statues
* The Nike was pieced together from fragments unearthed by the Germans at Olympia in
1890, and is now in the Olympia Museum.-Almost as beautiful are the Nereids, or Sea
Maidens, which were found headless among the ruins of a monument in Lycian Xanthus,
and are now in the British Museum. The Greek spirit had penetrated even into non-Greek
Asia.
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 3 2 j
of the city's goddess for the Acropolis. One was commissioned by Athenian
colonists in Lemnos; it was of bronze, a little larger than life, and so deli-
cately molded that Greek critics considered this Lemnmn Athena the most
beautiful of Pheidias' works.* 30 Another was the Athene Promachos, a
colossal bronze representation of the goddess as the warlike defender of her
city; it stood between the Propylaea and the Erechtheum, rose with its
pedestal to a height of seventy feet, and served as a beacon to mariners
and a warning to enemies. f The most famous of the three, the Athene
Parthenos, stood thirty-eight feet high in the interior of the Parthenon, as
the virgin goddess of wisdom and chastity. For this culminating figure
Pheidias wished to use marble, but the people would have nothing less
than ivory and gold. The artist used ivory for the visible body, and forty-
four talents (2545 Ibs.) of gold for the robe; 32 furthermore, he adorned it
with precious metals, and elaborate reliefs on the helmet, the sandals, and
the shield. It was so placed that on Athena's feast day the sun would shine
through the great doors of the temple directly upon the brilliant drapery
and pallid face of the Virgin.J
The completion of the work brought no happiness to Pheidias, for some
of the gold and ivory assigned to him for the statue disappeared from his
studio and could not be accounted for. The foes of Pericles did not over-
look this opportunity. They charged Pheidias with theft, and convicted
him. But the people of Olympia interceded for him, and paid his bail of
forty (?) talents, on condition that he come to Olympia and make a chrys-
elephantine statue for the temple of Zeus; 31 they were glad to trust him with
more ivory and gold. A special workshop was built for him and his assistants
near the temple precincts, and his brother Panaenus was commissioned to
decorate the throne of the statue and the walls of the temple with paint-
ings. 85 Pheidias was enamored of size, and made his seated 'Leus sixty feet
high, so that when it was placed within the temple critics complained that
the god would break through the roof if he should take it into his head to
stand up. On the "dark brows" and "ambrosial locks" 38 of the Thunderer,
Pheidias placed a crown of gold in the form of olive branches and leaves; in
* No authentic copy remains.
t It was carried off to Constantinople about A.D. 330, and -appears to have been destroyed in
a riot there in 12035
:f:If we may judge from the "Lenormant" and "Varvaka" models of this statue that are
preserved in the Athens Museum, we should not have cared much for the Athene Parthenos.
The first has a stout frame and a swollen face, and the breast of the second is crawling with
sacred snakes.
Ca. 438. There is much uncertainty about the date, and about the sequence of events in
the later years of Pheidias' life. 33
326 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XIV
the right hand he set a. small statue of Victory, also in ivory and gold; in the
left hand a scepter inlaid with precious stones; on the body a golden robe
engraved with flowers; and on the feet sandals of solid gold. The throne
was of gold, ebony, and ivory; at its base were smaller statues of Victory,
Apollo, Artemis, Niobe, and Theban lads kidnaped by the Sphinx. 87 The
final result was so impressive that legend grew around it: when Pheidias had
finished, we are told, he begged for a sign from heaven in approval; where-
upon a bolt of lightning struck the pavement near the statue's base a sign
which, like most celestial messages, admitted of diverse interpretations.*
The work was listed among the Seven Wonders of the World, and all who
could afford it made a pilgrimage to see the incarnate god. Aemilius Paullus,
the Roman who conquered Greece, was struck with awe on seeing the
colossus; his expectations, he confessed, had been exceeded by the
reality. 38 Dio Chrysostom called it the most beautiful image on earth, and
added, as Beethoven was to say of Beethoven's music: "If one who is heavy-
laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortune and sorrow in life,
and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he
would forget all the griefs and troubles that befall the life of man." 30 "The
beauty of the statue," said Quintilian, "even made some addition to the
received religion; the majesty of the work was equal to the god."*
Of Pheidias' last years there is no unchallenged account. One story pic-
tures him as returning to Athens and dying in jail; tt another lets him stay in
Elis, only to have Elis put him to death in 432;" there is not much to choose
between these denouements. His pupils carried on his work, and attested
his success as a teacher by almost equaling him. Agoracritus, his favorite,
carved a famous Nemesis; Alcamenes made an Aphrodite of the Gardens
which Lucian ranked with the highest masterpieces of statuary, t 43 The
school of Pheidias came to an end with the fifth century, but it left Greek
sculpture considerably further advanced than it had found it. Through
Pheidias and his followers the art had neared perfection at the very moment
when the Peloponnesian War began the ruin of Athens. Technique had
been mastered, anatomy was understood, lif e and movement and grace had
been poured into bronze and stone. But the characteristic achievement of
Pheidias was the attainment and definitive expression of the classic style, the
"grand style" of Winckelmann: strength reconciled with beauty, feeling
with restraint, motion with repose, flesh and bone with mind and soul.
Here, after five centuries of effort, the famed "serenity" so imaginatively
* Nothing remains of this Zeus but fragments of the pedestal,
f A Draped Venus in the Louvre may be a copy of this statue.
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 327
ascribed to the Greeks was at least conceived; and the passionate and turbu-
lent Athenians, contemplating the figures of Pheidias, might see how nearly,
if only in creative sculptury, men for a moment had been like gods.
IV. THE BUILDERS
1. The Progress of Architecture
During the fifth century the Doric order consolidated its conquest of Greece.
Among all the Greek temples built in this prosperous age only a few Ionic
shrines survive, chiefly the Erechtheum and the temple of Nike Apteros on the
Acropolis. Attica remained faithful to Doric, yielding to the Ionic order only
so far as to use it for the inner columns of the Propylaea, and to place a frieze
around the Theseum and the Parthenon; perhaps a tendency to make the Doric
column longer and slenderer reveals a further influence of the Ionic style. In
Asia Minor the Greeks imbibed the Oriental love of delicate ornament, and
expressed it in the complex elaboration of the Ionic entablature, and the creation
of a new and more ornate order, the Corinthian. About 430 (as Vitruvius tells
the tale) an Ionian sculptor, Callimachus, was struck by the sight of a basket
of votive offerings, covered with a tile, which a nurse had left upon the tomb
of her mistress; a wild acanthus had grown around the basket and the tile;
and the sculptor, pleased with the natural form so suggested, modified the
Ionic capitals of a temple that he was building at Corinth, by mingling acanthus
leaves with the volutes.** Probably the story is a myth, and the nurse's basket
had less influence than the palm and papyrus capitals of Egypt in generating the
Corinthian style. The new order made little headway in classic Greece; Ictinus
used it for one isolated column in the court of an Ionic temple at Phigalea, and
towards the end of the fourth century it was used for the choragic monument
of Lysicrates. Only under the elegant Romans of the Empire did this delicate
style reach its full development.
All the Greek world was building temples in this period. Cities almost bank-
rupted themselves in rivalry to have the fairest statuary and the largest shrines.
To her massive sixth-century edifices at Samos and Ephesus Ionia added new
Tonic temples at Magnesia, Teos, and Priene. At Assus in the Troad Greek
colonists raised an almost archaic Doric fane to Athena. At the other end of
Hellas Crotona built, about 480, a vast Doric home for Hera; it survived till
1600, when a bishop thought he could make better use of its stones.^ To the
fifth century belong the greatest of the temples at Poseidonia (Paestum),
Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas, and the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus. At
Syracuse the columns still stand of a temple raised to Athena by Gelon I, and
partly preserved by its transformation into a Christian church. At Bassae, near
328 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
Phigalea in the Peloponnesus, Ictimis designed a temple of Apollo strangely
different from his other masterpiece, the Parthenon; here the Doric periptery
enclosed a space occupied by a small naos and a large open court surrounded
by an Ionic colonnade; and around the interior of this court, along the inner
face of the Ionic columns, ran a frieze almost as graceful as the Parthenon's,
and having the added virtue of being visible.*
At Olympia the Elian architect Libon, a generation before the Parthenon,
raised a rival to it in a Doric shrine to Zeus. Six columns stood at each end,
thirteen on either side; perhaps too stout for beauty, and unfortunate in their
material a coarse limestone coated with stucco; the roof, however, was of
Pentelic tiles. Paeonius and Alcamenes, Pausanias tells us, 46 carved for the
pediments powerful figures! portraying on the eastern gable the chariot race
between Pelops and Oenomaus, and on the western gable the struggle of Lapiths
and centaurs. The Lapiths, in Greek legend, were a mountain tribe of Thes-
saly. When Pirithous, their king, married Hippodameia, daughter of King
Oenomaus of Pisa in Elis, he invited the centaurs to the wedding feast. The
centaurs dwelt in the mountains about Pelion; Greek art represented them as
half man and half horse, possibly to suggest their untamed woodland nature, or
because the centaurs were such excellent horsemen that each man and his mount
seemed to be one animal. At the feast these horsemen got drunk, and tried to
carry off the Lapith women. The Lapiths fought bravely for their ladies, and
won. (Greek art never tired of this story, and perhaps used it to symbolize
the clearing of the wilderness from wild beasts, and the straggle between the
human and the bestial in man.) The figures on the east pediment are archaically
stiff and still; those on the west seem hardly of the same period, for though
some of them are crude, and the hair is stylized in ancient fashion, they are alive
with action, and show a mature grasp of sculptural grouping. Startlingly beau-
tiful is the bride, a woman of no fragile slenderness, but of a full-bodied love-
liness that quite explains the war. A bearded centaur has one arm around her
waist, one hand upon her breast; she is about to be snatched from her nuptials,
and yet the artist portrays her features in such calm repose that one suspects
him of having read Lessing or Winckelmann; or perhaps, like any woman, she
is not insensitive to the compliment of desire. Less ambitious and massive, but
more delicately finished, are the extant metopes of the temple, recounting cer-
tain labors of Heracles; one, wherein Heracles holds up the world for Atlas,
stands out as a work of complete mastery. Heracles here is no abnormal giant,
rock-ribbed with musculature, but simply a man of full and harmonious devel-
opment. Before him is Atlas, whose head would adorn the shoulders of Plato.
At the left is one of Atlas' daughters, perfect in the natural beauty of healthy
* Thirty-eight of the columns remain, the walls of the naos, and parts of the inner colon-
nade. Fragments of the frieze are in the British Museum,
f Now in the Olympia Museum,
CHAP.XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 329
womanhood; perhaps the artist had some symbolism in mind when he showed
her gently helping the strong man to bear the weight of the world. The spe-
cialist finds some faults of execution and detail in these half-ruined metopes;
but to an amateur observer the bride, and Heracles, and the daughter of Adas,
are as near to perfection as anything in the history of sculptural relief.
2. The Reconstruction of Athens
Attica leads all Greece in the abundance and excellence of its fifth-cen-
tury building. Here the Doric style, which tends elsewhere to a bulging
corpulence, takes on Ionian grace and elegance; color is added to line, orna-
ment to symmetry. On a dangerous headland at Sunium those who risked
the sea raised to Poseidon a shrine of which eleven columns stand. At Eleusis
Ictinus designed a spacious temple to Demeter, and under Pericles' persua-
sion Athens contributed funds to make this edifice worthy of the Eleusinian
festival. At Athens the proximity of good marble on Mt. Pentelicus and in
Paros encouraged the artist with the finest of building materials. Seldom,
until our periods of economic breakdown, has a democracy been able or
willing to spend so lavishly on public construction. The Parthenon cost
seven hundred talents ($4,200,000); the Athene Parthenos (which, how-
ever, was a gold reserve as well as a statue) cost $6,000,000; the unfinished
Propylaea, $2,400,000; minor Periclean structures at Athens and the Piraeus,
1 1 8,000,000; sculpture and other decoration, $16,200,000; altogether, in
the sixteen years from 447 to 43 1, the city of Athens voted $57,600,000 for
public buildings, statuary, and painting/ 7 The spread of this sum among
artisans and artists, executives and slaves, had much to do with the pros-
perity of Athens under Pericles.
Imagination can picture vaguely the background of this courageous ad-
venture in art. The Athenians, on their return from Salamis, found their
city almost wholly devastated by the Persian occupation; every edifice of
any value had been burned to the ground. Such a calamity when it does not
destroy the citizens as well as the city, makes them stronger; the "act of
God" clears away many eyesores and unfit habitations; chance accomplishes
what human obstinacy would never allow; and if food can be found
through the crisis, the labor and genius of men create a finer city than be-
fore. The Athenians, even after the war with Persia, were rich in both labor
and genius, and the spirit of victory doubled their will for great enterprise.
In a generation Athens was rebuilt; a new council chamber rose, a new
330 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
prytaneum, new homes, new porticoes, new walls of defense, new wharves
and warehouses at a new port. About 446 Hippodamus of Miletus, chief
town-planner of antiquity, laid out a new Piraeus, and set a new style, by
replacing the old chaos of haphazard and winding alleys with broad, straight
streets crossing at right angles. On an elevation a mile northwest of the
Acropolis unknown artists raised that smaller Parthenon known as the
Theseum, or temple of Theseus.* Sculptors filled the pediments with
statuary and the metopes with reliefs, and ran a frieze above the inner
columns at both ends. Painters colored the moldings, the triglyphs, metopes,
and frieze, and made bright murals for an interior dimly lit by light shining
through marble tiles, f
The finest work of Pericles' builders was reserved for the Acropolis, the
ancient seat of the city's government and faith. Themistocles began its re-
construction, and planned a temple one hundred feet long, known there-
fore as the Hecatompedon. After his fall the work was abandoned; the
oligarchic party opposed it on the ground that any dwelling for Athena, if
it was not to bring bad luck to Athens, must be built upon the site of the
old temple of Athene Polias (i.e., Athena of the City) , which the Persians
had destroyed. Pericles, caring nothing about superstitions, adopted the
site of the Hecatompedon for the Parthenon, and, though the priests pro-
tested to the end, went on with his plans. On the southwestern slope of the
Acropolis his artists erected an Odeum, or Music Hall, unique in Athens
for its cone-shaped dome. It offered a handle to conservative satirists, who
thenceforth referred to Pericles' conical head as his odeion, or hall of song.
The Odeum was built for the most part of wood, and soon succumbed to
time. In this auditorium musical performances were presented, and the
Dionysian dramas were rehearsed; and there, annually, were held the con-
tests instituted by Pericles in vocal and instrumental music. The versatile
statesman himself often acted as a judge in these competitions.
The road to the summit, in classical days, was devious and gradual, and
was flanked with statues and votive offerings. Near the top was a majes-
tically broad flight of marble steps, buttressed with bastions on either side.
* The name is a mistake, since this temple, erected in 425, could not have been the
Theseum to which, in 469, Cimon brought the supposed bones of Theseus; but time sanc-
tifies error as well as theft, and the traditional name is commonly retained for lack of a
certain designation.
fThe Theseum is the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings; even so it lacks its
marble tiles, its rnurals, its interior statuary, its pedimental sculptures, and nearly all of its
external coloring. The metopes axe so badly damaged that their reliefs are almost undis-
tinguishable.
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 33!
On the south bastion Callicrates raised a miniature Ionic temple to Athena
as Nike Apteros, or the Wingless Victory.* Elegant reliefs (partly pre-
served in the Athens Museum) adorned the external balustrade with figures
of winged Victories bringing to Athens their far-gathered spoils. These
Nikai are in the noblest style of Pheidias, less vigorous than the massive god-
desses of the Parthenon, but even more graceful in motion, and more deli-
cate and natural in their protrayal of drapery. The Victory tying her
sandals deserves her name, for she is one of the triumphs of Greek art.
At the top of the Acropolis steps Mnesicles built, in elaboration of
Mycenaean pylons, an entrance with five openings, before each of which
stood a Doric portico; these colonnades in time gave to the whole edifice
their name of Propylaea, or Before the Gates. Each portico carried a
frieze of triglyphs and metopes, and was crowned with a pediment. Within
the passageway was an Ionic colonnade, boldly inserted within a Doric
form. The interior of the northern wing was decorated with paintings by
Polygnotus and others, and contained votive tablets (pinakes) of terra cotta
or marble; hence its name of Pinakotheka, or Hall of Tablets. A small south
wing remained unfinished; war, or the reaction against Pericles, put a stop
to the work, and left an ungainly mass of beautiful parts as a gateway to
the Parthenon.
Within these gates, on the left, was the strangely Oriental Erechtheum.
This, too, was overtaken by war: not more than half of it was finished when
the disaster of Aegospotami reduced Athens to chaos and poverty. It was
begun after Pericles' death, under the prodding of conservatives who feared
that the ancient heroes Erechtheus and Cecrops, as well as the Athena of
the older shrine, and the sacred snakes that haunted the spot, would punish
Athens for building the Parthenon on another site. The varied purposes of
the structure determined its design, and destroyed its unity. One wing was
dedicated to Athene Polias, and housed her ancient image; another was
devoted to Erechtheus and Poseidon. The naos or cella, instead of being
enclosed by a unifying peristyle, was here buttressed with three separate
porticoes. The northern and eastern porches were upheld by slender Ionic
* Statues of Nike, or Victory, were often made without wings, so that she might not be
able to abandon the city. The temple was pulled down by the Turks in AJX 1687 to make a
fortress. Lord Elgin rescued some slabs of the frieze and sent them to the British Museum.
In 1835 the stones of the temple were put together again; the restored building was replaced
on the original site, and terra-cotta casts were substituted for the missing parts of the badly
damaged frieze.
332 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
columns as beautiful as any of their kind.* In the northern porch was a
perfect portal, adorned with a molding of marble flowers. In the cella was
the primitive wooden statue of Athena, which the pious believed had fallen
from heaven; there, too, was the great lamp whose fire was never extin-
guished, and which Callimachus, the Cellini of his time, had fashioned of
gold and embellished with acanthus leaves, like his Corinthian capitals. The
south portico was the famous Porch of the Maidens, or Caryatids. f These
patient women were descended, presumably, from the basket bearers of the
Orient; and an early caryatid at Tralles, in Asia Minor, betrays the Eastern-
probably the Assyrian-origin of the form. The drapery is superb, and the
natural flexure of the knee gives an impression of ease; but even these siTb-
stantial ladies seem hardly strong enough to convey that sense of sturdy
and reliable support which the finest architecture gives. It was an aberra-
tion of taste that Pheidias would probably have forbidden.
3. The Parthenon
In 447 Ictinus, aided by Calibrates, and under the general supervision of
Pheidias and Pericles, began to build a new temple for Athene Parthenos.
In the western end of the structure he placed a room for her maiden priest-
esses, and called it the room "of the virgins" ton parthenon; and in the
course of careless time this name of a part, by a kind of architectural met-
aphor, was applied to the whole. Ictinus chose as his material the white
marble of Mt. Pentelicus, veined with iron grains. No mortar was used;
the blocks were so accurately squared and so finely finished that each stone
grasped the next as if the two were one. The column drums were bored
to let a small cylinder of olivewood connect them, and permit each drum to
be turned around and around upon the one below it until the meeting sur-
faces were ground so smooth that the division between drums was almost
invisible. 48
* These columns, rather than those of the Parthenon, set the style for later architecture.
The foot of each was modulated into the stylobate by an "Attic base" of three members,
articulated by fillets or bands. The top of the column was graduated into the voluted capital
by a band of flowers. The entablature had a richly decorated molding, a frieze of black
stone, and, tinder the cornice, a series of reliefs. The egg-and-dart and honeysuckle orna-
ment of the molding was as carefully carved as the sculpture; the artists were paid as much
for a foot of such molding as for a figure in the frieze."
t This term was applied to the figures by the Roman, architect Vitruvius, from the name
given to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae in Laconia. The Athenians called them simply
korai, or Maidens.
CHAP.XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 333
The style was pure Doric, and of classic simplicity. The design was rec-
tangular, for the Greeks did not care for circular or conical forms; hence
there were no arches in Greek architecture, though Greek architects must
have been familiar with them. The dimensions were modest: 228x101x65
feet. Probably a system of proportion, like the Polycleitan canon, prevailed
in every part of the building, all measurements bearing a given relation to
the diameter of the column. 60 At Poseidonia the height of the column was
four times its diameter; here it was five; and the new form mediated success-
fully between Spartan sturdiness and Attic elegance. Each column swelled
slightly (three quarters of an inch in diameter) from base to middle, tapered
toward the top, and leaned toward the center of its colonnade; each corner
column was a trifle thicker than the rest. Every horizontal line of stylobate
and entablature was curved upward towards its center, so that the eye
placed at one end of any supposedly level line could not see the farther half
of the line. The metopes were not quite square, but were designed to ap-
pear square from below. All these curvatures were subtle corrections for
optical illusions that would otherwise have made stylobate lines seem to
sink in the center, columns to diminish upward from the base, and corner
columns to be thinner and outwardly inclined. Such adjustments required
considerable knowledge of mathematics and optics, and constituted but one
of those mechanical features that made the temple a perfect union of science
and art. In the Parthenon, as in current physics, every straight line was a
curve, and, as in a painting, every part was drawn toward the center in
subtle composition. The result was a certain flexibility and grace that
seemed to give life and freedom to the stones.
Above the plain architrave ran an alternating series of triglyphs and
metopes. In the ninety-two metopes were high reliefs recounting once
more the struggle of "civilization" against "savagery" in the wars of Greeks
and Trojans, Greeks and Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, giants and gods.
These slabs are clearly the work of many hands and unequal skills; they do
not match in excellence the reliefs of the cella frieze, though some of the
centaur heads are Rembrandts in stone. In the gable pediments were statu-
ary groups carved in the round and in heroic size. In the east pediment, over
the entrance, the spectator was allowed to see the birth of Athena from the
head of Zeus. Here was a powerful recumbent "Theseus/'* a giant capable
of philosophical meditation and civilized repose; and a fine figure of Iris, the
female Hermes, with drapery clinging and yet blown by the wind for
* The naming of the Parthenon figures is mostly conjectural.
334 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
Pheidias considers it an ill wind that does not disturb some robe. Here also
was a majestic "Hebe," the goddess of youth, who filled the cups of the
Olympians with nectar; and here were three imposing "Fates." In the left
corner four horses' heads-eyes flashing, nostrils snorting, mouths foaming
with speed-announced the rising of the sun, while in the right corner the
moon drove her chariot to her setting; these eight are the finest horses in
sculptural history. In the west pediment Athena contested with Poseidon
the lordship of Attica. Here again were horses, as if to redeem the forked
absurdity of man; and reclining figures that represented, with unrealistic
magnificence, Athens' modest streams. Perhaps the male figures are too
muscular, and the female too spacious; but seldom has statuary been grouped
so naturally, or so skillfully adjusted to the narrowing spaces of a pediment.
"All other statues," said Canova, with some hyperbole, "are of stone; these
are of flesh and blood."
More attractive, however, are the men and women of the frieze. For 525
feet along the top of the outer wall of the cella, within the portico, ran this
most famous of all reliefs. Here, presumably, the youths and maids of
Attica are bearing homage and gifts to Athena on the festival day of the
Panathenaic games. One part of the procession moves along the west and
north sides, another along the south side, to meet on the east front before
the goddess, who proudly offers to Zeus and other Olympians the hospital-
ity of her city and a share of her spoils. Handsome knights move in graceful
dignity on still handsomer steeds; chariots support dignitaries, while simple
folk are happy to join in on foot; pretty girls and quiet old men carry olive
branches and trays of cakes; attendants bear on their shoulders jugs of sacred
wine; stately women convey to the goddess the peplos that they have woven
and embroidered for her in long anticipation of this holy day; sacrificial vic-
tims move with bovine patience or angry prescience to their fate; maidens
of high degree bring utensils of ritual and sacrifice; and musicians play on
their flutes deathless ditties of no tone. Seldom have animals or men been
honored with such painstaking art. With but two and a quarter inches of
relief the sculptors were able, by shading and modeling, to achieve such an
illusion of depth that one horse or horseman seems to be beyond another,
though the nearest is raised no farther from the background than the rest. 61
Perhaps it was a mistake to place this extraordinary relief so high that men
could not comfortably contemplate it, or exhaust its excellence. Pheidias
excused himself, doubtless with a twinkle in his eye, on the ground that the
gods could see it; but the gods were dying while he carved.
Beneath the seated deities of the frieze was the entrance to the inner
FIG. i-Hygiaea, Goddess of Health
Athens Museum
(See page 499)
FIG. 2-The Cup-Bearer
From the Palace of Minos.
Heracleum Museum
(See page 20)
FIG. 3-The "Snake Goddess"
Boston Museum
(See page 17)
FIG. 5 A Cup from Vaphio
Athens Museum
(See page 32)
FIG. 6 Mask of "Agamemwn"
Athens Museum
(See page 32)
FIG. 7 Warrior, from temple of Apbaea at Aegma
Munich Glyptothek
(See page 95)
FIG. 10-^ Krater Vase, With Athena, and Heracles
Louvre, Paris
(See page 220)
FIG. 13 A Kore, or Maiden
Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 222)
FIG. 14 The "Choiseul-Gouffiei
Apollo"
Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 222)
<i B c
Hi
I * ;
I* 8
FIG. ijOrphetis, Eurydice, and Hermes
Naples Museum
(See page 319)
c <
$
R;
Sfelg.
m
FIG. 23 The Discus Thrower. Roman copy,, after Myron (?)
Museo delle Terme, Rome
(See page 323)
FIG. 24 The "Dreaming Athena"
An anonymous relief, probably of the fifth century.
Acropolis Museum. Athens
(See page 319)
FIG. 2S-Nike Fixing Her Sandal
From the temple of Nike Apteros. Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 331)
FIG. ^o-Tbe Charioteer of Delphi
Delphi Museum
CSee page 221;
FIG. 31 A Caryatid from the Erechtheinn
British Museum
(See page 332)
FIG. 33 Goddesses and "7w"
East pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum
(See page 333)
FIG. w u Cecrop$ and Daughter"
West pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum
(See page 334)
FIG. 38^4 Tanagra Statuette
Metropolitan Museum, New York
(See page 49^;
FIG. 43 The Hermes of Praxiteles
Olympia Museum
(See pa?e aq6>
FIG. 48 The Apoxyomenos. A Roman copy, after Lysippus (?)
Vatican, Rome
(See page 498)
FIG. 51 The Aphrodite of Cyrene
Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 52 The Demeter of Cnldus
British Museum
(See page 499)
FIG. 53 Altar of Zeus at Pergamum
A reconstruction. State Museum, Berlin
(See page 618)
FIG. 56 The Laocoon
Vatican, Rome
(See page 622)
FIG. syThe Farnese Bull
Naples Museum
(See page 623)
p
<-<l
r
?s
il
FIG. 6iThe "Victory of Samothrace"
Louvre, Paris
f See page 624)
FIG. 62 Hellenistic Portrait Head
Naples Museum
CHAP. XIV) THE ART OF PERICLEAN GREECE 335
temple. The interior was relatively small; much of the space was taken up
by two double-storied Doric colonnades that supported the roof, and
divided the naos into a nave and two aisles; while in the western end Athene
Parthenos blinded her worshipers with the gold of her raiment, or fright-
ened them with her spear and shield and snakes. Behind her was the Room
of the Virgins, adorned with four columns in the Ionic style. The marble
tiles of the roof were sufficiently translucent to let some light into the nave,
and yet opaque enough to keep out the heat; moreover, piety, like love,
deprecates the sun. The cornices were decorated with careful detail, sur-
mounted with terra-cotta acroteria, and armed with gargoyles to carry off
the rain. Many parts of the temple were painted, not in subdued colors but
in bright tints of yellow, blue, and red. The marble was washed with a
stain of saifron and milk; the triglyphs and parts of the molding were blue;
the frieze had a blue background, the metopes a red, and every figure in
them was colored. 62 A people accustomed to a Mediterranean sky can bear
and relish brighter hues than those that suit the clouded atmosphere of
northern Europe. Today, shorn of its colors, the Parthenon is most beauti-
ful at night, when through every columned space come changing vistas of
sky, or the ever worshipful moon, or the lights of the sleeping city mingling
with the stars.*
Greek art was the greatest of Greek products; for though its masterpieces
have yielded one by one to the voracity of time, their form and spirit still
survive sufficiently to be a guide and stimulus to many arts, many genera-
tions, and many lands. There were faults here, as in all that men do. The
* The Parthenon, like the Erechtheum and the Theseurn, was preserved through its use as a
Christian church; it needed no great change of name, being in each case dedicated to the
Virgin. After the Turkish occupation in 1456 it was transformed into a mosque, and acquired
a minaret. In 1687, when the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turks used the temple to store
each day's supply of powder for their artillery. The Venetian commander, so informed,
ordered his gunners to fire upon the Parthenon. A shell pierced the roof, exploded the
powder, and laid half the building in ruins. After capturing the city Morosini tried also to
take the pediment statuary, but his workmen dropped and smashed the figures in lowering
them. In 1800 Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Turkey, secured permission to remove a
part of the sculptures to the British Museum, on the ground that they would be safer there
than, at Athens against weather and war. His spoils included twelve statues, fifteen metopes,
and fifty-six slabs of the frieze. The Museum's expert on sculpture advised against buying
this material; it was only after ten years of negotiations that the Museum agreed to pay
$175,000 for them, which was less than half what Lord Elgin had spent in securing and
transporting them. 83 A few years later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830),
the Acropolis was twice bombarded, and much of the Erechtheum was destroyed. 8 * Some
metopes of the Parthenon are still in place; a few slabs of the frieze are in the Athens
Museum, and a few others in the Louvre. The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, have built
a replica of the Parthenon, in the same dimensions as the original, with like materials, and, so
far as our knowledge goes, with the same decorations and coloring; and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art contains a small hypothetical reproduction of the interior.
336 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XIV
sculpture was too physical, and rarely reached the soul; it moves us more
often to admire its perfection than to feel its life. The architecture was
narrowly limited in form and style, and clung across a thousand years to the
simple rectangle of the Mycenaean megaron. It achieved almost nothing in
secular fields; it attempted only the easier problems of construction, and
avoided difficult tasks like the arch and the vault, which might have given it
greater scope. It held up its roofs with the clumsy expedient of internal and
superimposed colonnades. It crowded the interior of its temples with statues
whose size was out of proportion to the edifice, and whose ornamentation
lacked the simplicity and restraint that we expect of the classic style.*
But no faults can outweigh the fact that Greek art created the classic
style. The essence of that style if the theme of this chapter may be restated
in closing is order and form: moderation in design, expression, and decora-
tion; proportion in the parts and unity in the whole; the supremacy of rea-
son without the extinction of feeling; a quiet perfection that is content with
simplicity, and a sublimity that owes nothing to size. No other style but
the Gothic has had so much influence; indeed, Greek statuary is still the
ideal, and until yesterday the Greek column dominated architecture to the
discouragement of more congenial forms. It is good that we are freeing
ourselves from the Greeks; even perfection becomes oppressive when it
will not change. But long after our liberation is complete we shall find in-
struction and stimulus in that art which was the life of reason in form, and
in that classic style which was the most characteristic gift of Greece to
mankind.
*One might also note the lack of order in the arrangement of the buildings on the
Acropolis, or in die sacred enclosure at Olympia; but it is difficult to say whether this dis-
order was a defect of taste or an accident of history.
CHAPTER XV
The Advancement of Learning
THE cultural activity of Periclean Greece takes chiefly three forms-
art, drama, and philosophy. In the first, religion is the inspiration; in
the second it is the battleground; in the third it is the victim. Since the
organization of a religious group presumes a common and stable creed,
every religion sooner or later comes into opposition with that fluent and
changeful current of secular thought that we confidently call the progress
of knowledge. In Athens the conflict was not always visible on the surface,
and did not directly affect the masses of the people; the scientists and the
philosophers carried on their work without explicitly attacking the popular
faith, and often mitigated the strife by using the old religious terms as sym-
bols or allegories for their new beliefs; only now and then, as in the indict-
ments of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Diagoras of Melos, Euripides, and Socrates,
did the struggle come out into the open, and become a matter of life and
death. But it was there. It ran through the Periclean age like a major theme,
played in many keys and elaborated in many variations and forms; it was
heard most distinctly in the skeptical discourses of the Sophists and in the
materialism of Dernocritus; it sounded obscurely in the piety of Aeschylus,
in the heresies of Euripides, even in the irreverent banter of the conservative
Aristophanes; and it was violently recapitulated in the trial and death of
Socrates. Around this theme the Athens of Pericles lived its mental life.
I. THE MATHEMATICIANS
Pure science, in fifth-century Greece, was still the handmaiden of philosophy,
and was studied and developed by men who were philosophers rather than
scientists. To the Greeks higher mathematics was an instrument not of prac-
tice but of logic, directed less to the conquest of the physical environment than
to the intellectual construction of an abstract world.
Popular arithmetic, before the Periclean period, was almost primitively
clumsy.* One upright stroke indicated i, two strokes 2, three 3, and four 4; 5,
10, roo, 1000, and 10,000 were expressed by the initial letter of the Greek word
* On later (possibly Periclean) arithmetical notation cf. Chap. XXVIII, sect. I, below.
337
338 THELIFEOF GREECE ( CHAP. XV
for the number pente, deka, hekaton, chilioi, myrioi. Greek mathematics never
achieved a symbol for zero. Like our own it betrayed its Oriental origin by
taking from the Egyptians the decimal system of counting by tens, and from
the Babylonians, in astronomy and geography, the duodecimal or sexagesimal
system of counting by twelves or sixties, as still on our clocks, globes, and
charts. Probably an abacus helped the people with the simpler calculations.
Fractions were painful for them: to work with a complex fraction they reduced
it to an accumulation of fractions having i as their common numerator; so
If was broken down into i + i -{- Tir + aV 1
Of Greek algebra we have no record before the Christian era. Geometry,
however, was a favorite study of the philosophers, again less for its practical
value than for its theoretical interest, the fascination of its deductive logic, its
union of subtlety and clarity, its imposing architecture of thought. Three
problems particularly attracted these mathematical metaphysicians: the squar-
ing of the circle, the trisection of the angle, and the doubling of the cube.
How popular the first puzzle became appears in Aristophanes' Birds, in which
a character representing the astronomer Meton enters upon the stage armed
with ruler and compasses, and undertakes to show "how your circle may be
made a square" i.e., how to find a square whose area will equal that of a given
circle. Perhaps it was such problems as these that led the later Pythagoreans to
formulate a doctrine of irrational numbers and incommensurable quantities.*
It was the Pythagoreans, too, whose studies of the parabola, the hyperbola, and
the ellipse prepared for the epochal work of Apollonius of Perga on conic
sections. 3 About 440 Hippocrates of Chios (not the physician) published the
first known book on geometry, and solved the problem of squaring the lune.t
About 420 Hippias of Elia accomplished the trisection of an angle through the
quadratrk curve. 3 About 410 Democritus of Abdera announced that "in con-
structing lines according to given conditions no one has ever surpassed me, not
even the Egyptians;"* he almost made the boast forgivable by writing four
books on geometry, and finding formulas for the areas of cones and pyramids.*
All in all, the Greeks were as excellent in geometry as they were poor in arith-
metic. Even into their art geometry entered actively, making many forms of
ceramic and architectural ornament, and determining the proportions and cur-
vatures of the Parthenon.
* Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed by either a whole number or a
fraction, like the square root of 2. Incommensurable quantities are those for which no third
quantity can be found which bears to each of them a relation expressible by a rational num-
ber, like the side and diagonal of a square, or the radius and circumference of a circle.
t A moonlike figure made by the arcs of two intersecting circles.
CHAP.XV) THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 339
H. ANAXAGORAS
It was part of the struggle between religion and science that the study of
astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean
age.' At Acragas Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from
one point to another. 7 At Elea Parmenides announced the sphericity of the
earth, divided the planet into five zones, and observed that the moon always
has its bright portion turned toward the sun. 8 At Thebes Philolaus the
Pythagorean deposed the earth from the center of the universe, and reduced
it to the status of one among many planets revolving about a "central fire.'"
Leucippus, pupil of Philolaus, attributed the origin of the stars to the in-
candescent combustion and concentration of material "drawn onward in
the universal movement of the circular vortex." 10 At Abdera Democritus,
pupil of Leucippus and student of Babylonian lore, described the Milky
Way as a multitude of small stars, and summarized astronomic history as
the periodical collision and destruction of an infinite number of worlds."
At Chios Oenopides discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic. 08 Nearly
everywhere among the Greek colonies the fifth century saw scientific de-
velopments remarkable in a period almost devoid of scientific instruments.
But when Anaxagoras tried to do similar work at Athens he found the
mood of the people and the Assembly as hostile to free inquiry as the friend-
ship of Pericles was encouraging. He had come from. Clazomenae about
480 B.C., at twenty years of age. Anaximenes so interested him in the stars
tKat when someone asked him the object of life he answered, "The investi-
gation of sun, moon, and heaven." 13 He neglected his patrimony to chart
the earth and the sky, and fell into poverty while his book On Nature was
acclaimed by the intelligentsia of Athens as the greatest scientific work of
the century.
It carried on the traditions and. speculations of the Ionian school. The
universe, said Anaxagoras, was originally a chaos of diverse seeds (sper-
matti), pervaded by a noiis, or Mind, tenuously physical, and akin to the
source of life and motion in ourselves. And as mind gives order to the chaos
of our actions, so the World Mind gave order to the primeval seeds, setting
them into a rotatory vortex,* and guiding them toward the development of
organic forms." This rotation sorted the seeds into the four elements fire,
air, water, and earth and separated the world into two revolving layers, an
outer one of "ether," and an inner one of air. "In consequence of this violent
* This is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates'
substitute for Zeus.
34 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XV
whirling motion, the surrounding fiery ether tore away stones from the
earth, and kindled them into stars."" The sun and the stars are glowing
masses of rock: "The sun is a red-hot mass many times larger than the
Peloponnesus." 18 When their revolving motion wanes, the stones of the
outer layer fall upon the earth as meteors. 18 The moon is an incandescent
solid, having on its surface plains, mountains, and ravines; 17 it receives its
light from the sun, and is of all heavenly bodies the nearest to the earth. 18
"The moon is eclipsed through the interposition of the earth . . , the sun
through the interposition of the moon." 18 Probably other celestial bodies are
inhabited like the earth; upon them "men are formed, and other animals
that have life; the men dwell in cities, and cultivate fields as we do." 20 Out
of the inner or gaseous layer of our planet successive condensations pro-
duced clouds, water, earth, and stones. Winds are due to rarefactions of
the atmosphere produced by the heat of the sun; "thunder is caused by
the collision of clouds, and lightning by their friction." 21 The quantity of
matter never changes, but all forms begin and pass away; in time the moun-
tains will become the sea. 22 The various forms and objects of the world
are brought into being by increasingly definite aggregations of homo-
geneous parts (homoiomerm} .* All organisms were originally generated
out of earth, moisture, and heat, and thereafter from one another. 81 Man
has developed beyond other animals because his erect posture freed his
hands for grasping things.*
These achievements the foundation of meteorology, the correct ex-
planation of eclipses, a rational hypothesis of planetary formation, the dis-
covery of the borrowed light of the moon, and an evolutionary conception
of animal and human life made Anaxagoras at once the Copernicus and
Darwin of his age. The Athenians might have forgiven him these apergus
had he not neglected his nous in explaining the events of nature and history;
perhaps they suspected that this nous, like Euripides' deus ex machina, was
a device for saving the author's skin. Aristotle notes that Anaxagoras sought
natural explanations everywhere. 28 When a ram with a single horn in the
center of its forehead was brought to Pericles, and a soothsayer interpreted
it as a supernatural omen, Anaxagoras had the animal's skull cleft, and
showed that the brain, instead of filling both sides of the cranium, had
grown upward towards the center, and so had produced the solitary horn.* 7
He aroused the simple by giving a natural explanation of meteors, and re-
duced many mythical figures to personified abstractions. 38
The Athenians took him good-humoredly for a time, merely nicknaming
him nous," But when no other way could be found of weakening Pericles,
CHAP. XV) THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 341
Cleon, his demagogic rival, brought a formal indictment of impiety against
Anaxagoras on the charge that he had described the sun (still to the people
a god) as a mass of stone on fire; and pursued the case so relentlessly that
the philosopher, despite Pericles' brave defense of him, was convicted,*
Having no taste for hemlock, Anaxagoras fled to Lampsacus on the Helles-
pont, where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy.! When news
was brought to him that the Athenians had condemned him to death, he
said, "Nature has long since condemned both them and me." 38 He died a
few years later, aged seventy-three.
The backwardness of the Athenians in astronomy was reflected in their cal-
endar. There was no general Greek calendar: ever) 7 " state had its own; and
each of the four possible points for beginning a new year was adopted some-
where in Greece; even the months changed their names across frontiers. The
Attic calendar reckoned months by the moon, and years by the sun. 81 As twelve
lunar months made only 360 days, a thirteenth month was added every second
year to bring the calendar into harmony with the sun and the seasons. 89 Since
this made the year ten days too long, Solon introduced the custom of having
alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days, arranged into three weeks
(dekades} of ten (occasionally nine) days each; 38 and as an excess of four days
still remained, the Greeks omitted one month every eighth year. In this incred-
ibly devious way they at last arrived at a year of 365 K days. J
Meanwhile a modest degree of progress was made in terrestrial science.
Anaxagoras correctly explained the annual overflow of the Nile as due to the
spring thaws and rains of Ethiopia. 35 Greek geologists attributed the Straits of
Gibraltar to a cleaving earthquake, and the Aegean isles to a subsiding sea~ M
Xanthus of Lydia, about 496, surmised that the Mediterranean and the Red
Sea were formerly connected at Suez; and Aeschylus noted the belief of his
time that Sicily had been torn asunder from Italy by a convulsion of the earth.'
Scylax of Caria (521-485) explored the whole coast of the Mediterranean and
the Black Sea. No Greek seems to have dared so adventurous a voyage of dis-
covery as that which the Carthaginian Hanno, with a fleet of sixty ships, led
through Gibraltar some 2600 miles down the west coast of Africa (ca. 490).
Maps of the Mediterranean world were common in Athens at the end of the
fifth century. Physics, so far as we know, remained undeveloped, though the
curvatures of the Parthenon show considerable knowledge of optics. The
* Ca. 434." Another account places the trial in 4505
f According to a rival story he was imprisoned at Athens, and was awaiting the fatal cup
when Pericles arranged his escape."
$ Herodotus remarks on the superior calendar of the Egyptians. 87 From Egypt the Greets
took the gnomon, or sundial, and from Asia the clepsydra, or water clock, as their instru-
ments for measuring time.
34 2 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XV
Pythagoreans, towards 450, announced the most lasting of Greek scientific
hypotheses the atomic constitution of matter. Empedocles and others ex-
pounded a theory of the evolution of man from lower forms of life, and de-
scribed the slow advance of man from savagery to civilization.* 1
III. HIPPOCRATES
The epochal event in the history of Greek science during the Periclean
age was the rise of rational medicine. Even in the fifth century Greek
medicine was in large measure bound up with religion, and the treatment
of disease was still practiced by the temple priests of Asclepius. This tem-
ple therapy used a combination of empirical medicine with impressive ritual
and charms that touched and released the imagination of the patient; pos-
sibly hypnosis and some form of anesthesia were also employed." Secular
medicine competed with this ecclesiastical medicine. Though both groups
ascribed their origin to Asclepius, the profane Asclepiads rejected religious
aids, made no claim to miraculous cures, and gradually placed medicine
upon a rational basis.
Secular medicine, in fifth-century Greece, took form in four great
schools: at Cos and Cnidus in Asia Minor, at Crotona in Italy, and in Sicily.
At Acragas Empedocles, half philosopher and half miracle man, shared
medical honors with the rational practitioner Acron." As far back as 520
we read of the physician Democedes, who, born at Crotona, practiced
medicine in Aegina, Athens, Samos, and Susa, cured Darius and Queen
Atossa, and returned to spend his last days in the city of his birth. 44 At
Crotona, too, the Pythagorean school produced the most famous of Greek
physicians before Hippocrates. Alcmaeon has been called the real father
of Greek medicine,* 5 but he is clearly a late name in a long line of secular
medicos whose origin is lost beyond the horizons of history. Early in the
fifth century he published a work On Nature (peri phy sees) -the, usual
title, in Greece, for a general discussion of natural science. He, first of the
Greeks, so far as we know, located the optic nerve and the Eustachian
tubes, dissected animals, explained the physiology of sleep, recognized the
brain as the central organ of thought, and defined health Pythagoreanly as
a harmony of the parts of the body.** At Cnidus the dominating figure was
Euryphron, who composed a medical summary known as the Cnidian Sen-
tences, explained pleurisy as a disease of the lungs, ascribed many illnesses
to constipation, and became famous for his success as an obstetrician/ 7 An
unmerry war raeed between the schools of Cos and Cnidus; for the
CHAP. XV) THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 343
Cnidians, disliking Hippocrates' penchant for basing "prognosis" upon
general pathology, insisted upon a careful classification of each ailment,
and a treatment of it on specific lines. In the end, by a kind of philosophical
justice, many of the Cnidian writings found their way into the Hippo-
cratic Collection.
As we see Hippocrates in Suidas' thumbnail biography, he appears as the
outstanding physician of his time. He was born in Cos in the same year
as Democritus; despite their far-separated homes the two became great
friends, and perhaps the "laughing philosopher" had some share in the
secularization of medicine. Hippocrates was the son of a physician, and
grew up and practiced among the thousands of invalids and tourists who
came to "take the waters" in the hot springs of Cos. His teacher, Herodicus
of Selymbria, formed his art by accustoming him to rely upon diet and
exercise rather than upon drugs. Hippocrates won such repute that rulers
like Perdiccas of Macedon and Artaxerxes I of Persia were among his
patients; and in 430 Athens sent for him to try his hand at staying the great
plague. His friend Democritus shamed him by completing a century, while
the great physician died at the age of eighty-three.
Nothing in medical literature could be more heterogeneous than the
collection of treatises anciently ascribed to Hippocrates. Here are text-
books for physicians, counsels for laymen, lectures for students, reports of
researches and observations, clinical records of interesting cases, and essays
by Sophists interested in the scientific or philosophical aspects of medicine.
The forty-two clinical records are the only examples of their kind for the
uext seventeen hundred years; and they set a high standard of honesty by
confessing that in sixty per cent of the cases the disease, or the treatment,
proved fatal. 48 Of all these compositions only four are by general consent
from the pen of Hippocrates-the "Aphorisms," the "Prognostic," the
"Regimen in Acute Diseases," and the monograph "On Wounds in the
Head"; the remainder of the Corpus Hippocraticum is by a variety of
authors ranging from the fifth to the second century B.C. 49 There is a fair
amount of nonsense in the assortment, but probably not more than the
future will find in the treatises and histories of the present day. Much of
the material is fragmentary, and takes a loose aphoristic form verging now
and then upon Heracleitean obscurity. Among the "Aphorisms" is the
famous remark that "Art is long, but time is fleeting." 00
The historical role of Hippocrates and his successors was the liberation
of medicine from both religion and philosophy. Occasionally, as in the
treatise on "Regimen," prayer is advised as an aid; but the page-by-page
344 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XV
tone of the Collection is a resolute reliance upon rational therapy. The
essay on "The Sacred Disease" directly attacks the theory that ailments
are caused by the gods; all diseases, says the author, have natural causes.
Epilepsy, which the people explained as possession by a demon, is not
excepted: "Men continue to believe in its divine origin because they are
at a loss to understand it. ... Charlatans and quacks, having no treatment
that would help, concealed and sheltered themselves behind superstition,
and called this illness sacred in order that their complete ignorance might
not be revealed." 51 The mind of Hippocrates was typical of the Periclean
time spirit imaginative but realistic, averse to mystery and weary of myth,
recognizing the value of religion, but struggling to understand the world
in rational terms. The influence of the Sophists can be felt in this move
for the emancipation of medicine; and indeed, philosophy so powerfully
affected Greek therapy that the science had to fight against philosophical
as well as theological impediments. Hippocrates insists that philosophical
theories have no place in medicine, and that treatment must proceed by
careful observation and accurate recording of specific cases and facts. He
does not quite realize the value of experiment; but he is resolved to be
guided by experience. 53
The natal infection of Hippocratic medicine with philosophy appears in
the once famous doctrine of "humors." The body, says Hippocrates, is com-
pounded of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; that man enjoys the
most perfect health in whom these elements are duly proportioned and min-
gled; pain is the defect or excess of one "humor," or its isolation from the
rest. 1 * This theory outlived all the other medical hypotheses of antiquity; it
was abandoned only in the last century, and perhaps survives by transmigra-
tion in the doctrine of hormones or glandular secretions today. Since
the behavior of the "humors" was considered subject to climate and diet,
and the most prevalent ailments in Greece were colds, pneumonia, and
malaria, Hippocrates (?) wrote a brief treatise on "Airs, Waters, Places"
in relation to health. "One may expose oneself confidently to cold," we
are told, "except after eating or exercise. ... It is not good for the body
not to be exposed to the cold of winter." 84 The scientific physician, wherever
he settles, will study the effects, upon the local population, of the winds
and the seasons, the water supply and the nature of the soil.
The weakest point in Hippocratic medicine was diagnosis. There was,
apparently, no taking of the pulse; fever was judged by simple touch, and
auscultation was direct. Infection was understood in the case of scabies,
ophthalmia, and phthisis," The Corpus contains excellent clinical pictures
CHAP.XV) THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 345
of epilepsy, epidemic parotitis, puerperal septicemia, and quotidian, tertian,
and quartan fevers. There is no mention in the Collection of smallpox,
measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, or syphilis; and no clear mention of ty-
phoid fever. 69 The treatises on "Regimen" move towards preventive medi-
cine by advocating "prodiagnosis" an attempt to catch the first symptoms
of a disease, and nip it in the bud. 67 Hippocrates was particularly fond of
"prognosis": the good physician, he believed, will learn by experience to
foresee the effects of various bodily conditions, and be able to predict from
the first stages of a disease the course that it will follow. Most diseases
reach a crisis in which either the illness or the patient comes to an end;
the almost Pythagorean calculation of the day on which the crisis should
appear was a characteristic element of Hippocratic theory. If in these
crises the natural heat of the body can overcome the morbid matter and
discharge it, the patient is cured. In any cure nature i.e., the powers and
constitution of the bodyis the principal healer; all that the physician can
do is to remove or reduce the impediments to this natural defense and
recuperation. Hence Hippocratic treatment makes little use of drags, but
depends chiefly upon fresh air, emetics, suppositories, enemas, cupping,
bloodletting, fomentations, ointments, massage, and hydrotherapy. The
Greek pharmacopoeia was reassuringly small, and consisted largely of pur-
gatives. Skin troubles were treated with sulphur baths, and by adminis-
tering the oil of dolphin livers. 68 "Live a healthy life," Hippocrates
advises, "and you are not likely to fall ill, except through epidemic or acci-
dent. If you do fall ill, proper regimen will give you the best chance of
recovery." 58 Fasting was often prescribed, if the strength of the patient
allowed; for "the more we nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure
them." 60 In general "a man should have only one meal a day, unless he have
a very dry belly." 81
Anatomy and physiology made slow progress in Greece, and owed much
of this to the examination of animal entrails in the practice of augury. A
little brochure "On the Heart," in the Hippocratic Collection, describes
the ventricles, the gieat vessels, and their valves. Syennesis of Cyprus and
Diogenes of Crete wrote descriptions of the vascular system, and Diogenes
knew the significance of the pulse. 83 Empedocles recognized that the heart
is the center of the vascular system, and described it as the organ* by which
the pneuma, or vital breath (oxygen?), is carried through the blood vessels
to every part of the body. 63 The Corpus , following Alcmaeon, makes the
brain the seat of consciousness and thought; "Through it we think, see,
hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good."* 1
34<$ THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XV
Surgery was still for the most part an unspecialized activity of advanced
general practitioners, though the armies had surgeons on their staffs. 65 The
Hippocratic literature describes trephining operations, and its treatment for
dislocations of shoulder or jaw are "modern" in everything except anes-
thesia.* A votive tablet from the temple of Asclepius at Athens shows a
folding case containing scalpels of various forms. 67 The little museum at
Epidaurus has preserved for us ancient forceps, probes, scalpels, catheters,
and specula essentially like those that are used today; and certain statues
there are apparently models illustrating methods for reducing dislocations
of the hip. 68 The Hippocratic treatise "On the Physician" gives detailed
directions for the preparation of the operating room, the arrangement of
natural and artificial light, the cleanliness of the hands, the care and use
of instruments, the position of the patient, the bandaging of wounds, etc."
It is clear from these and other passages that Greek medicine in Hippoc-
rates' days had made great advances, technically and socially. Heretofore
Greek physicians had migrated from city to city as need called them, like
the Sophists of their time or the preachers of our own. Now they settled
down, opened iatreia "healing places," or offices and treated patients there
or at the patients' homes. 70 Women physicians were numerous, and were
usually employed for diseases of their sex; some of them wrote authoritative
treatises on the care of the skin and the hair. 71 The state exacted no public
examination of prospective practitioners, but required satisfactory evidence
of an apprenticeship or tutelage to a recognized physician. 72 City govern-
ments reconciled socialized with private medicine by engaging doctors to
attend to public health, and to give medical treatment to the poor; the
best of such state physicians, like Democedes, received two talents ($12,-
ooo) a year. 13 There were, of course, many quacks and, as always, an in-
exhaustible supply of omniscient amateurs. The profession, as in all gen-
erations, suffered from its dishonest or incompetent minority;" and like
other peoples the Greeks revenged themselves upon the uncertainties of
medicine by jokes almost as endless as those that wreak their vengeance
upon marriage.
Hippocrates raised the profession to a higher standing by his emphasis
on medical ethics. He was a teacher as well as a practitioner, and the famous
oath ascribed to him may have been designed to ensure the loyalty of the
student to his instructor.*
*Tlie oath is regarded as deriving from the Hippocratic school rather than from the
master himself; but Erotism, writing in the first century A.D., attributes it to Hippocrates."
CHAP. XV) THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 347
The Hippocratic Oath
I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Hygiaea, by Pana-
cea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses,
that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath
and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own
parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need
of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own
brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, with-
out fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all
other instruction to my own sons, to the sons of my teacher, and
to indentured pupils who have taken the physician's oath, but to
nobody else. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my
ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-
doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked
to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I w^ill not give
to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and
holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even,
verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are
craftsmen therein. Into whatsoever houses I enter I will enter to
help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing
and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman,
bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of
my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse
with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never
divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets. Now if I carry out
this oath, and break it not, may I gain forever reputation among all
men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and for-
swear myself, may the opposite befall me. 78
The physician, Hippocrates adds, should maintain a becoming exterior,
keeping his person clean and his clothing neat. He must always remain
calm, and must make his behavior inspire the patient with confidence. 7 "' He
must
keep a careful watch over himself, and . . . say only what is abso-
lutely necessary. . . . When you enter a sick man's room, bear in
mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive
utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners . . . self-
control, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done.
... I urge you not to be too unkind, but to consider carefully your
patient's superabundance or means. Sometimes give your services
34^ THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XV
for nothing; and if there be an opportunity of serving a stranger
who is in financial straits, give him full assistance. For where there
is love of man, there is also love of the art. 78
If, in addition to all this, the physician studies and practices philosophy, he
becomes the ideal of his profession; for "a physician who is a lover of wis-
dom is the equal of a god." 78
Greek medicine shows no essential advance upon the medical and surgi-
cal knowledge of Egypt a thousand years before the various Fathers of
Medicine; in the matter of specialization the Greek development seems to
have fallen short of the Egyptian. From another point of view we must
hold the Greeks in high esteem, for not until the nineteenth century of our
era was any substantial improvement made upon their medical practice or
theory. In general, Greek science went as far as could be expected with-
out instruments of observation and precision, and without experimental
methods. It would have done better had it not been harassed by religion
and discouraged by philosophy. At a time when many young men in
Athens were taking up with enthusiasm the study of astronomy and com-
parative anatomy, the progress of science was halted by obscurantist legis-
lation, and the persecutions of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; while
the famous "turning around" of Socrates and the Sophists from the exter-
nal to the internal world, from physics to ethics, drew Greek thought from
the problems of nature and evolution to those of metaphysics and morals.
Science stood still for a century while Greece succumbed to the charms
of philosophy.
CHAPTER XVI
The Conflict of Philosophy
and Religion
I. THE IDEALISTS
F I ^HE age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of
JL its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional
standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the num-
ber and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance
with which they were debated. Every issue that agitates the world today
was bruited about in ancient Athens, and with such freedom and eagerness
that all Greece except its youth was alarmed. Many cities above all, Sparta
forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, "on account
of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions" (says Athenaeus) "to
which they give rise." 1 But in Periclean Athens the "dear delight" of
philosophy captured the imagination of the educated classes; rich men
opened their homes and salons in the manner of the French Enlighten-
ment; philosophers were lionized, and clever arguments were applauded
like sturdy blows at the Olympic games. 2 When, in 432, a war of swords
was added to the war of words, the excitement of the Athenian mind be-
came a fever in which all soberness of thought and judgment was consumed.
The fever subsided for a time after the martyrdom of Socrates, or was
dissipated from Athens to other centers of Greek life; even Plato, who
had known the very height and crisis of it, became exhausted after sixty
years of the new game, and envied Egypt the inviolable orthodoxy and
quiet stability of its thought. No age until the Renaissance would know
such enthusiasm again.
Plato was the culmination of a development that began with Parmenides;
he played Hegel to Parmenides' Kant; and though he scattered condemna-
tion lavishly, he never ceased to reverence his metaphysical father. In the
little town of Elea, on the western coast of Italy, 450 years before Christ,
there began for Europe that philosophy of idealism which was to wage
349
350 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
through every subsequent century an obstinate war against materialism.*
The mysterious problem of knowledge, the distinction between noumenon
and phenomenon, between the unseen real and the unreal seen, was flung
into the caldron of European thought, and was to boil or simmer there
through Greek and medieval days until, in Kant, it would explode again
in a philosophical revolution.
As Kant was "awakened" by Hume, so Parmenides was aroused to
philosophy by Xenophanes; perhaps his was one of many minds stirred by
Xenophanes' declaration that the gods were myths, and that there was only
one reality, which was both world and God. Parmenides studied with the
Pythagoreans also, and absorbed something of their passion for astronomy.
But he did not lose himself in the stars. Like most Greek philosophers he
was interested in living affairs and the state; Elea commissioned him to
draw up for it a code of laws, which it liked so well that its magistrates were
thenceforth required to decide all cases by that code. 3 Possibly as a recrea-
tional aside in a busy life he composed a philosophical poem Chi Nature,
of which some 160 verses survive, enough to make us regret that Par-
menides did not write prose. The poet announces, with a twinkle in 'his
eye, that a goddess has delivered to him a revelation: that all things are one;
that motion, change, and development are unreal phantasms of superficial,
contradictory, untrustworthy sense; that beneath these mere appearances
lies an unchanging, homogeneous, indivisible, indissoluble, motionless unity,
which is the only Being, the only Truth, and the only God. Heracleitus
said, Panta rei, all things change; Parmenides says, Hen ta panta, all things
are one, and never change. At times, like Xenophanes, he speaks of this
One as the universe, and calls it spheroidal and finite; at times, in an idealis-
tic vision, he identifies Being with Thought, and sings, "One thing are
Thinking and Being," 4 as if to say that for us things exist only in so far
-as we are conscious of them. Beginning and end, birth and death, forma-
tion and destruction, are of forms only; the One Real never begins and
never ends; there is no Becoming, there is only Being. Motion, too, is un-
real, it assumes the passage of something from where it is to where there
is nothing, or empty space; but empty space, Not Being, cannot be; there is
no void; the One fills every nook and cranny of the world, and is forever
at restt
* The Hindus had seen the problem long before, and were to remain Parmenideans to th^
end; perhaps the antisensationism of the Upanishads had penetrated through Ionia or
Pythagoras to Parmenides.
t This strains the imagination; but almost in Parmenidean fashion we speak of a table as at
rest though it is composed (we are told) of the most excitably mobile "electrons." Par-
menides saw the world as we see the table; the electron would see the table as we see the
world.
CHAP. XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 351
It was not to be expected that men would listen patiently to all this;
and apparently the Parmenidean Rest became the target of a thousand
metaphysical assaults. The significance of Parmenides' subtle follower,
Zeno of Elea, lay in an attempt to show that the ideas of plurality and mo-
tion were, at least theoretically, as impossible as Parmenides' motionless One.
As an exercise in perversity, and to amuse his youth, Zeno published a book
of paradoxes, of which nine have come down to us, and of which three will
suffice. First, said Zeno, any body, in order to move to point A, must reach
B, the middle of its course toward A; to arrive at B it must reach C, the
middle of its course toward B; and so on to infinity. Since an infinity of
time would be required for this infinite series of motions, the motion of
any body to any point is impossible in a finite time. Second, as a variant
of the first, swift-footed Achilles can never overtake the leisurely tortoise;
for as often as Achilles reaches the point which the tortoise occupied, in
that same moment the tortoise has moved beyond that point. Third, a fly-
ing arrow is really at rest; for at any moment of its flight it is at only one
point in space, that is, is motionless; its motion, however actual to the
senses, is logically, metaphysically unreal.* 6
Zeno came to Athens about 450, perhaps with Parmenides, and set the
impressionable city astir by his skill in reducing any kind of philosophical
theory to absurd consequences. Timon of Phlius described
The two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, would argue it untrue.*
This pre-Socratic gadfly was (in the relative sense which our ignorance of
the past compels us to give to such phrases) the father of logic, as Par-
menides was for Europe the father of metaphysics. Socrates, who de-
nounced Zeno's dialectical method, 9 imitated it so zealously that men had
to kill him in order to have peace of mind. Zeno's influence upon the
skeptical Sophists was decisive, and in the end it was his skepticism that
triumphed in Pyrrho and Carneades. In his old age, having become a man
"of great wisdom and learning," 10 he complained that the philosophers had
taken too seriously the intellectual pranks of his youth. His final escapade
was more fatal to him: he joined in an attempt to depose the tyrant Nearches
at Elea, was foiled and arrested, tortured and killed. 11 He bore his suffer-
ings bravely, as if to associate his name so soon with the Stoic philosophy.
* The discussion of these paradoxes has gone on from Plato 6 to Bertrand Russell/ and may
continue as long as words are mistaken for things. The assumptions that invalidate the puzzles
are that "infinite" is a thing instead of merely a word indicating the inability of the mind to
conceive an absolute end; and that time, space, and motion are discontinuous, Le., are com-
posed of separate points or parts.
352 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
H. THE MATERIALISTS
As Parmenides' denial of motion and change was a reaction against the
fluid and unstable metaphysics of Hercleitus, so his monism was a counter-
blast to the atomism of the later Pythagoreans. For these had developed the
number theory of their founder into the doctrine that all things are com-
posed of numbers in the sense of indivisible units. 13 When Philolaus of
Thebes added that "all things take place by necessity and by harmony," 1 *
everything was ready for the Atomic school in Greek philosophy.
About 435 Leucippus of Miletus came to Elea, and studied under Zeno;
there, perhaps, he heard of the number atomism of the Pythagoreans, for
Zeno had aimed some of his subtlest paradoxes at this doctrine of plurality."
Leucippus finally settled in Abdera, a flourishing Ionian colony in Thrace.
Of his direct teaching only one fragment remains: "Nothing happens
without a reason, but all things occur for a reason, and of necessity. )ns
Presumably it was in answer to Zeno and Parmenides that Leucippus de-
veloped the notion of the void, or empty space; in this way he hoped to
make motion theoretically possible as well as sensibly actual. The uni-
verse, said Leucippus T contains atoms and space and nothing else. Atoms
tumbling about in a vortex fall by necessity into the first forms of all things,
like attaching itself to like; in this way arose the planets and the stars. 1 * All
things, even the human soul, are composed of atoms.
Democritus was the pupil or associate of Leucippus in developing the
atomistic philosophy into a rounded system of materialism. His father was
a man of wealth and position in Abdera; 17 from him, we are told, Democritus
inherited a hundred talents ($600,000), most of which he spent in travel"
Unconfirmed stories send him as far as Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylonia,
Persia, and India." "Among my contemporaries," he says, "I have traveled
over the largest portion of the earth in search of things the most remote, and
have seen the most climates and countries, and heard the largest number
of thinkers."** At Boeotian Thebes he stopped long enough to imbibe
the number atomism of Philolaus. 82 Having spent his money he became
a philosopher, lived simply, devoted himself to study and contemplation,
and said, "I would rather discover a single demonstration" (in geometry)
"than win the throne of Persia." 28 There was some modesty in him, for
he shunned dialectic and discussion, founded no school, and sojourned in
Athens without making himself known to any of the philosophers there. 8 *
* "To the wise and good man," he writes, "the whole earth is his fatherland.'""
CHAP. XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 353
Diogenes Laertius gives a long list of his publications in mathematics,
physics, astronomy, navigation, geography, anatomy, physiology, psychol-
ogy, psychotherapy, medicine, philosophy, music, and art. 35 Thrasyllus
called him pentathlos in philosophy, and some contemporaries gave him
the very name of Wisdom (sophia) . M His range was as wide as Aristotle's,
his style as highly praised as Plato's. 37 Francis Bacon, in no perverse mo-
ment, called him the greatest of ancient philosophers. 28
He begins, like Parmenides, with a critique of the senses. For practical
purposes we may trust them; but the moment we begin to analyze their
evidence we find ourselves taking away from the external world layer
after layer of the color, temperature, flavor, savor, sweetness, bitterness,
and sound that the senses lay upon it; these "secondary qualities" are in our-
selves or in the total process of perception, not in the objective thing; in
an earless world a falling forest would make no noise, and the ocean,
however angry, would never roar. "By convention (nomos) sweet is
sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth
there are only atoms and the void.*' 29 Hence the senses give us only obscure
knowledge, or opinion; genuine knowledge comes only by investigation
and thought. "Verily, we know nothing. Truth is buried deep. . . . We
know nothing for certain, but only the changes produced in our body by
the forces that impinge upon it." 80 All sensations are due to atoms dis-
charged by the object and falling upon our sense organs." All senses are
forms of touch. 8 *
The atoms that constitute the world differ in figure, size, and weight;
all have a tendency downward; in the resultant rotatory motion like atoms
combine with like and produce the planets and the stars. No nous, or in-
telligence, guides the atoms, no Empedoclean "love" or "hate" assorts
them, but necessity the natural operation of inherent causes rules over
all. M There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our
ignorance. 34 The quantity of matter remains always the same; none is
ever created, none ever destroyed; 85 only the atom combinations change.
Forms, however, are innumerable; even of worlds there is probably an
"infinite" number, coming into being and passing away in an interminable
pageantry. 36 Organic beings arose originally from the moist earth. 97 Every-
thing in man is made of atoms; the soul is composed of tiny, smooth, round
atoms, like those of fire. Mind, soul, vital heat, vital principle, are all one
and the same thing; they are not confined to men or animals, but are
354 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XVI
diffused throughout the world; and in man and other animals the mental
atoms whereby we think are distributed throughout the body.* 38
Nevertheless these fine atoms that constitute the soul are the noblest and
most wonderful part of the body. The wise man will cultivate thought,
will free himself from passion, superstition, and fear, and will seek in con-
templation and understanding the modest happiness available to human
life. Happiness does not come from external goods; a man "must become
accustomed to finding within himself the sources of his enjoyment." 12
"Culture is better than riches No power and no treasure can outweigh
the extension of our knowledge." 41 Happiness is fitful, and "sensual pleasure
affords only a brief satisfaction"; one comes to a more lasting content by
acquiring peace and serenity of soul (ataraxia}, good cheer (euthttmia),
moderation (nietriotes} , and a certain order and symmetry of life (biou
symmetric?) ." We may learn much from the animals "spinning from the
spider, building from the swallow, singing from the nightingale and the
swan"; 45 but "strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength
of character is nobility in man."" So, like the heretics of Victorian England,
Democritus raises upon his scandalous metaphysics a most presentable ethic.
"Good actions should be done not out of compulsion but from conviction;
not from hope of reward, but for their own sake. ... A man should feel
more shame in doing evil before himself than before all the world."* 7
He illustrated his own precepts, and perhaps justified his counsels, by
living to the age of a hundred and nine, or, as some say, to merely ninety,
years.** Diogenes Laertius relates that when Democritus read in public his
most important work, the megas diakosntos, or Great World, the city of
Abdera presented him with a hundred talents ($600,000) ; but perhaps Ab-
dera had depreciated its currency. When someone asked the secret of his
longevity, he answered that he ate honey daily, and bathed his body with
oil 48 Finally, having lived long enough, he reduced his food each day, de-
termined to starve himself by easy degrees. 60 "He was exceedingly old,"
says Diogenes, 51
and appeared to be at the point of death. His sister lamented that
he would die during the festival of the Thesmophoria, which would
prevent her from discharging her duties to the goddess. So he bade
her be of good cheer, and to bring him hot loaves (or a little honey 5 *)
every day. And by applying these to his nostrils he kept himself
* Lucretius attributes a kind of psychophysical parallelism to "the great Democritus," who
"laid it down tiiat the atoms of body and the atoms of mind are placed one beside one
alternately in pairs, and so link the frame together." 38
CHAP.XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 355
alive over the festival. But when the three days of the feast were
passed he expired without any pain, as Hipparchus assures us, hav-
ing lived one hundred and nine years.
His city gave him a public funeral, and Timon of Athens praised him."*
He founded no school; but he formulated for science its most famous hy-
pothesis, and gave to philosophy a system which, denounced by every
other, has survived them all, and reappears in every generation.
IH. EMPEDOCLES
Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains
everything but the world, the other everything but life. To merge these
half-truths it was necessary to find some dynamic principle that could medi-
ate between structure and growth, between things and thought. Anaxagoras
sought such a principle in a cosmic Mind; Empedocles sought it in the
inherent forces that made for evolution.
This Leonardo of Acragas was born in the year of Marathon, of a wealthy
family whose passion for horse racing gave no promise of philosophy. He
studied for a while with the Pythagoreans, but in his exuberance he
divulged some of their esoteric doctrine, and was expelled." He took very
much to heart the notion of transmigration, and announced with poetic
sympathy that he had been "in bygone times a youth, a maiden, and a
flowering shrub; a bird, yes, and a fish that swims in silence through the
deep sea.' 5BB He condemned the eating of animal food as a form of canni-
balism; for were not these animals the reincarnation of human beings? 66
All men, he believed, had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly
place by some impurity or violence; and Jie was certain that he felt in his
own soul intimations of a prenatal divinity. "From what glory, from what
immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth! " K
Convinced of his divine origin, he put golden sandals upon his feet, clothed
his body with purple robes, and crowned his head with laurel; he was, as
he modestly explained to his countrymen, a favorite of Apollo; only to
his friends did he confess that he was a god. He claimed supernatural pow-
ers, performed magic rites, and sought by incantations to wrest from the
other world the secrets of human destiny. He offered to cure diseases by
the enchantment of his words, and cured so many that the populace half
believed his claims. Actually he was a learned physician fertile in sug-
gestions to medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical
356 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
art. He was a brilliant orator; he "invented," says Aristotle," the principles
of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who peddled them in Athens.
He was an engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by draining marshes
and changing the courses of streams. He was a courageous statesman who,
though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow
aristocracy, refused the dictatorship, and established a moderate democ-
racy. 80 He was a poet, and wrote On Nature and On Purifications in such
excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the poets,
and Lucretius complimented him with imitation. "When he went to the
Olympic games," says Diogenes Laertius, "he was the object of general
attention, so that there was no mention made of anybody else in com-
parison with him."* 1 Perhaps, after all, he was a god.
The 470 lines that survive give us only hazardous intimations of his
philosophy. He was an eclectic, and saw some wisdom in every system.
He deprecated Parmenides' wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed
each sense as an "avenue to understanding." Sensation is due to effluxes
of particles proceeding from the object and falling upon the "pores" (poroi)
of the senses; therefore light needs time to come from the sun to us. 6 * Night
is caused by the earth intercepting the rays of the sun.* 3 All things are com-
posed of four elements air, fire, water, and earth. Operating upon these
are two basic forces, attraction and repulsion, Love and Hate. The end-
less combinations and separations of the elements by these forces produce
the world of things and history. When Love or the tendency to combine
is dominant, matter develops into plants, and organisms take higher and
higher forms. Just as transmigration weaves all souls into one biography,
so in nature there is no sharp distinction between one species or genus and
another; e.g., "Hair and leaves and the thick feathers of birds, and the
scales that form on tough limbs, are the same thing.'" 8 Nature produces
every kind of organ and form; Love unites them, sometimes into monstrosi-
ties that perish through maladaptation, sometimes into organisms capable
of propagating themselves and meeting the conditions of survival.* All
higher forms develop from lower forms. 70 At first both sexes are in the
same body; then they become separated, and each longs to be reunited
with the other.* 11 To this process of evolution corresponds a process of
dissolution, in which Hate, or the force of division, tears down the com-
plex structure that Love has built. Slowly organisms and planets revert
to more and more primitive forms, until all things are merged again in a
* Perhaps Plato poached here for Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium.
CHAP. XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 357
primeval and amorphous mass, 72 These alternating processes of develop-
ment and decay go on endlessly, in each part and in the whole; the two
forces of combination and separation, Love and Hate, Good and Evil, fight
and balance each other in a vast universal rhythm of Life and Death. So
old is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 13
The place of God in this process is not clear, for in Empedocles it is
difficult to separate fact from metaphor, philosophy from poetry. Some-
times he identifies deity with the cosmic sphere itself, sometimes with the
life of all life, or the mind of all mind; but he knows that we shall never
be able to form a just idea of the basic and original creative power. "We
cannot bring God near so as to reach him with our eyes and lay hold of him
with our hands. . . . For he has no human head attached to bodily members,
nor do two branching arms dangle from his shoulders; he has neither feet
nor knees nor any hairy parts. No; he is only mind, sacred and ineffable
mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts." 71 And
Empedocles concludes with the wise and weary counsel of old age:
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men;
many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought;
short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil.
Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and
what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled
upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they
have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath
seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of
man. 75
In his last years he became more distinctly a preacher and prophet, ab-
sorbed in the theory of reincarnation, and imploring his fellow men to
purge away the guilt that had exiled them from heaven. With the assorted
wisdom of Buddha, Pythagoras, and Schopenhauer he warned the human
race to abstain from marriage, procreation, 78 and beans. 77 When, in 415,
the Athenians besieged Syracuse, Empedocles did what he could to help
its resistance, and thereby offended Acragas, which hated Syracuse with
all the animosity of kinship. Banished from his native city, he went to the
mainland of Greece and died, some say, in Megara. 78 But Hippobotus, says
Diogenes Laertius, 79 tells how Empedocles, after bringing back to full life
a woman who had been given up for dead, rose from the feast that cele-
brated her recovery, disappeared, and was never seen again. Legend said
that he had leaped into Etna's fiery mouth so that he might die without
leaving a trace behind him, and thereby confirm his divinity. But the
358 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
elemental fire betrayed him; it flung up his brazen slippers and left them,
like heavy symbols of mortality, upon the crater's edge."
IV. THE SOPHISTS
It is a reproof to those who think of Greece as synonymous with Athens,
that none of the great Hellenic thinkers before Socrates belonged to that
city, and only Plato after him. The fate of Anaxagoras and Socrates indi-
cates that religious conservatism was stronger in Athens than in the col-
onies, where geographical separation had broken some of the bonds of
tradition. Perhaps Athens would have remained obscurantist and intolerant
to the point of stupidity had it not been for the growth of a cosmopolitan
trading class, and the coming of the Sophists to Athens.
The debates in the Assembly, the trials before the heliaea, and the rising
need for the ability to think with the appearance of logic and to speak
with clarity and persuasion, conspired with the wealth and curiosity of an
imperial society to create a demand for something unknown in Athens
before Pericles formal higher education in letters, oratory, science, philos-
ophy, and statesmanship. The demand was met at first not by the organi-
zation of universities but by wandering scholars who engaged lecture halls,
gave there their courses of instruction, and then passed on to other cities
to repeat them. Some of these men, like Protagoras, called themselves
sophistaii.^ teachers of wisdom. 81 The word was accepted as equivalent
to our "university professor," and bore no derogatory connotation until
the conflict between religion and philosophy led to conservative attacks
upon the Sophists, and the commercialism of certain of them provoked
Plato to darken their name with the imputations of venal sophistry that now
cling to it. Perhaps the general public entertained a vague dislike for these
teachers from their first appearance, since their costly instruction in logic
and rhetoric could be bought only by the well to do, and gave these an
advantage in trying their cases before the courts. 82 It is true that the more
famous Sophists, like most skilled practitioners in any field, charged all
that their patrons could be persuaded to pay; this is the final law of prices
everywhere. Protagoras and Gorgias, we are told, demanded ten thousand
drachmas (f 10,000) for the education of a single pupil. But lesser Sophists
were content with reasonably moderate fees; Prodicus, famous through-
out Greece, asked from one to fifty drachmas for admission to his courses.**
Protagoras, the most renowned of the Sophists, was born in Abdera a
CHAP. XVI ) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 359
generation before Democritus. In his lifetime he was the better known
of the two, and the more influential; we surmise his repute from the furore
created by his visits to Athens.*" Even Plato, who was not often intention-
ally fair to the Sophists, respected him, and described him as a man of
high character. In the Platonic dialogue that is named after him Protagoras
makes a much better showing than the argumentative young Socrates; here
it is Socrates who talks like a Sophist, and Protagoras who behaves like
a gentleman and a philosopher, never losing his temper, never jealous of
another's brilliance, never taking the argument too seriously, and never
anxious to speak. He admits that he undertakes to teach his pupils pru-
dence in private and public matters, the orderly management of home and
family, the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking, and the ability to under-
stand and direct affairs of state. 88 He defends his high fees by saying that
it is his custom, when a pupil objects to the sum asked, to agree to receive
as adequate whatever amount the pupil may name as just in a solemn
statement before some sacred shrine 87 a rash procedure for a teacher who
doubted the existence of the gods. Diogenes Laertius accuses him of being
the first to "arm disputants with the weapon of sophism," a charge that
would have pleased Socrates; but Diogenes adds that Protagoras "was also
the first to invent that sort of argument which is called Socratic" 88 which
might not have pleased Socrates.
It was but one of his many distinctions that he founded European gram-
mar and philology. He treated of the right use of words, says Plato, 88 and
was the first to distinguish the three genders of nouns, and certain tenses
and moods of verbs. 80 But his chief significance lay in this, that with him,
rather than with Socrates, began the subjective standpoint in philosophy.
Unlike the lonians he was less interested in things than in thought i.e., in
the whole process of sensation, perception, understanding, and expression.
Whereas Parmenides rejected sensation as a guide to truth, Protagoras, like
Locke, accepted it as the only means of knowledge, and refused to admit
any transcendental suprasensual reality. No absolute truth can be found,
said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold for given men under given
conditions; contradictory assertions can be equally true for different per-
sons or at different times. 91 All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative
and subjective; "man is the measure of all things of those that are, that
they are, and of those that are not, that they are not." M To the historical
eye a whole world begins to tremble when Protagoras announces this sim-
ple principle of humanism and relativity; all established truths and sacred
* These probably occurred in 451-45, ^32. AI-, ard 4iT, 8r
360 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
principles crack; individualism has found a voice and a philosophy; and the
supernatural bases of social order threaten to melt away.
The far-reaching skepticism implicit in this famous pronouncement might
have remained theoretical and safe had not Protagoras applied it for a mo-
ment to theology. Among a group of distinguished men in the home of
the unpopular freethinker, Euripides, Protagoras read a treatise whose first
sentence made a stir in Athens. "With regard to the gods I know not
whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our
knowing: the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of our mortal life." 9 *
The Athenian Assembly, frightened by that ominous prelude, banished
Protagoras, ordered all Athenians to surrender any copies they might have
of his writings, and burned the books in the market place. Protagoras fled
to Sicily, and, story tells us, was drowned on the way. 9 *
Gorgias of Leontini carried on this skeptical revolution, but had the
good sense to spend most of his life outside of Athens. His career was typi-
cal of the union between philosophy and statesmanship in Greece. Born
about 483, he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Empedocles, and be-
came so famous in Sicily as an orator and a teacher of oratory that in 427
he was sent by Leontini as an ambassador to Athens. At the Olympic games
of 408 he captivated a great crowd by an address in which he appealed to
the warring Greeks to make peace among themselves in order to face with
unity and confidence the resurrected power of Persia. Traveling from city
to city, he expounded his views in a style of oratory so euphuistically ornate,
so symmetrically antithetical in idea and phrase, so delicately poised be-
tween poetry and prose, that he had no difficulty in attracting students who
offered him a hundred minas fof a course of instruction. His book On
Nature sought to prove three startling propositions: (i) Nothing exists; (2)
if anything existed it would be unknowable; and (3) if anything were
knowable the knowledge of it could not be communicated from one person
to another.* 96 Nothing else remains of Gorgias T writings-. After enjoying
the hospitality and fees of many states he settled down in Thessaly, and had
the wisdom to consume most of his great fortune before his death. 9 " He
lived, as all authorities assure us, to at least one hundred and five; and an
ancient writer tells us that "though Gorgias attained to the age of one hun-
dred and eight, his body was not weakened by old age, but to the end of his
life he was in sound condition, and his senses were those of a youth." 07
* These propositions, aiming ro discredit the transcendentalism of Parrnenides, meant: (i)
Nothing exists beyond the senses; (2) if anything existed beyond the senses it would be un-
knowable, for all" knowledge comes through the senses; (3) if anything suprasensual were
knowable, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable, since all communication is through
the senses.
CHAP. XVI) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 361
If the Sophists together constituted a scattered university, Hippias of Elis
was a university in himself, and typified the polymath in a world where
knowledge was not yet so vast as to be clearly beyond the grasp of one
mind. He taught astronomy and mathematics, and made original contribu-
tions to geometry; he was a poet, a musician, and an orator; he lectured on
literature, morals, and politics; he was an historian, and laid the foundations
of Greek chronology by compiling a list of victors at the Olympic games;
he was employed by Elis as an envoy to other states; and he knew so many
arts and trades that he made with his own hands all his clothing and orna-
ments. 88 His work in philosophy was slight but important: he protested
against the degenerative artificiality of city life, contrasted nature with law,
and called law a tyrant over mankind. 89 Prodicus of Ceos carried on the
grammatical work of Protagoras, fixed the parts of speech, and pleased the
elders with a fable in which he represented Heracles choosing laborious
Virtue instead of easy Vice. 100 Other Sophists were not so pious: Antiphon
of Athens followed Democritus into materialism and atheism, and defined
justice in terms of expediency; Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (if we may
take Plato's word for it) identified right with might, and remarked that the
success of villains cast doubt upon the existence of the gods. 101
All in all, the Sophists must be ranked among the most vital factors in
the history of Greece. They invented grammar and logic for Europe;
they developed dialectic, analyzed the forms of argument, and taught men
how to detect and practice fallacies. Through their stimulus and example
reasoning became a ruling passion with the Greeks. By applying logic to
language they promoted clarity and precision of thought, and facilitated
the accurate transmission of knowledge. Through them prose became a
form of literature, and poetry became a vehicle of philosophy. They ap-
plied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could
not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and
they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down,
among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellas. "The common
opinion" of his time, says Plato, derived "the world and all animals and
plants . . . and inanimate substances from . . . some spontaneous and unin-
telligent cause." 103 Lysias tells of an atheistic society that called itself the
kakodannoniotai, or Devils' Club, and deliberately met and dined on holy-
days set apart for fasting. 10 * Pindar, at the opening of the fifth century,
accepted the oracle of Delphi piously; Aeschylus defended it politically;
Herodotus, about 450, criticized it timidly; Thucydides, at the end of the
century, openly rejected it. Euthyphro complained that when in the As-
362 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XVI
sembly he spoke of oracles, the people laughed at him as an antiquated
fool. 101
The Sophists must not be blamed or credited for all of this; much of it
was in the air, and was a natural result of growing wealth, leisure, travel,
research, and speculation. Their role in the deterioration of morals was
likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid
of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism and stoicism. But within these
modest limits the Sophists unwittingly quickened disintegration. Most of
them, barring a thoroughly human love of money, were men of high char-
acter and decent life; but they did not transmit to their pupils the tradi-
tions or the wisdom that had made or kept them reasonably virtuous despite
their discovery of the secular origin and geographical mutability of morals.
Their colonial derivation may have led them to underestimate the value
of custom as a peaceful substitute for force or law in maintaining morality
and order. To define morality or human worth in terms of knowledge,
as Protagoras did a generation before Socrates, 105 was a heady stimulus to
thought, but an unsteadying blow to character; the emphasis on knowledge
raised the educational level of the Greeks, but it did not develop intelli-
gence as rapidly as it liberated intellect. The announcement of the relativity
of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every
man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could
now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people,
reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to
rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul. The distinc-
tion between "Nature" and convention, and the willingness of minor
Sophists to argue that what "Nature" permitted was good regardless of
custom or law, sapped the ancient supports of Greek morality, and en-
couraged many experiments in living. Old men mourned the passing of
domestic simplicity and fidelity, and the pursuit of pleasure or wealth
unchecked by religious restraints. 100 Plato and Thucydides speak of think-
ers and public men who rejected morals as superstitions, and acknowledged
no right but strength. This unscrupulous individualism turned the logic
and rhetoric of the Sophists into an instrument of legal chicanery and
political demagogy, and degraded their broad cosmopolitanism into a cau-
tious reluctance to defend their country, or an unprejudiced readiness to
sell it to the highest bidder. The religious peasantry and the conservative
aristocrats began to agree with the common citizen of the urban democracy
that philosophy had become a danger to the state.
Some of the philosophers themselves joined in the attack upon the Soph-
CHAP. XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 36^
ists. Socrates condemned them (as Aristophanes was to condemn Socrates)
for making error specious with logic and persuasive with, rhetoric, and
scorned them for taking fees. 107 He excused his ignorance of grammar
on the ground that he could not afford the fifty-drachma course of Prodi-
cus, but only the one-drachma course, which gave merely the rudiments, 108
In an ungenial moment he used a merciless and revealing comparison:
It is believed among us, Antiphon, that it is possible to dispose of
beauty or of wisdom alike honorably or dishonorably; for if a per-
son sells his beauty for money to anyone that wishes to purchase it,
men call him a male prostitute; but if anyone makes a friend of
a person whom he knows to be an honorable and worthy admirer,
we regard him as prudent. In like manner those who sell their wis-
dom for money to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it
were, prostitutes of wisdom; but whoever makes a friend of a person
whom he knows to be deserving, and teaches him all the good that
he knows, we consider him to act the part which becomes a good
and honorable citizen. 109
Plato could afford to agree with this view, being a rich man. Isocrates be-
gan his career with a speech Against the Sophists, became a successful pro-
fessor of rhetoric, and charged a thousand drachmas ($rooo) for a course. 110
Aristotle continued the attack; he defined a Sophist as one who "is only
eager to get rich off his apparent wisdom," 111 and accused Protagoras of
^promising to make the worse appear the better reason." 133
The tragedy was deepened by the fact that both sides were right. The
complaint about fees was unjust: short of a state subsidy no other way
was then open to finance higher education. If the Sophists criticized tra-
ditions and morals it was, of course, with no evil intent; they thought that
they were liberating slaves. They were the intellectual representatives of
their time, sharing its passion for the free intellect; like the Encyclopedists
of Enlightenment France they swept away the dying past with magnifi-
cent elan, and did not live long enough, or think far enough, to establish
new institutions in place of those that loosened reason would destroy. In
every civilization the time comes when old ways must be re-examined if
the society is to readjust itself to irresistible economic change; the Sophists
were the instrument of this re-examination, but failed to provide the states-
manship for the readjustment. It remains to their credit that they power-
fully stimulated the pursuit of knowledge, and made it fashionable to think.
From every corner of the Greek world they brought new ideas and chal-
lenges to Athens, and aroused her to philosophical consciousness and ma-
364 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
turity. Without them Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would have been
impossible.
v. SOCRATES
L The Mask of Silenus
It is pleasant to stand at last face to face with a personality apparently
so real as Socrates. But when we consider the two sources upon which we
must rely for our knowledge of Socrates we find that one of them, Plato,
writes imaginative dramas, that the other, Xenophon, writes historical nov-
els, and that neither product can be taken as history. "They say," writes
Diogenes Laertius, "that Socrates having heard Plato read the Lysis, cried
out, *O Heracles! what a number of lies the young man has told about
me!' For Plato had set down a great many things as sayings of Socrates
which he had never said." Plato does not pretend to limit himself to fact;
probably it never occurred to him that the future might have scant means
of distinguishing, in his work, imagination from biography. But he draws
so consistent a picture of his master throughout the Dialogues, from
Socrates' youthful timidity in the Pamzenides and his insolent loquacity in
the Protagoras to the subdued piety and resignation of the Phaedo, that if
this was not Socrates, then Plato is one of the greatest character creators in
all literature. Aristotle accepts as authentically Socratic the views attrib-
uted to Socrates in the Protagoras.*" Recently discovered fragments of an
Alcibiades written by Aeschines of Sphettos, an immediate disciple of
Socrates, tend to confirm the portrait given in the earlier dialogues of Plato,
and the story of the philosopher's attachment to Alcibiades. 115 On the other
hand, Aristotle classes Xenophon's Memorabilia and "Banquet as forms of
fiction, imaginary conversations in which Socrates becomes, more often
than not, a mouthpiece for Xenophon's ideas.* 1 " If Xenophon honestly
played Eckermann to Socrates' Goethe we can only say that he has care-
fully collected the master's safest platitudes; it is incredible that so virtuous
a man should have upset a civilization. Other ancient writers did not make
the old sage into such a saint; Aristoxenus of Tarentum, about 318, re-
ported, on the testimony of his father who claimed to have known Socrates
that the philosopher was a person without education, "ignorant and
debauched"; 117 and Eupolis, the comic poet, rivaled his rival Aristophanes
* So in Book ffl of the Memorabilia Socrates is made to expound the principles of military
Strategy.
CHAP. XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ^65
in abusing the great gadfly. 118 Making due discount for polemic vitriol it
is at least clear that Socrates was a man, hated and loved beyond any other
figure of his time.
His father was a sculptor, and he himself was said to have carved a
Hermes, and three Graces that stood near the entrance to the Acropolis.**
His mother was a midwife: it was a standing joke with him that he merely
continued her trade, but in the realm of ideas, helping others to deliver
themselves of their conceptions. One tradition describes him as the son of a
slave it is improbable, for he served as a hoplite (a career open only to
citizens), inherited a house from his father, and had seventy minas ($7000)
invested for him by his friend Crito; 121 for the rest he is represented as
poor: 133 He paid much attention to the training of the body, and was usu-
ally in good physical condition. He made a reputation for himself as a
soldier during the Peloponnesian War: in 432 he fought at Potidaea, in 424
at Delium, in 422 at Amphipolis. At Potidaea he saved both the life and
the arms of the young Alcibiades, and gave up in the youth's favor his claim
to the prize for valor; at Delium he was the last Athenian to give ground
to the Spartans, and seems to have saved himself by glaring at the enemy;
even the Spartans were frightened. In these campaigns, we are told, he
excelled all in endurance and courage, bearing without complaint hunger,
fatigue, and cold. 131 At home, when he condescended to stay there, he
worked as a stonecutter and statuary. He had no interest in travel, and
seldom went outside the city and its port. He married Xanthippe, who
berated him for neglecting his family; he recognized the justice of her
complaint, 3 * 5 and defended her gallantly to his son and his friends. Mar-
riage disturbed him so little that he seems to have taken an additional wife
when the mortality of males in the war led to the temporary legalization
of polygamy. 338
All the world knows the face of Socrates. Judging precariously from
the bust in the Museo delle Terme at Rome, it was not typically Greek;" 8 its
spacious spread, its flat, broad nose, its thick lips, and heavy beard suggest
rather Solon's friend of the steppes, Anacharsis, or that modern Scythian,
Tolstoi. "I say," Alcibiades insists, even while protesting his love, "that
Socrates is exactly like the masks of Silenus, which may be seen sitting in
the statuaries' shops, having pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are
made to open in the middle, and there are images of gods inside them. I
say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You will not deny, Socrates,
that your face is that of a satyr." 130 Socrates raises no objection; to make
3<56 THE LIFE OF GREECE (CHAP. XVI
matters worse he confesses to an unduly large paunch, and hopes to reduce
it by dancing. 1 * 1
Plato and Xenophon agree in describing his habits and his character. He
was content with one simple and shabby robe throughout the year, and
liked bare feet better than sandals or shoes." 8 He was incredibly free from
the acquisitive fever that agitates mankind. Viewing the multitude of arti-
cles exposed for sale in the market place, he remarked, "How many things
there are that I do not want! " 13!1 and felt himself rich in his poverty. He
was a model of moderation and self-control, but all the world away from
a saint. He could drink like a gentleman, and needed no timid asceticism to
keep him straight.* He was no recluse; he liked good company, and let the
rich entertain him now and then; but he made no obeisance to them, could
get along very well without them, and rejected the gifts and invitations of
magnates and kings. 1 * All in all he was fortunate: he lived without working,
read without writing, taught without routine, drank without dizziness,
and died before senility, almost without pain.
His morals were excellent for his time, but would hardly satisfy all the
good people who praise him. He "took fire" at the sight of Charmides, but
controlled himself by asking if this handsome lad had also a "noble soul." 13 *
Plato speaks of Socrates and Alcibiades as lovers, and describes the philoso-
pher "in chase of the fair youth.'" 37 Though the old man seems to have
kept these amours for the most part Platonic, he was not above giving advice
to homosexuals and hetairai on how to attract lovers. 138 He gallantly prom-
ised his help to the courtesan Theodota, who rewarded him with the invi-
tation: "Come often to see me." 189 His good humor and kindliness were so
unfailing that those who could stomach his politics found it simple to put up
with his morals. When he had passed away Xenophon spoke of him as "so
just that he wronged no man in the most trifling affair ... so temperate that
he never preferred pleasure to virtue; so wise that he never erred in distin-
guishing better from worse ... so capable of discerning the character of
others, and of exhorting them to virtue and honor, that he seemed to be such
as the best and happiest of men would be." 110 Or, as Plato put it, with mov-
ing simplicity, he "was truly the wisest, and justest, and best of all the men
whom I have ever known."" 1
* "So far as drinking is concerned," Xenophon makes Socrates say, "wine does of a truth
'moisten the soul' and lull our griefs to sleep. . . . But I suspect that men's bodies fare like
those of plants. . . . When God gives the plants water in floods to drink they cannot stand up
straight or let the breezes blow through them; but when they drink only as much as they
enjoy they grow up straight and tall, and come to full and abundant fruitage.""*
CHAP.XVl) THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 367
2. Portrait of a Gadfly
Being curious and disputatious he became a student of philosophy, and
was for a time fascinated by the Sophists who invaded Athens in his youth.
There is no evidence that Plato invented the fact as well as the content of
Socrates' meetings with Parmenides, Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hip-
pias, and Thrasymachus; it is likely that he saw Zeno when the latter came
to Athens about 450, and that he was so infected with Zeno's dialectic
that it never left him. 1 " Probably he knew Anaxagoras, if not in person
then in doctrine; for Archelaus of Miletus, pupil of Anaxagoras, was for a
time the teacher of Socrates. Archelaus began as a physicist and ended as
a student of morals; he explained the origin and basis of morals on ration-
alistic lines, and perhaps turned Socrates from science to ethics. 1 " By all
these avenues Socrates came to philosophy, and thenceforth found his
"greatest good in daily converse about virtue, examining myself and others;
for a life unscrutinized is unworthy of a man."* So he went prowling among
men's beliefs, prodding them with questions, demanding precise answers and
consistent views, and making himself a terror to all who could not think
clearly. Even in Hades he proposed to be a gadfly, and "find out who is
wise, and who pretends to be wise and is not." 1 " He protected himself from
a similar cross-examination by announcing that he knew nothing; he knew
all the questions, but none of the answers; he modestly called himself an
"amateur in philosophy."" 5 What he meant, presumably, was that he was
certain of nothing except man's fallibility, and had no hard and fast system
of dogmas and principles. When the oracle at Delphi, to Chaerephon's
alleged inquiry, "Is any man wiser than Socrates?" gave the alleged reply,
"No one," 140 Socrates ascribed the response to his profession of ignorance.
From that moment he set himself to the pragmatic task of getting clear
ideas. "For himself," he said, "he would hold discourse, from time to time,
on what concerned mankind, considering what was pious, what impious;
what was just, what unjust; what was sanity, what insanity; what was
courage, what cowardice; what was the nature of government over men,
and the qualities of one skilled in governing them; and touching on other
subjects ... of which he thought that those who were ignorant might justly
be deemed no better than slaves." 1 " To every vague notion, easy generali-
zation, or secret prejudice he pointed the challenge, "What is it?" and asked
for precise definitions. It became his habit to rise early and go to the mar-
ket place, the gymnasiums, the palaestras, or the workshops of artisans, and
* De anexetastos bias ou biotas anthropo.Phto, Apology, 37.
368 THE LIFE OF GREECE ( CHAP. XVI
engage In discussion any person who gave promise of a stimulating intelli-
gence or an amusing stupidity. "Is not the road to Athens made for con-
versation? " he asked. 113 His method was simple: he called for the definition
of a large idea; he examined the definition, usually to reveal its incomplete-
ness, its contradictoriness, or its absurdity; he led on, by question after
question, to a fuller and juster definition, which, however, he never gave.
Sometimes he proceeded to a general conception, or exposed another, by
investigating a long series of particular instances, thereby introducing a
measure of induction into Greek logic; sometimes, with the famous So-
cratic irony, he unveiled the ridiculous consequences of the definition or
opinion he wished to destroy. He had a passion for orderly thinking, and
liked to classify individual things according to their genus, species, and
specific difference, thereby preparing for Aristotle's method of definition
as well as for Plato's theory of Ideas. He liked to describe dialectic as the
art of careful distinctions. And he salted the weary wastes of logic with a
humor that died an early death in the history of philosophy.
His opponents objected that he tore down but never built, that he re-
jected every answer but gave none of his own, and that the results de-
moralized morals and paralyzed thought. In many cases he left the idea
that he had set out to clarify more obscure than before. When a resolute
fellow like Critias tried to question him he turned his reply into another
question, and at once recaptured the advantage. In the Protagoras he offers
to answer instead of asking, but his good resolution lasts but a moment;
whereupon Protagoras, being an old hand at the game of logic, quietly with-
draws from the argument. 118 Hippias rages at Socrates' elusiveness: "By
Zeus!" he cries, "you shall not hear [my answer] until you yourself declare
what you think justice to be; for it is not enough that you laugh at others,
questioning and confuting everybody, while you yourself are unwilling
to give a reason to anybody, or to declare your opinion on any subject." 150
To such taunts Socrates replied that he was only 
