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THUCYDIDES
MYTHISTORICUS
BY
FRANCIS MACDONALD CORNFORD
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
Ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον Φανεῖται
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
1907
(All rights reserved)
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PREFACE
THE title of this book needs a word of explanation, if
not of apology; for to any one who is accustomed to think
of Thucydides as typically prosaic, and nothing if not purely
historical, the epithet Mythistoricus may seem to carry a
note of challenge, or even of paradox. But the sense in
which the expression has here been used is quite consistent
with the historian’s much-talked-of ‘trustworthiness’, and,
indeed, with the literal truth of every statement of fact in
the whole of his work. It is possible, however, even for
a writer of history, to be something much better than
trustworthy. Xenophon, I suppose, is honest; but his honesty
makes it none the easier to read him. To read Thucydides
is, although certainly not easy, at any rate pleasant, because '
—trustworthiness and all—he is a great artist. It is the
object of this essay to bring out an essentially artistic aspect
of his work, which has escaped notice, partly because the
history is so long that it is hard to take it in as a whole,
and partly because the execution of the effect is imperfect,
having been hindered by the good intentions with which
Thucydides set out.
The history, as it stands, is the product of two hardly
compatible designs. It was originally planned as a textbook
of strategy and politics in the form of a journal; and it is
commonly taken to be actually nothing more. But the work,
in the course of its progress, began to grow, as it were of
itself, out of this pedestrian plan into a shape with another
contour, which, however, is broken by the rigid lines of the
old plan, and discontinuous; much as a set of volcanic
islands might heave themselves out of the sea, at such angles
and distances that only to the eye of a bird, and not to the
sailor cruising among them, would they appear as the summits
~
Vill PREFACE
of one and the same submerged mountain-chain. The present
essay is mainly an attempt to chart these islands, leaving
uncoloured blanks where the sea lies flat between them,
and infringing none of the fishing-rights of the professed
historian.
It is the intrusion of this artistic tendency—for a thing
so unpremeditated can hardly be called a design—that justifies
the epithet Mythistoricus. By Mythistoria I mean history
cast in a mould of conception, whether artistic or philosophic,
which, long before the work was even contemplated, was
already inwrought into the very structure of the author’s
mind. In every age the common interpretation of the world
of things is controlled by some scheme of unchallenged and
unsuspected presupposition; and the mind of any individual,
however little he may think himself to be in sympathy
with his contemporaries, is not an insulated compartment,
but more like a pool in one continuous medium—the cir-
cumambient atmosphere of his place and time. This element
of thought is always, of course, most difficult to detect and
analyse, just because it is a constant factor which underlies
all the differential characters of many minds. It was im-
possible for Dante to know that his scheme of redemption
would appear improbable when astronomy should cease to
be geocentric. It is impossible for us to tell how pervasively
our own view of the world is eoloured by Darwinian biology
and by the categories of mechanical and physical science.
And so it was with Thucydides. He chose a task which
promised to lie wholly within the sphere of positively
ascertainable fact; and, to make assurance double sure, he
set himself limits which further restricted this sphere, till
it seemed that no bias, no preconception, no art except the
art of methodical inquiry, could possibly intrude. But he
had not reckoned with the truth that you cannot collect
facts, like so many pebbles, without your own personality
and the common mind of your age and country having
something to say to the choice and arrangement of the
collection. He had forgotten that he was an Athenian, born
before Aeschylus was dead; and it did not occur to him
PREFACE ix
that he must have a standpoint and outlook from which the
world, having a long way to travel in a thousand or two
thousand years, would drift far indeed. Thus it came about
that even his vigilant precaution allowed a certain traditional
mode of thought, characteristic of the Athenian mind, to
shape the mass of facts which was to have been shapeless,
so that the work of science came to be a work of art. And,
since this mode of thought had, as we shall see, grown
without a break out of a mythological conception of the
world of human acts and passions, which is the world of
history, I have given him the epithet Mythistoricus.
This essay, although its argument (of which a summary
will be found in the Table of Contents) is continuous, has
been divided into two parts which in a way reflect the
twofold design of Thucydides’ history. Having occasion to
look into the question, how the Peloponnesian War arose,
I felt, vaguely but strongly, that Thucydides’ account of its
origin is remarkably inadequate; and I came to form a very
_~ different theory of the real causes of the war. This theory
I have stated in the first four chapters, because, although the
subject seems to me to be of no great importance in itself,
it led me to inquire further, why Thucydides has told us
about this matter—and told us at considerable length—so
exceedingly little that appears to us relevant. The rest of
the book is an answer to this question. I found that the
reason lay, not in the author’s famous reticence—he thought
he had recorded all we should want to know—but in the fact
that he did not, as is commonly asserted, take a scientific
view of human history.. Rather he took the view of one
who, having an admirably scientific temper, lacked the
indispensable aid of accumulated and systematic knowledge,
and of the apparatus of scientific conceptions, which the
labour of subsequent centuries has refined, elaborated, and
distinguished. Instead of this furniture of thought, to the
inheritance of which every modern student is born, Thucydides
possessed, in common with his contemporaries at Athens, the
cast of mind induced by an early education consisting almost
L_~
x PREFACE
exclusively in the study of the poets. No amount of hard,
rational thinking—an exercise which Thucydides never inter-
mitted—could suffice to break up this mould, in an age
when science had as yet provided no alternative system of
conception. The bent of his poetical and artistic nurture
comes out in the mythistorical portions of the work, which
in the later chapters I have singled out and put together.
The principle which informs and connects them is the tragic
theory of human nature—a traditional psychology which
Thucydides seems to me to have learnt from Aeschylus. 1
have tried to show at some length how the form of the
Aeschylean drama is built upon this psychology ; and, finally,
I have traced the theory of the tragic passions back into that
dim past of mythological belief out of which it came into the
hands of the Athenian dramatists. So my original question
finds its answer. Thucydides never understood the origin of
the war, because his mind was filled with preconceptions
which shaped the events he witnessed into a certain form;
and this form chanced to be such that it snapped the causal
links between incidents, in the connexion of which the secret
lies.
The Greek historians can be interpreted only by reference
to the poets; and to understand the poets, we must know
something of the mythological stage of thought, the fund of
glowing chaos out of which every part of that beautiful,
articulate world was slowly fashioned by the Hellenic intellect.
There is, on the literary side, no branch of classical study
which is not still suffering from the neglect of mythology.
The poets are still treated as if, like an eighteenth-century
essayist, they had a tiresome trick of making ‘allusions’
which have to be looked up in a dictionary. The history of
philosophy is written as if Thales had suddenly dropped from
the sky, and, as he bumped the earth, ejaculated, ‘ Everything
must be made of water!’ The historians are examined on
the point of ‘trustworthiness’—a question which it is the
inveterate tendency of Englishmen to treat as a moral
question ; and, the certificate of honesty once awarded, their
evidence is accepted as if they had written yesterday. The
ει
PREFACE Xl
fallacy which I have designated ‘The Modernist Fallacy’ was
never, perhaps, so rife as it is now; and, but that I have no
wish to be contentious, this essay might be taken as a polemic
against it, in so far as I have argued that the thought of
a most prosaic and rational writer of antiquity moved in
an atmosphere which we should recognize to be poetic and
mythical.
Since I make no claim to have added to the stock of
detailed historical information, but only to have given a new
setting to established facts, I have not thought it necessary to
acknowledge the source of every statement. The material of
the first four chapters is taken largely from Dr. Busolt’s
monumental Griechische Geschichte, or from well-known
sources which Dr. Busolt’s learning and industry have made
easily accessible to any student. I have also found Beloch’s
work useful and suggestive. If I have, for the convenience
of exposition, here and there expressed disagreement with
a phrase from Professor Bury’s History of Greece, I would
not be thought insensible of the services rendered to scholar-
ship by a student whose vast erudition has not blunted
the delicate feeling for poetry revealed in his editions of
Pindar. ee
My thanks are due to the Publishers for their unvarying
courtesy and consideration. My friend, Mr. A. E. Bernays, of
Trinity College, has kindly read the proofs and suggested
corrections. I should like also to recognize with gratitude
the wonderful promptitude and efficiency of the readers and
staff of the Clarendon Press.
There remain two other debts of a more personal kind.
One, which I am glad to acknowledge in this place, is
somewhat indefinite, but still profound. It is to Dr. Verrall,
who, at a time when classical poetry in this country either
served as an engine of moral discipline in the teaching of
grammar or added an elegance of profane scholarship to the
cultured leisure of a deanery, was among the first to show
that a modern intellect could achieve a real and burning
xii - PREFACE
contact with the living minds of Greece. From his books and
lectures many of my generation first learnt that the Greeks
were not blind children, with a singular turn for the common-
place, crying for the light of Christian revelation; and I am
conscious, moreover, that in this present attempt to under-
stand, not the syntax, but the mind, of Thucydides, I am
following, for part of the way, a path which first opened
before me when, in the breathless silence of his lecture-room,
I began to understand how literary art could be the passion
of a life.
The other obligation is to Miss Jane Harrison, to whom this
book is dedicated in token that, but for the sympathy and
encouragement she has given at every stage of its growth,
this dream would have followed others up the chimney
with the smoke. Any element of value there may be in
the mythological chapters is due, directly or indirectly, to her;
and, grateful as I am for the learning which she has put
unreservedly at my disposal, I am much more grateful for
the swift and faultless insight which, again and again, has
taken me straight to a point which my slower apprehension
had fumbled for in vain.
F. M, Ὁ.
Trinity CoLLEGE,
January, 1907.
CONTENTS
PART I. THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
I. THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
7 enucyaides first Book does not provide either Athens or Sparta with
NY
What party at Athens made the war? The country population was
Al
—
‘became strong enough to dictate his policy.
a sufficient motive for fighting. The current views that the war
was (1) promoted by Pericles from personal motives; (2) racial ;
(3) political, are inadequate. Thucydides’ own view that the
Spartans were forced into war is true. Their reluctance explained.
But Pericles also had no reason to desire war. Thucydides states
only official policies ; perhaps this policy was unofficial.
II. ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR
a negligible factor in politics before the war. The large and
growing commercial population in the Piraeus, who regarded the
naval supremacy of Athens as a means of controlling trade,
furnished the bulk of Pericles’ majority in his last years, and
III. THE MEGARIAN DECREES
non-Thucydidean accounts of the outbreak of war make the
negotiations turn solely on the Megarian decrees. Thucydides
records none of these three decrees and keeps Megarian affairs in
the background, suppressing Pericles’ connexion with them.
The coercion of Megara was the first step in the unofficial policy
forced on Pericles by his commercial supporters ; the object being
to establish a trade-route from the Piraeus to the West across the
Megarid from Nisaea to Pegae, and so to cut out Corinth. The
earlier Peloponnesian War offers a parallel: the Egyptian Expedi-
tion analogous to the Sicilian, which was from the first part of the
commercial party’s plan.
IV. THE WESTERN POLICY
Thucydides says nothing of earlier Athenian relations with the West,
or of the part taken by Pericles in the alliance with Corcyra ;
though he gives one or two indications that this alliance was a
step towards conquest ofthe West. Similarly, designs on Carthage
date from nine years earlier than Thucydides’ first mention.
The Western policy was hindered by Pericles, who always dis-
approved of it; but it explains the fresh course taken by the
war after his death. Thucydides always regarded the Sicilian
Expedition as an irrelevant diversion, because he never saw its
connexion with the Megarian decrees, and could not know that
Pericles adopted the anti-Megarian policy only because it was
forced upon him. : ‘ : : :
ΩΝ .
PAGES
. 15-24
"
. 25-38
. 89-51
xiv CONTENTS
V. THUCYDIDES’ CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
PAGES
How could Thucydides regard his account of the origin of the war as
complete and final? The contrast between it and our own hypo-
thesis points to his conception of history being different from the
modern. He undertakes to record only what was actually done
in the war (ἔργα) and the ‘accounts’ (λόγοι) given by the agents.
(This method was partly imposed by circumstances. His original
plan of the work.) He says nothing about causes; and draws no
distinction between αἰτίαι and προφάσεις. The first Book is not»
about causes but ‘ grievances’ (aitia:)—the story of a feud between
Athens and Sparta ; which he traces down from the Persian Wars
(i. 88-118). The only natural causes of human events, considered by
, ancient historians, are psychological—the characters and immediate
ἡ motives of men or of personified states ; whereas moderns look to
social and economic conditions, &c., and formulate abstract laws.
The ancients’ latent ; assumption | is that every motive is a_/first
cause; human action is not part of a universal causal nexus,
and hues only immediate motives were thought relevant to
history by rationalists who rejected supernatural causes—the will
of gods, of spirits, or of Fate. Thucydides had not only no religion _. +
and no philosophy, but no science or scientific conceptions. ae
limits himself to recording observed actions and alleged motives) 58-76
oo
o y
.᾿
PART Il. THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS si
INTRODUCTORY
ἢ The impression conveyed by the whole History contains an element
of artistic unity not accounted for by the original design. The
explanation of this will, by the way, remove the moral cloud
which hangs over Thucydides’ treatment of Cleon. . < . 79-81 V4
ee ye
VI. THE LUCK OF PYLOS
The new principle is first traceable in the Pylos narrative. Summary
of this. The impression conyeyed is that the seizure of Pylos was
a mere stroke of luck, and the obscurities of the story all tend to this
effect ; and yet we can make out, by inference from the narrative”
itself, ‘that the occupation was designed. Why i is this impression
_given? Thucydides is not moralizing, or actuated by malignity.
He really saw an agency called Fortune at work; for he had no
general conception of natural law to exclude sich an agency.
The whole narrative illustrates the contrast of human foresight
(γνώμη) and non-human Fortune (Τύχη), which are the sole deter-
minant factors in a series of human events...
| But why was Thucydides predisposed to see Fortune at work just in
Siete CIOS EF a ΜΑΙ a: sak Nic bel ORY ae Bie) a et aS 82-109
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wt
CONTENTS KV
VII. THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS
PAGES
In order to find the preoccupying factor in Thucydides’ mind, we
resume the story of the negotiations after Pylos and of the capture
of Sphacteria. This incident and the only two others in which
Cleon appears, together form the complete outline of a drama,
embodying a well-known theory of human nature, which is set
forth in Diodotus’ Mytilenean speech. Thucydides has idealized
| and dramatized Cleon, who is quasi-hero of his own personal
‘drama, and also a minor character in the larger tragedy of
ΝΣ eT eee 90 4 ts
VIII. MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA
How facts ‘win over into the mythical’. Two phases of this pro-
cess—mythical injiguration by a traditional mould, and fabulous
invention—are illustrated by the legend of the tyrant-slayers.
Thucydides was on his guard against fabulous invention, not
against infiguration by an art-form, as seen in the dramatized
legend of Pausanias.
The external form of the History shows some conscious imitation of
Ἷμκοοαν ; but it also resembles the Aeschylean drama in technical
construction and in psychology. The structure of Aeschylean
tragedy is intermediate between pure symbolism and realism.
| The action falls into two planes : the lyric, which is supernatural
and universal, and the dialogue, which is human and particular.
_ The characters are highly abstract, being little more than personi- )
fied symbols. So are the characters in Thucydides. Tragic irony
arises from the separation of the two planes. Hypnotic effect of
some nope! in ee Compare the speeches in Thucy- (
dides. ‘ 4 : I ’ > : . 129-162
IX. PEITHO
Cleon’s relation to the larger plot, in which Athens is the heroine,
involves a further point of Aeschylean psychology. The problem
of responsibility in Aeschylus is solved by conceiving the Tragic
Passions both as supernatural agencies from without and as
integral factors in the agent’s mind. This is possible by means
of the idea of spiritual possession. The passions are internal
tempters from God ; and Temptation (Peitho) also comes externally
as incarnate in another person, e.g. Clytemnestra. Examples of
/this conception from History : Miltiades at Paros, Pausanias at
Plataea. Elpis, one of these dangerous, tempting passions, is
thought of as incarnate in Cleon, who acts as Peitho, or Apaté, to
Athens, when she has been intoxicated by Fortune at Pylos. 153-173
X. THE MELIAN DIALOGUE
The dialogue (which is summarized, with Dionysius’ comments) is
designed to express a pathological state of mind—insolence and
blindness—in which Athens voted the massacre of Melos, just
xvi CONTENTS
PAGES
| before the Sicilian Expedition. Alcibiades’ part in this incident
" fs omitted by Thucydides, 9. τ ww www ΨΡΎΝΝ
XI. THE LION’S WHELP
Thucydides’ conception of Alcibiades is ‘mythical’, as may be seen
from the first episode in which he appears. The motive of Apaté
in the legends of Darius and Xerxes, who are outwitted on the
| eve of their expeditions. So are the Athenians, on the eve of
| theirs, by the Egestaeans. ΔΝ νοις, τ
XII. EROS TYRANNUS
| Thucydides turns against Athens the moral of Aeschylus’ Persians, and
of Herodotus vii-ix. Nikias resembles Artabanus; Alcibiades,
Mardonius and Xerxes. Alcibiades and Eros, the tyrant passion.
The starting of the expedition, and its end, where the train of
mythical ‘ causes’ terminates. ἢ ᾿ ΐ : ᾿ ° 201-220
XIII. THE TRAGIC PASSIONS
The tragic theory of human nature turns on reversal of Fortune,
attributed at first to external agencies. Sinister conception of
‘Elpis, who was originally a Ker; so too was Eros. These and
other violent passions were at first invading daemons (explained
by the notion of orenda), whose permanence was due to cult,
while myth developed their personality. The daemons were
later subordinated to fully human Olympians; and in the theo-
logical stage of the tragic theory, the passions similarly became
ministerial agents of Divine Jealousy. God increases the arrogant
delusion by enhancing its causes.
Thucydides had not the sceptical Ionian temper of Herodotus. He
rationalized the Aeschylean theory, not realizing that, when the
theology was removed, what was left was mythical in origin.
Even Euripides still feels the supernatural quality of the elemen-
tary passions. . , : ξ ᾿ ᾿ : ‘ ‘ . 221-248
XIV. THE CAUSE OF THE WAR
Thucydides, tracing back his mythical ‘causes’, may have been driven
to connect the violence of Pericles against Megara—the inexplic-
able circumstance in the origin of the war—with the hereditary
madness of the Alemaeonidae. At any rate, his preoccupation with
these mythical causes prevented him from seeing the real factors
at work. , . ‘ ¥ . ‘ Σ ‘ . . . 244-250
INDEX . ‘ ‘ , ‘ : ν ; ; ; : . 251-252
PLATES
Design from Apulian Vase (Darius) ‘ ᾿ ‘ . facing page 195
Relief in Naples Museum (Peitho) . : rp ΜΙ a yee »» 209
CHAPTER I
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
TuvucYDIDES prefaces the introductory Book of his history
with the statement that he has recorded the grounds of
quarrel between Athens and the Peloponnesians, ‘in order
that no one may ever have to ask from what origin so great
a war arose among the Hellenes.’* Plainly he thought that
his account, which follows, of the disputes and negotiations
on the eve of the outbreak ought to satisfy posterity. He
has told us all the ascertained truth which seemed to him
relevant. But somehow we are not satisfied. We do not
feel, after reading the first Book, that Thucydides has told
us all that we want to know, or all that he knew and, if
he had considered it relevant, might have told. So attempts
have again and again been made to go behind his story.
We are still troubled by the question which he thought no
one would ever have to ask.
Our impression, as we review this preliminary narrative,
sums itself into a sense of contradiction. The ostensible
protagonists in the Peloponnesian War were Sparta and
Athens—Athens as represented by Pericles. On the other
hand, neither Pericles nor Sparta is provided with any
sufficient motive for engaging, just then, in hostilities... Ac-
cordingly we find in the modern histories, which are necessarily
based on Thucydides, conflicting statements of the type:
‘Sparta, or Corinth, forced the war upon Athens,’ and then
again: ‘Pericles saw that war was inevitable and chose this
moment for forcing it upon Sparta,’ { So uncertain are we
on the questions: who wanted this war, and why they
wanted it,
1 i, 23.5,
B2
4 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
Why, then, did Athens and Sparta fight? This very ques-
tion seems to have puzzled contemporaries; for various
accounts were already current when Thucydides wrote, and
it was partly his object to correct vulgar opinion and readjust
the perspective to his own view. Modern historians do little
more than traverse the same ground in his footsteps and
follow him to the same conclusion. .
Besides Thucydides’ own opinion, which we reserve for the
present, three main views can be distinguished. These are:
¥ (1) that the war was promoted by Pericles from personal
motives; (2) that it was a racial war—Ionian against Dorian ;
(3) that it was a conflict of political ideals—Democracy
against Oligarchy.! The first of these is only a superficial
account of the immediate cause. The other two are more
reflective, pointing to causes of a wider and deeper sort, and
touching the whole character and significance of the struggle.
We will briefly discuss them in order.
(1) That Pericles had personal grounds for thrusting the
war on Sparta, seems to have been the vulgar belief—the
belief which Thucydides desired, above all, to refute. Pericles,
said the gossips, was avenging the theft of three loose women ?;
he was afraid of sharing the fate of Pheidias, and so stirred
up a general conflagration ;* he wished to avoid rendering
account of public moneys;* he acted from an ambitious
desire to humble the pride of the Peloponnesians.’ These
and similar current scandals have found their way, through
Ephorus and others, into Plutarch and Diodorus. Among
the moderns, Beloch® inclines to revert to a view of this type.
Pericles, finding his position at home shaken, was anxious
to turn attention elsewhere. But it has been sufficiently
replied that, though this motive might explain his socialistic
‘ ¢The inevitable struggle between these rival powers widened into
a conflict of race between Ionians and Dorians, and a party warfare
between democracy and oligarchy.’—Companion to Greek Studies, Cambridge,
1905, p. 69. When a war is described as ‘inevitable’, we may be almost
certain that its causes are not known.
2 Arist. Ach. 524. 3 Arist. Pax, 603.
* Diod. xiii. 38. > Plut. malig. Herod. 6.
6. Griech. Gesch. i. 515.
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR 5
- measures in home politics, the war was certain to be unpopular
with a great part of the citizens, and could not, as conducted
by Pericles, have any dazzling results at first."
If there is any truth in this view, there must have been
something in Pericles’ situation more threatening and more
difficult to meet than malicious prosecutions of his personal
friends; or he could not have been driven to an expedient
so desperate and (must we not add?) so unscrupulous. We
| will pass on, bearing in mind that contemporary Athens,
_as this scandal shows, believed that Pericles made the war,
‘and was hard put to it to divine his reasons.
(2) Was it, then, a racial conflict of Ionian against Dorian?
Thucydides, at any rate, nowhere suggests that racial antipathy
was a main element. In fact, two nations do not go to war
on such grounds; though, of course, when war has broken
out, there will always be people wicked enough to inflame
the prejudice and pride of blood. The Corinthians will call
upon Sparta to help the Potidaeans ‘who are Dorians be-
sieged by Ionians’.2 Brasidas will tell his troops that they
are Dorians about to meet Ionians whom they have beaten
again and again.® Especially will language of this kind be
heard in Sicily, because there the diplomatic game of Athens
is to stir up Ionian racial feeling against Syracuse, and to
cover designs of conquest with the fine pretext of ‘succouring
our kinsmen of Leontini’.* Hermocratés brushes aside these
plausible excuses. Let no one say, he urges, that, though the
Dorians among us may be enemies to the Athenians, the
Chalcidians are safe because they are Ionians and kinsmen
to Athens. The Athenians do not attack us because we are
divided into two races, of which one is their enemy, the
other their friend.® Precisely ; and the same holds of Athens
and Sparta at home. We must find some more tangible
motive for war than a difference of race.
(3) The third view is that the struggle was political. ‘The
war became in time a conflict of political principles: com-
munity of feeling and interest joined democrats on the one
“Wtentisateenis ὃ eed
1 Delbriick, cit. Busolt, iii. 2. 819. 2 Thue, i. 124,
8. Thue. v. 9. * Thue. vi. 76 ff. 5 Thue. iy. 61.
ἫΝ
6 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
side against oligarchs on the other.’ But though it may
be true that the war became so in time, this will not account
or the outbreak. ep , because ‘ oli-
garch’ and ‘democrat’ meant very different things in different
states, and at different times in the same state. We must
recur to this difficulty later; here it is enough to observe
that Sparta did not fight Athens because Athens was silly
enough to have a democratic constitution. No one would
maintain that. Nor had the Athenians any objection to the
Spartan system of government—at Sparta.
It will hardly be believed, either, that each state fought to
give Greece in general the blessings of a constitution like its
own. Of course, we shall find one of them posing as a
benefactor. ‘The sympathies of mankind were largely on
the side of the Spartans, who proclaimed themselves the
liberators of Hellas’.2 The words were sure to find willing
ears among the oppressed subjects of Athenian ‘tyranny’.
But why, when Mytilene sent to Sparta immediately before
the war® and offered to revolt, did Sparta refuse her aid ὃ
The similar pretensions of Athens in earlier days had not been
more substantial. To the minor states ‘freedom’ meant auto-
‘nomy. The Athenian allies, until they revolted, were allowed
considerable latitude in self-government. An oligarchy of
landowners was tolerated at Samos, till the revolt of 440.
Mytilene had a moderate oligarchy, till the revolt of 428.
But then these very facts show that Athens did not care enough
for the abstract principle of democracy to fight for the re-
cognition of it in other states. Neither she nor Sparta was
so philanthropic. ‘Each of the two supreme states’, says
Aristotle,* ‘set up in the other cities governments on the
model of its own—democracies in the one case and oligarchies
in the other. In so doing they considered their own interests,
* Whibley, Political Parties at Athens, p. 83. Mr. Whibley, of course, only
gives this as one factor in the situation, which it certainly was, after the war
had broken out.
* Thue. ii. 8. 4.
3. Thue, iii. 2; the offer was probably made after the revolt of Potidaea.
* Ar. Pol. vi. (iv.) 11. 1296 a 82.
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR 7
not those of the cities... The result has been that the cities
have lost even the desire for equality, and are accustomed
either to seek empire or to bow to superior force.’ It was not, in
fact, a question of the ideal form of government. The Athenian
Demos did not set up democracies in the spirit in which
Piato instituted an aristocracy in Utopia; they supported
_ the corresponding class in the allied states, because they had
common interests and a class-sympathy of poor against rich.
Similarly the Spartan oligarchy maintained the corresponding
class in neighbouring states, but only inside the Peloponnese.
They were not conscious of a disinterested mission to the
rest of Hellas.
The struggle between democracy and oligarchy, where it
existed, was in the main not a warfare between nations
and cities, but an internal duel between two parties in
one city. Each wanted to rule in At. Oh HAY: 2200. os,
_ prepared at any moment to invoke the aid of the nationa
enemy. But neither at Athens nor at Sparta was there any™
natural for the contrasts ὁ ; Morian, democrat
onlian and
and oligarch, to be much in the air, because the nominal
head of the Peloponnesian league happened to be Dorian and
oligarchical, while Athens was Ionian and democratic. Argos
was democratic and Dorian; and she was sometimes on one
side, sometimes on the other. But did she join Athens in
461 because she was democratic, and Sparta in the present
war because she was Dorian ?
» Neither the racial contrast nor the political provides either
party with a definite and sufficient motive for embarking, just
at this moment, on a conflict. We must look elsewhere.
Most of the modern histories come back to Thucydides’
one explicit statement of his own view, and there rest content.
‘The most genuine pretext, though it appeared least in what
was said, I consider to have been the growing power of the
Athenians which alarmed the Lacedaemonians and forced |
them into war.’ Thucydides holds (1) that the Spartans\\/
1 Thue. i. 28. 6; repeated in i, 88, and explained 88-118. 2; alluded to by |) »
the Corcyreans in i, 33.
THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
aM PR a growing power, and (2) that the _war
_was forced. on Sparta
<5 SEMEN shall recur jist to the explanation which Thucydides
» gives of this alarm. It is sufficient here to note that the
‘| Spartans were reluctant to fight; the cage did not come
--
‘from them. This we believe to be true.
“an imperial or conquering state. )\ The purpose of her elaborate
arta was not
and rigid military system was often misunderstood; even
Aristotle speaks of it as designed for conquest. But its
existence is otherwise explained by a glance at the economic
_“and social-conditions. The soil of Lacedaemon was owned by
a few, very large proprietors. Hence, while the country could
have maintained fifteen hundred horse and thirty thousand
hoplites, the total number fell to a thousand, and Sparta could
‘not survive a single blow. Her fall at Leuctra was due to
the paucity of her citizen population. The laws were framed
to encourage-the-increase of the privileged class;and_ this
ae Line with the growth of large estates, was
bound_to produce a very large number of poor.? Only the
small ana ip body of the rich enjoyed full citizenship.
The Spartiates, says Isocrates,? enslaved the souls of the
common people no less than those of their servants. | They
appropriated, he goes on, not only the best of the land, but
also more of it than was similarly occupied elsewhere in
Greece, leaving so little for the mass of the people, and that
little so poor, that these could scarcely keep alive with
grinding toil. The common folk were split up in tiny
‘cities’, less important than villages in Attica. Deprived of
all a freeman should have, they were yet compelled to serve
as attendants in war. Worst of all, the Ephors could execute
them untried, in any numbers. Their condition was lower
than that of slaves in other parts of Greece. The Ephors, we
are told, on taking office regularly declared war on the Helots,
so that to massacre them at any moment might be legal)
1 Ar. Pol. ii. 9 furnishes this and the following particulars.
2 Cf. Thuc. i. 141. The Peloponnesians are αὐτουργοί and have no wealth.
3 Panath. 270. Isocrates’ statements are, of course, rhetorical ; but these
seem to be true.
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR *9
The danger of such a situation—the constant menace of
revolt—did not escape the observation of Aristotle who
further remarks that the Spartans plainly had not discovered
the best method of governing a subject population. To meet
this danger, and not for purposes of conquest, their military |
system was designed and maintained. Thucydides saw this.
In 424, he says, the Spartans favoured Brasidas’ expedition,
because, now that the Athenians were infesting the Pelopon-
nese, they wanted to send some Helots out of the way and
so prevent a rising for which the occupation of Pylos gave an τ,"
opportunity. ‘Most of the Lacedaemonian institutions wer
specially designed to secure them against this danger.’ ?
This sagacious observation had escaped most of Thucydides’
contemporaries. They could not understand why a great
military power should not be aggressive, and they put it down
to the notorious ‘slowness’ of the Spartan character. ‘Of all
the Hellenes’, so the Corinthians expostulate, ‘you alone keep
quiet.’ ‘Justice with you seems to consist in not injuring
others and only defending yourselves from being injured.’ ὃ
Elsewhere,t Thucydides himself falls into the same strain.
In 411, he says, if the Peloponnesians had been more
energetic, the whole Athenian empire might have fallen into
their hands; but the two peoples were of very different
tempers, the one quick and adventurous, the other timorous
and slow. The Spartans ἢ he remarks again, were neyercis-
“This reluctance i is - easy to perry ἜΠΟΣ in an out-of-
the-way corner of the peninsula, locked in by mountains
and almost harbourless coasts, prohibited by law from com-
᾿ “merce and industry, the Spartans never voluntarily and |.
spontaneously attempted conquest outside the Peloponnese.
| They did not want an empire over-seas, and when they got
_ | one, could not hold it. fei ideal was a ‘life of virtue’ P
| to be lived by a small class at the expense of a majority held
down by ruthless repression and treacherous massacre. For
1 Pol. ii, 9. 2 Thue, iv. 80.
3 Thue. i. 68. * Thue, viii. 96.
5 Thue, i, 118.
10 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
= of the Helots, it was necessary to maintain a ring of
igarchies’ on their land frontier. That was all their
‘ambition. Living on a -powder-mine, they had everything
| to fear, and nothing positive to gain, from hostilities with
Atheris. The moment war broke out their coasts were
enceless. )The Athenians—as Demosthenes had the wit to
see—had only to land a force on some remote point, like
Pylos, easily defensible and capable of being provisioned
from the sea, and the Spartans were powerless. What could
they do when the oppressed serfs flocked into such a centre of
revolt? Yet this obvious peril faced them from the first
noment of war with the mistress of the seas. Naturally,
they were reluctant, and ‘not of a temper to make war
except when compelled’. ("Thucydides is right when he says
“~~ But who foreed them? Pericles, and the Athenian demo-
eracy ? The term ‘democracy’ has fatally misleading associa-
tions, and it is not easy always to remember that the
language used by contemporaries about political parties is
vitiated by a constant source of error. The old names, Whig
and Tory, oligarch and democrat, which stand for the aims
of parties in one generation go on being used in the next,
when the lines of cleavage have really shifted and parties are
al divided on quite other issues. A democrat was a revolu-
aa tionary under Peisistratus, a radical under Cleisthenes, and
in the time of Pericles a conservative.
᾿ In order to understand the position of Pericles it is necessary
to glance back over the period occupied by this change. The
history of Athens exhibits a series of upheavals from below,
which end in the full realization of democracy. The power
of the great landed families, who ruled Athens down to the
Persian wars, had been broken by Cleisthenes, though repre-
sentatives of the two chief houses, the Alemaeonidae end the
Philaidae, continue to play the leading parts for some time to
come. Themistocles, half an alien by birth, had broken into
the charmed circle and created a party of his own, which the
aristocrats combined to oppose. His invention of Athenian
sea power and his creation of the Piraeus were strokes of fresh
ns AAT HO
oe ee ρυοος
a 3 ee
Oia = eh ate
eens
a
oR PI
at ae
< “Ὁ ey ae
Ϊ
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR al
and innovating genius. The policy they stood for was justified
at Salamis and adopted in the next generation.
After the Persian wars men’s minds were at first filled with
.the Eastern peril. The Philaidae, headed by Kimon, took
up the anti-Persian ideal—war to the death with the bar-
barian. The ideal was identified with pan-Hellenism and
friendship for Athens’ yokefellow, Sparta. The men of
Marathon, the victory of the aristocrat Miltiades, rallied
‘round Miltiades’ son. The men of Salamis, the democratic
__ motives fey x fe Grofit
Ba
victory won by the upstart Themistocles, supported the leader
of the opposite house. |The upheaval in this generation was
led by Pericles and Ephialtes, Family tradition associated
‘the Alemaeonid Pericles with the seafaring population of ‘ the
shore’. But the sea power of Athens comes to mean something
different from what it meant to the generation who had seen
the Persian wars. The Eastern peril fades, to vanish at
Eurymedon. ‘he Delian league. _loses its raison. détre δᾶ
passes from ‘an _ “alliance. Rak an_‘empire’. To Pericles”
the first of the ‘three most powerful
)which the Athenians allege as
stam the position they had won.! In
his speeches Paricles is always dwelling on the glory of
Athens’ rule- A genuine imperialist, he honestly believed
that the School of Hellas was a benevolent and beneficent
institution, and did his best to make it so. ‘No subject
complains of being ruled by such a mistress, no enemy of
being injured by so glorious an antagonist.’? Thucydides,
the son of Melesias, kept up the opposition on the antiquated
lines, and attacked Pericles for usingthe allies’. treasure
for other ends than war with Persia. Thucydides was behind
the times; he was ostracized, and left Pericles in undisputed
supremacy.
Meanwhile, with the achievement of complete democracy,
the constitutional struggle was over. The people had gained
‘all they wanted. They did not desiré complete equality of
all clasess. As the oligarchic writer? puts it, they did not
1 ὑπὸ (rpidv) τῶν μεγίστων νικηθέντες, τιμῆς καὶ δέους καὶ ὠφελίας, Thue. i. 76.
2 Pseudo-Xen, de rep. Ath. i, 8. 8 Thue. ii, 41.
The reign of Seas Nica What was there left for
Athens to do? From ae point of view, nothing. He
a beautiful thing is a worthier occupation than killing other is
people. An additional advantage gained by this use of the vr ae oF
“ye
15. THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
want the offices on which the safety of the state depended ;
they knew it was better.for men of substance to hold them.
They only want, he sneers, the offices which carry wages.
It is less unfair to say that they were content with their
stronghold, the law courts. As for the oligarchs, they were
no longer a party. The oligarchs from conviction were a
hopeless minority who could only intrigue in secret and try
to influence elections.
is accused of being no gre atesman, only a great politician ;
hé had no ‘original constructive idea’, We dispute this.
He had an original idea, which has tog rarely made its
appearance in the history of mankind. /[he idea was that,
instead of spending the treasure of the league on materials
for a very improbable war with Persia, it was better to spend
it on enduring monuments of perfect art, and that to make
Fund was that he could thus provide employment for a large
working population. Those who laboured in the building »
of those great memorials of Athens’ glory had as good a claim, “
he said, to be supported from the treasury as men engaged
on foreign service. / Workers in all materials, in marble and
bronze, ivory and gold, ebony and cypress; carpenters, masons,
brassfounders, marblecutters, dyers, goldsmiths, painters, en-
gravers, turners; merchants and sailors who brought the
material by sea and by land, wheelwrights, waggoners,
carriers, ropemakers, leathercutters, roadmakers, miners—
every art had a whole army of labourers at work and plenty:
was universally diffused. The whole city, almost, was drawing
ἮΝ \his wages.!
A thoroughly idyllic picture. It _is true that the allies,
who paid the bill, were becoming restive pint lee πέσοι “ἢ
the three iaporal motives—fear—was_ beginning to—be_felt
at_Athens,__Naxos—had been the first to revolt, and ‘the first,
to be enslaved contrary to the terms of alliance’? Samos
1 Plut. Per. xii. ? Thue. i. 98.
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR 13
and Byzantium had called for stern repression. But the
allies had weakened themselves by letting their navies go and
contributing money instead of ships. Scattered on islands
they had no common place of moeting(now that the congress
of the league had fallen into disuse.* Pericles’ policy towards
them was ‘to keep ‘them in hand’}~a phrase several times
attributed to him and probably. oftén_on_his lips.
What reason had Pericles for making war with Sparta?
That is just the question which puzzled contemporaries ;
“ hence the scandals which we mentioned and dismissed. When
historians cannot discover a motive, they say that he saw
that war was ‘inevitable’ and hastened the moment. But
war meant danger to the stability of the Athenian empire—
the one cloud on his horizon. So long as there was peace,
the allies could be ‘kept in hand’; but with the outbreak
of hostilities, the Athenian fleet would have other work to do.
The chances of revolt would be enormously increased. When
the ery for autonomy had once been raised, Sparta would
come forward as the liberator of Hellas. (ts first duty of
Athens was to maintain unimpaired the émpire which was
her glory. \Then why plunge her into a war which was the
one thing ‘that could make the danger of losing that empire
imminent? And what would become of the noble ideal of
Athens as a centre of culture and of art, the lesson and the
glory of all Greece ? :
Pericles | had no more reason than S ing war ;
and this is precisély~the~itfipression which we get from
__ Thucydides. He tells us indeed that Pericles_urged the
Athenians into the war; but neither at the place where
this statement occurs,” nor yet in the speech of Pericles at
the end of the Book is any motive assigned for this course
of action. We can only conclude that Thucydides was at
a loss to understand what the motive could be. Yet some
one must have desired the war; and if the two protagonists
on whom our attention is commonly fixed are each with-
out a sufficient motive, we must seek elsewhere. In what
direction ?
1 Ps.-Xen. de Rep, Ath. ii. 2. 2 Thue. i. 127,
14 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
The clue is supplied when we take account of a certain
point of Thucydidean method. The facts which Thucydides
in his introduction promises to tell us are of two kinds: first,
the events (épya)—what actually was done in the war; and
besides these, only ‘the accounts given of themselves by the
several parties in speeches (λόγῳ). The history does, in fact,
consist of two elements—descriptive narration and speeches
—what was done and what was said. This arrangement in-
volves a limitation important for our present guidance. The
arguments, pretexts, explanations, which occur in the speeches
must be such as could, and would, be used on formal occasions,
by speakers addressing a particular audience for a particular
purpose. β urther the speakers are, almost always, official
speakers, the leaders of parties or the representatives of states ;
there is no room in the plan for any statement of the views
and aims of minorities, or_of the non-official sections of a
majority.) It may be that our secret lies in those dark places
which the restrictions of this method compel Thucydides to
leave in darkness.
Ror Ξ Se ee ee ee na
pe ~ ye
ae
CHAPTER II
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR
Wo were the people on the Athenian side who made the
war and why did they make it? Who caused the ‘alarm of
the Lacedaemonians’ and ‘forced’ them to fight? We must
look behind the official utterances of Pericles, and attempt an
analysis of the majority with which he worked. We must
stop speaking of ‘the Athenians’, as Thucydides does; not
every Athenian was a Pericles in miniature.
Much has been written about the state of parties at Athens
during the war—the state reflected in the earlier extant
comedies of Aristophanes. One point, however, of great
importance, is easily overlooked. It is that the state of
parties during the war must have been very different from
what it was before the war. The annual invasions of Attica
caused an influx of the rural population into Athens, and so
altered the balance of parties. Aristophanes shows us only
the later, transformed condition. To answer our question
we must go back to the previous state of affairs. Further,
we must avoid obscuring the whole discussion by the use of
irrelevant terms, such as oligarch and democrat.
The unknown author of the tract On the Athenian Con-
stitution } tells us in a few pages more about the Athenian
Demos than we shall find in the whole of Thucydides, and
he shows us how the difference of parties looked to an
old-fashioned aristocrat. He uses three antitheses. (1) The~
ww
commons (δῆμος) are opposed to the men of birth (γενναῖοι) |
—a reminiscence of the old days of patrician rule ; (2) the base
mechanics (πονηροί, which seems to have some of its original
meaning, ‘working men’) are opposed to the leisured and
1 Ps,-Xen. de Rep. Ath.
-ας-.-
16 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
educated classes, naively called ‘the best’ (of χρηστοί or of
βέλτιστοι) ; (8) the poor (πένητες) are contrasted with the
rich (πλούσιοι) or men of position and substance (δυνατώτεροι).
» It will be seen that the division is not constitutional—
democrat against oligarch—but a division of class interest
_—poor against rich. This author, however, is criticizing
the democratic constitution which gives too much power
to the poor; he is not considering mainly the division of
parties from the point of view of war. The conditions of
war brin rent conflict of _Interests. The antithesis
of country and town here. ecm It_cuts across
the division_of rich and poor ; in n the country rich and poor
alike shared certain risks in war-time which set them against
rich and poor alike in the-town.
The same author,’ when speaking of war, says (almost
in Pericles’ words, Thue. i. 143): ‘If Athens were only an
island, she could escape having her lands ravaged by invaders.
As it is, the farmers.and the-rich (οἱ γεωργοῦντες καὶ of πλούσιοι)
dread the incursions of the enemy, whereas the people
(6 δῆμος), having nothing to ‘lose, live in security.’ In this
passage ‘the people ’—so shifting are are these terms 2—means
the town poor, contrasted with the owners of land, whether
large holders (πλούσιοι) or small farmers (γεωργοῦντες). In
Aristophanes ὅ the same class, the town demos, are called
‘the poor’. It is from this antithesis of country and town
that we must start.
The strength of the landed interest was, on paper, very
considerable. Thucydides,* in describing the removal of
the country folk into Athens,says that it was very painful,
because the Athenians, more than any other Hellenic people,
had always been accustomed to live on the soil. Although
united by Theseus in a single πόλις, most of them (οἱ λέν ἢ
1 ῬΆ,-Χρῃ. de Rep. Ath. ii. 14.
2 Thue. ii. 65, speaking only of the country population, uses δῆμος to mean
the peasantry with small holdings, as distinguished from of δυνατοί who have
large estates.
3 Eccl. 197 ναῦς δεῖ καθέλκειν" τῷ πένητι μὲν δοκεῖ, | τοῖς πλουσίοις δὲ καὶ γεωργοῖς
οὗ δοκεῖ, Of, Plut. vit. Nik. 9 οἱ εὔποροι καὶ πρεσβύτεροι and most of οἱ γεωργοί
favoured peace, * ii, 16.
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR 17:
down to the time of this war, resided from old habit in
the country. They had just restored their country houses
after the Persian invasion,.and now they. were..called upon
to forsake their ancient manner of.life-and leave the village
which to them was a city.
The country people, as is implied when the term ‘poor’
is specially used of the town demos, were comparatively
well-to-do. The larger owners worked their farms by slave-
labour; and even the small holders would have one or two
slaves.1 They grew, probably, enough corn to supply their
own needs, though not those of the town, which depended
chiefly on importation. They sent fruit and vegetables to
the Athenian market, and olive-oil across the seas. This
class had little interest in commerce or in empire; and.they
had everything to lose by war,which meant-the-destruction
of their olive “trees.” ἘΠ If f they were so. numerous, why did they
not prevent the war rt
The answer is “simple. ~ Their leaders, the-territorial_aristo-
eracy, had little-peliticat*imfluence. ‘ Oligarchs’ by tradition,
they were suspected of laconism and of intrigues to subvert
the democracy..-The great majority of the “country people
_were, like Aristophanes’ Acharnians, peasants who took no
interest in politics, and seldom or never came to Athens.
Their hatred of the confinement of town-life i is illustrated by
Dikaiopolis’ complaints :
‘Looking in vain to the prospect of the fields,
Loathing the city, longing for a peace,
To return to my poor village and my farm,
That never used to cry ‘‘Come buy my charcoal!”
Nor ‘Buy my oil!” nor ‘“‘Buy my anything!”’
But gave me what I wanted, freely and fairly,
Clear of all cost, with never a word of buying
Or such buy-words.’ ὃ
Many of the citizens, says Isocrates, did not. even come to
the city for festivals, but preferred to stay at home and enjoy
the pleasures of the country.*
1 Hence Thue. calls the Peloponnesians by contrast, αὐτουργοί.
* A point frequently mentioned : Thue. ii, 72, 75; Ar. Ach, 182, 232, 512 ;
Pax, 628, &c. 8 Ar. Ach. 32. Frere.
* Isocr. Areop. 52, Cf. Eur. Or. 918 ὀλιγάκις ἄστυ κἀγορᾶς xpaivey κύκλον, |
σ
18 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
The ‘men of Marathon’, now, as always, settled on the soil,
were a generation behind the townspeople, and hated the
new growth of the ‘democratic ’ Piraeus. They cared for
the Empire only on its original, anti-Persian basis, and for
the Parthenon not at all. They did not want to exploit the
allies. By traditional sentiment they were not hostile to
the Spartans. They were out of touch with the new school
in polities, and so long as peace allowed them to stay quietly
on their farms, they were a negligible factor. -_in_-political
combinations. In Aristophanes we only see them in much
altered circumstances, exasperated by being driven into the
town, and enraged against the invaders who had ravaged
their homes. The more sober and far-sighted joined the
peace party. Others in time would become assimilated to
the town-poor, and in the desperation of ruin would reinforce
the party of war. But all this was after the war had begun ;
before it broke out-their numerical strength was not “felt,
The country-folk, anyhow, were not the people who made
the war. To find them we must look to the town.
Athens was not one town, but two. The new factor in
᾿ fifth-century politics is the Piraeus. The port had been
—
created by Themistocles, who substituted for the exposed,
sandy bay of Phalerum the rock-defended harbour on the
other side of Acte. It had been fortified, and the new town
was laid out on the best modern principles by Hippodamus.
By the beginning of the Peloponnesian war it had become
the chief commercial centre of the Greek world. Even after
the fall of Athens its yearly export and import trade was
| reckoned at 2,000 talents, and before the war it must have
been much greater. From 510 to 480 B.c. the population of
Athens and the Piraeus together is said to have increased
from 20,000 to 100,000. This increase must have been
chiefly due to the influx of a commercial and industrial
population into the Piraeus. The new-comers were, of
course, aliens. While a majority of the citizens were, as
Thucydides says, country people, a great majority of the
αὐτουργός, Supp. 420 γαπόνος δ᾽ ἀνὴρ πένης, | εἰ καὶ γένοιτο μὴ ἀμαθής, ἔργων ὕπο |
οὖκ ἂν δύναιτο πρὸς τὰ κοίν᾽ ἀποβλέπειν. :
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR 19
‘resident aliens’ must have been townspeople, engaged in
industry or commerce down at the port. The strength of
the alien element in the town population is often ignored
in spite of the evidence.
The encouragement of alien immigrants dates from Solon,"
who ‘saw that Attica had a barren and poor soil and that
merchants who traffic by sea are not wont to import their
goods where they can get nothing in exchange, and accord-
ingly turned the attention of the citizens to manufactures’.
‘He ordered that trades should be accounted honourable.’
His law for the naturalization of foreigners granted the
citizenship only to such as transplanted themselves with
their whole family to Athens, to exercise some manual trade.
The intention was not to deter but to encourage immigrants,
by the hope of civic rights, to settle permanently and start
industries. This recruiting of the native population must
have gone on steadily through the sixth and fifth centuries.
Of course, foreign families who migrated to Athens before
the Persian war would be quite Athenianized by the end of
the fifth century. But the great influx must have been after
the foundation of the Piraeus. From 480 to 450 Athens
~\ granted citizenship freely. Pericles, perhaps in alarm at this
increasing infiltration of foreign blood, made the conditions of
naturalization harder. But the unnaturalized alien was still,
for industrial purposes, as free as the citizen, and had the
protection of law. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian
war there were 9,000 adult men in this condition, who, with
their families, made up an, alien population of 30,000.
Although not politically on the same level, these people
belonged to the same social class, and had the same interests
as the other recent immigrants who had been admitted to
citizenship. United with them they formed a solid body
with definite ends to gain, and with the business man’s
practical sense of the means to gaining them.
How the native-born Athenians regarded them we know
from the rhetorical outbursts of Isocrates. Reviewing the days
of maritime empire under the democracy, he says,? ‘Who
1 Plutarch, Solon, xxii. 2 de Pace, 79, 88, 89.
C2 ᾿
20 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
could endure the brutality of our fathers who gathered from
all Greece the laziest rascals to man their triremes, and so
excited the hatred of all Hellenes ; who ejected the best from
other states, and divided their substance among the lowest
ruffians in Greece!’ ‘They filled the public tombs with
citizens, and the public registers with aliens.’ ‘A city will be
happy, not when it collects a multitude of citizens at random
from every nation in the world, but when it preserves above
all the race of its original inhabitants. So Xenophon ? notes
that the resident aliens include not only Greeks from other
states, but many Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, and barbarians
of all sorts.
his growing mass of commercial, industrial, and sea-going
people, in the harbour town, must have been a factor of
great and increasing importance. We hear little about them,
except expressions of contempt from the aristocratic authors
whose work has come down to us. Their occupations
excited the disgust of the true Athenian gentleman who,
whatever Solon might prescribe, never could think of trade
as anything but dishonourable and degrading. The last
thing he would admit, even to himself, would be that this
class could have a decisive influence on the policy of
Athens. But we ought not to allow our own view to be
distorted by the prejudice of our authorities. \Some of the
wealthier of the unenfranchised aliens, it is true, were highly
respected, and mixed on equal terms with the Athenian
aristocracy. The house of Kephalus, Lysias’ father, seems to
have been a eentre of intellectual society. Men of this sort,
though excluded from eivic life, must have exercised consider-
able influence, and could make their interests felt indirectly,
through their citizen friends of the same social class. They
had, moreover, an economic hold on a large number of free
artisans in their employ, whose wages were kept down by the
competition of slave labour. Many of these workmen were
citizens, and their votes counted in the Assembly for just as
much as the votes of the aristocrats who regarded working
men as ‘incapable of virtue’. They were the sovereign Demos,
1 de Vect. 11. 3.
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR P|
and if they and their employers, whose interests were theirs,
knew what they wanted, they could be given a morning’s
holiday to go and vote for it.
This, then, is the new force in Athenian politics, ignored
and despised by the upper-class writers whose works we know,
but bound, sooner or later, to make itself felt decisively.
What were their aims and ideals? We have no expression
of them from any member of the class itself; but we can
infer enough from the statements of their opponents. The
, | Empire, to them, meant thalassocracy—command of the main
arteries of trade; it meant also the tribute of the allies, which
found its way into their pockets in wages or doles, and
served to keep them on the right side of the narrow line which
separated so many of them from starvation. We get a
glimpse—one of the very rare glimpses in literature of what
we call economic considerations—in the tract already referred
to, On the Constitution of Athens. The writer is not making
one of the ordinary aristocratic attacks on the Demos. He
recognizes that the Demos understands its own interests and
plays its game well; only he thinks the game a base one, and
the players πονηροί. ‘Wealth’, he says, ‘can belong only to the
Athenians among all Greeks and Barbarians, For, suppose a
city is rich in timber for ship-building, how is it to dispose of
its timber, unless it. prevails upon (πείθει) the power which
controls the sea? Or suppose it has iron, or bronze, or flax,
or any other commodity used in ship-building.. We import
these commodities, one from one place, another from another ;
and we will not allow other States, who are rivals, to import
them, on pain of being excluded from the seas.2 We sit at
_ home and all these things come to us by sea; but no other
city has all these commodities at once. One is rich in flax,
but its land is bare and timberless; another has iron, but not
bronze,and soon. Only at the Piraeus can you find them all.’ ®
1 Ps.-Xen. de Rep. Ath. ii. 11.
2 Οὐ χρήσονται τῇ θαλάττῃ---ὃ, reference to the Megarian decrees ὃ
8 Isocrates Paneg. 42 says, Athens set up at the Piraeus an emporium in the
midst of Greece, such that there can be obtained all the commodities which
could scarcely be found singly in other states.
22 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
The class we are considering evidently regarded the Athenian
navy as an instrument for controlling as they pleased the sea-
borne trade in Greek waters. The third of the three imperial
motives—profit—was dominant with them.
That Cleon’s majority, after Pericles’ death, was drawn
chiefly from this commercial and industrial class, has always
been recognized. Aristophanes speaks of them as tradesmen
—leather-sellers, honey-sellers, cheese-mongers.!_ When Try-
gaecus” summons ‘farmers, merchants, carpenters, workmen,
aliens, foreigners, islanders’ to help in drawing up the image
of Peace, only the farmers answer the summons; none of
the rest will stir a finger. But the evidence of Aristophanes
of course refers to a later date, when the war had already
run through its first stage.
The impression left by ancient writers is that no representa-
tives of this party—no members of this class—came to the
surface till after Pericles’ death. For this impression Thucy-
dides is chiefly responsible; in his mind, as in those of his
contemporaries,® the death of Pericles closed an epoch. When
that great personal influence was withdrawn, it seemed to
them as if the demos had undergone a critical change. Until
Pericles’ death, says the author of The Athenian Constitution,*
the leaders of the people were all respectable. The list runs:
Xanthippos, Themistocles, Ephialtes, Pericles—Cleon, Cleo-
phon. Cleon, we know, was a tanner; Cleophon was a
lyre-maker. What a fall, after the Olympian aristocrat!
But it was not so sudden a fall as it looks in this account;
Cleon was not the first of the ‘dynasty of tradesmen’.
There was the oakum-dealer and bran-seller, Eukrates, ‘the
boar-pig from Melite, who was condemned on the scrutiny
of his accounts and retired into private life—‘ made a clean
bolt to the bran-shop,’ as Aristophanes puts it. Then there
was the ‘sheep-seller’, Lysicles, with whom, as Aeschines, the
Socratic,® reported, Aspasia lived after Pericles’ death. There
1 Knights, 852 (425-424 5.0.). 2 Pax, 296 and 508.
" Cf. Eupolis, Demoi, 15 (Mein. ii. 466), Poleis, 7 (Mein. ii. 510).
* Ath. Pol. 28. 5 See Ar. Knights, 125 ff.
δ᾽ Plut. Per. 24.
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR 23
is no ground for believing that he was contemptible. Cleon
' was the next unofficial leader of the advanced section. We
happen to know, from a comic fragment, that he began to
attack Pericles as early as 431. He acted as prosecutor in
a process against the generals in the winter 430-429. Thucy-
dides,! in his first mention of him, calls him ‘at that time by
far the first in the people’s confidence’. This is less than
two years after Pericles’ death; he must have laid the founda-
tions of his influence long before.
Almost all we know of Cleon comes from Aristophanes
or Thucydides. The earliest extant play of Aristophanes dates
from some years after the beginning of the war. Thucydides
does not mention Cleon till he has become the official leader
and spokesman of the demos; Eukrates he never names ;
Lysicles is barely mentioned,? and then only as the officer
in command of an unimportant expedition. It is easy for
us to slip into the assumption that the class represented
by these leaders, and by others who are now hardly more
than names, only became important after Pericles’ death.
But when it is realized that before the war the country-
people were not a factor in politics, we see that the majority
which Pericles had to work with must have largely consisted
_of this same commercial and industrial class. The opposition
he had to fear came not from ‘oligarchs’, who were a power-
less minority, but from the advanced section of the demos
itself, led by these low-born tradesmen whom Thucydides
‘will not deign to mention.
TI We described fifth-century history at Athens as a series
of upheavals. The last of these had raised Pericles to
undisputed supremacy, and at the same time had brought
the constitutional question to a settlement. Democracy was
achieved; reform could go no further. But time does not
stand still; a new generation is growing up under Pericles’
feet, with new aims and new demands. A period of peace has
1 Thue. iii. 86; cf. iv. 21.
3 Thue. iii. 19. Lysicles fell in battle in the winter 428-427. Thucydides
omits to give his father’s name—in contempt, perhaps, of his low birth.
924, THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
given a new impetus to commerce and industry; and the Piraeus
is swelling to a size that threatens to overbalance the old town
under the Acropolis. This teeming population, largely of
alien birth or naturalized but yesterday, takes no stock of
the hereditary feuds of Alemaeonids and Philaidae. They
have nothing in common, either by tradition or interest, with
the autochthonous country-folk, who, on their side, despise
them as a ‘seafaring rabble’, an ‘undisciplined and vulgar
mob’. They know nothing of the obsolete, anti-Persian ideal
of the League; they care nothing for the Periclean ideal of
_ Athens as the School of Hellas. The later part of Pericles’
jcareer can only be explained if we see that the demos he had
| to manage did not, most of them, share his exalted thoughts
or understand a word of his magnificent Funeral Oration.
Gradually and steadily they were getting out of hand. They
extorted from him his socialistic measures. When he spent
the allies’ treasure on magnificent buildings, he was serving
two ends—his own end, the beauty and glory of Athens, and
his supporters’ end, employment and maintenance out of
public funds. By such dexterous compromises he could keep
them in hand, till some man of the people arose to tell the
demos that they could take as a right what was granted
them as a favour. From the moment the sovereign people
wakes up to its own power, Pericles must either go under
or take the lead whither they will. He must walk at the
head of the crowd, or be trampled under foot; but the crowd
is going its own way.
Whither? What were the aims of this obscure, inarticulate
yarmy of tradesmen and handworkers, leaders of commerce
/ and industry, merchants and sea captains? We shall attempt
an answer in the next Chapter.
his
-»
CHAPTER III
THE MEGARIAN DECREES
THERE is a remarkable discrepancy between Thucydides’
account of the negotiations immediately preceding the war
and all the other ancient accounts we possess. These other
authorities agree in representing certain decrees against
Megara, passed at Athens on the eve of the war, as having
a critical effect in bringing it on. Thucydides, on the contrary,
does not even record these decrees at the proper point, and
only makes a few allusions to them which attract no special
attention. The explanation of this discrepancy will, we hope,
throw some light on our inquiry into the aims of the party
which made the war.
The evidence of Aristophanes with regard to these decrees
has much weight. We must, of course, handle the statements
of a comic poet cautiously; but there is a kind of inference
which we can draw with confidence. The inference we can
draw here is that the audience which witnessed the Acharnians
believed certain things. They may or may not have believed
that Pericles acted from personal motives. That is unim-
portant; if they did, it merely shows that they did not
understand Pericles, and that they could not imagine any
serious motive he could have entertained. What is important
15 that they believed that the series of decrees against Megara
had much more to do with the outbreak of the war than any
ordinary reader, not on his guard, could possibly gather from
Thucydides’ account. Weare sure of this, because Aristophanes’
purpose here is serious ; he wishes to allay a shortsighted rage
against Sparta and convert the poor, exasperated peasants
to the cause of peace. He would not further this purpose
by giving such an account of the origin of the war as every
a
96 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS A}
one in his audience knew to be substantially false. It is
one thing to represent the quarrel as arising ultimately out
of the theft of three courtesans; no one would take that
too seriously. But when it comes to describing how the
actual outbreak occurred, we can imagine no motive for
pretending that the boycotting of Megara was the principal
point on which the negotiations turned, unless it really was
so. In Aristophanes’ account it is the sole point :—
‘For Pericles, like an Olympian Jove,
With all his thunder and his thunderbolts
Began to storm and lighten dreadfully,
Alarming all the neighbourhood of Greece ;
And made decrees drawn up like drinking-songs,
In which it was enacted and concluded,
That the Megarians should remain excluded
From every place where commerce was transacted,
With all their ware—like ‘old care’—in the ballad;
And this decree by sea and land was valid.
Then the Megarians, being all half starved,
Desired the Spartans, to desire of us,
Just to repeal those laws; the laws I mentioned,
Occasioned by the stealing of those strumpets.
And so they begged and prayed us several times;
And we refused; and so they went to war.’!
| If this sketch of the negotiations is not roughly correct,
what is the point of it ?
The impression here given by Aristophanes is confirmed by
iodorus, who, after stating that Pericles had private motives
for desiring war, proceeds thus”: ‘There was a decree at Athens
excluding the Megarians from the market and harbours, and the
Megarians appealed to Sparta. The Lacedaemonians at their
instance sent envoys empowered by a resolution of the Council
of the League to demand that the Athenians should rescind
the decree and to threaten war if they refused. The Athenian
Assembly met, and Pericles with his great eloquence per-
suaded the Athenians not to annul the decree, saying that to
give way to Sparta against their interests was the first step
to servitude. So he advised them to remove from the country
into the town, and having command of the sea to fight the
Spartans to the end.’
1 Ar. Ach. 580 ff. Frere, 2 Diod. xii. 39.
----
a= >
= =.
a
παθῶν
7
~e ee
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 97
Plutarch? goes a step further and expressly states that
‘ probably no other point would have _involved the Athenians
in war, if they could have been induced to rescind the
decree against Megara. Pericles exerted all his influence
to prevent this, and by working up the Athenian people to
share his rancour against Megara, was the sole author of the
war’. ‘He seems to have had some private grudge against
᾿ Megara.’
All these accounts agree in two respects. (1) They make
the Megarian decree the central point of the negotiations,
(2) They connect this decree with some unexplained personal
rancour felt by Pericles against Megara. On the other hand,
Thucydides, as we shall presently show at length, keeps the
measures against Megara in the background.
What was the history of these decrees? In 446 the
Megarians had risen and expelled the Athenian garrisons
which had for some time held their ports. The Megarian
colony, Byzantium, had joined in the Samian revolt. The
commercial interests of Megara in Pontus were threatened by
Athenian enterprise in that region. Megara had a very small
territory, and its population lived by industry and by the trade
which passed through. Athens was the nearest market; so it
was easy for the great sea power to put the screw on the
small one. The first decree against Megara dates, probably,
from before the summer of 488. Athens excluded Megarian
wares from the. aera market. on pain. of. confiscation. }
mentions.? It was s not. aie by Pericles, Thucydides does
not record it. |
The second decree was more stringent. After the conclu-
sion of the alliance with Corcyra,* on the trumpery excuse
that the Megarians had cultivated some sacred land at Eleusis,
or received fugitive slaves, or what not, Pericles moved that
the Megarians should be excluded (not merely from the
Athenian market, but) from n all ports i in the Athenian empire.
1 Pericles; 29. 2 Ach. 515.
3 Probable date, winter, 433-482.
28 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
This meant flat ruin to Megara; for she was shut out of
Byzantium, an indispensable port of call on the Pontic
route, and the central mart of the corn-trade on which she
depended. Aristophanes’? picture of starvation at Megara
is not overdrawn. JHere is another incident—surely im-
portant enough, and falling well within his period—which
Thucydides does not record in its place.
Thucydides also omits to mention a third decree—that of
Charinos—which declared a ‘truceless war’ with Megara.
This decree falls between the attack on Plataea in April, 481,
with which the war opens, and the march of the Peloponnesian
army.” Why do we hear nothing of it from the historian of
the war ?
Let us now look at the allusions to Megara which
Thucydides does make.
(1) The Corinthians in their speech at Athens (i. 42) refer,
in passing, to ‘the ill-feeling which your treatment of the
Megarians ‘has already inspired’.
(2) At the congress at Sparta (i. 67) the Lacedaemonians
summon their allies to bring forward their grievances against
Athens. ‘Others came with their several charges, including
the Megarians, who, among many other causes of quarrel,
stated that they were excluded from the harbours in the
Athenian Empire and from the Attic market, contrary to the
treaty.’
(3) In the negotiations which preceded the declaration of
war (i. 189), the Lacedaemonians after making other demands
‘insisted, above all, and in the plainest terms, that if the
Athenians wanted to avert war they must rescind the decree
which excluded the Megarians from the market of Athens and
the harbours in the Athenian dominions. But the Athenians
would not listen to them, or rescind the decree; alleging in
reply that the Megarians had tilled the sacred ground and the
neutral borderland and had received runaway slaves.’ In the
debate which followed ‘some said the decree ought not to
stand in the way of peace’.
1 Ach. 535, 730 ff. ; Pax, 245, 481.
2 In the interval between Thue. ii. 2 and ii. 18.
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 29
(4) Pericles in his speech on this occasion? discusses the
Lacedaemonian grievances, and refers to Megara in curious
language: ‘They tell us to withdraw from Potidaea, to leave
Aegina independent, and to rescind the decree against Megara.
Do not imagine that we shall be fighting for a small matter
if we refuse to annul this measure, of which they make so
much, telling us its revocation would stop the war. This
small matter involves the trial and confirmation of your
_ whole purpose. If you give way about a trifle they will
think you are afraid and make harder conditions.’
(5) At i. 144 Pericles makes his counter-demand: ‘We
will not exclude the Megarians, if the Lacedaemonians will
not exclude foreigners from Sparta.’ The Athenians adopted
these terms.
Even from these few allusions the truth peeps out, that
the decree ‘of which they make so much, telling us its revoca-
tion would stop the war’ was really, as it appears in Aristo-
- phanes, Plutarch, and Diodorus, the turning-point of the
| negotiations. But we venture to say that no one, reading
the whole story in Thucydides and unacquainted with the other
evidence, would gather this impression. Such a reader would
be left with the idea that the decree was in itself, as Pericles
calls it, ‘a trifling matter, exaggerated by the Spartans,
and merely held to by the Athenians as a point of honour.
He would never discover that there were three decrees, each
_more stringent than the last, or that the second was moved
by Pericles himself, or that, by this ‘trifling matter’, Megara
was reduced nearly to starvation.
The same design of keeping Megarian affairs in the back-
ground can be detected in Thucydides’ treatment of the
operations in that ‘truceless war’, the declaration of which
_he never records. At ii. 31 he mentions an invasion of the
| Megarid in full force, and observes that the invasion was
repeated every year until Nisaea was taken. This incidental
observation is repeated at iv. 66 (B.c. 424). But these inva-
sions are not, like the Spartan invasions of Attica, recorded
separately as they occurred, according to Thucydides’ avowed
1 Thue. i. 140 ff,
30 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
plan of chronicling the events of the war. At ii. 93 we
discover from a passing reference that the Athenians had
established a fort in Salamis, opposite the Megarian coast,
and kept three ships stationed there ‘to prevent anything
being conveyed by sea into or out of Megara’. We hear
of this fort again at iii. 51, when the Athenians capture
-Minoa, to make the blockade more effective. From these
hints we gather that all through the early part of the war
Athens was following up her policy of bringing the severest
| possible pressure to bear on Megara. But why are we only
tn
given hints and summary allusions to the incidents of this
truceless war ?
One motive which might induce Thucydides to suppress
Pericles’ connexion with the attack on Megara has already
been mentioned. From all the non-Thucydidean accounts
it is clear that this attack was currently associated with some
petty, personal rancour..on.Pericles’ part. Thucydides, who
were mere
<a
knew that Pericles was incapable of plunging Athens into
war for such motives, wished to contradict the scandal. For
the same reason he keeps silent about the indirect attacks
made upon Pericles through the persons of Pheidias, Anaxa-
goras, Aspasia. But this is hardly a sufficient explanation of
the anomalies we have pointed out.
There is however one hypothesis which would provide a
complete explanation. Thucydides, we remember, is bound by
his plan of speech-writing to state only official policies ; he
speaks of ‘the Athenians’ as if they were one united whole,
with a single purpose. Suppose, now, that the attack on
Megara, the boycotting decrees, and the truceless war, were
part of a policy which had not been originated by Pericles,
but forced upon him against his will. Suppose it was the
policy of the class which furnished the bulk of his majority,
the class we attempted to characterize in the last chapter—in
a word, the policy of the Piraeus. Suppose that younger
leaders, sprung from that class itself, were already threaten-
ing to outbid Pericles in the popular favour; that Cleon, for
instance, was telling the demos to take their own way and,
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 31
if Pericles would not lead them, he would. How would
Pericles meet this situation ?
magine a statesman of aristocratic birth, with the ideals
and prejudices of his class; mainly interested in culture, in
art and philosophy} by temperament exceptionally sensitive
and reserved; openly called a ‘tyrant ’—the ‘new Peisistratus’.
He owes his position—a position which the habits of a lifetime
have made indispensable-+to the favour of a class of working
people, incapable of his aspirations, ignorant of his pursuits ;
largely of alien extraction and indifferent to his hereditary tra-
ditions; engaged in occupations which his own class despises
as mercenary and degrading. He can keep them amused for
a time with festivals, doles, and abundance of employment on
| public works; but what will happen when they become
| conscious of the power he has irrevocably put in their hands ?
A very little agitation will suffice to consolidate and marshal
them in irresistible ranks. Someone—Cleon, let us say,—
puts into their heads a wider policy than that of appropriating
the allies’ treasure in the form of wages.
The first step in this policy involves tHe coercion of Megara
—why, we shall presently see. The policy is distasteful to
Pericles; he will stand out against it as long as he dares; but
even his influence cannot hold back the demos. The first decree
against Megara is moved by somebody—his very name is lost—
and carried. For Pericles to stand out longer would be to adver-
tise all Greece that his influence is no longer supreme. He
throws himself into the campaign against Megara with a vehe-
mence which makes people think he must have some personal
spite. Some young Megarians must have carried off a couple of
Aspasia’s women. So idle tongues run on scandal. Pericles
is not sorry that his real motive is not divined by the gossips.
He moves in his own person the second, more stringent decree.
His upstart competitors are instantly silenced; the words
are taken out of their mouths; their policy becomes the
policy of the leader whom they hoped to displace. There is
some disappointment of personal ambitions, which must wait
for a better opening; Pericles cannot live for ever. But,
politically, a signal triumph is won. Athens has taken the
ence
89 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
first step in the execution of a plan that was not matured in
Aspasia’s boudoir, but has been the theme of many back-
parlour conferences in the wineshops along the quays. Its
authors can well afford to go on working below the surface.
What was the rest of this plan? To find that out we must
concentrate our attention on the point from which Thucydides
diverts it. We must study the significance of Megara, and
discover the purpose of a violent and sustained attack on that
inoffensive little community.
The town of Megara is in a tiny plain, dominated on all
sides by barren hills. The country could, of itself, support
only a very small population. Yet Megara had once been .
a great sea-power, founding her colonies far to the east and
west, in Pontus and in Sicily. The Megarians, says Isocrates,”
started with few advantages; they had no territory, no
harbours, no mines; they were ‘tillers of stones’; yet now
they have the finest houses in Greece. Isocrates’ explanation
of this paradox well illustrates the blindness of the Greeks
to economic causes. The prosperity of Megara is due, he tells
us, to virtuous moderation (σωφροσύνη) !
The Megarian territory fills most of the length of the
isthmus which joins the Peloponnese and Northern Greece.
' The advantages of such a position, given the conditions under
which commerce was carried on in the ancient world, have,
‘until very recently, not been perceived. Thus Grote looked
at the situation only through modern eyes.* ‘The acquisi-
tion of Megara (in 461 B.c.) was of signal value to the
Athenians, since it opened up to them the whole range of
territory across the outer isthmus of Corinth to the interior
of the Krissaean Gulf, on which the Megarian port of Pegae
was situated, and placed them in possession of the passes of
Mount Geraneia, so that they could arrest the march of
1 In the next paragraphs I am following closely M. Victor Bérard’s
brilliant exposition of his ‘ Law « of Isthmuses ’ in Les Phéniciens et V Odyssée,
i. p. 61 ff, and freely borrowing his evidence. “Any reader of this fascinating
book will see that all this section of my work is inspired by his discoveries.
2 de Pace, 117. 3 Grote, iv. 408.
|
|
|
|
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 33
a Peloponnesian army over the isthmus and protect Attica
from invasion.’ This is a modern view; we naturally think
of the isthmus as a /and-link, ‘ opening up a range of territory’ ;
we travel along it by the railway which takes us from Patras,
through Corinth, to Athens. Our route by sea goes round
the south of the Peloponnese, past Cape Malea. But, before
the invention of steam, an isthmus, as M. Bérard has shown,
is not only a link between two continents ; it is of much more
importance as a bridge between two seas. For the compre-
hension of ancient commercial routes, and of all that part
of history which depends on them, it is essential to grasp
M. Bérard’s cardinal principle: the route which follows the
land as far as possible, and takes to the sea only when
the land fails, was the cheapest, easiest, and safest.
We will here adduce only one of M. Bérard’s illustrations,
because it is taken from Thucydides himself. Among the
reasons which the historian gives for the great distress at
Athens, caused by the occupation of Dekeleia, is the following:
‘Provisions formerly conveyed by the shorter route from
Euboea to Oropus and thence overland through Dekeleia, were
now carried by sea round the promontory of Sunium at great
cost. The road from Oropus by Dekeleia to Athens was an
isthmic route. Now that steam has made us independent of
winds, no one would dream of sending corn from Oropus to
Athens by_road; and this land-route, which in the time of
Dicaearchus? was still a flourishing caravan-track, ‘ well
supplied with inns,’ is now utterly abandoned. But before
the introduction of steam it was easier, quicker, and cheaper
_ than the sea-route round Sunium.
Now, if the isthmus of Dekeleia was of such vital signifi-
cance to Athens, the isthmus of Corinth and Megara—as
a glance at the map will show—must have been the most
important bridge between two seas in the whole of central
Greece. It was the gate of the Western Ocean. The other
gate—the channel, to the south of the Peloponnese, round
Cape Malea—was beset with terrors to the sailor. It is a
1 Thue. vii. 28 ἡ παρακομιδὴ . . . πολυτελὴς ἐγίγνετο.
2 Geogr. Gr. Min. i. p. 100, quoted by M. Bérard, i. p. 73.
D
, ar, *
34 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
gap in a chain of islands—Kythera, Aegilia, Crete, Kasos,
Karpathos, Rhodes—which block the southern entrance of the
Aegean. In the channels between these islands strong
currents and violent winds naturally prevail, and Malea is not
the least dangerous point. It was here that Ulysses was
swept from his course ‘ by the stream of the sea and the north
wind’.t Herodotus tells how the Corcyreans were prevented
from sending their fleet to help the Greeks at Salamis by the
Etesian winds at Malea.* The Athenians in 424 were afraid
that they could not revictual their fleet at Pylos in Messenia.
| ‘They feared lest the winter should overtake them at their
| post, seeing that the conveyance of provisions round the
| Peloponnese would be quite impossible. Pylos itself was
a desert, and not even in summer could they send round
, sufficient supplies. The coast was without harbours, * During
the four winter months, we read elsewhere,* it was not easy
even to send a message by sea from Sicily to Athens,
Such were the dangers, in the time of sailing-ships, of
what is now the regular sea-route to the Piraeus. The
possessors of the. Corinthian and Megarian isthmus were the
gainers... For this point we have the explicit evidence of
Strabo,> who says: ‘Corinth was called (by Homer) “the rich”,
because of its emporium, situated as it is on the isthmus and
possessing two harbours, one on the side of Asia, the other on
the side of Italy. This made the exchange of merchandise
between these regions easy. In the old days the passage to
Sicily was not good for sailing (εὔπλους), and the open seas
were dangerous, especially off Malea, because of the meeting
of winds there (ἀντίπνοιαι). Hence the proverb, “ When you
pass Malea, forget your home.” Hence it was convenient for
merchants both from Italy and from Asia to avoid the passage
. round Malea, and to bring their merchandise to Corinth. By
land, likewise, the tolls on what...was..exported from or
_ imported into the Peloponnese went to those who held the
entrance died κλεῖθρα).
1 Od. ix. 80. Most of these abused are taken from M. Bérard, i. p. 82 ff.
2 Herod. vii. 168. 3 Thue. vi. 27.
* Thue, iv. 21, 5 Strabo viii, 878.
Ι
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 35
Strabo gives another instance of the same phenomenon:
the wealth of Krisa, near Delphi, was due to its position on
an ‘isthmus’. Krisa was not a port; it lay inland on a spur
of the mountains commanding the road up the gorge from
the harbour of Itea to Delphi. The prosperity of its inhabi-
tants, according to Strabo,’ ‘was due to the heavy tolls
(τέλη) which they exacted from those who came to the shrine
from Sicily and Italy.’ The position of Krisa is analogous to
that of Dekeleia; it commands an isthmic route across Phokis
to Thebes and the Euboean seas. The importance of Delphi
itself was probably due to its being situated on this ancient
commercial artery. In the early days when Euboea was
colonizing Sicily we may be fairly sure that the communication
with the west followed this line.
Thucydides’? testimony about Corinth agrees with that of
Strabo. ‘Corinth, being seated on an isthmus, was naturally
from the first a centre of commerce; for the Hellenes within
and without the Peloponnese, in the old days when they
communicated more byland-than.by sea, had to pass through
her territory to reach one another. Her power was due to
| wealth, as the testimony of the ancient poets shows, when they
call her “rich”, And when the Hellenes began to take more to
the sea Corinth acquired a fleet and kept down piracy; and as
she offered an emporium both by sea and land, her revenues
were ὦ source of power.’
Consider, now, the feelings of the merchants, down in the
Piraeus, with the great stream of traffic between Sicily and
Italy in the west and Asia Minor and the seas and islands to
the east, flowing both ways across the isthmus, under their
| very eyes. The Piraeus had captured the bulk of the eastern
}
trade formerly carried on by Euboea, Aegina, Megara. The
pony great field for further expansion was in the west, and
‘Corinth held the gateway. Every vase that the Athenian
potteries exported to Italy, every cheese that came from
i} Syracuse to the port of Athens, had to pay toll to the keepers
il
of the isthmus. Attica was cut off from the western seas by
1 Strabo ix. 418, 2 Thue. i, 18,
D2
-------
96 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
Boeotia, the Megarid, Corinth. The weak point in this chain
was Megara, which possessed, moreover, a port on each sea—
Pegae on the west, Nisaea on the east—with a road over the
pass joining them. What would become of the riches of
Corinth, when the Piraeus had established an alternative
channel for the trade across the isthmus? And so we read?
that, in 461, ‘Athens obtained the alliance of Megara, which
‘had quarrelled with Corinth. Thus the Athenians gained
both Megara and Pegae, and built long walls from Megara
} to Nisaea, and garrisoned them. And fron this above all
‘\arose the intense hatred of Corinth for Athens.’
Yes! and we can guess the sort of hatred. It is not the
hatred of Dorian against Ionian, or of oligarch against demo-
᾿ crat; it is the hatred of the principal trader with Italy and
_ Sicily against her most dangerous rival, the Piraeus,
‘Corinth you hated; so did she hate you!’?
The war which followed the seizure of Megara by Athens
in 461 presents some remarkable analogies with the later
Peloponnesian war.
“ Ὁ) It began with a quarrel between Corinth and Megara,
whose territory forms the bridge between the Aegean and the
West. Athens was allied with Megara. The later war begins
with a quarrel between Corinth and Coreyra, which is ‘ con-
veniently situated for the voyage to Italy and Sicily ’.®
Athens is allied with Corcyra.
(2) In the earlier war Athens secured at once Megara,
' Pegae, and Nisaea.* At its conclusion, owing to the untimely
| revolt of Euboea, she was compelled to surrender them.
The later war opens with a series of drastic measures
against Megara, followed up by yearly invasions, and the
_ capture of Minoa, and later of Nisaea and Megara itself. At
| a critical moment, Cleon sacrifices the chance of peace by an
| exorbitant demand for the cession of Pegae and Nisaea,
together with other places, none of which had been in
Athenian hands in this war. The negotiations broke down.®
1 Thue. i. 103, 2 Ar, Eccl. 199. KopivOiows ἤχθεσθε, κἀκεῖνοί γέ σοι.
* Thue. i. 36.
* Thuc. i. 111, an Athenian fleet was at Pegae till 454, 5 Thue. iv. 21.
THE MEGARIAN DECREES 37
(3) In the earlier war Sparta held aloof at first, intervening
only when Boeotia was conquered.
In the later, Sparta is not concerned in the outbreak of war
ἢ at Coreyra. She only comes in under strong pressure from
| Corinth, on whose port (as the Corinthians point out) the
interior of the Peloponnese is economically dependent.*
(4) The most striking analogy of all is the following.
During the earlier operations, with all Greece on her hands,
i | Athens suddenly undertook a very large and costly expedition
—to Egypt!
In the thick of the Peloponnesian war, ‘with her suburbs,’
as Isocrates says, ‘in the enemies’ hands,’ Athens undertook
: | a still larger and costlier expedition to Sicily—an expedition
prepared for, years before, by small expeditions sent out to
foment civil and racial discord among the Sicilian states.
Each of these enterprises was a disastrous failure. With
regard to the Egyptian expedition, we are told that it was a
‘ fatal coincidence that Athens’ forces were divided. With her
full strength she might have crushed the Peloponnesians’.? The
Sicilian expedition, we suppose, must have been another fatal
coincidence. But, perhaps, if we look in the right quarter,
we may find in both undertakings some evidence of calcula-
tion and design.
_ The upshot of the earlier war, the net gain of Athens when
all her other gains had been lost, was the extinction of
_ Aegina, who had hitherto been a strong naval and commercial
power, and now had joined Corinth, Athens blockaded the
island, and reduced it; the Aeginetans’ fleet was surrendered
and they became tributaries. hogiims we note, is situated in
an eastward-facing gulf; her trade must have been chiefly in
Aegean waters and the Levant. Had she any commercial
connexion with Egypt? When King Amasis, who, as Hero-
dotus tells 8,5 was partial to the Greeks, established Greek
settlers at Naukratis, he granted lands to those who wanted
to trade along the coast, so that they might erect temples.
1 Thue. i. 120. 2 Bury, History of Greece (1900), p. 355.
3 Herod, ii. 178.
38 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
The most famous of these shrines was the Hellenion, a joint
foundation of several states, which had the right to appoint
governors of the emporium. Three states had separate
temples: the Samians had a temple to Hera; the Milesians,
to Apollo; the Aeginetans, to Zeus.
Aegina, then, was one of the three states whose interests in
Egyptian commerce were large enough for her to maintain
a separate sanctuary for her settlers there. Of the other two,
Miletus was ruined by the Persian wars, and her trade was
transferred to the Piraeus; Samos had become a tributary of
Athens. Aegina remained. Is it a very hazardous inference
that there was some connexion between the war in Greece
and the expedition to Egypt—that it was not a mere fatal
coincidence? If one of the objects of Athens was to capture
the Egyptian trade, that would explain these simultaneous
: operations at both ends of the chain. She failed of her
‘other objects because she tried too much at once; but she
‘succeeded in extinguishing Aegina.
_/ With this instructive parallel before us, may we not con-
ecture further that the Sicilian expedition was not an incom-
‘ prehensible vagary of the wild and self-interested Alcibiades,
but was part of the original scheme of the party which
τ promoted the Peloponnesian war? If Sicily had been from
the first the distant objective, the nearer objective was not
Sparta, but Corinth. And Corinth was to be attacked
through Megara, which provided the desired avenue to the
West.
This is the supposition required to complete our hypothesis
—the supposition that Sicily was in view from the first. Not
in Pericles’ view ; it was no part of the official programme, as
he saw it, and hence it does not appear in Thucydides’ story
- till he is out of the way. Pericles did not want to conquer
Sicily, but some other people did; and they were the people
who forced on Pericles the violent measures against Megara.
—
We reserve for the next chapter some considerations which
_ tend to show that Thucydides’ narrative, in its earlier part,
_ obscures important facts relating to the designs on Sicily.
|
one,
rear cere ee
CHAPTER IV
THE WESTERN POLICY
THE commercial relations of Athens with the West dated
from early in the sixth century; the black-figured Attic
vases found their way to Etruria before 550. But Athens
had no colony of her own in Italy or Sicily. After the
fall of Chalkis, however, and the loss of her marine (about
506), Athens succeeded to her position, and the Chalkidian
colonies looked to her for support against Syracuse. The
occupation of Naupactos in 459 was regarded as a menace to
Corinthian connexions with the West. Athenian commerce
was growing in that quarter; the Attic vases of the fifth
century completely oust Corinthian ware in Etruria. There
was also a considerable export to Campania, and a somewhat
smaller trade with Sicily. Athens imported corn, pigs, and
cheese from Sicily, metal-ware from Etruria, and woven
stuffs from Carthage. ‘All the pleasant things of Sicily and
Italy were brought together at Athens.’ They were paid for
partly in pottery and partly in Attic silver. The Euboic-
Attic standard was already in use in most Sicilian states at
the end of the sixth century.
Politically, the relations of Athens with the Western Greeks
can be traced as far back as the middle of the fifth century.
| We hear of an embassy from Egesta, asking for help against
Selinus, in 454-3 ; but Athens, just then weakened by the loss
of the Egyptian expedition, could do nothing. She was invited
to share in the settlement of New Sybaris in 453. The first
important step was the foundation of Thurii, for trade with
Campania and Etruria (448). Pericles tried to give the
i ea a panhellenic character; but Thurii was soon
1 Ps.-Xen. de rep. Ath. ii. 7.
xf
we
40 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
a centre of purely Athenian influence in Southern Italy. It
became rich and prosperous.
The founding of Thurii is not mentioned by Thucydides in
his account of the fifty years between the Persian war and
the Peloponnesian. We might have expected some notice
of it in a work which leads up to the great effort after
expansion in the West. But, if this omission is curious, his
silence on another incident is much more remarkable. Just
on the eve of the war, Syracuse and her Dorian neighbours
were fighting with Leontini, the other Ionian colonies, and
the Italian Locrians. Athens concluded an alliance _ with
|
|
]
Leontini, and another, in “the same year, with. Bhegium,?
' Of these treaties, made about the time when the two Athenian
squadrons were dispatched to Coreyra, Thucydides says not
a word, until he comes to the embassy of Leontini, six years
later, in 427. Even there we have only the merest allusion:
‘So the allies of Leontini sent to Athens, in accordance with
an old-standing alliance and because they were Ionians, and
induced the Athenians to send a fleet. ? That is the only
reference which is to be found in the history; so long as
Pericles is on the scene there is complete silence about his
colonial policy in the West, complete silence about political
relations with Sicilian and Italian states.
The part played by Pericles in the alliance with Corcyra
is also utterly effaced in the long story of the negotiations.®
We are given speeches by the Coreyreans and by the Corinth-
ians, but no utterance of the Athenian statesman. The
conclusion of the alliance is narrated in very summary lan-
guage, as follows:* ‘The Athenians heard both sides, and
two meetings of the Assembly were held. At the first they
inclined to the arguments of the Corinthians; but at the se second
they changed their minds. They would not go so far as an ~
offensive and defensive alliance with Corcyra, for if they did
* CIA, iv. 1, 88 8, p. 13. CIG. 74=CIA. i. 33. Both treaties are dated in
Ὑ' the archonship of Apseudes (488-2).
2 Thue. iii, 86 κατά τε παλαιὰν ξυμμαχίαν καὶ. 3 Thue, i, 22-44,
* Thue, i, 44.
THE WESTERN POLICY 41
so a demand from Corcyra that they should co-operate against
Corinth would involve them in a breach of their treaty with
the Peloponnesians. They concluded, however, a defensive
alliance. War wi Peloponnesians...appeared to be « ἢ
inevitable in any case, and they did not want to let Corcyra, Kt
with ber cirong pany joi Cpa Then ΤΙΣ was rather”
to embroil the ὑπο siates more and more with one ἀτοτπετ, Β΄ : 2:
that when war came Corinth ἃ fiaval powers
might be weaker.’ In the Wext-ch nges
straight into the story of the naval operations off Corcyra.
“Now, in all the twenty chapters, of which the last has
just been quoted, there is no mention of Pericles; we hear
only of ‘the Athenians’. Who effected the change of feeling
at the second assembly, when Athens was converted to the
Coreyrean side? “Why have we no account of this second
meeting, like the long account of the Mytilenean debate, at
which a similar conversion was effected? Surely at this
| critical point in the story of the quarrel which led to the
/war, Thucydides has missed an opportunity of explaining
‘somewhat more fully why Athens allied herself with Corcyra. y~~
At least he might have told us in three words whose policy
it was, even if he could not tell us whether this decisive
step had any bearing on larger schemes, whose schemes they
were, and what Pericles thought of them. He has, however,
given us just the bare minimum of enlightenment on these
points.
In the above translation of i. 44 we have omitted a short
sentence at the end which comes in as a sort of afterthought.
It is this?: ‘And further it seemed to them that the island
. (Coreyra) was conveniently situated on the coasting-route
to Italy and Sicily.’ These words refer to one of the numerous
arguments urged in the Corcyreans’ speech. nse eat |
say, ‘is conveniently situated for the coasting voyagé to Wa
Italy and Sicily, so as either to prevent a fleet from coming
1 One short sentence, to which we shall return in a moment, is omitted
here.
2 3. 44. 3 ἅμα δὲ τῆς τε ᾿Ιταλίας καὶ Σικελίας καλῶς ἐφαίνετο αὐτοῖς ἡ νῆσος ἐν
παράπλῳ κεῖσθαι.
4,2 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
/ from those countries to the aid of the Peloponnesians or to
help a fleet from here on its way thither, and is very useful,
_ generally.’! The point is then immediately dropped.
These two sentences, where they stand in the long story
of the negotiations, are exceedingly inconspicuous ; but when
we have noticed them we are set wondering why they are
there at all, if it is true, as Grote for instance says, that
the Athenians began to conceive designs on the West seven
or eight years after the outbreak of the war. Assertions of
this sort are made, against all other ancient testimony, on
the authority of Thucydides alone; but when we look closely,
have they even that authority? What is the point of
the two short sentences quoted above? Every one seems
content to remark that the Corcyreans only mean—as indeed
they say—that they could hinder help coming from Sicily
to the Peloponnesians. But that is not all; why do they
add ‘or help a fleet from here on its way thither’? This
tiny, inconspicuous clause has no meaning unless some one
iA Athens was already contemplating a transference of the
scene of war to Sicilian waters. The argument was addressed
to the Athenians; and, together with the other consideration,
that the second and third naval powers in Greece would be
weakened by division, it decided them to form an alliance with
Corcyra. A series of expeditions to the West were actually
made by Athens, and the Corcyrean democrats did what they
could to facilitate their passage. The conclusion is irresistible
that here, as in other instances, the fidelity of Thucydides
has preserved an indication of critical importance.
So long as we assume that when Thucydides says ‘the
Athenians’, he means Pericles, that Pericles and his majority
were completely agreed in their ideals and policy, and that
Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ policy is correct and complete,
we must, in the teeth of a whole series of indications and
testimonies, go on asserting that ‘Athens’ had no designs
on the West until Pericles was dead. But these current
1 i. 36, 2 τῆς τε γὰρ ᾿Ιταλίας καὶ Σικελίας καλῶς παράπλου κεῖται, ὥστε μήτε
ἐκεῖθεν ναυτικὸν ἐᾶσαι Πελοποννησίοις ἐπελθεῖν τό τε ἐνθένδε πρὸς τἀκεῖ ‘ouonvisitins
καὶ és τἄλλα ξυμφορώτατόν ἐστι.
THE WESTERN POLICY 43
| assumptions will not account for the fact that Thucydides
| completely effaces the action of Pericles in regard both to the
'Megarian decrees and to the Coreyrean alliance. We suggest
‘that when Thucydides says ‘the Athenians’, he means the
Athenians and not Pericles, because ‘the Athenians’ had a
policy of their own, which Pericles adopted only when his
| hand was forced. ’ The historian conveys the correct impres-
‘sion, that the policy in question was not originated by the
‘nominal Jeader of the demos. ~
He gives us another indication in the speech in which Pericles
lays down his plan of campaign?: Harass the Peloponnesian
coasts; abandon the country and move into town, so as to
turn Athens into an island. ‘I have many reasons for ex~
| | Pecting victory, 7f you will not eatend your empire.during
(. _| the war, or go out of your way to encounter unnecessary
i tae IT am more afraid of our own mistakes than of the
‘enemy’ s strategy.’ Why was this warning needed, unless
‘some extension of empire was already in contemplation ?
‘The acquisition of Megara alone can hardly be meant, since
Pericles himself had moved the second Megarian decree.
Thus, when we take enough trouble to collect and analyse
the indications which Thucydides’ accuracy has preserved,
we can extract from the historian himself a confirmation of
our other authorities. Diodorus supports our conclusion.
Speaking of the Leontine embassy of 427 he says*: ‘The
Athenians had long before (καὶ πάλαι) been coveting Sicily
for the excellence of the country, and they now concluded
an alliance with Leontini because they Τὸ
Songuer.the island. For, some years before, when
s fighting Corcyras_the demos. , preferred _ alliance with
᾿ροιξ γα. ὑσσζοο it was eo AGN uated. for thewes
| to Sicily.* ‘TheAthenians had bolic of the sea, many
allies, and much treasure; and they hoped to conquer the
Lacedaemonians, and, after becoming leaders of all Greece,
to gain possession of Sicily.’ That is how a later historian,
1 Thue. 1. 140 ff. 2 i, 144, 8 Diod. xii. δά.
* διὰ τὸ τὴν Κέρκυραν εὐφυῶς κεῖσθαι πρὸς τὸν εἰς Σικελίαν πλοῦν.
—~s
44, THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
who, though little more than a compiler, had sources of in-
formation closed to us, read the story of the Coreyrean
negotiation. His reading agrees exactly with ours.
Plutarch’s witness is on the same side. Speaking of the
moment after the Egyptian disaster of 449 and before the
‘Sacred War’ of 448 he says, ‘many were already possessed
by that fatal passion for Sicily which later was inflamed by
Alcibiades and his friends. Some dreamed even of Carthage
and Etruria.’ Here Plutarch dates these designs from seven-
teen or eighteen years before the war. Again, he says? ‘the
Athenians were coveting Sicily while Pericles was still alive,
_ and after his death they attacked her and sent their so-called
relief expeditions to prepare the way for the great expedition
against Syracuse’.
The only reason which modern historians have for refusing
to accept these statements is the silence of Thucydides, whose
hints escape them. But with reference to the further stage
of this policy—the attack on Carthage—we can estimate the
value of an argument based on his reticence. In this case
we have not the mere opinion of a late writer but the
indisputable evidence of a contemporary.
Thucydides does not mention Carthage till he comes to the
year 415, when he says that Alcibiades hoped to be the con-
queror of Sicily and Carthage.* In his speech at Sparta,*
Alcibiades asserts that the Athenians meant to attack Sicily
first, then the Greeks in Italy, and finally Carthage herself.
Hermocrates, addressing the Sicilians in conference, advises
_ them to send for help to the Carthaginians. ‘An Athenian
attack on their city is nothing more than they expect ; they live
in constant apprehension of it.® Here, once more, Thucy-
dides preserves just one indication that his story is incomplete.
But for this sentence, he would have left us to suppose that
the designs on Carthage originated in the wild brain of
Alcibiades. This impression has already been conveyed, and
1 vit. Per. 20. 3 wit. Alkib. 17.
3 vi. 15. * vi. 90.
ἢ vi. 84 ob γὰρ ἀνέλπιστον αὐτοῖς, ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ διὰ φόβου εἰσὶ μή ποτε ᾿Αθηναῖοι
αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τὴν πόλιν ἔλθωσι.
THE WESTERN POLICY 45
the language here is not explicit or striking enough to
dispel it.
We happen to know, however, that an attack on Carthage
was not first conceived in 415. In the Knights of Aristo-
phanes? the elderly trireme addresses her sisters—
Ladies, have you heard the news? In the town it passed for truth
That a certain low-bred upstart, one Hyperbolus forsooth,
Asks a hundred of our number, with a further proposition
That we should sail with him fo Carthage on a secret expedition.
_The date of this play is 424—nine years earlier than Thucy-
dides’ first mention of Carthage. The question at the moment
was between the recall and the reinforcement of the fleet in
Sicilian waters, which had been sent out in 427 and was
' actually recalled in the summer of this year 424-423. The
above passage makes it clear that Hyperbolus had demanded
a strong reinforcement, and further that designs against
J Carthage were already in the air. Thucydides never mentions
‘Hyperbolus till viii. 78, where he records his assassination,
δα he says nothing of the proposal mentioned in the
Knights... He has, in fact, done as much to connect the larger
| plans of Western conquest with Alcibiades as he has done to
disconnect them from Pericles. hall try to show later
Phos -eomiss about that the_ conquest of Sicily is Kept out of
wight 50 long 96--Porielaa lives, kepi.in te ackeround while
SS arn ge with Alci-
biades. é do not deny that this project did come more
and more to the front as the war proceeded; all that we
have argued is that it was in the background before Thucydides
allows us to see it at all.
The objection may be made: If the conquest of Sicily was
in view from the first, why did not the great expedition take
place earlier than 415 ?
There are several answers. At first Pericles was there to
prevent it. He could not avoid adopting the policy of w
with Corinth and the Peloponnesian league; Ἐπί παγίς
ἀῷ he triumphantly secured his own position, and so long as his
1 1303. Frere.
46 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
influence lasted he could restrict the Athenians to his own
oe defensive scheme “and “make™~them~tistent6~ his warning ;
| do ne “empire during the war.’ ~ ‘Then came aa
plague, upsetting all calculations and decimating Athens. The
revolt of Lesbos soon followed and diverted attention to
dangers within the empire. Yet even so, in the very year of
this revolt (427), with the treasure running out, the rich
burdened by the war-tax, the peasantry ruined by invasion,
' the crowded city ravaged by plague—in the midst of all this,
an advanced squadron of twenty ships was sent to stir up
discord in the Sicilian states. ‘ Athens,’ says Grote,! ‘ began
operations on a small scale in Sicily, probably contrary to the
advice of both Nikias and Kleon, neither of them seemingly
favourable to these distant undertakings.’ On whose advice,
then? Grote does not say. ‘Athens, writes a more recent
historian,” ‘again takes the maritime offensive, but the opera-
tions lack any connexion and design, in the absence ofa simple
and conscious purpose.’ Is there a lack of purpose and design ?
Let us glance at the main course of the war.
‘On Pericles’ plan, the war, but for accidents, might have
one on for ever. The Spartans invade Attica for two or
hree weeks every year; ravage the country unchecked, and
etire. The Athenians ‘conduct biennial\ invasions of the
|/ Megarid, ravage the country unchecked, and retire. The fleet,
/ in the sailing season, is sent round the coast of the Peloponnese,
makes descents unchecked, and retires. The two combatants
are like blindfolded boxers delivering in the dark blows which
neither hurt nor can be parried. This was what Pericles and
his Spartan friend Archidamus intended; they both hoped that
the combatants would get tired of these annual picnics.
But as soon as Pericles is out of the way things take
a different turn. Vigorous offensive action at the mouth of
the Corinthian gulf is crowned by the brilliant victory of
/Phormio. These naval operations are connected with an
attempt to detach the whole of Acarnania ie the Athenian
alliance. Observe how, at once, the ce j
shifted _to_the second stage in ‘the err voyage to Italy
ae Ὰ "History of Greece, v. 210, 3 Busolt, Griech. Gesch., iii. 2, p. 1058.
THE WESTERN POLICY 47
and Sicily’ in which. Megara.was..the, first stage and Corcyra κι
“the” third, Then the revolt of Lesbos creates an unforeseen
iversion, But when that is disposed of, we read of the
establishment of the democracy and of Athenian influence
in Corcyra; the capture of Minoa—a substantial step in the
coercion of Megara, which is still invaded twice yearly ;
a preliminary expedition to Sicily; Demosthenes’ campaigns
in Leucas and Aetolia; a second expedition to Sicily with
instructions to settle affairs at Corcyra onthe way. Then comes
a second diversion—the Pylos episode. The negotiations
which follow break down because Cleon demands the cession
Ὁ of Nisaea and Pegae (the Megarian ports), Troezen and Achaea.
An invasion of Corinthian territory is followed by the capture
4 of the long walls of Megara and Nisaea. There is an intrigue
with the Boeotian demos, by which Athens is to secure
' Siphae, the port on the Corinthian gulf. More operations
follow in Acarnania, including the capture of Oeniadae.
The third and most serious diversion is effected by Brasidas’
unprecedented winter-march to Amphipolis, the loss of which
brings the Ten Years’ War to a close.
Is there no design in this series of attacks at various points
~— along the route across Megara, down the Corinthian gulf,
round the corner of Acarnania to Corcyra, on to Italy and
Sicily ? Or are we right in thinking that as soon as the people
interested in the establishment of commercial connexions along
this route have a free hand, there is plenty of evidence in their
plan of war for a simple and conscious purpose ?
| Our main contention is simply that this scheme dates from
before the beginning of the war, and was only temporarily
i delayed by Pericles, who always disapproved of it.
{
Ϊ
1
There is one more passage’ to which, in concluding, we
ought to call attention. It is the chapter where Thucydides
reviews the career of Pericles and contrasts him with his
successors. Written after the fall of Athens, it is one of
the latest additions to the early part of the history.
1 ii, 65. The Sicilian disaster and the fall of Athens are mentioned in
§ 12,
48 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
‘So long as Pericles ruled Athens in the times of peace,
he led her wisely and brought her safely through, and in
his days she reached the height of her greatness. When the
war broke out, it is clear that, here again, he was right in
his estimate of her power. He survived the declaration of
war two years and six months; and after his death his
foresight with respect to the war was still more clearly
apparent. He had told the Athenians that all would be well
if they would be quiet, keep up their navy, and not try to
i add to their empire during the war or run their city into
danger. But the Athenians did everything he told them not
to do: they engaged in a policy which seemed to have nothing
to do with the war from motives of private ambition or
private gain,’ with disastrous consequences to themselves and
their allies. | Sucoas would only have meant glory or profit
to individuals; failure meant ruin to Athens. The reason
was that Pericles, since his position was assured by his
acknowledged worth and wisdom, and he was proved trans-
parently clear of corruption, controlled the multitude in a
free spirit. Instead of being led by them, he led them; he
was not seeking to acquire power by ignoble arts, for, on
the strength of his known high character, he already possessed
it; consequently, he did not speak to please the multitude,
but was able to oppose and even to anger them. Accordingly,
whenever he saw that they were elated with unmeasured
arrogance,” he spoke and east them down into fear; and
again, when they were unreasonably afraid, he tried to restore
their confidence. So came about what was nominally a de-
maneraey, but really a reign of the first citizen.
Hence came many errors—errors for a ἀνώων city with an
empire; above all, the Sicilian expedition, though in this
ΡΜ αν μόνον
ne,
1 ἄλλα ἔξω τοῦ πολέμου δοκοῦντα εἶναι... ἐπολίτευσαν,----ἰ 9 Sicilian expedi-
tion. ‘Private ambition’ was Alcibiades’ motive; ‘private gain’ that of
’ the commercial party.
2 παρὰ καιρὸν ὕβρει θαρσοῦντας.
THE WESTERN POLICY 49
instance it was not so much that they made a mistake of
judgement in estimating the strength of those whom they
assailed,' as that the men who sent out the expedition, instead
of taking thought for the needs of a distant army, were
engaged in private quarrels for the leadership of the people.
So they kept no vigilant eye on the fortunes of the fleet,
and at home for the first time introduced civil commotion.’
We do not wish to minimize or brush away the words:
‘instead of being led by them, he led them’—words which
seem to contradict the hypothesis we have put forward. But
it is fair to point out that Thucydides is reviewing the whole
of Pericles’ career, not speaking only of the last five years
of it. He ends with the words, ‘So came about what was
nominally a democracy, but really a reign of the first citizen.’
The reign of Pericles was established ten years before the
war, when his last opponent, Thucydides, son of Melesias,
was ostracized. The historian is contrasting the career as
a whole with the thirty years that followed. It is fair also
to remark that a statesman who is described as ‘not saying
pleasant things’, ‘opposing the people even to angering
— them, ‘casting them down when they were elated by un-
measured arrogance, was certainly one whose aims and
policy were likely to differ from those of his supporters. The
hypothesi hich_we-have-putforward merely involves that,
although all that Thucydides says is true of Pericles while
his position was undisputed, fin the last few years of his
life he chose to lead the people rather than be led by them.)
he main point of the contrast, what 8 5
th eat_ differ j |
that Pericles had no privat is position was
assured; he was indifferent to ers—
‘especially Alcibiades—had_ to tina position they sougat
1 This remarkable sentence has the air of a cool revision of the aes
expressed in vi. 1: ‘ Most of the Athenians had no idea of the size of Sicily
and the numbers of its inhabitants, and did not know they were undertaking
a war not much less serious than the Peloponnesian war.’ That was written
when Thucydides’ mind was full of conceptions hereafter to be analysed.
E
/
™
,
50 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
y glory and power. Others—especially the dynasty of tradesmen
—sou ( ence, where they flattered, Pericles ruled ;
while they were ambitious or sordid, he was ‘free’ (ἐλεύθερος),
above ambition and above gain. That this is a true picture
there is no io to doubt; we only question whether it is
quite complete. |
Thucydides, céntrary to his custom, anticipates the death
of Pericles in his narrative by more than a year.' He has
just before given us a glimpse of his behaviour when the
tide of popular indignation had risen against him, and in
the last speech he shows us the stately figure erect and calm
above the storm. Then, as if he could not bear to let any
later troubles or even death itself come between us and this
impression, he drops the curtain on the close of Pericles’
life. Whatever stood here in his original draft, he has sub-
stituted for it the sober and final tribute of a reverent
admiration.
The historian, when he watched the opening events of
the war and set about his task, could not foresee the Sicilian
expedition. He was not in the confidence either of Pericles
or of Cleon and the other, more obscure, captains of the
ommercial party, who formulated, in their secret conclaves,
he policy of the Piraeus. They were clever enough not to
\\\ /show their full hand to any outside observer. The first move
¥ in the game was the decree against Megara, the significance
of which was seen by Pericles but by no one else. What
made it finally impossible for any one else to see it, was
Pericles’ action in taking the anti-Megarian policy out of
the hands of its originators, and adopting it as his own.
Thucydides knew that he could not be acting from personal
spite; but the decrees and the sustained attacks by which
year by year they were followed up could only be interpreted
by one who took them in connexion with the whole series
_ of operations along the route to the West. At the outset,
1 ji. 65. The death of Pericles occurred in September 429, and its proper
place in chronological order would be at ii. 95.
THE WESTERN POLICY 51
the only people who had an inkling of the larger scheme
were the leaders of the commercial party, who originated
it; Pericles, who adopted the first manceuvre in order to
thwart, if possible, the rest of the plan; and~(probably)
the democratic leaders at Corcyra, the men whose arguments
and pretexts will be found in the Corcyrean envoys’ speech."
These envoys, not realizing, perhaps, how delicate the situa-
tion was at Athens, had tactlessly dropped a phrase which
stuck in Thucydides’ head because it puzzled him. They
had said something about Corcyra being a convenient station
on the voyage to Sicily and Italy. What could this have to
do with a war between Athens and Sparta? Yet Thucydides
vaguely felt that this consideration weighed with the majority
who voted for alliance with Corcyra; and so with his punc-
tilious fidelity he puts down exactly what he knew: ‘And
further it seemed to them that the island was conveniently
situated on the coasting-route to Italy and Sicily.’
The policy of the Piraeus came to the surface only after
Pericles’ death ; it did not finally and fully emerge till the
great expedition-of 415, and by that time Thucydides’ opinion
about the origin of the war was already formed, and much
of his First Part was written. In the lapse of eighteen
years the memory of the outbreak had faded. Looking back,
he sees the figure of Pericles, exalted by distance and
consecrated by time. How great was that free and gene-
rous spirit, in contrast with the selfish ambition or low
covetousness of the men who had taken his place! The
Sicilian expedition was their work; seeking glory or private
gain, they involved Athens in “ἃ pebey which seemed to
have nothing to do with the war’. ee Thucydides, from
first to last, the Sicilian enterprise was’ an_ irrelevant divér-
sion. imported into the war between-Athens. and. Sparta—
the war as designed by Pericles; and he attributed it to motives
oo as he rightly insists, Pericles. could not. have_enter-
> Hence he never saw its connexion with the Megarian
i a link without which the origin of the Pelopon-
nesian War was an insoluble enigma.
1 i. 32-6.
E 2
x
CHAPTER V
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
In the foregoing chapters we have put forward a theory
of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. If that theory is
well founded, the causes were such as Thucydides could not
have known. This is certainly a sufficient reason for his
not having told us what they were; but it does not explain
why he did not look for the origin of the war in the quarters
where we have looked for it, or how he came to regard his
account as complete and satisfactory. He says that his
description of what immediately preceded the outbreak is
written in order that no one may ever have to ask ‘out of
what so great a war arose ’—the very question, it might seem,
which we have spent four chapters in trying to answer.
Whether the answer we found is the right one or not, what
is certain is that some answer is wanted. Our next ques-
tion is: why was Thucydides content with his First Book,
and why are we not content with it?
There are on the surface indications of a wide divergence
between his conception of his task in writing history and
our conception of it, between what he offers and what we
demand. Can we trace this divergence down to its source ?
Putting our own, very different, hypothesis along-side of
Thucydides’ introductory Book, and taking it (whether right
or wrong in points of detail) as at least the expression of a
typically modern view, can we explain the contrast between
the two accounts? This is a wider and more interesting
inquiry than the search for the origin of a particular war
between two ancient cities; it should take us to the centre
of Thucydides’ general view of history and of the historian’s
aim and office.
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 53
What, precisely, does Thucydides undertake to tell us ?—
that is the point from which we must start. The answer lies
in his own prefatory statement of his scope and method.!
© In the first place, he undertakes to state the plain truth about
αν what happened.” In the second place he divides his subject-
matter—the truths he means to record—under two heads:
speeches (λόγοι), and the events (ἔργα) of the war. The passage
is so important for our purpose that we will give it in full:
‘As to the accounts given of themselves by the several
parties in speeches,’ either on the eve of war or when they
were already engaged, it would be hard to reproduce the
exact language used, whether I heard it myself or it was
reported to me by others. The speeches as they stand repre-
sent what, in my opinion was most necessary to be said by
the several speakers about the matter in question at the
moment, and I have kept as closely as possible to the general
sense of what was really said. Of the events—what actually
was done in the war,* I have thought fit not to write from
any chance information, nor yet according to any notion
of my own, but to record those at which I was present, or
which I heard of from others, with the greatest possible
accuracy of investigation. To discover these facts was labori-
ous, because those who were present at the various events
differed in their reports of the same occurrences, according
to the state of their memories or as they sympathized with
one side or the other.’
Observe that in this very careful account of what the history
is to contain, there is not a word about causes. Hach episode
in the military operations is to be described just as it hap-
pened ; we shall be told no more than an eyewitness might
have seen on the spot. Besides this, we are to listen to the
‘accounts’ given, the arguments used and pretexts alleged,
by politicians and the representatives of states—no more
than the audience at the assembly or at a congress of allies
might actually have heard, The history as we have it does
1 i, 20-2. 2 τῶν γενομένων τὸ σαφές, 1. 22, 4.
8 i, 22 ὅσα μὲν λόγῳ εἶπον ἕκαστοι.
4 τὰ δ᾽ ἔργα τῶν πραχθέντων ἐν τῷ πολέμῳ.
54, THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
consist, almost entirely, of these two elements. But why
has Thucydides deliberately adopted such an extraordinary
method? Why, in particular, does he say nothing about
causes, but put us off with the ex parte ‘accounts’ of in-
terested persons, as publicly and formally stated with a view
to persuading other interested persons? Here on the threshold
we find, between his notion of an historian’s business and
ours, as wide a gulf as can be conceived. How could he
think that it was enough to tell us what ‘the Corinthians ’
or ‘the Athenians’ alleged, instead of what were the real,
underlying causes of this war ?
The method adopted by Thucydides was to a certain extent
imposed upon him inevitably by the circumstances in which
he wrote. A brief account of these will throw some light on
the peculiarities of the work as we have it, and will help us
to determine how far these peculiarities are shaped by external
accident, and how far they result from the author’s conception
of history.
The work was intended to cover the whole twenty-seven
years of the Peloponnesian War. The eight books we have—
all that ever was written—actually cover twenty years. They
are divided into two nearly equal parts, of which the second
is unfinished. Part I contains the Ten Years’ War. Part II
begins with a fresh introduction in which the author for the
first time remarks that the Ten Years’ War turned out to be
only the first episode in a struggle of which it was all along
prophesied that it should last thrice nine years—the only
one of the many oracles which was fulfilled. From this
remark, occurring where it does, it is plain that Part I must
have been far advanced before Thucydides knew how long
the war was to continue. Careful search, moreover, has
detected in it here and there several expressions which a
thorough revision would have removed, and it may be con-
cluded that, although considerable additions were made later,
it was never rewritten as a whole. The second Part is
* The division occurs at v.20. The introduction to Part II begins at v. 26;
chapters 21-5 forming a connecting link.
-
THUCYDIDES’ CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 55
incomplete; Book VIII ends abruptly and is throughout in
an unfinished condition. On the other hand, Books VI and
VII (the Sicilian Expedition) are perhaps the most perfect
part of the work. |
We may infer with certainty that Thucydides having begun
to write, as he says himself,‘ so soon as the war broke out,
worked at the history, as occasion offered, all through the
twenty-seven years of war and after his restoration from
exile at its close, until death ended his labours.
About his manner of working there can be little doubt.
He evidently kept a sort of diary, recording the bare events,
with details of time and place, as he heard of them. The
entries form an annalistic thread, running through the whole,
on which the fuller narrative could be constructed. In some
places they actually remain embedded in the expanded story,
which in other instances has replaced them.? With this
᾿ chronological framework as a basis, he would write up the
more elaborate descriptions whenever he met with an eye-
witness who could supply the necessary details, and the account
would, no doubt, be carefully revised, if fresh information
came in later from another source. From the cireumstance
that the unfinished Book VIII contains only short notes of
the contents of speeches, whereas the narrative is in parts
fairly full, it is not rash to conclude that in many cases the
finished speeches of the earlier books were the last additions
to the narratives which they accompany.
His choice of incidents for fuller treatment was, of course,
in part dependent on the chance of his meeting with some one
who possessed the necessary information. Apart from this,
he appears to have selected typical episodes, such as the
siege of Plataea, the victory of Phormio, Demosthenes’ campaign
in Aetolia, the capture of Sphacteria, Brasidas’ great march to
the North, the siege of Syracuse. Each of these military
+3 dy ki, '
* See, for example, ii. 19. 1, where the formal record of the invasion is left
in the middle of the detailed description of it. On a close scrutiny it will
be seen that chapters 18 and 19, which precede and follow it, are slightly
inconsistent, and must have been written at different times.
56 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
achievements had some peculiar circumstances which made
the operations interesting to contemporaries—though not
,always in the same degree to us—from the point of
view of strategy and tactics. A few episodes, of which the
most remarkable is the Corcyrean sedition, are treated in the
same way on account of their political significance. The
description of the plague at Athens is for the instruction of
physicians. In all these cases, which together make up the
greater part of the work, the intention is that which is stated
‘in the introduction. ‘I shall be satisfied if the facts are pro-
‘nounced to be useful by those who shall desire to know clearly
what has happened in the past and the sort of things that
are likely, so far as man can foresee, to happen again in the
future.’
Such was the plan originally laid down for himself by
| Thucydides. He was not reviewing his whole period in focus
and perspective after a sufficient interval of time, but he
was obliged to compose at odd moments, determined by
the accidents of opportunity and seattered over a period
of thirty to thirty-five years. During all the first part of
his labours he was writing concurrently with the events he
recorded, often in the dark as to their relative importance,
their bearing and connexions, and necessarily ignorant of
their remoter consequences. All he could do at first was to
keep his journal, and now and then to work up a detached
episode. The result could not for a long time possess more
unity than the collected volumes of a monthly review; no
general tendency or trend of events could be discerned, no
shadow cast before the unknown issue.
But these considerations of outward circumstance, while
they account for many of the features which make the work
so unlike a modern history, leave our present question
untouched. However much he might be in the dark about
the causes of the war when he hegan to write, however
impossible it may have been for the darkness to be dispelled
later, the strange thing is that he should have thought that
he had dispelled it. It is stranger still that in describing the
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 57
contents of his book he should have altogether omitted to
mention causes, and laid down a plan of writing which, if
adhered to, would exclude any discussion of them. :
Another ancient historian, Polybius?, has told us explicitly
what class of things he considers are the ‘causes’ of a war.
In his superior and priggish way, he speaks with contempt of
men who cannot distinguish the ‘beginning’ (ἀρχή), or first
overt act of hostilities, from the ‘ cause and pretext’ (αἰτίας καὶ
προφάσεως). “1, he says, ‘shall regard the first attempt to put
in execution what had already been determined, as a “ begin-
ning”; but J shall mean by “ causes” (αἰτίας) those decisions
and cownsels which precede and lead to such attempts ; I mean
considerations and states of mind and calculations, and the
things which bring us to make ὦ decision or form a purpose.
A pretext is an alleged ‘cause’. Polybius illustrates his use
of terms from the war of Antiochus, of which the ‘ cause’
(αἰτία) was the anger of the Aetolians; the preteat (πρόφασις)
was the liberation of Greece; the beginning (ἀρχή) was the
descent of Antiochus upon Demetrias. The whole passage
is in a didactic tone; Polybius is evidently pleased with his
powers of discrimination.
With this in mind let us look at the passage”, where
Thucydides for a moment goes beyond his prescribed limits
and expresses his own opinion about the ‘ cause’ of the Pelo-
ponnesian War. Weshall find all the three terms distinguished
by Polybius.
‘The Athenians and Peloponnesians began (ἤρξαντο) by
breaking the thirty years’ truce which they had made after
the capture of Euboea. Why they broke it—their grievances
and differences (rds αἰτίας καὶ τὰς διαφοράς), I have first set
forth, that no one may ever have to inquire from what origin
(ἐξ ὅτου) so great a war arose among the Hellenes. The most
genuine preteat, though it appeared least in what was said,®
I believe to have been the increasing power of Athens, and
1 iii. 6-7.
2 i, 28. 4. We shall discuss later the digression (i. 88-118) where this
statement is repeated and the grounds of the Spartans’ fear are explained.
3. τὴν μὲν ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ.
58 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
the alarm which they gave to the Lacedaemonians, and so
forced them into war. But the grievances publicly alleged
by each side for breaking the truce and going to war were as
follows. Then he passes at once to the description of civil
strife at Epidamnus, of her appeal to Corinth, and so forth.
The first point in this passage to which we would draw
attention is a point of disagreement between Polybius and
Thucydides. Polybius carefully distinguishes between a
‘eause’ (αἰτία) and a ‘pretext’ (πρόφασις). The preteat of
the war of Antiochus was the liberation of Greece—an
avowed, but not a true, ‘cause’; its (true) cause was the
Aetolians’ anger. Now Thucydides, we note, inverts the
use of these terms. The alarm of the Lacedaemonians, which
Polybius would call a ‘ cause’ (true, but not avowed), Thucy-
dides calls ‘the most genuine pretext, though it appeared
least in what was said’. When he comes to the ‘ grievances
publicly alleged’—what Polybius would call ‘pretexts’ (avowed,
but not true), he calls them αἰτίαι.
We could hardly have better evidence that Thucydides draws
no clear distinction between an αἰτία and a πρόφασις. No re-
spectable writer who had such a distinction in his thoughts
could speak of a ‘most genuine pretext (πρόφασις) which
appeared least in what was said ’—which, in fact, was least
of all a pretext. Jowett, in rendering this phrase, instinc-
tively substitutes the modernism: ‘the real, though unavowed,
cause. Hobbes is less modern and renders it faithfully: ‘ the
truest Quarrell, though least in speech,’ 3
1 αἱ δ᾽ és τὸ φανερὸν λεγόμεναι αἰτίαι.
2 Mr. Forbes, in his edition of Thuc. i, translates: ‘For (and this was the
truest cause, though least was said about it), &c.’ (p. 28). In his glossary
p. 166) he says “πρόφασις is twice used emphatically for the real, as opposed
to the pretended, motive or cause’, citing i. 23 and vi.6. He adds a note:
‘The idea in these places probably is “if they had openly said what they
really meant”; of course πρόφασις cannot mean “real motive’’. Cf. Dem. de Cor.
156 (201), probably an imitation of Thucydides, ὅτι τὴν μὲν ἀληθῆ πρόφασιν
τῶν πραγμάτων... ἀπεκρύπτετο. αἰτίαι Mr. Forbes renders ‘grievances’
(p. 28); but slips into using ‘causes’ on p. 75: ‘Thucydides has thus far’
(up to chap. 88) ‘been explaining the avowed causes of the war. He now
goes on to the real cause—the alarm of Sparta...’ On i. 146 he translates
πρόφασις by ‘cause’, without comment.
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 59
Thucydides, in fact, throughout his first book uses the words
αἰτία and πρόφασις interchangeably.!| In Polybius αἰτία is per-
haps more nearly equivalent to ‘reason’ (in the psychological
sense), than to ‘cause’, In Thucydides it does not mean
‘cause’ at all, and should seldom be translated ‘reason’. It
means ‘ grievance’. There is in Thucydidean Greek no word
which even approaches the meaning and associations of the
English ‘ cause’, with its correlative ‘ effect’.
This truth is recognized as a linguistic fact; but surely it
is something more. It implies that when Thucydides sat down
to write his first Book, hé never so much as asked himself
the question which we have asked and tried to answer:
‘What were the causes of the war?’ The questions he did
ask were: What was the ‘ beginning’ (apy7)—the first aet of
war? and: What were the grievances, quarrels, pretexts
of the combatants?’—rives ἦσαν αἱ αἰτίαι; The answers to
these two questions he regards as containing a complete account
of that ‘out of which’ (ἐξ ὅτου) the war arose. The com-
batants ‘began’, he says, by breaking the treaty of thirty
years’ peace; the grievances, accusations, and pretexts oecupy
the rest of Book I (except the digression, 88-118). But that
is all which he attempts to tell. We ought to give up
speaking of the first Book as being about the causes of the
war; it is much truer to say that there is hardly a word
about causes in it from beginning to end. Thucydides has
not told us the causes, and one reason for this omission is that
he never raised the question,and never could raise it, in distinet
and unambiguous terms.
The first Book is not an analysis of causes, but the story of
a quarrel. Thucydides approaches his subject in the same
1 Compare iv. 85. 1, where Brasidas says, of his expedition to Acanthus,
ἡ ἔκπεμψίς pov... γεγένηται τὴν αἰτίαν ἐπαληθεύουσα ἣν ἀρχόμενοι Tod πολέμου
προείπομεν, ᾿Αθηναίοις ἐλευθεροῦντες τὴν Ἑλλάδα πολεμήσειν, and § 6 τὴν αἰτίαν
πιστὴν ἀποδεικνύναι. Here αἰτία is used to mean a pretext or alleged ground of
quarrel which (in the speaker’s view) was always genuine, but needed to be
proved genuine by corresponding action. i. 55. 2 αἰτία δὲ αὕτη πρώτη éyévero
τοῦ πολέμου τοῖς KopivGiows és τοὺς ᾿Αθηναίους, Sti... ἐναυμάχουν : i, 118, 1 ὅσα
πρόφασις τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου κατέστη, referring to the same events.
60 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
way that Herodotus approaches his in the opening chapters,
where he recounts the earlier stages in ‘the quarrel for which
the Greeks and barbarians fought’.1 That feud began with
the rape of the Argive princess, Io, by some Phoenician
traders. Certain Greeks retaliated by carrying off Europa,
daughter of the King of Tyre, and so ‘squared the account’.
Next time the aggressors were the Greeks, who sailed to
Colchis and carried away Medea. Then Alexander, son of
Priam, bent on vengeance, made a prize of Helen. Diplomatic
protests failing, the Trojan war followed, Priam’s kingdom
was overthrown, and thenceforth the barbarians regarded the
Greeks as enemies. The expeditions of Darius and Xerxes
were conceived as reprisals for the expedition of Agamemnon.
Similarly, the first book of Thucydides traces the feud
between Athens and ‘the Peloponnesians’. Seen in that
light, the structure and contents of the book become natural
and intelligible: accusations and pretexts and ex parte
statements, which are ridiculously out of place in a discus-
sion of causes, are just what we expect in the story of a
quarrel. The speakers are like litigants in a process; one
party states its grievances, the other attempts refutation.
Thucydides seems to take it as his primary duty to put
forward both cases fairly, and to leave the reader to judge.
He does not, like a modern historian, assume the judicial
position himself, treat the allegations as so much (almost
worthless) evidence to be ‘summed up’, and then attempt
an independent investigation of the causes which these
allegations were partly designed to conceal.
We may observe a further psychological consequence en-
tailed by this manner of approaching the subject: Thucydides’
thoughts, being bent on the earlier stages of the quarrel, are
fixed solely on the past. Now, the policy of commercial
expansion to the West, which we have ascribed to the Piraeus,
1 δ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν, Herod. i. 1. Compare the story of the feud
between Athens and Aegina (Herod. v. 82) which opens thus: ἡ δὲ ἔχθρη ἡ
προοφειλομένη és ᾿Αθηναίους ἐκ τῶν Αἰγινητέων éyévero ἐξ ἀρχῆς τοιῆσδε. Similarly
the earlier stages in the quarrel between Persia and Scythia are resumed
(Herod. iv. 1) to explain Darius’ invasion.
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 6)
lay wholly in the future. It was not a ‘ grievance’ on either
side; and no one who was looking for grievances could pos-
sibly come to think of it. Hence the alliance with Corcyra,
for instance, instead of being regarded as a step in the execu-
tion of this policy, is treated from the Corinthians’ standpoint,
as an interference on the part of Athens in a private feud
between Corinth and one of her colonies. The situation of
the island on the route to Italy and Sicily, which to us is the
significant fact, is, as we have seen, barely mentioned, in a
couple of sentences, without any emphasis or explanation;
it has nothing to do with any grievance.
But, if the bulk of this first Book is not about causes, there
remains the one statement that ‘the most genuine pretext was
the Spartans’ fear of the increasing powerof Athens’. Although
Thucydides has no word for cause, a ‘most genuine pretext’
means one which is based on some genuine, real feeling ; and
this feeling we may describe, though he cannot so describe
it, as a cause. We remark'here an agreement between the
two passages we quoted from Thucydides and Polybius:
both alike find the ‘reason’, or ‘genuine pretext’, of a war
in a feeling, a state of mind, attributed to one of the nations
involved. The anger of the Aetolians was the reason (αἰτία)
of the war of Antiochus; the fear of the Lacedaemonians is
the ‘most genuine pretext’ for this war. The digression in
chapters 88-118 is intended to explain this fear, by describing
the growth of Athens. We will glance through it, in order
to note from what point of view the description is written.
Thucydides goes back to the retreat of the Persians.
When the invaders were gone, the Athenians set about
restoring their desolated homes and rebuilding their walls
(89). The Lacedaemonians, urged by their allies and fear-
ing the new growth of the Athenian navy, send envoys to
dissuade them from fortifying their city. The diplomatic
manceuvres by which Themistocles hoodwinked the Spartans
until the walls were built are told in detail (90-1). The
Spartans concealed their anger and disappointment (92).
The Piraeus is founded and fortified as a refuge in case of
62 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
another barbarian invasion (93). The tyranny of Pausanias
drives the allies to prefer the supremacy of Athens (95), who
takes tribute of them, under colour of intended reprisals upon
Persia, though they remain autonomous and meet for delibera-
tion in a common assembly (97). Naxos was the first to revolt
and the first to be ‘enslaved contrary to the convention’ (98) ;
the turn of others came later. The fault lay partly with the
Athenians’ severity in exaction, partly with the negligence of
the allies (99). Various Athenian successes are recorded (100).
The revolted Thasians induce the Spartans secretly to promise
an invasion of Attica, which is prevented only by the great
Helot rising (101). Kimon is sent to help the Lacedaemonians
in crushing the rebels at Ithome, but he is received with
suspicion and sent back with insulting discourtesy. ‘ This
was the first open difference’ between the two states. Athens
renounces the Lacedaemonian alliance (102), and ‘being now
at feud with Sparta’ settles the banished Messenians at
Naupactus, and allies herself with Megara. Her occupation
of this city and of its ports, Nisaea and Pegae, is ‘the begin-
ning of the Corinthians’ intense hatred of Athens’ (103).
Then follow the Egyptian Expedition and the war with
Corinth, and later with Sparta; the battles of Tanagra and
Oenophyta; the reduction of Aegina; the failure of the
Egyptian Expedition (104-110). After some minor operations
a five years’ truce is concluded between the Peloponnesians
and Athens. Kimon (the last representative of the anti-
Persian ideal) falls, in an ‘Hellenic’ war against Asiatics,
at Cyprus (112). Then intestine strife breaks out again in
Greece; Athens is worsted and restores the places she has
held in the Peloponnese (115), The revolt of Samos and
Byzantium is crushed (117).
Thueydides returns to his main narrative in these words :!
‘And now, a few years later, occurred the affairs at Corcyra
and Potidaea above narrated, and all that came to be a
pretext for this war.’ The transactions mentioned in the
digression occupied fifty years, ‘in which, while the Athenians
established more firmly their mastery over their empire and
118.
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 63
themselves advanced greatly in power, the Lacedaemonians,
perceiving it, only made slight attempts to prevent them, and
for the most part of the time remained inactive ; for they had
never been quick to go to war, if they were not compelled ;
and in part they were hindered by wars at home; until at
last the power of Athens was clearly rising high and they
were laying hands on the Peloponnesian league. Now the
Lacedaemonians could bear it no longer; they deeided that
they must set to their hands with energy and pull down the
strength of Athens, if they could, by embarking on this war.’
In so far as this digression is more than a mere chronicle
intended to correct the current dating of the events, it is
clearly an account of how the ‘difference’ arose between Athens
and Sparta and the breach widened into an irreparable feud.
In the Persian wars the two states had stood together against
the Eastern invader ; but no sooner was the danger past than
anger and suspicion broke out through the deceitful policy
of Themistocles. So the feud began, and its course is
traced through the ‘first open difference’, and the wars that
followed, down to the latest ‘grievances’ which occupy the
rest of the book. The phase of this process which especially
interests Thucydides is the change that came over the char-
acter of the Athenian league. He belonged by family tradition
to the old school which took for its motto, Unity in Hellas and
War to the death with the barbarian, and in the transition
from an ‘alliance’ to an ‘empire’ and from an empire to a
‘tyranny’ he read the defection of Athens from this ideal,
which Kimon, his kinsman and hero, had championed to the
end. Thinking on these lines, his attention was fixed on the
nominal heads of the two leagues, Athens and Sparta. The
first Book might have been very different if he had studied
rather the Piraeus and Corinth, and sought causes instead
of grounds of quarrel.
We must now recur to the point of agreement we noted
between Thucydides and Polybius.* Thucydides has told us
1 See above, p. 61.
64 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
why a certain ‘pretext’ was ‘the most genuine’, and this
pretext, we notice, is a feeling of fear attributed to a nation
as a whole; just as the ‘reason’ which Polybius finds for the
war of Antiochus is the anger of the Aetolians. Polybius,
moreover, expressly limits the term αἰτία, in connexion with
the history of a war, solely to psychological ‘ reasons’—to feel-
ings and other states of mind which immediately precede
action, ‘whatever brings us to make a decision or form a
purpose.’ With this limitation Thucydides seems tacitly to
agree, when he finds the genuine pretext in the fear of the
Spartans, and attributes their inaction (in so far as it was
not due to accidental hindrances) to the slowness of their
national temperament. It appears to us to be slaractoaistll
of ancient historians in general, that in so far as they look
for causes of human events, they look, apart from supernatural
agencies, solely to psychological causes—the motives and
characters of individuals and of cities.
In the present instance, we ought not to overlook the fact
at Thucydides is writing from the Athenian side, and con-
sequently tends to regard ‘the Peloponnesians’ or at least the
several states (Sparta, Corinth, &c.) as units. Thus, he tells us
of the ‘fear of the Lacedaemonians’, and ‘ the intense hatred of
the Corinthians’; but Archidamus and Brasidas are the only
two individuals on the Peloponnesian side whose motives are
even dimly apprehended. | He evidently knew nothing about
the state of politics and the prominent personalities at Corinth.
On the other hand, in his own city he takes account of two
elements: the national character of ‘the Athenians’ as a
whole, and the character and motives of leading men, Pericles,
Cleon, Alcibiades, Nikias, and so on. This is perfectly
natural. The Athenian people met as a body in the ecclesia, and
its character could be observed there directly, as well as traced
in its collective action; but its motives become articulate
only in the ‘ demagogue’, the ‘spokesman of the people’, or in
the representative sent on a mission to a foreign state. When
they are formulated in the ‘pretexts’ of individual leaders,
\ they are inevitably associated with their personalities and
private ambitions. The disinterested ideal of Athens’ glory is
—
THUCYDIDES’ CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 65
in Cleon; her ambition of conquest in Alcibiades. Now all
these peculiarities of Thucydides’ narrative are psychological —
accidents which ought to be discounted in criticizing his
evidence. With respect to the origin of the war, in particular,
we see how the unconscious preoccupations they involve would
prevent Thucydides from seeing that Pericles and his majority
were not at one, that the motives which actuated the men who
voted for his proposals were not necessarily identical with the
motives which were expressed in his ‘ pretexts’, or with his
own private motives. The secret was not to be found in
Pericles’ speeches, nor yet in the national character of ‘the!
Athenians ’.
The exclusive concentration of the ancient historians on the
motives and characters of men and of states is the key ἰο
the divergence we noticed between their histories and ours.
We are not content with ‘causes’ of this sort only; we were
not satisfied, for instance, to attribute the prosperity of
Megara to virtuous moderation. When Solon (according to
Plutarch!) observed that merchants are not accustomed to |
bring their wares to places where they can get nothing in |
exchange, he was stating a truth not as we should state it.
We look for a different sort of explanations and we express
them in different terms. |
Thus, in constructing our hypothedia about the origin of the |
war, instead of looking for states of mind such as fear, ambition,
virtuous moderation, we sought for the causes alike of the
Peloponnesian war, of the Sicilian expedition, and of the
prosperity of Megara in what we call an economic and |
topological situation. We did not look, primarily, into —
the breasts of Pericles, Cleon, and Alcibiades and study their
characters and personal motives, but we consulted popula-
tion statistics and the map of Greece. When we had /
observed the rise of a commercial population in the Piraeus,
and noted that Corinth was well situated to control the
stream of trade from Sicily across the isthmus, it occurred to
us that Megara was on the same isthmus and presented the
impersonated in Pericles ; her restless covetousness “Now all
1 See above, p. 19,
F
66 FHUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
only weak point which the Piraeus, with designs of expan-
sion westward, could attack. The result was that, whereas
there was no possible connexion between such isolated psy-
chological facts as the alarm of the Spartans, the personal
ambitions of Cleon and Alcibiades, and the virtuous modera-
tion of the Megarian people, the connexion between the
elements and factors in the ‘situation’ we considered was
obvious. Hence we could perceive that the whole war, the
Sicilian enterprise, and the attack on Megara, could all be
traced to one and the same set of causes, which governed the
entire train of events. ἴω personal motives of individuals
‘only came in as a secondary factor, modifying the details of
what seemed in itself an almost inevitable precen
Similarly we are inclined to go beyond Solon’s/ acute ob-
servation of the habits of merchants. Solon’s way of putting
it was that merchants are not accustomed to give anything for
nothing; he remarks it as a fact of human nature. Our lan-
guage is different because we tend to abstract. from the psycho-
logical aspect, and to formulate, instead, a general law, which
says nothing about the natural preferences of merchants, but
speaks of a necessity that exports should balance imports.
So long as the preference ef merchants was alone considered,
the foundation of economie science could not be laid. Thus
we find Plato still ignorant of a law which Solon, a practical
man, was on the verge of discovering. *
The great contrast, in fact, between ancient and modern
history is this: that whereas the moderns instinctively and
incessantly seek for the operation of social conditions, of
economic and topological factors, and of political forces and
processes of evolution,—all of which elements they try to
bring under laws, as general and abstract as possible; the
ancients looked simply and solely to the feelings, motives,
characters of individuals or of cities. These, and (apart
from supernatural agencies) these only, appeared to them
to shape the course of human history.
' Socrates, in the Alcibiades (i. 122 ©), argues that the Lacedaemonians
must be exceedingly rich, because silver and gold come into the country
from all quarters of Greece and never go out again (industry and export
trade being forbidden by Lycurgus’ constitution).
THUCYDIDES’ CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 67
The contrast reveals a profound divergence of ultimate
views as to the position of man in the universe, and here at
last we reach the central point of the position. No historian
can be completely criticized until we have taken account of
his philosophical attitude. For an ancient historian, whose
standpoint is so remote that we cannot safely assume any
common ground, the inquiry is imperative. Our previous
discussion furnishes the point of departure: we have to
consider what philosophic doctrine is tacitly and unconsciously
implied, when it is tacitly and unconsciously assumed that
the only ‘causes’ which it is relevant to discuss in the
history of a war are the immediate motives and passions of
individuals or of personified states.
When we have brought the question to this issue, the
answer is not far to seek. The latent implication is that
every motive is a first cause, or is determined solely by
character
If we would understand Thucydides, we must not regard
a human action as partly caused by innumerable influences
1 This doctrine is implicit in rationalist Greek thought till the fourth
century, when it. first becomes explicit in the Aristotelian doctrine of free
will. We cannot go at length into this question; but briefly the doctrine
is as follows. A man’s action is caused by his desire of some end. That, of
course, is true; but the next step is false. This step is the assertion that
the end in question—the object of desire—is the cause of the desire. A man
thinks of some result he wishes to attain: how can he bring it about? He
thinks of the means to it; beginning from the ‘end ’—the last effect to be
caused—he traces the chain of means backwards till he reaches the first
means—some action which it is immediately within his power to perform.
This last link in his chain of thought is the first link in the chain of execu-
tion. He performs the action; it is a beginning (ἀρχή) which starts the
series of means leading back again to the desired result. The two processes
of reflection and execution form a closed circle, which ends where it began,
in the object or ‘end’ desired. The ‘end’ is called a ‘final cause’; the
action and the desire which prompts it are the ‘beginning of motion’ (ἀρχὴ
κινήσεως). Man is the original source and parent of his acts, ἀρχὴν...
γεννητὴν τῶν πράξεων ὥσπερ καὶ τέκνων, Ar. Eth. Nic. y iii. 15 and v. 5. To
this we may add, with Aristotle, that the activity is conditioned (not caused)
by character, and the account is then complete. We are here following
Aristotle’s statement of the point which concerns us without taking account
of any modifications first introduced by Aristotle. We are only considering
what is assumed by men who might have been his grandfathers.
F2
68 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
of environment, and by events that happened before the agent
was born, right back into an immeasurable past; nor must
we think of it as a single point in the total state of the
world at a given moment, which state can be completely
accounted for only by the total state at the previous moment,
and soon. We must think of it as springing then and there
out of the man’s passions and character, and rid our minds,
moreover, of the notion of Jaw as applying to human actions
and events. The fundamental conception which all our thought
about the world implies must be banished—the conception,
namely, that the whole course of events of every kind, human or
non-human, is one enormous concatenation of causes and effects
stretching forward and back into infinite time, and spreading
outwards over immeasurable space, a concatenation in which
every link is necessarily connected with all the rest, however
remote. The world upon which the Greek looked out pre-
sented no such spectacle as this. Human affairs—the subject-
matter of history—were not to him a single strand in the
illimitable web of natural evolution; their course was shaped
solely by one or both of two factors : immediate human motives,
and the will of gods and spirits, of Fortune, or of Fate. The
rationalist who rejected the second class was left with the
first alone—the original and uncaused acts of human wills.
That is why Polybius expressly limits the term ‘ cause’ (αἰτία)
in relation to history to one class of things — motives.
Thucydides takes the limitation for granted.
On this all-important point we part company with many
recognized authorities. We will quote a typical statement
from Professor Gomperz’ brilliant review of Greek thought :—
‘There is hardly any pair of contemporaries who offer
a more glaring contrast than Herodotus and Thucydides.
Barely a score of years divided their works from one another,
but a gulf of centuries seems to yawn between their temper
and inspiration. Herodotus creates throughout an entirely
old-fashioned impression; Thucydides is a modern of the
moderns. He made a clean sweep of the political and
religious bias, the legendary and novelistic sympathies, and
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 69
the primitive beliefs, rarely mitigated by the light of criticism,
which marked the elder historian. The gaze of Thucydides
is primarily fixed on the political factors, on the actual
relations of forces, on the natural foundation, so to speak,
of historical phenomena. He looks for their springs, not
in the dispensations of supernatural beings, nor yet, except
in a moderate degree, in the caprices and passions of
individual men. Behind those he always sought for the
universal forces that animated them, for the conditions of
the peoples, and the interests of the states.... It was
his constant endeavour to describe the course of human affairs
as though it were a process of nature informed by the light
of inexorable causality.’ 1
This passage is perhaps unguarded in expression, and it
seems somewhat ungracious to fasten upon details; we take
it only as a typical instance of what seems to us a fallacy
very prevalent in modern histories of ancient thought. What
lies behind the positive statements in Professor Gomperz’
paragraph is the very different and merely negative proposition
that Thucydides records nothing which is not consistent with
a scientific conception of the world—that he tacitly rejects
supernatural causes. Let us admit, for the present, that this
is true. The fallacy consists in passing from this negative
statement to the assertion, implied throughout the paragraph,
that the void left by the rejection of supernaturalism was
filled by modern science.
The chief point in which we differ from Professor Gomperz
arises over his last statement, that Thucydides endeavoured
to describe the course of human affairs as though it were
a process of nature informed by inexorable causality. This
is precisely what we have seen reason to deny. Human
affairs have, for Thucydides, not even an analogy with
processes of nature; much less are they identified with one
of the processes of nature; much less, again, is their course
informed by inexorable causality. Man, isolated from, and
opposed to, Nature, moves along a narrow path, unrelated
* Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (E.T.),i.503, We are sorry to quote this interesting
work only to express disagreement.
70 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
to what lies beyond, and lighted only by a few dim rays of
human ‘foresight’ (γνώμη), or by the false, wandering fires
of Hope. He bears within him, self-contained, his destiny
in his own character’; and this, with the purposes which
arise out of it, shapes his course. That is all, in Thucydides’
view, that we can say; except that, now and again, out of
the surrounding darkness come the blinding strokes of Fortune,
unaccountable and unforeseen. We shall try to prove later,
in detail, that Thucydides’ history can only be understood
when we start from some such conception as this. If we
presuppose the very modern view—it is not yet a century old
—that human affairs are a process of nature indissolubly
woven into one world-process by causal law, we shall be
misled at every turn.
And, besides rejecting this general conception, we must be-
ware of saying that Thucydides looked for such entities as
‘ political factors’, ‘relations of forces’, ‘the natural foundation
of historical phenomena,’ ‘universal forces which animate men.’
We are not merely objecting to forms of words; we are protest-
ing against the attribution to Thucydides of the whole class
of categories and conceptions and modes of thought of which
these and similar phrases are the expression. It is precisely
in respect of these conceptions that modern history differs
from ancient. They have been imported, but yesterday, from
Darwinian biology and from branches of mathematical and
physical science which in fifth-century Athens were undis-
covered, and which, if they had been discovered, no one
would have dreamed of bringing into connexion with human
history. Perhaps the importation has not been all: to the
good. A combination of political forces is a bloodless and
inhuman entity, and in the manipulation of these mechanical
categories we seem to lose touch of the realities they conceal
—the pulse and play of warm, live passions, the beating
hearts of men who suffer and aspire. We are sometimes
put off with phrases instead of explanations ; and the language
of cogs and pulleys fails, sometimes, to illuminate the workings
of the spirit.
1 *HO0s ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, Heracleitus, frag, 119 (Diels.).
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 71
Further, not only has History proper been invaded by these
abstract sciences, but also—and partly as a consequence—
a number of ancillary sciences, fast growing up round the
old method of narrating human actions, are parcelling out
the field occupied by the ancient descriptive science of Politics.
Collectively, they may be called Sociology. The best estab-
lished of them is Economics, which studies the phenomenon
known to the Greeks by the moral term, πλεονεξία, ‘ covetous-
ness, that vice of human character which makes a man want
to ‘have more’ than his neighbour. It was in ancient days
the topic for a chapter in Ethics or for a character sketch, like
those of Theophrastus, of ‘the covetous man’, Now it
is studied in almost complete abstraction from anything
psychological. The fluctuations of the money market are
traced in columns of figures and in curves on a diagram.
The laws which Economies attempts to establish, the cate-
gories of its ideal constructions, the abstract methods of this
science and of others like it, find their way into History. The
modern historian deals in vague entities, in groups and
tendencies and the balance of forces. Further, he is always
aware of a vast accumulation of ordered knowledge in the back-
ground, The comparative method and the survey of evidence
drawn from remote lands and from unnumbered centuries
have taught him to take nothing for granted, and to seek for
connexions between phenomena which his ancestors never
dreamed of correlating.
The course of human events, then, is to be thought of as
shaped by the wills and passions of individual men or of
cities, not as a part of what lies around it and beyond. And
what does lie beyond? For Thucydides, the answer is: the
Unknown. This was the only answer possible to a man of
his temperament, a man whose spirit needed, above all, what
was clear and definite.’ Like a few other enlightened men of
his time, he had rejected every systematic explanation of the
world that he could think of. Supernatural causes—the will
1 ¢Klarheit und Bestimmtheit ist das Bediirfnis seines Geistes,’ Classen,
Thue. i, Zinl. p. xlvi.
4 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
of personal gods and spirits—these men denied. Thucydides
ought not, perhaps, to be described as a sceptic; the word
has come to suggest a certain hardness of intellect and
a degree of positive antagonism which are not, we think,
characteristic of his mind. It is better to call him an
agnostic, not of the dogmatic sort who know so much about
the unknown that they confidently assert it to be unknow-
able; but of the sober, unprejudiced kind, whose single desire
is to reach, and to observe religiously, the limits of what is
known. Vulgar superstition is nothing to him, except at the
few points where it stands in the path of knowledge; there
he can treat it with cool irony. He could respect the piety
of Nikias and love the man, while gravely condemning his
credulity in one fatal matter where it blinded him to
a definitely ascertained fact. He will note with grave
severity how, in time of stress, men who profess religion
fall short of their ideals; but for his own part he seems
to stand aside, rejecting, we may imagine, with more scorn
than ignorant faith would deserve the philosophizing com-
promises and senile allegorizings of an age too sceptical, and
not quite sceptical enough, to be at ease with itself. In
his attitude towards religion (which must not be confounded
with the quackeries of strolling oracle-vendors) there is never
a trace of lightness or irreverence.
The men of the enlightenment were agreed in rejecting
religion; but Thucydides had gone yet further in agnosticism
than most of them, and rejected also the ‘philosophical’
schemes of the universe. With his strong and steady desire
for literal, certain truth, knowing by experience how hard it
is to get a consistent account of things actually seen and done
from the men who saw and did them, he had not much
respect for philosophies which, when science was still a blind
and babbling infant, professed to reveal how the universe
came into being.
Well-meaning efforts have been made to furnish him with
a belief in some providential government of the world.
But there is not a shadow of proof that he recognized the
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 73
‘Mind’ of Anaxagoras any more than the Zeus of Aeschylus.
Indeed, his avoidance of the word νοῦς (to which he prefers
γνώμη) may indicate a definite wish to renounce the philo-
sophie theory associated in his day with the term. From
Anaxagoras and other ‘ philosophers’ he accepted a few results
of scientific observation—about eclipses, earthquakes and the
like—all that had yet been won from the vast field of the
unknown by the first inroads of knowledge. That is the
extent of his debt to ‘philosophy’, in the way of positive
results; all it had done for him otherwise was of a negative
sort. Since Parmenides had declared the sensible world to
be an illusion, agnosticism in one form or another had taken
possession of many thoughtful minds. It is only in this
way that Thucydides owed to philosophy his marvellous
sense of the limits of certain knowledge.
Τὸ we would put ourselves at the point where Thucydides
stood when he began his task, we must perform an almost
impossible feat. To rid our minds of religious and meta-
physical beliefs which are not identical with our own is
comparatively easy. What is exceedingly difficult but equally
necessary, is to throw off the inheritance to which we are
born, of concepts distinguished and defined by a vast and
subtle terminology, logical, metaphysical, scientific, created
by Aristotle, refined by the schoolmen, and enlarged by
centuries of discovery. Thucydides lived at the one moment
in recorded history which has seen a brilliantly intellectual
society, nearly emancipated from a dying religion, and at the
same time unaided by science, as yet hardly born. Nowhere
but in a few men of that generation shall we find so much
independence of thought combined with such destitute poverty
in the apparatus and machinery of thinking! The want of
1 It is not easy for us to realize how impossible it was to think clearly in
a language which did not supply, as modern languages do, a refined and
distinct terminology. When Thucydides’ contemporary, Democritus, wrote :
‘By convention sweet, by convention sour; in truth atoms and void,’ he
meant, we say, something of this sort: that the primary qualities of matter
are objectively real, while the secondary are only subjective. But to offer
this proposition, or anything like it, as a paraphrase of the Greek is utterly
uncritical, It is to disguise the fact that the Greek word (νόμῳ) rendered
74, THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
scientific categories, and above all of the cardinal conception
of law as applying to human actions, makes a gulf between
Thucydides and ourselves immensely greater than any which
his want of superstitious beliefs makes between him and
Herodotus. We must rid our minds of scientific terminology,
as well as of religion and philosophy, if we are to appreciate
the unique detachment of Thucydides’ mind, moving in the
rarest of atmospheres between the old age and the new.
Descartes, for all his efforts, was immeasurably less free from
metaphysical preoccupation; Socrates appears, in comparison,
superstitious.
When we have made all these deductions, and swept away
as much as we can of our furniture of thought, we are left in
presence of a reflective and very observant mind, whose inter-
est is concentrated on human acts and motives. Its peculiar
note is a feeling for truth which, exalted as it is, has less
of passion in it than of austere regard. All the character
of the man is in the famous passage where he rebukes, with-
out condescending to name him, the inaccuracy of Herodotus.
‘There are many facts, not falling into oblivion through lapse
of time but belonging to our own day, about which the
Hellenes in general are misinformed. They believe, for in-
stance, that the Lacedaemonian kings have not one vote each
but two, and that they have a ‘ Pitanate regiment’, which in
fact never existed. So little pains do most men take in the
inquiry for the truth; they will sooner turn to the first story
that comes to hand.’ 1
Of all the indictments of Herodotus this is the most grim
and the most just. We could defend him from the accusa-
‘ subjective’, is deplorably ambiguous, and means ‘legal’, ‘conventional,’
‘artificial,’ ‘ unnatural,’ ‘arbitrary,’ and a number of other things. Enough
remains of the controversies of the time to show that this ambiguity lay,
not in language only, but in thought. These ideas, all covered by one word
in the only tongue known to the Greeks, were simply not distinguished,
and to import a distinction by assigning one meaning to the word to the
exclusion of the rest is to commit the fallacy into which Professor Gomperz _
seems to us to have fallen.
1 Thue. 1. 20; Hdt. vi. 57; ix. 53.
.
΄
ou
THUCYDIDES CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 7
tion of ‘malignity’; we could palliate his superstitions and
romancings ; but we cannot deny that in respect of these two
irreducible little facts, which may possibly be of some use to
a modern antiquary, but were then utterly insignificant, he
was careless. The kings of Lacedaemon had only one vote ;
the Spartan regiments were not territorial. He might have
ascertained the truth, and he did not.
Deeply interested in human character, punctiliously accu-
rate, an agnostic not of the militant order but by way of
patient, rational conviction, Thueydides found a congenial
field only in the history of a contemporary war waged
“between the states he knew by men whom he had seen and
heard. Here were facts which could be found out, and
laboriously sifted, and set down for the instruction of posterity.
Just how much can be found out and set down he is careful
to define in the passage from which we started in this chapter ;
we can now see why the field it limits is so restricted, the
renunciation so austere. If the creative faculties of man
could be severed from the receptive, if science could first
banish art and next cast out of herself all hypothesis and
generalization, then the historian might reduce himself to
the compass of Thucydides’ programme: ‘the accownts given
of themselves by the several states in speeches, when they were
on the eve of war or later when they were engaged’; and ‘the
events—what was actually done in the war’.
The events are matter of observation: the only difficulty is
to get an accurate account from eyewitnesses. Besides ‘what
was done’, nothing seems relevant except the immediate
motives of the agents. These can be ascertained only in two
‘ways. We may infer from a man’s behaviour what his
feelings are; but such inferences are a leap into the dark,
and although Thucydides of course could not avoid making
them, he openly states them as rarely as possible. Safer, to
his mind, was the method of keeping, here also, to observed
_ facts: namely, the reasons publicly alleged, the ‘accounts’
# given of their actions by the agents themselves. If these
can be faithfully and literally reported, posterity may perhaps
76 THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS
see more light through the words than Thucydides could
be sure of seeing. It is to this magnificent sense of the
historian’s duty to truth that we owe those indications, in-
explicable to the man who recorded them, significant only to
a modern observer, on which we can base our hypothesis
about the origin of the war.
The time for investigating causes, and making hypothetical
constructions was not yet. We must constantly remind our-
selves that Thucydides seemed to himself to stand on the very
threshold of history. Behind him lay a past which, in com-
parison with ours, was unimaginably meagre. From beyond the
Grecian seas had come nothing but travellers’ tales of the East-
ern wonderland. Within the tiny Hellenic world itself, the
slender current of history flashed only here and there a broken
gleam through the tangled overgrowth of legend and gorgeous
flowers of poetry, whose shoots and pushing tendrils had
gained even upon the great Persian war-time of fifty years
before, so that the figure of Xerxes was fading already to join
the shades of Priam and Agamemnon in the world of dreams.
The creator of history would set himself no more ambitious
task than to save from the dissolving fabric of human fact
a few hard stones, unhewn, and fit only to serve for a
foundation.
INTRODUCTORY
In the last chapter we tried to define Thucydides’ starting-
point, to take stock of his equipment, and to see his under-
taking as he must have seen it in prospect. When, however,
we observe the impression left on our minds by the work
as a whole, we find that this impression contains an element
which is not accounted for by the author’s avowed method
and design. If Thucydides had steadily adhered to what
must have been his original plan—a mere journal of the
war, threading a diseonnected row of illustrative episodes
—the history would have had no more artistic value than
just the sum of values of its several parts; but this does
not correspond to the impression actually conveyed. We
are vaguely, but unmistakably, conscious of an artistic effect
of the whole—an effect imperfectly executed, tentative, more
than half lost in broken lights and formless shadows, but
certainly something more than a series or aggregate of distinct
impressions.
We are further aware that this artistic unity is closely
bound up with the worth and beauty of the book, and with
its appeal to a modern mind. The antiquarian interest of
the story is no greater than that of Polybius’ narrative or
Xenophon’s. The utility which the detailed record of battle
and campaign was intended to possess—how obsolete and
meaningless this must be to a world whose armoury of
slaughter is enriched with siege-gun and ironclad! The
political philosophy of the city state may be neglected by
the modern socialist. The observations upon human nature
are less subtle than those of an ordinary novelist of to-day,
A certain nobility of thought, a considerable skill in the
presentation of character and in narrative—what more than
these would be left? If contemporaries were warned that
80 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
the history would be ‘rather unattractive’, what attraction
would it retain for us to-day? Yet it does attract and move
us strangely; and this appeal is a thing to be reckoned with
and explained.
The results of our inquiry, if they are true, will be of some
literary interest, and they also have a bearing on the moral
character of Thucydides. The current interpretation of that
part of the history which deals with Cleon leaves a dark
cloud hanging over its author,—a cloud which well-meaning
defenders have tried, but never quite successfully, to dispel,
It cannot, we think, be denied that Thucydides hated and
despised Cleon. We have no right to complain of that; for Ὅπθ
man may hate and despise another with very good reason;
and we need not think much the worse of either. .The moral
question touches not the man, but the historian. Has he
misrepresented the facts about Cleon because he had a
‘personal grudge’ against ‘an able, but coarse, noisy, ill-bred,
audacious man?’! If he has done so, and for that motive,
what are we to say of an historian who began his work with
an austere profession of fidelity to truth, and then distorted
his narrative, concealed facts, and insinuated detraction, with
the deliberate purpose of discrediting a politician who had
been instrumental in causing his own banishment? Yet this
is what is implied in the current hypothesis, that Thucydides
was actuated by a personal grudge. But why do we let him
off with this mild phrase, instead of branding the man for
a hypocrite, to be ranked among the lowest, as having sinned
against the light? If we do let him off, it is because the
history as a whole leaves an impression inconsistent with this
account of the matter. It is not the work of a man capable
of consciously indulging the pettiness of personal spite, but
of one who could tell the story of his own military failure,
which cost him twenty years of exile, without a syllable of
extenuation, Throughout the book there is a nobility οὗ... |
tone, a kind of exalted aloofness, which makes some of his...
1 Bury, Hist. of Greece (1900), p. 456.
INTRODUCTORY Sl
grave judgements sound as if the voice of FESWOEY herself had
spoken.
In the following pages we hope to show that Thucydides’
incomplete presentation of fact in this part of the history
is due, not to a personal motive, but to the influence of
a principle of design which was never formulated, because
he certainly did not contemplate it in prospect when he began
his work, and probably to the last never found out how
pervasive and profound had been its operation.
We believe, moreover, it is possible to lay our finger on the
place where this new principle first definitely modifies the nar-
rative. It is at the beginning of Book IV, in the story of the
occupation of Pylos. In the next chapter we shall proceed
at once to this episode, and try to bring to the surface this
underlying principle which in later chapters will be further
illustrated and explained.
There is always something ungracious, something, almost,
of impiety, in the office of criticism. A work of art is not
meant to be taken to pieces; analysis is like a mischievous
child dismounting a delicate machine. When it comes to
poetry, our instinct revolts and cries out to us, for the sake of all
that is beautiful, to leave it alone. But in the interpretation
of an age far removed from ours, with a cast of thought and
a tradition of artistic workmanship long fallen into disuse, we
are faced with a cruel dilemma. If we analyse, some volatile
and evanescent spirit is released and is not to be recaptured ;
if we refrain, we may miss the very qualities which the artist
himself valued most highly. The generation is gone which
was bred to the same intellectual heritage and met the lightest
hint with native comprehension. For us only the strong
effort of imaginative sympathy can reconquer the lost ground.
CHAPTER VI
THE LUCK OF PYLOS
THE first episode in the History which presents features
apparently inexplicable on the supposition that Thucydides is
working on his avowed plan, and certainly not fully explained
by any hypothesis yet advanced by modern criticism, is the
story of the occupation of Pylos. We shall first give an
outline of the narrative, in which we shall merely summarize
or abbreviate, refraining, with all the Thucydidean caution
we can muster, from throwing any colour over it. We shall
include those parts of the story in which the unexplained
factor is evidently at work, excluding details which present
no difficulty. A few introductory words are necessary to
describe the situation which immediately precedes our
episode.
The History has reached the opening of the seventh year of
war (B.C. 425). In consequence of the check which the
Peloponnesian arms had suffered in Acarnania, following
upon the failure of Demosthenes’ daring plan of campaign
in the same region, a lull had fallen. The first heat of
conflict was over; at Athens, as at Sparta, discouragement had
strengthened the party of peace. Year by year the suffering
peasants must crowd into the plague-stricken city, when word
came that the irresistible army of invasion was mustering
at the Isthmus; and year by year trudge sadly back to
find the seared vestiges of ruin in trampled cornfield, in
uptorn vine and olive, and blackened homestead. In the
early summer evenings, when the invader had crossed the
pass above Acharnae, knots of ragged and dejected figures
would gather on the northward slopes of the Acropolis, and
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 83
you might have heard husky voices debating whose farm
was that, which was marked by the ugly red glow, yonder,
on the foot-hills of Parnes. The Acharnians of Aristophanes
was produced at the Lenaean Festival in February of this year.
The poet’s genial sense of the clean healthfulness and beauty
of life on the country farms in happier days had enforced the
strong sanity of his appeal. He attempted to turn the current
of blind exasperation against the invader into the channels
that made for peace. It is no good, he told the poor fellows,
to grind your teeth at the wicked Spartans; the thing to do
is to stop the war. Some of the real Acharnians must have
been convinced ; for the good Nikias and his friends were
returned in some force at the elections in April. True, the
war-party had insisted that the operations in Sicily must
be seen through, and forty ships were sent to relieve the
small squadron already in the western seas. But Sicily was
far away; and it was understood that this expedition was
to ‘put an end to the war in that region’, and to give the
fleet the benefits of exercise.' From this point we will take
up the text of the narrative and follow it closely with just
the necessary abbreviation.? We shall draw attention in the
notes to certain expressions which the reader is asked to bear
in mind.
The fleet sailed for Sicily under the command of Eurymedon
and Sophocles, with orders to put in by the way at Corcyra,
where the democratic and philathenian party who held the
capital were reduced nearly to starvation by the depredations
of the exiles ensconced on Mount Istone. With the fleet went
Demosthenes, who ‘though since his retreat from Acarnania
he held no official command,’ was at his own request instructed
to make use of the fleet, if he so wished, about the coasts of
the Peloponnese’.
As the squadron rounded the southern promontory of
1 iii. 115, 4.
* iv. 2 ff. The passages within inverted commas are translated without
abbreviation or addition.
* He was general elect, but would not enter on office for some months.
G2
84 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Messenia, news came that a Peloponnesian fleet had stolen
a march on them and was already at Coreyra. Eurymedon
and Sophocles were anxious to push on. Demosthenes,
however, ‘urged them to put in first at Pylos and do what
was necessary before proceeding on their voyage. The
generals objected, but it so chanced that a storm came on
which drove the fleet into Pylos.1 Demosthenes began at
once to urge that the position should be fortified; this, he
said, was the object he had had in view when he accompanied
the fleet. He pointed out that there was great abundance of
timber and stones, and that the position was naturally strong,
while the country for a considerable distance round was, like
the place itself, uninhabited. Pylos is about forty-six miles
from Sparta, and lies in the land which was formerly Messenia ;
it is now called Koryphasium by the Lacedaemonians. The
generals replied that there were plenty of desert promontories
round the Peloponnese, which Demosthenes might occupy if
he wanted the public money to be wasted. But Demosthenes
thought that this particular spot had special advantages.
There was a harbour at hand,? and the Messenians, whose
ancient home this had been and who spoke the same dialect
as the Lacedaemonians, could do them much harm from such
a base; and further they would be a trusty garrison.
‘The generals would not listen to him; no more would the
soldiers, when he proceeded to impart his plan to the officers.
Hence, the weather being unfit for sailing, he was compelled to
remain idle; until the soldiers themselves, having nothing to
1 iv. 8. 1 ἀντιλεγόντων δὲ κατὰ τύχην χειμὼν ἐπιγενόμενος KaThveyKe TAs ναῦς és
τὴν Πύλον. The large and deep bay of Navarino is partly closed by the
narrow island of Sphacteria which lies, with a length of 23 miles, along its
mouth, leaving a narrow channel to the north, and a wider to the south.
The north channel is dominated on its further side by the deserted peninsula
of Pylos, the circumference of which is naturally defended by inaccessible
cliffs except for a small distance at the north end (where a sandy isthmus
joins it to the mainland), and for a somewhat longer extent on its south
and south-west shores.
2 The anchorage was close to Pylos at the north-west corner of what is
now the lagoon of Osmyn Aga. At this date the lagoon was navigable and
formed an inner chamber north of Navarino Bay, and partly cut off from it
by a sand-spit. ;
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 85
do, were seized with an impulse! to fortify the position. So
they set about the work; and, being unprovided with iron
tools for stone-cutting, they brought rocks which they picked
out and put together as they happened to fit. Where mortar
was required, for want of buckets, they carried the mud on
their backs, bending double to form a resting-place for it, and
locking their hands behind, to keep it from falling off. By
every means in their power they hurried on, so as to complete
the parts most open to attack, before the Lacedaemonians
should arrive, the position being in most places so strong
already that no wall was needed. The Lacedaemonians were
just then celebrating a festival?; and, besides, when they
heard the news they made light of it, thinking that, when
they did go out, they could easily take the place by assault,
even supposing the Athenians would wait to meet them.
They were also somewhat delayed by their army being still
in Attica. In six days the Athenians finished the fortification
on the land side and at other points where it was most
required. They then left Demosthenes with five ships to
defend it, while the greater part of the fleet hastened on their
voyage to Corcyra and Sicily.’ ὃ
‘The Peloponnesian army in Attica, on hearing of the
occupation of Pylos, retreated homewards in haste; for the
Lacedaemonians, and especially King Agis, saw that this
occupation touched them closely; and further, the invasion
having been made early, while the crops were still green,
they were running short of provisions for the soldiery, and
bad weather had come on with a severity unusual at that
season, and distressed the expedition. Thus many things
coincided to hasten their retreat and to make this invasion
very short. They had stayed in Attica only a fortnight.’
When the army reached home, the Spartiates raised the
country-side and started to the rescue of Pylos. The rest of
1 ἦν, 4. 1 ὁρμὴ ἐνέπεσε περιστᾶσιν ἐκτειχίσαι τὸ χωρίον. We omit περιστᾶσιν,
the meaning of which is doubtful.
2 iv. 5. 1 ἑορτήν τινα ἔτυχον ἄγοντες. ἜἜτυχον denotes the coincidence of two
events with the implication that the coincidence was undesigned, or
accidental. Often this implication is not /éit at all.
3. iv. 5. 2 ταῖς δὲ πλείοσι ναυσὶ τὸν és τὴν Κέρκυραν πλοῦν καὶ Σικελίαν ἠπείγοντο.
86 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
the Lacedaemonians were slower to move, having but just
returned from another expedition. They sent round a summons
to their allies in all quarters, and recalled their fleet from
Corcyra. It ‘reached Pylos, unperceived by the Athenian
fleet at Zakynthos’.1 On their approach Demosthenes sent
two of his five ships to summon ‘Eurymedon and the
Athenians in the fleet at Zakynthos’ to come to him, as
Pylos was in danger. They came in all haste. The Lacedae-
monians were preparing for a combined attack by sea and
land, ‘ expecting to capture with ease such hastily constructed
works, defended by so small a garrison.’ They intended to
block the fairway of the two entrances to the harbour with
lines of ships, so as to exclude the Athenian fleet,? ‘ unless
indeed they should have taken Pylos before’ it arrived.
1 The fleet of Eurymedon, last mentioned as leaving Pylos for Coreyra
and Sicily. Zakynthos is the first port of call on the route northwards,
about seventy miles from Pylos.
2 There has been much controversy on the question which were the two
channels to be blocked. My own opinion is (1) that in this part of the
narrative ‘the harbour’ means the present lagoon of Osmyn Aga; (2) that
the sand-spit separating this lagoon from Navarino Bay reached nearly to
Pylos, leaving only one narrow entrance just under Pylos; (3) that the two
channels to be blocked were the two approaches to this entrance, viz. the
Sphagia channel, between the north end of Sphacteria and the south shore
of Pylos, and the channel between the north-east corner of Sphacteria and
the end of the sand-spit. The object of blocking both these approaches,
instead of the one entrance (between Pylos and the sand-spit), was obviously
to keep open communications with the Spartans on the island. If the
entrance only had been barred, they would have been isolated. I also
believe that Thucydides’ informant in the first narrative (the siege of
Pylos) was one of the defenders of Pylos, who would naturally mean by
‘the harbour’ the lagoon, just under Pylos, which was his centre of
interest ; and that the informant in the second narrative (the capture of
Sphacteria) was a different person, much better at describing localities,
who had personally fought over the island on the day of its capture. His
centre of interest was Sphacteria, and by ‘the harbour’ he indisputably
meant Navarino Bay, where the Athenian fleet then was. Thucydides
never found out that there were really two harbours, owing to the curious
duplication of the sites: two harbours, each with two approaches, in the
one case at the two ends, in the other on the two sides of one end, of the
same island. The only new point in this view is the identification of the
two channels; the rest is taken from the valuable papers of Mr. Grundy
(J. ΗΠ. 8. xvi) and Mr. Burrows (J. H. S. xviii).
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 87
They landed a strong party on the island of Sphacteria, to
prevent the enemy from occupying it. Pylos, which had no
landing-place towards the open sea, would thus be completely
isolated. They thought ‘they would probably carry the
position by siege, without a sea-fight or any danger, as it
was unprovisioned and had been occupied with little prepara-
tion’.
Demosthenes drew up his three remaining ships under
shelter of a stockade at the south-east corner of his defences.
The sailors he armed as best he could, mostly with shields of
wicker-work. ‘For there was no means of providing heavy
armour in an uninhabited spot; and even these arms they
only obtained from a thirty-oared privateer and a light boat
belonging to some Messenians who just then arrived on the
scene. These Messenians proved to include about forty
heavy-armed men, whom Demosthenes used with the rest.’
Then follows a detailed account of Brasidas’ unsuccessful
attempt to force a landing on Pylos by running his ships
ashore. The description concludes with the reflection: ‘It
was a singular turn of fortune? that Athenians should be on
land, and that land Laconian, repelling an attack from the
sea by Lacedaemonians ; while Lacedaemonians on ship-board
were trying to effect a landing on their own soil, now hostile
to them, in the face of Athenians. For in those days it was
the great glory of the Lacedaemonians to be an inland people
superior to all in land fighting, and of the Athenians to be
sailors and the first power by sea.’ This observation is
echoed again after the battle which followed between the two
fleets in the harbour. The Peloponnesians had at the moment
neglected the precaution of closing the entrances. The
Athenian fleet, reinforced by a few guard-ships from Nau-
pactos and three Chians, sailed in and knocked them into bits,
following up the pursuit to the point of attempting to tow
off from the shore some ships which had not been launched.
1 iv. 9. 1 Μεσσηνίων... οἱ ἔτυχον παραγενόμενοι. ὅπλῖταί τε τῶν Μεσσηνίων
τούτων ὧς τεσσαράκοντα ἐγένοντο.
2 iv. 12, 8 ἐς τοῦτο περιέστη ἡ τύχη ὥστε...
3 iv. 18. 4 οὔτε ἃ διενοήθησαν, φάρξαι τοὺς ἔσπλους, ἔτυχον ποιησαντες.
88 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
The Lacedaemonians ran down into the water to save them,
and a fierce struggle ensued. Thus‘ the usual methods of war-
fare of the two combatants were interchanged. For in their
excitement and dismay the Lacedaemonians were (one might
almost say) fighting a sea-battle from land, while the Athenians
as they were winning and were desirous to follow up their
present good luck to the furthest point fought a land-
battle from ships’. So ended the first round of hostilities
at Pylos.
In shortening the above narrative we have intentionally
brought into prominence a series of suggestions which are any-
thing but conspicuous in the long story as it stands in the text.
We have cut away the mass in which they are embedded and
left them clumsily sticking out, so that no one can miss them.
Probably thousands of readers have passed them without
attention, and yet carried away just the impression which
of Pylos—the first step. to ‘the most decisive success achieved
by Athens in this war—was the most casual.thing in. the.
world,
The fleet, bound as it was for Sicily, with instructions to call
on the way at Corcyra, where it was urgently needed, would
never have put in at Pylos, if_a storm had_not‘ by chance’?
driven_it.to shelter. The generals in command could not
imagine why the position should be occupied; and when
Demosthenes tried to convince the troops, he failed. It was
owing to the accidental continuance of bad weather that from
sheer want_ of something todo ‘an..impulse._ seized’ the
soldiers to fortify the place. The undertaking was so un-
expected that no tools had been provided; the walls were
patched up somehow with rocks and mud. They had time to
finish it because the Lacedaemonians at home were just then
celebrating a festival: A -singularly happy improvisation on
1 iv. 14, 8 βουλόμενοι τῇ παρούσῃ τύχῃ ὧς ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐπεξελθεῖν.
2 Observe that the note of accident is clearly sounded at the outset in
κατὰ τύχην (not ἔτυχε) and below in ὁρμὴ ἐνέπεσε. Later the fainter sug-
gestion of ἔτυχον suffices to sustain it.
Rap aa ae ee Sram: ΟΊ
ον
aa ea
ey 5B
>
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 89
the part of Fortune; but there is more to come. Just when
reinforcements and a ᾿ Suppl ly of arms are urgently needed by
the extemporized garrison, a couple of piratical craft comée™
bearing down the wind. from, the north, They turn out,
oddly enough, to be Messenians with forty hoplites aboard -
and—how very fortunate !—a ‘supply . of spare arms.” When;
fiially, the Peloponnesians at the critical moment neglect
a precaution vital to their plan, and leave the garrison of
Sphacteria cut off on the island, we feel that Fortune has
filled the cup of the Athenians almost overfull. To crown
all, in her whimsical way, she reverses the réles of the
combatants, and sets the sailors fighting on Jand and the |
landsmen by 1 water.
“We observe, too, that if Fortune favoured the Athenians,
they were also helped by an extraordinary series of stupid
mistakes on the Lacédaemonian side. When the news first
reached Sparta, the Lacedaemonians at home could not see,
what Agis saw clearly enough, that the capture of Pylos was
a serious incident. They also thought they could easily
capture the position; though they might have remembered
that Sparta was notoriously incompetent in siege operations,
and that the revolted helots, who were not backed by the
first sea-power in the world, had, in a similar extemporized
stronghold at Ithome, held them at defiance. When they saw
the position, they were equally confident of taking it with
ease. They expected to exclude the Athenian fleet by closing
the entrances, and so to avoid a sea-battle altogether. They
landed troops on the island, and then by neglecting to close
the entrances left them cut off—and this, though they knew
the Athenian fleet was close at hand and were expecting its
arrival. When it did arrive, their own fleet was not even
clear of the beach and arrayed for battle. This series of
blunders is hardly less remarkable than the series of accidents
on the Athenian side. |
~We may admit, however, that it is not incredible that
Spartans should be exceedingly stupid. The difficulty arises
over that part of the narrative which is more concerned with
the Athenians. Can we accept this as a simple and natural
mew
90 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
account of what really happened? The moment we turn
back on it in a critical mood, we find that.it-is.full οὗ
obscurities, gaps, incoherencies, which cry out for explanation. Ὁ
' When we look still closer, we remark two further points. “One ~
is that some of these obscurities can be removed by careful
comparison of one part of the narrative with another, so that,
we Can piece ‘together an hypothesis to fill the gaps, from _
evidence’ supplied by Thucydides, but not used by him for |
this obvious purpose. The other is that we have not here, as
at other places in the History, a mere odd assortment of
ne --
obscurities.;. but all the omissions contribute to one effect.
What is left out_is whatever would explain the motives and_
designs of the principal actors ; what is put in and emphasized
is every accident and every blunder of the enemy, that
favoured the occupation, There is hardly a sentence in the
whole story which is not so turned and so disposed as to
make us feel that design counted for nothing and luck for
everything. Let us look at some of the questions which these
omissions and incoherencies leave unanswered.
First, we may ask whether it is credible that Demosthenes
should not have explained sooner to Eurymedon and Sophocles
‘the object he had in view when he accompanied the fleet’.
The details of this plan are not disclosed till the latest
possible moment in the narrative.. When he first asked the
generals to put in at Pylos, he is said to have requested
them ‘to do what was necessary before proceeding on their
voyage’. They refused. Then followed the storm and drove
them into Pylos. Not till this note of accident has been
sounded are we allowed to know ‘what was necessary’.
Then, as if the sight. of Pylos for the first.time suggested.the
plan, Demosthenes points out the natural strength of the
position. The generals, as if they had never had such a plan
before them, say that there are plenty of desert promontories,
if Demosthenes wants to waste the public money on occupying
them. Demosthenes urges that this one has special advantages,
and produces his trump card—the Messenians. In the next
sentence we are told that he failed to convince any one what-
ever. By this arrangement of the story, Demosthenes’ design
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THE LUCK OF PYLOS ΒᾺΝ
is before our minds for the least possible time. It is not
disclosed until in the first place it is firmly fixed in our
thoughts that the fleet is hastening to Corcyra, and in the
second place Fortune has intervened decisively to hinder its
journey; and when it is disclosed, it is immediately (as it
were) effaced again by the statement that the disclosure had
no effect on any one. We are left with the impression that
Demosthenes had not explained the whole thing to the gene- _
rals before the storm occurred, and pressed on them all the
advantages he mentions later. No wonder they objected to
doing ‘what was necessary’.
“In the second place, if the generals were so blind to the
possibilities of the place that they regarded the occupation
as a waste of public money, we may naturally ask what
occurred to make..them .change..their..minds...and— allow.
Demosthenes, after all, to remain? A Peloponnesian fleet of
sixty sail, as against their own forty, was already in their path.
Why did they detach five ships.and leave them with Demo-
sthenes, while they ‘ hastened-on. their. voyage.to Corcyra and
Sicily’? Did Demosthenes appeal to the irregular commis-
sion which licensed him to ‘use the fleet, if he wished, about
the coasts of the Peloponnese’? But, if he did so, he was
overruled; for we are definitely told that no one would listen
to him. No; the occupation οἵ Pylos was the purest of
accidents. The building of the defences was a schoolboy frolic, ~
begun ( (in ‘schoolboy language) for a lark, to break the tedium
of kicking heels and whistling for a wind. It kept them
amused for six days, till the gale dropped. For all we are told,
besides this piece of mudlarking, nothing whatever occurred in
the interval to change the opinion of the responsible officers.
Yet, without a syllable of explanation, we learn that they
detached five ships—one-eighth of their strength—to garrison
the deserted promontory, and themselves ‘hastened on their
voyage to Corcyra and Sicily’. Did they expect that Demo-
sthenes with no provisions! and a small, insufticiently armed
force would hold Pylos till they came back, or did they
mean to leave their fellow citizens, for whose lives they were
1 iv. 8. 8 σίτου τε οὐκ ἐνόντος.
92 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
responsible, to a certain fate? What would they say to the
Athenian people when they returned from Sicily ?
When we read on, however, we learn from a side-allusion
to ‘the Athenian fleet at Zakynthos’ that, so far from ‘hasten-
ing to Coreyra and Sicily ’, they were, after at least ten days’
or a fortnight’s interval,! still only seventy miles away, at the
nearest port of call. This change of plan is not even directly
recorded, much less explained. Yet it means that the generals
pitched their sailing orders to the winds, left Corcyra to the
imminent peril of starvation or capture by assault, and en-
dangered the advanced squadron in Sicilian waters which they
were sent to reinforce. Examples were not wanting to warn
them that in such circumstances, a failure or even a reverse,
meant certain prosecution and death, if ever they set foot
again in Athens. Yet they took the risk—all because of the
mudlarks !
Our purpose, however, is not to attack the veracity of
Thucydides, but to understand his method. Without enlarging
upon the obscurities of this episode, we have said enough to
prove that some explanation is needed. It is now clear that _ i
the story of Pylos, from first to last, is so “treated.as. to.
convey the suggestion that it was all a stroke of luck. It is
also ¢lear that; unless Eurymedon and Sophocles were out of
their minds, some elements in the situation of a less fortuitous
nature have been omitted or left almost out of sight.
Almost, but not entirely. The reader may have felt that,
although the narrative indicates no connexion between the
two references to the Messenians, some connexion there must
have been. One of the exceptional advantages of Pylos to
Demosthenes’ mind was that it was the ancient home of the
Messenians, whose knowledge of the local dialect would give
them peculiar facilities for distressing the Spartans. The point
is just mentioned and dropped. Six chapters later, a Messenian
privateer with arms and reinforcements arrives in the nick of
? The time needed for news to reach Sparta and be forwarded to Agis in
Attica ; for the withdrawal of the army of invasion, and after that, for word
to be sent to the Peloponnesian fleet at Corcyra, and for these to come south.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 93°
time. These Messenians were (though Thucydides does not
mention it) the exiles whom the Athenians had established at
Naupactos, their naval base near the mouth of the Corinthian
gulf. We remember now that in the previous year Demo-
sthenes had been co-operating with these very Messenians in
the Aetolian and Acarnanian campaigns. Moreover, in one of
the battles he had employed them to play off a trick on his
Doric antagonists.’ The accent of his Messenian friends was
now again to come in useful. And when the sentinel on
Pylos reported that a couple of sail were standing in from
the direction of Naupactos, we fancy Demosthenes was not
surprised when they turned out to have forty hoplites aboard
and a stock of spare shields in the casemates. Can we avoid
the inference that the selection of Pylos was not so casual
after all, that..Demosthenes had learnt all about the possi-
bilities of the position from..his..Messenian allies. the year
before? Further, must we not conjecture that Eurymedon,
not daring to leave:more than five ships behind, since the
Peloponnesian fleet would almost certainly be recalled south
and meet him, sent an urgent message to Naupactos, describing
the position of Demosthenes and telling the Messenians to
send a fast ship with such reinforcements and spare arms as
they could produce without a moment’s delay. The con-
jecture is confirmed by the later statement? that some guard-
ships from Naupactos joined the fleet while still at Zakynthos.
Kurymedon may have meant to wait there within.call-till
Demosthenes” force should have been replaced by a sufficient
garrison. . οἵ Messenians, and then. to reunite..hisfleet--and
proceed to Corcyra and Sicily. But why are we left to fill
all these blanks by conjecture ?
ὟνΡ
1 iii, 112; ‘At the first dawn of day he fell on the Ambrakiots, who were
still lying where they had slept, and who so far from knowing anything of
what had happened, thought his men were their own comrades. For
Demosthenes had taken care to place the Messenians in the front rank and
desired’ them to speak to the enemy in their own Doric dialect, so putting the out-
posts off their guard, since it was still dark and their appearance could not
be distinguished.’ This connexion has, of course, been remarked by other
writers.
3 iv. 13.1.
94, THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Moreover it is implied that Demosthenes knew that the
Athenian fleet was still elose at hand when he needed to
be rescued; and this seems to prove that when Eurymedon
and Sophocles left him, they arranged with him that they
should stop at the nearest possible port. If that is so, to
describe Eurymedon’s fleet on leaving Pylos as ‘hastening
to Corcyra and Sicily’ is, at least, misleading. But here,
at any rate, there can be no intention to mislead, since the
contradiction with what follows is patent. We can only
conclude that Thucydides’ mind 15. for some.reason_so.bent.
‘on regarding the occupation of Pylos as a mere casual
episode in a ‘voyage to Corcyra and Sicily’, that this
phrase slips out at a place where. thecontext. certainly _
contradicts it by implication. Such a lapse, in so careful
a writer, is aby itself sufficient. evidence of a preoccupied
mind,
We have here, in fine, a narrative which is unlike any _
earlier part. of Thucydides’..story...Hitherto he has told a
plain tale, lucid, intelligible, natural. Now we find an
episode in which. facts of cardinal importance for the under-_
standing of the events are left unmentioned, and. indispensable
links are wanting... If the missing facts and connexions were
“within the author’s knowledge, why are they omitted? If
they were not, we might at least expect that he would avow
his ignorance and draw some attention to the blanks, instead
of passing over them as if he were unconscious of ne
existence.
The question then is this: Why has Thucydides represented
the occupation of Pylos as the merest stroke of goodluck,
undertaken with the least possible amount of deliberate
calculation, and furthered at every turn of events by some
unforeseen accident ?
The simplest of all answers would be that as a matter Ὁ
fact so it was. Accidents do happen; and there certainly was
a considerable element of luck. No one can foresee the
occurrence of a storm. The festival at Sparta was a coinci-
dence—though we note by the way that it was not a festival
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 95
sufficiently important to prevent the army of invasion from
being absent in Attica. The Messenian privateer might
conceivably have come by accident—though the supply of
spare arms on so small a vessel is certainly odd. And so
on. But all this does not explain the blanks and incoheren-
cies we have noticed; and it is fair to add that every additional
accident increases the strain on our belief. As soon as we
reject this first answer, we have admitted that Thucydides—
for whatever reason—is not.telling the story just as it hap-
pened and just as we should tell it. There is some unexplained
factor at work, something of which we have not yet taken
accounts
“The solutions that have been offered, when the problem
before us has been faced at all, fall under two heads. We
are told either that..Thucydides.is ‘moralizing’ on the un-
certainty of war, or that he is actuated by some personal
feeling of *malignity” and indulging it in detraction. The
first of these hypotheses is, in our opinion, a grave charge
“against him as a man of sense; the second is a still graver
charge against his moral character.
et true that the uncertainty of war is one of the most
fréquent topics in the speeches; and small wonder that it is
so. Thucydides’ generation lived through a life-and-death
struggle waged almost continuously for twenty-seven years.
A nation at war is always, more or less, in a fever ;} when
the nation is intelligent and excitable by temperament, and
the war is close at home, the fever will run high. For these
twenty-seven years no Athenian mind was ever quite at rest.
Not a record or document of this period but we find in it
the mark of this unhealthiness, of nerves on the strain with
watching, of the pulse which beats just too fast. Every
capricious turn of good or ill luck in the struggle sent a thrill
through their hearts, Bat can we think that Thucydides
would deliberately distort the facts of the occupation of Pylos,
solely in order to illustrate the truth that accidents will
happen? The question hardly needs an answer. No man
of common intelligence could say to himself, ‘In order to
1 Cf. ii. 8 ἥ τε ἄλλη Ἑλλὰς ἅπασα μετέωρος ἣν ξυνιουσῶν τῶν πρώτων πολέων.
96 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
show how uncertain are the chances of war, I will describe
a series of events not just as they happened, but with the
causal links, which would show that the events were not
fortuitous, disguised and almost suppressed.’ There were
plenty of real instances of good and ill luck. What need
of this perverse invention of a spurious one?
Plainly, then, this is not a case of ‘ moralizing’; there is
some other reason; and so we fall back on the hypothaihe
of ‘malignity’. The malignity could only be directed either |
against Cleon, whose exploit at Sphacteria followed on. the
occupation of Pylos, or against Athens. There is, on this _
supposition, some personal grudge, against the hated political
opponent, or against the city which banished Thucydides.
With regard to Cleon, this hypothesis will not fit the facts.
The occupation of Pylos was the exploit not of Cleon, but of
Demosthenes. For Demosthenes, the only soldier of genius
whom the Athenians could match with Brasidas, Thucydides ~
consistently shows a marked admiration. The capture of
Pylos was his master-stroke, and there was no motive for
belittling the achievement. Cleon does not appear till
later, when he goes to the scene of action and co-operates
in the capture of Sphacteria. Malignity against him might
be fully satisfied either by representing that subsequent
operation as favoured by fortune or by. attributing all the
skill involved in its success to his colleague, Demosthenes.
Thucydides. actually does both these things—whether from
malignity or because he thought it was true, is no matter
for our present. problem. But a personal grudge against
Cleon could not be satisfied, or be in question at all, in the
earlier narrative of the seizure of Pylos.
Was it, then, a grudge against Athens that moved him ?
Did he hate the city which condemned him to banishment
for his failure at Amphipolis, and desire to represent—or
rather to misrepresent—her most successful feat in the war as
a mere stroke of luck? This, we believe, is an hypothesis
which is now, reluctantly and with many attempts at pallia-
tion, allowed to pass current. It cannot be so easily and
certainly dismissed as the other suggestions. It is a possible
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 97
motive—possible, at least, to some men—and it would account
for those facts we have hitherto considered. We cannot at
this point finally disprove it; the facts which it will not
account for have yet to be discussed. But we do not believe
that any one who knows Thucydides is really satisfied with
imputing to him ἃ motive which, candidly described, is
dishonourable, ignoble, mean. The imputation does not fit
in with-our general impression from the rest of the History.
If there is any one who is satisfied with it, we will ask him
to read once more the story of the retreat from Syracuse.
Were those pages written by a man who hated Athens and
triumphed in her fall ?
We cannot think of any other motive which could have
induced Thucydides deliberately to represent as fortuitous
a series of events which we, after some reflection, can see to
have been in great measure designed. We next observe that
the supposition of ‘malignity’ is itself based on the tacit
assumption that Thucydides is writing from the same stand-
point, and handling his story on the same methods, as
a modern historian. If a modern had written the narrative
of Pylos, we could say with the highest degree of moral
certainty, that the distortion was deliberate and the motive
must be at least dishonest, if not ignobly personal. Hence
We assume, unconsciously, that Thucydides’ motive must
have been of this sort. In our eagerness to hail him as
‘a modern of the moderns’, we thought we were paying him
a compliment; but now the epithet turns out to carry with
it a most damaging accusation. If we decline to regard
Thucydides as a modern, and recur to our thesis that, being
an ancient, he must have looked at the course of human
history with very different eyes from ours, it seems that an
alternative explanation may yet remain,
The suggestion which we would put forward is that
Thucydides thought he really saw an agency, called ‘ Fortune’,
‘at work in these events. When we say ‘chance favoured the
designs of Demosthenes’, of course we mean, not that any of
1 Bury, Hist. of Greece (1900), p. 429.
H
98 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
the accidents had no natural cause, but only that they were
such as could not have been foreseen. But have we any
ground for saying that this, and nothing more, was what
Thucydides would have meant ?!
We will, for the moment, leave the notion of Fortune
without precise definition. It is enough to take a belief in
Fortune as meaning a belief in any non-natural agency, which
breaks in, as it were, from outside and diverts the current of
events, without itself being a part of the series or an effect
determined by an antecedent member of it. Now, we have
already pointed out that human actions are not to be fitted
into such a series. Their only causes—if we are to speak of
causes at all—are motives, each of which is itself uncaused
by anything preceding it in time; all human motives are
absolute ‘beginnings of motion’. A view of the universe in
which this irruption of free human agency is tacitly assumed
is at any rate illogical if it denies the possibility of similar
irruptions into the course of Nature by non-human agencies,
But we can go further than this. We observed that
Thueydides had no word at all for ‘cause’ in our sense.
From the fact, among others, that instead of discussing the
causes of the war, he thought he had completely aceounted for
its origin when he had described the grievances (αἰτίαι) of the
combatants, it appeared that it was not only the word that
was missing, but the concept. Having no clear conception of
cause and effect, he cannot have had any clear conception of
a universal and exclusive reign.of..causal-law-in- Nature. . In
criticizing Professor Gomperz we denied that Thucydides
conceived the course of human affairs as ‘a process of Nature
informed by inexorable causality’, or as having anything in
common with such a process. We may now further deny that
he could have thought of the processes of Nature themselves
as informed by causality, in our modern sense—the sense,
namely, that every event has a place in one total series of all
1 That Thucydides would have meant just what we mean is commonly
assumed, as for instance by Mr. Forbes, Introduction to Book I (p. xxxii):
‘Chance (that is, the operation of unknown causes) is strong, the future is
hard to foresee, hope is dangerous ; we must look facts in the face, whether
we like them or not, and “ think it out”’,’
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 99
events, and is completely determined by previous events, and
so on backwards into infinity; and that this is true of the
future as well as of the past. By an αἰτία, ἴῃ nature as in
man, Thucydides does not mean a member of such a series,
but a free agency, a ‘ beginning of motion’, an incursion of
fresh original power. If this is.so, there was nothing whatever
in his view of the universe to exclude the possibility of extra-
ordinary intervention on the part of some undefined non-human
powers. We Ve shall ‘presently see that his language elsewhere
implies. that su such a possibility was admitted by him.
That Thucydides had, on the contrary, a quite definite
notion of causal law is commonly taken for granted, or
actually asserted. M. Croiset,' for instance, after contrasting
Thucydides with his predecessors, continues: ‘De lai sa
conception de l'histoire. Si les faits sont 1168 par des lois
permanentes et nécessaires, la connaissance des causes et des
effets dans le passé peut faire prévoir le retour des mémes
effets, produits par les mémes causes, selon la régle des choses
humaines (κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπειον). This passage suggests that
Thucydides based his conception of history on a belief in
permanent and necessary laws, connecting events in such
a way that from a sufficient knowledge of the present state of
the world the future could be predicted with certainty. If
this is true, it of course excludes the operation of Fortune.?
Let us, however, examine the passages to which M. Croiset
refers in his note, as the foundation of the above statement.
The first is as follows: ‘For recitation to an audience,
perhaps the absence of the “ mythical” will make these facts
rather unattractive ; but it will be enough if they are judged
useful by those who shall wish to know the plain truth of
what has happened and of the events which, according to the
course of human things, are likely to happen again, of the
1 Croiset, Hist. de la lit. grecque, iv. 118.
2 We may note, by the way, that if Thucydides thought this, he had
discovered a truth of which Aristotle was ignorant. The whole Aristotelian
doctrine of Possibility rests on the logical thesis that propositions which
refer to future events (6. g. ‘there will be a battle to-morrow’) are neither
true nor false, because, unless the future were undetermined, ‘ nothing
would happen by chance’ (ἀπὸ τύχης) and all deliberation would be futile,
H2
100 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
same, or much the same, sort as these.’ What Thucydides
here has in his mind, we know from the other passage to
which M. Croiset refers.2, Thucydides is there explaining
why he gives an account of the outbreak of plague at Athens.
‘Others may say, each according to his judgement, whether
he be physician or layman, from what it probably arose,
and assert that whatever he considers were the agencies of
so great a change, were sufficient to acquire power to (pro-
duce) the transformation. But I shall say what it was
like when it happened; and I shall set forth the things from
which, if it should ever come on again, one who considers
them might best be able, knowing them beforehand, to
recognize it without fail. I fell ill myself, ; ee I saw with
my own eyes others suffering.’ ͵
Thucydides will record the symptoms of the plague, from
personal observation, so that posterity may recognize the
disorder if it should break out again. This is all he thinks
useful. He hints that the guesses of physicians are not
worth much more than those of laymen, about the ‘ agencies
responsible’ which they consider were ‘ swffictent to acquire
power to (produce) such a transformation’. Had the man
who wrote that phrase anything in his mind remotely re-
sembling the modern notion of cause and causal law? The
phrase is the very contradiction of it. The notion it conveys
is that of an unknown, probably an unknowable, something,
responsible for the plague, and from time to time acquiring
enough power to produce an outbreak. Thucydides rejects
all attempts to scrutinize the nature of this something, and
does not even directly commit himself to a belief in its
existence. He will confine himself to describing what he
actually saw and suffered. He hints that other people,
11 92,4... καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπειον τοιούτων Kat
παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι.
2 ii, 48. 8.
3 λεγέτω... . τὰς αἰτίας ἅστινας νομίζει τοσαύτης μεταβολῆς ἱκανὰς εἶναι δύναμιν
ἐς τὸ μεταστῆσαι σχεῖν. The editors suspect interpolation in this portentous
phrase ; but there is no reason to doubt the text. αἰτία cannot be rendered
‘cause’ without misleading. It is something held ‘responsible’, and
credited with power.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 101
doctors and laymen alike, would do well to follow his ex-
ample. The doctors would see in the plague the operation
of something ‘divine’!; laymen would more definitely
ascribe it to the onslaught of malignant spirits or offended
gods. Some undoubtedly connected it with the curse which
attached to the Almaeonid Pericles.2, Others again would
murmur that they had always said harm would come of
allowing the homeless peasants to camp out in the Pelargikon,
against the warning of an ancient oracle.
In the former passage, likewise, Thucydides is not thinking
of ‘ necessary and permanent laws’ in the sequence of events.
He is merely reflecting that other wars will happen in the
future. Other ‘events of the same, or much the same, sort’
will occur, ‘according to the course of human things’.? This
last phrase is ambiguous. It might mean ‘so far as man
can foresee’, ‘in all human probability —a phrase which is
least likely to be on our lips when we have in our thoughts
a clear conception of non-human ‘inexorable causality ’.
We are too apt to take the few sound observations of
nature, made by the Greeks at that date, as a proof that
they conceived nature as universally ruled by law. Thucy-
dides notes, for instance, that ‘it seems (or, is thought) to
be possible for an eclipse of the sun to happen only at the
time of a new moon’‘; and again, that when the moon is
1 Mr. Forbes (Thuc. I, Introd. p. xxvii) rightly observes that ‘a remark-
able passage in Thucydides’ contemporary, the physician Hippocrates,
shows that we must not argue too hastily from a rejection of superstitious
explanations of particular phenomena. Speaking of a malady prevalent
among some of the Scythians, he says: of μὲν οὖν ἐπιχώριοι τὴν αἰτίην
προστιθέασι θεῷ, καὶ σέβονται τούτους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους Kal προσκυνέουσι, δεδοικότες
περί γε ἑωυτῶν ἕκαστοι. ἐμοὶ δὲ καὶ αὐτῷ δοκεῖ πάντα τὰ πάθεα θεῖα εἶναι καὶ
τἄλλα πάντα, καὶ οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἑτέρου θειότερον οὐδὲ ἀνθρωπινώτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα
ὁμοῖα καὶ πάντα θεῖα' ἕκαστον δὲ ἔχει φύσιν τῶν τοιούτων καὶ οὐδὲν ἄνευ φύσιος
γίγνεται... .ἢ
2 See ii. 58, 59, where, just after describing the severity of the plague,
Thucydides says that the Athenians, hard pressed at once by (1) the war,
and (2) the plague, (1) blamed Pericles for the war and (2) thought their
misfortunes had come on them ‘on his account’ (δι᾽ ἐκεῖνον). Cf. ii. 64, 1,
* ‘Nach dem Laufe menschlicher Dinge ’—Classen, ad loc.
* ii. 28 νουμηνίᾳ κατὰ σελήνην, ὥσπερ καὶ μόνον δοκεῖ εἶναι γίγνεσθαι δυνατόν,
ὁ ἥλιος ἐξέλιπε.
a
109/ THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
elipsed,. itis.full.t..He inferred, moreover, that eclipses
/could not, as superstitious men like Nikias supposed, give
/ prognostications of coming-events. But between an isolated
/ observation and inference of this sort’and a general.conception
of law in nature there was a gulf which many centuries of
labour had yet to fill. In the case of earthquakes, Thucydides
had no sufficient series of observations on which to base an
inference. Consequently, with admirable good sense, he
records, without..expressing ΟΥ̓ implying any.belief or dis-
belief of his own, the one fact of which he was certain,
namely, that ‘they were said and thought to be signs of
coming events ’.”
Again, when he is insisting in his introduction that. the
Peloponnesian War was the greatest in recorded history,
he thinks it worth while to point out that it was not
inferior to previous wars in the number of earthquakes,
eclipses,’ droughts, famines, plagues, and other such con-
vulsions of nature which accompanied it...Similar phenomena
had been reported of previous wars, but this hearsay was
too scantily confirmed by ascertained facts. ‘Jt now became
not incredible, he says, ‘for all these things came upon
the Greeks at the same time with this war’* An unpre-
judiced reader of this passage must draw several conclusions.
In the first place Thucydides feels no distinction between
famines and plagues on the one hand, and eclipses, earth-
quakes, and~drowshts on the other. To us it seems easy
to connect the-former class with .a.state.of.war,and absolutely
Pg
impossible to connect the latter. Second, he saw no reason
1 vii. 50.
2 ii. 8. 3.
5 His putting in ‘eclipses’ shows that he did not understand why the
sun is not eclipsed at every new moon, or the moon every time it is full. He
thought eclipses were more frequent at times of war and did not know why.
Cf. Plut. Nic. xxiii ὃ γὰρ πρῶτος σαφέστατόν τε πάντων καὶ θαρραλεώτατον περὶ
σελήνης καταυγασμῶν καὶ σκιᾶς λόγον εἰς γραφὴν καταθέμενος ᾿Αναξαγόρας οὔτ᾽ αὐτὸς
ἣν παλαιὸς οὔτε ὁ λόγος ἔνδοξος ἀλλ᾽ ἀπόρρητος ἔτι καὶ δι᾽ ὀλίγων καὶ per’ εὐλαβείας
τινὸς ἢ πίστεως βαδίζων.
41,28. 8 τά τε πρότερον ἀκοῇ μὲν λεγόμενα, ἔργῳ δὲ σπανιώτερον βεβαιούμενα
οὐκ ἄπιστα κατέστη, σεισμῶν τε πέρι... .. ταῦτα γὰρ πάντα μετὰ τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου
ἅμα ξυνεπέθετο.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 103°
in the nature of things why events of either class should not
be more frequent at times of war in Greece, and he thought
the evidence pointed to the fact that they were. Third,
if he was thinking at all of any sort of causal connexion
between wars and (for instance) droughts, he must have
attributed droughts to causes of a sort which find no place
in modern science. Fourth, he shows his usual good sense
in merely recording that these occurrences apparently came
at the same time (ἅμα), without committing himself to any
specific connexion between them. In fine, he shows a com-
pletely scientific spirit, and also an equally complete destitu-
tion of a scientific view of nature. In the former respect
he is superior to the man who sacrifices to a volcano or prays
for rain. In the latter he is not so far advanced as a modern
peasant who is just educated enough to feel that there can
be no connexion between his seeing four magpies and some one
else having a child. Thucydides will not worship the in-
scrutable agencies responsible for convulsions of Nature;
but he cannot rule out the hypothesis that such agencies
exist and may ‘acquire power’ to produce the convulsions
coincidently with a war in Greece. He refrains from dog-
matizing on either side; regarding, we may suppose, the
current belief that malevolent spirits were responsible for
such outbreaks,! as an incautious and unverified explanation.
M. Croiset has, in our opinion, slipped into a fallacy which
is so common in the written history of thought that it seems
to deserve a name of its own. We will call it the Modernist
Fallacy. It takes several kindred shapes. In the present
case, its formula is as follows: ‘If a man in the remote past
believed a certain proposition, he also believed all that we
1 Porph. de Abst. ii. 40 ἐν γὰρ δὴ καὶ τοῦτο τῆς μεγίστης βλάβης τῆς
ἀπὸ τῶν κακοεργῶν δαιμόνων θετέον, ὅτι αὐτοὶ αἴτιοι γιγνόμενοι τῶν περὶ τὴν
γῆν παθημάτων, οἷον λοιμῶν, ἀφοριῶν, σεισμῶν, αὐχμῶν καὶ τῶν ὁμοίων. ..
The belief, seriously entertained by this intelligent writer, has, of course,
flourished to our own time in civilized countries. We remember an article in
the Spectator, in which the writer argued that an earthquake in the West
Indies was designed by God to stimulate seismological research. Neither
the editor nor the readers seem to have been conscious of any difficulty or
impiety in this opinion.
104 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
have since discovered to be implied in that proposition.’
Thucydides believed—who ever did not?—that events of
‘the same, or much the same, sort’ recur. Therefore, he must
have had a full and conscious belief in permanent and neces-
sary laws of cause and effect, conceived as we conceive
them.
Thucydides’ notion of Fortune may be more closely defined
by comparison and contrast with the opinions of the hardest
and clearest thinker among his contemporaries. Socrates,
according to his friend Xenophon,! believed that omens were
signs from the gods or ‘the spiritual’ (τὸ δαιμόνιον), and
recommended the use of divination to determine actions of
which the future results could not be foreseen. Those who
refused to employ divination in such matters were, he said,
as much ‘ possessed by an evil spirit’ (δαιμονᾶν) as those who
did employ it in cases where ordinary human judgement
(γνώμη) would have sufficed. He ‘demonstrated’ that men
who supposed that the movements of the heavenly bodies
happened ‘by some sort of constraints’ (τισὶν ἀνάγκαις) were
fools. He asked (as Thucydides might have asked) whether
‘they thought they had by this time a sufficient knowledge
of human things, that they should turn to think about such
matters, neglecting what is human and theorizing about the
divine’. Could they not see that it was impossible for men
to discover such things? Those who most prided themselves
on their theories disagreed with one another like so many
madmen quarrelling over their various delusions. Did they
expect, when they knew about divine things and by what
sort of constraints? they happen, to be able to make winds
and rains when they pleased? Or were they content merely
to know how these things happened ?
The language here attributed to Socrates is religious; he
speaks of ‘the divine’ and ‘the spiritual’ (demonic). His
view is that human events are determined partly by ‘ fore-
sight’ (γνώμη) and partly by the agency of gods or spirits.
1 Xen. Mem. i. 1.
2 ᾿Ανάγκαις as the context shows, means ‘constraints’, such as a magician
claims to exercise in rain-making.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 105
Foresight must be used to the utmost; but when it fails, we
ought to resort to divination, the only means of discovering
the intentions of the other set of agencies. Thucydides, when
he is expressing his own opinions, does not speak of ‘the
divine’, but merely of Fortune (Τύχη). But both men are
alike in contrasting the field of ordinary human foresight
(γνώμη) with the unknown field, which lies beyond it, of
inscrutable, non-human powers, whether we call these gods and
spirits or simply Fortune. This antithesis is more frequently
in Thucydides’ thoughts than any other except the famous
contrast of ‘word’ and ‘deed’. The two factors—yvdun,
human foresight, purpose, motive, and Τύχη, unforeseen non-
human agencies—divide the field between them. They are
the two factors—and the only two—which determine the
course of a series of events such as a war; neither Socrates
nor Thucydides thinks of natural law. One speaker after
another in the History dwells on the contrast between a
man’s own γνώμη over which he has complete control, and
Fortune over which he has no control at 811.}1 Men may
be ruined by fortune (ταῖς τύχαις), but if they are steadfast
in purpose (γνώμαις), they have shown themselves true
men.” Pericles® says(that human designs and the issues of
events alike take a course which is hard to discern; ‘and
hence we commonly regard Fortune as responsible for what-
ever falls out contrary to calculation.’ Of the plague, Pericles
says * that it was | the only thing that had so far happened
in the course of the war ‘beyond any man’s expectation’. He
knows he is hated the more because of it;5 but this is not
fair unless he is to be given credit for unforeseen success as
well. ‘Divine things (τὰ δαιμόνια) must be borne as a matter
1 iv. 64. 1 e.g. (Hermocrates) μηδὲ μωρίᾳ φιλονικῶν ἡγεῖσθαι τῆς τε οἰκείας
γνώμης ὁμοίως αὐτοκράτωρ εἶναι καὶ ἧς οὐκ ἄρχω Τύχης : vi. 78. 2 οὐ γὰρ οἷόν τε
ἅμα τῆς τ᾽ ἐπιθυμίας καὶ τῆς Τύχης τὸν αὐτὸν ὁμοίως ταμίαν γενέσθαι.
2.1, 87. 2 (Peloponnesian generals),
* i, 140. 1 ἐνδέχεται γὰρ τὰς ξυμφορὰς τῶν πραγμάτων οὐχ ἧσσον ἀμαθῶς χωρῆσαι
ἢ καὶ τὰς διανοίας τοῦ ἀνθρώπου" δι᾿ ὅπερ καὶ τὴν Τύχην, ὅσα ἂν παρὰ λόγον ἐξυμβῇ,
εἰώθαμεν αἰτιᾶσθαι.
* ii. 64,
5 Owing to the Alemaeonid curse, see p. 101.
/
106 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of necessity.’ He does not argue that the plague cannot be
his fault ; he speaks of it as a ‘divine thing’ which he could
not be expected to foresee. He may, of course, be talking
down to his audience; in using the phrase τὰ δαιμόνια he
probably is doing so. But what proof is there that he did
not think of the outbreak as a stroke of some unknown
power, which it would be rash to call by any more definite
name than ‘ Fortune’ ?
There is no need to multiply instances. An examination
of all the important passages where this contrast occurs! has
convinced us that Thucydides does not mean by ‘Fortune’
simply ‘the operation of unknown (natural) causes’, the
working of ordinary causal law in the universe. He is
thinking of extraordinary, sudden interventions of non-human
agencies, occurring especially at critical moments in warfare,
or manifest from time to time in convulsions of Nature. It is
these irruptions, and not the normal sway of ‘necessary and
permanent laws’, which defeat the purposes of human γνώμη,
and together with γνώμη are the sole determinant factors in
a series of human events. The normal, ordinary course of
Nature attracts no attention and is not felt to need explana-
tion or to be relevant in any way to human action. When
he speaks of the future as uncertain, he means not merely
that it is unknown, but that it is undetermined, and that
human design cannot be sure of completely controlling human
events, because other unknown and incalculable agencies may
at any moment intervene.
What were the possible alternatives in an age which lacked
the true conception of universal causality? There were two,
and only two: Fate and Providence. But both of these were
mythical, and associated with superstition. Fate, the older,
vaguer, and less personal of the two, was conceived under the
aspect of veiled and awful figures: the three Moirai, Ananke,
Adrasteia. It was thus that man had his first dim apprehen-
sion of that element in the world outside which opposes the
will of men and even of gods, thwarts their purpose, and
1 The references will be found in Classen’s Introduction to Book I, p. xliv.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 107
beats down their passion. Later ages have at last resolved
this inexorable phantom into nothing more—if nothing less—
mysterious than the causal sequences of Law. But this solution
lay far in the future; Thucydides’ contemporaries could con-
ceive it only as a non-human will—a purely mythical entity.
_ The other alternative was Providence; but any conception
of Providence less anthropomorphic than the will of Zeus
or the agency of spirits was not possible as yet. The notion
of a supreme Mind intervening once, and only once, to bring
order into chaos had been reached by Anaxagoras; but this
suggestion, so disastrous to the progress of thought, was not
developed till Plato took it up. In any case this Mind was
merely eredited with an initial act of creation; it did not
rule the world which it had ordered. Thucydides, moreover,
as we saw, had probably considered and rejected Anaxagoras’
philosophy. And, after all, the ‘Mind’ was just as mythical
as Fate.
The word ‘Chance’ suggests to the modern educated in-
telligence something utterly impersonal; we think at once
of the mathematical theory of probability, of the odds at
a gambling table, and so on. But we must remember that
the current name for ‘Chance’ in Greek was the name of
a mythical Person, Τύχη, a spirit who was actually worshipped
by the superstitious, and placated by magical means. The
religious spoke of ‘the Fortune that comes from the divine’,
and believed that God’s will was manifest in the striking
turns of chance, and in spite of appearances was working for
the righteous.1 <A less definite belief in Fortune as a divine
or spiritual agency was thought worthy of mention by
Aristotle.? In his own discussion of ‘ what comes by fortune’
or ‘spontaneously ’, Aristotle starts from the very contrast we
have noted in Thucydides—the contrast between purpose (not
Law) and chance. Aristotle, moreover, has no better explana-
tion of Chance than one which involves the purposes of
1 y. 104 (We Melians) πιστεύομεν τῇ τύχῃ ἐκ τοῦ θείου μὴ ἐλασσώσεσθαι, ὅτι
ὅσιοι πρὸς οὐ δικαίους ἱστάμεθα.
2 Phys. β4. 196 "δ εἰσὲ δέ τινες οἷς δοκεῖ εἶναι αἰτία μὲν ἡ Τύχη, ἄδηλος δὲ
ἀνθρωπίνῃ διανοίᾳ ὧς θεῖόν τι οὖσα καὶ δαιμονιώτερον.
108 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
a mythical person, called Nature. He does not even approach
to the conception of causal law, but accounts for ‘chance’ by
the crossing and conflict of these imaginary purposes.! Thucy-
dides, who either had never considered or had definitely
rejected the notion of purposes in Nature, was even less
advanced. He had no explanation to give, and confines
himself to the most non-committal name for these invading
agencies—‘ Fortune ’.
The recognition of non-human agencies—however unde-
fined—as responsible for observed phenomena is, so far as it
goes, a metaphysical belief. It is not a scientific belief,
though perfectly consistent with the scientific spirit in the
then state of physical knowledge. It is not a religious belief;
for Thucydides does not imply that these powers ought to be
worshipped or placated. Nothing remains but to call it
mythical.
To recur now to the story of Pylos. We noticed that the
series of lucky accidents on the Athenian side was paralleled
by a series of extraordinary blunders on the Spartan side.
In the former series Fortune is prominent to the exclusion of
foresight (γνώμη); in the latter we see successive failures
of foresight rather than the intervention of Fortune. These
count as pieces of luck from the Athenian standpoint; but
from the Spartans’ they are simply errors of judgement. This
point is clearly made in the subsequent speech of the Spartan
envoys, who are careful to remark: ‘ We have not come to this
from want of power, nor yet from the pride that comes when
power is unduly increased ; but without any change im our
position, we failed in judgement—a point in which the position
of all men is alike. Thus the whole narrative of the occu-
pation illustrates the contrast of fortune and foresight.
Fortune, not foresight, has exalted the Athenians; want of
foresight, not of fortune, has depressed the Spartans.
It was in this light that Thucydides saw a series of events
1 de An. 484 381 ἕνεκά του πάντα ὑπάρχει τὰ φύσει, ἢ συμπτώματα ἔσται τῶν
ἕνεκά του.
2 iv. 18.2. A translation of this speech will be found on p. 111.
THE LUCK OF PYLOS 109°
which began with a striking accident, the storm. The
element of real luck was sufficient to suggest a belief that
Fortune was active to a mind predisposed by superstition or
some other cause to look for her agency just here. Thucydides
was not superstitious; and he was both careful and acute.
The belief accounts for the peculiarities of the narrative; but
we have further to account for his having the belief at
just this moment in his story so strongly upon him as to miss
the clues in his informant’s report. There must have been
something which positively predisposed him to see Fortune
at work. We shall explain in the next chapter what this
something was.
Here we need only add that the psychological phenomenon
we are supposing to have occurred in his mind is closely
analogous to what might occur in a Christian historian,
narrating from incomplete oral information a critical in-
cident in Church history, which began with a miracle.
Looking from the outset for the divine purpose, he might
easily fail to bring his mind to bear critically on the in-
dications which showed that the whole series of events could
be explained as the effect of purely natural causes; for
we know from daily experience that a belief in occasional
interferences on the part of Providence can co-exist in the
same educated mind with a conception of natural causality
immeasurably clearer than any that Thucydides could have
possessed.
CHAPTER VII
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS —~
In this chapter we propose to take up the narrative where
we left it after the occupation of Pylos. We have reached
the point where Cleon comes into the story. We shall mark
the circumstances of his entrance, and bring together the
other episodes in which Thucydides allows him to appear
before us. The hypothesis of ‘ malignity * would not account
for the peculiarities we noted in the earlier narrative where
Cléon was not concerned; but it is not finally disposed οὗ.
ds an explanation of the story of Sphacteria, where Cleon
is “very much concerned. And malignity- against..Athens..
asa whole still ‘stands as_a_theor y slice aay to the view
we expressed in the last chapter. The occupation of Pylos
was not an exploit of Cleon’s; but it was an exploit of the
Athenians. ΤῸ represent. it as a stroke of mere luck might
be a means of detracting (at the expense, by the way, of
Demosthenes’ reputation) from the glory..of Athens. These
imputations, so damaging to Thucydides’ character, so im-
probable as they seem to us, are still not disproved. We
resume the narrative, then, giving as before an abbreviated
summary, designed to preserve the points which seem relevant
to our problem. That problem is to discover, if we can,
something in Thucydides’ thoughts about these transactions
which will explain how he can have been, as we suggested,
positively predisposed to see the work of Fortune in the early
part of them. We shall find an influence at work in his
mind, the nature of which it will be fairer not to characterize
until we have laid the relevant facts before the reader's
judgement.
The news came to Lacedaemon that the Peloponnesian fleet
ΓΝ
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 11}
was sunk or captured, and that four hundred and twenty
Spartan citizens with their attendant helots were cut off
on the island, under close watch from the Athenian ships
cruising perpetually round it The magistrates were sent
to the scene of action, that no time might be lost. They
found that a rescue was impossible. Even if no attack were
made, starvation would speedily reduce the garrison of a
desert island, strewn with rocks and overgrown through
most of its extent with forest. They obtained a truce from
the enemy, and sent envoys to Athens with overtures of
peace.
The envoys addressed the Athenian assembly to the follow-
ing effect :?
‘Men of Athens, the Lacedaemonians have sent us to treat
_about our men on the island, and to persuade you to such
terms as may at once be advantageous to you and, so far as
the case allows, save our honour in this reverse. If we speak
at some length, this will be no breach of our national custom.
For though it is not our way to use many words when a few
will suffice, we can use more when there is an opportunity
to effect what is wanted, by setting forth some matters that
are pertinent. You must not take them in an unfriendly
way, or as if we were schooling your dullness; but think of
us as putting you in mind of what you know already to be
good counsel.
> ‘You have the opportunity of disposing well of the good
fortune which now is with you, keeping the advantage you
have won, and gaining as well respect and high fame. You
may escape what happens to men when they obtain some
good which is out of the ordinary: they are always coveting
more im hope, because their present good fortune likewise was
wneaxpected.? But those who have oftenest come in for the
ups and downs have good reason to be above all mistrustful
of their successes. Your city, no less than ours, may very
A iv. 14.5 ff
2 iv.17ff. The first half of the speech is translated verbatim.
" iv. 17, 4 αἰεὶ γὰρ τοῦ πλέονος ἐλπίδι ὀρέγονται διὰ τὸ καὶ τὰ παρόντα ἀδοκήτως
εὐτυχῆσαι.
112 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
well have learnt this by experience. You may read the
lesson again by looking closely at our present misfortunes,
when we who have the highest repute among the Hellenes
come before you and here make requests which formerly we
thought ourselves more in the position to grant. But note
that we have not come to this from want of power nor yet
from the pride that comes when power is unduly increased ;
but, without any change in our position, we failed in judge-
ment (yvdéun)—a point in which the position of all men is
alike. Therefore you too have no reason to think, because
your city is now strong in itself and in its new acquisitions,
that the hand of Fortune (τὸ τῆς Τύχης) also will always be
on your side. Wise men find safety in setting down their
gains to uncertainty—it is they who will meet misfortunes
too with sober foresight—and know that war does not wait
upon a man’s choice of this or that enterprise to take in hand,
but goes as the chances (ai τύχαι), here or there, may lead.
Such men are least of all likely to trip; and not being elated
by confidence that their footing in the struggle is sure, they
will be most disposed to end it in the hour of their good
fortune. And this is how you, Athenians, would do well to
deal with us, to prevent its being thought at some future day,
if ever you should reject us and fall into one of the many
possible disasters, that your advantage now, when all has
gone well with you, was due to fortune (τύχῃ) ; whereas you
may, if you choose, leave to later times a reputation for
strength combined with prudence, beyond the reach of
risk.’
The envoys go on still further to dwell on the prudence
of reasonable terms as the best security for a lasting peace,
and to recommend again the moderate use of unexpected
victory. An adversary who will only be exasperated by
violence (βιασθείς) and overbearing extortion will feel in
honour the obligation laid upon him by conciliatory sacrifices.
‘If you decide for peace, you have the opportunity of be-
coming firm friends with the Lacedaemonians, upon their
own invitation, and by way of concession instead of violence
(βιασαμένοι-)»
Te δα σῦσας » σευ ὦ» πεσε. ὧδ δον. a <
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 113°
The narrative continues. ‘The Lacedaemonians said all this
with the idea that the Athenians had formerly been desirous
to make terms and had only been prevented by their own
opposition, but that now peace was offered they would
welcome it and restore the prisoners. But the Athenians
thought that, now they held the men on the island, it was
always in their power to make terms whenever they chose
and they coveted something more. They were urged on
above all by Cleon, the son of Cleainetos, who was the popular
leader in those days and stood highest in the confidence of
the multitude. He persuaded them to answer that first of
all the men on the island must surrender themselves and their
arms and be conveyed to Athens; when that was done, the ~
Lacedaemonians were to restore Nisaea, Pegae, Troezen, and
Achaea. On these conditions they could recover their men and
make a peace of such duration as both parties should approve.
The places mentioned had not been taken in war, but had
been surrendered under the former treaty by the Athenians
in a time of reverse. Then it had been Athens that was
suing for terms.”
‘The envoys made no reply, beyond requesting the appoint-
ment of a commission to hear both sides and quietly come to
any understanding they could about details. Cleon fell upon
this proposal with all his vehemenece.? He had always known,
he said, that they had no fair intentions, and now it was
clear. They would not say a word before the people, but
1 iv. 21. 2 τοῦ δε πλέονος ὠρέγοντος Compare the envoys’ use of this phrase
above (p. 111, note 3).
2 The places had been evacuated when a ‘thirty years’ peace’ was con-
cluded at the end of the earlier Peloponnesian war, in which Athens had
at first been brilliantly successful and later lost all, or nearly all, she had
gained. In the course of the present war they had never been in Athenian
hands, and the demand for their ‘ restoration’ (ἀποδόντας) was impudent as
well as extortionate. We have already explained why Cleon stood out for
the two Megarian ports; but we must remember that this demand was to
Thucydides as inexplicable as Pericles’ obstinacy about the Megarian decrees.
The demand for Achaea was also part of the western policy. That for
Troezen may have been a blind.
3 iv. 22. 2 Κλέων δὲ ἐνταῦθα δὴ πολὺς ἐνέκειτο. The particle δή hints that
such a reasonable proposal was just the thing to unchain all his violence,
I
114 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
wanted to be closeted with a select few. No! if they had
any honest meaning, let them declare it to all! But the
Lacedaemonians saw that even if they were disposed to make
some concessions in their distress, it was impossible to speak
before a multitude, for fear lest, if their proposals failed, they
should be misrepresented to their allies. They saw too that
the Athenians were not going to do as they were invited on
reasonable conditions. So they went home unsuccessful.’
We shall return later to the sentences in which Cleon first
appears upon the scene in this episode. He is introduced as
as if we had never heard of him.! In point of fact he has
come before us once already—though only once—namely, in
the debate at which the assembly revoked its. first. ferocious
order for a general massacre of innocent and guilty in the re-
volted city of Mytilene. The opponent of that generous impulse
of remorse, the insistent advocate of cruelty and revenge, was
Cleon. As soon as the change of feeling became known, ‘ the
assembly was immediately summoned and various opinions —
were put forward. Cleon, the son of, Cleainetos, who had
carried the previous proposal to put the Mytileneans to death,
came forward again to speak. He was at all times the most
violent of the citizens,? and just now stood by far the highest
in” the confidence of the people.’ Then follows the speech,
which, for characterization, is a masterpiece. There is ποῦ
a touch of the gross or cringing flatterer ; it is not the Cleon
of Aristophanes. He/breaks out at once in violent denuncias>
tion of the sovereigm people. A democracy is incapable οὗ
empire. They are fooled by the fine speeches of hireling
orators; they weakly vacillate before appeals to pity andthe
generosity of strength. They are ready to forfeit the legitimate
satisfaction of revenge, and thereby to hasten the dissolution — Ἶ
of their power, whose only bonds are force and fear. The
1 The hypothesis of interpolation here from iii, 36. 6 may be ‘lee oo
The phrase here is similar, but differs in that Cleon is here correctly called —
δημαγωγός (i.e. προστάτης τοῦ δήμου). He had become so since the Mytilenean
affair, by the death of Lysicles.
2 iii, 86, 6 βιαιότατος τῶν πολιτῶν.
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 115)
allies need a bloody example to teach them submission.
Otherwise, let the Athenians resign their empire and stop at
home to play at their arm-chair morality! Every sentence
rings with the tone of insolent violence, the strength which
treads down pity and ‘in its haste for vengeance upon others
thinks fit to abrogate those common laws of humanity wherein
had lain its own hope of mercy in the hour of defeat’.
After this one appearance, which leaves an indelible impres-
sion of unrestrained force and cruelty, Cleon drops out of the
story till the present passage. The counsellor of violent
revenge is now the counsellor of grasping extortion. ‘The
Athenians coveted more’; and the man above all who urges
them on is Cleon.? It is he who persuades them to formulate
an extravagant demand which amounts to breaking off the
negotiations. As in the case of the Mytilenean decree, the
Athenians are offered a chance for reconsideration; the
envoys propose a commission to go quietly into the details
and come to a reasonable understanding. Again, as in the
former case, Cleon intervenes, and ‘falls upon the proposal
with all his vehemence’ in slanderous accusation. The
parallel is striking; but here it ends. The Mytilenean
decision was revoked in spite of him, and Athens was just,
and only just, saved from an awful act of insolent cruelty ;
but this time Cleon prevails. ‘Confident in the hope of their
strength, * certain of being able to make terms when they
choose, the assembly dismisses the ambassadors to return home
empty-handed. Cleon has had his way: we shall see whither
it will lead him.
It would take too long to follow the subsequent story in
detail: we will rapidly resume it.*
Winter was coming on, and the Spartans on the island
1 jii. 84. 8 (not referring to Cleon),
2 iv. 21. 2 τοῦ δὲ πλέονος ὠρέγοντο. μάλιστα δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐνῆγε Κλέων. Tod
πλέονος ὀρέγεσθαι is the verb corresponding to the noun πλεονεξία, ‘ covetous
desire to get the better.’
Sv. 14. 1 ἔχοντες τὴν ἐλπίδα τῆς ῥώμης πιστήν (referring to this occasion),
* iv. 26 ff.
12
116 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
were still uncaptured; they were kept alive by venturous
blockade-running. The stormy season would soon make it
difficult to provision the Athenian fleet. The Athenians at
home began to repent of their refusal to make terms,’ and
dark looks were turned on Cleon. Repentance was no more
to his mind now than it had been in the Mytilenean affair ;
for, personally committed to the rejection of peace, he had gone
too far to retreat without blasting his career. The dramatic
story of his challenge to the generals is well known. ‘He
came forward and said he was not afraid of the Lacedae-
monians.’ He would sail himself with only a small force
of light-armed auxiliaries,? and with these and the soldiers
already at Pylos in twenty days he would either bring the
Lacedaemonians home alive or kill them on the spot. He
chose Demosthenes, already on the scene of action, for his
colleague. ‘ Laughter seized the Athenians at his wild words; ὃ
but they were welcome to moderate men who reflected that
they would gain one or other of two goods: either they would
be rid of Cleon, which they would have greatly preferred,
or if they were disappointed, he would put the Lacedae-
monians in their hands.’
Cleon’s stroke was brilliantly successful; but all the credit,
in Thucydides’ narrative, falls not to him, but to Demosthenes,
who again receives the timely aid of Fortune.t Demosthenes,
we are told, had already, before Cleon left Athens, planned
an attack upon Sphacteria,> and he was encouraged by a fire
which burnt the woods on the island and so exposed the
enemy. The fire had been ‘unintentionally’ kindled by an
Athenian soldier, one of a party who had landed on the shore
to cook their midday meal. ‘A wind sprang up and the
greater part of the woods were burnt before they knew what —
1 iv. 27. 2.
2 28.4. It has been observed that the choice of light-armed troops is put
as if it were a further piece of rashness. The sequel proved that it was
prudent.
3 iv. 28. 5 κουφολογίᾳ.
* Plut. Nic. viii speaks of Cleon on this occasion as τύχῃ χρησάμενος ἀγαθῇ
καὶ στρατηγήσας ἄριστα μετὰ Δημοσθένους.
5 29, 2,
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS ΤΙ."
was happening. Βαῦ for this lucky accident, the attack
upon so strong a body of the best fighting-men in Greece,
sheltered by thick undergrowth, would have been almost a
forlorn hope. Really, the gales might be in league with
Athens! The storm which first drove the fleet into Pylos
is seconded by the wind which sweeps the forest fire over
Sphacteria. When the troops landed for the attack, ‘the
dispositions were made by Demosthenes who had originally
planned the assault.’* The Spartans were driven slowly
to their last stand, and the two hundred and ninety-two who
were left alive surrendered.
‘So the promise of Cleon, mad as it was, resulted in
success: for he brought the men within twenty days, just as
he had undertaken.’ ὃ
Much ink has been expended on the phrase: ‘mad as it
was. How can Thucydides call the promise mad, at the
very moment when he is recording its fulfilment? The best
comment is a sentence from Herodotus, where Artabanus is
warning Xerxes against rash haste in taking up so great an
enterprise as the conquest of Greece. ‘I know not,’ he says,
‘aught in the world that so profits a man as taking good
counsel with himself; for even if things fall out against one’s
hopes, still one has counselled well, though fortune has made
the counsel of none effect: whereas if a man counsels ill
and luck follows, he has gotten a windfall, but his counsel is
none the less silly. *
What use will Cleon make of his windfall? Surely, now,
the Athenians will tempt fortune no further. They resolve
to keep the captives in chains ‘till some agreement shall
be reached’. Meanwhile the Messenians from Naupactos
are established at Pylos, from whence they make descents ;
deserting helots begin to come in and join them. This was
1 30. 2 ἐμπρήσαντός τινος κατὰ μικρὸν τῆς ὕλης ἄκοντος καὶ ἀπὸ τούτου
πνεύματος ἐπιγενομένου τὸ πολὺ αὐτῆς ἔλαθε κατακαυθέν.
3 82, 4. Thucydides seems to emphasize the skill of Demosthenes, as if
he were half aware that the Pylos narrative hardly did him justice,
3. iv. 39. 3 cal τοῦ Κλέωνος καίπερ μανιώδης οὖσα ἡ ὑπόσχεσις ἀπέβη.
* Hat. vii. 10 (δ΄) Rawlinson’s trans.
118 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
the only danger which could touch the Lacedaemonians at
home, and they sent a second embassy for peace. Here is
another opening for moderation in victory. But no! ‘The
Athenians were coveting greater things’ \—again that ominous”
phrase—‘ and though the Spartans sent again and again, they
kept on dismissing the envoys unsuccessful. Thus ended the
affair of Pylos.’
We lose sight of Cleon till the scene of war is shifted to
Chalcidice. The combatants had actually concluded a truce
with provisions for the discussion of a permanent peace; but
the negotiations broke down through Brasidas’ refusal to
surrender Skione, which had revolted from Athens just two
days after the truce had been declared. The Athenians in a
rage carried a resolution for the destruction of Skione and
the massacre of its inhabitants.? Another act of force and
fury—once more the entrance-cue for ‘ the most violent of the
citizens’. ‘They were induced to carry the decree by the
advice of Cleon, This, however, is but a passing glimpse.
The last scene opens at the beginning of Book V.
Cleon himself sails with an expedition to Chalcidice, where
he is to meet with more than his match. Brasidas, ensconced
in Amphipolis, lays a trap into which Cleon is driven by the
impatience of his own men and the rashness of his disposition.
‘He behaved as he had done at Pylos, where his good luck
had given him confidence in his own wisdom.? He never
so much as expected that any one would come out to fight
him. ... He imagined he could go and come, without a battle,
whenever he chose. . . . He even thought he had made a mistake
in coming without siege-engines ; for, had he brought them, he
could have taken the place in its undefended state.’ Brasidas
knew how to turn to advantage the contempt of an enemy.
A sudden sally from the town; and the Athenians’ disorderly
retreat breaks into a rout, ‘The Athenian right made a
1 iv. 41. 8 μειζόνων τε ὡρέγοντο.
2 iv. 122. 6,
Sv, 7. 8 ἐχρήσατο τῷ τρόπῳ ᾧπερ Kal és τὴν Πύλον εὐτυχήσας ἐπίστευσέ τι
φρονεῖν.
\
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 1195
better stand, and though Cleon, who indeed had never
thought of holding his ground, fled immediately and was
overtaken by a Myrkinian targeteer and slain, the rest rallied
on the crest of the hill and repulsed Clearidas two or three
times, and they did not give in until the Myrkinian and
Chalcidian horse and the targeteers hemmed them round and
broke them with a shower of darts.’ Thus contemptuously
is Cleon’s end recorded: the victor of Sphacteria is spurned
out of the history in a parenthesis. Mad elation and self-
confidence, born of unexpected luck, have brought him to the
-ignominious death of a coward.
The first of these incidents which calls for remark is the
speech of the Spartan envoys in the abortive negotiations for
peace which came between the occupation of Pylos and the
capture of Sphacteria. This speech, half of which we trans-
lated, is a curious document. We remember that Thucydides
in the introduction to the History? remarked with regret on
the difficulty of remembering or learning by report the exact
words used by statesmen and envoys. The speeches set down
represent, he told us, ‘what seemed to me to be just what
would have been necessary for each speaker to say on the
occasion, and 1 have kept as closely as possible to the general
sense of the actual words.’ In the present instance it is
obvious that in a way the ‘ general sense’ of the envoys’ plea
has been preserved. They must have formulated the Spartans’
request for peace, asked for the release of the prisoners, and
hinted—they could do no more till they had some certainty
of success—that the ‘friendship of Sparta’, the only quid pro
quo openly named, would turn out to cover some more tangible
return. From our knowledge of Laconian eloquence and from
examples of it elsewhere in Thucydides,? we should expect
1 v. 10. 9.
2 4, 29,
3. The following are the other speeches made by Spartans in the first part
of the history: (1) Archidamus advises delay in going to war, i. 80-5
(strictly to the point ; short eulogy of Spartan institutions, 84) ; (2) Sthene-
laidas, i. 86 (extremely curt) ; (3) Archidamus to Peloponnesian generals, ii.
11 (short and businesslike); (4) Archidamus to Plataeans, ii. 72 (a few
190 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
further a few crisp, dry aphorisms about luck: ‘To-day to
me, to-morrow to thee.’ The situation itself, as we are later
told, precluded any definite statement about the only question
of practical business: what substantial equivalent the Spar-
tans had to offer in exchange for the prisoners. In such
circumstances, the whole case might be put in three minutes ;
we do not expect a homily, five-sixths of which are devoted
to a general disquisition on the theme of moderation in
prosperity. Nothing could be less ‘laconic’ than the speech
Thucydides has given us. Further, he was quite aware of
this, and knew that his readers would remark it. The exordium
apologizes for what may seem a departure from national
custom: ‘It is not our way to use many words when few
will suffice’; but the justification offered: ‘we can use
more when there is an opportunity to effect what is wanted
by setting forth some matters that are pertinent, sounds
vague and indeed (to be candid) all but meaningless in the
mouths of the speakers. We suspect that the matters to be
set forth are more to the point in explaining what Thucydides
has in his mind than in influencing the Athenians to abandon
the fruits of victory. There is obviously some connexion
between the sacrifice of dramatic probability here and the
sacrifice of historic probability in the Pylos episode. In the
handling of ‘what was done’ Thucydides has presented the
action as undesigned and fortuitous. In the speech we have
a dissertation on luck in war and moderation in unlooked-for
SUCCESS.
The Lacedaemonians, we shall be told, are ‘ moralizing’.
A sudden reversal of fortune was in itself a phenomenon
peculiarly interesting to the Greek mind, and the theme of
moderation in prosperity was the standing moral which they
drew from such occurrences—a most venerable commonplace.
sentences) ; (5) Brasidas at Acanthus, iv. 85 (length apologized for by
Thucydides: ‘for a Lacedaemonian, he was not an incapable speaker,’
84. 2) ; (6) Brasidas to his men, iv. 126 (short and pointed); (7) Brasidas to
his men, v. 9 (similar to the last). None of them presents a parallel to that
of the envoys on this occasion.
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 121
That, of course, is true; but it does not explain the problem
of the Pylos narrative. If that were all, we should have to
suppose that Thucydides distorted his facts there for the
purpose of moralizing—a supposition we have proved in-
credible. ,
Let us say, then, that Thucydides is using the device of
speech-writing to convey his own opinion that Athens ought
to have made peace after Sphacteria, and that Cleon’s
exorbitant demands were a mistake in policy. This certainly
was Thucydides’ opinion ; but again it gives no answer to our
problem. The policy was just as bad, whether the occupation
of Pylos was casual or carefully designed in every detail.
It is evident that the moral of the speech was, to Thucy-
dides’ view, illustrated by the subsequent career of Cleon.
He behaved at Amphipolis ‘as he had done at Pylos, where
his good luck had given him confidence in his own wisdom’.
‘He never so much as expected that any one would come out
to fight him’, and so on. We are to understand that Cleon’s
head was turned by the success of his ‘mad’ undertaking.
Elated and over-confident, he rushes into a still more difficult
enterprise. That is how we put it in our histories; but the
Greeks used a somewhat different language, and put a some-
what different construction on such a sequence of events as
this. They interpreted it according to a certain philosophy
of human nature which it will concern us to take account of.
If we turn back to the episode in which Cleon makes his.
first appearance in the History, we find this philosophy set
forth in remarkable terms by Diodotus in the Mytilenean
debate. Diodotus is replying to the great speech of Cleon
which we referred to above; he explains how futile is
Cleon’s policy of inflicting exemplary punishment on revolted
allies. The question of the purpose and true nature of
punitive justice was much in the air at this time, and the
speech of Diodotus is Thucydides’ contribution to the con-
troversy. ‘The passage is so interesting, and so important for
our purpose, that we will give it in full.
‘In the cities of Greece the death penalty has been affixed
to many offences actually less than this ; yet still, intoxicated
pa
—
122 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
by their hopes, men take the risk. No man ever, before
embarking on a dangerous course, passed sentence on himself
| that he would not succeed in his design; and no city enter-
ing on revolt ever set about doing so with the conviction that
her resources—whether her own or obtained from her allies—
were inadequate. All men are born to error in public, as in
private, conduct; and there is no law that will hinder them ;
for mankind has exhausted the whole catalogue of penalties,
continually adding fresh ones, to find some means of lessening
the wrongs they suffer from evil-doers. Probably in early
ages the punishments affixed to the worst offences were
milder; but as transgressions went on, in time they seldom
stopped short of death; yet still, even so, there are trans-
gressors.
‘Hither then some greater terror than death must be dis-
covered, or at any rate death is no deterrent. No; poverty
inspires daring by the stress of necessity; the licence of
prosperity inspires covetous ambition by insolence and
pride; and the other conditions of human life, as each is
possessed by some irremediable and mastering power, by
passion lead men on to perilous issues.
‘Desire and Hope are never wanting—the one leading the
way, the other busy in attendance. Desire devising the
attempt, and Hope flattering with suggestions of the riches in
Fortune’s store, very often lead to ruin, and, invisible as they
are, prevail over the dangers that are seen.
‘And besides these Fortune contributes no less to intoxi-
cation ; for sometimes she presents herself unexpectedly at a
man’s side and leads him forward to face danger at a dis-
advantage ; and cit’es even more than individuals, in propor-
tion as their stake is the greatest of all—freedom or empire—
and each, when all are with him, unthinkingly rates himself
the higher.?
1 iii, 45. 1 τῇ ἐλπίδι ἐπαιρόμενοι κινδυνεύουσι.
2 iii, 45.4 ἀλλ᾽ ἡ μὲν πενία ἀνάγκῃ τὴν τόλμαν παρέχουσα, ἡ δὲ ἐξουσία ὕβρει
τὴν πλεονεξίαν καὶ φρονήματι, αἱ δ᾽ ἄλλαι ἐυντυχίαι ὀργῇ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ws ἑκάστη
τις κατέχεται ὑπ᾽ ἀνηκέστου τινὸς κρείσσονος ἐξάγουσιν ἐς τοὺς κινδύνους.
ἥ τε Ἐλπὶς καὶ 6 "Ἔρως ἐπὶ παντί, ὁ μὲν ἡγούμενος, ἡ δ᾽ ἐφεπομένη, καὶ ὃ μὲν
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 123
‘In a word, it is impossible—and only a simpleton would
suppose the contrary—that human nature, when it is passion-
ately bent upon some act, should be averted from its purpose
by force of laws or any other terror,
We shall have something to say later of the extraordinary
and highly poetical language in which this theory of human
nature is set forth; here we shall note the main features of
the theory itself, the far-reaching significance of which will
become apparent in the sequel. We observe that human
nature is subject to two sorts of influences, which correspond
to the two general names γνώμη (in the widest sense) and Τύχη.
(1) There are, first, the man’s own vices of character—‘ daring,
covetousness, pride’ and the other ‘irremediable and mastering
powers’ which ‘possess’ him. (2) These vices, in the second
place, are ‘ supplied’ or inspired by the external circumstances
of his condition (vrvrvyla)—especially by the two extreme
conditions of grinding poverty and licentious prosperity.
Next, in these conditions man is peculiarly liable to
temptation, which comes to him in two ways. (1) One of
two violent passions may seize on him. Hope is busy in
attendance flattering him with suggestions of the wealth in
Fortune’s store; unrestrained Desire leads him on to lay
plans for yet further gain. (2) Fortune, herself, intervenes to
complete his intoxication. Appearing at his side unexpectedly,
she encourages him by giving success which, though he has
not designed it, he is apt to credit to his own ability. So he
comes to overrate his strength, and face dangers which are
beyond it. |
In this scheme the two factors, hwaan character and
τὴν ἐπιβουλὴν ἐκφροντίζων, ἡ δὲ τὴν εὐπορίαν τῆς Τύχης ὑποτιθεῖσα, πλεῖστα βλά-
πτουσι, καὶ ὄντα ἀφανῆ κρείσσω ἐστὶ τῶν ὁρωμένων δεινῶν.
καὶ ἡ Τύχη ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς οὐδὲν ἔλασσον ξυμβάλλεται ἐς τὸ ἐπαίρειν. ἀδοκήτως γὰρ
ἔστιν ὅτε παρισταμένη καὶ ἐκ τῶν ὑποδεεστέρων κινδυνεύειν τινὰ προάγει" καὶ οὐχ
ἧσσον τὰς πόλεις, ὅσῳ περὶ τῶν μεγίστων τε, ἐλευθερίας ἢ ἄλλων ἀρχῆς, καὶ μετὰ
πάντων ἕκαστος ἀλογίστως ἐπὶ πλέον τι αὑτὸν ἐδόξασεν. The meaning of the last
clause seems to be that intoxication is infectious: each man in a crowd is
more carried away than he would be if he were alone. For the construction
αὑτὸν ἐδόξασεν compare Plato, Philebus, 48 Ἑ.
124 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
external Fortune, appear twice over, in different aspects.
First, we are thinking of comparatively permanent conditions,
such as extreme poverty or wealth, and of the comparatively
permanent vices which gain upon a man slowly in such
circumstances. Second, we have the sudden access, at critical
moments, of temptation under the two forms of a violent
passion, Hope or Desire, and of Fortune appearing in un-
expected successes. These besetting agencies take advantage
of the faults of character already produced by Prosperity and
Penury, and they bring about a condition of blind intoxica-
tion, the eclipse of rational foresight. When this state is
reached the man is marked for his doom; neither the force
of laws nor any other terror will ‘avert’ his fatal course.
The point which now concerns us is that the train of
thought in these few sentences of Diodotus’ speech contains
the motive and the moral of the whole of Cleon’s career as
Thucydides has chosen to present it. We know, from other
sources, that Cleon was prominent in politics before the war
broke out. After Pericles’ death he soon became the leading
Athenian statesman and remained so to the end of his life.
During all this time he appears to have led the policy of the
war-party, and in a history of the war we should expect to
hear of him constantly. But out of all his public actions
Thucydides has selected three, and only three,’ to put before
us. These are the Mytilenean debate; the capture of Sphac-
teria and the negotiations preceding it; his last campaign at
Amphipolis. On the first of these occasions Thucydides puts
in his mouth a speech which is evidently meant to reveal the
character of the ‘most violent of the citizens’; one of the
vices of prosperity, ruthless ‘ insolence’ (ὕβρις), might be taken
as its keynote. On the second occasion, at Sphacteria, we see
him at a moment when Fortune, the temptress, unexpectedly
stands at his side. His promise was ‘mad’ for he was
intoxicated with ambitious passion, and he had just betrayed
another vice of prosperity, ‘covetousness’ (πλεονεξία). Thucy-
1 Except the glimpse at iv. 122. 6 where Cleon advocates the massacre of
the Skioneans. This repeats and renews the impression of the Mytilenean
debate.
THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 125
dides reiterates in the envoys’ un-laconic speech just that part
of his theory of human nature which is relevant—the danger
of covetousness in the flush of success. In the third and
last episode, at Amphipolis, Thucydides in his own person
points out that his train of causes has led to its inevitable
end. Infatuate pride (φρόνημα), the third vice of prosperity,
brings ruin.
The three episodes, put together, form the complete outline
of a drama, conforming to a well-known type which we shall
study in the next chapter. The first act reveals the hero’s
character; the second contains the crisis; the third, the
catastrophe. But though complete in outline, the drama is
obviously defective in other respects. The reason is that,
while the plot is tragic, Cleon is not a tragic figure. It is
true that at his first appearance, in the Mytilenean speech, he
does attain tragic proportions, for the character is treated with
perfect seriousness and expressed with astonishing force. But
to allow Cleon to remain on this level would have been fatal
to Thucydides’ larger design, which we shall study later; it
would never do to let him become the hero of this part of
the war. Besides, Thucydides could not conceal his contempt,
and probably saw no reason to conceal it. On both these
grounds he does not allow Cleon a second full-length speech.
Modern historians complain that Thucydides ought to have
given his reply to the Spartan envoys before Sphacteria ;
that he has missed an obvious opportunity of stating the policy
of the war-party; and that there is some unfairness in not
doing so. But artistic considerations were decisive. A long
speech from Cleon at this point, if it even approached the
force and impressiveness of the Mytilenean speech, would have
established him as a hero, or a villain on the heroic scale;
he would have bulked much too largely for a minor character.
Hence Cleon’s little personal drama, though its plot is kept
complete, is deliberately spoilt ;—‘laughter seized the Athenians
at his wild words.’ From that moment he is degraded from
the tragic rank; and his story runs out pitiably to its
contemptible close—in a parenthesis.
What immediately concerns us now is the difference that
126 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
this dramatizing of Cleon must make to our view of Thucy-
dides’ treatment of him, It is evident that the historian saw
him not purely, or even primarily, as an historic person, but
as a type of character. His career is seen through the
medium of a preconceived theory of human nature, and only
that part of the career is presented which conforms to the
theory and illustrates a certain part of it. The principle of
this selection has no place in historic method ; it has no place
in Thucydides’ original design of a detailed journal of the
war. The Mytilenean episode, for instance, shows us Cleon
at a moment when his action had no effect on the course
of the war, since his advice was rejected. The principle is
artistic, idealizing, dramatic. Thucydides has stripped away
all the accidents: and particulars of the historic individual ;
he has even stripped away his personality, leaving only an
abstract, generalized type. Now, we do not deny that
Thucydides both hated and despised the man Cleon; or that
these feelings operated as a psychological cause to facilitate
the erection of their object into an impersonation of insolent
Violence and Covetousness. But when this result was
effected, the attitude of feeling must have undergone a
simultaneous change. To idealize is an act of imaginative
creation, and the creator cannot feel towards the creature as
one man feels towards another. He is a spectator, not an
actor in the drama revealed to his larger vision. We need
talk no longer of ‘a personal grudge against an able, but
coarse, noisy, ill-bred, audacious man’; for none of these
epithets, except ‘ able’, quite fits the impression we get from
the Mytilenean speech. Nor is it even a man, a complete
concrete personality, that is there presented; it is rather a
symbol, an idea. The personality is contemned and thrust
out, and with its banishment personal antipathy gives place
to a noble indignation against Violence itself—aird τὸ βίαιον,
as Plato might call it. We have left the plane of pedestrian
history for the ‘more serious and philosophic’ plane of
poetry.
We have here reached a broad distinction of type between
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THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 127
Thucydides’ work and history as it was written in the
nineteenth century. The latter can be described generally as
realistic, if we stretch this term to cover both the scientific
(and sometimes dull) school and their graphic (and sometimes
inaccurate) rivals. The scientific principle is realistic in the
sense that it tends to regard any ascertainable fact as worth
ascertaining, and even as neither more nor less valuable
than any other. The graphic principle is realistic in that
it attempts to visualize the past, and is as careful to tell us
that Robespierre was sea-green as it is to tell us that he was
incorruptible. The realism which has grown upon the novel
and the drama has taught us that to see a man’s exterior is
halfway to understanding his character. Hence the graphic
school delight in personal, biographical touches; and in
delineating an age they find a broadside or a folk-song more
illuminating than the contents of a minister's dispatch-box.
Now Thucydides belongs to neither of these schools; or
rather he tried to be scientific and hoped to be dull, but he
failed. As his work goes on the principle that governs his
selection and his presentation of events is less and less
scientific. He originally meant to choose the facts which
would be useful in the vulgar practical sense; he projected
a descriptive textbook in strategy. But he ended by choosing
those which were useful for a very different end—a lesson in
morality ; and he comes, as we shall see, to treat events out of
all proportion to their significance as moments in a war
between Athens and Sparta. The graphic method he keeps
strictly for events, not for persons. The fortification of Pylos,
for instance, is vividly pictured in a single sentence describing
the mudlarks. Imagination, with this sharply defined glimpse
of the thing seen to work from, can fill in all the rest. But
the characters are never treated graphically; he does not
tell us that Cleon was a tanner wi voice like Kykloboros,
or that Pericles was called (squill-head } from the shape of his
skull. He tells us that the former was the ‘most violent’,
the latter the ‘ most powerful’ of the citizens. The characters
throughout are idealized to a very high degree of abstraction
—a method which is not practised by either school of moderns,
128 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Our attention in the next chapter will be directed to a closer
analysis of this idealistic treatment. We shall study the
method still as exemplified in the story of Cleon; but, as we
have said, Cleon is not the hero of the history as a whole, or
even of this part of it; the cycle of his fortunes is only an
epicycle on a larger orbit. But orbit and epicycle exhibit the
same type of curve. We have to trace this curve in both and
also to study the relation of the smaller body to the greater.
Cleon, in other words, has two aspects: he is quasi-hero of
his own little tragi-comedy and also a minor character in the
tragedy of Athens.
CHAPTER VIII
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA
Tue epithet ‘dramatic’ has often been applied to Thucy-
dides’ work; but usually nothing more is meant than that
he allows his persons to speak for themselves, and presents
their character with vividness.1 The dramatization which
we have pointed out in the treatment of Cleon is a very
different thing; it is a principle of construction which,
wherever it operates, determines the selection of incidents
to be recorded, and the proportions and perspective assigned
them. In this chapter we shall attempt to describe and
analyse the type of drama that we have to do with, and
to trace the literary influence under which Thucydides
worked.
We ought first, perhaps, to meet a possible objection. It
may be urged that Thucydides in his preface expressly ex-
cludes anything of the nature of poetical construction from
his literal record of what was said and what was done. He
criticizes the methods of poets and story-writers, and warns
us that, at the cost of making his story ‘somewhat un-
attractive’, he intends to exclude ‘the mythical’ (τὸ μυθῶδες).
He cannot, therefore, it might be inferred, have done what
we have thought we found him doing. But we would ask
for a careful examination of the passage in question. What
was in Thucydides’ thoughts when he wrote it, and above all,
what precisely did he mean to exclude when he banished ‘the
mythical’?
The words occur towards the end of the introduction,?
1 This seems to be all that Plutarch means: 6 Θουκυδίδης ἀεὶ τῷ λόγῳ πρὸς
ταύτην ἁμιλλᾶται τὴν ἐνάργειαν, οἷον θεατὴν ποιῆσαι τὸν ἀκροατήν, de Glor. Ath. 8.
K
180 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
which is designed to establish Thucydides’ belief that the
Peloponnesian war was the most memorable of all that had
ever been in Greece. The possible rivals, he points out, are
the Trojan war and the Persian invasion. For the first of
these events the only literary evidence we have is that of
the epic poets, and chiefly of Homer, whose record cannot
be checked by direct observation, while much of his theme
through the lapse of time has passed, or ‘won over’, into
the region of the mythical and incredible.1 The only tests
we have are certain indications in the existing condition of
Greece which seem inconsistent with the past state of things
as represented by the literary authorities. With these indica-
tions we must be content; and they suffice to show that the
epic poets embellished their tale by exaggeration.2 The
story-writers, again, on whom we depend for the history of
the Persian wars, were not bent upon accurate statement of
truth ;—witness the carelessness of Herodotus about points
of detail. Their object was rather to make their recitations
attractive and amusing to their audience; and if we discount
their evidence accordingly, we shall find, going by ascertained
facts alone, that the Peloponnesian war was the greatest
ever seen.
Thucydides next passes abruptly to the formulation of his
own method; he intends to record what was said and what
was done as accurately and literally as possible. The result,
he then remarks, will probably be somewhat unattractive to
an audience at a recitation, because the facts recorded will
have nothing ‘mythical’ about them;* he will be content,
however, if they are judged useful by people who wish to
know the plain truth of what happened.
The phrase ‘winning over into the mythical’ is illuminating.
It suggests the transformation which begins to steal over all
events from the moment of their occurrence, unless they are
1 i, 21 τὰ πολλὰ ὑπὸ χρόνου αὐτῶν ἀπίστως ἐπὶ τὸ μυθῶδες ἐκνενικηκότα.
24,21 ὡς ποιηταὶ ὑμνήκασι περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπὶ τὸ μεῖζον κοσμοῦντες. Cf. i. 10, 8
τῇ Ὁμήρου ποιήσει, εἴ τι χρὴ κἀνταῦθα πιστεύειν, ἣν εἰκὸς ἐπὶ τὸ μεῖζον μὲν
ποιητὴν ὄντα κοσμῆσαι.
8.1, 22, 4 καὶ ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται .. -
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 131
arrested and pinned down in writing by an alert and trained
observer. Even then some selection cannot be avoided—
a selection, moreover, determined by irrelevant psychological
factors, by the accidents of interest and attention. Moment
by moment the whole fabric of events dissolves in ruins and
melts into the past; and all that survives of the thing done
passes into the custody of a shifting, capricious, imperfect,
human memory. Nor is the mutilated fragment allowed to
rest there, as on a shelf in a museum ; imagination seizes on it
-and builds it with other fragments into some ideal construc-
tion, which may have a plan and outline laid out long before
this fresh bit of material came to the craftsman’s hand to be
worked into it, as the drums of fallen columns. are built into
the rampart of an Acropolis. Add to this the cumulative
effects of oral tradition. One ideal edifice falls into ruin; pieces
of it, conglomerates of those ill-assorted and haphazard frag-
ments, are carried to another site and worked into a structure
of, perhaps, a quite different model. Thus fact shifts into
legend, and legend into myth. The facts work loose ; they are
detached from their roots in time and space and shaped into
a story. The story is moulded and remoulded by imagination,
by passion and prejudice, by religious preconception or
aesthetic instinct, by the delight in the marvellous, by the
itch for a moral, by the love of a good story; and the thing
becomes a legend. A few irreducible facts will remain; no
more, perhaps, than the names of persons and places—Arthur,?
Caerleon, Camelot; but even these may at last drop out or be
turned by a poet into symbols. ‘By Arthur, said Tennyson,
‘I always meant the soul, and by the Round Table the passions
and capacities of man.’ The history has now all but won
over into the mythical. Change the names, and every trace
of literal fact will have vanished; the story will have escaped
from time into eternity.
When we study this process, we seem to make out two
phases of it, which, for the criticism of Thucydides, it is
necessary to distinguish. The more important and pervasive
1 We assume that Arthur was historic ; but he may have been Arcturus
for all we know.
K 2
132 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of the two is the moulding of fact into types of myth con-
tributed by traditional habits of thought. This process
of infiguration (if we may coin the word) may be carried
to any degree. Sometimes the facts happen to fit the mould,
and require hardly any modification; mere unconscious
selection is enough. In other cases they have to be stretched
a little here, and patted down there, and given a twist before
they will fit. In extreme instances, where a piece is missing,
it is supplied by mythological inference from the interrupted
portions which call for completion; and here we reach the
other phase of the process, namely invention. This is no
longer a matter of imparting a form to raw material; it
is the creation of fresh material when the supply of fact
is not sufficient to fill the mould. It leads further to the
embroidery of fabulous anecdote, which not only has no
basis in fact, but is a superfluous addition, related to fact
as illustrations in a book are related to the text.
The process, in both its phases, can be illustrated from
the version preserved by Thucydides! of the legend of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers. Harmodius’
sister, whom the tyrant insults, makes her first appearance
in this account, She is superfluous, since the murderers
had already a sufficient private motive arising out of the
love-quarrel. That is not in itself an argument against
her historical character, for superfluous people sometimes
do exist; but other circumstances make it not improbable
that she owes her existence to the mythical type which
normally appears in legend when tyrants have to be slain.
The two brothers, or lovers, and the injured sister, or wife—
the relationships vary—are the standing dramatis personae
on such occasions. Collatinus, Brutus, and Lucretia are
another example from legend; while the purely mythical
type which shapes such legends is seen in the Dioscuri
and Helen.? The suggestion is that Harmodius and Aris-
1 vi. δά ff.
3 Even aspirants to tyranny have to be killed on this pattern. Thus one
version of Alcibiades’ death was that the brothers of a woman with whom he
was spending the night set fire to the house and cut him down as he leapt
out through the flames, Plut. vit. Alcib, fin.
νι
πο - ee
ον τ ἀρ κοι οὶ ον λυ κων.
Rass σας SP act
*
it SES
Pee a
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 133
togeiton were identified with the Heavenly Twins. If _
there is any truth in the story of how Peisistratus was
conducted back to Athens by a woman dressed as Athena
and accepted by the citizens as the goddess in person,’ it
is not surprising that the next generation of Athenians
should have recognized the Dioscuri in Harmodius and his
friend. Given that identification, the injured sister is felt
to be a desirable, if not indispensable, accessory; she is
filled in by inference, and she becomes a candidate for
the place of ‘ basket-bearer’ in the Panathenaic procession,
at which the murder took place. Thus, the legend of
Harmodius illustrates both the phases of the process we
described : first, it is moulded on the mythical type of the
Heavenly Twins, and then invention supplies the missing
third figure.”
Mythical types of this sort can be discovered and classified
only after a wide survey of comparative Mythistoria; for we
all take our own habits of thought for granted, and we cannot
perceive their bias except by contrast. The Greek who knew
only Greek legend could not possibly disengage the substance
from the form; all he could do was to prune away the fabulous
and supernatural overgrowths, and cut down poetry into
prose. It is thus that Thucydides treats myths like the story
of Tereus, Proene, and Philomela*; he rationalizes them,
thinking that he has reduced them to history when he has
removed unattested and improbable accretions, such as the
transformation of Tereus into a hoopoe. But history can-
not be made by this process (which is still in use); all
that we get is, not the original facts, but a mutilated legend ;
and this may very well be so mutilated that it is no longer
possible to distinguish the informing element of fiction, which
was discernible till we effaced the clues.
The phenomenon that especially concerns us now is some-
1 Herod. i. 60,
2 On this subject see Miicke, Vom Euphrat zum Tiber (1899), who points out
other examples of the mythical type.
5. ii, 29.
184 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
thing much wider than the mythical infiguration of a single
incident here or there, such as the legend of the Tyrant-
slayers. It is the moulding of a long series of events into
a plan determined by an art form. When we set the Persians
of Aeschylus beside the history of Herodotus, we see at once
that the tragedian in dramatizing the events of Xerxes’ inva-
sion, some of which he had personally witnessed, has also
worked them into a theological scheme, preconceived and
contributed by his own mind. Further we remark that
Herodotus, although he is operating in a different medium
and writing a saga about the glory of Athens, uses the same
theological train of thought as a groundwork, and falls in
with the dramatic conception of Aeschylus. This is a case
of the infiguration of a whole train of events by a form which
is mythical, in so far as it involves a theological theory of
sinful pride punished by jealous divinity, and is also an art
form, by which the action is shaped on dramatic principles
of construction, involving such features as climax, reversal,
catastrophe. The theory and the form together provide the
setting of the whole story—the element which makes it a
work of art. This element is so structural that it cannot
be removed without the whole fabric falling to pieces, and
at the same time so latent and pervasive, as not to be per-
ceptible until the entire work is reviewed in its large outline.
Even then it can be detected only by a critic who is on
his guard and has not the same scheme inwrought into the
substance of his own mind; for if he is himself disposed to
see the events in conformity with the scheme, then the story
will answer his expectation and look to him’ perfectly
natural.
When Thucydides speaks of ‘the mythical’, it seems
probable from the context that he is thinking chiefly of
inventive ‘embellishment’. The accretions of fabulous anec-
dote are comparatively easy to detect; they often bring in
the supernatural in the forms of vulgar superstition, and
being for this reason improbable, they require better evidence
than is forthcoming. Also, poets tend to magnify their
theme for purposes of panegyric, flattering to their audience ;
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 135
they will, for instance, represent Agamemnon’s expedition
as much larger than it probably was. It is on these grounds
that Thucydides objects to the evidence of Ionian Epos and
Herodotean story-telling He warns us against the faults
which struck his notice ; and he was on his guard against
them, even more than against the popular superstition and
dogmatic philosophy of the day, which he tacitly repudiates.
But there was one thing against which he does not warn us,
precisely because it was the framework of his own thought,
not one among the objects of reflection,—a scheme contributed,
like the Kantian categories of space and time, by the mind
itself to whatever was presented from outside. Thucydides,
like Descartes, thought he had stripped himself bare of every
preconception; but, as happened also with Descartes, his
work shows that there was after all a residuum wrought
into the substance of his mind and ineradicable because
unperceived. This residuum was his philosophy of human
nature, as it is set forth in the speech of Diodotus,—a theory
of the passions and of their working which carried with it
_ ἃ principle of dramatic construction presently to be described.
That he was not forearmed against this, he himself shows
when, in attacking Herodotus, he accuses him of trivial errors
of fact, and does not bring the one sweeping and valid in-
dictment which is perfectly relevant to his own point about
the embellishment of the Persian War. The dramatic con-
struction of Herodotus’ work, which stares a modern reader
in the face, apparently escaped the observation of his severest
ancient critic.
Another proof can be drawn from Thucydides’ own account
of a series of events which he evidently believed to be
historical, the closing incidents, namely, of Pausanias’ career.”
He shows us the Spartan king intriguing with the Persian,
1 Cf. Plut. malig. Herod. 3 (855 p) ai γὰρ ἐκβολαὶ καὶ παρατροπαὶ τῆς ἱστορίας
μάλιστα τοῖς μύθοις δίδονται καὶ ταῖς ἀρχαιολογίαις, ἔτι δὲ πρὸς τοὺς ἐπαίνους. This
refers to digressions (παρενθῆκαι), which are regarded as legitimate, when
used for the purposes named.
«4128 δὲ
186 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
and ‘bent upon the empire of Hellas’. Pausanias commits
certain treacherous acts; boasts of his power to the Great
King; ‘intends, if the king please, to marry his daughter’ ;
is so ‘uplifted’ by the king’s answer that he can no longer
live like ordinary men;? behaves like an oriental ; cannot
keep silence about his larger designs; makes himself difficult
of access, and displays a harsh temper. We know all these
symptoms well enough, and we foresee the end. Pausanias
is recalled, but the evidence against him is insufficient. He
writes a letter betraying his designs and ending with an order
for the execution of the bearer. The messenger, whose sus-
picions are aroused, opens the letter and shows it to the
authorities at Sparta. The ephors arrange that they shall
be concealed behind a partition and overhear a conversation
between the king and his treacherous messenger, who contrives
to draw from Pausanias a full and damning avowal. The end
follows in the Brazen House.
This is not the sort of thing that Thucydides objects to
as ‘mythical’; it is not ‘fabulous’, not the embroidery of
mere poetical invention; and so he reports it all in perfect
good faith. What does not strike him, and what does strike
us, is that the story is a drama, framed on familiar lines,
and ready to be transferred to the stage without the altera-
tion of a detail. The earlier part is a complete presentation
of the ‘insolent’ type of character. The climax is reached
by a perfect example of ‘ Recoil’ (περιπέτεια), where the hero
gives the fatal letter to the messenger, and thus by his own
action precipitates the catastrophe. The last scene is staged
by means of a theatrical property now so cheapened by use
as to be barely respectable—a screen!? The manner of the
hero’s death involved sacrilege, and was believed to bring -
a curse upon his executioners. Could we have better proof
1 Thue. i. 180 πολλῷ τότε μᾶλλον ἦρτο καὶ οὐκέτι ἐδύνατο ἐν τῷ καθεστῶτι
τρόπῳ βιοτεύειν.
2 It is possible that in this scene we can just trace a dramatic motive,
which is all but rationalized away,—the idea, namely, that Pausanias
cannot fall till he has committed himself by his own act, to which act he must
be tempted by the traitor. This feature of Aeschylean drama will be
discussed in the next chapter.
sc al as ee a en eg ead POT Ie te
— a a ἈΝ a ee hin a pia ect — gt EE ee JL =. oA eS ee τὸ ed — oe ς PPD eae ee amt
acd, (2 at i eee = ται τς ὡς τι a ce 71. -Ξ = IRIE Sore opine Pe Le cn ~ —_— -
ee Ἄμε. τ σον
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 187
that Thucydides was not on his guard against dramatic
construction, and was predisposed to see in the working of
events a train of ‘causes’ which tragedy had made familiar ?
When we are alive to the dramatic setting, we can infer
with some certainty the stages through which the Thucy-
didean story of Pausanias has passed. The original stratum
of fact must have been that Pausanias somehow misconducted
himself, was recalled, and put to death in circumstances
which were capable of being used by superstition and policy
against the ephors. These facts: worked loose into a legend,
shaped by imagination on the model of preconceived morality
and views of human nature. The mould is supplied by drama ;
and meanwhile fabulous invention is busy in many minds,
embroidering the tale with illustrative anecdotes! Thucy-
dides brushes away these extravagant and unattested accre-
tions, and reduces the legend again to what seemed to him
a natural series of events. It is only we who can perceive
that what he has left is the dramatized legend, not the
historical facts out of which it was worked up. It is not
wildly paradoxical to think that the historian who accepted
the legend of Pausanias might frame on the same pattern
the legend of Cleon. Not that Thucydides invented any-
thing; all that was needed was to select, half unconsciously,
those parts of his life which of themselves composed the
pattern.”
We must now come to closer quarters with the epithet
‘dramatic’. It is worth noting, at the outset, that in the
mere matter of external form, the history seems to show the
influence of tragedy,—a fact which need not surprise us, if
we remember that Thucydides had no model for historical
writing. The brief abstract of the annalist was a scaffold,
not a building; and Thucydides was an architect, not a
carpenter. Chroniclers and story-writers like Herodotus had
* Some of these anecdotes, preserved by Herodotus, will come up for
discussion later.
? Another instance is Thucydides’ narrative of Themistocles’ latter days.
This is rationalized Saga-history, influenced by drama.
138 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
chosen the lax form of epic, congenial to ramblers; but
whatever the history was to be, it was not to be like
Herodotus, and it was to draw no inspiration from the
tradition of Ionian Epos. So Thucydides turned to drama—
the only other developed form of literature then existing
which could furnish a hint for the new type to be created.
The severe outline and scrupulous limitations of this form
satisfied his instinct for self-suppression. The epic poet
stands before his audience and tells his own tale; but the
dramatist never appears at all: the ‘thing done’ (δρᾶμα)
works itself out before the spectators’ eyes; the thing said
comes straight from the lips of the actors.
Best of all, to Thucydides’ thinking, if we, of after times,
could ourselves have watched every battle as it was won and
lost, and ourselves have heard every speech of envoy and
statesman ; we should then have known all, and much more
than all, this history was designed to tell. But as this cannot
be, we are to have the next thing to it; we shall sit as in
a theatre, where the historian will erect his mimic stage and
hold the mirror up to Nature. Himself will play the part of
‘messenger’ and narrate ‘what was actually done’ with just
so much of vividness as the extent of his own information
warrants. For the rest, the actors shall tell their own tale, as
near as may be, in the very words they used, ‘as I heard them
myself, or as others reported them.’
Speeches are much more prominent in Thucydides’ history
than they are in that of Herodotus. The change seems partly
due to the later historian’s preference for setting forth motives
in the form of ‘ pretexts’, instead of giving his own opinion; —
but it is also due to his being an Athenian. Plato similarly
chose to cast his speculations in the dramatic form of dialogue,
allowing various points of view to be expressed by typical
representatives, without committing himself to any of them.
Even oratory at Athens was dramatically conceiyed; the
speech-writer did not appear as advocate in court; he wrote
speeches in character to be delivered by his clients. It has
often been remarked that the debates in Thucydides resemble
in some points of technique the debates in a Euripidean play.
a
ea
CS ed
pe ᾿ eS
“" = -
—
ee ee ἘΞ πᾶδΞ
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 139
There is moreover in one respect an intellectual kinship
between Thucydides and the dramatist who was contempora-
neously moulding the form of tragedy to the strange uses of
realism, and working away from Aeschylus as Thucydides
had to work away from Herodotus. The two men are of very
different temperaments ; but in both we seem to find the same
sombre spirit of renunciation, the same conscious resolve
nowhere to overstep the actual, but to present the naked
thoughts and actions of humanity, just as they saw them.
No matter how crude the light, how harsh the outline, so that
the thing done and the thing said shall stand out as they
were, in isolated sharpness, though
Mist is under and mist above,...
And we drift on legends for ever.
These considerations, however, touch only the question of
external form: they show why so much that we should state
directly is stated indirectly by Thucydides, in speeches. The
choice of this form is consistent with a complete absence of
plot or of dramatic construction: otherwise Thucydides could
not have chosen it at starting; for at that moment the plot
lay in the unknown future. We mention the point only
because evidently it was somewhat easier for an historian
who consciously borrowed the outward form of tragedy, to
take unconsciously the further step, and fall in with its
_inward form and principle of design. It is this which we
now wish to define more closely. The type of drama we
have detected in the history is not the Euripidean type;
it will be found, on examination, to show an analogy with
the older form existing in the tragedies of Aeschylus.
The resemblances are reducible to two main points. The
first is an analogy of technical construction, seen in the use
and correlation of different parts of the work. The second
is a community of psychological conceptions: a mode of
presenting character, and also a theory of the passions which
has a place not only in psychology, but in ethics. We shall
begin by studying the structure; but we may bear in mind
1 Eurip. Hippol. 191 ff. Mr. Gilbert Murray’s translation.
140 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
that this structure is closely involved with the psychological
theory. j
An art form, such as the Aeschylean drama, shapes itself
as a sort of crust over certain beliefs which harden into that
outline. When this has happened, the beliefs themselves—
the content of the mould—may gradually be modified and
transmuted in many ways. Finally, they may melt and
almost fade away, leaving the type, which is preserved as
a traditional form of art. This survival of an element of
technical construction may be illustrated by the instance of
‘reversal’ (περιπέτεια). A ‘reversal of fortune’ is the cardinal
point of primitive tragedy; and it originally means an over-
throw caused by an external supernatural agency—Fate or
an angry god. When the belief in such agencies fades,
‘reversal’ remains as a feature in drama; but the change of
situation is now caused by the hero’s own act. The notion
of ‘recoil’ comes in: that is to say, the fatal action itself
produces results just the opposite of those intended—a per-
fectly natural occurrence. In this way a piece of technique
outlasts the belief which gave rise to it.
The Aeschylean drama appears to us to have gone through
a process of this kind. The structure, as we find it, seems
to imply an original content of beliefs in some respects more
primitive than those explicitly held by Aeschylus himself, but
surviving in his mind with sufficient strength to influence his
work. Similarly, as we hope to show, in transmission from
Aeschylus to Thucydides, the dramatic type has again out-
lasted much of the belief which informed it in the Aeschylean
stage. It is the artistic structure which is permanent; the
content changes with the advance of thought. Hence, if we
point to Aeschylean technique in Thucydides, we are not
necessarily attributing to him the creed of Aeschylus.
We must first attempt to describe the structure of Aeschy-
lean tragedy.t In order to understand it we must try to
1 The description which follows is based on an analysis of the impression
made on the writer by an Aeschylean tragedy. It is of course not sus-
MYTHISTORIA AND THE ῬΒΑΜΑ 147
imagine a yet more primitive stage in the development of the
drama than any represented in extant Greek literature, a
stage which the earliest of Aeschylus’ plays has already left
Some way behind. A glance at the development of modern
drama may help us.
Certain features which survived in Greek tragedy suggest
that we should look back to a type somewhat resembling
the mediaeval mystery and some of the earliest modern
dramas, such as Everyman, which are like the mystery in
being religious performances and in the element of allegorical
abstraction. Their effect, due in part to each of these
features, may be described as symbolic. Everyman is a
sermon made visible. To watch it is like watching the
pastime called ‘living chess’, in which the pieces are men
and women, but the man who is dressed like a bishop is
nothing more than a chessman who happens to be automatic.
He has not the episcopal character; his dress is a disguise
with nothing behind it; his words, if he spoke, would be
the speech of a parrot. And so it is with Everyman. The
persons are not persons at all, but personae, masks, symbols,
the vehicles of abstract ideas. They do not exist, and could
not be conceived as existing, in real space and time. They
have no human characters, no inward motives, no life of
their own. Everyman, as his name is meant to show, is
in fact not a man, but Man, the universal.
The main development of modern drama shows, in one
of its aspects, the process by which this symbolic method
gives way to the realistic. The process consists in the gradual
filling in of the human being behind the mask, till the
humanity is sufficiently concrete and vital to burst the shell
and step forth in solid flesh and blood. The symbol comes
to contain a type of character; the type is particularized
into a unique individual. The creature now has an inde-
pendent status and behaviour of its own. Every gesture
and every word must be such as would be used by an
ceptible of demonstration ; the only test is the reader’s own impression.
The description is not exhaustive, but is designed only to bring out a
neglected aspect.
142 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
ordinary human being with the given character in the given
situation. Once created, the personality is an original centre ;
it cannot be made to do what we please or to utter our
thoughts. In some such terms as these a modern novelist
or playwright will speak of his characters; and it is thus
that they appear to us.
Now we can observe a certain intermediate stage in which
these two methods, the symbolic and the realistic, are
balanced in antagonism, so as to produce a curious effect of
tension and incoherency. A good instance is Marlowe’s
Faustus. Faustus himself occupies the eentral plane; he
is a living man, but still imprisoned in a symbolical type.
The intrusion of humanity has gone far enough to disturb
the abstract effect, and it reacts on some of the persons in
the play who ought to be purely symbolic. Lucifer, it is
true, is kept apart and remains non-human; but Mephis-
tophilis oscillates in our imagination between the ideal and
reality, with a distressing result. Again, on a lower level
than Faustus there is yet another grade of persons, in contrast
with whom he shows up as heroic and ideal. These are the
vintner, the horse-courser, and other pieces of common clay
picked out of a London alley; they belong to a different
world, and we feel that they could no more communicate
with the tragic characters than men can talk with angels.1
Thus there are in this one play four sets or orders of persons:
(1) the purely abstract and symbolic, such as Lucifer, who
only appears on an upper stage at certain moments, and
takes no part in the action; (2) the intermediate, for instance
Mephistophilis, who ought to be symbolic, but treads the
lower stage, a cowled enigma,” horrible because at moments
he ceases to be symbolic without becoming human; (8) the
1 We hope it is true that Marlowe did not write the comic scenes; but we
are only concerned with the effect of the play as it stands.
2 In the Elizabethan Stage Society’s representation Mephistophilis is
cowled and his face is never seen. The effect is indescribably horrible. At
certain moments in Greek Tragedy the mask must have produced a some-
what similar effect, though the familiarity of the convention would make it
much less in degree. The longing to see the actor’s face, when his words
are enigmatic, is almost enough to drive a modern spectator insane.
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MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 143
heroic or tragic: Faustus, who is an ideal half realized,
hanging together on its own plane; (4) the real: common
mortals who would attract no attention in Fleet Street.
The Greek drama, although in the detail of historical
development it started at a different point from the modern,
and followed another course, seems, nevertheless, to pass
through a phase analogous to that which we have just de-
scribed. The original substance of the drama was the choral
lyric; the actors (as they afterwards became) began as an
excrescence. At a certain stage the actors are assimilated
to the chorus and move in the same atmosphere. Thus in
the earliest play of Aeschylus, the Suppliants, we find that
the chorus of Danaids are actually the heroines of the action,
which centres round them, so that they are not merely on
the same plane with the actors, but themselves a complex
actor, and the effect is simple, coherent, and uniform. In
the Prometheus, again, the chorus belong to the same ideal
world as the Titan hero, a world in which abstract symbols
like Mastery and Violence can move without showing as
unreal against the other persons.'. The whole drama is on
the symbolic plane, the life in it being due to anthropo-
morphic imagination, not to the intrusion of realism.
But in the latest plays of Aeschylus, the beginning of
a change is clearly marked: the actors are becoming human,
while the lyric is rising above them, or else remains sus-
pended in a rarer atmosphere from which they are sinking.
This is a natural stage in the passage from pure symbolism
to realism. The advance shows itself externally in the
drifting apart of the lyrical element from the dialogue,—
a separation which, of course, widens in the later tragedians,
till the choral ode, though still an indispensable and very
beautiful feature, becomes in point of construction little more
than an interlude, which relieves the concentrated intensity
of the action. This change is commonly taken as a pheno-
menon which needs no explanation; but really it is caused
1 Contrast the utter unreality of Iris and Lyssa in the Hercules Furens.
They are tolerable only when regarded as dream-phantoms,
144, THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
inevitably by the coming to life of the persons in the drama.
In proportion as these become more real, the lyric becomes
more ideal and further removed from the action.
In the stage observable in Aeschylus’ latest plays, the
choral part is still dramatic, and of equal importance with
the dialogue. The two elements are evenly balanced; but
at the same time they have begun to occupy different worlds,
so that we are sensible of the transition from one to the
other. The result is a curious duplication of the drama which
now has two aspects, the one universal and timeless, the other
particular and temporal.
The nature of this phenomenon will, we hope, become clear,
if we take as an illustration the Agamemnon. In this play,
the visible presentation shows how the conqueror of Troy
came home and was murdered by the queen. The events
that go forward on the stage are particular events, located at
a point of legendary time? and of real space. The characters are
certain individuals, legendary or historic—there is to Aeschylus
no difference here—who lived at that moment and trod that
spot of earth. But in the choral odes the action is lifted out
of time and place on to the plane of the universal. When the
stage is clear and the visible presentation is for the time
suspended, then, above and beyond the transient spectacle of
a few suffering mortals caught, just there and then, in the net
of crime, loom up in majestic distance and awful outline the
truths established, more unchangeably than the mountains,
in the eternal counsels of Zeus. The pulse of momentary
passion dies down; the clash and conflict of human wills,
which just now had held us in breathless concentration, sink
and dwindle to the scale of a puppet-show ; while the enduring
song of Destiny unrolls the theme of blood-haunted Insolence
lured by insistent Temptation into the toils of Doom. As
1 By legendary time we mean the time occupied by events which have
worked so loose from real time that you can only date them within a cen-
tury or so, and do not think of dating them at all, till challenged. They
are near the stage in which the only date is ‘ once-upon-a-time’, the verge
of mythical time which has no dates at all.
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 145
though on a higher stage, uncurtained in the choral part,
another company of actors concurrently plays out a more
majestic and symbolic drama. On this invisible scene walk
the figures of Hybris and Peitho, of Nemesis and Ate—not
the bloodless abstractions of later allegory, but still clothed
in the glowing lineaments of supernatural reality. The
curtain lifts for a timeless moment on the spectacle of human
life in an aspect known to the all-seeing eyes of Zeus; and
when it drops again, we turn back to the mortal tragedy of
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, enlightened, purified, uplifted,
calm.?
Thus we find in Aeschylus something analogous to the
hierarchy of persons we noted in Faustus; although, for
various reasons, there is not the same crude effect of
incoherency and tension. The supernatural characters—
Zeus, supreme above all, and the demonic figures? of Hybris,
Nemesis, Ate, and the rest, are not seen, as Lucifer is seen on
the upper stage of the Elizabethan theatre, but remain in the
spiritual world to which lyrical emotion exalts the inward
eye—the world where metaphor (as we call it) is the very
stuff of reality, where Cassandra quickens and breathes, and
whence she strays among mortal men like a fallen spirit,
sweet-voiced, mad, and broken-winged. Hence the effect
is far more awful and solemn than the actual apparition of
Lucifer; and when Apollo and Athene and the spirits of
vengeance take human shape in the Hwmenides, a spell is
broken, a veil rent, an impression shattered, for which not
the most splendid symphony of poetical language can atone.
Here, however, we would confine our attention to the
Agamemnon. At the lower end of the scale we find a further
advance of realism in some minor characters, the watchman
and the herald; the nurse in the Choephori is of the same
order. ‘These are allowed some wonderful touches of common
humanity, below the heroic level; for they are not directly
1 The metaphor of the invisible upper stage which the writer has used
in describing his impression will be shown later to have justification in
ancient pictorial art.
? This expression will be justified later.
L
146 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
concerned in the central action, and a little irrelevant
naturalism does no harm, if it is not carried far. But they
are only just below the heroic standard, and are certainly not
the sort of people you would have met in a walk to the
Piraeus.
Thus, the two planes in the Agamemnon are divided by
an interval less wide and less abrupt than the divisions in
Faustus. In psychological conception also the union is
very close, since the heroic characters are still so abstract
and symbolic that they are barely distinguishable from the
pure abstractions of the lyrical world. Agamemnon, for in-
stance, is simply Hybris typified in a legendary person. He
is a hero flown with ‘insolence’ (the pride and elation of
victory), and that is all that can be said of him. He is not,
like a character in Ibsen, a complete human being with
a complex personality,—a centre from which relations radiate
to innumerable points of contact in a universe of indifferent
fact. He has not a continuous history: nothing has ever
happened to him except the conquest of Troy and the sacrifice
of Iphigenia; nothing ever could happen to him except
Pride’s fall and the stroke of the axe. As we see him, he
is not a man, but a single state of mind, which has never
been preceded by other states of mind (except one, at the
sacrifice in Aulis), but is isolated, without context, margin,
or atmosphere. Every word he says, in so far as he speaks
for himself and not for the poet, comes straight out of that
state of mind and expresses some phase of it. He has a
definite relation to Cassandra, a definite relation to Clytem-
nestra; but no relation to anything else. If he can be said
to have a character at all, it consists solely of certain defects
which make him liable to Insolence; if he has any circwm-
stances, they are only those which prompt him to his besetting
passion.
Now it is in some such way as this that Thucydides
presents his principal characters. Cleon is a good instance.
He is allowed no individuality, no past history, no atmo-
sphere, no irrelevant relations. He enters the story abruptly
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 147
from nowhere. A single phrase fixes his type, as though
on a play-bill: ‘Cleon, the most violent of the citizens and
first in the people’s confidence’; that is all we know of him.
There follows a speech in which the type reveals itself in
a state of mind,—Violence in its several phases. Then he
vanishes, to reappear, before Sphacteria, as Violence with one
of its aspects (‘covetousness’) emphasized, and a sudden
passion of ambitious self-confidence (ἐλπίς) added thereto.
Finally, we see him wrecked by this passion at Amphipolis.
Pericles is introduced in the same way, with a single epithet :
‘Pericles, the son of Xanthippos, a man at that time first
among the Athenians, and most powerful (δυνατώτατος) in
action and in speech. His characteristic quality is wise
foresight (yréun—the opening word of his first speech?) ; and
he stands also, in the Funeral Oration, for the glory (τιμή)
of Athens. Alcibiades we shall study later. In every case
the principal characters are nearly as far removed from
realism, nearly as abstract and impersonal as the heroie
characters in Aeschylus. Thucydides, in fact, learnt his
psychology from the drama, just as we moderns (whether
historians or not) learn ours, not by direct observation, but
from the drama and the novel.
But we can carry the analogy further ; it extends to minor
points of Aeschylean technical construction, which follow
naturally upon the drifting apart of lyric and dialogue. In
the Agamemnon we note that the separation of the two
planes has gone far enough to make it impossible for the
members of the chorus to interfere with the action at its
crisis. The elders, when they hear the death-cry, cannot
enter the palace; not because the door is locked, nor yet
because they are feeble old men. Rather they are old men
because an impassable barrier of convention is forming
between chorus and actors, and their age gives colour to
their powerlessness. The need of a separate stage for the
actors, though tradition may cling to the old orchestra, is
already felt. The poet is half aware of the imaginative
* Thue. i. 139, 2 Thue. i. 140.
L 2
148 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
separation, and he bridges it by links of two kinds—formal
links of technical device, and internal connexions of a psycho-
logical sort, which will occupy us in the next chapter.
The formal links are provided by what is called ‘tragic
irony’. The dialogue is so contrived that, instructed by the
lyric, we can catch in it allusions to grander themes than any
of which the speakers are conscious, and follow the action
with eyes opened to a universal significance, hidden from
the agents themselves. Tragic irony, however, is not a
deliberately invented artifice; it arises of itself in the
advance from the purely symbolic stage of drama. In that
earliest stage the whole dialogue might be called ‘ironical’,
in the sense that it is the poet’s message to the audience, not
the expression of the persons’ characters, for they have none.
But it becomes ironical in the strict sense only when the
persons begin to have elementary characters and minds, and
so to be conscious of one meaning of their words, which is
not the whole meaning or the most important. The effect
is now no longer merely symbolic, but hypnotic ; the speaker
on the stage is like a somnambulist—alive, but controlled
and occupied by an external personality, the playwright.
Tragic irony is used by Aeschylus with great freedom ;
because his persons are still so near to the symbolic, they
have so little character and psychology of their own, that
they do not mind serving as mouthpieces. Here and there
we find instances of perfect irony, where the speaker’s words
bear both constructions equally well, and are at once the
natural expression of the appropriate state of mind and also
a message from the poet to the spectator, applying one of the
lyrical themes. This is the only sort of irony admitted by
Sophocles, whose characters have become so human that they
will not speak merely for another. In Aeschylus, however,
there are whole speeches which are hypnotic, and hardly in
character at all. The effect is so unfamiliar to readers
schooled in realism that it is often missed.
The first two speeches of Clytemnestra, for instance, seem
to be of this kind; notably, the beacon speech. If we try
to interpret this as a realistic revelation of Clytemnestra’s
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 149
character and thoughts, we shall not find that it helps us
to much insight, because its main function has nothing to
do with her character. The poet is speaking through her,
and the thoughts are his. The early part of the play, down
to the entrance of Agamemnon, is an overture, in which
Aeschylus musters and marshals the abstract themes which
are to be the framework of the trilogy. One of them is
expressed in the beacon speech; and it is this. The fire
of Idaean Zeus has fallen upon Troy, ‘neither before its
season nor striking as an idle glancing shaft beyond the
stars’; but that same fire, the symbol of Justice, speeds
now to ‘strike the roof of the Atreidae’. From mountain
top it leaps and hastens across the sea to mountain top;
and like the torch passed from hand to hand in the race,
it is itself a runner and the only one which ‘running first
and last reaches the goal’ This description of the symbolic
fire conducted along the beacon chain is given to Clytemnestra
because it can be given to no one else, not because it is the
best means of illustrating her psychology. The speech,
by the way, also exhibits another artifice employed to
link the two planes—the allusive verbal echo between
dialogue and lyric. The symbol of the fire, in a slightly
varied form, recurs at the beginning of the next chorus,
and the keyword (σκήπτειν») is reiterated to mark the
correspondence.
Now the speeches-in-Thucydides can_be roughly classed
under four heads. There are, first, a few realistic speeches
by minor characters ; for instance, the short, sharp utterance
of the Spartan ephor,’? which has the trick of the laconic
1 The notion that it is the same fire which passes from beacon to beacon
is subtly conveyed throughout. Note especially the words: πέμπειν and its
derivatives, repeated many times (‘ conduct’, ‘send on its way’) ; πορευτοῦ
λαμπάδος 299; φῶς μολόν 305; σθένουσα λαμπὰς ὑπερθοροῦσα 308, and so on.
Towards the end comes thrice the ominous word σκήπτειν : ἔσκηψεν 314;
ἔσκηψεν 320; Kamer’ ᾿Ατρειδῶν és τόδε σκήπτει στέγος | φάος τόδ᾽ οὐκ ἄπαππον
Ἰδαίου πυρός 822 ; echoed in the following chorus: ὅπως ἂν | μήτε πρὸ καιροῦ
μήθ᾽ ὑπὲρ ἄστρων | βέλος ἠλίθιον σκήψειεν. | Διός πλαγὰν ἔχουσιν εἰπεῖν, #.T.A.
2 Thue. i. 86 (Sthenelaidas).
150 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
practical man. Next, there are idealistic speeches, designed
as direct expressions of character or of national ideals;
the Funeral Oration will serve as an example. These shade
off, through a class in which sketches of national character
are introduced indirectly, with some strain upon dramatic
probability,! into a class where irony is openly employed
in the tragic manner. Cleon’s Mytilenean speech, for in-
stance, is nearly all of the character-revealing sort, but it
contains a passage about the evil results of exceptional
prosperity which is without any true application to the
position of Lesbos or to the history of the revolt. It runs
as follows *:
‘ Conceiving a reckless confidence in the future, and hopes
that outran their strength though they fell short of their
desires, they went to war; and they thought fit to prefer
might to right, for where they thought they saw a chance
of success, they set upon us when we were doing them no
wrong. It is always so: when exceptional prosperity comes
sudden and unexpected to a city, it turns to insolence: and,
in general, good fortune is safer for mankind when it answers
to calculation than when it surpasses expectation, and one
might almost say that men find it easier to drive away
adversity than to preserve prosperity. We were wrong
from the first. We ought never to have put the Mytileneans
above the rest by exceptional treatment; then their insolence
would not have come to this height. It is a general rule
that human nature despises flattery, and respects unyielding
strength.’
These words are patently inapplicable to the revolted
island, whose exceptional position was notoriously a survival
of the status originally enjoyed by every one of the allies,
but now forfeited by all but a few; to speak of it as a
sudden access of prosperity is simply meaningless. We
are driven to see in the passage a use of tragic irony ; Thucy-
dides puts into Cleon’s mouth the very moral which his
own career is to illustrate. The device is unskilfully em-
1 e, g. the Corinthians’ sketch of the Athenian character, i. 70.
2 iii. 89. 3.
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 151
ployed, since dramatic probability is too completely sacrificed.
Sophocles would not have passed these sentences, which on
the speaker’s lips have not even a plausible meaning; but
Aeschylus would have passed them, and after all Thucydides
was only an amateur tragedian.
A fourth use of speeches is illustrated by the Spartan
envoys’ homily before Sphacteria. This is still further re-
moved from realism, and resembles the beacon speech, which
is but one degree below the lyric plane. The historian,
reluctant to break silence in his own person, sets forth
the theme and framework of his drama in the form of a
solemn warning. He has already described the Athenians
at Pylos as ‘ wishing to follow up their present good fortune
to the furthest point’.1 This is a dangerous frame of mind,
against which Themistocles had warned the Athenians after
Salamis, when they wished to press forward and destroy
the Persians’ bridges over the Hellespont.? ‘I have often,’
says Themistocles, ‘myself witnessed occasions, and I have
heard of many from others, where men who had _ been
conquered by an enemy, having been driven quite to des-
peration, have renewed the fight and retrieved their former
disasters. We have now had the great good luck (εὕρημα
εὑρήκαμεν) to save both ourselves and all Greece by the
repulse of this vast cloud of men; let us then be content
and not press them too hard, now that they have begun
to fly. Be sure that we have not done this by our own
might. It is the work of gods and heroes, who were jealous
that one man should be king at once of Europe and Asia... .
At present all is well with us—let us then abide in Greece,
and look to ourselves and to our families.’
The warning of the Spartan envoys is conceived in the same
spirit; but it is unheeded and unanswered. No answer,
indeed, was possible; the speech is not an argument, but
a prophecy. A reply from Cleon, a statement of the war
party’s policy, such as modern critics desiderate, would be as
inappropriate as a reply from Clytemnestra to the Second
1 iv. 14. 8 βουλόμενοι τῇ παρούσῃ τύχῃ ws ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐπεξελθεῖν.
3 Herod. viii. 109 Rawlinson trans.
152 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Chorus in the Agamemnon. The stage is clear while this
prophecy, addressed not to the actors but to the spectators,
passes unheard by those who, could they have heard it, might
have been saved.
One further point of formal resemblance between Aeschylus
and Thucydides is the allusive echoing of significant phrases,
which sustain the moral motive dominant in the plot. We
have seen an instance of this device in the repetition of the
words ‘ coveting more’ (πλέονος ὀρέγεσθαι), which reappear at
critical moments after the use of them in the envoys’ speech ;
and we shall note other examples later. This completes the
analogy with Aeschylean form, so far as concerns external
peculiarities.
Before returning to Thucydides’ narrative, however, we
have yet to analyse a somewhat complex feature of Aeschylean
psychology, which is connected with the internal relations
between the two phases of the drama—the universal, or
supernatural, and the particular, or human. We shall then
be in a position to consider whether some traces of this
psychology are not to be seen in Thucydides’ treatment of
certain characters. The topic will need a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER IX
PEITHO
In the last two chapters we have studied the little drama of
Cleon’s exaltation and fall, and noted some analogies of treat-
ment which point to Aeschylean influence. Thucydides,
however, is not primarily interested in Cleon, nor does he
allow him to hold the stage. Cleon’s personal drama works
itself out on its own lines, but the thread of it crops up
only at those points where it crosses the woof of a larger
web and contributes a dark stain to its pattern. It is with
the tracing of this pattern that we shall henceforth be
occupied ; and though it spreads backward and forward some
way beyond the limits of Cleon’s story, it will be convenient
to start from the point we have reached. The treatment
of the Pylos incident is stili not completely explained, for
that episode is not a part of Cleon’s story, but belongs to the
larger plot and marks a critical stage in its development.
The heroine, we need hardly say, is Athens herself, whose
character is set in the focus of so many lights, and whose
tragic destiny takes a larger sweep, ‘in proportion as her
stake is the greatest of all—freedom or empire.’ Athens, we
shall come to see, has a character of her own and a psycho-
logical history, passing through well-marked phases, which
are determined partly by this character, and partly by the
intervention of external or internal forces. One of these
forces is embodied in Cleon; and in order to make out how
the mode of its operation is conceived, we must again look
for assistance from Aeschylus.
From the standpoint of form, we have attempted to describe
the duplication of the drama discernible in the Agamemnon.
There are, a8 it were, two parallel trains of action: the
154 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
human action visibly presented on the stage, and an abstract,
universal counterpart of it, revealed in the lyric. The persons
on this abstract plane are what we commonly (and somewhat
misleadingly) call personifications, such as Hybris, Peitho,
Nemesis, Ate. They are universals, not particular concrete
instances, like this or that legendary man or woman in
whom they are embodied. We might change the instances
and leave the abstract plot unaffected ; Hybris runs the same
course, whether it be impersonated in Agamemnon or in
Xerxes.
And, further, that course is ¢nevitable; its law is written
unalterably, whatever be the power that legislates—Destiny,
or Justice, or the Will of Zeus. We see it illustrated in the
tale of Troy or in the tale of Thebes: Sin leads through Sin
to punishment. The taint steals down the lineage of a house
once smitten with God’s curse; sorrow is heaped on sorrow ;
till the last light is smothered in the dust of death.!' In this
abstract procession the first figure is linked to the last with
iron bands.
But if that be so, wherein lies the guilt of the human
agents in any particular case? Are not the unseen powers
responsible (αἰτίαι), and may not the sinner cast his burden
on Necessity? Thus we reach the problem of free will on
the lower, human plane,—a moral problem, corresponding to
the artistic problem which arises when the two elements in
the drama begin to drift apart. The characters must not
seem to be the blind puppets of superhuman powers; the
dice of God must not be too heavily loaded. If, when seen
from above, Guilt appears to gravitate by unalterable necessity
to its punishment; seen from the level, the guilty man must
choose the act that precipitates his unknown fate. Is there
not here a contradiction fatal at once to the moral doctrine
and to the aesthetic effect ?
The solution, if there be one, must be psychological; we
require a theory of human motives which will allow of our
conceiving them, simultaneously, both as supernatural causes
coming from without, and also as integral parts in the working
1 Soph. Ant. 593.
PEITHO 155
of the agent’s mind. Modern psychology is, of course, not equal
to the task of this reconciliation. If we conceive of every
mental state as completely determined in a continuous series
by preceding states and by natural environment, the problem
of free will arises in relation to causal law and lies wholly
within the normal sphere, the intervention of supernatural
causes being left out of account.
Aeschylus, however, was not hampered by determinism;
and he was helped by some psychological conceptions, surviving
from the mythical order of thought, which have so completely
dropped out of our scheme of things that it is easy for us
to misinterpret, or to overlook, them in the ancient writers.
They are, nevertheless, essential to Aeschylus’ scheme, and we
shall find the after-working of them in Thucydides. We
hope to carry the analysis as far as it can safely go; but it
must be remembered that we are dealing with a poet and
theologian, not with a psychologist, and moving in a region
of thought where one phase melts into another at no rigidly
definable point.
The problem arises at every link in the chain of terrible
deeds. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, commit, each of
them, an act which is both the execution of divine justice
and also a sin. Modern ethics will of course admit that an
action may be both right and wrong. It will be externally
right if it produces more good than any possible alternative ;
but the same action may be also internally wrong, if the
agent intends to do harm and only does good by accident.
Thus a Christian will hold that Judas’ betrayal of his Master
was one of the causes of the Redemption; but Judas will
be damned for it to the nethermost circle. Aeschylus, how-
ever, had not reached this modern way of conceiving a right
action done from a wrong motive; the psychology involved
is less distinct and partly mythical.
At the beginning of the Agamemnon, the balance of right
and wrong stands as follows. Agamemnon has committed
two of these ambiguous acts. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was
enjoined by the chartered representative of Heaven, Calchas,
156 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
the seer; yet it was a deed of horror, for it was an offence
against nature, symbolized by Artemis, the patroness of young
creatures. So too the conquest of Troy was the stroke of
Zeus; but the same avenging fire will fall on the house
of the conqueror, who has brought the innocent with the
guilty to suffering which only the guilty had deserved. Paris
may have merited death; but what of Cassandra ?
In regard to the second of the two acts the conqueror
of Troy has gone beyond his divine mandate; the excess
and spirit of his vengeance have carried to his account with
Justice an adverse balance. What concerns us is the psycho-
logical process by which this has occurred ; and to understand
it we must refer to Clytemnestra’s second speech, where,
as in the former speech about the beacons, she is setting
forth, not her own character, but an indispensable moment
in Aeschylus’ moral theme.
As if endowed with second sight, she bodes the indiseri-
minate slaughter of young and old among the Trojans in the
captured city. The conquerors, released from the weary disci+
pline of a siege, and the nights of restless watching under
the cold dews, rove uncontrolled through Troy and lodge
themselves at hazard in her plundered palaces. The sentence
ends with a magnificent stroke of irony”: ‘The unlucky
wretches will sleep all night long and keep no watch!’
The words sound sympathetic until we catch the second
meaning which lies under them. A man is ‘unlucky’
(δυσδαίμων) when an evil spirit is haunting near him; his
peril is the greater if he is not on the watch (ἀφύλακτος).
And the name of the spirit follows almost immediately: Los,
the spirit of lust after forbidden rapine, may fall upon the
1 Agam. 880 ff.
2 Agam. 348 τῶν ὑπαιθρίων πάγων
δρόσων τ᾽ ἀπαλλαγέντες ὡς δυσδαίμονες
ἀφύλακτον εὑδήσουσι πᾶσαν εὐφρόνην.
It is questionable how these lines should be punctuated and construed ;
but any interpretation preserves the ironic ambiguity. The correction ὡς δ᾽
εὐδαίμονες (‘and how blest! will sleep’ &c.) merely makes evdaiywv the ironical
equivalent of δυσδαίμων.
PEITHO 157
host, unsentinelled against this invisible assailant.!_ And when
Clytemnestra ends by saying that she utters these bodings
‘as a woman’ 32 (or ‘as a wife’), we know that she is thinking
of Chryseis and the poet is thinking of Cassandra.
The Greeks believed that in the hour of sudden triumph,
when ‘Fortune’, as Diodotus says, ‘ presents herself unex-
pectedly at a man’s side,’ the conqueror is in a perilous
condition ; for in the flush and tumult of his feelings reason
is clouded and caution laid asleep. Then comes Temptation,
and it is especially with the manner in which it comes
that we are now concerned ; since it is at this point that
we are apt to miss the psychological conceptions, unfamiliar
to us, which govern Aeschylus’ design and will reappear, in
somewhat altered form, in Thucydides.
Internally, temptation takes the form of a violent passion,
uncontrollable if its victim is unguarded and secure. The
conquerors of Troy are beset by Eros, the spirit of rapine ;
but this passion is not conceived as a natural state of mind
determined by a previous state—the effect of a normal cause ;
it is a spirit (δαίμων) which haunts, swoops down, and takes
possession of the soul, when reason slumbers and keeps no
watch. Eros is constantly spoken of by the Greeks as a
disease (νόσος) ; but that word had not the associations
merely of a wasting and painful bodily corruption. Disease
was caused by invading spirits, those malignant Keres of
whom Age and Death are the chief, and who seize as much
upon the soul as upon the body. Abnormal states of mind
—the intoxication of wine, religious enthusiasm, nympholepsy,
poetic inspiration, an army’s panic fear, the raving of the
1 Ἔρως δὲ μή τις πρότερον ἐμπίπτῃ στρατῷ
πορθεῖν ἃ μὴ χρὴ κέρδεσιν νικωμένου-.
Eros, as the lust of blood, is alluded to in Agamemnon’s first speech where
he compares the Trojan horse to a ravening lion that has leapt over the
city’s wall and is glutted with the royal blood that it has licked. Agam. 818
ὑπερθορὼν δὲ πύργον ὠμηστὴς λέων
ἄδην ἔλειξεν αἵματος τυραννικοῦ . .
Cf. 1479 Ἔρως αἱματολοιχός ; Sept. 679 ὠμοδακὴς Ἵμερος.
2 360 τοιαῦτά τοι γυναικὸς ἐξ ἐμοῦ κλύεις,
158 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
prophet, the madness of the lover—all these were phenomena
of the same order, all instances of spiritual occupation. This
to the Greeks was a very familiar idea. The entering of
a god or spirit into a man’s body, so that he becomes ἔνθεος,
was the central doctrine of the orgiastic cults. Official re-
ligion recognized it in the oracular possession of the Pythian
priestess. Medical practice recommended the wild music
of the Corybant’s timbrel and drum as a purge to exorcize
the fiends of madness.1_ Plato, in his study of. Peitho and
Eros (the Phaedrwus), avails himself in all earnestness of
the idea of indwelling divinity as the most natural mode
of conceiving the relation between the all-pervading Form
of Beauty and the world which it penetrates and informs
with its splendour. His ‘participation’ (μέθεξις) is first
conceived as a mystical relation, the participation of the
mortal in the immortal, long before it withers up and be-
comes a logical relation of subject to predicate; the neo-
platonist only restores its original significance. Even in
Aristotle the theory of tragedy looks back to the belief
that the passions, which art is to purge, are spirits of madness
to be exorcized by wild music and the frantic rhythm of
the dance. They are, in Diodotus’ words, ‘irremediable
and mastering powers’, which ‘possess’ the various con-
ditions of human life, and lead men on into danger’.
In theological theory the violent passions are conceived as
forms of delusion sent by God upon the sinner to drive him
to his punishment. This aspect of them we shall study later
at some length; here it remains to note that the idea of
spiritual possession provides the psychological link we needed
1 Arist. Vesp. 119. See the evidence collected in Susemihl and Hicks,
Politics of Aristotle i-v. p. 644 (note on κάθαρσι5).
2 Thue. iii. 45 ai ἄλλαι ξυντυχίαι ὀργῇ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ὡς ἑκάστη τις κατέχεται
ὑπ᾽ ἀνηκέστου τινὸς κρείσσονος ἐξάγουσιν ἐς τοὺς κινδύνους, κατέχεσθαι is of course
regularly used of spiritual occupation of all kinds. ἀνηκέστου recalls Aesch.
Agam. 384 βιᾶται & ἃ τάλαινα Πειθώ, | πρόβουλου παῖς dpepros “Aras: | ἄκος δὲ
πᾶν μάταιον. κρείσσων is associated with the ‘daemons’, who were called
‘the stronger ones’, of xpeiacoves, Plato, Euthyd. 291.4 μή τις τῶν κρειττόνων
παρὼν αὐτὰ ἐφθέγξατο; Aelian, V. H. iv. 17 Pythagoras called the noise in his
ears φωνὴ τῶν κρειττόνων.
PEITHO 159°
between the abstract and symbolic series in which Hybris,
Koros, Eros, hold a place, and the level of human drama,
where these passions become literally embodied in individual
men and women. Eros, for instance, is in its higher aspect
a supernatural ‘cause’, an agency from God, ministering
to the divine purpose. But when Eros takes possession
of me, it is also my passion, an internal spring of action;
and I become responsible (αἴτιος) for the results that come
of it.
A character in Aeschylus, as we remarked above, should be
thought of, at any given moment, as a single state of mind,
with no background or margin of individual personality. It
has neither a past nor a future, except a few other states
which come in a settled order, but are (as it were) a dis-
continuous series, with gaps of any length between the terms.
The masked and muffled figures posed on the stage contain
no more concrete humanity than this. Agamemnon, as we
see him, is Insolence, possessed at the moment by Eros, who
is the inward tempter sent to blind him and drive him to
his fall. This Eros is outwardly symbolized, not indeed in
Cassandra, but in Agamemnon’s relation towards her—a one-
sided relation which (as it were) falls short of her, leaving
her white spirit wounded but unstained.
Now let us turn to Clytemnestra; for in her we shall see
Temptation besetting the king in its other, external, shape.
The earlier scenes, down to the entrance of Agamemnon, are
an overture, of which the keynote is Waiteng;—the note
which is struck in the opening words of the sentinel, tired of
his yearlong watch upon the constellations, as they rise and
set in the slow procession of the seasons. We watch the
mustering of solemn storm-clouds, and feel the increasing
tension of expectancy before the first blinding flash.
Clytemnestra is an enigma; her words are spoken from the
lips, and reveal nothing. She is like a compressed spring,
a nameless undetermined force, charged, and awaiting the
touch that will release it. Then, in the scene with Agamemnon,
she becomes animate in a peculiar way: a spirit has entered
160 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
her, and the name of it is Temptation or Delusion, Peitho or
Apaté?.
Dr. Headlam? has interpreted this famous scene, in which
the proud and masterful princess, at the death-grip now with
the opposing principle of Agamemnon’s lordship, lures and
flatters him to the committal act of pride, which calls down
his doom. Temptation in the inward form of passion has
already mastered him; now, from outside, as incarnate in
another person, she spreads the final snare. Clytemnestra
too is ministerial; she is sent by God to draw him to the
meeting ways where a false step is perdition. Another angel
of Justice has left the ranks of that invisible company and
taken shape in this woman.
Clytemnestra, however, is not, like Hamlet, the conscious
scourge and minister of Heaven, fulfilling an explicit command.
In herself she is the woman with the man’s courage and brain,
masterful and ambitious *; and she stands as a Queen defending
her native right of sovereignty against her consort and the
veiled captive at his side. As between wife and husband, her
account with Agamemnon is exactly balanced: he has sinned,
through Eros, against divine Justice and against her; but her
relation with Aegisthus was an equal sin, and she has forfeited
her claim.® Hence her vengeance on Agamemnon, in so far
1 The effect is prepared for in her previous (third) speech to the herald
(587 ff), and symbolically illustrated by the lion-cub simile in the following
chorus (717).
2 Cambridge Praelections (1906), p. 126. I owe this tragic conception of
Peitho, and the interpretation of the scene, to Dr. Headlam.
3 Agam. 1871 KA. πολλῶν πάροιθεν καιρίως εἰρημένων
τἀναντί᾽ εἰπεῖν οὐκ ἐπαισχυνθήσομαι.
πῶς γάρ τις ἐχθρὸς ἐχθρὰ πορσύνων, φίλοις
δοκοῦσιν εἶναι, πημονῆς ἀρκύστατ᾽ ἂν
φράξειεν ὕψος κρεῖσσον ἐκπηδήματος ;
Schol. ad loc. ὁ φιλικῶς ὑπερχόμενός τινα καὶ ἀπατῆσαι βουλόμενος εἰς ἄφυκτον
φραγμὸν ἐμπλέκει αὐτὸν τῆς ᾿Απάτης.
* Agam. 10 ὧδε γὰρ κρατεῖ γυναικὸς ἀνδρόβουλον ἐλπίζον Kéap,—a fine example
of Aeschylus’ power of describing a character in five words.
5 Clytemnestra is queen in her own right in a country originally matri-
archal; Agamemnon is merely her consort. Under a gynaecocratic system
the husband-consort’s sin would be thought to be as outrageous as the wife’s
is under the patriarchal system recognized by the foreigner Agamemnon
PEITHO 161
as it is conjugal, or rather queenly, is unjust; much more is
the murder of Cassandra.t With regard to Iphigeneia, her
daughter, she has justice on her side. Revenge upon this
score had been a long-harboured motive; and if, at the
moment of the crime, it had been the dominant and real
force in her, the sin would have been much less, and Aegisthus
would not have been involved in her punishment. From the
scene where she reveals her motives to the chorus ?, we think
it could be shown that the long-cherished, rational design of
just vengeance for Iphigeneia was, αὐ the moment of the
murder, eclipsed in her mind by a sudden passion which she
herself describes as ‘the lust for blood to lick’.? When she
first appears, standing over her victims, she is drunken with
this passion * and with the triumph of vindicated queenship.
‘There Agamemnon lies,
My husband 1" 5
Then, as she begins to recover her reason, comes the mention
and familiar to us. The situation is symmetrical. It is no question of
mere womanly jealousy; but a conflict of two principles of society. Simi-
larly the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, her daughter and heir, was as great an
outrage as Agamemnon would have felt the sacrifice of the son, Orestes,
to be. Clytemnestra would have acquiesced in the latter as Agamemnon
did in the former, but she would regard the murder of the daughter as an
attempt to secure the throne, which on her own death would pass from
Agamemnon to the daughter and the daughter’s husband. (See Frazer,
Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 28.) For the whole question of the conflict of
patriarchy and matriarchy see Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study
of Greek Religion, and Ridgeway, Cambridge Praelections, 1906. I am convinced
that this conflict is vaguely but unmistakably present to Aeschylus’ mind,
and that the conception of Clytemnestra can only be understood by taking
account of it.
1 Clytemnestra describes this as εὐνῆς παροψώνημα τῆς ἐμῆς χλιδῆς (1. 1446).
It is something over and above her due, even as she conceives it (ἐκ
περιουσίας, Schol.). See also 1396 where δικαίως... ὑπερδίκως μὲν οὖν is, by
tragic irony, an unconscious confession that she has gone beyond justice.
1384 παίω δέ νιν Sis: these are the two blows which Agamemnon’s two sins
have merited; but Clytemnestra adds a third, above due measure: καὶ
πεπτωκότι τρίτην ἐπενδίδωμι. 2 Agam. 1371-1576.
3. 1478 Ἔρως αἱματολοιχός, the very passion described by Agamemnon (see
above, note on p. 157).
* 1427 Xo. ... ὥσπερ οὖν φονολιβεῖ τύχᾳ φρὴν ἐπιμαίνεται, | λίπος ἐπ’ ὀμμάτων
αἵματος εὖ πρέπειν.
5. 1404 οὗτός ἐστιν ᾿Αγαμέμνων, ἐμὸς | πόσις. πόσις has all the maximum
Μ
162 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of Iphigeneia, as if this other motive were re-emerging from
temporary obscuration. In the next speech it is overpowered
again by the passion against Chryseis and Cassandra, but as
the scene proceeds she insists exclusively on Iphigeneia. The
dialogue becomes lyrical, and we begin to see the crime as
it appears from the higher plane. She who was just before
triumphing over her ‘husband’ now cries out that she is not
to be named Agamemnon’s wife; the deed is not hers: the
ancient bitter fiend has appeared in her shape.! But it is not she
who first thinks of this supernatural aspect ; it is suggested by
the chorus, and then she catches at it.2 When she claims to
be an incarnation of the fiend who haunts the race, the chorus
answer: ‘That thou art guiltless (ἀναίτιος) of this murder, who
shall aver? It cannot, cannot be; though perchance the
fiend of his sire (Atreus) might be thy helper (συλλήπτωρ) ὃ
Thus Aeschylus indicates that Clytemnestra was indeed
a minister of heaven, but not a conscious minister at the
moment. The righteous and rational motive, connected with
Iphigeneia, was for the time superseded by an unrighteous
passion—‘ the lust for blood to lick’, which comes upon one
and another of the race ‘till the old woe he laid to rest’.
This passion may come, as she says it does, from the evil
fiend of the house ;* but when it filled her it was her passion,
and withal unrighteous in excess, and so she is not guiltless.
Clytemnestra, then, is possessed in two ways. Her conscious-
ness, at the moment of her act, is merged in, and identified
amphasis of position. Cf. (just above, 1400) Χο... ἥτις τοιόνδ᾽ ἐπ᾿ ἀνδρὲ
κομπάζεις λόγον. KA, πειρᾶσθέ μου γυναικὸ ς ὧς ἀφράσμονος.
1 1497 Κλ. αὐχεῖς εἶναι τόδε τοὔργον ἐμόν ;
μηδ᾽ ἐπιλεχθῇς
᾿Αγαμεμνονίαν εἶναί μ᾽ ἄλοχον, κτλ.
3 1408 Χο. δαῖμον, ὃς ἐμπίτνεις, κτλ. 1475 Κλ. νῦν δ᾽ ὥρθωσας στόματος
νώμην, | τὸν τριπάχυντον | δαίμονα γέννης τόνδε κικλήσκων.
3 1506. Cf. Choeph. 909 Κλ. ἡ Μοῖρα τοῦτων, ὦ τέκνον, παραιτία, partly respon-
sible, not wholly ; a collateral, supernatural cause, which becomes natural
when it takes possession of the agent. Contrast the complete disclaiming of
responsibility in Iliad, T, 86: ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὐκ αἴτιός εἰμι, | GAAA Ζεὺς καὶ Μοῖρα καὶ
ἠεροφοῖτις ᾿Ἐρινύς.
4. 1477 δαίμονα γέννης . . . [ ἐκ τοῦ γὰρ "Epws αἱματολοιχὸς | νείρῃ τρέφεται,
πρὶν καταλῆξαι | τὸ παλαιὸν ἄχος.
PEITHO 163
with, a violent passion, a manifestation of the hereditary
curse or fatal genius of the race. In the earlier temptation
scene, she is further an incarnation of Peitho, the spirit of
Delusion sent in this external shape to ruin Agamemnon ;
although, since she is not conscious of this ministerial
character till all is over, she cannot cast her responsibility
on Fate.!
It may help us to glance at a few incidents in ‘history’ where
this latter idea of incarnate Temptation occurs.
Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, died in disgrace ; his last
expedition against Paros had failed disastrously, and he was
tried for his life on the charge of having deceived Athens to
satisfy a private revenge. The people let him off with a fine of
fifty talents, but he died soon afterwards of a wound received,
it was said, while he was at Paros. How he came by the
wound was a matter of some obscurity; the current tale is
told by Herodotus? as follows :—
‘Now for so much of the story all the Hellenes agree;
but for the sequel we have only the Parians’ account that it
happened thus. When Miltiades was at his wits’ end, a cap-
tive woman sought an interview with him. She was a Parian
by birth, and her name was Timo, and she was underpriestess
of the Lowerworld Divinities. She, coming into Miltiades’
presence, advised him, if he set great store upon taking Paros,
to do whatsoever she should suggest to him.® Thereupon, at
her suggestion, he made his way to the knoll that is in front
* Her unconsciousness, of course, makes the great difference between her
and Orestes, who was commanded by Apollo, Again, in the Choephori
(892 ff.), where Orestes is about to murder her, in pleading for life she does
not mention Iphigeneia at all to Iphigeneia’s brother, but she does refer to
Agamemnon’s adulteries. This is Aeschylus’ way of indicating that her
death is deserved, because her queenly vengeance was her real motive at
the,moment of her crime, and it is for that that she is now to be punished.
He also indicates it by putting the Iphigeneia chorus at the beginning of the
Agamemnon, the Helen chorus (connected with the conjugal relation) next
before the Temptation scene.
2 Herod. vi. 184.
3 τὰ ἂν αὐτὴ ὑποθῆται, ταῦτα ποιέειν.
M 2
164 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of the city and leapt over the enclosure-wall of Demeter
Thesmophoros, not being able to open the doors. And having
leapt over he went towards the Megaron to do such and such
things within it,—either to touch one of the things which it is
not lawful to touch, or to perform some act, whatever it might
be. And he came up to the doors, and immediately a shuddering
horror came over him and he hastened back by the way he
came. And in leaping down from the wall he strained his
thigh; but some say that he struck his knee.
‘So Miltiades sailed back home, being in evil case: he
neither brought money to the Athenians nor had he added
Paros to their dominion, though he had blockaded the island
six and twenty days and laid it waste. And when the Parians
learnt that the underpriestess of the Gods, Timo, had guided
Miltiades, desiring to take vengeance for this, they sent men
to inquire of the God at Delphi, as soon as they had rest from
the siege. And they sent them to ask whether they should
Put to death the underpriestess of the Gods, for that she had
shown their enemies how to take their country and had
revealed to Miltiades the sacred things which it is unlawful
for men to know. But the Pythia would not suffer them,
saying that the cause of these things was not Timo, but,
because it was necessary that Miltiades should not make
a good end, she had presented herself to him to guide hinv to
his destruction.’ *
So long as we confine our attention to ‘history’ and
neglect the study of mythical types, we cannot perceive
that a story like this is a temptation myth, containing
the very motive we have seen in the Agamemnon. When
Destruction (Ate) is about to overtake the sinner, he is
safe till he commits some overt act which will put him in
her power.? To ‘suggest’ (ὑποτίθεσθαι) this act is the function
of Temptation, Peitho or Apaté, who comes incarnate in a
woman, Clytemnestra or Timo. Thucydides would have re-
1 οὐ Τιμοῦν εἶναι τὴν αἰτίην τούτων, ἀλλὰ δέειν γὰρ Μιλτιάδεα τελευτᾶν μὴ εὖ, ᾿
φανῆναί οἱ τῶν κακῶν κατηγεμόνα. Stein, followed by Macan, thinks that the
meaning is that a φάσμα, apparition, in Timo’s shape, had misled Miltiades.
* See W. Headlam, Cambridge Praelections (1906), p. 118.
PEITHO 165
jected this story because the evidence was insuflicient —
the very ground on which Herodotus expresses scepticism.
Some modern histories still recite it with about as much
scepticism as Herodotus. We fail to see that it is mythical
because the idea of impersonation is unfamiliar to us, but
Herodotus failed to see it because that idea was too familiar
to him.
Let us look now at the story of another conqueror, Pausa-
nias, the victor of Plataea.' When the battle is just won,
Peitho comes to him likewise, in the form of a woman. He
is tempted to an act of violence, such as Ajax had committed
when Troy fell, such too as Agamemnon expiated at the hands
of his outraged queen.
‘As soon as the Greeks at Plataea had overthrown the
barbarians, a woman came over to them from the enemy.
She was one of the concubines of Pharandates, the son of
Teaspes, a Persian; and when she heard that the Persians
were all slain and that the Greeks had carried the day,
forthwith she adorned herself and her maids with many
golden ornaments and with the bravest of the apparel that
she had brought with her,? and alighting from her litter
came forward to the Lacedaemonians, ere the work of slaughter
was well over.’ She recognized Pausanias, and, embracing
his knees, said: ‘O king of Sparta! save thy suppliant
from the slavery that awaits the captive. Already I am
beholden to thee for one service—the slaughter of these men
who had no regard either for gods or spirits. I am by birth
a Coan, the daughter of Hegetoridas. The Persian seized
me by force (βίῃ) and kept me under constraint.’
Will Pausanias yield and do the act of violence which this
woman, the innocent vehicle of Temptation, unwittingly sug-
gests by deprecating it? No; this time he eludes the snare.
‘Lady,’ he answered, ‘fear nothing: as a suppliant thou
1 Herod. ix. 76.
2 ‘We are curiously reminded of Hesiod’s description of how Pandora was
decked to tempt man to his bane: ζῶσε δὲ καὶ κόσμησε θεὰ γλαυκῶπις ᾿Αθήνη" |
ἀμφὶ δέ of Χάριτές τε θεαὶ καὶ πότνια Πειθὼ | ὅρμους χρυσείους ἔθεσαν χροΐ, Erga 72.
166 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
art safe. We breathe again; but a moment later appears
another tempter. Lampon, the soothsayer of Aegina, came
in haste to Pausanias with ‘a most unholy word’. ‘Son
of Cleombrotus, he said earnestly, ‘what thou hast already
done is passing great and glorious, and God has given it to
thee to deliver Greece and lay up for thyself the greatest
glory of all the Hellenes whom we know.’ The action which
Lampon prompts is a deed of cruel vengeance; Pausanias
is to do to Mardonius as Xerxes had done to Leonidas, and
hang his dead body on a cross; so will he have praise in
Sparta and in all Greece. But Pausanias again evades the
trap. He rebukes Lampon for his ill counsel: ‘ First thou
liftest me up on high, me and my country and my work ;
and then thou dost cast me down, bidding me to maltreat
a dead man, and saying that if I do this I shall be the more
well spoken of. So Lampon is dismissed; and Pausanias takes
further precautions against the lust of rapine in his army.”
These incidents can be classed as fabulous anecdotes.
Miltiades ended his life under a cloud; therefore he must
have been guilty of some impious act; therefore Temptation
must have come to him and brought him to ruin. Pausanias,
for a while, prospered after his victory; therefore he must
have escaped Insolence; but Temptation always comes to
a man in such circumstances; so he must have spared @
captive woman and resisted a prompting to cruel excess
in vengeance. Such is the logic, or mytho-logic, by which
ancient history was made.?
1 Herod. ix. 78. 3 Herod. ix. 80.
8 Tradition was not to be put off with the account of Pausanias’ end
given by Thucydides (i. 134); he must have been the victim, not only of
Hybris, but of Eros. Accordingly a man of Byzantium informs his name-
sake, Pausanias the traveller, that ‘the reason why the intrigues of Pausanias
were detected, and why he alone failed to find protection in the sanctuary
of the goddess of the Brazen House, was simply that he was sullied with
an indelible taint (ἄγος) of blood’. When he was at the Hellespont he
lusted after a Byzantine maiden Kleonike. She was brought to him at
nightfall, and by upsetting the lamp awakened Pausanias from his sleep.
PEITHO 167
Let us return now to the story of Pylos and Sphacteria.
We are concerned no longer with the minor drama of which
Cleon is the hero; but with the tragedy of Athens, whose
character has been studied in the earlier books. She is
adventurous, restless, quick, ambitious; if she fails in one
attempt, she immediately conceives a new ambition (ἐλπίς)
to take its place; so rapidly does the act follow the decision,
that hoping and having are to her the same.’ A dangerous
temperament, this, peculiarly liable to be carried away in
the flush of success. ‘And Fortune, says Diodotus, ‘ con-
tributes to intoxication; for sometimes she presents herself
unexpectedly at a man’s side and leads him forward to
face danger at a disadvantage ; and cities even more than
individuals, in proportion as their stake is the greatest of
all—freedom or empire.’ We have seen this temptation of
external circumstance at work in the Pylos episode, and
it is enough to make us expect that temptation will appear
in another form. For Elpis and Eros also in such a case
‘are never wanting—Eros leading the way and devising
the attempt, Elpis busy in attendance and suggesting the
wealth in fortune’s store *—and invisible as they are, they
are stronger than the dangers that are seen’. One of these
passions might be expected to come to Athens with flattering
and delusive suggestions.
Elpis had not to the Greek the associations which
Christianity has given to ‘Hope’; she is not a virtue,
but a dangerous passion. The future is dark and uncer-
Haunted by the terrors of a guilty conscience, the king leapt up and killed
the maiden, not knowing who she was. All sorts of purifications he tried
in vain, and ‘paid the penalty, as was natural, to Kleonike and to the
god’ (Paus. 111. 17).
1 i, 70 (Corinthians, characterizing the Athenians) ἢν δ᾽ dpa του καὶ πείρᾳ
σφαλῶσιν, ἀντελπίσαντες ἄλλα ἐπλήρωσαν τὴν χρείαν' μόνοι yap ἔχουσί τε ὁμοίως
καὶ ἐλπίζουσιν ἃ ἂν ἐπινοήσωσι διὰ τὸ ταχεῖαν τὴν ἐπιχείρησιν ποιεῖσθαι ὧν ἂν
γνῶσιν. See the whole chapter.
2 jii, 45 ἡ δὲ (Ἐλπὶς) ἐφεπομένη. . . τὴν εὐπορίαν τῆς Τύχης ὑποτιθεῖσα (the
word used of Timo’s suggestion to ΜΙ 1865).
3 To the Christian the hope of immortal life isa duty ; to the Greek it
was ‘seeking to become a god’ (d@dvatros=6eds)—the worst symptom of
infatuate pride, exciting φθόνος.
168 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
tain, and although rational foresight (γνώμη) can see a little
way into the gloom, Fortune, or Fate, or Providence, is an
incalculable factor which at any moment may reverse the
purposes and defeat the designs of man. Elpis is the pas-
sion which deludes man to count on the future as if he could
perfectly control it; and thus she is a phase of infatuate
pride, a temptress who besets prosperity 1.
Again and again we find this conception of bic in the
earlier poets. There is hardly one who has a good word
for Elpis. ‘ Hope and Danger are twins among mankind,
spirits of evil both’? ‘ Hope and alluring Temptation feed
us all, straining after the unattainable’® ‘Up and down
toss the Hopes of men, cleaving the waste foam-drift on a
sea of lies. No mortal upon earth has ever found a sure
token from God of the thing which is still to be done;
but. of what shall be all discernment is blinded’. ‘Blind
Hopes’ were the only remedy Prometheus could give to
man in place of the foreknowledge of death—‘a great
boon’, say the chorus, with innocent irony.’ Hope is called
‘blind’ because she looks to the invisible future ; she is ‘ light’
(κούφη) and ‘ winged ’; like the flying bird which the child will
never catch. °
With these associations in mind, we will now take up again
Thucydides’ narrative,’ and consider whether certain expres-
' Compare the following moral from Polybius ii. 4 Αἰτωλοὶ δέ, τῇ παραδόξῳ
, χρησάμενοι συμφορᾷ, πάντας ἐδίδαξαν μηδέ ποτε βουλεύεσθαι περὶ τοῦ μέλλοντος,
ὡς ἤδη γεγονότος, μηδὲ προκατελπίζειν βεβαιουμένους ὑπὲρ ὧν ἀκμὴν ἐνδεχόμενόν
ἐστιν ἄλλως γενέσθαϊ" νέμειν δὲ μερίδα τῷ παραδόξῳ, πανταχῇ μέν, ἀνθρώπους ὄντας,
μάλιστα δὲ ἐν τοῖς πολεμικοῖς.
2 Theognis, 637.
3. Simon. ap. Stob. 96, 16, p. 529 Ἐλπὶς δὲ πάντας κἀπιπειθείη (a form of
Peitho) τρέφει ἄπρηκτον ὁρμαίνοντας.
* Pindar, Ol. xii. 5 αἵ γε μὲν ἀνδρῶν πόλλ᾽ ἄνω, τὰ δ᾽ αὖ κάτω ψευδῇ μεταμώνια
τάμνοισαι κυλίνδοντ᾽ ᾿Ελπίδες.... τῶν δὲ μελλόντων τετύφλωνται φραδαί.
5 Aesch. Prom. 252. ;
® Aesch. Agam. 404 διώκει παῖς ποτανὸν ὄρνιν, Euripides, Aegeus frag. 11
πτηνὰς διώκεις, ὦ τέκνον, τὰς ἐλπίδας. Solon v. (Gaisf.) 36 χάσκοντες κούφαις
᾿Ελπίσι τερπόμεθα.
7 iv. 58 ff.
PEITHO 169
sions employed in it are, as they are usually taken to be, mere
poetical metaphors out of which all literal meaning has faded,
or, on the other hand, are intended to suggest the circle of
ideas which we have been studying.
The Athenians followed up their success next year by the
capture of Cythera, the island which commands the entrance
to the Laconian Gulf. The Lacedaemonians were much dis-
heartened by their ‘great and unlooked-for disaster’? at
Sphacteria. They were involved in a war at sea ‘and
that a war against Athenians, to whom to miss an enterprise
was always to fall short of some anticipated achievement ;
and at the same time so many strokes of Fortune coming
together within a short time against all calculation * caused
them the greatest dismay. They feared lest some new re-
versal of fortune (περιτύχῃ), like that of Sphacteria, should
overtake them’.
In the same summer a conference of the Sicilian states
was held at Gela; and Thucydides gives a speech in which
Hermocrates of Syracuse appeals for united action against
the designs of Athens. Some expressions which occur in it
are worth noting. In the opening sentences our attention is
caught by a reminiscence of Diodotus’ Mytilenean speech.
‘No one, says Hermocrates, ‘is driven into war in ignorance
of what it means; no one is deterred from it by fear, if he
conceives that he will gain some coveted end.’* The ‘covetous
designs ’ of Athens upon Sicily, he says later,* are pardonable ;
human nature will always seek rule where it finds submission.
He touches on the secure blessings of peace in contrast with the
hazards of war; and then follows a curious passage about the
uncertainty of hopes in the future. ‘If there be any one who
makes sure that he will effect something (in revenge upon
1 iv. 55. 1 τοῦ ἐν τῇ νήσῳ πάθους ἀνελπίστου καὶ μεγάλου.
* iv. 55. 3 τὰ τῆς Τύχης πολλὰ καὶ ἐν ὀλίγῳ ἐυμβάντα παρὰ λόγον.
5. iv. 59 οὔτε φόβῳ, ἢν οἴηταί τι πλέον σχήσειν, ἀποτρέπεται. Cf. iii. 45
(Diodotus) ἁπλῶς τε ἀδύνατον καὶ πολλῆς εὐηθείας ὅστις οἴεται τῆς ἀνθρωπείας
φύσεως ὁρμωμένης προθύμως τι πρᾶξαι ἀποτροπήν τινα ἔχειν ἢ νόμων ἰσχύι ἢ ἄλλῳ
τῳ δεινῷ.
* iv. 61. 5 τοὺς μὲν ᾿Αθηναίους ταῦτα πλεονεκτεῖν καὶ προνοεῖσθαι πολλὴ
ἐυγγνώμη.
170 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Athens) by right or by force, let him not take his disappoint-
ment to heart. Let him know that too many before now who
have prosecuted revenges against those who wronged them, so
far from succeeding, have themselves perished; and others who
with no inconsiderable power have conceived hopes of some
coveted gain, instead of grasping it, have in the end lost even
what they had Revenge may be just, and yet not prosper ;
and strength is not swre because it is full of hope. The
instability of the future everywhere controls the event ;? and,
though most treacherous, is also most salutary, since mutual
fear makes men think twice before they attack one another.’
The speaker disclaims that ambitious folly by which men
arrogate as complete a mastery over Fortune, which is beyond
their control, as over their own purposes.®
Immediately after this speech Thucydides describes the
return of the Athenian fleet from Sicily, whither it had
proceeded from Sphacteria. The officers in command had
concluded a treaty in conjunction with their allies in the
west. They had been sent, we remember, ‘ to finish the war
in that region’,* and they did so; but they returned to find
Athens in an altered mood. Two of them, Pythodorus and
Sophocles, were banished, and the third, Eurymedon, was
fined, on the charge of having been bribed to withdraw ‘ when
they had the chance of subjugating Sicily’. ‘So wndignant
were the Athenians, in the enjoyment of their present good
fortune, at the dea of any check. They thought they could
accomplish anything—what was almost beyond their means
as well as what was within them, with any force, no matter
whether great or insufficient. The reason was the good fortune
which against all calculation had attended most of their
undertakings and now suggested the strength of Hope. ®
’ iv. 62. 3 ἐλπίσαντες ἕτεροι δυνάμει τινὶ πλεονεκτήσειν... ἀντὶ TOU πλέον ἔχειν
προσκαταλιπεῖν τὰ αὑτῶν...
2 τιμωρία γὰρ οὐκ εὐτυχεῖ δικαίως, ὅτι καὶ ἀδικεῖται" οὐδὲ ἰσχὺς βέβαιον, διότι
καὶ εὔελπι. τὸ δὲ ἀστάθμητον τοῦ μέλλοντος ws ἐπὶ πλεῖστον κρατεῖ...
> iv. 64 μηδὲ μωρίᾳ φιλονικῶν ἡγεῖσθαι τῆς τε οἰκείας γνώμης ὁμοίως αὐτοκράτωρ
εἶναι καὶ ἧς οὐκ ἄρχω Τύχης.
* iii, 115.
5 iv. 65 οὕτω τῇ [τε] παρούσῃ εὐτυχίᾳ χρώμενοι ἠξίουν σφίσι μηδὲν ἐναντιοῦσθαι,
PEITHO 171
Cleon was not the only victim of covetous ambition in-
spired by undesigned good luck. His overweening confidence
at Amphipolis, when he ‘ never so much as expected that any
one would come out and fight him’, appears as illustrative
of the reckless confidence of the Athenians who ‘in the enjoy-
ment of their present good fortune were indignant at the
idea of any check’.
And who conveyed to the Athenians the flattering sug-
gestions of Hope? who was the channel through which
she insinuated her strength? We need only turn back to
the story of the peace negotiations and repeat the sentences
in which Cleon intervenes. ‘The Athenians thought that,
now they held the men on the island, ἐξ was always in their
power to make terms whenever they chose, and they coveted
something more. They were urged on above all by Cleon,
the son of Cleainetos, who was the popular leader in those
days and stood highest in the confidence of the multitude,
and he persuaded them.’
To make his meaning unmistakable, Thucydides says later”
that Athens refused the offers of peace on this occasion because
she had ‘confidence in the hope of her strength’. It is not
without design that Cleon, both at his first appearance in
the Mytilenean debate * and again at this second, disastrous
intervention, is described as ‘ first in the people’s confidence’.
His little, personal catastrophe, could they have foreseen
it, might have warned his trusting followers of the peril
that lurks in ‘coveting more’; as the speech of the Spartan
envoys, could they have listened, had actually warned them
in those very words.
ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ ἐν ἴσῳ καὶ τὰ ἀπορώτερα μεγάλῃ τε ὁμοίως Kal ἐνδεεστέρᾳ
παρασκευῇ κατεργάζεσθαι. αἰτία δὲ ἣν ἡ παρὰ λόγον τῶν πλεόνων εὐπραγία αὐτοῖς
ὑποτιθεῖσα ἰσχὺν τῆς ἐλπίδος. Cf. i. 188. 2 (οὗ Themistocles tempting Artaxerxes
to undertake the conquest of Greece) τὴν... τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ ἐλπίδα, ἣν ὑπετίθει
(suggested, insinuated) αὐτῷ δουλώσειν.
* iv. 21 τοῦ δὲ πλέονος ὠρέγοντο. μάλιστα δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐνῆγε Κλέων... τῷ:
πλήθει πιθανώτατος" καὶ ἔπεισεν...
2 v. 14 ἔχοντες τὴν ἐλπίδα τῆς ῥώμης πιστήν.
5. iii. 86, ὁ Κλέων... ὧν καὶ ἐς τᾶλλα βιαιότατος τῶν πολιτῶν τῷ τε δήμφ'
παρὰ πολὺ ἐν τῷ τότε πιθανώτατος.
172 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
‘And so the promise of Cleon, mad as it was, resulted
in success, Yes, mad as it was! The promise was in-
spired by Ἑλπὶς μαινομένη, the spirit who lured Xerxes to
the sack of Athens, when in her train there followed certain
other invisible and awful figures,—Hybris, Koros, Diké.t
Thus Cleon stands to Athens as Peitho or Apaté, incarnate
in Clytemnestra, Timo, the Coan captive, Lampon, stood
to their victims. The passion with which he is identified
at the moment is Elpis, combined with ‘Covetousness’. His
intervention at the Mytilenean crisis was of a similar kind ;
but Athens was not then elated by undesigned success, and
she escaped temptation.
We cannot, of course, prove what we have here put forward;
it is only the analysis of the impression actually produced
on us by Thucydides’ story. If the reader does not find that
it interprets his own impression, we can do no more; but we
will ask him to suspend judgement till we have pointed out
how the rest of the drama is worked out by means of the
same conceptions. The ‘causes’ of the Sicilian expedition,
as we have so far seen them, are ‘ Fortune, attending against
“| all calculation the enterprises of Athens’ ; ‘ Covetousness ’
impersonated in Cleon; Elpis, mad, delusive confidence and
ambition, incarnate in the same individual.2 These are the
* Herod. viii, 77 (oracle) :
... EAmide μαινομένῃ λιπαρὰς πέρσαντες “AOnvas*
dia Δίκη σβέσσει κρατερὸν Képov, Ὕβριος υἱόν,
δεινὸν μαιμώοντα, δοκεῦντ᾽ dva πάντα πιθέσθαι.
The sack of Athens and the destruction of the temples were the committal
acts to which Xerxes was tempted by Elpis, thus precipitating his own
ruin (Ate).
2 The epithet μανιώδης stuck to Cleon; see Suidas, 5. ν. Κλέων. Referring
to Thugydides’ expression κουφολογία (iv. 36—Cleon’s ‘wild words’ at which
the Athenians laughed), Plutarch (malig. Herod. 2, p. 855) says that a writer
who uses unnecessarily harsh expressions—who should speak, for instance,
not of Cleon’s xovpodroyia, but of his θρασύτης καὶ μανία----οὐις εὐμενής ἐστιν ἀλλ᾽
οἷον ἀπολαύων τῷ σαφῶς διηγεῖσθαι τοῦ πράγματος. He adds that it is another
sign οὗ malignity in a historian if he goes out of his way to drag in the
misfortunes and errors of his. characters: ὅθεν ὃ Θουκυδίδης οὐδὲ τῶν Κλέωνος
Δ μαρτημάτων ἀφθόνων ὄντων ἐποιήσατο σαφῆ τὴν διήγησιν. It is curious that this
.
PEITHO 173
first terms in a series of ‘causes’ which lead in a determined -
order to an end that can be predicted. We have now only
to follow out its later course.
writer should, even for controversial purposes, pitch upon Thucydides’
treatment of Cleon as a case where Thucydides actually departs from his
plan of recording τῶν γενομένων τὸ σαφές in order not to be ‘malignant’
against Cleon. Plutarch himself does not shrink from the word μανία
(wit. Nic. vii).
CHAPTER X
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE
THE second half of the History opens with a summary and,
for the most part, colourless record of diplomatic negotiations
and battles, including a long description of the victory
of Mantinea, which restored the Lacedaemonian prestige.!
Except in one critical incident, which we reserve for the
next chapter, the story presents no features that call for
discussion. Accordingly we pass on to the end of Book V,
where, suddenly, we come upon one of the most extraordinary
and interesting passages in the whole work—the Melian
Dialogue. It is extraordinary because the expedition to
Melos, considered as an episode in military history, was
of no importance whatever; if it had never happened, the
main result of the Peloponnesian War would have been the
same. The interest lies in the dialogue which accompanies
the narrative; and here we happen to possess the detailed
comments of an ancient critic, Dionysius, who singles out
this passage—as well he might—for special remark. His
observations are instructive, and we shall take note of them
as we proceed.
The narrative begins as follows.2 ‘The Athenians made
an expedition against the island of Melos.... The Melians
are colonists from Lacedaemon, who would not submit to
Athens like the other islanders. At first they remained quiet
and were on neither side, but later, when the Athenians
tried to coerce them by ravaging their land, they had come
to open hostilities. The generals of this expedition, Cleo-
1 The Second Part begins at v. 26, and the remainder of Book V covers the
years 421-416,
2 v. 84 ff. 3 See iii, 91.
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 175
medes and Tisias, encamped with their army on Melos;
and before doing any harm to the country they sent envoys
to negotiate. Instead of bringing these envoys before the
people, the Melians asked them to explain their errand to
the magistrates and the chief citizens.’
The Athenians sneeringly remark that the magistrates are
evidently afraid of their deluding the people with seductive
arguments; they accept, however, the proposal of a conference,
in which the Melians are to criticize and reply to each
statement as it is made. The Melians answer that they
have nothing to say against the quiet interchange of ex-
planations ;' but, they add, the presence of the army shows
plainly that the Athenians have come, not to argue, but
to judge. fe alternative before themselves is war, if they
make out the justice of their case, and slavery, if they are
convinced by the Achenians ἢ
From this point to the énd, the historian changes from
narrative to full dramatic form, prefixing, as in a play, the
names —‘ Athenians’, ‘ Melians’—to the speeches.? The
Athenians begin the statement of their case as follows.®
Athenians. Well, then, we on our side will use no
fine words; we will not go into a long story, which would
not convince you, to prove either that our empire is justified
by our having overthrown the Persians,* or that our present
attack upon you was provoked by any injury on your part.
Nor is it of any use for you to urge that, although Lacedae-
monian colonists, you have not fought for Sparta, or to plead
that you have never wronged us. Let us both keep to
practical matters, and to what we really have in our minds.
We both know that in human reckoning the question of
justice comes up for decision only when the pressure of
1 Note how this situation recalls Athens’ refusal, prompted by Cleon, to
discuss terms quietly in a private conference with the Spartan envoys before
Sphacteria, iv. 22.
2 Dion. Hal. Thucyd. 37 ἐπὶ μιᾶς δ᾽ ἀποκρίσεως τοῦτο τὸ σχῆμα διατηρήσας τὸ
διηγηματικόν, προσωποποιεῖ τὸν μετὰ ταῦτα διάλογον καὶ δραματικόν.
3 The speeches are abbreviated.
* The standing official justification of the Athenian empire ; ef. vi. 83, &e.
176 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
necessity is equal on both sides; in practical matters the
stronger exact what they can, and the weak concede what
they must.
‘Thucydides begins,’ says Dionysius, ‘by putting together
a statement which is unworthy of Athens and inappropriate
to the circumstances. The opening words ‘amount to a
confession that their hostilities are not justified by any
provocation’. The rest comes to this: ‘You are right in
thinking that you are yielding to coercion; we are not
unaware that we are wronging you, and we intend to get
the better of your weakness by violence.’ ‘Such words
would be appropriate to an oriental monarch addressing
Greeks!; but it would not be like Athenians speaking to
the Greeks, whom they had freed from the Persians, to say
that while the question of justice is for equals, between
the weak and the strong the issue rests with violence.’
The Melians reply that, if the Athenians will speak only
of expediency and hear nothing of justice, still, even so, it
is to their own interest to listen to reason. If ever they
fall themselves, the vengeance that overtakes them will be
a terrible example to mankind. Then they may repent of
having set a precedent of unreasonable severity.
Athenians. We do not look forward with dismay to the
fall of our .empire, if it should ever come. The danger
is not from Sparta—ruling states are not harsh to the
vanquished—but from our own subjects who may rise and
overpower their masters. But you may leave that danger
to us. We will now point out that, while we are here in
the interest of our own empire, our present words are designed
to save your city. We want to add you to our empire with
the least trouble, and it is for the interests of us both that
you should be preserved.
Dionysius comments: The reference to the clemency of
Sparta amounts to saying ‘tyrants are not hated by tyrants’.
1 Thucyd. 89 βασιλεῦσι yap βαρβάροις ταῦτα πρὸς Ἕλληνας ἥρμοττε λέγειν.
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 177
‘The words “you may leave that danger to us” would hardly
have been used by a wrecker or a pirate, indulging the
passion of the moment and regardless of vengeance to come.’
Melians. It may be your interest to rule, but how can
it be ours to be enslaved ?
Athenians. Because by submission you will avert the
worst of fates ; while we shall profit by not destroying you.
Melians. But will you not allow us to remain neutral
and be friends instead of enemies ?
Athenians. No, your enmity is not half so mischievous
to us as your friendship; to our subjects, your hate is an
argument of our power, your friendship of our weakness.
Melians. But are your subjects blind to the difference
between neutrals and revolted allies ?
Athenians. Why, both, in their opinion, have no lack
of justification; but they think that we are afraid to touch
you. Thus, besides adding to our empire, we shall gain in
security. As masters of the sea, we cannot afford to let
islanders, and weak ones too, escape us.
Melians. But does not security lie in the opposite course ?
For, to leave justice aside, as you direct, and speak only
of expediency, will you not turn all who are now neutral
into enemies ?
Athenians. We are not afraid of the mainland peoples,
who are free and can take precautions against us at their
leisure, but of islanders like you, who are outside our empire,
and of those who are already within it and chafing at con-
straint. They are the most likely in their recklessness to
bring themselves and us into a danger which we foresee.
Melians. Surely, if you and your subjects will take all
this risk, you to keep your empire and they to be rid of it,
we who are still free should be cowards to submit to slavery.
Athenians. Not if you prudently reflect. There is no
question for you of honour, or of avoiding the shame of being
defeated by equals. You have to think of saving yourselves,
instead of opposing overwhelming strength.
Melians. But we know that the chances of war some-
N
178 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
times redress the inequality of numbers. To yield now would
extinguish all hope at once; but if we act we have still a
hope of standing upright.
Athenians. Hope is a consolation in danger, and when
men have some other support she may bring them to harm,
but not to utter ruin. But when men stake all they have
(for she is naturally a spendthrift), in the moment of their
fall she is recognized for what she is, and nothing is left
them in respect of which they might be on their guard
against her, now she is known. You are weak and depend
on a single turn of the scale. Do not choose that fate, like
80 many who, when ordinary human means might still save
them, in the hour when all their visible hopes fail them at
the pinch, turn to the invisible, to divination and oracles
and the like, which ruin men by the hopes which attend
them.?
‘ Thucydides,’ says Dionysius, ‘makes the Athenians reply
in a style of labyrinthine contortion, about Hope turning out
for evil to mankind. I cannot understand how any one can
praise this passage as appropriate in the mouths of Athenian
officers: that the hope that is from the gods (7 παρὰ τῶν θεῶν
ἐλπίς) ruins mankind, and that divination and oracles are no
help to those who have chosen a life of piety and righteous-
ness. It was the first and highest praise of Athens that in
every matter, and at every season, she followed the gods, and
accomplished nothing without divination and oracles.’ ‘The
Athenians’ next answer is still more brutal.’
Melians. We know, you may be sure, how hard our
1 v. 103 ’EAmis δὲ κινδύνῳ παραμύθιον οὖσα τοὺς μὲν ἀπὸ περιουσίας χρωμένους
αὐτῇ, κἂν βλάψῃ, οὐ καθεῖλεν" τοῖς δὲ ἐς ἅπαν τὸ ὑπάρχον ἀναρριπτοῦσι (Samay os yap
φύσει) ἅμα τε γιγνώσκεται σφαλέντων καὶ ἐν ὅτῳ ἔτι φυλάξεταί τις αὐτὴν γνωρι-
σθεῖσαν οὐκ ἐλλείπει. The last clause means that men are so utterly ruined by
Elpis that they have no goods left which they could be on their guard
against risking in another venture.
3 ἐπειδὰν πιεζομένους αὐτοὺς ἐπιλίπωσιν αἱ φανεραὶ ἐλπίδες, ἐπὶ τὰς ἀφανεῖς
καθίστανται, μαντικήν τε καὶ χρησμοὺς καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα per’ ἐλπίδων λυμαίνεται.
Cf. iii. 45. 5 (Diodotus) ἥ τε ᾿Ελπὶς καὶ ὁ Ἔρως... ὄντα ἀφαν ἣ κρείσσω ἐστὶ τῶν
ὁρωμένων δεινῶν.
ὩΣ ΓΕΡᾺ
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 179
struggle will be against your power and also against Fortune,
if she is not impartial. Yet we trust that in respect of
fortune that is from Heaven’ we shall not stand lower than
you, because we are pure men standing against the unrighteous.
And our weakness will be compensated by the aid of the
Lacedaemonians, who are bound in honour to save their
kinsmen, Thus our boldness is not utterly unreasonable.
Athenians. Oh, as for the favour of the divine, we
too do not expect to be left behind. Our claims and our
actions do not go beyond men’s common opinions about the
divine, or their wishes for themselves. Of divinity we believe,
and of humanity we know, that everywhere, by constraint of
nature, it rules wherever it can hold the mastery. We did
not lay down this law, nor are we the first to observe wt ;
it existed already when we inherited it, and we shall bequeath
it to exist for ever.2 We observe it now with the knowledge
that you or any one else, if you had our power, would do the
same. As for the honour of Lacedaemon, we congratulate
your innocence, but do not envy your folly. The Spartans
are very virtuous among themselves; but towards others,
a word is enough to describe their conduct: they are the
most notorious instance we know of men who identify the
honourable with the pleasant, and the just with the expe-
dient.
We will follow this horrible conversation no further, but
only quote the conclusion of Dionysius’ commentary, which
runs thus: ‘It is clear that the historian was not present
at this conference, and received no report of it from the
Athenians or the Melians who took part in it. From his
own statement in the previous book we know that after his
command at Amphipolis he was banished and spent in Thrace
ἔν, 104 τῇ μὲν τύχῃ ἐκ τοῦ θείου.
3. v. 106 τῆς μὲν τοίνυν πρὸς τὸ θεῖον (τοῦ θείου, Kriiger) εὐμενείας οὐδ᾽ ἡμεῖς οἰόμεθα
λελείψεσθαι: οὐδὲν γὰρ ἔξω τῆς ἀνθρωπείας τῶν μὲν ἐς τὸ θεῖον νομίσεως, τῶν δ᾽ ἐς
σφᾶς αὐτοὺς βουλήσεως δικαιοῦμεν ἢ πράσσομεν. ἡγούμεθα γὰρ τό τε θειὸν δόξῃ τὸ
ἀνθρώπειόν τε σαφῶς διὰ παντὸς ὑπὸ φύσεως ἀναγκαίας, οὗ ἂν κρατῇ, ἄρχειν" καὶ ἡμεῖς
οὔτε θέντες τὸν νόμον οὔτε κειμένῳ πρῶτοι χρησάμενοι, ὄντα δὲ παραλαβόντες καὶ
ἐσόμενον ἐς αἰεὶ καταλείψοντες χρώμεθα αὐτῷ.
N 2
180 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
all the rest of the years of war. The dialogue is an invention,
and the only question is whether he has made it appropriate
to the circumstances and fitting to the characters of the
interlocutors, “keeping as closely as possible to the general
sense of what was really said,” according to his own profes-
sion in the proem to the history.
‘Now, the Melians’ words about freedom, where they
appeal to the Athenians not to enslave an Hellenic state
which was doing them no wrong, are suitable both to the
speakers and to the facts. But is there any such propriety in
Athenian officers speaking as these do about justice, not
Allowing the question to be discussed or mentioned, but
( bringing in the law of violence and covetousness,' and declar-
Ning that the only rights of the weak consist in the pleasure of
he stronger? I cannot think this statement befitting to officers
sent on a mission to a foreign state by the city whose laws
were fairest of all.
_* Again, the Melians were citizens of an insignificant state
which had never performed any glorious action. The
Athenians, on the contrary, had chosen to abandon their land
and their city in the Persian war, rather than submit to
a dishonourable summons. I cannot believe that, while the
Melians thought more of honour than of safety and were
ready to endure the last extremity sooner than be driven to
any unseemly action, the Athenians would charge with folly
men who were making the very choice they had made them-
selves in the Persian invasion. No, in my belief, if any one
else had ventured to speak like this in the presence of
Athenians, he would have grievously offended the men who
civilized the world.
‘For these reasons I cannot approve this dialogue, as
compared with the other which I have contrasted with it
in detail. In that other the Lacedaemonian Archidamus
makes a just demand to the Plataeans; and the style
employed is clear and pure, without any contorted tropes
and incoherencies. In the Melian dialogue, the wisest of the
Greeks produce the most dishonourable arguments, conveyed
1 Dion. Hal. Thucyd. 41 τὸν τῆς Bias καὶ πλεονεξίας νόμον εἰσάγοντες.
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 181
in a most unpleasing style. Unless indeed we are to suppose
that the historian, nursing a grudge agatnst the city which had
condemned him, has powred upon her all these shames, which
were bound to make all men hate her.1 For the thoughts
and words of representatives, entrusted with high powers to
negotiate for their country with foreign states, are always
attributed to the whole community which sends them.’
The ancient critic, we notice, is not quite satisfied with the
explanation, ‘a personal grudge.’ He is dissenting from the
common verdict which singled out this passage in the history
for special praise,” and the gist of his judgement is that the
dialogue is dramatically a failure, wnless indeed we are to
think that the improbabilities are due to deliberate malice.
We believe, however, that as before, in the case of Cleon,
a personal grudge is not the whole, or the main, account of
the matter; and we think that the admirers of this passage
were better judges than Dionysius of its artistic quality.
We have already remarked that, as an incident in the
Peloponnesian war, the Melian expedition was a trivial affair ;
the population of a small island was wiped out, and that was
the end of it. The significance of the event is only moral,
and it is meant to be studied from that side. Our first
question is: Why has Thucydides abandoned his practice of
writing public speeches, and preferred the dramatic form of
conversation ? .
The proposal for a private discussion is made by the
Melians and accepted by the Athenian officers with a sneer.
‘ Well then,’ say the latter, ‘let us have no fine words about
justice on either side, but keep to practical matters, and say
what we really have in our minds.’ hat the Athenians
have in their minds is then disclosed in all its horrible
deformity. The cynical avowal of unprovoked aggression ;
‘the law of violence and covetousness’; the admission that
what they fear is not the victory of Sparta but the vengeance
1 Ei μὴ dpa μνησικακῶν ὃ συγγραφεὺς τῇ πόλει διὰ τὴν καταδίκην, ταῦτα τὰ ὀνείδη /
κατεσκέδασεν αὐτῆς, ἐξ ὧν ἅπαντες μισήσειν αὐτὴν ἔμελλον.
2 Ch, 87 init.
182 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of their own oppressed subjects ;—all this culminates in the
blasphemous insult to heaven. ‘Of divinity we believe, and
lof humanity we know that everywhere, under constraint of
/nature, it rules wherever it can hold the mastery. We did
/ not make this law, nor are we the first to observe it. It
existed piney when we inherited it; we shall bequeath it to
exist for ever.’ Words to make the blood of any Greek run
cold, \even without the ghastly reminiscence of Antigone’s
appeal to the over-ruling Law of God:
Not of to-day nor yesterday, it lives
For ever, and none knows from whence it dawned.
But there is another reminiscence, no less significant.
When Xerxes calls together the Persian nobles to lay be-
fore them his design of conquering Greece, the speech put
in his mouth by Herodotus? opens thus: ‘ Persians, I shall
not lay down a new law among you which I myself have
introduced, but I shall observe one that I have received
from them that were before me. For, as I learn from older
men, we have never reposed ourselves since we took the
supremacy from the Medes ... but God thus leads us on,?
and we, following this guidance in many enterprises, are
much advantaged.’
Dionysius, as himself a Greek, feels that the language
which Thucydides assigns to the Athenians is ‘fit only
for an oriental monarch’, and that no Greek could have
used it ;—except, we will add, on one condition: that the
speaker be mad, And, in fact, as we read the dialogue,
the impression deepens that the Athenian spokesman is out
of his right mind. We can, moreover, put a name to the
special form of his madness, which shows the peculiar
symptoms of a state classed, perhaps rightly, by the Greeks
as pathological. The two notes of it are Insolence (ὕβρις)
and Blindness (arn, in the subjective sense). ‘Insolence’ is
a weak translation of the Greek term, which covered two
types of insane exaltation, distinguishable, but closely allied.
One is exuberant, sanguine, triumphant, fed by alluring
1 Herod. vii. 8.
2 Θεός τε οὕτω ἄγει. Cf. Soph. Ant. (loc. cit. infra, p. 184) θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν.
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 183
Hope, leaping to clasp hands with unconquerable Desire.
The other is cold-drawn, masked, cruel, cynical, defiant of
the gods, self-assured of its own worldly wisdom. The former
type we shall meet with presently; the latter is portrayed
with finished art in the dialogue which leads up to the Melian
massacre. Both are blind,—blind to the doom towards which
the one speeds exultingly, blind to the vengeance which the
other impiously denies.
This effect of blindness comes out curiously in an utterance
of the Athenians later in the dialogue:! ‘Surely you are
not going to turn to that sense of ‘honour’ which ruins
so many when dishonour and danger stare them in the face! - +
Many whose eyes were still open to the end whither they
were borne have been drawn on, under the powerful spell
of a mere name, by this so-called ‘honour’, until, victims
of a phrase, they have voluntarily fallen upon irremediable
calamities and sunk by their folly te a deeper depth of
dishonour than fortune would have inflicted.’ Observe
how in this sentence αἰσχύνη is used both in the ‘moral
sense of ‘honour’, and to mean merely the disgrace of being
beaten. The speaker is not conscious of any change of
meaning; he has lost all sense of the difference between
honour and success, dishonour and defeat. He is already
smitten with the blindness by which insolent cruelty brings
vengeance on itself.
‘Reverence, daughter of Forethought, crowns mankind with
goodness and with joys. But over them steals a dim mist
of unconsciousness and turns aside the straight path of action,
away from right-mindedness.’ 3
Thucydides’ first reason for choosing the dialogue form
is that this pathological state of mind cannot be directly
1 vy. 111. 8 οὐ γὰρ δὴ ἐπί γε τὴν ἐν τοῖς αἰσχροῖς καὶ προύπτοις κινδύνοις πλεῖστα
διαφθείρουσαν ἀνθρώπους αἰσχύνην τρέψεσθε. πολλοῖς γὰρ προορωμένοις ἔτι ἐς οἷα
φέρονται τὸ αἰσχρὸν καλούμενον ὀνόματος ἐπαγωγοῦ δυνάμει ἐπεσπάσατο ἡσσηθεῖσι
τοῦ ῥήματος ἔργῳ ξυμφοραῖς ἀνηκέστοις ἑκόντας περιπεσεῖν, καὶ αἰσχύνην αἰσχίω
per’ ἀνοίας ἣ τύχῃ προσλαβεῖν.
2 Pindar, Ol. vii. 48 ; cf. 1. 89.
184 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
unfolded in a public speech designed to convince a large
audience. Another motive which may have influenced him
is that this form is better suited to dramatic irony. The
reader who has followed us so far will not have missed
the passage, which excites Dionysius’ astonishment, where
Thucydides ‘in a style of labyrinthine contortion makes
the Athenian speak of Hope as turning out for evil to
mankind’. Again we find Elpis spoken of as a personal
agency. ‘Hope is a consolation in danger, and when men
have something else to depend on she may bring them to
harm, but not to utter ruin. But when men stake all
they have (for she is naturally a spendthrift), in the moment
of their fall she is recognized for what she is, and nothing
is left them in respect of which they might be on their guard
against her now she is known. This sentence is almost
paraphrased from a chorus in the Antigone, where Sophocles
sets forth the theological theory of Delusion sent by God
upon a doomed sinner in the form of passionate Ambition.
‘For that far-roving Hope, though many men have comfort
of her, to many is a Delusion that wings the dreams of
Desire; and he whom she haunts knows nothing till he
burn his foot against hot fire. For with wisdom hath
one given forth the famous saying that, soon or late, evil
seems good to him whose mind God draws to ruin: and
from the blindness of that ruin his acts are free no more
than for a moment's span.’ !
1 Soph. Antigone 616 :—
‘A γὰρ δὴ πολύπλαγκτος ᾿Ελπὶς
πολλοῖς μὲν ὄνασις ἀνδρῶν,
πολλοῖς δ᾽ ᾿Απάτα κουφονόων ἐρώτων"
εἰδότι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἕρπει,
πρὶν πυρὶ θερμῷ πόδα τις προσαύσῃ. σοφίᾳ γὰρ Ex Tov
κλεινὸν ἔπος πέφανται,
τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν
τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν ὅτῳ φρένας
θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν"
πράσσει δ᾽ ὀλίγιστον χρόνον ἐκτὸς ἄτας.
The last line means that he will soon commit the fatal act, to which blind-
ness (ἄτη) makes him liable, which Elpis-Apaté prompts, and which
precipitates Ruin (“Arn).
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 185
The Athenians, on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, are
good counsellors to warn the Melians against spendthrift
Hope! The irony is repeated at the close of the conference.
The Melians had ended with a renewed declaration of trust
in ‘ the fortune from the divine which hitherto has preserved
them’ and in the help of Lacedaemon. The Athenians reply :
‘Well, we must say that this decision of yours makes us think
you altogether singular in the way you count upon the future
as clearer than what is under your eyes, and contemplate
things unseen as already being realized in your fond wishes.
The more completely you have staked all on the Lacedaemo-
nians and Fortune and Hopes, the more utter will be your
ruin.’ ὦ
The speaker is unconscious that even now Hope is busy in
attendance at Athens, with her flattering suggestion of the
wealth in Fortune’s store. In the impious exaltation of
strength he is unaware of the haunting Spirit of Delusion at
his side, who will be known for what she is only in the
moment of Athens’ fall. The ‘dim mist of unconsciousness’
has stolen down upon him; he is smitten with madness—
blind.
The thoughts and words of representatives, as Dionysius
says, are always attributed to the whole community which
entrusts them with their mission. Thucydides intends us to
feel, with no opening for mistake, that Athens was mad
when she committed this act of unprovoked, insolent cruelty,
comparable with the act which Cleon had formerly advised
and of which she had repented just in time. There was no
repentance now. ‘The siege was pressed hard, there was
treachery among the citizens themselves, and Melos surrendered
at discretion. The Athenians thereupon put to death all the
adult males whom they caught, and sold into slavery the
children and the women. Later, they colonized the island
themselves, sending thither five hundred settlers.’
1 vy. 118 ἀλλ᾽ οὖν μόνοι ye ἀπὸ τούτων τῶν βουλευμάτων, ὡς ἡμῖν δοκεῖτε, τὰ μὲν
μέλλοντα τῶν ὁρωμένων σαφέστερα κρίνετε, τὰ δὲ ἀφανῆ τῷ βούλεσθαι ws γιγνόμενα
ἤδη θεᾶσθε, καὶ Λακεδαιμονίοις καὶ Τύχῃ καὶ Ἔλπίσι πλεῖστον δὴ παραβεβλημένοι
καὶ πιστεύσαντες πλεῖστον καὶ σφαλήσεσθε.
186 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
In the older histories it was the custom at this point to
censure Thucydides for recording the massacre with no
expression of disapproval!
Whose doing was this? Thucydides has not told us who
played on this occasion the part which Cleon played in the
massacre of Mytilene; but Plutarch informs us! It was
Alcibiades, The biographer tells how his public munificence,
his illustrious birth, his eloquence, his bodily strength and
beauty, disposed the Athenians to indulge his lawlessness and
give it the mildest names—of boyish frolic and ambition.
Once he shut up the painter Agatharchos in his own house
till his portrait was finished, and then gave him the house for
his fee. He beat Taureas, in a fit of pique, because he had
been his successful rival in providing a chorus. He selected
a woman from among the Melian prisoners, and reared the
child he had by her. ‘ Even this the Athenians would have
called kindhearted ; only that he had been chiefly responsible, by
supporting the decree, for the massacre of all the adult male
inhabitants of Melos.’
A dark passage this, which Thucydides, for whatever reason,
has omitted. Had the stern historian a touch of weakness
which disposed him, not, like his countrymen, to use mild
names, but to draw a veil over some part of the brilliant
picture? Or—a likelier supposition—is he reserving Alcibiades
for a different and more characteristic effect? Cold-blooded
cruelty was not the dominant trait in that mutable disposition ;
he kindly reared the child of his Melian captive, whose father,
brothers, husband, perhaps, had perished by the decree which
he supported. He may have remembered the compassion of
Ajax for his Trojan captive, Tecmessa, and for their infant
child Eurysakes, ‘whelp of a lioness forlorn, ? from whom
Alcibiades’ family traced their descent*; for his own father,
Cleinias, had died in battle, and left him to the guardianship
of his kinsman, Pericles, as Ajax left Eurysakes to Teucer.
1 Plut. Alc. xvi.
2 Soph. Ajax 545-653 ; 986 ds κενῆς σκύμνον λεαίνης.
3. Plato, Alcib. I. 121 a, Alcibiades says, καὶ γὰρ τὸ ἡμέτερον (γένος ἀναφέρεται),
ὦ Σώκρατες, eis Edpvoden.
THE MELIAN DIALOGUE 187
Here, perhaps, we may see another motive for the choice of
the dialogue form. One alternative would have been to
report the debate in the Athenian assembly, at which the
decree of massacre was moved ; but a speech from Alcibiades
in support of it would have been too ¢lose and obvious
a parallel to Cleon’s Mytilenean speech. / Alcibiades is not
to appear like a second Cleon; for it was not he, but Athens,
that was mad and blinded with the thirst of gain and the
thirst of blood. So the historian saw her; so also did
Euripides. e prologue to the Trojan Women," first per-
formed in the interval between the massacre of Melos and the
Sicilian expedition, ends thus :—
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead ; yourselves so soon to die!
1 Eur. Troades, 95, Mr. Gilbert Murray’s version. See also Mr. Murray’s
Introduction to his translation of the play.
CHAPTER XI
THE LION'S WHELP
THERE are in European history perhaps a dozen born
heroes whom posterity will never reduce to common pro-
portions. They turn the soberest heads in their own genera-
tion, infecting the most prosaic observers with poetry; and
when the incorruptible evidence of monument and archive
is wanting, they are put beyond the reach of criticism.
We must submit to be dazzled as their contemporaries were ;
only let us realize that we are dazzled, and not take the
romantic creatures for more solid stuff than they are, or
ever have been.
When Socrates, at Agathon’s banquet, has finished his
encomium of Eros with the innermost revelation of Beauty,
a sudden knocking is heard at the gate of the courtyard,
a noise of revellers, and a flute-girl’s voice. A moment
later, drunken, and crowned with a thick wreath of ivy
and violets, Alcibiades stands in the doorway like an appari-
tion. Agathon’s company were already flushed with wine;
but the sight of Alcibiades was a more potent intoxication.
The value of their evidence before the court of History will
lie just in the witness they bear to the most important
fact about Alcibiades—the fact that no one could resist
him. The spell of physical beauty was a thing that made
the wisest of that company feel like a fawn trembling in
the clutches of a lion! Another of them, Aristophanes,
handles his Pheidippides tenderly in the Clouds. We must
be content with the portrait left us from the days when
two neighbours could not meet in the streets of Athens
1 Socrates in Plato, Charm. 155 ».
THE LIONS WHELP 189
without passing the news of Alcibiades’ latest frolic; but
we may bear in mind that they were not bent on collecting
the sort of evidence we like to use in our judicious estimates
of character.
Plutarch’s life of Alcibiades is a vivid and harmonious
composition, because Plutarch saw the personality with an
artist’s intuition of its total effect, and knew that a good
anecdote is more illuminating than a volume of criticism.
His principal authorities for the early part of his hero’s
career were Plato and Thucydides. That Plato, who idealized
the whole world of things, idealized the persons in his dia-
logues, we have always perceived; so we fall back on the
historian and try to patch up a real Alcibiades, by taking
the substance (as we call it) of his narrative for a framework.
It may be, however, that the substance is not separable, in
this case either, from the form. Even Thucydides’ treatment
of the character, as we shall now try to show, is already
dramatic and ‘ mythical’.
To avoid breaking the thread, we took the Melian episode
out of its chronological order. We must now go back to
the early chapters of Book V where the Second Part of
Thucydides’ history begins, and follow his narrative of the
incident in which Alcibiades’ type is fixed.
The two great enemies of peace had fallen at Amphipolis,
and both sides were weary of the war and disheartened. The
Athenians, beaten at Delium and again in the North, ‘no
longer possessed that confidence in the hope of their strength
which had made them reject the earlier proposals of peace,
when good fortune was with them and they expected to
triumph. They repented of having lost the fair opportunity
of reconciliation after Pylos’.1 The Spartans too were
disappointed. Their annual invasions had not weakened
Athens as they had hoped; the disaster of Sphacteria
was unprecedented in the annals of Lacedaemon; and the
occupation of Pylos and Cythera was a constant menace,
1 ν. 14 οὐκ ἔχοντες τὴν ἐλπίδα τῆς ῥώμης πιστὴν ἔτι, ἧπερ ov προσεδέχοντο πρότε-
pov τὰς σπονδάς, δοκοῦντες τῇ παρούσῃ εὐτυχίᾳ καθυπέρτεροι γενήσεσθαι.
190 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
for at any moment a general revolt of the serfs might
spread like a conflagration. Their kinsmen, captured on
the island, were still in durance at Athens, the earlier
negotiations for their recovery having failed, while Athens,
in the flowing tide of success,) had refused fair terms.
But now the troublers of Greece, Cleon and Brasidas, were
lying quiet in Thracian soil ; and their successors in influence
—Nikias at Athens, and King Pleistoanax, lately restored
from exile, at Sparta—both made for peace.
Nikias is described for us in terms which are designed
to set his character in pointed contrast to Cleon’s. He too
had. been favoured by Fortune, but he had escaped the
delusions of Hope.? More than for any of his contemporaries,
the tide of success* had flowed steadily for Nikias; but
his only ambition was, ‘while he was still unscathed and
held in repute, to preserve his good fortune to the end. For
the moment he desired to have rest from toil himself and to
give rest to his countrymen, and for the time to come to
leave behind the name of a man who in all his life had
never brought disaster on his city. He thought this end
could best be achieved by taking no risks and trusting
himself as little as possible to Fortune; and that risks
were best avoided by peace’. A sober and reverent man,
who thanked the gods for blessing him with success in
arms and an unstained reputation ; well fitted to give his
name to the peace with which the first part of Thucydides’
history concludes ; infinitely pathetic, as an unwilling leader
of the wild chase for empire in the western seas.
We need not follow the intricate disputes and diplomatic
manceuvres which worked up the latent ill-feeling on both
sides to the pitch of exasperation. In the spring of 420.
the war-party at Athens came in at the elections. Nikias
was not returned to the office of General; but in his place
appears for the first time another, very different, figure,
1 v.15. 2 eb φερόμενοι.
? οὐ συνηπατήθη ταῖς ἐλπίσι τῶν πολιτῶν, Plut. Nic. et Crassi comp. iv.
3 v. 16. 1 ed φερόμενος.
THE LIONS WHELP 191
whose fortunes were to be strangely and fatally linked with
his.
‘Foremost among those who desired an immediate renewal
of war was Alcibiades, the son of Cleinias, a man who was
still of an age that would in any other city have been thought
youthful, but influential on account of his illustrious ancestry.
He really thought that the Argive alliance was the better
policy, but he took that side, against Sparta, because his
pride and ambition were piqued. The Lacedaemonians had
negotiated the peace through Nikias and Laches, neglecting
him on account of his youth and showing no respect for their
old connexion with his family, which his grandfather had
renounced, but he had set his heart on renewing by his own
attentions to the captives from Sphacteria. He thought that
on all hands he was being put in the background’?
We noticed in the case of Cleon the care with which
Thucydides selects the occasion for the entrance of a principal
character; the present instance shows an equal skill. Alci-
biades’ first recorded exploit in public life was a dishonourable
trick played upon an embassy from Sparta. Thucydides
chose that this should be so, for reasons which we shall not
be long in perceiving. The story of the episode is treated
in considerable detail, so as to fix the impression; reduced
to the barest summary, it was as follows.
By means of a pledge of co-operation, given at a secret
interview, Alcibiades persuaded 3 the ambassadors to contradict
before the Assembly a statement they had previously made
to the Council; then he turned upon them and denounced
them for playing fast and loose. The people lost all patience
with them, and so Alcibiades won both his points: he threw
Athens into the arms of Argos, and avenged on the Spartans
his own wounded pride. He would teach them not to neglect
him as too young to be reckoned with, not to disregard the
overtures he had made them, courting a renewal of his family
connexion by flattering attentions to the prisoners.
τ v, 48,
3 νυν, 45 πείθει πίστιν δούς. Plut. Nic. x. ὃ ᾿Αλκιβιάδης ... περιῆλθεν αὐτοὺς δι᾽
ἀπάτης καὶ ὅρκων ὡς πάντα συμπράξων....
192 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
‘The trick which deluded the Lacedaemonians also com-
pletely deluded Nikias. 1 Still urging his pathetic formula,?
‘Now that your prosperity is on a firm footing, it is best
to preserve your good fortune to the end,’ Nikias got himself
sent on a fool’s errand to Sparta. His negotiations mis-
carried, and immediately, ‘in a fit of passion,’ Athens con-
cluded the alliance with Argos.®
‘The statecraft of Alcibiades,’ writes Plutarch,* ‘was
treacherous and false. The worst charge against him is a
malicious trick (ἀπάτη) by which, as Thucydides tells, he
deluded the Spartan envoys and put an end to the peace.
Yet this policy, though it plunged Athens again in war, made
her strong and terrible, for Alcibiades secured the alliance
with Mantinea and Argos’.
Strong and terrible and treacherous, the young lion would
have his country to be like himself. ‘His disposition was
full of shifts and inconsistencies.2 There were many violent
passions in his nature; but strongest of all was ambition
and the desire to be first, as may be seen in the anecdotes
of his childhood. Once, when he was gripped in a wrestling-
match, to save himself from being thrown, he wrenched the
clasped hands of his antagonist up to his mouth and made
as if to bite them through. The other relaxed his grip and
eried, “Do you bite like a woman, Alcibiades?” “No,” he
answered, “I bite like a lion.” ’®
1 v.46 6 Νικίας, καίπερ τῶν Λακεδαιμονιών αὐτῶν ἠπατημένων καὶ αὐτὸς ἐξηπα-
τημένος. ... Plutarch, Alc. p. 198 τὸν δὲ Νικίαν ἔκπληξις εἶχε καὶ κατήφεια τῶν
ἀνδρῶν τῆς μεταβολῆς, ἀγνοοῦντα τὴν ἀπάτην καὶ τὸν δόλον.
ἅν, 46 σφίσι μὲν γὰρ εὖ ἑστώτων τῶν πραγμάτων ws ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἄριστον εἶναι
διασώσασθαι τὴν εὐπραγίαν.
8 vy, 46. ὅ ἀναχωρήσαντός τε αὐτοῦ ὡς ἤκουσαν οἱ ᾿Αθηναῖοι οὐδὲν ἐκ τῆς Λακεδαί-
uovos πεπραγμένον, εὐθὺς δι’ ὀργῆς εἶχον, καὶ νομίζοντες ἀδικεῖσθαι... ἐποιήσαντο
σπονδάς. ...-.
* Plutarch, Alc. et Cor. comp. 2. Ὧ88 μάλιστα δὲ κατηγοροῦσιν αὐτοῦ κακοήθειαν
καὶ ἀπάτην... ..
5 Cf. Plutarch, Alc, xxiii, for another aspect of his versatility: ἦν γάρ, ὥς
φασι, pla δεινότης αὕτη τῶν πολλῶν ἐν αὐτῷ καὶ μηχανὴ θήρας ἀνθρῴπων, συνεξο-
μοιοῦσθαι καὶ συνομοπαθεῖν τοῖς ἐπιτηδεύμασι καὶ ταῖς διαίταις, ὀξυτέρας τρεπομένῳ
τροπὰς τοῦ χαμαιλέοντος,
6 Plut, Alc. ii.
THE LIONS WHELP 193
And as the lion’s whelp the doting multitude would hail
him. ‘Though men of repute,’ says Plutarch,! ‘ regarded with
abhorrence and indignant fear his reckless defiance of all
law, as a wildness that savoured of despotism, the feeling
of the people towards him is best described in Aristophanes’
line:
They hunger for him, and hate him, and must have him.
Aristophanes touches it still more closely in the parable:
Best not to rear a lion in a city;
But if you rear him, wait upon his moods.’
Both quotations are from the last scene of the Frogs,? where
the couplet about the lion is put in the mouth of Aeschylus,
in reply to a demand for his advice to Athens about Alci-
biades. Coming from Aeschylus, the words must allude—no
Athenian could miss the reference—to the famous simile in
the third chorus of the Agamemnon : ὃ
A young babe Lion, still at breast,
Was home once by a Herdsman borne,
Housed beneath roof among the rest
And reared there ; in his early morn
And first of age, all gentle, mild,
Youth’s darling, the delight of Eld;
And ofttimes, like a nursling child,
In arms with happy love was held,
While the weak flesh, demure and bland,
With fawning wooed the fostering hand.
But age grown ripe, his humour showed
The born touch that his parents had ;
Thank-offering when his nurture owed,
A banquet, ere the master bade,
1 Alc. xvi.
2 Ar, Frogs, 1425 ff. The first line ποθεῖ μέν, ἐχθαίρει δέ, βούλεται δ᾽ ἔχειν is
spoken by Dionysus in reply to Euripides’ question, how Athens feels
towards Alcibiades, who was now for the second time in exile. The MSS.
preserve two alternative forms of Aeschylus’ reply :—
AIS. οὐ χρὴ λέοντος σκύμνον ἐν πόλει τρέφειν.
μάλιστα μὲν λέοντα μὴ ᾽ν πόλει τρέφειν,
ἣν δ᾽ ἐκτραφῇ τις, τοῖς τρόποις ὑπηρετεῖν.
The last two lines are those which appear in Plutarch loc. cit. (except that
Plutarch has éxrpépn).
* Hermann (Opuse. ii. 332 cit. Rogers ad loc.) remarked that these lines
were probably adumbrated from the parable in this chorus.
O
194 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
With such wild slaughter he prepared,
It sluiced the dwelling foul with gore,
While helpless, all aghast, they stared
Upon that bloody mischief sore :—
Divine Will there had found him room,
Housed, to be Priest of slaughtering Doom.*
When we find Aeschylus in the Frogs referring to these
stanzas, they seem to read as an awful prophecy. Treacherous
and strong and terrible, the young creature, whose brilliant
beauty and wild ways made him the idol and cynosure of
the gaping citizens, has already given, in his first public —
exploit, an earnest of his quality; he turns upon the Spartans,
whose friendship he had courted, as a lion-cub bites the hand
it has licked. Such is the impression which Thucydides has
conveyed by his choice of this incident to sound the relevant
note in Alcibiades’ variable character. We cannot doubt
that the effect is intentional: Alcibiades comes before us as
an incarnation of Apaté. Thus one of a well-known train
of mythical figures treads the invisible stage, and a second
is soon to follow. Hybris, the cruel spirit of madness, which
fell on the Athenian people just before the Sicilian expedition
—her entrance we have marked in the Melian dialogue.
Both figures take us back to the other great expeditions
- for conquest across the seas.
The design here reproduced is from the body of an Apulian
krater2 which dates from about the middle or end of the
1 Aeschylus, Agam. 717, Dr. Headlam’s version, Cambridge Praelections,
1906, p. 120. Dr. Headlam comments : ‘ Here, expressly, Helen ’ (symbolized
by the young lion) ‘is the instrument of Ate ; and the point is enforced by
a technical device widely practised in the choral lyric.’ Referring to the
lines, φαιδρωπὸς ποτὶ χεῖρα σαίίνων τε γαστρὸς ἀνάγκαις, corresponding to ἐκ
θεοῦ δ᾽ ἱερεύς τις “Alras δόμοις προσεθρέφθη, Dr. Headlam continues: ‘ The
stress of the last sentence, which of course would be accentuated in the
singing, falls upon the word “Aras : now in the previous strophe the word in
the corresponding position of emphasis is σαίνων. Attention is thereby
called to a correspondence in idea; the Lion-cub or Helen is acting like the
ἀπάτη of “Arn, which we remember in the Persae φιλόφρων mapacaive.’
2 Naples Museum, Heydemann, Cat. 3253 ; Mon. Ined. ἃ. Inst. Arch. ix (1878),
Tay. 1, li; Annali (1873), p. 22 ff. ; Wiener Vorlegeblitter, vil. 6a; Baumeister,
Denkmiiler, Taf. vi, Fig. 449, p. 408. My attention was drawn to this vase by
Miss Jane E. Harrison.
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THE LION'S WHELP 195
fourth century B.c. The representation falls, as usual, into
three tiers. Midway in the second tier and occupying
the centre of the whole composition, Darius (inscribed) is
seated on a splendid throne. Behind him stands one of his
cuards with sword drawn ready for execution—ready ad-
visedly, for the old man in the pointed cap and travelling
boots, who stands in front of the king with uplifted warning
finger, has come on a perilous journey. He is standing on
the fatal golden plinth. Aelian tells us that ‘if any one
desired to give counsel to the Persian King on very secret
and dubious matters, he must do so standing on a plinth of
gold; if he was held to have given good advice, he took
the plinth away with him as a reward; but he was scourged
all the same, because he had gainsaid the King’*. We are
reminded of the warning of Artabanus*; the whole scene
signifies that to Darius, as to Xerxes, warning was given,
only to be disregarded.
The lowest tier contains a group designed to emphasize
the wealth and splendour of the King who is going to his
doom. The treasurer, holding his account-book, is receiving
the tribute. One tributary pours his gold out. on the table,
another brings three golden cups, three more prostrate them-
selves in the oriental manner, abhorred of the Greek.
In the uppermost tier is high Olympus, marked by two
golden stars; and here is played out the abstract, mythical
counterpart of the human drama. To the right, Asia (in-
scribed) is seated on the altar basis of her national goddess,
Aphrodite Ourania—her who at Athens, as Pausanias* tells
us, was represented in ancient herm-shape, the ‘Eldest of
the Fates’. In front of Asia, beckoning her to ruin, is
1 Aelian, V. H. 12. 62. Attention was first called to this passage by Prof.
Brunn in his discussion of the vase, Sitewngsb. ἃ. Bayer. Akad. 1881, ii. 107.
2 Herod. vii. 10.
3 The account-book is inscribed : TaAavyra H; and on the table is a row of
eight figures which are the initials of Μύριοι, Χίλιοι, Ἠεκατόν, Δέκα, Πέντε,
"OBoréds, Ἡμιοβόλιον, Teraprnpdpiov. Bickh, Arch, Zeit. 1857, p. 59.
* Paus. i. 19. 2 ταύτης γὰρ σχῆμα μὲν τετράγωνον κατὰ ταὐτὰ τοῖς Ἑρμαῖς. τὸ
δὲ ἐπίγραμμα σημαίνει τὴν οὐρανίαν ᾿Αφροδίτην τῶν καλουμένων Μοιρῶν εἶναι
πρεσβυτάτην.
02
196 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Apaté (AITA[TH]), her own incarnate passion, yet at the same
time the minister of Zeus, who himself sits serene with
thunderbolt and sceptre. Dress and action of Apaté are alike
significant. She wears the conventional costume of an Erinys
—short chiton with a beast’s skin over it, and high hunter’s
boots; she even has snakes in her hair. Her gesture shows
that she is about to perform the ritual act proper to the
declaration of war—the act of throwing a burning torch
between the combatants! Victory is for Greece; Nike,
standing at the knee of Zeus, points to Hellas, on whom
Athena lays a protecting hand. And since Marathon was
fought on the sacred day of Artemis and Apollo,? they too
are present—Apollo with his Delian swan, Artemis mounted
on her stag.?
The class of vases to which this krater belongs are the
only class which we know to have been influenced by
tragedy ; and the arrangement of the design, with its upper
and lower tiers, may recall the description we gave of the
Aeschylean drama.* It illustrates in spatial form the double
effect we spoke of—the unseen supernatural action developed
in a parallel series with the human action on the stage. The
link between the two is Apaté, one of those ministering
daemons, ‘ between mortal and immortal, who are described
by Diotima in the Symposium as ‘interpreting and con-
veying, to and fro, to the gods what comes from men, and
1 Schol. ad Eurip. Phoen. 1377 mpd γὰρ τῆς εὑρέσεως τῆς σάλπιγγος ἐν ταῖς
μάχαις καὶ τοῖς μονομαχοῦσιν ἐν μέσῳ τις λαμπάδα καιομένην ἔρριπτε, σημεῖον τοῦ
κατάρξασθαι τῆς μάχη.
2 Plut. de Glor. Ath. vii. The festival was really in honour of Artemis and
Enyalios ; the presence of Apollo is complimentary.
3. Although scenes of daily life on vases are innumerable, scenes from
legend or ‘history’ are very few in number. Arkesilas of Cyrene appears,
weighing his silphium; Croesus upon his funeral pyre; Harmodius and
Aristogeiton slaying Hipparchus; Sappho, with Eros, or the Muses, and
once with Alcaeus; the Persians, on the Darius vase. To appear on a vase-
painting was equivalent to a sort of pagan canonization. For a complete
list of historical subjects of vase-paintings see H. B. Walters, Hist. of Anc.
Pottery, ii. 149.
* This description, by the way, was written before the writer had seen the
design,
iy
THE LIONS WHELP 197
to men what comes from the gods’.! Porphyry, where he
enlarges on the daemonology of this part of the Symposium,
preserves in a philosophic form some very ancient doctrines
of mythology. Speaking of the evil daemons he says: ‘ All
unrestrained lust and hope of wealth and of glory comes
through these, and most of all, delusion.’* That sentence
will serve as a commentary on the Apulian vase, on the
Persians of Aeschylus, or on the last three books of
Herodotus.
For Apaté played her part also in the infatuation of
Xerxes. When we know the mythical motives of the Per-
sian legend we can almost predict the incidents in the
seventh Book of Herodotus. We can confidently predict
the types of those incidents: for example, we know before-
hand that the king will be deluded and outwitted on the
eve of his expedition. Turn up the place, and there it is.
The Aleuadae of Thessaly, we are told, sent an invitation
with promises of help. Xerxes thought they spoke in
the name of their whole people;® but really the Thessa-
lians had no part in the intrigues of the Aleuadae.® The
Pisistratids, again, through the agency of Onomacritus, plied
Xerxes with forged oracles, suppressing those which foretold
disaster to the Persian arms. ‘So at last Xerxes gave way
and decided to make an expedition against Greece.’ 7
Now, we do not deny that these incidents may be historical,
not ‘fabulous’; but it is well to realize that Herodotus’
1 Plato, Symp, 202 8 πᾶν τὸ δαιμόνιον μεταξύ ἔστι θεοῦ τε Kal θνητοῦ... . ἑρμη-
vetov καὶ διαπορθμεῦον θεσῖς τὰ παρ᾽ ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἀνθρώποις τὰ παρὰ θεῶν.
2 Porph. de Abst. ii. 42 πᾶσα γὰρ ἀκολασία καὶ πλούτων ἐλπὶς καὶ δόξης διὰ
τούτων, καὶ μάλιστα ἡ ἀπάτη. ;
3. Aesch. Persae 94 ff. δολόμητιν δ᾽ ᾿Απάταν θεοῦ τίς ἀνὴρ θνατὸς ἀλύξει :.. . φιλό-
φρων γὰρ σαίνουσα τὸ πρῶτον παράγει βρότον εἰς ἀρκύστατα.
* Herod. vii. 6. 5 Id. vii. 130.
6 Τά. vii. 172.
Τ᾿ Herod. vii. 6 fin. Alcibiades similarly deluded Athens, Plut. Nic. xiii
καίτοι λέγεται πολλὰ καὶ παρὰ τῶν ἱερέων ἐναντιοῦσθαι πρὸς τὴν στρατείαν" GAA’
ἑτέρους ἔχων μάντεις ὁ ᾿Αλκιβιάδης éx δή τινων λογίων προύφερε παλαιῶν μέγα κλέος
τῶν ᾿Αθηναίων ἀπὸ Σικελίας ἔσεσθαι. καὶ θεοπρόποι τινες αὐτῷ παρ᾽ Αμμωνος
ἀφίκοντο χρησμὸν κομίζοντες, ὡς λήψονται Συρακουσίους ἅπαντας ᾿Αθηναῖοι" τὰ δ᾽
ἐναντία φοβούμενοι δυσφημεῖν ἔκρυπτον.
198 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
motive for putting them in is that they illustrate one regular
link in a chain of mythical ideas. The sequence is so well
established that, if the historical facts had been missing,
fabulous imagination would have supplied their place. In
the same way we do not deny that every detail of Alcibiades’
trick upon the Spartan envoys may be historical. But we do
point out that Thucydides has made it specially prominent,
partly by treating it at considerable length, and partly by telling
us nothing of any other incident in Alcibiades’ early career ;
and we seem to have grounds for inferring that, in doing so,
he was in some degree influenced—however unconsciously—
by the same motives as Herodotus. We have already seen
such influence at work in the case of the Melian incident.
There, the disproportion between the military significance of
the events and their ‘mythical ’ import is more striking; and
there again, the treatment seems of a piece with the long tale
of acts of unprovoked cruelty and insolence which Herodotus,
or those who imagined the legend, attribute to Xerxes.
When we reach the narrative of the Sicilian expedition in
Book VI, we are not surprised to encounter another incident
in which the motive of Apaté is clear. To that narrative we
pass straight from the sentence which, at the close of Book V,
records the massacre at Melos. ‘They killed all the adult
males whom they caught, and sold their women and children
as slaves, and they colonized the place themselves, sending
later five hundred settlers. And in the course of the same
winter the Athenians began to desire to sail again with a larger
armament than that of Laches and Eurymedon to Sicily, to
conquer it if they could. Most of them knew nothing of the
great size of the island and the numbers of its inhabitants,
barbarian and Greek; and they did not know they were
undertaking a war not much less arduous than the war with
the Peloponnesians.’? Then follow five chapters which recite
the long muster-roll of Sicilian states, ‘the great power against
which the Athenians were bent on making war, with fair
professions of a desire to succour their kinsmen and newly-
1 See above, p. 49, note.
THE LIONS WHELP 199
acquired allies, though the most genuine account of the matter
was that they were eager to add the whole island to their
empire.’ ἢ
They were urgently invited by an embassy from Egesta,
a city which had a petty quarrel with its neighbour, Selinus.
Selinus was helped by Syracuse, and the Egestaeans appealed
for succour to their allies at Athens, promising to provide all
the money that was wanted for the war. The assembly
yielded and sent an embassy to find out if the temple
treasures, of which the Egestaeans talked so much, existed,
and to report on the state of the war with Selinus.2. The
envoys returned in the spring with some citizens of Egesta
who brought sixty talents of uncoined silver, a month’s
pay for as many ships which they hoped to obtain from
Athens. The assembly was told many ‘false and alluring’
tales, especially about the treasures at Egesta.* Their envoys
had been cheated by an ingenious trick: the Egestaeans had
shown them the temple of Aphrodite at Eryx full of bowls and
flagons and censers, which, being of silver, made a show out of
proportion to their worth, and entertained the ship’s crew évery-
where with gold and silver plate borrowed from all the neigh-
bouring towns, Phoenician and Hellenic. The seamen’s eyes |
were dazzled, and back at home their tongues ran on the bound-
less riches they had seen. Thus they ‘had been deluded them- '
selves and now persuaded their countrymen’.* The trick was
not to be discovered till too late; for the present, Delusion keeps
the Athenians’ eyes dazzled with the sheen of flaunting, golden
1 vi. 6.1 τοσαῦτα ἔθνη Ἑλλήνων καὶ βαρβάρων Σικελίαν wre, καὶ ἐπὶ τοσήνδε
οὖσαν αὐτὴν οἱ ᾿Αθηναῖοι στρατεύειν ὥρμηντο, ἐφιέμενοι μὲν τῇ ἀληθεστάτῃ προφάσει
τῆς πάσης ἄρξαι, βοηθεῖν δὲ ἅμα εὐπρεπῶς βουλόμενοι τοῖς ἑαυτῶν ἐυγγενέσι καὶ τοῖς
προσγεγενημένοις ξυμμάχοις, μάλιστα δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐξώρμησαν ᾿Ἐγεσταίων πρέσβεις. . . .
With the turn of the sentence cf. iv. 21. 2 (Cleon’s intervention before
Sphacteria, above, p. 113),... τοῦ δὲ πλέονος ὠρέγοντο, μάλιστα δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐνῆγε
Κλέων. ...
2 vi. 6.
3 vi. 8. 2 καὶ of ᾿Αθηναῖοι ἐκκλησίαν ποιήσαντες καὶ ἀκούσαντες τῶν τε ᾽Εγεσταίων
καὶ τῶν σφετέρων πρέσβεων τά τε ἄλλα ἐπαγωγὰ καὶ οὐκ ἀληθῆ καὶ περὶ τῶν
χρημάτων ὧς εἴη ἑτοῖμα ἔν τε τοῖς ἱεροῖς πολλὰ καὶ ἐν τῷ κοινῷ, ἐψηφίσαντο ναῦς
ἑξήκοντα πέμπειν. . -.
* vi. 46 αὐτοί τε ἀπατηθέντες καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους πείσαντες.
400 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Wealth. They voted that sixty ships should sail under the
command of Alcibiades, Nikias, and Lamachus.
_ ‘How else, says Peitho-Clytemnestra, ‘how else pitch the
toils of Harm to a height beyond o’erleaping ?...
I wreathed around him like a fishing-net,
Swathing in a blind maze,—deadly wealth of robe!’ +
Had Aphrodite, in her precinct at Eryx, a chapel for her
attendant spirit, Persuasion ?
1 Aesch. Agam. 1881, Dr. Headlam’s version (Cambridge Praelections, 1906,
p. 135) ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων,
περιστιχίζω, πλοῦτον εἵματος κακόν.
Schol. ad loc. τὸ δὲ ‘ ὕψος κρεῖσσον ἐκπηδήματος ᾽ τοῦτο σημαίνειν βούλεται, ὅτι ὃ
φιλικῶς ὑπερχόμενός τινα καὶ ἀπατῆσαι βουλόμενος εἰς ἄφυκτον φραγμὸν ἐμπλέκει
αὐτὸν τῆς ᾿Απάτη-".
Ν “44
CHAPTER XII
EROS TYRANNUS
THE Melian Dialogue, as we have already seen, suggested to
an ancient critic the parallel between the imperial people and
the Eastern monarch. Thucydides, by perpetual coincidences
of thought and phrase, and by-the turn-and colour of all this
part of his narrative, has with evident design emphasized-this
parallel, and-so turned” against Athens the tremendous-moral
which ΙΒ in the Persians of
Aeschylus and the-History..of Herodotus. ]Looking back
upon the development of the Empire in the\previous fifty
years, he saw, as we noted in our study of the first Book, the
defection of Athens from the old, glorious ideal of the union
of Hellas against the outer darkness of barbarismi¥'The
downward process led to this mad war of conquest between
Greek and Greek. ) Athens, tempted by Fortune, deluded by
Hope, and blinded by covetous Insolence, was attempting an
enterprise comparable with that which it was her boast to
have repulsed and broken at Salamis. In the debate upon
the expedition we shall hear Nikias reiterate the warnings
addressed in vain by Artabanus to the infatuate monarch,
and Alcibiades echo the eager tones of Mardonius, who, ‘ever
desirous of some new enterprise and wishing himself to be
regent of Hellas, persuaded Xerxes.’ ?
‘Nikias, appointed against his will, saw that Athens was
ill-advised and on a flimsy and fair-seeming pretext was bent
on a great enterprise, desiring the whole of Sicily. He
attempted to ‘avert’ their purpose,? with little hope of success,
1 Herod. vii. 6 νεωτέρων ἔργων ἐπιθυμητὴς ἐὼν καὶ θέλων αὐτὸς τῆς Ἑ .λλάδος
ὕπαρχος εἶναι... . ἀνέπεισε Ἐέρξην.
2 Thue. vi. 8. 4 ἀποτρέψαι, ‘ avert,’ has religious associations. It recalls the
story of Artabanus who is threatened by the vision (Herod. vii. 17) in these
ee
&
202 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
for he saw that the people were not in a mood to hear reason.
‘I have never, he said, ‘out of ambition spoken contrary
to what I thought, nor will Inow; but I will tell you what
in my judgement is best. If I exhorted you to preserve what
you have, instead of risking things present for the sake of
things future and uncertain,| my words would be powerless
against a temper like yours. Yet I must show you that your
haste is ill-timed and that the object for which you are so
eager is not easy to grasp.’ The position of Athens at home
is by no means secure. ‘ We ought to think of this and not
run into danger while the state is far from the desired
haven, or grasp at a new empire before we have secured the
old. Even if we conquer, we could hardly rule so many
cities at such a distance. It is madness for men to attack
a land which, if they prevail, they cannot hold, while failure
would not leave them where they were before the attempt. ...
Because your first fears of Lacedaemon have not been realized
and you have unexpectedly got the better of them, now you
despise them and desire Sicily. You ought not to be elated
at the chance mishaps of an enemy; conquer them in skill
before you are confident.’ ?
‘If there is one who, in delight at his appointment, urges
you to sail, looking only to his own interest; especially one
who is too young as yet to hold a command, and wants to
terms, ‘Thou shalt not escape scatheless, either now or in the time to come,
for seeking to avert that which must happen’ (ἀποτράπων τὸ χρεὸν γενέσθαι).
Cassandra’s fate was partly a punishment for her attempts to avert by
warnings the vengeance of God. No one would listen. Cf. Herod. ix. 16
ὅ τι δεῖ γενέσθαι ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ, ἀμήχανον ἀποτρέψαι ἀνθρώπῳ" οὐδὲ yap πιστὰ λέγουσι
ἐθέλει πείθεσθαι οὐδείς. The word is still reminiscent of a belief that Ruin is
an evil spirit to be charmed away by rites of magical ‘aversion’.
1 vi. 9.3 περὶ τῶν ἀφανῶν καὶ μελλόντων κινδυνεύειν, echoing the Athenians’
last words in the Melian dialogue (above, p. 185), τὰ μὲν μέλλοντα τῶν δρωμένων
σαφέστερα κρίνετε, TA δὲ ἀφανῆ τῷ βούλεσθαι ws γιγνόμενα ἤδη θεᾶσθε, κτλ.
2 vi. 11. 5 διὰ τὸ παρὰ γνώμην αὐτῶν πρὸς ἃ ἐφοβεῖσθε τὸ πρῶτον περιγεγενῆσθαι,
καταφρονήσαντες ἤδη καὶ Σικελίας ἐφίεσθε. χρὴ δὲ μὴ πρὸς τὰς τύχας τῶν ἐναντίων
ἐπαίρεσθαι, ἀλλὰ τὰς διανοίας κρατήσαντας θαρσεῖν. Compare the passage (iv. 65. 4)
quoted above, p. 170, which connects the desire for Sicily with the fortune
of Pylos, and ends: αἰτία δ᾽ ἣν ἡ παρὰ λόγον τῶν πλεόνων εὐπραγία αὐτοῖς
ὑποτιθεῖσα ἰσχὺν τῆς ἐλπίδος.
EROS TYRANNUS 203
be admired for his stud of horses and to make something
by his position to maintain him in his extravagance, do not
indulge him with the opportunity to display his personal
brilliance at Athens’ risk. Remember that such men, as
well as spending their private substance, do public harm.
This is a great enterprise and not one which a mere youth
can plan and rashly undertake.*
‘There, beside the man of whom I speak, I see now men
of this kind whom he has summoned to his support, and I am
afraid. I appeal against them to you elder citizens; if any
of you has one such sitting beside him, let him not be ashamed
or fear to seem a coward if he does not vote for war. Do
not, like them, fall sick of a fatal passion for what is beyond
your reach. Bethink you that desire gains few successes,
and forethought many.’ For your country’s sake, now on
the brink of the greatest danger she has known, hold up your
hands to vote against them. There is no fault to find with
the boundaries which the Sicilians now observe in this
direction—the Ionian Gulf on the coast voyage, and the
Sicilian Ocean by the open sea. Confirm these limits by
your vote, and leave Sicily to manage her own affairs’... .
‘President, if you believe that the welfare of Athens is
entrusted to you and you wish to be a good citizen, put the
question over again and lay the proposal once more before
the Athenians. If you hesitate to put a question already
once decided, remember that with so many witnesses present
there can be no question of breaking the law, and that you
would be the physician of the state when her thoughts are
sick. He proves himself a good magistrate who does all he
can to help his country, or to the best of his will at least does
her no harm,’
The speech is charged with allusions to themes which are
1 Compare the effect of this personal reference to Alcibiades with Arta-
banus’ concluding address to Mardonius, Herod. vii. 10. § 7.
2 vi. 13. 1 μηδ᾽ ὅπερ ἂν αὐτοὶ πάθοιεν, δυσέρωτας εἶναι τῶν ἀπόντων.
3. Thue. vi. 18 ἐπιθυμίᾳ μὲν ἐλάχιστα κατορθοῦνται, προνοίᾳ δὲ πλεῖστα. Herod.
vii. 10, Artabanus says : ἐπειχθῆναι μὲν πᾶν πρῆγμα τίκτει σφάλματα... ἐν δὲ τῷ
ἐπισχεῖν ἔνεστι ἀγαθά.
9204, THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
now familiar to us. Only one or two call for comment. The
reference to the natural boundary fixed by the Ionian and
Sicilian seas is significant in the mouth of the pious Nikias.
Some superstitious feeling still lingered about the impiety
of crossing the far, inviolable seas.1_ To pass the pillars of
Heracles is to Pindar a symbol of ambition that outruns the
limits of divine appointment. In this way Xerxes had
offended: the bridge over the Hellespont and the canal at
Athos? had led his armament to the deep waters of Arte-
misium and Salamis. The sea too had risen, ‘not without
Heaven’s wrath,’ * on his prototype, Agamemnon, returning,
flown with insolence, from the conquest of the East. In the
herald’s tremendous description of the storm we hear the
rolling thunder of outraged gods, which we heard before in
the Persians. It is echoed again by Poseidon himself in
the prologue to the Trojan Women, which was performed
within a month or two of Nikias’ speech :*
These mine hands
Shall stir the waste Aegean; reefs that cross
The Delian pathways, jag-torn Myconos,
Scyros and Lemnos, yea, and storm-driven
Caphéreus with the bones of drownéd men
Shall glut him.—Go thy ways, and bid the Sire
Yield to thine hand the arrows of his fire.
Then wait thine hour, when the last ship shall wind
Her cable coil for home!
The warnings of Nikias fell, as he anticipated, upon deaf
1 There seems to be some trace of this feeling in the anger of Poseidon at
the nautical skill of the Phaeacians, Hom. Od. @. 565; v. 162. It remains
as a commonplace in Augustan poetry. Hor. Od. i, 111. 21 :-—
Nequidquam deus abscidit
prudens Oceano dissociabili
terras, si tamen impiae
non tangenda rates transiliunt uada.
Plut. Nic. xii, deseribing this speech, says that Nikias ἀναστὰς ἀπέτρεπε καὶ
διεμαρτύρετο, καὶ τελευτῶν διέβαλε τὸν ᾿Αλκιβιάδην ἰδίων ἕνεκα κερδῶν καὶ φιλοτιμίας
τὴν πόλιν εἰς χαλεπὸν ἐξωθεῖν καὶ διαπόντιον κίνδυνον.
2 Herodotus (vii. 24) regards the making of the canal as unnecessary, and
an exhibition of pride.
3 Aesch. Agam. 654.
* Eurip. Trojan Women 87. Mr. Gilbert Murray’s version.
phe τῷ
EROS TYRANNUS 205
ears; for the thought of the city was sick and it was vain to
call for a physician. The name of her sickness was Eros, the
fatal, passionate lust for what is out of reach. She has caught
the infection from the band of spendthrift youths, sitting
there in the assembly at the summons of one who outshines
them all. He, pleased with the command he is as yet too
young to hold, nourishes hopes of new wealth to feed the
stream of his extravagance; he is ambitious to display his
brilliance at Athens’ risk, and he is hot for an enterprise too
great for a mere youth to plan. And yet, is not the planning
of great schemes the very office of Youth and ever-young
Desire? When delusive Hope is busy flattering men with
glimpses of the treasure in Fortune’s store, then Desire too
is never wanting—Eros, who ‘leads the way and devises the
attempt’.
‘Of the beauty of Alcibiades,’ says Plutarch, ‘one need only
say that it blossomed with every season of his life as boy and
youth and man, and bloomed upon his body, making him
lovely and pleasant to look upon.’! And not only in his
body ; for ‘while the rest of his thronging lovers were smitten
with the brilliance of his outward beauty, the love of Socrates
was a great witness to the boy’s excellent and fair nature,
which he discerned shining within his beautiful form and
flashing through it’. The pure and watchful attachment
of this strange friend was returned with as much fidelity as
the wayward moods of the younger allowed. ‘ Despising
himself, and wondering at Socrates, whose wisdom delighted
him and whose virtue he reverenced, Alcibiades, in Plato’s
words, was unwittingly possessed of Anteros, who is the
counterpart of Eros, so that all were amazed to see him
taking his meals with Socrates, and wrestling with him, and
sharing his tent, while to the rest of his lovers he was harsh
and untameable. ? But in other moods he would ‘slip away
from Socrates and play the truant, surrendering himself to
the pleasures with which flatterers allured him’. Then he
would become possessed of another Eros than that which the
discernment of Socrates divined through the radiant brilliance
of his form.
1 Plut. Ale. i. 2 Thid. iv. 3 Tbid. vi.
206 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
When Nikias describes Alcibiades and his friends as ‘sick
of a fatal passion for what is out of reach’, he is quoting from
Pindar’s story of Coronis, who, not content with one lover,
‘fell into a passion for what was out of reach, as many do.!
Of all men the most foolish sort are they who are ashamed of
what is homely and fix their eyes on what is afar off, a-chase
of bubbles, with Hopes (ἐλπίσιν) unachievable. Such utter
blindness (ἀξάταν) the spirit of fair-robed Coronis caught.’
This Eros is near akin to Elpis; and the two are often
coupled with Youth and Wealth. ‘He that wins some fresh
honour in the time of luxurious youth, out of great Hope
soars on the wings of prowess, with a dream that rises beyond
wealth. But the joy of mortals in a short while ripens to the
full, and soon again falls earthward, shaken by adverse doom.
Creatures of a day, something or nothing, man is the shadow
ofadream. Only, when a gleam from God comes, a shining
light rests on men and life is sweet.* So again, in
a more obscure passage,’ Pindar speaks of wealth giving
splendid opportunities and inspiring ‘a wilder dream’. Its
light is a sure beacon, if, but only if, ‘he who has it knows
what shall be’ If not, if his hopes are blind, and soar too
high towards the unknown future—we know the rest. ‘ For
each one has Hope with him, Hope, that shoots up in a young
man’s breast. So long as he has the lovely flower of Youth
and his heart is light, a mortal has many dreams that
cannot be fulfilled.’* And Eros brings Madness in his train:
‘Appetite, doubled, is Eros; and Eros, doubled, becomes
Madness.’® ‘The Spirits of Madness are swift to overtake
the Loves that cannot be attained.’ ®
1 Pind. Pyth. iii. 20 ἀλλά τοι ἤρατο τῶν ἀπεόντων" οἷα καὶ πολλοὶ πάθον. Thue.
vi. 18 μηδ᾽ ὅπερ ἂν αὐτοὶ πάθοιεν, δυσέρωτας εἶναι τῶν ἀπόντων; Plut. Per. xx
πολλοὺς δὲ καὶ Σικελίας ὃ δυσέρως ἐκεῖνος ἤδη καὶ δύσποτμος ἔρως εἶχεν, ὃν ὕστερον
ἐξέκαυσαν οἱ περὶ τὸν ᾿Αλκιβιάδην phropes.
2 Pind. Pyth. viii. 88.
3 Ol. 11, 58.
* Simonides ὁ. (Gaisf.).
5 Stob. 64. 29 Προδίκου" ᾿Επιθυμίαν μὲν διπλασιασθεῖσαν Ἔρωτα εἶναι, "Ἔρωτα δὲ
διπλασιασθέντα Μανίαν γίγνεσθαι.
6 Pind. Nem. xi. 48 ἀπροσίκτων δ᾽ ᾿Ερώτων ὀξύτεραι Mavia (cf. ὀξεῖ᾽ Ἔρινύς.
Ol. ii. 45).
EROS TYRANNUS 207
Eros is more particularly the passion of the tyrant. Note
how Plato! describes the genesis of the ‘tyrannical man’,
who is the successor of a ‘democratical’ parent, or ‘man of
the people’.
‘Imagine then again, said I, that the ‘‘ democratical” man is
now advanced in years and that once more a young son has
been brought up, in his habits of life.
‘Good.
‘ Imagine further that the old story of his father’s experiences
is repeated in his case. He is led away into every sort of
lawlessness,?—or liberty, as his seducers call it. His father
and the rest of his family come to the assistance of those
appetites which belong to his half-way position, while his
seducers reinforce them on the other side. When these wicked
sorcerers and tyrant-makers despair of gaining possession of the
youth. by any other spell, suppose that they contrive to raise
in him a spirit of passionate desire ("Epwra), to champion the
rabble of those idle appetites which divide among themselves
whatever is available? It will be like a great winged drone ;—
unless you can think of a better comparison for the spirit of
desire in such men as these ?
‘No, he said, I can think of none better.
‘This done, the other appetites, humming like bees round
the drone, laden with incense and perfumes and garlands and
wines and the loose pleasures of convivial luxury, feeding and
nursing him to full growth, implant in him a sting of longing
that cannot be satisfied (πόθου κέντρον). From this moment,
with madness for his body-guard, this champion of the soul-
mob is goaded to frenzy; and whenever he catches within
1 Plato, Rep. 5738.
2 παρανομίαν. Cf. Plut. Alc. xvi of μὲν ἔνδοξοι... ἐφοβοῦντο τὴν ὀλιγωρίαν
αὐτοῦ καὶ παρανομίαν, ws τυραννικά. . . but the Athenian people used τὰ
πρᾷοτατα τῶν ὀνομάτων for his misdeeds,
8 The allusion is to the evil which arises in an oligarchical state, when
men are allowed to sell all their property and become paupers, while the
purchasers become extravagantly rich. Thus arises a class of drones,
analogous to the idle appetites here. See 552 8B. Eros becomes ‘ champion’
(mpoorarns) of the desires, as the aspirant to tyranny champions the pro-
letariate,
208 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
himself any thoughts or passions that are of good report and
still sensible of shame, he slays them and casts them out from
himself as unclean, until he is purged of temperance and has
brought in a complement of madness to fill its place.
‘A complete description, said he, of how a“ tyrannical” an
comes to be. |
‘Is not this, then, I said, the reason why “tyrant” is quite an
old appellation of Eros ?
‘Probably, he replied.
‘Also, my friend, said I, when a man becomes intoxicated,
he begins to have a “tyrannical” temper, does he not ?
‘Yes.
‘ And then again, the madman, when his wits are deranged,
will attempt lordship over gods as well as men, and be
confident (ἐλπίζει) of his power to achieve it.
‘Very true, he replied.
‘So, said I, to be precise, a “ tyrannical” man comes into
being whenever, either by temperament or by habits of life
or by both together, he falls under the dominion of wine or of
love or of insanity.’
That Plato had Alcibiades in his mind is probable from his
language in another dialogue. Alcibiades is living on the
hope (ἐλπίδι) of becoming like Cyrus and Xerxes’; and he
has a passion (ἐρᾶν) for becoming the most famous man
among all Greeks and barbarians.? Socrates promises not to
give him up unless his worst fear should be realized, namely,
that Alcibiades ‘should be corrupted by becoming the Lover
of the Demos’. Plato has coined a word—®énpepacrijs—to
express the relation which Eros, the tyrant passion, has to
the lower desires, and which Alcibiades will have to the
democracy. At the end of the dialogue Socrates proves
that a man ought not to seek a tyranny for himself or for
his city.*
1 Plat. Alc. i. 105.4, cf. Ε τοσαυτῆς ἐλπίδος γέμειν.
2 Ibid. 124 x,
3 Ibid. 132 a.
* Ibid. 1858. Plutarch, keenly alive to the mythical side of Plato’s
thought, seized on this connexion of ideas. Recording one of the later
brilliant achievements of Alcibiades, he says, ἤρθη μὲν αὐτὸς τῷ φρονήματι
sy
EROS TYRANNUS 209.
| This association of Eros with ‘tyranny’ gives a fresh
meaning to Thucydides’ references to Athens as the tyrant
city. Each of the two earlier leaders of the people, Pericles
and Cleon, uses the expression; but Pericles would have
had the citizens be lovers of Athens; and ‘tyranny’ meant
in his original ideal what it had meant to many states of
Greece: the supremacy of art and civilization. To Cleon it
had meant the iron rule of force over unwilling subjects
always plotting rebellion. Alcibiades is the Lover, not of
Athens, but of the People;* he was suspected of designs for
personal despotism, and filled with the tyrant’s passion, the
lust of conquest and of personal glory.
In the relief,s here reproduced, Eros with his great wings
stands leaning his hand on the shoulder of Paris, who points
upward, whither his dreams are soaring. Over against them
sits Helen, scarcely listening to Aphrodite who is beside her,
but with eyes fascinated by the love-light from the eyes of
Paris; above her is Peitho, with a bird—perhaps the bird of
love-magic, the Iynx—in her hand. As Paris swept Helen
across the seas, so now the Lover of the People is ‘kindling
the flame of Desire in Athens, and persuading them to under-
take a great expedition to conquer Sicily, suggesting great
hopes to the People, and himself coveting yet greater things’.
kal τὴν στρατιὰν ἐπῆρεν ws ἄμαχον καὶ ἀήττητον οὖσαν ἐκείνου στρατηγοῦντος, τοὺς
δὲ φορτικοὺς καὶ πένητας οὕτως ἐδημαγώγησεν ὥστε ἐρᾶν ἔρωτα θαυμαστὸν ὑπ᾽
ἐκείνου τυραννεῖσθαι, Alc, xxxiv.
1 Thue. ii. 63 (Pericles) ὡς τυραννίδα γὰρ ἤδη ἔχετε αὐτὴν (τὴν ἀρχήνὶ, iii, 37
(Cleon) ὡς τυραννίδα ἔχετε τὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ πρὸς ἐπιβουλεύοντας αὐτοὺς καὶ ἄκοντας
ἀρχομένους.
2 Thuc, ii. 48 (Pericles) ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους αὐτῆς (τῆς πόλεως, not τοῦ
δήμου).
8 Thue. vi. 89 (Alcibiades) τῷ δήμῳ προσεκείμην μᾶλλον.
* This marble relief, now in the Naples Museum, is assigned to the middle
of the fourth century at earliest ; ‘die hier zum Ausdruck kommende Bedeu-
tung Peithos ist aber sicher viel alter,’ Weizsicker, Roscher, Lex. Myth. s.v.
Peitho. The types of the several figures are probably earlier than this
grouping of them.
δ Plut, Ale. xvii 6 δὲ παντάπασι τὸν ἔρωτα τοῦτον ἀναφλέξας αὐτῶν καὶ
πείσας μὴ κατὰ μέρος μηδὲ κατὰ μικρὸν ἀλλὰ μεγάλῳ στόλῳ πλεύσαντας ἐπιχειρεῖν
καὶ καταστρέφεσθαι τὴν νῆσον, ᾿Αλκιβιάδης ἦν, τόν τε δῆμον μεγάλα πείσας
ἐλπίζειν, αὐτός τε μειζόνων ὀρεγόμενος. Note how Plutarch preserves all
the key-phrases of Thucydides.
b
9210 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
In the debate which followed the speech of Nikias! ‘he
who most eagerly urged the expedition was Alcibiades the
son of Cleinias. He wished to oppose Nikias, who was
always his political antagonist and just now had referred to
him disparagingly; but above all he thirsted to command,
and hoped? that he might be instrumental in seizing Sicily
and even Carthage, and at the same time that his success
might repair his private fortunes and gain him money as well
as fame. For being in conspicuous repute among the citizens,
he indulged his desires beyond his means in the upkeep
of his horses and other extravagances—a temper which later
had much to do in bringing about the utter ruin? of Athens.
For the people took alarm at the extreme lawlessness of his
᾿ bodily self-indulgence, and at the far-reaching conceptions
which animated his conduct in every detail of any action in
which he took part, and thinking he was desirous of becoming
yrant, they set themselves to oppose him. Hence although
hig, management of the war was excellent, individuals took
AY nibrage at his private behaviour, and so they entrusted
the war to others and soon shipwrecked the state’ (ἔσφηλαν
Qriy πόλων).
“4 Alcibiades begins by asserting his claims to command, and
x ’ defending his personal magnificence as a public benefit. No
other private individual had ever sent seven chariots. into
the lists at Olympia; and, though a display of this kind
may excite murmurs at home, it impresses foreigners with
the strength of Athens. Such ‘folly’ (ἄνοια) is not useless.
One who knows his own superiority cannot be expected to
treat others as equals. Men of a lofty and disdainful spirit
are hated during their lives, but when they are dead their
country boasts of them and posterity are eager to claim ~
descent from them.t Such are his ambitions; and asforhis
i
iyi
νὴ
You
1 Thue. vi. 15. 2 ἐπιθυμῶν καὶ ἐλπίζων.
8. καθεῖλεν, a technical word for Ate. Aesch. Agam. 404 τὸν δ᾽ ἐπίστροφον
τῶν | par’ ἄδικον καθαιρεῖ. Of Elpis Thuc. v. 103 κἂν βλάψῃ, οὐ καθεῖλεν. .
* Bruns has remarked a reference to the exaggerated cult of Alcibiades
after his death—a proof that this speech was written later than that event.
Busolt iii, 2674". Aristotle’s remarks on heredity furnish a strange
comment: ‘There is a kind of crop in the families of men (φορά, as Cope
.
EROS TYRANNUS 211
public policy hitherto, who can show a better record? His
youth and ‘folly’, now held to be so monstrous, won the
Peloponnesians with well-sounding words and his heartiness
gained confidence for his persuasions. Let them not take alarm
now; but while this youth of his, like Nikias’ reputation for
success, is still in its flower,? take full advantage of both.
Alcibiades proceeds to make light of the power of Sicily
They are a motley rabble, disunited and unable to defend
themselves; the numbers of their heavy infantry have been
greatly exaggerated.2 And at home Athens, strong in her
navy, has little to fear. The Peloponnesians were never more
hopeless than now. Athens has no excuse for hanging
back from helping her allies in Sicily, on whose assistance
she relied for harassing her own enemies there. (Our empire,
like others, was acquired by readiness to respond to invita~
tions for help. We cannot play the housewife with an empire
and pick and choose how far it shall extend. We must keep
our grasp on what we have and contrive occasions against
others. If we do not rule, others will rule us.®
observes, here implies an alternation of φορά and ddopia, of good and bad
crops), just as there is in the produce of the soil; for a certain time re-
markable men grow up in them, and then (after an interval of unproductive-
ness) they begin again to produce them. "When clever families degenerate,
their characters acquire a tendency to madness, as for instance the descendants
of Alcibiades and Dionysius the Elder, whereas those of a steady character
degenerate into sluggishness or dullness, as in the case of those of Conon and
Pericles and Socrates.’ Ar. Rhet. 8. xv, Cope’s version. Cf. Plato, Alcib. I.
118 Ε, Alcibiades calls Pericles’ sons ἠλιθίω, and his own brother Cleinias
μαινόμενον ἄνθρωπον.
1 ὀργῇ πίστιν παρασχομένη ἔπεισεν.
2 ἕως ἔτι ἀκμάζω per αὐτῆς (τῆς νεότητος). Cf. Plut. Nic. xiv πρὶν ἔγγηράσα
μὲν τὴν ἀκμὴν τῆς ἐλπίδος.
3 Thue. vi, 17. 2 ὄχλοις ξυμμείκτοις πολυανδροῦσι.. . 4 τὸν τοιοῦτον ὅμιλον.
So Mardonius : The Ionians in Europe are ‘ worthless’ (ἀνάξιοι) and their
method of -fighting is foolish, Herod. vii. 9. Artabanus reproves him for
slanderously making light of the Greeks in order to ‘ exalt’ (ἐπαείρειν) Xerxes’
self-confidence,
* Thue, vi. 18. 3 (Alcibiades) ἀνάγκη ... τοῖς μὲν ἐπιβουλεύειν, τοὺς δὲ μὴ
ἀνιέναι. 111. 45 (Diodotus) ὃ μὲν (Ἔρως) τὴν ἐπιβουλὴν ἐκφροντίζων. Compare
iv. 60 (Hermocrates) ἐπιβουλευομένην τὴν πᾶσαν Σικελίαν ὑπ᾽ ᾿Αθηναίων, coming
just after the allusion to Diodotus’ speech (iii. 45 fin.) : οὔτε φόβῳ, ἢν οἴηταί
τι πλέον σχήσειν, ἀποτρέπεται (iv. 59),
ὅ Thue. vi. 18. 8 διὰ τὸ ἀρχθῆναι ἂν ὑφ᾽ ἑτέρων αὐτοῖς κίνδυνον εἶναι, εἰ μὴ
P2
212 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
A display of activity in attacking Sicily will lay the pride
of the Peloponnesians in the dust’; and the conquest of the
island will lead to the conquest of all Hellas.2 As masters
of the sea we can withdraw safely at any time. Do not be
diverted by Nikias’ doctrine of indolence or his attempts to
set old against young. Our fathers, old and young taking
counsel together, brought Athens to her present greatness:
you should endeavour to lead her yet further in the same
way.® Inaction will lead to internal friction and decay;
conflict and exercise bring gain of experience and new strength
for active defence.
The most remarkable part of this speech is the opening
defence of the speaker’s lavish magnificence, as being a
public benefit; following as it does immediately upon the
historian’s statement that this very quality was a principal
cause of Athens’ utter downfall. It seems very unlikely that
Alcibiades at such a moment would have actually used
language so offensively boastful. Once more Thucydides is
straining probability in order to give the impression of a
certain state of mind. The case is analogous to the Melian
dialogue, where the speeches of the Athenian representative
were used to portray the insolent and impious cruelty, hardly
distinguishable from madness, which was exhibited by Athens
as a whole in the massacre of Melos. Now, this early part
of Alcibiades’ speech—the rest of it may be very much what
was actually said—is similarly designed to illustrate, in a
typical way, another condition—that which we distinguished
αὐτοὶ ἄλλων ἄρχοιμεν. Herod. vii, 11, Xerxes says: ποιέειν ἢ παθεῖν προκέεται
ἀγών, ἵνα ἢ τάδε πάντα ὑπὸ Ἕλλησι ἢ ἐκεῖνα πάντα ὑπὸ Πέρσῃσι γένηται.
1 Thue. vi. 18. 4 ἵνα Πελοποννησίων τε στορέσωμεν τὸ φρόνημα. The humbling
of pride is God’s business : Ζεύς τοι κολαστὴς τῶν ὑπερκόμπων ἄγαν | φρονημάτων
ἔπεστι, Aesch, Persae, 827.
2 Cf. Xerxes: ‘We shall extend the Persian territory till it is conter-
minous with the ether of Zeus. The sun will shine on no land beyond our
borders’ &c. Herod. vii. 8.
3 Xerxes: ‘I but follow a custom handed down by our fathers. Our older
men tell me our race has never reposed since we conquered the Medes...
I, since I mounted the throne, have not ceased to think how I might rival
those who have gone before in this honour, and increase the power of Persia
as much as any of them.’ Herod. vii. 11.
EROS TYRANNUS 213
as the sanguine, hot-spirited kind of ‘Insolence’ (Hybris).
The pride of illustrious birth, the splendour of an Olympian
victory such as no private person had ever gained, the
superiority which cannot be expected to treat acknowledged
inferiors as equals, the successful: treachery practised on the
Spartans—all these are the subjects of almost fatuous boasting ;
and, as we have seen, there is hardly a point in the speeches of
Mardonius and Xerxes which is not echoed in the words of
Alcibiades.
The effect of the speech was that the Athenians ‘ were
much more eager than before for the expedition’. We need
not linger over Nikias’ second speech, in which, seeing that
‘he could not avert? their purpose by repeating the same
arguments’, he tried to win over the assembly by insisting
on the greatness of the armament required. We will only
note the peroration where Nikias’ ‘formula’ is once more
repeated :
‘Such are my fears. I know that we have much need
of good counsel, and yet more of good luck—a hard thing
for mortals to ensure. Hence I desire to trust myself as
little as possible to fortune on the expedition, and to start
upon it with the security of reasonable preparations. This
I think the surest course for the whole state, and for us who
are to be sent it means preservation. If any one thinks
otherwise, to him I resign my command.’
The next chapter describes in very remarkable language
ἐπ fevered excitement of the Athenians. Once more all the
leading ideas we have dwelt upon are reiterated.
‘Nikias said thus much, thinking that by dwelling on the
vastness of the undertaking he would either avert the purpose
(ἀποτρέψειν) of the Athenians, or, if he were compelled to go
on the expedition, he would thus have the best chance of
starting safely. But the Athenians were not delivered of
their passion for the voyage*® by the burdensome nature
1 vi. 19. 1 ὥρμηντο στρατεύειν - 20. 1 (Nikias) πάντως δρῶ ὑμᾶς ὡρμημένους
στρατεύειν.
2 vi. 19, 2 ἀποτρέπειν again, 8 vi. 24. 2 τὸ ἐπιθυμοῦν τοῦ πλοῦ.
214 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
of the preparation needed; rather they were much more
eagerly bent upon it (ὥρμηντο). So Nikias found his position
reversed ;1 for they thought his advice sound and that now
at any rate there would be complete safety. And a passion
seized upon all alike to start upon the voyage ; —the elder
men being confident either that they would conquer the
power against which they were sailing or else that no disaster
could befall so large a force; the youth longing to see the
marvels of that distant land, and in high hopes of a safe
return.® The general mass of the soldiers hoped to gain
money at once and further to acquire an inexhaustible mine
of pay for the future. Thus owing to their excessive desire
_ for more“ even if there were any who disapproved, they
kept quiet, fearing to be thought unpatriotic if they voted
on the other side.’
The most striking sentence in this paragraph—a passion
seized upon all alike for the voyage’—recalls by the very
turn of the phrase the sinister foreboding of Clytemnestra, in
the passage already quoted, where she is speaking of the
return of the conquering army from Troy.
Yet may some passion seize upon the host,
Some lust of rapine and forbidden gain ;
I fear it ;—half their race is yet to run,
Ere they win home in safety.
Must not Thucydides have intended this dark allusion which
so terribly fits the sequel?—‘Of the many who went few
1 τοὐναντίον περιέστη αὐτῷ: Another curious dramatic detail of resemblance
between Nikias and Artabanus, who, in consequence of the vision, ‘ whereas
he had formerly been the only person openly to oppose the expedition, now
appeared as openly to urge it.’ Herod. vii. 18.
2 *Epws ἐνέπεσε τοῖς πᾶσιν ὁμοίως ἐκπλεῦσαι.
3 χρῖς δὲ ἐν τῇ ἡλικίᾳ τῆς τε ἀπούσης πόθῳ ὄψεως καὶ θεωρίας, καὶ εὐέλπιδες ὄντες
σωθήσεσθαι.
* διὰ τὴν ἄγαν τῶν πλεόνων ἐπιθυμίαν.
5 Aesch. Agam. 353:
"Epws δὲ μή τις πρότερον ἐμπίπτῃ στρατῷ
πορθεῖν ἃ μὴ χρὴ κέρδεσιν νικωμένους"
δεῖ γὰρ πρὸς οἴκους νοστίμου σωτηρίας
κάμψαι διαύλου θάτερον κῶλον πάλιν.
EROS TYRANNUS 215
returned home again. Thus ended what happened concerning
Sicily.’ +
Another curious phrase: ‘the youth, longing to see the
marvels of that distant land’ (τῆς ἀπούσης πόθῳ ὄψεως καὶ
θεωρίας) not only reminds us of Nikias’ reference to ‘the fatal
passion for what is out of reach’; there is also a hint of the
lust of the eye which accompanies the pride of life. Besides
urging the motive of vengeance, Mardonius too had dwelt
upon the ‘exceeding beauty’ of Europe with its variety
of cultivated trees and the great excellence of its soil,
worthy only for the king to possess.2 Pothos is the special
name for the desire of what is distant ;* Love in absence is
the brother of Love in presence, Himeros.* Both, like Eros,
are associated with the eye, which was popularly regarded as
the channel through which the image or phantom (εἴδωλον)
of the desired object entered to inspire love in the soul.®
An allusion to the lust of the eye is suggested by the
occurrence of a similar phrase (again in conjunction with high
hopes) where the magnificent spectacle of the departing fleet
is described :® ‘the armament excited wonder no less by its
astonishing daring and the brilliance of the sight than by the
great disproportion of the force to the power against which it
was sent, and because never had a greater voyage been under-
taken across the seas from home,’ and never was enterprise
1 Thue. vii. fin. ὀλίγοι ἀπὸ πολλῶν ἐπ᾽ οἴκου ἀπενόστησαν. ταῦτα μὲν τὰ περὶ
Σικελίαν γενόμενα.
2 Herod, vii.5 περικαλλὴς χώρα. Xerxes recurs to this point vii. 8 8 1.
8 καὶ μὴν πόθος ad καλεῖται σημαίνων οὐ τοῦ παρόντος εἶναι, ἀλλὰ τοῦ ἄλλοθί
που ὄντος καὶ ἀπόντος, ὅθεν πόθος ἐπωνόμασται, ὃς τότε, ὅταν παρῇ οὗ τις ἐφίετο,
ἵμερος ἐκαλεῖτο, Plato, Cratylus,420a. Pind. Pyth. iii. 20 (quoted above, p. 206)
ὅστις αἰσχύνων ἐπιχώρια παπταίνει τὰ πόρσω. Compare also the πόθου κέντρον
which is implanted in the drone and goads him to frenzy, in the description
of the tyrant passion quoted above (p. 207) from Plato, Rep. 572.
* Himeros is used of Mardonius’ desire to take Athens; Herod. ix. 3 ἀλλά
οἱ δεινός τις ἐνέστακτο ἵμερος τὰς ᾿Αθήνας δεύτερα ἑλεῖν.
5 Plato, Phaedrus, 2500. Cf. also Xen. Symp. 1. 9, and Plato, Cratylus, 420 a,
Eros derived from ἐσρεῖν, ‘ flowing in.’
6 31. 6 τόλμης Te θάμβει καὶ ὄψεως λαμπρότητι.
τ Herod. vii. 20 ‘ Of all the expeditions known to us this (of Xerxes) was by
far the greatest.’
9216 ἶ THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
undertaken with higher hope in the future in proportion to
present power.’ 4
Thucydides, we are told, did not believe in omens: certainly
he treats oracle-mongering with ironic scorn. But whatever
the cool opinion of the rationalist may have been, the artist
cannot forgo the opportunity offered by the mutilation of the
Hermae, occurring as it did on the eve of the fleet’s departure.
It would have been perfectly consistent with his earlier
method to omit all mention of this incident until the moment
when it affected the course of ‘ what actually happened in the
war’, by causing the recall of Alcibiades. The Thucydides
of the first two Books would have postponed the episode and
briefly recurred to it at that point; but the Thucydides of
Book VI is alive to its indispensable value as an element in
his effect. The impenetrable mystery which will never be
solved, the stir and outbreak of superstitious panic, the
atmosphere tainted with sacrilege and poisoned by suspicion
—all these are needed to cast a shadow, just here, across the
brilliant path of Alcibiades. The art with which this impres-
sion is given culminates in the concluding sentence of the
paragraph—one of the most characteristic in the whole
history. It cannot be rendered in any other language, for
besides its bare simplicity, its effect depends partly on the
order of words and partly on the use of the definite article
with a proper name: καὶ ἔδοξε πλεῖν τὸν ᾿Αλκιβιάδην.
The disregard of omens is another constant motive in the
legend of Hybris, and we can predict its appearance at the
proper place. Xerxes, at the moment of crossing into Europe,
just after he has allowed himself, without reproof, to be
addressed as Zeus, makes no account of a prodigy which
might easily have been interpreted. He had neglected a
similar warning while still at Sardis.2 Whether Thucydides
1 Cf. also above, 30. 2 per’ ἐλπίδος τεἅμα ἰόντες καὶ ὀλυφυρμῶν, and 81. 1
τῇ ὄψει ἀνεθάρσουν.
2 Herod. vii. 57. So also Mardonius before Plataea obstinately rejects
good advice, refuses to take notice of the adverse omens of the victims, and
misinterprets an oracle predicting the fate of the Persians, Herod. ix.
39-42,
EROS TYRANNUS 217
believed in omens or not, the bulk of the Athenians did; and
their disregard of them is a note of the peculiar state of mind
portrayed in the Melian dialogue. ‘The affair of the Hermae
was construed in an exaggerated way, for it was thought to be
an omen for the voyage and to have been part of a conspiracy
for revolution and the overthrow of the democracy.’1 Charges
of another act of profanation were rife against Alcibiades, but
by the contrivance of his enemies they were left suspended
and not brought to trial. Καὶ ἔδοξε πλεῖν τὸν AAKiBiddnv—that
is the last we hear of him till the fleet has sailed.
‘And after this, when midsummer had come, they set
about the dispatching of the fleet to Sicily. The pages
that follow are a masterpiece of description. In the lumbering
roll of these Thucydidean sentences* we hear the clatter
and rumble of preparation, the dockyard hammer, the hoarse
cries of mariners, the grinding rush of the trireme taking
the water from the slips,—all the bustle and excitement of
launching this most splendid and costly of expeditions.‘
‘Each captain strove to the utmost that his own ship might
excel all others in beauty and swiftness’; for the spirit of
rivalry was in the air, ‘rivalry with one another in the
performance of their appointed tasks, rivalry with all Greece;
so that it looked more like a display of unrestrainable power
than a warlike expedition. ὅ
‘When the ships were manned and everything required
for the voyage had been placed on board, silence was pro-
claimed by the sound of the trumpet, and all with one voice
before setting sail offered up the customary prayers; these
were recited, not in each ship, but by a single herald, the
1 Thue, vi. 27. 3.
2 Thue. vi. 30, 1.
5 One of them (81. § 3) contains 121 words.
* vi. 31 πολυτελεστάτη καὶ εὐπρεπεστάτη.
5 vi. 81, 4 ἐυνέβη δὲ πρός τε σφᾶς αὐτοὺς ἅμα ἔριν γενέσθαι, ᾧ τις ἕκαστος
προσετάχθη, καὶ ἐς τοὺς ἄλλους Ἕλληνας ἐπίδειξιν μᾶλλον εἰκασθῆναι τῆς δυνάμεως
καὶ ἐξουσίας ἢ ἐπὶ πολεμίους παρασκευήν. This rivalry was characteristic too of
Xerxes’ preparations. The Persian officers competed eagerly for the prize which
the king offered for the most gallantly arrayed contingent at the muster,
Herod. vii. 8 5; 19; 26, The associations of Exousia are already familiar to us.
218 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
whole fleet accompanying him. On every deck both officers
and men, mingling wine in bowls, made libations from vessels
of gold and silver. The multitude of citizens and other
well-wishers who were looking on from the land joined in
the prayer. The crews raised the Paean, and when the
libations were completed, put to sea. After sailing out for
some distance in single file, the ships raced with one another
as far as Aegina,’ ἢ
Across the waters of Salamis! Even so, with prayer and
libation from golden vessels, had the armament drowned in
those very waters traversed the Hellespont. ‘ All that day,’
says Herodotus, ‘the preparations for the passage continued ;
and on the morrow they burnt all kinds of spices upon the
bridges, and strewed the way with myrtle-boughs, while they
waited anxiously for the sun, which they hoped to see as
he rose. And now the sun appeared; and Xerxes took a
golden goblet and poured from it a libation into the sea,
praying the while, with his face turned to the sun, “that
no misfortune might befall him such as to hinder his conquest
of Europe, until he had penetrated to the utmost boundaries.”
After he had prayed, he cast the golden cup into the
Hellespont, and with it a golden bowl and a Persian
sword.’ ?
Xerxes too had set his ships racing in a sailing-match, and
‘as he looked and saw the whole Hellespont covered with
vessels of his fleet, and all the shore and every plain about
Abydos as full as possible of men, Xerxes congratulated
himself on his good fortune; but after a little while, he
wept’. And now, as the Athenian ships in their turn race
over the sea, within sight of the promontory where the
Persian monarch watched from his throne the judgement of
God fall upon presumptuous ambition, there, on one of the
foremost and most luxuriously furnished galleys,* an eager
and beautiful figure stands, flushed with triumph. The shield
at his side is inwrought with ivory and gold, and bears an
1 Thue. vi. 82 Jowett. 2 Herod. vii. 54.Rawlinson.
8 Herod. vii. 44, 45 Rawlinson. 4 Plutarch, vit. Alcib. xvi.
EROS TYRANNUS 219
emblem which is none of the hereditary blazons of his house ;
the self-chosen cognizance of Alcibiades is the figure of Love
himself—of Eros with the thunderbolt in his hand. Over
the rich armada, hastening with full sail to Coreyra and
the West, floats the winged, unconquerable Eros who makes
havoc of wealth, ranging beyond the seas,2—-Eros who planned
the enterprise and now leads the way. Behind him follows
another unseen, haunting spirit— Nemesis, who ‘in later
times was represented with wings like Love, because it was
thought that the goddess hovers chiefly in Love’s train’.®
We cannot follow in detail the fortunes of the great
expedition; through most of the account the military interest
of the siege predominates. But there is one passage in the
description of the last retreat which concerns our subject
and forges the final link in our chain. In the speech ad-
dressed by Nikias to the despairing army one mythical
motive, so far wanting, is supplied—the motive of φθόνος,
the divine Jealousy. It could not be mentioned till this
moment; for Thucydides cannot speak of it in his own
person; he must put it in the mouth of the pious Nikias, as
Herodotus had put it in the mouth of Artabanus.*
‘Although, says Nikias, ‘there was a time when I might
have been thought equal to the best of you in the happiness
of my private and public life, I am now in as great danger,
and as much at the mercy of fortune, as the meanest. Yet
my days have been passed in the performance of many
a religious duty, and of many a just and blameless action.
Therefore my hope of the future remains wnshaken® and
our calamities do not appal me as they might. Who knows
1 Plutarch, vit. Alcib. xvi ἀσπίδος τε διαχρύσου ποίησιν οὐδὲν ἐπίσημον τῶν πατρίων
ἔχουσαν, ἀλλ᾽ "Ἔρωτα κεραυνοφόρον. Athen, xii. 684 καὶ στρατηγῶν δὲ ἔτι καλὸς
εἶναι ἤθελεν. ἀσπίδα γοῦν εἶχεν ex χρυσοῦ καὶ ἐλέφαντος πεποιημένην, ἐφ᾽ ἧς ἣν
ἐπίσημον "Ἔρως κεραυνὸν ἠγκυλημένος.
2 Soph, Ant. 781 Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, "Ἔρως ὃς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις,. φοιτᾷς δ᾽
ὑπερπόντιος.. ὃ δ᾽ ἔχων μέμηνεν.
3 Paus. i. 88. 6,
4 Herod. vii. 10, Thue. vii. 77.
5. vii. 77 ἡ μὲν ἐλπὶς ὅμως θρασεῖα τοῦ μέλλοντος.
990 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
that they may not be lightened? For our enemies have had
their full share of success, and if our expedition provoked
the jealousy of any God,’ by this time we have been punished
enough. Others ere now have attacked their neighbours;
they have done as men will do and suffered what men can
bear.2, We may therefore begin to hope that the Gods will
be more merciful to us; for we now invite their pity rather
than their jealousy.’ ὃ
The hope, as we know, was vain—a last delusion of
Elpis.* In a few weeks ‘the best friend of the Lacedae-
monians in the matter of Pylos and Sphacteria’® was lying
dead beside their worst enemy in the same affair, Cleon’s
colleague, Demosthenes. What need of further comment?
Tyché, Elpis, Apaté, Hybris, Eros, Phthonos, Nemesis, Até—
all these have crossed the stage and the play is done.
The flower of Pride hath bloomed, the ripened fruit
Of Suffering is all garnered up in tears:
Ye that have seen the reapers’ wages told,
Remember Athens! ὃ
1 εἴ τῳ θεῶν ἐπίφθονοι ἐστρατεύσαμεν.
2 ἀνθρώπεια δράσαντες ἀνεκτὰ ἔπαθον. Note the reminiscence of δράσαντι
παθεῖν.
8 Thue. vii. 77 Jowett.
4 So Plutarch (Nic. xviii) speaks of Nikias, after Lamachus’ death, as
being in high hope (ἐλπίδος μεγάλης), and παρὰ φύσιν ὑπὸ τῆς ἐν τῷ παρόντι ῥώμης
καὶ τύχης ἀνατεθαρρηκώς.
5 Thue. vii. 86. Observe how this phrase carries our thoughts back to the
first of the train of mythical causes: Fortune at Pylos.
ὁ Aesch. Persae, 821:
ἽὝβρις γὰρ ἐξανθοῦσ᾽ ἐκάρπωσεν στάχυν
“Arns, ὅθεν πάγκλαυτον ἐξαμᾷ θέρος"
τοιαῦθ᾽ δρῶντες τῶνδε τἀπιτίμια
μέμνησθ᾽ ᾿Αθηνῶν...
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS
THE question which we have now to face is more obscure
and difficult than any we have yet considered. In the language
used by Thucydides when he speaks of the tragic passions, are
we to see mere poetical metaphor, out of which all literal
meaning has faded; or does some of this meaning still linger
behind the words, as an unanalysed fund of mythical concep-
tion? When Thucydides borrowed the form of the Aeschylean
drama, much, certainly, of the explicit theological theory
which had been the soul of that form, was left behind in the
transmission. On the other hand, there seems to be a residuum
of implicit mythical belief which is inherent in the artistic
mould, and so inseparable from it that the adoption of the
mould might involve an unconscious or half-conscious accep-
tance of some of its original content. This content is more
primitive than the philosophy of Aeschylus himself, and much
older than the drama in which it became incorporated. We now
propose to trace back the tragic theory of human nature as
far as we can follow it, in the hope that a sketch of its
development may help us to answer our question, how much
of it survives in Thucydides.
When we look at the passage in Diodotus’ speech?
which contains in summary form the motives of Cleon’s
drama and of the tragedy of Athens, we observe that the
so-called ‘ personifications’ named in it fall into a series or
cycle. We begin with the various conditions (ξυντυχίαι) of
human life ; and in particular the two extreme conditions of
grinding Poverty and licentious Wealth—Penia and Ploutos
1 Thue, iii. 45, See above, p. 122, for text and translation.
222 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
(ἐξουσία). These are possessed by irremediable and mastering
powers—Daring (τόλμα), sprung from Poverty; and Cove-
tousness (πλεονεξία), Insolence (ὕβρις), and Pride (φρόνημα),
sprung from Wealth.
Then come Eros and Elpis, the inward tempters; with
Fortune, the temptress of external circumstance, completing
the intoxication. These lead finally to Ruin—the wreck and
downfall of a human life or of a nation’s greatness.
The first terms in the series, Wealth and Poverty, are
themselves ξυντυχίαι, the outcome of lucky or unlucky coinci-
dence—of Fortune. Our chain of causes leads us back to
a mysterious and unknown agency, which appears again at
the crisis, in ‘reversal’. The circle of thought revolves round
the very simple and universal observation of the mutability
of Fortune, chance, or luck. In ages before the laws of
causation and of probability were even dimly divined, this
mutability must have been the most terrible and bewildering
phenomenon in human events—more terrible, because more
incalculable, than death itself. Not only in the great
catastrophes, in flood and avalanche and earthquake, but
again and again in the turns of daily experience, man finds
himself the sport of an invisible demon. Now, by some
unforeseen stroke, his long-cherished design is foiled; now,
with equally unintelligible caprice, goods are heaped on him
which he never expected.
A reversal of Fortune, coming suddenly, is the primitive
root of all tragedy. Professor Bradley 2 quotes the conclusion
of the monk’s tale of Croesus in the Canterbury Pilgrims :—
Anhanged was Cresus, the proudé kyng;
His roial troné mighte hym nat availle.
Tragédie is noon oother maner thyng,
Ne kan in syngyng crié ne biwaille
But for that Fortune alwey wole assaille
With unwar strook the regnés that been proude ;
For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
And covere hire brighte facé with a clowde.
1 1,38 ὕβρει δὲ καὶ ἐξουσίᾳ πλούτου : Ar. Rhet. B17 φιλοτιμότεροι καὶ ἀνδρω-
δέστεροί εἰσιν τὰ ἤθη οἱ δυνάμενοι τῶν πλουσίων διὰ τὸ ἐφίεσθαι ἔργων ὅσα ἐξουσία
αὐτοῖς πράττειν διὰ τὴν δύναμιν. 2 Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 8.
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 223
Professor Bradley continues: ‘a total reverse of fortune
coming unawares upon a man who “stood in high degree”
happy and apparently secure—such was the tragic fact to the
mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human
sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling, that of
fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel
that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable
power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name—
a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then
on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.’
The external agencies to which these reversals are attributed
will vary at different stages in the development of thought.
In a primitive stage they would be thought of simply as
spirits ; later, perhaps, as a single spirit, called Fate (Μοῖρα)
or Fortune (Τύχη), who will be placated or ‘averted’ by
magical rites and observances. In any case, the overthrow
was thought of as coming from without—an unexpected
stroke out of the surrounding darkness.
To the early Greeks not only the sudden fall from prosperity,
but equally the sudden rise from adversity, was a part of
the tragic ἰδοὺ Both the extreme conditions are dangerous
the transition from either to the other is a ‘ reversal’. Ploutos
and Penia are also known as Resource and Resourcelessness
(Poros and Aporia, or Amechania?), and again as Licence
1 In this point the Greek view is darker than the Mediaeval. Thus at the
conclusion of the Monk’s Tale above quoted, the Knight breaks in :
Hoo! quod the Knyght, good sire, namoore of this!
That ye han seyd is right ynough, y-wis,...
I seye for me it is a greet disese,
Where as men han been in greet welthe and ese,
To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas!
And the contrarie is joye and greet solas,
As whan a man hath ben in poure estaat,
And clymbeth up, and wexeth fortunat,
And there abideth in prosperitee ;
Swich thyng is gladsom, as it thynketh me.
2 Herod. viii. 111. Themistocles, demanding money of the Andrians, said
he had brought ‘two mighty gods, Peitho and Anankaia’, to enforce his
demand. The Andrians replied that they were cursed with ‘ two unprofitable
gods, Penia and Amechania’, and could not pay.
224, THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
and Constraint (Exousia and Ananke,—both of which terms
are used by Diodotus). Eros and Elpis may be associated
with either. In the Symposiwm, Plato for his own purposes
makes Eros the child of both: he was born, in the garden
of Zeus, of Poros and Penia. But in an earlier stage Elpis,
at any rate, was more closely associated with Poverty.
As a personality, she first appears in Hesiod, who mentions
her twice. He warns the labouring man to pass by the
sunny portico where the poor gather for warmth in the
winter season, when the frost has stopped work in the fields.
Otherwise, in the hard winter-time, Amechania and Penia
will swoop down on him. ‘An idle man, waiting on empty
Hope, gathers many evils to his heart. Hope is an ill guide
for a needy man,’ sitting there and chattering when he has
not enough livelihood.t Such are the sinister associations
of Elpis, the temptress, prompting evil thoughts which we,
with our different conception of Hope, associate rather with
the daring of despavr.
No less significant is Hesiod’s other mention of her, which
occurs in the second, and more primitive, of the two versions
which he gives of the Pandora myth. Mankind originally
lived free from evil and pain and the sprites (Keres) of
disease. These were all shut up safely in the great jar; but
‘a woman’ lifted the lid and they all flew abroad, filling
land and sea. ‘Only there, in a house not to be broken into,
abode Elpis, inside the mouth of the jar, and flitted not
1 Hesiod, Erga, 493 ff. μή σε κακοῦ χειμῶνος ᾿Αμηχανίη καταμάρψῃ σὺν Tlevin...
᾿Ελπὶς δ᾽ οὐκ ἀγαθὴ κεχρημένον ἄνδρα κομίζει. Proclus (Schol. ad loc.) para-
phrases as follows : ‘Those who live in idleness and have empty hopes—
empty because they know of no work they can do to bring them to pros-
perity, must indeed fall into many evil thoughts, because of having no
resource (ἀπορίαν), to gain a living. Hence some will turn footpads or temple-
robbers,’ &. Thucydides was familiar with this conception; Pericles (ii.
42. 4) speaks of men being corrupted either by the enjoyment of wealth, or
πενίας ἐλπίδι, ws κἂν ἔτι διαφυγὼν αὐτὴν πλουτήσειεν. Democr. frag. 221 (Diels)
᾿Ελπὶς κακοῦ κέρδεος ἀρχὴ ζημίης. Theognis, 649 :
ἊΑ δειλὴ Πενίη, τί ἐμοῖς ἐπικειμένη ὥμοις
σῶμα καταισχύνεις καὶ νόον ἡμέτερον,
αἰσχρὰ δέ μ᾽ οὐκ ἐθέλοντα βίῃ καὶ πολλὰ διδάσκεις,
ἐσθλὰ μετ᾽ ἀνθρώπων καὶ Kad’ ἐπιστάμενον ;
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 225
forth; for the woman first shut down on her the lid of
the jar.’ 1
It seems probable that several notions are confused in the
myth. The uppermost and latest stratum, like the story of
the Erichthonius snake, is tinged with satire against feminine
curiosity. Woman is the source of evil, as she is in Hesiod’s
other version of the Pandora myth. But the woman herself
is tempted by Elpis, who is one of the baneful sprites inside
the jar. Perhaps in the earliest version there was no woman
at all, but only Elpis, the temptress, who stays with man
in his utter destitution and besets him with dreams of wealth.
This idea is crossed by the opposite (and later) notion that
hope is the sole comforter of poverty ;? and finally the
introduction of the curious woman who lets out the evil
sprites completes the confusion.
However the story is to be disentangled, it is certain that
1 Erga, 90-105 μούνη δ᾽ αὐτόθι ᾿Ελπὶς ἐν ἀρρήκτοισι δόμοισιν ἔνδον ἔμιμνε. The
ancient commentators on this passage are instructive. One takes the view
that Hesiod’s single jar corresponds to the two jars which Homer speaks of,
one full of goods, the other of evils. Hope is the one good among so many
ills, consoling the unfortunate with expectation of better days. But this
interpretation does not sound primitive, and is not grim enough for Hesiod.
Aristarchus seems nearer the truth when he distinguishes two Hopes.
The Hope of good things, he says, escaped ; the expectation of evils remained.
Hesiod, he adds, improperly uses ‘Hope’ to mean expectation of evil. The
thought is here a good deal confused. From the other passage in the Erga,
it seems likely that Hesiod does not mean expectation of evil, but a false and
flattering expectation of goods, which will not be realized. Another critic
says: ‘ The jar (πίθος) is appropriately introduced, because of the allurement
(πειθώ) that comes from women; it is empty of goods and contains only vain
hopes.’ This writer shows that he is on the true scent, by associating Elpis
with Peitho, though, of course, the word-play {(πίθος---πειθώ) is late. He sees,
too, that Elpis is not a good, but an evil; and this, we believe, was what the
authors of the myth intended.
2 Theogn. 1135 ff. ᾿Ελπὶς ἐν ἀνθρώποισι μόνη θεὸς ἐσθλὴ ἔνεστι, Pistis, the
Charites and Sophrosyne have all deserted mankind, and fled to Olympus.
Plut. vit sap. conv. 153 D τί κοινότατον ; ᾽᾿Ελπίς (ἔφη Θαλῆς)" καὶ γὰρ οἷς ἄλλο μηδέν,
αὕτη πάρεστι. The two notions of Elpis as both a comforter and a delusion are
combined by Sophocles in the Antigone chorus (616) : & γὰρ δὴ πολύπλαγκτος
Ἐλπὶς πολλοῖς μὲν ὄνασις ἀνδρῶν, πολλοῖς δ᾽ ᾿Απάτα κουφονόων ἐρώτων, and by
Thucydides (v. 103) in the parallel passage from the Melian dialogue (see
above, p. 184).
Q
226 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Elpis is a Ker; and this gives us one primitive form in which
the passions were conceived as external spiritual agencies.
Eros retained to the last some resemblance to the Keres;
the Erotes are always winged sprites.1 These figures are
something very different from what we think of as ‘ personi-
fications of abstract ideas’. They are not the intolerable,
bran-stuffed dummies which stalk absurdly through eighteenth-
century verse. They are spirits, unseen, and swift, and
terrible in onset. How did they come into being ?
The solid fact from which we must start is that many of
these ‘personifications’, as we call them, were objects of
established worship, possessing shrines and altars. In Athens
alone we know of altars to Aidos, Pheme, Horme, Anteros,
Ara, Eirene, Eleos, Eukleia, Lethe, Nike, Peitho, Philia,
Tyche, and others. Of those which specially concern us
here, Tyche is known to have been worshipped at a great
number of places; Penia had an altar at Gades; Elpis was
not, so far as we know, the object of any cult; Eros, on the
contrary, is the most real and personal of all, and finds his
way—much transformed, it is true—into Olympus.
Now it is certainly possible, in an advanced state of
civilization, for a cult to be artificially founded in honour
of an abstraction. Democratia, to whom the Athenian
Generals made offerings in Boedromion, must always have
been little more than an epithet of Athena, never an inde-
pendent person. In such an instance the cult must have
been established merely from political motives, and it remains
as unreal and artificial as the worship of the Goddess Reason
at the time of the French Revolution. But the case is not
the same with others of the names above enumerated: some
1 See Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Ὁ. 632.
Eros, as a developed personality, seems to be a complex product of several
different elements. "We are here only concerned with one of these—the
psychological affection of violent desire, whether sexual or other. Demo-
eritus, frag. 191 (Diels), calls Jealousy, Envy, and Hatred Κῆρες : ταύτης ἄρ᾽
ἐχόμενος τῆς γνώμης εὐθυμότερόν τε διάξεις Kal οὐκ ὀλίγας Κῆρας ἐν τῷ βίῳ διώσεαι,
Φθόνον καὶ Ζῆλον καὶ Δυσμενίην. .
2 The evidence will be found in Roscher’s Lexicon, s. v. Personificationen.
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 227
of these cults were too ancient to have been anything but
genuinely religious. In an early state of society we cannot
suppose that personified abstractions, regarded as such, could
become the objects of a permanent cult. How, then, did
these cults arise ?
Looking through the list, we find that a fair number of
these entities are psychological. Aidos, Anaideia, Eros,
Anteros, Eleos, Elpis, Himeros, Horme, Hybris, Phobos,
Pothos, are all names of states of mind; and to these we will
confine our attention. Their origin must be sought in mental
experience; and we may suppose that it occurs in some such
way as this. At moments of exceptional excitement, a man
feels himself carried away, taken hold of, ‘possessed’ by an
impulse, a gust of emotion, which seems to be not a part
of himself, but on the contrary a force against which he is
powerless. This is even to a civilized person a somewhat
terrifying experience. The inexplicable panic which will
suddenly run through an army, the infectious spirit of a
crowd, the ecstasy produced by intoxicants, the throes of
sexual pleasure, the raving of the seer and of the poet—all
these are states of mind in which the self appears to be
drowned and swept away. By what? There can be but
one answer: some spirit, or daemon, has entered the soul and
possesses it. This is the very language used by Diodotus;1
and, centuries later, Porphyry? describes in very similar terms
the invasions of maleficent spirits. ‘Having in general a
violent and insidious character, which moreover is without
the tutelage of the higher spiritual power, they for the most
part make their assaults, as though from an ambush, with
vehemence, so as to overpower their victims, and suddenly,
since they try to escape notice. Hence the passions that
* iii. 45 αἱ δ᾽ ἄλλαι ξυντυχίαι ὀργῇ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ὡς ἑκάστη Tis κατέχεται bn’
ἀνη κέστου τινος κρείσσονος. See above, p. 122.
2 Porph. de abst. ii. 89 βίαιον γὰρ ὅλως καὶ ὕπουλον ἔχοντες ἦθος ἐστερημένον τε
τῆς φυλακῆς τῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ κρείττονος δαιμονίου, σφοδρὰς καὶ αἰφνιδίους οἷον [ἐξἿ ἐνέδρας
ὡς τὸ πολὺ ποιοῦνται τὰς ἐμπτώσεις, πῇ μὲν λανθάνειν πειρώμενοι, πῇ δὲ βιαζόμενοι.
ὅθεν ὀξέα μὲν τὰ ἀπ᾽ ἐκείνων πάθη, αἱ δὲ ἀκέσεις (cf. Diodotus’ ἀνηκέστον) καὶ
κατορθώσεις αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν κρειτσόνων δαιμόνων βραδύτεραι δοκοῦσιν.
Q2
228 | THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
come from them are swift and keen; and the remedies
and restorations due to the higher spirits seem to be too
slow.’
When we have traced these agencies back to this stage,
it is only one step further to the most primitive theory of
causes and motives which we find among existing savages.
‘I can see, says Mr. Sidney Hartland,’ ‘no satisfactory
evidence that early man entertained any great faith in the
order and uniformity of nature...If he took aim at his
enemy and flung his spear, or whatever primitive weapon
served the same purpose; if it hit the man, and he fell; he
might witness the result, but the mere mechanical causation,
however inevitable in its action, would be the last thing he
would think about.’ What he does think about, Mr. Hart-
land, surveying the whole field of savage life as now known
to us, and drawing evidence from every part of it, explains
in convincing terms. Every known object has to the savage
an elementary personality, endowed with qualities which
enable it to persist and to influence others; and by virtue
of these qualities it possesses, inherent in it and surrounding
it, a sort of atmosphere charged with power. The Iroquois
in North America call this atmosphere or potentiality, orenda.
A good hunter is one whose orenda is good, and baffles the
orenda of his quarry. At public games, in contests of skill
or endurance between tribes, ‘the shamans—men reputed to
possess powerful orenda—are employed for hire by the oppos-
ing parties respectively to exercise their orenda to thwart
or overcome that of their antagonists. 2 When a storm is
brewing, it (the storm-maker) is said to be preparing its
orenda. Of one who has died from witchcraft it is said
‘an evil orenda has struck him’. This idea of orenda, says
Mr. Hartland, although it may not receive everywhere the
same explicit recognition, ‘is implied in the customs and
beliefs of mankind throughout the world.’
1 Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section of the British
Association, 1906.
2 Quoted from J. N. B. Hewitt, American Anthropologist, N.S. iv. 38.
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 229
The savage whose spear has struck down his enemy does
not, and cannot, think of the two events—the spear-blow and
the enemy’s death—as cause and effect. His view is that
‘his own orenda felt in his passion, his will, his effort,’ and
displayed in his acts and words, the orenda of the spear,
either inherent in itself, conceived as a personal being, or
conferred by its maker and manifested in the keenness of its
point, the precision and the force with which it flies to its
work and inflicts the deadly wound—these would be to him
the true causes of his enemy’s fall. His orenda is mightier
than his enemy’s and overcomes it.’?
We have here the notion of cause traced to its root—the
psychological experience of effort, the putting forth of will
to constrain or master an opposing effort. Now, in states
of violent excitement, man feels himself controlled and swept
away by something which seems to exercise over his will
a compelling force of the same kind as that which he is at
other times conscious of putting forth out of himself. He
regards this as the orenda of a spirit coming from outside.
At first the invading daemons will be associated only with
the peculiar experiences which they severally cause. Phobos
is simply the spirit which falls upon an army and inspires
panic ; Hros the spirit which possesses the lover, and so on.
For a long time they may have had no fuller personality, and
not even a continuous existence. They were momentary
beings, sweeping into the soul from nowhere and passing out
again into nothingness. Their continuous existence would
begin when first some rude, unshapen stone was set up and
conceived as their dwelling. The invisible agency can be
conveyed by incantation into a rock or tree, which thus
becomes a fetish. The famous unwrought stone at Thespiae
was the habitation, not the image, of Eros—his baetyl, or
beth-el. The personalities would gradually fill out, as stories
* In Homeric language, his ἱερὸν μένος.
? When Thales said that ‘all things are full of spirits’ (δαίμονες), and that
‘the magnet has a soul (ψυχή) because it moves iron’, he was using a notion
very like that of orenda. Like a savage, he thought that what moves some-
thing else must have a ‘soul’, a life-force in it.
280 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
were told about them. Cult would secure their perma-
nence ; myth would invest them with a character and history.
In the transition from aneikonic to eikonic cults, we see
the figure literally emerging out of its pillar habitation and
growing into human shape.!
We must think of all this as occurring long before the
earliest literature we know. Homer and Hesiod preserve
much that is primitive, but they preserve it in a late and
artificial dress; far behind them stretches a period of
popular myth-making, and it was in that period that these
‘abstractions’ reached their fullest reality and life. This
growth of a mythical person is something utterly dif-
ferent from the allegorical personification of an abstract
idea. To grasp an abstraction distinctly and then to assign
it personal attributes is a proceeding which can only occur
in a very advanced state of culture. These figures which
we are now considering are originally not allegorical, but
mythical; not personifications, but persons.
Allegory is a kind of story-telling, and in so far akin to
myth; but, in order of genesis, the fabrication of allegory is
the very reverse of myth-making. Allegory starts with a con-
sciousness of the prosaic truth and then invents an artificial
parable to clothe it withal. Christian sets out with neigh-
bour Hopeful on a pilgrimage from the city of Mansoul to
the New Jerusalem. The company he meets by the way,
Giant Despair and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, are personifications
which can only impose upon a child. Delightful as he is,
we never quite forget that Apollyon is a pantomime bogey
in pasteboard armour. It seems that an abstraction, once
escaped, can never get back into the concrete; abstract and
lifeless it must always remain. Allegory is an artificial
business from the first, and foredoomed to failure. It is not
thus that children—even modern sophisticated children—tell
themselves stories; it was not thus that primitive man told
himself myths. Eros and Elpis, Menis and Eris, Nemesis
and Ananke—these and their like are not allegorical fictions.
1 Note, for instance, that Peitho, in the relief (p. 209), is sitting on the top
of her pillar; Aphrodite, in the vase-painting (p. 195), is emerging from hers.
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 931
Man has not made them; it is they who make him, and
bitter his fate if he defy them. They have a long course to
run before the dissolution sets in, whereby the body falls
away from the soul, the presentment from the spirit. They
will become personifications only when they die.
How these discarnate passions came to develop into
personalities, which could be represented in human shape, we
can only guess. It is the work of myth-making imagination,
helped probably by the fully developed anthropomorphism of
the Olympian religion. Hesiod, by the. devices of affiliation
and marriage, somehow brings them into his multifarious
pantheon; but they look queer and unreal when they get
there, because they properly belong to a more primitive,
non-anthropomorphic, system of belief. They dwindle into
pale shadows beside the radiant and solid inhabitants of
Mount Olympus. Some of them, we remark—though our
impressions on this point are not very trustworthy—have
won and retained a fuller degree of personality than others.
Aidos, Peitho, Eros are more real to us than Eleos, Horme, or
Philia. It seems certain that to the Greeks also some were
fainter, others more vividly conceived. How far any one of
them would advance towards complete divinity would depend
on all sorts of accidents, and partly on the real frequency and
importance of the states of mind which the power in question
inspired.
Their later history confirms this impression. Some of them
retain their independence, others lose it. It is suggested by
Hermann Usener in an illuminating discussion of this subject?
that the fact that their names have a known meaning weakens
them as against the completely developed personal god with a
proper name, the meaning of which is forgotten. It is easy to
see what would happen if this world of daemons were invaded
by a hierarchy of gods who had reached full anthropomorphic
concreteness. The originally independent, but shadowy, per-
sonalities would yield to the stronger and become attached to
them as attendants or even as epithets. So we hear of Athena
1 Gitternamen, Ὁ. 369.
232 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
Nike, Athena Hygieia, Artemis Eucleia, and so forth. The
weakest will in this way almost disappear; their personality
is absorbed and they sink into adjectives. Others however
maintain their independence. Nike is not lost in Athena;
Peitho never becomes Aphrodite. A long-established cult
would be an anchor to save these ancient figures from being
swept away. If myth has wrought for them a fairly distinct
character and history, their personality will resist absorption.
Though many of them take lower rank as attendant and
ministering spirits, they will long retain a hold of their own
in the minds of their simple worshippers. If in one way they
are less human than the gods, in another they have remained
closer to the elementary feelings of humanity.
Figurative art will also contribute its help. If it is
markedly anthropomorphic and has advanced far enough to
fix a traditional human type with well-known traits and
attributes, its figures will not give way altogether to newly-
imported personalities whose traits and attributes are different.
In actual fact, Eris, Apaté, Peitho, and some others do remain
in Greek vase-painting. They are only subordinated to the
Olympians, not effaced by them, and often the divinity and
the attendant spirit appear side by side. The existence of
a familiar art-type counts for much, especially as polytheism
has no objection to indefinite multiplication of divine or
daemonic personalities, and all religions have a remarkable
power of ‘reconciliation’. Christianity finds room for as
many saints and martyrs as Greece had daemons and _ heroes.
In the modern world saints are kept alive and independent
by local cults. They are also preserved by literature which
gives a fixed and enduring form to popular hagiology.
Greek poetry did the same service to the primitive daemons,
for the clear imagination of poets arrested the flux of popular
myths, and prevented the disappearance of figures which
might otherwise have melted.
In the Ker stage, before they became humanized under the
influence of Olympian anthropomorphism, Eros and Elpis
were beings of the same order as that out of which the
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 233
Erinyes and the Moirai developed. They were closely akin
to the angry ghosts and the avenging spirits; and it was
easy for them to be associated with the malevolent daemon
who causes reversals of fortune,! since these reversals are often
due to excess of confidence, intoxication, the sudden access of
blind and violent feeling. Thus the passions take their place
in the cycle of the tragic fact—Elpis beside Penia, Eros beside
Ploutos. This first stage of the tragic theory is religious, but
not theological; and it is quite non-moral.
With the advent of the Olympian gods we reach a second
stage, which, though still non-moral, is theological. The
spirits of vengeance are now employed by the gods to punish
man, not for moral offences, but for arrogant presumption.
The notion of the divine Jealousy (Φθόνος) is now prominent.
If man seeks to overstep the limits assigned him and to
become as a god, he excites the resentment (νέμεσις) of higher
powers. Great prosperity is one of the divine prerogatives,
and the tragic passions of unrestrained desire and ambition
are offences against the gods. The reversal of fortune,
formerly attributed to an independent daemon, now becomes
an act of divine punishment.? ‘God is wont to lop and cut
1 As the Erinyes are in Aesch. Agam. 468 κελαιναὶ δ᾽ Ἐρινύες χρόνῳ τυχηρὸν
ὄντ᾽ ἄνευ δίκας παλιντυχεῖ τριβᾷ βίου τιθεῖσ᾽ ἀμαυρόν. ᾿Ἐλπίς occurs in the Orphic
Hymn (lix) to the Moirai: αἵτ᾽ ἐπὶ λίμνης | ὀρφναίης ... | ναίουσαι πεπότησθε
βροτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν. | évOev ἐπὶ Bpdreov δόκιμον γένος ἐλπίδι κούφῃ | στείχετε
—a reminiscence of the winged (κούφη) Ker-Elpis.
2 One of the earliest expressions of this theory is in a recently deciphered
Babylonian book, dated before 2000 B.c., the story of Tabi-utul-Bel, King of
Nippur :
‘ How can mortals fathom the way of a god ?
He who is still alive in the evening may be dead the next morning ;
In an instant he is east into grief; of a sudden he is crushed ;
One moment he sings and plays,
In a twinkling he wails like a mourner.
Like day and night their fate changes;
If they hunger they are like corpses,
When they are satiated they think themselves equal to their god ;
If things go well they talk of ascending to heaven,
If they are in distress, they speak of going down to Irkalla,’
Morris Jastrow (A Babylonian Job, Contemp. Review, Dec. 1906, p. 805),
from whom the above rendering is taken, discusses the document.
234 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
down all excess’;1 it is Zeus who ‘abases the high, and
exalts the low’.2 Countless stories of the attempts to scale
Olympus, and of men who have aspired to the love of
goddesses, belong to this order of thought. These latter sins
are the offences of Eros; but Elpis, who dares to count
upon the future as assured, is also guilty of impious pre-
sumption. ‘Some day,’ says Pindar, ‘I may say for certain
what shall be; but now, although I hope, with God is the
end.’* Such is the cautious language of piety. ‘In every
matter,’ says Solon to Croesus, ‘one must look to the end
and see how it will turn out; for there are many to whom
God gives a glimpse of prosperity and then overturns them
root and branch.’* It is not safe to call a man happy until
he is dead; premature congratulations will bring ill luck
on him.
As a third stage in the development of these ideas, we next
encounter the Aeschylean notion that God uses the tragic
passions themselves as agents of punishment, and brings the
sinner to ruin by increasing the arrogant delusion. His
ministers of Justice are Delusion ('Azdrn), and Blindness —
("Arn) ;® the former sometimes takes the shape of Elpis or —
of Eros. Thus the very causes of offence are enhanced by
God to lead the guilty man deeper into the snare which
Ruin spreads. This is the theory stated by Sophocles im
the chorus we have already quoted. Elpis, the Delusion
who wings the dreams of Desire, steals upon the sinner
unawares. He is blinded and becomes unable to distinguish —
1 Herod. vii. 10 φιλέει γὰρ ὃ θεὸς τὰ ὑπερέχοντα πάντα κολούειν. ι
2 Laert. Diog. i. 8. 2 Chilon asked Aesop how Zeus was employed ; φάναι δ᾽
αὐτόν: τὰ μὲν ὑψηλὰ ταπεινῶν, τὰ δὲ ταπεινὰ ὑψῶν. ;
3 Pind. Ol. xiii. 103. Cf. Theogn. 659 οὐδ᾽ ὀμόσαι χρὴ τοῦθ᾽, ὅτι μήποτε πρᾶγμα
τόδ᾽ ἔσται" | θεοὶ yap τοι νεμεσῶσ᾽, οἷσιν ἔπεστι τέλος.
4 Herod. i. 82 fin.
5 Aesch. fragm. 801 ’Ardrns δικαίας οὖκς ἀποστατεῖ θεός. One means of delu- 2
sion, used by the gods, is the riddling oracle, which is of the nature of an —
ordeal. If a man is right-minded, he will interpret it correctly and take
warning; but if he is infatuated, it will mislead him. Cf. the terms in
which Thucydides (v. 108 cit. supr. p. 178) speaks of oracles, divination, καὶ
ὅσα τοιαῦτα per’ ἐλπίδων λυμαίνεται, and Dionysius’ paraphrase, ἡ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν
ἐλπίς.
"“" “4
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 235
right from wrong.! Moral offences, as distinct from pre-
sumption against the gods, gradually become more prominent.
One of the earliest is excess in vengeance,?—though this,
perhaps, was at first only a theological offence against the
divine prerogative of cruelty.
The.notion that a passion like Eros can be the instrument
of the divine Jealousy finds an interesting expression on
a vase*® of the same class as the Darius krater figured on
p- 195. In the central field the death of Meleager is repre-
sented inside a house. Outside, and on a higher level, sits
Aphrodite, with her head inclined in sorrow, watching the
scene. In her left hand she holds a bow and arrow; and
beside her stands Eros. He is unmistakable, but the name
inscribed above him is not his own, but Phthonos (bOONOS).
The significance is clear: Aphrodite symbolizes the love of
Meleager for Atalanta, of which she is the supernatural cause,
the zapaitia; Eros-Phthonos is the enhanced passion which
has led Meleager to overstep the bounds assigned to man,
and brought on the doom by which the Jealousy of Heaven
is appeased.‘
This moral and theological theory and the drama based
on it concentrate attention more on the abasement of pride
than on the exaltation of the lowly; and the tragic fact
comes to consist chiefly of the former. Hence the original
associations of Penia and Elpis have faded for us, while
those of Ploutos and Hybris are vivid. Elpis and Eros, too,
1 Soph. Ant. 622 τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν | τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν ὅτῳ φρένας | θεὸς ἄγει
πρὸς ἄταν. Lycurgus in Leocr, 92 (cit. Jebb ad loc.) quotes from ‘ancient
poetry’: ὅταν γὰρ ὀργὴ δαιμόνων βλάπτῃ τινά, | τοῦτ᾽ αὐτὸ πρῶτον ἐξαφαιρεῖται
φρενῶν | τὸν νοῦν τὸν ἐσθλόν, εἰς δὲ τὴν χείρω τρέπει | γνώμην, iv’ εἰδῇ μηδὲν ὧν
ἁμαρτάνει. Similarly the chorus in the Antigone (791) addressing Eros:
σὺ καὶ δικαίων ἀδίκους φρένας παρασπᾷς ἐπὶ λώβᾳ.
2 Herod. iv. 205 ὡς ἄρα ἀνθρώποισι αἱ λίην ἰσχυραὶ τιμωρίαι πρὸς θεῶν ἐπίφθονοι
γίνονται. The moral, and non-theological, equivalent of this is expounded
in Hermocrates’ words (Thuc. iv. 62) quoted above on p. 170.
3. From Armentum, now at Naples in the Museo Nazionale Coll. Sant-
angelo, No. 11. Interpreted by Kekulé, Strenna festosa oferta a @. Henzen,
Roma, 1867.
* See Koerte, Ueber Personificationen psychol. Affekte in der spiteren Vasen-
malerei, Berlin, 1874,
236 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
become almost indistinguishable; both are characteristic of
Hybris, and ministerial agents of Nemesis.
We have entered upon this short and imperfect description
of primitive psychology with a view to bringing out the
pre-Aeschylean beliefs about the tragic passions and their —
relation to reversals of fortune—their place in the cycle οὗ
the tragic fact. Unless our description of the form of —
Aeschylean tragedy was altogether fanciful, we found in the ©
double structure of his drama certain features which pointed ;
back to the primitive, mythical theory of the passions. —
Aeschylus conceives them as ministerial agencies, external to
man and yet embodied and personified in him. On the ideal —
plane of the lyric they seemed still to keep something of
their old independent existence as elementary, supernatural —
persons. Hybris was not a mere name for Agamemnon’s —
pride; Eros was something more than the lust of rapine in
the conquerors of Troy. The old notion of incarnation or —
spiritual possession, combined with the subordination οὗ
daemons to the gods, provides at this stage of development —
a working theory to reconcile the supernatural with the
natural causation of human action. The characters of the
play are not merely the blind puppets of higher powers;
they have inward springs of motion, and yet these are”
agencies sent from God. Thus for a moment is the balance
poised between the two sets of powers which shape human
destiny. |
But only for a moment. The theory involves so delicate
an equilibrium between natural and superhuman, so nice ~
a compromise of faith and knowledge, that it cannot be
maintained for long. The balance must turn, and there is —
no doubt which scale will sink. The supernatural must fade
and recede. The gods must surrender again to man the life”
with which, as he slowly learns, himself at his own cost’
has lavishly endowed them. Human nature re-enters upon
its alienated domain, conscious of itself, and of nothing else
but a material world which centres round it. Desire and ἢ
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 237
left of them is a hot movement of the blood, the thrill of
a quickened nerve. Vengeance and Ruin will be at last
transformed into facts of heredity and causal sequences of
physical excess and pain. Destiny will give place to Law.
The question which can no longer be postponed is, how
far this process, with all the loss and gain it carries with
it, had advanced for Thucydides. The common assumption
is that the language of Diodotus is only poetical metaphor,—
that it means no more than a writer of our own day would
mean by it. ‘Thucydides, we are told, ‘has made a clean
sweep of the legendary and novelistic sympathies, and primi-
tive beliefs, rarely mitigated by the light of criticism, which
marked Herodotus.’ In a single generation he had leapt
across the whole gulf which separates us from Aeschylus
and Pindar.
In the course of this study the conviction has been growing
upon us that the comparisons commonly made between Thucy-
dides and Herodotus are based on false assumptions and
misleading. It is usual to speak of Herodotus as primitive,
and religious to..the-pointof superstition ; ; of ‘Thudpdides,
as advanced _ and sceptical to the point of“ irreligiousness.
Herodotus is treated as a naive and artless child ; Thueydides
as a disillusioned satirist, and sometimes. as a cynic. These
/representations seem to us to be founded simply on the
external fact that Herodotus was.by.a generation the older
of the two, and on the false assumption that, because their
books are both called histories, Thucydides must have started
where Herodotus left off, and developed the tradition he
originated. Our own view is almost exactly the reverse. If
either of the two men is to be called religious, it is Thucy-
dides; if either is sceptical, it is Herodotus. Naivety and
artlessness are not terms we should choose to apply to either ;
something closely akin to cynicism and flippancy is common
enough in Herodotus; there is not a trace of either in
Thucydides.
A single passage at the beginning of Herodotus’ history
238 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
will illustrate our meaning. In tracing the earlier stages
of the quarrel between East and West, Herodotus has occasion
to xelata.the story te cow-maiden beloved of Zeus and
persecuted by Hera. “Putting quietly aside the Greek legend,”
which was primitive, gross, and supernatural, Herodotus
gives tl the story as told by. the Persian chroniclers. In this
version Io, an Argive princess, was carried off to Egypt by
some Phoenicians who were trading along the Aegean coasts.
Herodotus also gives a slightly different version, current
among the Phoenicians, in which Io became the captain’s —
paramour, and, to escape her parents’ anger, sailed to Egypt —
of her own free will.
‘It is curious, says Rawlinson,’ ‘to observe the treatment
which the Greek myths met with at the hands of foreigners,
The Oriental mind, quite unable to appreciate poetry of
such a character, stripped the legends bare of all that
beautified them and then treated them, thus vulgarized, as
matters of simple history. lo, the virgin priestess, beloved —
by Zeus, and hated by jealous Hera, metamorphosed, Argus-
watched, and gadfly-driven from land to land, resting δῦ
last by holy Nile’s sweet-tasting stream, and there becoming
mother of a race of hero-kings, is changed to Io, the para-
mour, &c. ... Herodotus, left to himself, has no tendency to
treat myths in this coarse, rationalistic way: witness his
legends of Croesus, Battus, Labda, ἄρ. His spirit is too
\ )reverent, and, if we may so say, too credulous. The super-_
natural never. shocks or startles him,’
The critic's mind is filled with the Io legend as presented —
in the Supplices.and.the Prometheus,.and he quarrels with —
the Phoenicians for not having read. and appreciated.their —
Aeschylus. But what was the story of Io, before Aeschylus —
made it mysterious and beautiful? Apollodorus preserves —
the edifying tale* which ‘the Semitic race, unable to enter
1 Herod. i. 1 ff.
2 4,2 οὕτω μὲν Ἰοῦν és Αἴγυπτον ἀπικέσθαι λέγουσι Πέρσαι, οὐκ ws “EAAnves. —
That is all he says about the Greek story.
3 Translation of Herodotus, note ad loc.
* Apollod. Bibl. 2.1. 3. Io was priestess of Hera, and Zeus violated her.
Caught in the act by Hera, he changed the maiden into a white cow, and — 4
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 239
into the spirit of Greek poesy’,! vulgarized and stripped bare
of its beauty. Herodotus, ‘left to himself, would have been
too reverent to be shocked by it; but apparently the Persians
and Phoenicians stood over him with a stick and terrorized
his ‘reverent, and if we may so say, credulous’ spirit. They
did their work pretty thoroughly. They corrupted their
innocent victim to the extent of making him repeat a comment,
which is not quite the sort of thing we expect to hear in the
nursery. ‘Now the Persians argue that to carry off a woman
must of course be considered as the act of a wicked man ; but,
when the elopement has taken place, to make great ado about
vengeance is the mark of a very foolish man, and to take no
notice whatever is the mark of a very wise one. For ob-
viously, if the victim herself had not wished it, there would
have been no elopement. Now they themselves (they main-
tain) had acted like wise men,’ &c.?
Where else in Greek literature shall we find this flippant,
Parisian, man-of-the-worldly tone? Not in the Athenian
authors—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Euripides, Plato
—no, nor yet in Aristophanes. It is not Athenian, but
Ionian ;* we must look for a parallel to the latest and most
decadent passages of the Ionian Epos; just as, to match the
‘Milesian’ tale of Gyges, to which Herodotus next turns, we
must look to Boccaccio and Brantéme. Herodotus stands, not
swore he would not touch her again. That is why, says Hesiod, the breaking
of lovers’ vows does not draw down the anger of the gods. Hera begged the
cow from Zeus, and set Argus to watch her. He tied her to an olive-tree,
Then Zeus sent Hermes to steal the cow, but Hermes was detected by
Hierax (the Hawk) and he killed Argus with a stone, Hera sent a gad-fly
to drive Io from land to land, till at last she came to Egypt, was changed
back into a woman, and bore Epaphos.
1 Rawlinson, ibid.
2 Herod. i. 4, Plutarch, malig. Herod. ii. (856) protests against this
utterance as an ‘apology on behalf of the ravishers’ and as involving
impiety, since, if the women were carried off willingly, the punishment of
the gods upon the ravishers was unjust.
3 The contrast between the Ionian spirit and the Athenian was suggested
to me by an unpublished lecture of Mr. Gilbert Murray, which I have been
privileged to read, and which suddenly illuminated this part of my subject.
Whatever truth there is in the view expressed is due to him, though he is
in no way responsible for the expression of it.
9240 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
at the beginning, but at the end of a tradition. Hg_is not,
the father of history; he is the last of the Homeridae, turning
the refined and_ polished. product of centuries..of. festal recita-
tion into material for his amusing and instructive tale of the
quarrel of East and West. The process is, to our eyes,
unscientific; but it was then the most advanced and
enlightened treatment of saga. There is not a word in either
of the two versions given by Herodotus which might not be
literal fact.1. Such incidents must have occurred as frequently
when the Phoenicians bartered beads and gaudy stuffs with
the simple natives along the Aegean coasts, as they do now
when European traders ply exactly the same business along
the shores of Africa. He is, to ὁ inds, unscientific
only_in three respects. First, he does not understand that
Og pNP RP
was aware that sailed tporwmaes is a a sort of myth. Second, he
imports into the heroic age the international..courtesies..and
decently conducted negotiations by herald.and envoy, which
prevailed in his own time. Third,-he..does-not.. care.-which
story—the Persian or the Phoenician—is true. ‘About this
matter, he says, ‘I am not going to say whether it happened —
this way.or that.’...‘I will tell no lies, George, that.I promise ©
you, says the younger Pendennis; ‘and do no more than 4
coincide in those which are necessary and pass current, and —
can’t be got in without recalling the whole circulation.’ 5
1 The treatment of this myth illustrates a remark we made above (p. 183), _
to the effect that rationalization may easily efface the clues by which the —
elements of fiction and truth can be discriminated. Herodotus leaves only —
the name of Io and the voyage to Egypt, suppressing the transformation into _
acow. Now it is almost certain that the element of historical fact which —
lies behind the story is a primitive cow-worship at Argos, probably even —
earlier than the worship of Hera. Io is possibly a primaeval cow-goddess —
whom Hera replaced. The voyage to Egypt is purely mythical, having been
invented when Io was identified with Isis. Thus the most rational part of
the story is absolutely unhistorical; while the gross and supernatural —
features of it, which rationalism refines away, are the clue to historical
truth.
Rationalization is the converse of the mythical ‘infiguration’ of history:
it imparts the form of a possible series of events to a supernatural and
impossible story.
? Thackeray, Pendennis, xviii.
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 241
It is against this light and careless Jonian_temper..that
Thucydides-protests,. as Aeschylus, in his way, had protested
before, and Plato, in his, will protest later. To Aeschylus
it seemed irreligious; to Thucydides, regardless of truth; to
Plato, immoral. Aeschylus had taken Homer and made the
religion of Zeus spiritual by incorporating with it a profound
interpretation of those gross and primitive myths, like the story
of the cow-maiden, which the Ionians had rejected or turned to
ridicule in the parodies of mock Epic. Plato finds Homer too
thoroughly penetrated with immorality to be rendered service-
able even by drastic expurgation.1 To Thucydides the Ionian
tradition of Epos and story-telling is anathema; his introduc-
tion is a judicial and earnest polemic against it and all its works.
There was as little of the Ionian in his temperament as there
was in his blood. It is almost certain that he was related on
his mother’s side to the Philaidae, for his tomb was to be seen
close to those of Kimon and Miltiades.2 His father bore
a Thracian name, and came probably of that hard-drinking
and fighting stock which worshipped Ares and the northern
Dionysus; and it is to the religious drama which grew up at
Dionysus’ festivals in Pelasgian Athens, not to the Epos
which had flowered at the Ionian gatherings and now was
overblown, that Thucydides turns for his inspiration.
Herodotus picks up a good story where he can. His
dramatization of the expedition of Xerxes is tinged with
Aeschylean religion, because Aeschylus had created the
Persian legend on this type and fixed the lines which any one
who wished to glorify Athens and to please an Athenian
audience must follow. But in Herodotus the religious notions
are ill-digested and lie close to the surface. They are the
theme of illustrative and fabulous anecdote, not the deep-set
framework of earnest thought. It is not in this manner that
Thucydides works when he turns the great moral of Aeschylus’
Persians against the Athenian Empire.
1 When Homer is called ‘the Bible of the Greeks’, these points tend to
be overlooked.
3 The Philaidae were an Aeginetan family. Miltiades, the victor of
Marathon, married a Thracian wife.
R
242 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
In doing so, the historian inevitably borrowed much of the
structure of Aeschylean tragedy. This unhistoriec principle of
design came in on the top of his first, chronological plan, and
he allowed both to shape his work, leaving long tracts of
uncoloured narrative between the scattered episodes of his
drama. The tragic theory of human nature involved in the
dramatization differs from the Aeschylean in being non-
theological—at least on the surface and so far beneath it as
we are allowed to see; for in place of all-seeing Zeus,
Thucydides has Fortune,.In thus removing the theological
element, he has reverted in a curious way to the pre-theo-
logical conception of the tragic fact, which existed long
before Aeschylus. The language of Diodotus expresses that
conception in its completeness and with great precision. We
have in fact in that statement an instance of rationalizing.
The accretion of theological belief is removed; but what is
left is a mythical construction which contains and carries
with it conceptions still more primitive. Just as Thucydides
in rationalizing the story of Pausanias cut away the fabulous
anecdotes, and never saw that what remained was not fact,
but dramatized legend; so in rationalizing the theology of
Aeschylus, he was unaware that what remained was mythical
in origin, and not a fresh statement of the facts of life drawn
from direct and unbiassed observation. We have traced the
theory through three stages: (1) a primitive, pre-Olympian
stage, in which it might be called religious, but neither theo-
logical nor moral ; (2) a theological, but still non-moral stage,
in which the Jealousy of the Olympians is a dominant con-
ception ; and (8) a stage both theological and moral, in the
drama of Aeschylus. Thucydides adds a fourth stage in which
this train of thought ceases to involve theology, while it
remains moral, But through all its phases it is more or less
mythical.
How much warmth and life these primitive ideas still
held for him, what degree of reality Fortune, Elpis, and Eros
retained—these are questions which cannot be answered with
certainty. Our own impression is that the anthropomorphic
THE TRAGIC PASSIONS 243
mode of thought was so habitual and vivid in the Greek
mind, that only the most determined rationalists could shake
it off. Perhaps even they could not get free of it. Euripides,
like Thucydides, is hailed as a modern of the moderns, and
(to our thinking) with better reason. The tragedian has none
of the historian’s detachment; he will risk the success of an
artistic effect to gain a point in theological controversy ; he is
not coolly, but fervently, rationalistic. And yet, when we
read the Hippolytus, and still more when we see it played,
the feeling grows upon us that reason falls back like a broken
wave. A brooding power, relentless, inscrutable, waits and
watches and smites. There she stands, all through the action,
the white, implacable Aphrodite. Is she no more than a
marble image, the work of men’s hands? Is there no signifi-
cance in that secret smile, no force behind the beautiful mask,
no will looking out of the fixed, watching eyes? And yet,
how can there be? Is she not one of the outcast, dethroned
Olympians, a figment of bygone superstition, despised and
rejected of an enlightened age? No, she is more than this,
and much more. But what can she be?—a personification
of the ‘life-force’? A thousand times, no! It must be that
poetry has forced on reason some strange compromise. We
cannot detect the formula of that agreement; but we know
that somehow a compact has been made. Had the poet, in
one of the long days of musing in his seaward cave on
Salamis, seen a last vision of the goddess, rising in wrathful
foam ?
In the Hippolytus we are approaching the modern con-
ception of the tragic fact, in which the interest lies in the
inward conflict of purely natural motives; but we have not
yet quite reached it; and if the supernatural quality of the
elementary human passions is still felt by Euripides, it is no
great paradox to find traces of it in the historian, who looked
to drama of a much more primitive type.
R 2
CHAPTER XIV
THE CAUSE OF THE WAR
THE play, we said, is done;—that is the feeling which
every reader has, when he closes the seventh Book; and we
fancy it -was the writer's feeling too. He had traced the
‘causes’ of the Sicilian expedition from Fortune at Pylos
to Nemesis at the quarries of Syracuse. From this point
onwards he has little interest in his task; the eighth Book
is a mere continuation on the old chronological plan, un-
finished, dull, and spiritless. The historian patiently con-
tinued his record; but he seems to grope his way like
a man without a clue. The last seven years of the war he
left altogether unrecorded, preferring to spend his time in
retouching, amplifying, and shaping the earlier narrative,
where he could see clearly. His chain of ‘causes’ runs
through Books IV to VII. At the earlier end it pointed
back to foreshadowing events as far as the beginning of
Book III (the Mytilenean debate), but no further. To link
the Sicilian enterprise to the origin of the war, he would
have had to get completely out of himself, become ‘a modern
of the moderns’, and study the economic situation—an entity
he never dreamed of. Looking back to this point, where
his clue seemed to fail him, he must have puzzled and cast
about for some light. The historically insoluble riddle of
Pericles’ attack upon Megara—how he must have turned
this over, as again and again he took up his first Book, to
revise it once more.
Now, to almost all his contemporaries that riddle presented
no difficulty whatever; for there can have been very few
who did not belong to one or other of two classes. There
_ was the thoughtless mass of ordinary folk who were quite
content with the notion that Pericles had some personal
THE CAUSE OF THE WAR 245
rancour against the Megarians. These had not known
Pericles; their minds were not on a scale to measure his.
Their foolish opinions are not so much as stated, for a tacit
disproof was enough for them. But there was also a large
body of reflective, serious people, who were satisfied with
a very different explanation. About their opinion these
facts are certain: namely, that Thucydides, at some time
in his life, thought it worth mentioning, if only indirectly and
by implication ; that he mentioned it with no expression of
belief or disbelief on his own part; and that he described at
some length what he thought to be the facts on which it was
based. This explanation was that there was a curse—a taint |
of guilt and of madness—in the house to which Pericles, on his |
mother’s side, belonged.
We hasten to say that Thucydides’ detailed narration of
the incidents of the Kylonian conspiracy, to which this taint
was traced back, is sufficiently accounted for by a desire to
correct the version given by Herodotus.! Herodotus says
the Alemaeonids were ‘ considered responsible’; the ‘accusa-
tion was laid upon them’, and tells the story very briefly.
Thucydides tells it with much precision and detail, and
especially insists that the nine archons (not, as Herodotus
says, the ‘presidents of the Naucraries’) were absolutely re-
sponsible. The effect is to fix the guilt of the sacrilege
on the Alemaeonid archon, Megacles; and doubtless Thucy-
dides believed that so it was. Both historians have in view
1 It has been observed that Herodotus, here as in other places where the
Alemaeonids are concerned, gives the version current in that family.
Thucydides (who, by the way, was connected with the rival house of the
Philaidae—the family of Miltiades and Kimon), here as elsewhere, gives
a version which is, at least, without any bias in favour of the Alemaeonids.
Another instance is the expulsion of the tyrants: Thucydides (vi. 54 ff.)
barely mentions the Alemaeonids ; Herodotus gives them as much credit as
possible. See Herod. vi. 123.
2 Herod. v. 70 εἶχον αἰτίην rod φόνου ... 71 φονεῦσαι δὲ αὐτοὺς αἰτίη ἔχει
᾿Αλκμεωνΐίδας.
3 Herod. v. 71 τούτους ἀνιστᾶσι μὲν οἱ πρυτάνιες τῶν ναυκράρων, οἵ περ ἔνεμον
τότε τὰς ᾿Αθήνας. Thue. i. 126 οἱ ᾿Αθηναῖοι... ἀπῆλθον... . ἐπιτρέψαντες τοῖς ἐννέα
ἄρχουσι τήν τε φυλακὴν καὶ τὸ πᾶν αὐτοκράτορσι διαθεῖναι ἣ ἂν ἄριστα διαγιγνώ-
σκωσιν" τότε δὲ τὰ πολλὰ τῶν πολιτικῶν οἱ ἐννέα ἄρχοντες ἔπρασσον,
R3
246. THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
a current controversy on the subject roused by the Lacedae-
monians’ demand that the Athenians should expel ‘the
Accursed ’—a ‘pretext’ for the war which provides Thucy-
dides with an occasion for telling the story and correcting
Herodotus. ‘The occasion is sufficient; the desire to correct
accounts for the precision and detail.
The story is told with great reserve.! ‘The followers of
Kylon were besieged and were in distress for lack of food
and water. So, although Kylon and his brother escaped,
the rest, since they were in straits and some were dying
of hunger, took sanctuary as suppliants at the altar which
is on the Acropolis. And those Athenians who were charged
to keep watch, when they saw them dying in the holy place,
caused them to rise, promising they would do them no harm,
and they led them away and slew them. And some who,
as they passed by, took sanctuary actually at the altars of
the Venerable Goddesses, they dispatched. And from this
they were called accursed and banned of the goddess, they
and the race that came from them. Now the Athenians
drove out these accursed, and Cleomenes, also, the Lacedae-
monian, drove them out later when the Athenians were in
civil strife; and when they drove out the living they also
took up the bones of the dead and cast them out. They
were, however, restored later, and their race is to this day
in the city.
‘This then was the Curse which the Lacedaemonians bade |
them drive out; pretending that they were first of all
avenging the gods, but knowing that Pericles, the son of
Xanthippos, was connected with it on his mother’s side,®
* Die Erzihlung des Thukydides macht den Eindruck einer im ganzen
objektiven, wenngleich mit Bezug auf die Beteiligung der Alkmeoniden,
deren Name gar nicht genannt wird, dusserst zuriickhaltenden Darstellung.
Busolt, Gr. Gesch. ii. 204°.
? 1, 126. 11 καθεζομένους δέ τινας καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν Σεμνῶν Θεῶν τοῖς βωμοῖς ἐν τῇ
παρόδῳ ἀπεχρήσαντο. The καί is ambiguous: it may mean ‘also’ or ‘even’,
‘ actually.’
3. Observe that the curse follows the female line. Aeschylus had not
eradicated that belief. Alcibiades also was an Alemaeonid, certainly through
his mother, probably also through his father.
-
THE CAUSE OF THE WAR 24.7
and thinking that if he were exiled their affairs at Athens
would go more smoothly. However, they did not so much
expect that this would happen to him as that they would
bring him into ill-odour with the city, and make them think
that the war would be partly because of his misfortune
(ξυμφοράν). For being most powerful in his day and leading
the state, he was in all things opposing the Lacedaemonians
and not suffering the Athenians to give way, but was urging
them into the war.’?
This narrative is very serious and solemn. Thucydides,
moreover, has neither directly nor by implication given any
opinion about the beliefs connected with it. He implies,
᾿ Indeed, that to avenge the gods was not, as the Lacedae-
monians pretended, the ‘first’, the promary motive of their
demand. ‘The phrase which describes their primary object—
διαβολὴν οἴσειν αὐτῷ----ἰβ ambiguous ; for a διαβολή is any charge
brought with malicious intention to discredit a man—whether
the charge be true or false. The most pious believer in the
curse of the Alemaeonidae could have used the expression ;
on any view the revival of the curse to gain an end in
diplomacy was ‘malicious’. That the Lacedaemonians believed
in the curse, Thucydides implies when he says that the religious
motive was not, as they pretended, the primary one. In the
next chapter he records that the Spartans did believe in their
own curse—the dyos of the Brazen House—and thought it
caused the earthquake which preceded the Helot revolt.
Thucydides’ reserve is impenetrable; we can only fall back
on our general impression of the tone and manner of his
narrative. We are stating what is a mere matter of personal
opinion when we say that this story does not strike us as the
work of a man who was clearly convinced that the curse or
‘taint’ of the Alemaeonidae could not conceivably have had
any causal connexion with Pericles’ action in ‘urging the
Athenians into the war’, because there was no such thing as
1 és τὸν πόλεμον ὥρμα τοὺς ᾿Αθηναίους, the one explicit statement made by
Thucydides on his own account about Pericles’ action in forcing on the war.
We have seen how elsewhere he minimizes it.
248 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
an hereditary taint of guilt, obscurely working in the blood,
a seed of madness which might be a wise and innocent man’s
‘misfortune’. We feel that a writer who had altogether
rejected that conception would have given some indication
that he thought the whole controversy about the curse a piece
of silly superstition; and that he would not have told the
story of Kylon in so solemn a tone, or have added a still
longer and equally serious history of the curse of Taenarus.
That Thucydides believed in the religious and dogmatic
theory of hereditary guilt, we do not for one moment suppose.
He did not, we may be quite sure, think of an dyos as
Aeschylus thought of it,—as a spirit, an evil genius (δαίμων),
which could be incarnate in a series of descendants. But
there was nothing irrational or superstitious in believing that
when a man commits what is to him an awful religious crime,
remorse and terror may madden his brain ; and that this taint
of madness may be transmitted to his posterity. The first of
these propositions no one would deny; the second is, we
believe, not yet finally disproved.
It seems, then, just possible that Thucydides thought there
might be some touch of madness in Pericles which explained
his violence against Megara—the otherwise inexplicable
problem. But why against Megara? and why connect the
madness with the curse of the Alemaeonidae? Is it altogether
fanciful to point out that the Kylonian conspiracy was an
incident in the feud between Megara and Athens? ‘ Kylon
was an Athenian in olden time who won a victory at Olympia
and was well-born and powerful; and he had married a
daughter of Theagenes, a Megarian, who in those days was
tyrant of Megara.’ Theagenes, we are further told,’ supplied
him with forces for his attempt on the Acropolis of Athens. —
So most, at any rate, of the suppliants who were sacrilegiously
slain by the Alemaeonid archon, were Megarians. And now
Megacles’ descendant is ‘urging’ the Athenians into a war
sooner than revoke a violent decree against the descendants
of his victims. A strange coincidence, if it is nothing ©
more!
1 i, 126, ? Thid.
THE CAUSE OF THE WAR 249
However this may be, the point is, perhaps, clear, that
Thucydides’ attention was occupied with topics like these,
and so diverted from those factors in the economic situation
which might have enabled him to read the origin of the war |
in the light of the Sicilian expedition. All contemporary
thought was similarly directed to mythical causes. The
Lacedaemonians, for instance, explained the war on the same
lines. Their first open quarrel with Athens, says Thucydides,!
dated from the Helot revolt at Ithome, when they had dis-
missed Kimon’s contingent slightingly. The Helot revolt was
occasioned by an earthquake.? The earthquake was, as the
Lacedaemonians thought, caused by Poseidon, whose sanctuary
they had violated by killing suppliants. Their chain of
‘causes’ led them back to an dyos—the curse of Taenarus—
of just the same kind as the ἄγος of the Alemaeonidae. Such
were the ‘causes’ men looked for in Thucydides’ day. Can
we wonder that the origin of the Peloponnesian war is
somewhat obscure ?
Thucydides was one of those prophets and kings of thought
who have desired to see the day of all-conquering Knowledge,
and have not seen it. The deepest instinct of the human
mind is to shape the chaotic world and the illimitable stream |
of events into some intelligible form which it can hold before ;
itself and take in at one survey. From this instinct all mytho- |
logy takes its rise, and all the religious and philosophical Ὁ
systems which grow out of mythology without a break. The |
man whose reason has thrown over myth and abjured religion, ,
and who yet is born too soon to find any resting-place for his
thought provided by science and philosophy, may set himself |
to live on isolated facts without a theory ; but the time will |
come when his resistance will break down. All the artistic
and imaginative elements in his nature will pull against
his reason, and, if once he begins to produce, their triumph is
assured, In spite of all his good resolutions, the work will
grow under his hands into some satisfying shape, informed by
reflection and governed by art.
1 i, 102. 21 108; 5 i, 128.
250 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS
When Thucydides records his own military failure and the
exile by which the Athenians punished it, he neither extenuates
the blunder nor complains of the penalty. Perhaps he knew
that during those twenty years of banishment in his remote
Thracian home, he had gathered the maturer fruits of solitude
and silence. It must have been bitter at first to quit the
scene of a drama so intense and passionate, to step down from
the stage and find a place among the spectators; but asthe
long agony wore on, as crime led to crime and madness to
ruin, it was only from a distance that the artist who was no
longer an actor could discern the large outlines shaping all
that misery and suffering into the thing of beauty and awe
which we call Tragedy.
ΧΩ
INDEX,
AxrGina and Egypt, 38.
AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon, 144;
Agam. 2938-328, 149 ; 330 ff., 156;
353 ff., 214; 717 ff., 198 ; 801-965,
160; 1371-1576, 161; Persians,
134; Art-form of his drama,
139 ff.; psychology, 154 ff., 234,
236; free-will, 154.
ALCIBIADES, Melian massacre,
186; idealized, 188; deludes
Spartan envoys, 191; Sicilian
expedition, 205 ff.
ALOMAEONID curse, 245 ff.
ALIENS, influx of, 19.
ALLEGORY, 230.
ANAXAGORAS, 78, 107.
APATE, on Darius vase, 196; in
Aeschylus, 234.
ARISTOPHANES, Acharnians, 83,
26; Frogs, 1425, 193; Knights,
125 ff., 22; 1303, 45.
CARTHAGE, 44.
CAUSE, and pretext, 53; Polybius’
distinction, 57; meaning of
αἰτία, 57 ff.; only psychological
causes in ancient historians, 64 ;
causes of human events, 68.
VERON, leader of Piraeus, 22;
~ Thucydides’ treatment of, 80;
‘malignity’ against, 96, 110;
Pylos negotiations, 110-114,
119; Mytilenean debate, 114"
Sphacteria, 116; Amphipolis,
118 ; his career dramatized, 125;
as Elpis, 171.
CLYTEMNESTRA, as Peitho, 160.
CoMMERCIAL Party, 18; policy,
81,
CorcyYRA, alliance, 40, 48--44, 51.
CORINTH, position on Isthmus, 84.
CouNTRY against town at
16.
DAEMONS, and passions, 157; and
gods, 231.
DARIUS vase, 195.
Diopotus, Mytilenean
121, 221, 242.
Dionysius, on Melian Dialogue,
174 ff.
Dram, influence on Thucydides,
137 ff.
Economics, 71.
EaeEsta, 199.
EGYPTIAN expedition, 37.
Epis, in Diodotus’ speech, 122;
Cleon, 171; Melian Dialogue,
178, 184; conception of, 167;
in Hesiod, 224; as Ker, 225,
232.
Eros, in Diodotus’ speech, 122;
in Agamemnon, 156, 214; Alcib-
iades, 206 ff.; and tyranny, 207;
Phthonos, 235.
EURIPIDES, Hippolytus, 248.
EvVERYMAN, 141.
speech,
FORTUNE, as agency, 97 ff.; and
foresight, 104 ff.; in Diodotus’
speech, 122 ; and ‘ reversal’, 222.
GOMPERZ, 68.
HARMODIUS and Aristogeiton, 132.
HERODOTUS, ἡ. 1, 60, 237; criticized
by Thucydides, 74 ; dramatization
of Persian War, 134; compared
with Thucydides, 237.
HISTORIANS, ancient and modern,
65 ff., 127.
INFIGURATION, mythical, 131.
Io myth, 288.
252
Irony, tragic, 148; in clean. 8
speech, 50.
IstumusES, Bérard’s Law of 33.
Kyton, 245.
Law, natural, 68, 98.
LEONTINI, alliance, 40.
MALBA, 33.
MaRLowgE, Faustus, 142.
MEGARA, decrees against, 25-38 ;
isthmus of, 32; Kylonian con-
spiracy, 244 ff.
MILTIADES at Paros, 1 68,
MovERNIsT Fallacy, 103.
MytTuHistoria, 130 ff.
MYTILENEAN debate, Cleon, 114;
Diodotus, 121.
NAUKRATIS, 37,
NIsAEA, 36, 47.
ORENDA, 228,
PANDORA myth, 224.
PASSIONS, as daemons, 227;
ministers of Delusion, 158 ; tragic
theory of, 221 ff.
PAUSANTIAS, legend, 185, 165.
PEGAB, 86, 47.
PEITHO, 153 ff.; with Helen, 209.
PELOPONNESIAN War, causes of,
1-14; 244-249,
PERICLES, alleged personal motives,
4, 26, 30 ; Corcyrean alliance, 40;
plan of war, 46; Thucydides’
judgement of, 4%; Alcmaeonid
curse, 101, 105, 245 ff.
PERSONIFICATIONS, 226,
PHTHONOS, 219, 233.
PIRAEUS, growth of, 18,
Pornos, 215.
PYLOS, occupation of, 83-94.
REALISM, in History, 127; in
drama, 141.
REVERSAL of Fortune, 140, 222,
233.
INDEX
SICILIAN Expedition, part of com-
mercial policy, 88, 48; why
delayed, 45; how regarded by
Thucydides, 51; story of its
start, 198 ff.
SICILIAN trade, through Corinth,
34; with Athens, 39.
SocRATES, 104.
SOPHOCLES, Antigone, 616 ff., 184,
225, 234; 781ff., 219.
SPARTA, no motive for war, 8.
SPARTAN envoys after Pylos, 111,
119, 151.
SPHACTERIA, 115.
SYMBOLISM in drama, 141.
THUCYDIDES, states only official
policies, 14; scope of his history,
53; original plan, 54; relates
feud between Athens and Sparta,
61; attitude to Religion and
Philosophy, 72; idealizes char-
acters, 125; speeches, 138, 149.
Chief passages discussed : ὁ, 20,
74; 4. 22,53, 99; 7.23, 7,57, 102;
i. 44,40; 4. 88-118, 61; 4.126,
246; i. 16,16; i. 48,100; 7. 65,
48; iii, 37-40 (Mytilenean debate,
Cleon), 114; iii. 45 (Diodotus),
121, 221, 242; iv. 1-14 (Pylos),
83-94; iv. 15-22 (Pylos negotia-
tions), 111,151; iv. 26-41(Sphac-
teria), 115; iv. 53-65 (Elpis), 168;
iv. 80,9; v.2-11(Amphipolis), 118;
v. 14ff.,189; υ. 43-46(Alcibiades’
trick), 191;
174 ff.; vi. 6, 8, 46 (Egestaeans),
199; wi. 8-14 (Nikias), 201 ff. ;
vi. 15-18 (Alcibiades), 210 ff. ; vi.
19-24, 213; vi. 27-29 (Hermae),
216; vi. 30-32 (start of Expedi-
tion), 217; vii. 77 (Nikias), 219.
Town against Country at Athens, Pe
16. .
[XENOPHON] de Rep. Ath. 15, 21.
OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
v. 84-116 (Melos),
Ν «{
Telegrams : 41 and 43 Maddox Street,
* Scholarly, London,’ Bond Street, London, W.,
January, 1907+
Mr. Edward Arnold’s
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2 Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books
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A PICNIC PARTY IN WILDEST
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4 Mr. Edward Αγποίά᾽ 5 List of New Books
THE PRINCES OF ACHAIA AND THE
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ό Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books
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Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 7
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8 Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books
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go2
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"“ “(ᾳ,
Mr. Edward Αἀγηοϊά᾽ 5 List of New Books
NEW FICTION.
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se) Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books
ABYSSINIA OF TO-DAY.
Hn Zccount of the First Mission sent by the American Government
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WESTERN TIBET AND THE
BRITISH BORDERLAND.
By CHARLES A. SHERRING, M.A,, F.R.GS.,
InpDIAN Civi. SERVICE; Deputy CoMMISSIONER OF ALMORA.
Royal δυο. With Illustrations, Maps and Sketches. 21s. net.
During the last few years Tibet, wrapped through the centuries
in mystery, has been effectively ‘opened up’ to the gaze of the
Western world, and already the reader has at his disposal an
enormous mass of information on the country and its inhabitants.
But there is in Western Tibet a region which is still comparatively
little known, which is especially sacred to the Hindu and Buddhist,
and in which curious myths and still more curious manners abound ;
and it is of this portion of the British Borderland, its government, and
the religion and customs of its peoples, that Mr. Sherring writes.
The book contains a thrilling account by Dr. T. G. Longstaff,
M.B., F.R.G.S., of an attempt to climb Gurla Mandhata, the highest
mountain in Western Tibet, with two Swiss guides.
Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books IL
LETTERS OF
GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL,
D.C.L., LL.D., Hon. Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
Arranged by his Daughter, LUCY CRUMP.
Demy 8vo. With Portraits. 12s. 6d. net.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s ‘ Letters’ form, with a few connecting links
written by his daughter, an autobiography whose charm lies in its
intimate portrayal of a character which was, in its curious intensity,
at once learned, tender, and humorous. He wrote as he talked, and
his talk was famous for its fund of anecdote, of humour, of deep
poetic feeling, of vigorous literary criticism, and no less vigorous
political sentiment. As an Oxford undergraduate, he was one of the
founders, together with Mr. Swinburne, Prof. A. V. Dicey, and
Mr. James Bryce, of the Old Mortality Club. He was intimately
connected also with the Pre-Raphaelites. At college, at home, on
the Continent, or in America, everywhere he writes with the pen of
one who observes everything, and who could fit all he saw that was
new into his vast knowledge of the past. His editions of ‘ Boswell’s
Johnson,’ of ‘ Johnson’s Letters,’ and ‘The Lives of the Poets’
have passed into classical works, But that his writings were not
exclusively Johnsonian is abundantly shown by such books as the
Letters of Hume, Swift, General Gordon, and Rossetti, as well as
by his ‘Life of Sir Rowland Hill,’ his ‘History of Harvard
University,’ and various collections of essays.
LETTERS TO A GODCHILD
ON THE CATECHISM AND CONFIRMATION,
By ALICE GARDNER,
AssociaTE AND LECTURER OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; AUTHOR OF ‘ FRIENDS OF THE
Oxtpen Time,’ ‘ THEODORE OF STUDIUM,’ ETC.
Foolscap δυο. 2s. 6d. net.
This series of actual Letters written to an actual Godchild on the
subject of Confirmation is intended for parents and teachers who
either feel that some of the instruction to be derived from the
Catechism is obscured by archaism of style and thought, or who
desire something in the way of a supplement to the Catechism. It
is not intended to take the place of works of formal religious in-
struction. |
12 Mr. Edward Αγπμοίά᾽5 List of New Books
TRANSLATIONS INTO LATIN AND
GREEK VERSE.
By H. A. J. MUNRO,
SOMETIME FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, AND PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE.
With a Prefatory Note by J. D. DUFF,
FELLOw oF Trinity COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
Medium 8vo. With a Portrait. 6s. net.
These translations were originally printed for private circulation in
the autumn of 1884, a few months before the author’s death. They
were never published, and for years past the price asked for the
book second-hand has been high. It has therefore been decided,
with the consent of Munro’s representatives, to reprint the work, so
that those who are interested in Latin Verse and in Munro may
acquire a copy at a reasonable price.
NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION.
THE QUEEN’S POOR.
Life as they find it in Town and Country.
By M. LOANE.,
Crown δυο. 35. 6d.
Sir ArtHuR Cray, Bart., says of this book: ‘I have had a good deal of ex-
perience of ‘relief’ work, and I have never yet come across a book upon the
subject of the ‘‘ poor '’ which shows such true insight and such a grasp of reality
in describing the life, habits, and mental attitude of our poorer fellow-citizens, . ..
The whole book is not only admirable from a common-sense point of view, but it is
extremely pleasant and interesting to read, and has the great charm of humour.’
NEW EDITION, ENTIRELY REWRITTEN.
PSYCHOLOGY FOR TEACHERS.
By C. LLOYD MORGAN, LL.D., F.R.S.,
PRINCIPAL OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, BRISTOL 3
AuTHOR ΟΕ ‘ THE SprinGs oF Conpuct,’ ‘ HABIT AND INSTINCT,’ ETC.
Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d.
For this edition, Professor Lloyd Morgan has entirely rewritten,
and very considerably enlarged, his well-known work on this imporx-
tant subject. He has, in fact, practically made a new book of it.
Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books 13
MISREPRESENTATIVE WOMEN,
AND OTHER VERSES.
By HARRY GRAHAM,
ΑΥΤΗΟΚ oF ‘RuTHLESS RuymMEs FoR HeartTiLess Homgss,’ ‘ BALLADS OF THE BoER Wak,’
‘ MISREPRESENTATIVE Men,’ ‘ FiscaL BALLAps,’ ‘VERSE AND WORSE,’ ETC.
Foolscap 4to. With Illustrations by DaN SayRE GROESBECK. 568.
Admirers of Captain Graham’s ingenious and sarcastic verse will
welcome this fresh instalment, which contains, among the ‘ other
verses,’ a number of ‘ Poetic Paraphrases’ and ‘ Open Letters’ to
popular authors.
THE LAND OF PLAY.
By MRS. GRAHAM WALLAS.
Crown δυο. With Illustrations by GiLBERT JAMES. 35. 6d.
The four stories which make up this delightful children’s book are
entitled ‘ Luck-Child,’ ‘ The Princess and the Ordinary Little Girl,’
‘ Professor Green,’ and ‘ A Position of Trust.’
A SONG-GARDEN FOR CHILDREN.
A Collection of Children’s Songs
Adapted from the French and German by
HARRY GRAHAM anp ROSA NEWMARCH.
The Music Edited and Arranged by
NORMAN O’NEILL.
Imperial 8v0, Paper. 2s. 6d. net.
Cloth, gilt top. 45. 6d. net.
This is a charming collection of forty-three French and German
songs for children translated and adapted by Capt. Graham and
Mrs. Newmarch. It includes nine songs arranged by J. Brahms for
the children of Robert and Clara Schumann.
14 Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books
A HANDBOOK OF SKIN DISEASES
AND THEIR TREATMENT,
By ARTHUR WHITFIELD, M.D. (Lonp.), F.R.C.P.,
ProFessor OF DermatTo.ocy aT Kinc’s CoLLEGE; PHYSICIAN TO THE SKIN DEPARTMENTS,
Kine’s COLLEGE AND THE GREAT NorTHERN CENTRAL HospIrTAts.
Crown 8vo. Wiaith Illustrations. 8s. 6d. net.
This book is designed especially to meet the needs of those who
have to treat the commoner skin diseases. While giving short
descriptions of the rarer forms, the chief attention is bestowed on
Si 5 i eg a re lea
those more frequently met with. The diagnostic features of the
‘various eruptions are dealt with in detail, in order that they may
give help in determining the lines of treatment. The more recent
work in clinical pathology, both microscopical and chemical, is for ~
the first time brought into use in an English text-book. The book ~
is freely illustrated with original photographs.
THE CHEMICAL INVESTIGATION ©
OF GASTRIC AND INTESTINAL
DISEASES BY THE AID OF
TEST MEALS.
By VAUGHAN HARLEY, M.D. Epin., M.R.C.P., F.C.S.,
PROFESSOR OF PATHOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LoNDON ;
And FRANCIS GOODBODY, M.D. Dus., M.R.C.P.,
AssISTANT PROFESSOR OF PATHOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.
This book opens with a description of the method of obtaining
gastric contents, and the estimation of the capacity of the stomach. ~
The various Test Meals employed in diagnosis are next described. _
The macroscopical examination of the gastric contents and conclu-
sions to be drawn on inspection are discussed, and a short descrip-
tion of the microscopical appearances follows. The chemical
analysis of the gastric contents is then given. The Organic Diseases ~
of the Stomach are all separately described, with specimen cases of ὴ
analysis toillustrate them. The Functional Diseases of the Stomach,
which are more frequently met with in ordinary practice than the ~
Organic Diseases, are also very fully given. The chemical methods
employed in the investigation of Intestinal Diseases are then de-—
scribed with great fulness, four types of Test Meals being given.
τ
-
Mer.
~
Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books 15
A GUIDE TO DISEASES OF THE
NOSE AND THROAT AND THEIR
TREATMENT.
By CHARLES ARTHUR PARKER, F.R.C.S. Epi.
Demy 8v0. With 254 Illustrations. 18s. net.
EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE.
‘To acquire the necessary dexterity to examine a patient systemati-
cally so as to overlook nothing, to recognise and put in its proper
place the particular pathological condition found, and finally, but
chiefly, to treat both the patient and the local abnormality success-
fully, seem to me the three most important objects of a course of
study at a special hospital. This book, which is founded on lectures
given at the Throat Hospital with these objects in view, is now
published in the hope of helping those who are either attending or
have attended a short course of study at special departments or
special Hospitals for Diseases of the Throat and Nose. . . .’
THE DIAGNOSIS OF NERVOUS
DISEASES.
By PURVES STEWART, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P.,
PuysiciAN To OutT-PATIENTS AT THE WESTMINSTER HospiTaL, AND Jomvr LECTURER ON
MEDICINE IN THE Mepicat ScHOOL; PuysIcIAN TO THE Royat NaTionaL ORTHOP/EDIC
HospiraL; AssisTANT PHYSICIAN TO THE ITALIAN HosPITAL.
Demy 8vo. With Illustrations and Colouved Plates. 155. net.
This book, which is intended for the use of senior students and
practitioners, to supplement the ordinary text-books, discusses the
most modern methods of diagnosis of Diseases of the Nervous
System. The substance of the work, which is illustrated by original
diagrams and clinical photographs, nearly 200 in number, was
originally delivered in lecture form to students at the Westminster
Hospital and to certain post-graduate audiences in London and else-
where. The subject of Nervous Diseases is approached from the
point of view of the practical physician, and the diagnostic facts are
illustrated, as far as possible, by clinical cases.
311037
16 Mr. Edward Arnold’s List of New Books
MIDWIFERY FOR NURSES.
By HENRY RUSSELL ANDREWS, M.D., B.Sc. Lonp.,
M.R.C.P. Lonp.,
ASSISTANT OBSTETRIC PHYSICIAN AND LECTURER TO PupiL, MIDWIVES AT THE LONDON
HospiraL; EXAMINER TO THE CENTRAL MipwIvEs Boarp.
Crown 8v0. With Illustrations. 45. 6d. net.
This book is intended to supply the pupil midwife with all that is
necessary to meet the requirements of the Central Midwives Board,
and to be a practical handbook for the certificated midwife.
ALTERNATING CURRENTS.
A Texrt=book for Students of Engineering.
By C. G. LAMB, M.A., B.Sc.,
CLARE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
AssocIATE MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTION OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS; ASSOCIATE OF THE CITY
AND GuILps or LoNnpon INSTITUTE.
Demy 8v0. With Illustrations. 10s. 6d. net.
The scope of this book is intended to be such as to cover approxi-
mately the range of reading in alternating current machinery and
apparatus considered by the author as desirable for a student of
general engineering in his last year—as, for example, a candidate for
the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.
A MANUAL OF HYDRAULICS.
By ΚΕ. BUSQUET,
Proressor A Lv’EcoLe INDUSTRIELLE DE LYON.
Translated by A. H. PEAKE, M.A.,
DEMONSTRATOR IN MECHANISM AND APPLIED MECHANICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.
Crown 8v0. With Illustrations. 7s. 6d. net.
This work is a practical text-book of Applied Hydraulics, in which
complete technical theories and all useful calculations for the erection
of hydraulic plant are presented. It is not a purely descriptive work
designed merely for popular use, nor is it an abstruse treatise suitable
only for engineers versed in higher mathematics. The book is well
illustrated, and is full of Arithmetical Examples fully worked out. In
these examples, no knowledge is assumed beyond that of simple
arithmetic and the elements of geometry.
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